Ghost Stories Read online

  When they reached the manager’s office, the door was boarded up, as was the only window, and it appeared as though they’d been that way for quite some time. It wasn’t much of a surprise. Every window and door on the property was boarded up; it was as if someone had prepared for a hurricane and never bothered coming back.

  That’s why, when they finally reached the single payphone, Adam was not going to be disappointed if it didn’t work.

  “Well?” Renee asked as she looked up at Adam, who held the receiver of the old phone to his ear.

  He hated to disappoint her but there was no way he could lie to her and he shook his head.

  “I didn’t think it would…” she admitted then tilted her head back as if to look up at the bright sky, though her green eyes were closed, “…but I was hoping.”

  “I know you were. And that doesn’t mean that we won’t find something eventually,” he eased.

  She looked over at him with a smile. “I know,” she said with amusement in her tone. “Come on, let’s keep going.”

  Adam followed Renee as they headed back to the hole in the fence, though they didn’t quite make it before something caught Adam’s eye. It wasn’t much, but then it rarely was where he was concerned. His observational skills were something that got him noticed in his precinct and what had him earning his detective’s badge at such a young age.

  “What is it?” Renee asked when she noticed that he was walking in a different direction.

  “I just want to take a quick look.”

  Renee rolled her eyes, but instead of arguing she followed.

  It wasn’t that anything truly out of the ordinary caught Adam’s eye, but he was intrigued by the graffiti on a board covering a door that led to one of the rooms. Where most graffiti displayed an identification tag or a message, all that the graffiti on the door of the cabin with a cockeyed “6” to the side of it displayed were the letters “R&M RIP”.

  Odd would have been an understatement and Adam couldn’t curb his curiosity. When they reached the door he felt around the board in search of a loose corner or gap along the frame. It was as solid as any barrier and in this day and age where anything abandoned seemed to be fair game no matter the reason it was boarded up and how forgotten it might be, or for the lack of people surrounding it for that matter, it was unusual. But then it was starting to look as though many things in the little ghost town were unusual. In his experience it didn’t matter how tightly a place was boarded up, people, mostly the homeless and drug abusers, found their way inside.

  From what Adam could gather as he walked around the cabin, stopping in the front when he completed his circuit, was that it didn’t even appear that a fly had broken in.

  With no choice other than to let it go, which was not in his nature, he went back to the door and using all his strength he pulled the board from the frame. It wasn’t as easy as most people would think; the nails were long and there were a lot of them. Whoever had boarded the building up did not want anyone to get inside. However, Adam was equally determined and it wasn’t long before he had the board completely off the frame. Once that was done, picking the lock on the cabin door seemed like child’s play, though that’s exactly what it had been when he was a kid. At least he directed his juvenile delinquent skills towards good, and it was a decision he’d never regretted.

  When the door swung open, it did so with a loud creek and groan, and the vibration from the rusted hinges grinding against themselves could be felt on the floor beneath his feet. He could also feel the result of years of neglect as he walked inside and the padding beneath the carpet crumbled as the carpet itself crunched and disintegrated.

  Because the windows were boarded up, both in the front and in the bathroom, the only light that Adam and Renee could see by poured in through the door. Thankfully it was the middle of the day and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and it gave them enough light to see the entrance and the part of the room immediately surrounding it, though if Adam wanted to do any in-depth looking around he was going to need to retrieve the flashlight from the vehicle.

  However, for now it wasn’t necessary. Through the light of the door Adam could see enough to get a feel of what happened in that room, that is if it wasn’t a prank by someone who wanted to scare a friend or two.

  “This room is creepy,” Renee said out of the blue.

  Until Renee spoke, Adam hadn’t realized just how quiet the room truly was and he had to force himself not to jump at the sound of her voice.

  “What’s creepy?” he asked as he looked across the room where the light from the door violently struck the wall beside the bed.

  She gave a light snort. “You’re kidding…right? You can’t tell me that that wall isn’t completely splattered with blood stains.”

  That is what it looked like, but Adam wasn’t about to jump to conclusions. While the rust-colored stains were an accurate depiction of a brutal slaying in the bed, there was nothing in the room that didn’t tell him that it could have just as easily been paint. “Maybe,” he said finally.

  “What do you mean ‘maybe’?” she questioned in a slightly raised tone.

  “It could be paint,” he said evenly. “It could be the result of someone playing a nasty practical joke on someone else.”

  Renee shook her head and started to walk around the room while she grumbled, mostly to herself, however Adam remained focused on the scene ahead of him. He looked from the wall to the bed, where the bedding had long been removed and all that remained was a headboard and the mattress, though in spite of the fact that an abundance of dust had taken the place of sheets, the stains of what could have been one or two bodies bleeding out remained visible. It was getting harder and harder to deny the fact that something bad, bordering on evil, had happened in that room.

  “Maybe this will convince you,” Renee said from only a foot or two behind him, and this time he couldn’t stop the small jerk of his body.

