K.J. Emrick - Darcy Sweet 13 - Ghost Story (6 page)

One of the people at the party had been possessed and forced to kill a woman.  Now Jon was here, right here, while she was being beaten.  It couldn’t be him.  It couldn’t.

The pain in her arms and legs and all the rest of her said otherwise.

“Jon, please don’t panic.  I need to check your spirit.”

“You need to…what?”

“Your aura, Jon.  You need to let me see if Williams is still in you.”

His eyes practically bugged out of his head.  “Darcy don’t be stupid.  I’m fine.  I didn’t do anything.”

“You wouldn’t remember if you did.  Just stand there.  Right there, no closer.  Please, Jon?  Just for a few seconds.”

While he was trying to stutter an argument Darcy raised her hands towards him and closed her eyes and reached out with her own spirit, the energies of her soul, and felt for his.  She found it easily, the familiar warmth of his character that she had experienced so often, when he would hug her in the morning or walk with her at night or listen to her talk about her day.  It was him.  Purely him, and no one else.

“He’s gone Jon.  He’s not in you anymore.”

“Darcy, he was never in me!  I was not possessed.  It wasn’t me.”

She ran to him and threw herself in his arms.  They held each other tightly, and she didn’t bother arguing with him.  She was hurting.  Someone had attacked her, and there was no one else here but Jon.

And if Nathaniel Williams had possessed Jon just now to do this to her, then the prime suspect in the murder of Bonnie Verhault had just become her own fiancé.

“You don’t think you’re being just a little ridiculous?”

“No,” Darcy said to him honestly.  “I don’t.”

She was still sore all over, but it was only a dull throbbing now and a twinge that tweaked her back whenever she reached up above her head.

“Ow.”

Like that.

The book that Millie and Smudge had shown her in the dream was heavier than she remembered it.  Sitting at the kitchen table, she opened it up to read.  The red cover was soft in her hand like old leather got sometimes.  It was too bad, in her opinion, that all books weren’t still bound in leather like this.  Aside from how hard that would be on the cow population, she enjoyed the heft and feel of a book like this.  Then again, her bookstore was only making money now because of how she was able to sell e-books.

Technology was wonderful, but it sure made life confusing.

“What’s in that book?” Jon asked. 

“The instructions to do the exorcism.”  At least, she hoped that’s what was there.

“Hmm.”

His tone was still offended.  No matter what she said or how she explained it he refused to believe he had been possessed by a ghost.  She didn’t blame him for the attack.  If anything, she figured she hadn’t been hurt worse than she was exactly because it was Jon doing the…what was done to her.  He probably had resisted whatever Nathaniel Williams had made him do because of how much he loved her.

“Jon, just trust me, okay?  I know what I’m doing.”

Looking over at the windows, then back at her, he raised one eyebrow.

“It works!” she protested.

“I’m sure.  Listen, putting salt across the windowsills is one thing, but I’m going to be tracking it through the house for a week from where you laid it in front of the doors.”

There were certain rules that remained constant when dealing with ghosts.  They were rarely easy to understand even when they managed to contact the living.  They could not be seen by most people.  They were annoyingly evasive.  They missed their loved ones.  Things like that.

Then there were a few truly weird facts about ghosts.  Like they could not cross a line of salt.

Maybe one day Darcy would have the chance to write a book on the science of spiritual visitations.  They were as immutable as the laws of physics, really.  People had just as much use for knowing how to protect their home from ghosts as they did for knowing the periodic table of elements, and there were a ton of textbooks about the elements.  So why not one on ghosts?

There had been two round containers of household salt up in the cabinets.  Darcy had used everything in both of them to lace the windows and the doors, too.  No way was she going to let the Pilgrim Ghost back in here for round two.

She looked over at Jon.  Then looked away quickly.

“Stop that,” he said, pointing at her.  “I saw that.”

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled.  She couldn’t help it, though.  The thought that someone so close to her could have been taken over so easily scared her to death.  What would have happened if she hadn’t woken up when she did?  Or, worse, if it had been someone besides Jon who had been available for the possessing?

“Darcy, I did not attack you.  I came into the house and found you on the floor.”

