River of Ghosts (Haunted Florida Book 2)

by Gaby Triana

  Linda held out her hand to me, so I would help her up. I guided her to the side of the house that seemed driest, all the while I couldn’t believe this was happening. Having a séance, a communication circle of the dead, in a murder house during a thunderstorm. Good God.

  Linda sensed my trepidation. “The faster we do this, the faster we go home, right?” She patted my hand. “I’m so sorry we brought you into this, Avila.”

  “It’s fine,” I said though it wasn’t. Why did I always insist things were fine when they weren’t? Evil was going to come pouring into this house faster than a waterfall of shit.

  Kane gave orders to the crew who quickly set up their cameras and voice recorders and other tech stuff. I heard BJ telling Kane that the one camera which had malfunctioned earlier was still acting wonky though better than before. “Lock off the cam,” Kane told him. “We’ll need to open the aperture wide and boost two-stops. Drop some cans against the wall with some low red splash.”

  Quinn pulled a plastic film out of a bag, unfolded, and proceeded to place it on top of the camera, which he set up on a tripod. About ten minutes later, they were ready for their circle of death, and I wanted to scream, This is not a good idea! Maybe in a peaceful home with a mischievous spirit whose name you wanted to know, but not here. Not at Villegas House.

  What if we called the murderer through?

  I had zero say. I sat as far back from the circle as I could blending into the gray pall of the house. I didn’t even so much as want my skin touching the walls if I could help it, so I lingered on the fringe. Clutching my gator tooth necklace, head atop my knees, I watched in silence. Maybe Linda was right and this was best. It would satisfy the crew’s curiosity, give Sharon whatever the heck she was looking for, and be easy to produce into an episode. They could take footage of the séance and edit it into an easy, hour-long show later on without having to stay another full day.

  We could leave by morning.

  Linda rummaged through the bag Eve had handed her and began taking out what appeared to be a sage smudge wand, an abalone shell, little figurines of various saints, a white pillar candle, and a lighter. Once she lit the candle and gave Kane a nod, he turned off his flashlight and everyone fell into a circle with Linda. Taking the smudge wand and dipping it into the flame, Linda blew out the end and the wand smoked beautifully. Droplets of rain played at the edges of the candle.

  “Smoke of air, fire of earth, cleanse and bless this home and hearth…” She chanted off a simple prayer that had me feeling like it wouldn’t be enough to conquer the dark entities I was feeling here. “Drive away all harm and fear…only good may enter here.”

  She called to Archangel Michael for protection and summoned the help of Archangel Gabriel for clear communication, as the smudge stick got passed around and everyone had a hand in sage-ing themselves and the circle as it made its way back to Linda. Around me, I felt a lightness of being, like that of someone kind and gentle, but it could’ve been psychological or the spirit of my little brother again.

  “Billie, if you’re here, please go,” I whispered. “I don’t want you here.”

  Nothing came to me, and a moment later, the safe feeling was gone, replaced by a heaviness filled with sadness and guilt. So much for sage. I held onto my charm for protection. Grandfather, please, keep me safe.

  “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” Linda said, opening up her towel and pulling out a small cross. She held it up to the ceiling. I closed my eyes. I was Christian—many of us were from years of private schooling—and the prayer felt protective.

  Around me, the atmosphere grew heavier, darker. To the naked eye, nothing had changed, but I felt unseen presences flowing through the room like floodwaters reaching every corner. I swore on my life, on my brother’s life that when I got back home, I would never mess with the supernatural again. The core of my body trembled as though I were caught stuck in a meat locker. With eyes closed, I felt more sensitive to the energies, so I reopened them.

  The camera’s red light blinked steadily.

  “We ask for protection and implore that any spirits in this home, please come forth and tell us your name.” Linda put down the cross and joined hands with Kane to her left and Sharon to her right, as everyone else held hands to form a circle.

  For a whole minute, nobody spoke or moved.

  The candle flickered gently, though outside was still pouring and rogue drafts blew randomly through the house. The smoke from the sage wand billowed gently, creating a haze in the air above their heads.

