by JL Bryan
Anna and Lexa stayed on their side of the house, but Lexa stood right in the doorway watching Stacey with large, fascinated eyes.
I carried the thermal camera up the hall toward the front of the house, swinging my flashlight from side to side. The house contractors still had a lot of work to do, but generally the hallway looked nice, with its high crown molding and plaster ceiling fully intact and recently restored.
From the public real estate records, I knew the house had gone through several owners since it left the Marsh family. The sale prices had ballooned during the real estate bubble, until the last owner suffered foreclosure during the downturn. The house had been empty and bank-owned since then, until the Treadwells had purchased it at a very reduced price a few months earlier.
I reached the end of the hall and put down the thermal camera, but I didn’t set it up yet. Curiosity was driving me onward.
I nudged open the last door and stepped out into the foyer.
It was a large space, two stories with a row of narrow Gothic windows above the door. A wide, blocky staircase ran up the western wall and connected with a second-story walkway. Heavy oak double doors stood at the front of the room, with a fairly new steel chain looped and locked around the door handles, making entry from the outside impossible.
Unlike the rest of the house I’d seen, this spacious room appeared to have been hit hard by the corrosive effects of rain, wind, vagrants, and juvenile delinquents. Several of the second-story windows were boarded up, and many of them were surrounded by water damage and dark patches of mold. The room reeked of decay, probably because of the mold.
The walls were discolored and warped, and they looked like diseased skin. Graffiti was everywhere, all over the walls, floor, and stairs, some of it occult, most of it just puerile and pornographic.
I shined my light up the stairs. An ornate wooden handrail adorned the staircase. At the top, the handrail curved around and became the balustrade for the upstairs walkway, where a few doors and a central hallway led deeper into the house. The balusters were densely packed all along the way, two to a stair, and carved in ornate Victorian style.
The second-floor walkway ended at the eastern wall of the room. I could see a rectangular area where the hallway had been walled up and painted over to divide the east wing from the rest of the house. It looked oddly sunken, like a closed lid over a missing eye.
I swung the light back along the balustrade. Near the center, one of the thick wooden balusters had broken, and its lower half was missing. I wondered if that was the spot where Mercy Cutledge had hanged herself.
I was starting to feel ill. The rotten mold smell was aggressively forcing its way up my nostrils and down my throat. A sudden wave of sickness can indicate a ghost—typically a ghost who does not want you around.
“Mercy,” I said, in case she could hear me. “Mercy Cutledge. We know you died in this room. We’re here to help. We don’t mean you any harm—we want to help you move on and leave this family in peace.”
I didn’t receive an answer, unless it was the second wave of nausea rolling through me, making me want to vomit between my boots. I covered my nose and mouth with my hand, my stomach heaved, and I ran back to the door through which I’d entered as fast as I could.
“Hey, you okay?” Stacey called out at the sound of my running into the hall. She blasted her flashlight at me. “Ellie?”
I waved my hand, afraid that if I spoke, it would be the final straw in making me throw up in a very embarrassing and entirely unprofessional fashion. I leaned against the wall and caught my breath. Compared to the foyer, the air in the side hall was like a crisp, clean mountain breeze.
“Earth calling Ellie,” Stacey said. “Can you just say something? Say ‘shut up, I’m fine.’”
“Shut up, I’m fine,” I managed to breathe out. As the dizziness and nausea passed, I stood up and busied myself with the thermal camera. “That front room is a very bad place. Or at least a very rotten one. That could be the ghost’s main lair.”
“Should we stick a camera in there?” she asked.
“I’ll just place this one at the very end of the hall. Maybe we’ll catch something coming out of that room.” I activated the camera and checked the little monitor to make sure it captured the length of the hall. Then I walked back to the open security door to join the others.
Stacey gave me a giddy, excited grin as we stepped back into the east wing hallway. “All set?”
“We’re ready.” I followed her through and pushed the security door shut, then slid the deadbolt and twisted the knob up to lock it into place. I double-checked to make sure the door was sealed tight.