She didn’t argue with him.  There was no reason to debate it again with him.  She’d spent nearly a half an hour trying to explain that when people were possessed by ghosts they didn’t always remember what the ghost did while in their body.  She’d checked him over, felt for another spirit being overlaid on his, and there wasn’t any.  Nathaniel Williams had left him alone.  For now.

She wasn’t afraid of Jon, necessarily.  He hadn’t done anything to her.  It might have been his hands that did the attacking, but it had not been his mind, his spirit.  It hadn’t been him.

The thought of him killing Bonnie Verhault in that same sort of state, with his hands stabbing her over and over while his mind went on hiatus, was even more disturbing to her.  Neither of them had brought that up.  What would they do if physical trace evidence linked Jon to that crime?  The Devil made me do it had gone out of style as a defense decades ago. 

There was nothing they could say that would make that killing all right.  For the police, or for Jon either.  Darcy knew what kind of man he was.  Knowing that he had killed a woman, whether or not he was possessed when he did it, would tear him apart.

“Look,” she said instead, “we’ve got the ghost locked out of here for right now.  Let’s just make use of our time and find out what we need to stop him for good.”

“Fine by me,” he grumped.  “So this is an Exorcism 101 textbook?”

“Something like that,” she agreed, managing a wisp of a smile at Jon’s wry sense of humor.  No matter what, he would always be Jon to her.

In her dream, Great Aunt Millie had told her that there was a method and a way to do the exorcism.  Two separate things.  The method would be spelled out in the book.  Forms, conjurings to recite, that sort of thing.  All of that could be spelled out in black and white.  The way to do the exorcism was different.  Hopefully, the book would point her toward that as well.

When Darcy did a communication, it was a calling for a particular ghost to come to her.  She provided a path for them to connect with her for a little while.  By doing so, a ghost could find its way back to the realm of the living to speak to her.  An exorcism was the exact opposite.  The exorcism would provide a way for a ghost to leave the Earth, for good.  It was like pushing an unwanted houseguest out of a door.  The exorcism opened the door.  That was the method.  But she also would need something to create the way to the door and out the other side.

A method, and a way.

Starting at the first page of the book, Darcy smelled the pleasant scent of old paper, felt the smooth texture of the pages beneath her fingers.  She loved books.  It was comforting to have something this solid and real in her hands as she searched for the answers they needed.

Page by page, she read through the carefully written text of the book.  Searching from the front to the back, she soon got to the last page. Then she frowned, flipped the page back and forward again, wondering if she had missed something.

There was nothing there.

Darcy blinked.  That couldn’t be right.  Why would Millie and Smudge point her towards a book that had nothing to do with the problem at hand?  She thought back to her dream, remembering every detail that she could.  No.  This was definitely the book that Millie had pointed to.  The one Smudge had tried to take off the shelf in his teeth.

Flipping back to page one, she read through it again.  She smelled the pleasant scent of old paper, felt the smooth texture of the pages beneath her fingers as she turned them one after the other, reading through the carefully printed words of each chapter.  There was a lot of information in this book.  A lot of interesting facts about ghosts and the world of the hereafter.

Nothing on exorcisms.

“What is it?” Jon asked.

“It’s not here,” Darcy said, scrunching her eyebrows, not able to believe what she was seeing.  “There’s nothing in this book on exorcisms at all, Jon.”

“Are you sure?”  He came to stand behind her, leaning down over her shoulder.  “Because I was sure I saw…right here.  What’s this?”

Darcy looked down to where his finger pointed at a title in bold, illuminated letters.  She sighed patiently and turned to look up at him.  “That isn’t what we’re looking for.  We need to learn about exorcisms.  How is this going to help?”

He stared at her blankly.  “Because that’s what it says.”

She had been about to argue with him more but the words died on her lips.  What was he talking about?  Turning back to the book, she ran her fingers over the title he had indicated, smelling the pleasant scent of old paper, feeling the smooth texture of the page as she started to rip it out of the book.

“Darcy!” he shouted, grabbing her hands.  “Darcy stop it!  What are you doing?”

She struggled against him, making the neat tear she had started along the inside edge of the page cut away in a jagged line across the middle of the paper.  She gasped and pulled her hands away from the book as fast as she could, shocked at what she had done.

