The Ghoul Next Door Page 7

  “I crossed Bethany over,” I told Heath.

  “I figured. Anyway, Kendra added that she’s reached out to you for further comment, but you haven’t returned her calls so far, and since this aired ten minutes ago, the office phone’s been ringing off the hook.”

  “Well, that’s just great,” I grumbled.

  “What’s happening?” Gilley asked.

  I ignored him. “Don’t answer the phone,” I told Heath.

  He chuckled. “Oh, I’m not touching it. But, Em, this could be good for you and the show. It’s great publicity at least.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see. Listen, we’re heading back now, and all I need is a few minutes to change and we can head to the hospital.”

  “Cool. I’ll be ready.”

  I hung up with Heath and told Gil what’d happened. “The phone is ringing off the hook?” he asked, his eyes as shiny as Salesgirl’s.

  “Don’t get too excited,” I told him. “Remember, you’re under strict orders not to overbook me.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Gil said. “Come on, let’s get you changed.”

  “Thank God!” I said, picking up the bags and preparing to head out the door.

  “Where’re you going?” Gil asked.

  “Aren’t we leaving?”

  He laughed and held up three blouses and two pairs of jeans. “Oh, honey, how you do entertain me! Now, go try these on. If I like any of them, you’ll wear them out of the store.”

  Chapter 4

  We met up with Heath at my place a “mere” three hundred additional dollars later. The minute I walked into my condo, I headed to a drawer in my kitchen and pulled out a pair of scissors. Holding up my credit card so Gilley could see, I snipped it in half.

  “You act like I don’t have the numbers, expiration date, and security code memorized,” he mocked.

  I threw the two halves at him and stomped off to my room to change. I put on my favorite outfit from the ones Gil had selected for me, and inwardly I had to admit it was quite flattering—although I’d never let Gilley know it.

  Heath whistled appreciatively when I came back out of the bedroom, and I couldn’t help smiling. Then he turned to Gil and said, “Nice.”

  Gil rubbed his knuckles on his shirt. “What can I say? It’s a gift.”

  I headed toward the door. “If you two are done bromancing each other, we need to get going.”

  “Wait a sec,” Gil said, trotting over with two handfuls of thin magnets. “Let me put these in your new handbag just to be safe.”

  As Gil was loading down my shiny new purse, I saw Heath stick a few magnets into his back pockets. And I noticed as Gil bent over that he’d packed a few in the pocket of the shirt he wore under his sweater.

  “There,” Gilley said once he’d finished. “We can go now.”

  We made it to the hospital in only twenty minutes, which was a miracle, given Boston’s notorious traffic jams. Gil parked the van in the parking structure and we headed down in the elevator and over to the main entrance. The hospital had several waiting rooms, and I realized I hadn’t asked Courtney which one to meet in. I texted Steven, and while we waited for him to respond, I grew impatient, and as I was about to call Courtney, I heard Steven’s voice call out to us. We turned and saw him wave us over. “We’re upstairs,” he said, and I couldn’t help noticing that he looked me up and down, and his eyes gave away his approval.

  Heath took my hand, and I knew he’d seen it too.

  Steven’s gaze shifted subtly to the move and he turned away and began to walk toward the elevator. We rode up in relative silence, but there was enough tension in the air to do most of the talking. Steven and Heath were silently bristling at each other, while I pretended we were all best buds and Gil seemed to be finding everyone’s reaction highly amusing.

  Finally we reached the sixth floor and Steven led the way down the corridor to a door marked PRIVATE.

  When we got through the door, I saw Courtney sitting with a young man in his early twenties with sandy blond hair and sharp-angled features that were quite handsome, but deep blue circles under his gray eyes.

  I smiled to reassure him as Courtney stood and introduced us to her brother. “Hi, Luke,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand. “We’re here to help.”

  His lips parted in a weary smile, but he seemed to be so exhausted that I doubted it was all sinking in. We took our seats at the small table set up in the room—which was obviously a lunch or conference room of some type—and I took control of the meeting. “Your sister has told us a little about what’s been happening, but we’d like to hear from you about this mysterious spirit that’s been giving you trouble,” I said to him.

  Luke nodded. “Where do you want me to start?”

  “At the beginning,” I said. “When did you first notice things weren’t quite right?”

  Luke sighed wearily. His head hung low and his shoulders were slumped. I wondered when was the last time he’d gotten a decent night’s rest. “I think it started at the beginning of the semester,” he said. “I came home one day from class and the stuff in my house was all out of whack.”

  “Out of whack?” Heath asked. He was taking notes, but he almost needn’t have bothered—Gil was recording the session on his phone.

  “Yeah, it was crazy,” Luke told him. “I came home and it was like somebody had rearranged all the furniture. The couch was on the opposite wall, and my recliner was next to the kitchen facing away from the TV—totally not the way I’d left it. And the kitchen was off too. All my glasses and plates were in one cabinet together, instead of spread out in different cabinets like I’d had ’em before.”

  “Anything else out of place?” Heath asked.

