The Reaper Within

by Stephanie Jackson

  “I know that it was all folks around here talked about for years after Curtis died. It wasn’t just his family that was looking for it, half the county was in on the hunt.

  It’s was hard times around here back then, and a treasure of gold was just too much for most folks to resist.

  “When the gold wasn’t found at the house or on the grounds, the people in the county went to poking around all the small businesses in town that Curtis had owned or invested in. They even went so far as to search all of the caves in the county, but no one ever found the gold.

  “After a few years, people finally gave up the hunt. Some say that Curtis squandered all of the gold while he was alive, others say that the lawyers probably stole it when Curtis died. And a lot of folks think that the gold never existed at all.

  “They say that Curtis just made up the gold as a way to make himself sound more successful than he really was. Folks did do that back then to give themselves a better standing in the community; and without all the computer networks that we have now to check you out, I imagine it wasn’t too hard to get away with.”

  “What do you think?” Mel asked.

  “I think that gold existed,” Angie said without hesitation. “I think it’s still out there somewhere, but I couldn’t begin to guess where. You see, my Granddaddy was an accountant for Curtis, and he said he knew for a fact that the gold existed because he’d seen it with his own eyes.

  “My Granddaddy was a dyed in the wool Christian, and he would have sooner cut out his own tongue before he’d tell a lie.”

  “Your Granddaddy didn’t happen to tell you where old Curtis hid that gold; did he?”

  Angie shook her head. “Afraid not. He said he didn’t know where Curtis took the gold when it left the offices and didn’t consider it to be his, or anyone else’s, business anyway.”

  “How much of the house did they tear down before giving up on the idea that it was there?”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. Enough to satisfy themselves that it wasn’t there, I guess. I don’t imagine they gave up before a thorough search. $12 million dollars in gold was a lot to just give up on back then.”

  “It’s a lot to give up on now. What would you say if I told you that the gold may still be in that house?”

  “I’d say that I’m not looking for gold, Ms. Chaser, and I’d ask you not to waste your time looking for it either. All I’m looking for is a return on my investment. Most of my nest egg is tied up in that house in one way or another. If I can’t make this work my retirement is not going to be what I’d hoped.”

  Mel nodded, “Fair enough. What can you tell me about the last Harlowe that owned the property?”

  “Abbott? He was a good enough kid, I guess. He came into possession of the house long after the family fortune was gone. If memory severs, he worked at Olson’s Leather Tannery until he disappeared in 1993.”

  “Is there anybody that may have wanted Abbott to disappear?”

  “Why, do you think he was murdered?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “I couldn’t imagine what anyone would have to gain from it. He didn’t have any money. His family had burned through that long before Abbott was even born. He went to college to be some kind of chemist I think, graduated at the top of his class from what I understand. He’d just got some big job and was about to leave town when his momma took sick.

  “She was a thirty year, three pack a day smoker, and she came down with lung cancer. No big surprise there. She lingered on treatments for a couple of years before she finally couldn’t fight it anymore. She died at Baptist Memorial in 1991.”

  “And Abbott stayed on after she died?” Mel asked, surprised. “Why would he stay here and work at a leather factory when he could have left and put his college degree to some use?”

  Angie shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you; I just know that he stayed in Memphis until he disappeared in 1993.”

  “And his body was never found?”

  “Nope, people looked, but with that cop missing at the same time, they didn’t look as hard as they could have. If his body was out in the woods somewhere it would have been scattered from hell to Sunday by the following spring.

  “There are a lot of wild animals around here to spread your bones over miles of land. People that disappear into the woods around here tend to stay disappeared.”

  “What cop?” Mel asked. “Betty didn’t tell me about a missing police officer.”

  “No reason that she would have, because he wasn’t missing. Jack Roday was a Missing Persons detective that was reported missing himself around the same time as Abbott. Roday surfaced a couple of months later when he sent a telegram by Western Union to his sister telling her that he was alright.

  “He was just sick of Memphis PD and wanted to move somewhere else. I guess a lot of the cops on the force knew that Roday had been talking about moving on, so no big surprise there, either.

  “What it amounted to was a lot of time wasted looking for him when more people could have been out looking for poor Abbott.”

  “And he was the last owner of the house?”

  Angie nodded again. “Until the county took it for unpaid property taxes a few years back. That’s when I got it at a county auction. I only paid a little over $80,000 for the house and grounds. That left me about $140,000 of my nest egg to get the Bed and Breakfast fixed up and going. It seemed like a good deal at the time, but now…”

  “Now not so much?”

  “No, not at all. I’ve already gone through another $80,000 for remodeling materials that aren’t getting used. Not to mention taxes and permits. I gotta tell ya, Mel, I thought about mold inspectors, and reconstruction costs before making my decision to bid on the property. It never occurred to me to take specters from the grave into consideration. Shame on me, I guess.”

  Mel felt sorry for the old lady, but she’d seen this problem many times before. “So what kinds of things have been happening in the house?”

