by JL Bryan
The whirling glow of my falling flashlight illuminated glimpses of rope and wooden boards, and then I crashed into the loose old catwalk high above the stage. My iPod went silent, bringing "Ode to Joy" to an abrupt close.
The catwalk did not take the impact well at all. Dusty old ropes snapped, boards broke free, chunks of wood and nails rained down onto the stage three stories below. The narrow platform turned on its side, leaving me holding onto one edge with sweaty hands, my legs dangling high above the stage. If I fell, it was possible I'd survive, but I'd almost definitely suffer a broken bone or two.
"Jacob!" I screamed.
"I see you!" he shouted back across the auditorium, pointing his flashlight at the stage from the window of the projection booth. "Wait! That's just your flashlight!"
"Look higher!" As I shouted, something creaked above, and the catwalk sank further. It was only an inch or two, but it was a gut-wrenching feeling. The whole rickety thing was ready to break loose, then I would fall to the floor far below, and then the catwalk would clobber me and crush me. The official story would be "stupid girl breaks into dangerous abandoned property, falls and dies." Not "brave investigator chased to death by a ghost."
"I'm on my way!" Jacob yelled back, as the whole catwalk sagged even lower.
A wave of cold, sour air washed down over me, raising chill bumps on my skin and making me gag at the same time.
The shadowy top-hat figure approached, walking straight toward me along the loose, swinging catwalk, as if it were still horizontal rather than hanging vertically by the last couple of ropes. It would have been impossible for a living person to walk on the catwalk that way.
Something gray fluttered at the corner of my vision. A dove, just as dead and decayed as the rabbit had been, landed on a broken chunk of the catwalk's arm rail, which dangled a couple of feet above my head.
"You're a regular Snow White, with the rabbits and birds," I said to the magician ghost. I hoped acting tough would make him back off a little. Creeps like these want you to be scared and don't always know how to react if you don't show them fear. Of course, that can be hard to pull off when you're actually face to face with them. "Is your stepmother jealous of how pretty you are?"
He moved closer. Long, pale fingers emerged from his shadowy shape, reaching for me.
"I'll make you a deal, Houdini," I said. "You leave me alone, and I'll leave you—"
Before I could finish, his snake-skeleton fingers passed through my flesh like smoke, then clamped shut not only my jaw, but also my windpipe. I was out of air right away, because I'd been in the middle of talking, not in the middle of taking a deep breath to avoid getting strangled.
I was distantly aware of footfalls echoing through the theater as Jacob ran toward me. Too slow, I thought, as dark spots welled up over my vision.
The pain and discomfort of choking vanished. I felt like I was floating. I could see my body a few feet ahead of me, fingers still struggling to hold onto the loose catwalk, but clearly losing their grasp.
I had my clearest view yet of the man crouching over me. I could see the crimson band on his top hat and the matching silk lining his black cape. Stage makeup outlined his lean face in sharp whites and blacks, and he sported a pointed Van Dyke goatee like a devil from central casting. His white-gloved hand was crammed down my mouth, as if my body were a fish and his arm a hook.
Fear shivered all through me. I was like a cloud, I was a ghost separated from my body, watching helplessly as my body ran out of air while losing its grip on the broken catwalk. The magician-ghost crammed his spectral arm deeper into my mouth, as though my lips and teeth weren't even there, reaching into me like he was trying to grab my lungs.
"STOP!" Jacob's voice thundered through the air, seeming to shake every molecule in the building. He stood on the stage below my dangling form, staring up at me. He wasn't moving his mouth at all. The voice seemed to roar outward from his core and ricochet off the cracked walls and vaulted ceiling. It was, strangely, almost pleasurable when Jacob's voice rippled through me, in my out-of-body state, his energy mingling with mine for a moment. "LET HER GO!"
I don't think I'd ever heard such power in his voice before, and his lips hadn't even opened.
