18.98: An ONC 2023 Thriller

Chapter 17

THE PRESENT

Twisting to her right in the front passenger's seat, Liv admired a panoramic view of the Olympic mountains as Graham drove over the floating bridge connecting the Kitsap and Olympic peninsulas. Cloud cover to their west had cleared just enough to make out the range's craggy, snow-capped peaks. They reminded Liv of old men laying down in a bed of clover, wrinkled skin adorned with the long, aged beards of the withered and wise.

As they exited the bridge, waiting in a line of cars turning north, she finally answered the question that had been dancing on her tongue since they'd left Port Townsend. "What do you want to know, Graham?"

Liv half expected him to maintain his stony silence, but instead, her question seemed to wake him from his stupor. "So many things. Like, why the note behind the door bothered you so much that you ran out of the gallery, or how you figured out Ted is a dude named GnochiGhost from that paranormal forum. I thought he and Helina met at the town's wooden boat festival, not online discussing the very thing that might be responsible for Helina's disappearance. Or how about, why the hell you didn't you clue me in earlier on this online conversation between the two of them."

"That's a lot to unpack," she said, stalling for time. "What do you want me to answer first?"

Graham slowed down the car as the yellow light ahead of them turned red. Windshield wipers flung drops of rain off the glass, clearing their view, only to have it obscured again by the ongoing storm, slowly at first, then heavier, with a fervor that made Liv feel like the clouds had traveled from the mountains to purposefully wage war on the lowlands, their army of raindrops sent to assault Graham's Subaru like machine gun fire.

He turned the wiper speed up to high. "Have you communicated with Penelope since... since she helped you find Allen Chen's body?"

A surprising choice of a question, and one Liv could answer honestly.

"It was never really her. I wanted it to be, so, so badly. But it was a deception. A mirage. I never spoke with her after she died."

"How can you be so sure? It sounded like her, right? Couldn't she be in the ghost realm?"

"The ghost realm isn't a world full of dead people, Graham."

"Are you kidding me?" Liv watched as a tiny spark of hope burned out in his soul. "But it's ghosts."

"That's just what we call them. Ghosts, spirits, otherworldly beings. They exist. They're alive, if you can call it that, but the rules of life are different there. Everything is different."

"So, if you're dead, you can't exist there?"

"Not any more than you can exist here. That's my best guess, of course. Take it for what it's worth."

"It's worth a lot to me."

"It shouldn't be." Liv leaned her head against the car's window. "It's all I have though. Penelope is dead. Whether her conscience lives on in an afterlife or not isn't for me to say. I hope so, obviously. I just know she can't come back here and she's not in the ghost realm." And thank God for that. Penelope's brief foray into that world had been traumatic enough to make her claw her way back into this reality with a level of desperation that had ended with her death. The idea that someone as pure and good as her would be subjected to that hell forever made Liv want to obliterate all of existence—human, ghost, monster, or otherwise.

"The first night after you arrived," Graham said, "When we took those edibles. You spoke... you sounded just like her. Like Helina."

A warning signal went off in Liv's mind. Get out, get out, get out!