World's Scariest Places: Volume Two

by Bates, Jeremy

  “They tell you everything?” he asked her.

  Elizaveta nodded. “I can’t believe—” She looked at Rosa, closed her mouth.

  “Rosa,” Jack said, “can you go play over there with one of those dolls for a bit? I need to talk to Elizaveta about some adult stuff.”

  “Which doll can I play with?”

  “Whichever one you want.”

  “But they’re all attached to the wall.”

  “Here.” He took a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and popped the blade. “Choose one and cut the string. Be careful though.”

  “I will!”

  She accepted the knife carefully and went to the dolls, where she began examining the ratty things with great deliberation.

  “I can’t believe someone…killed him like that,” Elizaveta said softly, even though Rosa wouldn’t be able to hear her over the rain and wind. “Nitro thinks it was a serial killer. Do you believe that too?”

  Jack nodded. “Lucinda didn’t take the eyes. Neither did kidnappers.”

  “Kidnappers?”

  Jack explained Nitro’s previous theory.

  “You’re right,” she said. “There’s no reason Lucinda or kidnappers would do something like that. Still, a serial killer…?”

  “Think about all those movies and stuff when the serial killer pins pictures of victims to his wall, and they all have their eyes cut out.”

  “Those are movies, Jack.”

  “But they’re probably based on fact,” he said. “Besides, there’s a name for it. Dehumanizing or something. The eyes are windows to the soul, right? Or to the personality or whatever. Serial killers cut them out to make their victims less human, to make them easier to kill.”

  Elizaveta considered that, then said, “You know what Pita thinks?”

  “That the ghost did it?”

  Elizaveta nodded. “She was…how you say…flipping out? She even quoted Jesus—of Nazareth. I knew she was religious, but I never knew so much.”

  “It’s her upbringing. Her whole family is super religious. Jesus is named Jesus after all.”

  “But Jesus isn’t religious.”

  “Apparently his mother’s death changed him. You know the details?”

  “Of her death?” Elizaveta nodded again. “After Jesus’s and Pita’s younger sister died, their parents tried to have another child. There were complications with pregnancy. Their mother died along with unborn child.”

  “That’s only half of it,” Jack said. “Her death wasn’t sudden or unexpected. She had pulmonary hypertension. Doctors told her if she had an abortion, she would live; if she didn’t, she would die. Their father, Marco, forbade it. Abortion went against his beliefs. So, yeah, their mother died along with the unborn child. But it didn’t have to happen. That’s why Jesus changed his tune toward religion.”

  “Pita told you this?”

  “Marco did,” he said. “We were pretty close. He eventually came to regret his decision not to save his wife.”

  “But Pita, she never changed?”

  “Nope,” Jack said. “She’s still as zealous as they come. The way she talks about God sometimes, and faith, it’s like she thinks He lives in the attic or something.” He shrugged. “Look, I might not be religious, but I don’t really have a problem with it. In fact, I think in moderation it might be a good thing. It teaches you values and all. My problem is when it’s taken to extremes, when it makes you choose between knowledge and myth. You know, Pita still takes everything in the Bible as the literal word of God. She doesn’t believe in evolution. She doesn’t believe in the Big Bang. The first time she mentioned the world was made in seven days, I thought she was joking. She was dead serious. I couldn’t get my head around it, and she couldn’t get her head around the fact I didn’t believe this too. We argued, but you can’t get through to her. Even when the proof is right in front of her she refuses to see it. I mean, if humans and other living things existed in their present state since the beginning of time, how do you explain the variety of dogs and horses and other animals we’ve created through selective breeding?” He shrugged. “The neurons that fire together wire together.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The more you believe in something, the more that something becomes your reality. It’s probably why Pita’s so into ghosts. Part of it stems from her spirituality. But more, I think, stems from seeing her sister’s ghost, or thinking she did, at such a young age. She’s believed this for so long, that ghosts exist, she can’t change her beliefs. When her Yorkshire terrier died, she buried it in a pet cemetery in Vegas and packed its coffin with all sorts of things that it could use in its afterlife. I felt like we were back two thousand years in Ancient Egypt. And when her father died, she lit one of those candles for him at the bedroom window for a couple of months, every night.”

