K.J. Emrick - Darcy Sweet 13 - Ghost Story (12 page)

Letting herself go, she drifted away from the endless depths of this in between space, slipping back to her real body, waking up slowly to the land of the living once more.

When she did, she smelled smoke.

In her vision, while she had been locked in deadly mental combat with the Pilgrim Ghost, she had seen two of the candles in her circle knocked over.  It turned out that was exactly what had happened.

She woke up face down on the carpet.  Down here, there was still enough air to breathe, although it was getting smoky and hot even this low to the floor.  Somehow Nathaniel Williams’ spirit had managed to actually knock her body around.  She ached all along both sides.  Her spine felt like it had been bent backward.  Her skull ached.  Other pains hurt less, but still argued for her attention.

Putting her hand up in front of her face, she looked at the ring in wonder.  It had been amazing to see what it could do.  It kind of scared her now, knowing what it was.  All this time she had worn it because it connected her to Aunt Millie.  She never could have guessed that by giving it to her, Millie would one day save her life.

She coughed, and inhaled a harsh breath full of heat and little specks of ash.  That was when she realized she was in the middle of a blazing inferno.

The mayor’s office was on fire.  The candles that she had so carefully set in place in their holders had been knocked down, setting first the rug and then the nice wooden furniture and then the books in their shelves on fire.  She had lucked out when the fire spread to the back of the room first.  It was a miracle that she hadn’t died from smoke inhalation already, or from being burned alive.

Now that would have been a terrible thing to wake up to.  Sensing it was still a possibility if she didn’t get moving, she forced her wobbly legs to stand her up and she staggered to the door.  It had been knocked off its hinges, and the edges of it were already being lapped at by flames. 

Out into the hallway she stumbled, the smoke from the room behind her roiling up along the ceiling in all directions.  She coughed again, wondering if she had time to get a fire extinguisher.  Didn’t the Town Hall have a fire alarm?

She looked for one quickly, shuffling quickly up the entry hall, sure there must be something like that near the main doors.  If there was, she didn’t find it.  There was nothing to see except a round, white clock near the entrance that told her the time.

11:59pm.

That gave her a moment’s pause, until a loud
whoosh
showed her that the flames had eaten their way out of Helen’s office and were now hungrily feasting on the wood paneling of the hall.

Jon.  Where was Jon?

Edging past the growing flames as fast as she could, she found him right where she had left him, near the door leading into the meeting room.  He was awake now, and she could have cried tears of joy if the air wasn’t so dry and smoky.  She fell against him where he sat on the floor, throwing her arms around his neck.  It was all she could do to manage that.  She was exhausted.  Completely spent.

“Darcy?”  He blinked at her, feeling at the back of his head repeatedly.  “What happened?  Did we win?”

An involuntary laugh that she couldn’t stop bubbled up from deep inside.  It felt good, to know she was alive and that, yes, they had won.  The Pilgrim Ghost was no more.

Behind her, something exploded with the sound of shattering glass.

Right.  They were in a burning building.  Tender moment later, save themselves from fire now.  “Jon, we have to go.  I’ll tell you all about it later but right now we can’t be here.”

“Why?” he asked groggily, letting her help him to his feet, and helping her in turn.  “What’d you do?  Burn the place…down…”

His eyes widened as he looked down the hallway.

“Oh.”

“Long story,” she told him.  “Just trust me right now when I say we have to go.”

She put her shoulder under his arm, although it was a question in her mind which one of them was worse off.  Together, they helped each other step by step down the hall, carefully watching the slow spread of the flames.

Until the wall next to Helen’s office blew out in a gush of red and orange fire that rolled like a ball across the floor and up the wall on the opposite side.

They both stumbled back, realizing they couldn’t leave that way.

Unfortunately, that was the way out.  Darcy’s mind put together what that meant in a split second.

It meant they were trapped.

