Ghost Trackers (29 page)

“Your subconscious mind tapped into the virtual
world Greg created,” Drew said. “And it found a way to counter the threat he’d sent against us.” He reached out and gave her shoulders a loving squeeze. “Thanks to you, we now know we can fight him on his own terms.”

The Native American village and the forest that surrounded it began to fade then, and the dark shape of the Lowry House reappeared.

“Looks like we’re back to square one,” Trevor said.

Drew shook his head. “No, we dealt with one challenge. If Greg is playing a game, then we just scored our first point. That means it’s time for the next move.”

“Greg’s using our past as a model for his game,” Amber said. She glanced at the old barn on the side of the property. “If the hunters chased us fifteen years ago, we would’ve run. And if that’s the case, the closest place to hide is there.” She pointed to the barn.

“I don’t remember going to the barn,” Trevor said. “Do either of you?”

“No,” Drew said. He turned to Amber.

“Me, neither. But it makes sense, doesn’t it?” she said.

“All right, let’s go see what Greg’s got planned for us next.”

Drew took her hand. Despite the circumstances, she smiled, and the two of them headed for the barn, Trevor walking alongside them.

For the first time since Greg had revealed his powers to them, she felt as if they might have a chance not only of surviving but of actually beating him. Of course, the game was far from over yet.

They continued walking toward the barn and whatever waited for them within.

They’d experienced a
lot of weird stuff this weekend, but Trevor thought that the walk to the barn was in some ways the strangest of all, and not just because the three of them looked and sounded fifteen years younger. This was, in a sense, the third time he’d been there. Once during the previous hallucination that Greg had caused him to experience when he’d been at the Historical Society with Amber and once before that, when the three of them had been there as teenagers. And now here he was again, heading for the location where the bootlegger Stockslager had buried his victims.

He wasn’t at all certain that they were doing the right thing by following the path Greg had laid out for them. Sure, they’d made it through the first scenario he’d set up, and Drew and Amber were emboldened by that victory, but Trevor wasn’t quite as encouraged. Greg might not be a god, but he’d do until the real thing came along, and Trevor had a hard time believing that the three of them had escaped the Indian massacre so easily. He suspected they’d been able to
do so only because Greg had wanted it that way, that he was playing a deeper, more subtle game than they were aware of. How could they hope to fight Greg if they didn’t understand the rules he was playing by? How could they hope to survive, let alone win?

He was still having trouble accepting that Greg was the dark guiding hand behind the supernatural occurrences they’d experienced this weekend. He hadn’t seemed like the evil-genius type back in high school. Ever since Greg had revealed himself back at the dance, Trevor had been sifting through his memories of him, fragmented and incomplete as they were. He remembered him as a hanger-on who’d professed an interest in the paranormal but had really just wanted to be a member of their little group. He’d rarely contributed anything, never offered any ideas, hadn’t even kicked in any money when they ordered pizza. And he’d often gotten in the way during investigations.

He’d seemed nice enough on the surface, especially to Amber. But Trevor had detected a mean streak in him, one that manifested in small ways—a snide comment here, a curled lip there, a look as if you’d just said the stupidest thing a human being could express. Amber hadn’t seemed aware of it, which didn’t surprise Trevor, since she had a tendency to see the best in people. But what had surprised him was that Drew had never
seemed to notice. Even as a teenager, Drew had been more empathetic and perceptive than most people, but, like Amber, he tended to be optimistic and give people the benefit of the doubt. Trevor was more pragmatic and clear-eyed, if not cynical. But even so, he had a difficult time seeing how a kid like Greg had turned into a stone-cold killer. But he hadn’t done it on his own, had he? The Lowry House had had everything to do with it, which begged a question: If fifteen years ago, Greg had been corrupted by the evil that inhabited this place, why hadn’t they? And that led to an even more disturbing thought: Just because they’d escaped corruption last time didn’t mean they’d do so this time.

They reached the barn door, and Trevor saw that the wood was far more weathered than it had been in the vision he’d experienced at the Historical Society. The night air was warmer, too. It was still April, not January as in the vision, and there was no snow on the ground. This must have been the way it had been fifteen years ago, the night they’d investigated the Lowry House.

