Again, Julie’s assessment was right on. Gabriel decided that she might not be so bad a partner.
As they strolled through the late afternoon, Lonetree was surprised to see that Gabriel’s attitude and demeanor had changed over from night to day. It was as if he had come home to a welcoming reunion with a long lost family member. It wasn’t only in the way he looked, but the way he carried himself, as if the horror of seven years ago never happened. It was as if he hadn’t recounted to him and the others the nightmare of Kyle Pritchard’s death in a town not an hour and a half away, or the dead animals he and Julie saw on the road in a spot that coincided with an area they had broken-down the night before.
John waited for Gabe to catch up with he and Jenny, and then intentionally slowed his pace until they were shoulder to shoulder. He would not only see how Gabe reacted, but he also wanted to gauge the others as well.
“Since we’ve been on property, Gabe, have you felt it?”
Gabriel looked up at his old friend with a curious look on his face. The others heard the question and listened in, which was exactly what John wanted. He would judge each, especially Kelly Delaphoy, by their reactions to his upcoming statement.
Gabriel didn’t answer right off. He stopped and tilted his head, as if trying to detect something he might have missed.
“You know what I mean,” John said. “Without actually going inside the house. It’s changed, hasn’t it?”
Gabriel turned and looked up at the massive summer home, watching as a light breeze blew the curtains in the third floor windows. Eunice must have been by and opened the windows to air the house out for the big night, he thought.
“It’s not oppressive to you, is it?” John persisted.
“What do you mean?” Kelly asked.
“I mean, for at least the moment, Summer Place is just a bunch of wood and stone,” John answered as he turned to face Kelly. “Does that worry you at all, Ms. Delaphoy?”
“Why do you say that,” Julie Reilly asked, eyeing the concerned look on Kelly’s face.
“Whatever was in there,” he faced Gabriel once more, “and I do believe your story, is gone.”
“Goddamn it!” Kelly said loudly. “I knew that son of a bitch was here to fuck this show up!”
Gabriel wanted to laugh at Kelly’s terror. The others saw his reaction to John’s statement and probably wondered why he would take John’s feeling so lightly.
“You’re right, whatever is in the house, or walking these grounds, isn’t active right now.” He faced Kelly. “And if it doesn’t choose to display its abilities tomorrow night, that’s just what your show is going to report. Is that clear, Ms. Delaphoy? If you try to fake something and we catch it, we’ll humiliate you. If there is one person in the world who can smoke out a rat, it’s my friend Leonard. Don’t try it.”
Kelly closed her eyes and mentally made herself not react to Kennedy’s statement. Instead she turned on her heel and went up the small incline to the large production tent.
“Jesus, I think you just scared her more than Summer Place ever could,” Jennifer said as she watched Kelly leave.
Gabriel smiled. “I don’t know about you guys, but I could use a drink. Miss ace reporter, may I assume your people brought the makings of a martini?”
“Oh, I think we can dig something up. If not we’ll break into the ballroom and steal some of Lindemann’s private stock.”
On the way up the hill, Gabriel looked over at the tree line and wondered if anyone had seen what he had. When he locked eyes with Julie Reilly, who was trying hard not to show Gabriel’s hole card, he knew she had seen them also.
Fifteen feet inside the tree line, beneath one of the large and ancient pine trees, Gabriel had counted over twenty dead birds and three dead squirrels.
Summer Place was very much alive, he thought. Alive and waiting for its time.
George Cordero sat in the backseat of the cab as it slowly made its way along the Van Wyck Expressway in bumper to bumper traffic. The turnoff for JFK airport was nowhere in sight. The cab driver looked in his rearview mirror and saw that the dark eyed man hadn’t moved since he had been picked up in front of the Waldorf Astoria an hour before.
The driver reached over and switched on his radio.
“This is the top of the hour news from KWBW, John Stannic reporting. All is going well for one of the strangest television events to be launched in many years over at the UBC television network, as their highly anticipated Hunters of the Paranormal Halloween special is set to go off with wide spread fanfare tomorrow night from the Pocono Mountains. While the outlook is bright for record-setting numbers of viewers to tune into the extended programming, many stockholders are furious over the cost of the program itself. They say that Abraham Feuerstein, CEO of the parent company, has overstepped his bounds in the expensive endeavor. Meanwhile, here in New York, many residents are anticipating a glorious night for all Trick or Treaters and partygoers. Expect some of the nicest evening weather of the year, mild and almost balmy all the way from Washington, D.C. to the Maine border…”
George listened to the news report, thinking about the friend he had left high and dry. He knew he had let Gabriel down. Now he only had John Lonetree as a visionist, and he would only be good if he was asleep. That could be very dangerous, potentially leaving Lonetree vulnerable at the worst possible moment.
“Running away, George?”
Cordero’s eyes widened. His father was sitting next to him, eating a Nathan’s hotdog and looking straight out through the screen separating the driver from his backseat passengers. His father looked over at him and took a bite of the hotdog, and George watched as the food went through his mouth and into a throat that wasn’t really there. In the time since his father had been buried in New Jersey, his features had more than just deteriorated; they had rotted away to the point where the only thing holding him together was the suit he was wearing. George fixated on the piece of hotdog and bun that rolled from his throat to rest on the seat between them.
“You wouldn’t know a thing about it, outside of the coward part of the equation, you bastard.”
The cab driver looked up and into his rearview mirror.
“You’re so fucking high and mighty, you’re leaving your friends and running away when they need you the most,” his father said. He looked over the hotdog and tossed it on the floor. That was the move George had been waiting for — it confirmed that it wasn’t his father he was seeing, but a manifestation of himself. When he was a kid his father took him to Coney Island on several occasions and they always stopped for hotdogs at Nathan’s. George always refused to eat his, no matter how many times his father thrust the dog into his face. He just never could stomach hotdogs. Now he knew the ghost wasn’t his father at all, but his conscience coming out in the shape and rotting features of his murderous dad.
“All that time your mother was dying of cancer, you never once saw the pain. Oh, you heard it, you saw the tears, but you never in your life would have thought about ending it for her. You waited until I did it.” His father turned and faced him, his cheekbones sticking through blackened and moldy skin. One eye was completely gone and the other had the lid hanging over it. The black hair was how he remembered it, but everything else was a rotten meat sack. “Ah, you knew what I was planning. You can’t be that close to another person and not feel the hate, the desire to kill. She was holding us back from making a fortune with your ability.” His father laughed. “You knew, and did nothing, because deep down inside you were a coward, George. You always were. You wanted to be free of her as much as I, oh for different reasons to be sure, but free nonetheless. So you allowed me to do the dirty work and then acted shocked when you touched me that day. You scum, you hypocrite.”