CHAPTER FORTY ONE

Redmond dumped the cruiser half on the curb outside Ghostlight Books and Ella was out before the engine had cut. She didn't bother checking for traffic, because any car dumb enough to get in her way tonight would be wearing their bumper like a hood ornament. Her shoulder met the entrance to the bookstore a second later, and the thing ripped clean off its frame.

‘Police!' she screamed. ‘Luca! Where are you?'

The store had the aura of a tomb. Ella moved fast through the darkness, trying to put herself in her partner's head. She still had no idea how he'd found this place on his own, but that was a question for later. Redmond piled in behind her, one hand on his piece, the other pawing for a flashlight.

She hit the back wall. ‘Hawkins! You in here?' Hush folded around her words. If Luca was in this shop, he wasn't in any condition to answer.

Redmond pushed past her, wormed his way behind the counter. ‘Dark! Blood. And…'

Ella sprinted over and saw it. A slick patch of crimson gleaming black in the torchlight.

And right beside them, a familiar glint of tech – Luca's cell phone.

‘Shit! Our guy figured we could track it.'

‘Damn snake,' Redmond said. She snatched up the phone, swiped to unlock, but the screen stayed stubbornly black.

But then Ella's gaze fell to the papers stacked beside a splatter of arterial spray. The words Ghost Writings stared up at her in handwritten scrawl.

‘The hell is this?'

Ella grabbed the stack and flipped through the pages. To be published upon my death, the second page read. Then came the stories.

The Cursed Teddy Bear Of Yamhill County.

The Glass-Eyed Woman.

The Hanged Man's Lament.

The Heartless Phantom.

And the pictures. All four victims. The dead bodies of Gregory Van Allen, Natasha Langston, Benjamin Clarke and Amanda Krafton. These snapshots hadn't come from any newspapers – the compositions were too perfect, the angles too intimate. Whoever had taken these had been up close and personal with the recently deceased.

Ella stared at Redmond. The static image finally came into view. It was all here, in black and white. This explained the constant shift in ritual, the reason the killer had claimed that haunted houses weren't real.

He was creating his own urban legends with real bodies and real blood. He was sewing the seed for future ghost stories. These haunted houses were simply gratuitous affronts for the real thing. Ella sped-read the stories again, picking out key phrases, little linguistic tells. Spurned lover, driven mad by heartbreak. Tear into your chest, rip out your still-beating heart. Fragments of truth cloaked in lurid prose.

But it was the last page that stopped Ella cold. A page she'd missed, her hindbrain having stopped at the fourth in line with the victim count. The last page was a loose sheaf with no photos glued to it. Just a few sparse paragraphs written in that same cramped, fervent hand.

The Boy Who Cried Ghost.

No one believed him. The child on the farm with the dark circles under his eyes and the shaking hands. Always whispering to his teddy bear, always jumping at shadows. Swearing up and down that specters stalked the night, that disembodied voices whispered secrets through the walls.

They told him he was crazy. Told him to shut up with that fool talk before they shut him up themselves. But the boy knew the truth. He'd seen them, heard them. Felt their cold and clammy touch in the night.

The ghosts of the farm. Piggy eyes gleaming in the dark. Pale faces pressed against the glass. And the bear, always the bear. Watching. Waiting.

He tried to tell them. Tried to make them see. But grown-ups don't believe in ghosts. Don't believe in monsters under the bed or boogeymen in the closet. So they shut him away, called him broken. Gave him pills to make him docile, to muffle the screams.

But you can't medicate the truth away. And the boy never forgot. He held onto that hurt, let it fester and rot. Whispered to it like a prayer every night as the ghosts circled ever closer.

One day, he vowed, he'd make them all see. One day he'd give a face to his nightmares, make his tormentors known. And when that day came, when he'd birthed a thousand terrors with his own two hands...

He'd march back into the dark. Back to where it all began. And he'd become the very thing that haunted him.

Ella lowered the page with numb fingers. Her breath dragged like razorblades up her windpipe.

A deranged man haunted by visions only he could see. Driven half-mad by night terrors and a world that refused to believe. It fit the profile to a tee - the narcissism, the God complex. Cassius didn't just want to scare people. He wanted to become fear itself.

‘Sheriff, Cassius is going to kill himself tonight.'

Redmond shone his flashlight around the room. ‘So why take Hawkins?'

‘I don't know. But something tells me he wants to take Luca with him.'

‘Dark, look.' Redmond shone his light up a staircase that led to another floor. ‘Could be where our guy lives.'

Ella shot up three steps at a time. ‘Find this guy's name,' she called back to Redmond.

‘You go left, I'll go right.'

The second floor stretched before her – a dim hallway flanked by three doors and a few black and white photos on the walls. Killer's living quarters. Something in here had to reveal what his name was and where he was headed.