  “If you can hear me,” Linda said, “please come forward and tell us your name.”

  We waited. I knew where it was. Right in middle of the room. Though I couldn’t see it, I felt its hatred. Overwhelming, angry, and now…ticked off that we were summoning it.

  “You…”

  From thin air, a voice spoke in a low, dull thrum. It felt male and old.

  I wanted to DIE just like the spirit had asked of us.

  The crew all looked at each other making sure none of them had spoken. Please, God, no, God no, God no… This couldn’t have been happening. There couldn’t be an actual male voice belonging to none of us channeling through Linda’s lips. I was living a nightmare. Watching Linda, I saw her lips move in time with the voice that was not hers, not anybody’s.

  “Get out. Don’t you know when you’re not wanted? GET OUT!”

  The voice coming from Linda Hutchinson’s lips didn’t sound human. I covered my ears, shook my head. God, please make it stop… They weren’t faking this.

  “Why do you want us to get out? If we do that, how will we ever help you?” Sharon wanted to know.

  “It doesn’t want our help. It wants us dead,” I muttered, gripping the gator tooth charm.

  “Keep rolling,” Kane mumbled, one eye on DJ. “You gettin’ this?”

  BJ nodded, his mouth agape, as he stared forward.

  Every single one of the crew members startled and adjusted their seating, clearly uncomfortable. DJ’s forehead had broken out into huge beads of sweat, Quinn shook his head angrily, and Kane and Eve exchanged confused glances across Linda’s body.

  Sharon cleared her throat. “Who are you? Why do you want us to leave?”

  No response.

  We all watched as Linda’s head hung back, her chin tilted into the air, as a line of saliva slowly dripped from her mouth. Slowly, she began to tremble until she was shaking, convulsing, yet nobody would help her. I wanted to leap forward and assist her but did not want to enter their sacred circle.

  “Maybe we should end this,” I suggested. “She’s not well. This isn’t right,” I said louder. It didn’t look right to have an older woman shaking that way with her neck loose, nor to have these people abusing her abilities and kindness this way. “Hello? Anybody hear me?”

  Only Eve looked my way, but her expression was one of helplessness. She seemed to agree with me, sympathized but didn’t make the decisions, and everyone else was hell-bent on going through with this. I would rather go back outside in the rain. I would rather deal with my own personal demons haunting the woods than this.

  “You are not safe here,” another voice spoke from Linda’s mouth. This one had an English accent, and I immediately knew it could only be that of Gregory Rutherford who’d been murdered here.

  “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…” Eve murmured, and I crossed myself. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you…” All her catechism came pouring out of her, as she randomly rambled prayers out loud. I was grateful for them.

  “Cursed woman…” the first voice continued in its raspy tone. “Leave now.”

  “We will leave when you tell us what happened here,” Sharon said, holding tightly onto Kane and Quinn’s hands.

  “Cursed woman. It was you…”

  “Who are you talking about, spirit? Or are you a demon?” Sharon asked.

  Spirit, demon—did it matter? The
re was no body, no face, no eyes, but I felt like he—IT—was talking about me.

  “You must go. It’s not safe,” Rutherford pled with us from beyond.

  I felt something surround me, a cold breeze followed by a dark shadow that crossed in front of me and swirled into the middle of the circle forming a vortex that spun faster with every second. The darkness reminded me of the energy I had seen as a child. It was here—it wanted me.

  Sharon ignored the environmentalist spirit’s request. “Were you murdered? Or were you the murderer? Tell us then we’ll leave.” Sharon spoke for Linda who was no longer in control, her soul having been overtaken by someone…something. Grabbing the pencil on the table, she again gripped it like a four-year-old might and again scribbled on the bare floor of the house like she had on her crossword puzzle.

  “What does it say?” Eve asked, tears in her eyes.

  Vulnerable in my corner of the room, I moved closer to the circle, peeking to see what Linda was writing. Sharon shot me a look. I didn’t care if my presence was disturbing the energies or disrupting the séance, I needed to see what she wrote.

