Voices (Whisper Trilogy Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

road. Main Street and its scatter of dying businesses soon gave way to denser tree cover which overhung the road on both sides, shrouding the Jeep in an artificial gloom.
    “You can’t stay up there for long,” Kimmel said, more to himself than to Fisher.
    “At the hotel?”
    “The hotel is bearable as long as you have people with you. I’m talking about the clearing out back in the woods. Anything more than twenty minutes and you start to feel it crawling around inside you. Nobody is allowed up there by themselves. Always groups, and then in short spells.”
    “Who made that rule?”
    “I did,” Kimmel snapped, “after one of my men castrated himself up there then pulled out his own eyes.”
    Fisher swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat.
    He’s starting to understand , the General thought as they continued down the bumpy track.
    Fisher remained silent, hands folded neatly in his lap.
    “You might not know this, Fisher, since you ‘skimmed’ the report, but there have been over seventy eight recorded deaths in and around these lands over the years.”
    Fisher glanced across at the general, waiting for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, Fisher pressed. “That sounds like a lot of people.”
    “Those are only the ones we know about. Since we started to actively monitor the site, we’ve found countless bone fragments. Just last week one of my men found a complete human skull out in the woods. So far we haven’t identified it.”
    “Still, you can’t attribute those deaths to the house or this… clearing you mentioned. People die all the time. Natural causes, old age, strokes, heart attacks.”
    “Fair point, and there have been documented cases of those here too. What we also have are the other deaths. The murders, the suicides. The mutilations.”
    “Mutilations? What the hell do you mean by that?” Fisher asked.
    “If you’d read that damn report I sent you, you’d already know all this.”
    “I’d rather hear it from you.”
    “What the hell do you think it means? People who stay up here for any length of time do things to themselves or to the people they’re with. We’ve had hangings, stabbings, bludgeonings. We’ve had people drown themselves in the river, others have set fire to themselves. Perfectly sane and rational people have spent time in that place and transformed into brutal, violent psychopaths without warning or explanation.”
    Despite his unwillingness to believe, the hairs on Fisher’s forearms bristled. “What about the fire that burned the place to the ground. Were your ghosts responsible for that too?”
    Kimmel glared across the seat, making Fisher aware that he may have overstepped the boundaries with his comment. He cleared his throat and set about keeping on track.
    “I remember a little bit about this part,” Fisher said. “There was a couple who lived in the house. I remember reading about how the husband got burned up in the fire, the uh, Sandersons I think it was.”
    “ Samsons . Steve and Melody. You’re right about the burns to the husband. He got it pretty bad. He’s dead now.”
    “He was killed during the massacre at the hotel, right?”
    Kimmel glared at Fisher. “So you do know something about what happened out here.”
    “Just vague things I remember from the news at the time. It was a councilor wasn’t it? Went and hacked up a bunch of people?”
    “It’s not how it happened.”
    “But that’s the gist, right?” Fisher said, reverting to his ‘I don’t quite believe all this’ smile.
    “The stuff reported in the news was only half of it. For the record, Henry Marshall was an upstanding, law abiding citizen who had never had so much as a parking ticket before he decided to build that damn hotel.”
    “People don’t just change. Maybe there was some kind of trigger, but people like that are inherently disturbed.”
    “I saw his psychological evaluations. It shows a complete turnaround in behavior directly in line with the