by Bryan, JL
We followed him into an odd, downward-sloped corridor painted all black—floors, ceiling, walls. The unlit, widely spaced wall sconces were made of the horned skulls of goats and sheep.
“Where did those lead?” I pointed at a brick staircase that spanned most of the way up to a large square trap door on the ceiling. The top rows of stairs had been demolished, leaving a gap of empty space.
“That was the entrance to this area, many long years ago,” Gary said. “Used to lead up to the India room. When they moved out, they busted out the upper stairs and nailed a new floor over the old trap door, then parked the dang elephant on top of it, too. Like I said, it’s like they meant to hide it forever, and it was just bad luck that led workers to discover it.”
“Why bad luck?” Stacey asked.
“Well, dumb luck, at least. Could be bad luck, too, we’ll see.” He glanced around nervously.
The hidden underground hallway ended at a round black steel door like the entrance to a bank vault. The keyhole, taller than my hand and narrower than my little finger, was not quite like any I’d seen before. I didn’t think my pack of lock picks and my basic skills with them would be any match for this door. I’d never even attempted to pick a bank vault lock. If I could do that, maybe I’d have a bigger apartment.
“What exactly did the locksmith experience?” I asked Gary.
“He said he kept hearing someone speaking to him, but he didn’t understand the words, like it was just too far to hear. At first, he figured it was voices echoing down from the workers upstairs. Then after another little while, the voice came again, only real close to him, and this time he heard it. And it just said one word, ‘Go.’ And at the same time, something snarled at him like a demon, he said, and that sound chased him all the way to the stairs. He never came back.”
“Who would?” Stacey stared at the massive black steel door. “Any guesses what’s back there?”
Gary shrugged. “I’d guess nothing much. Maybe spiders, maybe a nice view of the house’s foundation.”
“Any plans to bring out another locksmith?”
“Believe me, the boss lady’s breathing fire down my neck about that,” Gary said. “The locksmith said the problem is it’s some kind of rare custom lock, and you’d have to know all about antique vault locks to even get started on it, and there’s just not a lot of specialists available. I’m doing my best.”
“Think you can pick it, Ellie?” Stacey asked.
“Not a chance. Let’s monitor this area, though, obviously.” I plonked down the tripod I was carrying. Stacey topped it with a night vision camera, then dug an audio recorder out of her backpack and set it up nearby.
“Let’s keep moving,” I said. “We’ve got a long night ahead.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice.” Gary wasted no time getting through the broken hole in the wall, then ran through the basement corridor and the wine cellar. He took the stairs up to the main floor two at a time.
Chapter Six
We picked the card room as our nerve center, using the worn green felt tables as display stands for our monitors and speakers. It was conveniently located on the first floor, just off the front hall, and wasn’t a reported center of supernatural activity.
As Gary predicted, we couldn’t hope to cover all the indoor and outdoor areas where people had experienced strange encounters, so we did our best to focus on major paranormal hotspots, which Stacey still liked to call “hauntspots.”
In the master bedroom upstairs, workers had reported a large, shadowy mass shaped like a giant man silently watching them. The room had turned cold, and the electricity in the room had gone out, leaving them in darkness. Their phones were drained of power, too, and they’d fallen over each other in their scramble to escape.
The Moroccan-style smoking room had been another busy place, where the sound of piano music and voices had been reported, along with the smell of tobacco.
“I’m exhausted.” Stacey slouched in one of the card room’s high-back chairs, looking over the array of monitors and the wires snaking among them. “Good thing we’re just getting started.”
“We’ll make it an early night,” I assured her. “Maybe wrap it up around midnight or one.”
“Oh, early, good.” Stacey yawned and stretched then peeked over at my computer. “Whatcha doing?”
“Cyberstalking Darika,” I said.
“With data fusion?”
“So far, just LinkedIn. That’s too public to feel truly stalkerish. Assuming this is the right person—there’s no picture—she’s got an MBA from Brown and is currently the managing director of something called Why Enterprises.”
“Which is…?”
“The thing I’m now trying to figure out.”
“Why Enterprises is a personal investment arm of my employer.” Darika entered the room, looking sharp and still ready for business in her suit, though it was hours past sunset. “Whose name, as you would have inevitably discovered, is Wyatt Lanigan.”
“Oh,” I said, torn between my shock at recognizing that name and the awkwardness of her walking in on me stalking her, even if just mildly through publicly available information. “I’m sorry, Darika, I was just trying to, uh, get an overall picture of anything that might affect the case.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “It’s only LinkedIn.”
“Right, exactly.” I tried to relax, but it didn’t go well. “Are we talking about the Wyatt Lanigan? Creator of—”
“LookyLoon!” Stacey piped up. She tapped her phone and turned the screen to face me. A logo filled it for a moment—the profile of a black bird with a huge red eye that stared relentlessly like some kind of zombie, its pupil a stylized black “L.”
The logo vanished, replaced by a selfie of Stacey and Jacob hiking in the woods, with Bigfoot stalking behind them, hairy hands raised as if preparing to grab them both. I assumed Bigfoot had been added later using the app. “I use it all the time lately. I actually meant to Look Back at Jacob earlier. I’ve sent you a couple of Look-At-Me requests, Ellie, but you never Look Back.”
