Beyond The Grave

“What are we doing?” Noah whispered, his lips brushing my ear. I shivered with delight and turned the handle. The door opened, and I pulled Noah inside.

“I’m giving you the tour,” I replied in the same soft whisper. “I thought you might like to see where I take English.”

“But I can’t see anything.” His backpack hit the floor with a soft thud. Then his hands were in my hair as he placed gentle kisses all over my face.

I pushed him against a wall. “Then I’ll describe it for you.” I nuzzled against his neck. “There’s a big desk at the front of the room, and a bunch of smaller desks in the back.” We kissed, and I melted into his warm embrace, overcome by the feeling of being so close to him. Then his lips moved to my neck and he began planting soft kisses there, a sensation I craved. He moved back, but as I leaned in to kiss him again, he pulled away.

“Something’s wrong.”

I thought he meant that someone was walking toward the classroom. I listened, expecting to hear approaching footsteps or voices in the hallway.

“We’re alone,” I assured him. “Everything’s fine.”

“No, we’re not. Someone’s here.”

Beyond the Grave

Mara Purnhagen

www.miraink.co.uk

For spending over a decade putting up with thousands of bizarre, inane, and downright frustrating questions, this one is for Joe Purnhagen, who always has the answers I need.

one

I never should have sent my boyfriend to the electric chair. Watching Noah from a monitor in the next room, I felt awful for him. Frayed leather straps restrained his arms. Shackles held his legs in place and, even though his eyes were squeezed shut, I knew he was anxious and uncomfortable.

“Was it really necessary to restrain him?” I asked Shane.

“We’re keeping it authentic,” he replied.

Mr. Pate, the prison historian, scoffed. “Then you shoulda put the blindfold on him like I suggested.”

I ignored him. We’d been Pate’s guests at the Southern State Penitentiary for only three hours, but he’d already managed to completely offend me at least a hundred times. It wasn’t just that he insisted on referring to me as “little lady,” or that he was constantly snorting instead of blowing his nose into a tissue. What bugged me most was that he refused to leave us alone for even a second. He was openly suspicious of me and Shane and Noah, as if he thought we might try to steal something from the nearly barren building. As far as I could tell, the only things left in the abandoned prison were rusty metal bunk-bed frames and hungry rats.

And one antique electric chair.

“How much longer?” I asked Shane.

He glanced at his watch. “A few more minutes should do it.”

On the monitor, Noah swallowed hard. Guilt flared through me and I fidgeted with my bracelet, the one Noah had given me on my birthday. I was the one who had convinced him to come along on this last-minute trip, even though four months ago I’d sworn off ever participating in another investigation. I reasoned that this was not a true investigation, but simply an outing to piece together needed footage. And it was Shane who organized the whole thing.

My family was semifamous because of my parents’ work as paranormal investigators. Mom and Dad spent decades together debunking ghost stories and working under the theory that all hauntings were actually the effects of residual energy manifesting itself in different ways. Their career crossed over into book deals, DVDs and cable-TV specials and made all five of us—Mom, Dad, me, my older sister, Annalise, and our longtime cameraman, Shane—into dependable fixtures during Halloween TV marathons. I thought it would always be that way. It had never occurred to me that the Silver family would change the way we had—suddenly, and soaked in blood.

Four months earlier, Mom had been attacked in our home by a strange entity calling itself the Watcher. The head trauma she’d suffered had left her in a deep coma and doctors had warned us that even if she woke up, she might never be the same. I knew I had moved past the denial stage of grief, but there were still days when it didn’t feel real. It had only been a week earlier that I had spotted a pair of her worn blue slippers tucked under a computer desk in the living room. I had thought of her sliding them on while she worked, and the way they looked as if they were simply waiting for her to return. I had left them where they were.

