The Ghost Hunter's Daughter

by Caroline Flarity

  what r u up 2? ☺

  Craig texted right back.

  blasting tunes so mom stays out. Ur webcam on?

  He wanted to see her. A webcam box appeared on Anna's laptop across the room. She scrambled over her bed, reaching the laptop on her desk in record time. It was Craig's face! Live-action Craig! His tousled black hair was slightly matted and his face had an oily sheen, but Anna barely registered it. A longing for him welled inside her, pulsing along with her quickening heartbeat. Moisture drained from her mouth.

  Another text from Craig on her phone.

  u alone?

  yes, she replied.

  turn ur cam on wanna c u

  k hold on

  Anna rushed to her mirror, applied lip gloss, flipped her hair, brushed it, flipped it again and then took the black tape off the camera on her laptop. Craig smiled in response and typed on his cell.

  u look hot

  Can u turn ur mic on? she asked. Why were they still texting? She wanted to hear his voice.

  Craig shook his head.

  wanna listen 2 tunes and c ur sexy body. K??

  ☺, Anna replied.

  serious, he texted.

  The butterflies in her stomach morphed into a murder of crows. Was she supposed to act like the women in Izzy’s posters? Was that what Craig wanted? Arched back, pouty lips, that kind of thing? Or should she just pose and flex like a bodybuilder? She stepped back and then playfully sashayed toward the camera, hands on hips, lips parted. Craig was smiling and singing to himself. He was into it. He was into her. It was a rush like no other.

  u r hot lemme c ur bra

  Was he kidding?

  no way, she texted.

  its no big deal? I know about hastings, he replied.

  A gut punch. Craig knew about Michael Hastings and her last year. Anna cringed at the memory. The beer on Hastings’s breath, her wanting to know what the Fuss Was All About, their complete lack of chemistry. And if that wasn’t letdown enough, Mike went and ran his mouth about it, after swearing on his little sister's life that he wouldn’t. It went buzzing through the whole school. Sydney and her cronies were all over it, telling anyone that cared to listen (pretty much everyone), making him out to be this big player and Anna a slut. Such a glaring double standard, but that was how the Mikes and Sydneys of the world liked it.

  So what? Craig assumed that because of Hastings she was fair game? An urge to tell Craig to go screw himself was on the verge of manifesting.

  Jk hastings is a doosh, just wanna c u, Craig texted. think about u all the time.

  Heat blew through her. She felt light and giddy like the time she drank wine at Freddy’s house during a Seder dinner. Attention from Craig was an elixir that made everything else fade away, and this was her chance to connect with him, to give him what he wanted. For a quick second, Anna lifted her shirt at the webcam, grateful as hell that she had a cute black bra on. Craig was singing again, bobbing his head and wearing a smirk that didn’t quite reach his eyes. He typed.

  take the bra off

  There was a muffled crash from downstairs. No, the basement. Whatever Jack was up to, he wasn’t going to screw this up for her. She texted Craig.

  not gonna happen ☺

  But then a second muffled crash rattled the walls. Something was wrong. She sent Craig a final text.

  Brb

  Anna rushed out of her room, down the stairs and into the kitchen. She yanked on the basement door handle, but it didn’t budge.

  “Dad! What's going on?”

  She rattled the doorknob hard, hearing only muffled coughing until Jack finally screamed, “I’m okay!” And then a strangled, high-pitched “Tripped!!”

  “Come upstairs!” she yelled through the door.

  This was ridiculous. She pulled on the doorknob, feeling resistance from a middle and upper latch. But there wasn’t an upper latch on the outside of the door. The basement door was locked from the inside? What the hell? Bending down she peered underneath the door. Nothing. Total blackness. Jack couldn’t work down there without a trace of light.

  Anna foraged through the hoard under the kitchen table, finding an old wire hanger. After straightening the hanger’s pliable tip, she poked it under the basement door and then withdrew it. Pieces of dark blue foam were stuck to the metal tip. Jack had placed some kind of a barrier, a seal, on the inside of the basement door. To keep her out or to keep something else in? Below, Jack’s coughing fit ended in a nauseating retch.

