CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CONNECTICUT, PRESENT DAY
Black velvet night shrouds the cemetery as bare feet slap furiously against sodden ground. There isn’t enough air in the world to fill my lungs. My arms pump, my heart pounds, my legs protest with each step taken. Every part of my body begs to stop running, even if to take a short break, but there isn’t time for that.
The scent of cigarettes permeates the moist air. He is close.
“Leave me alone!” I cry, breaking free of the trees and finally stepping onto the blacktop.
The cottage on the hill is within view, illuminated now by a crack of lightning slashing across the angry sky. Home is right there, so close that I can taste it, taste her. Behind that door, I'll be safe—she'll make sure of it.
I take another step across the rough road before gnarled, shadowed hands reach out from the asphalt. Gripping my ankles, feet, legs. Holding me still, holding me down.
“No!” I cry, tears streaming down my face, arms reaching out toward the house. “No, please! Let me go!”
“Charlie.”
That old, familiar voice from my nightmares breaks through the trees at my back. Icy tendrils slither down my spine as I squeeze my eyes shut, shaking my head.
“Go away, go away, go away …” Like Dorothy and her red slippers, I chant the wish over and over and over until the rain ceases in its onslaught.
A cool, calming breeze blows the wet strands of my hair from off my shoulders, and as if by the wind's command, the grasping, clawing hands retreat back into the surface of the road, once again solid beneath my feet.
A breath of relief escapes my lungs, and I think of her. Stormy.
“I'm coming home, my love,” I whisper, then open my eyes to the hooded figure of a faceless man, standing mere inches from where I stand.
“Don't forget what's important, Charlie. Don't forget me.”
His hands reach out to grab me. I step backward and trip over something hard and solid, falling to my hands and knees. Turning, I see the grave and the name etched into the headstone.
Then, I scream.
“Charlie! Wake up!”
With a desperate gulp of air, I snapped my eyes open to find Stormy's wide, terrified gaze staring down at me, her hands gripping my shoulders.
“Oh my God,” I gasped, clapping a shaking hand over my sweat-drenched forehead.
I wasn't in the cemetery. I was in her parents' house, in her old room. We had come back after the wedding to sleep. I was safe, I was okay, and I reminded myself of all these things, yet I couldn't calm my heart or steady my lungs.
“Here.” She left me momentarily to grab a bottle of water from the nightstand. She uncapped it and handed it to me. “Drink this.”
I did as she’d said, swallowing what was left of the bottle in two hearty gulps. It helped, and as I pulled myself into a seated position, I focused on forcing steady breaths in and out, in and out, in and out, until I was sure I wasn't going to hyperventilate.
“Holy shit,” Stormy said on a breathless whisper, pushing the loose, frazzled strands of hair off her forehead. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“I'm sorry.” Despite the water, my throat felt dry and sore.
“You just started yelling and yelling, and it took a good … I don't know … thirty seconds to wake you up.”
I furrowed my brow, turning to look at her with a sinking feeling in the pit of my gut. “Really?”
She nodded. “That must've been one hell of a nightmare.”
With my arms folded over bent knees, I told her what I could remember. Running through the storm, weaving through the headstones, trying to get back to the cottage. The hands reaching out from the road, holding me in place. The faceless, hooded man. What he had said.
“Then, I saw this grave and … couldn't stop screaming,” I mumbled, feeling simultaneously spooked and foolish.
“What did it say?” Stormy asked, clearly invested.
I shook my head, trying to envision the dirt-encrusted stone. “I can't remember. You know, like … when you try to read something in your dreams and you can’t process what it says, but dream you knows?”
She bit down on her lip. “Damn. I wanna know what it said.”
“It was probably Tommy's,” I grumbled, now rolling my eyes and flopping back against the headboard.
The early morning light streamed in from between the curtains. I didn't know what time it was, but I knew it had to be too soon to be awake. We'd come in close to midnight, and I'd made it a point to not set my alarm, granting myself the permission to sleep until my body was ready to wake.
I guessed my mind had other plans.
