Ghostly Summons: A Lars Kelsen Spectral Thriller, #1

By John Andrew Karr

Lars Kelsen doesn't believe in psychic phenomenon. To him, visions of murder victims are a form of mental illness. Once they begin, options are limited. He can try to ignore them or deal with them by exposing a killer. Only the latter provides any semblance of peace. Temporarily, anyway.

Five years into his new life as a programmer, Kelsen-ex-crime beat reporter with a penance he can never fully satisfy-sees a victim. In person. Upright. Staring.

Typical of such past "Visits" as he calls them, he doesn't welcome this one. The nude form of a beautiful millionairess in his cubicle means murder has come to the vacation haven known as North Carolina's Outer Banks.

It means he'll have to go places he'd rather avoid. See things he'll wish he hadn't. Do things that don't come naturally, like in-your-face confrontation and bending the law. Actually, breaking the law ... but with good intent.

It also means dealing with one very attractive county coroner, who pushes his buttons in a not entirely unwelcome way.

So begins Kelsen's return to investigative reporting-complete with attempts on his life, fights, deception, and all the technological tricks, such as GPS and computer hacking, at his disposal. And maybe even finding a new love interest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Andrew Karr
• Release date: Feb 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224482566

John Andrew Karr

Seeking out the strange and spectacular, John Andrew Karr is a writer, IT worker and family guy residing near the southern coast of North Carolina.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Tremors as the A-10 Thunderbolt II roared past. Earl Griggs squinted against the rising sun as the Warthog shrunk to a gleaming toy over the tree tops. He didn’t need the radar to show the close support aircraft killing it over the waters of the Pamlico and Croatan Sounds. All pilots are speed demons, even if they’re not in the fastest jet ever made. ZipD, moniker of the fly-boy inside this war bird, would straddle a lightning bolt if he could time it right. Wasn’t unusual for him to peel paint from the aircraft’s nose well beyond the island chain of the Outer Banks—dubbed Graveyard of the Atlantic from all the shipwrecks since the year 1526—turn and burn over the mainland in mere minutes. Similar trip via Route 264 took two hours.

Griggs half-smiled as he flipped the thin microphone arm beneath his chin and took a sip of coffee. Man, if he had it to do over again...and wasn’t color blind to certain shades of red and green. Bombs were about to drop from the sky.

Bonus: Today they’d actually explode.

Griggs hummed and thumb-tapped his thigh, keys jingling merrily in his shorts pocket. Yeah, live bombs can make life interesting.

Pseudo-bombs most other days. Target practice on 46,000 acres of steamy North Carolina coastal forest and marsh. Today was still practice, but the bombs were the real deal, and while he’d overseen many such live drops, the danger factor had notched up. As had his excitement.

Inside the control tower, Griggs trained his binoculars and watched the Warthog approach. Similar images of the fighter-bomber played at different camera angles on the oversized computer monitor at the central desk, including real-time images from the high-powered camera mounted on the plane’s undercarriage, dubbed the belly cam by Griggs’s predecessor long ago. Each window in the group was recorded, both here and at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, where the famous Flying Tiger Squadron relocated after years at Pope AFB in Fayetteville, NC. Griggs preferred the binocs so he could see the bombing run play out in his own perspective. Twelve years and he never tired of this.

A silver tank with red fins detached from the underbelly. Normal enough—but early. Way too early.

The pilot swore in Griggs’s earpiece.

Coffee sloshed and spilled as cup met desk. Griggs grabbed for the joystick of the revolving camera, highest on the tower, missed and grabbed again, this time succeeding. He trained it on the bomb as it plunged on its premature path.

Heart thumping against his ribs, Griggs swallowed and glanced at the radar panel. Yellow dashes marked the bomb’s descent. A click and drag of the mouse shifted the superimposed map of the mock Iraqi town eastward, toward Stumpy Point Bay and a slice of the Pamlico Sound to the far right. No houses in this area, but the people at the small businesses around Stumpy Bay were now at risk, along with any fisherman and perhaps small game hunters, all-terrain vehicle riders, and motorists on the scenic byway.

He ignored the statistics in the side panel and zeroed in on the projected destination, highlighted in red blinking dashes. A gust of air as he let out the breath he’d been holding. 

