Ghost Fire (The Ghost Files Book 3)

by Eve Paludan

  “That’s a lot of skulls,” I said. “Where do you get them all?”

  “Some we pick up on government land but there is a huge market for them, so often, we buy them from tanneries, slaughterhouses or from ranches that advertise on the Internet. You can get almost everything on the Internet.”

  “Wait, wait,” I said. “Slaughterhouses? People aren’t eating horsemeat in the United States?”

  Ezekiel raised an eyebrow. “There is a movement of some cultures to bring horsemeat to tables in the U.S. and also to raise horsemeat for export to Mexico. In November of 2011, the ban on funding for the Department of Agriculture’s horsemeat inspection was lifted. In April of 2012, a slaughterhouse in New Mexico applied for a permit and are within the law to do so. Horsemeat really isn’t far away from being in restaurants.”

  I gulped. “But, they are quite sentient beings.”

  “We don’t kill the horses, Mr. Drew. We just make art with the parts that we buy. It is a spiritual and respectful way for us to pay homage to the horse. We have nothing to do with its death, but we revere the horse in our culture and we give back something in a spiritual way, through our art.”

  “Of course,” Diego said respectfully and gave me a withering look. Poor Ellen, she just wanted to run from the room at my faux pas. I didn’t care, though. No one should eat horses. I saw her move to the window and close her eyes for a moment. I knew she was reading the room and the people in it and using the window to let bad vibes go past her to the outdoors.

  Diego left one of the fire extinguisher cans on a work table.

  “So? What about the spontaneous combustion fires in our gallery? What do you think?” Ezekiel said to me.

  “Well, first of all,” I said, “from a science standpoint, do you have any chemicals that you use in your gallery that are highly combustible?”

  He shook his head. “A lot of taxidermists use chemicals but we don’t because we want to only use natural cleaning and we even make our own pigments. Everything in our gallery is completely organic. We wash our skulls and put them in buckets of water and let nature take its course. Then we boil the skulls and whatever meat is left on the skulls, we cool off the skulls and use Dermestid beetles to eat them clean. Then we paint the skulls with the paint that we make from plant pigments and clay.”

  “Wow. Beetles?”

  “Yeah. We buy them from a taxidermy shop. Beetles clean up a skull perfectly.”

  “So, you don’t use chemicals at all?” I asked. “Nothing that could spontaneously combust?”

  “Nope. I have kids here and my grandmother, too. We are very safe in our art processes. The only thing I can think of that is pretty gross is the cold water maceration, or rotting of the flesh. But it’s not toxic. Just smelly. It can’t be helped.”

  “Well, thank you, then. I guess that I wanted to see if there is a scientific reason for the fires that keep breaking out.”

  “I can’t think of one,” Ezekiel said. “I’m pretty sure that it’s a bad spirit haunting the building.”

  “Why do you say that?” Ellen asked.

  He pointed to a drawing taped to the wall. “My grandmother drew this. She says it is the spirit that she saw when we worked late last week and a fire broke out. That’s why we’re burning sage in here. It seems to be helping the humor in the room.”

  Ellen and I looked at the drawing. It looked like the Monster from the Id that I had joked about earlier.

  “That’s it, all right,” Ellen said. “The big shadow.”

  “You ought to know,” I said.

  “What is that thing? Exactly,” Ezekiel asked. “It scared the pee out of my grandmother and she ran down the stairs like she was fifteen years old.”

  “Well,” Ellen said as delicately as she could. “We think it’s the spirit of a dead chupacabra.”

  Ezekiel’s bushy gray eyebrows shot up in shock and he put a hand on his chest. “I think I need to call it a day and take out my family for some Mexican food.”

  He told his grandmother something Spanish that ended with the words “chupacabra” and “vaminos.” And, as they hurriedly closed up their paints and washed their brushes, I told Ellen, “Darling, you sure know how to clear out a room.”

