The Reaper Within

by Stephanie Jackson

  She was starting to wish she’d taken the job in Adams, Tn. She might not want to get close to the Bell Witch, but it had to be better than dealing with the aftermath of a psychopath that had liked to play God in his basement.

  Chapter Eight

  She was sitting in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee when Jack returned. She’d been waiting for him, but now that he was here, she didn’t know quite what to say to him.

  “I guess your idea about finding the gold didn’t pan out or you would be with the treasure not sitting alone in here.”

  “I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, no” Mel said, and then stood up and pulled a paper cup out of the cabinet. “Why don’t you sit down and have a cup of coffee?”

  Jack sat down at his usual stool. “You want me to drink something? What’s going on, Mel?”

  She poured his coffee, carried it over, and sat on the stool next to him.

  “Jack, you’re right; I didn’t find the gold, but I did find something. I found bodies, eleven of them. Ten of the bodies belonged to the souls that I’ve crossed over from this house. And the eleventh body…”

  “The eleventh body is mine, isn’t it? You found my body,” he said, turning the paper cup in his hands. “But how do you know it’s me? It’s been twenty years since I died. I would be a pile of bones by now; so how can you be so sure that the body you found is mine?”

  She took one of his hands in hers. This was something that she’d never had to do before; tell a spirit that their body was still in the house.

  “You’re not a pile of bones, you’re you, and you still look like you.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “You’re frozen. Every soul I reaped in this house had their body frozen at the time of death. I don’t know what Abbott was up to exactly, but…”

  “Abbott?” Jack asked in shock, cutting her off. “Are you telling me that we’re in Abbott Harlowe’s house?”

  “Well, no. We’re in Angie Mabry’s house. She’s been the owner for the past two years. But yes, the owner before her was Abbott Harlowe. Why do you have that look on your face?”

  “Because I remember that I had my eye on Abbott as a person of interest in a lot of my Missing Persons cases. Abbott had access to quite a few of them. A lot of my missing people were sick and were being treated at the same hospital that Abbott’s momma went to get her treatments for lung cancer. He’s the connection to the hospital that I was trying to remember.

  “Abbott was around these people a lot. One of them, James I think his name was, even worked with him. They would have trusted him, because he was a good boy taking care of his mother.”

  “Well, I have news for all the people that thought that way about Abbott. He was most certainly not a ‘good boy’. What he was, was a psychopath with a God complex. And if all those people were sick, how is it that you know about it, but it wasn’t in the Missing Persons reports?”

  “Not everything a cop knows goes into those reports. I don’t know how they do it now, but most of my work consisted of note taking, and I found out about the illness connection after the Missing Persons reports were already sent out to the public. I would have updated them eventually, but…”

  “But you never got the chance,” Mel said quietly.

  “No, I didn’t,” Jack agreed. “You need to call the police and tell them what you’ve found here.”

  Mel looked at Jack like he’d suddenly grown a second head. “That’s simply not going to happen. I’ll warn Mrs. Mabry about what I found here, and then I’ll make an anonymous call to the police on my way out of town, but that’s the extent of it.”

  “Mel, you need to call the cops. They need to…”

  “No, Jack. This is the crime scene of a serial killer. That comes with tons of press. Journalist will want to talk to the person that found the bodies, and everyone, including the police, will want to know what I was doing here. My life is difficult enough. I don’t need to add nationwide coverage to it.

  “Those bodies are frozen. There’s no harm in waiting until I get out of here to alert the authorities. Until then I have to figure out what to do with you, and I’ll be honest, Jack. I don’t have a clue what to do.”

  “I want to see.”

  “You want to see what?”

  “My body,” he said. “I want to see it.”

  “Jack, no. There’s no point in you seeing that. It’s just a body. You have no use for it anymore.”

  “I still want to see. For all you know, me seeing my body will be the closure I need for you to be able to cross me over into that tunnel you keep talking about.”

  “Or it may be enough to turn you instantly into a malevolent spirit; an angry spirit that I can’t just grab and reap. It could be extremely dangerous for me. I can’t even run out of the house to get away from you.”

  He gave her a look of pure frustration. “You’re afraid I’ll hurt you?”

  She shrugged. “Not afraid, but it’s a strong possibility. You could see your body and completely forget who I am. It could cause you to snap.”

  “Mel, I can’t begin to tell you how much I care about you, and I know that doesn’t make any sense because I just met you, but it’s true. I feel closer to you than I’ve ever felt to anyone in my whole life. There is nothing that could ever make me forget who you are or how much you mean to me.”

  “I just don’t feel comfortable showing that to you. I think it’s a bad idea.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” he said, and stood up. “If you won’t show me, I’ll just find it for myself. I know it has something to do with that fireplace because that’s where you were headed when I disappeared the last time.”

  She followed him out of the kitchen, though the entry hall, and then down the hallway and into the library. He walked over to the fireplace and just stood there looking at it for a minute.