“I’m not on LookyLoon,” I said. “I thought that was for high schoolers.”
“Whatever. You can fool around with your pictures and your friends’ pictures too. And put each other into popular memes. And add word and thought balloons like a comic book. Here, I’ll send you another Look-At-Me.”
“That’s okay, I’m not really interested in LookyLoon…” I glanced at Darika and realized my comment might annoy her. “Uh, right this second.”
“I’ll send Look-At-Me requests to both of you,” Darika said, plainly trying to drag me onto the social media platform. She tapped at her phone. Stacey’s phone let out a shrieking, haunting cry like a loon, and she tapped at it.
“Looked Back at you!” Stacey told Darika cheerfully. “Ellie, check your email or your phone messages. I just sent a Look-At-Me cluster invite to all the contact information I have for you. The LookyLoon app lets me do it with one button.”
“Well, that explains who can afford to spruce up an nineteenth-century mansion that’s been sitting abandoned all these years,” I said, ignoring the pinging notifications from my phone as they both spammed me with Look-At-Me requests. “A tech billionaire. But why’s he doing it?”
“Wyatt has a number of homes around the world,” Darika said. “Collecting and managing unique houses is one of his interests.”
“And you manage that for him?” I asked.
“His real estate portfolio falls under my purview, but rarely do things go so poorly that I must be this hands-on with a single property. Unfortunately, I fired the former project manager after failing to take him seriously about the estate being haunted. So here I am, with the last dreg of our security team, trying to secure the island against things I never believed existed.”
“We’ll have to dig into the history of the place,” I said. “Are there any old records in the study?”
“You’re welcome to see whatever
is there so long as you leave my things alone. I didn’t notice many files of interest, just land surveys. If there was more, the Grolman family must have taken it when they moved out.”
“Maybe we could find the living descendants and ask if they have any archives about the house—”
“Out of the question.” Darika spoke so quickly and sharply that I couldn’t help but draw back from her, startled. Noticing my expression, she softened. A little. “From what we understand, the family prefers the island to remain in its wild, uninhabited condition. However, their focus and influence in the state of Georgia has waned over the generations. They haven’t lived here since the Great Depression. So, when Wyatt decided he wanted this island, we had to keep it quiet, negotiate carefully with the current lever-pullers of the state, and provide the necessary generous political donations, as you would expect. Keeping it quiet up until now has been a tremendous effort.”
“But people will know sooner or later,” Stacey said. “I mean, they won’t hear it from Ellie and me, because of the nondisclosure and all, but…won’t the public hear about it?”
“Of course,” Darika said. “When Wyatt does go public, the house will be restored to its historical condition, but updated to minimize impact on the island’s ecosystem. Only electric vehicles will be allowed on the island once the heavy construction phase is complete. Rainwater will be cached to irrigate the landscaping…assuming that system ever gets installed. Wyatt’s goals are fully aligned with the preservation and protection of the island in its natural state.”
After the bulldozers and excavators are done, I thought, but didn’t say aloud. “I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “Anyway, his goals aren’t really our business, except to say that renovation and construction at a haunted site are good ways to stir up any local spirits. The spirits may be territorial, they may resent change, they may hate the presence of the living. Or, in the worst scenarios, they may have been lying in wait, hungry ghosts ready to prey on the energy of the living, and the arrival of living souls enables them to feed.”
Darika shuddered. I felt for her, but I wasn’t pulling any punches, because it sounded like this estate was a hive of paranormal activity. “Pretas,” she said. “That’s what they call them in India.”
“Do you know of any possible reason for the haunting?” I asked. “Tragic deaths? Murders?”
“Hank Grolman died in a hunting accident,” she said. “Killed by one of the island’s wild pigs. He had imported some Carpathian boar to breed with the local swine to make them larger and stronger, more dangerous game. Just as he bred larger, stronger boarhounds to hunt them with. All for the entertainment of his guests, I suppose.”
“People had weird entertainment in the 1800s.” Stacey was distracted, thumbing at her phone, which kept screeching out notifications. “Oh, my roommate just Looked At some new plants for our apartment. Let me Look Back at her real quick.”
Darika grew absorbed in the LookyLoon app on her own phone, which kept emitting its own screeching-loon notifications, leaving me standing there waiting for them, my phone still in my pocket. My eyes wandered over to the South American hunting trophies, like the dead jaguar with its glassy, staring eyes, as though it too had been sucked into the stupefying glare of some social media app.
“Wyatt just Private-Looked me, asking for an update on this house,” Darika said. Her eyes moved up from her phone to look at me. I saw again incredible tension there, the gaze of someone who’d been carrying a lot of stress for quite a while and might be considering snapping fairly soon. “What is our timeline?”
“Timeline?” I asked. “We’re just starting. I really don’t know. We’ll try to identify the entities who are causing trouble, but this will take a combination of observation and historical research.”
“I’ll tell him three days.”
I gaped. “I don’t think so!” I finally managed to say. “We can’t even begin—”
“Four?”
