Johnny Gruesome (36 page)

Excited by the scent of her perfume, he focused on her eyes and her lips. Leaning forward, he kissed her. She responded and he eased his tongue into her mouth. To his astonishment, she reciprocated. With his confidence building, he drew her closer to him. He allowed himself to block out everything that had occurred during the last week and concentrated solely on that moment. When they parted, she led him to his bed. Reclining on their sides, they resumed kissing. He cupped his right hand over her left breast and his pulse quickened when she arched her back.

The room grew dark as they kissed, groped, and fondled each other. As he pressed against her, and felt her pressing back, an image coalesced in his mind: Johnny, resurrected and rotting, standing behind the bonfire at the memorial party for Todd. He felt his erection wilt.

No! It didn’t happen! It was just my imagination!

Opening his eyes, he knew better.

I saw him.

Rhonda opened her eyes, as well. “Is something wrong?”

Flaccid now, with his face turning red, he stammered. “Nothing, it’s just—I—” She sat up, and in the dim light he read the rejection on her features. How could he save this situation? “I don’t have any, um, you know … protection.”

She raised her eyebrows. “What makes you think you need protection?”

I’m drowning here.
“I don’t. I mean, I don’t want to take any chances. I like you too much.”

The look on her face told him she didn’t believe him. “Eric, I like you, too. A lot. But this thing between us is just beginning. I’ll let you know if we ever reach the point where you need to worry about that, okay?”

Nodding, he feigned disappointment. “Whatever you say.”

She leaned against him and he slid an arm around her shoulders.

Carol pulled into her driveway. After switching off the engine, she sat in the Prius for ten minutes, staring at the front door of the house. No matter how hard she tried, she failed to convince herself she was just being paranoid. Finally, when she realized she had dug her fingernails into her palms so hard they almost bled, she forced herself to exit the car. The wind numbed her face.

She unlocked the door and the streetlight behind her projected her shadow across the living room floor. She turned on the light and her shadow vanished, like a phantom. Her heartbeat quickened.

No one here. No one here. No one here.

She closed the door and locked it, then marched through the house, turning on one light after another. Satisfied that no one had broken in, she retrieved a shiny metal case from the bedroom closet and sat on the bed. Pushing the tabs, she opened the case. Matt’s .45 gleamed in its foam compartment, next to a magazine cartridge. Closing her fingers around the weapon’s grip, she took it out and raised it before her face. It felt heavy. She abhorred guns and violence.

Removing the cartridge, she slapped it into the semiautomatic’s grip and clicked off the safety. Then she chambered a bullet, as she’d seen done in the action movies Matt enjoyed watching.

Outside, the wind howled, and a tree limb creaked in protest.

E
ric helped Rhonda slip into her coat. “Maybe we can see a movie on Friday if the curfew is lifted.”

“I cashier at the supermarket Fridays.”

“How about Saturday?”

“It’s a potential date,” she said. “I like foreign films and indie flicks.”

“Oh, uh, yeah, so do I …”

Laughing, she kissed him. “See you tomorrow.”

“Right.” He opened the door for her, and a rolled-up newspaper leaning against it fell over. He picked it up and watched the wind whip Rhonda’s hair as she ran to her car. She got in and started the engine.

No undead teenager sat up behind her.

She backed out of the driveway. Closing the door, he opened the newspaper to its front page. Class photos of Derek and Cliff stared at him from beneath a screaming headline:
MURDER TIMES TWO!

He swallowed. Who could want Derek and Cliff dead? And Todd? Gary had nothing to gain from such crimes, and he was too paranoid over what he’d done to Johnny to commit such brazen acts.

Johnny.

He had really seen him.

Impossible.

His mind had to be playing tricks on him. It all seemed like a distant nightmare now.

I know what I saw.

He went upstairs, pulled back his bedroom curtains, and stared at the handprint on the window. Through the frozen residue, he watched snow fall.

Then he sat at his desk and booted his computer.

A ghost is a paranormal phenomenon, often believed to be the spirit of a human being remaining on earth after physical death.