  “Can you move?” she yelled into the door.

  “I’m fine!”

  “Then come upstairs!” She was screaming through the keyhole now.

  When Jack didn't reply, Anna decided that she’d had enough. She followed the path into the unlivable living room and starting kicking around the hoard piles, looking for something with some weight. Ow. Her foot found something heavy, all right. Who knew they had a bowling ball? Was there anything that Jack wouldn’t hoard?

  Anna lugged the ball back into the kitchen, stomping on any of Jack’s hoard that had fallen into the narrow path. Back in front of the basement door, she held the bowling ball with both hands and swung her arms between her legs, gaining momentum. One, two, three. She let go, heaving the heavy bowling ball at the doorknob. Bull’s-eye!

  The door buckled inward and the doorknob popped off, falling to the kitchen floor along with the bowling ball, which bounced heavily, cracking the tile. But the top lock of the basement door was still stubbornly latched from the inside. Anna picked up the bowling ball, her arms burning, and hurled it again, higher this time. The bowling ball hit the top of the door, cracking the molding and breaking the inside top latch. The basement door busted inward, exposing the dingy light below. The bowling ball went crashing down the basement steps, and Anna was right behind it.

  Chapter Twelve

  Another Level of Sick

  The fumes hit Anna on the way down the basement stairs. She pulled her T-shirt over her mouth to filter the dreadful stench. Flies littered the steps, most of them dead, some listlessly hopping, using their last throes of life to try to escape. When she reached the bottom step, she saw what had attracted them.

  A rotting mess of garbage littered the concrete floor at the base of the steps. Vegetable scraps, banana peels and moldy pizza formed a putrid brown collage. She stepped around it and turned left into the large, unfinished basement. Anna wheezed as her lungs rejected the foul air. The smell of harsh chemicals and rotting garbage was nauseating. But what lay before her was much worse. Open trash bags sat atop the massive hoard piles throughout the basement, dangerously close to several dingy lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling on wires.

  Below the blanket of rotting garbage were piles of broken furniture, artwork and stacks of rusted pipes that had crushed the boxes of books and appliances beneath them. In one corner, the rusted green handlebar of her childhood bicycle stuck out of a chaotic pile of toys and gardening equipment. A rat ran over Anna’s foot and she stumbled and then gagged, more from the stench than the rat. There was a stirring in the edge of her vision—something moved inside one of the garbage bags atop the hoard pile to Anna’s left. She reached up and pulled the soft plastic further open. A rotten piece of raw chicken fell out of the bag and flopped down to the concrete floor, infested with dozens of squirming maggots.

  Anna spun around, looking for Jack, but it was hard to see specifics in the chaos. The overstimulation of the basement was too much for Anna’s battered mind to process. She was used to Jack’s hoard. But this was a whole other level of sick. Another rat ran by her feet and Anna jumped, startled, and sucked in rancid air. She gagged, struggling to breathe, pulling at her throat. The so-called air was thick with mold spores, fumes and cobwebs. Something else moved, and Anna whipped toward it, ready to fight.

  It was Jack. She hadn’t seen him crouched in the shadow of a looming hoard pile. He got to his feet, stepping into the murky light. His eye sockets threw shadows over his face, turning his features skeletal.
The sliver of pity she felt for him turned into anger.

  “What did you do, Dad? What happened here?”

  “I was rooting around in there and slipped,” Jack said, gesturing to one of the large canvas bins of exposed bound objects. Each object had a tag that identified the owner and date of binding, and from what she could see, every tag was now stained and unreadable. “Cracked my head on the side of the table.” He gestured to a broken folding table that was now supported at an odd angle solely by the hoard underneath it.

  She’d forgotten about the crash she heard. “Not that,” she said, throwing her hands up. “This!”

  Fumes from concentrated drain cleaners and other harsh industrial-strength solvents hung in the air in a toxic fog. The thickest part of the rancid chemical cloud clung to the ceiling above several rows of steel shelving that had long since collapsed atop one another. The containers of chemicals, remnants of Jack’s plumbing days, had all either burst or cracked.

