by JL Bryan
I drew it out: a little iron locomotive, about as long as my finger, patchy with rust, with the insignia “GC&R” on the side.
“Here we go.” I held it up in the light from the bare bulb above. “Great find, Juniper.”
“What is it?” Stacey asked, stepping closer and lighting the little object with her flashlight.
“It looks like some kind of promotional item for the Georgia Canal and Railroad,” I said. “The company that ate Isaiah’s investment money. The bankruptcy may have led to Isaiah’s suicide.”
“Sh,” somebody said.
“What?” I looked at Juniper.
“Huh? I didn’t say anything,” Juniper said.
“Me, either,” Stacey said, glancing around. “I heard it, though. Right after you mentioned Isaiah’s death--”
“Sh,” the voice repeated, and it definitely wasn’t Stacey or Juniper this time, because I could see them both.
“What was that?” Juniper whispered.
The three of us shined our flashlights around the attic, our beams crossing back and forth over the old furniture and storage chests.
I saw something flicker for a moment, but it was just a shadow on the wall. I thought it was my own shadow, cast by somebody else’s flashlight. Then the shadow turned and stepped behind a tall, dusty bookshelf, out of the glare of my light. Goose bumps rose all over my skin.
“Noah? Luke?” I asked, which made Stacey and Juniper turn their heads. “Who’s there? I saw you. We’re not here to cause you any trouble--”
“Sh!” the voice sounded a third time, louder and more insistent now, enough to make Stacey jump.
“What the cow?” Stacey asked, pointing her flashlight in the direction of the voice.
The flickering light over the stairs finally went out, leaving only two bulbs to push against the deep gloom. Then the light bulb at the center of the room crackled and fell dark, followed by the final bulb, the one closest to us, leaving us with only our flashlights for illumination.
“What’s happening?” Juniper asked.
“Sh,” sounded a fourth time, but now it was very quiet, hardly audible at all.
A footstep fell on one of the attic stairs, and the wooden step seemed to groan under the weight of a large person.
The attic grew cold. I could feel the freezing air hit me like a moving wall, and I saw Stacey and Juniper wince a little as it struck them, too.
“What do we--?” Juniper began.
“Sh,” I told her, then I whispered, “That was me that time.”
I pulled the thermal goggles down over my eyes.
The room was so deep blue, it looked like we were underwater. A dark purple head, mottled with black, rose up from the steps and peered right at me through the railing. I could feel it staring, just as I’d felt it down in the crafts room.
Now I understood why Noah and Luke’s ghosts might be shushing us. They didn’t want us drawing Isaiah’s attention up to the attic, which seemed to be the boys’ domain.
Oops.
I jabbed my flashlight in Isaiah’s direction, trying to punch him through the head with a solid blast of white. It seemed to work—he actually ducked down out of sight. The attic still felt like the inside of a refrigerator.
With gestures, I told Stacey to accompany me and Juniper to stay put. Juniper nodded with wide eyes, clutching her flashlight. If I had to risk either leaving Juniper with the boy ghosts or bringing her closer to Isaiah and his crazy torture belt, the choice was obvious to me.
Stacey and I advanced across the attic, the floorboards creaking beneath us. My heart was thumping somewhere near my esophagus as we approached the railing and leaned over for a look. We shined our flashlights down onto the two flights of steps below.
As far as we could see, there was nothing. The air was cold and blue in my thermal goggles, but there was no dense concentration of cold, no purple-black mass in the shape of a large man.
I lifted my goggles away to look with my own eyes. Dusty stairs, nothing more.
Stacey breathed out a little sigh of relief.
“Looks like he stepped out,” she whispered. “Maybe into the gray zone?”
“Maybe.”
“What’s the gray zone?” Juniper asked. Despite the fairly clear instructions I’d given with my hands, she’d tiptoed after us and now stood just halfway across the attic instead of at the far end. I shined my light into the shadows around her, checking for any trouble.
