The Lodge (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 15)

by Bryan, JL

  “And the people?” I asked. “The peasants in fox and boar masks?”

  “The Great Hunt is an ancient tradition,” Adrienne said. “And it pleases the old gods, or at least that’s what my ancestors believed.”

  Her words surprised me so much that I struggled to act calm and keep the conversation going. “What about Evangeline? Why was she among the hunted? I read she drowned while sailing.”

  Adrienne looked puzzled for a moment, not that it creased her forehead at all. Then she smiled. “Evangeline Ryland? My, you have been dipping deep into the past.”

  “I just saw her ghost,” I said. “She was with the maids. Even dressed like them.”

  “And what do you suppose that means?” Adrienne cocked her head, seeming amused more than anything.

  “She didn’t die in a shipwreck, but here on the island, hunted by the lodge members. Sacrificed to their god. But how? She went sailing…was it Garit?” I thought of the pictures I’d seen of the boxy early motorboats that had been eagerly adopted by wealthy sea island vacationers, including Evangeline’s uncles. “He’d been in the Imperial Navy. He must have ridden out in a motorboat and attacked Evangeline while she was sailing. Maybe he had help from other lodge members. So they dumped Evangeline’s brother and cousins, but kept her alive…hit her with the old chloroform, maybe…”

  “And why would he do such a thing?” Adrienne crossed her arms, looking amused now.

  “Garit?” I said. “Maybe he wanted his brother’s fortune for himself. Heinrich died only two years later. I think I saw his ghost earlier, too, covered in bloody holes from being gored to death during that wild boar hunt. Did Garit stage that, too?”

  Adrienne took her time, seeming to weigh whether to answer this or not. Finally, she said, “My ancestor, Garit, was in truth only a half-brother to Heinrich, or ‘Hank.’ Hank’s father was no more than a low and crude peasant, a servant in Count Hackelberend’s stables. But Garit’s true father was Count Hackelberend himself. Heinrich and Garit shared only a common mother…the stableman’s wife.”

  “Ooh, scandalous,” Stacey said.

  “Garit had noble blood. My family is an aristocratic bloodline. That’s why Garit became an imperial naval officer and Hank was meant to remain a servant mucking out horse dung.”

  “But German nobility abdicated after the first World War, so it’s kind of a moot point, right?” I thought something moved behind me, in the alcove holding Garit’s skull, but saw nothing when I turned. I took a couple steps away from it.

  “Not our bloodline,” Adrienne smirked. “Only the weaker European line. They are nothing now. We are the American branch, the stronger arm of the family. My ancestors made tremendous sacrifices to come to America and to get us where we are today.”

  “Yeah, but those sacrifices are supposed to be, like, hard work, thrift, and perseverance,” Stacey said. “You’re not supposed to make literal human sacrifices.”

  “The Hackelberend family has honored the old gods for centuries, and the gods below have provided for us in return,” Adrienne said. “It is far too late to break our bond now. Generations too late.”

  “So, Evangeline and Heinrich were both murdered by Garit,” I said. “Sacrificed to their god. Enabling him to take control of Heinrich’s cattle-and-coal fortune. And the secret lodge, too?”

  “Garit was always Heinrich’s superior in the lodge hierarchy,” Adrienne said, looking amused, like I was a clueless child who’d just wandered into a molecular biology lab and started poking at microscopes. “Garit was the noble child, after all. He was the one who initiated his half-brother Heinrich and had this lodge designed to accommodate the old ways.”

  “Like this temple. And…whatever this is.” I approached the circular hole in the floor, sealed with wood that was mostly rotten and black. “What’s under there?”

  “Nothing for your eyes to see,” Adrienne said.

  “You know that's only going to make me more curious.” I approached the lever built into the wall, most of its wooden handle now rotted down to reveal a flat length of sharp steel. I’d have to touch it carefully.

  “Leave the dead for the dead,” Adrienne said.

  I pulled the lever. It required a lot of force to move; I was glad for my gloves protecting my fingers against the splinters and steel.

