The Spirits of Six Minstrel Run

by Matthew S. Cox

  Mia trudged to the kitchen, tossed the church ad in the trash, then went up to her bedroom to change out of her work clothes. In a T-shirt and shorts, she wandered back downstairs while texting Adam that he would be cooking dinner tonight.

  Without waiting for his reply, she fixed herself a mug of chamomile tea and curled up on the couch. A sense of not being alone made the hairs on the backs of her arms stand on end. Amid a sudden surge of wakefulness, Mia looked around for the source—and spotted her hairbrush on the cushion beside her.

  That wasn’t there when I walked in the door. She picked it up, not quite sure if it had been there when she’d carried the tea into the living room. As bleary as she’d been, maybe it had been there the whole time. However, even if she simply failed to notice it when she’d gotten home from work, she still hadn’t put it on the sofa. Whether it happened minutes ago or hours ago, someone other than Mia moved it.

  She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, and turned the brush over, examining it. The idea that a ghostly little girl might be stuck in her house brought on a pang of sorrow. Having no true understanding of how the universe worked, she couldn’t say for absolute certainty that the entity was, in fact, a child. Weston appeared to be of the mind that a demon lurked in the house. If such creatures as demons existed, one of those could be responsible for both the angry male presence as well as the innocent one.

  “That doesn’t feel right…” Mia turned the brush over and over. “You’re real, aren’t you?”

  Her eyes tingled with imminent tears, but rather than cry, she let out a long, slow sigh at the depressing thought of a dead child.

  A chill gathered in the air by her leg. Mia looked up in search of an air conditioning vent above her, but the ceiling had no openings. She sat up straight and reached around at the air in front of her, discovering a cold spot roughly four feet high hovering close by. Within a second or two of sticking her hand into the chilly air, a strong sense of loneliness came over her.

  “Hi, sweetie,” said Mia in an almost whisper.

  The chilly spot moved a bit to the left, tucking between her knees. Mia bowed her head at the somberness of the moment, and noticed faint footprints in the carpet at the base of the sofa, toes pointing away from her.

  This kid is standing right in front of me with her back turned… what…?

  Mia glanced at the hairbrush she still held, and pictured a small girl standing patiently in front of her. Oh, no way… She felt around for the top of the cold spot, then went through the motions of brushing the girl’s hair as best she could guess where it would be. Neither her fingers nor the brush made contact with anything more solid than chilly air.

  “This would be so much easier if I could see you. What kind of hair do you have? Is it long like mine? I’m sure it’s pretty.”

  The radiant loneliness abated over the course of a few minutes. Eventually, she noticed the cold spot had gone away. Mia leaned back on the couch, hands draped in her lap, and tried to understand why the ghost would show up only for a little while if she were that lonely.

  Mia awoke to a dark room and Adam gently nudging her shoulder.

  “Hey, hon. Dinner’s ready.”

  She closed her eyes again long enough to take a breath of garlicy air, then sat up. “What time is it?”

  “A little after eight. Waited a while to start dinner since you looked exhausted.” He took her hand and helped her up.

  “Thanks.” Mia yawned hard and followed him to the kitchen.

  He’d cooked chicken cutlets with a side of butter-garlic pasta. While they ate, she mentioned the brush being on the sofa and the cold spot that had hovered nearby for a few minutes.

  “I don’t understand why she would go away so fast, if she’s as lonely as she feels.”

  Adam nodded while chewing. “That is odd. I’m still not entirely convinced we’re dealing with an actual kid. Careful and don’t let your guard down just yet.”

  “She feels genuine to me.”

  “A radio plays whatever signal it picks up.”

  Mia rushed a mouthful of chicken and took a sip of wine. “What?”

  “You’re basically a radio picking up psychic broadcasts. Whatever is in the air, you receive. If some other entity with dark intentions is broadcasting ‘hey, trust me, I’m a real little girl,’ that’s exactly what you will feel.”

