What a Ghoul Wants (28 page)

“Yep. It’s never been proven, of course, but the story goes that one night after the
young man got a little rough with one of the lady servants who’d been nice to Lady
Mortimer, he was found facedown in the moat the next morning.”

“Got a little rough with the servant? How old was this kid?” Heath asked.

“Nineteen. He was born in between the time the duke was married to the sisters, and
I think I read that the duke really wanted to marry the woman he had the kid with,
but Lady Mortimer’s father insisted that the duke marry Jane.”

My mind was skipping over certain details of Gil’s research and focusing on other
clues too consistent to be mere coincidence. A theory began to form in my mind. It
was sketchy at best, but I wondered. . .

“What?” Gil asked, and I realized he’d stopped talking and was waiting for me to say
something.

“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t want to share my theory yet. I wanted to think on it and
maybe find something else to help connect the dots, but what I was thinking wasn’t
good, because it meant we’d all been looking in the wrong direction.

Shortly after dinner, Heath and I went up to bed. I was dopey eyed by the time my
head hit the pillow, and just before giving in to sleep, I remembered to call out
to Sam Whitefeather, asking him to come visit me in my dreams.

“Hello, M. J.,” I heard from somewhere close.

I opened my eyes. “Sam?” I was standing on a dock at the edge of a beautiful moonlit
lake and there was someone just to my side. Turning, I saw him—my spirit guide and
Heath’s grandfather—looking effervescent in a white cotton shirt and linen pants,
and with a beautiful glow about him.

“You rang?” he said, bending over to pull at something behind us. I noticed it was
a stool, and he placed it just behind me. I sat down and he snapped his fingers and
another stool appeared. He took his seat by my side, crossing his legs leisurely.

“Thanks for coming,” I said.

He winked at me. “Least I could do. You had some questions for me?”

“Almost too many to count, my friend. But let me first ask you what you might know
about the Grim Widow.”

Sam shook his head distastefully. “She’s an evil, evil spirit, M. J. One of the worst
you’ve ever taken on, I’m afraid. She’s completely given herself over to forces of
evil and she’s hungry to add more victims to her collection.”

“She’s added at least one more since the other day, Sam,” I said. “André Lefebvre.
I saw him chained to her, just like Merrick. The one small bit of grace we’ve had
lately is that it doesn’t look like Fiona Hollingsworth was killed by the Widow, and
she managed to get across to your side without trouble.”

Sam nodded. “Yes, Fiona is here, but she’s not in very good shape. She’s having trouble
with the adjustment and several angels are working with her as we speak.”

I cocked my head. “Angels? As in pretty people with white wings?”

Sam laughed. “Not exactly. Although I’ve never seen an ugly angel, most take on a
human-looking form minus the wings.”

“How can you tell them apart from regular people?”

Sam grinned. “Trust me, the minute you see one, you know.”

“Huh,” I said, then got back to the point of the conversation. “I’m glad Fiona’s all
right, but I’m still concerned over Merrick and André.”

“For good reason,” Sam said in agreement. “I’ve managed to connect with Merrick’s
grandmother. She’s beside herself because she can’t locate him anywhere in the ether.
And André’s father is also quite upset that his son may be lost to him forever.”

“See, now, that’s what I really don’t understand, Sam. How is it possible for one
spirit to keep another spirit prisoner? If Merrick knows he’s dead, why can’t he just
cross?”

Sam sighed heavily. “You, more than most, should know the answer to that, M. J. Merrick
can’t cross because he
believes
he’s a prisoner of the Widow. He’s blind to the possibility that he can escape from
her clutches by merely believing that he can. For him, the prison is real, and while
it remains so in his mind, he won’t be able to cross. His mother can’t reach out to
him because he spends most of his time stuck behind the barrier of the Widow’s portal.
No spirit from the higher realms can cross into the lower, but we can sometimes meet
in the middle in your realm.”

“It’s still hard for me to believe one soul could have that effect on another,” I
said. “I mean, he’s bound by a
chain
, Sam. And I know the chain isn’t real—it’s a manifestation of the Widow’s thoughts,
so how come Merrick can’t figure this out?”

My spirit guide smiled wisely before pointing to my hands. The moment I looked down
I felt a cold heavy weight on both my wrists. I gasped as I held them up—they were
bound by shackles. I tugged on them and the shackles tightened. They were very, very
real. “Whoa,” I said. “How the heck did you do that?”

