Highway to Hell

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

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  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Highway to Hell

  Vengeful Spirits, Book Two

  Val St. Crowe

  HIGHWAY TO HELL

  © copyright 2018 by Val St. Crowe

  http://vjchambers.com

  Punk Rawk Books

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  CHAPTER ONE

  “Honey, look,” said my mother as she puttered around in the kitchen in her motorhome, the same one that she’d driven around when I was a kid. The thing was at least twenty years old. It was amazing she kept it on the road. “Lord knows I wasn’t a perfect parent. Who is?”

  I was sitting at the table in the motorhome, toying with a cup of coffee that my mother had served me, and wondering why the hell I was even there at all. My mother was never going to admit a damned thing to me. She’d made that clear on the phone when we’d spoken. And yet, here I was, like a dumbass, sitting in my mother’s motorhome and listening to her run her mouth.

  Partly this was because I just… missed her. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with my mother over the past ten years, not voluntarily. A few forced meals here and there, occasional phone calls, that sort of thing. But I never came to see her to visit.

  She set down a plate of cookies in the middle of the table. “These go great with coffee. They’re made with almond flour. Did I tell you that I went gluten free?”

  “Mom, if you could just sit down so that we could talk?”

  “It’s made an enormous difference. You wouldn’t believe it. I think wheat is probably the devil.”

  I flinched. The devil, huh? Well, maybe that was what had possessed my mother and taken control of her body, hurting me for all those months back when I was ten years old. Wheat. Somehow, though, I didn’t think that was the end of it.

  “No one should be eating wheat,” said my mother. “Actually, I’m thinking about going grain free too. It’s only that’s so tough when you’re trying to eat out, and I sometimes have to do that for days on end.”

  “Mom.” I eyed her.

  She looked older than she did the last time I saw her. But that made sense. I had made it a point not to see her. The way I saw it, she’d abused me, and I needed to get away from her before she hurt me again. But I had recently found out that it hadn’t been my mother who had done those things to me. She’d been possessed by some entity. I didn’t know anything about the possessor, except his name. Negus. And that he wanted to suck me dry, which was kind of a thing that most spirits wanted to do to me.

  “Lord knows I wasn’t a perfect parent,” she repeated. “I mean, I left that necklace lying around and let you play with it while I was intoning something in another language, and it burrowed into your skin and turned you into… into… a ghost magnet.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” I said.

  “And I never forgave myself for that,” she said. “I can’t believe that I could have been so irresponsible as to allow that to happen to you.” She sat down at the table opposite me. “But, sweetheart, I didn’t know any of this was real.” She gestured around her head, mostly pointing to the curtains, which were striped pink and gray.

  I knew that she didn’t mean the curtains. She meant the supernatural. She had built her career on pretending to communicate with the dead. My mother was a fake medium. When she’d accidentally invoked some ancient talisman I’d been playing with, it had attached to me, and ever since, I’d been able to see ghosts.

  “If I’d had any inkling, I would have been so much more careful. And I’ve been trying, ever since that day, to fix you, but I’ve never found a way to do it yet. It hasn’t helped that you won’t let me help you. Anytime I find a spell or a ritual—”

  “You’re not a magician, Mom,” I said. She was just a bumbling fake psychic who did seances with a smoke machine. I didn’t trust her not to screw things up worse.

  “I know that,” she said. “But I got you into this mess. I want to get you out of it. At least you do try that oil I gave you, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s useful.” It allowed me to summon powerful spirits, which could absorb other spirits that were nagging me. Sometimes. It was kind of hit and miss. Also, it took a long out of me. Knocked me out for a whole day.

  “I’m glad.” She patted me on the shoulder.

  “But there’s more than that,” I said.

  “Deacon, please.” She threw up her hands. “I know that kids feel the need to blame their parents for everything. Lord knows, I spent years of my life being angry with your grandmother for not being perfect, until I finally realized that she had done the best she could. Lord knows that. But this idea that you have in your head, it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Mom, it’s not an idea. It happened. I guess you don’t remember for some reason.” But I didn’t know why that would be. I had been possessed once, and I had remembered everything that happened while it was going on. Maybe she’d simply blocked it out. Maybe it was too horrible for her to remember—being out of control of her body while some other being used it to bruise me and hurt me.

  “I would never raise a hand to you.”

  “It wasn’t you. I know that now,” I said. “Something took possession of you.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You thought ghosts were ridiculous, but they aren’t. Possession is real too.”

  “Like… what? Demons? Next you’ll be telling me that I can sell my soul to help make it so that you can’t see ghosts.”

  “No, not demons. I don’t know that they are. What he is. Mom, please, try to focus. Negus. Do you know that name?”

