by Gaby Triana
I held my breath and hoped it would pass right over me.
But the shape floated toward me from the center of the room. I wanted to run but couldn’t move. Frozen, all I could do was stand and watch, my lungs seizing breath, my feet rooted to the floor.
“What do you want? Why won’t you leave us alone?” I asked.
I could ask you the same.
“You’re not living anymore,” I tried reasoning, watching the cloud creep closer. The hairs on my arms stood up, as its chilly gale blew over me. “You don’t need a home. You can go. Go anywhere you want.”
Who decides this? You? He laughed a cackling sound that would haunt me for the rest of my life. It resonated through the house, shaking the walls and my inner core. A house built with remnants of my own. No one asked permission. They took what didn’t belong.
“Because you died. The things you leave behind are no longer yours.”
Like the talisman around your neck.
I fingered the tooth charm, nearly yanked it off my neck as I finally backed away from the form. Was this activating the unwanted spirit activity all along? I nearly ripped it off me, if it meant not having to see or hear these ghosts anymore.
No, stop, Avila.
Linda’s spirit was nearby, talking to me.
It serves you.
It didn’t serve me! Nothing about the spirit world had ever served me! And the one time I thought it would was this time I followed a production crew out to Villegas House, and now I was stuck here with them. Stuck in my house of nightmares.
One slow step at a time, I backed into the hallway, the fuming black cloud cornering me. If I tried to run, I knew it would attack me and last thing I wanted was to become the third death of the day. “This used to be my grandfather’s but he’s no longer here,” I told the spirit. “Just like this house should be someone else’s. You are the one who needs to leave.”
I will not. My home was fractured, hacked, repurposed.
“I’m sorry that happened to you, but you’re free to move wherever you want.”
I do not nor can I.
“You can if you want to. Accept, forgive, and love. Didn’t you love anyone? You can go find them.” I tried. I tried words and phrases to reason with this spirit, but I felt its pain and anguish, and it wasn’t easy to digest.
My only love was the sea, and I cannot reach her. I am cursed.
He spoke without a voice. To any of the others, I was upstairs talking to myself, yet I heard him clearly in my mind, no English words, just universal language, meaning, thought. And here he was, telling me he’d loved the sea. Well, that made sense for a spirit trapped on a peninsula surrounded by ocean. But whoever he was, he was in pain. He’d done terrible things in life and being stuck in this house was his punishment. He’d paid that price many, many times over and over again through the years.
I wanted to help him. I really did but I wasn’t a medium, a healer, or anyone who could guide him. I had my own life to worry about. Besides, this primordial entity didn’t want to be helped. He was a demon, a beast now, a spirit out of touch with his original humanity.
“What’s your name?” I asked, stumbling backwards further down the hallway.
The entity hovered closer, bearing down on me. It’d pushed me up against the hallway wall, a few feet from the stairwell. I turned my face when I felt it approach, felt the sour breath of rot and decay and salt coming from the misty being, or it could’ve been the corpse’s stench emanating all the way up the stairs. My little brother had disappeared. It hurt me that he had to exist on the same plane as this thing, whoever he’d been in life.
I am no one.
“If you’re no one, then you don’t need to live here.”
I live here because it is no place. No man’s land.
No one and no place belong together. We are both forsaken.
“Tell me your name,” I demanded. If only I could wield its name, I might be able to guide it out of this dimension. Linda kept telling me not to be afraid, but how could I not when a massive oppressive spirit slowly, menacingly, kept aiming its focus on me?
I am he who rules all who live here—the huntsman, the bird man, your diplomat grandfather—all who dare call themselves captain. There is only room for one aboard this ship. Extensions of mist ejected from the sides of the shape and now began encircling me.
Ship? “This is a house, not a ship.”
Planks from my wreckage serve as the foundation for this place. A captain must never abandon his ship. Therefore I must stay. There is only room for one. Leave or serve me.
I watched in horror as this shape continued to bear down on me. I felt the choking waters of the salty sea suffocate my lungs, the acrid smoke of his last battle burning my eyes, tasted the blood of those he’d eradicated on the same beams of wood supporting what was left of this structure.
This had once been a ship—a pirate ship.
And the suffering soul was a captain I’d talked about countless times—Bellamy.
For so long, I’d assumed the tale of the pirate ship doomed to roam the Everglades was just a tale, a ghost story to recount around a campfire or an airboat full of tourists at dusk. But legends are born from truth and truths are born from facts. It’d never occurred to me to research and see if Bellamy and the Vanquish had been a factual vessel that had sailed.
“Captain Bellamy of the Vanquish,” I called on him. “That’s who you are.”
Blasphemer! Where did you hear that name?
The angry spirit whirled around me, lifting my hair in a harsh tug, raising my feet off the ground. I was rising, being taken, rather, higher up the wall until my head smacked against the ceiling. My skull banged against the wood, and I felt a surge of pain bolt through my spine. One more hard shove, and my neck would split in half.
He was pissed because I knew him.
Undo this curse, wench!
