Chapter 14 #2
I round the side of the van where Griffin and Donny are standing. Donny has a spray bottle in one hand and is spritzing his jacket sleeves, his pants, and even the tops of his boots. Griffin’s doing the same thing to himself, though he’s being way less careful, just dousing his whole torso.
“Um.” I point at the spray bottle. “What are you doing?”
“Salt water,” Griffin explains. “We apply it to our clothes as a repellent.”
“You’re salting yourselves?”
“Yep.” Griffin sprays another liberal coating across his chest, and Donny rests his bottle on the rear bumper. “Like a nice dry rub before we get barbecued.”
“That’s not a good analogy,” I say.
“Thank you. I worked really hard on it.” He tosses me a spray bottle, and I yank my hands out of my pockets just in time to catch it. “Here. Get yourself nice and seasoned.”
Okay then. I give myself a couple of sprays and am about to put it back when Griffin adds, “You also have to drink some.”
My arm holding the bottle goes slack at my side. “I’m sorry, but what?”
“Just a little bit.” He offers me a Poland Spring bottle with SALT WATER written on it in rushed Sharpie. “Helps repel them from the inside out.”
“Are you saying I could get possessed?”
Donny must see the panic on my face because he says, “Possession doesn’t happen instantaneously. It’s a gradual process. One week minimum before an entity can establish full control of a person.”
DJ made it sound like the ghost who took Bonnie’s sanity did so mere minutes after entering her mind, but I guess a direct assault on the brain is different than full possession. I’m starting to learn that there are a lot of different ways a ghost can hurt someone.
Donny takes a measured sip from his own bottle. “The salt water does marginally disrupt their ability to cause damage if they successfully initiate an internal assault.”
At least that’s something. I look at the water bottle Griffin’s offering me.
“It’s not that bad.” Griffin unscrews the cap and takes a long swig, making a face that suggests it is, in fact, that bad. “See? I’m fine.”
I bring the bottle to my lips, my mouth puckering.
“Just a couple sips,” Griffin says, but I’m already tilting the bottle back, gulping it down. If everyone else can do this, then I can, too.
“Easy.” Griffin pushes the bottom of the bottle down. “I said a couple sips, not chug the whole thing.”
I gag and stick out my tongue, scraping it along the roof of my mouth. The salt taste clings to my teeth and gums, but I guess that’s the entire point of drinking it.
“There you go.” Griffin claps me on the shoulder. “You’re officially baptized.”
Donny chuckles as he returns his bottle to the storage basket and pulls out two handheld devices about the size of TV remotes. They’re black and boxy with small LED screens on top and a sensor array on the business end. Both he and Griffin slip rusted iron crowbars into their belts.
I shift my weight from foot to foot, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand as they prep their equipment. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Griffin glances up. “Nah, you’re here to observe, remember? But I can show you how these bad boys work. ” He holds up one of the scanners. “Come here.”
He tells me the device is called a residue scanner.
It’s heavier than it looks, and I turn it over in my hands, studying the small screen and the array of sensors, as he runs through how it works: green light means we’re fine, yellow light means a ghost was here not long ago, and red light means we’re about to become something very dead ourselves.
“Energy doesn’t hang in the air,” he explains. “It settles on surfaces, soaks into fabric, clings to walls—so the scanner has to make contact to pick anything up.”
Griffin hands me a pair of latex gloves and a small earpiece. I tug on the gloves, stretching the latex under the cuffs of my jumpsuit, then fumble with the earpiece until it settles in my ear canal.
“Testing, testing,” DJ’s voice crackles through, making me jump. “Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” I say, touching my ear.
Griffin snorts and guides my finger to the raised button on the fat part of the earpiece.
“Eden, push down on the button once when you want to talk, then once when you’re done talking,” DJ says, and I glimpse her watching me from the front of the van, through the back window.
I nod even though she can’t see me. Griffin laughs at me, and I realize why a second too long.
I press the button firmly. “Copy that.”
