Texas Gothic

14



midnight found me sitting on a rock in the McCullochs’ pasture, watching my sister pace between one excavation and the other, talking to herself. Or possibly to her equipment. I couldn’t be sure.

My feelings on ghost hunting had not changed. My feelings on trespassing had not changed. I’d laid out all the pitfalls of this plan in the car on the way back to the site.

“What about not prostituting your scientific integrity?” I’d asked Phin.

“I just said that because I don’t want a bunch of well-intentioned amateurs getting in the way.”

I’d taken my eyes from the road just long enough to make sure she wasn’t being ironic. “You know, when it comes to the dig, we are well-intentioned amateurs.”

“It’s not the same thing at all. Paranormal events are difficult enough to document in a meaningful, repeatable way without adding more variables. I don’t want anything to interfere with my test of the Kirlianometer.”

“You’re really going to call it that?”

“You’re the one who said I need a better name for it. And you are very good at thinking like normal people.”

This lavish praise wasn’t what convinced me to go with her. Neither was it the worry that she would justify going without me, or worse, invite Mark along, even if he was an amateur. It wasn’t even to spite Ben McCulloch.

It was that I was more afraid of what would happen if I said no than what would happen if I said yes. The awful mental paralysis was still too fresh in my memory to even try—especially while I was driving.

I rationalized my participation by the fact that Phin was measuring metaphysical stimuli in order to look for remains and not for ghosts. And someone had to make sure she didn’t trip in a gopher hole or get carried off by coyotes. Or bitten by a rabid bat, or fall in the river. Or even, you know, get hit on the head or pushed down a ravine by a Mad Monk.

How I would prevent any of those things was a mystery.

I rubbed at a fire ant bite on my hand, concentrating on the burning sting to keep alert. When we’d first reached the excavation site, you could have bounced a quarter off my tautly strung nerves. I flinched at the cool, damp breeze that ruffled my hair. The moon made eerie patterns on the rough ground, and the places where the topsoil had worn down to the limestone clay glowed with reflected light.

But after an hour and a half of jumping at shadows, I was more worried about mosquito bites than spectral manifestations.

“Holy smokes,” said Phin. “What a bust.”

I shook myself out of my thoughts, and my boredom, and looked at her. There was a good bit of moonlight to see by. “Isn’t it working?”

“Too well.” She thumbed through the images she’d taken, the glow of the screen on her frustrated face.

Curiosity nudged me off my rocky seat. I leaned around Phin’s shoulder and peered at the image of a faint neon footprint. It was eerie to see something on the camera that I couldn’t with my eyes, but since Phin wasn’t excited about it, I figured it was normal. Relatively speaking.

“Is this your footstep on the grass?” I asked.

She sighed. Loudly. “Yes. That’s all I’m getting. I don’t know if the stronger stimulus is masking weaker, older ones, or if there’s nothing else to read.”

“Are you ready to call it quits?” I didn’t bother to keep the hopeful note from my voice.

“For tonight.” She sounded distracted, like she was already working out the problem in her head. “This is so frustrating. I should have tested it in a controlled environment first, but I didn’t want to miss the opportunity. Who knows when I’ll get another chance to image an unconsecrated grave pre- and post-disinterment?”

I’d been doing fine until she said “unconsecrated grave.” The words conjured images of restless spirits with unfinished business, and disquiet skittered up my spine, making me shiver despite the warm night.

Phin took her sweet time putting away her stuff and zipping her backpack. We’d walked from the river gate, the way I’d come that morning, which seemed eons ago. “And you saw no fluctuations on the EMF meter?”

I glanced down at the electromagnetic field meter in my hand. Paranormal events often made the EM fields spike or dip. But so did a lot of other things—microwaves, uninsulated appliances, and electrical cords, for example. The interaction of natural and supernatural fields could make a mess of one’s spells, which was why a lot of kitchen witches like Aunt Hyacinth wouldn’t do spells in the actual kitchen. Or they’d unplug everything first, which was a bit of a nuisance.

The thing was, naturally occurring EMFs could make you feel unsettled and uneasy, mess with your sleep, or even make your pacemaker do wonky things. All of which could make your house feel haunted, when it was really just too close to a high-voltage power line.

I’d run the EMF meter over both dig sites and gotten no fluctuations. Whatever Lila had sensed that made her dig up the second skull, EMFs weren’t it.

