The Ghost Files 2 (The Ghost Files - Book 2) (5 page)

“Look, I did NOT sign up for this, Doc! Ghosts are one thing, but you’re telling me that demons are real? And that I’ve got one who has my 411? Would
you
be calm right now? I DON’T THINK SO!”

“Dan, can you talk some sense into her?”

“Uh, no, don’t think so, Doctor,” Dan whispers. “I’m right there on the freak out train with her.”

We both hear him sigh. “I need to do some research, kids. Let me get back to you in a couple hours. I need to find out why Dan is seeing the demon. He shouldn’t be able to. Mattie, I don’t want you by yourself tonight. Do you have somewhere you can stay?”

“She can stay with me,” Dan tells him. “We’ll camp out in the living room.”

“Good, good, you should both probably stay together until I figure this out. I’ll give you guys a call back soon.”

Click.

No good-bye or a hang in there. Nope, just click. So rude.

“So we should both probably at least try to stay calm,” Dan says. “I mean, Doctor Olivet will figure this out, right?”

“Demon, Dan, DE-MON!”

“Yeah, I know, Squirt, I saw it too, remember?” He sighs. “We can’t freak out. We have to be ready if it shows up again. So, let’s focus on just getting through the next couple hours till the Doc calls back. Can you do that for me?”

I nod. Not like I have much of a choice in the matter. Freak out or try to stay on the up and up, ready to pounce if the thing comes back.

“Up for a horror movie marathon on Chiller?” Dan tries to be funny.

“
Really, Officer Dan?
”

He shrugs and tosses me the remote. Neither one of us will be getting much sleep tonight, I’m thinking, so I settle for something I know will cause Dan to groan in sheer horror…a
Twilight
marathon!

Sure enough as soon as he sees it, he tries to steal the remote. Nope, he’s gonna suffer for making me miss out on the best burger in town even if I have to suffer through it, too.

Chapter Five

My teeth are chattering and I can’t get warm. Fuzz greets my eyes when I blink them open. The TV. The screen has gone all snowy. Did one of us roll on the remote and change the channel? Dan has Direct TV so the channels never go snowy unless you change the input. Dan is sprawled in his comfy chair, drool falling out of his mouth. I so want a camera right now. Wait, I can use my new phone to take a picture!

I struggle to sit up. My body feels like it’s weighted down. I’d fallen asleep on the floor, so now my body is protesting the hard surface. It’s freezing in here. That isn’t helping my aching back, either. Note to self, never watch TV on Dan’s floor again.

Once I’m up on my knees, I freeze. I’m eye level with the glasses we’d used for our pop earlier. Ice makes trails up the surfaces of the glasses, spidering here and there. I look around, but don’t see any ghosts. That doesn’t stop the creepy feeling, though. It’s like someone is watching me. I don’t like it.

The floorboards creak and my head swivels in the direction of Dan’s bedroom. He has a small apartment. It’s basically a living room/kitchen, a bedroom, and a tiny, tiny bathroom. There are few places to hide in here. The satellite box tells me it’s after midnight, which explains why it’s so dark. We must have fallen asleep without turning on any lights.

I listen, but don’t hear anything. Thoughts of that thing flood my memories and I’m tempted to wake up Dan, but if it’s just an ordinary ghost, I’d rather get it out before Officer Dan wakes up and freaks out about a ghost in his place. Decision made, I push myself up off the floor and take a hesitant step towards the closed bedroom door. I swear someone is watching me, but I shake it off. Can’t show them any fear.

I am only a few inches from the door when I hear footsteps on the other side. They aren’t loud, but then he has carpet, if that makes a difference. My hand reaches for the door, but I hear footsteps behind me. I whirl, but see nothing. Someone is watching me, trying to scare me. Freaking ghosts.

“You can’t scare me,” I whisper, trying not to wake up Dan. Ghosts don’t have to make themselves seen. That’s one of the first things I learned. Most show themselves to me because they want something, but they can hide, too. This one is hiding. “Show yourself.”

