Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls

  “Time to go,” Heath’s ragged voice whispered in the dark. He clicked his flashlight on, and in the dim light I could see that he looked as scared as I felt.

  “I’m right behind you,” I told him.

  We left the tunnel leading to the crypts and hustled down the stairs. From the top of the rock we could still hear snatches of Bouvet’s terrified screams. His reliving what I suspected was an encounter with the phantom had elicited other spirits to stir in the night. More than once I heard Kincaid shout out for Alex, and eerily, I also heard a man with a thick Irish brogue shout, “It’s after me! Get away with you! Get away!”

  “That’s gotta be the coast guard officer,” Heath called over his shoulder as we raced down the stairs.

  I mentally agreed but was too busy focusing on the sounds in the night and keeping my footing to reply. What I didn’t tell Heath was that I was also listening for Gopher’s voice. If he had been killed, I suspected I might hear it mixed in with the other victims of the phantom.

  But no sound or sign of him came to my senses. “I just want off this damn rock!” I swore as we neared the bottom.

  Heath cleared the last step, pausing briefly to catch his breath and wait for me. I joined him and he reached for my hand. Together we ran to the causeway.

  I took a step onto the cobblestones, feeling a wash of relief to be so close to leaving this cursed place, when an agonized cry descended from high above, followed by a sickening WHUMP somewhere behind me near the base of the cliffs. A flurry of shivers shot up my spine.

  Heath and I both froze midstep. I swallowed hard and tried to resist the urge to look behind me. “Sweet Jesus!” I gasped. “Please don’t tell me that was what I think it was!”

  And then, we both heard Kincaid’s voice scream, “Allllllllllllllex!” followed by another WHUMP.

  I thought I was going to be physically ill, and I did actually begin to wretch and gag. I staggered forward onto the causeway, dizzy with the horror playing out in the ether, and nearly stumbled right over the side and into the water.

  Heath’s hand caught my shoulder, keeping me on the cobblestones, but my knees gave out and I started to sink down. I felt his strong arm sweep under my back while his other arm moved under my knees, and before I knew it, he had swept me off my feet and was carrying me quickly over the wet stones.

  Only then did I realize I was crying.

  I clutched his coat and wept, trying to still the flash of memories of Kincaid falling off the cliff. Hearing the sound of him hitting the rocks was almost more than I could bear.

  He and Bouvet were reliving those terrifying moments before their deaths over and over again, and no soul deserves such torture. “We ... have ... to ... help them!” I sobbed.

  Heath came to an abrupt stop, his breathing labored. He squeezed me tight and lowered his head to my shoulder. “Yes,” he whispered. “But not tonight.”

  I hugged him fiercely and tried to collect myself. “I’m okay,” I said after a bit.

  He set me down and took my hand again. We didn’t waste any more time hustling our butts back across the causeway.

  We arrived at the B&B only to find the lights still out. The two of us made our way to the sitting room, which was surprisingly warm and cozy by the fire. Heath sank onto the couch and stared a little forlornly at the fire.

  I shrugged out of my coat, kicked off my shoes, and was taken by how handsome his face was in the glow of the fire. I moved to the cushion next to him, and ran a finger along his black silky hair.

  He turned to me and our eyes locked, and I wondered why I’d ever thought I could resist the attraction I had to this man.

  He didn’t try to kiss me; he just waited for me to decide. I hesitated only a second or two, wondering where my true feelings were amid all the chaos of the last few days. And then, I realized I really, really, really wanted to kiss him; so I leaned in and touched my lips to his, and it was like opening a release valve. All that fear and adrenaline and awfulness that he and I had so recently witnessed melted away and a wave of passion flooded between us.

  It wasn’t long before our clothes came off and we moved it upstairs.

  The next morning I woke with Heath’s naked warmth curled around me. For a few heartbeats I felt content and happy. His body fit so nicely around mine. There was a synchronicity about us—even our breathing was in time together.

