Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Okay, so Rick, you had no new reports of sightings or attacks from the ghost patrols. Correct?” Natalie asked.
Rick nodded. “Yuppers, doll. All’s quiet on the cemetery front.”
“Harriet, what’s happening with Doug?”
“He’s still being a total pain in the you know what. But I do think he’s softening. He’s gotten used to me following him around. He even looks for me now when he leaves the house. I see him do it.”
That did seem much less confrontational on the part of Doug’s ghost than before.
“I wonder what he’d do if he looked for you and didn’t see you,” Gabe said suggestively.
“You mean, would he be disappointed? That is an interesting tactic. I’ll give that a try. Hide from him. See if he looks agitated that I’m not there. See if he’s relieved the next time I am there. I’ll report back my findings next meeting.”
Harriet had been in the psych field during life and had obviously retained her fascination with the human mind in her afterlife.
“Is there any news about Alice?” Millie, always the sweetheart, asked quietly from her seat next to Gabe.
“I’ll ask Liam to call and check in with his friend at the hospital and get a more recent update, but last he heard, if she remained stable, they were going to bring her out of the coma.”
The room was filled with murmurs of varying levels of relief and joy over that news from all the ghosts save Tim, who couldn’t speak but nodded and banged his single hand on the arm of the chair in his version of applause.
She drew in a breath and glanced around the room at what she’d come to think of as her ghosts.
But they were so much more than that. They were her partners. Her friends.
Her family.
She’d come to love each and every one of them. In fact it was hard to remember a time when they weren’t in her life, even if that was only a few years ago.
And now even though they had been infiltrated by that evil entity, by all accounts they’d fought and won that battle.
The lead pig was working.
Mudville was saved. The world was saved.
Did that mean her dream of living a normal life—at least as normal a life as a person who saw ghosts could—might actually come to fruition?
If so, she was ready to start that life right now.
It was six-thirty. The shop had been closed for half an hour. The meeting was ready to be wrapped up and the ghosts sent off to their various assignments. Liam should have finished his work for the day. He should be waiting for her in the apartment.
Time to go see her man.
“All right. Good meeting. Good news. I think we can call this meeting and the case of the evil brain a wrap.”
“Wait, so you’re convinced? You really think containing the brain worked?” Gabe asked.
“I really do,” she said with a smile.
The lights flickered just a bit, dimming then coming back to life. Natalie stared at the bulb nearest her with a frown.
“Old wiring,” Rick commented, standing up from the chair he’d lounged in. “You’re lucky this old knob and tube works at all and you didn’t have to rewire the whole damn building.”
“That would have cost her a pretty penny,” Gabe agreed. “Do you know what union electricians get paid nowadays?”
“The lights always acted up back in my day. Then again, my family was one of the first to have electricity. It was so new, outages were to be expected,” Milly told them.
“The first to have electricity? Did my girl grow up rich?” Gabe joked as he extended a hand to help Millie rise from her seat.
“No.” She blushed.
“My father grew up in Ossining, the infamous home of Sing Sing prison and Old Sparky. Dad would tell us about the lights flickering in the house, but for a very different reason than old wiring.” Harriet let out a snort.
Rick chuckled.
“What reason?” Millie asked innocently.
“I’ll explain it on the way home,” Gabe said, wrapping his arm around Millie as they headed for the front.
“Good night, all,” Natalie called as they all walked through the front window of the meeting room.
She got waves and a few G’nights in return.
Satisfied it had been a good night following a good day, she flipped off the lights in the meeting room and the shop, leaving on only one small lamp behind the counter, and then made her way to her apartment.
Inside was dark, telling her Liam wasn’t there yet.
He probably got invested in his paper and had no clue what time it was.
Reaching for her cell phone, she pulled it out of her pocket… and noticed it was dead.
Dammit. She couldn’t remember if she’d charged it last night. She must have forgotten.
Stomping to the shop, she picked up the land line to call Liam… and realized she didn’t know Liam’s number.
It was saved in her cell phone so she hadn’t memorized it. Heck, she’d never dialed it. She just tapped the connect button below his name. Who remembered phone numbers nowadays?
