Ghouls Gone Wild Read Online Free PDF Page B

would know what to use.”
    “Is he gifted like you?”
    “Was,” Heath said. “He used to know a lot about the spirit world. Sometimes he’d drift off into a trance, and there was no waking him from it. He’d be completely out of it for hours, and then, all of a sudden he’d be back and he’d talk about all the dead people he’d walked with out on the plains.”
    “Does he ever come to you?” I asked.
    Heath eyed me from his chair. “Sometimes,” he said. “Every once in a while he’ll show up in one of my dreams.”
    “Do us a favor and try to contact him,” I said in all seriousness. “Maybe if he sees that you have a need, he’ll come visit you while you’re sleeping tonight.” Heath looked doubtfully at me. “Worth a try at least,” I reasoned.
    He smiled. “It is,” he conceded. “Okay, I’ll call out to him before I hit the hay. Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll respond.”
    “And I’ll do some scouting around for someplace we can get some crystals.”
    Gilley came into the room at that moment, followed closely by the camera and sound crew. He seemed to be enjoying that fact, or so I gathered from the constant smile on his face every time they were around.
    “Hello, dahlings!” he said with a grandiose hand flourish.
    “Gil,” I said.
    “Guess what?”
    I sighed tiredly. “You’ve discovered something riveting in your research?”
    Gilley rocked back and forth on his heels. “I did!”
    “What is it?” Heath asked.
    Gilley looked around at the many available seating surfaces, and finally moved over to sit next to a lamp where he positioned himself just so on the couch, before glancing up at Jake, the camera guy. “How’s my lighting?”
    “Fine,” Jake said in a way that told me he was sick of answering that question.
    Gilley turned up the wattage on the made-for-TV smile and said, “I found out why Briar Road knocked you guys on your keisters.”
    Heath leaned forward. “What’d you find?”
    “Sooo much,” Gil said. “For starters, that road is one of the oldest in the village. It dates back to the middle of the tenth century, in fact. And it’s seen its share of tragedy too. There have been at least five major waves of bubonic plague that have run rampant through this village over the millennia.”
    I eyed Gilley skeptically. “I don’t think so, buddy,” I told him. “I mean, yeah, I would expect a place as old as this to have its fair share of spooks, but the intensity of that street, Gil . . . I don’t even know how to describe it! It was like my skin was on fire and the level of panic was out of this world.” I turned to Heath and he was nodding his head vigorously.
    “It was beyond description,” he said, “but M. J. comes pretty close to what it felt like.”
    Gilley nodded as if he knew just what I was talking about. “I get it,” he assured me. “And I really think I understand why it hit you two in exactly the same way. See, in the mid-sixteenth century the plague came through here with a vengeance. At that time, Briar Road was part of a densely populated quarter of this village, filled to bursting with lots of small shops and residences. Most of the village’s poor lived on or near Briar in cramped close quarters. Problem was, with all that traffic and humanity packed into such a small space, the Black Death had plenty of victims to choose from, and it wasn’t long before the entire street was lined with dead bodies.
    “About two weeks into the height of the plague, and in a poorly thought-out attempt to contain the spread of it, a few of the village’s noblemen decided it was a good idea to set up barricades at each end of Briar Road, which they did, blocking the residents in. And then, the noblemen set fire to it.”
    My jaw dropped. “They burned the whole street with all those people trapped inside?”
    “Yes,” Gilley said somberly. “And then they repeated that action a few years later when the plague returned.”
    I was