Eric copied and pasted the sentence into a Word document. The first Web sites he’d checked had been useless. He had no idea that 32 percent of citizens living in the United States believed in ghosts, or that so many pursued “ghost sighting” or “ghost hunting” as a hobby. He skimmed information about orbs, electronic voice phenomenon, ectoplasm, and stigmatized property, and studied grainy photographs of what appeared to be lens flares in the cameras that had taken them. Concrete proof? He didn’t think so. One site recommended that people who believed their house haunted should “discreetly obtain” holy water from a Catholic church, stand in a doorway of their home with it, and make the sign of the cross! Or use sea salts blessed by a Catholic priest …

On another site, he found this:
Ghosts are unable to cross, travel over, or escape from, running water.
The statement existed within a general article on ghosts that didn’t specify if this pertained to fictional specters or paranormal phenomena. So many sites existed on the subject that he found it difficult to sort the serious-minded ones from the absurdities.

A ghost can be defined as the apparition of a deceased person, which frequently manifests the deceased person’s likeness in association with that person’s former habitats. “Ghost” also refers to the spirit or soul of a dead person, or to any spirit or demon. Ghosts are associated with haunting.

He added this portion to his notes.

According to the Parapsychological Association, “The more or less regular occurrence of paranormal phenomena associated with a particular locality (especially a building) and usually attributed to the activities of a discarnate entity; the phenomena may include apparitions, poltergeist disturbances, cold drafts, footsteps and voices, and various odors.”

He sat back in his chair. It would be difficult to attribute a cold draft to a ghost in this weather. But he had heard footsteps on the roof outside his window; he’d also seen a shadow, and his visitor had left the handprint on the window.

“… various odors.”

He had smelled chlorine on numerous occasions since Johnny’s murder, without any apparent reason for it. And Johnny had saved him from drowning in the school pool when they were both in fifth grade.

Because the word ghost has been deemed imprecise, it has been replaced by the term apparition in the scientific field of parapsychology.

To Eric,
apparition
suggested something intangible. Whoever or whatever had committed the Red Hill murders was very tangible.

He keyed in the word
zombie
and waited to see what the search engine kicked back at him. Discounting those entries related to films, he concentrated on the more academic ones.

A zombie is a dead person whose body has been reanimated. Stories of zombies originated in the Afro-Caribbean spiritual belief system of Vodoun (voodoo), in which zombies are humans who have had their “Ti Bon Ange” or soul stolen by supernatural means or shamanic medicine. They therefore lack free will and are forced to work as slaves for a “zombie master,” typically on plantations. Certain studies indicate that if such “zombies” exist, they are in fact heavily drugged but still-living humans.

There were no plantations in Red Hill, just wineries and grape vineyards, and Eric couldn’t picture them utilizing zombie slaves.

In contemporary horror fiction, zombies are brought back from the dead by supernatural or scientific methods, and eat the flesh of the living. They have limited intelligence and may not be under anyone’s direct control.

So far as he knew, none of the murder victims had been devoured. And whoever had placed Todd’s head inside Gary’s locker had possessed more than “limited intelligence”; more likely, they were smarter than Gary. Sighing, he reviewed the notes he had taken during his hour of online research.

“‘… in association with that person’s former habitats,’” he read out loud.

Standing, he shut down his computer and went to his closet.

D
ressed in patched blue jeans and a Windbreaker over a hooded sweatshirt, Eric stood in the fading shadow of the Grissom house, regulating his breathing after the thirtyminute run from his own home. The sun, gauzy through the falling snow, dipped behind the house, leaving pink and orange slashes in the gray sky. He felt like a child again, reluctant to deliver a fruit basket to Johnny and Charlie following Helen Grissom’s death.

The elements had been cruel to the old house; advanced decay had already set in. The roof sagged in the middle, the grimy windows bowed, and the porch steps twisted at a warped angle. If the structure survived the winter, would people believe it haunted? Johnny’s Aunt Alicia stood to inherit the house. Would she invest in the necessary repairs, sell it as quickly as possible, or simply tear it down and start all over? In his mind it deserved burial, like any other corpse.

Pulling the hood low over his face, he started forward, trudging through the snow where he estimated the cracked walkway split the lawn. The bitter cold wind elicited tears from his eyes, which he wiped on his jacket sleeve. He licked his dry lips as he drew closer to the dead house, then mounted its icy steps. The space where he had smashed the glass had been boarded up with plywood and an official seal bearing the town emblem had been affixed to the edge of the door and its frame, preventing entry. He tried the knob anyway, but the door didn’t budge. Stepping to his left, he cupped his hands around his eyes and peered through the nearest window. Darkness shrouded the interior, allowing him to discern only the dim outline of the living room furniture.