EJ06 - Maze of Souls

by JL Bryan

  The laundry room was a few degrees colder, and I did detect higher electricity here, but nothing wildly out of step with my earlier readings. The laundry room was at an outside edge of the house, lower than the rest of it, and of course had large electrical cables to power the laundry machines. Along with the garage, it was a later addition to the early nineteenth-century farmhouse, made of visibly newer and more modern brick.

  I passed through another door and into the dark garage, where Amber's metal-working bench occupied one corner. Another area, used for storage, was a jumble of old and new, like a broken antique bedframe parked next to a stack of sealed plastic Container Store tubs labeled with magic marker. CLOTHES. SCHOOL. TOYS. MEMORIES.

  Stacey's voice crackled over my headset, but the reception was poor in the garage. I couldn't make out what she said, but her tone was urgent.

  “Repeat,” I said, hurrying back through the laundry room and up the steps to the living room, in search of better reception. “Stacey, repeat whatever you just said.”

  “—moving in,” Stacey said, her voice a little clearer now. “Severe temperature drop outside the front door from our sensors out there. Motion detector is pinging. Now it's moving in.”

  “Moving in?” I dashed through folding doors into the front room stocked with old paperbacks and board games.

  “The thermal in the foyer is picking up a cold shape. Be careful, Ellie. I'm ready to jump in anytime.”

  “Hold your position.”

  Usually Stacey would snark out some kind of cop or military movie cliché at this point. The fact that she didn't told me that she was seriously spooked by whatever she was seeing on the monitors.

  I slowed and drew my tactical flashlight as I stepped into the foyer, narrowing the iris so it would give me a focused, slicing light-saber sort of beam, in the event that I chose to click it on. I kept it dark for now—this was meant to be an observation, not a fight. I didn't want to run off the ghost I'd been waiting to see.

  There was no denying how cold the foyer had become. On my Mel-Meter, the temperature dropped from a perfectly pleasant sixty-eight degrees to a frigid thirty-nine as I crossed the threshold. The air was bitterly cold. My earlier feelings of foreboding returned in full bloom now, and I fought to stay calm.

  Something was definitely in the room with me.

  A thin white mist hung about an inch above the floor, thickest near the front door. It was spreading slowly from the door toward the stairs, as if carried on a trickle of air current.

  This kind of frosty mist or cold fog is commonly associated with high-energy hauntings. It's essentially the reverse of seeing heat ripples in the air, radiating from a hot surface in the summertime. The mist results from the sudden cooling and freezing of the humidity in the air as a ghost passes through, hungrily slurping up what energy it can from the ambient heat of the room.

  “Ellie?” Stacey asked.

  I tapped my microphone with my finger to indicate that I wouldn't be speaking for the moment. I didn't want to run off the ghost.

  I eased around the slowly flowing mist and scooped up my thermal goggles from the little heap of gear next to my air mattress. Then I moved up a few steps and turned to face the mist, claiming the staircase for myself. I didn't want to scare the ghost away, not at the moment, but I also had no intention of letting it slip past me to harass Maya in her room, or any other member of the family.

  The mist inched forward, slowly making its way from the front door to the staircase. As the first frosty tendrils reached the bottom step, I spoke up. I kept my voice low but firm and filled with intention.

  “Stop,” I said.

  The mist may have slowed, or possibly not—it had been moving at a snail's trot already. Gradually, it filled in more of the space in front of the bottom stair, and seemed to ease a little ways up and over the lip of the stair. The slow pace of the thing was almost maddening. I could feel the individual seconds dragging on and on.

  I took the opportunity to strap on my thermal goggles and try for a more in-depth look at the entity. Sometimes this gives me the rough shape of the ghost and tells me whether it presents itself as large or small, maybe even whether it's male or female.

  In this case, though, what I saw was a deep blue, almost black mass of no clear shape, chilling the space around it. It was like a black cloud rolling its way over the floorboards toward my boots.