  She shrugged, looking at the skulls on the table. “I think we’re done in this Dry Bones gallery,” she said. “I’m not thrilled with the horse skull art, but I don’t get a vibe from any of the Gallegos family that is negative. They are not causing a poltergeist activity. I was especially interested in the children, but their energy was serene and sweet. The grandmother, too. Even Ezekiel. Nice family, despite the artistic medium of choice. There was nothing but a few Native American spirits hanging around them. All benevolent. Great-grandparents, from my impression. They’re clear. And when I mean clear, I mean that they are not causing the disturbances in the building.”

  “Wonderful.” Diego put his hand on Ellen’s shoulder. “Thank you for all of this.”

  She nodded. “It’s my job.”

  “One more floor to explore in the co-op gallery,” Diego said.

  “Bring it on,” I said. Ellen nodded, happy to leave the horse skulls behind.

  Chapter Eight

  As we walked up the stairs, Diego said, “The second co-op gallery floor is rented by just one artist. She is a brilliant and prolific oil painter and she’s here on a community arts grant that pays her lease for the floor and she gets a small stipend from me to help support her other needs. She actually lives up here on the second floor, but we won’t tell the city that, since I am not licensed for work-live space and my taxes would go up.”

  I smiled.

  “I know you’ll like her, Ellen. You two have so much in common.”

  Diego tapped gently on the door and at a melodious “Enter!” he opened the door and a tall, large woman dressed in handmade leather sandals and an unbleached white robe—not a bathrobe, but a Biblical-type robe—came out of her stacks of paintings to meet us.

  Her hair was long and white and fell in soft waves to her waist. She had a small paintbrush in her hand with the tip dipped in red, but had not one speck of paint on her. Her face was round and her skin glowed with health, and not a drop of makeup was on her face. Gregorian chant music played softly in the background. Sunlight burst through the windows in streaming beams, illuminating the workspace with glorious light. The atmosphere was nearly ethereal.

  Diego said, “Ellen and Monty, I’d like you to meet Sister Magdalene. Sister Maggie, this is Ellen and Monty, the couple I told you about. They’ve agreed to do a paranormal investigation of the building to see what’s causing the fires and the spiritual disturbances.”

  “Welcome!” she said with exuberance, and her eyes were shining. “Welcome to Inspired Life Art Gallery. I want to show you something. I hope you like it.”

  She put her arm around Ellen and steered her to her latest painting. I saw Ellen stop in shock in front of a large painting on the easel.

  Ellen turned her face to me, tears in her eyes. “Monty, it’s a painting of my dad and me when I was a little girl. We are on our back porch, at the old house, with the currant bush and the dark green metal glider that we used to sit on. She even painted a popcorn bowl, a yellow ware bowl of my mother’s that we used to use all the time for snacks. I can’t believe this. I mean, I do, but it’s incredible.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You’re a psychic painter, Sister Maggie?”

  Sister Magdalene nodded. “I suppose you could call it that. I think of myself as able to paint spirits. I can’t see them or talk to them, but I can paint them. When I heard you were coming, this painting just leaped into my head while Diego was talking about you. I call it inspired painting. I take no credit for it myself. It all comes from…” and Sister Maggie lifted her eyes to the ceiling for a moment.

  Ellen smiled through a couple of tears and dashed them away. “This never happens to me. Where I lose it in front of a client. I guess I was just overcome at seeing what are clearly m
y dad and me in the last months of his life.”

  I looked at the painting and could certainly see the resemblance of a little Ellen and the old photos of her father that I had seen. I touched Ellen’s shoulder gently. “Do you want the painting, Ellen?” I asked.

  “Is it for sale?” Ellen asked hopefully. She got a tissue out of her purse and dabbed at her eyes.

  “No, I am sorry.”

  “Oh,” Ellen said, disappointed. “I understand.”

  “No, I won’t sell it. I want to give it to you,” Sister Maggie said. “But if you want to take it home, it has to dry for a couple of weeks because it’s oil paint. After it dries, I’ll ship it to you for a donation that covers the postage.”

  “Oh!” Ellen said, her face alight with pleasure.

  “We’d be happy to do that, Sister,” I said. “And more.”

