Mel didn’t know if what she was saying about Anna Mai getting to be with her passed loved ones again was true or not; she’d only been halfway down the tunnel herself before she was sent back, but she believed it was true.
“I don’t believe you,” Anna Mai said, but took a small step forward. “You’re going to send me somewhere awful.”
“I wouldn’t do that, and I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I can only send you where you were supposed to go when you died anyway. Were you a good person in life?”
Anna Mai took another small step forward. “I tried to be. I helped people when I could, and I tried not the hurt anyone if I could avoid it.”
“Then I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” Mel said, stretching her hands out to the ghost.
“I can see my momma again?” Anna Mai asked, starting to reach out her hands to Mel.
“You can if you want to. You can be with her now if you’d like.”
Their fingers were almost touching when a man grabbed Mel’s arm and spun her around. “Don’t touch her! She’s dangerous.”
The trust that she had formed with Anna Mai broke. Anna Mai rushed at Mel and dove onto her back, clawing her jagged fingernails down Mel’s bare arms.
“Damn it!” Mel screamed.
She reached back over her shoulders and grabbed Anna Mai by the head. This was not how she had wanted to do this. When a soul crossed over willing as Rosie did, what Mel felt was a rush of warmth.
When she had to force them to go, it felt that her insides were being deep-fried. It was a nearly indescribable pain, and she didn’t imagine that it felt much better to the ghost.
She pulled Anna’s soul through her own, and then dropped to the floor, screaming in pain.
“Ma’am, are you alright?” the man said, putting his hand on Mel’s shoulder. “Ma’am?”
She was in too much pain to even open her eyes, much less talk to him. By the time the pain had faded enough for her to look up at him, the man was gone.
***
Mel sat up and waited for the pain to pass completely away. It didn’t last that long, but it was intense while it
was happening. Her whole body was soaked in sweat; her shirt was now dripping wet. When the pain was gone, she got up and searched the house for the man that had grabbed her.
She found nothing…yet again, and all the doors and windows were still locked up tight. She just couldn’t figure out how the guy kept getting in and out, or why for that matter.
He obviously wasn’t there to do anything to her. If that had been the case, he’d had his best chance while she was lying helpless on the floor. She didn’t know what he was doing there, but what she did know was that if she saw him again she was going to slap the snot out of him.
She’d had Anna Mai ready to go, and everything had went south because of him! If he’d just minded his own business everything would have gone smoothly. Hopefully he was gone for good this time.
She was halfway up the stairs, heading to her room to get a dry shirt when what the man had said came back to her.
“Don’t touch her. She’s dangerous,” Mel mumbled, repeating what the man had said. “That means he could see Anna Mai, too.”
Who was this man? The lights dimmed again, and she could hear a slight humming sound. She looked back down the stairs into the entry hall, but there wasn’t anyone there.
The lights came back up a few seconds later, the humming stopped, and she continued up the stairs to change.
***
She made her rounds through the house again, looking for more souls to crossover. She found three; two men and a woman. None of them gave her any problems crossing over.
The two women didn’t remember who they were, but the man remembered his name. James Radcliff. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell her how he’d come to be at the house or anything about his death.
He did mention that the last thing he remembered was leaving work. He’d worked at the same factory as Abbott Harlowe, but that didn’t help her any because a lot of people had worked at that factory, and Abbott had came up missing after James had died.
“Did you know Abbott?” she’d asked.
“Sure I did. Everybody at Olsen’s knew Abbott. He was a good kid; smart as a whip, too. I kept telling him he should get out of that factory while he was still young enough to do something with his life, but he’d just laugh it off. I’m sorry to hear about his death. It’s a damn shame.”
She’d crossed James over after that and was now looking for the next soul. Her arms were burning where Anna Mai had scratched her. The gouges weren’t too bad, though. She’d definitely had worse happen to her. She doubted that they would even scar.
Not that that made a difference to her arms. They were covered in crisscross scars she’d gotten over the years of doing this job. Her right arm even had several bite marks on it, compliments of her first Revenant.
She was walking past the library when she saw movement from the corner of her eye. It was an echo of a man she was willing to bet real money was Curtis Harlowe himself.
She was using his suit as a gauge. It was what was known as a London cut and had been all the rage in the late 30’s. He was a short-statured man, with thinning gray hair. He walked from the middle of the room to the fireplace and vanished.
“Huh,” she said, and then shrugged and turned around…and walked straight into the man that had grabbed her earlier.
“What the hell?!” she gasped, bouncing off of his chest.
She was thrown off balance and landed on her ass on the library floor. She looked up at the man she’d been searching the house for. He was tall, maybe in the range of 6’2”, with short black hair.
“Sorry about that,” he said, reaching his hand down to help her to her feet. “I wasn’t expecting you to turn around quite so fast.”
She ignored his offered help of assistance and pushed herself up from the floor. She looked into his warm hazel-green eyes, and then drew back her hand and slapped the holy hell out of him.