  “Stop there,” I said. At this point, I had my flashlight in one hand and a microphone drawn from my utility belt in the other. “Can you tell me your name?”

  If there was a response, it wasn't audible to me. Maybe I'd recorded something out of the range of my hearing, though.

  “Can you tell me why you're here?” I asked, still pointing the microphone at the cold front gathering on the first stair.

  No words came back, but there was a sighing sound in the air, barely audible, coming and going like a soft breeze.

  “Are you lost?” I asked. “Are you scared? I can help you move on—”

  The darkness surged forward, like a flood of black water pouring upward and swallowing one stair after another, climbing up to my feet in an eyeblink. I stumbled back, startled at the sudden change in the entity's speed. The plodding slowness of the mist had given me a false sense of security.

  I glimpsed her shape for only an instant through my thermal goggles, a blurry black-ice outline suggesting a woman from the waist up, the freezing shapeless darkness spreading out behind her like a impossibly large shadowy skirt big enough to enclose half the foyer and the front door.

  The thermals revealed no details, only the shape of a slender, slightly curvy abdomen, and long arms ending in claw-tip fingers.

  One purple-black hand seized my ankle. Pain scorched my skin. Her fingers were freezing, cold enough to kill the skin and possibly the bone beneath.

  I lanced her with my flashlight, but this entity wouldn't be deterred. She gripped harder, and I'm pretty sure I heard the bones inside my ankle squeak in protest, and then I toppled backwards onto the stairs.

  My head banged against wood, and I smelled horses.

  I bounced, jarring my head again, but the real pain was in my lower body.

  Male voices muttered around me, and red light oozed from the ends of burning sticks, the crude pine torches of the old days. Visibility was poor.

  I realized I was moving, lying in the knobby bed of some kind of wagon. The scrape of wooden wheels filled my ears as I jostled over an uneven road.

  Looking down at myself, toward the pain in my lower half, I glimpsed my legs by the red torch light. I wore a red dress—no. A simple white cotton dress, perhaps no more than a slip or a petticoat, most of it red with fresh blood.

  I was dying. Stars rolled past overhead. Men walked alongside the slow wagon and spoke to each other in low voices, too quiet for me to make out the words, but they were seething with emotion. I could smell the acrid sizzling pitch of their torches. Their faces were in shadow, but I could see they wore white wigs and triangular black hats.

  The wagon must have hit a stone, because the whole thing bucked, and my head slammed against the wooden floor of the wagon again—

  —and I was lying sprawled in front of the staircase in the Neville house, disoriented, my head throbbing. It looked as though I'd fallen down the few steps that had been below me, conking my skull along the way.

  The front door swung open. Stacey entered and ran toward where I lay at the foot of the stairs. My hips were on the inflatable mattress, but the upper half of my body had landed past it and crashed straight into the wooden floor.

  “Ellie! What happened?” She swung her light around the room as she dropped to her knees beside me.

  That was a good question. A fine question. It took a moment to gather my wits around the pounding in my head and remember just what had happened. As soon as I did, I sat up—while Stacey cautioned me to lie still—and drew my backup flashlight from my belt, since I wasn't sure where the first one had landed as
I fell.

  I switched it on and looked up the stairs. I didn't see anything, but that doesn't mean much in ghost-land.

  “See if the ghost is still here,” I said. I found my thermal goggles on my forehead, knocked askew but fortunately not broken. Those things are expensive. I drew them back down over my eyes and looked up the stairs from where I still sprawled on the floor.

  I couldn't see any cold spots or other remnants of the freezing mist. I saw Stacey's warm red form move closer to the stairs, taking readings with her Mel-Meter.

  “Nothing weird here,” she said.

  “Help me up.” I pushed my thermals up onto my forehead, then Stacey loaned me an arm so I could regain my feet. I felt slow and dizzy, but I was starting to panic. “We need to get upstairs.”

  “Wait, let me check you for head injuries and stuff—”

  “Bloody..uh...what's her name—”

  “Bloody Betty?”

