Mollies' Ghost

MOLLIES’ GHOST

PROLOGUE

Silence…the absolute absence of sound detectable by the ear, discernible by the mind. Silence…broken by a low moaning, the sound of abject despair, the growling of men, and the whimpers of boys. Silence…shattered by a multitude of voices hurling their vitriol at anything, anyone who will listen. The voices of the innocent, yet damned, merge one-by-one into a single shout, a name…

Since arriving in the mountains with his parents, the boy was unusually quiet for an eight-year-old. Gone was any interest in his toys and books. He went swimming and fishing with Mom and Dad, but always seemed distracted, and would sometimes cock his head and freeze as if trying to make sense of a rustling, or murmurings, barely heard.

The voices always came to the boy at night, preventing even the hope of sleep. Each time they visited his mind, their intensity, their insistence, grew. No longer were they a cacophony of jumbled whispers. This night, on that dark mountain road, they found their purpose. They found the strength of collaboration. They found their one voice, and the vessel to carry it into the world.

1

The brown liquor sloshed over the edge of the shot glass as Kathy lifted it to her lips. A tilt of the head, a hard gulp, a squint, and a lick of her wet thumb later, she gingerly set the empty glass among its mates.

“Another.” Her voice even sounded slurred to her own ears.

“Nah. You’ve had enough,” Lloyd the bartender said. He paused in his never-ending polishing of the spotless bar.

Kathy snapped her head up to make a smartass reply, but when her head stopped, the world in her vision didn’t.

“Whoa.” She closed her eyes until the world caught up with her head. “You just may be right.”

“I’ll call Andy,” Lloyd said. Andy Wysecki was the only Uber driver in or around the small town of Dundee. “It wouldn’t look good for the county’s newest Sheriff’s Detective to get a DUI,” he said while he punched virtual buttons on his phone. “It’s on me.”

“Don’t need an Ube’. My ‘partmen’s only two blocks away. It’s Friday. Half the county’s drunk or high on something. Andy’ll be busy.”

Lloyd looked around the otherwise empty bar. “Not here. And not on Friday afternoon.” He slipped the phone back into his pocket. “You bought the Mackey House. Why do you keep that firetrap apartment?”

“Need a place. A place to get away.” Kathy put her head down on her folded arms on the bar.

“Get away from what? The ghost?” Lloyd’s tone was joking, but he leaned flipped the towel over his shoulder and leaned on his side of the bar, watching her intently.

Kathy shook her head against her forearm. “Ghost’s gone. Killed it.”

A grin spread across Lloyd’s face. This was the first confirmation from Kathy of the rumors surrounding the Mackey House, the busted statue on its lawn, and the resulting landscaping. Lloyd reached for his phone again but paused. Posting anything online that he heard from his best customer while she was drunk would be like a priest breaking the seal of the confessional.

Instead, he leaned even closer. “So, you’re getting away from the cripple?”

In an instant, Kathy’s head flew up and she grabbed him by the front of his shirt up under his chin.

“Don’t call him that,” she growled.

Lloyd, despite his six-foot two-inch height knew that even a drunken Detective Kaveetha Jensen could kick his ass in a heartbeat. He slowly raised his hands in surrender.

“Sorry, sorry. That’s just what everybody calls him.”

Kathy pushed him back from the bar and swayed in her seat. “Not when I’m around.”

A car horn beeped outside.

Lloyd said, “What’s it gonna be? A ride back to that creepy place you call home now, or an escort to your equally creepy and sorry love nest?”

Kathy snorted, their momentary altercation forgotten. “’Love nest.’ I wish.” She slid off the barstool and stood swaying for a second. “Hell, there’s more booze at home.” She fished two twenties out of her pocket and dropped them on the bar. “We good?”

He looked at the line of shot glasses and her half-empty bottle of beer, then he plucked the towel off his shoulder and waved it toward the door. “Sure. Go home.”

2

“Piece o’ shit,” Jan muttered as he highlighted the last five hundred words he had typed. His finger, poised above the Delete key, shook a little. Those words represented his entire output for the day. But instead of punching the key, he reached for something next to his keyboard.

His hand seemed to find the bourbon of its own accord. The glass was at his lips and the harsh brown liquid flowed into his mouth before he consciously thought about it.

I hate editing. “Make her more three-dimensional. We can see his ‘want’ but what is his ‘need?’ Show, don’t tell!” It’s all bullshit. These aren’t real people. They’re just figments floating around in my head.

He closed his eyes while he savored the taste of the whiskey before letting it burn the back of his throat. When he opened his eyes, he un-highlighted the text and started typing elsewhere in the document.

After ten minutes, he picked up the glass again and sat back.

There, how’s that for a ‘need?’ Proving his manhood to his macho, gun-toting father. That’s fucked-up enough to generate all kinds of internal angst and bad decisions.

He nodded, satisfied that his protagonist was indeed more rounded and realistic. And hopefully, more relatable. A gulp emptied his glass. He rattled the ice cubes as he rose to get a refill.