The bomb would hit the outskirts of the range, west of the bay and Route 264 by about five miles. Thankfully, no one from his crew was there.

The control tower camera was inadequate for the trees and distance involved, so he maximized the pilot’s belly cam feed.

Griggs prayed nobody was wandering around or riding all-terrain vehicles out there. He didn’t want a tragedy, nor did he want the pilot to get in trouble. As a veteran of Desert Storm and Desert Shield before easing into the Air Force Reserve, ZipD, or Captain Darius Williams, wouldn’t get much of an ass chewing for this incident unless someone got hurt. Could be equipment malfunction. Or maybe his thumb slipped.

Back Lake rushed up as the pilot circled and zoomed his video camera.

The monitor carried no sound, but Griggs saw the hit and knew the explosion would have emptied the bladder of anyone a mile away. A geyser of water and smoke and debris erupted near the small lake’s south-western shore. Rotting sticks, lily pads with white blooms, sand, muck, turtles and fish blew outward with the watery blast. A man-made tsunami rose and scoured the shallows and shoreline.

A large object heaved upward on the wave.

It spun haphazardly and tumbled, draped in lily pads and dead branches. The wave carried it to shore, where it vanished in the perpetual green of swamp vegetation.

Griggs leaned hard on the desk, working the mouse. He froze the recording, reversed, then clicked to zoom in on the target area. His gut knotted.

ZipD, did you visual?

Affirmative, Ground. Hit a pocket of turbulence just as my thumb flipped the guard on the button. Premature drop. Struck that lake. Wildlife rode the after-wave. Sizeable. Dead deer or maybe a bear?

Griggs squinted. Strands of blond hair waved listlessly from a twisted branch of driftwood. The ex-combat veteran’s stomach recoiled as he reached for the alarm to scramble the ground crew. Abort and return to base, pilot. Inform superiors the bombing range is code black. Repeat, range is now closed to operations until further notice. Lord, we got a human body out there.

On the civilian phone he punched 911 for the Dare County Sheriff’s office.

***

Unsettling, the images his mind had chosen to conjure.

Not photographic; not two-dimensional. More like 3-D. Damn close to seeing a live person, only not quite in the flesh.

After the first few moments, they would not be confused with those who still drew breath. No, his mental manifestations arrived in a more surreal manner than a living person. Stillness for one; these images were static. Victims appeared as they were the moment before life departed, often with visual cues as to the cause of death—which could make them even more difficult to face.

Frozen at Death’s door.

Upright. Sitting or standing as if they still lived. Watching. Staring in one direction. At one guy.

Lars Kelsen.

Lucky devil.

Ten years of such visits lay in the not-so-distant past. During that decade, he couldn’t shrink them away with counseling or medication. Or booze. Instead he coped—sort of. Learned to deal with them. Used them to get his job done; as impetus to hunt down information on crimes for news and features stories.

Several times his efforts helped the Charlotte police capture a killer.

With the suspect or suspects in custody—or dead—the images, these visits from beyond the grave ceased. His mind let go. Until the next injected itself into an otherwise mundane setting.

Convenient, this mental flaw. Eventually he came to grips with it. His slice of insanity was both functional and timely in that it repeated itself with the next unresolved murder case.

Kelsen labeled them Visitors, with a capital V. Upright bodies projected at the moment before final heartbeat. Ill-gotten death. Victims. Always watching—even if they had no eyes. Such had been the case with one of the victims of the Charlotte Car Bomber, a psycho who believed in documenting his insanity with a video camera. Cloaked in anonymity, CCB posted clips of his signature horror on YouTube. They were soon removed from the site, but only after a few thousand hits. The bomber adeptly masked his electronic footprints.

CCB abducted a college student and slashed her eyes. He duct-taped her arms to the steering wheel and remotely triggered the bomb planted in her lap. Her body disintegrated. She appeared to Kelsen as she had been in the final seconds of life...blood streaming down her face and mouth twisted in a silent scream.

Without question her random visits smashed a tank-sized hole in the walls of his investigative limits and kept plowing forward.

Motivating. Very.

