Ghouls Gone Wild

  I thought about darting back into the thicker forest, but then my eye caught a mammoth-looking tree on the far side of the lawn, and tucked just behind it—a house with the lights on. I knew instantly that if I could make it to the tree before the broom cleared the woods, I could use it as cover to race for the house. And if I made it to the house, I might be safe.

  Tossing aside the stick that would only slow me down, I gritted my teeth and called up every ounce of reserve energy I had. I tore as fast as I could across the open grass, using my breath and pumping my arms to help get me there in time.

  I also pricked my ears, listening as the witch and her broom struggled to get through the remaining foliage, but very quickly my own breathing and the distance I was creating obscured the sound.

  I couldn’t very well glance back—that would only slow me down. So I focused on the trunk of the tree, closing the distance as fast as I could. And then, I was there and I hurtled around to the other side, using the tree to hide from the approaching spook. I dropped to the ground and crawled to sit in between two massive roots. I pulled my knees up, making myself as small as possible, and just focused on breathing quietly. It was really hard because my chest was heaving while I took great gulps of air.

  I was also sweating profusely, and my hands were slick from both nerves and exertion. I kept waiting for the witch and her broom to round the tree and find me, but the seconds ticked by and nothing happened. I wanted to take a peek on the other side of the tree, but quickly dismissed that idea, reasoning that it would be difficult in this dim light to pick the broom out and I’d have to expose part of my head in order to take a look. Too risky.

  Once my breathing had calmed a bit, I switched my focus to the house. It was maybe thirty yards away and several of the lights were on. As I looked at it, I saw a figure move across the window, and I knew someone was home.

  Gathering a little more courage, I eased myself to my feet, but remained low. I’d have to be careful to keep the tree directly at my back until I made it to the house. I was just about to go for it when something right over my head made an eerie creaking sound. I froze. And waited.

  A gust of wind pushed across the lawn, rattling the leaves and bringing that creepy creak again. The sound was right above me, making a long unsettling noise, like rope rubbing against wood. Slowly I tilted my chin up and stole a glance. Right over my head was a pair of shoes. I leaned slightly to my right and saw the shoes were attached to feet and legs and a torso . . . and then another gust of wind caused the object above me to swing back and forth.

  And then it hit me. Literally. Out of nowhere a broom struck my shoulder and sent me crashing sideways. I cried out as I hit the ground and put my arms up defensively, my eyes swiveling wildly between the dead person hanging from the tree and the broom coming in for another attack. “Stop!” I screamed right before closing my eyes and turning my head away.

  I braced for the impact as a loud THWACK resounded in my ears, and something large and heavy fell right next to my head. I lay there shivering for a few beats until someone gripped my shoulder hard and asked, “Miss! Are you all right?”

  Chapter 9

  “M. J.!” a familiar voice spoke next. “Jesus! Are you okay?”

  I opened my eyes and saw Heath hovering over me, looking terrible. His face was a crisscross of angry scratches, his nose looked bruised, and one of his eyes was completely swollen shut. He also appeared to be gripping his left arm tightly. I sat up quickly and glanced around. Two halves of the remaining broom lay on either side of me, and a man holding a large ax hovered near my feet.

  “I’m okay,” I said, trying to get my bearings. The man at my feet looked really familiar, but before I could place him, he turned and walked around the tree to the side to retrieve a ladder. I watched him for a moment as he placed it against the side of the tree and climbed quickly up to the lowest branch.

  “I found him about five minutes ago,” Heath said. I looked at him and saw him staring up at the terrible sight of a middle-aged man with a blue face, a protruding swollen tongue, and bugged-out eyes. His body swayed grotesquely from side to side as the wind hit it.

  I turned away from the awful scene as a wave of nausea threatened to make me lose my lunch, and focused on taking deep breaths. When I could talk again, I asked Heath, “What happened?”

  “One of the spooks got me. I ran all the way to the edge of this lawn and I thought I’d lost her and started to double back to find you when one of the witches bashed me pretty good with her broom. She swung at my face first, which is how I got the shiner, and when I put an arm up to defend myself, she whacked me hard enough to break the bone.”