Hobbling out of his suite of rooms into the former bed-and-breakfast’s entrance hall, he tried to stretch the stiffness out of his joints. The fire he barely survived a year before left him covered in burn scars, some of which went much deeper than his skin or even his muscles. His wrists and ankles, where the ghost and her avatar had held him down, still required daily physical therapy for the joints to function. And the damage to his cock and balls meant he had to sit to piss. The thought of ever having sex again made him cringe.

The deepest scars, though, penetrated straight into his psyche. His worldview, his belief system, his entire understanding of the universe was shattered by the events that had taken place in that very house, a creaky old mansion built on the foundation of a nineteenth century hotel. That hotel’s fiery demise had claimed the life of a young housemaid, a young woman whose ghost had escaped her statue prison and possessed his sometimes lover. Together, lover and ghost had tried to emasculate him through immolation during sex.

The novel that resulted from that ordeal had shot up the charts, topping almost every bestseller list. Promoting it had been a bitch, since he couldn’t drive for the first six months, but it was worth it. He earned out his meager advance, and the royalty checks were enough to pay Kathy rent for his suite in Mackey House and to put away enough to become a financial presence in Dundee.

As always, the pressure to follow up with another bestseller made him the local liquor store’s best customer. Standing in the kitchen, he was pulling the cork with the horse and jockey on top from the bourbon bottle when the back door slammed open.

“Hey, Kath—Uh-oh.”

Kathy stumbled into the kitchen, stopped and stared for a moment as if she had never seen Jan before, then bolted into her apartment.

“Not again.” He pushed away the bourbon bottle and dug out the coffee and filters.

Ten minutes later, Kathy emerged, wiping her mouth. Jan handed her a mug and shook his head. “Again?”

“It’s Friday…afternoon.”

“There’s no crime on Friday?”

“Cut me a break. Please.”

Jan shrugged and poured bourbon into his coffee, then waggled the bottle toward her mug.

“Oh, God. No f-in’ way.”

“It’s not a good look, you know.”

Kathy tilted her head and stared. “No shit,” she finally said. “How’s that follow-up to your bestseller comin’?”

Jan snorted. “Touché. At least if I get too drunk to work, all that happens is my agent gets pissed. You—”

“Aw, shut up. Any stolen bicycle crime scenes can wait. In fact, I’m going to bed.”

“You’ll be up all night…again.”

Kathy shrugged as she turned away. “I’d be up, anyway.”

Jan nodded. Probably right.

3

Her world—her universe—is tiny, yet infinite. Nothing more than emptiness, a dark void stretching beyond the point where any senses can reach, and yet so devoid of sensation that it can also be nothing more than a shell around her mind. Its extent is immeasurable, simply because there is no feature—no texture, no scent, no taste, no image nor whisper—against which a measurement can be made.

Even her mind, or rather the tiniest spark of a mind, is curled in upon itself, reflexively terrified to engage with that vast emptiness—if, indeed, it is truly empty. Terror keeps that shard of awareness wrapped into a tight ball, its own shield against the horrors beyond its ken.

But it is not the terror of what might be lurking outside of the cocoon her mind-shard has made of itself. No, the singular focus of that piece of awareness is not what awaits a possible awakening. Rather, she is terrified of what would be unleashed on that outside world if she relaxes her vigilance for even the slightest moment.

For the wall she has made of herself is not a fortress to keep the world of sound and light out. It is instead a prison to keep the evil it contains sequestered from the world of the living. Guilt and shame are alloyed with her terror to strengthen that prison, but at the expense of never looking outward for even a heartbeat.

Yet, despite the total lack of sensation impinging upon her mind-shard, her heart measures time with its metronomic beating. Or rather, the body housing that tiny piece of awareness does, for the self-isolated consciousness feels it not.

But what, one might ask, is at the core of that mental prison? What is the evil that the host so fears unleashing on the world? Why, it is nothing more than a glowing ember. A seemingly harmless firefly in the dusk of a summer evening. Unlike the insect’s blinking mating plea, though, the core of evil glows uninterrupted, a hungry Flame awaiting its chance to light a conflagration within the world of light and sound.

And the shame borne by the Keeper that fuels her unending struggle is one of complicit partnership with that evil. Of willing collusion when both were much more than the infinitesimal, unconscious essences that remain.

Gone are any remnants of the intelligent, thinking beings the Keeper and Flame once were. Through selfless acts of heroism, the Flame’s demonic spirit was ripped from this world, taking most, but not all, of the Keeper’s consciousness with it. All that remains of that violent episode are the Flame’s core of hatred, the Keeper’s guilt, and the scars—mental and physical—they left on the real world. Reflexively, like the phase transition of a liquid into a perfect crystal, the fractured pieces of shameful guilt were drawn together, like puzzle pieces, to become the Keeper—a shell encasing the Flame, isolating, yet protecting it. Together, they form a spore, impenetrable while dormant.