“Hey, lady!” he said, rubbing his cheek. “What was that for?”
“For interfering. I’m trying to do a job here, and you’re not making things any easier for me. And where the hell did you go earlier after trying to get me killed?”
“Where did I go? The question is where did you go? After you fell when the ghost lady disappeared I turned around to make sure she wasn’t behind us. When I turned back around, you were gone.”
Mel shook her head. “That’s not what happened at all.”
She was relieved to finally come face to face with him. At least she knew she wasn’t in any kind of danger. He was just a guy, a live one, and he seemed harmless enough; if a bit off in the head.
The sad part was that he was looking at her as if she was the one that wasn’t quite right. It was a shame he was crazy, because he was a beautiful man. He was maybe thirty years old with a well defined frame wrapped in faded jeans and a light blue T-shirt. He was wearing a dark blue, long sleeved, dress shirt like an open jacket.
He put his hand on her shoulder and tried to lead her down the hall. “Why don’t you come and sit down for a minute? Maybe you hit your head when you fell earlier. You seem to be a little confused.”
“Touch me again and see if I don’t break your damn arm!” she snapped and jerked away from him. “I’m not the one with the mental problem here, dumbass, you are.”
“Me?” he said, giving her a sour look. “I’m not the one running around someone else’s house playing with ghosts, am I?”
“Are you kidding me? You saw the ghost, too. Who the hell are you anyway?”
“I’m…” he started to say, and then the lights dimmed again and he disappeared.
The lights didn’t dim enough for her to loose sight of him because of the darkness. He’d literally vanished right before her eyes.
“What the fuck!” she yelled, jumping away from the place where he’d been standing just seconds ago.
What in the hell was going on here? She’d been around a lot of haunted houses, and had crossed over literally hundreds of souls, but she had never seen anything like this before in her entire life.
She needed to find some answers before this place managed to drive her insane.
***
“Are you serious?” Betty asked sleepily. “You really thought he was a live person?”
“I did, and now I don’t know what to think,” Mel said, going through the boxes of paperwork she’d found in an upstairs closet.
She didn’t know if she’d find the answers she was looking for up here, but all of the paperwork related to the Harlowes and went back to when the house had originally been built.
“He said you were running around someone else’s house,” Betty said. “Maybe he’s Abbott Harlowe, and he thinks you just running around, willy nilly, through his home.”
“If he’s Abbott, then he’s kind of right. I am running around his house. But that still doesn’t explain why he’s so there when he shows up, why he’s so lifelike. I should have known that he wasn’t alive, but I didn’t. Hell, I even smacked him, for Christ’s sake.”
She found a small newspaper clipping for the opening of a paper company from 1937. It had a picture of Curtis Harlowe. He was definitely the echo she had seen in the library.
“You touched him and he didn’t crossover?”
“He didn’t even fade out a little. It was just like touching a living person. I’m telling you, Betty, I didn’t know he wasn’t real until he disappeared.”
She laid the newspaper clipping in the small pile she’d made so far and pulled the next one out of the box. It was a tally sheet of one of the businesses Curtis Harlowe had started.
It said he’d collected $1300 for services rendered; in gold. She didn’t know much about the Harlowes family life; but she’d give them this, they were excellent record keepers.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet. First I have to figure out what he is before I can decide how to deal with him. Maybe he is a Revenant of some sort, just an extremely non-violent one.”
“There are no non-violent Revenants. You told me that yourself.”
“Yeah, Betty, I know that. I was just trying to make a joke.”
“Well it’s not funny. You now have a soul on your hands that you have no clue as to how to help, and you can’t leave that house until he’s gone. Aren’t you even a little worried?”
Mel smiled. “Not yet. I’ve only been in the house for a few hours. If I’m still here after a week, then I’ll start
to worry. But maybe he’s so lifelike that his spirit won’t bind me to the house.”
“You can’t just leave him there, Mel. If you can’t move him on, he’ll probably be stuck there forever.”
“I was just making another joke, hon.”
“Well, then you need to work on your comedic skills, because you suck at being funny,” Betty said just as someone cleared their throat.
Mel turned around and saw an older lady standing behind her.
“I don’t mean to interrupt, but I saw what you did to help the other people here, and I was just wondering if maybe you’d be able to help me too?”
“Betty, I have to go. Someone is asking me to help them.”
“Is it him?”
“No, it’s a woman. Do me a favor and run the names of Anna Mai Fowler, Rosie Thomlin, and James Radcliff. They would have died between 1985 and 1995. Oh, and see if you can’t find me a picture of Abbott Harlowe.”
“Will do,” Betty said.
Mel turned back to the woman and got back to work.
Chapter Three
She was arm deep in old paperwork again when her phone rang.
“I didn’t find any Death Records for James Radcliff, Anna Mai Fowler, or Rosie Thomlin, but I did find them all listed in the Missing Persons database,” Betty said when Mel answered the phone. “I sent you the records for all three of them, and I emailed you a college picture of Abbott Harlowe. He was a handsome guy.”
