by JL Bryan
“I feel more comfortable with you out here in the van, monitoring the whole house for me,” I said. “I think you’re right about the two ghosts. If they’re Noah and Luke, and Whippy McHalf-Face is Isaiah, that would mean they’re in fear of their father. The belt would be an extension of his will to punish, probably representing something he used in life.”
“So...you’re saying he used to beat the boys with a belt when they were alive?”
“Possibly. And now they’re caught repeating that drama after death.”
“For a hundred and sixty years,” Stacey said, looking a little distraught at the idea. “That’s terrible.”
“And it must have grown worse and worse,” I said. “Isaiah’s turned into this monstrous entity with a crazy weapon. The belt’s grown link by link over the years, like Jacob Marley’s chains.”
“So creepy,” Stacey whispered. “So what about the two boys? How would they have changed over the years, suffering that?”
“I don’t know. They could be dangerous by now, too. But so far all we’ve seen them do is play with toys and run away in fear. Maybe they threw some Christmas ornaments down the attic stairs. They don’t seem malevolent so far. Mischievous, I’d say.”
“It must be awful for them,” she said. “Like a prison, but it’s worse than a life sentence. You don’t get to escape even when you’re dead.”
“If we can find any evidence that Isaiah whipped or abused his kids in life, that would really help tie this together,” I said. “At least we’re getting some insight about what’s going on in that house. And here’s your house.” I stopped at the curb in front of a three-story U-shaped brick building with a few of its exterior walls covered with carefully groomed mats of ivy. The apartment building was a short walk from the College of Art and Design campus and inhabited entirely by students. “Any plans to move now that you’ve graduated?” I asked.
“Why, do you want a roommate?” She cast her smile on me. She had an easy, charming smile that I wish I could copy. My smiles always make me look like I’m scowling, or else working up the steam to bite your head off about something. Which I’m not. Usually.
“I already have a roommate,” I said.
“You have a cat.”
“The two of us barely fit into the apartment at the same time,” I said. I had a narrow little brick studio in a somewhat-refurbished factory loft.
“I haven’t thought about it. My lease runs a couple more weeks...so...maybe I should. Because I’m adult now, not a college kid. Totally an adult. It’s weird, because I still don’t feel like it.”
“You still don’t act like it, either,” I said, and she stuck out her tongue before climbing out of the van.
I had enough time to drive home, feed my cat, and lie on the bed for twenty minutes before my phone woke me up. I’d forgotten to turn the ringer off. It usually doesn’t matter, because I don’t have tons of people calling to chat, and most of the ones who do call are trying to sell me magazine subscriptions or something.
“Grant, it’s my bedtime,” I said when I answered the phone. It was Grant Patterson, my usual contact at the Savannah Historical Association.
“Are you busy?” Grant asked.
“Just going to sleep,” I said, thinking I’d already hinted pretty strongly at that when I’d told him it was my bedtime.
“Are you having insomnia, too? I’ve hardly slept this week.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Have you ever tried Ambien? I’m considering it,” he said.
“I don’t have insomnia, Grant. I spend my nights chasing ghosts in creepy old mansions.” My cat Bandit jumped on top of me, purring and bashing his head into my face, so I gave him a petting.
“A fantastic job description,” Grant said. “Enviable.”
“Yeah, it’s a real resume-stuffer,” I said. Between Grant and Bandit, I gave up sleeping and sat up in bed. “Did you find something about the house?”
“My loss of sleep is your gain, dear,” Grant said. “I let myself into the Association archives last night, and after thumbing through index after index, I did find a few items that should interest you. There are a number of boring public records about Isaiah Ridley’s business and political activities, but one box is particularly tantalizing.”
“So tantalize me, what is it?”
“Letters and family records, including correspondence from one Catherine Ridley—your woman who drowned along with her children—sent to her sister in Port Royal. Including the last several weeks of her life.”
Grant hesitated, in a way that usually meant he had more gossip but needed more attention before he would relinquish it.