Sam tapped his temple. “I have control here,” he explained. “The stool you’re sitting
on, this dock, and that lake were all created by me. You see it, feel it,
experience
it, because you’ve allowed me to have control of the world you currently find yourself
in. When Merrick and the other victims enter into their grounded state, they’re very
confused. If the Widow gets to them before they can cross over, she sets the structure
of what they see and experience. The chains that bind them are very real to them.”

I eyed the shackles again. I felt there was a lesson Sam was trying to teach me more
than what he’d just shown me, so I closed my eyes and focused. Feeling a little dizzy,
I concentrated on the shackles around my wrists, making myself believe that I had
control over them and my surroundings, and that I could make them disappear simply
by willing them gone. In an instant I felt them disappear. I then fell right on my
ass. “Ow!” I said, rubbing my bum and looking up at Sam, who was laughing heartily.
I realized belatedly that the stool I’d been sitting on had also disappeared.

“You focused a little too hard there, M. J.,” he said, snapping his fingers again
so that another stool appeared.

I got up and sat down again, grinning myself. “Thanks for the lesson,” I said to him.
“So really, what we have to do is convince the Widow’s ghosts that the chains binding
them to her aren’t real, right?”

“That would be ideal, but I’m not sure she’ll allow you the opportunity, M. J.,” Sam
said, losing all traces of his former humor.

“Do you have any other ideas for freeing the Widow’s victims?”

Sam turned to look out at the lake for a while, and I could see his easy countenance
become troubled. “I do have one,” Sam confessed. “But it’s complicated.”

“Complicated? In what way?”

Sam turned back to me. “You’re my spirit daughter, M. J. I promised your mother that
I’d look after you, and I know she’d want me to talk you out of even the thought of
something so dangerous as freeing the Widow’s victims. Heck, she’d want me to tell
you to pack your bags and hightail it right out of Wales, but I don’t know that I
can do that. I took on the role of your spirit guide to be just that. To guide you,
not to tell you what to do. Also, I know that if I tried to tell you what to do, you’d
ignore me and do what you wanted anyway.”

I felt a small smile tug at the corners of my mouth. Sam was the best in so many ways,
but mostly in the way he really understood me. “What’s the idea, Sam?”

“I’m thinking of a prison break,” he said. “Obviously the Widow is keeping these souls
locked up in her portal, but if you can somehow damage the portal to the point where
it weakens, then you might be able to have them all break out at once. The tricky
part is getting around the Widow and that demon she’s attached to.”

“Yeah,” I said with a chuckle, “
that’s
the tricky part.”

“You’ll need to find a way to weaken the demon,” Sam continued, as if I hadn’t just
made fun of him. “The best way to do that is to engage the Widow. She’s drawing all
her energy from the demon, so if you can suck her dry by having her try to go after
you, you’ll effectively rob it of its energy too.”

“Is that why it didn’t show up when she and I were going at it in the south wing the
other night?”

Sam nodded. “I think it is.”

My mind was once again awhirl with thoughts. Heath had suggested almost the exact
same idea, and I really thought the two men might be onto something. “Thanks, Sam.
I’ll talk to Heath and the others and see if we can’t come up with a plan. The other
hard part is finding her portal. My theory is that she’s hiding it in a secret passage
on the second floor of the south wing.”

Sam eyed me quizzically for a moment before leaning out to wave his hand over the
water. Its black calm surface swirled a bit before becoming a little smoky; then as
if by magic an overview of the castle appeared—as if we were looking straight through
the roof into the second story. I could see details like the burgundy carpet, the
peeling paint, a lopsided portrait, and then, when Sam pointed, I could see a dark
swirling blob of energy obscuring the secret passageway and the stairwell within it.

“You’re correct,” Sam said. “Somewhere in there is her portal.”

“It’s getting to it without getting killed that’ll be the tricky part,” I muttered.

“Isn’t it always?” Sam said with a nudge to my arm. “I’ll help you in any way I can,”
he vowed. “The vests were a good idea.”

“Wasn’t mine, but I’ll pass along your compliments to the help.” And then I focused
back on my other questions for Sam. “We’re also going to try and find the duke on
our ghost hunt tonight. I know I saw him after I jumped out the door of the south
wing, but I may have also gotten a glimpse of him out on the moors too, and I can
feel it in my gut that I need to find and engage him, but the local folklore suggests
that those who encounter the Desperate Duke are marked for death. Should we be worried
about that?”

