What a Ghoul Wants (19 page)

“You didn’t snap,” he said, allowing me to go first down the stairs. “It’s all good.”

We reached the landing and began to make our way toward the left to a hallway that
I had yet to explore. As we neared the entrance, however, a strong arm snaked around
my middle and I was pulled backward into someone else. “Hey, babe,” Heath whispered
into my ear. “I missed you.”

I turned and flung my arms around him. He was warm and strong, and his breath felt
wonderful against the crook of my neck. “God, it’s good to hug you!” I whispered.

He squeezed me tight, pulled back, and gave me a sweet kiss. “Me too.”

“Oh, are they at it
again
?”

I turned my head to see Gilley standing behind us with his hands on his hips and an
annoyed look on his face. I couldn’t help but also take in the
enormous
sweatshirt draped over most of Gil’s body. It was puffy and bumpy—no doubt filled
with fresh magnets—and it made him look like the Michelin Man.

“Aw, cut ’em some slack, Gil,” John said. I had to hand it to our sound tech. He was
seriously turning out to be one good egg in my book.

Behind Gil I saw someone else wave and realized it was Michel. I waved back and then
my stomach gave another loud rumble and Heath laughed. “We should get you something
to eat,” he said, taking my hand and leading me into the hallway. I glanced behind
me and saw that Gilley, Michel, and John had fallen into step behind us.

We emerged into a large dining hall with a currant-colored carpet, round tables draped
in crimson tablecloths, and burgundy curtains along the windows. At one of the larger
tables sat the rest of the
Ghoul Getters
crew, in the middle of a heavy discussion by the look of it.

As the four of us approached, they all looked up and their happy expressions at the
sight of me made me feel really good inside. “Hey, guys,” I said as Heath pulled out
a chair for me.

“How’re you feeling?” Meg asked right away.

“I’m good.” My eye fell on the basket of baked goods in the center of the table and
I added, “Just hungry.”

Kim pushed the basket toward me, while Heath waved to an elderly woman clearing a
two-top. “Mary, can we please have another cup of tea?”

“And two more for us too, please?” Gil added, pointing to himself and Michel. “Oh,
and maybe another basket of those yummy pastries while you’re at it if you don’t mind?”

The elderly woman seemed taken aback by so many requests, but recovered herself and
with a nod hurried off to get us more tea and goodies for the table.

I lifted a buttery scone out of the basket and decided not to wait for the tea. I
was too famished. “I assume the drawbridge is back down again?” I asked after I’d
swallowed the first delicious bite.

“It is, but no one’s owning up to dismantling it in the first place,” Gilley said.
“We think it was an inside job.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“He would’ve had to use a ladder to climb down from the watchtower on the other side,
and then he’d have to get that ladder across the moat, haul it and a boat up out of
the water, and disappear. Way too much work, if you ask me.”

But I wasn’t so sure. “He could have easily come in through the side door that Crunn
led us through when we first accompanied him to Merrick’s body.”

Gil leaned in and narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Crunn could have done it, you know.”

I blinked. “Done what?”

“Dismantled the drawbridge.”

I scowled at him. “No, he couldn’t. He was in here with us, remember? I came across
that drawbridge just a minute or two before entering the front hall last night and
he was behind his counter while you guys were trying to figure out what to do about
Gopher and the rest of the crew.”

Gilley made a face. “Crap. I forgot about that. Okay, so it couldn’t have been Crunn.”

“Thank you, Sherlock Holmes,” I deadpanned. “Plus, I don’t think anybody with intimate
knowledge of that side entrance would ever brave it in the dead of night right after
Heath was nearly drowned.”

“So how did an outsider do it?” John asked. “And why?”

Heath leaned forward to answer. “I took a good look at the rigging of the bridge on
this side, and if someone dismantled the system, they’d still have three minutes to
exit over the drawbridge before it was too high to get past. The thing takes forever
to open and close.”

“So you’re saying that somebody could have tampered with the mechanism and either
run across the bridge and jumped, or gotten across by boat?” I asked.

“Easily,” Heath said.

John scratched his head. “But that still leaves the question of why. Why lock us in
here?”

