The Ghost Hunter's Daughter

by Caroline Flarity

  Chapter Eight

  Dirt Bath

  When Jack pulled up to the battered Fagan mailbox, the wheat-like grass in the front yard swayed in the wind, and the house loomed dark and unwelcoming in the dim evening light. Anna’s relatively good mood snuffed out like an air-starved candle.

  “So, whatcha think?” he said.

  Reaching into the now lidless and crunched mailbox, Anna removed the mail that the letter carrier had dutifully shoved into the twisted metal. She knew better than to try to sort it. Most of it would be tossed unopened on the Mountain of Mail.

  “About?” Anna said, even though she knew he was asking about Geneva.

  “Ms. Sanders, um, Geneva.”

  “Kind of granola for a scientist.” Anna said. “But she’s cool.”

  “Yep,” Jack said. “She seems pretty cool, pretty groovy.”

  What a goof. Jack was unusually cheery, and she probably should be grateful that he was at least normal enough to have a crush on someone. But it still made her uneasy, aside from being kind of gross.

  Jack hadn’t dated anyone since her mother’s death. There was one woman, Sheila, a divorced neighbor who used to come by in sundresses and strappy sandals to check on them in the months after Helen’s funeral, bringing over food and toys and then, discreetly, bottles of wine. Jack made excuses to cut her visits short until they stopped altogether.

  Sheila was now firmly in the anti-Fagan camp (and who on Eden street wasn’t?). Anna couldn’t blame her. Jack’s yard was a blight that undoubtedly brought down the value of every house on the street.

  Her head suddenly thudded with resentment. Her father was too selfish to think of anyone but himself. And what about you? Where were you when Dor needed your help? But Anna ignored the fading voice of her conscience.

  Once inside, the oppressive bulk of Jack's hoard felt heavier after spending the day in the airy new office. As usual, Jack seemed oblivious to it.

  “I'm going to grab some dormant objects from the basement for tomorrow's training with Geneva,” he said, winding through the path toward the kitchen. “It's gonna be a busy weekend!”

  “Yip-a-dee-doo-dah!” Anna replied sarcastically, following him to search for something edible.

  The basement was off-limits and therefore not of much interest. The spirits down there were either struggling against their bindings or in the process of transitioning into Source. The latter especially needed a peaceful environment and, according to Jack, Anna’s presence in the basement would be disruptive. Spirits, he said, were drawn to the raw, chaotic energy surging from teenage bodies and minds.

  Jack reemerged from the basement carrying a filthy burlap bag full of tagged objects. Anna’s nose wrinkled as a musky, chemical smell wafted toward her. She was about to complain about the stench when Jack removed the iron box from the bag and placed it inside an open steel briefcase on the counter. The box was wrapped in dirty hand towels, moldy with crusted brown slime.

  Anna ceased rummaging through the fridge, suddenly at full attention. The spirit inside the box was still strong and no doubt ready to do some damage, if it had the chance.

  “Where do you think it’s from?” she asked.

  “Looks early European,” Jack said, scooping up an armful of old newspapers from under the kitchen table.

  He was acting weirder than usual, hovering by the basement door with the newspapers, tapping his feet as if waiting for her to leave.

  Anna reached for the basement door.

  “Hey!” he snapped. “The basement is off-limits.”

  “I was getting the door for you. Geez! I can't even touch the doorknob?”

  “What's with your sudden interest?”

  “What's with the trash reshuffling?”

  “They’re newspapers,” Jack snapped. Trash was one of the words on the do-not-say list.

  Anna threw her hands up. “Fine.” She feigned a casual interest. “You keeping that box up here now?”

  “You’re a little too curious about the damn box,” Jack said. He shuffled over to the kitchen counter without dropping a single newspaper and shut the briefcase with his elbow. “It's going in my bedroom. I don't want it agitating the dormant objects.”

  She eyed the useless trash in his arms and felt another surge of resentment.

  “Wouldn’t it feel better to toss that crap?” she asked.

  Jack remained rooted by the basement door, wheezing slightly.

  “Give it a rest,” he said, “and go to your room.”