She turned the knob on the first door, and it swung inward. A bedroom. Spartan, almost monkish in its austerity. A narrow cot hugged one wall, with its sheets pulled taut enough to choke someone. A single dresser squatted in the corner, bare save for a few neatly folded shirts. Nothing to suggest a life beyond these walls.

Ella moved on. The next door revealed an office. An antique roll-top desk hulked in the center of the room, its surface buried under a drift of papers. Bookshelves lined the walls, crammed with tomes that had never seen a bestseller list. Titles leaped out at her – The Malleus Maleficarum. The Necronomicon. The Black Pullet.

She rifled through the papers on the desk, speed-reading like her life depended on it. More of the same - journal entries, half-finished manuscripts, all in that same spidery hand. A whole scrapbook of insanity.

Only one room remained. A bathroom tiled in an institutional green. Redmond was rifling through an old wooden drawer beside an antique bath. ‘Please say you've got something,' she said.

‘Jack,' Redmond snapped. He rushed out into the hallway with his hands on his hips.

Ella spun. The only thing in this place that might conceal a secret was the medicine cabinet. She hauled it open and found herself staring at the usual suspects; toothpaste, razor, creams.

And a few amber pill bottles.

She plucked one out and squinted to make out the label. Whatever this guy was dosing himself with, it wasn't chewing gum.

The drug had a name that looked familiar but she still couldn't pronounce – Enzalutamide. A quick dig into her memory bank pulled up the secure knowledge that Enzalutamide was used to treat prostate cancer.

Shit. This unsub was on his way out. Terminal C ticket to the boneyard. Suddenly, his twisted little memoir made a lot more sense. This was his trigger, his stressor.

The name. Check the goddamn name.

She flipped the bottle, scanned the label. There, printed in smudged block letters:

MR. MARROW, VINCENT – Enzalutamide 40mg. Take 4 capsules daily.

'Got you! Vincent Marrow!' She held the bottle aloft like a trophy, then ran out to meet Sheriff Redmond in the hallway. 'Sheriff, you hear me? Got his name. Let's find him.'

Redmond turned to her. He looked like he'd just watched his own autopsy.

Ella waved the pill bottle under his nose. ‘Vincent Marrow. You ever come across that name?'

But Redmond was busy staring into the middle distance, his hangdog face gone slack and pale.

Ella snapped her fingers in front of his nose. ‘Redmond. Hey. You with me?'

He blinked slowly. ‘We're too late.'

‘What? Too late for what?'

Redmond shook his head. ‘It's been right in front of us the whole damn time. I can't believe I missed it.'

Ella fought the urge to grab him by his rumpled lapels and shake until candy fell out. She didn't have time for this cryptic crap.

‘What the f….? Sheriff, hurry up. What's going on?'

‘There's... Jesus, there's another haunt.' Redmond clutched his gut like he'd just taken a bullet. ‘One off the books. I forgot all about the damn place 'til just now. ‘Til you mentioned that name.'

The world tilted on its axis. Ella grabbed the door jamb for support, new sweat slicking her palms. ‘Another haunted house? One you forgot to mention?'

Redmond nodded miserably. He looked like he wanted the floor to swallow him whole. ‘It's been shut for years, decades! How was I supposed to know?'

‘Son of a bitch! You forgot? You forgot the one place this fuckhead would run to?'

‘I didn't know it was still standing! Marrow Farm. About twenty klicks away from here. Owner tried turning it into some scare house decades back, but it got shut down for being…'

Ella raised a hand. A memory surfaced. One of Carter's inane video titles flashed in Ella's mind like a neon sign:

MARROW FARM - ABANDONED HAUNTED HOUSE, CLOSED DOWN FOR BEING TOO SCARY??

‘Marrow Farm,' Ella said. Her head snapped to the left and she found herself staring at a faded photograph hung crooked on the wall. A towheaded boy, no more than eight, standing rigid before a weather-beaten sign.

MARROW FARM. EST 1897.

The fragmented tale clicked into focus, one bloody slide at a time. Vincent Marrow, farm boy. A troubled kid, plagued by visions no one else could see. So he grew up twisted, desperate to make the world believe. And what better way than to turn people into his own personal ghost stories? Craft a legend so visceral that no one could deny it?

She asked, ‘You remember where it is?'

Redmond pulled out his car keys. ‘We can be there in fifteen minutes.'

And then they were down the stairs, out of the bookshop and back in the car.

Somewhere in the darkness, a killer waited. Ella's only comforting thought was that Luca wasn't a squealer, he was a fighter. Maybe there was still time, maybe Luca wasn't…

No. Ella couldn't finish the thought. Speaking the possibility aloud, even in her own head, would make it real.

Time to go. Time to meet Vincent Marrow and show him how a real ghost story ended.