The Dream Machine: Book 6, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (2 page)

Alison knew she was dreaming. The worst part? When she woke up she wouldn’t remember what it was about.

But she could always tell the difference between dreaming and reality. That didn’t take anything away from the magic of her nocturnal sojourns. She didn’t feel cheated. If anything, that knowing the difference between dream and reality made her feel powerful.

Because, if she was right, there was
no difference
between dream and reality. At least not when it came to
her
dreams.

She stood on the nearby rocky shore under a dark, moonless night sky. The wind pushed her backward, toward the bay, as it intensified and began howling.

A storm.

Had she dreamed of a storm last time? She thought so. But she couldn’t be sure. Because she never remembered her dreams. And the doctors never let her write them down either.

But this was just another storm. Didn’t matter that it was probably a hurricane. Storms were
just storms
. Big whoop. They didn’t
prove
anything.

She needed to dream something important. Something they could verify.

Confirm.

Validate.

Like death, murder, terrorism, rape. Like cheating and stealing and catastrophe. Like national headlines. Like the lottery. When was she going to dream about the next set of winning numbers on the big drawing? That would be awesome. Alison didn’t have much of a life, or much of a life left, but she was certain of one thing: money didn’t make you happy, but it fucking made you happier.

How could it not?

Hitting the lotto for several mill would be a game-changer. Her parents could buy a nice house, or hell, buy two nice houses and just finally get divorced. They hadn’t fought in front of her in a long time, and it was all her fault. Every time her disease worsened, mom and dad pulled it together
for her sake
and kept on being married, even though they were way past the point of being able to love each other.

Alison hated it when people wasted their lives. Because she had next-to-no life to waste. She would have given anything for
normal
, for classrooms and cross country races, for sleepovers and boys, for cars and drinking, for so much…

In the dream, the wind intensified and she felt that dark grey mass approaching. The hurricane. The rain began to pelt her.

Boring.

It had been a good week so far. Only one seizure, which was, now that she thought about it, probably some kind of record. Ever since she was seven and she’d lost her shit in the cafeteria during lunch, the seizures had been a constant, annoying, and often dangerous companion. At first they had called it epilepsy, then encephalitis, then something else, then back to epilepsy. She saw the specialists, the best doctors in the area, and none of these geniuses had any fucking idea what was wrong with her.

The whatever-she-had had fried her brain. Math was difficult. Each seizure messed with her memory. She had no recollection of extended periods of her life, weeks at a time gone, as if they had never been lived.

She thought it couldn’t get worse.

It did.

Vertigo. Wordnesia—where regular words suddenly appeared foreign—happened constantly. In and out of the hospital. In and out of medically-induced comas, the doctors frantic to halt the electrical activity in her brain. One guy had explained it to her in laymen’s terms: your brain doesn’t have enough circuit breakers. It can’t shut itself down sometimes, and it’s only capable of handling so much juice.

In the dream, the hurricane raged. It was just another storm. Didn’t prove anything one way or the other. She wanted to be important. She wanted it all to mean something. She saw the great, grey wall of air coming toward her, obscuring everything in its path. Trees scattered.

She wondered what would happen when she lost her eyesight, like they were now predicting. She wondered if she would still be able to see in her dreams. If
they
would still be able to see her dreams, or if the image would become too blurry to comprehend.

It was only a matter of time before she lost her sight. Rare genetic disease, they had said. Everything wrong with her was rare.

Alison didn’t want to spend the rest of her time with eyesight watching hurricanes in her dreams. Once her eyes no longer worked, she wouldn’t have much time left to live, they told her.

She couldn’t die not having ever done something meaningful…

“So tonight’s the night?” Stan said.

Though they were in Stan’s office, I heard his infant daughter’s ear-piercing shrieks from the living room, which was practically on the other side of the McMansion.

Stan made no move to check out the wailing.

I said, “You wanna see if Maddy’s okay?”

Stan shook his head. “Par for the course and probably nothing.”

“How can you know she didn’t just open up a vein?”

Stan smiled. “For the first ten thousand screams, you worry every time. But after that? You begin to develop a sixth sense about these things.”

“I feel like I have to go check it out. New Jersey might have one of those Good Samaritan laws.”