Sam laid a gentle hand on my arm. “I think you should be worried about everything,
M. J. But maybe not that in particular. Ghosts who appear to those who die soon after
get a bum rap. The ghosts don’t bring on death; they’re there to warn that particular
soul to be careful, do something other than what they were planning to do, like evacuate
in the face of a hurricane instead of riding it out. They act as a warning, not as
a curse. I also don’t think you should go against your gut. Your own spirit is attempting
to lead you in the right direction, and that’s something you should never ignore.”

“Yeah, that was my feeling too, Sam. Thanks for the affirmation.”

“Anything else?” he asked me.

I was grateful for all the advice that Sam had given me, but one of the things that
still troubled me greatly was this demon the Widow was involved with. I didn’t really
know what it was or what it could do, and that was something to be worried about.
“Do you have any suggestions for how to fight the Widow and her pet demon if we happen
to encounter both of them at once?”

Sam actually shuddered. I’d never seen a spirit do that before. “My advice to you
is this: If you see both of them coming for you at the same time, run like hell, M. J.
Run like hell.”

Chapter 12

The alarm went off at twelve thirty a.m., but I’d been up for at least half an hour,
considering all that Sam had told me. Next to me Heath stirred and slapped his arm
across the nightstand to shut off the alarm. . . which was on my side. I quickly silenced
it and propped my head up on one elbow to look at the hot guy in bed next to me. “Hey,
there,” I said.

Heath opened one lid. “I know that tone.”

“What tone?”

“That’s your how-you-doin’? tone.”

“Well,” I said, “how you doin’, baby?”

Heath chuckled. “You realize this is gonna make us late.”

I leaned over to wrap my arms around him. “So we’ll be late.”

Thirty minutes later as Heath and I shuffled quickly down the staircase, I could hear
Gilley saying, “They’re probably bonking. Those two can’t keep their hands off each
other. You should have seen them in Santa Fe.”

This of course was an exaggeration. . . well, at least for the first part of our trip
to New Mexico. Still, Gil shouldn’t have been wagging his tongue about my personal
business, so when we reached the group and everyone looked up at us, I made sure to
give him the old death-ray stare.

“You look freshly tousled,” he said to me.

Damn my nonexistent superpowers! “Shut it, Gil.”

Gil turned to Michel and mouthed, “Told you so.”

“Now that we’re all here,” Gopher said to us, “let’s go over our strategy for tonight.
We should have at least four hours of good film time before the spooks quiet down,
and I’d like to start in the south wing—”

I’d been afraid Gopher would change his mind about letting us work our way up to that,
and luckily, I had my speech already prepared. Truthfully, it had been part of my
plan to take advantage of Heath and make us late. “Actually, Goph, while Heath and
I were getting ready, I swear I saw the duke out on the grounds. I think we should
head out there right away and get him on tape. That way we’ll have some good variety
to show Chris in the morning. I mean, if we can get him on film, it’s bound to make
our movie even more compelling.”

Gopher’s brow shot up. “You saw him?”

I nodded, and prayed that Gil—who always knew when I was fibbing—kept his big yap
shut.

“How long ago?”

“Just a minute or two!” I said, trying to appear anxious. “Come on, Goph, we’ve got
to get a move on if we’re going to get him on film!”

All around me the crew began to hoist backpacks and equipment onto their shoulders,
and Michel, John, Meg, and Kim were already following Heath (who was in on my ruse)
to the door. “Yeah,” Gopher said. “Okay. But let’s regroup here in the main hall around
three so we’ll have lots of time to—”

No one waited for Gopher to finish his sentence; we all hurried out the door and left
him to gab at Gilley. I almost felt bad for sticking our producer with Gil, but then,
Gilley was getting on my last nerve these days, so I stopped short of actually feeling
sorry for him.

As we walked, John quickened his stride to come up next to me. “What’s your game plan?”
he asked, making sure to put his palm over his microphone. I didn’t think that Gil
and Gopher were listening in yet, but I was glad that John wasn’t taking any chances.

“I really do want to try and find the duke,” I told him, covering my own mic too.
“When I was inside the south wing, I spotted him along the far right side of the castle,
near the lake.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell the girls and we’ll all keep an eye out for him.”

John dropped back to whisper to Michel and the girls and Heath took his place next
to me. Holding up the new expensive infrared camera, he flipped the switch to the
attached lights on the top of the camera and nothing happened. “Great,” I groaned.
“The infrared is already broken. Didn’t Gilley test all this stuff before sending
us out in the field with it?”