My injuries from that night had faded, but my memories had not. I often awoke in the middle of the night, my hand throbbing with a phantom pain. I had wallowed in guilt for months, convinced that everything was my fault, including the death of Marcus, the young man the Watcher had possessed. Mine was the last hand to touch him. Now that hand was scarred and Marcus was dead and I felt like a dull photocopy of the person I’d been before it had all happened, someone who was trying to hold on to anything familiar before it shattered into unrecognizable pieces. Because the truth was, I may have stopped the Watcher, but I wasn’t sure if I had destroyed it. I doubted if such a thing could be destroyed, and that thought was enough to make me tremble.

Since the attack, Dad spent most of his time at the care center where Mom had been transferred a month before. He slept on a cot in her room during the week, and came home on weekends. At first, he had said it was a temporary arrangement. But days folded into weeks, and Dad’s computers remained turned off, his files untouched. We all noticed but no one knew what to say, not even Shane, who was like Dad’s brother. I didn’t know what would happen to the Silver Spirits franchise or the hours of video footage that sat, unedited, in our living room.

It was strange to wake up each morning to a quiet house, but even stranger was the absence of anyone sitting at a computer with earphones on, editing footage. There was something so unsettling and somber about those blank computer screens that I tried to avoid the living room completely. It was no longer the heart of our house; instead, it was more like a sort of graveyard, with the monitors serving as tombstones.

One evening, Shane pulled me aside. “I need to complete the DVD your parents were working on before everything happened,” he told me after dinner at Trisha’s apartment. Since their engagement, Shane and Trisha had insisted on hosting a Sunday-night supper every week. I liked it, not just because it gave me a chance to see Noah, but because it provided a rare opportunity to be with Dad, as well.

“Edit the footage,” I told Shane. “Dad won’t care if you come over and use the computers.”

“I need more than that.” Shane downed the last of his red wine—ever since he’d met Trisha, he had given up beer with dinner for a good Cabernet—and looked at me. “I need to go back to that old prison we visited last year. The video I took didn’t come out right. I have to redo it.”

“So redo it.”

“We were supposed to film a reenactment scene. I need Noah to fill in.” He glanced over at Trisha as she set a peach cobbler on the table, then turned back to me. “I need you to convince Noah to help me with this one. He said he’d go only if you were okay with it.”

I refused. There was no way I was dragging my wonderful new boyfriend, the guy who had stood with me during my darkest days and was still by my side, to an old prison where people reported hearing the wails of dying inmates. We’d been through too much, and I wasn’t eager to throw myself again into anything even resembling a paranormal investigation for a long, long time—if ever—and there was nothing Shane could say that would change my mind.

But Trisha could. “I know you’ve been through so much, Charlotte, and the last thing on your mind is stepping into a strange situation,” she said. “But it means the world to Shane. He thinks that if he can complete this DVD, he’ll be doing something for your mom, something she would be proud of.” She lowered her voice. “And he doesn’t want to worry you, but the production company needs the DVD completed before Halloween. Your family is under contract, but Shane doesn’t want your dad to have to deal with it right now.”

The practical importance of fulfilling a contract was one of the business aspects of my family’s work that I was actually familiar with. Growing up I had witnessed my parents pulling all-nighters to get their work turned in. The house would fill with the scent of coffee, Mom and Dad would wear the same baggy sweatpants for days on end, tensions would rise and then, finally, the work would be completed and we would all go out to a fancy dinner to celebrate.

I missed those dinners.

“No pressure,” Trisha said. “But please think about it, okay?”

And I did think about it. I thought about how Shane had been a constant presence in my life, how he would do anything for me. Now I had a chance to do something for him—and for the rest of my family.

Mom had always been in charge of the finances. I didn’t know how much money we earned from DVDs, but I knew it was the most vital source of our livelihood. And while I was sure my parents had a savings account and we weren’t drowning in debt—they were frugal people whose only indulgence was state-of-the-art equipment—I also knew that Mom’s medical bills would be staggering, even with decent insurance. Meeting a deadline meant earning a paycheck, one I was sure we would need.

But I wasn’t entirely comfortable with walking into an abandoned prison, and I suspected that Trisha had no clue that her youngest son would be an integral part of the investigation. I called Beth, my mom’s friend and owner of a shop called Potion, to get her advice. I trusted her and her knowledge about the Watcher.