“That’s an amazing find,” I said.
“I think you’ll find her final letters very interesting, Ellie.”
“Why? What’s in them?”
“They are the thoughts of an increasingly distraught woman, suffering the terrible strain of her husband’s death, and finding her home...disturbed by inexplicable events,” Grant said.
“Haunted?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. You’ll have to come and read the letters for yourself. They cannot be removed from the archives.”
“Can they be photocopied?”
“I am a research fellow, not a copy boy,” Grant said. “There’s a good bit of material, so come and see what you want. Visit me in my domain.”
“All right. Wait. We have to test this girl for psychic powers this afternoon.”
“I’m sure there’s something similar on my schedule.”
“Can we meet at the archives at...about seven? Ish?” I asked.
“You assume I have no plans for the evening?” Grant asked, but he sounded amused rather than annoyed.
“Seven p.m. sounds a little early for you.”
“True. I’m not quite among the early-bird-special crowd just yet. Give me a few more years...”
“Thanks. That should give us time to see our clients first.”
“Do what you must. I’ll be here, attempting to put this box of letters into something resembling chronological order.”
“I really appreciate it, Grant. Can’t wait to see you.” Not as much as I couldn’t wait to sleep, though.
“I’m sure it will be delightful, dear.”
After he hung up, I closed my eyes. I immediately saw the big, shadowy man, encrusted in dirt, half his face misshapen by the lead ball of an old-fashioned pistol, probably a flintlock. The whip writhing in his hands like a serpent, its buckles jangling. The entire room turning ice cold around him.
It seemed clear to me that, of the ghosts infesting our clients’ home, Isaiah was the one we needed to worry about the most.
Chapter Nine
Eckhart Investigations is located in an industrial area a few miles west of the actual city, next to a junkyard where they crush old cars. It’s in a cinderblock building we share with a couple of other shady businesses. Well, I’d like to think we’re not shady ourselves, but plenty of people treat us like scam artists. Lots of folks just don’t believe in ghosts until one is in their house, creeping into bedrooms and smashing Hummel figurines.
I arrived there in the middle of the afternoon to find Calvin, my boss, in the big workshop in the back of our office, loading boxes into the back of his truck. Calvin is a retired police detective, paraplegic and stuck in a wheelchair. He drives a big old forest-green Chevy Blazer with a camper shell over the truck bed.
“I said I’d help,” I told him.
“Too late,” he said. He wheeled around to the driver’s seat. Calvin wore a tie, which was extremely unusual for him, but I guess he didn’t get out much in the professional sense anymore.
He opened the door and hauled himself up into the driver’s chair, refusing my attempts to help him. “If you want to help, fold up my chair and shove it in back,” he said.
By the time I did that and closed up the tailgate, Calvin was already positioned in his seat, the engine rumbling, his hand on the a
ccelerator handle. The truck had been modified to enable him to drive without his legs.
He pressed the remote clipped to his sun visor and the garage door rattled up behind us. “Now, fill me in,” he said as he backed out.
I told him everything we’d observed the night before.
“You’re still thinking poltergeist?” he asked.
“Maybe. Stacey recorded some movement in Juniper’s room last night, but I don’t think she’s analyzed it very thoroughly yet. Little stuff on the dresser or floor would move around, and Juniper would stir in her sleep. We were kind of distracted by the three actual ghosts we saw.”
“Sounds to me like you’ve got a couple of missing ghosts,” Calvin said.
“What do you mean?”
“The wife and the girl. No sign of them?”
“Not so far...”
“If the father and boys are haunting the place, and the mother and daughter died in the same way alongside them, there’s a good chance they’re still around, too.”
“We’re definitely keeping our eyes open.”
Calvin drove too fast into town, as he typically did, probably because of all his years as a police detective who didn’t really have to worry about speeding tickets. Or maybe it was compensation for his inability to walk.
