Lullaby (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 7)

by JL Bryan

  My Mel-Meter sensed it, too—the electrical readings spiked by three milligaus. That's a very significant amount, considering that one or two milligaus can indicate a weak presence, while the most powerful entities register around nine or ten.

  The temperature was even lower alongside the cabinets, too, as if they were doors to a refrigerator. I tried not to think of the row of little square doors they have in morgues, with a cold corpse on a metal tray tucked behind each one.

  "Are you in there?" I asked, tapping one cabinet. "If you're there, make a noise. Say your name." It felt both absurd and scary, the idea of a creepy ghost lurking behind one of the doors, just waiting for me to open it.

  I swallowed and reached for the first cabinet door, fighting to keep my hand from shaking, as though determined to hide my fear. That was probably an exercise in futility, since ghosts are as likely to feel your emotion as they are to see your face or hear your voice. More likely, even. Ghosts are made of emotionally charged energy, and the nastier ones feed on the emotional energy of the living, particularly darker feelings like fear or sorrow. Consequently, they want to provoke these kinds of feelings in the living. To those kinds of ghosts, scaring a living person is like milking a cow—first you squeeze, then you drink.

  The first cabinet door opened onto nothing but empty shelves, just as I'd seen in the daytime, but it was a little chilly inside. Four degrees below the rest of the nursery, actually.

  The second door was the same, and the third, and the temperature dropped a little with each door I opened. Finally I reached the fifth and final door, the one that would not open onto a small cabinet but a deep, low crawlspace.

  I took the cold little brass doorknob in my fingers and readied my tactical flashlight with my other hand. Then I took another deep breath and opened the last door.

  Leaving my flashlight off, I peered into the darkness.

  The crawlspace was completely black inside, except for the first few inches where the slightly brighter gloom of the nursery just barely penetrated. The back end of the crawlspace was somewhere deep in the darkness between the walls of the house. A faint unpleasant odor rose from back there, with a tang of decay.

  I pointed my flashlight but hesitated before clicking it on. It's good to take a second to mentally prepare yourself in moments like these. I would not have been surprised to see a foul, corpse-like apparition crouched back there, staring at me with raw, empty eye sockets, perhaps baring its rotten teeth at me...or perhaps surging out in a fury when I shined a bright light on it, knocking me down, maybe even drawing three bloody scratch marks across my face. When the nasty ones scratch you, it's almost always three parallel lines in your flesh, as if their ghostly thumbs and pinkies aren't quite long enough to reach.

  I finally switched on the flashlight, pouring a searing white full-spectrum beam into the crawlspace, three thousand lumens, bright as an intense ray of sunlight.

  Empty space lay ahead, floorboards and bare walls with visible studs. I saw lots of dust near the back, and a few dead bugs and spiders. Nothing immediately jumped out to attack me.

  It was a cold, lightless, unsettling area, eight degrees colder than the rest of the nursery, about the size and shape of a coffin. You almost couldn't have designed a better space to attract a dead person's spirit.

  The crawlspace extended six or seven feet and dead-ended at a flat panel of wall. A small child could have wriggled to the very back pretty easily, but the dark emotional atmosphere would probably discourage any kid from exploring. Even I could feel it, and I'm a non-psychic adult. No more psychic than a hamster, anyway.

  "You're in there, aren't you?" I asked. "Do you like to hide there at the back? I can't see you, but I know you're here. Speak up. Tell me your name. Tell me who you are." After a long pause, I added: "Why are you here?" And later: "What do you want?"

  No answer came to my ears. Nothing happened, in fact, except the continued indicators of a presence, the abnormally low temperature and high electromagnetic readings.

  I clicked off my flashlight and waited there, kneeling in the dark, wondering if any answer would come. Maybe it already had. Reviewing the audio for anomalies, such as voices outside the range of human hearing, would be Stacey's job.

  The air in the room remained thick and cold, but also still and quiet. I was certain something was present, but it was being coy, or maybe it was just entirely indifferent to me.

  I returned to my backpack by the loveseat to get my thermal goggles. I strapped them on and looked around the room. The temperature gradient was fairly uniform, growing colder near the cabinets. I didn't see any other major cold spots.

