Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper

by JL Bryan

  I nodded. It sounded like Eugenia Marsh. Stacey set up another camera.

  As we approached the second floor up the steep back stairs, Jacob make a sickened noise and put his hands to his head.

  “What now?” Stacey asked.

  “It’s really bad up here,” he said. “We should be careful.”

  “True.” Stacey nodded, looking at me. She really wanted him to be a genuine psychic, I guess, or wanted me to believe it. I was still waiting and seeing, though.

  “Okay. We can do this.” Jacob took a deep breath, then continued up to the second-floor hallway, as though it took a great effort. We stayed close to him. I was a little better prepared for ghost attacks this time.

  He paced back and forth in the hall, shaking his head and laughing a little.

  “Oh, no,” he finally said. “It’s crazy. They’re going in and out, flickering in and out of sight…” He clapped his hands. “Okay. Here’s what we’ve got: I see a couple of drifter types, one of them’s like a hobo from the 1920s…the next guy, he’s a drug addict, bad, to the point that he hasn’t let go of it even in death. But he can’t get a fix, because he’s dead. He’s kind of a 1940s or 1950s guy, and he wears that kind of suit and fedora that everybody wore, even though he’s basically homeless and he commits petty robberies…these guys aren’t really from here, they’re just passing through, only they’re not, because they got caught here.”

  “Caught by what?” I asked.

  Jacob raised a finger, telling me to be quiet. He certainly acted more commanding when he was being psychic. “You’ve got another big thug guy, his throat’s cut…oh, and hookers, hookers, hookers. At least three of them, but they didn’t know each other in life. They’re from different times. Like one is kind of in a fringed-out flapper-style dress, and the other is in these, like, hot pants from the Seventies…yeah. There are a few different people here.”

  “Why are they here?” I asked. “What do they want?”

  “They’re…stuck. Oh, yeah. Something’s holding them here, and it’s not just trapping them. It can kind of control them, it has power over them. They’re prisoners, though. They don’t want to be here.”

  “What’s holding them?”

  “I can’t…” He closed his eyes. “They don’t want to talk about it. They’re all shrinking away, back into the walls…they’re running away from me.” He looked at me again. “Well, they didn’t like that.”

  He walked along, pointed to occasional rooms and saying “bad…bad…bad…” These included the two with the rows of nails in the doors. “They’ve all got a story. None of them expected to stay here when they came. It was like a net…a spiderweb, to catch stray people. Most of these weren’t so bad in life, but now they’re twisted and violent, they’re under the spell of the house.”

  “Is there a way to free them?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  We returned downstairs for more cameras, then took Jacob up to the third floor.

  “Yeah, it’s thick up here, isn’t it? And cold,” he said. “Some of the oldest ones stay up here. They barely look like people anymore, they’re shriveled…”

  Jacob stopped just inside the master bedroom, looking at the mold-encrusted bed, then up at the giant patch of dark mold on the ceiling high above it.

  “This is that woman again, from the kitchen,” he said. “She’s defiant. The mold is her way of crying out, reaching out. She resists him more than the others, but she’s tied here, too, by the same kind of…I want to say it’s almost like a rope, a black rope anchoring each spirit to the darkness below.” Jacob’s head snapped around and he looked at me with a cold, solemn expression. “Does this house have a basement?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t want to go down there.

  After grabbing two more cameras, the three of us returned to the wine cellar door by the kitchen. We pushed it open. Rough-hewn steps led into the rock-lined darkness below.

  “Who wants to go first?” Stacey asked, trying to make it sound funny, but it didn’t. That cellar was creepy by anyone’s standards.

  “Let’s get in and out fast.” I started down the stairs, widening the lens on my flashlight so it changed from a narrow beam into a flood. This kind of made it a worse offensive weapon, as far as chasing ghosts away, but a better defensive one. Like a shield of light.

  Each one of those rough old stairs just had to creak beneath me as I stepped on it. Every single one.

