by JL Bryan
“Let me go,” I croaked, fighting her as she tried to pull me up and over the edge. My legs slid up to the top, but I managed to hook one foot under the railing. My heart was pounding too fast, like it was going to break right out of my ribs.
“You should have left me alone.” She leaned in close, an expression of evil glee on her face. “Now you’ll be my prisoner. My most hated pet.”
She gave a hard tug, and I flipped over the top of the wet railing. I managed to cling to the outside. The drop below was at least fifteen feet, and I had a feeling she’d give me an extra push on the way down, just to make sure my head split open against the front steps.
She floated alongside me, obviously not worried about the long drop below.
“I will torment you for years,” she said. “For centuries. That will be your punishment.”
“That’s all you can think of, because you’re nothing but leftover anger and wrath,” I said. “You have no soul. You are not real.”
“How dare you.” She hissed as she floated above me. She gave me a hard downward shove, with crushing force.
I tried to resist it, but all I had was a feeble grip on the slick railing.
She grabbed my little finger and peeled it back. Then my ring finger. She was prying my fingers loose, one by one.
Thunder crashed again. The poltergeist-girl looked perfectly dry, every white-blond hair in place, the rain falling right through her.
With another weird, throaty giggle, she pried my middle finger loose. Now I was only holding on with my thumb and forefinger. My foot was still hooked under the top of the railing, but she’d be able to pull that loose with a little more effort.
My other hand grasped the railing from the outside, and I didn’t think it would hold my weight if I suffered another hard push from above.
I couldn’t believe I would die like this, dragged off and killed by a poltergeist. They’re typically the mindless puppies of the paranormal world, knocking things and breaking them with no real sense of direction or purpose—just disorganized, chaotic kinetic energy.
This one had lived far too long, become self-aware, and created some plans of its own.
“I will enjoy watching your skull shatter,” she said, her face twisting in a mask of anger and hate. “I will enjoy...enjoy...” She made a gagging sound and reached for her throat.
“Having problems?” I asked, feeling the first glimmer of hope.
“What...what...” Her head snapped back and forth, as if she were emphatically saying “no” and having a series of muscle spasms at the same time.
“I told you, you shouldn’t exist,” I said. “You only endured so long because Eliza’s ghost was trapped in this house. That’s why you’ve been protecting Isaiah. He keeps people out of that room, and he scares Eliza into staying right where she is. A hundred and sixty years in that closet, with you sucking out whatever strength she had. That’s all over now.”
The poltergeist twisted at the waist, her body elongated as she turned to look back at the open doors behind her.
“It’s too late,” I said. “Eliza is beyond your reach now.” From the way the poltergeist was suffering, I could only assume Jacob had convinced Eliza to enter the trap, then sealed her inside.
The poltergeist turned back to me. Cracks spread all over her face, torso, and arms, as if she were a cheap plaster statue breaking apart in the rain.
“Now you’ve been uprooted,” I said. “Your time is over.”
The poltergeist screeched and lunged at me, moving so fast that her face and body blurred and distended. Her hands reached for me like little claws.
If she was going out, she was going to take me with her.
I tightened my grip on the railing, for what it was worth.
As she reached me, she exploded.
I don’t know how else to describe it. The cracks in her face and body widened, then blew open altogether, shattering her.
She let out a high-pitched wail that could have made my ears bleed. My ears had been through way too much tonight.
A huge pulse of light erupted from her core, lighting up the stormy night like another bright flash of lightning. It swelled, pushing out force in all directions, nearly knocking me off the railing anyway. One end of the railing snapped loose, and the section where I clung tilted out and away from the balcony, leaving me dangling over the bricks below.
The glowing explosion swept over me and over the house, too. The unleashed poltergeist energy blew off window shutters, cracked panes on every floor, and dug deep furrows into the roof. Broken shingles sprayed into the sky.
