The Reaper Within

by Stephanie Jackson

  “They do exist, but they’re exceedingly rare. I’ve only seen four in my whole life as a Reaper. And I can tell you that there’s not one here.”

  “What do you do when you see one?”

  “I turn the job down. There’s absolutely nothing I can do to close an energy vortex. It’s a purplish, swirling, tornado-looking thing, and spirits are drawn to them for some reason. For all I know, it’s another way for them to get to the tunnel.

  “I don’t really know what the vortexes are, and they’re a little outside of my purview. I just know that I can stand outside of one and reap souls over all day, every day, but I could never destroy or close the vortex itself.

  “So when I see one, I tell my client what is going on there, and tell them that if it’s bothering them that much then their best bet would be to sell the property. They’re never happy about it, but it is what it is.”

  “You lead a very interesting life.”

  “Not really. Once you’ve been doing this for awhile, it just gets to be the norm. You’ll have some things happen every now and again like hunting a Revenant, but most souls crossover quietly enough.

  “It‘s actually boring most of the time; just me alone in a building with ghosts. I don’t usually talk to them anymore than to tell them it’s time for them to go, and try to convince them to go willing. You’re the first ghost I’ve ever had a meaning conversation with.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “Don’t be. You know that as soon as I figure out how to do it, I’m going to reap you too.”

  “I know, and I told you I’ll go quietly, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t keep you company until that time comes. What harm is there in that?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said as lighting lit up the night sky beyond the kitchen window. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You can ask me anything you want.”

  “In your twenty years of rambling around this house, have you ever seen any gold?”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Gold? What kind of gold?”

  “Coins, I guess, maybe bars too; I’m not really sure.”

  “No, I haven’t seen anything like that. Why are you asking me about gold?”

  “Curtis, the owner of this house in the early to mid 1900’s, was rumored to have kept $12 million in gold somewhere in the house. After he died, the gold was never found.”

  “Damn, that’s a lot of money to just vanish into thin air.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “And the house was searched?”

  She nodded. “The house was damn near torn down in the search for the missing gold. They had to use what money Curtis had left them in the will just to rebuild and make it livable again.”

  “Okay, sounds like fun. Let’s do our own search of the house, maybe knock on a few walls. If you’re lucky, you could walk away from here with a bit more than just a thousand dollars per ghost.”

  “I don’t have any interest in keeping the gold. It would belong to the new owner under the U.S. Treasure Trove law. She’s owned the house for over two years. Anything of value found on the property now is considered abandoned by the previous owner and would legally belong to Mrs. Mabry. If by some stretch of the imagination I did find that gold in this house while I’m here, it would belong to her. I Googled it.”

  “You should have read the law a little closer. It also says that, ‘Where the finder is an employee, most cases hold that the find should be awarded to the employer if it has a heightened legal obligation to take care of its customers' property, otherwise it should go to the employee.’

  “You were hired by the owner of this house. That makes you her employee. There are no customer obligations to take into account in a case like this; so technically, if you found it, the gold would be yours. Now, I didn’t Google it, but I did go Austin Peay as a pre-law student.”

  She grabbed her phone and looked it up again. He was right. According to the law the gold would be Mel’s if she found it.

  “It doesn’t matter; morally I’d feel like it belonged to Mrs. Mabry. I don’t have anything invested in this house, she does. I would give it to her if I found it.”

  “Well let’s look for it anyway?” Jack said. “It’ll give us something to do until you find your next ghost.”

  Chapter Seven

  They walked through the house, knocking on walls and stomping on floors, listening for any difference in the sound. They didn’t stomp on the second floor, though. She’d already gone through in one place and didn’t want to tempt fate. They didn’t find anything. She hadn’t thought they would, but it was fun.

  “Well, it was worth a try,” Jack said when they were back downstairs in the hall.

  She leaned on the wall and rested her head against it. This was a huge house and running around it, up and down long staircases, for hours could get exhausting.

  Jack turned to her and braced a hand on the wall beside her head. “Is this the first time you’ve been on a treasure hunt with a ghost?”

  “It’s the first time I’ve been on a treasure hunt at all; with a ghost or otherwise.”

  He was about to kiss her again when she caught movement in the library behind him. She almost passed it off as Curtis, but it wasn’t. It was a little old lady who looked to be in her seventies.

  Mel ducked under Jack’s arm and went to the woman.

  “Do you need my help?” she asked and held her hand out to the woman.

  “If you wouldn’t mind, dearie,” the woman said. “I seem to be a little lost.”

  “Come with me and I’ll take you home.”

  The woman took her hand, and she crossed her over. A familiar still settled over the house after the woman’s crossing; a feeling that Mel knew all too well.

  “That was it,” she said turning to Jack. “That was the last ghost in the house. Except for you, of course.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “I’m sure. I’d feel it if there were more. I still can’t feel you, though.”

  “So, can you leave now?” he asked frowning.

  “I don’t know. Let’s find out.”

