by JL Bryan
“So much for your ghost trap.” Dale slumped against the door. His face said he wanted to punch my lights out, but his swaying stance said he was more likely to barf all over me. Neither option appealed.
“We did remove Mercy Cutledge from your home,” I said. “It’s possible that, in doing so, we awoke something else. A house like this has layers of history.” I didn’t exactly want to go into Captain Marsh and his love of whiskey, opium, and prostitutes—not with Lexa close by, listening in on every word.
“Yeah,” Dale snorted. “Now you sound like this mechanic I knew back in Chicago. Go in for a lube job, he’ll always just happen to find you need a new transmission or some expensive work like that. Like clockwork.” Dale tried to punctuate this with another swig of beer, and looked surprised to discover he was no longer holding one. He wandered off into the kitchen.
“There’s more,” Anna said. “After they left, we heard things from the main house. Banging, crashing, yelling. Off and on all night. This morning, I found the medicine cabinet in our master bath was shattered. I walked in there in my bare feet and almost cut myself up. The sink was full of glass and pills. It looked like somebody had opened and dumped out every pill bottle, from the aspirin to Dale’s prescription back medicine. All mixed in with little bits of glass. I had to throw it all away.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That sounds terrifying.”
“We’re still pretty shaken up.”
“Have you had any more trouble with this door?” I stepped one foot back over the threshold of the security door so I could glance over at Lexa, too.
“No, but we’ve had it barricaded,” Anna said. “The bolt did stay in place all night, I guess. It didn’t keep them from demolishing my bathroom, though, did it?”
“We’re dealing with a different ghost now,” I said. “It might not care about that door at all.”
“The other lady’s gone,” Lexa said softly, nodding. “These new things are worse.”
“Have you seen another ghost, Lexa?” Stacey asked.
Lexa shook her head. “But I’ve heard them. And they’re worse than the lady. They’re scarier.”
“Has anything else happened over here in the east wing?” I asked Anna. “Or has everything else been in the main house?”
“It’s hard to say where all the sounds are coming from. It seems like they’re mostly over there, but I can’t be sure.” Anna shivered. “The voices are the most disturbing. You can’t make out the words, but they sound like people talking to each other.”
“What about the main house? Was anything else damaged over there?”
“I wouldn’t know. We haven’t really gone exploring. The problems we already have are overwhelming. I’m scared to see what happens next,” Anna said.
“We’ll go exploring for you. Stacey, let’s grab some gear.” I gestured for Stacey to follow me out to the van.
“Can you get rid of the new ghost, too?” Lexa asked as we walked past.
“I’m sure we can,” I told her. “We just have to learn more about it.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Stacey said. She extended her hand toward Lexa. “Hey, cheer up! Give me five.”
Lexa reluctantly slapped Stacey’s hand. Stacey winked at her and gave her a thumbs-up, but Lexa didn’t seem comforted by Stacey’s attempts to lighten things up.
We didn’t have much in the van, since we’d unloaded it that morning. Our tactical flashlights were there, and so was my toolbox, so I grabbed my Mel Meter night vision goggles and handed the thermal ones to Stacey.
“My own goggles! Finally!” Stacey said.
“Hey, I’m just sharing,” I told her. “Be careful with my stuff.”
Soon, we were stepping through the security door again, into the freshly wrecked hallway of the main house. My instruments showed a lower temperature and higher EMF activity, enough to indicate a background haunting. I could feel it, too, like cold spiders crawling under my skin.
I did not want to walk any deeper into that house, but I put on my bravest face. I’d also put on my leather jacket, because it looked like this new ghost liked to get destructive.
We did a room-by-room check, but most of the first-floor rooms looked as we remembered, though the air felt dark and heavy. We did not go down into the cellar—after the asylum basement, we wanted to avoid dark underground places as long as we could. We didn’t have to say anything out loud. It took no more than a look between Stacey and me to agree on avoiding it for now.
