Anna was with her dad the night he first encountered Source. She was ten years old and nodding off on a plaid loveseat in the living room of a haunted cabin in the Pocono Mountains. Jack dozed nearby in a recliner. Back then he’d taken Anna on many of his investigations. There wasn’t money for a babysitter, and he didn’t want her to wear out her welcome at either Freddy’s or Dor’s house.
That night Anna was on the edge of sleep, where perception floats unencumbered and the veil between the worlds can thin. As her eyes fluttered shut, a basketball-sized orb of light appeared in the center of the room, illuminating a poker hanging on a hook attached to the brick fireplace. A wispy mist, feminine in form, twisted around the poker like a tiny tornado.
As bizarre as seeing the spirit was, Anna’s young eyes were drawn back to the orb of light. The light had a belonging quality that was somehow more credible than the room itself. It was like the living room had been reduced to a drab painting on a window shade, and the fabric of that shade was torn, allowing a ball of brilliant sunlight in. Anna stared at the light, transfixed. The light expanded and blissful warmth spread throughout her small body. Then, somehow, Anna expanded.
There were no longer any boundaries between Anna’s consciousness and the wispy feminine spirit. Anna felt its desperate need to cling to the antique poker. She knew, as if the memories were her own, that the spirit was a girl named Mary who was forced to marry at thirteen. Mary had taken many beatings from her much older husband in their cramped hovel. She became pregnant, but her body was too small to deliver the child. The baby died and Mary barely survived, only to be attacked again by her husband before her wounds could heal. Anna was flooded with dark images and sensations—violations of the tortured girl’s body and soul that Anna’s young mind could not understand.
One night, after another attack, Mary-the-child-bride could take no more. Her husband passed out drunk on the floor, and she found the courage to beat him to death with a poker. When her husband’s body was found, Mary was arrested and shackled in the town square. For three days villagers spit on her. Little kids poked her with sharp sticks. In a jail cell, waiting to be hanged, Mary died of her infected wounds, her soul rising from her body like seeds off a dandelion. When the light came for her, Mary was confused, ashamed, and terrified of further torture. She resisted it. Instead of crossing into Source, Mary’s spirit had returned to the poker—the one thing that had given her safety, power, and justice, however temporary.
With Anna bearing witness, the light of Source had now returned to claim Mary once again.
“Go,” Anna said.
The girl’s spirit stopped spinning, curling tight around the poker. Details of the misty figure emerged: her dress was a quilt of crudely sewn rags, her long black hair snaked around her head in matted knots. But it was Mary’s face that made Anna want to turn away. Mary’s left eye was swollen shut, protruding from her broken eye socket like a bruised and rotting apple. Her nose was a crushed, boneless mass that hung under her right eye, an eye that peered at Anna with shock and suspicion.
“Anna. Shhhh,” Jack said from the recliner, awake and sitting up.
The light of Source flared, fully illuminating the room. Mary turned toward it, and Anna saw the girl’s spirit as the light saw her: beautiful despite her battered face, innocent and wholly loved. Mary’s spirit drifted toward the light and then shot straight into it like an arrow. It was then that the vibrations began. Anna’s teeth rattled and her body trembled as the overwhelming want to follow Mary’s spirit into that light encompassed her. Anna had never wanted anything so passionately, but the light disappeared.
This first encounter with Source left Jack with the gift of discernment, the ability to sense spirits, and from that day forward he could “sniff out” contaminated objects without any special instruments. It also left him with another lucrative gift, the ability to make holy water. But over time that ability had slowly weakened and finally evaporated. Jack now bought holy water on the open market, an expense that was eroding his already slim profit margins.
When Anna got home—still unsettled from her encounter with Denton—Jack was at the kitchen table, scrolling through emails on his phone. He rubbed his red eyes.
“How was school?”