Jacob's command hit the magician like a barrel of acid. The ghost's outer appearance seemed to melt, making him smaller. His top hat looked shorter and badly battered, and his cloak and tuxedo suit hung loosely, frayed and pulling open along the seams.
Dead Magician Guy slumped and hunched forward, withering inside his flamboyant stage clothes. His carefully made-up face was suddenly just as rotten as his little bird and rabbit friends. He looked like a corpse that had seasoned in the earth for a few months, with no preservatives.
He backed away from me—from my dangling, unconscious body—and retreated a few paces up the broken catwalk before vanishing altogether.
My body took a huge breath, which seemed to create some kind of vortex that sucked me, spinning, back home into my own skin. Physical pain returned all at once, all through my windpipe and down deep inside my lungs, as though the magician had hacked through my bronchioles like a machete-wielding explorer in the jungle.
I felt relief as cool, fresh air finally hit my long-suffering lungs, and I slipped for a moment before remembering that I still had to hold on or I would suffer a long drop to a hard floor. My arms and hands ached from holding on so tightly with so little oxygen available.
"He's gone," Jacob called up to me, using his actual mouth this time. "Are you okay?"
"Not really," I croaked, clinging to broken wood on rotten ropes three stories in the air. A groan sounded from somewhere above, and the whole rickety structure to which I clung dropped a few inches. "I don't think I can climb up or it'll crash. It'll crash if I stay here much longer, too."
"All right." Jacob held out his arms as if offering to catch me, then drew them back to his sides. "Hang on just another minute."
"That's exactly what I just said I can't do."
Jacob stepped away to the nearest section of mildewed, moth-eaten stage curtain. He pulled it experimentally with both hands, looking up along its length as if trying to calculate how large or loose it was, or maybe whether he could turn it into a nice sweater or bathrobe.
"Jacob!" I called out again, as one of the ropes above gave a pretty threatening creak.
He held onto the curtain and walked toward me, drawing the big slab of red velvet across the stage like...well, like one of those big firefighter safety nets for catching people from high buildings.
"That's actually a pretty good idea," I said.
"Yeah, I know." Jacob passed under me and continued on, stretching the curtain further across the stage, creating a red, mildew-stained velvet slope beneath me. "Unless it doesn't work. Then it'll turn out that it was a pretty bad one the whole time—"
The rickety wood-and-rope structure let out a loud crack and sank lower. I immediately let go, not waiting to see whether it was all finally going to break loose and crash this time.
"Look out!" I shouted as I fell through the air, hoping that was enough warning. My hair blew back and I felt some perfectly natural freefall terror as I toppled through far too much empty space, picking up speed the whole way.
I smacked into the steeply slanted curtain, belly-flopping into yards of thick, sour-smelling redness. I worried I'd rip right through and slam into the floorboards below. Instead, I actually bounced, rolled, and then slammed right into Jacob.
He toppled over on impact, sprawled out onto the stage on his back, and let out an annoyed grunt as I slammed down on top of him, knocking out all his air. But I was alive, and so was he, I was pretty sure, so that much had worked out. I stayed on top of him for a second, shaking and catching my breath.
The moment of peace didn't last long. A sound like a gunshot boomed overhead and echoed through the theater. Then the entire catwalk came rushing down.
I managed to slide to one side of Jacob, trying to block him as
the tangled mass of boards crashed onto the stage just beside us. Chunks of wood and lengths of rope lashed us as the catwalk fell apart. I thought I could sense a kind of rage in the crashing destruction, as though the old magician ghost had deliberately sent it down in another attempt to kill us.
I looked over at Jacob, his face near mine. A splinter of wood had scratched one of his cheeks. I reached out to touch it, checking the damage.
"You're bleeding," I said.
"I usually am after a night with you."
"Yeah. Blood, broken bones, coma, burning to death—I have that effect on people." I sat up, taking a breath. It was weird how I'd kind of wanted to linger there with him, and it made me think of how resistant I'd been when Calvin had first brought in Jacob as a psychic consultant. Past experience told me that psychics generally fell into three categories: they were frauds, or well-meaning but delusional people with no actual abilities, or genuinely psychic but also nutty. I'd been cold to him, while Stacey had welcomed him with open arms—pretty literally, as it turned out.