Annoyed, at herself for not knowing his number, at the cell phone for having a dead battery, and a little bit at Liam for not being here yet, she shoved her fingers beneath the cash register, searching for the page of emergency phone numbers she left there for Jules.
Finally her fingers connected with the paper. She coaxed it out from beneath the big, heavy, vintage cash register she’d thought was a good idea when she bought it, but not without a lot of difficulty and some pain on the part of her fingers that really didn’t fit in the tiny space beneath.
Squinting at the numbers in the dim light, she dialed Liam’s number on the landline. It didn’t even ring, but went straight to voicemail.
Scowling, she disconnected the call. Now she was going to have to walk over there to remind him it was time to come home.
Loving a brainy man was challenging.
She couldn’t really be mad at him though. That brainy man and his idea had single-handedly solved their problems with the brain ghost.
He also routinely forgot to charge his cell phone. But since her cell was also dead she really couldn’t yell at him about that. At least, not today.
Drawing in a breath, she grabbed a light jacket and headed out the back door.
There was a chill in the air which only added to the feeling of fall in upstate New York. Crisp nights. Falling leaves.
The night was clear. No clouds. No moon either. She stared up, taking a moment to appreciate the night sky and all its celestial wonders.
It was the perfect night for stargazing, even if the darkness did make it a challenge to navigate over the tracks between the train depot she’d turned into her shop and Liam’s warehouse turned lab.
Main Street was well lit with streetlights, but she was too far for any of those lights to help her now.
Normally, she’d have used the light on her cell phone to see but… Yeah. Dead battery.
A more organized person would have a flashlight, or three, available for situations like this. Natalie was not that person.
With a sigh, she picked her way gingerly along. Careful not to trip as she stared down at her feet.
She knew the path well enough. She’d walked it countless times and it wasn’t far.
The spotlight Liam had installed on the outside of the warehouse came on automatically at dusk nightly, so she wasn’t in complete darkness.
She saw the light now, guiding her as she glanced up to gage how much farther she had to go.
But then the light was gone. Blacked out by something large and dark. Something solid yet not. Something that made her unable to breathe.
She fell to her knees, unable to remain upright as her heart pounded painfully.
Her hands connected with gravel and wood and metal rail.
She was on the train tracks.
She tried to crawl off them as she felt consciousness slipping away from her.
Just a few feet and she’d be clear. But that’s when the assault moved from her body to her mind.
Images screamed through her brain. The pain she’d felt being electrocuted by that downed power line in the storm.
The image changed and fear coursed through her. She was back in Liam’s industrial-sized freezer. Trapped. Cold. The air thinning by the moment as she knew she was going to die inside there, if not from cold then from lack of oxygen.
She still couldn’t breathe as the scene switched again.
She felt the oppressive darkness of the entity in Utica closing in on her.
She was running down the hotel’s hallway again, the entity chasing her.
Closing in. Not that it had to catch her.
Its rage reached out to assault her from a distance.
Her only hope was to reach the elevator and escape…
Natalie was reliving every horror she’d survived over the past three years.
But she had survived them. She knew she had. She was there, alive, to prove it.
She might be on her knees now, unable to move, but she was alive. She had survived.
The scene in her brain changed again to something unfamiliar this time.
Blood.
So much blood. On her hands. On the knife. On the woman whose screams became weaker as the life seeped from her and onto the floor.
It wasn’t Natalie’s blood. It wasn’t her hands.
It was his.
The brain ghost.
These were his memories.
The feeling of satisfaction. Arousal at seeing her die, slowly, painfully. It was all his.
He was sick. Disturbed… and dead.
Yes! He was dead but Natalie was alive.
“You died. You didn’t win. You lost,” she gasped with her last bit of breath before the pain shot through her chest.
Or maybe it was her lungs that hurt.
It was hard to tell. The pressure. The pain. It radiated through her as darkness closed in.
A train whistle sounded, far in the distance.
Was this another delusion? The brain ghost’s next form of torture?
But no, the track was vibrating beneath her hands.
She tried to crawl again but collapsed face down.
What might well be her final thought was how tragic it was going to be that she would die here on the train tracks and have to spend eternity as a ghost in a dismembered body, cut in half by a freight train. Mutilated, possibly unable to ever speak again, just like poor Tim.