Only the Good Die Young

9

It took me a few hours to recover.

I mean, damn, how do you ever come to terms with the fact that you’d once starred in your own horror movie? That there’d been an ax-wielding maniac in the woods and you’d been one of the stupid dime-a-dozen, dead-meat kids who usually get picked off one by one with low-budget special effects?

I didn’t know what I’d expected my killer to be like. Just a regular old Joe wandering through Elfin Forest with an itch to murder? Just a jealous ex-boyfriend who’d seized the chance to get me alone and take some blood-ridden revenge, à la Gavin Edgett and Elizabeth Dalton?

I also wondered why my own personal Jason Voorhees hadn’t gone after the kids I’d been with, too. Had something scared the killer away and saved them? Or had he been stalking me and me alone, and once his mission was accomplished, he was done? Also, if my killer had gotten me with an ax, why wasn’t there any blood at my death spot?

After I traveled from the forest and back to the casita, I soothed myself with the computer, doing a search for everything I could find out about serial killers, especially when it came to psychology. But there was so much to cover. Too much.

And the distraction wasn’t keeping away the willies.

I just kept hearing Amanda Lee’s frantic voice when she’d pulled me out of the vision.

“Jensen, you come back to me! Don’t leave me!”

Her pleas had worked because, with that familiar backward sucking sensation, I was yanked out of the vision, returned to the world, Amanda Lee coming into focus second by confusing second.

“Jensen?” she asked, still panicked while reaching out to me.

I dodged her hand. She didn’t like to get cold, and that’s what she would be if she made contact with me. For some demented reason, that fact was first and foremost in my mind during the fuzzy aftermath.

As if remembering my coldness, she backed off. But her voice didn’t calm down.

“You’re so gray right now,” she said. “Just like you were when I first met you.”

As I checked out my essence—definitely no color here—she’d gone on to tell me that my pallor had been going grayer and grayer while we were sharing her vision, and she’d been afraid that I was about to return to my residual haunting phase.

So what was the lesson here? That I shouldn’t be partaking in any more of Amanda Lee’s murder visions. But the ramifications of what’d happened today in Elfin Forest extended even beyond that.

Was this what would happen to me if I scared myself to death with a hallucination during a haunting? Should I be taking Amanda Lee’s psychic vision as a warning for how much terror I could tolerate?

Those were the questions dogging me during my serial killer research, so I finally broke it off and did the next best thing.

I went outside and restlessly hopped into a travel tunnel, already leaving my killer in a “to be continued” mental file. Seriously, since the ax and the old granny mask had added about five hundred notches of creep to my story, the only thing that made me feel better about it was putting it at a distance for the rest of the day.

I told myself it’d been another girl in that vision today, a different Jensen Murphy.

It hadn’t been me. Couldn’t have been.

And I kept telling myself that as I surged to my next destination on the Jensen Justice Tour, popping into the atmosphere right across the street from the shorefront building that housed Gavin Edgett’s gaming company.

I was invisible to the tourists who trooped by on the village sidewalk, some looking for the Hard Rock Café, which I guess used to be in the building I was pseudo-leaning against. They were only background noise, though, because I had to decide, here and now, if scaring myself back into a time loop was going to be worth catching killers.

But would I even know that I’d returned to that numb state? Would I even care, just as long as people like Gavin Edgett made a confession that led to punishment?

My killer’s granny mask flashed before me again. So did the glint of that ax blade.

And it was there, on the sidewalk, facing the windows of Gavin’s building as the sun threatened to dip below the ocean, that I decided that no amount of danger was going to stop me, ever.

In for a penny, in for a pound of flesh.

As I surveyed the two-story structure, I knew what I had to do now—restrict myself to only playing full-on detective with Gavin today, using my empathy to get into his head so I could be sure of his guilt and then get to the real haunting stuff.

Since the clock hadn’t struck five yet, I’d been betting that he was still inside his office, so I rose above the heads of a family dressed in tropical shirts, shorts, and flip-flops, then floated over the traffic toward the building.

It was easy enough to get inside, because I just followed a punky-looking girl with dreadlocked hair through the door, then the lobby. I took a detour up some stairs and through a quiet white hallway. When I got to a place marked ON EDGE PRODUCTIONS, I breezed inside.

Way busier in here. I navigated what seemed like a maze of modern-art-like pale walls that slanted away from the main hall, then cubicles where workers—mostly nerdy guys—were chatting away and having a grand old time while others wore headsets and played games on their computers.

All around, there were cardboard cutouts of characters that probably starred in the games On Edge Productions made, and the same characters were framed on the walls. Some of them even looked like the ones in Wendy’s room.

I flattened myself against the ceiling, flowing along at a crawl as employees strolled below me. I swung down to glance in every open office door I passed.

No Gavin anywhere.