  “You’re always down here,” she said through her shirt. “How do you survive?”

  Jack didn’t answer, just stared back at her dumbly. Disgusted, she turned away from him. Something twinkled in a dank corner. Anna stomped her way over hoard and garbage to the filthy and cracked wooden trunk where the tiny gleam of light originated. Squatting next to it, she touched the lapel of a stained and tattered corduroy blazer. A rusty butterfly pin on the blazer's lapel somehow sparkled in the murky light. The wooden trunk was full of clothes, jewelry and shoes.

  “Anna,” Jack said, from behind her. She felt his pleading eyes boring into her back.

  But Anna couldn’t look at him.

  “These are Mom's?”

  “I wasn't sure…how to let them go.”

  So he had destroyed them, like he did to everything else. She looked inside another nearby box. Pictures of her mother and Jack, of Anna as a child, her grandparents’ wedding portrait—all exposed to the filthy air and ruined. Stuck to the back of the wedding portrait was the worn image of Freddy blowing out seven birthday candles, accidentally spitting all over the cake. That day the other kids had yelled eww, but Anna and Dor ate it anyway, not making a big deal of scraping off the top.

  “I'm going to fix it,” Jack sputtered. “I promise.”

  She turned to face him. “Your promises are worthless.”

  Anna kicked and climbed her way over to one of the three bins of bound objects, each the size of a small dumpster. She reached in and picked up a mold-covered box of "Christmas Sausage" that had been smothering one of the bound objects—an old-fashioned typewriter. There was other garbage in the bins, strewn over the objects Jack had once so meticulously documented.

  The poor spirits! Even if they wanted to cross into Source, they were trapped. The thick and putrid atmosphere was keeping the spirits from moving into Source. It was against everything she thought Jack stood for. Instead of providing them with a safe environment where they could make peace with their earthly existence, he’d created a hellish trap.

  Jack stepped toward her.

  “I was going to take them outside this week, air them out,” he said. “Let me just…my head.” He ran a hand through his tangled mop of hair, and it came away smeared with blood.

  “You're bleeding,” she said.

  “It’s okay, just a scratch.”

  Yeah. Just a scratch, like the house just needed a little cleanup.

  “None of this is okay!” she yelled, her voice cracking. “Look!” she screamed, pointing at the garbage rotting over hoard piles, kicking at the ground carpeted with dead bugs and rat droppings. “It's this place…this is what’s making you sick.”

  It wasn’t allergies that caused Jack’s illness. Penelope should have been kept inside. Peeps should have been safe. Anna’s vision blurred. She was going to faint if she didn’t get some fresh air.

  There was a small window near the top of each of the side walls in the basement. Anna clambered up a hoard pile and tried to force one of the windows open, but it was hopelessly rusted and stuck. She kicked around the hoard pile, her hair dark with grime, looking for something heavy, and then—ouch—her tender toes found a wooden coat stand.

  Anna’s arms already ached from swinging the bowling ball, and her knees threatened to buckle as she pried the coat stand free. Jack sat on the diseased floor, watching her with a dazed expression, his tall frame leaning against his hoard. She rammed the window with the coat stand, breaking the glass. Heading for the second window, she scrambled up another pile of debris, wincing as her foot cracked a piece of burned plywood from Penelope’s doghouse. In a single thrust, Anna smashed the second window with the tip of the coat stand.

  The chemical fog wafted toward the broken windows, pulled by the fresh air. A few ectoplasmic wisps of souls rose from the large bins of tagged objects, and one by one, they soared out of the small windows. A spirit flew by Anna’s head. The trail of relief it radiated penetrated her anger and disgust, giving her brief respite.

  “I started to smell lilacs.”

  Anna whirled around. Jack’s sunken face looked back at her blankly.

  “What?” she said.

  “I started to smell lilacs,” he said. “It…it smells like lilacs down here.”

  Lilacs. Her mother used to dab lilac oil on her wrists every morning. Was he kidding? It smelled like a toxic waste dump.

  “I don’t smell lilacs,” Anna said.

  Jack was running his hands through his hair, smearing the dirt and blood on his forehead.