  I opened my eyes, and a bit of the magic evaporated. He and I had made our way to the only unoccupied room—Gopher’s.

  Our producer’s suitcase was still sitting on a nearby bench, opened and overflowing with his clothes. I sighed and closed my eyes again, pushing away the rush of reality.

  “Hey,” Heath said softly.

  “Hey.”

  I felt gentle lips on my shoulder. “You okay?”

  A smile crept at the corners of my mouth. He was so good at reading me. “Yeah. Just worried about Gopher.”

  Heath’s arms wrapped tightly around me. “We’ll find him.”

  I sighed again. “Finding him means going back to Dunlow.”

  “Yep.”

  “I hate that stupid rock.”

  That won me a small chuckle. And then, “Did you notice the clock is working?”

  I opened my eyes and peered at the nightstand. The digital clock was flashing 12:00. “The electricity’s back on!”

  Heath sat up and looked around, squinting in the morning light. “About time,” he muttered with a yawn.

  There was a sudden eruption of noise out in the hallway, and Heath and I both jumped out of bed, naked and staring at the door. I knew that shrieking anywhere. “Gilley!”

  I ran toward the door and Heath caught my arm. He shoved his flannel shirt at me and reached for his jeans. I threw the shirt over my head and dashed to the door. Pulling it open, I saw Gilley crying and waving his arms around, raising a ruckus, while John, Kim, and Meg all stood by trying to console him.

  “They never came back!” he wailed. “The phantom’s got them! It’s got them!”

  I heard Heath clear his throat from over my shoulder and four heads swiveled abruptly in our direction.

  Followed by four jaws dropping open.

  Followed by four pairs of eyes opening wide.

  Gilley was the first to recover himself. “Are you two serious?”

  I winced. He can really reach those higher octaves when he’s upset. “We’re fine,” I said calmly.

  Gilley put both hands on his hips and snapped, “Oh, we can all see that, M. J.!”

  I smiled sheepishly and pushed Heath back inside the room, closing the door quickly behind me.

  “We probably should have left them a note or something,” Heath whispered.

  I sighed yet again. “Yeah, well, hindsight’s twenty-twenty.”

  Heath and I took our time going down to breakfast. I wasn’t interested in facing the reproachful glare I knew Gilley would be issuing my way the moment he saw me. I hoped that if I took my time, he’d eat, grow tired of waiting for us, and move on to his computer now that the power was back on.

  I hoped wrong.

  Heath and I arrived in the dining room to find it still full. All conversation died away the moment we appeared. “Uh, boy,” I mumbled.

  Heath cleared his throat and laid a gentle hand on my back. “Morning,” he said to our group.

  “It is for some of us,” Gilley snapped.

  I felt my shoulders sag, but Heath ignored the sarcasm and took a seat near the end, patting the chair next to him. I took my seat and immediately got busy loading some eggs onto my plate.

  I was acutely aware of the palpable silence all around me.

  Heath also busied himself, pouring some tea into my cup, before adding some into his.

  I thanked him but avoided all eye contact and dived into the eggs. They were stone cold, as was the tea, but I wasn’t about to complain or even hint that the meal was anything less than scrump-dilly-icious.

  “We’re waiting ...,” Meg said.


  My fork stopped halfway to my mouth, and I set it down. Heath and I exchanged a look, and I was irked to see the corners of his mouth lifting. He thought this was funny.

  Still, I was going to stick to my guns. “For what?” I asked innocently.

  Meg started laughing. Kim and John joined in, as did Heath, but Gilley had folded his arms and was scowling at us. “Details,” Heath said. “They want details.”

  “Uh ...,” I said. Were they serious? “How about if I tell you that what happens between Heath and me is private?”

  This made the group laugh even harder, and even Gilley’s scowl turned less frowny. “We don’t care about your extracurricular activities,” Kim said delicately. “We’re waiting to hear what happened at Dunlow.”

  “Ahhhhh ...,” I said, relieved down to my toes.