When I got to the only closed door, near the corner of the building—a place for a boss to have an office—I took a chance and slid underneath.

And there he was. The boss.

He wasn’t working behind his computer-cluttered desk, though. He wasn’t even staring out the window at the palm-studded street below and seemingly dreaming up all those blood and blades featured in his video games.

The big guy was fast asleep on a couch, one hand hanging off it until his blunt fingers almost brushed the floor.

Was he catching up on the sleep he’d lost last night, during the haunting?

Electricity beat through me, and I tried not to think about how it would feel to whoosh by him, trailing my hand over his short brown hair. I tried not to look at him up close, noticing the thickness of his lashes against his otherwise hard features.

But I did both anyway, flying over him, then hovering.

What’s going on in your head? I wondered, face-to-face, now that I could get away with it. What was the trigger that made you kill Elizabeth, if you really did it?

I braced myself—make it subtle, Jen—then touched his cheek, thinking what a shame it was that a killer had to be this brutally handsome.

But maybe that had been his best weapon, just like Ted Bundy.

Something like anger boiled in me—anger at him, at anyone who’d take a knife or an ax to another person—and before I knew it, I was pressing harder on his cheek than I intended.

Beyond an empathetic touch and into hallucination territory.

Without warning, I got sucked into him, turning, flailing, flying, then landing in what seemed to be a blank space.

Why did I keep ending up in these situations?

God.

Then I realized that I could still feel me in this new place. This wasn’t like the hallucination I’d shared with Wendy, when the beach had come into her room, thanks to my efforts.

I was in complete control as Jensen right now. And I was still floating in complete blackness inside Gavin’s psyche.

If this wasn’t a hallucination, then what was it? Definitely not the more superficial thought-empathy.

I heard a warped knocking sound to my right. Slow motion, drawn out, unclear.

This was more like… a dream?

Gavin’s dream?

Shit. Did it make a difference if the hauntee was asleep or awake when I went into him? Drunken Sailor Randy hadn’t gotten around to that explanation, either, but it sure looked like I’d become a part of Gavin’s psyche in a different way than how hallucinations or empathy worked.

I was deeper inside his head because he was totally unguarded in sleep.

Well, since I was here, I had to go for it, right? Actually, this was pretty awesome, when it came right down to it. How many detectives had opportunities like this to investigate their subjects?

A faint outline was gradually appearing where that knocking was coming from, and the sight resembled a door with a light on behind it.

But the light was… blurred. Smudgy.

Another draggy knock sounded on it.

In what seemed like slow motion, I went over and reached out to open the door, but as I looked down, the soft light showed me something I hadn’t expected.

I had a hand.

Even though fear struck me—was I actually in another part of the star place? Was fake Dean the one knocking?—I went ahead and opened that door, letting in a flood of blinding light.

It washed over me, and girding myself, I walked through it.

Once I was on the other side, the light drew back, revealing the most fucked-up thing I’d ever experienced, even as a ghost.

Everything was in slow motion, from the walls that moved upward like golden waves, to the sky that rolled with contained fire. And in that sky were things that made no sense whatsoever—a Victorian-looking air machine that was being piloted by a little dark-haired girl in goggles and a leather jacket. A big black bird winging just above the machine, casting a shadow over it.

Before I could even say, “Huh?” something more surreal reared up on my left.

A dragon rising out of the water wall, bellowing.

Just get out of here, I thought, but my brain and my body seemed to have been reduced to the same twisted lack of speed that was affecting this entire dream room.

Then I saw the worst part of all—the dragon had the face of an older man but sort of crushed, unrecognizable.

I absorbed that just before the thing plunged back into the moving ocean wall.

If the star place was almost heaven, this was almost hell, with brimstone and a sky of fire.

At least I had the presence of mind to glance down at myself, just to make sure I hadn’t turned into something strange, too.

But I was me. With a body.

Just like in the star place.

What was the connection here? I didn’t get it. I didn’t have the brainpower right now… .

It took me a few moments to realize that I wasn’t alone, either. Someone… something… was behind me.

Fake Dean?

As in a dream, it felt like forever and a day had passed by as I turned around to see who it was.

When I spied Gavin Edgett, with his startling blue eyes, short brown hair, and accusing expression, I wasn’t sure if he was better or worse than fake Dean.

“What are you doing in here?” Dream Gavin asked, his words stretched, echoing like a god’s.

It was like he couldn’t give a crap about the chaos going on around him. I was the big problem.

I searched for an answer, but came up empty.

In dream time, his hand reached out, then rested on my shoulder. A flood of sparks burned me, and I bit down on any response I might’ve had.

“You’re… real,” he said.

Above us, in the flaming sky, the air machine sputtered. When I pulled my gaze up to it, the little girl pilot was peering down at us, her long, dark hair trailing out from under her leather helmet, a worshipful expression on her goggle-hidden face as she lavished a look on Gavin.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked, my words dragging together as I finally backed away from his hand. I didn’t want him touching me.