The house shook as if a powerful earthquake were striking its foundations. This did not help with my slippery grasp on the loose, swinging railing, which bounced and shuddered while I hung on for my life.
The air felt stiff and hot, as though filled with static electricity.
Then the house ceased its quaking, the explosive light faded, and all was calm.
I started the pretty scary process of trying to climb back over a loose, slick iron railing in the middle of a pounding storm.
Chapter Twenty
I had just eased my toe over the top of the unstable railing when Jacob came running out through the balcony doors.
“Ellie?” he shouted, blinking against the heavy rain. He looked pretty tattered and bloody. Whippy had given him a very bad beating.
“Over here,” I managed to say. He was already running toward me.
Jacob took my arms and lifted me over the railing. He set my feet on nice, solid ground.
I leaned against him, embracing him. Like I said, I’m not usually that much of a hugger, but he’d just saved my life, okay? It made me feel warm just to lean against him for a few seconds, letting him support me.
“You did it,” I said, backing away from him a little. “Good work. Thanks.”
“What did I do?” he asked.
“You convinced Eliza to go into the trap, and then you closed it. Right?”
“Me? I was busy getting my butt kicked all over the room by Whippy McFaddon.”
“Whippy McHalf-Face,” I said.
“Look what he did to me.” Jacob held out one arm, the shirt sleeve ripped to pieces, the flesh lacerated and bleeding. “After that, I should be able to call him whatever nickname I want.”
“Good point. But who caught the ghost, then?” I asked while we staggered inside, leaning on each other.
The room was destroyed, every piece of furniture overturned and smashed.
Juniper lay where I’d left her, on her side next to the cabinet door. Something was different, though—she now clutched the tall cylinder of the ghost trap in both arms.
“Juniper?” I shook her shoulder gently.
Her eyes parted just a little.
“Are you okay?” Jacob asked, kneeling beside her.
“I...I got her.” Juniper gave an exhausted smile. “She’s in there.”
“Are you sure?” I gazed into the empty-looking ghost trap.
“Saw her do it. She came out like a mist, just a tiny mist...”
“And you closed the trap?”
“Like you were going to do,” Juniper whispered. “Did it work?”
I glanced out at the balcony.
“It worked,” I said. “You destroyed the poltergeist.”
“What about the other one?” Juniper’s eyes opened a little more, and I helped her sit up.
“I don’t know.” I looked at Jacob.
“Oh, Whippy?” Jacob asked. “After torturing me all over the room for a hundred million years, he vanished. It was right when that big explosion rocked the whole house. He isn’t gone, I can tell that much. He’s hiding somewhere.”
“Ellie!” Stacey shouted from downstairs. There was panic in her voice. “Ellie, come down here!”
“Sounds like good news,” I said, trying to ease the rising fear in Juniper’s eyes. We helped her to her feet.
Out in the hall, I dashed ahead, leaving Jaco
b to help steady the exhausted girl. The poltergeist had drained Juniper like a battery.
I finally reached the far end of the hall, and I only had to descend a couple of steps before I saw what was frightening everybody downstairs.
Stacey stood near the foot of the stairs, shining her flashlight. Another beam, held by one of the family members I couldn’t see from my angle, pointed in the general direction of both Stacey and the apparition.
It was a woman in a heavy woolen dress, thick with petticoats, and a matching kerchief. She was soaking wet, and as she ascended the first flight of steps, she left watery footprints behind her.
She walked slowly, like a recording moving at half speed, or somehow out of sync with our own reality. Each step took an agonizing amount of time.
I cautiously continued my descent, down the upper and middle flights. She’d barely climbed half of the bottom flight by the time I reached her.
“She came in through the door.” Stacey pointed to the shattered back door below the stairs, from which rain spattered into the house. “I think she came from the pond.”
The woman’s face was cold and blank, like a porcelain death mask, but submerged below an inch or two of foul green pond water.
The pond water surrounded her like a nimbus, or like those hooded cauls in which some babies are born. It clung to her with no regard for gravity, other than the footprint puddles she left in her wake.
