Bone Island 03 - Ghost Moon Read Online Free PDF

artificial light, as well.
    “All right, come on.”
    He turned, and the three came running up behind him like metal drawn to a magnet; he thought he’d trip, they were so tight against him.
    Scared. They had scared themselves in the place. They’d wanted a spooky challenge; they had found one in the Merlin house.
    They went out to the porch. Liam hoped the patrol car would hurry. If the door had been unlocked, someone else had gotten in. That someone might have provided the shadows and touches that had scared them so badly.
    He wanted to find the trespasser before it was too late.
    The three remained stuck to him like glue while they stood on the porch. “Hey!” he said. “You’ll be home in a few minutes. Look, there’s someone still in there. That person was trying to scare you out. But it’s a good lesson. No trespassing. It can be dangerous.”
    “They weren’t just trying to scare us, and it wasn’t any person,” Jane said. “They wanted to kill us—they would have killed us. They were ghosts, evil spirits!”
    “Jane, it’s just a house,” Liam said.
    “Then the house wanted to kill us.”
    “What makes you say that?” he asked.
    “Because we heard it!” she whispered. “We all heard it! It was horrible, a horrible whisper in the darkness saying, ‘You’re going to die. I’m going to kill you.’”
    “And he was there,” Joshua said gravely. “I saw him. I saw old man Merlin. His eyes were burning in the darkness. I felt him, felt him put his hands around my throat.”
    “He shoved me,” Jane said.
    Just then the patrol car arrived and Art Saunders and Ricky Long emerged. “Art, get these three home,” Liam instructed. “Ricky, come with me. Lights are out, and I want to search the place.”
    “Yessir,” Art called. “You three, get your little juvenile-delinquent butts into the car,” he said to the kids.
    Ricky Long had been with the department about three years. He was a good cop. He’d seen some bad things in his brief stint.
    He looked sick as he walked toward the house.
    “You want me to search it with you, sir?” he asked.
    “Ricky, it’s a house. If there’s something in it, it’s flesh and blood. Yes, we’re supposed to guard lives and personal property. I’ll take the upstairs, you take the downstairs.”
    Ricky nodded slowly.
    Liam left him to search through the ground floor. Upstairs, he went methodically from room to room, aware that Bartholomew was at his back.
    “I don’t like this place,” Bartholomew whispered.
    Liam stopped. “Bartholomew, you are a ghost.”
    “I still don’t like this place. There is something here. Remnants of evil and pain. Maybe it’s in all this creepy stuff. Mummies, coffins, shrunken skulls. Evil spirits, the memories of pain and sacrifice and human suffering. Miasma on the air. Let’s get this done and get out.”
    “Bartholomew, someone human was in here. Doors don’t unlock themselves.”
    “What if evil spirits unlock them to lure in the innocent?” Bartholomew asked. “I may be a ghost, but we both know that evil isn’t something that dies easily.”
    Liam wondered if Kelsey Donovan was going to have Joe Richter sell the place for her, or if she’d come to Key West herself. He’d have to ask Richter. If Kelsey was going to come down and move back into the house, he had to stop whatever the hell was going on.
    “Cutter Merlin wasn’t an evil man,” he said.
    Bartholomew sniffed, sidestepping a huge stone gargoyle probably procured from a medieval church somewhere in Europe.
    The gargoyle’s huge shoulders hunched and the eyes seemed to stare at them with malice.
    “They say he practiced black magic!” Bartholomew told him.
    “People make up whatever they wish regarding an old hermit,” Liam said sadly.
    “He was some kind of a wizard. Or a witch, maybe. Men can be witches, right? Yeah, that’s right. They hanged men as witches in Salem, Massachusetts. And in Europe, too,” Bartholomew said.
    “They