  “She could be up in that little girl's room right now. I sure didn't stop her.”

  “I'll go check. Wait here.” Stacey raced up the stairs. I shambled after her, leaning on the wide wooden banister for support. My head hurt and I urged my boots to move faster instead of clomping along as though stuck in the mud. I lost sight of Stacey as she reached the top of the stairs and continued on toward Maya's room.

  As I climbed the stairs, I noticed a disturbing numbness in my ankle and foot where the ghost had grabbed me. The numbness flared into a burning sensation that reminded me of the time when I was eight years old, having a great time at the beach with my parents until I happened to swim into the long tendrils of a jellyfish. The pain had seemed to last forever.

  There was no time to stop and de-boot and de-sock myself to check myself for damage, though. I reached the second floor and found Stacey outside Maya's room, taking readings. The upstairs hallway was dim, lit only by a little moonlight and the glow of Stacey's Mel-Meter.

  “Nothing here,” she whispered, shaking her head.

  “I'm going to check anyway,” I whispered back. With my flashlight off, I took hold of the doorknob and turned it as quietly as I could, not wanting to disturb the little girl if she was resting peacefully.

  Her room seemed cool but not unnaturally so. Moonlight trickled in through the curtains, but for the most part the room was all shadow. I took a step inside for a closer look, to make sure the girl was sleeping soundly in her bed. A floorboard creaked, and I tensed, hoping I hadn't woken her.

  Nothing moved in the dark room.

  Leaving Stacey in the hall, I tiptoed deeper into the room, taking readings with my Mel-Meter. It registered a spike as I approached the sleeping girl. Her long red hair reached out in all directions across her pillow, tangling and knotting even in her sleep, making me think of Medusa and her coif of live snakes. My hair's pretty difficult to manage, too, but at least it's not venomous.

  I waved the meter past the girl's alarm clock, which looked like a small aquarium with a couple of plastic goldfish suspended in blue gel. A lamp shaped like a giant seashell sat beside it. So did a LeapFrog digital tablet. This little cluster of electronics and wires could account for some of the energy I was detecting, but I still thought the reading should have been less pronounced.

  The reading ticked upward as I lowered the meter toward the floor. Here was a wheeled car that resembled a shark, its angry yellow eyes and open jaws pointed at a pink plastic palace full of little doors and slides. There might have been batteries in these toys, but they were turned off at the moment. Why the high electrical readings? If it was a ghost, though, it was fairly good at hiding itself, because I wasn't getting any other signs, like temperature fluctuations or goosebumps on my neck.

  In the doorway, Stacey gave me a big shrug, silently asking just when the heck I planned on wrapping this up and moving on. I gave her a big shrug in return. I didn't know.

  I followed the ever-increasing electrical readings right to the floor, feeling myself relax as I did so. It had to be some kind of cable or wire running beneath the floorboard.

  Then I heard something giggle under the bed.

  Tensing, I pointed my flashlight at the ruffled bed skirt and reached for it with my other hand. The bed skirt was long enough to touch the floor, concealing the entire space below the bed. A full-grown man could have hidden under there.

  I held my breath as I raised the bed skirt. I saw a pale little shape that I first thought to be the plastic hand of a toy doll.

  The giggle sounded again, and two white eyes glowed in the darkness under Maya's bed. My first impression was right—it was a plastic baby doll toy, larger than life size, with eyes that lit up as it giggled. Its rosy plastic cheeks and lips were frozen in an immutable smile, its white teeth bared at me.

  The giggle stopped, the eyes turned black, and the doll vanished again as darkness reclaimed the space under the bed. I'd probably jarred the doll to life with my poking and prodding, maybe causing the bed skirt to brush against it.

  Tricked by an oversized baby doll—judging by its size, the thing probably ran on six or eight fat D cell batteries, or maybe something with an even bigger kick. This mistake wasn't going to win me any of the major ghost-hunter awards, but I don't suppose those actually exist, anyway.

