by JL Bryan
The scrawled letter didn’t appear to be organized into clear paragraphs, but I found what Grant was probably talking about, and I read aloud for Stacey’s benefit.
“‘The disturbances I described in my last letter have grown worse,’” I read. “‘There has been a darkness on this house since Isaiah’s death, I am sure of it, a curse of evil. I pray for relief but the Lord sends none. I told you before of the strange knocking from Isaiah’s office—as though someone stood inside, requesting to be allowed out of the room. Two nights ago it began again. I took my candle and walked into the hall, thinking first to check on the children, and found them all sleeping, as though the knocking was heard only by me. I fear I may be going mad.
“‘I went to Isaiah’s office. The rapping had stopped by now, the house silent and cold. It has been a bitter January in so many ways for us. I opened the door, which creaked badly, as it has taken to doing in the past month. I saw nobody in there, but someone could have hidden behind his desk, or in one of his closets or cabinets.
“‘I spoke—I cannot recall my specific words now, but spoke to ask if anyone was there, and that they show themselves promptly. The room was dreadfully cold, more so than the hall had been. This might owe to the lack of a fire, which I have not bothered to restore since he died, as it would entirely be a waste of fuel to warm his office now—yet it seemed cold even for that, and I checked the windows but could find no draft. The cold burned through my night clothes, into my very bones.
“It was when I inspected the windows that the voice spoke to me. It was only one word, my name, Catherine, but clear and loud as a branch breaking under the weight of ice in the winter. I turned and said his name, because it was his voice, you see, I knew it so well, hearing it day and night these many years. Isaiah. He spoke to me, but just that once, just that word. I searched all through the office and did not find him. I even looked in the little cabinet where Eliza used to hide, thinking she might be the one who’d done the knocking, but it was empty.
“I closed the door and have not entered the room since. There is worse to report. I told you of strange events that would happen, the dish that leaped from the table, the time Eliza’s drinking glass shattered though no one had touched it. It continues, sometimes in the daylight hours as well as at night, items and furniture moving on their own as though by some restless spirit—and it seems to follow Eliza particularly. An hour before sitting to write this letter—it is night time—I heard a scream from her room.
“‘I do not know how to put this in words without sounding feeble. I found Eliza in her corner, poor thing, her hair a yellow tangle, weeping and screaming, her face red and smeared with tears. She was being tormented. Toys floated before her—her favorite doll, the boys’ jacks, a wooden rabbit with wheeled feet. They spun and rose and fell as through carried by some evil whirlwind, and Eliza held up her arms to protect herself.
“‘I lifted the poor girl and clutched her tight—and I was deeply afraid myself—but the thing passed, and the toys dropped to the floor, as if the wind had died—but there was no wind, I promise you, and besides, what wind could do that?
“‘Eliza is in my bed now, just steps away from me, asleep again by some miracle, but I do not know if I shall ever sleep in this house again. I have a mind to call on Mr. Humphries, our pastor, but fear he will only think me an hysterical woman.
“‘I do not know if this spirit is truly Isaiah or not—though it was his voice I heard, he would never torment poor Eliza. He was hard on the boys, as you know, a strong believer in discipline, but he doted on the girl, in his way. He was never so rough with her. I fear it is some devil of vengeance, here to torment us all—and just when it seemed the long darkness had finally lifted. I am filled with guilt, and do not know how to live with these horrors, nor how to banish them from our home.
“‘I must sleep now, but will write again soon when my wits have returned. I do hope you will keep your promise of a longer visit when the weather warms, and please give my love to all. Yours, Catherine.’”
“So, wow,” Stacey said. “Isaiah started haunting them right away. Do you think he drowned them in the pond?”
Grant looked to me, eyebrows raised in definite interest. “Do we think that?” he asked.
“I can’t say,” I said. I was still feeling bad for the little girl Eliza. “Well, if the crafts room is Isaiah’s old office, it sounds like he’s been haunting it since his death. But she says he wouldn’t torment the little girl, he’d be more likely to go after the boys.”