  She went to the front door and opened it. The storm was raging outside. The wind gusted in, blowing rain and leaves into the house. She tried to step out of the door, but an invisible bearer held her inside.

  “Well…the house may not recognize that you’re here, but the other side sure does. I’m not going to be able to leave until I figure out what to do with you.”

  “I’m sorry, Mel.”

  “Don’t be. This isn’t your fault, Jack, and it’s my job to cross you over no matter how long it takes.”

  The fireplace poker that she’d carried out of the dining room earlier, and had eventually leaned against the base of the stairs, now caught her eye. An idea that should have occurred to her before now popped into her brain like someone had flipped on a light switch.

  “I have an idea,” she said hurrying past Jack and back down the hall.

  “About how to cross me over?” he asked following behind her.

  “No, about where Curtis hid his gold.”

  She went into the library and was headed toward the fireplace when the lights dimmed, and she heard that weird humming noise again. She spun around but was too late. Jack was gone again.

  She considered waiting for him to come back before trying out her idea, but she was too excited to wait. She ran her hands around the fireplace but didn’t find a switch. She even pressed different spots on the ornate design of the mantel, but nothing happened.

  Damn it! She’d been so sure that this would be the answer. Curtis had left his echo in this room by doing something that he did repetitively; walking to this fireplace. He would have had servants to tend to his fire. So, why would he have walked that path so often if not to visit his gold?

  She was about to give up when she decided to try one last thing. She knelt down on her knees in front of the wide hearth and reached her hand up into the firepla
ce. She found two levers. One was where the flue lever should be, and the other was about 8” above that, in a place that wouldn’t be found unless you were looking for it.

  She pushed up on the first lever and felt wind rush down from the open flue. She reclosed the flue and pushed up on the second lever. The fireplace made a great grinding noise as it slid forward out of the wall and then slid to the side, revealing a set of stone steps leading down into the darkness.

  “Sorry, Jack,” she whispered.

  She slid her phone from her pocket and pulled up her flashlight app. The light wasn’t as bright as the flashlight in her bag, but she was too excited to go upstairs and get it. With her phone held out in front of her, she started her descent down the old stone stairs.

  ***

  There was an old oil lamp hanging from a hook on the wall that Curtis must have once used to make his way down these stairs. He hadn’t had the convenience of a flashlight app on his cell phone to light his way.

  There were a dozen stone steps that brought you down to a wooden door with an old crystal doorknob. She put her hand on the knob and turned it. The door swung open to reveal a dark room beyond it.

  She stepped inside and shone the light around the room. She saw something, but it wasn’t gold. She flashed the light up at the ceiling and saw a string hanging down from a florescent light fixture. She pulled the string and the four long florescent light bulbs hummed to life, bathing the room in bright light.

  The room was approximately 12’ wide and maybe 20’ long. The stone walls and floors stopped about halfway down the room where red brick and concrete took their place. She imagined that the room could have been redone at some point, but she thought it more likely that it had been expanded. Plus, she didn’t think florescent lighting came standard in the 1940’s.

  There were ten, six foot tall canisters standing against the walls on the concrete floor at the end of the room. The canisters were dusty and covered in cobwebs. There was also a desk and a small file cabinet on that side of the room.

  On the stone side of the room was something that resembled an old school tanning bed. It was made out of metal and clamped closed with the same kind of latches that you used to see on luggage before everything started using a zipper.

  She had a really bad feeling about this place. Not much could give her the creeps, but there were goosebumps crawling up her arms now. She walked over to the desk and opened one of its drawers. There were hypodermic needles inside, and little bottles of clear fluid that read Acepromazine Maleate Injection.

  She pulled out her phone and speed dialed Betty. She didn’t really need her to look up the name of the drug in the bottles for her, she could have done that herself, but hearing Betty’s voice would make her feel not so alone in the room. She expected to be waking Betty up out of a dead sleep and was thoroughly surprised when Betty answered on the first ring.

  “What are you doing up at two in the morning?”

  “I went to bed not long after I talked to you the last time, and I just kind of fell awake about half an hour ago. I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I’m just sitting here playing Solitaire on the computer. What do you need?”

  “I need you to tell me what Acepromazine Maleate Injection is.”

  “How do you spell it?” Betty asked.

  Mel read her the spelling from the label and waited for Betty to come back with an answer.

  “It’s an animal tranquilizer; a strong one. Why?”

  “I found some bottles of it, along with some hypodermic needles, in a desk drawer.”

  “I wonder what it was being used for,” Betty said.

  “Oh, I have a pretty good idea what it was used for.”

  She opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet and pulled out the two files that were inside. The first file was thick and filled with a bunch of equations that she would never be able to understand. The second file held eleven pieces of paper. There was a paperclip holding a picture to each of the pages.

  The people in the picture were either dead or unconscious at the time their picture was taken, she wasn’t sure which, but she recognized them anyway. Each one of them was one of the souls she’d reaped from this house.