  Luke was staring at the tabletop, his expression troubled. “Yeah,” he said softly, almost as if he didn’t want to tell us. “It was so crazy, though. . . .”

  “Tell us,” I said gently. He pulled his gaze up to mine and I smiled at him encouragingly.

  Luke licked his lips and said, “At first I thought somebody had broken in, you know? I mean what the freak, right? So I sort of went around the house real quick looking for all the expensive stuff like my Xbox and my TVs and stuff. They were all still there, but when I went into the bedroom . . . it . . . there . . .” Luke paused. He didn’t seem to know what words to use.

  “What?” I prodded. “What did you see, Luke?”

  He sighed again and rubbed his hand over his short hair. “My bed was on the opposite wall and so was the nightstand—right under the window. The light was off, but it was still pretty light out and the sun was hitting the bedspread, which was the first weird thing I noticed. I used to never make my bed. I mean, I figured that I’d just get right back in it every night, so why make it up, you know?”

  I nodded, hoping to draw the rest out of him. I saw that his hands were trembling slightly. Whatever it was he’d seen that day in his bedroom had seriously shaken him.

  “Anyway, so I get to the bedroom door and I’m just standing there, trying to figure all this out, and I see the bed is made up, like, the cover is even pulled up over the pillow, but on the bed there’s this . . .” Luke paused again to make a motion with his hands to convey that he’d seen something big there. “There’s this indentation,” he said at last. “Like, if a person were lying on the bed it would make an impression in the mattress, you know?”

  Heath and I exchanged a look. That was a new one for us, but not completely unheard-of. “What did you do?” I asked when he didn’t go on.

  He shook his head. “At first I just stood there. I mean, I couldn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing, and then I sort of freaked out and got out of there. I mean, I swear I heard someone on the bed, like, sleeping—you know, how people breathe real deep when they’re asleep?”

  Heath, Gilley, and I all nodded.

  “It sou
nded like that.”

  “What happened after that?” I asked.

  Luke shrugged. “Eventually I went back home and whatever had been in my room was gone, but the furniture and the stuff was still out of whack. I put it back the way I had it, but then a couple of days later when I came home from my study group, it’d been all turned around again. I was starting to freak out, wondering if someone was punking me, you know?”

  “You thought someone might be trying to play a trick on you?” I said. I always marveled at how hard people worked to deny what they saw with their own eyes.

  “Yeah,” Luke said with another shrug. “I didn’t know if one of my buddies was playing me or something.”

  “Did you confront your friends?” Heath asked.

  “I did. They all denied it. Then I called the landlord and I asked if he’d had the locks changed before I leased the place. I mean, I couldn’t explain how anybody was getting in. All the windows and doors were locked up tight, and as far as I knew, I had the only key.”

  “How long had you lived there?” I asked him.

  Luke rubbed his eyes. “Just a few weeks,” he told me.

  “Had the landlord changed the locks?” Gil asked.

  Luke shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “He wasn’t around when I called, so I left him a message and he never got back to me, which made me wonder if maybe he was playing with me or something.”

  “Tell me when you decided it wasn’t anybody trying to trick on you,” I said.

  Luke shifted in his chair. “I think it was maybe a week later. I came home from class and my furniture was all out of whack again, and it was really starting to freak me out. I didn’t go into the bedroom because I couldn’t take seeing that thing on the bed again, so I just grabbed a blanket and went to sleep on the couch. That night I had this really intense dream. More of a nightmare really. I mean, it was one of those dreams that feels so real and so crazy that you just want to wake up, but I couldn’t. I was having a hard time moving, too. Like my arms and legs were made of lead. And then there was all this blood. . . .” Luke’s voice drifted off.

  “Blood?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he whispered, extending his arms out to look at them like he could still see the blood on them. “I was covered in it.”

  Heath stopped writing and he looked up at me. His expression seemed to say, “Whoa. That’s bad.”

  “Was there anybody else with you in the dream?” I asked Luke.

  At first the young man nodded, but then he shifted to shaking his head. “Yes?” he said. “No? I don’t know. It felt like someone else was there, but I couldn’t see them because there was just so much blood.”

  “I’m assuming you eventually woke up and saw that it was just a dream,” I said.

  Luke shuddered. “I woke up,” he said softly. “But what I woke up to totally freaked me out.”

  “What’d you see?” Gil asked.

  Luke opened his mouth to speak, but it was a long moment before he found his voice. “There was this shadow,” he said. “It was like . . . on the wall, but not. It was sort of closer to me than the wall. The room was dark, but it wasn’t pitch-black, but that shadow was pitch-black. It was like this black hole that light couldn’t penetrate.”

  “Did the shadow have a form?” I asked. I was very familiar with the kinds of shadow ghosts Luke was describing.

  He nodded. “It looked like a guy. Like the outline of a guy.”

  “How tall?” Heath asked.

  “I don’t know . . . maybe five ten, five eleven?”

  “Did it move?” I asked.

  Luke shook his head. “No. I mean, it just hung there for about thirty seconds and then it vanished. It freaked me out. I stayed up the whole rest of the night with all the lights on and the TV at full blast.”

