The Dule Tree (The Sullivan Gray Series Book 3) by H.P. Bayne

Author:H.P. Bayne [Bayne, H.P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bayne Independent Publishing
Published: 2019-01-21T22:00:00+00:00

Sully hadn’t intended to fall asleep, didn’t realize he had until a nightmare woke him.

He was unnerved to see her standing next to the mattress, watching him with those large, pained eyes, blood ever-present on the front of her white nightgown and turning her purple hair black on one side.

Sully sat up, sliding himself back to sit against the wall facing her. She wasn’t fully solid like she so often appeared, but filmy, enabling him to see the edge of the door through her body.

Ordinarily, the sight of her unsettled him, even scared him in those instances where he hadn’t been expecting her. But here, in this place, locked in this small cell with nothing but a spider for company, he greeted her as a friend.

“I wish you could talk,” he said. “I could use the conversation.”

As expected, she didn’t respond, instead holding him in that wide-eyed stare he was trying very hard to ignore despite his unbroken track record of failure. It occurred to him he’d never looked for other ways to converse, never really wanting to go too far down that path. Today—or tonight, if that’s what it was—felt different. Today, he needed her in a way he’d never felt before.

“If I ask you questions, can you nod or shake your head? Or can you respond some other way?”

Her answer came in the form of a slow nod and, for the first time since he’d been brought to this place, Sully smiled. It might not be a traditional conversation, but right now anything was better than nothing—even if that anything was talking to a dead girl.

“I know you can’t tell me your name, and I can’t even begin to guess it. If I go through the alphabet, can you nod when I get to the right letter?”

Her head moved slowly side to side this time.

“You don’t want me to know your name?”

Another slow shake, no.

“Okay. How about your age? Can I ask that?”

Another no. Sully moved on.

“Do you know how long you’ve been dead?”

Again, she shook motioned the negative. Sully believed he’d been about four or five when he first saw her—or at least when he first remembered seeing her, and it seemed to him she’d be impossible to forget. That meant she’d been in this form for at least twenty years. How time passed for a ghost was something he’d never got his head around. Did they feel time like everyone else, or did it pass in some other way? Did twenty years drag on or did it blink past like the bat of an eye? In those moments when they weren’t seen, heard or felt, did they still exist somewhere, or did time and space in that other world bend and unfold somehow, pulling them from one location to the next? If so, did they control it, or did it control them?

He’d given those ideas a lot of thought over the years, but now wasn’t the time to ask. He had bigger fish to fry.

“Am I in danger here?”

This time a nod, up and down.

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