Sleep Stalker (Ghosts Beyond the Grove Book 1) (6 page)

     I hadn’t had a nightmare in months and that night was no exception.  My alarm
did
interrupt an odd dream, though.  I was dreaming about feathers—lots and lots of feathers.  They were all different sizes and shapes and every color in the rainbow.  As I rolled over to hit the snooze button for an extra nine minutes of rest, I spotted something strange on my pillow. 

     One tiny, fluffy, white feather was staring me in the face.  Granted, it
was
a down pillow but I’d never had one escape its confines before.  Coincidence?  Maybe.  But I’d come to the conclusion that nothing in my life was ever simply a random fluke.  I slipped the feather into my desk drawer and immediately placed a call to my old boss.  Mountain or molehill, I was going to get to the bottom of things.

9.  Head in the Clouds

     When I woke up the next morning, Ruby was already gone.  There was a short note on the coffee table along with the car keys.  I could tell by the way she worded her message that she was angry with me.  But why? 
She
was the one playing games with
me
.  She was the one popping up in random places, teasing me, and then disappearing.  She was constantly lying to me.  That dress.  She always played dumb when I mentioned that dress.  Was she
trying
to drive me crazy?  It felt like I was already halfway there.

     My plan for the weekend was to catch up on my sleep.  But according to her note,
she’d
decided that
we
were going back to Charlotte’s Grove to get her car.  Why did she have to be so demanding?  Why was
she
all of a sudden my boss?  My head hurt and I didn’t want to get up.  I didn’t want to think about her at all.  But I did.  The way she looked in my dream, playing in the water.  And the way she smelled at the bookstore yesterday.  She was driving me slowly insane with this new dual personality routine—sexy siren one minute, cold bitchy fish the next.  What was wrong with her?

     I dragged myself through my classes as best as I could.  Every muscle ached worse than when I was getting pummeled back when I played football.  This relationship was draining me. 
She
was draining me without offering an ounce of sympathy in return.  But why couldn’t I stop thinking about her?  Maybe it was the strain of the move that was tearing us apart.  Or maybe she was just being a selfish bitch.  But I wanted that bitch.  I wanted her bad. 

     By the time I got to my last class of the day, I could barely keep my eyes open.  None of my professors seemed to notice
or
care that I wasn’t paying attention to them—except for one.  As I began to drift off in bio lab, Professor “I wasn’t paying enough attention to catch the jerk’s name” called me out.  And yet again, Ruby was the cause for another round of public humiliation.

     “What’s your name, son?” he asked, rapping on the table sharply to snap me awake. 

     “Ruby!” I blurted out loudly before correcting myself.  “I mean Zach.  My name is Zach.”

     I was so embarrassed.  A few snickers from my classmates and the professor himself made me want to crawl under my desk and never come back out.  I made that mistake because I had already begun dreaming about her.  We were in that dark forest hideaway again.  She was right there in front of me—dancing along the shore.  Her perfume was the only scent in the breeze.  I couldn’t take it anymore.  Tonight, she needed to put on that dress and perfume and dance for me.  Tonight, she needed to stop teasing me and give me what I wanted.  Her.  I wanted
her
.

     Halfheartedly, I listened to the lecture about why college wasn’t like high school.  Why so many intelligent students fail out in their freshmen year.  That not having Mommy and Daddy around meant that I would have to take responsibility for myself for once.  Why partying all night and sleeping during class was a bad idea.  Who had the
energy
to party?  Certainly not me.  It was only the second day of the semester but I hated college already.

     After two hours in that pompous jerk’s lab, I was done for the day.  I drove home with only two things on my mind—sleep and Ruby.  Was she being a bitch all of a sudden because I hadn’t taken her out in a while?  I wanted to take her shopping yesterday but she went and ruined it by playing games with me at the bookstore and then not fessing up to it later.  Shopping bored me enough on a good day—today, I would fall asleep waiting for her outside the fitting room while she played dress-up with a thousand different outfits yet walked out of the store empty handed.  She was going to have to be satisfied with dinner tonight instead.

     When I got back to the apartment, I kicked off my shoes and headed straight for the bed.  That futon wasn’t built for someone my size and that’s probably why I’d been sore and achy from the minute I woke up.  That selfish bitch wasn’t kicking me out of this bed tonight.  If I had to
buy
pillow time with her, I was willing to do it.  Before I drifted off, I sent her one text. 

     “Let me take you to dinner tonight.”

     Her reply came within less than a minute.

     “Okay.”

     What kind of response was that?  I didn’t speak the Emotional Girlfriend dialect that all women did.  Did that mean she was still mad about last night?  Whatever.  She was going to go to dinner with me and enjoy it like she used to.  Then she was going to come home and dance for me.

     I drifted in and out of sleep for the next hour, dreaming only of her in that dress.  She had to wear that specific outfit to dinner tonight—no exceptions.  I didn’t care that she wore it yesterday.  She was going to wear it for
me
today.  But I
knew
that she would whine and complain like a typical girl about not wanting to be seen in the same outfit two days in a row.  Stupid women.  Stupid, shallow, irresistible women.  Why did I hate her so much yet crave her so badly?

     Restless and pissed off, I crawled out of bed and went to the bathroom in search of the dress and the new perfume that she insisted she didn’t own.  Once I had everything set out for her to see, it would be impossible for her to deny it.  She would wear what
I
wanted her to wear.  And stop playing these childish games with me.  Tonight, I was going to put an end to this madness.