  I nudged the massive doll the rest of the way under the bed, hoping it wouldn't giggle again and wake Maya when I dropped the bed skirt back into place.

  The pale woman surged up from the darkness behind the doll. Her face was a white death mask, but her hand was a gleaming blood red, droplets of gore hanging from her long fingernails. I had a good look at those as they swiped at my face, as though she intended to skewer my eyes. The air was instantly ice-cold all around me.

  I screamed and leaped back from the bed, at the same time clicking on my tactical flashlight to blast the attacking ghost with thousands of lumens of white light.

  Above me, Maya seemed to bounce on the bed, and she let out a scream of her own. Stacey, over in the doorway, screamed along with her about a second later.

  Once again, I would not be winning any awards in the category of Most Professional Ghost Hunter for my performance this evening.

  My flashlight flooded the room with white light. Stacey added her own and lifted the bed skirt on the other side of the bed to soak the bloody dead woman in light from another angle.

  The woman was already gone, though. Our lights revealed, in searing white, the giant giggly baby doll and an assortment of stuffed animals, balled-up socks, and dust bunnies. Or maybe they were lint bunnies. Definitely some sort of harmless under-the-furniture floor fluff.

  “Is she here?” Maya asked. “Do you see her?”

  “I saw her,” I said. “It looks like we scared her away for now.”

  “You know how to scare her?” Maya asked.

  “Light,” I said. “If you keep a flashlight by your bed, that's like a weapon you can use against her.”

  Maya nodded, her eyes wide and frightened, her red tangles bouncing everywhere. “Is she really gone?”

  I checked my Mel-Meter. The unusual high electricity readings had vanished. “She's not in the room,” I said. “We're going to figure out how to kick her out forever. Are you okay, Maya? Did she hurt you?”

  Maya shook her head.

  “What about you, Ellie?” Stacey asked.

  “I'm fine.” With the immediate shock averted, I had time to notice the stinging pain around my ankle again, but then the family members arrived, clamoring up the hall from their respective rooms in response to our screams.

  Maya's room grew crowded fast, and everyone looked at me, ready for an explanation of what had just happened.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Okay,” I said. “My associate Stacey and I have made our initial assessment, and in our professional opinion, this house is definitely haunted. You have at least one semi-conscious apparition, she has a lot of energy, and she is not happy.”

  “Can you get rid of it?” Jeremy asked.


  “As soon as we know who she is and why she's here, we can figure out how to remove her.” I felt drained, as if Bloody Betty had sucked out most out of my energy when she'd grabbed me. I was doing my best to sound confident and together despite being badly shaken by what I'd just witnessed. I've gotten pretty good at faking it.

  The ghost had inadvertently given me something, too—a glimpse into her own memories. I needed to write down every detail I could remember as soon as possible, before it began to fade like a dream. If it contained any clues to her identity and how to deal with her, then it was worth a conk on the head and a jellyfish sting from beyond the grave.

  Chapter Seven

  We explained the situation as well as we could. Though the family members had their share of conflicts with each other, they certainly drew together in a moment of crisis, revealing a bond that lasted until it became apparent that the supernatural flare-up was, hopefully, concluded for the night. Bloody Betty had made her visit and moved on.

  The family broke down into bickering before returning to their rooms. Maya went with her parents. Stacey and I moved cameras into her room to keep a close watch for the rest of the night, recording everything in case the ghost returned to make a repeat performance.

  “Why are you limping?” Stacey asked as I returned to the van with her. It was well past midnight.

  “Our cold friend grabbed me,” I said, and quickly recounted the attack and my glimpse of being someone else, somewhere else. “It feels like she did some damage.”

  I climbed into the back of the van, sat on my bunk, and winced as I slid off my boot. The movement didn't feel great against my injured ankle. Then I pulled off my sock.

  “Yowtch,” Stacey said, then let out a little sympathetic hiss of pain.

  Reddish-purple fingermarks were visible on my ankles, showing exactly where she'd seized me.

  “Looks like frostbite,” Stacey said.