  Counterweights groaned and rumbled somewhere behind the wall.

  The slab of rotten wood inside the circular opening slid aside, very slowly. It was so warped and decayed that it shredded and broke into pieces as it opened, the cracked chunks of woods tumbling away into the space below.

  There was a lot of space below, too. A rock tunnel dropped straight down like a well, reaching far into the depths beneath the lodge.

  Stacey joined me at the edge of the circular opening, and together we shined our flashlights down into it. Even with our powerful tactical flashlights, we were barely able to see the bottom. I had to tighten my flashlight iris to create a narrow, penetrating beam, and I still had to squint.

  “Are those…?” Stacey whispered.

  “Bones,” I whispered.

  It was like peering into the skeleton-filled catacombs below Paris, only these bodies had been strewn haphazardly, dropped from above and left abandoned.

  Among the cracked ribs and broken skulls and rotten rags of clothes lay another kind of artifact: fox and boar masks, shattered into fragments.

  “This is where your ancestors put the peasants' bodies.” I turned back to Adrienne.

  She wasn’t there.

  “Where’d she go?” Stacey asked. While we’d been looking at the bones below, Adrienne had slipped out of the room.

  Well, not all the way out, because she stood at the curve of the stairs at the far end of the room from us. She was almost out of there, though, poised to fire a last verbal parting shot.

  “Since you’re so interested in my ancestors, maybe you should meet them,” Adrienne said. “I would stay and visit myself, but frankly, they’re a little scary.”

  She turned and left.

  Something moved in the alcove where Garit’s skull was mounted.

  In fact, something moved in nearly all the alcoves.

  The dark, hooded figures emerged, led by the same specter who had blown the horn, the leader of the hunting party, who looked like Hank but thinner and with no facial hair. That had actually been Garit, then. His brother Hank’s ghost haunted the bedroom upstairs, and perhaps lingered around his own grave, but Hank did not lead the hunting party nor rule the island, though he was apparently not innocent and had dabbled in his brother’s occult evil himself before getting murdered.

  A tremendous wealth transfer had occurred with Hank’s death. The blessings of Plutus had indeed passed to Hank’s brother Garit, first great wealth, and now a favored status after death, an eternal vacation.

  The hooded lodge members closed in on either side of us as they emerged from their alcoves. The pit of sacrifices lay wide open behind us, not really a great escape route.

  Ahead, Adrienne’s footsteps echoed from the stone stairs as she ran the rest of the way up to the vault door.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  A gauntlet of shadowy figures gathered ahead of us—the long-dead lodge members, the hunters, roused from their slumber by our intrusion. Garit, apparently the leader of the pack, wore his gilded elephant-ivory hunting horn, which I'd since learned was called an oliphant, on a leather strap over his robe.

  I understood now why the temple’s center aisle was built like a wide gutter. Bloodied corpses, the bodies of the hunters’ victims, had once been dragged down to the sacrifice pit at the death god’s feet. The aisle could later be rinsed with water, and, if nothing else, the creeping dampness would gradually erode the blood with black, soil-thickened water weeping down from above, year after year.

  It looked like Stacey and I might become the latest sacrifices, perhaps the first on this island in many years. Adrienne was leaving us here as an offering, one that cou
ld strengthen her dead ancestors. If we died here, Stacey and I could end up trapped on the island even after death, as ghosts to be hunted across the centuries.

  That sounded unpleasant, so I screamed, “Run!” as Stacey and I charged in the only direction we could—straight ahead, into the converging mob of ghosts, toward the stairs beyond.

  The ghosts looked like risen corpses. One had a face like badly rotten fruit, but thankfully most of this was concealed by its hood.

  Garit, their bloodless-white leader, drew a gold-plated dagger from his robes.

  Other lodge members drew their own knives. Some had boar tusks mounted in place of blades. Anyone stabbed by those might appear to have been gored to death rather than murdered, especially if one of the murderers was also the doctor who signed the death certificate.

