Georgia opened the door to the guest room and stood back to let them in. “Here you go, gentlemen. One of you can sleep in the adjoining room. The connecting hall is right there. Let me know if you need anything else. Oops, forgot clean towels. Be right back.” Whenever Georgia wheeled off somewhere, the hem of her long dress swished over the floor, giving her the appearance of a dancing ballroom ghost at the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland.
Appropriate. Sam closed the door.
“I don’t know. If she’s not back by 11:11 on the dot, I’m marking down her score.” Colby flopped on the same bed in the same spot where Sam had had his nightmare and reached for a chocolate square.
Sam dumped the scripts next to him and covered them with two decorative cushions on either side of a pineapple. He held the fruit up, the wheels in his head working overtime.
“Pineapples are a sign of hospitality,” Alex said, entering the connecting hallway to his room. “She’s Southern, remember?”
“Oh.” Sam put the pineapple on the nightstand.
She’d also lit candles, of course, with that crossed scent of flowers and burning hay. Cedarwood? The pillars decorated every dresser, shelf, and nightstand. Sam wondered if it was some native Hawaiian custom they didn’t know about, like the pineapple on the bed. She’d even placed them in the windows facing the south part of the house. With the curtains open, they might be able to see the famous mountain peaks if it hadn’t been so dark outside.
On a corner table was a glass decanter of amber liquid with four crystal glasses sitting on a round mirrored plate, similar to the downstairs bar. Sam pulled on the bottle stopper and took a whiff. Whiskey. He put the stopper back. “Is she trying to welcome us or seduce us?”
Colby took a bed cushion and hugged it. “Who knows? Maybe she’s got a four-guy fetish she’s hoping to fulfill.”
“Ew, with Trey? No thanks.” Sam peeked into the bathroom, wishing he could take a relaxing shower but definitely didn’t want to change into any of Trey’s, or worse—Clint’s—clothes.
“Guys,” Alex was back. “It’s more likely she’s just trying to be a good hostess. Give the woman a break. You guys going to sleep in here?”
“Yeah, we’ll take this one,” Sam said, thinking that sleep would probably elude him tonight. He didn’t want to think about the possibility of nodding off, letting down his guard, only to be woken up in the middle of the night with a massive dark shadow hovering over him, trying to choke him.
Colby rocked upwards onto his feet and circled the room, blowing out candles. “I hate these.” He opened the shutters covering the panes, then pushed them up to let in the sweet Pacific breezes. “That’s more like it.”
“Let’s close them back up when we go to sleep, though, and turn on that guy.” Sam pointed to the AC unit between the window and floor.
“Yeah, for sure. I just want to get this stink out of here.”
Most of the old buildings in Kauai didn’t have AC. Most residents liked to keep the windows and sliders open all day, relying on ceiling fans to cool them at night, but Sam was used to sleeping with cold, nonhumid air, and if he didn’t have it, he definitely wouldn’t be sleeping.
“Why’d you steal the scripts?” Colby sat on the bed and started flipping through the pages.
Sam shrugged and sat cross-legged. “I want to study them. See if I can find out what makes those two tick. If we’re going to be stuck here tonight, I may as well make good use of my time. Did you bring a charger?”
“No, bro,” Colby replied. “And I don’t want to ask Trey ’cause the dude hates me enough right now as it is. I have two percent.”
“Then reading, it is.” Sam handed him a script and then created a fort wall of cushions and pillows for when Georgia made it back with the towels, so she wouldn’t see the stolen intellectual property.
With a huge outbreath, Sam began to read. He was still on edge, flighty and worried that the Dark Man might come for him, but if he did, Colby would be here to help him fight it.
Every so often, as he and Colby read through pages, Alex would pop back into the room, carrying more found items from his guest room—a nude statuette carved out of what looked like ivory, a macramé planter hanging from a long, blanched animal bone, or some other crazy psychedelic painting straight out of the seventies.
“Guys, the stuff in this house is insane.” Alex walked up to the bed, holding up a framed poster of a group of people. “There’s something new every day. You’ll never see the same thing twice for five or more years.”
“Wait, let me see that?” Sam leaned in close to look. The photo featured the Ryder Camp hippies. He recognized their sun-kissed skin and worry-free hairstyles. In the center front row were two familiar faces—the Trey look-alike, Clint, with his arm around the nude woman from the other photo, the one who looked like a young Georgia. “Did she ever confirm if she was one of the hippies?”
“She hasn’t outright said it,” Colby said. “But she’s gotta be. The math adds up.”
“Plus, they all look like her.” Sam peered closer. Directly behind the Trey look-alike was a dark area, a cloudy black shape that could’ve been a stain on the photo, a mistake in the film’s processing, or… “You guys see this?” He pointed to the shadowy mass. “This is the thing I’ve been seeing since yesterday.”
Alex leaned in for a look. “What thing?”
Sam forgot he hadn’t told Alex or Nate about his vision, only Colby, but at this point, it was too late to hide it. They were in this together. The Dark Man was real, not imagined, and there was no use keeping it a secret. “An inky black cloud. Colby thinks it might be the Shadow Man.”
“The one that follows Corey?” Alex asked.
“But I think it’s a completely different ghost, spirit, whatever it is. I’m not actually sure,” Sam replied. “I just feel like it’s a masculine energy. I’ve come across it a few times already.” He left out the part of how it tried to paralyze him.
“Where?” Alex peered closer. “Here? In this house?”
“See this? The shape in the photo kind of looks like it.” He stared at Trey/Clint’s smiling, sunburned cheeks, at the column of darkness looming just behind him. Accompanying him. Haunting him. Was the dark spirit Clint himself?