“Swell,” Anna said, almost tripping over a pile of books. There were more books, yellowed paperbacks, occupying her chair. Jack had been to the thrift store and the kitchen was apparently no longer a hoard-free zone. Anna was disappointed but not surprised. She spotted a pile of identical copies of a two-year-old issue of Paranormal Times. On the cover, a picture of her father smiled up at her above the caption “Plumber to Prodigy,” his salt-and-pepper hair and permanent five-o’clock shadow eerily lit for effect. The corners of the pages were curled up like dead rose petals.
“That magical Internet thing you told me about sure came in handy,” he said. “I’m hearing from a lot of impressive job applicants.”
Anna’s shoulders ached. She wanted to say that she didn’t give a flying frig about Jack’s new assistant. There was nowhere now to drop her backpack, and suddenly the weight of it seemed too heavy to bear. It was like a chain around her shoulders, trapping her in place to await the inevitable homicidal avalanche of Jack’s Crap.
“One in particular really stands out,” Jack said, handing her a sheet of paper. Anna scanned the information at the top: Geneva Sanders, University of California, Berkeley, PhD in Electrical Engineering, 2012.
“If this Geneva Sanders is so smart,” Anna said, offering it back to Jack, “why does she want to work with you for free."
“Oh, she’s not only smart,” Jack said, “she's an inventor, and if what she says is true, her latest invention could be a game changer, not just for the field of paranormal investigation, but for us. We could open the new office with a heck of a lot of buzz."
Buzz. Anna knew what that meant. Stories about Jack’s business in the newspaper, Jack parading around on the local news. In short, more public humiliation. Everyone at school would be snickering about it. Craig would hear about it. Dor and Freddy would face consequences too, just for being her friends. Not that they ever complained—hell, they were used to it by now—but Anna knew it had to get to them.
“You're going through with this office thing?” Anna said. “You deal with it. I have my own problems.”
She started to walk off, but Jack put a hand on her shoulder.
“What problems?”
His hand on her backpack strap sent a bolt of pain up her neck and into her head. He wanted her to carry his burden, too, and it was too much.
“It’s nothing I want to talk to you about, okay?”
“Well, who do you want to talk to?”
Bitter tears welled in her eyes before she could stop them.
“I know it’s a tough day,” Jack said softly, “but you should be grateful your mother crossed over and isn’t earthbound.”
Anger flared like a struck match. “You don’t know that. You only know that you haven’t been able to contact her.”
The hand remained, a lead glove.
“We have to accept that we don’t have all the answers. That’s part of life.”
“Maybe you’ve given up on her, but I haven’t.”
Anna went outside to feed Penelope, who lumbered over to her dish with her tail low. One of the puppies stumbled over the dog’s hind legs and Penelope snapped at it, growling. A wave of guilt hit Anna. She was too old to have them, and it’s your fault. Anna hardened. No. It was Jack’s fault. She thought about going over to Freddy’s. They could pick up Dor and drive somewhere, to the mall, to McDonalds, anywhere. But upstairs her laptop waited. Maybe Craig was online.
When she came back inside, Jack was sitting at the table grimacing. In front of him on the table was an object covered with layers of soiled hand towels.
“Gross,” Anna said. “What is that?” The stench coming from the table was a nauseating blend of sulfur and wet dog.
“Sam
e old song. Some curious dimwit bought a haunted object on eBay, screwed up his life and now it’s my problem.”
Jack peeled away the crusty towels, revealing a corroded iron box. A figure was etched into its hinged lid, some sort of muscle-bound mammal with large spikes protruding from its back. Anna sat down to get a closer look, placing a clean hand towel over her nose. Jack bought hand towels by the bushel at Costco.
Jack’s eyes narrowed. “Do you see that?”
“See what?” Anna leaned in. And then she saw it. The box was no longer metal. It was…meat, sinewy and alive, puckered with beads of white fat and drops of liquid.
“Is that…sweat?”
Jack frowned. “It’s messing with us.”
Anna blinked. It was an iron box again. The attachment was clearly powerful, a spirit with a century or more of practice manipulating the natural world. It was almost a shame that it would soon be wrenched away from its pseudo home, but Jack had a job to do.