  “I dunno…” She replayed her ‘brushing’ moment in her head while nibbling on pasta. It could’ve stood to be cooked a little longer, but he liked noodles on the firmer side. “What you’re saying does make sense, but I don’t see an entity like that standing there while I brushed its hair.”

  “It could be acting that way on purpose to get into your head, build you up to think of it as innocent.”

  She stabbed another piece of chicken. “But why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” asked Adam with a serious expression. “It wants your soul.”

  Mia blinked.

  He cracked up.

  “Ugh.” Mia gazed at the ceiling. “Speaking of which… he was here again. Left a paper in the doorway.”

  Adam shook his head. “He’ll eventually get the hint.”

  “Here’s hoping.” Mia sighed and ate another forkful of pasta.

  They finished dinner amid a conversation about setting up an auto-payment for the mortgage and a notice from the town that had been in the mail claiming that their property value assessment ‘had some irregularities’ and they wanted to send an appraiser. Mia grumbled that some politician in the city wanted them to pay taxes based on an overinflated estimate rather than the sale price, which had been admittedly low. Adam felt that because they didn’t know the seller or have any relation to them, the city would find no evidence of fraud and allow the value to stand for tax purposes.

  After eating, Mia loaded the dishwasher. Adam went upstairs to run the laundry machines. She returned to the sofa intending to watch television, but didn’t stay conscious long enough to reach for the remote.

  Mia awoke to Adam’s less-than-gentle shaking of her leg and the metallic crash of a toolbox in the kitchen. Thick emotional energy hung in the air, the room saturated with a pervasive sense of imminent doom. She sat upright with a poorly-stifled yelp of alarm. If not for her husband’s grip on her ankle, she might’ve bolted for the door.

  “1:03 a.m. again,” whispered Adam.

  Shivering from nerves, she twisted around to peer over the back of the sofa at the kitchen doorway far on the other side of the dining room. The same grungy male figure appeared a few paces short of the archway to the living room in full view, unlike the prior night where she’d only caught a flash of him as if he’d crossed a spotlight beam. She stared in awestruck horror at the man in dirty blue coveralls walking toward her, still with the exact same dead expression in his eyes.

  A small white oval on his chest bore the name Vic in curvy red letters. What had been an unrecognizable metallic glint in his hand now looked like mini sledge hammer. She couldn’t move, barely able to breathe, as he came within arm’s reach of her. The stink of body odor, engine grease, and beer overwhelmed her senses. Mia leaned away, half expecting the man to take a swing at her with the hammer, but he turned toward the stairs. As soon as he stopped looking through her, Mia’s fear lessened enough to let her breathe. Except for being faintly transparent, and not existing much below the knees, the apparition had a remarkable amount of definition.

  She continued watching him until the wispy traces of his lower legs vanished into the upstairs hall. As soon as he moved out of sight, the freakiness in the air went away. She twisted to look at Adam, who gazed with intense focus at the laptop screen.

  “Did you see that?”

  “Are you referring to the light anomaly?”

  Mia shook her head, but he didn’t notice. “No. I saw him. All of him… well, above the knees. His name was Vic.”

  “What?” Adam looked up with wide eyes. “He spoke?”

  “No… I think he
was a mechanic or something. He had a jumpsuit on with a name tag. White oval, red letters. Smelled like he hadn’t taken a shower in a week or two… probably drunk. He…” She shivered. “Oh, no…”

  “Oh no?” Adam knee-walked closer to her and took her hand. “What did you see?”

  Mia steeled herself before she burst into tears. “He carried a hammer. I think he killed her with it.”

  “Damn…” He climbed up to sit beside her on the couch and pulled her into an embrace. “I hope you didn’t see that.”

  She leaned against him. “No. He had such an evil look in his eyes, and he went upstairs holding a hammer. There’s a child ghost in the house… what do you think happened?”

