K.J. Emrick - Darcy Sweet 13 - Ghost Story Read Online Free Page B

the legs of the table holding Addison, who had somehow managed to fall back asleep, curled up into her mother like nothing had happened at all.  “What just happened?”
    “I’m not sure,” Darcy answered truthfully.  Had she really been listening to baby Addison’s thoughts before?  Was that even possible?  She rubbed her temples and decided that she should only tackle one impossible thing at a time.  “Jon, where’s Helen?”
    “I’m right here,” Helen said, sitting up in her place at the head of the table, her chair turned upright again.  Her hands trembled as she held them in front of her, several of the nails broken ragged and bleeding.  Blood had smeared down her arms.  Andrew was kneeling next to her, holding a small wastebasket lined with a plastic bag.  From the smell, Darcy figured Helen had used it a couple of times already. “I mean, I’m here now.  Darcy,” she whispered, “what was that?”
    “It was a ghost,” Darcy said.  “That much I’m sure of.”
    “How?”  Helen looked like she was about to be violently sick again and Andrew moved the bucket closer.  “Oh, Dear God, what’s going on?”
    Darcy had seen possessions before.  They weren’t always pleasant for the person being possessed but she didn’t remember ever seeing an event this powerful.  The ghost had forced its presence on all of them, like a velvet glove reaching in to squeeze their brains.  Darcy’s head felt like it had been wrung through a juicer.
    “Does your head hurt like this?” she asked Jon.
    “Yes,” he said in a quiet voice that didn’t carry past her ears.  “That was completely freaky, Darcy.  Can you answer Helen’s question?  Do you know what just happened?”
    She felt like reminding him that he was the detective, but they both knew this was her area of expertise.  “I’ll need to check on a few things.  That ghost…I’ve felt that presence before.  That spirit.  In the Town Hall.  It’s the one I’ve been telling you about from the Town Hall.”
    “The Pilgrim’s Ghost?  The one that’s been making you avoid the place like the plague?”
    She opened her mouth to argue with him that she hadn’t been doing that but really, he was right.  She could have investigated that haunting long before now.  All of her excuses about not having time really only meant one thing.  She was afraid.  Afraid like she’d never been before in her life.
    “I know this much,” she said, “that ghost really, really needed to talk to us if it was able to hijack Helen’s body to do it.  That kind of means a very strong entity.”
    He eyed her, and she realized why.  She’d called this spirit an entity.  Not a ghost, not a soul, not the dearly departed.  Entity.  It had a very negative and menacing connotation to it.  Darcy hadn’t used that word on purpose, but it fit perfectly with what she had just felt.
    “Oh, come on, Darcy,” Andrew said angrily.  “You would skip right to possession.  Don’t you think that just maybe my Helen is stressed or tired or something?”
    Darcy didn’t try to argue with him.  Very few of the people in town believed her when she talked about these things.  It didn’t matter if the evidence was right in front of them.  It didn’t matter what Andrew had just seen or experienced.  He wanted an easy, understandable answer.
    “Andrew, hush,” Helen said gently.  She let him lean her head against his shoulder.  Her color looked better, to Darcy’s eyes, but she was obviously drained by what the possession had done to her. 
    Jon didn’t try to argue with Andrew, either.  “What concerns me is what you said at the end there.  Helen, could you hear yourself?”
    She shook her head no, curling her hand into the front of Andrew’s shirt for comfort.  “I could see everything, but it was all blurry, and there was just this violent ringing noise in my ears.”
    “You said…um.”  It was Andrew who started to answer.  He