“There must be a back door,” Jon said, raising his voice to be heard over the crackling roar of the growing conflagration.  “I’ve never looked for one, but there must be something, right?  A window or something?”

Darcy remembered being in the meeting room.  There were no windows there.  There was the wide open floor, and the low stage, and she did not want to die in a burning building when the outside world was literally three feet on the other side of the wall she was standing next to!

Jon suddenly dropped like dead weight to his knees.  “Jon?” she asked in a panic.  “Jon, what is it?  Are you all right?”

He nodded, but his eyes looked blurry and his grip on her arm was weak.  “I’m still a little out of it, I guess.  I can’t…um, think.  Darcy…?”

She forced her weight under his arm again, and pushed with all her might to get him to his feet.  He moved only because she helped him do it, and she had the sickening feeling that he was going to pass out again.  Worse, she knew she would do the same thing if she stopped to rest for even a moment.

“Jon,” she said to him, making sure he kept his attention focused on her.  “You have to help me, okay?  I need you to stay with me because I can’t do this on my own and I need your help, all right?  Are you listening to me?  Jon!”

“I hear…you…” he said, right before his eyes closed and he sank back to the floor, unconscious.

“No!” Darcy yelled to no one in particular.  “No!  Jon, get up!”

He wouldn’t answer her.  His eyes rolled back into his skull and he twitched, but that was all the response she could get out of him.

The fire raced closer, devouring the aged wood and wall paneling.  The molding along the ceiling and floor and doorways was consumed like fine delicacies and each bite brought the flames closer to them.

Frantically she took hold of him from behind, hands in his armpits, and dragged him along the floor into the meeting room.  It was too much for her battered body to take, yet she did it anyway.  She would do anything it took to save him.  There was no other option.

The fire made it to the doorway when she was only five feet into the room.  Darcy looked around, saw the walls and the stage and the ceiling and absolutely no way out at all.  There had to be some way.  There had to be!

“Darcy.”

From behind the stage, where an alcove had artfully concealed a door, Helen Nelson stood with her hand out to them.  She was ragged, her clothes torn and her hair a mess, but Darcy could see in her friend’s eyes that she was herself again.  The curse of the Pilgrim Ghost had been lifted.

“Darcy,” Helen said, “bring him this way.”

“I can’t!” Darcy sobbed.  “I can’t, Helen.  I don’t…I’m not strong enough.”

And then Helen was at her side, taking one of Jon’s arms while Darcy took the other, and together they fled the burning structure as it came down around them.

***

Two long hours in the dark cellar as the Town Hall burned above them would always be one of Darcy’s least favorite memories.

It had saved their lives, though.  Her and Jon and Helen.  Looking at it that way, she was grateful that Helen knew the back way down through the meeting room.  The back door that led outside had been on the other side of the building, as it turned out, past where the worst of the fire was, so it was good that Darcy hadn’t wasted time looking for it.  Helen had arrived just in the nick of time.

She just didn’t remember why she was there.

Wrapped in a rough woolen blanket on the back of a fire truck, Helen shook her head again.  “I remember going to your house for dinner, Darcy.  I remember being worried about you and Jon and coming to find you here.  But I think I must have taken a knock to the head inside or something because a lot of it is fuzzy.  Or just not there.”

Darcy figured that was probably a blessing for her friend.  She didn’t have to remember the more horrible parts of the last two days.  Darcy would never forget them.  She stood huddled next to Jon, the two of them sharing one blanket, silently communicating their love and support.

The EMTs had checked Jon out and declared it was just a bump to his head.  He’d probably have more dizzy spells in the days to come, and there would be an awful knot there for a while, and an x-ray at the hospital over in Meadowood probably wouldn’t be a bad idea, but for now he had been allowed to sign off from any treatment.

All of them had inhaled far too much smoke, but no one was really worried about that.  The fresh night air was doing them good.  What had worried the paramedics the most, was Darcy’s bruises.