Kelsen hardly slept for months. Dead ends abounded. Finally a forensic friend clued him to the bomber’s penchant for a brand of duct tape manufactured only in Arkansas called Razorback Duck. The cops found no official distributer or retailer in the Charlotte region. After a lot of legwork, Kelsen discovered five rolls stacked like a miniature missile silo on the shelves of a local truck stop on the outskirts of the city. The manager had accepted a case of the tape from a driver in exchange for access to the showers in the back of the place. Hours of surveillance DVD’s put a face to a repeat customer, but he only paid with cash and parked out of camera range so tracking was impossible. Days later, a call from a clerk in the middle of the night; the suspect had arrived again. Kelsen instructed the clerk to get the license plate without appearing obvious. He did. Kelsen hired a computer hacker to dig for more, starting with a home address.

The suspect was a professor at Davidson College. The duct tape should have been enough for a search warrant, but the dumbass judge employed what Charles Krauthammer referred to as judicial creativity, and wasn’t satisfied.

So Kelsen proceeded to trespass.

Breaking and entering a bomber’s lair ranked right up there with tap dancing on a mine field, and he’d sweated .44 caliber magnum slugs the entire time. Thanks to the temporary power outage—compliments of a sympathetic power contractor—electronic alarms and cameras weren’t as much a threat as the booby traps. The wiring and plastic explosives found in the basement justified rubbing a pack of the latter on the inside of a shopping bag to produce a signature residue. Kelsen threw a wire in for good measure. He told his forensic friend where the bag could be found, and waited.

Illegal on a couple of levels, of course.

The judge was dubious but couldn’t argue since the bag was found on a curb near the suspect’s house. Probable cause. The search warrant for professor CCB resulted in his arrest and subsequent death sentence.

The bomber’s last victim didn’t appear after that. Kelsen got some rest. Until two weeks later when the next one arrived.

They—Kelsen’s Visitors—did not react to a sudden sound or passing stranger. They did not move at all, that he could tell. Instead they repositioned. Showed up somewhere else like they’d been there all along.

Anytime. Anywhere.

But not anymore, thank God.

All that used to haunt Kelsen. Back when his mind took a nearly lethal blow and bled madness on what had been an otherwise somewhat normal existence for a crime reporter.

Harry Houdini proved—at least to himself and his wife—that séances were bullshit. No one alive communicates with the dead. There are no true psychics, only true shamans.

Kelsen agreed. He didn’t have psychic ability. The visits were manufactured goods. The result of psychological trauma. Back then, anyway.

Now he had life at the beach. Specifically, the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

The OBX, baby.

A long strip of sand that prodded the Atlantic as if looking for trouble. All but engulfed in blue. Light years removed from holographic images and staring madness.

Kelsen swung the rubber fetch toy like a propeller.

Hooper’s brown eyes watched with predatory interest. The thin rope the toy was tied to no doubt whistled through the air, judging by Hooper’s twitching ears, but the stiff inland breeze and steady crash of the surf kept it from registering in the auditory passages of the forty-something in khaki swim trunks.

This isolated stretch of beach on Pea Island—wildlife refuge and next island south of Nags Head in the OBX chain—served as one of Kelsen’s favorite haunts. An easy way to avoid the average summer vacationer. Four-wheel drive pathways had been cut at regular intervals between long white dunes stitched with drift fences and speckled with clumps of bobbing sea oats. Had any women driven through to this part of the beach, their gazes may have initially been drawn to the sleek black animal dashing back and forth in the frothy surf, but likely would have lingered upon the dog’s owner.  

Tanned, thick-boned and broad, Lars Kelsen stood six foot two, the youngest and smallest of three brothers. The older ones enjoyed rough and tumble. It wasn’t the natural inclination of Lars, but fighting and wrestling had been necessary to surviving youth with some dignity. Even at rare family occasions as adults, his ex-convict brother Tory liked to have a go at his brothers. The last came two years ago. Lars was different after losing Erik and seeing so much crime. He didn’t try to beg off, nor did he play. He ended it quickly, closing for a grapple and launching three quick knees to Tor’s floating ribs and abdomen. Not enough to break bone, but a clear message that Tor’s grimace of pain marked as received.