  “What happened after that?” I asked.

  Luke closed his eyes and hung his head even lower. Courtney put a gentle hand on his back. She looked pained by her brother’s recounting. “It got worse,” Luke said. “I started staying later and later at school, but the library closes at midnight and my last semester was crazy hard. I avoided going home and I called the landlord again, telling him I wanted out of the lease.”

  I wondered if this landlord had had any other tenants complaining about the shadow in the house. “What’d he say?” I asked.

  “He wouldn’t return my calls, but he did send me a certified letter letting me know that if I broke the lease, he’d sue me for the remainder of the rent.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s a real asshole. Anyway, that dream with me covered in blood kept coming back and it got to where I couldn’t sleep at night. And then I couldn’t sleep during the day. And then I couldn’t sleep at all. I was like a zombie. I felt like I was going nuts and I was so twisted up I didn’t know if I was awake or dreaming. I stopped going to class, I stopped hanging out with my friends, I dropped out of life.”

  “Then what happened?” Gilley asked, his expression completely captivated.

  Luke stared at the tabletop and shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s all pretty fuzzy. My dreams got weirder and then I woke up at my sister’s house.”

  Luke paused to take a drink of water before continuing. “I think I slept for three straight days and I started to feel like my old self again.”

  “But it didn’t last,” Heath said.

  Luke shook his head. “Nope. My sister and I were out on a walk down by the water when all of the sudden I felt the shadowman right behind me again. I just wanted to get away from him, you know? I took off and it followed me until I ran into the Stop & Shop. And then, it was like a miracle—he backed off. I realized that as long as I keep myself near a group of people, the shadowman can’t get inside my head.”

  “But that’s hardly a solution,” his sister said, reaching out to squeeze his hand. “He’s been unable to function normally from sleep deprivation. He comes here and sleeps either in the waiting room or, if I can get him a bed, in one of the doctors’ lounges, but the sleep he’s able to get is never long enough or deep enough for him to become fully rested. I’m worried about the lasting effects from his lack of restorative sleep.”

  The room fell silent and I felt everyone’s gaze land on me. I was deeply troubled by what Luke was telling me. I knew by experience that he was in fact being haunted, and he looked so worn down and exhausted that I felt strongly that the spook in question might be angling for a full-on possession.

  Possessions are particularly tricky, because once that door’s been opened—once a spook has gotten “in,” so to speak—even if it’s exorcised, it is most likely to come back again and again until it all but destroys its host’s life.

  “I’d like to set up an observation,” I said to the group.

  “An observation?” Steven repeated.

  I nodded but focused on Luke. “I want to see what happens when you try to sleep, Luke. With your permission, I’d like to set up some cameras to watch you overnight. And I’d like you to be alone during the time we’re observing you.”

  “If you think it’ll help, I’m willing to try anything. I just want this thing to go away and for my life to go back to normal,” Luke said.

  I pressed my lips together. I thought I owed it to Steven, Courtney, and Luke to be honest with them. “The truth is that I’m not sure we can help. Whatever is haunting Luke is focusing very hard on wearing him down. I don’t know yet what the ulterior motive is, but it’s trying to take him over. And if it does, then we’re not the experts to help him with that.”

  “You’re talking about possession?” Courtney asked, her face turning pale.

  “Yes.” I let everyone in the room take that in for a good long moment before continuing. Then, I focused on Luke again, who looked scared to death. “The good news is that I don’t think we’re at the point where you�
�ve been taken over, Luke. But I suspect we might be close. I want to observe you, tomorrow night if possible, and hopefully Heath, Gilley, and I will be able to identify what’s truly going on. Then we’ll consider our options.”

  “What are the options?” Steven asked.

  “I won’t know that until I see what kind of spook we’re dealing with. If this is just a grounded spirit, then it’s not nearly as bad as it could be.”

  “How bad could it be?” Luke asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “It could be a demon,” Gilley told him.

  It was Luke’s turn to pale and I wished Gil hadn’t spoken. I reached out and put my hand over Luke’s. “Listen,” I said, “whatever it is that’s haunting you, we’ll figure it out, and we’ll come up with a plan. Maybe that plan will include reinforcements. Maybe it’ll just take the three of us, but I promise you we won’t leave you hanging, okay?”

  “You promise?” Luke asked, his expression pleading.

  I held up my hand. “On my honor, Luke. We’ll help you see this thing through.”

  • • •

  The next morning Heath and I slept in. We were going to be up all night observing Luke, so I wanted us to be well rested so that we could focus. Around noon we met with Gilley to go over the strategy and formulate a plan. Courtney had given us a key to her row house along with the alarm code so that we could set up our cameras in Luke’s room and around her home. She would spend the night at Steven’s place. I tried not to think too much about that.

  Meanwhile, Heath and I would be situated just down the block from Courtney’s place at an all-night diner while Gilley would be staying at his condo, monitoring all the feeds, and coordinating with us. He’d been invited to set up shop at the diner . . . and he’d declined with a firm, “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” Gil wanted to be as far away from this spook as he could get while still being able to help us.