He slowed down as we reached the downtown area, heavy with pedestrians and bicyclists. It was about three-thirty when he pulled into the driveway of the old Georgian mansion. The unwanted, stagnant little pond at the center of the backyard seemed a bit larger to me, and a swarm of nasty mosquitoes hovered over it.
I grabbed the wheelchair for him. After Calvin lowered himself into it, we approached the back doors on the brick patio, since that meant I didn’t have to haul Calvin backwards up the front steps. I can do that, as long as I don’t mind a sore back for a couple of days.
I introduced Calvin to our clients—Toolie, Gord, Juniper. Crane was nowhere to be seen; apparently he preferred to be barricaded in his room, away from everyone. I was worried about the kid, even more so than Juniper. Who knew what the ghosts of Noah and Luke wanted with him? Maybe just a playmate, but I felt uncomfortable with the boy’s situation. It didn’t help that he didn’t want to talk about it beyond telling us to go away.
“Do you give a lot of these tests?” Juniper asked Calvin, eyeing him warily.
“I’ve done my share,” he said. They waited in the dining room, on opposite sides of the tables, while I brought in the boxes of testing materials, including an automatic shuffler for the Zener cards.
“Do most people turn out to be psychic, or not?” Juniper asked.
“Almost nobody does,” Calvin told her.
Juniper gave a half-smile at that. “Do you think I am?”
“I’ll tell you my opinion in about two hours,” he said.
I set a wide, tall balsa-wood divider on the table between them. I would slide it into place at the beginning of the test so Juniper wouldn’t be able to see the cards.
Stacey arrived, very conveniently, just after I’d finished carrying everything inside. She’d driven separately.
“Isn’t this exciting?” Stacey asked Juniper, who responded to Stacey’s overflowing enthusiasm with a half-hearted shrug. Stacey set up a camera behind Calvin, at a slight angle, to capture the cards on video as he drew them from the shuffler.
“Are you going to show this to people?” Juniper asked, frowning at the camera.
“It’s just for our records,” Stacey said, while setting up a high-powered microphone near the head of the table.
“Someone has to double-check the accuracy of my notes, especially at my age,” Calvin said, and that actually made Juniper smile a little.
“So you’re a ghost detective, too, right?” Juniper asked.
“He’s the boss ghost detective,” Stacey said. “We both work for him.”
“How did you get to be one of those?” Juniper asked him.
“I used to be a city homicide detective,” he said. “I ran into more than one case that turned out to involve ghosts, and that led me to research them. After a while, other investigators would bring me their ‘oddball’ cases. I developed a sort of unwanted reputation for solving the ghostly ones.”
“So the ghosts were killing people?” Juniper’s eyes widened. Oops, Calvin was freaking her out.
“That’s very rare, I promise,” he said, trying to put her at ease.
“Do you think the ghosts here will kill me?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said, but he had no basis for saying that. Not after Whippy McHalf-Face and his Belt of Doom had put in their appearance. “We’re going to get rid of your ghosts, so you don’t need to worry about a thing.”
Juniper didn’t look like she believed him.
“Do poltergeists kill people?” she asked.
“Poltergeists are usually just pests,” he told her.
“If I’m making the poltergeist, how do I stop doing it?”
“They feed on unbalanced emotions—anger, fear, hatred,” Calvin said. “We usually prescribe a regular activity that will keep your energy calm and centered. You can study meditation at the Zen center, or take yoga or ta’i chi at several places around town.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Juniper said. I wondered what she’d been imagining. An elaborate exorcism, maybe.
“I know a great place for hot yoga! I’ve done it once, and it was awesome!” Stacey volunteered. I knew a good place, too—I went twice a week, just to keep myself sane—but it was small and out of the way, and I didn’t want to run into clients there if I didn’t have to, so I didn’t mention it.
“It’s a good practice, anyway,” I offered. “Good for your health.”
“Are we ready to begin?” Calvin asked, opening a small cardboard box beside him.
