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  All around, the ghosts began to fade away into the night air as the final parts of the old Middleford Cross building came crashing down.

  Part Eight

  Return to Lakehurst

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  A sparrow landed on the grass, looking around in the sunlight for a moment before taking a few hops forward and then stopping as it reached an old, broken piece of stone. After examining the stone for a moment, the sparrow reached down and pulled at a worm, tugging it out of the ground and then taking flight, heading up into a nearby tree to eat its prize.

  “I forgot how peaceful it can be here,” Kirsten whispered, sitting on the grass with her elbows resting on her knees. “More than any other place in the world, Lakehurst just feels like...”

  She paused as a faint, happy smile reached her face.

  “Home. Maybe I'm being nostalgic, but hell, I don't care. I feel like I've come home.”

  Closing her eyes, she felt the warm morning light on her face.

  “It shouldn't be like this,” she whispered, “but it is. I finally feel like I'm where I'm meant to be.”

  Nearby, the ambulance stood with its doors open. Rachel Brown was still strapped to one of the beds in the back, while the other bed had been pulled out and tipped over onto the grass with Thomas Lacy's unconscious body still in place. His eyes were halfway open, but the vacant stare on his face hinted at a mind that had been broken by the horrors of the previous night. Elly, meanwhile, was also on the grass, and had begun to slowly recover from her head injury. Reaching out, she felt the grass and soil against her hands, and finally she opened her eyes as a soft breeze blew against her face.

  “Wh...” she began to say, feeling a sharp pain in her head as she sat up. “Wh...” She looked around at the calm, tranquil scene, and then she saw Kirsten sitting nearby. “What happened?”

  “You died and went to heaven. Oh no, wait...” Kirsten smiled. “It can't be that, because I'm here.”

  “Where are we?” Elly reached up and touched the side of her head, wincing as soon as she felt the pain from a large bruise. “What happened?”

  “Don't you know yet? Can't you feel it in your soul?”

  “Feel what? I just -”

  “Listen.”

  “But if -”

  “Listen!” Kirsten said firmly, placing a hand against the grass as if she was waiting to feel something. “Just be quiet for a moment and listen!”

  Elly paused, but all she heard was the rustle of grass and, a little further off, the sound of birds in the forest. She waited, and finally she heard another sound: behind her, Thomas Lacy was starting to let out a faint moan.

  “You don't hear anything unusual?” Kirsten asked.

  “Should I?” Elly replied.

  “Maybe it's a little soon.” Getting to her feet, Kirsten made her way over to Lacy and looked down at him. “He's coming around again,” she muttered, before wrapping her hands slowly around his throat and starting to squeeze. As the old man began to struggle, she pushed down harder, her eyes filled with dark intent.

  “What are you doing?” Elly asked, shocked by the sight unfolding in front of her.

  “Calm down,” Kirsten replied. “I'm just throttling him.”

  “Stop!”

  “In a moment.”

  “Stop right now!”

  Elly hurried over and tried to pull her away, but Kirsten kicked out and tripped her over before pushing her right foot down against her chest to pin her to the ground.

  “You're going to kill him!”

  “Just a moment longer,” Kirsten continued, keeping her eyes fixed on Lacy's face. “Wait for it... Wait for it...” She paused, her eyes filled with anticipation, before the old man's body shuddered. “There,” she added, pulling her hands away. “He's dead.”

  Struggling to her feet, Elly reached out and checked Lacy's pulse, but she quickly realized that there was nothing.

  “You killed him,” she whispered, with shock in her voice. “You murdered him in cold blood!”

  “Out of the way,” Kirsten replied, pushing her aside as she pulled a set of paddles from the ambulance and set them on Lacy's chest. “Here we go again. Clear!”

  “But -”

  Without waiting to check that Elly was out of the way, Kirsten charged the paddles and then delivered a shock to Lacy's body. She reached down and checked for a pulse, before sighing and charging the paddles again.

  “Clear!”

  Shaking her head in shock, Elly took a step back and watched as Kirsten shocked the body again.

  “Still nothing,” Kirsten muttered. “Okay, clear!”

  This time, after his whole body shuddered, Lacy let out a faint gasp.

  “There,” Kirsten said, setting the paddles back down, “he's absolutely fine. While I was waiting for you to wake up, Elly, I throttled and revived old Mr. Lacy several times.” She checked the old man's pulse again. “Anyone can murder an evil, sadistic old man. It takes someone special to murder the same evil old man over and over again.”

  “But his heart...”

  “I only need him to be alive,” she said firmly. “I don't care what state he's in. He's nothing more than a conduit, anyway.”

  Turning, Elly looked across the lawn and realized that, dotted about as far as the eye could see, there were sections of ruined walls and several large, charred stones. Taking a few steps forward, she ran a hand over what appeared to have one been part of a doorway, although the bricks were charred and damaged. Down on the ground, next to her feet, a few old sections of paving had been left cracked and partially pulverized.

  “What is this place?” she asked finally.

  “Now,” Kirsten explained, “it's just a patch of unused land. Until a few years ago, however, it was the site of a psychiatric facility named Lakehurst. Before that, it was a home for sick nuns, and before that it was the location of a copper mine.”