"I guess that's what happens when you spend your life digging into haunted places." He regained his feet while I regained mine.
"They dug into me first," I said. "I didn't always want to chase dead things in the dark."
"What did you want to do?"
"I...you mean, before?" Before my parents died, he meant. Before I'd been reduced to endlessly walking the grim border between life and death, trying to keep the monsters on the other side where they belonged. I tried to remember, stirring up thoughts I hadn't had since my early teenage years. "I thought about being a biologist or something, where I would travel and discover weird lifeforms."
"On distant, uncharted islands?" he asked.
"Ideally. I also thought about medicine. And being a ballerina. But that was really, really, really early on. What about you? Did you always dream of sitting in a cubicle counting money?"
"Oh, yeah. That's exactly what I do. Are we leaving now?"
"We've confirmed that the guy upstairs isn't Anton." I stepped out to the front edge of the stage and looked out. "Let's set up a camera and a microphone in the back corner, try to get as much of the house and stage as possible. Maybe they'll pick something up, and we won't have come here and gotten attacked by Hellish Houdini for nothing."
"Who? The guy in the top hat?"
"Top hat, cape, and he had a rabbit and did card tricks. Also, he has the creepiest fingers I've ever seen. Or felt." I shuddered, feeling a little flash of revulsion, and glanced up at the gaping dark cavity of the ceiling again. "Yeah, let's get out of here."
I unzipped my backpack and hopped down from the stage. The magician-ghost might have pulled a disappearing act for now, but I didn't want to stick around to see whether he came back for an encore.
Chapter Eighteen
With the gear set up, we managed to slip out the back and down the alley. We didn't have too much time before sunrise, and I needed to try and sneak back into Mackenzie's house under cover of darkness. Of course, that might have been pointless if Kara and pals were monitoring the house from all sides with night or thermal cameras, which are just the sorts of things ghost hunters tend to have lying around.
Jacob parked near Pulaski Square, where he'd picked me up. I hesitated before getting out.
"I didn't say thank you," I told him. "You saved me. A couple times. What was that thing you did? The one that chased the magician away? I need to learn that one."
"It was just a big blast of anger, mostly."
"Sounds like something I could do. Thanks. For...all of that. And just for being here for us."
"I'm good at just being here. Sometimes I do it on my couch for hours at a time."
"Amazing." I gave him a quick hug, then backed away, out the passenger door of his sensible gray accountant's car. "Try to get some sleep before work."
"You sure you don't want me to drop you closer?" He looked around the dark neighborhood, with shadowy alleys and doorways everywhere.
"This is closer than it looks. Thanks again."
I crossed the grassy, tree-lined park and over the next street, into a dark alley. I was definitely banged up and fatigued from my night. The only bright spot was that my backpack was empty now, making it easier to get over garden walls and wrought-iron fences.
Back at Mackenzie's house, I slipped in through the back door—well, I walked in through the back door, anyway. I'm not sure my move was ninja enough to qualify as "slipping in." But I tried to be discreet.
I swept my flashlight around inside a couple of times, then stepped out the front door and went out to join Stacey in the van. It was still dark, but the earliest shades of blue had appeared in the eastern sky.
"How'd it go?" Stacey asked. I had texted her that I was returning, but not any details.
"Could've been better." I filled her in on what had happened. "So, zero sign of Anton at that location so far. I hope our cameras at the old gas station pick up something, or we're out of locations to check at the moment."
"There's just one thing I don't understand," Stacey said, furrowing her brow.
"What's that?"
"Why did you call him 'Hellish Houdini' when 'Scary Houdini' works better and is more obvious?"
"I was in a hurry, Stacey," I said. "I had also just jumped three stories, so I was a little worked up."
