Chris Green - Only the Good Die Young

The good news just kept on trucking, didn’t it?

Even so, I said, “If you’re afraid that a hallucination could spook me just as much as it could Gavin, don’t worry. If I find proof that he’s our man, I won’t hold back on wielding the full force of any images.”

Wasn’t I sounding bold? I’d had no control over those beach images with Wendy, only the good intentions. This haunting deal was packaged with more strings attached than I’d anticipated. But I’d known it wouldn’t be easy.

And I still wasn’t scared.

Seriously—how bad could I freak myself out? Sailor Randy hadn’t said anything about ghosts booing themselves back into a time loop. Or maybe he just hadn’t gotten around to it.

I’d have to hunt him down again soon to get more info.

“Don’t worry, Amanda Lee,” I said. “I’m not going to quit on this.”

“Especially because we’ll find your killer, too?”

I tried to smile, but I have to say—the longer I stayed here, near my death spot, the more surreal everything was starting to seem. It was still comfortable, but in the same way it’s comfortable to huddle under a thick blanket in the dark of night when you think there’s something in the closet.

And there were more somethings in closets than I had ever suspected while I was living.

How had Elizabeth Dalton reacted when her own personal bogeyman came calling? Had she been afraid at first to see Gavin? Had he been phoning and harassing her after they’d broken up and she’d tried to run away from him when he’d confronted her in person instead?

What had been going through her mind?

“I just wish,” I said, “you could’ve gotten in contact with Elizabeth on the other side. It’d be helpful.”

She looked away from me, then at the ground. Had I said something wrong?

“I know,” I said. “You’ve been trying to contact her. I don’t mean to make you feel bad about being unsuccessful.”

“No, I don’t feel bad. I told you that this case does things to me.” After a second, she added, “It’s so hard to wallow in lost chances. You and Elizabeth make me think of Michael and how life can end in the blink of an eye. One moment, everything is beautiful. The next, the phone rings and…”

Something psychic must’ve struck her right then, because she got really thoughtful, resuming her pacing around my death spot.

She came to a hard stop at the nearest tree, laying her hand against the trunk.

“So many times,” she said, softer now, “I would come here, trying to find you. But there’s something different today. New sensations. Maybe it’s because you’re here with me with far more power in you than the night you emerged from the residual haunting imprint.”

Was she saying she had something now? Information about my death? I started to tremble in my core. I wanted to know.

Didn’t I?

“Come here, Jensen,” she whispered with such urgency in her voice that I zipped over to her.

Then she made another request. “Lie down. I think there’s a lot of psychic energy that’s been gathering with you nearby, and it suddenly flared.”

I wasn’t scared.

Numbing myself, I lay down, realizing intuitively that I’d assumed the exact pose of my death. I shuddered.

Amanda Lee reared back her head, her mouth agape.

At first, I thought she might be having a heart attack, and I surged upward, wanting to help her with one of my ghost powers. What kind of power, though?

Who the hell knew?

She fell backward, away from my death spot, before I could even reach out to her, then stumbled and regained her balance. Her eyes were open, one hand clutching the silken front of her blouse.

Then she slowly walked toward me, raising her other hand.

Night of the Living Dead , I thought, just standing there and waiting for her to get to me.

She arrived, and before I knew what she was doing, she took that hand and swiped it through the air, passing it through me.

Making contact and delivering an image that rocked me.

Running, fast, faster. Gotta get away… .

Was it here? Near?

Silence.

Maybe it was gone.

Maybe I’d lost it a few minutes back. Maybe if I didn’t breathe, it wouldn’t find me again—

Stop! Please! Why’re you doing this?

My voice, pleading. Then my scream, because out of nowhere came that mask, that hideous, gaped mouth of a hag, leering, laughing, only inches away.

Then the ax, raised over its head…

Speeding down toward me—

Banging my vision to black.

It took me a few hours to recover.

I mean, damn, how do you ever come to terms with the fact that you’d once starred in your own horror movie? That there’d been an ax-wielding maniac in the woods and you’d been one of the stupid dime-a-dozen, dead-meat kids who usually get picked off one by one with low-budget special effects?

I didn’t know what I’d expected my killer to be like. Just a regular old Joe wandering through Elfin Forest with an itch to murder? Just a jealous ex-boyfriend who’d seized the chance to get me alone and take some blood-ridden revenge, à la Gavin Edgett and Elizabeth Dalton?

I also wondered why my own personal Jason Voorhees hadn’t gone after the kids I’d been with, too. Had something scared the killer away and saved them? Or had he been stalking me and me alone, and once his mission was accomplished, he was done? Also, if my killer had gotten me with an ax, why wasn’t there any blood at my death spot?

After I traveled from the forest and back to the casita, I soothed myself with the computer, doing a search for everything I could find out about serial killers, especially when it came to psychology. But there was so much to cover. Too much.

And the distraction wasn’t keeping away the willies.

I just kept hearing Amanda Lee’s frantic voice when she’d pulled me out of the vision.

“Jensen, you come back to me! Don’t leave me!”

Her pleas had worked because, with that familiar backward sucking sensation, I was yanked out of the vision, returned to the world, Amanda Lee coming into focus second by confusing second.

“Jensen?” she asked, still panicked while reaching out to me.

I dodged her hand. She didn’t like to get cold, and that’s what she would be if she made contact with me. For some demented reason, that fact was first and foremost in my mind during the fuzzy aftermath.

As if remembering my coldness, she backed off. But her voice didn’t calm down.

“You’re so gray right now,” she said. “Just like you were when I first met you.”

As I checked out my essence—definitely no color here—she’d gone on to tell me that my pallor had been going grayer and grayer while we were sharing her vision, and she’d been afraid that I was about to return to my residual haunting phase.

So what was the lesson here? That I shouldn’t be partaking in any more of Amanda Lee’s murder visions. But the ramifications of what’d happened today in Elfin Forest extended even beyond that.

Was this what would happen to me if I scared myself to death with a hallucination during a haunting? Should I be taking Amanda Lee’s psychic vision as a warning for how much terror I could tolerate?

Those were the questions dogging me during my serial killer research, so I finally broke it off and did the next best thing.

I went outside and restlessly hopped into a travel tunnel, already leaving my killer in a “to be continued” mental file. Seriously, since the ax and the old granny mask had added about five hundred notches of creep to my story, the only thing that made me feel better about it was putting it at a distance for the rest of the day.