Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (6 page)

“You really believe a ghost is out here killing people?” He sounded disappointed. “You look smarter than that.”

Edie gripped the steering wheel tighter. He had no idea how smart. “I take it you don’t?”

He looked away. “Ghosts are apparitions. They can’t actually hurt anyone.”

“Sounds like you know a lot about ghosts.”

It was the same thing Edie said the second time she hung out with Wes and Trip in the filthy garage. Wes was adjusting some kind of gadget that looked like a giant calculator, with a meter and a needle where the display would normally have been. “We know enough.”

“Enough for what?” She imagined the two of them wandering around with their oversized calculators, searching for ghosts the way people troll the beach for loose change and jewelry with metal detectors.

“I told you, we hunt ghosts.” Wes tossed the device to Trip, who opened the back with a screwdriver and changed the batteries.

Edie settled into the cushions on the ratty plaid couch. “So you hang out in haunted houses and take pictures, like those guys on TV?”

Trip laughed. “Hardly. Those guys aren’t ghost hunters. They’re glorified photographers. We don’t stand around taking pictures.” Trip tossed the screwdriver onto the rotting workbench. “We send the ghosts back where they belong.”

Wes and Trip weren’t as stupid as Edie had assumed. In fact, if the two of them had ever bothered to enter the science fair, they would’ve won. They knew more about science, physics mainly—energy, electromagnetism, frequency, and matter— than any of the teachers at school. And they were practically engineers, capable of building almost anything with some wires and scrap metal. Wes explained that the human body was made up of electricity—electrical impulses that keep you alive. When a person died, those impulses changed form, resulting in ghosts.

Edie only understood about half of what he was saying. “How do you know? Maybe it just disappears.”

Trip shook his head. “Impossible. Energy can’t be destroyed. Physics 101. Those electrical impulses have to go somewhere.”

“So they change into ghosts, just like that?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘ just like that.’ I gave you the simplified version,” Trip said, attaching another wire to his tricked-out calculator.

“What is that thing?” she asked.

“This—” Trip held it up proudly, “is an EMF meter. It picks up electromagnetic fields and frequencies, movement we can’t detect. The kind created by ghosts.”

“That’s how we find them,” Wes said, taking a swig from an old can of Mountain Dew. “Then we kill them.”

Edie was still thinking about that day in the garage when she smelled something horrible coming from outside. It was suffocating—heavy and chemical, like burning plastic. She rolled up her window, even though the air inside the Jeep immediately became stifling.

“Don’t you want to let some air in?” the blue-eyed boy ventured.

“I’m more concerned about letting something out.”

He waited for Edie to explain, but she didn’t. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot,” she said.

“If you believe there’s a ghost on this road, why are you driving out here all alone at night?”

Edie took a deep breath and spoke the words she had rehearsed in her mind since the moment he climbed into the car. “The ghost that haunts Red Run killed my brother, and I’m going to destroy it.”

Edie watched as the fear swept over him.

The realization.

“What are you talking about? How do you kill a ghost?”

He didn’t know.

Edie took her time answering. She had waited a long time for this. “Ghosts are made of energy like everything else. Scatter the energy, you destroy the ghost.”

“How do you plan to do that?”

Edie knocked on the black plastic paneling on her door. It was the same paneling that covered every inch of the Jeep’s interior. “Ghosts absorb the electrical impulses around them— from power lines, machines, cars—even people. I have these two friends who are pretty smart. They made this stuff. Some compounds conduct electricity.” She ran her palm over the paneling. “Others block it.”

“So you’re going to trap a ghost in the car with you and— what? Wait till it shorts out like a lightbulb?”

“It’s not that simple,” Edie said, without taking her eyes off the road. “Energy can’t be destroyed. You have to disperse it, sort of like blowing up a bomb. My friends know how to do it. I just have to keep the ghost contained until I get to their place. They’ll do the rest.”

Tommy glanced at the black paneling. “You’re crazy, you know that?” His arm wasn’t draped casually over the seat anymore, and his hands were balled up in his lap.

“Maybe,” she answered. “Maybe not.”