  Stacey and I turned what defensive weapons we had on them as we charged, widening our flashlight irises into floods of white light that we hoped might shield us, but the entities didn’t slow. This was their sanctum sanctorum, the seat of their power and their ghostly immortality, and we had violated it.

  We bolted through the center of them, swerving to avoid their slashing blades.

  The hooded hunters pursued us up the stairs as we took them two and three at a time.

  Up ahead, the vault door was swinging closed. Adrienne was sealing us inside. If the ghosts didn’t kill us, we could starve to death, or die of thirst if the creeping black water proved undrinkable, which seemed very possible.

  Stacey let out a bellow and threw herself against the vault door with a painful-sounding smack, grunting on impact.

  I sucked in my stomach and squeezed through the remaining space, out into the hallway. Adrienne gaped at me.

  “Get back in there!” Adrienne snapped.

  “You’re crazy!” I replied. It wasn’t the greatest conversation, but I was focused on applying some kickboxing knowledge. I launched a foot into Adrienne’s narrow gut. She staggered back a few steps, my muddy boot print visible on her shirt, and fell to a sitting position on the floor.

  I turned my attention to getting Stacey out, then shoving the vault door closed.

  “Where did she go?” Stacey asked.

  Adrienne had already fled.

  “I’m not sure, but I’m keeping this key.” I struggled to remove the vault key from the door, which proved almost as difficult a process as inserting it.

  “She’s getting away!” Stacey said.

  “We’re on an island,” I said.

  “But we have to warn the others that she’s a murderous nutjob.”

  “That would be the right thing to do. Let’s head for the guest house.”

  “What about Wyatt? He’s staying here in the lodge, isn’t he? We have to warn him,” Stacey said.

  “What if he’s in on it?” I asked.

  Stacey’s mouth dropped. “No! Do you think? He doesn’t seem like the type.”

  “I’m not sure what type you’re looking for, but he’s rich and powerful, which seemed to be the top qualifications for getting invited to join the lodge.”

  “Yikes. But if Wyatt’s in on it, then maybe all his people are in on it, too.”

  “I’m guessing some of them are innocent. Maybe Darika. Probably Wyatt’s chef. Maybe all of them. We probably won’t know until we get there. Or until it’s too late.”

  The sound of male voices and the growling of dogs rose around us, the supernatural hunters leaving their vault to join us in the corridor. We wasted no more time getting out of there and through the catacombs of the basement.

  The nearest way out was the front door, which risked an encounter with Gary, and at the moment I didn’t really trust anyone on the island. At this point, though, if I absolutely had to trust anyone, it was probably Gary, because Wyatt and Adrienne seemed to have no idea who he was and didn't bother remembering his name.

  We emerged into the front hall and ran toward the front door, past the big, shadowy animals of the African savanna.

  “Excuse me, ladies?” a woman’s voice shouted. “It’s so rude of you to run out like this. We haven’t even had coffee.”

  We turned to see Adrienne on the second-floor gallery overlooking the front hall.

  “Tonight we hunt and sacrifice in honor of our god,” Adrienne said. “You will have the honor of serving as our sacrifice, little foxes. Your deaths will be worth more than your lives ever were. Now let's amuse the gods with a spirited chase.”

  Adrienne raised a long semi-automatic rifle, the kind that gives hunters an absurdly unfair advantage over their prey, and fired at us. The crack of the rifle in the enclosed room was loud as thunder.

  Stacey and I screamed and ran. The bullet struck the Cape buffalo near us. Its side exploded in a dirty cloud of cotton stuffing, decayed wooden support structure, and rotten, dried-out skin.

  Adrienne kept shooting, and I’m pretty sure she was laughing, letting loose like a crazed hyena—or maybe a loon—as she fired again and again.

  Stacey and I twisted and turned among the sizable hunting trophies in the room. Adrienne blasted out a huge chunk of the dead giraffe’s neck, hacking through it like a giant ax. The head and upper neck broke off and crashed to the floor, leaving only half a giraffe.

