Pale Immortal (7 page)

Evan tossed down the pen. "But my research has led me to believe it's in Old Tuonela. Do you know Jacob Johannsen? He died a few years ago, but he claimed his father dug the grave for the Pale Immortal. And when they were done an oak tree was planted over it."

"Why a tree?"

"To keep the Pale Immortal from rising up."

"I've never heard that."

"Jacob seemed pretty sure it was in Old Tuonela. In the graveyard next to the church, but you know how these stories are. Most of the history I've gathered on Old Tuonela isn't history at all, but tall tales and fabrications."

"Still, it should be looked into."

"Don't go out there by yourself."

By herself? After last night she didn't want to go out there period.

The dark basement with cement-block walls smelled faintly of a sewer and a lot of mold.

This would be over soon.

The camera flashed again, blinding him.

Graham hadn't gotten a good look at the guy—he was pretty sure that was intentional. The man with a digital camera had answered his knock on the unlit basement door wearing some kind of fishing cap pulled down to meet the top of silver aviator glasses with blue lenses.

Kind of the fishing-hat bandit meets the Una-bomber. Pervs were never cool. Pervs never had any sense of style. Not that Graham had known a lot of them, but he watched the news.

"Come on."

The perv had motioned for Graham to follow him down the wooden stairs into a dark hole. Graham had known it was stupid, but he went with only a second of hesitation.

And now Graham stood naked in front of a tripod and camera while the guy snapped away. It should have been awful. It should have been degrading. But it was so weird and stupid that Graham had to stifle the laughter that bubbled in his throat.

"Turn around."

Graham complied.
I aim to please.

Click.

Flash.

Had Isobel listened to the CD he'd given her? If so, had she liked the Sonic Youth song, "Diamond Sea"? It was a little darker than most of the music he listened to. He tended to lean toward songs that were light and upbeat, passing over music that made him sad and put him in a dark mood. A young heart could take only so much.

"Turn around."

He turned again.

Had she liked the line about the kids dressed in dreams? He loved that.
Loved
it.

The man stepped away from the camera. "I can't pay you the full hundred dollars."

"Why not?"

"The scars."

"What difference do a few scars make?"

"I don't want to see them. They make me uncomfortable. I'm not into any of that sadomasochism shit."

"You said a hundred bucks."

"You said there was nothing wrong with you."

"There isn't. Come on, man. I need the money."

"Okay. Listen. There's one way you can make it up."

"How's that?"

"Ever do it with a man before? I'll wear a rubber. I'll make it quick."

It was another one of those this-can't-be-happening moments. Graham had been having a lot of them lately.

Everybody had a line they wouldn't cross. Graham had just reached his. But the scary thing was that he'd actually thought about it for a quarter of a second.

Graham quickly pulled on his jeans. Forget underwear. Sockless feet shoved into unlaced boots. He grabbed the rest of his stuff. "Fuck you."

He ran, leaving with no money.

Rachel tucked the hardback copy of
Terror Twilight
under her arm, pressed the metal security bar, and stepped out of the public library. Like most buildings in Tuonela, the library had been built on a steep hill. Across the street was St. Paul's Church. The steeple appeared to be falling over as the sky pressed down upon it.

Rachel could smell earth and new grass, a scent she associated exclusively with Tuonela, even though she was fairly certain grass grew other places. It was unusually warm for early April, so warm she'd left her coat at home, the sun's rays penetrating the back of her black short-sleeved top.

On the way to the van, she stopped near a tall, moss-covered stone wall, pulled out her cell phone, and keyed in Evan Stroud's number. "I just picked up your new book at the library," she said when he answered.

"You should have told me you wanted one when you were here last night."

"That's okay."

"Return it. I'll give you a copy."

"That's
okay."

"I don't like library books. They've been imprinted with the previous readers. And they smell. Not like paper, but like people. I want my books to be clean."