The oldest brother was a stockbroker and club football coach, with fifty pounds on Lars. Rolf liked wrestling and using his weight advantage. He witnessed what Lars did to Tory and took it as a challenge. Lars kept him off with leg kicks and ear slaps and a mean streak he preferred not to tap into but did when he had to.

Their father told them to break it up and they listened.   

Lars Kelsen presented an odd mix of impressions. Big but not hulking. Quick for his size. Decisive but not initially aggressive. He moved with a certain amount of conserved vitality; occupying space and time without apology or seeking reaction. He employed enough effort to accomplish a task and then moved on.

Shin-deep in the ebb and flow of the shore break, the casual observer might liken him to a son of Neptune himself, or Aegir, to correlate more precisely to Kelsen’s Norse ancestry. He basked in the sea spray coming off the turbulent Atlantic as if spawned from it. Sunlight glistened on the beads of water that merged and ran in rivulets down the muscular play of arm, shoulder, back and legs. Kelsen appeared the embodiment of healthy middle age.

So much for first impressions.

Further investigation reveals pertinent detail.

One shoulder carried higher. As a teen he had overshot the landing on his Huffy and went down in a tangle of bike, dirt, and limb. And his back, while broad and strong, had a vivid scar near the base where two vertebra had been fused after years of pain. Bastard still went out on him on occasion. Dead lifts had been banned from his weight routine years ago.

Close inspection would reveal lines mapping a high forehead, etched by experience and too much worry. Frown ridges reflected a core intensity and a well-honed sense of outrage that had spiked through the surface too often. Unable or unwilling to control the violent impulses, the middle brother had taken to the unsanctioned fight game and pulled three years in the Butner state pen after hospitalizing the son of a lawyer. Lars didn’t have Tory’s raw aggression or Rolf’s innate sports skills, but avoiding trouble can make others think you’re prey, and then you have to defend yourself, even if you don’t always win. The ridges on his reset nose and scars around the eyes attested to the fact.

Crow’s feet around his eyes cut into the tan, indicative of Kelsen’s penchant for the outdoors. A crop of bleach blond hair had begun to thin so he kept it short. A moustache, trimmed to little more than a stubble, curved around the edges of a grimly set mouth. Ice-blue eyes reflected a mix of intensity and weariness. The body was strong; but exercise was more than a tool for staying in shape.

Other diversions helped.

Hooper. The beach. Boating. Fishing. Parties. Women. Booze.

These helped distract. They did not placate.

Kelsen spun the fetch toy with his right hand while his left held the length of yellow nylon rope attached to it. He glanced at the tattoo inside his left forearm. The lettering was bold. Black against bronze, all caps in Imprint Shadow font: E R I K.

The name conjured his son’s face. Light hair, like his daddy. A half-smile dimpled rounded cheeks. Caring eyes from his mother. Talker. Loved to chat and sing. Piggybacks had been big treats, particularly going upstairs for bedtime. A half-smile formed at these memories. Then Kelsen’s face transformed; slackened, hardened, then frowned as Erik’s face faded into eternal ocean.

Off his rear flank, higher up on shore, Hooper barked for the toy.  

Kelsen let go of the line and waded forth like his Viking ancestors had done on distant shores a thousand years earlier. The fetch toy shot over the shallow white water and just past the first tumbling wave. He glanced over his shoulder. Hooper’s big paws kicked wet sand behind him, then water splashed high as he tore through the shallows. The canine leaped over the first rush of white water, a shiny black lab rising and falling and then swimming, contrasting with a moving world of liquid white and green beneath a glaring sun.

Shit—! Hey, Hoop! Back here. C’mon boy!

Lars waded deeper, the start of a caution warning raising from within. The toy went farther than normal, though the two-year-old gave little concern as he plowed forth, swimming now as the backflow carried him out, faster and deeper than he realized. A lunge of dark snout and white teeth clamped on the toy.

A wave, bigger than the others, rose with silent menace behind the swimming dog. Lars pulled harder at the water now.

Hooper! C’mon Hoop!

Too late. The wave curled and consumed the dog. Lars rushed forward, bracing against the onslaught of white water. Chest deep, he pulled the lab by the collar until he could get his arm around him and half-carry him to the shallows.

