Ghost Soldier Read online

  Her face was set, steely and determined and it gave me faith, faith that there was a light at the end of the tunnel here. That there would be a soft bed and giggles and sighs after all this was over.

  So I closed my eyes and, to the best of my telepathic ability, sunk into the skin of Stephen Whitehall. When I opened my eyes, I was at the foot of the stairs. Behind me I could see Ellen and my own body right where I’d left it.

  “Can you hear me, Monty?” she asked.

  “Loud and clear.”

  “All right, I might have to watch what I say once you get near Beale.”

  “I remember, the nosy S.O.B.”

  “Do you want to go straight to the second floor?”

  “No, I’ll take the slow route, makes me feel like I have some control, and I want to get used to this form in case I need to run like hell.” I took my first step, trying to remember, Whitehall, Whitehall. And then I slowly ascended the stairs.

  Just before I made it to the top landing, I saw the games were on. Beale was standing there waiting for me, looking none too pleased. “Ellen, Ellen,” I said loudly in my mind.

  “Keep calm Stephen, follow your feelings.” How great was that? She was calling me by his name now. Luckily I didn’t blurt out “Who’s Stephen?”

  “Hey, Josh,” I said, a real pal.

  “You can stop right there. You won’t fool me this time, Monty Drew.”

  It felt a bit like a punch, the air knocked out of my lungs. Was it emotional or something else? “I’m not trying to fool you, Josh, just trying to help you.”

  “It won’t work. I had a long talk with the Colonel. He explained things. Explained how you were trying to deceive me.”

  The mention of the Colonel sent a tendril of creepiness up my neck, which I hoped wasn’t a baby moccasin in disguise. “Well, he’s wrong, Josh. You recognized me for a reason. Sure, I’m Monty Drew now, but I did live a life as Stephen Whitehall. And now I’m living a new life just like you could one day if you just let go of all this.” I didn’t know if I believed what I was saying but it was important that I make him believe it.

  “I saw Whitehall die,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah, we all die, all these people around here.” And then I noticed there weren’t many people around right now. Not like before. “Hey, where did everybody go?”

  He looked at me as though he were coming out of a fog. “They’re hiding.”

  I hoped I hadn’t scared them off. When you scare a ghost, that doesn’t look so good on your resume. “Hiding? Why?”

  “The Colonel is angry.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  “Ellen, Ellen,” I whispered softly in my mind.

  “What do you mean ‘he’s angry’?”

  I repeated emphatically, “What do you mean ‘he’s angry’?”

  Beale looked at me with a brooding gaze. “Is there an echo in here?” he asked.

  I was tempted to say “Is there an echo in here?” but this was serious business. “No, really, this Colonel. Who is he exactly?”

  His face hardened. “He wants to meet you,” and then he stopped, as if he’d almost said Whitehall. It was working. I could feel it. “Well, I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not.”

  “Ellen, Ellen, come on; give me some direction.”

  “It’s difficult.” She managed to get through. Not very helpful. I’d figured that part out for myself.

  Beale smiled coldly, “Yes, it is difficult, especially when someone else is blocking your communication. So it looks like you’re on your own, Monty.”

  Great. Monty, not Whitehall. I was losing ground. Looked like I needed to follow my instincts now. “Yes, why don’t we go in and talk to the Colonel?”

  Beale looked a bit surprised. “I’ll have to see if that’s what he wants.” He walked away from me and headed down the hall to that room.

  I still didn’t get it. If that room was so pivotal, why hadn’t we picked up anything when we were there?

  “We did.” Ellen’s voice.

  “Hey where have you—”

  “We don’t have a lot of time. Beale has found a way to block our connection, somewhat, when he’s around. We felt emptiness—stark emptiness, remember?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. But what does that mean?”

  “I think we’re dealing with something else. It would be good if you could locate some of the other spirits. I’m worried about them.”