  “A lot of reports of being attacked. I’ve had construction workers complain about everything from being pushed off of ladders, to one actually being thrown from the second floor banister, and breaking his back.

  “He tried to sue me in court, but the Judge threw the case out. Told the man that I couldn’t be held responsible for what the ghosts in the house did. I don’t think he believed the man at all.”

  “But you believed him.”

  Angie nodded. “I did. I’ve had too many people just walk away from the job to disbelieve it anymore. People don’t just leave a good job in this economy for no good reason. Those men left because they were scared.”

  “Has anything ever happen to you there?”

  “I’ve never been touched, if that’s what you mean. But there’s always the feeling that something was always there watching you; like it was following you through the house. And then the last time I was there…”

  Mel saw a visible shiver run through Angie. “The last time you were there, what?”

  “The scream,” Angie said. “I heard some of the construction workers talk about hearing a woman scream in the house, but it’s a lot different when you hear it for yourself.

  “I had decided that the quickest way to get anything done in the house was to pitch in and do some of it myself. I couldn’t do any of the reconstruction of course, but I could do some of the painting and wallpapering.

  “I bought some paint for the parlor, one of the few rooms in the house that did get redone enough to put on the final touches, and I decided to drop it off on the way home from Home Depot that night, and then come back in the morning to get started.

  “I hauled all the buckets of paint up onto the porch just as it was starting to get dark. I was going to just leave them there, but then I started to worry that somebody might take it.

  “There’s nobody staying at the house, so anybody can just wander up. It seems silly now. If somebody wanted it bad enough to take it from the porch they probabl
y would have went inside to get it, too.

  “Anyway, I unlocked the door and was setting the buckets against the entryway wall when a scream went off right beside my head; near scared the life out of me. It wasn’t a little ‘maybe it could have been a scream’ either. It was a great big, blood curdling scream of pain and fear.

  “I don’t know who the woman was that screamed, but I can tell you that she was hurt and terrified. It was the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got the hell out of there is what I did, and with a quickness. I about wreaked my truck getting out of the driveway. I haven’t been back into that house since. That was over two months ago.

  “Now that the stories of the haunting have gotten around to all the local construction companies, I can’t hardly even get anybody to come out and look at the job. There have been a couple of brave souls willing to give it a try, but they didn’t stay. Most are honest enough to tell me right out that it’s just too much of a risk.

  “And I understand that, I do. After that poor man had his back broken, how could I not understand it? And even if I could get the place finished, how could I, in good conscience, let anyone stay there?”

  “A lot of people like haunted houses,” Mel said. “They’ll pay a lot of money to stay in one.”

  “People like the idea of haunted houses. They want to hear strange noises, and maybe see a glimpse of a ghost. It’s a different matter when the entities in the house are attacking you to the point of breaking your bones or causing you to get stitches. Would you pay to stay in a place like that?”

  “No, I get paid to stay in places like that. What your describing is what I’m surrounded by all the time. Your nightmare is my 9 to 5 job.”

  “How can you live like that? Always being surrounded by darkness and death? Don’t you ever get tired of it?”

  Mel was a little surprised by the woman’s questions. None of her other clients had ever asked her how she felt about her job.

  “Sometimes it gets a little wearing. It all depends on what kind of spirit that I’m dealing with.”

  “There are different kinds?”

  “Sure, you have your basic echo. That’s a ghost that’s not really a ghost at all. It’s just an echo of a part of a person’s life. A part of a person who isn’t actually there, but something in their life managed to leave a stain on the environment.

  “It could be something they did everyday in repetition, or a one time event that took such an emotional toll, that it just exploded out of them, splattering the place around them like a water balloon. Either way, an echo is just an echo.

  “It’s usually just a sound or an occasional sighting, but there is no acknowledgment from them of your existence because you never existed to them. They don’t see you because they’re not really there.

  “The person that stained the environment with their echo doesn’t even have to be dead. I’ve gone on jobs just to find out that the person that’s being haunted is actually being haunted by an echo from their own life.

  “You can think of the echoes as a wine stain you can never quite get out of the tablecloth. They’re not a threat, which is a good thing because there is absolutely nothing I can do about them.”

  “You can’t get rid of an echo?”

  “There’s nothing to get rid of. There’s no soul for me to deal with. What if the stain was left by a person that’s still among the living? What I’m I supposed to do, go find out where Earl may be living now and tell him to knock it the hell off?”

  “I see your point.”

  “Your next ghost is your basic lost soul. These are people that may have been willing to cross over but just somehow didn’t quite make it. They just need a way home.”

  “That sounds pretty harmless, too,” Angie said.

  “It does, and it usually is, but not always. These are the noisy ghosts. They see you and are crying out for help. Unfortunately, most people can’t see them and couldn’t help them even if they could.

  “The ghosts get frustrated with the living and that’s when things start to get interesting. Things start moving around the house. You may even see stuff go flying through the air, but the spirit isn’t doing it on purpose.