  The cellar was unnaturally cool at the top of the steps, but felt like a deep freezer by the time I reached the bottom. My breath plumed out in front of me. I swear, if we could learn to harness and domesticate ghosts, we could save a ton on air conditioning, especially down here in the Deep South.

  I wished I had my trusty Mel Meter or at least some kind of EMF meter with me, but I’d left that in my toolbox out in the foyer. I didn’t want to give our supposed psychic any clues. I had to admit, though—he was hitting pretty close to home, as far as I could tell.

  The walls were rocks held together with a massive amount of cement. It felt like the oldest part of the house, the one that probably hadn’t been altered much since the original construction. No 1970s stovetops here, though there was an old wood-burning furnace, obviously long abandoned. Rusty tools, sheeted furniture, and crates and boxes filled the room, leaving only a few twisty paths through the clutter. A huge built-in floor-to-ceiling wine rack held nothing but dust and spiderwebs. The floor was paved with concrete and more river rocks.

  I felt ill. Stacey didn’t look too happy, either, but Jacob looked far worse, like he’d contracted a disease and was about to keel over dead.

  “It was down here,” he said. “But not exactly here. I can’t explain. Is there a door? Another room?” Jacob sprang from his sickly slump and dashed along the walls, searching with his flashlight.

  “Don’t get too far away,” I warned him. “I’ll help you look.”

  As far as we could find, though, the cellar was a single large room. We even checked behind precarious heaps of boxes to see if any sort of passageway had been concealed over the years.

  “I don’t get it.” Jacob kicked at the floor. “Maybe all the stuff was taken away, and that’s why…”

  “What stuff?” Stacey touched his shoulder, leaning in toward him. She was dangerously close to flirting with him, actually.

  “He killed them,” Jacob said. He squeezed Stacey’s hand. “He brought them down here…somewhere right around here. It was a ritual thing, black magic. He thought killing them would extend his own life. The thing is…when he died, he didn’t stop the killing. There was a supply of people drifting through, and sometimes he would wake up and take one for his collection. Because he controls all the other ghosts.” Jacob’s eyes were bugging out, and he was sweating.

  “Stop!” Stacey screamed. She drew her hand back from him. “Stop, I can see it!”

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  “It was horrible,” Stacey said, looking at me. “The migrant workers, the addicts and petty thieves, the prostitutes…people he thought nobody would miss. People he thought were no better than animals.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Who was he?”

  Jacob shook his head. “Whatever he looked like in life, he’s become so twisted and mutated. Now he’s more like a festering tumor. That’s how I see him. And all the other ghosts are stuck to him.”

  “Was it Captain Marsh?” I asked. “The man with the big beard you saw upstairs?”

  “Could be,” Jacob said. “He could be one of those guys from the smoking room, yeah, but he got into something dark…or something dark got into him.” He stiffened. “We need to get out of here.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “We just do. It could get ugly.”

  “All right. Stacey, are those cameras ready?”

  She nodded. She’d placed tripods with thermal and night vision, spacing them far enough apart that if one were to fall down, it wouldn’t collide with
the other. We would monitor them from the van outside.

  We hurried upstairs. Stacey and I had been more or less unconsciously avoiding the basement throughout our investigation, and now I understood why. It was extremely creepy down there, and we’d both felt it. Maybe it was the center of everything happening in the house.

  Jacob helped me carry the heavy stamper upstairs to the room where we’d found the broken syringes. I crushed up an OxyContin pill with the steel ridges that protruded in front of my flashlight lens, then dumped the powder into the ghost trap. I lit the three candles as an additional lure.

  I set it to automatic—a ten-degree drop in temperature plus an EM spike would make it seal the trap, though I could still activate it with the remote if I wanted.

  Then we walked back to the foyer, toward the front doors.

  Jacob hesitated, tilting his head as though picking up a signal.