He reached for the handle to roll down his window, but it wouldn’t turn. “Your window’s—” He paused, working it out in his mind. “It isn’t broken, is it?”

Edie took her foot off the gas and let the car roll to a stop. “You didn’t really think I’d pick up a hitchhiker, on a deserted road in the middle of nowhere?” She turned toward the blue-eyed boy, a boy she knew was a ghost. “Did you, Tommy?”

His eyes widened at the sound of his name.

Edie’s heart felt like it was trying to punch its way out of her chest. There was no way to predict how Tommy’s ghost was going to react. Wes had warned her that ghosts could psychically attack the living by moving objects or causing hallucinations, even madness. His mom had walked off the second-story balcony of their house when Wes was in fourth grade. It was only a few weeks after she had started hearing strange noises and seeing shadows in the house. Wes’ father wanted to move, but his mom said she wasn’t going to be driven out of her house by swamp-water superstition. She didn’t believe in ghosts. Not until one killed her.

Now Edie was sitting only inches away from a ghost that had already murdered six people.

But he didn’t look murderous. There was something else lingering in his blue eyes. Panic. “You can’t stop here.”

“What?”

“There’s something I need to tell you, Edie. But you have to keep driving. It’s not safe.” He was turning around in his seat, scanning the woods through the windows.

Edie bit the inside of her cheek again. “What are you talking about?”

Before he had time to respond, the light outside flickered as a shadow cut through the path of the car’s headlights.

Edie jumped, jerking her eyes back toward the road.

There was a man a few yards away, waving his arms wildly. “Get outta the car now!”

“It’s too late,” Tommy whispered. “He’s already here.”

“Who?”

“The man who killed me.”

Edie didn’t have a chance to ask him to explain. The man in the road was still yelling as he moved closer to the car. “Hurry up! Before that blue-eyed devil skins you alive like the rest a them!”

Tommy’s ghost grabbed her arm, but she couldn’t feel his touch. “Don’t listen to him, Edie. He wants to hurt you, the same way he hurt me. And your brother.”

“What did you say?” The words tore at Edie’s throat like razor blades.

“I didn’t kill any of those kids that died out here. He did.” Tommy pointed at the man in the road. “I watch the road. I try to make sure no one stops near his cabin. I tried to warn all of them, but they wouldn’t listen.”

Edie remembered her brother’s last words.

I should have listened . . .

She had assumed he was referring to the stories—the constant warnings to stay off Red Run after dark. What if she was wrong? What if he had been talking about a different warning altogether?

“No.” Edie shook her head. “Those guys beat you to death—”

Tommy cut her off before she could finish. “They didn’t. That’s the story he told the police. And no one believed a bunch of drunk kids when they denied it.”

The voice outside was getting louder and more frantic. “Whatever that spirit’s telling you is a lie! He’s trying to keep you in there with him so he can kill you! Come on out, sweetheart.”

It was easier to see the man now that he was just a few feet away. He was about her dad’s age, but worse for the wear. His green John Deere cap was pulled low over his eyes, and he was wearing an old hunting jacket over his broad shoulders despite the heat.

He was shifting from side to side nervously, his eyes flitting back and forth between the woods and the car.

“He’s lying. I swear,” Tommy—it was becoming harder to remember that he was a ghost, not a regular boy—pleaded. “Why do you think I got in the car? I wanted to make sure you didn’t stop. He doesn’t like it when people get this close to his place. Especially teenagers.”

“You expect me to believe some old guy is killing people because they’re coming too close to his house?” Her voice was rising, a dangerous combination of fear and anger burning through her veins.

“He’s crazy, Edie. He cooks meth back there at night, and he’s convinced people can smell it. He’s always been paranoid, but after being cooped up in a tiny cabin with those fumes for years, it’s gotten worse.”

Edie remembered the nauseating stench of melted plastic. She never would have recognized it. Still. The man was pacing in front of the car, wringing his hands nervously. There was something off about him. But then again, he was facing off against a ghost.

Tommy was still talking. “That’s what he was doing the night I got lost in the woods, only back then it was something else. He’s been cooking up drugs in his cabin for years, supplying dealers in the city. I was looking for this girl who wandered off, and I got all turned around. I didn’t realize how far I’d walked. There was a cabin.” He paused, looking out at the man in the green cap. “Let’s just say, I knocked on the wrong door.”