  My wife, the Little Bo Peep of the dead. I glanced down the hall. Beale had disappeared into that bedroom. Right down the hallway at the opposite end was another door. “Quickly,” Ellen said and pushed me on.

  In a few quick steps I was down the hall and, without much debate, I went inside the doorway.

  A blast of cool air hit me. The French doors were open but weren’t at all reflecting the warm weather Ellen and I had experienced walking back from the museum. It was freezing cold.

  “What the—” I murmured, then looked around. The room was empty of furniture but filled with people, all sitting huddled against the walls. “Hey, what’s going on here?”

  No one spoke, just eyed me fearfully.

  “Come on, I’m here to help.”

  “Did he send you?” a voice spoke out. It was a woman with long dark hair, and something seemed familiar about her.

  “Loretta,” Ellen coached.

  “You must be Loretta,” I said in my most amiable voice. “Were you talking about Beale?”

  She shook her head. “Beale, the Colonel. They’re becoming the same. They took Gerald, the Lieutenant, took him into that room and now he’s….”

  “That’s enough, Loretta,” another woman’s voice snapped out. “You heard what they said. If we do as we’re told, we’ll be fine. Rest in peace, like they promised.”

  Loretta stood up, glaring at the older woman who’d spoken. “You know that’s a lie. We’re all just getting weaker and weaker. That thing is draining us and we won’t be able to move on from here. Ever.”

  “It’s not a ‘thing.’ It’s the Colonel. You’re going to get us all in trouble.”

  “Guide them, guide them,” Ellen’s voice came to me, but now seeming distant as if she were out across the gulf.

  “Look, I don’t know what’s going on here,” I said, trusting my wife’s instincts even though I didn’t understand them. “But all of you need to cross over to another place where you’ll really be safe.”

  “They’re vulnerable in the state they’re in.”

  “You’re vulnerable in the state you’re in.”

  Tears were streaming down Loretta’s face, ghostly milk that somehow seemed more painful and heavy than a living human’s tears. “Please help us. We can’t last much longer.”

  And then I heard the door flinging open behind me, and I knew time had run out. Beale’s voice was cold, “Well Monty, the Colonel is ready to see you. And not too soon, I see. Come along.”

  Loretta backed away and sunk down on the floor next to the other frightened ghosts. Well wasn’t this great. “Any advice, Ellen?” I asked but was met with only silence.

  Great. Looks like I was getting drafted and I didn’t even know which war we were in.

  Chapter Thirty

  The word “draining” ricocheted around my head. Loretta said they were all being drained, becoming weak.

  “Yes, that’s it.” Barely a whisper.

  I followed Beale down the hall, feeling a bit like a condemned man but also eying his World War I military uniform with curiosity. How long had he been here? Nearly a hundred years. What would I do if I were trapped in the same place, confused and clearly depressed for nearly a hundred years? No doubt go a bit crazier every day.

  He stopped in front of the door of the bedroom and looked at me with a bit of concern. “The Colonel is different than other people, Whitehall.”

  “Yeah, he has a fluffy little silver bird pinned to his chest.” I couldn’t help it. The sarcasm slipped out.

  “I mean i
t, Whitehall. You can’t mouth off in your arrogant way.”

  Strange, I was Whitehall again. Beale looked nervous, fearful now. Not the confident, cold man that had walked into that room of terrified people. “It’s all right, Josh,” I said calmly. “I know how to handle myself.”

  He nodded, put his hand on the door, and walked inside.

  For a moment I felt completely baffled. I looked around and all I saw was what Ellen and I had seen when we had first walked in—a completely empty, clean room. In fact, I could still smell the floor cleaner.

  “Concentrate on Beale and what Beale sees,” Ellen said. Beale had walked to the dead center of the room and was just standing there motionless. “Concentrate.”