  On her way out of the kitchen, Anna picked up Oof from the kitchen table, discreetly tucking the book under her arm.

  Jack stood by the basement door until he heard the mattress in Anna’s bedroom creak. It floored him sometimes, how much she looked like her mother, especially when she was frustrated: her chin jutting out in defiance, her almond-shaped eyes growing subtly rounder. He balanced the papers in his arms while using his pinky fingers to twist the doorknob on the basement door. Grimacing, he swung the door open with his foot. His sinus infections were acting up again, keeping him awake at night with their unrelenting pressure and squeezing.

  The light switch unreachable, the darkness unnerved him as he shuffled down each wooden step. It became harder to inhale, as if something heavy crouched on his chest ready to spring at his face, teeth bared. His foot kicked into some errant trash on the steps and he stumbled, throwing his shoulder against the wall to catch himself. A sharp pain dominated and his mind almost cleared. He should go outside, take a walk around the block, maybe take Anna to a movie. But no—the pressure in his sinuses returned—the neighbors would be seething at him from their perfect yards and tidy, monochromatic cars. Besides, Anna wouldn’t want to be seen with him.

  As he struggled with the physical and mental unease that accompanied the shrinking of his airways, Jack puzzled over how it came to be that he was now too much of a coward to face his neighbors. He wasn’t altogether sure, but he knew exactly how it had begun.

  It started with nightmares. For days Helen Fagan had barely slept, waking, when she did, overwhelmed by indefinable dread. Then came the scratching noises on the floorboards under her side of the bed. Jack couldn’t hear them, but there was Helen every morning with bags under her eyes, insisting that the scratching had kept her up all night. After several weeks, the scratching migrated to the inside of her pillow. “Here,” she’d say, “listen,” but Jack heard nothing.

  Helen was drugged the night it took full possession of her. She’d taken two sleeping pills, hoping to sleep until morning. Jack awoke later that night to the sound of gurgling. He turned to his wife and the demon was staring at him, staring into him. At first it could only hiss and spit. It had to learn to manipulate Helen’s vocal cords. “The sow is mine,” it finally said, and Jack felt his bowels loosen and quiver. “Helen, stop,” he said stupidly, knowing it wasn’t Helen. The demon’s eyes grew wide, sensing his terror. Its cackling reached a crescendo along with Jack’s racing heart until, slowly, Helen managed to gain back control of her body.

  “Don’t leave me,” she’d begged, and Jack held her, although it sickened him, and said he never would, although he wanted to. After that night, Helen offered to sleep in the guest room. She couldn’t hide her relief when Jack said no; they were in this together. Till death do us part. Had she known, he now wondered, that death was coming?

  Suicide. Schizophrenia. Those were the words doctors wrote in their charts and filed away after Helen’s death. Jack hadn’t wasted time arguing with them. They were fools. He focused instead on contacting Helen’s spirit, sure that if he lost sight of that goal, he’d sink into the quicksand of despair tugging at his heels.

  He became obsessed with studying religions and the occult but was unable to connect to Helen’s spirit. Although he couldn’t reach Helen, he went on to help others find peace, both the living and the dead. But now his connection to Source was gone.

  He’d lost his wife, his daughter was ashamed of him and his busines
s was failing. Jack descended into the dark basement thinking that he should have been the one to die.

  After midnight, Anna crouched in the dark hallway outside Jack’s bedroom, waiting for her eyes to adjust and listening to her father’s labored breathing. She crawled into the room, the carpet muffling her movements. The steel briefcase was on his nightstand on top of a pile of books. He was sleeping right next to it! She wouldn’t have to go searching through the hoard piles in his room.

  Holding her breath, Anna lifted the metal case from the small table inches from Jack’s head. She darted out of the room, pausing in the hallway to listen for any signs he was awake. Her heart felt both fluttery and leaden. She was stealing from her own father. Could she get any lower? She thought of Izzy’s smug face and the horrible coolness of Penelope’s body. She could.

  Back in her room, Anna spent an hour thumbing through Oof and searching the Web before leaning back in her chair, satisfied. Oof was open to a chapter titled "Celtic Animism and Polytheism," which featured sketches of animal images, one of which was a very close match to the beast etched into the lid of the iron box. On her laptop a website on ancient Ireland contained another near match, and a confirmation. It was a boar. The animal carved into the lid of the iron box was a pig. How fitting. How perfect. It was a sign.