A large glass bowl and a jug of holy water sat on the kitchen table. Jack emptied half of the holy water into the bowl, careful not to spill any. He picked up the iron box and immediately cried out, letting the box drop. It clattered on the table for far longer and louder than it should have.
“Nasty thing,” Jack said. He placed an oven mitt on each hand before picking the box up again and lowering it into the bowl of holy water.
The water instantly corrupted. A hissing gray-brown foam rose inside the bowl, almost to overflow, and then slowly fizzled. They sat staring, waiting for the water to lose its cloudiness as it normally did during a successful clearing, but instead it settled around the box in a murky soup. The vein in Jack’s forehead made an appearance. Anna knew what that meant. He’d need more holy water to finish the job, which meant any profits from this gig were history.
Jack scowled, lifted the box out of the water and placed it back on the table. He soaked a new batch of towels in a fresh bowl of holy water and then rewrapped the box. Smothering the box with the soaked towels should take the fight out of it for a while. The next dunking would either send the spirit attachment into Source or weaken it enough so that Jack could store the box safely in the basement until the spirit crossed on its own.
But within moments the towels around the box grew brown and putrid.
“What are you going to do with it?” Anna asked. “Move it to the basement?”
Jack shook his head. “It might agitate the dormant objects.” The basement was home to dormant objects whose spirit attachments had been weakened and bound with holy water. Most bound spirits eventually chose to cross into Source, and the newly-vacant objects were then officially cleared.
“Send it back to its owner,” Anna said.
He wouldn’t and she knew it. His compulsion to hoard would claim another victory, and the box would never leave his house.
“I’ll deal with the box later,” Jack said. “For now I need to concentrate on setting up the new office. And, kid”—he looked at her pointedly—“I could use less attitude and more help.”
Jack’s vein throbbed as Anna stood from the table, repositioning her backpack on her sore shoulders. “Stay away from this box,” he said. “The attachment is an ugly one.”
The box rattled on the table. The lines on Jack's face, the bags under his eyes, were deeper than ever. Anna left him there, surrounded by the evidence of his compulsive hoarding, in kinship with the fearful spirits that clung to the earthly realm, entrenched in the most meaningless of things.
At long last, she was alone in her room. The first thing she did after unloading her backpack was settle on the bed and pull up Craig’s Instagram on her phone. Craig’s page occasionally highlighted new music by the Manarchists but consisted mostly of heavily filtered selfies of him and his bandmates making angry faces. Today Craig posed with his guitar, wearing a black knit cap pulled low on his forehead. Vaguely aware that her obsession with Craig was no longer fun, Anna typed a comment—“nice hat”—and then cringed. How lame. Her phone buzzed, causing her heart to jump, but it was only a text from Freddy.
space gaze yay or nay?
not 2nite, Anna replied.
On Anna’s wall a picture of Doreen, Freddy, and herself stared down. They were camping in Freddy’s backyard on his eleventh birthday. It was a cute picture of the three of them, and Freddy’s mom had given them each a framed copy. Anna was ten years old in the photo, when she still loved the feel of warm summer rain and never worried about her hair frizzing. She was a tomboy in those days, probably taking after her mom.
Helen used to wear clothes splattered with wood finish around the house. Her hands were always stained, and she hardly ever wore makeup. Anna struggled to remember her mother’s hands, the calluses on her palm, her stained and tapered fingers.
Although the memories of her mother were fading, at least she still had Freddy and Doreen. They were her tribe, small but reliable. The camping picture tugged at her from the wall, as if whispering something just out of range. Anna blew the feeling off and snooped through the comments on Craig’s page.
Her phone vibrated. Please be Craig.
It was a text from Doreen.
moms driving me crzy
least u have a mom? call u later, Anna replied.
The ringing in Anna’s ears had shifted into another pounding headache, but she continued to snoop around Craig’s page. Sydney had posted a comment thanking him for turning her on to some band Anna had never heard of. So, he was sharing music with Sydney now? She threw her phone on the mattress.