  “And then I started thinking about the garbage in the kitchen. That maybe something was in there that had been thrown away by mistake, like a button or nail, something I could wash off and put away, where it wouldn’t be forgotten, where it could be used someday. But then it dawned on me that even food scraps could be saved. That right there”—he pointed at a mesh bag full of rotting onions—“I can turn into compost, and those”—he pointed at a stack of crushed shoe boxes—“can be used to package the compost to sell on eBay.”

  Her father had finally lost his mind. And she’d thought that he could help find out what was screwing up Bloomtown? Doreen’s mom, the puppy-squeezing brat, even Pickens and Izzy—they were all paragons of mental health compared to Jack Fagan.

  “Okay,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” Jack said, as a drop of blood trickled down his forehead.

  “To the hospital,” Anna said. “I’ll drive.”

  Jack was shaking his head. “It’s not that bad, doesn’t even hurt, and we're in the hole enough as it is.”

  He was worried about money, but had no problem wrecking the house? Fine. Let him get a nasty scar, but she couldn’t let him stay in the basement.

  “Well, you’re going upstairs,” she said, coughing. Her lungs were closing up. “At least until this cesspool airs out.”

  She walked to the base of the stairs, stepping directly in the garbage she’d so carefully avoided before finding the mother lode in the basement. The mess at the bottom of the stairs seemed almost quaint now. Jack had the gall to hesitate.

  “Come on, Dad,” Anna said, doing her best to speak calmly, “up to your room. Get cleaned up and I'll check on you later.”

  Jack looked almost comfortable in the toxic fog. He opened his mouth, about to protest.

  “Let's go!” She stalked over to him and held out her hand. Reluctantly, he took it and got to his feet.

  • • •

  An hour later, Anna wore two cloth face masks, one right over the other for extra filtration, as she pulled a large, industrial-size metal fan down the basement stairs. Chunks of the wooden steps flew off as the heavy fan banged down, but she didn’t much care. The Better Homes and Gardens shoot would have to wait. She’d already brought down two buckets of soapy water, a gallon of bleach, a mop and a box of extra-large garbage bags. In her back pocket was a pair of mongo barbecue tongs for picking up anything too gross for rubber gloves alone.

  Ann
a positioned the fan in the meter-wide circumference of concrete floor that she’d cleared of garbage so far. She'd found the fan in the living room underneath a pile of moth-eaten bedspreads that Jack had “collected” from Goodwill.

  Taking a deep breath, she snapped on a pair of plastic gloves and trudged to the top of a hoard pile, reaching for one of the dim lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. The thick winter boots she wore crunched into a box of petrified Cocoa Krispies as she screwed in a new high-wattage bulb.

  Anna surveyed the stark ugliness of the now brightly lit basement. Something was bothering her.

  Well, a lot of things were bothering her: a sick, injured and apparently completely off-his-rocker father, her raging headache, and that Craig was probably pissed she’d disappeared in the middle of their webcam chat. But there was something else nagging at her, something she couldn't quite access. Anna turned slowly in a circle, taking the basement in. And there it was.

  There were garbage bags that she didn’t recognize. The Fagans used black garbage bags, but scattered around the basement were white bags, clear bags, and even blue recycling bags. Jack was taking other people's garbage down there, too.

  But why? It was a stupid question. To rifle through them, searching for God-knows-what? Something he could never find because it wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere? Things to fix and hold on to for a goddamn rainy day? Jack's reasoning never made any sense. But this was way over the top, even for him. Her dad was crazy, bonkers, gonzo and probably belonged in a mental institution. Fear overwhelmed her and she knew she had to move, had to do something, or she might remain there, paralyzed forever on top of Hoard Mountain.

  Anna skidded down the hoard pile and returned to the small but reasonably clean area of floor space. Stubborn grit remained in the cracks of concrete under her feet. She reached into her bucket of cleaning supplies and took out a roll of paper towels and antibacterial spray. Squatting down, she scrubbed the grit on the floor, turning the paper towels black with soot. Anna pulled more paper towels off the roll, but no matter how much she scrubbed and sprayed, the paper towels still picked up dirt.