Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls (5 page)

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Authors: Victoria Laurie

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General

BOOK: Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls
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There was a squeak behind me and the sound of a zipper. I looked again over my shoulder and saw Gil rummaging through his backpack until he located his magic sweatshirt.
Several months earlier—before Gil and I had begun working on the TV show—I’d realized that Gilley was one of those rather unlucky people who is super attractive to spooks. For whatever reason, they love to haunt him and invariably, as he’s actually terrified of spooks, they end up torturing him. To keep him safe, I’d glued about a dozen refrigerator magnets to the inside of one of his old sweatshirts, and as long as he wore it, he would be far less appealing to mischievous or malevolent spirits.
That first sweatshirt had had a few different versions since then, and the one he was currently shrugging into had triple the number of magnets, thus tripling its power and range of protection. Gilley, by nature, was never too careful when protecting what he treasured most in this world ... himself.
“Need some help?” I asked him when I saw how he was struggling to take off his jacket, hold his backpack, and put on the sweatshirt all at the same time.
“I got it,” he insisted, just as he dropped his backpack. Something crunched when it struck the cobblestones, and all three of us stopped to stare at the pack.
“Uh-oh,” Heath said.
“What was in there?” I asked as Gilley stared at his backpack in horror.
“The meters,” he said weakly.
I reached down and picked up the pack carefully. Glass tinkled inside. After unzipping it and moving aside a few items, I said, “Aww, Gil! You broke all three of them!”
“It was an accident!”
“Well, of course it was an accident,” I snapped. “But did you
have
to put the meters at the bottom of the pack where they were the most vulnerable?”
Our electrostatic meters, which we use to isolate ghostly hot spots at all our haunted locales, were pretty fragile gadgets and we often lost one or two due to wear and tear on our investigations, but we hadn’t even made it to the island yet and a major piece of our ghost-hunting equipment wasn’t just gone; it was likely irreplaceable for the rest of the hunt.
“I can get us some new ones,” Gil vowed.
I scowled at him. “From where? The local hardware store?”
“I can buy one or two online and have it shipped to us.”
I sighed and handed him the pack, thoroughly irritated that he’d been so careless and stubborn when all he’d had to do was accept my offer to help. Still, as I looked into his guilty face, I softened. “Okay, buddy. We’ll work without them for now.”
We got moving again and I was really relieved when the thin drizzle stopped and the clouds began to clear. At least we’d soon be dry. Not long after that, we were standing at the base of the cliff on the rocky shore of the island. I tilted my chin up while Heath, Gilley, and I waited for the rest of the crew to catch up to us. Heath shrugged uncomfortably. “You sensing that?”
I nodded. “Feels thick as molasses.”
“What feels thick as molasses?” Gopher asked, stepping up next to us.
“The air,” I said. “It’s thick with spooks.”
“Should make for some great footage, then,” Gopher said happily. Leave it to Gopher to always think about the ratings. Our show,
Ghoul Getters
, hadn’t even aired its first episode yet, but Gopher wasn’t about to pull back on the throttle. He wanted footage of majorly creepy stuff. Period.
When John, Meg, and Kim joined us, I pointed to the stairs. “Better get on with it,” I said.
We climbed the steep rock staircase for maybe ten minutes and had gone only about halfway to the top when I heard a call coming from somewhere above us. Grabbing Heath’s shoulder in front of me to stop him, I asked, “Did you hear that?”
“What?”
Something faint reached my ears again and I turned my head in the direction, which was up and over to my left.
“That.”
Heath cocked his head. “All I can hear is Gilley.”
I looked over my shoulder as Gil clutched the old iron railing while he hacked and wheezed like he was running a marathon. “I’ll ... never ... make ... it ...,” he gasped.
I frowned and felt myself getting frustrated again. I’d been trying to get Gil on some kind of exercise regimen for ages, and he staunchly refused to work out anything but his fingers as they flicked across the keyboard of his computer. “You’ll make it,” I told him flatly. Just then, I distinctly heard a male voice call out, “Alex!”
“Whoa,” said Heath, whipping his head in the direction of the mysterious voice. “Now,
that
I heard.”
Gilley lifted his head to glare at me, oblivious to anything but his own suffering. “This is the last ghostbust I’ll ever agree to that involves this many stairs!”
“Shhh!” I told him, while I listened again.
“Alex!”
“Who is
that
?” Gil asked, turning his head to look in the same direction Heath and I were squinting in.
“I think it’s that same guy from last night!” I said.
Heath appeared puzzled. “Why hasn’t he recruited some help to find this Alex person he’s searching for? I mean, if he’s been looking all night, you’d think that the moment the causeway opened up again, he’d head back to the mainland to alert the coast guard.”
Gilley was fishing around in his backpack again, and after a moment he came up with a pair of binoculars. “I thought we might need these on this shoot,” he said, putting them to his eyes and scanning along the top of the cliff where the voice was coming from.
I watched him anxiously, a terrible sense of foreboding forming in the pit of my stomach. “Something’s not right,” I whispered.
At that moment Gilley sucked in a breath of surprise.
“What?” I asked.
Gilley thrust the binoculars at me. “He’s in trouble!” he said, and pointed to the top of the cliff. I squinted but couldn’t see anything, so I put the binoculars up to my eyes and played with the focus while searching along the cliff—and that was when I nearly dropped the glasses.
“Ohmigod!”
“What?” Heath asked.
I pulled the binoculars away and grabbed his hand, running past him up the stairs. “Come on!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Just follow me!” I yelled, pumping my legs as fast as I could to get to the top in time.
Dutifully Heath followed behind. In short order we reached the top of the rock, my legs screaming with the effort, and I tore across the unusually flat terrain, passing the large stone castle as we ran. I barely noticed it because I was so focused on getting to the far end in time.
As we raced forward, we both distinctly heard someone calling for help, and I used every ounce of my reserve strength to run as fast as I could. Heath came abreast of me quickly, and as the cries for help became more urgent, he picked up his speed and zoomed past me in three strides.
By the time he reached the edge of the cliff, he was a good twenty yards ahead of me. I watched him drop to his knees and reach down; then he appeared to jerk forward and I cried out, afraid he was being pulled off the edge. With two more long strides I reached him and flung myself across the back of his legs to keep him from falling.
“Noooooooooooooo!” I heard him cry, and I gripped his legs even more fiercely.
With a sickening dread I heard someone dropping away from us scream,
“Alllllllex!”
Using my weight to anchor Heath, I peered over the side and gasped when I saw the same man I’d seen through the binoculars falling, his arms pitifully still reaching up and flailing as his hands grabbed at thin air, all the while falling down, and down and down.
I screamed—the scene was so horrible I could barely stand it. The man’s face was so panic-stricken and frightened and there was nothing anyone could do to help him.
And then his form disappeared in what remained of the fog at the base of the rock, and an instant later Heath and I both heard a faint sickening crunch.
I rolled away from Heath and lay on my back, covering my eyes with both hands. A moment later—I burst into tears.
 