  “That’s not so strange,” Elizaveta said. “Many people do that. Pay respect to dead.”

  “Yeah, but Pita would actually sit there in front of it some nights. She said she was praying, but I’m pretty sure she was waiting for her father’s spirit to appear, like her sister’s supposedly did. Anyway, just a heads up. Don’t get sucked into a debate about the supernatural with her. You won’t win. You can’t.”

  “I guess that’s why Jesus agreed so easy.”

  Jack frowned. “Agreed to what?”

  “We’re having séance, Jack.”

  2

  They returned to the hut with the shrine to find everyone in a sober mood. Jesus and Pepper and Pita sat on the floor. Jesus’s face was impassive while Pita appeared both quietly angry and terrified. Pepper seemed to be dozing. Nitro stood by himself in a far corner, his back to everyone.

  Pita looked at Elizaveta. “Did you tell him?”

  She nodded.

  “Well?” Pita said to Jack, and it was almost a challenge.

  “We have all night and nothing to do.” He shrugged. “You want to hold a séance, let’s hold one. The question is, do you know how to?”

  “Pepper does. He performed one before on his show. He’ll be the medium.”

  Elizaveta had seen the episode of Mexico’s Scariest Places to which Pita was referring. It had focused on a haunted vicarage in Todo Santos, a small coastal town at the foothills of the Sierra de la Laguana Mountains. According to the locals Pepper interviewed, supernatural events had been documented there since the nineteen twenties when the chaplain, who kept a journal of the goings-on, claimed an unseen force would tear his laundry off the line and toss him out of his favorite chair. In the following decades several different priests claimed to have seen the apparition of an old woman dressed in gray. In the eighties, the vicarage was turned into a café, which included a guesthouse. One guest that Pepper tracked down said she had been staying in the guestroom in 1987 and was awoken in the middle of the night to find three old women staring at her. She turned on the light and could still see them for a few moments, though they were blurry, before they disappeared.

  Pepper and his crew held a séance in the guesthouse, which resulted in strange noises, automatic writing, and the table levitating. The Travel Network received close to one hundred complaints, mostly from religious groups that took offence to the show’s pagan subject matter.

  “Pepper?” Pita said. “Hey—are you sleeping? Wake up. You need to tell us what to do.”

  Pepper opened his eyes. Yes, he really didn’t look well, Elizaveta thought. His complexion remained grim, and his bouncy energy was gone. In fact, he seemed downright lethargic. She wondered whether he was drained from the ordeal of discovering Miguel’s body, or whether he had come down with something.

  Pepper cleared his throat and said, “First we need to decide who’s participating in the séance. The number must be divisible by three.”

  Pita counted everyone present. “Good, we have six!”

  “No,” Pepper said, shaking his head. “Rosa can’t participate. Children can’t participate.”

  “I’ll sit it out with h
er,” Jack said.

  Pita frowned. “That leaves us with four.”

  “Count me out too,” Nitro said.

  “So it’s just me, Pepper, and Jesus?” Pita shook her head. “No, the more participants the better. We can generate more psychic energy that way. Pepper, are you sure we can’t let Rosa join?”

  “Please?” Rosa said.

  “Oh…well…okay,” Pepper said, and he didn’t seem to care one way or another. He was definitely not in top showmanship form. “Now,” he went on, “spirits seek warmth and light. Candles would be best, but since we don’t have any, we’re going to have to improvise.” Moving slowly, like an old man with aching joints, he opened his bag and withdrew an LED lamp that could either be mounted on his video camera or held via a handle. He turned it on and set it in the middle of the floor, so it shot a beam of white light to the ceiling, scattering the shadows nesting there.

  Pita appeared dubious. “That doesn’t look very séance-like.”