He ignored the dragon as it resurfaced again behind him, then dove underwater.

“It’s a game.” He kept watching me, his gaze so intense that I thought he could see everything about me.

Something in my chest clenched.

“A game,” I repeated. Then I understood. “Your game?”

Was this the project he’d been working on when he was falling asleep? Flying machines… big ugly birds… dragons with human faces?

Where were the blood and blades from his other games?

Just as the question faded in my mind, the dragon thrust itself out of the water wall again, but it was going for the sky this time.

Its neck was so endlessly long that the monster’s teeth would be able to crunch down on the air machine that the little girl was flying.

Just as I started to slow-scream for her to watch out, I felt Gavin covering my eyes with his rough-skinned hand, like he didn’t want me to see.

I heard the sound of steel being unsheathed.

Then, in a flash of black, we were someplace else.

A room stacked with books on heaven-high shelves, but one wall was missing, and it opened to the lagoon-shaped pool just outside the Edgetts’ mansion.

Gavin was sitting across from me in the same chair he’d been seated in last night, both feet planted on the carpet as his hands clutched the armrests. Blood from his fingers trailed down the creamy leather, and he had a pearl-handled gun on his lap.

Now he talked in normal time, his voice deep and a little raspy as he checked me out.

“You’re so familiar,” he whispered. “Have I seen you before?”

Along with his speech, my thoughts were up to speed, too. So was my heartbeat.

Was he talking about last night, when I might’ve accidentally appeared to him during the haunting? Had he seen me then?

But this was a dream, and nothing made sense. Why should he?

“You just saw me in that other room,” I said. “Remember?”

The way he was staring me down made me shift, and I realized that I was perched on the edge of a desk in the study that I’d visited during a tour of the mansion. One of my legs was crossed over the other, and I had my hands braced on the edges.

He slowly leaned forward, too, and I felt locked in his sights.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Outside, the pool water splashed, like someone was swimming. From the open wall, I could see gentle waves lapping out of the pool and against the concrete.

“I’m just a figment of your imagination,” I said.

Then I had an idea.

Could I make even better use of my time in his dreamland? Could I actually plant a seed in his subconscious—if that’s where we were—for all the odd things he would be experiencing about Elizabeth while I drove him to a confession?

Hell, I’d just seen Inception on HBO about a week ago. It’d sure worked there.

He rested his forearms on his thighs and stared me down with those pale blue eyes. They were such a deep, dream-enhanced extra-blue that I had to tell myself not to fall in.

Then he stood, coming toward me with a deliberation that made my stomach flip. The gun had disappeared from his lap.

“I know you,” he said.

Outside, it sounded like someone was getting out of the pool, water smacking concrete.

Gavin got close enough to me so I could hear him breathing, even in a dreamland. And every breath made my dream heart beat louder.

Danger, I thought. But that didn’t make me back away from him.

Just as he was opening his mouth to say something else, someone entered through the empty wall.

“Gavin?”

A light, bright voice. A woman.

And as he turned around, I saw that Elizabeth Dalton was standing there in a one-piece white bathing suit that would’ve been right at home in the ’fifties, when movie stars still shone with glamour and mystery.

Her short, wet blond hair was slicked back, her mouth lipstick red as she held a towel in one hand.

As Gavin began walking toward her, he fisted his hands at his sides, his body stiff.

Then Elizabeth disappeared into thin air, her towel dropping to the carpet.

But instead of a towel, it was a fashionable white scarf, lying prone on the floor like a corpse. And now…

Now there was blood all over it.

In slow motion—yeah, it was back, slower and more terrible than ever—Gavin turned to me.

He was wearing a mask.

Just like my killer had, but this one was different.

Before the details settled into my brain, horror screamed through me, and I shut my eyes.

Out. Out now!

With a rushed yank backward, I flew out of him, violently popping into the world again, back to where I was before.

In his office.

But this time I was on what I had for an ass, spread over the floor in front of his couch.

My essence quaked. I wasn’t a body anymore. Everything was back to ghost-normal, and he was still sleeping, although now he’d changed position, clearly restless, riddled with what had to be a nightmare.

I took a moment, just in case his subconscious was playing a trick on me and I was actually still in his dream. Horror movies always finished that way, with a shock ending that you don’t expect, just like Halloween, where Michael Meyers isn’t really dead.

When nothing happened, I relaxed. What the hell had everything meant in that dream, anyway?

Dragons. Air machines. A video game in action.

Elizabeth.

But what haunted me the most was Gavin’s face as he was turning around during those last moments.

Now that I was safe, my brain let me see what I’d blocked out as I’d exited the dream, allowing me to realize that his mask had been made of clear plastic, eerily dulling his features.

And emphasizing the trails of bloody tears running down his cheeks.