  “If you want to donate extra, I will put it toward more paint and canvas. I thank you,” Sister Maggie said. “Most of my needs are small. An arts grant takes care of my lease here, and a stipend from Diego takes care of my food and personal care needs. And I am blessed with robust health. But I seem to need a lot of money for paint and canvas.”

  “I can see why,” I said, looking at the hundreds of canvases stacked in the room.

  “Are all of these inspired paintings?” Ellen asked.

  “Most of them are. Not all of them show spirits of dead people. I also paint spirits of long-passed-on pets and even get inspired by painting the angels that surround us.”

  Ellen smiled as I caught a whiff of freshly baked bread, yet there was nothing like that in this art gallery. “Yes, your guardian angel is here,” she said. And she and Sister Maggie shared a knowing smile.

  “I haven’t quite figured out how to display all of the paintings on First Friday. Hector, our gallery intern, said he would come tomorrow and help me choose ones for the sidewalk display and also, he is going to hang a lot of them up on the walls instead of all of these messy stacks. I am pretty excited. It’s going to be wall-to-wall paintings in here.”

  “Maggie,” Diego said. “I can’t wait to see what it looks like when you and Hector get all of the paintings off the floor and onto these high walls. It’s going to be magnificent.”

  Sister Maggie’s eyes shone. “I don’t want to be prideful, but it’s my first gallery opening and I’m terribly excited. I hope people like my work.”

  “I’m sure they will,” Ellen said.

  I cleared my throat. “So,” I said, “I hope it is okay to ask you this, but have you done any inspired paintings that have to do with the fires in this building?” I asked. Or the scary shadow thing? I thought.

  “Oh, yes.” Sister Maggie put a finger to her chin. “Where did I put that painting to dry?” She snapped her fingers. “Oh, I laid it on my little cot in the back room. Wait here, please. It’s kind of a mess back there.”

  Sister Maggie walked past the stacks of paintings and Ellen was drawn to the oil painting of herself and her father.

  “How does she do it?” I asked Diego.

  “She says it is from God. That is her only explanation that she will give.”

  I looked at Ellen. “Is she a psychic?”

  “It’s weird,” Ellen replied. “I get a vibe from her that she is a deeply spiritual woman but I don’t get this woo-woo feeling about her. I don’t know how to explain it. She is very genuine and down to earth, yet connected to a higher spiritual world than I am perhaps privy to. If she is psychic, it is on a different level, one that is more in tune with goodness than perhaps I am.”

  I squeezed Ellen’s shoulder gently. “You are very good,” I whispered.

  She smiled. “To one person. But perhaps I need a goodness that extends beyond myself and you.”

  Ellen changed the subject as we were not alone. She looked at Diego. “Where did you find her?”

  Diego cleared his throat. “She was a nun but she left her order some years ago. She didn’t follow all of their tenets and was also a feminist activist. They also tried to stifle her artistic talent for painting dead people that she’d never met because it didn’t fit into their little box of rules. When I bought this building and put a sign in the window that read ‘Artist’s co-op gallery space available,’ she approached me. She told me how she was living in a nearby shelter and her paintings were in storage. She didn’t have enough money to pay the storage fee and she was going to lose all of her stuff.”

  “Poor thing,” Ellen said.

  “I hate this economy. It has really hit the arts and hurt people in so many ways,” I chimed in to Diego.

  “It has,” Diego agreed. “But especially someone fragile and alone in the world, an artist. Because she lived a sheltered life as a nun, she doesn’t have a lot of street smarts, but she is a lovely woman, as you can see.”

  “So, she told you her story and you gave her the whole second floor?”

  Diego smiled. “Not exactly. I went with her to her storage unit and her stuff was held hostage from her. I paid the fee and when they opened the unit, she showed me a painting of my dead wife. It was oil painting and it was a dry painting, so there is no way she could have just painted it to scam me or anything like that.”

  “Wow,” I said. “She’s the real deal.”

  Diego said, “She never calls herself a psychic. She sees herself as a channel for God and his angels, to do good things. A lot of people who meet her think she is playing a trick of some kind or running a scam. It’s hard to convince them otherwise.”