  “It going to have to do. Also, we need food.”

  “Food?” Jesus said.

  “You don’t have incense, do you?”

  “No…”

  “So we need food, something with a strong aroma.”

  “I didn’t bring any food.”

  “I have vodka,” Jack said.

  Pita frowned at him. “Why do you have vodka?”

  “I brought it.”

  “You can’t go a day without alcohol?”

  Jack ignored that. “Will vodka work, Peps?”

  “Better than nothing.”

  Jack withdrew a bottle of vodka from his daypack, unscrewed the cap, and set the bottle next to the LED light.

  “The ghost is only a little girl, Pepper,” Pita said. “I don’t think she drinks vodka.”

  “She’s not going to drink it,” he told her curtly. “But the smell can help attract her.”

  Next, Pepper instructed them to form a circle and hold hands. Elizaveta sat between Jack and Rosa, Jack’s big hand in her left one, Rosa’s little hand in her right one. Pita was to Jack’s left, then Nitro, then Jesus, then Pepper.

  “To summon a spirit…” Pepper began, then frowned, as if he’d just realized something. He cleared his throat. “There might be a problem, Pita. To summon a spirit, you need the spirit’s name.”

  “But we don’t know the girl’s name,” she said.

  “We can’t summon her without a name.”

  “Well, that was a quick séance,” Jesus said, and started to stand.

  “Sit down, Jesus!” Pita said. “We’ll just make up a name. She’s the only ghost on this island, right?”

  Elizaveta was watching Pita, trying to figure out whether she was having a lark, or whether she truly believed they were about to summon the spirit of a little girl who died fifty years before.

  What was it Jack had said?

  The neurons that fire together wire together.

  “Why don’t we summon Solano instead?” Nitro offered as a solution to their dilemma. Elizaveta suspected he, like everyone else with the exception of Rosa, was playing along for Pita’s benefit. “He died here too.”

  Pita seemed to contemplate that, then shook her head. “No, I want to summon the girl. We’ll just call her…Candelaria. Is that okay, Pepper?”

  “Sure, Pita, why not?” he said. “Candelaria’s fine.”

  “You okay, Peps?” Jack asked him. “You’re not looking all that great.”

  “I’m just tired. I might lie down after this. Okay—we’re ready?”

  “Ready,” Pita said.

  “Ready!” Rosa said earnestly.

  Pepper offered a short prayer and a request for protection, told them to repeat after him, and said in a theatrical voice: “Spirit of the past, move among us.”

  They repeated: “Spirit of the past, move among us.”

  “Be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us.”

  “You couldn’t miss that light,” Jesus mumbled.

  “Quiet, Jesus!” Pita said.

  “People!” Pepper said. “Negative energy will dissuade the spirit. And try sounding a bit more respectful, like you’re inviting someone into your home.” He started from the beginning again: “Spirit of the past, move among us.”

  “Spirit of the past, move among us.”

  “Be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us.”

  “Be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us.”

  “Beloved Candelaria, be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us.”

  “Beloved Candelaria, be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us.”

  “Now close your eyes,” Pepper instructed them softly. “And wait.”

  Elizaveta closed her eyes. She half expected someone to scream, to try to scare them, but no one did. One minute stretched into two, then three.

  Finally she opened her eyes to peek at the others. Jesus and Nitro both had their eyes open as well. Jesus was screwing up his face, trying to make Nitro laugh.

  “Did you feel that?” Pepper said suddenly.

  “What? Pita breathed.

  “I felt a presence.”

  “I think I did too!”

  Elizaveta hadn’t felt anything. She closed her eyes again.

  “I think Candelaria’s spirit is with us,” Pepper said. He adopted the theatrical voice: “Our beloved Candelaria, thank you for joining us on this cold and wet evening. We are honored by your presence. We seek answers from the world you inhabit beyond the grave, and if you so choose to reply, please use one rap for ‘yes’ and two raps for ‘no.’” He whispered: “Okay, Pita. Ask your questions, but keep them simple.”

