Free Echoes (Whisper Trilogy Book 2) by Michael Bray Page B

Cody remained outwardly neutral, although inside he was battling to regain control of his body and tell his friends he hadn’t actually seen anything, but the last thing they should be doing was to enter the building. Every fiber in his body screamed at him to do something, yet whatever was inside his head writhed and grew, sending tendrils of fury and darkness further into his body. He could imagine them like an aggressive mold, growing without obstruction, filling his arteries and veins, even the very cells making up his being with their polluted presence. He could almost see cold, skeletal hands on his wrists holding him in place. His only hope was the others would see and somehow understand what was going on. Alex looked into the dark, then back at Cody and the girls, before his face melted into his familiar god-awful cocky grin followed by the equally annoying hyuck hyuck hyuck laugh.
    “Maybe you saw a ghost,” he said, glancing at the girls for approval. “Maybe they’re coming out here to shoo us away, to banish us from their lands for daring to trespass.”
    “Hey, cut it out!” Scott said. Alex, however was on a roll, and now had the attention of the girls.
    “No, it’s true, maybe the old and dead things have come back to finish what they started.”
    Hyuck hyuck hyuck
    Cody watched him and, easing off on the fight a little, he allowed the rage into him. He looked at Alex: those bad, uneven teeth; his acne; the wispy ghost of first facial hair on his cheeks.
    Hyuck hyuck hyuck
    Cody imagined letting the fury out, unleashing all the power of whatever festered inside him onto Alex. He saw it in glorious clarity. Peeling flesh from muscle, popping his eyeballs and feeling the warm jelly inside seep over his hands. He saw himself tearing open the boy’s stomach, watching the cavity steam as it made contact with the cold air, and he heard himself cackle as he squeezed stomach tripe above his head to the intoxicating chorus of those voices.
    “Maybe it’s him. The guy who died here,” Emma said, her eyes bright with excitement.
    Her words killed Cody’s train of thought, giving him back a little control.
    “A lot of people died here,” Scott said as he kicked his trainers in the dirt. When he noticed he was the focus of their attention, he blushed and began to fidget, swaying from one foot to the other. “It’s no secret,” he said, keeping his eyes on the ground. “It’s all public record. Don’t any of you read?”
    “We know what happened here, hell we’re not stupid,” Alex hissed, trying to turn the attention back on himself. “Maybe your buddy saw a shadow, or maybe he’s just fucking with us to try and freak us out,” he added, glaring at Cody, not knowing how close he was to being attacked.
    “You wouldn’t lie to us, would you, Cody?” Emma said, looking him in the eye.
    He stared back at her blankly, horrified at the images of flaying her flesh from bone and feasting on entrails which exploded in his mind like fireworks.
    “I know what I saw,” he heard himself say to the group. “It was a man.”
    “Ooooh, maybe it was the spirit of Michael Jones, haunting the place he built, the place where so many died,” Alex said, chuckling and trying to impress the girls.
    “It was Donovan.”
    “It’s not funny, Cody,” Carrie said, linking arms with Emma and staring at the shell of the building.
    “Maybe it is,” Alex said, looking at them in turn, a sly smile on his face. “Maybe he’s still haunting here, looking for people to murder. I heard nobody really knows how many he killed. I heard it could be as many as twenty people.”
    “My Grandma Molly knew his mother,” Emma said, her voice crisp in the silence. “They used to be best friends. Her, Donovan’s mother, and their friend Petunia. They were always together. Everyone in town knew them well.”
    “Are you serious?” Carrie asked. Emma nodded
    “None of them used to talk about him, about Donovan. They all knew