Page 18 of The Mare Rider of Cornwall Cove
“Always, baby, I want to pop the cork on our bubbly and ring in the new year with you in two hours.”
Our boots crunched through the hard snow, the moon now hidden behind thick snow clouds. The ghost didn’t move. It just stood there, observing, as we closed the distance. A limb snapped off somewhere to our left in the wooded area of the grounds where patients walked daily if they were stable enough to leave their rooms. Many were not. Many were chained to walls or tied to beds. Given what took place in this hellhole, the low number of wraiths haunting the grounds actually surprised me.
“Good evening,” I called when we were about ten feet from the shed. The window was long gone, the roof had fallen in years ago, and the doorway was just that. A doorway. The door was nowhere to be seen. “I’m a friend.” The ghost nodded. “We discovered this dead opossum in the hospital and would like to bury it somewhere.” The grizzled old man stared at me. Didn’t speak. Just stared. Then he shook his head. “Oh, no, we don’t want you to do it. We’ll do the digging. My boyfriend is quite strong. We just need a shovel or something to make a hole, and then we’ll be on our way.”
The specter turned its head to stare at the hospital. I waited. Phil waited. The dead opossum in the sweater waited. My toes and nose grew colder by the minute. Snow swirled. Trees groaned. My nose ran like a faucet. I opened my mouth to speak again when the old man looked back at me, his angular face now drawn into a rictus. The unnatural grin set me back a few steps.
“He’s not happy,” I croaked to whoever might be listening. Then, without warning, the phantom howled at me to leave before he rocketed off, his scream of misery setting off an explosion inside my head. I dropped the bundle in my arms to grab my skull. Bending over, I fought not to pass out from the shiv of paranormal power and noted with no small amount of unpleasantness that droplets of red were dripping from my nose to the white snow at my feet. “Should have been snot,” I mumbled as Phil enveloped me in his arms, spun us around, and did his best to shelter me from whatever it was that was hurting me that he couldn’t see. I think he was talking. Calling my name, but the thunderous pain inside my skull drowned out my boyfriend.
“Arch, fucking hell,” Phil shouted, his yell slicing through the pain that was slowly, incrementally, starting to fade. I teetered into him, grasping at his coat with the stupid glow in the dark logo, and dry heaved. With a speed that served him well on the football field, he quickly turned my head to the side and then bent me over. I gagged and spit, but go me, I did not puke up my dinner on my boots. “Arch, holy shit, what happened?”
He rubbed my back as spittle dribbled from my lower lip to the snow. What an image I must be to the people watching. Hopefully, this was the time for the connection to be shitty, but I wasn’t that lucky most of the time. Wiping at my mouth with the back of my gloved hand, I straightened, gave the viewers a measly smile and a thumbs up, and then sucked in some cold air.
“I’m okay. I just…that was a lot of energy thrown at me. The ghost…groundskeeper maybe…he never said it was fine, and then he seemed to be taken over with malice of some sort. I think we need to get this job done and go back inside. I could use some water and gum.”
“Sure, yeah, of course.” Phil took over then, the sweetest bottom in the world now showing his toppy side as he pointed afinger at me to stay and then scooped up the opossum. Wobbly but feeling steadier as the seconds ticked past, I watched as he slid into the shed and a few moments later emerged empty-handed. He gathered me into a hug. “There were literally like no tools of any kind in there, but the floorboards were rotted out, so I placed him/her—I didn’t check to see what it was—in the ground, then pushed some snow over it. I said a few nice words about opossums. About how they were clever and ate ticks and carried their babies on their backs. I thanked it for eating ticks because ticks are the worst, and then I came back out.”
“You’re the sweetest soul ever.” I sighed into his coat. I longed just to spend the rest of forever in his arms, but the camera was still rolling. Exhaustion was pulling me down rapidly. Combined with the surges of psychic powers coming at me, I was fading fast. “Let’s go back to the game room. Take a break. Find some acetaminophen and see what our subscribers are saying while we replenish our preternatural vitality.”
“Yeah, Arch needs to have a snack and charge up his chi,” Phil said, speaking into the camera I imagined, or perhaps to me or himself. Phil loved to talk, and when he got nervous, he got even chattier. “I might take a tiny nap myself. I’m beat. Also, this battery is just about toasted.”
That all sounded marvelous. Pulling back a bit, I looked up at my boyfriend. He did look done in. He had dark circles under his eyes. I went to my toes for a kiss. The camera bobbled about behind my head and hoped the BL lovers out there were happy with a blurry smooch.