Then I turned to face Anna and Lexa. Anna stood behind her daughter, her hands on the girl’s shoulders. Lexa twisted the soft doll nervously in her hands.
“Okay, ladies,” I told them. “You said it usually shows up between midnight and two, right? So we have about an hour. I’d recommend you follow your usual routine from here on.”
“That means we should have gone to bed at nine,” Anna said with a thin smile.
“I want to stay up with the ghost hunters,” Lexa told her mom. “I want to see what they do.”
“You won’t miss much, Lexa,” I said. “It’s mostly a lot of sitting around. Like a police stakeout, but without the doughnuts, because Stacey and I are watching our carbs. If anything happens, Stacey will record it to show you in the morning.”
“Yeah, you get to skip to the best parts, without the long boring parts in between,” Stacey told her. “I’ll cut together a special video of anything that’s not boring, okay?” She flashed Lexa a cheerful smile, and the girl returned it, a little.
“Come on, sweetie,” Anna told her daughter. “I’m ready for bed, too. We should let them work.”
I watched the two of them depart up the stairs.
“Are we ready?” Stacey whispered. “Do you think we’ll get one this time?”
“I hope so,” I whispered back. “I’ve got bills to pay.”
“Good luck to both of us, then.” Stacey winked and clapped me on the shoulder. She left through the side door. I made sure it was closed behind her, but not locked. Stacey would be outside in the van, watching every camera at once. I wanted her to be able to come running if I needed help.
The house lay quiet. I turned out the lights, leaving only a single small lamp burning in the living room. It left the hall in a deep gloom, but not pitch dark. When my eyes adjusted, I could see the outline of the bolted security door.
I sat down on my inflated mattress on the hallway floor, facing the security door. I checked the display screens on the thermal and night vision cameras again. My cameras were recording the door at the end of the hall and a portion of the first flight of stairs. If anything came through the door and up the stairs to harass Lexa, there was a fair chance I’d capture a hint of it on camera.
I slipped on my headphones. While I waited for midnight, I read a thick paper copy of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. So sue me, I’m a nerd.
I kept my eyes on the locked security door, and I waited.
Chapter Six
It’s a tricky business, ghost trapping. Ghosts have a funny way of not showing up when you want them, but instead creeping up on you when you don’t. When you’re alone in the house late at night, minding your own business, that’s when you’re likely to hear the unexplained footsteps, walk into a cold spot, or feel invisible fingers touch the back of your neck. When you’re actually trying to find them, they can hide silently for days, even weeks.
The ghost at the Treadwell house, fortunately, did not keep us waiting long.
For a time, all I could hear was occasional creaks, and a slow drip of water somewhere as if a faucet had been left slightly open.
“Ellie,” Stacey whispered over my headset. We stayed in touch through headphones with little microphones to keep our hands free. “Ellie, there’s something happening in the main house.”
“What is i
t?”
“It’s a…oh, wow…uh…uh…holy cow…”
“You could be a littler clearer,” I whispered.
“Sorry. The hall, over in the main house, by the foyer. I’m getting a rapid drop in temperature…it’s been eighty-seven degrees but now it’s seventy…sixty-eight…”
“What do you see?”
“Nothing on night vision. The thermal, though…it’s like a deep blue cloud. It looks like it came from the foyer…now it’s drifting down the hall…it’s moving toward you, Ellie.”
“Okay,” I managed to say, while staring at the bolted door. My heart was already thumping faster in anticipation. I listened carefully, but I heard nothing on the other side. If an entity was moving toward me, it was doing so in complete silence.
“Getter closer now,” Stacey whispered in my ear. “It’s almost to the door.”
“Can you see anything on night vision?”
“Nothing, sorry.” Stacey took a breath. “It’s at the door. It’s stopping. Still just a blue mist on the thermal…the whole hallway is getting cold, like fifty degrees now, so it’s hard to make out the shape…”
“Shh.” I thought I’d heard something very small. A tiny metallic plink. The door was just a dark rectangle in the gloom, so I looked to the little screen of my night vision camera.