“It’s Catherine Ridley,” I said, standing two steps above the slow-moving ghost. “I’m pretty sure of it.” She resembled the woman I’d seen faintly by the pond, but this was no faint, pale apparition. She appeared solid, three-dimensional, in full detail from her long blond hair—which floated in the thick layer of pond water on her shoulders—down to her leather winter boots.
Her eyes shifted to glance at me when I said her name, but she did not speak, did not react at all to my presence. She didn’t seem to notice that the trap in my hands held her daughter’s ghost, either. She just kept up her unnaturally slow steps, from one stair...to the next.
“Catherine, do you need some help?” I asked her.
She didn’t reply. She was staring straight ahead as she walked right past me. I could see tangled, muddy weeds floating in the layer of water around her. The air dropped to near-freezing temperature as she passed, and I shivered, still dripping wet from the rain.
She turned...slowly...to begin the second flight.
Jacob stood at the railing by the top of the stairs, with Juniper beside him.
“Come on down, I think,” I said. “Just hold tight to the railing. The stairs are getting pretty soaked.”
I remained against the wall, easing sideways up the steps, shadowing Catherine’s ghost in case she suddenly attacked somebody. I doubted she would, but you could never be sure. I knew a thing or two about who Catherine had been in life, but I didn’t know who she was now, as a century-and-a-half year old ghost, or what her intentions might be.
I had a pretty good idea, though.
When Jacob and Juniper had successfully slipped around the ghost without incident, we hurried downstairs to join the others.
“Juniper!” Toolie said. “Where have you been?”
“Up...” Juniper pointed, then let out a deep yawn.
“What happened out there?” Stacey asked. “That wasn’t just lightning and thunder, was it? I thought the house was going to fall down on us.”
“We detonated a poltergeist,” I said. I touched Juniper’s shoulder. “Actually, Juniper did.”
“And I missed it?” Stacey frowned. “That would have been a great video for our YouTube channel. Jacob! What happened to you?”
“We don’t have a YouTube channel,” I said, but Stacey was already gushing and gasping over Jacob’s many belt-buckle wounds, holding his arms to look at them more closely. She hadn’t even asked about the sealed ghost trap in my hands.
Toolie and Gord were scolding Juniper for running off, but she seemed much too exhausted to care.
Catherine’s ghost made her slow way up the second flight, still retaining a small pond’s worth of water in the air around her.
“Where’s Crane?” I asked, while placing the trap inside a coat closet. It would have to do for the moment.
“Oh, he’s right...” Toolie pointed to the empty space beside her, then ran into the living room. “Crane? Crane? Where did you go? He’s not here!”
“We need to search for him,” I said, my brain shifting back into high-adrenaline mode. We hadn’t done anything about the boy ghosts yet, and last I’d heard, they wanted Crane dead. They might have quietly lured him away to some other part of the house while we were busy dealing with the poltergeist. “Jacob, you go with Toolie. I’ll take Stacey back upstairs. Juniper, stay in the living room with your dad.”
“But I want to help...” Juniper gave another huge yawn and stretched. “Couch sounds good.”
Toolie and Jacob went into the living room with Juniper and Gord. They would probably start there and move on to the library.
Stacey and I sloshed our way up the stairs, mumbling “Excuse me” as we passed Catherine’s ghost, who did not acknowledge us at all.
I ran directly to the attic door and flung it open, shining my flashlight up along the steep stairs. Nothing immediately leaped out to kill me.
“Shouldn’t we check Crane’s room first?” Stacey asked.
“No.” I hurried up the stairs, not caring how loud my footsteps echoed. Whatever the ghosts were doing with Crane, I definitely wanted to distract them from it.
Stacey and I shouted Crane’s name, sweeping our flashlights through the darkness.
