Ghost Night

But tonight she’d bring Georgia in with her and be a mother hen.

Carlos had been settling the young woman down; the two were sitting by the fire with large plastic cups—Vanessa was pretty sure they contained something a lot harder than champagne. As Vanessa, Jay and Lew returned, Georgia jumped to her feet, staring at them. “See? See? I told you!”

Jay took Georgia by the shoulders and tried to be calm and reassuring. “Georgia, all I can think is that Travis is playing some kind of a trick on you, sweetie.”

“No, no! You have to go look for Travis!” Georgia said.

“I guess we should,” Vanessa said quietly.

Jay stared at her with aggravation. “Look for him? Oh, please! You know damned well that Travis is the one who played this ridiculous joke, or he’s in on it! And there’s nothing there, Georgia. No hands, no skulls, no monsters. Georgia, you’ve got to get some sleep. I need some sleep.”

“No, no, I saw it!” Georgia said, shaking her head in fear. She glared furiously at Jay. “I have to get out of here. I won’t stay here!” she insisted.

“You’ve got to be joking!” Jay declared irritably. “Georgia, you were touting used cars, for God’s sake! This could make you the new scream queen!”

Georgia was obviously terrified beyond caring. “I don’t care! I don’t care if I spend the rest of my life as a waitress. I have to get off this island—now. Now!”

“It’s dark!” Jay reminded her.

“Hey, hey, it’s all right, we’re fifty miles from Miami, and we’ve got a good speedboat. I can take her in and be back to help with any follow-up or backup shots that we need tomorrow,” Carlos offered.

“What if we need the actress?” Jay demanded. “I haven’t looked through the sequences we shot today.”

Carlos looked at Vanessa. “If Nessa doesn’t mind, she’s the same height and build and has long blond hair. She can fill in.”

“Yes, yes, Vanessa can fill in! You can be my stunt double!” Georgia said enthusiastically.

“For joy, for joy,” Vanessa murmured. But she was still disturbed by the young woman’s absolute terror. Georgia was ambitious. Was she really so terrified that she would walk away from what could be a big break for her?

She realized that everyone was staring at her.

“Sure. Whatever is needed,” she said dryly to Jay. Of course she would do it. They both had a lot of hard work—not to mention their finances—tied up with this.

“I’ll be back in the morning,” Carlos promised. “Look, seriously, it’s what? Seven-thirty, eight o’clock now? I can make Miami in a few hours. I’ll get a night’s sleep and head back by five or six tomorrow morning.”

It was agreed. In another hour, Carlos and Georgia were off.

Vanessa found herself sitting by the fire with the others, sipping champagne once again, though it had lost its taste.

“I still think we should look for Travis,” she said.

Zoe let out an irritated “tsking” sound. “That jerk! He’s out there somewhere, laughing at everyone, and not caring that he’s put a real bug in the production.”

“And messing with the props. When he walks up laughing and swaggering in the morning, I think we should give him a good right hook,” Barry said.

Silence fell.

“Hey, we could sit here and tell ghost stories!” Bill suggested.

They all glared at him. Apparently, no one was in the mood.

For a while, they did reflect upon the many disappearances and oddities that had occurred in the Bermuda Triangle, but even that didn’t last long.

It was only nine-thirty when Vanessa opted for bed. She lay awake, watching the patterns of the low-burning fire playing upon the canvas roof of her tent. She thought about the ridiculousness of filming the movie—the hours of getting the characters into makeup and how, to save money, they had all taken on so many different tasks. Jay and Carlos had played the vengeful pirates, coming out of the sea, and she had supplied some of the sound effects and acted as the kidnapped and murdered Dona Isabella.