“I guess.” Juniper gave a partial shrug.
He passed her a laminated sheet with five symbols on it.
“Each card has one of those symbols,” he told her, while feeding a couple of decks into the automated shuffler. “Wavy lines, circle, square, star, or a cross. You won’t be able to see me, so each time I draw a card, I’ll ring this.” Calvin touched the button on the sort of little bell you might find on the front desk at a hotel. It gave off a little ding. “Any questions?”
“Nah, sounds easy.” Juniper looked over the five symbols from which she had to choose. “So I’m trying to read your mind?”
“Exactly right.” Calvin nodded.
“Do I concentrate really hard, or what?”
“You can just relax,” he said. “Say whatever comes to your mind.”
“You’ll be fine, sweetie,” Toolie said. She stood in the doorway to the main hall, watching us set up in the dining room.
“I know,” Juniper replied, looking annoyed.
“Everyone clear the room now.” Calvin nodded at me, and I slid the tall balsa-wood divider into place, separating Calvin and Juniper.
Stacey, Toolie, and I walked over to the kitchen, where Gord was already sitting and watching Stacey’s laptop. On the screen, we could see Calvin and the card he’d drawn. It had a circle on it.
“Star?” Juniper guessed. We couldn’t see her, but the microphone picked up her voice.
Calvin made an “X” on his worksheet to indicate a wrong answer, then dropped the card back into the shuffler and drew another, which had the wavy lines on it. He dinged the little bell.
“Uh...square?” Juniper guessed. She was not off to a very accurate start.
She got the third one wrong, too.
“She doesn’t seem very...psychic to me,” Gord breathed.
“While the kids are busy, we wanted to catch you up on some details from last night,” I told Toolie and Gord. I glanced around to make sure Crane wasn’t eavesdropping from some little nook—the kid moved as quietly as a ninja. “Stacey, can you pull up one of the poltergeist videos from Juniper’s room?”
“Of course.” Stacey opened a second laptop
and drew up a few clips of interest she’d put aside to show our clients.
On the screen, we saw Juniper asleep in bed. After a few seconds, the clothes and jewelry heaped carelessly on her dresser shifted, as if someone had pushed them, and a few items fell to the floor.
“That kind of thing happens all the time,” Toolie said. “I’m always on her to clean up her room, but it can’t be easy when something else is always messing it up.”
“Here’s the same timeframe from the thermal camera,” Stacey said.
The next video clip showed Juniper as a red-orange shape in her bed.
A blurry shape the size of a soccer ball appeared near her door. It was green, speckled with blue, an unfocused blob shape with no discernible face or limbs.
It rolled across Juniper’s dresser like a misshapen ball, pushing and knocking items aside, only to vanish at the far end.
“I saw that! Did you see that?” Toolie asked Gord, who nodded.
“Back it up and pause it,” I told Stacey. She found a frame with a decent view of the green shape, though there wasn’t much to see, no details at all. “Most ghosts show up in the blue-to-black spectrum on thermal,” I told our clients. “They’re constantly sucking heat out of the room to power themselves. This entity is a little warmer than a ghost but, as you can see by comparing it with Juniper, still colder than a live person. Poltergeists tend to have more energy because they’re regularly feeding on the living. It’s usually unfocused, destructive, kinetic energy, drawn from their human host.”
Toolie looked at the other laptop, where her daughter continued trying to guess the cards behind the balsa barrier.
“Poor Juniper,” she said.
“We’ve identified four separate entities,” I said. “The poltergeist is one. Two of them we believe might be Noah and Luke Ridley, because your son came up with their names without knowing the history of the house. They seem like small-scale vandals and troublemakers, but not particularly threatening as far as we know. And the fourth...” I recounted my encounter the night before, not sparing any details this time. Gord and Toolie’s eyes widened, and Toolie, who’d encountered the shadow-man before, turned pale. Gord looked horrified as I described the man’s long, metal-spiked torture belt.
