The Reaper Within

by Stephanie Jackson

  She pulled back up to the mansion just as it was starting to get dark. She imagined it was about the same time of day that Angie had heard the scream, but the time of day really had nothing to do with ghostly activity.

  There was as much ghost activity during the day as there was at night. It was just that the living seemed to tune into it more after darkness fell. It was an ancient instinct ingrained in the human psyche. You tend to be more wary of predators when it was too dark to see them coming; therefore people were more aware of danger after nightfall.

  She got out of the car, pulled her bag with her computer, modem, extra batteries, and whatnot out of the backseat, and grabbed the groceries and supplies with her other hand. She had to take everything she needed into the house in one go. There would be no coming back out to retrieve anything she may have forgotten.

  She walked up to the steps of the porch, sat all the bags down at her feet, and slid the key into the lock. She swung the door open, and a scream that sounded as if it were ripped from the bowels of hell tore through the house.

  “I hear you, but I don’t scare that easy. I’m sorry, but I’m not leaving.”

  The scream faded away as Mel started scooting her bags and supplies inside the door. The paint buckets that Angie had brought were still stacked against the entry wall, abandoned. She stepped into the house, turned to take one more look outside, and closed the door. She was ready.

  She found a double light switch halfway down the entry hall and flipped it on. The hallway and parlor flooded with surprisingly bright light. Someone had replaced all the old bulbs with new, energy saving, fluorescents.

  Angie hadn’t been exaggerating about the remodeling being left unfinished. She walked from room to room on the first floor, turning on all the lights as she went.

  She found a formal dining room; a smaller family sized dining room; a ballroom; a drawing room; what may at one time have been a beautiful library, but had now fallen victim to neglect; several smaller rooms that were probably originally used as personal offices when the home was still a working plantation; a large kitchen, and finally the mudroom that led you out into the backyard.

  She also found three ghosts on the first floor; all women. She gave them no indication that she could see them. She wanted to explore the house before she got down do the actual reaping of souls.

  The ghosts had a keen curiosity about Mel. They could feel that she was different from all the other people that had ever entered the house, and proceeded to follow her through the home. Most of the inside of the house was still in horrible condition, but she thought the floors and stairs were structurally sound.

  There were large holes in the walls, and some big chunks were missing from the ceiling where the plaster had fallen away over the years. She walked her way back to the entry hall, picked up her bag, and climbed the wide, sweeping staircase up to the second floor.

  She opened the doors of each room and flipped on the lights. There were six large bedrooms on the second floor, each with its own bathroom, but only two of the rooms were actually finished.

  One of the rooms had a full bedroom set in it, including a made-up king sized bed, two dressers, two bedside tables with a lamp on each, a chest of drawers, and a wardrobe. Plus it had a small desk and a chair.

  She claimed that room for her own, and tossed her bag onto the bed. It was stifling hot on the second floor, so she opened both of the windows in the room and hoped for a cross breeze.

  She then left the room to go explore the third floor of the home. All that was up there was attic space. There were building supplies in the main room and some boxes of old paperwork in a small closet she found, but not much else. She had, however, spotted four more ghosts on the second floor, bringing the tally up to seven so far.

  Things were not looking good for Angie’s bank account. And seven was just what she’d seen so far, but it no way meant that that was all there were.

  The ghosts here were a fairly eclectic group. She’d seen five women and two men. They ranged in age from what she would guess was twenty to sixty years old, and she’d seen both white and African Americans.

  By the way they were dressed she’d say that none of them had been here that long; not in ghost time anyway. She’d dealt with ghosts that had lingered on earth for hundreds of years, but she’d guess that none of the ghosts here had been dead much earlier than the late 1980’s.

  That was good, and the mix of people was good, too. It meant that she probably wasn’t dealing with a mess left behind by a serial killer. Serial killers tended to have a type; like women all fitting the same age and description. They were vicious killings that resulted in vicious spirits. She wasn’t seeing that here.

  She was kind of curious as to why she was seeing such a wide range of people, though. What were they all doing here? Had they all died in the area? Something about it just didn’t seem right. She pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket and called Betty.

  “Yeah?” Betty said when she answered the phone.

  “Was there any big accidents around this house between the mid 80’s to late 90’s?”

  “You’ll have to be more specific. Which 80’s and 90’s are we talking about?”

  “The 1980’s and 90’s,” Mel specified.

  “Let me do a little research and I’ll get back to you.”

  Mel hung up and walked back downstairs. She busied herself with putting the groceries away while waiting for Betty to call back. All the ghosts had retreated except for one.

  She was a young girl of maybe twenty. She was wearing faded jeans, and a red blouse that hung off of one shoulder. It was the blouse that gave her time of death away. It almost screamed late 80’s.

  “Am I dead?” the girl asked suddenly.

  Mel nodded her head, and turn to look at the girl. “I’m sorry, but yes, you are.”

  “If I’m really dead, then why can you see me?” the girl asked peevishly. “Nobody else has been able to see me.”