“The door was unlocked,” Amber said. “At least, I think it was. But I still don’t remember what we found inside.”

“I have a pretty good idea,” Trevor said. “Let’s get to it.”

He stepped forward, gripped the barn door handle, and slid the door open.

The barn was dark inside, and the air that wafted out smelled thick and musty, as if the barn hadn’t been opened in decades. There was a faint sour-sweet underscent that made him think of old decay, like leaves rotting on a forest floor, and his stomach did a somersault because he knew where the smell came from.

Drew shone his flashlight beam into the gloom to illuminate the way for them, and then the three friends stepped into Stockslager’s barn.

Drew panned the flashlight beam around the barn’s interior, revealing it to be empty. The homemade still was gone, and the bare earth of the barn floor had been smoothed over, leaving no signs of the fire pit or the still or the graves that had once been there.

“The police must’ve cleaned out the place,” Drew said. “And removed the bodies to bury them elsewhere.”

The door slammed shut behind them. Trevor tried to open it but without success. The door, while not locked, refused to budge.

The barn lights were still intact, and they came on now, filling the place with sour yellow illumination.

“Something’s coming,” Amber said. “I feel it. Something
bad
.”

The ground in the middle of the barn began to bulge upward as if something was pushing from underneath. It pulsed once, twice, and then, on
the third time, soil burst upward and an obese form dragged itself into the light. It was Stockslager. The front of his clothes was soaked with blood, a result of the multiple gunshot wounds he’d suffered when the police ended his life, Trevor guessed. His head lolled on his fat neck, and his eyes . . . his eyes were gone, replaced with flickering orange-yellow light, as if a fire burned inside his skull.

Once he’d fully emerged from the earth, Stockslager stood and regarded them for a moment. At least, that’s what Trevor thought he was doing. It was hard to tell with his eyes glowing like that. Waves of heat emanated from the man’s body, and the interior of the barn became hot. Trevor sensed what had happened. Stockslager had emerged from the exact spot where his fire pit had been, and he’d somehow internalized the flames that had once burned there. Beads of sweat formed on Trevor’s forehead and began trickling down his face, and he felt sweat roll down the length of his spine. The heat continued to increase and reached the point where it felt painful on his exposed skin, as if he was being stung by tiny insects. Stockslager’s dead flesh fared far worse. It began to redden and sizzle, as if being cooked from the inside out, and the smell of burning skin and meat filled the air. Trevor felt his gorge rise, and although he told himself that this was all part of the illusion and that he wasn’t really smelling anything, it didn’t help.

Stockslager opened his mouth wider, and the heat coming off him increased even more. Trevor had a bad feeling about what was going to happen next, and he shoved Drew and Amber to the side as a gout of sharp-smelling clear liquid shot forth from Stockslager’s mouth. The liquid missed them and splattered the sealed-shut barn door. He feared that Stockslager wasn’t finished, and he pushed Drew and Amber even farther away. Stockslager made a harsh coughing sound then, and a stream of flame blasted outward from his mouth, blackening his dead lips, and struck the barn door. The alcohol ignited, and a mass of bright orange flame
whooshed
into life and began devouring the wood.

Stockslager had internalized more than just the fire pit, Trevor realized. As bizarre as it sounded, he had the still inside him, too.

“Thanks,” Amber told Trevor, and gave his arm a quick squeeze. The heat had continued to intensify, and sweat poured off her. She wiped a hand across her brow to mop it away, but she only succeeded in smearing the moisture around.

Drew looked equally uncomfortable, but he didn’t bother trying to wipe his sweat away. He just let it drip off him and fall to the ground. “Whatever we do, we’d better do it fast, before we succumb to either the heat or smoke inhalation.”

The latter was a real problem, Trevor thought,
as smoke was rising from the fire Stockslager had started, a fire that was spreading. How long would it take for the smoke to build up in the barn, as closed as it was? More to the point, if the fire continued to spread, how long before they couldn’t escape it and were burned to death?

Stockslager came toward them, raising his hands and reaching for them with sausage-thick fingers as he approached. His dead face remained expressionless, but Trevor sensed a malign delight emanating from the man as he headed toward them.

