Chapter 26

I sighed and rubbed my temples, trying to think of a way to explain. But before I could speak, Brice's phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. His eyes widened and he looked at me.

"It's about Newton. There's been a incident."

My heart skipped a beat as I braced myself for the worst. What could possibly have happened now?

"What kind of incident?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

Brice shook his head, his eyes narrowed. "They're not giving much away. Just that there's been some kind of...disturbance."

I frowned, my mind racing with possibilities. A disturbance could mean anything from a minor mishap to a full-blown disaster. My gut told me the later.

~~

As we arrived back in Newton, I hadn’t expected the strange sensation that the town was too modern—a hundred or so years too modern. I had the impression that where there were now cars, there should be horse drawn buggies, and where cobblestone streets should have been, there were sleek asphalt roads. The buildings, too, were wrong, as where kerosene lamps should be mounted to the exterior of homes and stores, there were now electrical porch lights and brightly lit store fronts. As well, sleek glass facades replaced the old wooden structures that should have been there. As I pondered over the strangeness of the sensation, the Specter muttered, “This is wrong, all wrong!”

At the sound of the Specter's voice, I jumped, startled. He had never connected with me in this manner. Before, when his voice had been in my mind, there had been pain. This time, there was none.

Ridiculously, I looked around, half-expecting to see him, but there was only Brice, Ashley, Ethan and Jordan. Nonetheless, and though he wasn’t there physically, I could feel the weight of the Specter within my mind, bearing down on me.

"What do you want?" I whispered, my voice barely audible over the music and laughter in the SUV.

Brice glanced in my direction, his eyes narrowing as he tried to make out what I had said. "You say something?" he asked.

I shook my head, "Just talking to myself," I muttered, as basically, when you got down to the nuts and bolts of it, that was exactly what I was doing. I was talking to someone I had never seen in the physical form, only heard his voice within my head. As a child, I had always been a bit of a daydreamer, lost in my own thoughts and imagination. At first, the voice was just a whisper, a soft, raspy sound that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, but always brought with it a migraine. It would speak to me in the dead of night, when my parents were asleep, and the house was quiet. It would tell me things, horrible things, about the people around me. It would tell me that my best friend was a liar, that my teacher was a pervert, that my family was a bunch of fakes. Then, it started telling me things that it couldn't possibly know. It told me about the secret parties my friends and I had held in the woods, the secrets we had shared, the lies we had told. It told me about the things my parents had done, the things they had hidden from me.

I had been terrified. I hadn't known what was happening to me, or who was behind the voice. I had tried to ignore it, to pretend that it wasn't there, but it had only grown louder and more insistent. It started to show me things, horrible things, like a slideshow of images that I couldn't turn off. I'd known then that I wasn't crazy, that the voice was real. But I hadn't known who or what it was, or why it was doing this to me. I was trapped in a nightmare, and I didn't know how to wake up.

As the voice grew in strength, I had started to notice strange things happening around me. My family would argue and fight, and then suddenly, they would be fine, as if nothing had ever happened. My friends would disappear, and then reappear, as if they had never been gone. I had felt like I was living in a dream, a dream that I couldn't wake up from. And then, the voice told me about the killings. It would describe the victims, the methods, the blood and the pain. It would show me the scenes, like a movie playing in my mind, over and over again. I had been horrified, unable able to look away. I'd been trapped in this never-ending cycle of violence and terror, forced to view scenes I hadn't known how to handle.

I had tried to tell my parents, but they had just looked at me like I was crazy. They had told me I was imagining things, that I was just a teenager with a wild imagination. But I had known that wasn't true. I had known that the voice was real, and that it was trying to drive me insane. Over time, I had realized that it wasn't just a voice. It was a presence, a being that was watching me, waiting for me. I didn't know what it wanted, or why it had been doing what it had. But I'd known that I had to find out and stop it.

Before we had left Garland to head toward Newton, Brice had informed the team that we would be returning to the scene of our earlier investigation, but had been unable to offer any further information. I couldn’t help but wonder what was so significant about this particular house to the perpetrator; why had he deviated from his usual killing ground and ventured out of Dallas County. It didn't make any sense.