Ghost Trackers (2 page)

A greasy, burning-food smell filled the air of her small bedroom, the thick odor making her stomach roil with nausea. She lived in a one-bedroom efficiency apartment above the Flaming Wok, a fast-food Chinese restaurant, and her place always stank of fried food and cloying spices. She hated the stink so much that she hadn’t eaten Chinese
in the two years she’d lived there, and she doubted she’d ever touch the damned stuff again. The apartment wasn’t much, and the location sucked, but it was all she could afford on her monthly disability checks. The nausea set off a pounding headache, and she considered asking Greg to hold on so she could take a painkiller, but he was in the middle of saying something, and with an effort, she forced herself to focus on his voice once more.

“—from the alumni organization. They don’t normally give out people’s numbers, but I told them this was a special case. It didn’t hurt that I made a healthy contribution to the alumni fund this year.” A small chuckle.

She usually slept in a pair of panties and an oversize T-shirt, and now that the sweat was beginning to cool on her too-thin body, she felt a chill coming on. She drew the damp sheet around her, but it felt cold and clammy and did nothing to prevent her from shivering.

“What do you want?” Then, realizing how that sounded, she added, “Sorry, that was rude.”

“No worries. You don’t talk to someone for fifteen years, and they suddenly call out of the blue, of course you’re curious about why they decided to get in touch again. Do you know what’s coming up this weekend?”

“No.”

“Our fifteenth reunion.”

The news seemed so random that for an instant,
she considered the possibility that, like in a cheesy movie, she only thought she’d woken up and in reality was still dreaming, but she dismissed the notion. The terror quotient was way too low for this to be one of
her
dreams.

“Really?”

“Doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, does it?”

Her gaze fell on the prescription bottles on her nightstand. “I don’t know. Sometimes it seems like it’s been a hell of a lot longer.”

There was an awkward pause before Greg continued. “Well, like I said, I’ve been in contact with the alumni organization, and not only did I get your number from them, but they told me you haven’t signed up to attend the reunion.”

The pounding in her head grew worse, and she reached up with her free hand to massage the back of her neck, not that it did any good. “Yeah, well, what can I say? High school was hard enough the first time.”

Greg chuckled again. “I hear you.”

Of course you do
, she thought. Greg Daniels had been a bona fide geek in high school, the kind of kid everyone else hated and made fun of. He’d been overweight, wore ill-fitting secondhand clothes, and possessed few social skills. But there’d been something else about him, too, a sense of . . . otherness, for lack of a better word. As if no matter what he said or did, no matter how hard he tried, he would never be able to fit in with others,
as if he’d been born to be an outsider—something the other kids in school had been only too glad to point out to him. She had felt sorry for him back then, had even befriended him to a certain extent, although now that she tried to remember, she found the details somewhat fuzzy. But that didn’t worry her; given the amount of meds she took, she was used to feeling as if her brain were wrapped in layers of wet burlap most of the time.

“So you’re calling to, what, exactly?” The words came out harsher than she intended, but her head was really starting to hurt now, and her nausea was getting worse.

If Greg had detected the harshness in her words, he gave no sign. “To try to convince you to come to the reunion. Things have changed for me since high school—a lot.” He paused, as if searching for the right words. “I guess you could say that after fifteen years, I finally grew up.” He gave a small laugh that held a trace of bitterness. “I’ve never been to any of the reunions, either, but I’m going to this one. Partly as a ‘screw you’ to all the people who treated me so badly, to be honest. Show them the ugly duckling has morphed into a swan, that kind of thing. But mostly, I’m going because I hope to get some kind of closure on that part of my life, make peace with my past.” Another pause. “I don’t know. It sounds stupid, doesn’t it?”

It took her a few moments to reply.

“No, it doesn’t sound stupid at all.”

“I know we weren’t close or anything, but I considered you a friend. Probably the only real one I had. It would mean a lot to me if you were there to witness the debut of the new Greg.”