  Heath and I then filled them in on everything that had happened, including the detail about the ghosts of Kincaid and Bouvet falling to the rocks.

  Gilley now appeared troubled. “Have you ever heard of a ghost reliving their actual moment of death?”

  He had a point. Most spooks go right up to that moment where things start to go really bad, but almost never step into their actual death scene. “I’ve heard about it only rarely,” I said. “I’ve never actually witnessed it.”

  “What could cause a ghost to want to go through that?” Meg asked. “I mean, forcing themselves to relive that horrible fall. Why?”

  I pushed my plate away. My appetite was gone. “There’s only one reason,” I said. “And that is that they’re so desperate in those moments to get away from the thing chasing them that they see death as an actual escape route.”

  “So why don’t they cross?” Gilley wondered. “I mean, at some point they’ve got to realize that they’re really dead.”

  I felt goose bumps rise on my arms. “It’s the phantom,” I said. “I think it might have some sort of captive power over their spirits.”

  Everyone at the table fell silent for a moment as we thought about those poor men and all the years their spirits were spending reliving their worst nightmares.

  Gilley broke the somber silence when he asked, “What about that section in the middle?” I looked at him curiously and he added, “The part about Bouvet talking to someone else.”

  I rubbed my temples. “I’m not sure, Gil. I don’t know who he was talking to or half of what he was saying.”

  “A lot of it was in French.”

  “But you had your camera on the whole time, right?”

  My eyebrows rose. “Yeah.”

  “So it should be on the tape.”

  “As long as the microphone picked it up,” I said.

  “I’d be interested in looking at that footage,” John said. “I mean, from everything you’ve told us, it seems like that’s the exact moment when the phantom was released.”

  “Yeah, but from where?” I asked. “All we know is that Bouvet lifted a heavy lid, and out it came.”

  “From one of the crypts?” Meg suggested.

  I nodded. That made the most sense. “Gil, can you do a little research on who’s buried at Dunlow Castle? See if you can find anything on one of Dunnyvale’s successors talking about coming back as a phantom or placing a curse on any trespassers.”

  “I still have to research this Alexandra chick,” he reminded me moodily.

  I smiled. “Then you’d better get crackin’.”

  In the end, Heath, John, and I decided to see if we could at least provide Gilley with the full name of Alex by heading to the newspaper. To our relief the building appeared to be open and functional.

  The paper was a typical small-town affair; it was run by a father-and-son team with a circulation of slightly over a thousand people.

  As it happened, Jordan Kincaid’s appearance in Dunlee and his subsequent death were the biggest stories the paper had ever covered, so they had no trouble providing us with the articles from the days leading up to and including the tragedies. Of course, they also requested that we grant them an interview, which is why it took us two hours to get back to the inn with our intel.

  We found Gilley upstairs in his room, tapping away on his laptop, a cord connecting the camera to his computer.

  I laid the articles on his bed. “The best we can do is show you a picture of her,” I said.

  Gilley pulled his eyes reluctantly away from the screen. “Huh?”

  “Alex’s name was withheld from the article at the request of Kincaid, but the reporter did manage to snag a picture of her right before she, Kincaid, and some other unnamed dude set out for Dunlow.”

  Gilley squinted at the grainy black-and-white image. “Pretty, though, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” said Heath. I cut him a look and he smiled sheepishly.

  “Anyway,” I said, “now I want more than ever to track her down. There’s got to be a reason why Kincaid worked so hard to keep her a secret, and I want to know what that was.”

  “Can I finish this first?” Gil asked.

  I sat down next to him on the bed. “Are you working on the camera feed?”

  “Yeppers,” he said, focusing back on the frozen green image. “I’ve been running the sound through a filter trying to pick up what he’s saying, but a lot of it is so corrupted or muted that I can’t really make a lot of sense out of it.”

  “Were you able to get anything at all?”

  Gilley swiveled the screen toward me. “I can distinctly hear this word,” he said before hitting the play button. Through the computer I heard, “trésor ...”