Floorboards creak on the other side of the bedroom door and I turn back to it. The bedroom is carpeted. The floor shouldn’t be creaking. I reach for the doorknob again and a wave of icy cold hits me as soon as I touch it. It seeps into my bones and I shudder, my teeth starting to chatter. The cold is the worst part. It invades my body and chases out any warmth. It’s the cold of the dead and it hurts.

The door opens easily and a small gasp escapes me. The room beyond is a studio of some sort. There are paintings everywhere. Dark, morbid paintings. Images of tortured souls leap out of the canvases, their pain and horror evident in their eyes. I hear a scraping sound and look to the left. Someone is standing in front of a canvas, muttering to themselves. I take a step into the room and chills begin to wrack my body. I’m so cold, but I have to see who it is. There’s something about the painting he’s working on that I have to see.

My legs feel weighted down worse than they were before. The cold is intense and as I force myself forward, I see ice start to form on my fingers, spreading up my hands. I push on, the need to see that painting outweighing everything else. I have to see it.

The man has his back turned to me, but his unruly curls escape everywhere. They are dark like mine. He’s holding a jar with dark red liquid in it. His brush dips into it and then makes more strokes across the canvas. The floor around him is soaked with red paint. All the paintings in here are done in red paint.

A tinny smell hits me as I draw closer. It’s a smell I recognize. It’s blood. He’s not using red paint, he’s using blood. All the paintings are blood soaked. I can see it drip from his paintbrush. He’s using blood to paint his portraits. Bile rises in my throat, but I swallow it down. I need to see what he’s painting.

An image of a young woman stares at me, her eyes tortured. There is such a lost look in them I feel her pain and despair. Her face is beautiful, hauntingly so, but it’s her eyes that hold a person. They are the only other spark of color in the painting. Hazel eyes, much like my own, stare at me helplessly.

The man mutters again and stalks over to a table. He pulls back a sheet and I want to scream. There’s a woman strapped down to the table and he uses a knife to open an old wound on her arm, letting blood drip down into his now empty jar. She moans softly, but doesn’t move. I can see she’s almost dead and I want to shout, to scream for him to leave her alone, but I’m frozen. I can’t move. It’s the woman who he’s painting and she looks so familiar to me, but I don’t know from where.

When he’s collected enough blood, he throws the sheet back over her and then comes back to the painting.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it
,” he asks me. “
Did you know the soul can be found in the blood?”

“Who are you?” I ask.

“You have beautiful features,”
he says.
“You’d make a wonderful subject.”

Uh, no, not gonna happen, not in a billion gazillion years.

He turns around and I try to take a step backwards, but I can’t. Ice has formed around my feet, locking them in place. So not good. He tilts his head and his black eyes are dark, an edge of madness in them. He comes to stand by me and his fingers graze my cheek. I flinch from the cold and he smiles.

“So beautiful,”
he whispers.

“Get away from me, freak!” I shout and struggle to make my feet move.

“You shouldn’t talk to me like that, Emma Rose.”

“What?” Why did he call me that? Does he think I’m someone else?

His eyes start to bleed black ooze like that thing from earlier and I renew my efforts to get free. Is he a demon? Dang it, I hate the fear that crawls up my spine.

“Poor Emma Rose,”
he whispers.
“You seek the truth, but you don’t really want to know it.”
He leans in, his breath putrid, smelling of rot.
“I can show you the truth, but are you willing to go as far as it takes to find out?”

“What are you talking about?” I demand. Why does he keep calling me that? Is he some psycho ghost who’s trapped in a nightmare and wants to trap me, too?

“Let me show you, my Emma Rose, let me show you.”

He takes my hand and pulls it towards him, the knife he had earlier coming up. He slices it across my wrist and I watch in horror as blood wells up. He picks up another jar and lets my blood drip into it. Drop by drop it falls until there is a good inch in the jar. I can’t struggle, try as I might. It feels like before, when that thing touched me. I’m paralyzed.

He dips the brush into my blood and starts to paint again. The image on the canvas starts to move, to breathe.

Black goo oozes from the canvas and drips onto the floor. The pool of liquid starts to snake its way towards me and I can’t move, my feet frozen. It reaches my sneakers and begins to crawl its way up my shoes and then reaches the bare skin of my legs. Pain explodes everywhere.

I scream.

Chapter Six

“Mattie! Mattie, wake up!”

