Palace of Ghosts

By Thomas S. Flowers

Evil resides in Amon Palace. Something worse came to visit.

Four veterans of the Iraq War seeking a cure for Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder arrive at a notoriously haunted house in the bogs of Galveston Island called Amon Palace.

Samantha Green, a friendless former Army K-9 handler looking for a way to put her loss behind her.

Brad Myers, a lighthearted former Military Police Officer severally wounded in war wanting nothing more than a good nights sleep.

Andy Lovejoy, an overweight light spoken drone operator who once watched the war from above now questions who he has become.

Marcus Pangborn, a headstrong Marine who desperately wants a dead friend's forgiveness.

The group joins Doctor Frederick Peters, an experimental psychologist looking to prove his exposure theory hypothesis, and his two assistants, Tiffany Burgess and Dexter Reid.

At first, their stay seems to conjure nothing more than spooky encounters with inexplicable phenomena. But Amon Palace is gathering its powers—and soon it will reveal that these veterans are not who they seem.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas S. Flowers
• Release date: Mar 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781988819143

Book preview

PALACE OF GHOSTS

Thomas S. Flowers

__________________________

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author.

SHADOW WORK PUBLISHING

Copyright © 2019 by Thomas S. Flowers

All rights reserved.

Edited by Chad A. Clark

Proofed by Duncan Ralston

Cover design by Luke Spooner © 2019

Chapter illustrations by Patrick Loveland © 2019

For my family.

Chapter 1

Missing Persons

Detective Carter studied the man across the table through the smoky haze of stale cigarettes. He paid close attention to any clue that could give away some other reasonable explanation than the insanity that had just been confessed. Manila envelopes and folders spread out before him, containing recent photographs and reports of what remained of the old mansion out in the bogs on Galveston Island by Boddeker Road. The fire was substantial to say the least, leaving only skeletal remnants of charred stone and soot of what was once a magnificent estate. And among the destruction spread out on the table in interrogation room 2B, six separate missing persons reports. Reaching down, he switched off the recorder, flipped the tape and resumed the interview.

Maybe we should throw you back in holding for another twenty-four hours—see if that gets you to start talking reasonably, Carter's partner, Detective Harley Warren, growled. He walked around the room and stood behind the suspect. He leaned close to his ear and whispered, What you're giving us, Doc—well, we ain't buying it. I think maybe you're a shit liar and can't come up with a more realistic story. You want to know what I think? I think maybe you did something to your patients. Maybe you lost your temper and— he made a slicing motion with his thumb across his neck.

Squinting against the harsh fluorescent light above them, Carter focused on the suspect's reaction. But all he saw was more of the same.

The suspect propped his head up with his elbows on the table, rubbing his temples, eyes closed. I've told you what happened, I know its hard to believe, but—

Hard to believe? I'd say this was all a waste of our time. Warren stood but remained behind the suspect. "There are six people missing—six, don't you think their families deserve closure? Just tell us where the bodies are and then we'll let you go see the wizard, get your own personal padded cell."

The suspect scoffed. "Missing? They aren't missing—they were taken, but long before coming to Amon Palace. Whatever happened to them happened in Iraq."

Warren made a face. Again with this crazy bullshit.

"Its not bullshit—I'm telling you what happened, you simply don't want to listen." The suspect glanced behind him, speaking to Warren directly.

Warren waved him off. "Fancy talk, Doc. But where does it leave us? I'll tell you, I think you just scored a free ride to the insane asylum. Three hots and a cot, you'll be living like a king while the parents of the people you killed suffer. All because you're too chickenshit to tell us what really happened."

The suspect looked into his palms and said, mostly to himself, Insane? Maybe I am insane—God, I wish I was.

Carter cleared his throat. "Okay, Doctor Peters, let's take it slow. Let's see if we got this straight. What you're telling us is that you put together this group from patients you were treating at the VA hospital, right?

Correct, Peters nodded. An experiment in exposure therapy.