“For your information,” I heard Gilley say tersely in my ear, “I did test it. It works
perfectly well. Have Heath turn on the viewfinder and look into it.”

Heath did that with me watching over his shoulder, and as if by magic the world was
illuminated in a purple blue haze. “Cool!” we both said.

“I read about these,” Heath told me. “This has better results than the night-vision
cameras, because even spooks who aren’t visible on the night-vision cameras can be
seen on an infrared.”

Heath and I were leading the others toward the drawbridge, and I was about to give
them instructions on where to point their equipment when I heard a loud thump right
underfoot that stopped me in my tracks.

Looking down, I noticed that I’d taken the very first step onto the drawbridge.

“Not this again,” Heath whispered, pointing the camera down at the planks, and as
he did so, he sucked in a breath. “Em! Look at this!”

I gulped and leaned over to look. Below us, seeping through the cracks in the planks
I could see a purple glow. I lifted one foot and took a tentative step, and the blob
moved to that exact spot, and just as I set my toe on the dock, a tremendous whump
vibrated through the planks.

“No. . . freaking. . . way!” I heard Gilley whisper in my ear.

“What’s happening?” Gopher asked, replacing Gil’s voice with his.

“M. J.’s got a friend,” Heath said quietly. I could feel the crew gather at the edge
of the drawbridge, watching the screen over Heath’s shoulder.

Meanwhile I held perfectly still. I didn’t quite know what to do. I’d been through
this before and wasn’t in any hurry to repeat it.

“Why is she just standing there?” Gopher complained. “M. J.,
move
!”

I looked back at the group, uncertain, and caught Michel’s eye. He was filming with
a night-vision camera, and he lowered it to move around the group and approach me.
“We’ll go across together,” he said, but the moment he stepped onto the planks, two
tremendous thumps echoed up from the wood. “There’s a second one!” Heath whispered.

Michel had stopped dead in his tracks too, and I saw that he now looked properly frightened.

“Maybe we should all go together,” John suggested. “I mean, it can’t follow all of
us, can it?”

Bravely he and Heath stepped out onto the planks, and each of their footfalls was
followed by the same kind of pounding I’d been subjected to. “Damn,” I swore, looking
to the far side of the drawbridge, which felt a million miles away. “We’ll need to
run for it.”

“I don’t want to!” Kim cried.

“Me either!” said Meg.

Meg and Kim were along as backup should one of our cameras fail, and I figured that
as long as the three guys and I had working cameras, then we should have plenty to
spare.

“Go back inside, then, ladies. We’ll take it from here,” I told them while eyeing
the boys meaningfully. “On three?”

They all nodded, but just then in the center of the drawbridge we heard three loud
raps—as if whatever evil under the planks was daring us to go for it.

At the end of the last rap, John took off running, and his sudden bolt for the other
side of the bridge got the rest of us moving.

The planks underneath were a thunderstorm of noise from our footfalls and the matching
pounding from the underside. My feet and knees felt every jarring blow and my teeth
seemed to be rattling in my head. The traverse was painful, and as much as I tried
to pour on the speed, my body couldn’t help but brace a little at each footfall, which
hampered my pace.

All of us were in the same boat, because no one seemed able to keep a steady stride.
Through the noise I could hear Gopher yelling something, but what he said I hadn’t
a clue, nor did I much care. I just wanted to get across to solid ground.

At last John reached the cobblestones, leaping onto them in a move that Baryshnikov
would’ve envied. Heath was next, followed by me and finally Michel.

Upon reaching the safety zone, we all fell to the ground and lay there panting. I
rubbed my shins and knees and cursed the thing below the bridge that had made the
run so painful.

“I have no picture!” Gopher shouted. “What’s happening! Gilley, make them tell me
what’s happening!”

“It’s not like they listen to me,” Gil snapped. “M. J.? Heath? Are you okay? Over.”

I pulled the microphone closer to my mouth. “We’re okay for the most part, buddy.”

“If you’re all okay, why aren’t you filming?!”
Gopher shouted.

I pulled the headset off my head and rolled onto my side to get to my cell phone.
Lifting it out of my back pocket, I dialed Gil’s number and he took the call right
away. “He’s driving you crazy, right?” he asked in a muffled whisper.

“You’ve got to do something,” I told him.

“Who’re you talking to?” I heard Gopher demand in the background.

“My mom,” Gil said without hesitation. “Her bursitis is acting up again.”

“Gil,” I said softly. “Seriously. His headset needs to have a major malfunction or
I’m going to kill him when I get back.”