     I checked the stupid wicker hamper she was
so
in love with but that dress was nowhere in sight.  Okay, Zach, focus.  I took a deep breath and started systematically going through her toiletries to find the perfume.  I had no idea what she used half of that shit for so I sniffed everything before eliminating it as the source of that magical scent.  Deodorant?  No.  Shampoo or conditioner?  No.  A thousand and one different hair products that barely even looked like she’d touched them.  A thousand and one times, no. 

     Once I’d sniffed everything in the bathroom, I moved to the bedroom.  I searched every drawer, every possible place that she could have hidden it but came up empty handed.  Never mind.  I could do without the perfume as long as she wore that dress.  Frustrated nearly out of my mind by this point, I raided the closet to find it.  I flipped through hanger after hanger and sorted through every drawer.  Nothing.

     “Dammit!” I exclaimed out loud.

     “Oh my God!  Zach!  What are you doing?!”

     I poked my head out of the closet to see her standing in the doorway to the bedroom with a look of terror on her face.  Her hands were now both clasped across her mouth—her eyes ready to pop out of their sockets.  Before I had a chance to scold her for what I assumed was the usual hormonal girl overreaction to something minor, I looked around the room.  And finally got my head out of the clouds.  Now I could see what had her so terrified.  I slid down onto the carpeting, shocked and horrified myself.

10.  Feet on the Ground

     Something Wick-ed wasn’t even open yet when I started dialing the number.  I needed to catch Rita before any customers got there.  There were too many old ladies in Charlotte’s Grove who made it their business to know everyone else’s business.  While my secret life as a ghost hunter was no longer much of a secret, I still felt no inclination to air every piece of my dirty laundry around that “too small for its own good” little town.  Like Shelly, Rita sounded happy to hear from me. 

     “Hey, Ruby, how’s everything out in Ohio?” she said cheerfully.  Little did she know what a loaded question
that
was. 

     “Terrible, confusing, exhausting, and of course, paranormal.”

     “Oh,” she replied, the cheer factor drained from her voice.  “Which one of you is it this time?”

     What a sad commentary about my life.  I always seemed to have ghost issues of some sort—be it my own, Zach’s, or even Clay’s for that matter.  My life always seemed to be about a death of some sort.  While I owed my ability to see ghosts to the near death experience I’d had over two years ago, I couldn’t help but think that my attraction to death actually began years earlier than that.  It started when I was four.  It started with the loss of both of my sister and my mom.  There were no secrets to uncover about Miranda—she died at birth.  But my mother was a different story.  Sigh.  I needed to take my life one paranormal problem at a time.

     And my top priority right now was Zach.  I needed Rita to decipher what kind of entity was haunting him.  Then we had to come up with a game plan on how to get rid of it.  Easy peasy.  I should have known that it wouldn’t end that way.  It never ended that way.  At least not for me, anyway.  Nothing ever came easy.  The roadmap to my life didn’t include a single straight line from Point A to Point B.  No, my map resembled a Slinky—consistently kinked and annoyingly coiled.

      “Zach hasn’t been himself since he got back from California.  I’m pretty sure that he acquired some sort of paranormal parasite while he was out there.  I’m calling to see what kind of ghost it is and what I can do to get rid of it.”

     A deep sigh preceded her reply.  “Okay, I’ll do what I can to help.  Tell me exactly what’s been going on.”

     I briefly explained how weird he’d been acting.  Even though Clay and I had theorized that maybe his physical ailments were due to a medical cause, I included them anyway in case we were wrong.  The part that puzzled me the most, though, were the strange delusions he seemed to be having—particularly his frequent ramblings about a dress I didn’t own.  In fact, all of his current hallucinations were centered around me in some way.  Rita stayed silent until I was finished then hit me with a barrage of questions.

     “What was the first weird thing you noticed about him?  Did his behavior change rapidly or slowly over time?”

     “He was really cranky when we picked him up at the airport—he snapped at me for complaining about it being too hot.  That was the first time he mentioned anything about a dress.”  I concentrated hard on the last communication I had with him before that.  The last time we talked was the night before when he called to tell me what time his flight was scheduled to arrive.  And he told me how much he missed me, how excited he was to see me again.

     “Well—”

     “Wait!” I shouted as I remembered one other thing.  “The day of his flight, I tried to leave him a voice message to let him know that we might be late.  He should have been on the plane at the time but since his flight was delayed, he answered his phone.  But he sounded strange.  He gave me a one word answer then hung up on me.  I didn’t think it was a big deal at the time but looking back on it, I think that was the start of it.  What kind of ghost is it?”

     But of course, the more impatient I was for answers the more questions she threw out at me.  When she ran out of things to ask me, I asked her one more time. 

     “What kind of ghost am I dealing with here, Rita?  And please don’t say wraith!  I got lucky in defeating Allison—I don’t think I could do it again.”

     “What you described to me doesn’t match any kind of entity I’ve dealt with personally or even heard of, Ruby.  I’ll have to think about this for a bit.  It’s possible that he picked something up at the airport in Chicago but we can’t be certain.  You have no idea where else he was between the hotel and the airport.  He could have been to any number of restaurants in California that morning.  Hell, he even might have encountered something just walking down the street.  Regardless, I’ll do a little research on O’Hare International anyway and get back to you later.  Okay?”

     No, it was
not
okay.  But for the time being, I was going to have to
make
it be okay.  As long as I could avoid another fight with Zach, I thought I would be fine.  I snuck out of the bedroom quietly only to find him dead asleep on the futon.  After a quick shower, I dressed and left him a hasty note like he’d done for me the day before.  Geez.  Things had escalated so rapidly that in a matter of only a few days, we were communicating solely through one sentence notes jotted down on napkins and random bits of scrap paper.  As a matter of fact, the last texts we exchanged were sent while he was still on the west coast.