  The crawlspace, as I'd expected, grew colder as it grew deeper. But again, I saw a uniform gradient, not a shape or a dense cold spot to indicate that a conscious entity was there to look back at me. It was more like a supernatural tunnel, leading away somewhere that I definitely didn't want to go.

  "Come on," I said. "Come on out. I know you're hiding back there."

  There wasn't even a hint of a response, and certainly no half-formed face rising up to meet me.

  "I heard you can walk around and rattle doors. How about rattling that door for me?" I pointed toward the nursery door behind me. "Just shake it a little bit. Pretend I've got a baby with me. Why are you so interested in babies, anyway? What's your story?"

  I watched carefully through the heavy thermal goggles, but nothing stirred, nothing responded.

  "Why do you come into the nursery at night?" I asked. "Why are you looking for the baby?"

  I waited. Then I waited some more. Then I heard a voice. Unfortunately, it was just Stacey.

  "Anything happening up there, Sherlock?" she asked. "It all looks dead from where I'm sitting. Should we bail and go Anton-hunting for a couple hours?"

  "I'd like to, but there's a presence here. It's just not responding to me."

  "Do you think it has plans to do anything tonight? Or do you need to stir the pot a little?"

  "I'll give it more time."

  I retreated to the loveseat again, sitting in the dark, legs crossed, watching the crawlspace through my thermals. The ghost hadn't responded to my up-close-and-in-your-face approach, so maybe sitting back and out of the way would pay off better.

  I sat and waited. And sat. And waited.

  The little cold blue throat of the crawlspace held steady, the temperature neither rising nor falling, no particular shape or sign of activity.

  "Now?" Stacey asked, after another slow hour. "It's coming up on two a.m., Ellie."

  "It's only the first night. We shouldn't interfere too much."

  "And how many nights did you want to spend here, again?" she asked.

  "As few as possible." I glanced toward the empty crib and let out a sigh. "All right. I already warned Mackenzie it could happen."

  "That's what I'm saying," Stacey said. "Throw caution to the wind. Force the unknown spirit into a confrontation."

  "I'm only doing this so we can get back to Anton," I said. "Just know that. A normal investigation should usually be silent observation the first night."

  "Yeah, yeah, boss. Now let's lure that ghost. Just know that I'm watching you on thermal and night vision with a big bowl of popcorn in my lap. Well, I wish I had a big bowl of popcorn, anyway. With butter. And garlic salt. Or have you ever mixed in peanut M&M's?"

  "You'd better be on the edge of your seat," I said. "Ready to run up here if anything happens."

  "I am, Ellie. I'll come in now if you want."

  "Hold your position." I reached into my backpack and pulled out my secret weapon. It was about twelve inches long, made of plastic, with big blue eyes and dark skin and hair. GIGGLING GLORIA was written in puffy yellow letters on the pink packaging. She laughs! She cries! She burps and snores!

  I brought out the package of batteries I'd bought along with the doll and tore it open. Then I unzipped the back of Giggling Gloria's smiling-sun pink shirt and opened the battery panel.

  "Okay, G
loria," I said. "Let's see what you can do."

  The doll's eyes flickered, rolling up and down in their sockets, and it let out a mechanical giggle.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dolls are creepy, at least when they're made well. Giggling Gloria was no exception. She may have been manufactured in a plastic-injection mold somewhere in China, but she looked like a live human being at first glance. At second glance, she looked more like a dead baby. Then her eyes would open when she laughed or cried, and her eyeballs rolled mechanically up and down, up and down. Her jaw did the same, making it clear she was a toy, albeit still a fairly creepy one.

  The switch beside her battery pack offered four settings—HAPPY, SAD, RANDOM, and OFF. I set it to RANDOM.

  I laid the doll on her back in the crib, facing the tiger-cub mobile overhead. There was no blanket or pillow in there to help me make the scene more convincing, or at least hide the fact that it wasn't a real baby. I tossed a stuffed zebra and the toothy lion in there to help hide the doll a little.

  Then I retreated to the loveseat, where I sat cross-legged and generally tried to make myself as small, quiet, and unnoticeable as possible.

