Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper

by JL Bryan

  The raised steel ridges around my flashlight lens, designed to help SWAT raiders and soldiers break down windows and doors, swung dangerously close to my eyes again and again, but I didn’t seem to care about hurting my face. Or Mercy didn’t care, at least.

  I knocked over the little antique table that decorated the dead-end hall, ignoring the vase on top as it crashed to the floor and shattered. Then I kicked low on the blank wall, still trying to find a hollow spot.

  “Didn’t we already check there?” Stacey asked, coming up behind me. “There’s no hidden panels or anything.”

  “Because she walled over it,” I growled. I holstered my flashlight and pointed at the ghost cannon on the floor beside me. “Stay here,” I ordered her, meaning for her to watch over our most powerful piece of equipment.

  “Stay here? Where are you going?” Stacey asked.

  I didn’t reply as I hurried past her, dodging around Jacob as he tried to join us.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer him, either. My ghost-haunted brain was entirely focused on the task at hand.

  I dashed down the steep stairs three at a time, then ran through the kitchen into the first-floor hallway, aiming directly for the security door into the east wing.

  It was locked, bolted on the other side, but this was no major obstacle for Mercy, who’d opened the door so many times in her attempts to make the Treadwell family move out, away from danger.

  I pressed my hand against the door. I felt a portion of her flow out of me like cold smoke through my fingers. I heard the rasp and clack of the heavy bolt drawing aside.

  The door creaked open.

  I walked on through, to the closet where Dale and Anna stored their home-restoration tools. I decided the sledgehammer had a nice heft to it and would do nicely.

  The second-floor ghosts eyeballed me again as I passed them on the way to the stairs, whispering among themselves, a sound like dry leaves scratching their way down the street in a gust of wind.

  Captain Marsh clearly hadn’t given them the order to attack me—not yet.

  I stalked up the stairs, my lips peeled back into an insane grin. Inside me, Mercy was exultant.

  “Whoa,” Stacey said, when I reached her and Jacob. “Don’t you think we should maybe call our clients before we bash apart their house?”

  I wasn’t looking at Stacey. I was looking at the fourth person on the landing, the small, dark-haired woman in the high lace collar whom Stacey could not see.

  The ghost of Eugenia pointed to the blank wall I was about to demolish.

  “Destroy him, Mercy,” she said. “For both of us. For all of us.”

  I nodded.

  “Can you see her?” Jacob asked me.

  “Yes. She’s okay. She won’t hurt us.”

  “Maybe not, but I’m feeling some bad stuff creep toward us.” Jacob pointed up the second flight of stairs, the one that ended in a trap door to the master suite.

  I saw them pass right through the door, dark and rotten shapes crawling down the stairs on their hands and knees. Because of Mercy possessing me, I now understood that these were among Captain Marsh’s earliest victims, people he’d killed in his first ritual sacrifices. There were about six of them, and they’d mostly been hobos and vagrants in life, but one had been from a fairly prominent local family, a personal enemy of Captain Marsh after some business deal gone sour. Now, as long-decayed ghosts, the rich man was indistinguishable from the homeless.

  “The crawlers,” Eugenia said. “My husband sends them to torment me. You must hurry.”

  I turned and swung the hammer, bashing a hole through the center of the dead-end wall.

  The entire house seemed to rumble. The rotten crawlers slithered down the stairs, some of them crawling sideways on the stairwell walls.

  “It’s getting worse.” Jacob pointed down the stairs to the second floor, where the ghosts had so far been content to watch and whisper. Now the entire crowd advanced up the stairs toward us, their faces twisted with rage and hate. Some of their faces had gone transparent, giving a ghostly view of the skulls beneath the pale skin. “They’re all ganging up.”

  Every ghost in the house had come out, except for Captain Marsh himself, waiting down in his lair. Waiting for me.

  Eugenia threw herself at the shadowy crawlers. One grappled with her, but the other five continued their relentless advance.

  “Try to slow them down,” I said. “Jacob, you get the ones from downstairs. Stacey, you get the crawlers.”

