Nightmare (25 page)

Never had I been so happy to smell dead fish.

That was my first sensation when I awoke in a bright room
where a man was sitting next to me.

"Carl?" I rasped.

I blinked and noted the tiny cot I lay on, and the stark surroundings of the small metal room I was in. It was bright from
several lights that were shining in the room, and I could hear
the rain coming down just a short distance away. I was inside
on the main deck.

My crusty old friend was staring me in the eye, his expression unreadable.

"Thirsty," I croaked, my tongue and throat dry. "How did
you find me?"

Carl held up a single hand, and inside it was my phone.
"Almost had to get the jaws a' life to pry it out of your hand."

I understood. Before Jordin ran off, my finger had been right on the phone's Send button, with his number already input. I
must've mashed it sometime during the chaos that followed.

"Where's Jordin?" I said, still having a hard time getting my
voice. But I noted with relief that my heart was beating normally,
and the sweats and pains I'd felt earlier were gone.

"Your friend?" Carl shrugged. "Must still be belowdecks
somewhere."

"I better go find her-"

I tried to sit up, but Carl gently forced me back down, and I was
surprised at how much strength the old seaman still possessed.
"You ain't going nowhere till you tell me what happened."

My mind scrambled, trying to think of an excuse. I didn't dare
tell Carl what was really wrong with me; as much as I appreciated
his care and concern, I knew he'd take the information straight
to my parents. And I wasn't ready for them to know.

"I forgot how hot it can get down there," I lied. "Must've
gotten dehydrated."

His eyes narrowed, and he stared me down. "Then why did
you call me?" he asked, producing the phone again, and this time
handing it over to me.

I sighed. "I thought someone was on the ship-a real, live
person-other than us. I thought somebody had snuck onboard
and was pranking us. But then I saw the thing we were chasing,
and it definitely wasn't alive."

Carl seemed to sense the truth in this part of my story, at
least. "I run a tight ship. Nobody gets onboard without my knowledge, you know that, Maia. Why were you all by yourself when
I found you?"

I shook my head in frustration, or almost anger. "Jordin ran
off after the apparition. I tried telling her I didn't feel well, but she was already gone. I should've brought some walkies.... Just
didn't think about it."

Carl seemed to deflate a bit. I read this to mean that all of
his questions had been answered to his satisfaction.

"Something's happening, Carl. Something's wrong," I said, at
last vocalizing a dawning comprehension that had been bugging
me all week. It had nothing to do with my little heart problem.
That was just my own personal stuff, and one way or another, I
would handle that myself. There was something else going on
here that was much bigger than me.

He sat back in his seat and looked at me.

I took a deep breath. "Every single time I've gone investigating
with Jordin, we've encountered paranormal phenomena. Every
time. One hundred percent success rate. That ... that's impossible. It just doesn't happen."

Carl crossed his arms in front of his chest and frowned.
"Honey, you know I don't know much about the ghost business.
I'm just an old sailor who never lost his sea legs. Why are you
talking to me about this, instead of what's-her-name?"

I smiled, with a hint of desperation on my face. "Because
you're here." And because he was my friend. Though that went
without saying.

His eyebrows rose as he resigned himself to being my sounding board. "Well, when you're at sea and you wind up somewhere
you didn't expect to, there's only two possible explanations.
There's a problem with the weather or there's a problem with
the boat."

I pondered this. "So ... either the paranormal itself is ... I
don't know, changing, like the weather, which doesn't make any
sense. Or there's something wrong with me? Am I the boat?"

He stared me down. "You're driving the boat, Maia. But you're
not the only passenger on it, are you?"

It was over an hour from the time I passed out until Jordin
emerged from belowdecks. Carl had left me to get some rest
twenty or thirty minutes ago. He made up some excuse about
needing to check the ship's moorings because of the weather.

In that time, I'd left his quarters and returned to the crew
bunk Jordin and I had selected, curling up in my sleeping bag. My
strength had improved tremendously, but I was beginning to fear
the worst about Jordin. What if she had fallen and hurt herself?
Maybe she'd been impaled on some metal spike. Or, more likely
but no less troubling, the batteries in her flashlight had drained
thanks to all the paranormal activity, and she was lost down there
in the dark, amid the ship's endless, mazelike corridors.

I was working up the resolve to go look for her when she ran
into the room, breathless and grinning ear to ear. I wanted to
beat the living snot out of her.

Instead, I played it cool.

"It went well?" I asked, yawning as if she'd woken me up.

Jordin nodded vigorously, plopping down on top of her sleeping bag and pulling out her laptop. "I think I got it on video!
Can't wait to get this to a bigger screen.... Man, that thing could
move."

She was hooking up her video camera to her computer when
she noticed that I was buried in my sleeping bag. "Hey, you okay?
I saw where you threw up back in that hallway. Did you get food
poisoning or something?"