“I can’t guarantee anything like that,” I said. “What is the hurry?”
Instead of answering, Darika typed something back on her phone, hopefully not giving us a four-day deadline.
Wyatt Lanigan was a person I knew from the media, a young Silicon Valley hotshot typically seen in vintage video game shirts and cargo pants, too cool for suits or even business casual.
“How old is Wyatt?” I asked Darika, but she was too engrossed in her phone to respond.
“Twenty-three,” Stacey said.
“He’s younger than me?”
“Not younger than me,” Stacey pointed out, somewhat unnecessarily. “But hey, most people don’t even make their first billion until they’re past thirty. You’ve still got time, Ellie.”
“He wants it done in three.” Darika put her phone away.
“I told you I can’t guarantee three days,” I said. “You already hired us for a week. Maybe—”
“When Wyatt declares something, he expects people to make it happen. He calls it ‘programming our own reality.’ So now I must aggressively, relentlessly, and annoyingly push you to make it happen. Which I am sorry about, because you do seem like nice ladies, and you don’t deserve the kind of pressure and scrutiny I’m going to apply to you.”
“We can only do so much.”
“What resources would enable you to do more?” she asked. “What are your constraints?”
“Resources? Constraints?” I repeated, which did not make me sound particularly bright, but I was accustomed to operating on a shoestring. Sometimes just the little plastic tip of the shoestring. And constraints? We’ve got nothing but constraints.
“Yes.” Darika spoke slowly, as if her estimate of my intelligence had adjusted downward. “If we determine the constraints in your process, we may find that certain aspects can be offloaded and outsourced to be performed in parallel with those core competencies that cannot be offloaded. What do you typically spend most of your time doing? What usually slows you down that could be performed by others with appropriate skills?”
“Uh,” I said, which I was sure lowered her estimation of me a little more. I got what she meant, but I simply wasn’t used to the idea of bringing in other people just to help me out. Occasionally, we needed a specialist, like an exorcist, but I hadn’t yet determined what we might need here. “We usually bring a psychic eventually, after we make some initial—”
“Bring her in now.”
“It’s a him, actually,” Stacey said. “He can come this weekend. Right now, he’s out of town for work—”
“Who cares? What else?” Darika had her phone out, taking notes.
“Historical research,” I said. “A list of everyone who ever died on the island would be great. And everyone who ever lived here, while we’re at it.”
“It will be a short list,” Darika said. “Unless you count Native Americans from the precolonial period, of whom we know nothing beyond a few artifacts. Satilla Island was considered too steep and rocky for cotton or rice plantations, and so mostly ignored by settlers. What else do you need?”
“That should do it for now. Unless you want to buy us some extra cameras and microphones and motion detectors—”
“Write up a list with prices and send it to me.”
“Okay.” I felt weirdly stunned by her request. It was far from my usual experience, which often involved trying to collect partial payments from clients months after removing their ghosts.
“Today,” Darika added, though it was already very late. “What else?”
“I’ll let you know as we determine the, uh, particular constraints of the case,” I said.
“Good.” Darika looked between us as if evaluating us yet again. She frowned. “You really are going to be able to take care of this, correct?”
“Yes,” I said, not because I was sure we could, but because I didn’t think I would enjoy the consequences of saying anything else. I’d already tried to explain that I wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t willing to take it partly depends on
circumstances outside my control for an answer. She expected me to program reality.
With a final sharp nod, Darika left the card room, but her presence seemed to echo loudly as Stacey and I got back to work.
On the monitors, the shadowy house lay silent, the slowly rotting predators from around the world standing guard over the emptiness, as they had for so many decades.
Though, as we would shortly observe, the house was not nearly as empty as it seemed.
Chapter Seven
It didn’t take long for me to draw up a wish list of equipment and email it to Darika, who had gone home to the guest cottage for the night. Then Stacey and I settled into our observation, stakeout style, waiting for the hour to grow late. We kept the lights off to avoid scaring away any ghosts, so the card room was lit only by the glow of our monitors.
Our sensors began picking up whispers of activity well before midnight—an electrical spike in the billiards room, a temperature drop in the upstairs bedroom where the large shadow had scared off the workers. Something unseen set off a motion detector in the smoking room. A sound like breaking glass in the dining room lasted less than half a second, but certainly got us excited. Stacey replayed it a few times.
These traces of paranormal activity came and went, and in any normal investigation, this would have been a tremendous haul of data for a single night. More often we sit night after night, waiting for any hint of ghostly action at all.
The lodge appeared to be a profoundly haunted place, long ruled by the spirits and untouched by the living, the kind of location I would usually write off as a ghost hive—better abandoned to the dead than reclaimed by the living. One of the worst such places we’d visited was Lassiter State Asylum, an old psychiatric hospital near Milledgeville where Stacey and I had searched for forgotten records. It had left me with recurring nightmares.
Clearing the ghosts from the lodge, if it was even possible, seemed like far too much to handle on Darika’s unreasonable timeline. Three or four days could potentially happen in other cases, if the haunting was relatively simple, the ghost’s identity and motives known, and all the stars aligned and the ducks lined up in rows, but none of that was happening here.
