“Get out of there now or I’ll shoot her,” Misty ordered Oscar, brandishing her weapon. “Turn that damned light off.”
“All right, all right, don’t shoot,” Oscar said. “Small quarters in here—the bullet could ricochet and hit any of us,” he added, climbing out from behind or beneath—Teddy wasn’t certain—the lenses.
“Outside,” Rob said, yanking Teddy to her feet by a hank of her hair. “Now.” She cried out in pain and moved along as quickly as possible.
Rob reached for the glass door. Just before he touched it, it burst open with a gust of rain and chill.
But it wasn’t just rain. It wasice.
And Teddy’s breath immediately frosted, hanging in the air like a dense cloud.
The world turned eerily frigid.
And that was when she saw it: the amorphous blue-green shape, billowing just outside the doorway.
Twenty
Oscar frozeat the sight of the shape glowing against the thrashing night sky.
It was bluish-green, and as he watched, it stretched, lengthening into a tall figure that loomed over them. It had the vague, undulating shape of a human, but not a normal human: an elongated, horrible, furious creature with a cavernous black mouth and fiery yellow eyes.
Oscar’s breath—what he managed to exhale, for his lungs had frozen (as had the rest of his body)—hung in the air, and what should have been rain were sharp, frigid needles that pounded him and everyone around him.
“What thehell…” whispered Misty, stepping backward, goggling at the apparition. “Is that…?”
In spite of himself, Oscar already knew the answer to that, and somehow, he had the wherewithal to grab the fascinated Teddy’s hand and yank her back from the tableau in front of them.
A horrible scream—more of a cry of anger and fury rather than one of terror and fear—filled the air. It came from the apparition, hethought, and it rattled the glass windows, swelling in the lantern room as if attempting to combust the enclosure.
Rob and Misty fell back, petrified, their faces frozen as the apparition swelled, engulfing them, while its livid cry battled with the roll of thunder and the howl of the wind. Rain and sleet whipped up, spinning into the lantern room like raging icicles pummeling them through the fog of their cloudy, icy breaths.
“Watch out,” Teddy cried over the ferocity as Misty screamed and turned to run, eyes blind with terror.
She bolted from the apparition—past Oscar and Teddy—and spun out of the lantern room door. Over the tornado around them, Oscar heard another cry, a more shocked and terrified one that was suddenly, horribly cut off. He heard the ugly, unpleasant noise of someone falling.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
As Teddy and Oscar stood there, holding hands, watching in horror, Rob seemed unable to move for a long moment. He placed his hands over his ears as the ghost’s scream continued to fill the night, malevolent and bloodcurdling, and then suddenly, somehow, he was airborne…into the night, over the edge of the railing.
If he screamed, the sound was drowned out by the wild storm and the fury of the specter.
Oscar squeezed Teddy’s hand, yanking her behind him when the blue-green entity roared wider and louder in front of them. His fingers were so cold that they hardly moved, and his wrist, which had been hot with angry pain, felt slightly better. His eyelashes and nose felt tipped with ice. The arctic blast of the furious ghost roared around them, and for a moment, he thought they were to be the next victims.
But from behind him, Teddy shouted, “Thank you, Stuart! Now you can rest in peace! Be off with you!”
Oscar would have rolled his eyes if the moment hadn’t been so desperate, and when the ghost shivered violently, he tensed, prepared to defend them—how he would do so, he had no idea—
Then suddenly, it eased.
The noise, the storm, the energy in front of them. It softened—if one could use that term to describe an amorphous object—and then, all at once, it was justgone.
The freeze in the air also disappeared instantly, the rain and normal storm wind returned, and even the lightning and thunder seemed to lessen.
The only sound was the drum of rain on the roof and glass walls and the unsteady breathing of Teddy next to him.
His hands still shaky, his wrist now a mottled purple and blue balloon with no mobility to speak of, Oscar nevertheless managed to pull Teddy into his arms.
“That was…” Words failed him.