We didn’t have to search long. He sat under the big plastic Christmas tree, next to the endlessly cheery life-size plastic Santa Claus. A wooden train full of toys, operated by a reindeer engineer, lay toppled over where Crane had made room for himself.
Stacey gasped and squeezed my hand at the sight of him.
He barely reacted when he saw us.
In his right hand, he held a broken Christmas ornament. It had once been a cut-glass angel, but one wing had been snapped off, leaving a long, sharp edge.
Red blood shimmered along the broken wing, and a drop of it had coursed all the way down the cut-glass robes into the angel’s sandal.
Crane’s left wrist was coated in blood, leaking from three deep scratches he’d apparently carved himself.
“Crane,” I whispered. “What are you doing?”
“You can’t help them,” Crane said. “I have to help them. I have to join them.”
“No, no, no,” Stacey shook her head. “You totally don’t have to do that.”
“It’s the only way to beat him,” he said. “All of us together.”
“You mean Isaiah? Their father?” I asked.
Crane hesitated, then nodded.
I eased forward. I wanted to grab the broken angel from his hand, but the way he was holding it, I could have sliced his fingers in the process. The entire situation was so wrong, trying to talk a seven-year-old kid out of suicide. Again.
“This won’t work,” I said. “Believe me, I know as much as anybody can know about ghosts, and this will not--”
“Shh!” a voice hissed, loud and angry, right in my ear.
Stacey cried out as something slammed into her, flinging her backward until her head cracked against one of those low-lying beams.
At the same time, something slammed into my ribs, knocking me into a pile of plastic jack-o’-lanterns, ghosts, and witches. I managed to climb up to my hands and knees, but then I was slammed into the stacks of cardboard boxes lining one wall. I couldn’t move. The air was turning very cold.
“Shh,” the voice said again, near my ear.
“Quit shushing me,” I said.
“Quit,” it whispered back, echoing me.
By the Christmas tree, Crane was digging the broken ornament into his arm again, carving a fourth red line.
“Crane, stop!” I shouted. �
��Stacey, can you hear me?” She was lying on the floor several feet away from me.
“Ugh,” she said. “I can’t move. Like somebody’s sitting on me. Somebody with a really cold rear end.”
“That’s Luke,” I said. “Or Noah.”
Boyish laughter echoed in the air. It sounded menacing enough to me.
“Crane, put down that angel and run downstairs!” I shouted. “Go back to your parents!”
Crane looked at me with a glimmer of hope, as if this was just what he’d hoped someone would tell him to do.
“Go!” I repeated.
Crane stood, moving much slower than I would have liked. He held onto the ornament, but he took a step or two toward the stairs. I figured Noah and Luke couldn’t restrain him without releasing either Stacey or me—there were only so many ghosts to go around.
“Don’t leave,” a voice whispered, very close to me.
“Help us,” whispered another, over by Stacey.
Crane hesitated.
“Don’t listen to them,” I said. “You don’t have to do what they say.” I suddenly wished I’d brought Jacob instead of Stacey—the kid at least seemed to listen to Jacob. Jacob had been pretty banged up, though, so I’d given him the lighter duty of searching downstairs.
I hoped they’d decided to continue to the second floor.
“Jacob!” I shouted toward the stairs. “Toolie! Can anybody hear me? Come up to the attic--”
I gagged on something invisible. It felt like a rough, dirty cloth had just been shoved down my mouth and into my throat. I managed to cough and hack, but I couldn’t speak.
Downstairs, the doorway to the hall slammed shut—I could hear it, but I couldn’t see it.
Heavy footsteps clomped up the stairs. Stacey and I looked at each other, and I hoped I didn’t look as afraid as she did. The footsteps didn’t sound like Jacob or Toolie to me, and I don’t think either of them would have slammed the door shut, anyway.
Stacey remained silent. She saw the figure on the steps before I did, and her eyes grew wide.
Isaiah’s ghost became visible in profile first, a shadowy figure rising up behind the broken railing, his head shattered and smeared with earth.