“I can’t. I don’t know how,” I said, gasping for breath. Did he think I was the woman who cursed him to begin with? My vision and lungs choked with smoke and stench. I felt like I’d been dropped in the middle of an ocean battle between ships, and I was being forced to walk the plank while breathing sulfuric acid. But how? Like my other visions, it had happened centuries ago, not today.
I had power over him, because I was real and corporeal. He existed no longer and couldn’t do this to me unless I allowed it. “You cannot hurt me, Bellamy,” I insisted.
Undo this curse, I say!
“Put me down…or…I won’t help you!” I sputtered. Suddenly, my body dropped and fell to the floor. The force of my fall ripped open a rotten hole, and my leg sank through the gaping hole down to my knee. In pain, I yanked it out, got to my feet, and stumbled to the stairs. I began hobbling down, desperate to get outside. Where had everyone been while I’d practically choked to death?
I hit a solid real body at the foot of the steps—Sharon.
“Move,” I grunted, shoving her. She cursed, stumbled to her knees, then stood again, following me outside. Even the rain felt good, as I tilted up my chin to the sky and felt the very real water pelting my face. Kane had been outside, ripping wood off a weak section of wall and Eve was doing her best to help him.
“What is your problem, Cypress?” Sharon asked.
I faced her. Why the hell hadn’t the captain’s spirit pestered her instead of me? Clearly, she was the one who thought herself the leader, the captain of this group, so why me?
He thinks you’re the Red Witch, Billie said. He was still here. My little brother still lingered, though I couldn’t see him.
“Who the hell is the Red Witch?” I asked.
The one in your story—the one who cursed him.
That was ridiculous. How could I be Maria Pilar Carmona, the wife of the Spanish captain who created the curse? I lived three hundred years later and looked nothing like her.
Sharon winced. “Red Witch? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I wasn’t talking to you.
And my problem is that you have not once tried to be a team player. Instead of asking me what’s wrong, you ask my problem. Instead of saying what a great idea making the raft is, you tell us we’re out of our minds. It’s like you can’t stand not being in control.”
“This show was my conception, Cypress, or did you not know that? I hired Kane to produce it, but this and every investigation we’ve ever been on was my idea—my stupid crusade to find answers. So, yeah, I am in control.”
“Well, then you suck at it significantly. People in charge make decisions for the good of everybody. Whereas every decision you’ve made so far has been for yourself.”
Sharon cracked her neck and took deliberate slow toward me. I stood my ground and refused to be moved aside again as the ghost upstairs had done, but the black cloud of energy had widened and spread until I felt like he enveloped the whole house.
“This whole trip was for me, Avila. Kane works for me, Linda works for me…”
“Worked for you. Not anymore, you killed her. How many people are you going to sacrifice until you get your answers? What are you looking for anyway?”
“That’s between me and the house, sister.”
“Then talk to the house, not me…sister.”
“You are my link to the house,” Sharon said. “I can’t talk to the spirits like you can.”
Two people had died, one had abandoned ship, and she still wanted to talk to spirits. She still wanted to bring the unnatural world into this.
“There’s four of us here, Sharon, and three of us want to get off this island. Meanwhile you want to commune with ghosts.” I laughed. Of course the host of the ghost show still wanted to commune with ghosts. Just like every ghost host I’d ever seen on TV, they rested at nothing until they got that golden nugget—the holy grail—the full body apparition.
Sharon’s nose moved inches from mine. I looked into her steel blue eyes, eyes that would’ve been beautiful, reflective of a summer sky had there been less anger in her heart. “What did the entity tell you? I heard you talking to it.”
“Nothing to do with you.”
“Everything to do with me!” she screamed, lines around her eyes deepening as her temper grew. She chuckled, caught herself, calmed down. “I need to know what happened here.”
“If I knew, I would tell you,” I said, doing my best to get away from this crazy woman. I slipped out the door into the refreshing darkness of the outer part of the house to find Kane. I needed to know where the shotgun was without asking him in front of Sharon, but she’d followed me around the side of the house. I needed to feel safe. “Leave me alone.”
“Sure I’ll leave you alone.”
Sharon stopped in her tracks, as though Kane, Eve, and I had grown an electric force field over the last few seconds. She looked past me. I checked behind me to see what she was looking at. It was too dark to see anything. Shaking her head, Sharon took two steps back then headed inside.
“Holy Jesus,” I said to Kane whose shirt was tied around his head. He stopped, wiped sweat from his face, grimacing. “I heard shouting. What’s up?”
“What’s going on with that woman?” I pointed in the direction of the house. He knew who I was talking about because there was only one highly exasperating woman in Villegas House. “I know she came here on a mission, but the history of this place is now the last thing we need to worry about. Why are you out here at night, by the way? It’s pure darkness.”
The moment I spotted the good pile of planks on the ground, I understood why.
“It’s easier to do this out of the sun.” He reached for more siding, wrapping his fingers around the flat pieces of wood and tugging. “Sharon’s obsessed. Thought you’d have noticed that by now.”
“We’re all obsessed about something. That doesn’t make it right to harass people when you haven’t gotten your way.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Kane said. “But I also know where she’s coming from. She’s adopted. Wants to find her birth mother. She’s been on a mission ever since someone posted info about Villegas House on that one website—Deadly Florida.”
