Ravenous Ghosts (23 page)

He half-heartedly ran a towel over the thick black hair plastered to his scalp and sighed before he finally met her gaze.
"I'm sorry about Kyle."

"
Yeah, so am I," she answered tonelessly, then quickly added. "You said he gave you a letter?"

"
Yeah. I found it in my mailbox last Friday. The day after he--" He swallowed. "The day after."

"
How did you know him?"

Newman shifted his seat so that he was no longer casting flinching shadows over her.
"We were good friends a few years back, until his parents moved away from Akron and came here."

Gina took another hearty swallow of her coffee, savoring the warmth. A burst of wind made the walls rattle and she jumped, almost spilling her drink. The flame in the hurricane lamp fluttered in protest.
"Do you still live in Akron?" she breathed, a hand against her chest.

Newman nodded.
"Born and raised."

"
I didn't see you at the funeral."

He gave her an apologetic shrug and dropped the towel, a bead of water still clinging to his earlobe.
"No. I didn't go. I can't hack funerals."

"
Me neither, but it would have been wrong for me not to go."

If he was offended by the accusation in her tone, it didn
't show and she quickly chastised herself for being needlessly rude. After all, how Newman dealt with his grief was none of her business. "What did the letter say?"

He sniffed, withdrew a ragged envelope from the inside pocket of his leather jacket and handed it to her. Bracing the half-full thermos lid between her knees, she took the letter and quickly opened it. While she read, Newman produced a cigarette from the same pocket in which he
'd kept Kyle's letter, sat back and lit it, his exhalations slow and deliberate.

* * *

Dear Danny Boy:

I bet you're surprised as hell to hear from me after all this time and for that I apologize. I should have kept in touch but in truth, you were much better off not knowing the person I became, the hopeless soul the world made of me. They say the path we travel on is set and until last night when God himself visited me, I believed in that. Now I know different. As you shall too. We have suffered for too long, my friend.

Tonight I die, but in death I bring a gift to the underdog, to all our brethren who have tasted the boots of our oppressors. Tonight I bleed a tide that turns for all of us.

Find her. Find my disciple. Her name is Gina Lewis. She lives at 12 Barker Lane. Go there Thursday night and bring her to Our Place, the shack in Devlin Woods and show her what you've discovered, show her the meaning of the list I've written here, the Freedom List. Make her believe in herself again. Make her believe in us, in The Defenseless. Show her the light that burns inside all our kind and set her free…

I
'll miss you old friend, but do not mourn. Instead, bask in the glory of your new life.

Always,

Kyle Winter

P.S. Here are the names of the first seven. They will be followed by seven more until the world begins to recognize us for who we are:

Marion Haines

Judith Weinstein

Josh Berkeley

Graham Lieder

Frank Streck

Alice Peterson

Peter Teller

* * *

"
I don't understand this," Gina said and looked up at Newman. "Was he really that far gone? I mean, who are these people?"

Newman stood up and went to the doorway to jettison his cigarette.
"I thought the same thing," he said. "When I learned that he'd really gone and killed himself, I thought, at least his madness made it that much easier for him. But over the next couple of days, I started thinking about the note." Stooping, he drew close to Gina. "Can you stand up for a moment?"

"
Why?"

"
I need to show you what made me change my mind about Kyle."

She looked down between her legs at the bundle of newspapers she
'd been sitting on. Her wet jeans had darkened the top copy but she could see enough to recognize it as the local rag:
The Harperville Gazette
. She stood up and moved to stand next to Newman, who immediately hunkered down and produced a short-handled penknife from his coat.

"
That's one hell of a pocket you got there," Gina said, moving back a step although she didn't really feel threatened. Not yet, at least.

Newman made a sound that might have been an airless chuckle and sliced open the thin red cord holding the newspapers together. He pushed aside the dampened copy and handed her the next one without looking back.

"Tell me what you see," he said and continued fishing through the papers.

At first she saw nothing, her eyes flitting over the headlines but finding nothing to grab her attention, and she was about to tell him so when her eyes caught on a small column near the bottom of the page.

"God," she said and heard Newman mutter his agreement.

The headline read:
WOMAN SOUGHT IN MURDER INVESTIGATION

But this was not what caused the hair to prickle on the back of Gina
's neck. It was the first two lines of the story itself:
Alice Peterson (38), is wanted for questioning by the police after the authorities discovered the body of her husband, Bill Peterson (41) at their home in Gatesburg, Harperville last Monday morning. The victim had been stabbed to death.

"
She's one of the names in Kyle's letter, isn't she?"

"
Yes," Newman replied, rising to face her. "And if you're thinking he might have had some information about this prior to writing the note, look at the date."

Gina did.
"Today."

"
Yes. Kyle died last Friday. Alice Peterson killed her husband three days later. He couldn't have known about it."

Gina thought about this and struggled to shake off the dread that crawled up her spine like a living thing.
"Wait. Maybe he knew her. Maybe she got a letter too. Maybe…Maybe he
told
her to kill her husband."

"
Does that sound like Kyle to you?"