“Like he’s done again and again for the past hundred and sixty years, right?” Stacey asked.
“I also wonder whether Eliza may have been dealing with a poltergeist,” I said. “Something following her around, throwing objects, loose psychokinetic energy whirling through her room...”
“Wait,” Stacey said, sitting up and scrunching her forehead as she thought it over. “But it wouldn’t be the same poltergeist that Juniper’s dealing with now, would it? Or would it?”
“That...would be a very unusual case,” I said. “Poltergeists usually burn out. The emotional makeup of their creator shifts as they grow up, and even without realizing it, they’ve stopped feeding the poltergeist their emotional energy.”
“So our advice for Juniper would just speed up that chilling-out-as-you-grow-up process?” Stacey asked.
“Right. Nothing chills you out like yoga or Zen,” I said. “The average lifespan of a poltergeist is six to eighteen months. Then they just kind of dissolve from lack of energy.”
“Or go dormant,” Stacey said. “Right? Calvin said something about going dormant. So what if something happened to wake it up?”
“Then we’d be talking about a poltergeist that’s a hundred and sixty years old,” I said. “I don’t know how an entity like that might grow or evolve over time, what powers it might gain, how self-aware it might become, what would motivate it...” I shook my head, overwhelmed with thoughts and possibilities. “It’s still entirely possible Crane created the poltergeist himself. The boy has some psychic talent.”
“He seems troubled,” Stacey said. “Like really, really troubled, to me, anyway...”
“His two best friends are ghosts from the nineteenth century,” I said. “That’s a pretty lonely life. I hate it when kids have to deal with this kind of stuff. Life’s hard enough without it.” I leaned over the magnifying glass again. “Grant, do you have any of the letters leading up to this one?”
He used the tweezers to gently move the yellow papers around.
I read backwards in time, letter by letter, moving slowly as I deciphered Catherine’s faded handwriting.
Her previous letter described more instances of things moving on their own, like a teapot rising from the stove and flying across the kitchen, very poltergeist-y stuff. The knocking sounds at night, a sound like moaning from the home office where her husband had died.
It wasn’t hard to imagine the terrible emotional toll it must have taken on Eliza, just eight years old, her father blowing his brains out after losing all his money. The darkness that would have hung over the house. That could have been enough of an emotional crucible to make a small girl generate a poltergeist, I thought. I felt so sorry for the girl, now long dead, and the mother frantically trying to cope with unseen, ghostly forces in the house on top of all the other weight that her life had put on her—broke, three children to support, widowed in a most horrible way, her husband choosing to abandon them all for the cold comfort of the grave.
I managed to hold back some tears.
The tone and content of the letters shifted immensely when we moved backwards in time to her mid-December Christmas letter, detailing with enthusiasm her holiday preparations, new dresses she’d had made for herself and Eliza, presenting in every way the picture of a happy family. There was no hint in that letter of the horror to come.
Darker shadows appeared in her earlier letters to her sister, though. She fretted that her husband was too
harsh with their boys, much too quick to punish and reprimand, that her daughter was always disappearing into hiding places around the house, and her husband was reducing the household budget yet again...In one, she mentioned how her husband had left their son Noah’s legs peppered with bloody welts from his iron belt buckle.
“That fits,” Stacey said, nodding. “That fits everything.”
“What time is it?” I’d completely lost track. I checked my phone—we were more than an hour late. Reading through Catherine’s letters had been a slow, time-eating process, but I felt like we’d picked up a few puzzle pieces for our case. It definitely confirmed for me that removing Isaiah was our top priority. If he’d abused his own children, then he could be working his way up to attacking Crane and Juniper, too. From the letters, it sounded like Crane, as the boy, would be in greater danger.
It would have helped a great deal if we could get the kid to talk to us.
“Can we take these letters with us?” I asked Grant. “I need to study them all.”
“Absolutely not,” he said.
“I need to come back and make copies tomorrow, then,” I said.