  “Lakehurst,” Elly whispered. “I've heard that name before.”

  Reaching down, Kirsten placed a hand against the ground again, as if she still expected to feel something.

  “I heard you mentioning this place,” Elly continued, picking her way through the ruins before stopping and looking around. She felt as if a sense of great calm was starting to settle on her shoulders, as if there was a kind of stillness emanating from the air. “Why's this place so important?” she asked, turning to Kirsten. “What does it -” She frowned. “What are those for?”

  “Relax,” Kirsten said, heading over to her with a couple of spades in her hands. “You look like you've seen a ghost.” She thrust one of the spades into Elly's right hand. “We're just going to dig up a dead body.”

  ***

  “Before she died,” Kirsten continued, gasping a little as she shoveled another pile of dirt out of the hole, “Annie Radford requested that her body be brought here to the old Lakehurst site for burial. Until I found the documents at Middleford Cross, I thought Annie had gone into hiding, and that she was waiting for me to find her. Now I realize she really died, in which case I'm hoping she left a message for me in her coffin.”

  She pushed the shovel into the soil, and this time she smiled as she heard it strike something solid.

  “Bingo,” she whispered. “Hello, Annie.”

  “But who is Annie Radford?” Elly asked, having more or less stopped helping with the dig. “Why's she so important?”

  “Don't you read the tabloids?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Annie was mixed up in all of this,” Kirsten explained, shoveling more dirt away as she began to uncover the coffin's lid. “She was a patient at Lakehurst, back when I worked here. She was unusually sensitive to the forces that existed in this place, even if the nature of those forces wasn't entirely understood at the time. I thought a man named Rudolf Langheim was broadcasting his own mind using radio waves. Hell, Langheim thought that was what he was doing too, but later I worked it out...”

  She reached down to
wipe more soil from the top of the coffin.

  “Langheim was just mixed up in something much, much bigger than he could ever have comprehended,” she continued. “He wasn't capable of seeing the bigger picture, but eventually I looked into the whole thing and I understood. I think Annie did, too, after she escaped from Lakehurst, but the knowledge drove her insane. Over the past few years, under various false names, she bounced from hospital to hospital. At first she was cared for by a man named Kieran Evans, but after he died in a car crash, she was left at the mercy of a broken system. She ended up at Middleford Cross because, well, no-one knew what to do with her. She got a message to me, begging me to go and help her. She said something was after her, something that wanted the information in her head. Shortly before I could get there, she passed away. Or...” She paused. “Maybe that's just she wanted us all to think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I'm not convinced she's dead. I think maybe she faked it to throw Mary off her trail.”

  “Mary?”

  “Someone else who was close to the truth of this whole thing.” Standing back, Kirsten raised the shovel. “I think Annie hid something far more important in this coffin, and I think she knew that I'd find it. I think this is a message for me.”

  “But -”

  Before Elly could finish, Kirsten brought the shovel crashing down onto the coffin, splitting the wood. Raising the shovel again, she smashed the lid a few more times before tossing the shovel aside and reaching down to break the remaining splinters away with her bare hands.

  “Are you sure you should be doing that?” Elly asked, shocked by what she was seeing.

  “Relax,” Kirsten replied, pulling another large section of the lid away, “it's just -”

  Stopping suddenly, she stared through the hole in the lid.

  “Well,” she whispered, with a hint of concern in her eyes, “that's unexpected. Hello again, Annie.”

  Staring up at her from inside the coffin, there was a partially-rotten human face.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “There's nothing in here,” Kirsten muttered as she ran her hands along the interior of the coffin. Spotting another maggot, she picked it up, watched it wriggle for a moment across the palm of her hand, and then flicked it away. “The grave's empty.”

  “Apart from the body you just pulled out,” Elly replied, glancing over at the rotten corpse that Kirsten had unceremoniously left on the grass a few minutes ago. Discolored and rotten, with worms and maggots wriggling through its flesh, the corpse had a few strands of shoulder-length hair remaining, and there was just enough of its original features left for Elly to be sure it was female.

  “I was expecting more,” Kirsten replied, sighing as she stepped back from the coffin, which she'd broken apart with her bare hands in her search for a hidden compartment. “I was expecting a message.”

  “Is this her?” Elly asked. “Is this Annie Radford?”

  “I suppose it must be,” Kirsten muttered. “Strange, I really thought there was a good chance she'd faked her death. The papers at Middleford Cross said something about cancer, but that seemed so mundane and boring, I couldn't believe mere cancer would be capable of killing someone like her. Now, though...” Stepping over to the body, she crouched on the grass and stared at the withered, rotten face. “Come on, Annie,” she continued, “you must have left something for me. I know you and Kieran were investigating the EMB-57 signal and the work Langheim had been doing here at Lakehurst. You wouldn't have just let all your discoveries become lost, especially if you knew you were dying. Where did you leave them?”

  “This is crazy,” Elly said after a moment, looking toward the ambulance on the other side of the lawn. “There has to -”

  She froze as she spotted a figure slipping past the vehicle. She only saw it for a fraction of a second, but she was certain that a moment ago there had been a nun next to Thomas Lacy's trolley.

