He touched the paper with his fingertip and traced out a shape. Then she saw it, the deeper shading where she had turned her pencil lead sideways and raked out a series of zig-zags. It looked like two small figures standing at the back of the hallway, waiting in the shadows.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said, with a shudder in his voice.

“Smart.”

“Will you draw a picture just for me?” One corner of his mouth lifted in a weak attempt at a smile, and his pale, injured face looked so forlorn and pitiful that Kendra felt ashamed for thinking of him as a twerp. After all, if her mother hadn’t died, she might have had a little brother and–

She looked away from the hollow eyes and the glistening, bruised flesh around his nose. “Sure thing, Bruce. You want Spiderman or Batman?”

“I don’t believe in heroes, either. Draw something scary. Like the two kids.”

Kendra flipped the sketch pad to a clean sheet and began roughing in the end of the break room. “Sure. I’ll have them sitting on that couch like they’re going to bite the legs off whoever comes in the door.”

Bruce giggled, and the sound gave a flat echo off the walls. The kid had moved a little closer, and the room was too small for such intrusion on her personal space. But probably he just wanted to see her work.

“I don’t know what they look like, so I’ll make one fat and one skinny,” she said.

“Dorrie’s the fat one,” he said. “She eats all the cupcake crumbs when everybody’s asleep.”

The kid’s got a good imagination. He’s probably like me— his dad leaves him to entertain himself so he escapes into his own little world.

“Is this fat enough?” She squiggled out a peanut shape. “Man, she’s totally breaking the couch in two. Whoever walks in the door is going to lose their legs and their arms.”

Kendra rounded out the figure and went to the next, glancing up so she could get the perspective right. “There’s Dorrie, fat as a donut hole,” she said. “Now for–”

Jesus.

For a split second, Dorrie was sitting there, pouting in a plain brown frock, hair in a terrible page cut that made her face look even rounder. Her fists were clenched on her knees, as if she were going to spring up from the couch and punch somebody. Twelve, maybe, swollen with her first period, confused about the changes of her body, chunky boobs already sagging.

Kendra blinked and the vision cleared. “Man, I hope Dorrie doesn’t mind being ugly.”

“I wouldn’t say that if I were you.”

But Kendra was already adding the details she’d just imagined. When inspiration flowed, you bottled it. “Okay, tell me about the other one.”

She decided to make them Emily Dee’s mortal enemies. The creepy kids who terrorized an old hotel. It probably couldn’t be an on-going series, because there were only so many storylines you could squeeze out of one location, but maybe it could fill up a graphic novel and catch some Hollywood producer’s eye. Another dumb haunted house story, just the way they liked them.

“Rochester’s even meaner than Dorrie,” Bruce said. “He’s got a pointy nose and he smells like mice. You know how mice smell, when they die behind the walls? My dad has to put out the poison every winter, because they move in when it gets cold. The poison sure tastes yucky.”

Kendra chuckled. High-larious, kid.

She drew a stick figure, giving it a long rodent’s tail. She wanted to get the job finished. Bruce stood there, not blinking, silent, holding his breath. And, worse, now she could smell the mice, like that high school science lab where the hampster cages never shook that odor of death.

“Rochester the Rat Boy,” she said with cheerful bravado. She realized she was afraid to look up, lest Rochester was sitting there with his red, beady eyes and sharp, yellow incisors. The gaunt rendering horrified her.

She gave him oversize Mickey Mouse ears and ripped the sheet out of the pad. In her haste, the rip was uneven, dissecting a chunk of Dorrie’s head. “Here you go, Brucie. No charge.”

Bruce was gone.

She forced herself to look at the couch, and it was empty. Bruce couldn’t have squeezed past her to the door without nudging her chair. Maybe there were other entrances, ones she couldn’t see. Even if the walls held secret passages, it was hard to imagine someone sneaking away without a revealing creak of wood. But if Bruce had been stuck here playing for years by himself, he’d probably figured out the best hiding places.

“Dorrie Dough-Face and Rochester the Rat Boy,” she said aloud.

The company of fictional characters provided no comfort. Her fantasy life, the cherished escape from a world where her mother had abandoned her and her father regretted the inconvenience, had turned on her, and she didn’t like it. Because if that went bad, then what else did she have left?

The pictures added up to nothing.

Painted into a corner.

On the bottom of the sketch, she scribbled “To Bruce, for the forever inn,” before adding the flourish of her initials. One day she’d be as famous as Jack Kirby, Moebius, and Todd McFarlane rolled into one, and her initials would be gold. In the meantime, a girl could always dream.

Always and forever.

She left the drawing on the table and headed for her room, clicking on her walkie talkie. Maybe Digger had actually noticed his daughter was gone and was fuming because he needed some help. He would be huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf in a cancer ward, muttering curses under his breath, his blood pressure rising. His impatience and frustration would only be rivaled by his helplessness.

She wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Chapter 19

The group was really getting on Burton’s nerves.

Ninety percent of paranormal tourism was about keeping the travelers safe while delivering the illusion of danger. That’s why the liability waiver was so loaded with phrases like “inherent risk” and language that implied the hunter might end up being the hunted.

So Burton wasn’t above the occasional “Look, did that shadow move?”

The tactic never failed to draw a few gasps, and once in a while a newbie would get so shaken the hunt would be disrupted. Then a twenty-minute debate would ensue as people recounted their versions of what they did or didn’t see, and those with cameras would flip through the thumbnails. Burton would review the evidence and reluctantly validate whatever happened to appear in the images, whether it was an orb, a flash of light, or the Second Coming of Harry Houdini. All in a day’s work, all part of the show.

But sometimes a group collected at random would yield such an obnoxious array of personalities that Burton felt like he was punching a time clock in a Portajohn business instead of serving as a shamanistic guide to the land of mystery and spirit. When you got right down to it, shit was shit, and you didn’t want to step in it, either here on Planet Earth or in the otherworld.

And the dude in the Henry Fonda fishing cap was a two-hundred-pound bag of shit that was bursting at the seams.

“Where’s the Percival Ghost?” whined Cappie. “You promised us the Percival Ghost.”

“There are no guarantees in ghost-hunting,” Burton said.

“She may not even be dead,” said an unfortunate woman whose make-up was thick enough to make an undertaker proud. She was way too old to put Kool-Aid-blue highlights in her hair. Her T-shirt read “Ghosts believe in me,” and Burton figured she was a paranormal slut who’d get in bed with any group or ideology that whispered “boo.”

“She’d be dead by now, one way or another,” said a woman who looked over the top of her glasses like a librarian. “Even if she didn’t die in 1948, she’d be well over a century old.”

“Maybe that’s why her ghost isn’t here,” Cappie said.