  He started doing the same things she had done. She watched him run his hands around the mantel and outside of the fireplace looking for a switch or lever. He even tried something she hadn’t. He put his foot inside the fireplace and stepped down hard on the hearth, but of course nothing happened.

  He kicked the old stones, and then turned back to her. “Come on, Mel; help me out here,” he said, but before she could say anything he spun back to the fireplace. “Wait a second. I know this.”

  He gave the fireplace an inquisitive look, and then knelt before the hearth. He put his arm up the fireplace and pushed up the lever that caused the whole thing to slide out.

  “How did you know to do that?”

  “I’ve seen Abbott do it. He still comes to the house sometimes,” he said and gave her a curious look. “You don’t look surprised by that. Did you find something down there that told you as much?”

  “I did, but that wasn’t my first clue,” she admitted. “I thought Abbott was dead, just like the other people in this house, until I saw Michelle Brighton’s shoes. I had a pair just like them, and I’d bought mine around 2005-2006.

  “When she told me she thought the year was 2006, it all kind of started to make since. Abbott wasn’t one of the ghosts in this house, but he was their connection to it, because he had brought them all here to die. And I knew he couldn’t have died in 1993 when he was reported missing, because Michelle wasn’t killed until 2006.

  “That meant the odds were that Abbott was the killer and not just another victim. And he was still killing in 2006, which meant that he was still coming to the house at least until then.”

  Jack grinned. “You got all of that out of a pair of shoes?”

  “I’m very fashionable,” she smiled. “And then I found something downstairs that confirmed what I’d been thinking about Abbott. He has a file with the victim’s names and pictures in it. He wrote on one of those in March of this year.”

  She pulled out her phone and turned on the flashlight app again. There was no point in trying to stop him now anyway, so she might as well light the way. She followed him down the st
one stairs to the door at the bottom.

  She put her phone away when they walked into the room. She’d left the overhead lights on when she left earlier, and the room was still bathed in bright light. The bed with Jack in it stood against the stone wall.

  “So where am I?”

  She hesitated for a moment and then pointed to the metal bed. She backed away to the door while Jack was opening what was essentially his coffin. She wanted to have a head start in running if what he saw snapped his mind.

  He lifted the lid, and white fog from the cold bellowed out. That hadn’t happened when she’d peeked inside. When the smoke cleared Jack just stood and stared down at his body. She stepped one foot back out the door, expecting the worst.

  She knew what was likely to happen when you shock a ghost. When you showed them that there was no way they were ever going to get to live again, a lot of them had a tendency to get violent. He reached inside the bed, but she couldn’t see what he was doing.

  And then Jack slammed the lid down, and Mel bolted up the old stone stairs. She was halfway up them when Jack caught up to her and grabbed her around the waist.

  He pulled her back against him. “It’s okay, Mel, you don’t have to run from me. I’m just pissed off, not crazy.”

  “Are you sure you’re alright?”

  “I’m sure, and even if I wasn’t, I would never hurt you. I told you that. Now come back down here while I look around.”

  She followed him back down there stairs and watched him look through the stuff that she’d already seen.

  “All of them with the exception of Michelle Brighton were killed in or before 1993. Why kill again in 2006?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he was too afraid to come back before then.”

  “No, he was back many times since you said he was reported missing, you saw that for yourself. He seems to have a particular interest in me. He stopped paying any attention to his other victims by 1995, and he never added anything to Michelle’s file after she was killed, but he seems to check on me every few months.

  “Maybe you interest him, not because who you are, but because of what you were.”

  “You think he’s fascinated with me because I’m a cop?”

  “No, I think he’s fascinated with you because you weren’t sick when he killed you,” she explained. “Think about it. Out of all of his victims, you’re the only one that wasn’t suffering from a potentially fatal disease.”

  “So?”

  “So I think on some level that it bothers him a little. I don’t think he considers himself to be a killer.”

  “How can you say that when you’re standing in a room full of his victim’s bodies?”

  “I’ve dealt with the aftermath of serial killers before and that’s not what I found in this house.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, tossing the file with the victim’s pictures onto the top of the desk.

  “Well, the souls of the victims of serial killers are angry, violent spirits. Not just because their lives were stolen from them, but because of the pain, fear, torture, and humiliation they suffered before death as well.

  “It stays with them even after death and they try to take it out on the living. There were a couple of angry spirits here, but nothing like I would expect to find with victims like that.”

  “So what’s your theory?”

  “My theory is that Abbott didn’t see himself as a killer, because he wasn’t trying to kill anyone. He was trying to save them. He was a cryogenicist. He wanted to put people in a cryogenic state and be able to bring them back to life when they could be cured.”

  A look of understand dawned on Jack’s face. “Ahh, but I wasn’t sick.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So why kill me at all?”

  “Think about it, Jack. What would you have done when you made the connection between Abbott and your Missing Persons cases? Would you have called him?”

  “No, I never liked to call in suspects. It gave them too much of a chance to come up with a cover story, or worse, run. No, when I came up with a suspect I went to them.