She gritted her teeth and forced herself to concentrate past the throbbing in her head and the churning in her gut. What was wrong with her? She hadn’t had a reaction to a nightmare this intense in months. And the nightmare she’d had—the walls closing in on her—wasn’t all that bad. Not like some of the horror shows that went on inside her skull when her eyes were closed. Why was she reacting so strongly? “That’s . . . sweet of you, Greg, but I don’t know if I can make it. My . . . health isn’t all that great these days.”

“I’ll understand if you can’t make it.” Greg sounded sincere enough, but there was an undertone of disappointment in his voice. “But mull it over a little. Who knows? Maybe you’ll change your mind. It sure would be great to see you again . . . not to mention Drew and Trevor.”

“Amber? Are you all right? Amber!”

A memory slipped past her defenses: Drew shouting, his voice muffled.

He was calling to me
, she thought.
From somewhere in the house
. She felt more memories coming then, rising from her subconscious like a vast sea creature leaving the depths of the shadowy ocean where it had lain slumbering in the muddy darkness for far too long. The thought of what
those memories might look like once they reached the surface of her mind filled her with a terror she hadn’t known since, since . . .

That night
.

She spoke then, her voice seeming to operate of its own accord.

“Drew and Trevor are coming?” The words were almost a whisper.

“I hope so,” Greg said. His voice was calm, soothing, reassuring, and she grabbed hold of it with the grateful desperation of a drowning woman reaching for a rescuer’s outstretched hand. “But that’s up to you, Amber. You’ll need to convince them. Do you think you can do that for me?”

Blackness nibbled at the edges of her vision as her mind began to shut itself down to protect her from the rush of oncoming memories.

“Yes,” she breathed, before giving herself over to darkness and silence.

Late afternoon at
the end of August. Unseasonably cool.

Greg Daniels crossed the street from where he’d parked his Lexus and strode across an open field. He was dressed in a black polo shirt, jeans, and running shoes, so the breeze blowing across the field should have caused him to shiver. At the very least, it should have raised gooseflesh on his arms and the back of his neck, but he didn’t notice the wind. It had been fifteen years since he’d been there, and during that time, he’d walked in places far colder.

A lot had changed in the last decade and a half. There was no sign of the house that had once stood there, and the land itself had been reshaped—trees cut down, hilly ground bulldozed and flattened, grass reseeded. It was as if the Ash Creek City Council had done its best to erase every trace of the past, but he knew that was a fool’s game, for the past was always part of the present—never gone, merely sleeping, waiting for the right time to come alive again.

A prime example of this was the nearly-completed
structure on the property. One story, gray brick, black roof, with high, wide windows and large glass doors. Landscaped with trimmed hedges close to the building and young trees brought in to replace the old ones that had been cut down. A freshly paved parking lot was in front, with painted spaces—white lines, not yellow—and plenty of them, too, seemingly enough for every man, woman, and child in town to have one. The overall effect was modern, friendly, warm, and inviting. But the link to yesterday was plain for all to see, spelled out in shiny new chrome letters above the main entrance: “Lowry Recreation Center.”

Greg closed his eyes and stretched out his senses, searching for hints of the power this place had once held. He felt faint echoes but nothing more. To be expected, really, considering what had taken place there fifteen years ago.

Snatches of memory raced through his mind quicksilver-fast: distorted shadows moving with a life of their own, the sound of shoes pounding hard on a wooden floor as someone fled, the shouting of fear-laced voices, and above it all, the terrified screams of a young girl—

The sound of youthful laughter tore him from his memories. He opened his eyes and turned to see a trio of preadolescents—two boys and a girl—riding their bikes down the suburban street toward the rec center. It was still technically a construction site, he supposed, since the center wasn’t
due to open for another month, as the wooden sign erected near the street proclaimed in large red letters followed by an enthusiastic exclamation point, but as near as he could tell, all of the major structural and exterior cosmetic work had been completed, and only the interior needed to be finished. So there were no “Danger: Construction Zone, Keep Out” signs for the kids to ignore as they hopped their bikes over the curb and pedaled across the field toward the building. Too bad. Ignoring warning signs might have given them a bit of a transgressive thrill; Greg knew it would have for him at that age. Life was all about enjoying the little pleasures, even the dark ones.