"Probably less than three. You said the catwalk had drooped kind of low, and the curtain had to be at least a few feet off the ground when it caught you, so you maybe you fell fifteen or twenty feet—"
"The exact math isn't the point. If Anton is there, he's hiding from us, and it's not going to be easy to keep sniffing around the old theater with Scary Houdini on the loose."
"Or Magic Mike!" Stacey said. "Maybe we should go with that. It feels fresher, more relevant—"
"We're not nicknaming him after my hospitalized boyfriend."
"Oh. Oops. Any word on him?" Stacey frowned and patted my hand like she was my grandma.
"I'm not family, so the doctors won't talk to me, and Melissa's still freezing me out for getting him hurt in the first place. I need to run up there and visit him." I lay back on one of the two narrow drop-down cots built into the van. "Not now, though. I'm exhausted from my near-death experience. I think Kara did some permanent damage to me."
"Seriously? Like what?"
"Like pulling my soul loose from my body. It's like whatever spiritual glue that's supposed to hold me in isn't working so well anymore." I closed my eyes. "Anything happen here? Did our mushy-faced ghost show up again?"
"I thought you'd never ask."
I opened one eye. "What happened?"
"The mobile rotated over the crib," Stacey said. "And I heard the ghost singing."
"Did it record?" I sat up.
"See, I knew I shouldn't have mentioned it. You obviously need to rest, Ellie, and—"
"Play it. Video, too."
"Okey-doke." Stacey turned her laptop toward me. One window showed video of the fuzzy orange tiger cubs orbiting above the crib, turned by an unseen hand. Another showed soundwave graphics. She turned up the volume so I could hear the singing ghost.
The voice was small and sounded distant, but it was definitely female. Stacey had only caught a piece of the song. She played it again, then again, letting it loop.
"Sounds like a lullaby to me," I said. "Other people have described that. What are the words?" I leaned forward, squinting at the speakers as though that would help me decipher the lyrics more clearly.
"I've been trying to figure that out. It sounds like 'all who are not...'"
"Or maybe like 'Are you the moss?'"
"That doesn't make any sense, Ellie."
"I didn't say it made sense. Is there more?"
Stacey played additional audio of the ghostly lullaby, but the voice was too soft to distinguish any further syllables. It quickly faded away altogether.
"So she was singing to the empty crib?" I asked.
"Yep.
There's also this." Stacey selected a video clip she'd already flagged. I watched as the tiger-cub mobile spun for several seconds before slamming to a halt. The pastel orange cubs tangled around each other, their strings around their necks like a gang of suspected cattle rustlers who'd just faced vigilante justice.
The mobile lay still for a moment. Then the whole crib moved, as though someone had given it a hard shove near the head, moving that end of the crib a couple of feet.
"I think we've made her angry somehow," I said.
"Or maybe she was just born that way."
"So that makes a weeping ghost out in the shed, a lullaby ghost creeping around the nursery and obsessing over the baby, and three little ghosts at the bench in the entrance hall."
"But the one in the nursery's the real problem," Stacey said. "Right?"
"If we could just put a name to her face—"
"—her scary, eyeless, doughy white face—"
"—we could get started on kicking her out." I rubbed my temples. "But not now. Did I miss anything else?"
"That was it," Stacey said. "The crib hasn't moved since then. The room's been cold but silent the rest of the night."
"Play the audio again." I lay back down on my cot and closed my eyes. The ghostly lullaby rasped out from the speakers again, almost tuneless, lacking vitality, lacking life.
"Maybe it's '...are you the one?'" Stacey suggested.
I listened as she played it again. "All you the noss? Are we sure it's even English, Stacey?"
"Not at all. Kind of sounds like it to me, though, even if I can't hash out the individual words."
"Keep working on cleaning it up. And hey...if you notice my spirit floating up out of my body, do me a favor and cram it right back down inside me, okay?"
"Deal. Should I use a Mel-Meter to help monitor for that? And hey, do you think your ghost would show up on thermals? Or not, since you're technically still alive?"
