by Leanne Leeds
“Let’s have a meeting in the big top,” I told the group.
“In the visible big top or the invisible big top?”
“I… the what now?
“Charlotte, Samson is ensuring that every single building in this place has a false front, essentially. Humans cannot go beyond that false front. Paranormals can, and it’s where most are currently hiding. Didn’t you notice when you came back over here that the circus essentially looked like a ghost town?”
“How does that keep suspicion down with the police, Uncle Phil?”
“Well, it is Texas, and it’s hot. I imagine if the police glanced over here, they would assume that everyone is inside or they left to go visit their own family.”
“My head hurts,” I told him.
“Snap out of it, Ringmaster,” he responded looking up at me. “This is likely the most risk that you’ve faced since being elevated to your position. I would highly suggest that you take it seriously.”
“Out of everything going on, everything that the Witches' Council is pulling, you think this is the most risk that we’ve faced?”
“Charlotte, the rule to not expose us to the human world is an old one, and a strong one. That is not some Witches' Council dictate. That is a separation of realities woven into the very fabric of our world. The humans cannot know for certain we exist.”
“Why?” I asked him.
He stared at me and blinked. Gunther and Fiona looked at each other uncomfortably.
“What do you mean, why?”
“I mean just what I said. Why? I know about the rule. I know that the rule is a big deal. I know humans being exposed to the fact that we exist is supposed to be dangerous. I’m just curious as to why.”
“Why? You want to know why?” Uncle Phil asked, getting even more agitated.
“Yes! It’s a simple question. Why is it so serious?”
“They would move against us, Charlotte,” Fiona said. “They moved against us before. It’s why we had to withdraw from the world and live in the shadows.”
“They don’t hunt down psychics in the streets anymore,” I pointed out. “Or drown women to find out if their witches.”
“It wasn’t as long ago as you might think that they did,” Uncle Phil argued back. “Once they found out our power and our riches, they would hunt us down like dogs in the street.”
“First, no one hunts down dogs in the street. Second, we don’t think very well of humanity, do we?”
“We have a reason not to think well of humanity, Charlotte,” Gunther pointed out. “We don’t have a very good history with humans.”
“I know that you’re fond of having these philosophical discussions, but do you think we could perhaps have them at another time when we were not under a cloud of human and paranormal suspicion?” Uncle Phil asked with exasperation.
“Sorry! It was just a question.”
“Question our reality at another time,” Uncle Phil said. “There’s one more thing.”
“What is it?”
“The dead girl’s ghost is in the haunted house, and she is not very happy about it.”
3
“Do you think he does that on purpose?” I asked Gunther as we hurried toward the haunted house.
“Does what?”
“Bury the lead. Wait to tell me the most important, most pressing piece of information until the very last part of the conversation.”
“I doubt that he thought Tiffany Drake’s ghost appearing in the haunted house was very important,” Gunther said as we walked. “After all, she’s dead, and we’re not here to solve a crime. We are here to make sure that we don’t get accused of a crime. Well, now, anyway.”
“Look, this is the world I grew up in. I realize in the paranormal world investigation is kind of whacked out, but the human world is pretty methodical about everything. You know what the easiest way is to stop the police from investigating?”
“What?”
“To have the murder case solved. That would make them go away. We have resources that they don’t have, so we may as well see what we can find out,” I told Gunther as I climbed the steps to the haunted house door. “At least it’s cool inside there. If the ghosts all gather around us, it will be positively balmy. We may even need a jacket.”
We slipped inside the always dark haunted house, and the quiet of the place wrapped around me. There was something about the Gothic decor and the Victorian era furnishings that made me feel at peace when I came in here. It seemed weird in a way because this was a totally legit haunted house. It was designed to be creepy, the place we sent the humans to be scared out of their wits.
For me, though, it felt like a church. Quiet, peaceful, dark and serene.
“You came for the new ghost!” little Anna squealed as she popped into visibility in front of me. Gunther jumped and slammed against the wall in surprise.
“Gunther, this is Anna. Anna, this is my boyfriend, Gunther,” I said as I introduced them. “Anna was one of the first ghosts that I met when I came to the Magical Midway.”
“How do you do, Anna,” Gunther said with a small bow.
“How do I do what?” Anna asked him, tilting her head in confusion.
“It’s just a way of saying that it’s nice to meet you,” Gunther responded with a chuckle.
“Oh! Good. It’s nice to meet you, too, even though I’ve heard you talk, and I’ve heard you talking and talking about Charlotte, and I know you like her a whole lot,” Anna said pointing her little hands at his chest. “She likes you a lot, too. Are you going to have babies? I think it would be cool to have babies. No one’s had babies in a while.”
Gunther smiled widely.
“Anna, where is your mom?” I asked quickly, cutting the little girl off before that conversation went further.
Thank goodness it was dark in here and no one could see me blushing.