“Moira’s out there.”

“In that case, discretion is the better part of valor.” Last thing I needed to do was make Moira think I was questioning her abilities as a mother.

Stan shot me a look. “I told you, she’s
mostly
over you almost getting me killed.”

“Ah, bullshit.” I waved him off. “You went in to the last investigation with eyes wide open.”

“Um,
language
.”

We spun at the same time and found Moira in the doorway, holding an eerily quiet, seemingly content Maddy.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Is she okay?”

“Yeah, why do you ask?” Moira said. She was wearing her typical all-black outfit and pixie glasses. Maddy was sporting a brightly-colored onesy and looking no worse for the wear.

“She was just screaming,” I said. “Unless that was you.”

“She dropped her doll,” Moira said.

“See, I told you,” Stan said.

“Told him what?”

“Never mind,” Stan said. “Hey, did Eddie tell you he’s going to pop the question?”

Moira walked into the office and held Maddy out for Stan. “About time.”

I said, “We haven’t even dated for a year.”

Stan started making goo-goo noises to Maddy.

Moira folded her arms and sat on the edge of Stan’s desk. “What I mean is, it’s good you’re putting a ring on Sumiko’s finger. Before she wises up.”

“Hey, at this price I’m a steal.”

Moira actually smiled. Maybe Stan was right. She was finally
almost
getting over the past. “You get to use the new toy tomorrow night.”

I shook my head. Stan was always buying new equipment for our ghost hunts. “The field tests are crap. I trust it even less than a ghost box.”

Moira smiled. “For once, you and I agree on something.”

Stan stopped making goo-goo noises at Maddy. “You guys are such Luddites. If it were up to you two, we’d still be using divining rods and fu—
frigging
Ouija boards.”

“
Language
!” Moira said.

“I didn’t say it.”

“What you did say is just as bad as saying f-u-c-k-i-n-g, Stan.”

I smiled. Stan and I had argued about the same thing before. They got into it and Stan absently handed Maddy off to me. The cutey developed a fascination with my nose and decided to mash it against my face. I did the old stealing-your-nose trick, but my cleverness was lost upon her.

“Did you just try to steal her nose?” Stan said. “She’s not even eighteen months old, Eddie.”

“Yeah, but she’s an
advanced
eighteen months old.”

Moira took Maddy back and Stan and I went back to game-planning our go-dark the following evening. The client complained of loud noises in the middle of the night, coming from the attic. It didn’t sound like much to me. All noises were loud at night, when there was no other sound. It was probably something in the ceiling.

“Good luck tonight, man,” Stan said. “I hope she’s dumb enough to say yes.”

Because Maddy was playing within earshot, I settled on sign language instead and flipped him off. “Thanks, pal. Oh, one thing. Do you have any spare recorders? The ones that are voice-activated?”

“I’m an eccentric millionaire obsessed with the paranormal.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Why do you need them?”

“Side project,” I said.

“You gonna tell me what it is, or are we doing things behind each others’ backs again?”

I told him why. He didn’t much like it, but he also handed over two digital recorders.

On my way back home I swung by the Moriarty house. The Rossellis, the family we’d helped there years ago, had moved out and nobody had moved in. The lot had sat vacant for years now. Nobody wanted to buy a house where a triple murder had occurred and which had been indisputably haunted.

But right now that was working toward my advantage.

It was weird going back there. I hadn’t been since the investigation, and the place seemed
smaller
to me. Maybe that was the gathering darkness. Maybe that was my brain playing tricks on me. Bastard liked to do that.

Half the windows were boarded up. Someone had tacked a NO TRESPASSING sign across the front door. I ignored it and went around the back. The sliding glass door was long gone. Someone had boarded the exit up. Someone else had removed two of the planks. I crouched and stepped inside.

The house was ruined.

It smelled like a toilet and many animals, including humans, had been through it.

The carpet in the living room was covered with trash. My quick forensic analysis of the garbage (empty forties, beer cans, cigarettes, and hoagie wrappers) led me to conclude that plenty of thrill-seeking teens had been through the house, probably in an attempt to out-do each other and impress girlfriends and boyfriends. I wondered if spending a night at the Moriarty house had become a rite of passage in this town, like running the three stop signs at Breakers’ Point, or like losing your virginity at the old barn.