  “Mel, are you alright?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m looking at some paperwork I just found.”

  She looked at the piece of paper that accompanied each picture.

  “I think you were right about the hospital connection to the victims.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because I just found a file of all the souls I’ve reaped in this house. It has a picture of each one, and a page for each listing their particular illness. Rosie had leukemia, of course. James Radcliff had been diagnosed with emphysema, and Anna Mai Fowler had lupus.

  “Melissa’s illness was pancreatic cancer. On Jack’s page, under illness, someone wrote: Meddlesome. I don’t know what that means, but that’s what it says. He’s listed as a healthy male. There seems to be more writing on Jack’s page than the others, mostly gibberish to me, but there are dates and times. The last one being March 27th of this year at 8:47 p.m.

  “Betty, listen to this list of victims and tell me what you think.”

  She read the victims names off to Betty and waited for Betty to confirm what Mel already thought.

  “What I think is that Abbott Harlowe’s name isn’t on that list.”

  “Exactly,” Mel said, and then caught one word on Jack’s page that she did understand.

  The sight of the word made her skin crawl. She flipped through the pages and found the same word on every victims sheet; cryo.

  A light went on in Mel’s head about what she’d seen earlier in one of the boxes in the attic: 280gls L.N. It meant 280 gallons of Liquid Nitrogen.

  “Betty, look up a company named Youth Eternal and tell me what it is.”

  She looked at the death picture of Jack while Betty found the information for her. He looked fairly peaceful in the picture, like he was sleeping.

  “It was a company that offered to freeze you after you died. It went bankrupt in 1993. Why in the name of God would anyone pay someone to freeze them after death?”

  “Because they didn’t want to die?” Mel said, sliding the files back into the drawer and opening the bottom drawer of the file cabinet. “They thought by being frozen after death, that at some point in the future they could be cured of whatever it was that was killing them, and they could be revived and continue on with their life.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “No, it’s not, which is what the scientific community has been telling people for years. I saw a documentary on it a while back. Once frozen, the water in the body expands and shatters the cells. Until they can find a way to prevent that kind of damage from occurring, then you’re just throwing your money at a false hope.

  “And it’s not the natural order of things. If you get sick, then by all means try whatever you can to get better. But you’re not supposed to get a second bite at the apple after you die, and I don’t think the light would even allow it. Your time to go is your time to go. The end.”

  The bottom drawer had a few more bottles of Acepromazine Maleate Injection in it, plus a few bottles of Heparin, and a couple of vials of a reddish liquid that didn’t have labels on them. She knew that Heparin was a blood thinner. She wondered what was inside of the other bottles.

  “It sounds morbid,” Betty said.

  “It’s just another attempt of humans trying to cheat Death. I guess people just don’t understand that Death can’t be cheated.”

  “Why are we talking about freezing people?”

  She looked back at the ten canisters standing against the wall. “Because Abbott didn’t go to college to become a biologist or a chemist, or a least that wasn’t his primary goal; Abbott went to school to become a cryogenicist with a specialty in Cryonics.

  “He was going to go to work for Youth Eternal when his momma got sick. But Abbott didn’t let that slo
w him down any. When he couldn’t continue his research in the labs of Youth Eternal, he decided to go right on ahead and continue his research right here in this basement.”

  “How do you know that?” Betty asked.

  “Because I’m pretty sure I’m looking at the bodies. I reaped ten souls from this house, and I’m looking at ten six foot tall canisters. What do you think is inside of them?”

  “Oh, dear God.”

  “No, I don’t think God had anything to do with this, Betty. As a matter of fact I’m pretty sure that Abbott was trying to cut God right out of the equation.”

  If she was right, and the ten containers held the bodies of the souls that she had already crossed over, then…she turned and looked at the box/bed that was standing on the stone floor. That must mean that Jack’s body was in there.

  “Betty, I’ll call you back.”

  “No, Mel. You need…”

  She hung up before Betty could finish her sentence and walked over to the metal bed. There were hoses running from it to three canisters of liquid nitrogen. There were also a bunch of wires running from the bed to a circuit box on the wall.

  There was a battery powered generator attached to the circuit breaker, as well. She assumed this was to provide the bed with a few hours of back-up energy should the power go off for any reason. She snapped the latches open on the bed and lifted the top.

  She only took quick look before she slammed the lid shut and snapped the latches back into place. It was Jack inside the bed. Murdered and put inside for the crime of being ‘Meddlesome’.

  Why was Jack in this thing instead of in one of the containers like the others? What made Jack different to Abbott? She’d gone through the desk and file cabinet and hadn’t found an answer to that question. Whatever made Jack special to Abbott, the answer wasn’t down here.

  She went back up the stairs and pushed the lever to put the fireplace back into its proper place. She leaned back against the fireplace and dropped her face in her hands. She knew Jack was dead, but it was hard to see him frozen inside that box like a bag of peas. And she was going to have to tell him what she’d found.