~5.12~

From the moment she’d made up her mind to come to Jericho, Laurie had worked to prepare herself for anything from disappointment to exultation to outright terror. It had been disappointment that she’d worked on the hardest… the idea that she’d waste her vacation time and her savings on traveling to a strange city and then having nothing happen had seemed so eminently possible. She’d told herself she wouldn’t be too greedy or too skeptical, that even if she stood in a courtyard or a graveyard or an abandoned building at night and nothing happened outwardly she’d accept the experience of being there and be satisfied.

She probably could have, too. Many people are better at justifying a disappointing purchase to themselves than they are admitting it was a waste.

What she hadn’t been prepared for was such a pure anti-climax. It made her whole trip seem like some lame shaggy dog story. Something had happened, something fleeting and real, but mostly fleeting… she hadn’t realized it until it was over. She’d come all the way to the east coast for that?

“Hello?” she said again, just to be sure. She thought about calling the girl’s name, but then she realized she hadn’t caught it. “Is this some sort of a joke?”

In voicing the possibility, she almost convinced herself it was… after all, it seemed so possible. People didn’t just vanish like ghosts.

Ghosts might, though.

She shivered at the thought. What else did you call it, though, when you were talking to somebody in a “spooky” place and then they just up and disappeared? A lot of the hauntings Laurie had read about had only mentioned odd sights and sounds, feelings of “presence”… it was only in older stories, wider-circulated and of a more questionable provenance, that she encountered the ghostly hitchhikers, the helpful strangers who couldn’t be found, and other such persons.

Viewed that way, it seemed like this experience should be more than enough for her.

Was it?

No.