I did a quick sweep through the house to make sure I was alone. I was. Then I stopped in Eamon’s room. More kids would be through here and I didn’t want them stealing or screwing around with these digital recorders, so I had to carefully hide them. The furniture was all gone and the room was bare, so there was really nowhere to hide the recorder except the closet and hope nobody got adventurous and went looking in there.

The closet door was open about a foot. As I slid it further open, this horrible shriek sounded from within.

I managed to duck out of the raccoon’s way as it literally took flight off the shelf inside.

My own scream was embarrassingly high-pitched and I was glad I was alone in the house. There would be no living that one down.

The hopefully non-rabid animal scurried out of the room. I stuck my head out the door to watch where it went. It scrambled down the stairs out of sight.

Once my pulse got back under a million beats per minute, I turned back to the closet. My friend Rocky had left me some half-eaten trash on the shelf and fully-digested droppings on the floor of the closet. I found a home for the recorder on the near wall, out of eyesight for anybody casually glancing inside.

Hopefully the raccoon would return and scare the living bejesus out of any nitwits curious enough to enter this room and stupidly look inside the closet.

Creeping downstairs, my ears pricked for any sounds of raccoon, I made my way back to the living room, site of the most paranormal activity in the home. The sectional sofa was still there, but all the cushions were gone. I lifted one piece up and tried to ignore whatever was rotting on the floor under it and carefully placed the recorder face up.

“Eddie McCloskey.”

The sound of the man’s voice didn’t scare me as much as the raccoon coming out of the fucking closet. But it was a close second.

“Charlie Waite.”

Sheriff Charlie Waite was every inch of six-five. He had put on twenty pounds since I’d last seen him, some eight or nine years ago. Despite my very illegal status on this property, and despite his very official, very legal position in the community, he didn’t look like he was going to arrest me. Thank God for small favors.

“Long time,” he said. “Whatcha doing there with that thing?”

“Honestly?”

He nodded.

“It’s a digital recorder designed to pick up EVP. That’s—”

“I remember. Electronic voice phenomenon. Your boy Eamon Moriarty pulled a Houdini out of that psychiatric facility not so long ago, and so you’ve resorted to this to try to find him.”

I nodded. “Nothing ever got by you, did it, Charlie?”

“Not till I blew out my knee trying to dunk over Hollis Waldron.” He smirked. “You’re trespassing here, you know.”

I nodded again. “Mea culpa.”

I hadn’t ever planned on seeing Charlie Waite again because, after all, he’d been the one to arrest me on the drug charges that had landed me in the clink. Charlie was a good guy, even I had to admit that, and had been good friends with my brother. But he’d never really liked me.

Couldn’t say I blamed him. Back when he knew me I was a derelict.

“Heard you’re dating a cop,” Charlie said.

“Dramatic irony, right?”

Charlie hmphed, took a step closer, looked around. He was getting that cop look about him, the one I knew too well. I’d seen it many times from the back of a cruiser.

“Anybody else know you’re here?” he asked, his voice a little ominous.

“No.” Didn’t want to get Stan in trouble.

“They’ve been talking about tearing this place down. Just like the McKenna place over in Taberville.”

“They tore that down?” That was where Tim had been murdered.

Charlie nodded. “You get your shit together?”

“When did you turn into my father?”

He gave me a sharp look. “This is still my town, Eddie. I heard you cleaned yourself up, but all cops know we gotta keep an eye on ex-cons.”

“Look, Charlie. I fucked up. But that was years ago. And you called me to task for it. That’s over and done with. I paid my debt. And I’ve been paying it back ever since. Now get the fuck off my back.”

A cold, hard look filled his eyes. He had a few inches on me, and a lot more weight. Guy probably thought he could lay me out, no problem. But I’d learned a few tricks over the years. Krav maga classes. Tangoing with Giles Tyson, an expert in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and later, doing the dance with a couple highly-trained federal agents.

I’d come out alive.

Charlie broke into laughter. “You were always a pain in the ass. I hope you find Eamon Moriarty, the little shit. He got off way too easily for killing your brother.”

“Thanks, Charlie.”