The room was quiet for a second…and then there was no mistaking the rusty, rasping sound as the bolt slid open. I could see it plainly on my night vision, the heavy bolt moved by an invisible hand.
I don’t care how many ghosts you’ve encountered—the fear never goes away. I watched the bolt slide and felt myself shiver. A feeling of panic rose in my gut and had to be fought down. It was surreal, like a bad dream, watching that bolt scrape itself open.
I grabbed my flashlight from my open toolbox, just in case Mercy the ghost was in an angry, attacking sort of mood tonight, but I kept it turned off.
The door opened slowly and gently, as if nudged by a silent breeze, the hinges creaking. Behind the door lay a rectangle of solid darkness—even on my night vision camera, I couldn’t see any details of the little hallway on the other side. There was just no light over there at all. It was unnerving to see that on my night vision, like staring into a black hole.
“Holy cow, the door’s open!” Stacey gasped over my headset. “Right in front of you, Ellie!”
“Yeah, I noticed,” I whispered back.
“We’re picking up something on your thermal,” Stacey added. “This could be it!”
I looked at the screen, and there it was—the blue mist shape Stacey had mentioned, visible only by its cold temperature.
I didn’t need the camera to tell me something was in the room with me. Already, the temperature was dropping hard. It’s disturbing to be surrounded by hot summer air that abruptly begins to freeze. The air grows heavy and closes in around you like a big invisible hand.
I checked my Mel Meter, which detects electromagnetic fields as well as temperature. It’s a critical tool. Parapsychology has never been an exact science—in fact, it’s often called a pseudo-science or just plain delusion—but generally, a ghostly presence is strongly indicated when you have an unexplained surge in electromagnetic energy combined with a sudden drop in temperature.
I’d already checked the usual electrical hotspots, like outlets and appliances, so I had a general idea of what was normal for the room around me.
The EM portion of the meter spiked to six milligaus, indicating a high-energy presence. Readings of two to seven milligaus are often associated with ghosts. At the same time, the Mel Meter’s temperature readings plummeted from ninety to sixty-seven degrees, confirming that the cold front prickling my skin and making me shiver wasn’t just in my head.
“You okay in there?” Stacey asked. “Should I join you? I can totally come in if you want! I’m ready!”
“Stay in the van,” I whispered. “I need your eyes all over the house.”
On the thermal display, the mist rolled slowly toward the stairs, then drifted up along the first flight. I still couldn’t see anything with my eyes or the night vision.
Then I heard the creak. It was just one stair, something like a light footstep made by a small woman. It may not sound like much, but at that moment, the single creak all but made my hair stand up.
Onscreen, the blue mist continued upward and out of sight. I quietly rose to my feet, flashlight in one hand and Mel Meter in the other. I grabbed my thermal goggles and perched the lenses on my forehead in case I needed them.
“She’s out of sight,” I whispered.
“Coming up the stairs,” Stacey whispered back, and at that moment, I heard another creak, this one from the second flight that I couldn’t see. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I forced myself to stay calm.
“She’s a very active one,” I whispered. “I’m following her.”
“Are you sure? Should I come in now? Let me just grab my flashlight and my handheld camera, okay?” Stacey asked. She was trying to sound concerned, but she wasn’t able to hide the excitement that wanted to bubble out. Stacey hadn’t seen enough scary stuff to be cautious, but I knew she would eventually, if she stuck with me long enough.
“Hold your position,” I said. That kind of talk comes by way of being trained by Calvin Eckhart. It’s become automatic for me in these situations. “Just keep your eyes and ears open for me.”
Gripping my flashlight in one hand and the Mel Meter in the other, I began to ascend the stairs. It grew colder with each step…sixty-one degrees on the first flight, fifty-three by the time I reached the midway landing. I started up the second flight.
“You’re right behind her,” Stacey whispered. “This is so freaky.”