"Jesus Christ, don't you think these vets have gone through enough without you playing around with their heads?" Warren barked.

I was trying to help them! Peters cried.

Sure you were—sounds like you were trying to help your own career, if you ask me, Warren quipped.

Carter held up a hand, glancing up at Warren, gesturing for him to ease off.

Warren rolled his eyes but said nothing else.

"Okay, Doctor. So, you put together this group for a week at Amon Palace?" Carter asked.

Rubbing his temples again, Peters said, I've told you all of this already. Yes, I acquired special permission from Mrs. Driscoll. She allowed me use of her estate to conduct the week-long experiment.

"Mrs. Driscoll? As in Elizabeth Driscoll, daughter of John Driscoll?"

Yes, and niece of Sir Christopher Driscoll.

Carter glanced up at Warren.

Noticing the exchanged expression, Peters asked, Why?

Carter shifted in his seat and looked Peters straight in the face, bracing for the reaction that would come. Elizabeth Driscoll has been dead now for over thirty years. The estate passed on to another member of the family who had never bothered to do anything with it. Amon Palace has been abandoned since the 1980s.

As if on cue, Peters's hand dropped to the table. His eyes shot wide. What? he whispered.

Carter nodded, Whoever you talked with—if anyone, it wasn't Elizabeth Driscoll.

That can't be possible, Peters stammered.

Let's assume for now that whoever it was you spoke with, you believed it to be Elizabeth Driscoll, Carter said, scribbling gibberish in his notebook, a trick he'd used a dozen times with perps. They see him writing something down after getting the rug swept under them and get nervous. And with jittery nerves come mistakes.

Can't be—I spoke with her... Peters went on, glancing at the notebook, whispering to himself. He looked up suddenly, What about the Andersons?

Carter frowned. Who?

Marge and John Anderson.

Are you saying there were others?

There should be—they were the caretakers hired by Miss Driscoll.

Exhaling, Carter said, Amon Palace has no caretakers—at least none on record. He flipped through some of the folders on the table. And there have been no bodies recovered as of yet at the crime scene.

Peters resumed rubbing his temples. "They have to be there, she hired them to take care of the estate. I spoke with both on more than one occasion. And I saw them both on the night of the fire...they were in the house."

Warren stepped forward and slammed his fist on the table beside Peters, filling the room with a loud pang as he shouted, "Don't you understand what we're saying? The woman you supposedly talked with doesn't exist and there were no caretakers! Which means your story is total fucking bullshit!"

Peters flinched.

Okay, Doctor, Carter prodded, "you brought this group in for an experiment. And then what, spooky encounters start happening—are you telling us that Amon Palace is haunted?"

Warren scoffed. He stood back now, leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his barrel chest.

Smiling, Peters said, "Go ahead and laugh, I understand. I didn't believe either, not at first. Haunted by some specter or specters or demonically possessed? That would be the real question. Those familiar with parapsychology—of which I am not; I'm paraphrasing here from what I've read—almost all cases with reports of hauntings, psychic invasions, and the like, all bear a strong parallel to our experiences within Amon Palace. Cold spots, slamming of doors or banging on walls by some unknown; unseen force, retrocognition—and yet, according to documents published by the Vatican, hauntings such as these sometimes serve as the first manifestation of an entity ultimately bent on demonic possession. According to said article, odors of human excrement or rotting eggs, sulfur can be a characteristic clue of demonic infestation."

More laughing from Warren.

"As I said, laugh if it makes you feel better. But what would you find more incredible, that Amon Palace is; was indeed possessed, or at the very least haunted, or that we all somehow shared the same hallucinations and grotesque misinterpretations of fact?"

Carter leaned back in his chair, pondering the possibility.

Warren jabbed Peters with a finger. "If what you're saying is even true—we only have your statement to go off of. Convenient, wouldn't you say, Doctor?"

Peters shook his head, Certainly not convenient for Samantha Green, Brad Myers, Marcus Pangborn, Tiffany Burgess, or Dexter Reid.