  The baby doll giggled, its jaw and eyes moving in their simple up-and-down patterns. The arms and legs remained stiff as if frozen—I hadn't paid extra for the Giggling Gloria Deluxe, which moved its limbs and also drank from a bottle.

  The recorded giggles stopped after thirty seconds, as though someone had muzzled the baby. I raised my thermal lenses in front of my eyes for a quick look, but I didn't see any changes in the room, nothing dark and cold emerging from the crawlspace or anywhere else.

  The doll cycled through its sequence every few minutes—thirty seconds of giggling, then silence, followed by thirty seconds of crying, another long pause, then either burping or snoring, after which it eventually began again with the giggling.

  I hoped the sound wouldn't wake Mackenzie or Dylan, and that the two closed doors and the hallway separating us were enough to block out the repeated crying and laughing.

  "How's our baby doing?" Stacey asked over the headset.

  "I think she has rapid-cycling mood swings. Are we all out of baby lithium?"

  "Yep. Has Lullaby Lucy shown her face?"

  "Oh, yeah. We had a long, drawn-out battle while you were texting Jacob."

  "I wasn't...I mean, how did..."

  "I'm psychic, too. And I heard your fingers tapping and your giggle-snort about twenty seconds ago."

  "I did not giggle-snort," Stacey said. "That must have been the doll."

  "Impossible," I said. "It has no snort setting."

  After that, there was more sitting and waiting while listening to the doll giggle and cry. Nothing seemed to change in the room, no sign that the bait-baby was drawing out our ghost.

  The lack of response went on for about an hour before Stacey spoke up over the headset.

  "Uh, Ellie?"

  "Tell me you're seeing something I'm not," I said. "Anything at this point. Even a lame little orb."

  "I'm seeing it, but it's not in the nursery with you."

  "The hall?" I stood and started for the door.

  "Downstairs. The ripped-up room. Hey, that's pleasant-sounding, am I right? The 'ripped-up room' or maybe 'the Ripper room' if you're into Victorian true crime—"

  "What are you seeing down there?"

  "Cold spots."

  "Spots, multiple?"

  "Definitely two. Possibly three, or maybe one of the two just had a weird shape. There's a slight possibility it was three-headed, even like that one dog from Greek Hell. Anyway, they were bunched up close like that when they passed the thermal camera on their way out."

  "They're on the move? Where are they going?" I opened the door to the hall, then hesitated, not sure which way to turn.

  "I couldn't tell you—remember how we're saving back gear to deal with Anton instead of wiring up the client's entire house? But they were moving toward the front hall the last time I saw them."

  I glanced back at the nursery through my thermals. The pale blue miasma of cold continued leaking around the cabinet doors, as it had all night. No change. An entity was downstairs, possibly more than one.

  "I'm going down for a look," I said. "Keep your eyes peeled upstairs for me."

  "Okay, but I'm not sure how peeling my eyes is supposed to help me see. It seems like it wouldn't help at all, and would more likely lead to permanent blindness..."

  Stacey may have said some other things after that, but I wasn't listening. I closed the nursery door tightly behind me to keep the doll's recorded cries and giggles bottled up in there.

  My Mel-Meter revealed nothing unusual as I moved down the hall, past the night vision camera monitoring me with its big, unblinking eye like a silent, possibly judgmental little robot.

  The front stairs creaked as I moved down them, but otherwise the house was silent. My thermals were parked up above my eyes—they're not great for navigating down room-temperature stairways—but I could sense that the environment was different. It wasn't the stiff, stale dead-air feeling from the nursery this time. It was more like an electrical charge in the atmosphere, like when a thunderstorm is forming.

  The air did grow colder as I descended the steps, though, as if I were entering some dark root cellar in January instead of a front hallway in a pretty warm early November in a city that borders on tropical.

  My Mel-Meter confirmed a ten-degree drop in temperature as I walked downstairs. Electromagnetic readings were up, too, weaker than those in the nursery crawlspace, but also more dynamic, flickering quickly between one and four milligaus.