  “I’m not like other people.”

  The girl tiled her head and stared at Mel for a long moment before speaking again. “I don’t want to be dead.”

  “No, I don’t imagine you do, but nevertheless, it is what it is. What’s your name?”

  “I’m…I…I’m not sure,” she said, her voice beginning to quake with fear. “I can’t remember. Why can’t I remember my own name?”

  This was another problem Mel ran into quite often. If a ghost died away from the people that they knew in life, and had been dead for a few years, they sometimes started to forget who they’d been in life.

  “It just happens sometimes,” Mel said in her most calming voice. She tried to be as kind to the souls that she reaped as she could. Being dead was stressful enough for them. “I don’t know why, but I know it’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “I don’t want to be here anymore,” the girl whispered, shooting a nervous glance over her shoulder. “It’s scary here.”

  Mel wanted to ask her what scared her, but let it go. “You don’t have to stay here anymore if you don’t want to. I came here to help you.”

  “How?”

  Mel held out her hands to the girl. “Just take my hands, and I promise you that everything will be okay.”

  The girl looked skeptical but finally reached out to Mel.

  The girl smiled brightly as soon as their hands touched. “I’m Rosie. My name is Rosie Thomlin.”

  “Of course it is,” Mel said, smiling back at Rosie as she began to fade away.

  She felt the familiar warmth of a soul passing gently through hers, almost like a warm breeze, and then Rosie was gone. The phone rang before the warmth had faded completely away.

  “Talk to me,” Mel said, putting the phone to her ear.

  “I can’t find anything in that timeframe that happened within five miles of the house. Do you want me to expand the radius?”

  “No,” Mel said. “If it didn’t happen nearby then there’s no reason the ghosts would be he
re.”

  “Desert Storm happened in 1990, maybe…”

  “No, these aren’t soldiers. They’re just people. I just wanted to know what happened that they died in such a short timeframe and then all ended up here.”

  “You don’t have to know that to help them.”

  “I know that, but I want to know. Nosiness is a perk of the job.”

  “So how’s it going so far?”

  “I’ve crossed one over, but there’s at least six more to go, probably more than that.”

  Mel looked up as the lights dimmed. It only lasted a few seconds, and then they blazed back to life. It was also something that could happen in a haunted house. Ghosts were notorious for draining energy from the things around them. Even people.

  “Ms. Mabry isn’t gonna be happy when she finds out how much money this is going to cost…”

  Mel paused when something incredibly solid flashed past the kitchen door.

  “What’s wrong, Mel?” Betty asked.

  “Either there is an extra-strength ghost here or someone is in the house with me. Let me call you back.”

  “Mel, wait…”

  Mel hung up the phone before Betty could complete her panic attack. She put the phone on the counter and walked to the door that the shape had just darted past. She looked out into the long hallway that ran in both directions from the kitchen.

  There was nothing out there now, but that didn’t mean anything. There were several doors leading off the hall, and the person, or ghost, could have gone through any of them. Hell, a ghost could’ve walked right through the wall.

  She considered calling the police, but immediately nixed the idea for two reasons. One; she’d ran into people at her jobs before and had never really had a problem with them.

  They were usually just people that had heard about the haunting and wanted to check it out for themselves; thrill seekers that had no respect for the dead. They usually left without protest when she told them to leave.

  Two; police screwed with her process. Anytime a cop was called they always arrived amped up for anything. She didn’t blame them for that; they were paid to walk blindly into potentially dangerous situations.

  But the presence of their high energy and anxiety put the ghosts on site in high alert. They were difficult to calm down after that and hard to cross over. Mel wanted to avoid the whole situation, especially with the number of ghosts she was dealing with here.

  She steeled herself and went on a search of the house.

  ***

  She searched the whole house, including closets and under the old furniture that had been left in the home, checking every door and window on her way through the house.

  Everything was locked up tight except for the two open windows in her second floor room, and she didn’t think anyone had come in or dove out of one of those.

  She didn’t find anyone. Either there was a person in the house with her that was an Olympic Gold Medalist in Hide and Go Seek, or she truly was alone.

  She was hoping that it was a person that had seen her and left the house before she found them; though she didn’t see how they could have with the house locked down, because the only other option was a Revenant.

  She refused to believe that was the case, because she would be able to feel it. A Revenant wasn’t like any other ghost. Their bodies had been reanimated underground, or above ground depending on where the body was left, because the soul had tried to return to it. Contact with their remains reanimated the corpse but still left them unable to take possession of their body. The anger at not being able to successfully re-enter their body is what sent a Revenant on a bloody, vicious, killing spree.

  The only way for her to get rid of them was to kill the body again, and then force the soul to crossover. A Revenant was in a perpetual state of rage. It singed the air with a feeling of electricity that someone like Mel just couldn’t miss.