  Stacey swung her flashlight beam up the stairs. The crawling apparitions didn’t scatter or vanish, but I could now see them in greater, more grisly detail.

  “How do I slow them down?” Jacob asked. “Jabbing this flashlight at them?”

  “That would be a good start, yes,” I said. We’d given him one of our high-powered tactical flashlights for the mission, but I doubted they would slow this mob very much. “Stacey, music?”

  “Oh, yep. Get back, crawlers! Last warning!” Stacey touched the iPod on her belt.

  Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” blasted at about ninety decibels from Stacey’s portable speaker on her belt. The timbers of the house seemed to vibrate around us. I have to admit, it seemed to give the ghosts some pause.

  “Maybe something a little holier!” I shouted. Then I swung the sledgehammer again, bashing a second hole into the wall.

  “Sorry,” Stacey said, fumbling with her iPod while the ghosts recovered and began to advance on us again from both stairways, clearly ignoring Taylor Swift’s firm rejection of pursuing any further relationship.

  A relatively fast-paced Gregorian chant replaced the pop song. I had somewhat better hopes for that.

  I didn’t look back, though. I kept pounding the wall, punching four, five, six holes. Mercy urged me on with her spectral energy, swinging the hammer with the same righteous fury that had driven her to grab that butcher knife from the kitchen after finding her dead friend, the fury that had sent her up these same stairs to stab the murderous Captain Marsh in his sleep.

  The wall splintered and cracked. I broke through plaster, masonry, studs, and joists. Chunks of wood piled up at my feet, and I swept them aside with the head of the hammer. Then I kept swinging, first high over my head, then low like the hammer was a massive golf club of destruction. I was bashing myself a new doorway.

  “This isn’t going to work much longer!” Stacey shouted. I turned to see the ghosts from above and below crowding into the hallway. “Ellie, I need to use the ghost cannon!”

  “No,” I said. “We have to save the full charge for him.”

  “Then I need a Plan B. You have one, right?”

  “Um,” I said. “Jacob, can’t you, like, lash out at them with your psychic medium powers?”

  “Not that I’m aware of!” Jacob was doing his best to stay between Stacey and the ghosts, while she was doing her best to stay on the front line and protect me while I hammered. I appreciated both of them, especially since their flashlights and music weren’t doing much to hold back the horde.

  “Just push out some intense emotion or something,” I said. “Ghosts are all about drama and emotion.”

  “Would fear work?” he asked. “I’ve got plenty of that hanging around.”

  “Not fear! You’ll start a feeding frenzy. Use anger or something.”

  “Like being angry at myself for being here?” Jacob asked.

  “Think about…think about how it felt when you woke up in that plane crash,” I said. “There had to be some big feelings there, right?”

  “So you want me to throw months of intense suicidal depression at them?” Jacob asked.

  “That would be perfect, thanks!” I turned back and began bashing the wall again, widening the crevice I’d carved out so far. I was beginning to see something beyond it.

  Behind me, I heard Jacob take a few deep breaths, then let out a long sigh, like something buried deep in his gut had b
een set free. I took another swing at the wall, knocking aside a skeletal frame of wood. I could see where we were going now.

  When I turned back, the ghostly horde had slowed greatly. Jacob faced them, clutching his hands to his head, grimacing as though in intense pain. He was protecting us for the moment, but it looked like it was hurting him pretty badly.

  “Good, keep it up, Jacob,” I said. I turned to look through the gaping, jagged hole I’d made.

  On the other side was a door carved from dark ebony, which is pretty heavy, expensive stuff. The door handle was ornate, silver-plated, gripped in the teeth of a devilish gargoyle face.

  “Here it is,” I said. “We made it.”

  Then I slumped, as if my body had turned to rags, and Stacey had to catch me so I didn’t crack my head against the wall. The sledgehammer crashed to the floor beside my feet.

  Mercy’s fury and energy had driven me on until that moment, powering me up like a shot of steroids, or a can of Popeye’s spinach. Now I sensed she was exhausted. I could feel her deep in my gut, curled up in a depleted ball of energy. I didn’t think I would get much more help from her tonight.