“What about the voice recorder?” Phin said. “Did you keep it running for EVPs?”

She was asking me about the MP3 recorder I had going to catch electronic voice phenomena. That was when a voice you didn’t hear during an investigation turned up when you were listening later. There were a lot of gadgets to juggle when Phin was involved.

“It’s been running the whole time,” I told her.

“Did you ask questions while I was taking Kirlianographs?” Phin’s impatient voice said she knew the answer. The area wasn’t so big she wouldn’t have heard me talking to myself. But I answered her anyway.

“No.”

“Amy! Why didn’t you ask questions?”

“Because I hate EVPs. They creep me out.”

They always had. EMFs and EVPs might seem mystifying if you were new to investigating, but this was like getting back on a bike I hadn’t ridden in years. Other kids go through dinosaur phases. When I was eight, I could name every kind of spirit from revenants to poltergeists. That was how I knew that apparitions were so rare.

I was thinking that maybe I should have Mom send me the books and videos I’d boxed up after the La Llorona incident. That was how far I’d slipped out of my entrenched position. Except calling might get her hopes up that I was changing my mind, which was another reason I didn’t want to be in the pasture doing what I swore I would never do again.

Phin exhaled in exasperation. “If we’re going to do this, we have to do it right.”

“I said I would come and test your Kirlianometer to see if it could visualize any anomalies with the ground. And I went along with measuring EMFs. But I’m not here to look for—”

I bit my tongue. Literally. After cursing in pain for a while, as Phin waited impatiently for me to make my point, I rephrased.

“I don’t want to invite the ghost to talk to me. I just want it to go away. From me and everyone else.”

My sister looked at me like I was an idiot, which was not uncommon, and then said something that made me feel like an idiot, which was much more rare:

“How can you know how to make it go away if you won’t even ask it?”

This was remarkably sensible. Maybe if I didn’t have so many hot buttons about ghosts, I would have thought of it myself. I started to tell her as much, but she was looking at the display screen of the camera with an expression of … well, it could have been either concentration or consternation.

“What?” I said, because that look often preceded blown fuses and blown tempers. “Nothing.”

And then she turned off the gadget. Sure, we were wrapping up, but the way she did it set my alarms to pinging. Phin had no subtlety, and if there was something she didn’t want me to see, it could not be good.

“Delphinium, what is in that picture—”

I broke off as another noise caught my attention. Phin went still, and nodded to show she heard it, too. I didn’t want to stir the air with even a whisper.

The indistinct ripple of sound continued, a hushed rise and fall. The rocky hills threw voices like a ventriloquist. The noise could have been coming from over the ridge or over the river.

I scanned the night in a slow circle and nearly strangled myself on a swallowed shriek when I saw a pair of glowing eyes staring at me from the dark. But at my half-audible gurgle, the eyes disappeared, and the deer they belonged to bounded away with a flick of her white tail and a clatter of hooves on the rock.

The murmuring broke off, and its abrupt absence was somehow easier to locate. Phin pointed east, where a hill obscured any long-range view. I gestured that we should go the other way. She shook her head and turned on her Kirlianometer and jabbed an emphatic finger at the EMF meter and voice recorder that I held.

She started up the hill, crouching low to keep her silhouette hidden. I went after her, worried she would fall and break her neck, worried about what would come over the rise to meet us. Worried about things that bump in the dark and grab with cold hands …

Memory and imagination wound me in knots, and just when I thought I would snap, three figures appeared over the hill.

In between “Holy crap!” and “What the hell?” I recognized Mark’s close-cropped hair and chiseled profile. Ditto Jennie’s Pocahontas braids and Dwayne’s linebacker shoulders.

Phin straightened like a shot. “What are you doing here?” she demanded, like we had any more right to be at the site than they did.

“Aw, man!” said Dwayne, lowering his video recorder.

Jennie laughed, but Mark gave more of a crow. “I knew it! You ditched us to play Ghostbusters all on your own. Unfair!”

His word choice had Phin vibrating with outrage. “We’re trying to conduct serious paranormal research. If you want to play, go do it somewhere else.”

“Where?” asked Mark. “This is where the graves are. Our graves, I might add.”

“Don’t tempt me,” she snapped. I had to cover my mouth to hold back a laugh, because I’d never seen my sister like this. “I’m trying to control the variables in this experiment.”