  “Got it,” I shot back. Ellen could be a bit heavy handed with her suggestions, but now was not the time to be hammering. I wasn’t a psychic, but I did the best I could, completely shifting my focus to Beale’s perception. It was difficult, uncomfortable, and even painful, but soon enough the light around me seemed to dim. The whiteness of the room darkened, became shadowed and grimy. And then I began to see a figure forming right in front of Beale, translucent at first then slowly solidifying.

  From what I could see, it seemed to be a man, taller and broader than Beale. He was definitely in a uniform, with a hat and tufts of grayish hair. Where the face should have been, there was a smudge, a blur except for the mouth. The mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear anything.

  “What the hell is this?” I directed to Ellen.

  “It’s what Beale sees.”

  “He sees a man with no face?”

  “He sees what his mind is comfortable with.”

  “By the way, how is it we’re talking now and he isn’t butting in?”

  “He’s distracted. He’s communicating with it.”

  It took an extra beat for me to soak up what she’d said. “It? Did you say ‘it’?”

  “Seems so. Sorry, honey. I didn’t know or I wouldn’t have let you—”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m going to work to clear your vision now. So you can see what you’re really up against.”

  “Wait a minute….”

  Things had begun to shift around me. It was moist in the room, dark and moist, reminding me uncomfortably of the smell of something old and moldy that hadn’t been cleaned in a long time, like an overgrown fish tank. My stomach kind of flipped, or maybe it was my astral center. And then I focused on Beale, and a little tendril of horror ran all over me like some metaphysical electricity.

  The situation was as Ellen had suggested. It had shifted. It wore pretty much nothing, no uniform or clothes, and its arms had changed into long, spindly appendages covered with little spikes of what I could only describe as insect hair.

  Yeah, that was it, some kind of insect. with definite oversized fangs protruding from its mouth. It was gray, maybe green, sort of shifting color. And it had its claw-like, spindly hand right on Beale’s forehead. “Jesus, Ellen. It’s like a radioactive Mothra fresh out of hell!.”

  “I know,” she said softly. “It’s draining him like a psychic mosquito, controlling him so it can have the others and. . .”

  “And what?”

  “Everything else,” she said quietly. “Lots of souls to suck.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  So here I was standing across the room staring at a beast that had crawled straight out of some of my worst childhood nightmares. I had grown accustomed to the idea of human ghosts, and even shape-shifting ghosts, but this thing seemed like a demon that not even the Old Testament prophets could have envisioned. “Where the hell did this thing come from?”

  “Close guess,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Monty, I can’t be sure, but from what I can gather, probably another dimension.”

  “Again, what?”

  “There isn’t a lot of time before it...okay,” she started to ramble quickly, “there are all sorts of dimensions running alongside our own, filled with other creatures, some of them parasites. Some feed off energy. This one feeds off negative energy, that explains all the pained souls gathered into one place.”

  “Okay, okay, all the negative energy at the base.”

  “Yes, somehow it gained entrance to the plane Beale and the others are on. It’s been feeding off of them all.”

  “So we cut off its food.”

  “Not so simple, honey. It’s clearly gained strength and evolved. That’s how it’s tricking Beale. You need to reach him.”

  “Now?”

  The thing still had its tentacle, arm thing attached to Beale’s head.”

  “Use Whitehall, before it’s too late.”

  “What?”

  “Monty!”

  “Hey, Beale,” I called out in a bit of veiled panic. “Are you finished kissing up to your Colonel?”

  There was a stirring in the pair of them. The creature thing shifted, trying to maintain a hold on Beale.

  “Yeah, buddy, I had no idea how much of an ass kisser you were. Bucking for a promotion, huh?”

  Again stirring, Beale seemed to be moving but the creature tried to maintain its grip. “Good thing the boys in the regiment didn’t know. They’d never have listened to a suck-up like you. Taking abuse from Moth Boy there. Some leader of men you are.”

  That did it. Beale pulled away from the creature, breaking contact. It hissed and chirped, of course it did. It was a damned insect demon.

  Beale seemed completely disoriented and drained. “Keep it going.”