  DIE DIE DIE… Linda scribbled without looking at her words, her body continuing to convulse harder and harder.

  CYPRESS

  CYPRESS

  CYPRESS.

  What? No.

  “I think we should stop,” Kane said, looking at me. His hands still held onto Linda’s arm and Sharon’s hand.

  “Not until he answers us!” Sharon shouted.

  Who was the boss here—Kane or Sharon? What the hell was this woman thinking, and why was Linda writing my name? I couldn’t hold it anymore and let out tears of frustration that welled up and spilled over.

  “Tell us what happened here, spirit, and we will leave! Who are you?”

  “I’m out of here.” I stood and stepped to the front door. Who would know my name in this place except my grandfather? Could my grandfather be trying to contact me, and this demon wasn’t letting it?

  “Don’t move!” Sharon shouted at me. “It’s trying to scare you.”

  I nearly went back and slapped her. She was nobody to tell me what to do, especially not now when I didn’t feel safe, when I feared for my life. “Yeah, well, it’s doing a great job.”

  “I have forgotten my name,” the spirit uttered then shouted, “I won’t tell you again!” Nameless spirit opened Linda’s mouth wide and from where I stood, a dark cloud of energy emerged from her cracked, dry lips tinged with pink old-lady lipstick. It rose into the air and slammed into the ceiling, knocking a loose beam onto the ground, inches from DJ.

  Our screams echoed off the walls, as we scattered. We covered our heads, dispersing and breaking the circle. Enough was enough, and I hated Sharon for forcing the issue when it became clear that we shouldn’t have been meddling to begin with.

  “Fuck…” Kane breathed into his hands, looked away, then breathed nervously into them again. He crouched to the ground and placed his hand on Linda’s back, checking her breathing. She had slumped forward, her face pushed into the cracked wooden floor of the house. He pulled her up by the shoulders, checked her breathing.

  Limp, motionless.

  My stomach gripped around a knot in my core.

  Kane’s fingers pressed against her pulse points on her neck. No reaction. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I think she’s dead.”

  THIRTEEN

  Yes, she was.

  I knew, because I saw it—the familiar soft light rising out of the old woman’s body into the ceiling, same as I’d seen the night when my little brother had passed. She was gone—Linda was gone, and we were all to blame.

  Especially me.

  I hadn’t argued with them enough, hadn’t warned them enough, not that they would’ve listened. I’d tried but they blew me off.

  “Dead?” Sharon lay her down flat on her back. The woman’s body fell limp. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean dead, Sharon! What the hell else do you think I mean?” Kane shouted, then began pacing in a circle to calm himself down before crouching beside Linda’s body again. “Jesus Christ.”

  Eve threw her arm around her husband’s shoulders. “Babe, don’t. Let’s think about this for a second.”

  Kane nodded in quick succession.

  “Check her breathing, Sharon,” Quinn said.

  “I already checked it,” Kane told her. “CPR…who knows CPR?”

  “Nobody. Jesus…” BJ turned his back to us and rocked back and forth.

  Sharon tilted back Linda’s head, opened her airways and prepared to administer CPR while Quinn attempted chest compressions. There was no point to any of this, because I’d seen her spirit leave. I crossed my fingers anyway, hoping I was wrong and had seen a trick of the light.

  They did everything they could do, while Kane and I attempted over and over to get a signal on our phones to call emergency services, but the storm was too heavy and service had been shitty out here to begin with.

  Damn. We shouldn’t have come out. All signs pointed to staying away, to warning us it was a bad idea, but this was what happened when six stubborn people got together and tempted fate.

  Quinn stopped with the compressions, as Sharon stopped with trying to reactivate Linda’s lungs. “Lord have mercy,” she said, sitting back on her heels. For the first time, she was quiet and resigned. “In the good Lord Jesus’s name, Amen.” She gestured the sign of the cross over Linda’s body. “I can’t believe this…”

  “What do we do now?” Eve pressed back tears with the palms of her hands.