“Thanks, Betty. I’ll talk to you later.”
She hung up, and then turned back to the paperwork. It was three hours later, and she was up to 1984 in the increasingly boring Harlowe history when she remembered the emails Betty had sent her. She picked up her phone and checked them out. The first email had the Missing Persons records for James, Rosie, and Anna Mai.
James Radcliff had been forty-eight years old when he went missing from his home after returning from work in November of 1992. They knew he’d been home because his truck was in the driveway, and they’d found his lunchbox and car keys on the kitchen table.
James had been divorced and lived alone. He wasn’t discovered missing until the leather factory called his then nineteen year old daughter after James had failed to show up to work for four days. His body had never been found.
Rosie Thomlin had been twenty-three years old when she was reported missing in late May of 1991, so Mel had been wrong about that. Rosie hadn’t died in the late 80’s. She’d just been out of fashion. She had last been seen at one of the local bars down on Beale St. Friends had reported that Rosie had left the bar around 11:00 that night.
Her car had been found down the street from the bar the next morning, most likely where she’d parked it the night before. She had been reported missing the next morning. Mel knew that the police wouldn’t take a missing persons report for an adult until they had been missing at least 48 hours, but a special exception had been made in Rosie’s case because Rosie had had leukemia.
Her chances of living had been excellent if she kept to her treatment schedule. Rosie had missed her appointment the morning her mother reported her missing. Her friends had said that Rosie hadn’t been drinking that night and that she had left the bar to go get some sleep before she had to get up to go to her appointment. Her body had also never been found.
Anna Mai Fowler had been forty-four years old when she came up missing in December of 2001 from the hospital where she worked as an emergency room nurse. She’d gone to get some lunch in the cafeteria about halfway through her shift and had just never come back.
Her purse and other personal belongings were found in her locker, and her car was still in the hospital parking lot, but Anna Mai was gone. Her body was never recovered.
There was a side note from Betty at the bottom of the email. Mel, don’t know how much this info is going to help you. Just so you know, over 4000 people go missing from Memphis every year. Most are found, but hundreds are never recovered. Call me if you need anything else. B.
Hundreds of missing people? Mel knew a lot of people came up missing every year, but damn. Betty was right, it wasn’t very helpful. She checked the next email and found the picture of Abbott Harlowe.
Betty was right again; he had been handsome. He had blonde hair with a slight curl and bright blue eyes. Handsome, but unfortunately, not the guy she’d seen earlier.
“Well, that was useless,” she said and tossed the phone on top of the stack of papers she’d already gone through.
“You disappeared on me again,” a voice said from behind her.
She gasped and looked over her shoulder. The man that she’d slapped earlier was standing above her. He looked and felt just as solid to her as he had before.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“What is what?”
“That,” he said, and pointed down at her phone.
“Uh…my phone. Haven’t you ever seen a mobile phone before?”
“Sure I have, and they’re about the size of a brick. That’s not a phone.”
She sighed, picked her phone up, and speed-dialed Betty. She left the speaker phone on and waited for Betty to answer.
“It’s 2:00 a.m., Mel. You’d better be being attacked with a damned butcher knife or be suffering some equally grave emergency to be calling at this hour,” Betty growled into the phone.
Mel smiled. The only time Betty was cranky was if
you woke her up in the middle of the night. Mel liked it. It made Betty seem more normal.
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m fine. I just wanted you to say hello to the guy I was telling you about.”
“He’s there?” Betty asked sounding instantly recharged.
“Yeah, he’s here. We were just talking about my phone. I just thought you’d like to say hi to him. I know how you hate it when you’re not included.”
“Uh…hi,” Betty said hesitantly.
“Hello,” the man said.
“Jesus Christ, Mel, I can hear him! I thought you said…”
“I did,” Mel said, cutting Betty off before she could spill their secret. “And he is. Now isn’t this an interesting cluster fuck?”
“Mel, you take me off of speaker phone this instant,” Betty demanded.
“Excuse me just a second,” she told the man, touched the screen of her iPhone to release the speaker phone, and put the phone up to her ear. “What’s wrong, Betty?”
“Are you freaking kidding me? You called me so I could talk to a dead man?”
“I thought you’d want to share in the experience. And I was curious if you’d be able to hear him.”
“Well I didn’t want to hear him, so never do that again. Now I’ll never get back to sleep. So is it Abbott?”
“Nope. I’ll talk to you later.”
She hung up and turned her eyes back up to the man. He was still there this time. She pushed herself up and stood in front of him
“I told you it was a phone. It’s called an iPhone. It’s uh…new technology.”
“Nice. Can I see it?”
“Maybe later,” she said and slid the phone back into her back pocket. “Right now we need to talk.”
“Are you going to tell me why you’re here talking to ghosts?”
“Yeah, I’ll tell you about that…and a few other things I think you need to be made aware of. Let’s go down to the kitchen where we can sit down.”
The Reaper Within Page 4