“The gray zone isn’t really a definite thing,” I explained. “It’s just our word for where ghosts go when we can’t track them down--”
Something snatched my ankle. Fingers as sharp as vulture talons dug into my boot.
I was pulled backwards by a great force, right off my feet. The old railing cracked and shattered beneath me, no more sturdy than if had been made of toothpicks and popsicle sticks.
I fell through and into the empty space over the stairs. I seemed to hover there, just a moment, like Wile E. Coyote after running off a cliff...then I dropped hard onto the steps below, banging my knee, hip, ribs, and head against the stairs. My flashlight clattered away in a swoop of light, rolling down the steps and across the landing below.
I had landed upside down on the stairs, my feet near the top step, my head pointed down toward the landing. The impact knocked the air from my lungs, and I couldn’t move.
That moment of breathless paralysis seemed to stretch on and on, as if I were in a place where time barely flowed at all.
A heavy footstep clomped on the stair just below my head. The air turned so cold it seemed to freeze solid around me.
I craned my neck back, rolling my eyes up to see him. From where I lay, he seemed like a giant, crusted in filth and dark earth, head half-collapsed, like a pumpkin two weeks after Halloween. The long belt quivered in his hand, its crust of buckles and studs clacking together like metallic teeth.
With my head thrown back like that, my throat was dangerously exposed, only inches from the cluster of long, sharp prongs at the tip of the belt. If he hit me as hard as I’d seen him strike the game boards in the living room, he could kill me right there.
I urged the muscles in my arms and legs to move, but they remained useless, as if flash-frozen into place by the rapid temperature drop. His raspy breathing continued. Ghosts don’t need to breathe. It was a sign of mental disorder on his part, a failure to fully accept his own death.
I felt as if I lay on a frozen tundra somewhere near the Arctic, with a beast hungry for meat and blood pinning me down and sniffing at my neck. All I could hear was my own heartbeat, nothing else. The rest of the world had fallen silent.
Isaiah leaned forward and peered at me, his eyes sunken deep in their sockets, giving them a hollow look. I could smell him now, sour earth and decay, and I could have gagged. I could taste him in the back of my throat like a pungent splash of chunky sour milk.
The belt crawled onto my face like a rotten, leathery millipede with sharp steel legs. Its prongs poked at my cheek.
I heard shouting voices, Stacey and Juniper, but they sounded distant and tinny to me, as though I were listening to them from the far end of a long, echoing pipe.
I felt like I’d be trapped there forever, Isaiah slowly flaying me to death with his belt.
Then a pair of lights erupted from overhead, through the broken ruins of the railing. Stacey and Juniper had twisted their flashlight irises to create the wide floodlight beams, and suddenly the dark stairwell was lit up like a stadium.
Isaiah and his belt were gone.
The door to the hallway slammed below me, as if someone had just fled the attic stairs.
Yeah, run away, Whippy, I thought. Your time’s almost up.
Then I drew a deep breath and the pain came, erupting at every spot on my body that had slammed against the steps. Time seemed to speed up again, and I could hear Stacey and Juniper’s voices clearly now.
“She’s not talking! Why isn’t she talking?” Juniper asked, shini
ng her high-powered beam right into my face.
“Ellie!” Stacey shouted my name as she rounded the last cracked post of the railing and came down the stairs. Juniper copied her, and soon they were helping me sit up. “Are you hurt?” Stacey asked.
“I’ll live,” I said, but I was gritting my teeth in pain. A growing sense of anger began to displace my shock. Isaiah had just tried to kill me.
Stacey stood and pointed her flashlight at the landing. She walked down and checked the lower flight.
“I think he took off,” I told her. The temperature had risen to its previous level already.
“We have to get him,” Stacey said.
“We will.” I looked at Juniper, who was pale and clearly terrified. “We can take care of it, Juniper. I promise. This is what we do.”
She looked at me for a long time, as if thinking that over, and then she nodded.