  After reaching the floor of the front hall, I drew my thermals down to take a good look around the room. It didn't take any time at all to see the huge cold area, like a blue cloud surrounding the old bench that backed up to the stairway handrail. It was so close to me that the entity could have reached through the banister and grabbed my leg on the way down, had it wanted to do that.

  I returned my Mel-Meter to my utility belt and drew my flashlight instead, ready to lance the thing if it made a move toward me.

  With my other hand, I brought out a small voice recorder from another pouch on my belt.

  "Hello," I said to the cloud. Its shape roiled and churned, and I could see why Stacey wasn't sure whether she was looking at one, two, or three entities. "Can you hear me?" I asked. "I'm here to help." Unless you get violent.

  The shifting, changing cloud seemed to freeze up, as if in response to my voice.

  I heard something, so faint at first that I thought maybe it was the baby doll doing one of its noises upstairs. Then it grew louder, as if floating closer. Soft music, almost too low to hear.

  I found myself freezing up, too, at the wordless, tuneless lullaby. I remembered Mackenzie's description of being frozen in fear. It was suddenly hard to move, as if my whole body wanted to drop to the carpet and lie still.

  The voice drifted down the stairs toward me. A significant cold spot had appeared at the top of the steps, very solid and dark, a powerful presence.

  The notes stopped in mid-melody, as though someone had slammed down a lid on a music box. I turned back to look at the cold shapes on the bench, mainly to make sure they weren't attacking me.

  They shrank away as I looked at them, the cold spots pulling in on themselves and leaving only empty room-temperature space around them. They melted in an instant, but just before they vanished, I saw that they shrank to three distinct little masses of cold, very likely indicating three distinct entities, though two of them seemed to cling close to each other.

  They contracted into cold blue pinpoints and disappeared altogether. Within seconds, there was no sign that the room had ever been haunted at all. They'd slipped into invisibility, beyond my gear's ability to track them. Either they were running from me or from the lullaby-singing ghost.

  I looked back up at the top of the stairs. The cold spot there had vanished, too, just about the time the lullaby stopp
ed.

  "Did you see that?" I asked.

  "I have no cameras in there with you," Stacey said. "But if you're not too busy, you might check upstairs. I just saw a face on the night vision camera, floating above the crib. It came and went pretty quickly, but it was definitely there."

  "Good. The doll's working." I removed my thermals again so I could see clearly while I raced back upstairs. I pushed open the door to the nursery.

  The nursery felt arctic, full of cold, sour air that seemed to roll out from the crawlspace door that I'd left open. I didn't see any face floating above the crib, or any apparition at all, but what I saw next was even stranger.

  The baby doll was crying, its eyes and mouth moving up and down in the exact same way they did when it was laughing. As I stood there, looking over the room, the doll began slowly to float, inching up and away from the mattress in its crib, remaining perfectly still and balanced on its back as it rose through empty air.

  "Uh, Ellie? Am I seeing this right?" Stacey said.

  I didn't answer. I'm pretty sure it was rhetorical.

  The crying baby doll rose above the barred walls of its crib, until it was about eye level with me. Then it stopped, and slowly it pivoted from a lying-down position to a standing one, its plastic blue eyes pointed directly at me.

  The crying stopped. The baby doll hovered in the air, really seeming to stare at me, its tiny plastic lips hanging wide open.

  "Holy cow, Ellie," Stacey whispered. "Is that baby levitating?"

  "Sh," I said. "I think she's about to say her first word."

  I waited, my skin crawling, barely holding in my rising sense of panic as I waited to see what would happen.

  The baby began to laugh, as it usually did, its eyes and mouth moving up and down.

  Then it flew, as though hurled at incredible speed by an unseen hand, or maybe an unseen rocket launcher. It streaked across the room in a blur, angling toward me, and I ducked and dropped to my knees.

  I'm not sure whether I was the intended target or not. The doll slammed headfirst into a mirror on a wall nearby, one ringed with plastic leaves, flowers, and toucans. It crashed with such force that the glass shattered and the whole mirror seemed to slam back against the wall and then rebound. The mirror frame toppled forward from the wall in a way that flung shards and needles of broken glass all over the room.