"Or something," I replied, turning over to indicate that I was
going to sleep.

"Do you need to get out of here? Want me to drive you to
the emergency room?"

"I'm fine," I said, thinking only about Carl's boat metaphor,
and wondering if he could be right about Jordin. "Don't worry
about me."

There was a knock at the door at 7:30 a.m., and I knew it was
Derek. Had to be.

I decided I wasn't going to hold back from him this time.
I would tell him about my nightmare, and what it probably
meant.

Jill was an exercise freak who got up early to run and do yoga,
so I had to get out of my nice, warm sleeping bag to answer the
door. I shivered and rubbed my arms.

"I saw Jordin last night!" Derek blurted. His face was pale
and his eyes were bloodshot. "She was a ghost."

"You-she-what?! "

He walked into the room and shut the door, probably worried that someone outside would hear the pastor-in-training claiming
to have seen a ghost.

"I was asleep ... in my room," he explained, "and she called
out my name. It woke me up, and I saw her! She was right there,
beside my bed. I think she was kneeling. I was so startled, I didn't
get a good look at her body-"

"There was no mist?" I asked.

He shook his head. "No, but she was definitely there. Only I
could kind of... see through her. She was only there for about
twenty seconds, and then-" Derek bit his lip and swallowed
back an emotion that threatened to overtake him. "These three
dark figures-I couldn't see any details, they were just like, shadows-they grabbed her and dragged her away! They dragged her
through the walls of my room...."

He couldn't hold back the tears anymore, but he let them
sting his eyes as just two spilled out and ran down his cheeks.
"It's real. Somebody's out there turning living people into disembodied souls!"

Derek's story was unnerving. I could see why it would upset
him so, but it struck me as consistent with the scenario I was
already imagining. She had found a way to reach him, but whoever was behind all of this caught up with her and put a stop to
her efforts to communicate.

"Did she say anything?" I asked, already knowing what the
answer would be.

"She said `the nightmare is coming,' and she said something
I couldn't quite make out about Howell Durham," Derek replied.
"Then she just vanished."

Howell Durham, I thought. President and CEO of Durham Holdings International, the company funding Ghost Town, and
very likely the conspirators behind all this.

Derek was so beside himself, I had to ask. "Are you sure you
weren't dreaming?"

"I'm sure!"

I let out a long breath. "Okay, all right.... There's something
you should know. I had a nightmare last night."

"So?"

"A nightmare, Derek."

His eyes popped. "Oh! Wow! Are you okay? Do you have-?"

I shook my head. "No, I don't have a mark on my neck. Not
yet. But both reports we've heard suggest that there's roughly
a week between when the nightmares start and when the mark
appears. And then ..." I didn't finish the thought.

"And then," he agreed, looking at me with worry. "I guess
Durham Holdings is making good on its threat to target you
next. Assuming they're the ones that threatened you."

"That's what we have to find out," I said, turning to business.
"And Jordin's journal may hold the key."

"The Vineyard, then?"

"You're driving."

An hour later, we were on I-95 heading north in Derek's
pickup truck.

"So, uh, when you saw Jordin last night..." I said, trying to
sound as innocent as possible, "was she wearing clothes?"

I was expecting a dirty look to be shot my way, but Derek
maintained his expression of caffeinated anxiety, though there
was a knowing gleam in his eye. "I don't know," he said without a trace of deception. "It happened really fast.... She was there
and then she wasn't. She might have been."

"I'm surprised to hear you admit that," I offered in a friendly
tone.

"It's what happened," he said with a shrug. "I'm not going to
lie about it because it doesn't fit with my theology."

I didn't reply, but I valued his commitment to the truth.

We drove for a while in silence and then he said, "Try this
one. When I was about seven or eight years old, my parents and
I were living in this small apartment. This was back when Dad
had gotten his first church, which was in Kansas. I remember one
day at the apartment that I looked out the back door and saw
a man standing there on the other side of the screen door. He
smiled warmly at me through the screen, but he never knocked
on the door or even waved at me. He had curly white hair and a
beard and wore old-fashioned overalls and muddy work boots.
He kept his hands in his pockets the whole time.

"I went to tell my mom about the man at the back door, but
even though I was gone less than ten seconds, when I brought
Mom back to the door, the man was gone.

"That afternoon, I told a neighbor kid about what I'd seen,
and he said that it was `old Mr. Andrews,' a farmer who had
owned all of the land for miles around, about a hundred years
ago, before the land had been zoned by the city for development.
I thought my friend was nuts, of course, but he described the
man I'd seen down to every last detail.

"He asked if the man I saw had kept his hands in his pockets
the whole time. I said that he did. My friend explained that that
was because Mr. Andrews died after an accident where his hands
were cut off, and he bled to death in his cornfield."