  “What should I ask?” She sounded unsure of herself.

  “How about next week’s lottery numbers?”

  “Jack!”

  “People!” Pepper said.

  “Our beloved Candelaria,” Pita said loudly, mimicking Pepper’s mannered intonation, “did you drown on this island fifty years ago?”

  There was no response.

  “Ask again,” Pepper said.

  Pita repeated the question.

  They waited in silence until Pepper whispered, “Did you hear that?”

  “Yes!” Pita said.

  Elizaveta did too. A knock on the exterior of the hut. A chill iced her spine, but she quickly chided herself. It was nothing but a doll blowing in the wind, a limb striking the wall. She didn’t know whether the dolls had been making these noises all along, though she suspected they had been; she simply hadn’t been listening for them. Yet Pepper would have been. It was likely why he suggested this method for communication.

  “Ask her another question,” Pepper said. “She might not remain for long.”

  “Our beloved Candelaria, is your spirit trapped on this island?”

  There was no response.

  “Ask again,” Pepper said.

  “Beloved Candelaria, is your spirit—”

  Knock.

  Pita gasped.

  Elizaveta opened her eyes. Everyone else had theirs closed now. Rosa’s were not merely closed but squeezed shut, as if she was terrified. Jack appeared bored, while Nitro and Jesus seemed to be biting back smiles.

  Pita’s face was a mask of concentration.

  Elizaveta closed her eyes.

  “Beloved Candelaria,” Pita went on, “are you responsible for the murder that occurred on this island?”

  More knocks.

  “Was that three?” Pita breathed.

  “It was two,” Elizaveta said.

  “It was three!” Rosa said.

  “Ask again,” Pepper said.

  “Beloved Candelaria, are you responsible for the murder that occurred on this island?”

  Two raps on the wall.

  “Beloved Candelaria, is the killer still on this island?”

  Silence.

  “Beloved Candelaria, is—”

  A clap of thunder, the loudest yet, exploded above them.

>   At the same time a doll began to cackle.

  3

  Everyone, Jesus with his sprained ankle included, sprang to their feet. Although dusk had descended while they’d participated in the séance, claiming the last of the daylight, Pepper’s LED lamp continued to illuminate the hut. Elizaveta was able to zero in on the laughing doll. “It’s that one!” she said, pointing a finger at a doll clad in a blue dress with white polka dots. Its lips seemed to be smeared with red lipstick.

  “Don’t touch it!” Pita said, her voice jumping to a soprano level. She backed toward the hut’s door. “It’s possessed! She’s in it! The girl’s in it! Don’t touch it!”

  Ignoring her hysterics, Nitro went to the doll.

  Jack grabbed Pita’s wrist as she passed him. “Calm down!” he said.

  “Don’t touch it!” she wailed.

  Nitro lifted the doll away from the wall and turned it over. He cried out and stepped back.

  Everyone started shouting, asking what happened.

  It was instant chaos.

  Pita tore loose from Jack and disappeared outside.

  Nitro was flapping his hands madly.

  “What happened?” Jack demanded.

  “It’s covered with spiders!” he said.

  Not understanding Nitro’s Spanish, Jack reached for the doll.

  “Jack, don’t!” Elizaveta said, hurrying toward him. “There are spiders!”

  He tugged his hand back. Together, they bent close to examine the doll. Dozens and dozens of tiny black spiders were scrambling out from beneath the dress.

  The doll continued to laugh.

  “Shut the fucking thing off!” Jesus said.

  Jack produced his Swiss Army knife and lifted the doll’s dress with the tip of the blade, revealing a cobweb that was as thick as cotton candy and crawling with more spiders.

  “Move back,” he told Elizaveta even as he cut the string from which the doll depended. It dropped to the floor. The impact sent spiders flying off it. Jack raised his foot and crushed the plastic torso where the electronics and battery would be located.

  The laughing stopped.

  4

  In the stunned silence that followed Pepper blurted, “What the hell just happened?”