“Maybe they weren’t locking us in,” I said. “Maybe they were locking Lefebvre out.”
Several puzzled expressions eyed me across the table. “He was the only one killed
last night, right?”

Gilley shivered into the silence that followed. “This place gives me the weirds.”

I didn’t pretend to look surprised, and instead turned to Heath. “I assume someone’s
filled you in on my run-in with the Widow last night?”

“I did,” John said, raising his hand. “And now that you’re here, we can finally vote.”

Our beverages and pastries arrived just then and I thanked Mary, who looked very much
like her brother, Mr. Crunn. I guessed her to be in her early seventies, but she was
quite spry. “What are we voting on?” I asked when she’d left us again.

“To stay or go,” Gil replied, glaring hard at Gopher. I had the feeling that I’d come
to the table in the middle of a pretty good argument. “Gopher wants us to stay and
shoot more footage, and some of those fools”—Gil paused to point across the table
at Kim and Meg—“also want to stay.”

Kim scowled at Gilley before turning pleading eyes on me. “My mom just lost her job,
M. J., and she can’t make it on unemployment. I
need
this job!”

“So do I,” Meg added quickly. “I’ve got student loans up the wazoo, and this gig was
hard enough to find. If we quit, I’ll have to go back to waitressing at the IHOP.”

I held up my hand and focused on Gilley. “You sent Chris the footage I took from last
night, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “The footage of the Widow when she first jumped out at you
and
all the other stuff too!”

Exasperated, I turned next to Gopher. “How can Chris watch that and
not
think it’s good enough?”

“Oh, he loved it,” Gopher said, tracing small circles with his finger on the tablecloth.

“Which is the problem,” Heath muttered.

I picked up another scone and broke it in half to spread on some homemade butter.
“I don’t know that I’m following what the heck the problem is. Any time one of you
wants to make some sense, please clue me in.”

“We knocked Chris out of the park with what you caught on film,” Gopher explained.
“He wants to do a full-length movie.”

I dropped my knife and stared in shock at my producer.
“What?”

Gopher opened his laptop and peered at his screen. “He says, and I quote, ‘That is
the scariest shit I have ever seen!’”

I offered him a level look. “He should try living through it.”

Gopher smiled tightly. “Yeah, I know, and remind me to thank you for being such a
trouper about trying to rescue us last night.”

“I wouldn’t have had to, Gopher, if you’d at least left us a note or something.”

Gopher pointed to John. “I told him we were going out on the moors!”

“No, dude, you didn’t,” John said firmly. “You said you were going on a bust with
or without me. You never said you were leaving the castle.”

“Well, I’m not stupid enough to go into the south wing after what you guys went through
when M. J. went back to retrieve her stuff, especially not after what happened to
Heath! Seriously, do I look like an
idiot
?”

Absolutely everyone at the table dropped their eyes or looked away.

“Oh, thanks, you guys!” he growled. “The point is, we’ve got some really amazing footage,
and Chris thinks it’s a serious winner, but we need more if we’re going to make a
full-length feature out of it.”

Heath leaned in over the table, his face hard with anger “Are you
crazy
?” Gopher just frowned at him. “Seriously, sending any of us back there would be suicide!
I mean. . . Jesus, Gopher! She almost
killed
me! And then she almost
killed
M. J.! And then she
did
kill Merrick Brown and André Lefebvre!”

But Gopher was unfazed. In fact, Heath’s last statement actually seemed to animate
him. “But that’s the hook, don’t you get it? All those other fake ghost movies that’ve
come out in recent years—they’ve made hundreds of
millions
! Our movie would be
real
,
backed up by actual verifiable events!”

I crossed my arms and stared hard at him. Our producer liked to play a little too
fast and loose with our lives for my taste.

Gopher turned pleading eyes on me. “M. J.,” he said, knowing full well that if he
had a chance in hell, he’d have to convince me, “if you agree to get more footage,
and we sell this as a movie, you and every person at this table would stand to make
a
lot
of money.”

I cocked a skeptical eyebrow.

Gopher seemed to take that as a sign to continue the argument. “I’ve crunched the
numbers with Chris, and told him that for this kind of dangerous work you guys would
need a couple of points on the back end of the deal.”