  Now my arms and back ached from recklessly swinging the hammer, and blisters had formed on my fingers. Mercy had worn me out, too, and the job was just beginning.

  “Are you okay?” Stacey whispered.

  “I’m great,” I panted, wiping sweat from my face. Weak-kneed, I approached the ebony door.

  “What’s that?” Stacey asked.

  I reached a hand toward the silver gargoyle latch. I was definitely trembling, but I couldn’t say whether it was from too much exertion or from the dark batch of fear boiling up in my belly.

  Before I touched it, the silver gargoyle’s jaw flexed with a sharp squeak. The black door swung open silently, revealing the darkness beyond.

  As with the stairs into the wine cellar, these were rough planks of wood surrounded by rock walls. They descended into pitch blackness. Cold radiated from the darkness below, along with a kind of reverse wind, seeming to tug things toward it like a black hole. The air temperature plunged into deep-arctic range. I could feel my lips and nose chapping in the sudden freeze.

  Marsh, the master ghost, had opened the door for me. He wanted me to come down and see him.

  The fear that struck me then was profound and total, the kind of awful dread that starts deep inside the pit of your stomach and grows up your spine to blossom into a black bloom of total horror inside your skull. It wasn’t the kind of fear that makes you run and scream. It was the kind that makes you die of fright, because you know the end has come.

  I swallowed.

  Down in the darkness, a deep voice gave a long, rumbling moan, as if in response to my gulping sound.

  “He’s there,” I whispered.

  I picked up the ghost canon and started toward the doorway, ducking under the remnants of the wall I’d bashed to pieces.

  “Ellie?” Stacey asked, touching my arm.

  “Stay with Jacob,” I said. “Do not let any of those minions through this door.”

  “But, come on, you’re not going by yourself—” Stacey looked into the horrible, freezing darkness below.

  “Mercy is coming with me,” I said, not mentioning that Mercy had more or less collapsed inside me and might not be heard from again. I still had some of the ghostvision going for me—I could see the horde coming to kill us all. I guess that was a good thing. I couldn’t see in the dark anymore, though, so I drew my flashlight and clicked it on. “Cover my back. That’s, like, an order. Seriously.”

  Stacey nodded and turned to face the ghosts, blasting them with a tactical flashlight in each hand while they trudged their way through the melancholy blue haze of Jacob’s sadness. It looked like they were attempting to cross a swamp while wearing heavy boots. Jacob’s hands covered his eyes, his teeth bared in pain.

  I turned my attention to the evil waiting below, and I started down the stairs, the ghost cannon in one hand, my flashlight pointed ahead of me.

  “Captain Marsh!” I said. When in doubt, act like you’re in control. Showing fear to a ghost is like feeding a stray cat—once they get a taste, they’ll never leave you alone. “I know you’re down here. It’s time for you to leave this house.”

  The stairwell did not immediately widen to give a view of the room below, as the wine cellar stairs did. The raw rock walls stayed narrow, brushing my shoulders every step of the way. I wondered how Captain Marsh, a man of some height and girth, had fit through here. I suppose he sucked in his gut.

  My heart beat faster every step of the way. The stairs below me creaked and groaned under my weight—which isn’t that much, people—and the whole rickety staircase structure felt much weaker than the one in the wine cellar. I was tense, waiting for it to collapse below me. Nobody had walked down these stairs in many years. They could easily have been rotten through, or even eaten by termites.

  The cellar seemed completely silent. I hadn’t heard the moaning sound again.

  The walls finally flared out as I reached the bottom stair, but not by much. My flashlight found rock shelves built into the walls on either side, like stone bunk beds stacked three high. A skeleton in decomposed clothing lay on each one.

  I’d walked into a crypt.

  “Captain Marsh?” I said, shining my flashlight forward. Across the roughly oval-shaped room, opposite the stairway, a little alcove had been carved halfway up the wall. Its lower lip was framed by layer after layer of black-wax stalactites, as though countless black candles had been burned there over the years.