“See these people?” Colby slid his fingertip along the group of happy hippies posing for the shot. “I’ve been seeing them since yesterday, too. It might be this guy here, or this lady…I don’t know.” He shook his head and pushed the frame away. “Take that photo out of my face, please. It’s starting to creep me out, and that’s the last thing I need right now.”
When Alex walked off with the artifact, Colby muttered, “Tonight, one of them told me to leave.”
“When?”
“At the dinner table. Bro, are they really ghosts? Or my imagination? ’Cause I gotta say, Sam, I feel like I’m losing my mind a little bit. Being out here fucks with your sanity, am I right?”
“Yes, and if we’re affected after just two days, imagine Trey,” Sam said.
Colby’s eyes flickered. “Exactly. Something’s definitely going on. I don’t even want to say, but it feels…” He couldn’t finish his thought.
But Sam knew, because not only could Sam detect what Colby was thinking sometimes, he felt it in his soul as well. “Sinister,” he guessed.
Colby froze in thought for a minute, then silently, they went back to reading the scripts. Sam tried to focus on the paragraph he was on, but he kept thinking about that word—sinister. Were they right, and evil lived on this slice of real estate? That would mean Georgia and Trey were immersed in it all day long, 24/7.
“Do you think…?” Sam started, then began again. “Do you think doing paranormal investigations has opened us up more? Made us more susceptible to negative energy?”
“Yes, bro. I think we need a good energy cleansing after this trip. Sage, sage, everywhere.”
“For sure.”
Alex kept coming in with more stuff. This time, he brought back in the Ryder Camp book that Georgia had first shown them. “Guys, listen to this. In the nine-year period from 1969–1978, at least ten deaths occurred on Ryder Camp, an unusually high number for a population in their twenties-thirties living on a mostly fish and vegetarian or vegan diet, unexposed to air or industrial pollutants of any kind.”
Sam wondered if those were the people whose spirits Colby claimed to be seeing.
“Does it say how they died?” Colby asked.
Alex nodded. “It says that some of the tree house residents believed a dark presence was haunting their commune, while others said it was nothing more than hallucinogens from the extreme drugs they were doing.” He looked up at Sam. “And you just mentioned seeing a dark spirit. Maybe they’re one and the same.”
Sam gulped. “What else does it say?”
“It says that many of the residents called it the ‘Dark Lord’ and that it moved from person to person, depending on who it wanted to complete a task. ‘The members of the community claimed this Dark Lord was on a quest to find people to do his bidding when others failed,’ member, Susan G., claimed in an exclusive interview in 2014,” Alex read aloud, turning the book around to show them a close-up of the shadowy smudge in the photo. Even though no face was delineated, Sam felt it was the same presence.
“That’s him. That’s the same dark man haunting this place,” he said, staring at the shape. “The beach, Belle Estate, this whole region. I’m ninety-nine percent sure he’s the one manifesting for me, too. Guys, it feels crazy talking about it. Normally I’m skeptical and wouldn’t believe in stuff without proof, but…”
He shook his head and closed his eyes.
“The proof is everywhere,” Colby finished.
Sam nodded slowly. He was tired, physical and mentally exhausted, and the residual candle scents filtering through the room had given him a shitkicker of a headache. Great, in true ghost hunter form, they’d stepped into a portal of paranormal energy when they should’ve been on a relaxing vacation. They couldn’t get away from it.
“I wonder where the remaining hippies are now,” Colby said.
Alex flipped to the back of the book, eyes scanning. “It says here that some live on the east side of Kauai, a few are in Honolulu, but most eventually moved back to the mainland after the state tore down Ryder Camp. That’s depressing. Their pristine sanctuary on the North Shore, completely dismantled, when all they wanted was to raise their families in peace.”
“Yeah, it’s sad,” Sam muttered. “Party over.”
“Hey, here we go…bingo.” Alex read, “‘Georgia Belle Rollins is the sole remaining member of the Ryder Camp community, living closest to the condemned tree houses, now turned into Ke’e Beach on state park property, than any other former member. Her husband, the late Kauai real estate mogul, Clint Rollins, died by suicide on December 5, 1997.’”
“Twenty-two years ago,” Sam said.
“Same year I was born,” Colby said.
“And me,” Alex added.
Sam had been born in 1996. It was hard for him to fathom that the woman in this house had been married for nearly forty years before they even came into this world kicking and screaming.
A low feminine voice joined theirs. “It was a difficult time for me.”
They all whirled to see Georgia standing in the open doorway, holding a stack of clean towels. She had a faraway, dreamy look in her eyes. She’d been gone a long time just to grab those, Sam thought. “But when the universe closes a window, it lets light in elsewhere,” Georgia said, setting the towels on the dresser.
It must’ve been hard for her to deal with her husband’s suicide, Sam thought. And the reason why he’d taken his life suddenly mattered to Sam. Was he not happy out here in paradise with everything in the world that the Earth could possibly give him? If Trey was a lot like Clint, did that make him susceptible to danger?
“And the same day my husband died, Trey was born. Isn’t that remarkable?” She smiled, adopting a new sunny expression.
Sam’s mouth fell open.
“With evidence like that, who doesn’t believe in reincarnation? The resemblance is uncanny, isn’t it?”
“Wait, so Trey was born the same day your husband died?” Sam asked.
“Yes, tell me that’s not meant to be.” Georgia relit one of the candles with a lighter from a drawer. Sam mentally extinguished it with his mind.
“Okay, but you know that Trey isn’t actually your husband, right?” Colby said. “It’s…it’s just a coincidence.”
At the door, Georgia paused and gave them a sultry, ominous look. “I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe in fate and love that defies the laws of physical death. My husband swore before the—before he took his life—that he’d return to take care of me. And he has. Goodnight, boys.”