“I’ll make them for you,” Grant said.
“I thought you said you weren’t a copy boy.”
“I’m not, but if I were acting as a junior ghost investigator...” He smiled.
“I deputize you a junior ghost investigator,” I said, mockingly gesturing on either side of his head, like a queen bestowing a knighthood, using rubber-tipped tweezers in place of a sword. Dorky, I know. “Go forth and copy.” Super-dorky.
“I will proceed immediately to the fearsome Canon multi-purpose machine.” He gingerly lifted the letters in his gloved hands.
We thanked him and ran out the door into a rainy evening. We’d been so engrossed in the letters, we hadn’t even noticed the sound of rainfall on the roof.
Stacey drove as fast she could, but we still had to go by the office and pick up the van, and it was already dark by the time we reached our clients’ haunted home.
Chapter Eleven
It was a good thing we’d set up all our gear inside the Paulding house the night before, because the rain was pounding by the time I nosed the van into their driveway. Stacey was worried the bad weather might interfere with reception to her monitors inside the van.
“Look at that.” I pointed at their back yard, where the downpour sent gushers of water to collect in the low depression. It looked like a true pond now, almost a third of the grass totally flooded. “How much do you want to bet that’s exactly the location of the pond where Catherine and her children drowned?”
“I told you that’s where the bodies are buried,” Stacey said, snickering a little. You can’t do this job without developing a somewhat morbid sense of humor. Stacey’s was coming along fine.
The wind and rain billowed sideways under our umbrellas, drenching us on the brief walk to our clients’ front door.
“Oh, my goodness,” Toolie said when she greeted us. “You look like a couple of wet kittens. Come on in. Would you like some hot tea? Or I could brew some decaf.”
“If you could brew some caf, that would be better,” I said. “Thank you.”
She brought us towels, and Juniper came down from her room to peer at us.
We joined Gord in the living room, where I gave a quick recount of what we’d learned from the archives. I didn’t mention the outside possibility of a hundred-and-sixty-year-old poltergeist; it still seemed far more probable that Crane had created a new one. I wanted to consult with Calvin and do a little research before even broaching that subject. We were able to confirm the identity of the three non-poltergeist ghosts, though, which felt like some progress.
“I’d recommend you have keep a close eye on Crane,” I told Toolie at one point. “From what we’ve learned, Isaiah is more likely to harm him than Junie.”
“This is just awful,” Toolie said, shaking her head. “Well, he’s already gone to sleep tonight. This whole thing hasn’t seemed to bother him too much. Not like Junie.”
Juniper nodded. “It only comes after me. Like I...like it wants to bother me or hurt me for some reason.”
“That’s the poltergeist,” I said. “Not Isaiah’s ghost.”
I wished my quick summary had gone a little quicker, because it was almost ten-thirty by the time Gord and Toolie finished asking questions and let us get to work. They retired to their separate bedrooms, Gord downstairs because the steps were too hard on him, Toolie upstairs to stay near her children.
Juniper hung around, watching us while Stacey swapped out the batteries in the downstairs hallway camera, the one meant to catch any activity around the powder room faucet.
“I don’t feel like sleeping,” Juniper said. “Can I hang out with y’all for a while?”
“Maybe,” I said, unable to resist smiling a little. I have to admit, the girl kind of reminded me of a younger version of myself. She also reminded me of Grant, jokingly calling himself a junior ghost investigator. Sure, my job’s all fun and games until an evil presence lurking in the cellar tries to kill you. “How well do you know your way around your attic?”
“I’ve been up there a few times.” Juniper shrugged. “Mom makes me get the Christmas decorations and stuff.”
“Good enough for me,” I said.
She watched as we made our rounds of the house, changing out battery packs on the cameras and making sure they were recording. Stacey turned the cameras in the upstairs hallway to face the closed door to the crafts room so we could monitor whether Isaiah left it during the night.