  “Yeah, what a disappointment you turned out to be, Joshie. I always thought you were your own man, thought for yourself. Not a little tin soldier just following orders.”

  “What are you talking about, Whitehall?” Beale said, emerging slightly from his psychic stupor.

  I stepped back. Behind Beale the creature was moving erratically, hissing and crackling and twitching those spindly appendages.

  “You’re a patsy, a tool this thing is using,” I said. “The only chain of command is the one that made you a slave to this twitchy little bug.”

  Beale looked furious. I’d gotten to him, but then the thing reached out, putting its long insect claw on his shoulder. Beale closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them again as if under a spell. “The Colonel says you’re lying.”

  “Of course he says that, Beale. He’s got a pretty good set up here. You bring him fresh meat and he sucks its up with his little antenna things.”

  “He’s so weak, Monty.”

  “You don’t understand, Whitehall. You don’t know what I did. How I failed.”

  “You didn’t fail. You were human. Hell, if I’d been through half of what you had….”

  Beale shook his head. “You were always strong. You wouldn’t have fallen apart like I did. And I did it in this room, the Colonel’s room. But then he came back and gave me a chance to redeem myself. And I can’t let you get in the way. I’ve enlisted for life. And beyond.”

  The insect had both claws on Beale, actually sinking into his shoulders, into flesh, or what looked like flesh. And then it tore off a strip of flesh from Beale’s shoulder and shoved it into its mouth.

  “Ellen” I yelled. “It’s eating him.”

  “ That’s the next stage. Devouring souls.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Beale’s shoulders were oozing blood, and bone protruded where the creature had ripped into him. But he didn’t unacknowledged the wounds. I had a feeling this wasn’t the first time this had happened.

  “The Colonel says you are too dangerous to be allowed to live.” Beale’s face was menacing now, despite the pain etched in it. What had Loretta said? Something about “becoming the same.” The more contact he had with it, the more it took him over.

  “You can still reach him, Monty. Try, you don’t know how important it is.”

  Important. Save an asshole from a good psychic ripping? Ah, well, people believed I was a nice guy, and I’d never wanted to
disappoint Ellen. “So what are you planning, Beale? Going to feed me to your monster? Order me to take it like a man, give up my soul for God and country, take a bullet for the unit?”

  Confusion crossed his face, “What?”

  “You heard me. Is that what happened to the Lieutenant, Beale? He didn’t just disappear. You fed him to your pet here. Or maybe it’s not the pet. Maybe you are!”

  Beale stepped closer to me, but more than that he’d moved away from the creature. Again, it hissed. I guess I was pissing it off, cheating it of one of those decent meals that had helped make New Orleans famous. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Whitehall.”

  “Of course you don’t, you idiot. You’re being played. There is no colonel. It’s been using you, lying to you. All these people here, so afraid, but they trusted you. And one by one you’re destroying them.”

  “That’s not true!” As he yelled, from behind him it lunged out, past him, reaching for me with its long flailing insect arms. I jumped aside just in time to avoid its grasp as it made a horrible rasping sound.

  “Ellen?” I called.

  “Run, Monty. It’s after you!”

  Finally, an order I could get behind. As it scuttled across the room, I made a beeline to the closed door. Behind me I could hear Beale’s voice yelling, “Stop, Whitehall. That’s an order!”

  I tore down the hallway, realizing that I should have taken the stairs down. And then came Ellen’s voice, “Something’s wrong. I can’t pull you back.”

  The thing was behind me, skittering across the hardwood floor. I could feel heat, sick, moist heat. So I did the only thing I could, I ran into the bedroom with all the other ghosts. Immediately they scrambled up, heading toward the French doors. “Get out,” I yelled. “Get the hell out.”

  They moved frantically in a pack toward the outside but then stopped. Beale stood in the doorway, “You can’t go out that way,” he said. The house is sealed. Behind him I saw the creature and then I saw it walk straight into Beale and merge with him.