Someone is shaking me and I come awake violently, my fist swinging. It connects with something solid and I hear a muttered curse.

“Stop it, Mattie, it’s just me!”

Dan. It’s Dan. Oh, God, did I just hit Dan? I blink my eyes open and he’s staring down at me in concern. I see the redness on his cheek and realize I whopped him a good one. “I’m so sorry!”

“What were you dreaming about?” he asks and helps me up off the floor. He frowns and grabs my hand. There’s blood on it. Those big old brown eyes widen when he sees how badly my wrist is bleeding. He lets out a curse and runs to the kitchen.

I stare in shock and fascination at my wrist. There’s a bloody gash going across it exactly where I’d been cut in my dream. I managed to carry the wound out of my dream? No way. No freaking way.

Dan is back, cleaning and then binding the wound tightly. He’s giving me covert looks of suspicion. Does he really think I’d go and cut my wrists? As if I’d ever be stupid enough to do that no matter what situation I’m in. Idiot boy.

“You’d best get that idea right out of that head of yours,” I tell him, the aggravation plain in my voice.

“Mattie…”

“Look, Officer Dan,” I say sarcastically. “If I survived this long being plagued by ghosts, what makes you think I’d go and do this now?”

“Your mom.”

Dang, why does he always have to have a good reason for everything? Thoughts of my mom freak me out beyond belief, but I still wouldn’t do this.

“Dan, I didn’t do this. Besides, you forget I’m religious. Just ‘cuz I don’t go to church doesn’t mean I don’t believe in Heaven. Suicide is a sure way to buy yourself a one way ticket on the train to down under. And I’m not that selfish, either,” I add. Killing yourself might stop your problems at the moment, but it left everyone who cared about you in as much pain or more than you were in before you offed yourself.

“Then what happened, Squirt?”

I tell him about my dream and his frown deepens. “You’re sure it felt like that thing from before?”

“No, the man was definitely not like that thing, but the way I was frozen felt like what happened to me.”

“I don’t like this, Mattie, not one bit.” He stands up and starts to pace.

“Well, we knew ghosts could hurt people,” I offer.

“Not when you’re asleep!”

I wince. Dan is slightly more freaked out than usual because he saw that thing earlier. He doesn’t understand why he could see it. He’s as normal as normal can get. The idea of seeing something he didn’t believe in only a few months ago has him on edge. Not that I blame him. Even though I’ve been seeing ghosts since I was five, this thing has me weirded out more than normal, too.

My phone belts out the tunes of Fall Out Boy and causes both of us to jump. Dan reaches it before I can and relief crosses his face.

“Doctor, hang on a sec and let me put you on speaker.”

“Hey, Doc,” I greet him once Dan put the phone on the coffee table. “What took you so long? I thought you were calling back in a couple of hours?”

“Sorry about that, kids.”

Why does everyone insist on calling us kids? Dan is twenty and I just turned seventeen. Kids we are not.

“I had to contact a friend of mine. Took me a couple hours just to get him to answer his phone. He was on a hunt out in Arizona with his boys.”

“And?” Dan prompts, leaning in close to the phone.

“Well, what you two saw was definitely a demon, but I don’t know what kind. I need more information.”

“Yeah, we figured that out already, Doc,” I tell him. “Why did Dan see it?”

“Well, it might be a little hard to believe,” he says hesitantly. He knows how un-supernatural Dan can be. If he doesn’t see it with his own two eyes, he doesn’t believe it.

“According my friend, there’s really only two types of beings that can see demons. One is someone like you, Mattie. Your essence is essentially that of a ghost and you can see things on a plane of existence most of us can’t. That thing exists outside this plane of reality and therefore you see it.”

Makes sense, sorta. “And Dan?”

“Well, there’s really only one other type of being that can see them.” The Doc clears his throat. “Dan, what do you know about your family history?”

“Dan was adopted, Doc,” I answer before Dan can. “He doesn’t know anything about his birth parents.”

There was a sigh on the other end of the line. “Do you know about the Knights Templars?”

“Weren’t they some big secret society or something in the Dark Ages?” Dan asks, the frown creasing his forehead tells me he’s working hard to remember.