The three of us shivered as we stepped into the cold crafts room itself. My Mel-Meter showed an unnatural low temperature of forty-two degrees—compared to about seventy-eight degrees in the rest of the house—and the EMF reading spiked up by eight milligaus. There could have been a dozen ghosts in that room, with readings like that. Isaiah’s presence was a strong one.
We didn’t speak in that room, just hurried to swap out the camera battery packs. It felt like something was watching us from the shadows, that same uncomfortable feeling you get on the back of your neck when you sense someone looking at you from behind.
We relaxed a little after leaving and closing the door.
“I hate that room,” Juniper whispered. She was shaking a little. “I always have.”
“For good reason,” I told her, patting her on the back. “But we will help you. I promise.” I felt the greater responsibility of my job at moments like these—not just nabbing ghosts and collecting a paycheck, but protecting the lives and sanity of people who’ve been troubled by the supernatural, especially the kids. “Maybe you shouldn’t come up into the attic with us.”
“I’m totally coming.” Juniper straightened up. “I’m not scared of the attic.”
Before heading up there, I opened my toolbox, strapped on my thermal goggles and perched them above my eyes. They’re heavy, boxy things, so this is about as comfortable as duct-taping a brick to your forehead.
Stacey placed the night vision goggles, which were also pretty annoyingly cumbersome, on her head.
I opened the door to the attic, flipped on the lights and led the way upstairs, into the flickering gloom created by the dying bulb above. Juniper followed, carrying a spare tactical flashlight, and Stacey was behind her—the order was meant to keep our client safe if anything happened. The ghosts in the attic were not threatening, so far as we knew, but it’s wise to be cautious.
We climbed the steep steps, emerging near one end of the attic, where an old wooden railing surrounded the stairwell area, and the heaps of old stuff extended out into the dim distance under three widely spaced bulbs overhead.
Rain pounded the roof just above us. Water dashed constantly against the high, narrow dormer windows, which brought us no light at all, not even a glimmer from a streetlamp.
I checked my Mel Meter and found similar readings as before, the EMF markedly high, the temperature low but not chilly or freezi
ng.
“What’s that?” Juniper asked, pointing to the device.
“It’s a handy tool for detecting possible paranormal activity,” I said. “Unexplained low temperatures and electromagnetic spikes can tell you if there might be a ghost.”
“Cool. What’s it telling you now?”
“The same thing it told me yesterday—there could be a presence here. From our observations last night, we’re guessing it’s...those two boys.” I avoided saying their names. I wasn’t here to stir them up or grab their attention, not at all. I much preferred they leave us alone in our rummaging.
We ducked under those annoying low beams while we walked toward the far end of the attic, where cardboard boxes gave way to wooden crates and old chests. Dust and spiderwebs were everywhere. I lowered my thermal goggles and saw a pretty unnerving number of little glowing-yellow spider bodies scattered all over the room. It seemed unusually infested, but maybe some of them had crawled inside to escape the rainstorm.
I used my flashlight to clear the little critters out of the way before Juniper or Stacey could walk into their webs.
“What are we looking for?” Juniper asked.
“Anything to do with the Ridley family, especially Isaiah Ridley. They lived here mostly in the 1840’s, up until 1851, so...look for the oldest stuff you can find,” I said.
Stacey and I started lifting chest lids, while Juniper opened drawers in an old bureau squatting near the back corner of the attic. The contents were jumbled, as if somebody had hastily thrown things together—a dress, a man’s jacket, assorted kitchenware that looked a little bit primitive, a painted doll with yarn hair. I wondered if this was the same doll with which the poltergeist had menaced little Eliza.
“I found it!” Juniper announced. “Or some stuff with that Isaiah guy’s name on it. It’s mostly a bunch of papers and junk, but...” She shrugged, looking to me for a response.
“Good work,” I said. “Let me take a look.”
What she’d found in the old desk was mostly an assortment of Isaiah’s tax papers and legal records. One drawer contained a few brochures and one-sheet ads about the failed Georgia Canal and Railroad Company. Under these, I saw something that made me smile.