***
Exhausted and buzzing with a fresh bout of paranoia, I sat in the passenger seat of Stormy's car, allowing the music from the radio to entertain us in an otherwise comfortable silence. She'd insisted on me trying to rest on the drive to her sister's house in River Canyon, which was roughly two hours from her parents' house. But every time I closed my eyes, there was that faceless, hooded man again and his words …
“Don't forget what’s important, Charlie. Don't forget about me.”
I wasn't a stupid man, but it didn't take a genius to decipher what this nightmare symbolized. Tommy—or my subconscious, whatever—didn't want me moving forward from that Halloween night years ago. His ghost wanted me to dwell in a mundane purgatory of reliving that nightmare, repenting my sins for the rest of my days in this life. I'd been so agreeable a few months ago. I hadn't fought against the torment his spirit continuously dealt upon mine. But that was before I'd found happiness. It was before I'd found her . Now, I was fighting it. I was battling against him, struggling to escape the hold he still had on me.
It explained so much, now that I thought about it, and maybe the secret was to simply ignore it. Maybe, eventually, he'd just … fade into the background, the way things often did after enough time passed.
But he was there every time I closed my damn eyes, his face shadowed by that hood.
Fuck .
The chiming of my phone startled me. Stormy jolted, turning her head toward the center console, where it sat beside hers. A surprising name flashed across the screen, and I furrowed my brow.
“It's Max.”
I answered. “Hello?”
“Chuck, man, sorry to bother you during your time off.”
My back straightened against the car seat as my eyes met Stormy's. “It's fine. Is everything okay?”
“Oh, yeah, everything's good. Or, you know, I think so. I don't wanna worry you or anything. But I did wanna mention that last night, while I was watching the security cameras, I thought I saw something—”
“What?” Dread rolled over my gut as every ounce of oxygen was sucked from the car.
“Well …” He laughed abruptly, a sound of hesitation and disbelief. “You know, maybe it's better that I ask you this first. Chuck … do you believe in ghosts?”
“Kinda hard to work where we work without believing in them.”
“Right. Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “So, um … I was watching the cameras, and the one facing your place flashed. Like, the screen flickered, and at first, I thought maybe it was a bug crawling over the camera lens. But this went on for a solid two, three minutes, man, so then I started wondering if the connection was bad. ‘Cause that's what it was like, like the signal was off or something, you know? And then, boom, it just stopped, like nothing had happened.”
Stormy glanced at me from across the car and mouthed, What's up?
“And all the other cameras were fine?” I asked, my mouth dry, my hands trembling.
“Totally fine, man. It was just that one.”
“Huh,” I grunted, sucking in a tremulous breath. “That's—”
“But, listen, that's not the end of it.”
I swallowed against my parched, constricted throat. “Okay.”
“I kept thinking about it for the rest of my shift. I just had this feeling about it, you know? Couldn't shake it off. So, before I went to head home, I drove down to your place to check things out.”
Oh God, my heart couldn't have pounded any harder. “And? Did you find anything?”
Max built the anticipation by feeding a few moments of silence through the line before saying, “Yeah, um … it was a letter.”
That thundering organ in my chest stopped beating altogether. “A letter ?”
“Yeah, hold on. I have it … in my …” Max grunted, and then there was the crinkling of paper. “Okay. It says, There can be no tie more strong than that of brother for brother . What the hell, man, right? It was just … lying there on your doormat.”
“Poe,” I whispered, wiping my hand over my mouth.
“What?”
“It's, um … it's a quote from Edgar Allan Poe,” I said, coaxing my voice to hold steady despite the tremors coursing through my nerves. “Th-thanks, Max. I, uh … I appreciate you letting me know.”
“Yeah, no problem, Chuck. Just gave me the fucking creeps, you know? Figured you at least deserved to know what you were coming back to. Someone's out there, leaving you quotes about brothers.” He huffed another chuckle, just as humorless as before. “And whoever it is, man … they must've fuckin' reeked of cigarettes when they were alive.”
***
The dead can't hurt the living , I kept telling myself on the duration of the ride to Soldier and Ray's place. The last thing I'd wanted to do was allow my anxieties and fears to blacken the nice reprieve from real life Stormy and I had been having over the last several days. But Max's findings sat at the forefront of my mind.