Warren wound up as if he was about to punch Peters.

Okay, okay, Carter offered his hands again, urging his partner to cool down. "You bring your experimental exposure group to Amon Palace and everyone starts seeing things—but didn't you say you wanted them to see this weird stuff? Triggers, you called them, right?"

The idea—the experiment, Peters exhaled, glancing sideways at Warren, "was for them to spend a week unplugged from the rest of the world. No phones. No TV. No internet. Completely isolated in an unfamiliar and potentially stressful environment that could possibly trigger certain responses. At the time, I did not believe Amon Palace was truly haunted. Exposure therapy works by triggering patients, forcing them to confront buried trauma. But this was supposed to be a place where I could safely monitor their conditions. There have been cases before, therapeutic exposure experiments that have gone awry. I'm sure you have heard of the former Navy Seal whose post-service time was spent helping veterans with PTSD. He would take them to gun ranges, a known trigger for many soldiers returning from war. The idea is the same—to help patients with PTSD face trauma in order to heal. On one occasion, he had taken a veteran out who had been struggling significantly. The veteran snapped. And in the end, he shot and killed his would-be therapist and his friend. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. A horrible tragedy with three ruined lives. At Amon Palace I wanted my patients to be able to face the memory of their trauma without the fear of hurting loved ones or themselves. As they began to react to the suggested belief that Amon Palace was in fact haunted, I would guide them toward projecting what they feared the most—their own unique traumas."

"Jesus Christ," Warren quipped again.

Carter silenced his partner with a hand. So, the experiment was designed for them to react to being locked up in a creepy mansion under the pretense that the house was haunted, and it worked?

Peters nodded, tears brimming his eyes. "And I confess, I pushed them—more than I should have."

Carter leaned forward, he could sense they were finally getting somewhere. "What do you mean, pushed?"

Looking up, tears now trickling down his face, he said, Hypnosis.

Hypnotherapy? You put them in a suggestive state when they were already under duress?

Under duress? No—they volunteered!

Only because you promised a cure—didn't you?

"And it would have worked too...but they weren't who I thought they were—they changed into something horrible."

Carter sneered, tired of this interrogation, tired of the lies and wild fantasies. "And why didn't it work, Doctor? Did your little hypothesis backfire? Did you have visions of your career burning so you decided to burn everything else? Did you kill them?"

NO!

THEN WHAT HAPPENED?

THEY WERE TAKEN!

Carter shook his head, the feeling of defeat sinking in and the weariness of this prolonged interrogation taking a toll. Taken? Where, Doctor—and by whom?

Chapter 2

The Hypothesis

Are you recording?

Yes?

Good.

Where do I start?

So much has happened—and it'll be difficult to explain.

The most obvious, yes, that's where I'll start.

I don't know why I picked Amon Palace to conduct my experiment. I think it started with a memory from my childhood, this old beat up place in my neighborhood growing up. Every neighborhood has one of those houses. The kind you can't walk past without looking at it. You look at it alone or in company, in the safety of the sun or moon, light or in the dark, regardless when you look at it that place looks as exactly as you imagine: sinister. When you're walking down the street—with those tall shadows and the lamp lights dim, yellow, like pale ghosts, it feels as if the whole world is being sucked up into that house. Have you ever walked down a street like that? You jog and walk the block—streets you've known for years, streets you trust, and then you pass that house, the house you've known about for years. It scared you as a kid and it scares you now. The large Victorian or some shit-hole trailer no one owns anymore with witchgrass, chest high in the front yard. Vacant. And you start to wonder, Is it really vacant? Why hasn't someone flipped it, turned it into a bed and breakfast with high-end designer decor or some bullshit. A roadside museum or some other kind of tourist trap.