He smiled.
Especially
the dark ones.

He expected the children to ignore him. When he’d been their age, he’d rarely noticed adults. They’d been like distant trees or faraway clouds in the sky, something you were dimly aware of off toward the horizon but not on your radar. So he was surprised when the three young bikers rode straight up to him, stopped, and fixed him with bored gazes.

The girl was the tallest of the three and presumably the oldest. She had short, curly black hair and pale skin and wore shorts and a T-shirt displaying the image of some animé character he wasn’t familiar with. The girl looked him up and down and pursed her lips, as if she found him more of a disappointment than usual for an adult.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

He kept his tone pleasant and allowed his lips to form a suggestion of a smile. “I could ask you the same question, since the rec center’s not open yet.”

“We
live
on this street,” one of the boys said, an edge of whininess in his voice. He was a full head shorter than the girl, stocky, with greasy brown hair and a doughy face that in a couple of years would be covered with pimples. He wore an oversize T-shirt and baggy jeans in an unsuccessful attempt to hide the contours of his body. The boy reminded Greg of himself at that age. He was thin now and looked reasonably attractive, even if he’d never grace the cover of
GQ
, but he still felt a wave of sympathy for the dough-faced boy, mixed with a strong taint of self-loathing. He might no longer resemble this kid outwardly, but on the inside . . .

You’ve changed
, he told himself.
You’re nothing like this kid, not anymore
. And mostly, he believed it.

“What are you three?” he asked, still smiling. “The neighborhood watch?”

“Sort of,” the second boy said. “Since we live here, we can’t be trespassers. Not like you.” He was thin, with short brown hair and glasses that lent him a bookish aspect, reinforced by the calm, matter-of-fact way he spoke. His plain red T-shirt and khaki shorts did nothing to dispel his geeky image, especially considering that he wore white socks that rode too high on his calves.

Funny, the little jokes that fate played from
time to time. These three kids were younger than Amber, Drew, and Trevor had been fifteen years ago, and they didn’t look
exactly
like them, but as his father had been fond of saying, it was close enough for government work. It was all too fitting that these three young doppelgängers should be the ones to welcome him home.

The girl spoke again, brow still furrowed in suspicion. “What are you doing here?”

Greg was old enough to be her father, but that didn’t seem to matter to her. As far as she was concerned, he was an interloper who needed to be dealt with. He wondered if she’d be so brave if she didn’t have her two friends along to back her up. Maybe, he decided.

“I grew up in Ash Creek. I’m back visiting and thought I’d check out the new rec center,” he said. “Looks great, doesn’t it?”

“It’s all right, I guess,” the chubby boy said. “But you won’t catch me going inside when it’s done.”

Greg tilted his head to the side. “Really? Why not?” As if he didn’t know.

“A long time ago, there used to be a house here,” the boy with glasses said.

“A
haunted
house,” the chubby boy added in a hushed voice.

“It burned down before any of us were born,” the girl said. “But our parents still talk about the Lowry House.”

“They say the land is cursed,” Chubby said.

“Not that we believe any of that stuff,” Glasses was quick to add.

“We used to, when I was a kid,” Greg said. He kept his tone calm, but inside he felt something cold and dark begin to stir. “Everyone knew the Lowry House was haunted. Kids used to dare each other to go inside.”

“Did you?” Chubby asked. “Ever go inside, I mean.”

Greg nodded. “Yes, along with three friends of mine.”

Despite his earlier profession of skepticism, Glasses sounded eager as he asked, “Did anything happen, anything weird?”

“Many things happened,” Greg said. “It was a very eventful night.”

Once again, a girl’s long-ago screams filled his ears.

“Don’t listen to him,” the young girl—the girl of today—snapped. “He’s trying to scare us. This place isn’t haunted, and it never was.”

Greg turned to face the girl and gave her a smile that caused her to go pale.

“You’re wrong. The Lowry House
was
haunted until that last night, the night it burned down.”