Page 3 of The Haunting of Lockton

Arms came around my torso, the decayed skin hanging off milk-white bone. Another set of arms gripped my legs. Hands crawled up my body, and nails dug into my skin. I tried to scream but was frozen in place.

The woman threw her head back, face turned toward the starless night sky, and wailed, the sound broken and spine chilling. “His blood is on your hands.”

I saw him then.

Julian lay facedown in a pool of icy water, his skin blue.

I woke with a start, my chest sticky with sweat and my heart pounding. I could still hear her mournful sobs. Could still feel the cold hands gliding over my skin. Could still see my brother…

I looked over at Julian. He was still asleep, the blanket pulled up to his chin.

Just a nightmare.

I checked the time on my phone. A little after 6:00 a.m. Sleeping was out of the question, so might as well get us breakfast. After sliding out of bed, I pulled on jeans and a hoodie, then left the room, softly closing the door behind me.

The hotel had a coffee shop, so I grabbed two large vanilla lattes, a cinnamon bagel with cream cheese, a fruit cup, and a blueberry muffin before balancing it all in my arms and heading back up to the room.

“Trouble sleeping?” Julian asked in a sleep-heavy voice as he sat up in bed. His brown hair fell into his eyes, and he brushed it aside. He kept his hair longer than me as a way to stand out. To be his own person.

“Yeah.” I handed him a coffee. No sense in lying to him. He was my twin and could read me better than anyone. “I’m okay though. Nothing coffee can’t fix.”

“You don’t look okay.” Julian sat across from me at the small table beside the window. He’d brought the sheet from his bed and had it wrapped around his bare shoulders. “Are you having nightmares again?”

“No.” Okay. So maybe I lied to him a little bit sometimes. I just didn’t want to worry him. The nightmares had started when we were younger. After he…

Nope. Not going there.

Julian’s frown said he didn’t believe me, but he let the matter drop and sipped his coffee. He eyed the blueberry muffin and smiled when I pushed it toward him.

“What’s on the agenda for today?” I slathered cream cheese on the bagel and took a bite.

“I thought we could go over footage,” he responded, pinching off a tiny piece of the muffin and eating it. “Mayberesearch Lockton more too. I found several online articles about it.”

“Between the asylum and Redwood, we’ll be in paranormal heaven in Ivy Grove,” I said with my mouth full of bagel.

He nodded. “Both have a gruesome trail of death behind them. Murders, suicides, twisted experiments.”

“I love when you say such cheerful things in the morning.”

He gently kicked my leg beneath the table.

After breakfast, we pulled out the recorders and cameras from the night before and got to work. Julian plugged the EVP into his laptop and put on headphones while I watched footage from one of the cameras we had set up beside a tombstone where many people claimed to have witnessed a young boy on several occasions.

While we reviewed footage, we set up a camera on a tripod to record us. It added a nice touch to the episode, showing us when we discovered something. We edited it later and only included the interesting parts.

“Hey, Sky.” Julian took off his headphones and handed them to me. “This is when you were asking questions last night. Listen closely and tell me what you hear.”

I put them on and waited.

“Is there anyone here with us?”I heard myself ask. A weird static sounded in the background, but nothing substantial. I listened closer, hearing myself ask the second question.“Do you want to communicate with us?”

That’s when I heard it.

“Crying,” I told Julian. “It’s faint, but I definitely hear it. Like a woman’s.”

“Yes!” He marked the time stamp. “We got it! It backs up the stories we heard about the White Lady.”

His enthusiasm wasn’t just because we were recording the session. He was actually that excited. I was too. We didn’t always get solid evidence, so I basked in the instances when we did.