A receding wave allowed that thin tail to whip Kelsen’s side. The dog was happy despite the dousing. They exchanged a glance. Kelsen doubted Hooper was capable of letting the toy drift away. Probably would have drowned first.

They played tug-of-war for a while. Both grunted from the effort. Kelsen could have commanded the dog to release but he didn’t hunt with him and didn’t care if such play made him reluctant to give up the prize. After several minutes Kelsen strode just out of the reach of the waves, to the edge of the fine white sand, donned straw hat and sunglasses and let the sun dry him as he sat on a towel stretched out upon an old bed sheet. He watched Hooper sniff the shell beds and dig for sand fleas after the retreating waves. After some time Kelsen’s gaze rose past the dog, beyond the breakers to the blue horizon.

He didn’t want to start reflecting but did it anyway. Kind of like he didn’t want a lot of things to happen and they did anyway: death of his son, divorce, partial insanity.

Walking insanity, as he thought of it. And his shrink hadn’t made much of an argument to the contrary. Your mind creates images, you act on them, they go away...all while functioning in the real world.

It was similar to walking pneumonia. You’re out and about, but sick nevertheless.

Best not to raise it all up again, his inner voice warned. Leave it in the past.

What could happen? The last Visit came five years ago. Long damn time, junior. 

It’d be different if flashes of the murders played before him. Or came to him in a dream. Or if he saw other images associated with the crime. Faces of the murderers, weapons used, locations of missing bodies...that sort of thing. It’d also be different if the deceased whispered ethereal secrets in his ears, as some mediums claimed.

None of that had happened.

He wasn’t psychic. No way. No how.

A crime reporter with a fractured mind. That was more like it. More apt.

Used to be, anyhow.

He refused to believe it for a long time, until evidence to the contrary became irrefutable. Maybe a year and a half after inheriting the crime beat for the Charlotte Tribune, emotional strain bled into his personal life. Nights and weekends no longer provided sanctuary. Soon his inability to cope created fissures no amount of therapy or medication could repair.

He became a reporter unable to separate work from life. Nothing new there. Journalists burn out every day. But his situation went further than that. He found himself striding toward the breakdown ledge.

The way his instability manifested was different. Perhaps even unique.

First came the warning. A sense of dread would rise and close around him. If that was the worst of it, he’d be happy. The dread meant he’d see them sometime within the next twenty four hours—without fail. And though he had become somewhat desensitized to Death’s incarnations, his Visitors appeared not as memories, but right there before him.

Murder victims. Dead, but upright. Always upright. Even if they died flat on the floor.

They injected themselves into his everyday life.

Tricky bastard, the mind. Lifts images from forensic photos, web sites, the news. Sits ‘em up, deals ‘em around. Lars figured he’d outsmart his traitorous senses by refusing to look at crime and morgue photos, but they proved resourceful, conjuring themselves from something as basic as three or four lines of a detective’s or coroner’s description. Sometimes they appeared without his conscious knowledge of a case.

Senseless murders. Made you question the presence of a higher power.

Never mind your own lack of worth.

A creative emotional outlet would help, his shrink had advised. Woodworking, sculpture, music, painting, writing, even gardening. Since you work with words already, perhaps try writing a novel. Obviously you have a vivid imagination.

Problem: he wasn’t all that imaginative. At least, not novel-length. He was getting better at short stories, however.

The stories he wrote for the paper and website were non-fiction. Safe and structured. A few lines of description tossed in with snippets of dialog from his interview attempts with the players in the case. Fiction originated from personal impressions, but the rest had to be cooked up. He just couldn’t see his settings and characters clearly enough. Attempts at the novels came off as flat and dull, and ultimately abandoned.

He thought origami might focus his mind.

It did, but they kept showing up. Hell, sometimes they watched him fold paper into shapes.

Manifested victims, his Visitors. Disturbing, but not the worst of it. He didn’t see them as they were discovered. Instead they stood or sat or reclined, always upright. Always staring. At no one else. Just him, their eyes practically igniting with desperation.  

They appeared as they had when their lungs surrendered their final breaths. Trauma was often visible, but no decay. He could be immersed in a crowd of humanity and the dread would hit him. He’d be at some bar and there was a body, appearing as it did when the final heartbeat sounded. Dried blood from gash, stab, or bullet wound, or blue from strangulation, but always with face turned toward him, gaze boring holes into his soul.