  We ducked behind the black rhino. A couple of shots punched out its innards in a cloud of filthy stuffing and continued onward, undeterred, screeching over our heads like angry wasps.

  Another bullet struck the front door just before I pushed it open.

  Stacey and I bolted outside. A window by the door shattered as Adrienne shot it out.

  Unfortunately for us, Gary was no longer posted at the front door, and his security cart was missing. We would have to escape on foot.

  We ran down the road in the direction of the guest cottage where Darika and Wyatt’s entourage had gathered for the night.

  “What,” Stacey gasped, “the heck is going on?”

  “Worst…client…ever…” I panted.

  “Shouldn’t we take the woods?”

  “She’ll…need at least thirty seconds to get downstairs…and out the door…so…let’s put as much distance—”

  The rifle cracked again. Adrienne was shooting at us from a second-story window instead of pursuing us on foot. Until we reached the next bend in the road, she’d have a pretty clear shot at us.

  “Woods!” I said, and we ran for cover.

  Without the maids guiding us—I guess they’d only been good for a one-way trip—it was much harder to find our way in the dark. Going through the woods slowed us considerably, especially since we didn’t want to use any flashlights that might make it easy for Adrienne to target us. At least the guest cottage was closer to the main lodge than the chambermaids’ cottage, indicating the higher status of its intended residents. Everyone else was there now, Darika as well as Wyatt's three other employees.

  We finally stumbled out of the wilderness behind the guest cottage. We kept to the shadows and away from the moonlight as best we could, though it was possible Adrienne had her own night vision or thermal gear, enabling her to see us in the dark.

  The lights in the guest cottage were all out, not surprising at four in the morning.

  Something stung me, right in the chest. I thought it was a hornet at first, until I touched it and found a dart.

  “Stacey, look out!” I turned back to stop her, and also to try to block her against any additional darts. I stumbled right into her, nearly losing my balance.

  “Oh, hi,” she said, catching me in her arms and standing me back up.

  “Someone shot me. We have to go back. We can’t…go this way.” My thoughts were going cloudy already from the tranquilizer, or maybe I was just panicking.

  I tried to turn her back to the woods, but it was too late. She cried out as a dart stabbed into her shoulder.

  “Let’s go!” I shouted, or maybe I slurred “Leggo!” but I definitely managed to do it loudly.

  Stacey and I ran back the way we’d come, bu
t again we couldn’t go very fast in the dark and root-cluttered woods.

  A dark figure followed us.

  “He’s behind us,” I told Stacey.

  “What, who’s what?” Stacey asked, her voice and her legs going sluggish. “He’s who where?”

  “It’s the guy. Who shot us.”

  “Yeah, about that.” Stacey sat down on a log and cradled her head in her hands like we weren’t even being chased. “Who did shoot us? That’s what I don’t get. And why, Ellie? Why do people shoot us? We’re good people. I’m good persons, usually, sometimes.”

  “It’s that guy.” I clicked on my flashlight and blazed its beam down the trail behind us.

  He stood several yards away, completely still, watching us. He wore camouflage coveralls and a black balaclava, and of course carried a tranquilizer rifle.

  He kept his distance. Time was on his side. Stacey and I would be helpless and entirely at his mercy soon.

  I decided not to fold that easily. With my last bit of strength, I charged toward him, drawing my second tactical flashlight with my other hand, ready to bash him on both sides of the head, or ram the beveled front edges into his stupid balaclava-covered face. And then take a nice nap, because I was just so sleepy.

  “Stop.” He pointed the rifle at me.

  “No.” I swung both flashlights in pincer move, but not fast enough.

  He backed away, shooting me in the ribs as he did, the dart stabbing in somewhere near my vital organs.

  “You got me there,” I told the camouflaged gunman drowsily. I turned away from him and started up the trail again, thinking distantly that if I ran fast enough, maybe I could still escape. “You really…got me there.”

  Then I collapsed to the forest floor, my landing not exactly softened by the wide, hard root that cracked into my ribs.