  Anna switched off her lamp, looking out her bedroom window and down to the burned patch in the backyard. Tears wet her eyes, but she was sick of crying. She was sick of grieving. Instead, she would get justice. She went downstairs and removed Jack's car keys from their hook on the kitchen wall and left the dark house through the back door.

  Twenty minutes later, what she saw through Izzy’s bedroom window had her biting her fist to keep from laughing. Anna was on her toes in Izzy’s backyard, watching him through the glass. He slept in his bed, curled up in the fetal position with his thumb in his mouth. If she had her phone, she could show the world what big, bad Izzy was really like. What she was about to do to him would have to suffice.

  Izzy’s bedroom was dimly lit by the moonlight filtering through the window and the glow of a screen saver scrolling across his computer monitor. It was the image of a naked woman wearing a dog collar. Typical. But there was something very off about the angle of the woman’s head. Anna pressed down further on her aching toes and leaned closer to the window, squinting to get a better look. The air caught in her throat.

  A picture of Anna’s face had been digitally attached to the naked woman scrolling across Izzy’s monitor.

  The potato salad Anna had for lunch made a bitter reappearance in the back of her throat. She turned her back to the window, sliding down the aluminum siding to the grass, and picked up the iron box from where she’d left it on the ground. Anna ran her hand over the closed lid, feeling the dulled vibration of a spirit muted by holy water.

  “I’m going to set you free,” she whispered to it.

  Anna dug into the grass with both hands, scooping up cold, moist soil. Using her thumbs, she massaged the dirt into the shallow crevices of the pig etching, smearing it along the hinges, covering the box with the musty dark earth. She filled her hands with more dirt and continued to caress it onto the box. Once saturated with soil, she brought the box close to her face, looking for signs that the attachment was responding to the ritual. A blast of hot, wet air, like a sharp exhale, swirled across her cheek.

  “I wash away your binding,” she whispered, her mouth almost touching the box. Another blast of hot air, wet and pungent, fell across her lips like a grateful kiss. She wiped her lips off with her sleeve (she wasn’t that desperate), got to her feet and tucked the box into the nook of a pine tree a few yards from Izzy’s window. From the landscaping around the base of the tree, she collected several pinecones and threw them—one, two, three—at Izzy’s window. As the thwacks echoed in the empty yard, Anna sprinted down the block to Jack’s car.

  She didn’t take a deep breath until she was out of Izzy’s neighborhood. Now all she had to do was get back home undetected. There was also the matter of dealing with her father once he realized the box was missing, but she’d handle that later. A block from her house Anna turned the engine off, coasting into the Fagan driveway with the car in neutral, lights off. But through Jack’s hoard in the windows, she saw a sliver of light. The kitchen light was on. Crack balls!

  Jack didn’t look up when she walked in. He sat on the stairs facing the front door, his head in his hands.

  “Where is it?” he asked through gritted teeth.

  Minutes later Anna was back in Jack’s car, sitting slumped and cross-armed in the passenger seat, a black baseball cap pulled down over her eyes. Jack turned around in the driver's seat, searching through the mess in the backseat. He pulled out a blue velvet bag with a cross stitched on it and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. After pulling out of the driveway, Jack broke the loaded silence between them.

  “Do you have any idea what you've done?”

  Anna met his withering gaze with one of her own. “I know exactly what I did. Peeps was murdered and I did something about it.”

  Jack bristled but said nothing. These digs at him about her mother weren’t altogether fair. It wasn’t his fault Helen Fagan was dead, Anna knew that. But it was his fault that he gave up on trying to contact her spirit, that he’d trashed the house and made them both objects of fear and ridicule.

  Jack kept his eyes on the road. “This is our goddamn livelihood you’re messing with, not to mention exposing this poor Izzy kid to god knows what. I didn’t raise you to hurt people.”