And so, Flame and Keeper wait. Seemingly patiently, though they do not sense the passage of time. Waiting for the catalyst that will crack the Keeper’s crystalline barrier.

4

The boy squirmed in his booster seat. They’d been driving through the forest in the dark for hours. He was bored and had to pee.

How much longer? he thought, but kept quiet. The last time he had asked that question, Dad had used his angry voice. “We’ll get there when we get there.” The scolding echoed in the boy’s head. It wasn’t his fault they were lost on these back roads in the middle of the night.

The headlights caught the sign for the Boy Scout camp they had passed twice before. In the dashboard lights, he saw Mom turn to Dad and open her mouth, but she held her silence, too. Dad’s last words to her were just, “Shut up!”

“The damned GPS is fucked,” Dad mumbled.

“George!” Mom hissed and looked over her shoulder at the boy. Just as quickly, he closed his eyes and feigned sleep.

“Well, it’s sending us in fu—friggin’ circles.”

The boy squeezed his thighs together. He really had to pee now.

“Don’t worry,” the Whispery Voice said in his head. “It won’t be long now.”

“Turn here,” Mom blurted, and Dad hit the brakes hard. “Look. It says you should turn here.”

“It’s just a dirt road.”

“We must have missed it the last couple of times—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dad muttered as he backed the car up and turned onto the narrow track.

Oaks, maples, and ash trees thrust themselves up out of the thick mountain laurel that lined the road. They made a tunnel that their headlights barely lit without penetrating.

“Friggin’ Hicksville,” Dad muttered for about the hundredth time. “We should be floating in a lazy river back at that Coyote Lodge—or whatever it’s called.”

Mom pursed her lips, but kept quiet. It had been her idea to leave the indoor water park behind and “rough it” for a weekend of canoeing, hiking, and fishing at the Wild Poconos Camp.

Soon. The voice whispered in the boy’s head. Soon.

Dad took Mom’s silence as an admission of guilt, though. “If we’re wasting the weekend, not to mention the money, or the Giant’s game—.” He pushed the gas pedal down.

Get ready, the Whispery Voice said.

The car bounced over ridges in the washboard road, which made the boy’s bladder demand release, and fueled Dad’s anger. He pressed down on the pedal even harder.

“George! Slow down!”

But of course, his Darkness had overtaken him, and he couldn’t slow down. For the first time, the boy’s detachment cracked, and real fear filled him.

Ready!

The greenish glow of the dashboard showed Dad’s mindless fury and Mom’s stark terror. His own terror unlocked a gateway into his mind, releasing the Whispery Voice from its hiding place.

The wordless growl that escaped the boy hurt his throat, but he was long past feeling the strain. The sound of guttural hate snapped Mom’s head around to stare at her son. Her eyes flew open in horror at what she saw.

Her beautiful, blond-haired, quiet eight-year-old had become a monster. Drool leaked from his mouth and ran in streaks to drip off his chin. But it was his red-rimmed eyes that truly terrified her. They stared at the rearview mirror, locked in feral hatred with Dad’s.

The pain of every spanking, every snidely hurtful comment, every belittlement of Mom, every mumbled f-word poured from the boy into his father. It bored a hole in Dad’s mind into which the Whispery Voice poured its vitriol—the aggregate terror, pain, and hate of the One Hundred And Ten, fueled by over a century of solitude.

Unable to look away, Dad never saw the bend in the road approaching at breakneck speed. From behind the mental veil that had descended, the boy saw the Whispery Voice’s intention. And was…intrigued. At least the “walking on eggshells,” as Mom put it, would be over. But Mom, too?

Ineffectively, he tried to wrest back control, but Whispery Voice’s grip was too strong.

“He deserves this.”

But Mom doesn’t. The boy argued.

“Silence Is Compliance,” the Voice countered.

The road ahead curved to the right to meet the bridge over Wolf’s Creek at right angles. The car didn’t turn, though. Perhaps out of pity, or simply to protect a useful tool, Whispery Voice pulled a dark shroud over the boy’s senses, so he didn’t hear Mom scream or his own throat growl, “Die, Mothfu—” as the car’s tires skidded off the shoulder.

The jerk of his booster seat’s restraints released the boy’s bladder as the car missed the bridge and executed its nosedive down the gorge. The seconds of freefall were eerily silent, and a perfect counterpoint to the crunch of metal, glass, and bone that followed, as the SUV flipped end-over-end and settled into the deepest pool of the creek.

The shroud over the boy’s thoughts lifted just enough to let him release the belts that held him securely to the safety seat. Shrugging out of the harness as the cold mountain water poured into the car, he let it carry him through the broken window to the shallows.

Looking back from the bank, the Whispery Voice chuckled. “Well done. Come find me. Come join me,” it said before withdrawing, leaving the eight-year-old boy silently standing in the mud, drenched and shivering.