  I gasped, looking up at him. “She broke your arm?”

  Heath nodded. “I heard it crack,” he said with a painful grimace. “And that got me on my knees. That’s when she hit me on the back of the head hard enough to knock me out for a few minutes. When I came to, I managed to make it here and saw the lights on in the house, so I was on my way there when . . .” His voice trailed off and he didn’t finish his story.

  “And that’s when you saw the dead guy?”

  Heath nodded, his eyes darting up to the swaying figure, then quickly away. “I came around the tree and was leaning against it to catch my breath when I saw him. I felt his ankle and it was stone cold and stiff, so I knew there was nothing I could do for him. That’s when I went up to the house and got help.”

  There was a loud thump, like someone dropping a sack of potatoes, and reflexively I glanced over to see the hanging victim crumpled into a ghastly heap. “I think I’m gonna be sick,” I groaned, closing my eyes tightly again and taking deep breaths.

  “The police will be here shortly,” said the man from the ladder. And as he spoke, I realized who he was and my eyes snapped open again to stare at Fergus Ericson while he carefully descended the ladder with the ax he’d used to cut through the thick rope. “I called them right before we came out to cut poor Joseph down.”

  “You knew him?” I asked.

  “Aye,” Fergus said, making the sign of the cross as he stared grimly down at the crumpled remains. “That’s Joseph Hill, my neighbor.”

  The police arrived about two minutes later. An ambulance was also routed to the scene, and once the paramedics determined that Hill was quite beyond their help, they focused on Heath.

  His cuts and bruises were tended to, and they wanted to take him to the hospital for his broken arm, but he assured them that he would head there on his own later. They compromised by wrapping a make-shift splint around his arm, and setting that in a sling strapped around his neck.

  A baby-faced inspector with a brogue so thick I could barely understand it took Fergus’s statement first. He tried to move Fergus out of earshot, but the pervasive wind carried the sound of their conversation down to me. And even though I could understand only one side of the conversation—Fergus’s—I listened intently to his rather uninformative account of what had transpired.

  Fergus said that he’d heard someone knocking urgently on his door and found a young man in distress. He recounted how the stranger at his door was injured, and had leaves and twigs in his hair, so Fergus just assumed the young man must have fallen down a ravine in the woods and had come to his door for aid.

  The young man, he said, pointing to Heath, wasn’t so frantic about his own injuries as he was about poor Joseph Hill, hanging from Fergus’s own tree! And Fergus suspected that after years of living with a terrible illness, Joseph finally succumbed to his depression and took his own life.

  The constable asked Fergus about Joseph’s illness and Fergus said, “I know he’s been battling cancer for years. And I know that the poor man was running out of time.”

  The constable then asked what signs of depression Joseph had exhibited. Fergus replied that Joseph wasn’t a man to show much emotion, but in the past two years he’d become more and more reclusive and hardly ever came out of his house anymore.

  Fergus next told the constable that once he was told about a man hanging in his tree, h
e’d gotten his ladder and ax and hurried down to the tree as fast as he could to get poor Joseph down, but the man was clearly dead and there was nothing more for it.

  The constable noted that Joseph must have been dead for hours, as rigor had already begun to set in, and he asked Fergus why he hadn’t seen Joseph for himself from his own house.

  In answer, Fergus crooked a finger and led the constable up the hill toward the house; then he turned around and pointed down. It was obvious that the bough of the tree had actually hidden the body from Fergus’s view and quite unremarkable that the ghost-tour guide hadn’t seen Hill dangling from the tree.

  I wondered why Fergus hadn’t mentioned anything about the witch, and as the inspector turned to me to get my statement, I caught the very subtle head-shake from Ericson, standing behind the constable, and then he placed a finger to his lips. His message was clear—I shouldn’t mention her either.