Forty-eight degrees. My own footsteps sounded as loud as gunshots in my ears as I climbed the stairs. Forty-five degrees. By the time I reached the top stop, it was at forty degrees, and I could see a frosty plume each time I exhaled.
I stood in front of Lexa’s door. The upstairs hallway was cold and silent around me, the moonlight thin from the windows, barely penetrating the darkness. The gloom felt oppressive, the air unnaturally heavy.
I was just about to drop the thermal goggles down over my eyes when I heard the tiny click from Lexa’s door. Lexa’s name was painted on a wooden square mounted in the middle of the door, surrounded by little flowers and butterflies in bright pigments.
The round doorknob gave the smallest squeak as it turned. The door to Lexa’s room crept inward, again moving slowly, as if nudged by the lightest possible draft of air.
Lexa sat up in her bed, outlined by a feeble pink-flower nightlight plugged into the far wall near the fireplace. The room grew even darker around her, as if the nightlight were burning out.
“She’s here,” Lexa whispered to me. She raised a shaking arm and pointed at me. “She’s right beside you.”
The temperature was down to thirty-six degrees—my fingers would begin to freeze if it grew much worse.
I turned toward the freezing center of the cold spot and reached for my goggles again.
I didn’t need them.
She took shape gradually, like a scrim of frost collecting in midair. At first, she was just a shape—female, petite, a little shorter than me, pale as ice. Then more details appeared. She wore a clingy, low-cut black dress, and some kind of teardrop-shaped pendant hung against her transparent white flesh. Her hair was colorless and stringy, hanging in thick clumps.
Then I could see rope burns on her neck, and I recognized her face from the picture. Mercy.
She stared at me with hollow eye sockets. Even at her most detailed, she was transparent, barely even there. I could plainly see the hallway behind her. I felt like, if I blinked, she might vanish again.
“Ellie, what’s up?” Stacey asked. “Are you seeing something? These temp readings are down low, like deep-winter low…that whole upstairs hallways is like creepy-crawly with cold—”
“Sh,” I whispered. Her chatting wasn’t
helping me. Every nerve in my body was tense, screaming at me to run away, to run straight out of the house and slam the door behind me. It was hard to ignore my instincts, but I had a job to do.
Resisting the desire to flee, I forced myself to speak instead.
“Mercy,” I said. “Mercy Cutledge.”
The ghost’s hollow eyes widened a little, giving me a better view of the empty hallway behind her. Her mouth opened, and I thought I heard a cold buzzing in the air. For some reason, it made me think of the ice machines at cheap motels.
“Mercy,” I said. “Leave this family alone. Your time here is done. You need to move on.”
Her lips drew into a sneer. She had no visible teeth or tongue—as with her eyes, it was just empty hallway behind her when her mouth opened.
She blasted one word at me. I felt it strike me in the forehead like a gust of arctic air, and I heard the word inside my brain more than with my ears: Leave.
“You don’t understand, Mercy,” I said. “You’re dead, you died—”
A howling shriek hit me right in the brain. The ghost charged at me, her misty face distorted and distending as she put on speed, her empty eye sockets and mouth hole stretching to inhuman shapes.
I raised my flashlight, but she slammed into me before I could click it. A rush of cold, rank air that smelled like a meat locker full of rotten carcasses blew back my hair, and I gagged, growing instantly sick and off-balance. Stacey shouted my name over the headset.
Then it was gone, an evil wind blowing away down the stairs. I didn’t have the luxury of a moment to recover. I had to keep moving.
“What happened?” Lexa asked.
“Be right back,” I told her, racing down the stairs. I heard footsteps from the lower flight below, but I couldn’t see anyone there. The apparition was no longer visible.
I hate it when they turn invisible.
“Mercy, wait!” I shouted. “Show yourself again.”
That got no response. I took the second flight of stairs two at a time. When I reached the bottom, I dropped my thermal goggles over my eyes in time to see flimsy blue tendrils of cold mist curling away into the open security door.