We reached the foyer last, and found sawdust and broken chunks of wood scattered on the floor just below the walkway.
Stacey turned her flashlight beam to the second-floor walkway above us.
“Whoa, looks like somebody came through with a chainsaw,” Stacey said.
Where there had been a single broken baluster, now several of them lay shattered, and the railing they supported was broken into pieces.
“Let’s get a closer look,” I said, and Stacey followed me up the stairs. I avoided using the railing just to be safe, though the portion of it alongside the stairway didn’t seem damaged. Only the balusters along the second-floor walkway were destroyed.
“What a mess,” Stacey said. The broken baluster pieces lay everywhere. It would have been easy for an unsuspecting person to trip over them and topple through the broken railing to the first floor.
On the second floor, the temperatures were lower and the EMF readings were high, two to three milligaus, a strong sign of a haunting.
The first thing we noticed was that the doors with rows of rusty nails stood wide open, making me think of Venus flytraps waiting to snap shut on an unsuspecting victim. Stacey and I had been careful to close them on our last visit, and the Treadwells said none of them had been up here since then. It was possible some of the workers had come upstairs, but it sounded like they’d been focused on the first floor.
Inside the rooms, furniture had been moved and closet doors had been thrown wide open. This was most obvious in the room with the broken syringes, where the single bed had slid from the corner to the center of the room and come to a halt in a diagonal position. In the other room that had previously been nailed closed, hangers and rotten dresses had left the closet and were scattered all over the floor, and the old blankets had been stripped from the bed and left in a tangled heap on the floor.
It looked as if some mischievous entity had run through the second floor, gleefully throwing everything into disarray, but we didn’t find any major structural damage.
“I think the spirit just wants to destroy the new work, the remodeling,” I said.
“Then it’s probably going to hit the east wing much harder,” Stacey said. “The family needs to watch out.”
We reached the slatted door that opened onto the steep, dim staircase to the third floor. That door was flanked by closets on either side. We checked them both, but they held nothing beyond cobwebs and empty shelves littered with dead spiders.
“Who goes first?” Stacey whispered, shining her light up into the darkness and spiderwebs of the third floor.
“I’ll do it.” I clicked off my flashlight and slid my night vision goggles over my eyes. I started up the stairs, using my hands for balance. It really was more like a ladder than a staircase.
The steps creaked under my weight as I climbed up. The night vision showed me where I was going in lurid shades of glowing green. Unfortunately, it showed me a world of trundling palmetto bugs and spiders lurking in their webs. I used my unlit flashlight to clear a path for Stacey.
“How does it look?” she whispered.
“Fine. A little icky.”
The stairs flattened out into a weird landing halfway up to the third floor. Weird because it was sort of like a short, narrow hallway. To my right, another steep staircase continued at a right angle to the first. To my left, the hallway extended a few feet and hit a dead end. An old end table sat there, with a vase of long-dead flowers parked on top.
“Where ar
e you going?” Stacey whispered behind me.
“Just looking.” I knocked on the dead-end wall. It sounded solid to me. I turned to start up the second flight, which was as narrow and unfriendly as the first, and possibly even steeper.
They led up to a rectangular trap door in the ceiling, as big as your average interior doorway but turned on its side. I took a breath, then pushed it open. If any inhuman things crouched in the darkness above, waiting to eat my face, then the loud rusty hinges of the trap door alerted them that I’d arrived.
The third floor had originally been nothing but the sprawling master suite. It was smaller than the second, and it had more furniture and bric-a-brac, but less graffiti, as if vandals hadn’t made their way up here over the years, or something had made them leave fast.
To one side of us, we found a large, round den with wide steps spiraling away to the second floor. We were in one of the house’s turrets, and narrow windows looked down on us from high above. Old furniture was pushed against one wall and draped in sheets. The large, attractive central fireplace, built to resemble a thick tree growing up through the middle of the room, had been plugged with bricks.