  “It’s just the only way they can rid themselves of pent up energy. It may only happen every now again, but eventually that energy is going to burst out of them and cause things to happen.”

  “And you can get rid of those?”

  Mel nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I can. But I don’t think that’s the type of haunting that you’re experiencing in your house. Your case sounds more like your dealing with a malevolent spirit.”

  “You don’t look very pleased at that idea,” Angie said, taking notice of Mel’s slight frown. “So what’s a malevolent spirit?”

  “You have two options with a Malevolent. It’s either a person who suffered a gruesome or untimely death; usually victims of a violent murder. They’ve had their lives stolen from them, and they’re bitter about it.

  “They come to blame every living person around them for their fates. And the longer they’re left to linger, the stronger they become. They want to be left alone and will stop at nothing to get you out of what they consider to be their space.

  “They usually start by making noises like the screaming you described, and doing other things to scare you away, but if you don’t heed their warnings they will turn to violence to get rid of you.

  “They’re harder for me to deal with because they haven’t accepted they’re deaths as an irreversible state.

  They believe that if they stay here long enough that the injustice they’ve suffered will be rectified and they’ll be allowed to live again. I have to convince them that that’s never going to happen.”

  “Is that hard to do?”

  “It can be. It can be hard to cross a soul over when they don’t want to go. It helps if I know who the spirit was in life. I find it much easier to reach them if I can call them by name. Some are willing to tell me, but more likely than not, they stay difficult to the end.”

  “What happens if you can’t convince them to crossover?”

  “Then I make them do it anyway. It isn’t pleasant for either one of us, but it has to be done.”

  “You said there are two options with a malevolent spirit. What’s the other one?”

  “That the spirit is the soul of an evil person; someone that took joy or recreation by delivering torture, pain, and degradation onto others.

  “If you think dealing with the murder victim sounds bad, try dealing with the murderer. These are bad people, and the last thing they want to do is cross over.”

  “I don’t imagine they would when they can stay here and keep hurting people. If they enjoyed it in life, I’m sure they still take pleasure from it even in death,” Angie said.

  “That’s definitely part of it,” Mel agreed. “But it’s not their main reason for staying here. You see, while they were alive most of these people didn’t believe that they would face any punishment for the deeds they’d done in life.

  “They believed that when you died it was over, the end. Now that they’re dead and find that they’re still here, they have to take a different view on things. They know that only punishment awaits them on the other side, so they fight to stay here.”

  “Wow, you know before I bought the plantation I didn’t even believe in ghosts, and now you’re telling me that there’s three different varieties of them. It’s kind of mind blowing.”

  “Actually, there are four types of ghosts. The fourth kind is a Revenant. It’s what you get when you kill someone like me; someone who already had a strong connection with the afterlife.

  “You kill us and we get pissed off, and we can do a lot of damage. Getting rid of a Revenant involves digging up a body, and trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to go there. Plus I charge extra to dig up the dead.”

  “You’ve actual done that before?”

 
Mel nodded. “Twice, and it’s not fun, but I don’t think you’re dealing with a Revenant. I would have felt that from outside the home, and I didn’t.”

  “Thank God for that, at least,” Angie said. “So will you help me?”

  “I’ll help you. I’ll start tonight. I’ll need to stay in the house alone for the duration of the job.”

  “How long do you think it will take?” Angie asked.

  “There’s no way to say for sure. I could be done five minutes after I walk through the door, or it could take up to a week. I tell my clients to expect a week, just to be on the safe side.”

  Angie dug in her hand bag, pulled out a key, and slid it across the table to Mel. “Take your time. I’d rather have it done right than rushed through and maybe leave something behind.”

  “When I’m done your house will be ghost free. I promise.”

  “Good,” Angie said. “Then all I’ve have to do is convince a contractor to come in and finish the work.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” Mel said.

  “That’s all right. I’ll figure something out. I’ll get it done even if I have to hire people from out of state,” Angie said when Mel stood up to leave. “There are a couple of finished bedrooms on the second floor of the house, help yourself to either one.

  “The kitchen is finished, and the appliances are all up and running. I’m afraid there’s no air-conditioning yet, but the windows work just fine. There’s no television or internet connection in the house, though.”

  “I’m not there to watch T.V. and I carry my own modem around with me. Betty usually does all my research for me but I like to be able to look something up for myself if the need arises. I’ll be fine.”

  Angie stopped her at the diner door. “Can I ask you why you choose to do this for a living?”

  “It’s not really a choice; it’s just what I am. And sometimes I actually get to help someone.”

  “Well, God love ya for it.”

  Mel smiled at her. “Let’s hope so.”

  Chapter Two

  She called Betty, told her that she’d be taking the job, and then went to a local grocery store to get enough food and supplies to last for several days. She may not need all of it, but she hated to be in the middle of a job and have to call someone to bring her some food.