  Ellen said, “I sort of know a little bit about how she feels. People don’t exactly believe that what I can sense is real. And talents such as ours don’t fall within acceptable parameters of what mainstream society believes or even speaks about. Society fills itself up with fictional media to feed the need for deeper spiritual quests without a commitment to study the motivation for that quest. Movies and books are safe venues that talk about the supernatural world, but when it comes to real life, there is a hard line about what can be believed as a truth in the day-to-day world and what will be shot down as fakery.”

  I nodded. “If it wasn’t for knowing Ellen, I probably wouldn’t believe in the power of the spirit world,” I said. “And it helps to have my instruments, which, by the way, are probably recording all kinds of paranormal activity in the basement. I can’t wait to see what we captured.” I looked at my watch. “I should probably get my instruments in the next hour before the batteries run down.”

  Diego nodded. “That will be next on our agenda.”

  Sister Maggie came back with a painting and when she turned it around so we could see it, a small man in the yellow-and-green jockey silks was in it. Ellen made a little surprised noise in her throat.

  “What’s wrong, Ellen?” I asked.

  She folded her hands and looked at the painting. “I didn’t see him clearly before but now I do, thanks to the painting. The jockey is a very small but full-grown man with short legs, as if his growth was stunted. Somehow, he has become a slave of the spirit of the chupacabra. It is an angry thing that makes him set the fires in the building.”

  “Oh my,” Sister Maggie said.

  “Oops, I didn’t mean to mention the chupacabra spirit in your gallery space,” Ellen said. “I hope you aren’t scared to live here.”

  “That inhuman thing wouldn’t dare to come in my art gallery,” Sister Maggie said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “So many angels in here,” Ellen said. “So many.”

  Sister Maggie nodded, her face radiant.

  Chapter Nine

  Sister Maggie insisted on going with Ellen and me to retrieve my paranormal investigations equipment from the dank basement that smelled of dead animals.

  She said she wanted to see the process of our investigation and asked if she could view the video footage with us. I said that she could but didn’t know what we would learn. I can’t say that just the thought of her semi-ethereal presence accompanying us to the creepy
basement utility room didn’t give me some extra courage. I wondered if her legion of angels was accompanying us, too.

  “Yes,” Ellen said softly, reading my mind. I breathed easier. Chupacabra spirit versus Gregorian-music-powered angels? No contest.

  As we got close to the closet-like door that led to the basement stairwell, Diego suddenly said that he had to run out to the Whole Foods on Lincoln Boulevard and get some organic chicken breasts and other fixings for our dinner in the courtyard patio. He unlocked the door for us and sort of fled. I guess I couldn’t blame him for wanting to skip going back to the locked utility room where the bodies of dead cats and dogs awaited us in the chupacabra spirit’s disgusting den with its claw marks scraped high on the concrete walls.

  I hesitantly flipped on the light switch in the dark stairwell. “Okay, ladies, I will go down first and...”

  Sister Maggie just went down the stairs by herself and at the bottom, looked up at us and grinned. “Me first. Come on down after me,” she said. “We are not alone. And I mean that in a good way. Angel power!”

  Ellen and I walked down the stairs behind her and in the utility room, the floor was bare of dead animals. She and I looked at each other in surprise. “Where’d they go?”

  “What were you two expecting to find down here?” Sister Maggie asked.

  “Oh, you don’t want to know what was here,” I said. I took a sniff. “I don’t smell anything bad.”

  “That’s because it went somewhere else,” Ellen said. “And took its food with it.”

  “Hmm, wrinkled,” Sister Maggie said, and opened the clothes dryer and took out a Biblical-looking white cotton robe, just like the one she was wearing. She shook it out and folded it, then reached in the dryer again and withdrew a pair of huge white panties and stuck them discreetly in the folded robe. Then she drew out a towel and folded it. So much for an ex-nun’s laundry. She apparently had two identical sets of clothes and a towel.

  I turned off my paranormal investigations equipment and gathered it up. “We’ll take this upstairs and look at the video, the audio, the temperature readings, everything,” I said. I looked at Ellen and she stood in the middle of the utility room with her eyes closed.