  I almost ignored that advice, but when I looked around for the evidence of the broken broom to prove that Heath and I had been chased through the woods by an unnatural entity, I couldn’t find any trace of the broomstick that had been so neatly severed. And I would have found that very odd if I hadn’t known the spirit world so well; material objects often disappear when there’s a ghost on the loose, especially one as powerful as the witch. I suspected that while we’d managed to destroy the three brooms she and her sisters used to clobber us, we hadn’t even dented the power of the spirits behind the attacks.

  So I decided to trust my own instincts and tell the inspector that Heath and I had been taking a leisurely walk through the woods when we became separated, which was sort of true—he and I had taken a walk for at least a little ways into the woods, and then later we were separated.

  Additionally, I told the inspector that I’d searched and searched for Heath, only to discover him injured but still attempting to help Fergus get Joseph down from the tree.

  Meanwhile, I could see Fergus amble casually over to where Heath was just finishing up with the paramedics and whisper something in his ear. Heath didn’t look happy, but he nodded.

  Once all our statements had been given, and Joseph had been placed inside a body bag and set on a gurney bound for the morgue, Fergus offered to drive Heath and me to our car so that I could take Heath to the hospital.

  On the way there I asked Ericson why he’d subtly advised us against telling the police about the witch. “They’d never believe you, now, would they?” he said simply. I had to agree; not many people on earth would’ve believed what’d happened to us. I fell silent and saw that Fergus was eyeing me in the rearview mirror like he had something else to say to me. I waited him out and he finally spoke. “Sarah tells me you’ve adopted the pug.”

  I tried to keep the anger out of my voice when he broached the sensitive topic. “Yes,” I said, and left it at that.

  “She also suggested I look elsewhere should I need a dog to demonstrate the effects of Briar Road.” I pretended to be very interested in the passing scenery. “She says that her conscience won’t be allowing her to rent me any more dogs.”

  I wanted to bite my tongue and not take the bait, but I couldn’t. “And what I don’t understand, Mr. Ericson, is how your conscience could allow you to subject those defenseless animals to such torture.”

  Ericson surprised me by chuckling merrily. “Oh, it’s only a little unpleasant for them, Miss Holliday. And they all recover quite nicely after all.”

  “But how can you do that?” I insisted. “I mean, you’re terrorizing them!”

  Fergus sighed. “You have to keep in mind that I’m competing with some of the best ghost tours in the world,” he explained. “The city of Edinburgh is one of the most haunted places on earth, dear, and tourists are far more likely to visit one of my competitors in the city. I need some theatrics to pull the patrons in, I’m afraid.”

  “So you’re going to continue to torture these defenseless animals?” I asked.

  Fergus’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “No,” he said. “No other shelter will allow me to borrow the strays.”

  The car was silent for a bit while I wrestled with the fact that Fergus had probably saved my life with his ax, and I’d gone and wrecked his business. Even if it was justifiable, I still felt bad.

  “I’m sure you can find another way to pull in the tourists,” I said to him, although I didn’t quite know how.

  Fergus smiled kindly at me. “I’m sure I will,” he said, stopping in front of our newly rented van.

  We got out of his car, thanked him, and hopped into our rental, where I had to take a turn at the wheel. This was something I’d been hoping to avoid, as driving on the opposite side of the road looked mighty tricky. Looking at the little map Fergus had drawn for us, Heath said, “We take this straight for about two kilometers, then turn right onto Hedgeforth and it should be on our left.”

  I helped Heath with his buckle and got settled, checked all my mirrors, and prayed that I didn’t get into an accident for the next two kilometers. Once we were under way, Heath said, “Pretty crazy afternoon, huh?”

  “There aren’t even words,” I told him with a sideways glance. “And I’m not buying that Joseph Hill committed suicide,” I added.

  Heath pulled his head back to look at me in surprise. “Why not?”

  “I think the witch was responsible.”

  I could tell by Heath’s expression that he wasn’t getting it and so I reminded him, “Joseph Hill,” I said, emphasizing the last name. “Remember how Bonnie named the Gillespies, McLarens, Lancasters, and Hills?”