  “Please don’t do that,” he requested with mild irritation in his tone.

  “Do what?” she asked in a tone so sweet he knew immediately that, while the first time she startled him by speaking was an accident, this time she’d done it on purpose.

  He didn’t bother answering her question and instead he gave her a stern glower, which never worked on her in the past and didn’t appear to work on her now. It was one of the things that drew him to her – the fact that she never backed down from him when she knew that there was no reason to. Instead he kept his stare firm and focused on her face. “What will convince me?” he questioned.

  Her smile faded and she looked down at her hand, where she held a piece of garbage…or so it seemed.

  “What is it?” he questioned as he held his hand out.

  Renee willingly handed him the garbage, which turned out to be a piece of yellow tape. Much of it was faded and it wasn’t a large piece, but Adam recognized it right away. It was “police line” tape. “Where did you find this?” he asked.

  She looked back towards the entrance. “It was snagged on the bottom of the door,” she said. “Still think that it was a joke?”

  Adam wasn’t ready to relent, though without chemicals or an ultraviolet light with him to determine if it was blood, he could only go on his gut feeling, and his gut was telling him that something nasty had taken place in that room. Of course he didn’t want to say so to Renee. She was a strong woman, but in spite of her strength she quivered whenever the news came on with a story about a shooting, and whatever happened in that room was far worse than a drug deal gone bad.

  “You don’t have to say…I can see it in your face. You believe that there was a murder here…maybe more than one.”

  Yes he did believe that, though he was still unwilling to admit it. Instead he reached out to her and grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the room. He knew that she didn’t like abandoned buildings, in spite of the fact that she tried to hide her fear from him, and he wasn’t going to make her stay there longer when there was
nothing they could do about what happened. Whatever had gone on in that room happened years ago, longer than ten if he didn’t miss his guess, and solved or not, it wasn’t their business. Of course that wasn’t going to stop him from looking into it when they got home, but for now they had more pressing business at hand. They needed to find a phone and get out of the godforsaken town.

  When Adam left the motel Renee wasn’t sure that she’d be able to hide her sigh of relief; the last thing she wanted to do was stay in that damned room a minute more. It was bad enough when they discovered the graffiti on the board, telling R and M to rest in peace, but when that door opened and they found the stains on the wall and the mattress, Renee thought that she was going to pass out. Of course the air was thick, simply because the room had been boarded up for so long, but there was something else there that had her feeling as though she had a thousand pound weight bearing down on her and she knew that it wasn’t a combination of time and fear. She would never tell Adam, but she was certain that she felt the ghost of the victims in that room and she knew that if she didn’t get out of there when she did she would have either thrown up or lost consciousness…or both.

  When they finally left the room, Adam replaced the board on the door. He had to return to their vehicle to retrieve something to pound the nails back into the frame with, which turned out to be a wrench since they didn’t keep a hammer in their tool kit. He’d also retrieved the flashlight they kept in the vehicle and in a matter of ten minutes or so they were on their way in hopes of finding a phone.

  As they headed through town they passed a slew of abandoned and boarded up buildings, along with two more payphones. The first was at the gas station, neighboring the motel they parked next to. They didn’t even bother to cross the street to check it out, simply because they could see from their position fifty feet away that it was out of order. Even if it had power, it had no receiver, which rendered it immediately useless.

  The second phone was at the post office, which was actually in remarkable shape considering that it was as abandoned as the rest of the town, but unfortunately the decent condition of the building didn’t make the phone work, and Renee was starting to lose hope.

  She grew even more uncomfortable when Adam suggested that they head into the neighborhood behind the post office. When she scanned the neighborhood, the definition of which was a stretch, she didn’t see any signs of life. There were no cars or trucks, no television dishes, but most importantly, there were no sounds of life of any kind. There were no squeals from children, no hollers from adults, no music or staticky voices from radios or televisions…there weren’t even any sounds of dogs barking or birds chirping. The only sound that Renee could hear was the sound of the breeze that wound around the empty shells of the buildings as it started to grow just a bit stronger.

  Still, she followed Adam as he headed into the neighborhood, because no way was she going anywhere, or waiting anywhere, alone in this town. And while Adam was a big boy and could take care of himself better than most, there was no way she was going to let him go anywhere without her.

  As Renee expected, every house they passed was abandoned and empty of almost everything but bugs and desert animals. Unlike the businesses in town, many of the homes were not boarded up, and instead, most sported broken doors and windows, and some were only half standing. The homes that were trailers were barely approachable, and many appeared as though they were about to blow over. Given that the strength of the wind that pushed through town was increasing, Renee and Adam were certain to steer clear.

  The houses were spread out, many of them with groves of trees in their yards that had gone unchecked for years. Some of the trees had fallen while others bore fruit in varying stages from blooms to rotten shells that hung limply, though very few remnants remained on the ground; likely being hauled off by coyotes and javelina, both of which were abundant in the area. Neither animal was all that threatening – the coyotes didn’t care for people and often stayed away and the javelina were just as leery of people and weren’t carnivorous. What was worrisome was that because the town had been deserted, other animals might have moved in nearby, including bobcats and pumas, neither of which would hesitate to go after Renee and Adam if they felt threatened.

