Page 30 of The Mare Rider of Cornwall Cove
“Good. Good. I’m good.” He was not good. I could read the fear on his face, but he pulled up to the front door and threw the driver’s side door open as if he owned the place. “I am so good it stinks!”
His shout echoed around us.
“That’s stinking good,” I whispered, a loving little twitch tugging at my lips before I undid my belt. “Let’s get set up and find this dream abuser.”
I exited the truck, feet dropping down to the snow-covered drive, grabbed the spare cup of coffee, and then began hauling out the equipment that we’d brought. More technical stuff. No party stuff. None of us were here to bust out and do the “Party Rock Anthem” dance tonight.
Shoulders and arms burdened with gear, we made our way through the formerly elegant front doors into the reception area. Four spirits lingered here, skittish as wild colts, then they melted into nothingness.
“There are some phantoms here, or were, watching from the shadows,” I offered as Phil took a moment to get his camera out and turned on. Light filled the area like a beacon, drowning out our feeble phone flashlights.
“Sorry, I was…uhm, not ready. Can you open things, Arch?” Phil asked as he settled his camera on his shoulder.
“Sure, of course. Let me know when you’re ready, babe.”
He drew in a long breath, exhaled it slowly, the warmth of his breath making a cloud that lingered in front of him for a moment or two. Then I got a wobbly thumbs up. The red light flashed green, and I dug deep to find a persona that wasn’t too smiley or too dour. Which was just kind of being me, I guess.
“Hey, gang, welcome back to Cornwall Cove Lunatic Asylum. Phil and I are back for another go, and we brought along better equipment. We’ve returned to hopefully settle something that we ran into last night. We’ll get into that as we set up back in the game room. We’d like to thank you all for rejoining us. We’re still trying to figure out all of this. Sometimes we mess up, and sometimes we rock. Last night we didn’t do well, but it’s a learning experience, as some of my professors like to say. They also like to say that preparation is key, and we were not prepared last night, but we are tonight.” I hoped.
I began to move, past the fountain, along the corridor, past offices and upset wheelchairs, taking care where to step.
“Last night we had all kinds of intense paranormal activity,” I explained, using my toe to nudge aside a scalpel, one of many, lying on the cold floor. “Unfortunately, we were not live, so we did not capture it for examination. Hopefully, we’ll be able to bring out the one who—”
I skidded to a halt. Timothy appeared in front of me, face slack, eyes mildly curious. “Oh, uhm, hello, Timothy,” I said as Phil rushed to drop his gear bag and pull out a phasmometer, or for those not in the ghost biz, a digital thermometer. I tookit from him as he circled us, the camera lens wide. I held the thermometer out at arm’s length. Phil came around behind me, skirting wide of Timothy. The numbers on the thermometer dipped quickly, dropping to the low twenties, which was the ambient air temp, then down and down and down to four degrees. “Timothy is here,” I told the viewers while lifting the phasmometer up over my head, where the reading climbed back to twenty-four. “I met him last night in the lavatory. He is a young boy, perhaps ten, and was sent here as an indigent Irish orphan to have his behavioral problems cured by a procedure known as a transorbital lobotomy.”
“Why are you back?” Timothy asked, his question holding no ire or upset, just a mild interest asked in that same Irish brogue I’d heard just twenty-four hours ago.
“We’re back to try to send Smoke Man back to his realm,” I explained, taking another temperature reading as Phil zeroed in on it. There was nothing else for the people out there to see. Only I could lay eyes on and converse with the dead, but this lift and fall of temps should get the comments section lit up. It was commonly known that ghosts produce cold spots that humans without any psychic powers can feel. In a warm house, a sudden blast of icy air would be alarming. Here, in this cold, abandoned sanitarium, it was still pretty solid evidence of some sort of intake of the warmer air required for a phantom to materialize. Twenty degrees wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing either. Perhaps that was why the souls that passed and were trapped here were so thin and wispy, more so than, say, Reg or Caleb. They didn’t have the warmth to pull in to give them a firmer form. Interesting.
“He’s not one to send back,” Timothy replied, rocking left to right in a soft rhythm. “He likes it here, likes to fill our heads with badness.”
“Fill your heads with badness?” I dropped to one knee, placed the gallon of blue paint on the cracked tile floor, and tried to get Timothy to focus on me. He seemed interested in something off to the left—Phil, I presumed. “Timmy, hey.” I snapped my fingers, and his serene gaze moved back to me. “How does he fill your heads with badness?”
He shrugged before leaning right once more. “He’s not special like you.” He motioned toward Phil.
“No, he’s not a seer, he’s my boyfriend, but he’s brave and strong and is going to help me guide Smoke Man forward.” Hopefully. I didn’t really know if the philosophies of Buddhism would work here, but we had nothing else shy of running out to find a priest. “What do you know of him?”
Timothy rolled his hollow eyes around and then blinked a time or two. “He was here when I come here.”
“Okay, that helps.” Not much, but a little. “Did he ever tell you how he came to be here?”
“Said he was called forth by Nurse Hannah Herring.”
“Herring? Like the fish?”
He nodded gently. “We called her that because she eat them every day for lunch and then breathed on you to take blood and tie you down.”
I took a second to process that. Timothy moved around me, stopping just in front of Phil, who obviously could not see him, but he felt the cold seeping from him as he smiled softly down at nothing, the corners of his eyes crinkling. Timothy drifted off then, bored it seemed, humming “Three Blind Mice” as he went to join his spectral friends. The pudgy flapper gathered him to her bosom before they popped out of sight. I suspected they would be keeping tabs on what went down.
I glanced up at Phil, the camera light still green, and pushed to my feet. “Timothy explained that the entity they call Smoke Man was called forth by a Nurse Hannah Herring. I wonder if our techsupport back at K&K central could dive into the internet to see if they can find employment records for Cornwall Cove Lunatic Asylum pre-1845. That was when the Great Potato Famine in Ireland began. I’m assuming young Timothy O’Neal came over with his parents soon after that catastrophe. If we can get the names of the nursing staff, that might come in handy when we’re trying to have a conversation with Smoke Man.”
“Someone in the comments said they can find it for us,” Phil explained, tapping the small Bluetooth earpiece in his ear, a gift from Tray, allowing him to stay in contact with homebase. “Give them a few minutes.”
“Hey, cool! Thanks, subs, we love it when you’re as invested as we are. Okay, well, we have some information, so let’s return to the game room. That was where we had the most intense moments with the being we believe to be a mare rider. And if you’re expecting a ghost to come charging through on a spectral steed, you’re going to be disappointed.”
I chatted about ghostly trivia facts as we made our way to the rec room. The place looked just the same as it had when we’d busted ass to leave last night. The glow balloons had all gone flat, presumably from the cold, and lay on the floor, limp and not at all entertaining in any way. Most of the party stuff had been left behind. Guess Smoke Man wasn’t into glow parties.
“Do you feel anything?” Phil asked as we entered the icy room. I shook my head. “Then we should start setting up for the rider’s appearance. We’ll need the paint opened first, Tray is telling me.”
