Echoes of the Dead Read Free

His blue eyes locked onto hers. He held out a hand. “We won’t be here long.”
    She hesitated, her breath catching in her throat, and then took his hand. The skin was cool and ruff, not warm like she’d expected. Maybe it was the room. Maybe the chill was in the house itself. “We should look, too.”
    Johnny turned toward the hallway. “The basement, wherever it is?”
    “I don’t want to, but—”
    The scream stopped Kelsey’s words before they left her mouth. Sarah’s scream. Kelsey didn’t think again until she was, following Johnny, halfway up the stairs. They rounded the landing, hurtled the final flight, spilling into the darkened second story hallway.  Dim, yellowish light filtered from a window at one end. Down the other direction, a black figure waved.
    “Down here!” Ben called.
    Kelsey’s eyes adjusted to the darkened hallway, but she couldn’t see Sarah. Johnny trotted in front. He didn’t seem to be afraid—not like she was. Why was her heart rattling in her chest?  Why did she feel like she couldn’t breathe? Ben moved back, further into the hallway. Johnny stepped through the doorway to which Ben had been pointing.  He wheeled and tried to grab Kelsey, but too late.
    She gasped. “Oh my God.”  Her hands covered her mouth, but she couldn’t shut her eyes.
    A man lay in a half-filled bathtub. His near-white hair clung close to his pinkish scalp, but was not wet. Although his hair showed old age’s silver-grey, the lack of lines on his face told a much younger story. His dead eyes stared at them, almost as though he’d been watching the door when he died. Almost as though he’d been waiting for them. In his left hand, draped as it was over the tub’s edge, he held a knife, the folding type which held utility blades used in construction.  Thick gashes marred both wrists, a disordered criss-crossing of cuts. His right arm stretched along the far edge of the tub and wore a slash from the base of his hand to mid forearm. The cuts on the left were much smaller.
    Sarah whimpered from the corner.  Johnny stepped inside and pulled her to him, pressing her face against his chest. “There’s no blood,” she muttered.
    “Bullshit,” Ben said. He’d closed in behind Kelsey, blocking the door.
    Sarah pushed away from Johnny’s chest and glared at Ben. Her voice became firm, almost angry. “No blood. There’s no God-damned blood.”
    Kelsey’s body turned to ice as she hunted—but didn’t find—a single drop.  The few inches of bathwater in the tub were clear despite the old man being fully clothed.  The linoleum floor reflected a small, sunny patch from the window but was otherwise unmarred.
    “No blood at all.”
     
     

Part 1: The Cast
     

Chapter 1: Kelsey
     
     
    Kelsey hated the club.
    She hated the noise, the sweat-slicked men bumping and grabbing and oozing all over her. She hated the way the throbbing beat worked into her brain, and how she woke the morning after a dancing with the beat still pounding in her blood. She knew these were things a fit, attractive, twenty-seven-year-old woman was supposed to like.
    But she didn’t.
    She went to Tremors with Brit and Caitlin because she didn’t want to be alone, not after the dreams came back. Jared had haunted her dreams for the past week, Jared and the dead man with no blood. Even during waking hours, if Kelsey closed her eyes, the puckered-white flesh of the dead man’s gashes blinked in her memory. It haunted her more than the wreck, but Jared’s disappearance and the dull ached it caused weighed more than the dead man.
    Nearly five years later, and the dreams were as bad as they’d ever been.
    Even though she hated it, the club banished demons better than graduate studies ever had—much better than Human Lifespan Development or Principles of Testing and Measurement. A PhD in psychology seemed rather meaningless after what happened in the house. The world felt rather purposeless after Jared vanished without a