The man stopped in the path of one of the headlights, a beam of light creating shadows across his face. “You can’t trust the dead. No matter what they say, sweetheart.”

Edie reached for the door handle.

Tommy—the boy-ghost—grabbed her other hand. For a second, Edie thought she felt the weight of his hand on hers. It was impossible, but it gave her goose bumps all the same. “He beat me to death, Edie. Then he dragged my body all the way back to the party, and left me in the middle of Red Run.”

Edie didn’t know who to believe. One of them was lying. And if she made the wrong choice, she was going to die tonight.

Tommy’s blue eyes were searching hers. “I would never hurt you, Edie. I swear.”

She thought about everything Wes and Trip had taught her, which boiled down to one thing: You can’t trust a ghost. She thought about her brother lying in the road.
I should have listened
. He could’ve been talking about the man in the green cap—the one begging her to get out of the car right now.

What was she thinking? She couldn’t trust a ghost.

Edie threw the door open before she could change her mind. The smell of burnt plastic flooded into the Jeep.

“Edie, no!” Tommy’s eyes were terrified, darting back and forth between Edie and the man in the road. In that moment, she knew he was telling the truth.

She reached for the door to pull it shut again as the man in the green cap rushed toward the driver’s side of the car. When he passed through the headlights, Edie saw him grab the buck knife from his waistband.

Edie tried to close the door, but it felt like she was wading through syrup. She wasn’t fast enough. But the man in the green cap was, his arm coming around the edge of the door. His knife was in his hand, reddish-brown lines streaking the dull blade.

“Oh, no you don’t, you little bitch!” The man grabbed the metal frame before she could close the door, the blade of the knife waving dangerously close to her face.

Tommy appeared just outside the open car door, only inches from the man wielding the knife. Before the man had a chance to react, Tommy rushed forward and stepped right through him.

Edie saw the man’s eyes go wide for a second, and he shivered.

“Back up!” Tommy shouted.

Edie didn’t think about anything but Tommy’s voice as she turned the key, grinding the ignition. She threw the car into reverse, slamming her foot on the gas.

The man swore, his hand uncurling from the handle of the knife. He tried to hold onto the doorframe, his filthy nails clawing at the metal.

Then his fingers slid away, and Edie saw him hit the ground.

She heard the scream as the Jeep bucked and the front tire rolled over his body. Edie didn’t stop until she could see him lying facedown in the dust. She could see the crushed bones, forced into awkward angles. He wasn’t moving.

Edie didn’t notice Tommy standing next to the car. He pulled the door open, bent metal scraping through the silence, and knelt down next to her. “Are you okay?”

“I think I killed him.” Her voice was shaking uncontrollably.

“Edie, look at me.” Tommy’s was calm. She leaned her head against the seat, turning her face toward his. “You didn’t have a choice. He was going to kill you.”

She knew Tommy was right. But it didn’t change the fact that she had just killed a man, even if that man was a monster.

Tommy’s blue eyes were searching her brown ones, their faces only inches apart. “What made you trust me?”

“Your eyes,” Edie answered. “The eyes don’t lie.”

“Even if you’re a ghost?”

Edie smiled weakly. “Especially if you’re a ghost.”

She looked out at the road. For the first time in forever, it was just a road—dirt and rocks and trees. She tried to imagine what it would be like to spend every night out here, so close to the place where you died.

“You’re the first person who ever believed me,” Tommy said. “The first person I saved.”

“Then why did you stay here for so long?”

Tommy looked away. “I didn’t have a choice.”

Edie remembered Wes telling her that most ghosts couldn’t leave a place where they had died traumatically. They were chained to that spot, trying to find a way to right the wrong.

When he turned back to face her, Edie noticed the sadness lingering in his eyes. And something else. . . .

Tommy was fading, flickering like static on an old TV set. He stared down at his hands, turning them slowly as if seeing them for the first time.

“I think you can move on now,” Edie said gently. “You know, to wherever you’re supposed to be. Red Run doesn’t need protecting anymore.”