  Inside the alcove squatted one of the ugliest pieces of art I’d ever seen, a black volcanic-rock sculpture of a rotund little humanoid with cloven hooves, a pot belly, and a flat face adorned with tusks and horns. It was about a foot tall. Its clawed hands were clasped as though in prayer, but its bugging black eyes looked straight ahead, and its neck was stiff and fully erect.

  Below that, on the floor, lay something I’d seen in Mercy’s memory: a mound of smooth river stones. She’d found the body of a friend there, another regular working girl at Captain Marsh’s nonstop party.

  Now a mold-encrusted hardwood coffin lay on top of the rocks, the lid closed.

  That’s him, Mercy whispered in my mind. He told Louisa to move his body here.

  “Whose bodies are these, Captain Marsh?” I asked. “These are the people you killed when you were still alive, aren’t they? You sacrificed them to that tiny little idol in the corner. Where’d you find that? One of your trips to New York? Or across the ocean?”

  I could feel something watching me from all sides, but I couldn’t see anything but shadows and skeletons. The presence was heavy in the air, which was beyond foul and hard to breathe. I tried not to think of how much corpse-dust I was sucking up with each breath.

  “It’s an ugly little thing, isn’t it?” I asked, shining my flashlight onto the idol again. “It looks so wimpy, too. Couldn’t protect you against one angry girl with a knife. Hey, a little bird told me that’s you in there.” I kicked the foot of the coffin, jostling the rotten wood.

  The low moaning sounded again, all around me, a deep bass far below the normal range of the human voice. The cement-rock floor seemed to shudder, or maybe I was just losing my balance.

  A shadow formed on the wall, right in the center of the glowing puddle of light cast by my flashlight. It swelled to swallow up most of the light, taking the shape of a larger-than-life man with an enormous beard, most of the head projected onto the ceiling.

  There was nothing in front of me that would have cast such a shadow.

  “You didn’t like that, did you?” I asked. I kicked his coffin again, then again. Portions of the rotten lid cracked away and tumbled inside, and I glimpsed a skeletal arm in a rotting suit jacket.

  He roared now, swelling out from the wall in three dimensions. He spread through the room like inky black smoke, engulfing the idol, his own casket, and the crypt bunks on either side of h
im.

  The darkness billowed forward, diminishing my flashlight beam until it was no more useful than a paper match.

  I holstered the flashlight.

  I faced a wall of solid darkness, which had swollen to fill the entire back half of the cellar. Its surface pulsed and wavered organically, like the flesh of a massive, oily black tumor.

  It bulged toward me.

  “Okay, Augustus,” I said. “I know you’re a big, bad monster of a ghost, but right now I need you to get out of my way.”

  I put on my sunglasses, raised the ghost cannon, thumbed it to the highest possible setting, and pulled the trigger.

  The underground crypt lit up like a dive bar at closing time. The cannon flooded the room with scalding hot light, and I could see every detail of the skeletons on their rocky bunks. The back half of the room remained dimmer, as though some kind of dark veil were drawn across it, but I could still see Marsh’s rotting coffin and the idol in the wall beyond it.

  An angry-sounding groan shook the room as the darkness seemed to retreat into the walls.

  From my own experience, I had a pretty good idea that if we moved these bodies out of the house, we might knock out the haunting altogether, sending the restless spirits on their way to wherever they’re supposed to go. We would start with Captain Marsh’s remains.

  “Hey, Stacey!” I shouted.

  “What’s up?” Stacey leaned through the doorway above, looking down at me while pointing her flashlights in the opposite direction. She looked pretty pale and terrified, which is the proper reaction to trying to stave off a horde of attacking ghosts.

  “Give me a hand with this old corpse,” I said.

  “I knew you were going to say something awful,” Stacey replied. She leaned out of sight, I assume to pass Jacob a flashlight, then started down the stairs holding her one remaining light, though she didn’t need it at the moment. The room could not have been any brighter.

  Then I heard something snap behind me. A scorching heat scalded my back, and I cried out in pain. The ghost cannon blew out like a candle, plunging the cellar back into darkness. I fiddled with the switch, but the big light-blaster was dead.