“This is an illusion, right?” he said. “Maybe we can wish it away, use our minds to dispel it.”

Drew shook his head, keeping his eyes on Stockslager as he came toward them. “If it were that easy to counter Greg’s illusions, they’d never have progressed to this point. They’d have disappeared the moment we saw them, if for no other reason than our subconscious minds would’ve rejected them.”

Stockslager was coming uncomfortably close by this point, and the three friends ran past him to the other side of the barn. He shot another stream of moonshine, followed by another burst of fire. Both missed, but now a second section of the barn was aflame. Stockslager could only move so fast on his dead legs, and although he turned and continued toward the friends, he did so slowly, giving them time to talk.

“But we
can
counter the illusions,” Trevor insisted. “Amber did it with the hunters.”

“She did it using the scenario against itself,” Drew said. “That’s what we have to do here.”

Something about what Drew had said spurred a thought in him about how Amber had used the last illusion against itself. When he had been there before, during his visit to the Historical Society, it had been during the time period when Stockslager had been alive, and it had been winter outside. This current scenario was the spring of fifteen years ago, but both times were illusions, so why couldn’t they
both
be real? Or at least as real as they needed to be?

He specialized in paranormal and supernatural lore, and he knew that elemental forces often played a large role in various mythologies, belief systems, and magic rituals. Not only that, but the concepts of opposing and complementary forces were also vital. Right now, Stockslager was, at least symbolically, a creature of fire. And the opposite of fire was water. They had no water on them, but water could take on different forms, and one of those forms was present in abundance on the night when the police had come for Stockslager. But to access it, Trevor needed to make an opening in the barn, an opening between this time period and the earlier one. But how could he do that? Drew, at least the teenager he appeared to be, carried a backpack, but he knew there were
no tools in there, nothing that could bash a hole in the side of a barn. Drew hadn’t packed such tools fifteen years ago, so there wouldn’t be any in there now. If only he still had hold of the tire iron he’d carried with him into the rec center. If he had, he could use it to—

Wait a minute. He didn’t remember dropping the tire iron. He
did
remember dropping the camera he’d been holding when they’d been transformed into their teenage selves—he’d let go of it when the werewolf hunters had attacked—but not the tire iron. It had seemed to vanish when they’d become teenagers again. But just because he could no longer see the tire iron or feel it didn’t mean it wasn’t still gripped tight in his hand. He might look like a teenager, but in reality, he was a man in his early thirties. And there was a good chance that the man still had hold of a tire iron and didn’t know it.

Unless, of course, he’d dropped the tire iron when he thought he was dropping the illusory camera . . .

Stockslager shot a third stream of ’shine at them, and Trevor was so lost in thought that the alcohol would have hit him full on if Drew hadn’t caught hold of his arm and yanked him out of the way. As before, Stockslager followed up with a blast of flame, and a third fire blossomed into life.

“I’ve got an idea,” he told Drew and Amber. “Keep an eye on him, OK?” Without waiting for
their acknowledgment, he turned to face the wooden wall. He looked down at his right hand. It appeared empty, but he told himself that it wasn’t, that he held a solid length of metal in it. Then he closed his eyes, and, concentrating as hard as he could, he raised his hand and swung it at the wall—

—and was rewarded with the solid
thunk
of metal striking wood.

He kept his eyes closed and continued concentrating as he swung a second, third, and fourth time. He felt the wall give way with the last blow, and a gust of cold winter air hit him in the face, the sudden change in temperature coming as a shock.

He opened his eyes, and although he still didn’t see a tire iron in his hand, he did see the splinter-edged hole he’d made in the wall, and he smiled with satisfaction. He then turned around to face Stockslager, who’d advanced much closer while Trevor had been making the hole.

“Stay clear,” Trevor warned his friends, and then, remembering how Amber had plunged her hands into the earth to summon the blood tendrils that had defeated the hunters, he slammed his palms against the wood to the left of the hole he’d created and thought about the blanket of snow that lay beneath the moonlight outside the barn on the night the police had come for Stockslager.