“Cameraman Phil, I need a second with our subs.” He nodded and brought the camcorder around to shine on us both. I glanced at the glowing green light. “That was a pretty intense supernatural encounter with a phantom that seemed to waver between mildly curious and hostile. The nosebleed is something that happens, no biggie. It’s stopped now, so don’t freak out.And the opossum is in the ground, where it will return to nature. Phil and I are going to try to find a bathroom that works. Cross your fingers for us, and we will be back in fifteen to continue our stream. We love you. See you after the break.”
The green light faded to red. I let my brow drop to Phil’s chest as my stomach roiled. I’d swallowed a lot of blood in the past few minutes. It tasted foul. I sorely needed some water, something to eat, and some gum. Mouthwash would be better, toothpaste even better still.
“Can we get into the truck to get our bags? I would love to brush my teeth,” I asked and got a worried nod. “I’m okay. Seriously, that happens with a high mystic wave. I just need to get something to eat and drink, take a second to center, and I’ll be fine.”
“I hate it when you go all anime fangirl nosebleed.” He cupped my face with a large hand. “I’m going to be really glad to blow this place and go to the hotel.”
“Me too, babe.” I turned my cheek into his cold hand.
“Let’s go. I want to check for any signs of other people here. I mean, fans could have seen the stream and decided to join us, right? Although I don’t think our subs would kill anything to be a part of the stream.”
“No, me either. I think your fisher suggestion was on point.”
“Thanks. I like wildlife. One time when I was camping with my mom, we saw this owl in the tree over our lake house. It had these huge yellow eyes, and then it hooted—”
I mentally drifted as Phil regaled me with a camping trip to some small state park in New Hampshire when he was a kid. It was hard to focus now. My thoughts kept returning to the groundskeeper’s wraith. I’d never seen such an abrupt change in a ghost before. I had a pretty good feel for which phantoms are friendly and which aren’t. That one had fooled me. I’d not let my guard down again on these grounds. Not every specter was anaughty redcoat or a homespun milkman. I needed to keep that at the fore from now on.
We released each other but held hands as we made our way to the driveway. The snow had fallen off now, with just a few flakes drifting downward. As we trudged through fresh snow atop old crunchy snow, I glanced down to check where I was stepping and noted that there was a patch of drying blood on my coat. The sweater had been too threadbare to really be much of a bandage or absorb any liquid. I felt terrible about the opossum and vowed that I would donate some of the monies raised on this feed.
“I’m going to donate some of the money we make on this stream to the opossum,” I mumbled as we neared the truck sitting untouched right where we had parked it what seemed like days ago.
“You think he had a family?” Phil asked. I shot him a look. He gave me a little cockeyed wink. “Sorry, I had to say it.”
“Oh, that was…” I snorted in amusement at my own dumb ramblings. “Yeah, no, that’s totally a fair question.” Phil chuckled. “You wiseass.” He snickered. “What I meant was that I’d like to send something to an opossum group. There has to be some out there, right?”
“Totally. We’ll find one.” He was always so sure, so upbeat, so damn lovable. “And we can make a donation in his name.” With that announcement, he gave a sharp nod and then yanked open the driver’s side door to grab our small personal bags. We’d left them behind on the assumption we’d not need to brush our teeth to remove the ganky taste of nosebleed blood. Guess I should have known better. Next time I run into a mad wraith, I’d be sure to have a travel toothbrush and one of those tiny sample toothpaste tubes the dentist hands out. Nowhere in any of the notes from my ancestors did any of them mention carrying breath fresheners. I’d have to add that as an annotation in the tome of ghost hunters. Note to future Kee’s—bring mints.
Chapter Seven
We’d found a bathroom.
It was not exactly sanitary. It was a managerial lavatory just off one of the first-floor offices. Given the floors were white tile—or had been a hundred years ago—and the walls were dark wood paneled, the delight of whatever designer had furbished this bathroom had faded into something depressingly dank. Sinks and toilets with brass moldings had been torn off the walls and the brass stolen. Resold, I guessed. One lone sink remained, hanging by a thread beside a urinal that would have worked with a flushing tank and a pull chain. Busted porcelain littered the floor. Water had long ago been turned off, so I was staring at my face in a shattered mirror with a busted screen that had been set up to afford privacy at the urinals at my back. Someone had spray painted big boobs on the screen as well as the always popular penis.
Using a sock and a bottle of spring water, I was trying my best to remove the now frozen blood from my coat. I was not succeeding. Phil and I had taken a pee break by the fountain in front, standing on the snowy sides of the icy reservoir doing our best imitations of those little boys peeing into a fountain. Yeah, it was juvenile. Yeah, it was stupid. Yeah, we laughed like bloody nobs, as Reg would say. It was a moment of being a moron that helped balance the frights of the night. I regret nothing. Other than taking my dick out when it was ten degrees. Not that pissing in here would have been much better, but it was marginally warmer with no wind blowing over your prick.