Mark raised his hands. “Dial it down, chica. You could have controlled these variables much better if you hadn’t ditched us to come here on your own.”

“I didn’t think you’d follow us.”

“We didn’t follow you. You’re not the only one who can look up ghost hunting on Wikipedia.”

“Wikipedia!” If Phin got any more indignant, she was going to be in orbit. It didn’t help when Mark laughed.

Dwayne, Jennie, and I watched them like a tennis match. When I was reasonably sure Mark was safe from my sister, I asked Jennie, “Where’s everyone else?”

Jennie answered, “Lucas was enjoying himself at the bar, and we ditched Emery because he’d tell on us. Caitlin was trying to ditch him, too, so she could talk to Ben.”

Nice. Now I was doubly embarrassed that I’d been thinking about inappropriate Mini Cooper kissing when Ben really was at the bar to meet Caitlin.

Focus, Amy. He’s just a guy.

“Did you try your corona thing on the dig site?” Mark asked, which might have gotten him back into Phin’s good graces if the unsuccessful experiment weren’t a sore point with her.

“I’m still working the bugs out.”

Before she could go on, something stopped her. The same thing that made us all freeze, at exactly the same moment. So I knew I wasn’t imagining it, the sound that, just like before, was more of a sensation in my middle, as if the noise were too low for my auditory sense to register.

Then came a soft grumble, like a cranky complaint from an ancient man.

The taut air of a collective held breath kept the five of us still until the last rumbling echo. Only then did we turn toward the sound.

“Look!” said Dwayne. There was the faintest flickering glow against the starless silhouette of the big granite bluff to the south.

Mark punched Dwayne’s arm in excitement. “Let’s go see.”

“You are not blowing this test for me,” said Phin, and she and Jennie ran after them.

I would have, too, but I knocked the voice recorder out of my pocket, and it hit the ground with a clatter.

“Crap.” I crouched to feel around for it, and then I had to find the batteries that had fallen out. In the dark, I reassembled the recorder, then made sure it still worked. Which it did. Phin might be the death of me, but she wouldn’t be killing me for losing evidence.

Then I stood, looked around, and found myself utterly alone.

Logic said the others weren’t far, maybe just over the hill. But for all I could see of them, they might have vanished to another dimension. I was pretty sure this was against the buddy-system rule.

Something brushed the back of my head, like a hand catching on the strands of my hair. My heart banged against my ribs and I spun to see—

Nothing. A tarp lay like a dark pool over the now-empty grave by the river. The stakes and cord that Mark had measured out looked like faint, shadowy facets on the diamond-shaped field.

The caliche road ran down the hill like a silver-gray snake. The calcium carbonate makes the dirt roads pack down hard; it’s very white and very dusty, and it gets all over your car and your clothes. It rises up in clouds when you drive on it, catching the moonlight like a spectral fog.

Like it was doing now.

An eerie paleness hung like smoke over the field, as if swept up by the breeze that swirled around me. It lifted the hair on the nape of my neck and crept up the cuffs of my jeans and the gap under my shirt, and my skin prickled at the chill.

Fear took a white-knuckled grip on my vocal cords. This wasn’t comfortable hearth magic or cozy Uncle Burt in his rocker. There was a wrongness about the sickly mist coiling into a column in front of me, a fierce foreignness that arrowed straight into my self-preservation instinct.

An intangible hand sculpted moonlit fog into the translucent form of a man. Not tall, but straight and slender, somehow youthful, though the details of hair and clothes were obscured by the unearthly glow.

The eyes were shadowed but no longer hollow. They bound my gaze, and I couldn’t tear myself free.

There was something in my hand. The voice recorder. My joints ached and cracked as if frosted over, but I managed to move my thumb, fumbling for the on switch.

Drawing a breath was like breathing ice. I had never been so cold in my life. My teeth wouldn’t stop chattering, but I made my numb lips form a question.

“Wh-wh-what d-d-do you want?”

With slow, forced effort, he raised his arm. His hand grasped at the air between us, and his mouth worked in futile desperation to speak, but only shaped soundless syllables.

Only my choked gasps broke the eerie silence. I couldn’t breathe. Frigid fingers reached into me, squeezing my lungs. My insides felt brittle with ghostly cold, as if I might shatter. The dark night was growing darker, and sparks danced on the spreading blackness.