"
I don't know. I'd like to think not, but it's a bit too much of a coincidence isn't it?"

Newman shrugged.
"If it is…" He handed her another two newspapers. "Then, these must be too."

She looked from his empty eyes to the papers:
MAN KILLED IN HUNTING ACCIDENT

"
The victim was Arnold Streck. Shot by his own son, Frank."

Gina swallowed, remembering the name from the list and feeling increasingly detached from the insanity in which she suddenly found herself. She flipped to the next paper, eyes scanning until Newman
's finger indicated a small box near the bottom of the front page: LOCAL SCHOOLTEACHER DIES IN FIRE AT HOME

"
Susan Teller. She is survived by her husband, Peter. And guess what?"

Gina nodded.
"He's on Kyle's list."

"
Yes."

She let the papers slip from her hands.
"But why? Why are these people murdering their loved ones? Was Kyle psychic or something?" She sat down heavily on the remaining newspapers and sighed in exasperation. "This is making my head hurt."

Newman returned to his seat and lit another cigarette.

"Believe me, I was as surprised as you when I traced the names from the list to all these headlines." He made a sweeping gesture over the scattered papers. "It didn't seem possible. Surely no one could have that kind of influence over total strangers."

"
Unless they weren't strangers," Gina said. "Unless he knew them all somehow but--Jesus, I
loved
him. I knew him better than anyone. He wasn't capable of this kind of madness!"

"
Does that letter sound like it was written by someone you know?"

She looked up at him, his eyes glistening pools of oil in the lamplight.
"What else did you find out? There must be more, unless you brought me here just to tell me my dead boyfriend was a cult leader?"

For a moment Newman was silent, the wind battering the hut like an angry animal, the hurricane lamp trembling and then:
"Those who died were not the true victims. The true victims were the people who killed them."

Gina frowned.
"I don't understand."

"
I think you do. That list, according to Kyle is the Freedom List, the names of the first to be set free under some kind of power he believed his death unleashed. The question I asked myself was what these people needed to be set free
from
. So I started digging. And I found out that Alice Peterson was an abused wife, constantly living in fear of her husband, who a year prior to his death put his wife in the hospital after throwing her down the stairs at their home. She broke both her legs, her shoulder and nose and ruptured her spleen. The doctors suspected everything but her legs had been broken
before
her fall but of course she denied that."

"
Then there's Frank Streck, a sixteen-year-old boy whose father had a habit of bringing little kids home and locking them in the basement, where the old man could play with them to his heart's content. Then, when he was done, Arnold Streck would make his son drag the bodies out to the old covered well at the far end of their property and heave them in."

Gina put a trembling hand to her mouth.
"Jesus." She thought for a moment. "But how do you know all this? How come the police don't know about it if you do?"

Newman nodded.
"I'll explain in a moment. But do you see the pattern? The seven names on Kyle's list were all people who were abused, trodden upon, beaten in one way or another. They were victims, and Kyle believed his death was the catalyst in changing their lives. He believed by dying, he would be imparting a gift to them. The gift of freedom, of being able to take back what had been stolen from them. He wanted to help the defenseless regain their power."

"
But how did he know? If these people were strangers, then how could he know what they were going to do before they did it? There must have been some contact between them!"

"
Unless he wasn't crazy," Newman said ominously. "Unless he really
did
see God, or
a
god or something that gave him the power he wrote about in his letter to me. It sounds incredible, of course, but when you think about it, would
you
turn away such a gift?"

"
Of course I would," Gina answered, too quickly and saw Newman raise an eyebrow. "It's wrong."

"
Is that what you really believe?"

"
Don't you?"

It was clear to her now however, that he didn
't. That he had brought her up here to try and convince her that Kyle had been on to something and that the only option left for her would be to buy into it. Her whole body shuddered and she was not entirely able to convince herself it was just the cold anymore.

Newman leaned forward in his chair.
"We are victims too, Gina."

She struggled for the words to counter his statement but could find none. This in turn ignited a frustration in her chest that brought hot tears to her eyes.

"Your father likes to touch you," Newman said and her head snapped up.

"
What the fuck do you know about it?"

A sad smile creased his lips.
"Ever since the death of your mother, he takes solace in you, both mentally and physically. When you cry, he calls it grief. When you scream, he calls it passion. Such self-deceit keeps him sane while you crumble before him. I know, Gina. Kyle knew and it brought him here, to search for a God who could take away your pain, his pain and the agony suffered every day by countless others who walk crippled in the shadows of their tormentors."

The tears were coming freely now and Newman was a twitching mass of darkness and light when Gina looked up.
"How? How did you know?"

"
The same way Kyle knew about those seven people. The same way I knew about what drove them to kill their torturers and the same way I know who the next seven are."

He was on his knees now, his hands on hers. She convulsed with hitching sobs and shook her head.
"He doesn't mean to do it."

"
I know." His voice was soothing, brushing the gooseflesh from her skin with invisible fingers of warmth. "But he will have to answer for his sins just the same. God has said it to be so. Just as I have put my own mother in the grave for her malevolence toward me, you must do the same."