  “No,” she said. “That sounds like the name of some kind of rum punch I read about in a book once.” She got up from the table.

  “Well, he’s still after me.”

  “Who is?”

  “Negus. The spirit that possessed you.”

  She went over to the counter and refreshed her coffee cup with fresh coffee. “Here’s what I think must have happened. You were so upset by the ghosts back then, baby, and I was too. I wanted to make them go away for you, but I couldn’t. And I remember that you started having really bad nightmares about them. I don’t know if they were invading your dreams or if it was just so traumatic for you that you didn’t know what to do, but I think this all must have been a really bad dream you had. A dream so real that you thought—”

  “I did not dream months of my life. And I have scars to prove it.”

  “Oh, Lord, of course you have scars from being a kid. You were an active little boy. You
skinned your knees. You wrecked your bike. Do you remember that bike I found you at that rummage sale? We attached it to the back of the motorhome and took it with us everywhere. You loved that thing. You’d take off on it and ride off for hours on end—”

  “Yes, because after all this happened, I only wanted to get away from you,” I said. “I didn’t feel as though I could trust you. I thought you were going to snap at any time and turn back into that thing.” I’d had it backwards. I’d thought that my mother was really a monster who pretended to love me, when she had always loved me and a monster had taken her over. But because I didn’t trust my mother, I had run away from her around the age of sixteen, and I’d kept my distance ever since. It was only after this revelation that she had been possessed that I trusted her enough to try to rekindle a relationship with her. “Why do you think I ran away?”

  She turned back, stirring more cream into her coffee. “You were sixteen. You were rebellious. You didn’t want to live under my rules.”

  “Oh, come on, Mom. You know that—”

  “You were my little boy,” she said, “and we were close. And then you grew up, and we grew apart. And it hurt me, but I figured that was the way things usually went normally. I figured you’d be back, once you found a girl to settle down with, once you started to have your own kids. Are you having a kid? Is that why you’re back now?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not. This is about Negus and the possession. It’s not some kind of normal teenage rebellion I went through.”

  She bit down on her lip. “Oh, you’re always so serious about this stuff. I guess you really can’t let it go.”

  I sighed. “Can you admit that it happened, even if you don’t remember it? You had to have noticed that you lost nearly three months of your life, didn’t you?”

  Her lips parted.

  I waited.

  She sipped at her coffee. “When was this again, kiddo?”

  I snatched up a cookie. Forget it. We were getting nowhere here.

  There was a knock on the door of her motorhome.

  She straightened. “Who could that be? I’m not expecting anyone until tomorrow.” She set down her coffee and went over to open the door. “Hello?”

  “Cora Garrison?” said a male voice from outside the door.

  “Yes?” said my mother, sounding confused.

  “It’s me, Oscar Milton.”

  “Oh, Oscar!” said my mother in recognition. “Come in. You’re early.”

  “I usually like to get to a location a little early to scope everything out. If I can find the center of the haunting, it makes for a better podcast overall. I can sometimes pick up some amazing sounds before everyone arrives. Truly eerie stuff.” A man climbed into the motorhome’s interior. He was older, maybe my mother’s age. He had a straggly goatee, streaked with gray. He was wearing ball cap on his head, and no hair was peeking out of the front, which probably meant he was trying to disguise a bald spot. And I wasn’t sure what the hell he was talking about, because the truth was that ghosts didn’t show up on recordings. Not video, not sound recordings. So, sounded to me like this guy was another hoax creator, just like my mother.

  “Oh, how fabulous,” said my mother. “Well, maybe we can eat together this evening, then. This is my son, Deacon.”

  “Deacon, how nice to meet you.” Oscar came for me, hand outstretched.

  I didn’t get up, making for an awkward hand shake. I didn’t want this guy here, interrupting the very important conversation that I’d been having with my mother.

  “Are you going to be helping out?” said Oscar.

  “Me?” I said.

  “Oh, you should,” said my mother. “At least stay. This is a genuinely haunted location. Lots of energy. Maybe we’ll find something here that had help to fix your, er, condition, sweetheart.”

  “What’s his condition?” said Oscar.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Deacon is sensitive to the supernatural,” said my mother.

  Oscar raised his eyebrows. “Really? What an amazing gift that must be.”

  I rolled my eyes and went back to the cookies. They were actually really good.

  “It’s honestly a bit of a burden for him,” said my mother. “I think he’d do anything to be rid of it. It keeps him from getting close to others.”

  “Mom.” I glared at her. Would it kill her not to share my personal stuff with complete strangers?

  “That’s so true,” said Oscar. “Those who are given such gifts are rarely prepared. Sort of the sick sense of humor of the universe. Now, if either you or I had been sensitive, we could have put that to good use.”

  My mother nodded. “Indeed.”