“Jon…I don’t understand.”  She didn’t, either.  Had she really done that?  What was she thinking?  “Look, I’m sorry.  I guess I’m just frustrated because I can’t find what I need.  We have to do something about Nathaniel Williams now, before he gets someone else hurt.”

Jon looked like he was ready to pounce on her again if he needed to, but he pointed back down at the page of the book she had nearly ruined.  “Darcy.  Look at what it says right there.  Tell me what you see.”

They didn’t have time for games like this, and she was furious that he was going on about what simply wasn’t there, but she did as he asked anyway, figuring it would be the quickest way to get back to actually finding answers to this mystery.  Staring down at the title on the page she read the words, then turned back to him.

And forgot what she had just read.

Jon’s eyes showed her that he knew what had just happened to her.  She saw concern there, but also a little fear.  This was silly.  It simply didn’t say anything important.  Turning in her chair again she read the title one more time.

Only, it was gone again as soon as she read it.

Concentrating, focusing harder, she saw the letters squiggle on the page and blur and twist until she clenched her jaw and narrowed her eyes and made them stay in place so she could read them.

“The Art of the Exorcism Method.”  That was what they said.  The exact thing her aunt had wanted her to find.

“How…?” she breathed, not understanding what was happening.  She reached out with trembling fingers as she quickly read through the page, the words presenting themselves plainly where they had escaped her attention before.  It was all here.  The knowledge she needed, wrapped up with the pleasant scent of old paper and the smooth feel of the page between her fingers as she pulled it away from the spine completely and began tearing it into tiny pieces.

“Darcy, stop!”  Jon had her by her wrists but she had already torn the page in two.  He grabbed the one half from her and stuffed it into his back pocket but that left her hands free to tear the other half into pieces too tiny to ever be put back together again.

“Why?” he asked her.  “Darcy, look at what you’re doing!”

Her fingers were still trying to tear the pieces apart when she came back to herself.  Oh, dear God, what had she done?  That was the very thing they needed to do spiritual combat with the murderous Pilgrim Ghost, and she had just destroyed it.

She looked up at Jon, miserable and scared, not understanding anything that had just happened. 

He jumped back from her a half step, until his back hit up against the refrigerator with a hollow rattling of the condiment bottles inside.  His face drained of color.

“What is it?” she said, cold fingers of dread tickling up her spine.  “What is it?  Jon, what is it?”

“Your face,” was all he said.

And then she knew.

A cry of terror caught in her throat as she raced from the kitchen, through the living room and up the stairs to where the bedrooms and the storage room and the bathroom were.  It was the bathroom she needed, and she rushed in, throwing open the door so hard in her haste that it banged against the linen closet.  It was a small space built in an era before huge on suites had become the fashion.  The tub and the other amenities didn’t leave a lot of space for the small sink.  Darcy gripped the edge of the vanity to steady herself and stared into the mirrored cabinet secured to the wall in front of her.

Her reflection stared back at her.  Her face.

Only, there was someone else there with her.

There was the faint outline of another person, like their image had been taken and photoshopped over her own.  A man with an angular jaw and sharp cheekbones.  His hair was darker than her own.  Deep pools of shadow stared at her menacingly, piercing through her hazel eyes.  She knew that face hovering there around her own.

It was the same face she had seen in the book at Benson LaCroix’s house.  Nathaniel Williams.

The Pilgrim Ghost.

“Get out of my body!” she blurted out.  It was the first thing that came to her mind.

The next thing was an image of her own hands around Jon’s neck, squeezing and squeezing until the life had been forced out of him.

“No!” she shrieked, knowing that Jon could hear everything she was saying downstairs.  “No, I won’t do that!  You get out of my body.  Right now!”

In the reflection, the mouth that was not hers opened wide in a cruel, inhuman laugh.

All this time she had thought it was Jon who had been possessed.  Jon who had attacked her.  Jon who was in danger.

She’d been wrong.

It was her.

The ghost of Nathaniel Williams had taken over her body while she slept.  Even as Millie had been trying to tell her how to defend herself, the entity known as the Pilgrim Ghost had stolen into her and used her own body against her.  That was why her injuries weren’t that bad.  There was only so much a person could do to hurt themselves.