I opened my hand, which still clutched the tiny model locomotive. The little iron smokestack and cowcatcher had gouged holes in my palm, drawing blood, as I’d crashed into the stairs. Not the most child-safe little toy.
As I stood, I slid the locomotive into my jeans pocket, and I started planning my ghost trap.
Chapter Twelve
I set up my air mattress at the intersection of the two upstairs halls. This gave me a view of the doors to the kids’ rooms, plus the attic and master bedroom doors. Most importantly, it afforded a straight-on view of the door to the crafts room. My top priority was to keep the family safe from Isaiah if he emerged again.
As usual, I positioned the thermal and night cameras so I could see their display screens at a glance from where I sat. I added a motion detector in front of the door, too, with lights that would flicker if anything moved. I wanted to monitor that door as closely and in as many dimensions as possible.
Even closed, the door was a bluer hue on thermal than all the other doors in the hall, as if a deep freezer lay on the other side.
Stacey and I strapped on our microphone headsets so we could stay in touch, and we gave them a quick test. Juniper hung around, watching us.
“Good luck,” Stacey said.
“Good luck seeing the ghost, or good luck not getting attacked again?” I asked.
“Both of those. You sure you don’t want me to stay here with you?” Stacey asked.
“I’m sure I want you in the van watching the whole house.”
“If you see him again, just scream.”
“If you see him anywhere in the house, you’d better scream at me,” I said.
“Done.” Stacey smiled at Juniper. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. A little freaked out.” She glanced at the door to the attic, now tightly closed.
“You’ll be fine. We’re watching out for you.” Stacey winked at her before leaving.
Juniper still didn’t seem eager to go to bed—not surprising. It was a little past midnight, the rain was pounding outside, and she had just seen a ghost attack me in a potentially lethal way. Oh, and that small matter of a poltergeist tossing things around her room at night. The poor kid.
“Want to hang out?” I asked, since it was obvious she did. I sat down on my mattress, and she sat cross-legged on the hallway floor in front of me.
“Okay. So what do we do now?” she asked.
“We call this the observation period,” I said. “We just soak up information about what’s happening in the house. Tonight, it’s kind of guard duty, too. We don’t want Isaiah sneaking around causing trouble.”
“How do we stop him if he comes back out?” Juniper glanced at the crafts room door, chewing her lip, then quickly looked away again, as if afraid staring at the door too long might cause it to open.
“Light is your first defense against ghosts.” I gestured to the pair of tactical flashlights laid out in front of me, already pointing toward the crafts room door. “Ghosts don’t like light. It doesn’t hurt them, but it scrambles them and slows them down. Usually that’s enough to send a ghost into hiding, unless it’s really focused on doing something.”
“Like trying to hurt you,” Juniper said.
“Or some little task of their own. Ghosts kind of repeat the emotionally charged moments of their lives, their personal tragedies, again and again. Obsessive-compulsive. A lot of the time, they’re lost in their memories and aren’t even aware of the living people they’re disturbing. Some of them have no idea they’re even dead.”
“What if the lights don’t work?”
“Sound,” I said, touching the little portable speaker on my belt. “I’ve got a massive orchestral performance of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms ready to fire. The right kind of music is like hitting them with a big emotional blast that can drive them back.”
“That’s pretty cool. But what if that doesn’t work?”
“I have a few other tricks up my sleeve,” I said, though I really didn’t have many. “Tonight I just want to keep Whippy McHalf-Face in his own room--”
Juniper laughed, and I realized I’d let slip the nickname Stacey and I had given Isaiah. We usually don’t talk like that right in front of clients. Clients wouldn’t necessarily like to hear us using silly nicknames for the dark things that torment them in their home. But sometimes you can’t help it. I guess it helps you feel like you’ve got a handle on the monster you’re facing.
“--and tomorrow, we’ll try to trap him,” I said.