  “Did you see her?” Kirsten asked, with a knowing smile. “There are a few of them about. I told you this place used to be a nunnery.”

  Elly turned to her. “You mean... More ghosts?”

  “A place like Lakehurst is full of the damn things,” Kirsten replied, getting to her feet and taking a few steps away from the grave before stopping and looking around. “A lot of people have died here over the years, probably more than even I'm aware of. The place just seems to attract darkness, probably because of the...” She paused, before looking down at the grass. “The voice you heard as a child, Elly. The voice that made you different. It comes from here. It reaches out around the world, but it comes from somewhere beneath Lakehurst.”

  “What voice?”

  “The voice you've worked hard to forget. You can never quite forget it, though. It's always there in the back of your mind, something that worries you. I can see it in your eyes.” She paused. “That voice has great range, Elly. Most people can't hear it, some people are vaguely aware of it, and some people, some very lucky people, hear it far more clearly. It gets into their thoughts, it intrudes and whispers ideas to them. Through an accident of biology, Elly, you're one of those people. I knew it as soon as I met you, so I decided it would be useful to bring you along.” She looked toward the ambulance. “Thomas Clay Lacy, though... He's the real Patient Zero in all of this.”

  ***

  “Wake up,” Kirsten said firmly, slapping the side of Lacy's face. “This is not time for napping, old man. I need you to wake up and tell me what you hear.”

  “He's ill,” Elly pointed out. “After everything you did to him -”

  “He deserved all of it. Every horror, every terrible sight, was just his own work brought back to face him.” She slapped him again. “Still nothing? Fine. Elly, fetch the paddles, I'll shock him into -”

  “No,” Elly replied, pushing her out of the way and reaching down to check Lacy's pulse. “Can you hear me?” she asked, her voice trembling with fear. “Mr. Lacy, it's Elisa from the hospital. I went and fetched your suitcase for you, remember? Can you hear me?”

  “Don't get too close,” Kirsten muttered. “That old man has killed closed to a hundred women over the years, as well as several cops who got too close to him.”

  Slowly, Lacy's eyes began to open.

  “He's conscious,” Elly said, smiling in an attempt to put him at ease. “Mr. Lacy, can you hear me? Can you say something?”

  “The sight of all his victims was probably enough to drive him out of his mind,” Kirsten said, stepping around to the other side of the trolley. “That's exactly what I wanted to happen. I need to break his thoughts apart so that he'd be at his maximum level of susceptibility. He's been hearing the Lakehurst voice for more than half a century, and during that time it drove him to commit horrific acts. Elly, you're looking at the Sobolton serial killer.”

  “No,” Elly replied. “I refuse to believe that.”

  “The photos in his suitcase -”

  “No!”

  “It's true,” Lacy whispered suddenly. “It's all... true.”

  Elly stared down at him.

  “I wasn't a bad man,” he continued, his voice slurred and weak. “I swear, I was good, I never hurt anyone, not until...” He turned his head slightly. “This place. It was when I came to this place that I first...”

  “I pieced most of the story together,” Kirsten said after a moment. “The forest around Lakehurst used to be home to drifters, vagrants, people who were down on their luck after the war years. Many of them ended up losing their minds because of the voice that reached out to them. One of those lunatics ended up attacking a coal train that passed through the area, he killed the chief engineer before being shot by the only other crew-member. That crew-member, shocked by what he'd seen, stumbled away and by pure bad luck ended up at Lakehurst. After that, the voice got into his head and never left.”

  “Like a song...” Lacy whispered.

  “Like a song,” Kirsten continued, “that gets stuck in your mind. But it wasn't a
song, it was a voice and it brought ideas, dark ideas, and thoughts that intruded on his every waking moment. “She leaned closer to the old man. “What do you hear now? I've brought you back, tell me what you hear.”

  He paused, as if he was listening to something.

  “Tell me!” Kirsten snapped, reaching out to grab him by the throat.

  Elly pushed her hand away. “Let him listen,” she whispered. “That's what you brought him here for, isn't it? If you want someone to listen, you have to shut up.”

  They stood in silence for a moment, watching as Lacy took slow, labored breaths.

  “I hear my own heart beating in my chest,” he said finally. “I hear birds in the trees. I hear the grass, I hear the wind. And I hear the kind of silence you only hear when a great evil is waiting nearby. The kind of silence you hear after a battle or a massacre.”

  “It's still here, isn't it?” Kirsten replied. “It's been here all along, but I wasn't ready to come back, not until I had the tools I needed. Thomas Lacy, I need you to talk to it for me. I need you to make it listen to what I have to say. I can't do this without your help.”

  He shook his head.

  “You don't have a choice. I've spent too long getting these tools together, and now I'm here... I could talk to the voice myself, but one thing I've noticed is that the mere act of talking to such a great presence tends to leave the human mind in tatters. I'd rather insulate myself by talking to it through you, and I'm afraid you don't have a choice in the matter. Your mind will probably be burned out in the process, but that's just the price you'll have to pay for where you've ended up.”

  “You can't use him like this,” Elly told her. “It's inhumane.”