  A sudden rush of wind grabbed Renee and Adam’s attention and they looked back through the grove of lemon trees just in time to see a dust devil reaching about thirty feet up into the air, carrying with it debris from one of the trailers they’d just passed, along with an old, aluminum water trough that had to weigh at least fifty pounds, and the trough was hurdling in their direction.

  Adam grabbed Renee’s hand and they ran towards the nearest house to them – one that didn’t look as though it might fall over in a gentle breeze – and they took cover as the dusty, miniature tornado blew by them and they didn’t come out until they were certain that the dusty menace was gone.

  “That was nuts,” Adam said in a tone that was an octave above its usual deep and even nature as he grabbed Renee’s hand and led her out of the old garage they’d taken cover in. “Does that happen often?”

  Renee didn’t have to think long about it and she nodded. “Often enough. They’re basically harmless.”

  “That damned thing hurled a water trough at us…I wouldn’t call it harmless.”

  Renee couldn’t help but laugh, which goaded Adam into a laugh of his own, though it didn’t last long. Their light moment was broken up by the sound of a man clearing his throat and Renee couldn’t stop her jump.

  “Who are you folks and what are you doing on my property?” an old man asked from the steps of the house next to the detached garage.

  There was nothing spectacular about the house, and certainly nothing that told them that it was occupied. Like most of the other houses they’d passed, the yard was overrun by weeds and cacti, and the couple of trees that stood in the yard were wild and untrimmed, though when Renee looked back at the old man she could understand why. He looked as frail as the rest of the town and she half expected the man to fall over at any moment, especially since the breeze that had been present since their arrival remained.

  “Sorry, sir, we didn’t realize that anyone lived here,” Adam said evenly. “We were just getting out of the way of the dust devil that just blew through the area and avoiding getting knocked around by flying debris.”

  “Yes, I saw it. Now what are you doing here?” the old man questioned in a raspy voice that was as rough as his weathered and aged appearance.

  Adam wasn’t put off by the man’s attitude, after all he dealt with far worse on the job, yet he remained guarded and kept himself between the man and Renee. “We’re sorry to bother you, but our vehicle won’t start and we don’t have any cell phone reception out here. We were wondering if you had a phone we could use in hopes of calling for a tow truck.”

  The man raised a single, wiry, salt and pepper eye brow and looked at them suspiciously. “What are you doing out this way?” he questioned. “No one comes out here unless they’re looking for trouble.”

  “No,” Renee jumped as she stepped to Adam’s side. Immediately she felt him tense, but she stepped ahead of him regardless. “I used to visit this town when I was a kid, and we just dropped down this way to visit. We had no idea that the town had died.”

  The old man snorted. “Oh, the town is still around, it just moved thirty miles to the east…much like everything else, it simply moved away.”

  “Why’s that?” Adam questioned as he stepped up beside Renee.

  The old man’s blue eyes were cold and he shrugged. “Things happen…people move on.”

  Silence fell over the trio after the cryptic statement and for a moment all they could do was stand and stare at one another.

  “I have a phone inside,” the old man said finally. “It’s old, but it works…as long as you know how to turn a dial. There’s no speed dial and no buttons. Just a rotary dial. And it will work if it wants to…don’t go beating it up if you don’t get
a dial tone…I know how you young people are.”

  Adam allowed a light chuckle, but Renee couldn’t bring herself to lighten her cautious attitude. There was something about the old man that she didn’t like and she wasn’t about to let Adam go inside by himself. Thankfully he didn’t have to; the old man disappeared through his rickety front door, only to return moments later with an olive green, rotary dial telephone in his hand. “You’ll have to come up to the door, the cord don’t go no further,” the old man grumbled.

  Adam handed Renee his phone and asked that she read him the number from the roadside assistance program through their insurance company.

  Renee held her breath and watched Adam’s face as he plucked the receiver off of the phone’s handset and when he gave her a nod her body flooded with relief.

  While staying close to Adam, she read off the “800” service number and relief once again filled her body when she heard the scratchy tone of someone on the other end of the line through the earpiece of the receiver. She couldn’t make out what the other person was saying, and the look on Adam’s face wasn’t pleasant.

  “What do you mean you can’t get out here until tomorrow morning?” he questioned. “We’re stranded in a ghost town, and I don’t pay an additional fee on my insurance bill every six months just to be stranded in the middle of nowhere,” he calmly argued, though Renee could see the heat in his bright, blue eyes.

  There was another scratching through the earpiece and Adam shoved his long fingers through his bushy, dark brown hair. “Do I have a choice?” he questioned in a deceptively calm tone. “We’ll see you in the morning in front of the remnants of the red motel on the west side of the town.”