  “The darkness that’s here,” he said. “It’s welling up. Something was holding it down for a long time, but now it’s been unleashed, and it’s growing. The monsters will be coming out of the walls soon. I don’t know who your clients are or what their plans are, but they should probably just tear this place down.”

  “Well, thanks for your advice,” I said, after waiting to make sure he was finished. “And thanks for coming out. Have a safe drive home, all right?”

  “You’re not staying here, are you?” he asked.

  “Not inside the house.”

  “Promise me you won’t go in there,” Jacob said. “Nobody should go in there, especially at night. Okay?”

  “We promise.” Stacey patted his arm. “Thanks.”

  Outside, where night had fully fallen now, Jacob pulled away in his fairly new gray Hyundai, the car of ultra-sensible people.

  “I thought he was kind of amazing,” Stacey said.

  “He was okay,” I said. “Let’s get in the van. We still have work to do.”

  “Don’t you ever get a chance to sleep?” she asked.

  “Sure. In between cases.”

  She trudged after me to the van.

  Chapter Twenty

  The array of monitors in our van is built behind the driver and shotgun seats. Two narrow, very uncomfortable bunks fold down from the walls, which is convenient for overnight trips, but you don’t want to sleep on them unless you have absolutely no other choice. More comfortable options would include a park bench with a newspaper blanket, or a bed of slightly rusty nails.

  They were good enough for now, though. We dropped them and sat down to watch the dozen small monitors, some of which periodically flipped viewpoints among cameras throughout the house.

  “Do you think what he said is true?” Stacey asked. “Somebody was doing weird occult murders down in that basement?”

  “I’d need more evidence than a psychic’s word,” I said.

  “He was right about other stuff.”

  “Maybe.” I settled back on my camping pillow.

  The house was quiet for a while, but then things began to happen. First it was just small things—a door slowly swinging open or shut, a creak or a footstep, a cough. Then came the voices, here and there, murmuring too low to make out. Then a shout, a scream, and a loud crash that had no physical cause we could see.

  “That poor little girl, Lexa,” Stacey whispered. “Lying awake at night, hearing this from her bed.”

  I nodded.

  A thermal camera in the second-floor hall caught the shape of an icy cold woman walk past, then vanish. Our night vision cameras showed suggestions of people moving in some of the rooms on the second and third floor, but they faded quickly.

  “That’s a lot of activity,” I said after a couple of hours. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a house this active.”

  Then two screens turned black.

  “What were those?” I asked.

  “Uh,” Stacey said. “Yeah. Those were the cameras in the cellar.”

  “What happened? Did something knock them over?”

  “Not that I saw. They just turned off.”

  “Okay.” I stood up and stretched my legs. “Let’s go check it out.”

  “Seriously? I thought you said it was too dangerous. That’s why you’re out here with me.”

  “Yep. And that’s why we’re bringing the ghost cannon.” I knelt on the floor, reached under my bunk, and unsnapped the latches on something that roughly resembled a big black tuba case. “You said you wanted to see it in action.”

  “Yeah, but…maybe not right now, okay?” Stacey said. “Do we really have to go in there? The house is obviously crawling with ghosts.”

  “The basement might hold the key to everything,” I replied. “And something’s happening down there. I want to check it out. We need to fix those cameras.”

  “Ugh,” Stacey said. “All right. As long as we bring the ghost cannon.”

  I lifted it out of its case. It looked like a big round cylinder of a stage light with a carrying handle on top. The battery pack was so heavy I had to strap it to my back. I couldn’t hook the batteries to my belt if I wanted to keep my pants on for more than two seconds, which I typically do in most situations.

  We closed up the van and walked through the front doors of the house. I used my regular flashlight, as did Stacey, because I didn’t want to burn the house down with the cannon.

  We crossed the dark lobby and entered the main hallway, heading for the kitchen and the wine cellar. Voices echoed from the floors above. Quick footsteps banged overhead, as if someone were running, then stopped abruptly.

  I kept moving, slowed considerably by the heavy weapon I’d chosen to bring.

