The Ghost Files

Chapter Thirty

The ever-growing familiar beep, beep, beep pulls me out of a blissful darkness. I try to move and can't. Panic sets in. Am I still there? Am I still trapped? Still strapped to that table? I force my eyes to open. Good. I can see. Relief sweeps through me. It's dark, but the IV machine is all lit up.

There are several other machines I don't recognize, but I'm in the hospital. Again. The smell alone should have alerted me, but I'm tired. My blurry eyes do a frantic search of the room, looking for ghosts, but again, they are strangely absent. Why do they leave me alone when I'm here?

I shift my head slightly and wince at the pain, but am glad I moved. Dan is asleep in the chair beside my bed. He propped his feet on the bottom of the bed and is slouched down. He looks exhausted. His police uniform is wrinkled and stained with dark patches. It has to be blood, whose I don't know. It could be mine or it could be Mrs. O's.

Thoughts of Mrs. Olson make me shudder violently. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined she was the killer. She took care of me, stayed with me, and made me feel safe. How can I have been so wrong about her? Usually my instincts are much better than this. I never saw it coming. The things she did to those poor kids, to me. I can feel the knife tracing over my skin even now. The shakes start in as soon as I think about it. The monitor attached to me starts to beep wildly. My breath comes in short panting gasps and in a heartbeat I am back in that house, strapped down, crying and begging for it to stop.

"Shh, Mattie, you're safe now, shhh...."

Eric? I open my eyes and find his blue ones staring at me. He is sitting beside me on the bed. I thought he'd gone into the light. What is he doing here?

"If you don't calm down, you're gonna wake up your friend. He hasn't slept in days."

"Eric?  Why are you here?" I ask in my head, mindful of Dan asleep in the chair. "Why didn't you cross over?"

"Trying to get rid of me already, Hathaway?"

"What?  No!  I just don't understand...why didn't you go into the light?" My breathing slows, calmer now that I know I'm not alone in that basement again.

"I said I would wait for you, Mattie, and when you didn't go, I stayed. I needed to know you'd be safe, that you were okay."

His eyes have lost their teasing light and he's serious. He is looking at me the way I'd always wanted a boy to look at me and I want to scream at the unfairness of it all. Why does he have to be dead? Fate is cruel, I think. She gives me someone I could really come to trust, to maybe even love, and I can't have him. That is not his fault, though. He did his best for me, now it's my turn to help him.

"I am okay, Eric, because of you."

"When I first saw you, you were so outrageous," he laughs softly. "I knew they'd want you. I thought if I scared you, you'd stop looking, but you just got more determined. I swear I didn't mean to hurt you, Mattie. I didn't know I could."

"You and me both," I tell him wryly. "I thought you guys could just pester me. I didn't know you could physically harm me. I'm glad, though. Without that screeching of yours, I don't think I could have taken Mrs. Olson."

"I do not screech. Girls screech, not guys. Guys yell."

The outraged expression he wears makes me laugh. Why does he have to be dead? Why do I have to convince him to cross over? I don't want him to go.

"Eric...."

"No." He puts a finger to my lips to shush me. "I am not going into the light, Mattie."