“Do you think we’ll be in danger if we do this?” I asked her. Part of me hoped she would say yes, that the Watcher was asleep for the moment but if I did this he’d wake up. I didn’t really believe that, though, and if I was truly concerned about rousing a demon, I wouldn’t be conducting my secret late-night experiments on the floor of my bedroom. I realized that I needed Beth to tell me that everything was okay. Because if it wasn’t, I had been putting myself in danger for weeks.

“I honestly believe that you subdued him for a good long while,” she’d assured me. Her voice had a soothing, confident quality that acted like a bandage wrapped around my nervous mind, despite the fact that she had said subdued. Not destroyed or vanquished or incinerated. “This work is a part of your life,” Beth continued. “The longer you stay away from it, the more scared of it you may become. Don’t let the fear chase you, Charlotte. This could be a good thing for you.”

A good thing for me would be to have my mom home, safe and recovering. I could almost hear her voice reciting words she’d spoken ever since I could remember:

Don’t let fear guide you, Charlotte. Don’t let it make your decisions for you.

In the end, I agreed, which was how I had ended up listening to the tired tales of Mr. Wilbur Pate, whose father and grandfather had worked as prison guards at the penitentiary.

I watched the monitor closely for any signs that Noah was in distress. He was alone in the execution chamber, with only a tripod camera stationed in front of him, but it was creepy to think that he sat in a chair in which hundreds of lives had come to their violent ends. I twisted my bracelet, feeling the cool black stones that circled my wrist, and turned to Shane. “We have enough footage,” I said. “Please. Let him out of there.”

“One more minute.”

I narrowed my eyes. “In one more minute, I’m calling your fiancée.”

The threat worked. Shane hurried out of the room, appearing a second later on the screen. I knew he was trying to recreate the execution of a young man, and that with his brown hair and medium build, Noah fit the description, but I wished we had spent a little money and hired an actor. Noah didn’t mind, though. “It’s initiation,” he told me. “I’ll feel like I’m a real member of the team.”

I didn’t have it in me to tell him that there was no more team. Once Mom had been hurt, it was over. But finishing the final DVD was important, and it only required Noah’s presence for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon.

Shane released Noah from the chair and returned to the viewing area with him.

“Noah!” I flung my arms around him, careful to avoid touching his neck, and planted a kiss on his cheek. He cleared his throat and stepped back.

“That was intense,” he said, keeping one arm around me.

Mr. Pate snorted, and I cringed when he loudly swallowed. “You was only in there for ten minutes. Anyone can sit in an ol’ chair for ten minutes.”

“Really?” I challenged. “Could you do it for ten minutes?”

Pate moved his mouth like a cow chewing his cud. “I do believe I could, little lady.”

While Shane strapped Pate in the chair, I turned to Noah. “Was it terrible?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I can think of better ways to spend an afternoon.”

I tried not to look at the little bruise on Noah’s neck. It was the size of a thumbprint, and midnight-black in color, almost like the stones on my bracelet. I knew how he’d gotten it, but I didn’t understand why, after more than four months, it still remained. The other bruises had faded after a couple weeks, but this one refused to disappear.

“He’s strapped in as tight as I could get it,” Shane announced when he returned from the execution chamber.

“Good,” I muttered. Maybe a few minutes in the chair would strip away some of the tough-guy veneer Mr. Pate had been shoving in our faces. When we’d arrived, he had slapped Shane on the shoulder so hard that he’d stumbled a little.

“We could just leave,” Noah suggested. “Let him spend the night here.”

“Be nice.” Shane adjusted the color on the monitor. “He’s doing me a favor by letting us in here.”

“I think he’s getting more out of it than we are,” I said. “I mean, how often does he get to lead people through his empty building and bore them with stories about his grandfather shooting a rowdy inmate to death?”

Noah shook his head. “That was bad. Did he really have to imitate a death rattle?”

“Look.” Shane pointed to the monitor. Pate was squirming and flexing his fingers.

I scoffed. “It’s only been three minutes.”