  Plus, activity from a Revenant started within hours after their deaths. It didn’t do the things that were happening in this house. A Revenant had the ability to kill, and that’s exactly what they did. People had been hurt here, but no murders had ever been reported. Revenants didn’t hit you or throw you from the stairs. They shredded you, and everything in their wake, like confetti.

  The two Revenants that she’d gotten rid of had committed multiple murders in their area, and both had been dead for less than a week. This house is known to have been haunted for at least two years, and not one death had occurred, and only one serious injury had been reported.

  No, this wasn’t the work of a Revenant, she was confident of that. That meant that a living person was, or is, in the house with her. Either way, there was nothing she could do about it now. If she ran across them again she would throw them out. It was the best she could do.

  She heard her phone ringing and hurried back to the kitchen to answer it. “Yeah?”

  “Are you okay?” Betty asked anxiously.

  “I’m fine, Betty. You worry too much.”

  “I don’t worry about you dealing with the dead. I’ve long since given up on that. But I worry just the right amount when you tell me that you’re locked in a house with a stranger. Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t find anybody.”

  “Did you make sure that the house is locked up?”

  Mel smiled. “Yes, Mom. I checked everything. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “If I don’t, who will?” Betty asked. “You don’t have any family, and you refuse to make any other friends.”

  Mel groaned internally at the direction the conversation was going in. It was true she didn’t have any family. She had been abandoned at a shopping mall when she was two years old, and the local authorities in Nashville never found out who her parents were.

  No one had every shown any interest in adopting her, so she had gone from foster home to foster home until she turned seventeen and ran away to be on her own. The only constants in her life had been school and Betty.

  It just seemed to work out that all of the foster homes she was moved to were in range of her school, so she never really had the problem of transferring all the time like some foster kids did. It wouldn’t have mattered if she had though.

  Not many kids wanted to make friends with the foster kids. Mel still believed that kids could smell the stink of neglect and abandonment on foster kids and avoided them because of it.

  Having families of their own that loved them, it was hard for them to believe that adults would just get rid of you unless there was something wrong with you. It never occurred to them that maybe something had been wrong with the adults.

  And then there was Betty. She’d met Betty on the first day of school in 3rd grade. Betty had looked at her and smiled that smile that Mel hated so much. She tried ignoring Betty’s constant chatter. When that didn’t work, she’d actually tried being mean to her.

  But it hadn’t mattered to Betty. She’d just ignored Mel’s rudeness and had been smiling at her every since. Mel had eventually come to accept Betty’s constant presence and could grudgingly admit that she’d come to depend on it to some degree.

  “I don’t need anymore friends. You’re more than enough.”

  “It’s not healthy, Mel. You shouldn’t be so isolated all the time, especially doing what you do for a living.”

  “I’m hanging up now, Betty. Goodnight.”

  She hit the button and disconnected the call before Betty could protest. She had a job to do and talking on the phone to Betty about her feelings and mental stability wasn’t going to help get it done. She started to wander through the house, this time actively looking for spirits.

  She found one in the parlor. It was a black woman around forty years of age. The woman was wearing white, nondescript, tennis shoes; white pants; and a light blue smock top. And this woman was pissed. Mel could feel the anger rolling off of her in waves.

  The woman glared at Mel, and then opened her mouth and screamed. The sound tore through the ho
use like a rampant wind.

  Mel didn’t even flinch. “So you’re the screamer, huh? I’m Mel; it’s nice to meet you.”

  The woman opened her mouth and screamed again. It had apparently worked so well for her in the past that she was going to try it again.

  Mel frowned at her. “That’s not really doing much to scare me. What else do you have?”

  The woman looked at Mel like she had been slapped. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “No, ma’am, you’re the one that’s not supposed to be here. It’s time for you to go. I’m here to help you get out of here.”

  “I’m not leaving,” the ghost snarled.

  “Yes, you are. It’s up to you how you want to go. We can do this the easy way or the hard way, but you can’t stay here any longer.”

  “You can’t make me leave,” the woman hissed.

  “Actually, I can. It’s my job, and I’m very good at it,” she said, taking a tentative step toward the woman. “Do you even know who you are anymore?”

  “Of course I do. I’m Anna Mai Fowler.”

  “You do understand that you’re dead, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I kind of figured that out for myself when I walked through my first wall.”

  Mel could feel the ghost calming down. It was a good thing and exactly what she had hoped would happen. She didn’t want to cause this woman or herself, for that matter, any pain.

  “Do you remember how you died?”

  Anna Mai shook hear head. “All I can remember is that it was so cold. I’ve tried to remember why, but I can’t.”

  “It’s okay, you don’t have to. Can I ask you why you want to stay here? Do you really want to spend eternity locked inside this house with no way out?”

  Anna Mai looked at her in confusion. “What else is there?”

  “You can crossover. I can help you,” Mel said, and held out her hands to Anna Mai as she had to Rosie. “All you have to do is take my hands, and you can be with your family that passed on before you. There may even be some there now that you don’t know about. Isn’t there anyone you’d like to see again?”