The Touch of Ghosts
PROLOGUE
A jewel-clear summer’s day. The kind they photograph and sell to tourists on postcards for fifty cents apiece. The late morning sun is a burning ember, a relentless, blazing diamond pinned against empty blue. Acetylene-white light washes over weathered mountain crags that pierce a vast rumpled blanket of forest. It glitters like frost from dozens of lakes and rivers.
Closer, the same light flashes from the glistening plumage of a bird diving for fish in one of these lakes and from its struggling rainbow-scaled catch. It dances from the wings of dozens of insects flitting through the trees surrounding the water. It sparkles in the hair of a running woman.
She sprints across an open stretch of wild grass, a narrow break in the tangled forest, carving a swathe of darker green bent and broken stalks in her wake. Her heart pounds against her ribcage, threatening to punch through it with every beat. Her breath burns her throat as she gulps for air. She can feel her backpack slamming into her spine with each stride, flattening her shirt against her sweat-soaked skin. She ignores it all, waiting instead for the sound she dreads.
Running footsteps, behind her. Sneakers smashing through the grass. The man has followed her downstairs and out through the doors, no shouting, no calls - silent all the way. She knows he’s no cop - they shout “Freeze!” or “Hold it!” don’t they? They pursue, they don’t chase.
More than anything, she wishes she’d never taken a look at the old building with the sagging roof, wishes that her will alone was enough to rewrite the past. Wishes she could wake up from what has to be a dream.
Thin, spidery branches rattle from her jeans and whip against the skin of her face and arms, tracing needle-thin lines of fire. The air changes, becoming cooler and carrying the acid scent of leaf mulch. The ground beneath the canopy is rough and uneven. Roots and tough, wiry vines lurk in the plant litter that covers the floor, ready to snag her feet as she pounds past.
She could have run for the dirt track, but she saw the man had a car parked outside. She could have made for the lakeshore, hoping that someone from town would see her from the opposite bank, but she knows how far away it is. She can feel the distance, the open gulf between her and safety, tugging at her soul and threatening to swallow her entirely. Her only hope is the highway, north through the woods.
She thinks of the look on her pursuer’s face when she turned a corner in the ramshackle structure and nearly walked into him. Panic. Suspicion that mirrored hers. Eyes glittering in the musty gloom. The faint sheen coming from his open jacket, dim light sliding off the gun nestled by his shoulder. How his expression changed when he realised she’d seen it. “I’m a cop.” His accent not local, voice getting higher, betraying the lie. Didn’t offer to show her a badge. Feeling his eyes on her as she walked slowly and deliberately towards the stairs, trying to look like she believed him. Hearing him gasp as her nerve broke and she started running, uncomfortably aware of how alone she was.
Muscles burning as her legs pump up a gentle incline, eyes concentrating on the ground in front of her. Breath increasingly ragged, hacking and blowing. Trying to maintain her pace, to ignore her tiring body. Can’t even hear the man’s footsteps over the roaring of blood in her ears.
A flash of blackness explodes from her jaw and suddenly she can taste dirt, feel dry, dead leaves against her cheek, head swimming. Her mouth feels warm and coppery, one of her teeth shakes and pulls sickeningly as she squirms, trying to drag herself to her feet again. Weight, heavy against the small of her back, stops her and her limbs feel awkward and rubbery.
As she opens her mouth and the first notes of her scream erupt from within, a hand snatches at her hair, hauling her head back by a thousand tiny points of white-hot pain. Metal, cold, thin and sharp touches the skin of her neck.
In the microseconds it takes for the knife to draw a line of liquid ice across her throat she thinks about her parents, waving as she pulled away in the taxi bound for the airport. She thinks about her two-year-old cousin Charlie, playing with his birthday presents. She pictures her friends from college and how she won’t be able to enjoy graduation with them. She tries to remember them all, one last time.
Her ravaged arteries pump and sputter blood across the forest floor, leaving a clear path for her soul to follow after.
Crying bundle of newborn joy.
Photo in a yearbook.
Face on a milk carton.
Name on a grave.
Books
A dozen people trapped in a roadhouse during a storm, three corpses buried in a field, and a good chance no one's going to make it through the night alive. Burial Ground is the last Alex Rourke novel.
One mistake. Seven years of a child's life. In The Darkness Inside, Alex finds out the missing kid in a case he worked on in his FBI days may not have been killed after all. And that the man he crossed the line to put away may not have worked alone.
A single bullet blows Alex's world to pieces. He finds himself in the strange Vermont town of Bleakwater Ridge trying to piece together what's happened, alone except for the dead and The Touch Of Ghosts.
A silent murder suspect, caught red-handed at the scene, draws former FBI agent Alex Rourke back to his home town of Winter's End in northern Maine. But it soon becomes clear that there's far more to the place, and to his own past, than he ever realised.
Short Fiction
Wish, featuring gay Nazis and the terror of living urban myth, appears in the Ken Bruen-edited Dublin Noir, as well as in 2008's Best British Mysteries anthology.
Twenty Dollar Future, about the tragic making of a child soldier in east Africa, appears in Jen Jordan's Expletive Deleted anthology.