  I closed my eyes and thought back to what I’d just heard. “Did he say ‘treasure’?”

  Gilley nodded. “I think he was talking about finding the treasure in one of the crypts.”

  But Heath still appeared skeptical. “But why would Dunnyvale tell you the phantom was brought to Dunlow by someone else?”

  I turned to him. “Like I said before, he could have been lying.”

  “But why?” Heath pressed. “I mean, what good would it do to ask you to rid his castle of the very thing that’s currently protecting his treasure? And what good does it do to tell you it was put there by someone with some sort of a connection to Alex? I mean, does this whole thing make sense as a wild-goose chase just for his amusement?”

  Gilley sighed. “Nothing about this bust makes any sense, Heath.”

  I was silent for a moment, weighing the possibility that Dunnyvale was lying just to have some fun with us, and I finally had to admit that it didn’t sit well with me at all. I finally admitted it to the guys. “My gut is telling me that he wasn’t lying.”

  “Maybe it was one of the other descendants?” Heath suggested, as if he’d just thought of the idea. Gilley and I both turned to him. “What I mean is, maybe one of Dunnyvale’s heirs brought the phantom to the castle to protect the family treasure.”

  “That’s possible,” Gil conceded.

  “And in line with what Dunnyvale claims, that he didn’t bring it to Dunlow.”

  “So where does this Alexandra person fit in?” Heath wondered.

  My eye went to the paper on the bed. I picked it up and squinted at the tall lanky figure. “I’ve no idea,” I admitted. “But she must be involved somehow. Maybe she’s a descendant of Dunnyvale’s line or something.”

  Gilley rubbed his eyes. “There’s too much conjecture here,” he said. “We know little to nothing about who brought the phantom or where it came from or where the treasure is or even where Gopher might be.”

  “We definitely need more to go on,” I agreed when something else occurred to me. “You know who might be able to give us a few more clues?”

  “Who?” Gil and Heath both said together.

  “The man who was with Bouvet when he opened that crypt.”

  Heath’s eyes widened. “That’s right!” he said. “He was with his friend from France when they opened the lid!”

  “Didn’t you guys say that he went insane, though?” Gil asked.

&nbsp
; “Maybe he’s better now,” I said. “What we really need is a name, which might lead us to a phone number.”

  “I know where you could kill two birds with one stone,” Gil suggested. “The library. I bet someone there can tell you who Bouvet’s friend was, and they might also give you all the names of Dunnyvale’s descendants.”

  I got up from the bed and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Thanks, Gil. We’ll check it out first thing in the morning, but in the meantime, could you please keep working on that tape?”

  “Only if you go out and bring me back some food. I’m in the mood for a nice burger and fries.”

  “You’ve been pretty hungry lately,” I said. Gilley had been carbo-loading like he was preparing for a marathon.

  “You know I eat when I’m stressed!”

  “Fine,” I agreed. “We’ll bring you some dinner. But I’m having them put extra lettuce on your burger.”

  “Go right ahead,” Gilley said sweetly. “I can pick it off later when you’re not looking.”

  Chapter 9

  The next morning, Heath and I headed to the village library, which was larger than I expected. There we met with the librarian, a lovely elderly woman named Mary, who was something of an expert on Dunlow Castle, and she graciously agreed to sit with us and answer our questions.

  “We know that Dunlow was built by Ranald Dunnyvale in the late sixteenth century,” I said after we’d found a nice quiet corner. “But what I’m more interested in is anything you can tell me about his descendants, and this rumor of the Spanish gold hidden somewhere in the castle.”

  Mary tilted back in her chair and lifted both hands. “Oh, is that all you’ll be needing to know, then?” she said with a laugh.

  I grinned. “I realize it might be a lot to tackle.”

  “Oh, aye,” she said. “Seven generations of Dunnyvales lived in that old keep after Ranald. In fact, there were Dunnyvales living there right up until the turn of the twentieth century, when no more male heirs survived to pass it on.”