  “I liked to see the look in their eyes when I told them what I was there for. You can tell a lot by the look in a person’s eyes when you accuse them of kidnapping someone.”

  “So what did you do when you made the connection between Abbott Harlowe and his victims?”

  “I…well I…I don’t remember.”

  He looked frustrated by his lack of memory, but it was one area of death he did have in common with other spirits, even if everything else was different about him.

  “You may never remember. It’s just a symptom of death, but I know what happened,” she said. “Or, at least I think I have a pretty good idea about what happened. I think you came out here to talk to Abbott, and he managed to sedate you somehow, most likely with Acepromazine Maleate Injection…”

  “No, he cracked me on the back of my head.”

  “How can you know that? Do you remember him doing it?”

  “No, but I checked for injuries when I reached into my death box. There’s a big knot on the back of my frozen head. I don’t know what happened after that, but I’m fairly confident in saying that it all started with that conk on the head.”

  Mel looked at him and shuddered. “You felt the head on your own dead body?”

  He shrugged. “I’m a cop; so I know the quickest way to find an answer is to examine the evidence. Right now, I’m evidence.”

  “That’s so wrong,” she said, and shuddered again.

  “Anyway I think after you were knocked out, that he

  dragged you down here and did what he had to do to put you in a cryogenic state. I think as long as he believes that you can be revived that he’s not really a killer. Like I said, he’s trying to save people, not kill them.”

  “You don’t actually think that any of these people volunteered for his little experiment, do you?”

  “No, but I’m sure he would rationalize what he did as being for their own good. After all, they were going to wake up in a decade or two, cured and healthy, and they’d be thanking him then, wouldn’t they? And I don’t think he made his victims suffer anymore than he absolutely had to. He wasn’t trying to traumatize or humiliate them. He just thought he was saving them.”

  “But they’re not going to wake up. None of us are. That makes him a murderer, no matter what his intentions were.”

  “I agree with you 100%. I’m just saying that Abbott wouldn’t see it that way.”

  “I don’t care how he sees it,” Jack said angrily. “I want his ass in jail for the kidnap and murder of eleven people.”

  “And one dog,” she reminded him. “Don’t forget about the dog.”

  “Arresting him for killing a dog isn’t my job.”

  “Neither is arresting him for kidnap and murder. In case you’ve forgotten, you’re one of the people he killed. And is it technically kidnap since you came to his house willingly?”

  “Actually, yes it is. According to the laws of Tennessee, kidnapping is false imprisonment as defined in § 39-13-302, under circumstances exposing the other person to substantial risk of bodily injury. §39-13-302 defines that a person commits the offense of false imprisonment when knowingly removes or confines another unlawfully so as to interfere substantially with the other’s liberty.”

  “Unless the law has changed in the twenty years you’ve been gone.”

  Jack shook his head. “It doesn’t matter if the law has changed since then. If Abbott is ever arrested and taken to trial, he’ll be tried according to the laws that were in place at the time he committed his crimes. It’s just how the criminal system works, and I’m pretty sure that hasn’t changed.”

  “You know that law well enough to recite it word for word?”

  “It’s…it was my job to know.”

  Mel looked at him and realized he looked stressed. “Are you sure you okay?”

  “I’ll admit I’m a little shook up by seeing my own body,
but yeah, I’m okay. I mean, I knew I was dead anyway, right?”

  “Having me tell you you’re dead and actually seeing your deceased earthly remains are two different things, Jack.”

  “Maybe, and to tell you the truth, I wished I’d listened to you and not looked, but I can’t un-look so I just have to get passed it.”

  “Do you feel any closer to crossing over?”

  “I don’t know what feeling close to crossing over feels like, so I really couldn’t tell you. But I don’t feel any less here than I did before I looked at my body, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Let’s give it a try anyway?” she said and held her hands out to him,

  He stared at Mel’s hands for several long seconds before reaching out and twining his fingers with hers.

  “You don’t have to do that. All you really have to is touch my fingertips, or touch me anywhere for that matter.”

  “If it’s going to be my last moment on earth, then I want to spend it holding your hand.”

  Mel had to swallow the knot that had jumped up in her throat. That was the sweetest thing any man had ever said to her, and the sweetest part of all was that she knew he meant it.

  She cleared her throat and pulled her hands away. “Well, it doesn’t matter. It didn’t work anyway.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I don’t know, Jack. I’ve never had a situation like this occur.”

  “So we’re stuck?”

  She nodded. “ For now anyway.”

  “Have I said I’m sorry about this?”

  “Yes, and just as I told you then, it’s not your fault,” she smiled at him and tried to lighten the mood. “Maybe I’m going to have to treat you like a Revenant and kill you again.”

  “Would you like me to get you a hammer? I’m frozen solid, it shouldn’t be too hard to shatter me.”

  She drew away from him in disgust. “No I don’t want to shatter you, Jack!”

  “So you’ll fight the living dead back into the grave, and beat or stab them to death, but you won’t do me a solid and break me?”

  “I can’t, Jack”

  “It wouldn’t be because of this would it?”