What time did it happen? I wondered. Could it have been around the time I woke up from that nightmare? It was eerie, disturbing, and …
Borderline insane , I silently reprimanded, thrusting my hand through the tangled lengths of my hair.
God, it was so unfair that, just when it seemed I was gaining everything, I also seemed to be completely and utterly losing my damn mind.
“Are you ready to tell me what Max said?” Stormy asked, parking the car outside a bright and cheery colonial-style house in an equally bright and cheery suburb.
There was the faintest tinge of impatience in her tone, nearly undetectable but there all the same. And who could blame her? She had suggested I rest on the two-hour drive, but she hadn't mentioned anything about uncomfortable silence and nervous knee-jittering while my eyes remained fixed on the trees and buildings that passed. A healthy relationship wasn't healthy at all without honesty and unhindered communication, yet there I was, brushing her off once again because I was terrified of what she'd think of my supernatural suspicions.
Christ, hadn't she proven herself to me already? If she hadn't run for the hills after learning I'd unintentionally killed a man, why the hell would I think for a second that she'd be at all bothered by my fear of the potentially undead?
She turned to me, a helpless plea in her eyes, and the guilt of having clammed up again wrapped its tendrils around my unnerved body.
“I'm sorry,” I said, speaking for the first time since ending the call with Max. “I should've just said something before. I'm just … trying to wrap my head around it, I guess.” I huffed out a humorless chuckle and rolled my gaze toward the window. “Honestly, I've been trying to do that for the past couple of months, but …”
“What? What's going on?”
“Tommy is haunting me,” I said point-blank, and the moment the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to find a deep, dark hole to crawl into. “I-I know I’ve said it before, but I mean it. And honestly, it's probably nothing …”
I was downplaying when I knew I shouldn't. It wasn't nothing . It hadn't been nothing since the first time I'd found the cigarette butt on the back of Luke's bike. But those other incidents, I could brush them off as bullshit pranks committed by local teenagers—maybe even those kids who'd tried to start shit with me a while back. I could loosely explain the hooded man— apparition? —I'd seen across the road from the house, the one Max had caught on camera.
But I couldn't explain this.
It was easy to brush things away when you were the only one to see them happen, but it was harder when there were witnesses.
So, before we climbed the steps to her sister's house, I told Stormy everything. Every moment I'd found something, every time I'd been struck with the scent of cigarette smoke. And she listened intently, not once flinching or snickering.
I didn't deserve her.
“And you think it's Tommy?” she asked after I laid it all out.
“Who else would it be?” I challenged.
“No, I know. I'm just failing to understand why he'd pick now to torment you when you said it's been, what, five years?”
“The only thing I can think is, I've spent those five years damning myself to a life of solitude. But I have you now. I'm happy . But maybe he doesn't like that. Maybe …” I squeezed my eyes shut and pinched the bridge of my nose, painfully aware of how this all sounded. “Maybe my self-torture was enough before, but it wasn’t long enough. So, now, he's taking matters into his own hands.”
It was ridiculous. Even as I said the words, I couldn't believe they were leaving my mouth to hang in the air around us. The absurdity of it all echoed with irritating flicks against my brain, and my cheeks heated more and more from the embarrassment with every passing second.
“I mean, I guess,” Stormy finally replied, sounding unconvinced. “It kinda feels like a stretch to me though. I think, if I were a pissed-off ghost, I wouldn't have waited five freakin' years to make you lose your mind. I'd have been right there the whole time, making your life a total living hell.”
“Thanks,” I grumbled while chuckling at the sincerity in her tone.
She reached out and laid her hand on my thigh. I took it, sliding my fingers between hers until our palms touched.
“We'll figure it out,” she declared softly, determined.
We . I sighed into the security of that little word and nodded. “Yeah,” I agreed. “We will.”
And just like that, I swept another incident under the rug and allowed myself, once again, to believe that everything would be fine.
If only I'd known how terribly, terribly wrong I was, if only I'd listened to the intuition that had never stopped talking since I was a boy …
If only …