We checked a smaller room that might have originally been an office or other side room, but now it looked like a storage room. Antique lamps and odds and ends of furniture were crammed inside. An external lock had been added to the door, so this had probably been turned into a separate bedroom during the boarding-house years.
When we opened the door to the former master bedroom, Stacey and I both cringed and stepped back a little. The smell of rot was overpowering.
It was cold, just sixty degrees, and the EMF reading spiked up to 4.1.
The room was immense, with a very high, round ceiling, clearly the house’s biggest turret, the underside painted with the remnants of a flaking mural that looked like something from ancient Greece, horned fauns chasing blushing nymphs. Or it could have been goat demons eating little girls. The painting was pretty deteriorated.
The room was still partially furnished, with a king-size canopied bed and a wing chair and a desk by the fireplace, plus an old armoire near the closet. Dark mold grew up along the posters of the bed, all over the sheets, and a huge, roughly circular patch grew on the ceiling above the bed. Runners of mold ran across the ceiling and down the closed double doors of the closet.
“Ew.” Stacey pinched her nose against the stink. “This is going to take somebody a long time to clean up.”
“I wonder if the roof’s leaking,” I said. “I thought the roofers were done, though.”
“They need to recheck their work.” Stacey walked to the picture window overlooking the front yard, then turned to the bathroom. “It’s pretty foul in here, too.”
“More mold?”
“No, just a grimy tub and a toilet and sink that haven’t been cleaned in forever. Marble tiles, though, and some nice colored-glass windows. It was pretty luxurious in its day.” Stacey shook her head. “That day is now long gone.”
“Can you have a look with your thermal?” I asked Stacey.
“Sure.” Stacey dropped her goggles and looked over the bedroom. “The cold is everywhere, but there’s a particularly cold spot over the bed. The closet looks extra cold, too.”
Great. I walked over to the double doors and eased them open. I had a bad feeling about it, but there was nothing inside except more mold and the ever-present spiderwebs.
“Empty,” I said. As I turned my back, though, I heard something. It was like a male voice, unnaturally deep, but I couldn’t make out the words it said. It lasted about three seconds. I looked in the closet again. “Did you hear that, Stacey?”
“Hear what?” She joined me. “It’s cold in there, but I don’t see any obvious shapes or a center to it…”
Something heavy crashed downstairs. Voices rose through the floorboards—a shouting, angry-sounding man with a deep voice like the one I’d just heard from the closet. A woman screamed, and then her scream broke into cackling laughter.
We ran to the stairs, with me in the lead. I hesitated before stepping through to the second-floor hallway, because I heard a couple of voices nearby. They were distorted, but it sounded like a fast-paced conversation between two women. Stacey took my hand and squeezed it, letting me know she heard it, too.
The voices passed by, and I glimpsed some movement in my night vision, but nothing very clear. They were like ripples in the air.
I stepped out of the doorway to watch them ripple down the hall and disappear.
We looked into doorways, trying to find the source of the crash. In the broken-syringe room, the bed had moved again, and was now shoved against the window. I barely had time to notice that, though.
A figure knelt on the floor, transparent but thinly visible in night vision. He was a scrawny, shirtless man, with track marks all over his arms and at least a dozen syringes stabbed deep into his back, his shoulders, and his arms and legs.
As he became more visible, I realized he was licking at the two broken syringes on the floor, as though desperate to get something out of them.
“Stacey, are you seeing anything?” I whispered.
“Major cold spot on the floor by the wall.” Stacey pointed at the same figure I was seeing. “It’s starting to get clearer…”
In my night vision view, the transparent green man stopped his licking and looked up at us. I couldn’t see much of his face, but a needle was stuck through his abnormally long tongue.
He vanished. That either meant he was gone, retreating into the gray zone where ghosts go when we can’t find them, or he was coming for us.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be the latter.
I felt a rush of cold wind, then an impact on my breastbone that sent me tumbling across the hallway. Stacey screamed as something pushed her against the wall, then upward along it.