Her script was honestly good, based on history and legend. Once, the Florida Keys and the Bahamas had been areas of lawlessness, ruled by pirates. An infamous pirate captain, Mad Miller, and his mistress, Kitty Cutlass, had gone on a wild reign of terror, taking ship after ship, or so legend said. Then all had gone wrong. They had taken a ship bearing the beautiful and rich Dona Isabella. They had sunk her ship, killed most of the crew and, presumably, planned on ransoming Dona Isabella. She had been sailing from Key West to Spain, back to her wealthy husband, when she had been taken. But nothing had happened as planned. Legend said that Kitty Cutlass killed Dona Isabella in a fit of rage, and on Haunt Island, Mad Miller went really mad and massacred the remaining crew and many of his own men. Finally, his pirate ship had sunk off Haunt Island, caught in the vengeful winds of a massive storm. Vanessa had based her script on the legend, doing what research she could, with contemporary teenagers finding themselves victims of bitter ghosts risen from the sand and the sea. As a screenplay, the story provided amazing fodder for the imagination. Filming had actually been fun. There had been some amusing accidents along the way, but none that had caused any harm. Bill had fallen into one of the buckets of blood, and Jake had come bolting up out of the water once, terrified of a nurse shark. She liked the people she was working with, and so, for the most part, it had been enjoyable. A crash shoot—all of it done within three weeks. And Jay was right—it could hit big at the box office.

She still felt disturbed and uneasy, although she wasn’t alone. The tents were no more than a few feet apart. Jay, who had been bunking with Carlos, was next to her. Bill and Jake were on her left side. Lew, as secure a figure as anyone might ever want to meet, was just beyond Zoe.

But she was still afraid. It was as if Georgia’s gut-wrenching scream had awakened something inside her that knew something was coming, something that she dreaded.

At eleven o’clock, she was still staring at the canvas. She didn’t have anything really strong to help her sleep, but she decided on an over-the-counter aid. In another half an hour, she was asleep.

It might have been the pill. She slept, but she tossed and turned and awakened throughout the night. And she dreamed that Georgia was standing in front of her, giant tears dripping down her cheeks. “I told you, I told you there were monsters!”

Georgia’s image disappeared.

She dreamed of giant shadow figures rising over her tent and of seaweed monsters rising out of the ocean, growing and growing and devouring ships, boats and people, and reaching up to the sky to snatch planes right from the atmosphere.

She awoke feeling better, laughing at herself for the absurdity of her dreams.

She didn’t believe in seaweed monsters—sea snakes, yes, sharks and other demons of the real world, but seaweed monsters, no.

When she had nightmares, they were usually more logic-based—being chased in the darkness by a human killer, finding out she was in a dark house alone with a knife-wielding madman.

It had been Georgia. Georgia and that terrifying scream.

She blinked, stretched and rose. Taking off the long T-shirt nightgown she’d worn, she put on a bathing suit, ready to hit the beach. There were showers in the heads on both boats the crew had been using, the Seven Seas and the Jalapeño. Of course, one boat wouldn’t be back until Carlos returned. It was a bright and beautiful morning, and she felt that a good dousing in the surf would be refreshing.

She stepped out of her tent. The morning sun was shining, but the air retained a note of the night’s pleasant coolness. The sea stretched out before her, azure as it could only be in the Bahamas. Jay and Zoe were already up, and one of them had put the coffeepot to brew on the camp stove.

“Morning!” Jay called.

“Morning!” she returned. “How long till coffee?”

“Hey! As fast as it brews!” Jay told her.

Zoe giggled. “What? Did you think this film had a budget for a cook?”

Vanessa walked on out to the water. It was delightful; warm, but not too warm. So clear she could easily see the bottom, even when she had gone out about twenty-five feet from shore and the depth was around ten feet. The current of the Gulf Stream was sweeping the water around to the north; she decided to fight it and swim south, then let it bring her on back offshore from the campsite.

She swam a hard crawl, relaxed with a backstroke, worked on her butterfly and went back to doing the crawl, and then decided that she had gone far enough. She had angled herself in toward shore, so she paused a minute, standing, smoothing back her hair.

It was then that she looked toward the shore.

She would have screamed, but the sound froze in her throat.

She stood paralyzed, suddenly freezing as if she were a cube of ice in the balmy water.