  I had to say, to my mother’s credit, she had never once attempted to cash in on my abilities. It would have been easy for her. There she was, sitting in the tent she sent up in each town, fawning over her crystal ball and pretending to hear the voice of dear old departed Uncle Bill. But she never asked me if I could actually speak to Uncle Bill.

  Probably because she knew real spirits might not stick to the script the way she needed them to. People paid her money to hear certain kinds of things. They wanted to believe their loved ones were happy and at peace. They wanted to be told that they could move on and let go of the past. They wanted to be told that their pain would fade and that they would find happiness again someday. She sold them what they wanted to hear. Real ghosts were immaterial.

  “But Deacon isn’t interested in capitalizing on his gifts,” she said. “He’s made that very clear.” She laughed. “Not going to follow along in the family business.” She winked at me.

  “Listen, Mom, I’m not really interested in… whatever it is you’re doing.” I swept one hand in a wide arc to encompass the cookies and the table and the motorhome and all the surroundings. I got up. “I guess if you’re busy with, uh, Oscar here, then I’ll be on my way.”

  “No!” My mother was across the room in seconds, grasping both my hands. She looked imploringly into my eyes. “Don’t leave yet. You just got here.”

  I couldn’t handle the nakedness of her expression. I looked away, but I didn’t pull my hands away. It was funny, how strangely nice it was to have my mother touching me again, after all this time when I’d avoided being close to her.

  “Stay, Deacon,” she murmured.

  “I can be on my way,” said Oscar. “I’ve got some exploring to do.”

  I looked down at the place where our hands were joined, and then I slowly pulled my hands away from hers. “If you’re busy, and you don’t really have time to talk, then there’s not much point, Mom.” Or, if she was in denial about everything, then that was about the same thing too. She couldn’t help me.

  I might sort of have my mother back, but it all came to the same thing in the end. I was on my own.

  I moved across the room toward the door. “I’ll walk you out, Oscar.”

  “Deacon, wait,” said my mother, coming after me.

  I didn’t. I went out of the motorhome, into the vaguely autumnal September air outside. (It was in the seventies that day, sunny and pleasant. Couldn’t ask for a nicer day, really.)

  My mother came after me and Oscar brought up the rear.

  Once I was outside of the motorhome, I could see my camper—a 1965 Airstream Ambassador trailer. It gleamed silver in the sunlight. And beyond that I could see the outlines of the abandoned amusement park Point Oakes, that my mother was here to visit.

  I didn’t understand any of that.

  I peered at the tangle of vine-covered ancient roller coaster track and ancient Ferris wheel against the horizon. A sudden feeling of quiet came over me. It was a deep silence, as if everything had completely cut off—no animals, no insects, no cars in the distance.

  And then…

  A rustling noise from within that place. It was soft, but I heard it anyway. The amusement park whispered to me.

  Negus.

  I licked my lips.

  So, the way I’
d found out about Negus was that a crazed ghost had told me about him. That particular ghost had once been David Mosely, a mass murderer—or it had been part of him, anyway. I wasn’t really sure how it all worked. Often times, ghosts didn’t seem to be as fully rounded as a real person. They seemed to be obsessed with one thing—getting a message across, doing the same action over and over, replaying one afternoon of their lives. I wasn’t sure if a ghost was all of a dead person, or just a sliver of one.

  Or if ghosts weren’t something else. After all, they sometimes changed form around me, shifting in and out of various personas, even taking on the form of my own mother, who wasn’t even dead.

  I didn’t understand any of it, not truly. I was working my way through it as best as I could.

  Anyway, if this ghost had told me about Negus, and the ghost didn’t seem related to what had happened to me at all, it stood to reason that some other, unrelated ghost might know more. My mother didn’t seem to know anything.

  I needed to know.

  I turned back to my mother. “Uh, what is it exactly that you’re doing here?”

  “There’s a brother and sister,” said my mother. “Nice kids. Well, they’re in their twenties, around your age. Not little kids, but still young. They lost their older sister in this place.” She gestured at the amusement park. “People tend to disappear in here, after all.”

  I looked back at the rundown roller coaster and I could hear the rustling whisper again, but this time, it didn’t form words. I shivered, feeling suddenly cold.

  “They want to know what happened to her,” said my mother. “They want closure.”

  “I’ve actually been following their story for a while now,” said Oscar. “I do podcasts about supernatural incidents.”

  “Podcasts,” I repeated.

  “That’s right,” said Oscar, grinning. “It’s really exciting, let me tell you. Anyway, at first, it was just going to be the three of us. The two of them and me. But then they decided that they’d do better with a medium along.”

  I raised my eyebrows at my mother.

  “I was happy to help, of course,” my mom said.