Page 32 of Stalked By Shadows
Chapter 11
We actually ended up in his bed, which would have sounded kinky except that as twins we’d always been that way. Curling up together, even as teens. It wasn’t sexual, more a comfort thing. Lukas needed sleep, and I needed to rest my brain in the safe proximity of someone I trusted. He told me he texted Micah that we’d both be taking a few hours of reprieve from peopling. I hadn’t planned to actually fall asleep. Instead, lying beside Lukas, with my eyes closed and meditating, focusing on pushing aside the negative and focusing on numbers. Which is why I fell asleep.
The smell of spicy sausage and frankincense woke me up with my stomach growling. I opened my eyes to Lukas’ bedroom, but with Micah sitting on the bed beside me, crocheting something. I think it was crochet as it was one hook thing instead of a couple of needles. My mom had done a little of both when we were kids. One of the guys on my second tour with me had been a knitter, whipping those two needles around in a frenzy that instead of having the team tease him, they joked about how he was some sort of ninja with them. He’d been very adamant about the fact that he was a knitter, not a crocheter. Though to this day I still wasn’t sure why it was such a big deal.
I rolled onto my back and stared up at Micah.
“I programmed my number into your phone,” he said. “And there’s food out in the kitchen. Lukas had to go into work. He wanted you to eat, ordered you something before he left.”
While I was shocked by the lack of nightmares from falling asleep again, I wondered at his presence.
“Are you feeling better? Lukas says the stress from last night really threw you off, and that I shouldn’t take your quitting as fact.” He glanced my way. “You left your key in the bag. It’s out on the counter.”
I studied his face, wondering a thousand things and where to begin. “Why would you still want to work with me?” I wanted to know.
He hesitated for a minute, his hands moving faster, creating some sort of magic that seemed to spit out rows of something, a shawl perhaps. “If we go on the walking tour, and I say I feel something, people take pictures in that direction. They don’t really see anything until the pictures show them something. None of them feel the same things I do. They need the camera toseesomething.”
I let those words process for a minute. “So you’re saying you may not see ghosts or whatever, but you can feel them there?”
Micah frowned, staring intently at his work. “Yes? No? I’m not sure. I’ve never really talked about it before because everyone looks at me like I’m crazy. Even Sky and Lukas who have been on tour with me a half dozen times.”
“But Sky has heard stuff while staying in your house at night? Lukas told me.”
“I think that’s different. That one, whatever it is, seeks me out.” He shivered. “I don’t go looking for it. The stuff on the tour… well I usually walk the route beforehand, find places that feel… different, and take the tour that way.”
Well that would make for a pretty awesome ghost tour if Micah could sense where they were, though he said he didn’t believe in ghosts. “What do you think you feel? Ghosts?”
“I’m not a believer in ghosts. I think whatever is after all of this,” he paused to wave his hand over us, “is something more? Perhaps a higher plane of existence? What I feel doesn’t make me think of people. Not in the same way. More like something else?” He sighed. “A lot of voodoo practitioners talk about veils and the weakness between dimensions, so maybe it’s something from across the veil, if that is a thing. Sometimes it feels very faint. Other times it’s so intense I can almost hear them talking to me, but they never feel like people.”
“How do you feel them?”
“It’s hard to explain. Like it starts in my stomach and then turns to jitters sometimes, or even a tingling on my skin. Like ants.” He frowned. “Or bugs crawling.” He glanced my way. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No,” I didn’t. Who was I to judge? “Were you always able to feel them?”
He shook his head. “Not until after the park.”
“When you disappeared? Do you really not remember anything?”
“I remember hearing something. I remember seeing some sort of wavy break in the path, like when the day is really hot and the roadway has those heat waves you can see? Only it was in one spot. That’s all I really remember. The police and therapists, and everyone say it was a dream.”
“You were gone three months. Do you remember anything from that time?”
“Sometimes I dream of stuff. I don’t know if any of that is real or stuff my head thought up,” Micah admitted.
That was a lot like what was in my head. Had what I’d seen really been what I now dream? Or had my brain expanded it somehow? “Was what you heard similar to what you hear at night?”
He put the crochet down and stared into the distance for a minute. “Sometimes, yes. I’m not sure if the thing that comes at night is mimicking what I heard to scare me, or it really is the same thing. I don’t want to know.”
No wonder it scared him so much. If he went out into the darkness would it take him again? Had he escaped it somehow and now it followed him waiting for the right time? If it had taken him in broad daylight the first time, why not now? Maybe it was toying with him, enjoying making him afraid. That idea made me shiver.
We sat in silence for a few minutes, and he started his crocheting again. Stress relief, he’d called it. I could see that.
“Lukas said you’ve experienced stuff that can’t exactly be explained. So I thought that maybe you would understand and not look at me like I’m pretending or eccentric,” he said after a few minutes.
“I’m not sure what I saw.” Not in the desert and not last night. “It was scary. That’s all I’m sure of.”
He nodded. “Sometimes when I prepare for a tour, I feel something that isn’t right. Not in the way of ‘there is something there that others might feel,’ but something that makes me… afraid? Worried? Anxious? I’m not quite sure. Usually I change my route to avoid those spots.”