Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 by Christopher Golden Page A

look at her,” Jack said. “What do you think?”
    Though he had meant the comment to be sarcastic, Artie did glance over to the shore again. He slipped lower in the water and Jack was unnerved at the way the portions of him below the surface just seemed to dissipate. Only Artie’s head and shoulders were above the waves now.
    “What are you going to do?” Artie asked.
    “I don’t know.” Jack studied the ghost and wondered if the despair he saw in its features was genuine or something he had projected there.
    “Look, Artie, I should get back to her. I assume you didn’t show up to get some sun. What’s so urgent?”
    Artie flinched, his ghostly form shuddering again. A wave washed up and over him, momentarily erasing everything below his nose. Jack turned away, unsettled by the sight, but when he turned back the ghost’s countenance had begun to coalesce again.
    “I’m sorry,” Artie said.
    “For what?”
    “Everything, I guess. Just try not to forget who the dead guy is, okay?”
    Jack smiled thinly. “That’s low. Playing my grief for sympathy.”
    Artie reached up and, pushing a hand through his long blond hair, he shifted back and forth somehow, as though he were standing. It was eerie to see him behaving in ways that were so familiar. In those moments it became hard to remember that he was dead.
    “Seeing Molly like that threw me off,” Artie explained. “But I really did need to talk to you. Need your help. I guess it could have waited until later, but the more time that goes by for me here in the Ghostlands, the less I think about what’s proper there, with the living. All I could think was that we needed to talk and then I was here and I saw you and . . . Do you want me to come see you later?” Again, Jack was chilled by the familiar. In life, Artie had had an excitable way of talking, of running his words together in a rush of enthusiasm or anger. That had changed some, since his death. But here was the old Artie again.
    “I should go see what’s up with her,” Jack agreed. “But you’re here. At least tell me what’s got you so worked up. More Prowlers in Boston?”
    One last time, Artie cast a regretful glance up at the shore. “It isn’t Prowlers,” the ghost said, and again his voice had that odd static, that hollow echo. “You have to understand, Jack, that I thought it was over, now. I’m dead. There isn’t supposed to be anything left for me to be afraid of, yeah? But turns out there is. Big freakin’ joke on me. Apparently there’s something here, in the Ghostlands, and it’s been here for a while only nobody bothered to tell me that. They must have left it out of all the guidebooks.
    “The dead just call it the Ravenous, Jack, but from what I’ve been able to figure out so far, it eats souls. It cruises the Ghostlands like some kind of animal, a lion or something, and it eats the spirits of the dead.” Jack stared at Artie in horror, for once barely noticing the way the light shone right through him. On the shore nearby, a fortyish couple began to wade into the water side by side, so when he spoke again, Jack dropped his voice even further.
    “So . . . so what happens then?” he asked. “If a ghost is eaten, what happens to it then? I mean, a soul is immortal, right?”
    Reluctantly, he looked into Artie’s eyes. In the depths of the darkness there he could see a distant nightscape, something that might have been stars, rolling shapes that might have been black waves on some eternal ocean.
    “No one knows for sure. But the whispers say that’s it, Jack. That’s the real end. Nothing’s supposed to be able to touch us over here. Even the most desperate and lost spirits only have themselves to fear until they get where they’re going. But the Ravenous gets you? You’ll never get there.” Jack shook his head in frustration. “I don’t get it. What am I supposed to do?”
    Hushed laughter came from nearby and he turned to see the couple who had just entered