  Here are several reasons you should never use a ghost cannon. First, they’re painfully heavy and unwieldy. Second, they’re unreliable. Third, even when they’re working, they suck a lot of power and don’t last long. Fourth, they get hot enough to burn your hand after a couple of minutes. Fifth, they’re a major fire hazard—the intense blast of light can ignite anything dry and flammable, like paper, wood, and other materials commonly found in old haunted houses.

  There’s only one good reason to use a ghost cannon, and that’s because you absolutely have no other choice. While a powerful flashlight beam of a few thousand lumens can startle a difficult ghost and confuse or annoy it into leaving you alone, it will never stop the real monsters when they’re determined to attack you.

  For guaranteed safety—for a minute or two, at least, until it overheats or the battery pack runs dry—you want a specially designed light that can cast more than a million lumens. That’s the ghost cannon. Created as an offensive weapon against the most difficult ghosts, it can save your life, provided it doesn’t kill you first. It puts out the kind of light and heat normally associated with the big searchlights that the military use to watch the skies, or Vegas hotel owners use to draw attention to their skyscrapers.

  That’s what I was lugging to the basement with us.

  Stacey pushed open the wine cellar door.

  The cellar air was freezing cold and much heavier now. I felt like things were watching me from the shadows, but my flashlight revealed nothing, as if the things melted back into corners and walls just before the beam hit them.

  “They’re dead,” Stacey said.

  “Who?” I asked, feeling anxious.

  “These cameras.” She’d walked a few feet ahead of me to check them. “Like something drained the batteries. I can’t even get them to turn on.”

  There’s the downside of using electronic equipment. While most ghosts can feed on fire, or even ambient heat in the air, more sophisticated ghosts learn to suck energy out of batteries. We’d just fed a little snack to whatever dark thing dwelled in the cellar.

  Above us, the cellar door slammed shut, making us both jump.

  Footsteps creaked on the stairs. It sounded like more than one person, like a group walking in slow single file.

  I shined my flashlight up to the steps, but I didn’t see any apparitions.

>   I did see the steps themselves move, each one bending and squeaking again and again, as if a parade of unseen shoes pressed down on the old wood.

  My heart was banging hard in my chest. I managed not to scream.

  “What do we do?” Stacey whispered.

  “Finish changing the batteries,” I said. I was prickly and sweaty all over, despite the deathly cold of the cellar. I knew I was surrounded by invisible monsters.

  I moved closer to her, holding my flashlight on the camera so she could use both hands.

  A low murmuring of voices swirled in the cold air around me, encircling me.

  “Leave us alone,” I said, trying to sound commanding rather than terrified. I’m not sure it worked. “I’m warning all of you. Get back.”

  The murmuring grew louder. Shapes formed in the air around me, like simple, transparent faces stretched into exaggerated frowns.

  They moved in on us.

  “Stacey?” I asked.

  “Almost done. Sorry, my hand keeps shaking.” She slid the new battery into place with an audible click.

  As if this were some kind of signal, the ghosts charged us, grabbing at my hair, my sleeves, my legs. Stacey screamed, so she was probably experiencing the same thing.

  I turned on the ghost cannon.

  The scorching-white beam threw the ghosts into full relief. I saw the menagerie Jacob had talked about, the transient-looking men and the scantily clad women. A few crawled on the floor like worms, their ghostly forms severely decayed. All of them were grabbing at us.

  A sound like a scream echoed through the room, and it didn’t come from Stacey. The ghosts scattered, retreating into walls or just vanishing where they stood. I could feel the heat of the cannon throbbing against my leg and arm.

  “What did you see?” I asked. “How many?”

  “How should I know?” Stacey whispered.

  “Think.”

  “Eight? Ten? Way too many, let’s get out of here.”

  “Did you see anyone that looked like Captain Marsh?”

  “I don’t think so. Hey, I didn’t know there would be a pop quiz afterward. Let’s talk about it somewhere outside this house, okay?”