What was she thinking? Someone like Craig would never really be interested in Goblin Girl, especially not with girls like Sydney around. Anna picked up a fashion magazine and flipped through it to the back pages, where ad after ad for breast implants, butt implants, hair removal, liposuction, nose jobs, and even "vaginal rejuvenation" flashed by.
With the magazine curled into her fist, Anna stood before her full-length mirror and assessed herself. All she could see was a pimple on her forehead and the small bump on her nose. Her brown hair was drab, mousy. The hair of a rodent. She should get highlights like Sydney. She’d need money for that, a real job that paid.
She leaned closer to the mirror, inspecting her pores. You’re so disgusting. The thought was punctuated by a sharp prick of pain behind her eyes.
Anna winced, glaring at her reflection. You stupid ugly bitch.
She froze, gripped with an intense urge to punch the mirror. For a moment her image in the mirror distorted into a grotesque mound of flesh and hair, a puckered blob of blackheads and bony protrusions. Instinctively, she threw the magazine at the mirror. It hit the glass with a loud thud, bringing the mania and pain in her head to an abrupt stop. In its wake was bone-deep exhaustion.
Anna turned off the light and crawled under her covers, falling asleep almost instantly. Hours later, when she opened her eyes again, it was dark. It was night, yes, but the air itself was dark. The air was black and she was choking on it! Before she could register what was happening, Jack burst into her room and slammed her window shut. Anna thought that she was dreaming for a few bewildered seconds. Then it hit her. The backyard is on fire. Penelope.
Anna flew out of bed and down the stairs. Jack trailed her, screaming at her to stay inside. But Anna ran into the kitchen, stumbling over Jack’s hoard, and flung open the back door, stopping for a moment to take in the alien scene before her. Flaming tendrils of leaves and paper danced through the air, curling in and out of the doghouse. The P on the doghouse roof was warping; the melting glue and rhinestones crackled and popped. Along the side of the house a pile of newspapers and leaves smoldered, glowing orange through the black smoke as the wind spit embers across the yard.
Anna lunged for the burning doghouse, the hot air singeing her eyebrows, but Jack grabbed her and yanked her back.
“She’s by the gate,” he said.
“Where?” Anna yelled, disorientated by the thick smoke and swirling debris. Then she saw her.
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br /> Penelope was lying still, her two puppies squirming next to her. There was something off about Penelope’s stillness. Burned, Anna thought. She prepared for the smell of scorched fur and sound of agonized whines as her legs carried her forward, but when she reached Penelope there was only silence. The puppies were safe, huddled together next to their mother, their tails low.
“Don't touch her,” Jack said.
But Anna reached out and felt the horrible coolness of Penelope. Dead.
A wailing filled her ears. A fire truck, followed by an ambulance, pulled into the Fagan driveway. Anna tore her eyes from Penelope’s body and looked up. Freddy and Doreen were standing a few feet away. Each of them lifted up a puppy without saying a word, looking like wide-eyed children, younger versions of themselves, like they had when Helen Fagan still breathed air and felt the wind on her face. Life wasn’t perfect then, but it was pretty good. But now, nothing could ever be good again.
Neighbors were gathering in small groups, arms folded like they were watching a Little League game, a few of them shooting video with their phones. Anna wanted to scream at them, but her attention turned to a fireman who was picking something up from the ground near the charred newspaper pile. Her numb legs carried her over to the fireman to see what was in his hand. It was a clove cigarette butt, half smoked.
Chapter Five
Ready to Reenie
The last-period bell rang and students swarmed out of classrooms and into the hallway. Two days had passed since Penelope’s death. Anna was miserable, but she’d made it through the first day back at school after the fire. There were stares and whispers, but being Goblin Girl she was used to it. Tomorrow was Friday, at least, and that helped to push her through the day, despite her broken heart.
The Ghost Hunter's Daughter Page 4