  “Holy shit!” Heath exclaimed. “I’d totally forgotten about that!”

  “Yeah, well, on this bust it sort of pays to remember the details.”

  “But how did she hang him?” Heath asked me. “I mean, that’s a pretty mean feat for a ghost. Even one that can ride a real broom.”

  “I think Joseph did all the heavy lifting,” I said, trying to stay over to my left and feeling like opposing traffic was coming right at me.

  “Huh?”

  I waited for two cars to pass before I explained. “I once saw a videotape made by a buddy of mine who’s a parapsychologist up in New Hampshire. He was on a ghost hunt at this house with this supposedly really crazy spook up in the attic. The house is now abandoned—no one will live there because the last four residents all had someone in their family hang themselves from the rafters. Not one of the people who died had any history of mental illness or depression, and almost all of them died exactly six months after moving in.

  “The other similarity, of course, was that all four victims reported hearing strange noises in the attic and showed a curiosity about investigating the source prior to their deaths. Finally, in nineteen ninety-six after the last victim was discovered, the owner of the house—a woman who’d just lost her eldest son, whom she found hanging in the attic—hired a paranormal investigative team to look into the rash of hangings.

  “My buddy was part of that team, and they spent the night at the house, and two guys took cameras up into the attic. No one heard anything from them, or anything unusual, for a solid three hours, but then around three in the morning the remaining crew overheard some shouts for help. When they ran up the ladder to the attic, they found one crew member dazed and confused, walking around with an electrical cord wrapped around his neck, while the other had a noose over his head and was sitting precariously on a beam while attempting to secure the other end of the noose to a nail on the rafter.”

  “Whoa!”

  I nodded. “ ‘Whoa’ is right. If the guy on the beam had fallen, he would have snapped his neck. I saw the actual footage; they were talking to him while they tried to get him to come down. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing—I mean, in the video, you can see him methodically going through the motions of trying to hang himself. It took the crew nearly ten minutes to convince him he was doing something dangerous and to remove the noose from around his neck.”

  “Okay, now I want to see the tape,” Heath said, and I knew I’d really piqued his morbid curiosity.

  Bu
t I shuddered as I remembered watching the footage. It was incredibly unsettling because it was so clear that the paranormal investigator had been completely taken over by a murderous ghost. “Gilley has it stored somewhere on his computer. It’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen.”

  “So the ghost took over his mind? Hypnotized him somehow?” Heath asked.

  “Yes,” I said simply. “I think that’s exactly what happened.”

  “And you believe the witch did that with Joseph Hill?”

  I shrugged as we arrived at the hospital. “I think it’s entirely possible that anything that could command a three-broom attack and give us a few whacks hard enough to break your arm is powerful enough to creep into the mind of a poor unsuspecting individual and convince him to hang himself.”

  “But why in that tree?” Heath asked. “I mean, wouldn’t the witch have been able to convince Hill to kill himself anywhere, like in his house, where it would have taken less effort? Why push him to walk over to Fergus’s property, climb that tree, and kill himself there?”

  “Made a hell of a statement, didn’t it?” I said in reply, pulling into a parking slot and relaxing my white-knuckle grip on the wheel.

  Heath eased himself out of the car and eyed me over the hood with a forlorn look in his eyes. “We’re way out of our league here, aren’t we, M. J.?”

  I regarded him soberly. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean we can’t go down fighting, my friend. Now, let’s get you in there and fixed up, okay?”

  We were lucky in that there wasn’t much going on in the emergency room of the hospital. Heath was taken right into X-ray and a fracture of his right ulna showed up quickly, but the bone was still in place, so he wouldn’t need surgery. He’d have to wear a cast for the next six weeks, but otherwise he was fine.

  It took about an hour for the hospital staff to plaster over his arm, and during that time a kindly nurse took pity on me and cleaned up the scratches on my face and hands. I then called Gilley, who was worried sick about us, and Gopher, who had no idea we’d even left the hotel, and told both of them that we’d be back before midnight.