Griffin’s stupid smile turns green as I secure my goggles over my eyes. I pull my sleeves down over my hands, but then roll them back up because what am I thinking? I’m going to need my hands.
“I was scared on my first one of these, too,” Griffin tells me.
“I’m not scared.”
“Oh, sure,” he says. “And I’m a natural blond.”
I roll my eyes, and he touches my shoulder, then pulls his goggles over his eyes. “Stick close, okay?”
I nod, wiggling my nose to adjust the way the heavy goggles are sitting on my face.
The loading dock stretches out before us, a wide expanse of cracked concrete dimly lit by a single streetlamp.
Scraggly bushes press against a chain-link fence at the back, entangled branches rattling in the wind.
It’s eerily quiet, save for the distant wail of a siren and the occasional groan of metal as the wind catches the loose corner of a store’s dilapidated awning.
The goggles make it feel like I’m wearing sunglasses at night, and I want to turn the brightness up on the world.
My boot comes down in what I thought was a shallow puddle, but the water immediately floods over the top and soaks my sock. I curl my toes to soothe how cold they are and hang back as Griffin and Donny approach the dumpster.
Greg and Rafael were here. Right here, in this forgotten parking lot that smells like rotten food and something chemical I can’t identify.
I dig my nails into my palms through the latex gloves, then realize I might tear them.
Griffin runs his scanner across the dumpster’s rim just a whisper away from the metal. “DJ, you reading anything on your end?”
“Good ole Officer Henley is still three blocks away.”
Donny crouches, running his scanner over a dark stain on the concrete. The LED remains green.
I wrap my arms around myself, wishing Dad’s smell was still in the fabric instead of my cheap dry shampoo, sweat, and concrete dust.
“Hey there, spirits,” Griffin says, taking one step out of the way. “It’s me. Ya boy.”
I pull my bottom lip between my teeth because any sign of amusement from me is just going to encourage him. Turns out he doesn’t need any encouraging, because he starts humming Dancing Queen, running the device along the base of the dumpster where it meets the asphalt.
A clicking sound comes from Donny’s scanner that escalates in frequency as he touches it against the brick wall. The green LED flickers, then turns yellow.
“Hm.”
Griffin joins him. His device makes the same clicking noise, almost like the two devices are having a conversation. His face hardens in the glow of the warning light.
“Definite activity here,” Donny says. “Recent, too.”
Griffin and Donny continue their sweep. I hang back, trying to be useful by staying out of the way, when something shifts in the air. There’s this sudden heaviness, like the atmospheric pressure just dropped ten points, and my ears need to pop but won’t.
I get an uneasy feeling like someone is behind me, reaching out to touch me, but when I glance over my shoulder, nothing is there. I hear a hissing sound, so faint I almost miss it under the traffic noise and the groaning awning above us.
I take a step toward the edge of the parking lot before I even realize I’m moving.
“Eden?” Donny’s voice sounds far away even though he’s only a few feet away. “Everything all right?”
“Yeah, I just—” I just, what? Hear something coming from the woods? That sounds crazy, but my crazy barometer is broken, considering I drank salt water a few minutes ago.
Waving at them to follow me, I walk in the direction of the sound.
My boots crunch over loose asphalt and broken glass as I reach the scraggly trees marking the boundary between the strip mall and whatever forgotten patch of woods lies beyond.
The streetlights don’t reach here, and the shadows gather so densely between the trees that they look like dark green pools through the goggles.
I stop where the asphalt ends, my heart hammering against my ribs.
Griffin comes to a stop beside me, his voice low and careful. “What’s going on?”
“You don’t hear that?” I ask.
He shakes his head, trying to catch my eyes, but I’m still focused on the woods. “Hear what?”
It’s not static. Too organic for that. More like… whispers? But layered, overlapping, like a dozen people trying to talk at the same time through a bad radio signal.
Donny steps past me into the woods, dragging his scanner across the bark of the closest tree. The LED stays yellow, clicking steadily.
Donny tries another tree. The clicking speeds up until it’s almost a continuous buzz.
The scanner turns red, bathing Donny’s face in crimson.