  He sighed out his nose, warm breath puffing over the top of her head.

  “At least he died, too. The guy didn’t look that old.”

  “Hmm.” Adam made a series of contemplative noises, then scrunched his face. “I’m not sure he’s an actual spirit.”

  “As opposed to what? A hologram? Did you see him?”

  “Nope. Just a light ball on the video, gliding along the same route you most likely observed him walking.”

  “So… I’m hallucinating now. The demon you think is here is making me see stuff to, what, drive me insane?”

  He kissed the top of her head. “While that’s an outside chance, I don’t think so. This guy appeared at the exact same time he did last night. Same series of noises. While you were mesmerized by something on the stairwell, I played the audio from last night and tonight simultaneously and compared the waveforms. After I eliminated any sounds you or I made, the rest matched exactly.”

  “Okay…”

  “This isn’t an intelligent haunt. It’s a psychic impression. Whatever he did had such a strong emotional/psychic charge it imprinted itself in the house, maybe even on the land itself.”

  “Oh, that stone tape theory thing?” She sat up again and looked toward the kitchen. All the electromagnetic sensor devices had gone dark.

  “Basically.”

  Mia glanced at him. “So every night for the rest of however long we live here, we get to hear that stupid crash at 1:03 a.m.?”

  “Until we find a way to erase the tape, that’s probably going to repeat every night, yeah. Good thing you sleep like a rock.”

  “If I can get to sleep in the first place. Haven’t been sleeping too well lately.”

  “New place, ghost stuff, or are you worried about something?”

  “A little of everything.”

  He leaned his head against hers. “What are you worrying about?”

  “Not so much worry as I can’t stop thinking about that poor child. How scared she had to have been living with that man… and then to have… okay. Sorry. Curiosity is getting the better of me.”

  Mia stood and approached the stairs, peering up at the hallway in front of the washer/dryer nook. A fleeting sense of warning came and went, similar to how she’d felt as a child looking at the attic stairs of her old home. No force on Earth short of a literal gun to her head could have made her go up into the attic of her parents’ house alone, but this dread didn’t hit her that hard. Fists clenched, she made her way up.

  “Sec, hon.”

  She paused at the top of the stairs, gazing down the hallway to the left. All the doors were closed except for the middle one on the right. Adam came up the stairs behind her with the night vision video camera. Mia walked past the first door on the right, which led to the atrium.

  Even without the middle door being open, she knew Vic had gone to that room.

  Her bare feet all but glowed in the moonlight as she padded up to the door and stopped with her toes an inch from an invisible line where hallway carpet became room carpet. The door hung open about a quarter of the way, the room beyond a morass of shadows. Mia stood there, listening both with her ears as well as her mind, but picked up nothing out of the ordinary.

  Heart racing, Mia reached out and touched her fingertips to the door, finding it freezing. Against her better judgement, she pushed it inward. The room had three closets, each with louvered double doors, on the left, no furniture, and a henge of unopened cardboard boxes at the center.

  “I know he went in here.”

  Adam nodded and leaned around her to point the camera into the room. “Just boxes. Closets are all empty.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’m narrating for the camera,” whispered Adam.

  “Yeah… but what’s here now doesn’t mean anything.”

  The instant Mia stepped past the door, she cringed at a crushing sense of aversion that hadn’t been in the room before. Some part of her did not like being in the room and wanted to back away as fast as possible. She looked around at the boxes, her hands trembling. The day they’d carried them all in here, this room hadn’t seemed any different from the rest of the house, merely another empty bedroom in a house with four extra bedrooms.

  In that moment, Mia Gartner knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that something horrible had happened there. She wound up staring to the right, fixating on a spot near the wall in the far corner beside one of the two windows. The patch of floor gave off a strong sense of significance, though she couldn’t bring herself to look at it for more than a few seconds.