"I'm sure Mrs. Douglass would love to hear you talking that way about her library books. If I remember correctly, you and I spent a lot of hours at the library. I don't recall you having a dirty book problem then."

"It's a more recent development."

Ah.
If he could see better, his sense of smell was probably also more acute.

A teenager came rushing around the corner. He was tall, with curly golden hair, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt. He almost ran into her.

"Sorry," he mumbled, putting up a hand as if to steady her. He made eye contact, then quickly glanced away.

It looked as if he'd been crying.

Rachel watched the boy as he strode down the hill, his movements heavy from a large canvas pack he carried on his back.

"Rachel?" came Evan's voice from the cell phone.

"I gotta go. Talk to you later." She disconnected and hurried down the hill after the kid. "Hey!"

Half a block away, he stopped and turned.

She continued to walk toward him, but more slowly now, because she didn't want her movements to come across as threatening. "Are you okay?"

His mouth opened in alarm. He gave a little launching hop, spun around, and took off, running like hell. At the intersection of Church and Jefferson the light was green, and traffic was coming from both directions. He slowed and took a right, skidding around the corner.

Rachel hurried down the hill, but when she reached the intersection there was no sign of the boy.

Her cell phone rang. She expected Stroud, but it was her dad.

"I made arrangements to meet Phillip Alba at his home near Old Tuonela late this afternoon so I could have a look around the place," he said. "But I've had something come up and I haven't been able to get in touch with him. Would you have time to run out there? Just have a look around. Take Dan with you."

Weakness flooded her arms and legs. Old Tuonela was the last place she wanted to go.

"Rachel? You still there?"

She pulled in a deep breath. "I'm here."

"I lost you for a minute. Did you hear what I said about Alba? He has play practice tonight, so he's making a special trip to meet with me."

"Yeah, I heard. I can do that."

Sure, she could. Going to OT was exactly what she needed to do. A chance to prove that what had happened with Chelsea Gerber's body had been nothing more than an illusion caused by poor lighting, or low blood sugar, or fumes....

She told him good-bye and disconnected. She pulled up her phone book, found Dan's number, and pushed the call button. She got his voice mail and left a message, telling him to call if he wanted to ride to OT with her.

Two hours later, when she hadn't heard back from him, she headed to Old Tuonela by herself. It was probably better this way. If she freaked out, there would be less explaining to do.

Her parents didn't know it, but Rachel had sometimes ridden her bike the five miles to Old Tuonela. A foolish thing for a young girl to do.

She turned off a narrow, unmarked asphalt road to an even narrower gravel drive. Getting there wasn't easy. You had to know the way. If you didn't know Old Tuonela was back there hidden in the hills, you'd never see it. Which was perhaps why the original settlers had chosen that spot.

When she reached a rusty for sale sign, she turned left and headed up a steep rutted lane leading deeper into heavy woodland.

You could feel it before you got there: the change in the air. It became heavy and seemed filled with static electricity. Maybe that was one of the things that had drawn her as a kid.

She drove over a shallow, rocky stream and finally came to a stop in an open, treeless area. In the distance, a dark two-story house stood outside the boundaries of Old Tuonela. This time she was prepared for the fear that overcame her. It didn't surprise her or make her weak, but it fluttered insistently in her belly.

A conditioned reaction, that's what it was. A childhood fear and fascination revisited.

This was where her dad had said to meet Alba. She checked her watch. She was ten minutes late. Had he been here already, gotten tired of waiting, and left? But she hadn't met another vehicle. And there was only one way in.

Rachel got out of the van.

She'd parked downhill from the house, which made the building tower over her. No one knew for sure, but some said the two-story house, made of dark stone chiseled from a quarry that no longer existed, had been built by Richard Manchester, the Pale Immortal. It stood in a cleared area on top of a small knoll. There were a few ragged shrubs near the house, but not a single tree.

Sometimes Rachel agreed with the people who thought Old Tuonela's rotting buildings should be demolished and burned, all trace of its existence wiped out. But others felt the town should remain undisturbed, that something bad might be released unless the place was left alone.

An old fear crept into Rachel's head. What if the ground itself was cursed and imprinted by the evil done there a hundred years ago? What if their ancestors had been right to walk away and not look back?

Phillip Alba's parents were from Chicago. As outsiders, none of them had believed the superstitions that surround Old Tuonela. They bought the OT property and began restoring the main house. When they couldn't stir up interest in their plans to turn OT into a tourist village, they packed up and moved on. Rachel had never met Phillip Alba, but he was the talk of Tuonela.

As a graduate student he'd been involved in a horrendous bus accident. He'd been the only survivor. His girlfriend had died. His best friend had died. A tragic story. His parents told him he could recover in Old Tuonela, finish the restoration, and keep an eye on things in case any buyers showed up.

His parents were idiots. Who would send someone to such a place of a horrors to get over a tragedy?

Damn.
There she went again. Believing all the hype and superstition.

Go see for yourself that nothing's there.

Old Tuonela was a scary campfire story, a flashlight under the chin.

Off in the distance, treeless grassland met dark woodland. The woodland was surrounded by a fairly new fence. Rachel climbed the locked gate, her feet landing solidly on the other side.

She looked back toward the van. Still there. She hadn't passed through some invisible barrier, she noted wryly. She began walking in the direction of Old Tuonela, staying between the ruts left by horse-drawn wagons and buggies.

She'd been twelve or thirteen when she'd ridden her bike here. She would lean it against the fence, then slip between the loose strands of barbed wire that had surrounded the place then. One time she'd scratched her back. When her mother asked how it had happened, she'd lied. She'd rarely lied to her mother, but it had been a compulsion, just like riding her bike to Old Tuonela had been a compulsion. Girls on the cusp of puberty did weird things, had strange ideas.

Old Tuonela's pain and loss and tragedy had spoken to her, and she had responded.

The lane opened up.

Suddenly there was the town, or what was left of it. The buildings looked as if they were growing out of the ground. They had sunk over the years, slanted, decaying, shrouded in vegetation. Except for the flour mill at the opposite end of the street, most of the structures were being devoured by moss and creeper vines, the wood beams rotten and mushy. Roofs had caved in, and what was outside had come inside.

Rachel spotted the church with its crumbling bell tower. The stone wall surrounding the adjoining graveyard was only a couple of feet high, and she climbed over easily.

Hidden in the grove of hickory and cottonwoods was a tree that could have been an oak. She knew an oak leaf when she saw one, but this tree hadn't begun to leaf. Dead? Dying? It appeared to be blighted, the trunk dark with sap and crawling with ants.

If there were graves in the graveyard, she saw no evidence of them, no traditional markers. She supposed flat rocks covered by tangled grass and weeds could be lurking underneath. Wooden markers would have disintegrated long ago.

Nothing appeared disturbed. There were no signs that anyone had visited recently. She paid particular attention to the areas around the base of the tree in question. Just grass and weeds. Just earth and stones.

She pulled out her cell phone. Two bars ... three bars ....

She punched in Evan's number, hoping to ask him for suggestions. It rang twice, then went dead. She checked the signal. Nothing. She redialed but it didn't connect, so she dropped the phone back in her pocket.

She heard the drone of bees and the twitter of birds, the faraway trickle of water.

Old Tuonela made the hair on your arms move It was a place where an incredibly evil man had butchered children and drunk their blood.

But sometimes, like today, the town didn't seem so bad It could almost appear peaceful.

Darkness was falling.

She clicked the green light on her watch dial. She'd been there over an hour.

A faint sound came from inside the crumbling stone church. Almost like a voice. Or a whisper.

Female.

Human.

Rachel froze. Her scalp tingled The air around her suddenly seemed thick and close and smothering.

Run!

Instead she moved slowly toward the church. Weeds brushed the legs of her jeans, and the soles of her sneakers made a
shh-shh-shh
sound against the flagstones.