Page 39 of Possessed By Shadows

Chapter 11

Iended up switching with Sky. My brain was too loud to focus on reading the dull monotony of the files Lukas had gathered. They were long lists of details about each place, including whatever sordid history the modern world had thought caused a haunting. I wasn’t sure I believed that large centers of death made for negative energy. Having seen my fair share of battlefields in my life, strewn with the corpses of thousands of unjustified deaths, and only encountering actualDeathon one of them. I thought it less to do with volume than it did with intent.

Recently we’d stumbled on a serial killer in Texas. A woman who had been murdering rivals and hiding them in the Texas countryside. Among one of those fields of bodies, Micah and I had encounteredDeathwith a capital D. And it had seemed focused on the killer. Perhaps it had been made up of the souls of the people she had killed, only getting to be free when she was caught or killed? And how sad that was, to think people were forever caught in a cycle like that. What did that say for all those whose killers weren’t caught?

Statistically, there were probably anywhere from thirty to fifty serial killers across the USA at any time, all unfound, all expanding their kill field. The country was vast and mostly uninterested in helping the average person, so they got overlooked regularly enough that when they were found, a dozen instances in which they could have been caught sooner always ended up in their bio. I’d spent far too many evenings before bed reading or watching profiles on serial killers. Found it oddly relaxing. Like the bits we were told would help me recognize one if I saw one next.

We hadn’t had warning about MaryAnn. She had seemed normal until she’d come unhinged at the end after failing to kill me and Micah. Most of the killer profiles didn’t have the unhinged part. And most of the killers turned themselves in. Did that leave all their spaces haunted? Or free the souls taken there because their killer was behind bars? The two locations in Louisiana I’d glanced through, indicated otherwise. I’d glazed over the rest of it, notes of sounds, shadow figures, and apparitions. On paper it was very bland after having experienced it firsthand.

Sky and I exchanged places. I sat on the futon with Jet in my lap while I watched videos. I wore headphones to hear whatever sounds there were better, and keep the noise from bothering them while they read. And I began with the very first content from Lukas’ channel. Because we had his computer, which was already logged into his YouTube account, we had access to unpublished content that had been uploaded and either never went live, or had been taken out of public view. Those first videos were all unpublished. Easily a dozen. Some only a few minutes. Others were hours long.

After another hour, Sky decided to go home, which currently was Lukas’s apartment, for the night, promising to help more another time.

“Do you want me to walk you home?” I asked.

She waved at me as she packed up her bag. “No. I’m fine. It’s not far and not even late yet. I’ve got my pepper spray and knuckle key fob.”

“I hate that you have to carry stuff like that,” I told her.

“I love that you worry. See you both tomorrow.”

After she was gone, I went back to the audio, trying to deduce a thousand unsaid things my brother might be implying. But even here he didn’t talk much. The commentary rare, other than an occasional time stamp of a location, or a notation of a sound.

The night noises were all muted, distant, and little more than focused on a digital recorder playback. None of them seemed to be videos in a location, just an audio time stamp of Lukas saying where he recorded and when. The first was captured only a few months after Micah’s return.

I wondered why the sound was so muted, no matter how he tried to record it. In a handful of the short commentaries, he remarked that the sound wasn’t something that seemed to be heard by human hearing, so how did it wake Micah up so much? Or me now.

Good question. I knew that noise was insanely loud most nights. Not muffled or muted, or only heard on some highly sensitive audio device. Did that mean Micah and I were changed? Had some sort of supernatural hearing now? That was something I didn’t want to ponder, so I headed on to the next.

The ghost hunts began long before I showed up in New Orleans. But the date indicated it was after the incident with Sky. Had that been a trigger?

I watched the first two, finding even the edited hourlong video boring and uneventful. Lukas had been on his own, local places, and caught nothing really other than a few vague shadows that could have been his. So maybe he hadn’t recorded whatever had helped him find Sky. Maybe it had been a dream or a night noise?

I dug into his computer, searching for video and audio files. Found a fine selection of porn. None of it was Micah’s old work, for which I was grateful, but there were a handful of porn focused on trans women. Research for Sky maybe? The upload dates seemed to correspond with their time dating. I did not watch to see what he might be looking for.

There were multiple folders filled with vlog bits. None of them labeled with anything other than dates. The first two I clicked on was Lukas, obviously using his phone as a camera, the lighting wasn’t great, talking about random things. Rambling almost. A bit about a case for work here, or something he’d encountered in the Quarter that intrigued him, whether it be a person or a bit of art, or even a feeling.

Lukas learning the Quarter, maybe? Though I knew he had been here almost a decade. The vlogs made him sound very lonely. None of them mentioned Sky or Micah, or anyone other than his fellow cops on rare occasion. Odd.

Micah kissed my cheek and I looked up at him, pausing the video and taking the headphone off one ear. “We should get some sleep,” he said. “It’s late.”

“I’m just going to do this a bit longer,” I said. “You okay without me for a little bit?”

He smiled. “Never, but alright.”

I reached out to grab his hand and tug him down for a real kiss. His lips were warm and soft, and I could fall into him forever if I let myself. “Sleep. I know you’re exhausted.”

“You are too,” he said, his thumb brushing across the skin under my right eye. I probably had those dark circles forming from stress and lack of sleep.

“I’ll be up soon,” I promised, catching his palm and kissing it softly.

Once he had vanished upstairs, I turned back to the videos. Watching another hour until I found something that made me pause. The time stamps around the date Sky had vanished had all been bland. Nothing about his search mentioned. More of the day to day. I understood why he hadn’t uploaded any of this, as it was as dull as could be. But this one, dated almost a month after Sky had been lured into the trafficking thing and rescued, was Lukas in the Quarter at night.

Most of his videos had been him, at home in his apartment, at a desk, staring into the camera. This one was him moving, camera shaking, breathing heavy, the time stamp on the recording indicating it was after two in the morning.

He talked about where he was. “Was down by the river, thought, why not? Can’t sleep anyway. So I just started walking. Don’t know how I ended up here. Almost to Howard.” He showed some of the area which I knew to be close to the warehouse district. An area rife with homeless people and crime. A lot of the crime against homeless people. Probably not the best place for him to be walking at night.

“This is where it happened, right?” He walked and showed a section under a bridge that the city had added spikes to keep the homeless out. A cruel and unnecessary thing that made me angry even now that I was no longer homeless. That way of life was never easy. But for a while, I’d chosen it over burdening my family. Probably a dumb thing to do, but we all had our hang-ups.