  They spoke to each other in grunted monosyllables as she directed him to Izzy’s house. Jack parked a few houses down and they darted between neighboring houses to Izzy’s backyard. The box was no longer in the tree outside Izzy’s window, and his bedroom light was on.

  “He’s in there,” Anna whispered, gesturing to Izzy’s bedroom window. “I’ll wait in the car.”

  “I may need you to assist,” Jack said.

  “Are you kidding? I can’t risk him spotting me.”

  “Possession victims have little to no recall of what happens when they’re possessed, you know that.”

  “I'll ponder that in the car.”

  Jack placed a firm hand on her forearm. “Maybe it's time you took some responsibility for your actions.”

  It felt like all of the blood in her body was being pumped in hot pulses from her aching brain. She wrenched her arm out of his grasp, ignoring the shock in his eyes. “Fine.”

  They crept up to the window. Anna crouched down by the siding while Jack peered inside.

  “I don’t see him,” Jack said. “What is that…” he trailed off, suddenly rigid.

  Anna’s stomach dropped. Oh no. The screen saver on Izzy’s monitor! Anna stood just as Jack bent down toward her. They bonked foreheads.

  “Ow,” she said, rubbing her head. The last thing she needed was more pain in her friggin’ head.

  Jack’s sunken eyes were full of horror. “What is that…picture?”

  Anna’s cheeks burned. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Why was he looking at her like that? “It’s not me, Dad. He just put my head on it.”

  “Is that little…that boy, is he bothering you?”

  “Yeah, he's bothers me. He killed Peeps!”

  Jack’s struggle to find something to say ended when Izzy levitated into view behind the window. Izzy was horizontal, wearing only unfortunate black briefs adorned with a white skull pattern. The skin on his grinning face was puckered and ridged the way fingers and toes get after a long bath, aging him half a century.

  Anna and Jack ducked beneath the window, breathing hard, their backs against the siding.

  “It’s a full possession,” Jack said, “and the spirit is strong. What did you do?”

  “Not much. Gave the box a little dirt bath.”

  “You must have been pretty enthusiastic about it,” he said, with a hint of pride. After seeing that screen saver, Jack no longer seemed overly concerned ab
out Izzy’s well-being. “Okay,” he said, standing up, “you have permission to go to the car.”

  As Jack pushed open the window, Anna speed-walked around the side of Izzy’s house. She was almost out of the driveway when she heard a loud grunt and a string of muffled curses. Crap. Jack was in trouble. She crept back around the side of the house and saw her father’s legs sticking out of the window.

  By the time Anna reached him, he’d collapsed belly-first onto the windowsill, gasping. Before she could grab one of Jack’s feet, he tumbled into Izzy’s room, landing with a loud thump.

  Anna stood on the tips of her sore toes, her fingers gripping the windowsill. “You okay?”

  Jack nodded from the floor of Izzy’s bedroom. He put his finger to his lips, shushing her. Izzy slowly turned in midair like he was being roasted on an invisible skewer, still wearing a vacant grin as if unaware of their presence. Izzy’s reddish hair, normally cropped to his head, looked lethal; the short spikes came to sharp points and had knife-like edges, mimicking the spikes in the crude pig etching on the lid of the iron box. Whatever was in the iron box was now inside Izzy. And where was the box? Anna scanned the room. Besides a dirty couch, there was no furniture other than his messy bed and desk. Izzy’s clothes were in a pile on the floor of the closet—not a single item hung on a hanger. Posters of naked women lined the walls, their faces and bodies twisted in either contrived ecstasy or pain. The room was gross, just like Izzy.

  Jack struggled to his feet. “Go back to the car,” he hissed, and then launched into a coughing fit, stifling the noise with his hands.

  Anna sighed. She wasn’t going anywhere. Jack was clearly in no shape to deal with this alone. She pulled herself through the window and into Izzy’s bedroom.

  Chapter Nine

  The Pig Man Cometh

  Izzy sure was pissy about something, or maybe it was the spirit from the iron box who was pissy. Floating in the air, his facial expressions shifted between fear and a defiant glare. He was snorting, too, and squealing. The irony wasn’t lost on Anna. Izzy, the piggish bore, appeared to be possessed by an actual boar-pig. Sometimes life was fair.