I lifted off my goggles while clicking my flashlight on. I stabbed the intense white beam at the empty air in front of Stacey.
There was an irritated hissing sound, along with a partial apparition. I could see one side of his face, plus a bit of his forearm and the hand pinning Stacey against the wall. A syringe was stabbed through his wrist like a crucifixion nail.
The half-face turned to me, glaring at the light with its dark, empty eye socket.
I wished I’d been prepared for more than a quick look-see around the house.
“Leave her alone!” I shouted, because there’s nothing more intimidating than a girl with thick glasses armed with a flashlight.
A second, transparent hand materialized and lashed out at me. The syringe embedded in its wrist scraped along the sleeve of my jacket. Thanks, leather.
It turned back to Stacey, lifting her higher on the wall. She kicked out at it with her tennis shoes, but there was nothing solid to kick. This is why fighting with a ghost is totally unfair.
Then, naturally, she screamed: “Ellie! Help me!”
I didn’t have my iPod, or I would have shoved some “Ode to Joy” down his creepy maw. I didn’t have anything I needed.
I ran back into the room where we’d found him, and I carefully picked up the broken pieces of syringe, trying not to stick myself with the needle or broken glass. That way, I’d be less likely to pick up some weird disease and die.
“Hey, did you want these?” I held out the pieces of syringe. The pale half-face turned to me, and the half of its mouth I could see plunged into a wide-open frown, as if expressing horror. One of the hands reached for me.
I turned and flung all the pieces down the hall. This brought a faint, startled cry from the ghost, who dropped Stacey to the floor, began to chase the pieces of its syringe, then vanished.
I barely noticed all of this, because I was looking at the shadowy woman at the end of the hall. She was so solid that I initially thought I was looking at Anna. The woman watched as the broken bits of syringe landed at her feet and scattered.
She was a small, mousy woman with dark hair, wearing a high-co
llared white dress that did not belong in this century. She looked up at me, then vanished.
I recognized her from the old photograph—Eugenia Marsh, Captain Marsh’s wife, who had died in 1901.
I couldn’t dwell on this, though, because I had to turn around and check on Stacey. She was recovering, or at least rising unsteadily onto her feet while rubbing her throat.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“It got me here.” She showed me a red scratch near her collar bone. It looked like it had been drawn with a needle. “Can we go yet, or…?”
“We can go,” I said. “We’re not hanging around here without our equipment. We need to figure out what’s going on.” I looked back toward Eugenia Marsh, but she was gone. The syringe’s needle rolled back and forth on the floor, as though someone were trying to pick it up but couldn’t quite manage it. Our junkie ghost, I guessed.
We walked the other way, moving carefully around the shattered balusters, and hurried down the stairs.
Voices echoed from the second-story hall after we left. It sounded like they were arguing with each other.
Chapter Eighteen
“You have a multiple haunting,” I told Anna and Dale Treadwell. Stacey and I sat on the couch in their living room. Anna sat in the matching loveseat, while Dale occupied his usual recliner. Lexa had been sent up to her room. A golf game was muted on the television. “We encountered at least three, possibly four ghosts upstairs. And a presence in the master bedroom. How long has that mold been there?”
“Mold?” Dale sat up in his recliner. “Where?”
I told them what we’d seen.
“Roofers probably screwed it up,” he said, shaking his head and looking grim. It was an expensive problem. “I’m calling those half-wits first thing, when we’re done here.”
“What kind of ghosts?” Anna asked.
“Some were just voices,” I said. “Women. There was a man who looked like a heroin addict…” Anna grew pale as I recounted the attack, some of which had been caught on Stacey’s handheld camera. Stacey had dropped it when the thing grabbed her, which unfortunately had left it pointed at a baseboard the whole time. “The other, I think, may have been Eugenia Marsh, the captain’s wife. I’ll look at her picture again to check.”