Noah peered over my shoulder at the screen, which sent a warm, tingly wave over me. “Ten bucks says he won’t make it a full five minutes.”

“I’ll give him six,” Shane said, his eyes on the monitor.

“You’re both wrong,” I announced. “He’ll be screaming like a baby in thirty seconds.”

Exactly twenty-nine seconds later, Pate was thrashing his head from side to side and straining his arms against the straps. I actually felt a pang of pity for him.

So did Shane. He rushed into the execution chamber and quickly released Pate from the chair.

“Looks like you win the bet,” Noah said. “I owe you ten dollars.”

I smiled at him. “Take me out for pizza and we’ll call it even.”

The door opened. Shane was holding up Pate, who panted as if he’d just participated in a marathon. “I heard voices,” he gasped. Shane helped him to a folding chair, and I handed him a bottle of lukewarm water. He gulped it down noisily.

“There were voices. I heard them.”

“Try to breathe normally,” Shane instructed.

“They were real! You have to believe me!”

“Of course we believe you,” I said. “Tell us what the voices said.”

Pate’s face burned bright red. He wiped at his forehead with the back of his hand. “They were whispering to me. They said no. Then they said out.” He groaned. “They want us to leave!” He scrambled to his feet, knocking over the metal chair. “I’m getting out of here.”

“We need a few minutes to take down our equipment,” Shane said. We were in no rush. The debunker in me thought that Pate had probably overheard the wind. When the four of us had first entered the execution chamber, I had noticed small cracks in the concrete bricks. When I’d put my hand over one of them I’d felt a trickle of cool air. It wouldn’t take much for a freaked-out imagination to interpret the whistle of wind as a voice. Besides, Pate had heard only two words, and simple ones at that. If he’d heard a sentence, I might reconsider the possibility that irate inmates were demanding his immediate departure.

Pate was still red and sweaty. “I never experienced nothin’ in this place before,” he said, his voice shaky. “I heard the stories but that’s all they were. And then your family—” he pointed a chubby finger at me “—they come in here last year and now there’s voices telling me to get out.”

Noah stepped in front of Pate. “You might want to reconsider pointing at her like that.” His voice was low and deadly serious, almost a growl. I’d never heard him sound like that, as if he was ready to punch someone.

“Okay, okay.” Shane put his hand on Noah’s shoulder. “Sorry, Mr. Pate. I know you’ve had a bad experience. We’ll hurry up and be out of here in five minutes.”

Noah stared hard until Pate looked away. “Five minutes,” he mumbled. “I’ll wait outside.” He lumbered off, his heavy footsteps echoing through the hallway.

We automatically began the task of taking everything down. I knew Shane was upset by Noah’s outburst—he considered it unprofessional to display a temper to anyone outside of the team—but he said nothing.

As Noah took down the tripod in the execution chamber, I asked him what was wrong. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so angry,” I said.

“I’ve had enough of that guy.” He shook his head. “Let’s get this done and get out of here.”

We worked quickly to finish the job. It wasn’t fast enough, though, because Pate began bellowing at us from inside the front door. “Hurry up or I’m locking y’all inside!”

Shane handed me a case of cable and the small monitor. “Why don’t you head out so he knows we’re making progress?”

“Sure.” I lugged the equipment down the dark halls. The prison didn’t scare me, but there was something undeniably creepy about the walls, which were moldy and covered with satanic-themed graffiti. I was happy to reach the front doors and step outside into the bright August afternoon. From the outside, the prison resembled an ancient mansion, complete with stone walls and narrow turrets. A barbed-wire fence enclosed the back of the property, but in the front, a graceful wrought-iron gate greeted visitors. The delicate curves of the iron provided an ironic contrast to what lay behind them.

Pate leaned against a wall and watched me as I slid open the van door and carefully placed the monitor and cables inside. I took my time, hoping Pate would get bored or that Shane and Noah would join me. Neither happened. Instead, Pate ambled over and peered inside the van.

“Fancy,” he remarked. It was clear by his tone that “fancy” was not a compliment.