“Stop staring at me,” I ordered.
“Sorry!” Gilley apologized. “It’s just, you almost never cry, M. J., and this flood’s been going for almost thirty minutes now.”
I wiped my tearstained cheeks and stared out at the waves crashing onto shore. “Yeah, well, I almost never see someone die right in front of my eyes either, Gil.”
“John should be back soon. And Heath and Gopher should also be showing up any minute.”
I shuddered. John had gone back to shore to alert the authorities, while Heath and Gopher were conducting a search at the base of the rocks where the man had likely landed. I knew the distance he’d fallen and the hard surface he’d landed on certainly meant that there was no hope, but I still wanted to cling to it anyway.
“You look cold,” Meg said from behind me. “Do you want my coat?”
I worked to control the shivering sending tremors through my body. The wind was cold, but I was probably in a little bit of shock from the scene I’d witnessed earlier. “No,” I told her. “Thanks, though. I’ll be okay.”
Gilley looked guilt-ridden, probably because he hadn’t offered to help me warm up. “Here,” he said, shrugging out of his sweatshirt and handing it to me. “It’s warm at least.”
“What’re you going to wear?”
Gilley reached for his backpack and pulled out his own coat. “This.”
I held out my hand for his coat instead of the sweatshirt, knowing how nervous Gil got when he wasn’t wearing it. “Thanks, honey.”
“How’s she doing?” I heard someone ask.
Turning to look, I saw Gopher and Heath walking toward us.
“She’ll be okay,” Gilley said.
I blushed because I’d been an emotional wreck all the way back down the staircase. “Did you find him?” I asked softly.
Both men shook their heads. “No,” Gopher said. “We looked all the way along the rocks underneath the cliff, and there’s no sign of him.”
I blinked. “Was he swept offshore?”
Gopher and Heath exchanged an uncomfortable look. “We don’t think so.”
“So, where’d he go?”
Heath sat down next to me and wrapped a muscled arm across my shoulders. “I don’t think he was ever really there.”
I cocked my head at him and Gilley said, “Huh?”
Heath eyed the top of the cliff for a moment before he explained. “I know you didn’t see it, M. J., but when I got to the edge of the cliff, I dropped down and reached for the guy hanging there. He wasn’t far away, maybe a foot or two, and as he grabbed for my hand, I swear, it passed right through mine.”
My jaw fell open. “He was a
spook
?!”
Heath nodded. “I think so.”
No one said anything for the longest time; we were all too stunned by the possibility that we’d been so easily duped. “He looked so real,” I whispered, knowing that I had been so panic-stricken to get to him that I hadn’t even considered using my sixth sense to feel out the energy around the man.
“He did look real,” Heath agreed. “And we were running on pure adrenaline up there. It never even occurred to me when we saw him hanging over the edge like that that he might be a ghost, which was why I automatically thought his hand passing through mine had to have been a trick of the light. But then Gopher and I couldn’t find any trace of him anywhere near the base of the cliffs, and at that end of the beach, the tide is still low enough that there’s no way his body could have been carried out to sea. There are at least fifty yards of dry rocky shore between the edge of the water and the cliffs.”
I inhaled deeply, my tattered emotions already mending themselves back together. “He fell straight down,” I said. “So he should have landed within about ten to twenty feet of the rock face.”
“Yep,” Heath agreed.
I switched my attention to Gilley. “Can you do some research for us when we get back to the B&B? I want to know if there is anything in cyberspace about this ghost.”
“On it,” Gil said.
“And don’t go back too far in history,” Heath told him. “The guy was wearing a down vest, jeans, and a really nice watch. I think it might even have been a Rolex.”
“You got a lot of detail in those few seconds,” I told him.
“I don’t know that I’ll ever get that image out of my head,” Heath replied, looking pained.
I moved closer to him and squeezed my arm around his waist. “I know exactly how you feel.”
“So what do we do now?” Kim asked. She’d gotten very quiet after hearing about the man who’d fallen off the cliff.
“Wait for John,” Gilley said. “He’ll probably bring the cavalry with him and we’ll have some explaining to do.”
“Maybe whoever he brings with him will know about our spook,” I suggested.

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