“Okay. Sounds cool.” Juniper looked around awkwardly for a minute, taking in my gear—flashlights, cameras, black toolbox containing those highly overrated “other tricks” of mine. Then she looked at me and smiled. “Hey, want me to read your fortune?”
“How would you do that?”
“Tarot. I’m pretty good at them. One time, I did it for Dayton and they said money was in his future, and then he found like twenty bucks in an old jacket. So that was kind of cool. I’ll go get ‘em!” Juniper rose to her feet.
I wouldn’t have minded at all—anything to keep the girl calm and get her mind off the ghosts in her house—but I glanced at Toolie’s door and remembered how the woman had told me not to encourage her daughter in the occult. I could imagine Toolie stepping out into the hall and finding me facing her daughter over a spread of major arcana.
Then I could imagine the Yelp review that would come afterward: “One star: Eckhart Investigations encouraged my daughter to practice black magic and worship Satan!”
“Thanks, but maybe not tonight,” I said. “I’m kind of in the mood for avoiding the supernatural if possible.”
“Okay.” Juniper frowned, then smiled again. New idea. “Do you want some snacks?”
Actually, I did.
I accompanied Juniper down to the kitchen, notifying Stacey so she would keep a closer watch on the upstairs crafts room while I was away.
Juniper made us nachos from scratch—modern scratch, anyway. A bag of Tostitos, a bag of pre-shredded cheese, a jar of sliced jalapenos. My stomach was rumbling.
“What are you doing in there?” Stacey asked over my headphones. There weren’t any cameras in the kitchen, since there hadn’t been very much activity there. We’d stuck one night vision camera into the dining room where the pictures had fallen from the walls during a family argument, but nothing had happened there so far.
“We’re making nachos,” I told her.
“Oh, no fair!” I could hear her pout over my headphones, as clear as a bassoon. “I’m starving out here.”
“We’ll leave you a bowl by the kitchen door,” I said. “When we’re back in position, you can dash inside and grab it, then return to base.”
“Aye aye, Roger,” Stacey said. “‘Base’ just means the van, right?”
I sighed. “Jalapenos or not?”
“Jalapenos. And sour cream, if you got it?”
“Sour cream?” I asked Juniper. She nodded. Excellent.
When the nachos were done, we left the promised bowl sitting out for Stacey. It felt weirdly like leaving out cookies for Santa Cla
us.
“Hey, want to use my spirit board?” Juniper asked as we returned to the downstairs hall.
“No, never!” I said. “Those things are dangerous.”
“Just asking. You don’t have to get deranged about it.”
“Have you ever used one in this house?” I asked.
“Yeah...kinda,” she said. “With my boyfriend Dayton.”
“How many times did you do it?”
“Mainly just once...or twice.” She frowned and stopped walking. “Is this all my fault?”
“Definitely not all of it, but you might have stoked up the fire with that. What exactly happened?”
Juniper sighed. “It was Halloween. Dayton and me went out to the shed out back, you know, and lit some candles and stuff. To see if we could summon any spirits.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing, we were just kind of fooling around.” She blushed. “I mean, you know, playing around. Then it started to move, but it didn’t really spell anything out. It just went in circles. Then we heard this banging on the door. And I screamed, I totally screamed. And Dayton grabbed a lawn thingie, you know, a hoe, and he went to the door. I told him not to open it, but he did.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing. There was nobody around at all. That was the spooky thing. And then...stuff started happening around the house. The faucets turning on at night and everything. And my poltergeist.” Her shoulders slumped as if a great boulder had just settled onto her back. “It is all my fault.”
“It’s not your fault the place is haunted,” I said. “But promise me you won’t play around with those things anymore, okay?”
She nodded.
“Seriously, promise,” I said.
“I promise.” She rolled her eyes just a little bit, then she smiled.
“How about a board game?” I pointed to the living room. “Candy Land?”
“That’s a kid’s game.”
“It’s okay to be a kid sometimes.”
