Page 80 of The Haunting of Lockton
Paxton nodded. “Not homemade, I’m afraid. I bought them at the store.”
“I don’t care.” I snatched one up and bit into it. “Peanut butter’s my favorite cookie.”
“It’ll go nice with coffee,” Julian said, sweeping his gaze around the kitchen. “I know you’re here, even if you aren’t ready to show yourself. Thank you for the coffee and treats. It was really considerate of you.”
The side of Julian’s hair lightly ruffled, as though someone had touched the strands. Or walked by him superfast. One or the other. By the soft gleam in my brother’s eyes, however, I’d go with the former. He had shared many details of his gift with me, but not even he knew everything about it. Sometimes he could sense ghosts’ intentions and their emotions. And whatever emotion Alan was feeling in that moment, Julian had picked up on it.
Paxton refilled his mug and poured one for me and Julian. He added a splash of french vanilla creamer to his and set out sugar and a carton of half-and-half—Julian’s preference. Seemed Alan wasn’t the only considerate one. The unopened carton showed Paxton had bought it specifically for my brother.
With our mugs and trays of snacks, we returned to the living room and got to work. An hour and a half into it, my eyes started to glaze over. I had finished my coffee and took a small break to refill my mug—theirs too—and then devoured two cookies before continuing. I was reviewing video from one of the cameras, and a whole lot of nothing was happening.
But then, something did.
“Whoa.” Heart racing, I hit the Stop button and spun on the couch to face Paxton. He paused the audio and took off his headphones. “Remember when we were in the medical ward and the camera fell over?”
“Yeah.”
“Well… it didn’t fall over. Look.” Excited, I turned the laptop toward him. Julian had paused his video and focused on the screen. I increased the volume. “There’s audio too.”
The footage showed Paxton and me walking across the main area of the ward and going through the door into the private examination room beyond it. I skipped ahead a few minutes, then let it play in real time.
A glimmer appeared on the left side of the camera. As it drifted closer, the edges of the glimmery blur pulsated before the shape of a woman appeared. She wasn’t in full focus, still a bit blurry and unclear, as though she were made of static.
The blur then dashed out of sight.
“That doesn’t explain how the camera fell,” Paxton said.
“Keep watching.”
Subtly, the camera changed direction, as if someone out of sight was adjusting the tripod. Chills erupted up and down my arms just like it did the first time I watched it. On the right side of the frame, a dark shape appeared. It moved slowly in front of the camera, almost as if it were gliding. The shape stopped in the center of the frame, and I could make out the sleeve of a white coat.
“Unnatural,”a deep voice rasped.
Then, the shape lowered, and although blurry like the woman’s apparition had been, a set of pitch-black eyes filled the screen before the camera toppled over.
“Did he say unnatural?” Julian asked.
“I think so.” My scalp tingled. “When this was happening, Pax and I were… kind of kissing in the other room.”
Paxton’s already pale skin turned more ashen. “Medical records state Samuel Howard performed the lobotomy that killed Roy.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m not following. How does that relate?”
“Psychosurgery was a type of operation that removed parts of the brain and sometimes shifted pieces around,” Paxton explained. “Lobotomies were the most common of these types of surgeries. They severed parts of the prefrontal cortex in the hope of rewiring a patient’s brain and ridding them of homosexual thoughts.”
Understanding dawned on me. “Roy’s lobotomy could’ve been because he was gay? And this Samuel Howard fucker did it because he was a damn homophobe?”
“People believed homosexuality was a disease back then,” Julian said, the book-smart one of the two of us. He knew all sorts of facts like that. “The doctor probably felt justified in trying to cure Roy of hisunnaturaldesires.”
I leaned back against the couch cushion. “And if Roy and his lover did sneak out a lot to see each other, that could’ve been what alerted this Samuel bastard to him. I wonder who the other guy was.”
“I don’t know.” Paxton grabbed a piece of chocolate from the half-empty candy bowl and unwrapped it. We had gone to town on that candy and would probably be high on sugar and caffeine for the next week. “But I want to find out.”
“Me too,” Julian said. “I’ve read through all the books at the library concerning Lockton. Maybe I can go through them again. See if anything jumps out.”
“I’ll go with you,” Paxton offered.
I groaned. “Not the library again. Anything but that.” I eyed the platter and grabbed another cookie. Most of them had been eaten by me. No fucks given. I bit into it and chewed. “I’ll for real die, Jules.”