“Mama said she can’t come down,” Anna told me seriously. “She has to stay upstairs because of Gunther. But I’m supposed to tell you she has to stay upstairs because she doesn’t feel well, and not tell you that it’s because of Gunther,” Anna finished. Then the little girl tilted her head and put her tiny hand over her mouth. “Oops. I didn’t do that right, did I? Mama said I need to think before I speak more.”
“You did fine, Anna. Tell your mom I hope she feels better.”
I wondered why Gerda couldn’t come down because Gunther was in the haunted house. Was there some problem between the matronly ghost and the Makepeace Circus? As I went over my previous interactions with Gerda, I suddenly realized how little the spirit had shared with me about her own history.
“I will. Are you here about Tiffany?”
“I am. You said you had a new ghost. Did she come here?”
Anna made a face as if she sucked on a lemon and nodded.
“She’s mean. She’s mean to everybody. Sometimes when new ghosts show up I don’t understand why they had to become ghosts when they became ghosts,” the little girl said. “It’s sad, you know? But Charlotte?”
“Yes?”
“I totally understand why someone would want her a ghost. I sure do.”
“Has she said anything about who wanted to make her a ghost?”
“She’s mad at them,” Anna responded. “She’s upset they made her face look funny. Like, really upset.”
“Did she say who made her face look funny?”
“She didn’t see them,” she said while shaking her head no. “She was stuck for a while, and when she finally popped out, there wasn’t anybody there anymore.”
“Stuck?” Gunther asked.
“She probably wasn’t killed instantly,” I told him. “My guess is it took some time for her to pass away, and by the time she left her body the person that killed her was gone. It doesn’t take that long to run out of the area where she was killed.”
“She said she was very surprised,” Anna told us. “She didn’t see anyone come up to her. Well, no one was there besides the pe
ople that were looking to adopt the doggies.”
“Did she say how many people were there in the kennel at the time?”
“She thought they had all left.”
“Don’t your parents require a sign in to go back to the kennels?” Gunther asked.
“No, we never have,” I told Gunther. “They can’t take them out of the kennels without someone from the shelter unlocking the door, so there never seemed to be a reason for it. Once they decide they want to meet a dog, then we get their information. That way anyone can go back there and just look. We try to make it easy for folks.”
“Can’t your dad just ask the dogs?”
“I imagine he has,” I told him. “When I left him this morning, I wasn’t planning on looking into this, though, so I didn’t ask. We probably should swing by there after this. I didn’t get there early enough to hear what he told Kyle, so I’m not sure.”
“Kyle?”
“The detective.”
“You’re on a first name basis with the detective?” Gunther raised his eyebrow.
“Would you quit? I went to high school with the guy.”
“I saw the big detective, and he’s a cutie patootie,” Anna unhelpfully added. “He’s big and handsome!”
“You know, for a little girl, you notice some seriously inappropriate things,” I told her.
“After five hundred years I know when someone is cute,” she told me crossing her arms. “Like him, he’s cute,” she pointed at Gunther.
“Thank you, Anna, I appreciate the compliment,” he said and smiled at her. “I think, though, it would be really helpful if you took us to go meet Tiffany.”
“Ugh. You really want to meet her? She’s really really not nice,” Anna warned us again. “If she didn’t die and she became a grown-up? She would have been a very mean lady.”
“Yep, I think we need to. Can we come in?”
Anna sighed. She nodded and walked toward the threshold that led to the interior part of the walkthrough haunted house. “Follow me. I know where she was last throwing a fit. She throws long fits, so I bet she’s still there.”
The haunted house was set up so that patrons entered in and were led through all the rooms of a rickety old Victorian-era mansion. Each chamber was elaborately decorated, and humans were funneled through the consecutive spaces by a maze-like path. Each area, of course, was manned by one or more ghosts that did their best to make visitors scream in fright.
When the ride was closed, the haunted house was merely the house where the ghosts lived. Aside from the Victorian furnishings, thick soundproofed walls, and darkness, it resembled a frat house. Well, if they had frat houses in the Victorian era.
“They did,” Gunther said.
“They did what?”
“Have fraternities in the Victorian era. The first frat in the United States was founded in 1825. I read a human book on it once.”
I stopped walking and turned to stare at Gunther in shock.
“What?” he asked, concerned.
“How did you know I was thinking about that?”
“What are you talking about? I heard you. You were talking about how this resembled a frat house.”
“No, I wasn’t,” I insisted. “I was thinking about it, but I didn’t say anything out loud.”
“Of course you did! I heard you clear as a bell,” Gunther said, stepping closer to me.
“Gunther, I swear to you, I didn’t say anything about it out loud. I’m not messing around with you. I was thinking it as we walked through the haunted house, but I never said any of what I was thinking out loud at all,” I told him.
“I think you have new powers, too,” Anna said.
“What do you mean, new powers?” Gunther asked the little girl.
“Well, we can pop all over the place and be invisible now,” Anna said after she stopped and turned to face us. “One day all the ghosts just woke up and we could do it again. Mama said we used to be able to do it and then we couldn’t do it anymore, and now we can do it again. So maybe you used to be able to read minds, and then you couldn’t, and now you can!”