Sound receded when they were near. Ice water dripped into veins.

They never talked, never blinked, never really moved. One moment his setting was normal, the next, a dead person was staring at him. No one else noticed them. He could walk around the deceased and they’d turn without moving. Reaching out, his hand passed through them. And yet they appeared at random times and places; steadily, in three dimensions but not quite solid, or flashing in and out in black and white, or fading by degrees only to reappear sometime later.

Ten years on the crime beat in Charlotte.

For more than eight of those, murder victims had injected themselves into his world.

He gave himself a little rare credit for lasting so long. Probably because the visits ceased when a suspect was apprehended or slain. Lars figured it served as reward for helping in an investigation. A dozen times the information he gathered aided the cops and district attorney in sealing murder cases. A few times the suspects came after him.

With the criminal in jail or dead, the visits ceased.

The shrink said the images were a product of his mind, compensating for the loss of Erik. A motivational tool forged in the kilns of rage and regret. Effective, too. It made him ask uncomfortable questions. Go to dangerous places. Confront people he normally would have avoided, at least initially. It even allowed him to bend a law or two.

And then it released him.

Problem was, the cycle started over again. Each unresolved murder led to a string of victim visits. Then multiples, simultaneously, from unrelated cases. And still more came, until he couldn’t move without them appearing somewhere around him.  

Jill finally left him at the tail end of those years. He didn’t blame her. The emotional chasm between them, ripped open by Erik’s abduction and murder, had only widened as the weeks and months trudged by.

For the millionth time he wondered what kind of man his son would have been.

The horizon shimmered and Lars swiped his eyes. 

Anyway.

Things had escalated with his Visitors to the red zone, then pushed him over the edge. Break point.

They don’t call them Sanitariums or Loony Bins or Cuckoo’s Nests anymore. You don’t have to worry about being there a long time either, unless you’re criminally insane, and even then you’d be a rare case. Kelsen’s insurance through the newspaper actually paid for three full days of insanity. Seventy-two hours in the Shady Glen Rehabilitation Center—forced incarceration despite the manicured lawns, flowering gardens, and pond with fountain—horrified Kelsen more than the silent demands of the murder victims, and prompted a life-changing move.  

For the divorce he asked only for thirty thousand to help him get on his feet, and relinquished his stake in the house to Jill. He quit the Tribune and the city of Charlotte and moved to a decrepit house in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. His dad and brothers helped him fix it up, or rather, thanks to his lack of skill at home repair, he served as gopher and circular saw man while they performed the skilled carpentry. He’d been part of the OBX ever since.

Something about being surrounded by water—the eternal Atlantic or broad expanse of Roanoke Sounds or twisting creeks of the intracoastal—soothed the part of him that psychiatry and meds could not. He worked landscaping jobs while taking community college and online courses in programming. He threw himself at his new studies like a desert wanderer toward a distant oasis. Got a job in the computer lab, then was offered contract positions in the area before getting his degree. Cognizant of the power of details, he excelled in his second profession. Instead of searching for clues he mined data. Instead of revealing the likely perpetrator, he mined data to solve business problems. Factual, safe, dull. No one got shot. Stabbed. Strangled. Beat to death. Run over. Set on fire. Drowned in a bathtub. Poisoned.

Actually, some patients did suffer such ill-gotten fates and were brought to the Outer Banks Hospital, where he worked part-time. He wasn’t certain, but maybe since he didn’t actively seek out the stories behind the crimes, his mind didn’t seek out and raise any new images. And the old ones faded, thank God.

Hooper shook the water off like only furred animals can do. Trotted up and sat beside his owner. Lars rested a hand on Hooper’s back, scarcely noticing the wet and relative coolness of the dog’s fur.

Lars mentally repeated his old mantra: he was not psychic. Like Harry Houdini, he did not believe in psychics or ghosts. The images had been the product of a cracked mind, mortared together once again with distance, a change in lifestyle, and regular doses of diversion in the form of booze and babes.

Question was, after almost five years, why had that familiar sense of foreboding snaked back into his psyche?

What I then saw