I was going to pass out. If I was lucky.

Through the ringing in my ears, I heard the others running back. I felt them through the ground.

“Amy!” Phin called.

And then another voice I didn’t know. “Miss! Miss, come back here.”

I spent the last of my strength in the effort to call out, then hit the ground and curled into a ball, and wondered how anyone would explain my death by hypothermia on a July night.

My vision went black, like someone had flipped a switch. For a moment I thought I was dead, or unconscious, but my skin still hurt and I could smell the beer in my hair.

The apparition had … disapparated.

I heard a scrabble of feet on dry ground, and then Phin’s voice, and the others. Then a flashlight was shining right in my eyes.

“Amy! Are you okay?” asked Phin, owner of the flashlight. “Say something!”

“Ugh. Light. Eyes.” That was all I could manage through my chattering teeth, and I sounded like a three-pack-a-day smoker, but I could talk. Yay. I took a quick inventory. A deep breath filled my lungs with wonderful, warm air. I still thought I might pee ice cubes, but I could feel my fingers and toes.

Jennie put her very warm hands on my face. “Good grief. She’s freezing.”

“I’ll b-b-be ok-k-kay.” That would have sounded more convincing if my teeth weren’t rattling my brain.

All their flashlights were on. I guess we weren’t worried about ghosts or preserving night vision anymore. Mark turned to—oh hell—a uniformed man and said, “Aren’t you supposed to have a Thermos of hot coffee or something? Isn’t that a stakeout requirement?”

The young officer—who was not, thank God, Deputy Kelly—said, “Wait right here. Do not move.” And took off at a jog.

“Who was that?” I asked, more or less, through the chattering, and tried to sit up. My joints mostly cooperated.

“Apparently, they’re keeping an eye on this area because of the recent activity,” said Dwayne. “Are you okay?”

“A warm drink will help get her core temperature back up,” said Jennie. She felt my face and hands again. “But she’s warming very quickly.”

“I’ll be f-f-fine.” The shivering was letting up a little, too.

“Holy moly,” said Phin, sinking to a seat as if weakened by her reaction. “You scared the life out of me. I had no idea how I was going to explain this to Mom.”

I was so touched by her concern that I told her, “You should take a Kirl—a corona—a picture of that spot right there.” I pointed.

“The apparition?” she said, excitement restoring her strength. “Again?”

“Quick!” I said. “Before the deputy comes back.”

She jumped to it while Dwayne and Mark and Jennie stared. “An apparition?” Jennie asked. “As in, you saw the Mad Monk?”

“Again?” echoed Dwayne.

“Shhhh.” I was much more worried about the deputy than what the three of them thought just then. I heard the officer coming and gestured Mark closer so I could whisper, “Tell him you came out to check something on the site, and we tagged along. Just don’t tell him we were ghost hunting.”

Mark gave me a doubtful look. “I’m good, chica, but I’m not sure I’m that good. Everyone here thinks you’re a—”

“—Goodnight. I know.”

“I was going to say bruja. But tomato, tomahto.”

He’d just called me a witch in Spanish. I watched him walk to meet the officer, and penciled Mark Delgado onto the things-to-sort-out-later list.

“Look!” said Phin, holding her camera out to me. In the dark, the images on the display screen were very vivid. Not footprints, like ours, but bright, hot swirls, like a slow exposure of a neon-lit sky.

“That’s so cool!” said Jennie, and she and Dwayne oohed over the pictures for a moment. “That’s the afterimage of the ghost on the grass?”

“Close enough,” said Phin. I couldn’t believe she’d foregone the lecture, until she turned to me and said, “I don’t suppose you took any EMF readings.”

I wasn’t quite up to rolling my eyes. “Before I passed out from hypothermia, you mean?”

She sighed. “That’s what I thought. I suppose it’s forgivable under the circumstances.”

Jennie and Dwayne were like a pair of excited puppies with a new toy. “Can you describe it? Did it say anything?”

“It was a pale figure, there—” I pointed. “Where Phin’s standing.” A chill prickled my neck, but it was only a memory, a ghost of a ghost. “It pointed at me, and was mouthing …”

“What?” Jennie breathed, on the edge of her figurative seat.

I really didn’t want to say it, but I was too frazzled to come up with anything but the truth.

“ ‘Boo,’ ” I admitted with a cringe. “It was saying ‘boo.’ ”