I wasn’t going to agree to stay, but he had piqued my curiosity a little. “In English,
how much is that, Goph?”

“
If
we get enough for a full-length film, and
if
the studio takes it to the big screen, we’re talking a couple of million for you
and Heath, and about a half million apiece for the rest of the crew.” My eyes bugged.
Was he serious?

“Or,” Heath said testily, “the two of us might die.”

Meg scowled at him and nudged Gopher with her elbow. “Tell her about the bonus.”

“The bonus is really more of an incentive for you and the crew to stick with this
no matter what, but basically Chris is offering a thirty percent bonus for this shoot
if everybody agrees to stay on to the end.”

“No matter what?” I repeated. That was the part of his speech that worried me.

Gopher shifted in his seat and dropped his eyes.

“He means, no matter if someone from the crew gets hurt or dies during filming, Em,”
Heath said softly.

Around the table both Meg and Kim looked at me with hopeful eyes, while Heath’s position
was perfectly clear, and Gilley of course was shaking his head adamantly, but John
kind of looked undecided and Michel seemed to be taking in everything that was said
with rapt curiosity. I had a feeling John would grudgingly vote whichever way I was
leaning. The guy had seen too much in that hallway to not have a personal appreciation
for the level of danger we could face.

And I’ll have to admit that my mind was racing with the offer. Gil and I had lived
close to the edge of poverty since college, and I suddenly realized what kind of lasting
financial freedom making that kind of money could buy us. “How much more footage?”
I asked, and everyone looked at me with no small measure of surprise.

“Maybe three or four hours’ worth,” Gopher said. “But not all of that would need to
be usable. If we edit what we’ve got now, I figure we’ll only need about thirty to
forty more minutes of solid scary stuff, and not all of that has to be taken in the
danger zone. I mean, if you fill some of that with a few knocks, bumps, disembodied
footsteps, or whatever, then that should get us by.”

I felt the weight of the decision settle onto my shoulders, so I decided to play devil’s
advocate. “We have enough for an amazing episode of
Ghoul Getters
, Gopher—why are you asking us to risk to get more? I mean, is a movie
really
a big enough reason?”

“No, but think what the money could do for you and the crew, M. J.,” Gopher countered.

“That and the thirty percent bonus,” Kim said. “Me and my mom could
really
use that cash right now.”

“There is one more incentive,” Gopher said, in that way that clearly indicated he
hadn’t told us everything yet.

Heath rolled his eyes. “Here we go.”

Gopher took a deep breath before continuing, as if weighing whether to even let us
in on it. “Chris believes in this movie idea so much that he’s laid it all on the
line. He said that this would be an all-or-nothing offer.”

I blinked and looked around the table. It seemed that everyone was just as confused
as I was. “Come again?” John said.

Gopher leveled his gaze at me. “Either we proceed with getting more footage for the
movie or he’s pulling the plug on our show.”

Several loud gasps echoed around the table, but I wasn’t surprised. I’d met Chris
only once and even then it’d been brief. Still, it’d been long enough to label him
a total douche bag.

“I’m assuming the clock is ticking on our final decision?” I asked.

Gopher nodded. “We have until midnight to give him an answer.”

Looking around the table, I knew exactly how the vote would go. Meg, Kim, and Gopher—yea.
Gilley and Heath—nay. John was the swing vote, but even if he voted yea, my voting
no would effectively veto it. Gopher couldn’t proceed without at least one of his
mediums.

So the decision rested on my shoulders. Again.

I sighed heavily. At that moment I was so damn tired of the show, I knew that I could
easily walk away and not look back. I’d head back to Boston and carve out a living
doing readings for clients and the occasional ghostbust, but what tugged at me—besides
the pleading eyes of Meg and Kim, who I knew really needed the cash—was the nagging
thought of the souls of those victims the Widow had claimed. I suspected there might
be at least a dozen or more names to her macabre roster—Mr. Lefebvre and Merrick were
only the two most recent. The look on the ghost of Merrick Brown’s face really bothered
me. He’d seemed so scared and confused. I hated the thought of him spending an eternity
with the likes of the Widow, and I knew that if we worked this bust right, we’d have
to look more in depth at that, and at least try to find a solution to freeing those
poor souls.