A Hanging at Barton Academy (Gulf Coast Paranormal Season Three Book 5) by M. L. Bullock

Author:M. L. Bullock [Bullock, M. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2025-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven–Cassidy

The charcoal smudged beneath my fingers, dark streaks bleeding across the paper in jagged, frenzied strokes that felt like they clawed their way out of me. My breath hitched, shallow and uneven, my hands trembling as they moved faster than my mind could grasp, driven by a will not my own. The sketchbook weighed heavy on my lap, its pages filling with shapes I didn’t summon—twisted shadows stretching like skeletal fingers, something dangling in torment, something screaming into the void.

Clarence.

I knew it before the image solidified, before the chaotic smears sharpened into the grotesque form of a boy swinging from a noose, his arms limp, his feet twitching above an abyss that devoured light itself. His face blurred into a mask of agony, his mouth gaping in a silent, endless wail. But behind him—

A woman.

No eyes. Just gaping hollows, blacker than pitch, radiating a hunger that pulled at my soul. The White Lady. Her presence didn’t just stain the page—it seeped into the air, a venomous fog that coiled around me, tightening with every breath.

My fingers spasmed around the charcoal, snapping it with a brittle crack that reverberated like a gunshot in the stillness. A searing jolt stabbed through my chest, and I curled instinctively around my belly, shielding it from a threat I couldn’t name. A shiver clawed down my spine, sharp and unrelenting, as the room’s pressure thickened into a crushing force, the walls groaning as if they might collapse inward under her wrath. The air turned glacial, a biting cold that sank fangs into my skin, numbing my fingertips until they burned with frost.

I forced a breath, but it fractured, barely escaping my lips. “Midas.” My voice was a ghost, frail and fleeting. “I think he’s reaching out.”

He was already watching me, his face a slab of stone etched with unease. His gaze darted from my shaking hands to the sketch, lingering on the dark nightmare spilling across the page. “What do you see?”

I swallowed, my throat raw as if scraped by claws. “He’s trapped. She won’t let him go.”

The classroom lay entombed around us, a decaying shrine to lost time. The peeling chalkboard bore faded equations, their lines trembling like the last gasps of the forgotten. The ceiling sagged, water stains sprawling like blackened veins, pulsing with the rot beneath. Chalk dust hung faint in the air, mingling with the dank, festering reek of moldering wood—a stench now laced with something sharper, like the sour tang of blood long spilled. Beneath it all pulsed a whispering malice, a presence that gnashed at reality’s edges, ravenous and alive. Watching. Waiting. Hunting.

Sierra rubbed her arms, her movements jerky, her breath fogging in the icy air. “It feels like something’s shifting. Like the energy just… snapped.”

Jericho’s fingers clenched around the rosary at his neck, the beads rattling as his calm unraveled into something raw, urgent. “We’re getting close.”

Joshua glanced at the EMF detector, its red lights blazing in a frantic dance, spiking higher with each shudder of the room.

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