“Gilley!” Gopher demanded. “No one’s responding to me!”

I looked around. The guys had all removed their headsets—John had even tossed his
a few feet away.

“Leave it to me,” Gil whispered. “And tell everyone to switch to channel nine.”

I sat up and told the boys to switch to the new channel, and reluctantly they all
donned their headsets again. At first all I heard on the new channel was static, but
then Gil’s voice came through loud and clear. “I don’t know, Gopher,” he said. “Your
headset was working fine just a minute ago.”

“Well, now it’s full of static!” I heard Gopher shout. The pressure of pleasing Chris
was really starting to take its toll on our producer. I mean, Gopher is almost always
a pain in the ass, but even he’s not usually this much of a tyrant.

“I can either stop the shoot and try to fix your headset or I can let them continue
and relay your instructions to them. You’ll still be able to hear everything they
say through the feed,” Gil told him. “Once I turn it on, that is.”

“Don’t we have any spare headphones?” Gopher asked.

“No,” Gilley lied.

“God bless you, Gil,” I said.

There was more grumbling in the background, and while Gilley and Gopher worked it
out, I gathered the shaken remnants of my crew and motioned them well away from the
drawbridge. “Is anybody hurt?” I asked first.

Michel pulled up one pant leg and I sucked in a breath when I saw his knees were both
swollen and blue. “I fell,” he said. “While I was down, they pounded against my knees.”

My own feet were seriously sore, so I gingerly took off one boot and the accompanying
sock. I flashed a light onto the sole and hissed. My entire heel and the pad of my
foot were a light purple, and I knew they’d get much darker as time wore on.

The other crew members also took off their shoes, and all of us had some bruising,
but mine was by far the worst.

“Those boots have no padding,” Heath said.

“And it’s the second time I’ve been through that pummeling,” I reminded him. “Not
to mention that ten-foot leap out of the south wing the other night.”

Heath reached out and pulled me into him. “Maybe this was a bad idea.”

“I’m okay, honey,” I told him. And for the most part, I was. The drawbridge was bad,
but going after the Widow in her part of the castle would be far, far worse. Plus,
now we were on the other side of the bridge, and away from the Widow’s reach. Or at
least I hoped we were.

“What’s it going to be like when we have to go back?” John asked, staring with dread
at the drawbridge.

I shuddered. “Probably just as bad.”

John only shook his head, and I was beginning to think he wished he’d voted another
way when we were deciding to stay on or go home.

Once we had all put our socks and shoes back on, we set out for the hills on the far
side of the castle. There were two ways to get there: take the road, which Heath and
I had done earlier in the day and found it to be long and winding, or take a walking
path, which appeared to be more direct. So, we chose the path and before too long
we realized we should’ve stuck with the road. The route we were on was muddy and rough
going, and there were more steep inclines than we’d anticipated.

At last we crested a particularly big hill and found ourselves exactly where I thought
I’d seen the ghost wandering the moors from two nights before. Heath came to stand
next to me. “Should we look around here?” he asked.

I nodded and pointed over to a flat area leading to the edge of the moat. “Can I look
through your view screen at that section there?”

Heath handed his camera to me and I raised it to shoulder level. I scanned the area
to the right, middle, and left, but nothing unusual came into view. “Gopher wants
to know what’s happening,” Gilley said.

My jaw clenched. Gopher could be such a pain in the keister and I needed to shut his
annoying pestering down or I’d be walking off this shoot in a hurry. “Tell him that
every time he asks that question from now on, we’re going to stop filming for ten
minutes.”

I heard Gilley repeat what I’d said and then Gil said, “Gopher says it was just a
simple question.”

“He can see what’s happening, Gil. All he has to do is look at your monitor.” I was
still using the camera to survey the area, but I’d stopped paying attention to the
screen because I was too busy trying to quell my irritation with our producer.

“He says he can see the monitors, but he’d like to know what your plan of action is.”

I looked at Heath, who could hear everything in his ear too, and he grinned when I
rolled my eyes. “My plan of action is to find the duke. Gopher doesn’t need to know
anything more than that for now.”

A rumble of thunder sounded in the distance behind us, and we all turned as a gust
of wind blew across the moors and brought with it the damp smell of rain.

“Gopher wants to know if that was thunder he heard?”

“It was,” I said, still eyeing the horizon when a bright flash of lightning lit the
sky. It was followed about ten seconds later by another rumble of thunder.