Her left side was a mosaic of purple and yellow.  Both of her arms were covered in red marks, some of them looking suspiciously like hand prints.  She was sore all over, but she figured she would live.  The nice EMTs had chalked it up to having half of a building fall down around her before the fire department could put the blaze out.  They insisted that she ride with them in an ambulance to the hospital to be checked out, and Jon had given her that look that said she had better do it or she’d never hear the end of it.

So, she had agreed to go.  They would be leaving any minute, but for right now she got to cozy into the warmth of her fiancé and know that everything would be all right.

Firefighters and police officers and curious onlookers poked around the remains of the Town Hall.  The far corner of it still stood, but the rest was a charred mass of support beams and red bricks that had fallen in on themselves.  The roof that had stood over the entryway doors had come crashing to the ground and now lay at a cockeyed angle over piles of debris.

“I can’t believe we got pulled out of that,” Helen said, shaking her head.  “Good thing I got here when I did, I suppose.  I would hate to think anything would have happened to you two.  What were you doing here, anyway?”

Jon pulled Darcy to her tighter.  “We saw the smoke,” was his answer.  “We got inside just in time to be cut off by the flames.  I’m really glad you were there, Helen.”

She shrugged off the compliment.  With a shake of her head, she muttered, “I just wish I could remember…”

A loud chiming cut off all other sounds around them.  Then another, the sound tinny and out of tune, like a hammer striking a bent pipe.  Another, and another.  People all around them stopped and turned toward the source of the sound.  They stared, some of them pointing.

Darcy counted each of the tones until they were done, twelve in all.  Everyone stared at the cracked face of the old Town Hall clock, propped up at an angle amid the debris.  It had been stuck with its hands pointing at 11:59pm for as long as anyone could remember.  Now they had suddenly started moving forward, chiming out the witching hour even though it had already passed them by.

“That’s creepy,” Jon whispered.

“I’ll second that.”  Darcy knew Nathaniel Williams was gone.  She’d felt him go.  She couldn’t help but wonder, though, if his influence would ever be cleansed from the town entirely.

Two paramedics in stiff white shirts came up to her, rolling a stretcher between them.  “Oh, guys,” she complained.  “Is that really necessary?”

It was, and they helped her on and strapped her in.  Just as they were going to wheel her away, Chief Daleson appeared out of the crowd, asking them to hold on a moment.

“Jon, Helen, I want you to hear this,” he said.  “You too, Darcy.  We just got a call from the state crime lab.  I had asked them to put a rush on the fingerprints we found on that knife.”

“What knife?” Helen asked.

Daleson didn’t miss a beat.  “The one that killed Bonnie Verhault.  Guess whose prints were on the thing?”

“Well, I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” Helen said, turning to look down at Darcy.  “I didn’t kill her.”

“Nope, you sure didn’t,” the Chief agreed.  It was obvious how happy it made him to be able to say it.  “Turns out, she killed herself.  Stabbed herself to death, based on the fingerprint evidence.  We figure that land deal she was negotiating was turning sour on her.  Probably a lot of other stresses in her life, too, if she could kill herself that way.  Dumped herself on the lawn of the town’s mayor as some sort of crazy statement.  Can you believe that?”

He looked from Helen, to Jon, to Darcy, the wind puffing out of his cheeks.  “How come none of you seem surprised?”

“Darcy figured it out a little while ago, Chief,” Jon explained.  “Come on.  I’ll follow you down to the station.  I’m sure there’s a lot to do.”

“You aren’t kidding,” the Chief grumped.  “The lights came back on in town but now everyone is freaking out because of the fire, and that incident back at the station didn’t help.  That, and the fact that it’s almost Halloween.”

The incident down at the station that he was talking about had turned out to be a rookie officer shooting off his weapon during a power grid failure.  Accidental discharge.  At least, that was what the official report would say.

Taking her hand, Jon leaned down to Darcy and kissed her cheek.  “I’ll meet you at the hospital.  They’ll probably have you discharged before I even get there.”