Hell, on this island, Galveston's an easy enough place to hook out-of-towners. But no. No one has dared to buy this house, and your mind starts to wander as you're walking down the sidewalk and you pass by the front of this decrepit empty house. Maybe there's an iron fence that creaks and a gate and arched dirty windows and dirty, molding brick. You don't want to look, you just want to get back home, even though you're certain your dad is waiting up for you with some snide remark about how you're late and why you can't keep your dick in your pants. But you don't care. You just want to be home in your room under the cover on your bed with the lights on.

Still.

There's something about this house. It pulls you in, softens your will, you become obsessed, can't not look, and so you do, you look up at it. And at first everything is fine, you trace the wall, brick by brick, and note the stain of age, the moss that has tried to live but never succeeded. Dead gnarled trees. As if the house itself is poison and everything around it dies. And then, finally, your gaze comes to rest on a window and there you see what you feared the most but never dared give form with words. A shadow of a chair—no, a person that shouldn't be there, standing in the window, seen but unseen, dark and unreal, but real. Watching you watching it. And as it does a cold hard spasm takes your spine and squeezes with a hellish perversion.

You shouldn't be watching.

That person shouldn't be there—the house is abandoned.

But you can't stop staring.

And then you run home.

You've never run so fast in your entire life.

You run back into the light.

At home you feel safe with Mom and Dad snoring in the room next door and you laugh, calling yourself silly or dumb, a chickenshit. Either way, slowly you forget just how scared and how real it really felt. All the while, who's to say that strange shadow wasn't really there and that after you ran like the chickenshit that you are, whatever it was turned away from the tall glass window and faded back into that empty horrible house. Alone—for nothing in that house desires anything more in this world than to forget it was ever alive.

Maybe that's why I picked Amon Palace.

There are a lot of bullshit stories. Exaggerations mostly. Good fodder for the tourists. But I knew there was something real there too. Deep inside my subconscious there was a desire that among the tales told by those ghost tour enthusiasts who'd shit themselves if they ever saw a smidgen of what really lives there.

Excuse me?

Why am I telling you this?

Precisely.

Why indeed.

Perhaps the simplest reason is that I'm terrified of what would happen if I don't. And I know that doesn't make much sense, not yet anyway. I'm here out of my own free volition to say what I don't want to believe myself. And I know that doesn't make sense either. Just let me talk. I'll do the best I can to force this out. When I am finished—then you can judge me as batshit crazy, prophet, or both.

What?

You find that last part funny?

Prophet? Perhaps augur would be better suited.

No—you don't understand.

Not yet.

The beginning though—that's the trick; where do we start?

For all intents and purposes, let's not start with my patients, the four from my group therapy experiment. We'll get to them. I know you are curious to hear what happened. Let me say that they came to Amon Palace—upon my invitation, to spend a week with me living in this so-called haunted house for what I promised would be a new form of extreme therapy, an experiment. I wanted to help them, you see? I honestly, truthfully had nothing but the best intentions for those four souls. They had seen more than most, packed into such short, trauma-filled lives.

And that is why I picked them.

And that is why I picked that house.

The house—mansion—palace.

Amon Palace, I trust you've heard of it? Yes?

That's why we're here, isn't it?

Good.

Then I'm sure you've heard the campfires stories. Legends told on ghost tours. I've been informed that on almost all the tour buses that drive by Amon Palace they first mention the 1963 Grice Family Massacre. You've heard this one? Seeing her supposedly was like watching a Super 8 movie, a flickering, jerking kind of motion. The psychic manifestation was oddly selective. Only two of my patients reported a sighting—the sound of the axe dragging lazily across the wood floor and the thick wet sound of the head being sunk into flesh, well, it left an unsettling impression on them both.

Do you mind if I smoke?

Thanks.

Jeez, look at my hands. I'm sure you know the rest. But while the Grices are buried together in a family lot on Galveston, what happened to them never left the house. The cleft of the axe still echoes. And while the crime scene may have been scrubbed clean, the blood saturated the wood floor, the walls, the very soul of Amon Palace drank it up.

I believe there was something in that house, an awful, rotting, diseased something that touches anyone and everyone who enters through those grand double doors. And it started with the