“I’m not sure it’s related, but Anna has a point,” Gunther said. “I did go from being a half-witch to a full witch. We were dealing with so much that I never really stopped and explored what that might mean. Maybe I did get new powers out of it.”
“It seems really strange that it would just happen now,” I pointed out. “Why couldn’t you pick up on what I was thinking before this?”
“Honestly, Charlotte, this may very well be the quietest moment we’ve had since I transitioned,” Gunther smiled. “Maybe I just needed to be somewhere calm and peaceful for it to bubble up and happen.”
“You and I have had quiet moments together. I mean, we spent a lot of time in the yurt together just you and me.”
“Yes, but I couldn’t really say that I was relaxed during a lot of those moments.”
I blushed.
Gunther tended to cover his nerves really well, then. It was sweet that he was nervous around me. Even so, I had a nagging feeling that his sudden ability to read my mind wasn’t just a new power he picked up after he became a full witch.
“Well, maybe I’ll be able to teach you a thing or two for a change,” I told him. “In any case, we probably need to put this aside and deal with it later. Oh, and Gunther? Stay out of my head.”
“Um. I’m not sure I know how to do that,” Gunther admitted as we began walking again.
“Well, that’s the first thing you’re going to learn,” I told him. “Fortuna should be able to help, too.”
I added helping Gunther control his mind, so he didn’t rummage willy-nilly through people’s heads to my long list of things I needed to do.
Tiffany Drake was more than mad.
Tiffany Drake was enraged.
The blonde girl was shrieking at the three ghosts that circled her. They pleaded with her to calm down so they could talk to her, but she simply screamed back at them.
“I’m 19 years old! I’m not supposed to be dead! I’m certainly not supposed to be stuck in some old, dark, horribly dirty house with a bunch of nerdy ghosts that are pretending they walked out of history! I want to talk to my father!”
Pictures rattled on the wall, and a lamp crashed to the floor.
If the young woman’s face could change color, it would likely be red. Walking into the room, I was grateful for the absence of her body. She rushed me so fast and screamed so loud that I likely would have been covered in spittle if she had a mouth.
“Get me out of here! These stupid idiots told me you were in charge! I don’t know what you people have done to me, but I absolutely and completely refuse to be dead! I haven’t even graduated from college yet! Take me to my father, and he can fix all of this!”
“Tiffany, my name is Charlotte Astley, and if you don’t calm down none of us will be able to help you,” I told her in as soothing a voice as I could muster while being shrieked at. “I am very sorry about the day that you had, but Gunther and I are here to try and help you.”
“Help me with what? I’m a bloody ghost!”
“Well, you’re not bloody,” Anna matter-of-factly told her. “We can make ourselves look scary and bloodied, but we don’t have any skin. Or blood. So no one is really a bloody ghost.”
“Someone shut that stupid child up,” Tiffany snapped.
“Hey now, let’s dial it back a little, huh, sister?” I told the angry sorority girl a little more sternly. “There’s no reason to be rude or mean to anyone in this room. We are not responsible for the fact that you’re here, and we are trying to help you.”
“How do I know that you’re not responsible for me being dead? I don’t know who killed me. It could have been you. It could have been any of you! I want my father!” Tiffany screeched again as she paced around the room, her translucent hands balled into fists.
I suspected that the shouting, mumbling, and pacing would continue unabated. The girl just did not wa
nt to accept what had happened to her, and she was unwilling to calm down to listen. A wall of denial was being thrown off in every direction.
“Can you send Samson to get your mother? Maybe she can calm a ghost down,” Gunther said.
“No, we can’t bother Samson while he’s holding the illusion. Why don’t you go and get my mother? I don’t know if her power works on ghosts, but it seems to work on everything else, so it’s worth a shot. We're not going to get anything out of Tiffany like this, and her current state isn’t doing her any good, either.”
“Charlotte?” I heard my mother call.
“We’re back here, Mom,” I called back.
As my mother stepped into the room, Tiffany whirled on her. Shaking a pointed finger, she screeched even louder. “This is all your fault! I told you that I didn’t want to work in the back room! I told you! You made me do it and now look what happened! I’m dead and trapped in some kind of circus hell-scape!”
“You know, no one invited you here, young lady,” one ghost snapped at her. “You made your way to our house all on your own.”
“I know, right?” Anna agreed with her. The older and younger ghosts crossed their arms judgmentally at the newest member of their little house.
“Tiffany, I am so terribly sorry that this happened to you,” my mother told the girl in a soothing voice I recognized from my teenage tantrum phase. “This is our family circus, and as a ghost, you would have likely chosen to come here on your own even if you’re not fully aware of why.”
“I would never come to this filthy place! I live in a mansion, summer in Paris, and spend my Saturdays at a country club! I would most certainly never choose to come to a place like this!” Tiffany’s voice was still louder than would be appropriate for conversation, but I could see the rage slowly draining from her.
“Well, I never!” the older ghost standing next to Anna exclaimed. She and the other two ghosts that had been attempting to get through to Tiffany floated over to, and then through, the wall.