“The others will be here in a minute.” I touched my bracelet and tried to push back the discomfort I felt at having Pate stand so close to me. He was still breathing hard and obviously did not use mouthwash. Or deodorant.

“Never shoulda let you people in here,” Pate said. I kept my eyes down and pretended I was securing the monitor. “Everything was just fine. Never heard no voices before. But you roused ‘em up, didn’t you? You and all that fancy equipment.”

He moved closer to me and I stepped to the side. “Nothing was roused up, sir.” I kept my voice quiet and tried not to further agitate him.

“Don’t you tell me lies, girl.” I felt his finger jab me in the shoulder and I winced. Where were Noah and Shane? I was two seconds away from kicking this guy in the crotch.

“Mr. Pate, I’m very sorry you thought you heard something in there,” I began.

“I don’t think, girl. I know. Just like I know you got something to do with all this. Your family’s cursed, and a curse attracts the spirits.”

A drop of spittle landed on my cheek when he said “spirits.” I felt my rage grow like a heat inside my chest and gripped the van’s bumper.

“And another thing.” He poked me again. Before he could say anything else, Noah was there, shoving Pate with both hands.

“Don’t touch her!” he yelled.

Pate stumbled backward and landed on the pavement. Shane ran out of the building, his cameras left behind on the front steps. The wide wooden door of the prison was open, but it slowly began to close. As Shane pulled Noah off Pate, who was kicking his legs wildly as he lay on the ground, the door slammed shut, creating a cracking sound that reverberated in the air. Noah and Shane froze and looked at me. Pate scrambled to get on his feet.

The noise hung in the air, an echo that wouldn’t die. I became dizzy and had trouble breathing. I tried to say Noah’s name, but I couldn’t. Black dots swam in front of my eyes, the world around me began to go dark, and the last thing I remembered before passing out was the sensation of falling—and of Noah catching me before I hit the ground.

two

For our final dinner together before Annalise returned to college, I displayed my culinary talents by throwing a bunch of stuff into a bowl. It had been almost a full week since the visit to Pate’s prison, a week I had tried to fill by spending time with my sister, texting Avery at college and struggling to find moments for Noah and me.

“Is that parsley?” Annalise wrinkled her nose. “You’re putting parsley in the salad?”

“It’s green, isn’t it?” I tossed in chopped walnuts, apple wedges and sliced carrots. If it had been sitting in the crisper drawer of the fridge, it was now part of my experimental dish.

A timer went off, and Annalise opened the oven to inspect her lasagna. “A couple more minutes, I think.”

“I’m impressed, you know.” I opened a bag of store-bought rolls. “I never knew you could cook.”

“Mills and I took a couple’s cooking class together last semester.”

I liked my sister’s boyfriend. He’d been so kind to me after Mom’s injury, often staying up with me as I’d sat next to her hospital bed. We had talked a lot over the past few months, and he was starting to feel like family.

Annalise frowned as I arranged the rolls on a plate and shoved them into the microwave. “Maybe we should pop those in the oven,” she suggested.

“No time.” I pointed to the clock. “Everyone will be here soon.”

Our guest list for the evening included Shane, Trisha and Noah. It occurred to me that out of the group, Dad would be the only one who had no idea that I had been having panic attacks.

Four months had passed since I’d witnessed the attack on my parents. Four months, one week and three days. And during that time I’d experienced six panic attacks, each one brought on by the sound of something cracking, each one jamming my mind with the agonizing echo of a metal fire poker smashing my mother’s skull.

The first one had occurred when I was at home by myself. The second time, I’d been grocery shopping with Noah. A little kid had bumped into a display of canned vegetables, and the sound of the cans crashing had caused me to double over. Noah had practically carried me to the car, leaving our shopping cart behind as he’d whispered, “Please be okay, please be okay.”

I understood the cause of the panic attacks, but I had no idea how to stop them. Annalise thought it was a classic case of post-traumatic stress syndrome. She consulted her former roommate, a psychology major, through daily emails and forced me to participate in annoying mental health exercises. I complained about it constantly to my best friend.