  Her resolve faltered, and she backed out of the room, desperate to get away from such a sense of evil. As soon as she entered the hallway, weight lifted from her, even her breathing grew easier. Light-headed, she swooned into the wall on the other side, cringing from the bad energy in the room.

  Adam remained inside, aiming the camera around, oblivious. “You okay, hon?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He lowered the camera to look at her. “Not sure?”

  Mia covered her mouth with one hand, shaking her head, unable to speak.

  Adam emerged from the doorway and stood close. “Hon?”

  She raised a shaking hand, pointing. “Something… something bad happened in there.”

  13

  Farewell

  Wednesday, August 29, 2012

  Minutes passed in silence, Mia unable to look away from the bedroom.

  “What did you see?” asked Adam for the fifth or sixth time.

  His voice broke the trance she hadn’t realized she’d fallen into. “Umm. Nothing. Only a feeling.”

  “You look pale.”

  “I’m a little freaked out, Adam. I’m feeling stuff that I shouldn’t feel. It’s like I’m a kid again back home at night. I haven’t been scared of the dark since I was little.”

  “Okay.” He flicked the camera off. “Why don’t we go to bed?”

  She shifted her weight off the wall and took a step away, but stopped, gaze fixated on the door. “This is weird. I went from being afraid of that room to feeling like I really ought to look again.”

  “Only if you’re sure.” He touched foreheads with her. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  Mia hugged him, clinging for a minute or two. Her need to look again didn’t weaken. His asking her what she’d seen made her feel like she’d gone back to high school chemistry class and missed a basic but important step. Whether it came from personal pride or a supernatural pull that wanted to share information, she couldn’t tell.

  “Okay. I’m going in.” Mia released her hold on Adam and approached the door.

  He turned the video camera back on.

  Hands braced to either side on the doorjamb, she peered into the room, wanting to see. Amid the towers of cardboard boxes, she caught a fleeting glimpse of a white dresser directly opposite the door right in front of her. Left of it, a small desk. Empty rug and cardboard returned for several seconds, then gave way to a scattering of Barbie dolls, which promptly disappeared.

  Mia’s stomach twisted into a knot of anxiety.

  She stepped into the room, arms slack at her sides, and made a deliberate effort to desire seeing the ‘not here.’ The room blurred. She simultaneously perceived empty rug as well as a large
toy chest beside the door. As if reality in front of her had become a movie projected on a claw-shredded sheet, the room existed in two versions at once. Within the rips, the walls appeared covered in patterned wallpaper. Furniture that didn’t exist anymore still stood around a child’s room. She stifled a gasp at blood spatter on the white dresser.

  Cringing, Mia kept looking around. Empty space at the inner corner on the right traded places back and forth with a small bed, sheets turned down as though the child who slept in it had gotten up in the middle of the night. Red past the foot end drew her attention toward the bad spot of floor.

  Droplets of blood ran down the wall from a tall arc spray, flowing around letters smeared in the crude finger-penmanship of a drunken adult.

  All the breath leaked out of Mia’s lungs at the sight.

  With one shaking hand over her mouth, tears streaming from her eyes, she started to lower her gaze down past the letters, but the instant she caught sight of a small, lifeless hand laying on the rug by a bloody mini sledge, she screamed and turned away—refusing to look at the body she knew would be there.

  A woman’s voice screamed in anguish, distant, yet loud. The cry continued despite the woman running out of air, too grief stricken to remember how to breathe in. That same grief—and the same scream of horrible heartache—erupted from Mia.

  She clutched her chest and fell to her knees, her body wracked by great, heaving sobs. Nothing mattered anymore. The only thing in the world she cared about lay dead in what should have been the safest place in the world for her. Guilt crashed into grief, as biting and cold as though Mia had murdered the girl herself.

  The rug came up to hit her in the face. She curled on her side, wailing in sorrow, unable to move. She could only lay there wanting to die while staring up at the three unspeakable words painted on the wall in a little girl’s blood: