The Ghoul Next Door

by Victoria Laurie

  “The stress of dealing with Sy’s psychosis took its toll on my parents. My dad had a heart attack when he was only forty-five, and Mom got cancer only five years later. During the last year of her life, girls in our neighborhood started dying. Mom and I both suspected Sy, and when he was brought in by police for questioning, he named me as his alibi. Mom was in the hospital, on her deathbed, and she begged me to cover for him, so like a fool I did.

  “After we buried her, I told Sy that I would never cover for him again, and if he tried to hurt another girl, I’d personally turn him in.”

  Lester’s voice broke at that moment and he had to look away. I gave him a little time, then said, “What happened when you threatened to do that, Mr. Akers?”

  Lester cleared his throat and turned back to me. “He tried to kill my fiancée, Rosie,” he whispered, and he looked so pained that my heart went out to him. “She knew all about Sy, and what my mother had asked me to do for him. I tried to keep her a secret from him, but he learned about her soon enough. She would go to the hospital to look in on Mom, and she told me that she and Sy met one afternoon. Sy had been so charming, and I knew she wondered if all my stories about him were true, but she trusted me, and the next time she saw him at my mother’s bedside, she avoided him. Then, as if he knew she was trying to avoid him, he started showing up at the flower shop where she worked, and once or twice he tried to pretend he was me, but Rosie knew better. She told me it was in his eyes and the fact that he always called her Mary instead of Rosie or Rosemary. Then he started bumping into her at the market, or at the library, and I began to really worry about his interest in her. I worked long hours—I was a train conductor back then—and I couldn’t always be around to protect Rosie, so, before I even had the money for a decent ring, I popped the question and told her I wanted to get married right away.

  “Back then you couldn’t live together unless you were married, and moving her into my new house was the only way I knew to protect her. Then, one night a week before our wedding, Rosie was on her way over to my place to drop off a dinner she’d made special for me when Sy came up behind her and slit her throat. A man walking his dog saw the attack, but not the face of the man who tried to murder Rose. He got to her and helped keep her alive until an ambulance came, and I’ve thanked God every day since for that man—otherwise I know Sy would’ve made sure to finish the deed.

  “Still, after I got to the hospital, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was Sy, and Rosie mouthed ‘No’ when the police asked her if she’d seen who attacked her, but the minute they left, she reached for a pen and paper and wrote down Sy’s name to show me. Then she tore it up into tiny pieces. She knew it’d be awful for me if there was a trial. I’d have to admit that I’d lied about Sy’s alibi, and I bore the exact face of a killer, which would’ve been plastered across every newspaper in Boston. Rosie trusted me to protect her from any further harm. She knew I’d take care of it.”

  I nodded. “And you knew that he’d attack her again, or someone else, unless something was done.”

  Lester seemed to hesitate and I could feel him begin to retreat away from me, as if he was realizing he’d already said too much. I had to hear more, so I decided to use everything in my arsenal to coax the truth out of him. “Mr. Akers,” I said, “I think you should know that I’m a spirit medium. I can connect with souls that have moved across to the other side.”

  Lester’s eyes shone with interest. “You are?” he asked. “I believe in stuff like that, M.J.”

  “Good. Because next to me is your wife, Rosemary.” I opened up my energy fully to Lester’s deceased wife and she filled my mind with something that looked like a gesture. I felt compelled to take my right hand and tap my chest, then cross both my arms and point to Lester. And then I repeated the first part of the gesture, tapped my chin, and pointed again to him.

  Lester’s eyes misted. “You know sign?”

  “No,” I said. “That was from Rose. What does it mean?”

  Lester mimicked my gesture, but his was more pronounced. “I love you,” he said as he made the first movements. “I miss you,” he said for the second set.

  “She’s here,” I told him. “She says to thank you for burying her in that blue dress. It wasn’t her favorite, but she knew it was yours, and it was important to you to see her one last time in it.”

  Lester made a noise that was a half-sob, half-choking sound and he pushed his fist up to his mouth. He then started to sign in earnest, but there were no words to accompany the gestures. “I don’t understand sign,” I said. “I’m sorry. I have no idea what you said.”

  “Can Rosie see me?” he asked.

  “She can.”

  “Then she knows what I said,” he told me, wiping his eyes.

  “Do you trust me enough now to tell me what happened to your brother?”

  Lester took several deep breaths and stared at his lap for a long time. At last he said, “He liked to hunt on weekends. I knew his habits. I also knew what I had to do.”

  “Where’s the knife?” I asked. I suspected he had it.

  “The one he used against her? I don’t know. I searched his hunting shack and never found it. I looked all over the house for it too, but I couldn’t find it there either. It was his favorite hunting knife. Dad gave it to him when Sy turned sixteen. It was the same knife he used on me when we got into it that time before my folks told me I had to leave. I know Dad tried to take it away from Sy, but he told me he couldn’t find it. The bastard had hidden it good. I know it’s the one he used on Rosie and the other girls. There was something evil in Sy. Something demonic.”

  “I believe it,” I told him. “Tell me when his ghost started showing up.”

  Lester shook his head and stared at the blanket across his legs. He looked so much frailer than when I’d met him that morning. “It was a few years after Rosie and me got married,” he said. “She spent weeks in the hospital after the attack recovering, and she and I had to learn how to sign, but we never brought up the subject of my brother again after I showed her the article in the paper about Sy’s hunting accident. Rosie had simply nodded and squeezed my hand, and I admit I never loved her more than in that moment. We married a few days before she was released—the hospital pastor did the honors. Rosie came home to my house and we adjusted to our new life together and it was wonderful for several years. We tried to have kids, but it never worked out for us, which was okay because we still had each other.”

  Lester’s eyes misted and he wiped them with his sleeve. I was moved by the love he carried for his deceased wife and subtly I felt her energy come stand next to me again, but I didn’t want to distract Lester, so I waited for him to continue. “Anyway, I thought our life together was perfect until one night I woke up and I couldn’t move. What was even stranger was that I was lying in the middle of the living room of my parents’ house. And then out of the kitchen walked Sy with that hunting knife in his hand and a terrible look in his eye.

  “I couldn’t make any sense of it, because everything about the dream felt so real, except I was totally paralyzed and my dead brother was about to stab me. And then Sy put his foot on my chest, just to show me that I was no match for him, and then he stabbed me, right in the abdomen. I felt the knife. I felt the searing pain of it and I felt myself bleeding to death, and then I blacked out.”

  I was a little stunned by Lester’s story. It was very similar to the OBE I’d had, and with a shudder I wondered, if Heath hadn’t shown up and rescued me, would I have been stabbed too?

  “When I came to, I was back in my bed, but in agony. Rosie got me to the doctor, and I had a severe kidney infection that no one could figure out the source of. And for years I was plagued by them, and then, about six years ago, they found cancer in my left kidney, which then spread to my bones. I know it sounds crazy, but I’m convinced Sy was the cause of it.”

  I nodded to let Les kno
w that I thought so too. His brother was a powerfully evil force, capable of causing great harm, so it seemed plausible to me that he’d been responsible for the poison that put a tumor into Lester’s kidney.

  “Anyway, Sy kept coming into my dreams, not every night, but often enough that I’d lose sleep. I told Rosie what was happening and she got me sleeping pills, but they didn’t work and then the dreams got worse. Soon Sy was coming into the room with a poor girl in his grip and he’d stab her right in front of me, then slit her throat. It was terrible, and I started avoiding going to bed. I’d get up and pace the room, trying to stay awake until I was so tired that I’d fall asleep and not dream, but I was also so sleep deprived that I started making mistakes at work.

  “One day when I almost took my train down the wrong set of tracks, which would’ve been a disaster, Rosie put her foot down and told me we had to do something. She said she’d been doing some research and she found this spiritualist—he was an Indian medicine man or something—and he said he could help me. With no other option I gave in and decided to go see him. At his house he brought me to this tepee-looking thing and sat me down in the middle of it. Then he gave me some sort of potion and he told me he’d sit with me while the potion took effect. Then, the craziest thing happened: I was back inside my parents’ house, and Sy was there too, but this time I wasn’t paralyzed. Sy came at both of us, and me and the medicine man fought Sy to the ground. Then the medicine man told Sy that he’d given me a powerful potion, and that I was now Sy’s master. He’d never again bring me to that place and paralyze me. I was free to fight him, and the medicine man made sure to let Sy know I was stronger because I was connected to the world of the living. He also told Sy that he would join me whenever I came to that place and help keep Sy in check.”

  “And what happened?” I asked, because I knew that Lester hadn’t been able to stop his evil brother from haunting others and influencing their thoughts.

  “Well, it worked for about a year. Every time I found myself in my parents’ living room, I was joined by the medicine man and we fought Sy to the ground each time. But then one day, when I was back in the hospital with another kidney infection, I woke up to find myself alone with Sy—there was no sign of the medicine man. My brother and I fought one-on-one, but I was so tired from the infection, and Sy won. He laughed when he’d beaten me and said that from now on the odds were even. I learned a few days later that the medicine man who’d helped me was killed in a car accident.

  “Over the years I’ve had many fights with my brother. I’ve won most of them, but there’re times when I’ve been sick with a kidney infection or something else and I’ve lost the battle and it’s those times that I feel him get away from me.”

  “Did you or Ray know he was haunting the men who rented the house on Stoughton Street?” I asked next.

  Lester’s face fell and he stared again at the blanket. “Ray doesn’t know a thing about it, and I didn’t at first either,” he said. “I just thought that house might be attracting bad men. It didn’t dawn on me that Sy was behind it until Dan Foster’s trial. And then Ray told me a few days ago that the last tenant had been arrested for murder, and I started to think that maybe we should just let that house stand vacant. He’s over there, M.J. My brother has found a way to get loose from me and he’s over there now.”

  “He’s been very active lately,” I said, and then I stepped away from Lester and opened up my sixth sense to really look at him. What I saw astonished me.

  The ether all around Lester vibrated in a way that I was used to seeing in haunted houses, but usually that type of vibration was visible to my eye only in a central location like a wall, or a stairwell, or a small patch of ground.

  What I realized was that Lester Akers was the portal his brother was using to come and go from one realm to another. What that medicine man had intended to do, I couldn’t say, but what he had actually done was turn Lester into the portal for his brother. I had never in all my years of ghostbusting even heard of such a thing, but it explained how Sy the Slayer was able to move about so freely. If his portal was tied not to a house but to a living being, then he could draw energy from his brother and go where he pleased.

  I then let my eyes travel to Lester’s crippled form, and I realized that the infections and the cancer that had spread unchecked to the man’s bones were probably a result of all that energy being slowly drained away from him by his brother.

  “You’re the key,” I said to Lester. “Or rather, you’re the doorway.”

  “I’m the what?” he asked, and there was a hint of fear in his voice.

  “Your brother has gone from being imprisoned by you to using you as his portal, Mr. Akers. As long as you’re alive and in a weakened condition, he can use you to come and go as he pleases.” I went on to explain what a portal was, and what I thought the medicine man had done in creating a portal for Sy that was bound by Lester’s body. “I can’t tell you how unusual that is, Mr. Akers. I’ve not only never heard of a person acting as a portal before today—I never even thought it was possible.”

  Lester’s shoulders sagged. “I’m so tired,” he said. “I’ve been trying to keep him contained for thirty years, and I’m so very tired.”

  I reached out and squeezed his hand. “I can’t imagine.” The truth was, though, that I had no idea how to shut down a human portal. The only thing I could think of was to take off my vest and hand it over to him. “Lester, until I figure this whole thing out, do me one favor. Keep this near you at all times. Wear it if you can, okay?”

  He took the vest and his arm dipped with the weight of it. “What’s in here?” he asked, feeling the bubbles.

  “Magnets. They should help keep that portal under control until I figure out what to do.”

  “What do you usually do with portals?” Lester asked curiously.

  I grinned sideways and reached into my messenger bag, pulling out several magnetic stakes that I had taken out of my car just in case there was trouble with Lester. I put them in a line on the bed so he could see. “Usually we drive a few of these babies right into them. But in your case, how about we find another, less invasive way to handle this?”

  Lester chuckled and picked up one of the stakes to examine it. He then tapped it against the base of his lamp and it stuck tight. He took it off the lamp and hovered it over his chest. “I’m a little like a vampire, huh? You need to drive a stake through my heart to keep the bad stuff from hurting people.”

  I shook my head and touched the vest now resting on his legs. “The vest will work just fine for now until I can try to come up with something else. Like I said, it’s important for you to keep that close.”

  Lester handed me back the stake and saluted. “Yes ma’am. I’ll keep it close, but come up with something soon, okay?”

  My phone rang at that moment and I glanced at the ID, hoping it was Heath. It was. “I will, Mr. Akers, but would you please excuse me for one second, I have to take this call.”

  Lester waved at me to go ahead and I moved to the hallway to answer the phone. Hello?” I said. “Heath?”

  “It’s all clear,” he told me. “I had to hold Gilley down for the past half hour. He fought me tooth and nail and I couldn’t even let go long enough to get a vest on him, but about three minutes ago Sy gave up or just left. I’m not sure which.”

  I glanced behind me toward Lester’s door. I wondered if putting the vest on Lester had been enough to yank Sy away from Gilley. I hoped so. “I’m on my way back,” I told him.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Uh . . . ,” I said, thinking there was no way I was going to let him know I’d gone back to the senior center on my own. At least not until I got home. “I’m at the coffee shop. Can I bring you back something?”

  “Sure,” Heath said. “But stop off on your way home and get something stronger to put in it. I could use a drink after my wrestling
match with Gil.”

  I laughed, so relieved that he sounded like himself again. “I’ll be home in a little bit. Stay safe until then, okay?”

  “I’ve got my vest on,” Heath said, which reminded me about Mr. Akers back in the room. “But get home soon. I’m gonna worry about you until we catch this guy.”

  “I’m on my way,” I promised. After hanging up with Heath, I went back into Lester’s room and said, “I’m so sorry, but I’ve got to go. I’ll come back a little later and check on you, okay?”

  “Can you come back around eight?” he asked as I began to gather up the spikes still lined up on his bed. “No one comes by between eight and ten, and a man gets lonely.”

  I tucked the spikes into my messenger bag and gave him a thumbs-up. “I’ll be here,” I promised. Lester smiled but it wasn’t the carefree smile he’d graced me with that morning. It was forced and I could tell he was still anxious about what I’d told him, about being a portal for his brother.

  “Try not to worry, Mr. Akers,” I told him, squeezing his hand. “I swear to you that my associates and I won’t rest until we come up with a plan to deal with your brother’s ghost.”

  “Thank you, M.J.,” he said, squeezing my hand in return. “You’re very kind.”

  I left Akers and headed out into the hallway, my mind a whirl of thoughts. I had no idea how to deal with a human portal, and I was worried that there might be no good long-term solution. What’s more, I still didn’t know who might’ve killed Brook and attacked Kendra.

  As I was trying to navigate the hallways to the exit, my phone went off again. “Hello?”