The one John got in trouble for talking about on a message board. One little paragraph of information about this house had led her here?
“Wait, what?”
“Sorry, thought you knew. She chose this locale for our next investigation because of personal connections she has with the house.”
“Years ago, Linda told her her father was killed here,” Eve added, throwing down a plank of wood. I felt bad for Eve’s nails that she was having to do this kind of physical work, but I had to admit it was nice to see her helping. “She went to her for answers, and since then, she’s kept Linda close to her everywhere she went.”
“Her own personal medium,” Kane added.
“Who she used and abused until she got what she wanted.” I scoffed, deciding to join in and start pulling wood off the walls. “How much do we need?”
“I’m pulling enough to make a big pile. In the morning, we can assess how many rafts it’ll make. Some of this is too rotten to use, I think. We may need to pry off the doors,” Kane said. “Anyway, she grew up in Georgia mountains. When she was a kid, she learned she was adopted after she kept having dreams about a woman running out of a house wearing a white dress. A house like this one.”
Oh, man.
“Her parents took her to a psychologist who suggested they tell her the truth about her adoption. Ever since they did, she’s been trying to find her birth mother,” Kane explained.
“Which I can understand,” Eve said.
“Sure, I can too, but why would that lead her here?” I asked. “Lots of houses look like this one.”
Kane and Eve exchanged looks. “Linda also told her that a woman by your name in South Florida would be able to help her.”
“Me?” I remembered hearing this a few days ago, but how would I know anything about Sharon’s birth mother? So Linda was to blame for sending Sharon my way.
“Yes, and through her research, she thinks one of the Nesbitt brothers might’ve been her biological father. Were either married?” Kane asked.
“I have no clue,” I told them.
Kane panted, out of breath. “Years ago, she found a photo of this house online and swore it matched the one in her dreams. She’s been wanting to find it for the longest time but could never find any info on it.”
“Until the Deadly Florida website,” I guessed.
“Right,” Eve said. “And you were the one to take us there.”
I shook my head in dismay. “I brought you here and look at all that’s happened.”
“Not your fault, Avila,” Kane said, wiping more sweat. He doubled over to catch his breath. “Not your fault at all. In fact, we were just talking about this. We’re sorry for putting you in this position. As producers of the show, we should’ve told her that this one would be impossible.”
“She wouldn’t have taken no for an answer,” I said.
“So you have figured her out by now.” Kane smirked.
I appreciated the apology but couldn’t shake the feeling that it was still my fault. If I could get rid of something forever, something that had plagued me my whole life, it would be the irrational fear that I was responsible for everyone’s misery including my own.
Had I insisted that Villegas House was off-limits, that there was no way in hell anyone from my tribe would escort them there, we wouldn’t be in this position right now.
Some frontiers are better left unexplored.
Sharon appeared around the side of the house like a meek spirit harassed by stronger ones. “I’m sorry for the way I spoke earlier,” she said, looking at me. “That wasn’t fair of me.”
I glanced at Kane and Eve who said nothing, then back at her. Something was up. “No problem,” I replied, but I wasn’t a hundred percent convinced.
“Could you come with me a minute? I want to show you something.”
I stopped mid-pull on a particularly difficult plank
that would’ve been so much easier to remove with the proper tools. Our hands would be shredded by the morning. I gave her side-eye. “I can’t right now. I’m busy solving a problem.”
It was sassy but I wouldn’t follow that woman into that house again, even if they coughed up a million dollars.
“It’s about your grandfather.”
TWENTY-ONE
He died two entire decades before I was born.
In fact, my mother was born the same year he was killed and didn’t know him either. Uncle Bob had only been a kid, and it was because of him that we had stories about him. They were diffused through the lens of a child, but they were our only connection to him. Him, my grandmother, and others who knew him.
And the necklace around my neck. Every time I touched it, I thought of him, of this house, and the mystery surrounding it. If Sharon had found something related to me through all her rummaging of papers and random items, I wanted to know what it was.
But the gators were encroaching.
In the dark, I watched them creeping toward the house, lured by the prospect of a meal. I wasn’t sure how we would sleep at this point, how we would fight them off, how we would even get a raft finished under their watchful reptilian eyes. A vision of us feeding them Linda’s corpse struck a chord—if we had to do it to keep them away from us, we had to entertain the option.
Sharon led me into the house, and as usual, I tried not to look at Linda’s body but I caught a glimpse of the poncho someone had put over her to help protect her from the rain. Not sure doing so was a good idea, as the plastic material would help trap the heat and gases emanating from the corpse. I was also on the lookout for the “angry man,” for the ominous energy cloud now identified as Captain Bellamy. I had nothing to prove it, except that the information had come to me the more my third eye opened to the portal that was this house in the middle of nowhere.
Sharon led me to an area behind the room used as a kitchen, judging from the crude gas stove rusting away in the corner. From the inside of the house, it looked like a closet but just beyond it, it sank a few steps into a secret room. A small window near the top let in just a small amount of light. This house had been built in the mid 50s, early 60s. It would make sense if it were a bomb shelter. Americans in those times feared the threat of nuclear war more than its own systemic racism.