  “That’s it. We’re done,” Kane said. “Let’s pack it up, get Linda back to the Indian village or Miami. From there, we’ll call an ambulance. Game over, y’all.”

  “In this storm?” Quinn asked. The man of few words said exactly what I was thinking. It’s be better to pack it up and wait, then leave.

  “What else are we going to do?” Kane asked, his agitation rising once again.

  “He’s right, though,” I said. “We can’t go back until the rain is over. Airboats are light. They can’t handle conditions like this.”

  Eve knotted her sweaty locks into a tight bun on top of her head. “Then we have to cover her, keep her comfortable until the rain stops. Let’s pack it up while we’re waiting for the storm to blow over. When it does, we leave.”

  Besides the glaring error that Linda would no longer have a need for comfort, Eve was right. All we could do for now was pack this party up. I watched as Eve held Linda’s limp hand and shed tears for the woman.

  “Exactly,” I said, sorry that it took the death of a lovely woman to realize this. We all looked at Linda’s body—a dead body right there in the middle of the floor. A woman we all knew, who’d been breathing and talking moments before, now lying lifeless. It was surreal and nobody would mention the elephant in the room.

  Why had she collapsed? What had caused it?

  “It was nobody’s fault,” Kane assured us. “Got it? The situation was stressful. Her heart naturally gave out. We all know she had a heart condition.”

  She’d a heart condition. Disease… Yet they’d allowed her to come on this investigation? Wasn’t that selfish and irresponsible, even if she had insisted on helping them?

  Only Eve and Sharon nodded in agreement. Quinn seemed to think otherwise from his grim thin-lipped stance, but kept it quiet, and BJ was busy rocking himself in the corner, like a mental patient at Briarcliff Manor. “The spirit killed her…” he mumbled.

  “BJ, you got something to say, buddy?” Kane asked, hands on his hips.

  “I said the spirit killed her,” the man said louder, still rocking back and forth. “She warned us to stay away but we kept going and going, then it warned us that someone would die, and someone did!” He was shouting by the end.

  “No, bro, that’s not what happened. You know damn well the spirits can’t hurt us,” Kane said.

  “If they can’t hurt us, then why do we burn sage?” BJ asked through tear-st
ained face. “Why is there footage and photos of us with scratches on our arms and backs? Savannah Garden House, anyone?” He’d turned around now and was eyeing the group with anger in his red-rimmed bright eyes. I couldn’t remember what had happened on the Savannah Garden House episode. “You say they can’t hurt us, yet they do. And now look what happened.”

  “No, BJ,” Eve continued with the theory she and Kane were selling. “She was old, and her heart gave out.”

  But there was truth in BJ’s words. The spirit did warn us that someone would die.

  Shit. Shit, shit.

  I felt his pain as though it were my own, or maybe I felt exactly as he did, like getting the hell of this island and feeling trapped. There was nothing we could do at the moment, however, and standing around arguing wasn’t helping. I stood and charged to the nearest pile of tech gear, lifting random things off the ground and stuffing them in bags.

  “What are you doing?” Quinn asked.

  “Packing.”

  “That’s not where that goes,” he said.

  “Then put it where it goes,” I stammered, shooting him a severe look. “We need to pack while it’s raining so the moment it stops, we can get out of here. If you’re not ready by the time the sun is up and the rains have stopped, I’m leaving without you all.”

  I threw down a boom I was holding and stormed off to find my own things somewhere in this evil house, make sure they were ready to go. I packed Linda’s things as well, finding her crossword puzzle and stopped cold. In the corner of the page, she’d created a beautiful sketch of a young woman. Hair floating in the wind, gauzy dress billowing behind her.

  The woman from the woods.

  In the opposite corner of the page, connected with tendrils of smoke to the woman in the dress was another woman who looked a lot like me—long, straight black hair loose over my shoulders, medium build, stocky, not very romantic by comparison but just as proud. Hanging around my neck was my necklace with little lines coming out of it as though it emitted power of its own.

  I placed the crossword book inside my own backpack to further examine later.