by JL Bryan
House of Whispers
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper,
Book Five
by
J.L. Bryan
Copyright 2015 J.L. Bryan
All rights reserved.
Acknowledgments
I appreciate everyone who has helped with this book. My beta readers include authors Daniel Arenson and Robert Duperre (try their books!), Annie Chanse, and as Isalys Blackwell from the blog Book Soulmates. The proofing was done by Thelia Kelly and Barb Ferrante. The cover is by PhatPuppy Art.
Most of all, I appreciate the book bloggers and readers who keep coming back for more! The book bloggers who’ve supported me over the years include Danny, Heather, and Heather from Bewitched Bookworks; Mandy from I Read Indie; Michelle from Much Loved Books; Shirley from Creative Deeds; Katie and Krisha from Inkk Reviews; Lori from Contagious Reads; Heather from Buried in Books; Kristina from Ladybug Storytime; Chandra from Unabridged Bookshelf; Kelly from Reading the Paranormal; AimeeKay from Reviews from My First Reads Shelf and Melissa from Books and Things; Kristin from Blood, Sweat, and Books; Aeicha from Word Spelunking; Lauren from Lose Time Reading; Kat from Aussie Zombie; Andra from Unabridged Andralyn; Jennifer from A Tale of Many Reviews; Giselle from Xpresso Reads; Ash from Smash Attack Reads; Ashley from Bookish Brunette; Loretta from Between the Pages; Ashley from Bibliophile’s Corner; Lili from Lili Lost in a Book; Line from Moonstar’s Fantasy World; Lindsay from The Violet Hour; Rebecca from Bending the Spine; Holly from Geek Glitter; Louise from Nerdette Reviews; Isalys from Book Soulmates; Jennifer from The Feminist Fairy; Heidi from Rainy Day Ramblings; Kristilyn from Reading in Winter; Kelsey from Kelsey’s Cluttered Bookshelf; Lizzy from Lizzy’s Dark Fiction; Shanon from Escaping with Fiction; Savannah from Books with Bite; Tara from Basically Books; Toni from My Book Addiction; Abbi from Book Obsession; Lake from Lake’s Reads; Jenny from Jenny on the Book; and anyone else I missed!
Also by J.L. Bryan:
The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper
Cold Shadows
The Crawling Darkness
Terminal
House of Whispers
The sixth Ellie Jordan book will be available in January/February 2016
The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)
Jenny Pox
Tommy Nightmare
Alexander Death
Jenny Plague-Bringer
Urban Fantasy/Horror
Inferno Park
The Unseen
Science Fiction
Nomad
Helix
The Songs of Magic Series (YA/Fantasy)
Fairy Metal Thunder
Fairy Blues
Fairystruck
Fairyland
Fairyvision
Fairy Luck
For Sherri
Chapter One
During autumn in Savannah, you can feel the spirits everywhere, watching from the shadows under the shifting trees. Leaves stir on the ground when there seems to be no wind, and footfalls echo down empty alleys between crumbling antique mansions.
Sometimes the ghosts come right up to your window and look in at you while you’re sleeping.
That happened to me the night before we began our investigation at the Lathrop Grand Hotel. My cat, Bandit, woke me with a low growl, one paw resting on my face. It was late, almost three in the morning.
Normally I sleep with my blackout curtains drawn tight, because normally I sleep during the day. Ghost hunting is nocturnal work. Between cases, though, I sometimes get crazy and decide to sleep at night instead.
So I awoke to my cat growling, his ears flattened back, his little black nose pointing at the glass door to my balcony, where I’d left one of the curtains wide open. The door looked out onto a dark night, full of the crooked shadows of old oaks and magnolias dimly lit by streetlamps.
“Sh,” I said, groggily patting my cat’s head. “There’s nothing...”
He growled again. I eased him away from my face and leaned far over the edge of my bed to drop him down onto the floorboards, since I generally try to keep some distance between my eyeballs and the claws of panicky cats.
As I pulled myself back up, I saw it looking at me from the balcony.
The face was pale white—not transparent or filmy, but a solid opaque shape, smooth and bloodless as a plastic mask, with none of the wrinkles and hairs of living flesh, nor any expression on its white lips. It was female, fading into shadows at the edges. The eyes were dark and empty.
I lay rigid with fear in my bed, caught entirely off-guard, hoping this was a dream but not really believing it.
The face floated just outside the window, disembodied. I wanted to blink it away but didn’t dare take my eyes off it long enough to close my lids. Besides, blinking only works if you’re dealing with something imaginary.
I had a tactical flashlight within reach, just under my bed, but I didn’t want to make any sudden moves. I told my rapidly-beating heart to calm down a bit, which it failed to do, and I waited to see if my defenses would hold.
My apartment is a long, narrow studio, a somewhat refurbished loft in a small, long-disused factory. I hang the walls with folk remedies against malevolent spirits—dreamcatchers, witch balls, and so on—the trim around the windows and doors is painted haint blue, a local tradition to protect against the countless ghosts in the area.
Whether any of that helps with any particular ghost is little more than a matter of random chance, but I’d also replaced my windows and the balcony door pane with thick leaded glass, as ghost-proof as it gets. They should hold out any entities trying to slip inside my apartment.
I stared at the face, trying to identify it. I have any number of malevolent ghostly enemies out there who might want to stalk me in search of revenge, but this face didn’t particularly match any of them. It was female, but because of the plaster-mask quality of the skin, and the ghost-white hair color, it did not appear any specific age.
The face remained. I eased my hand down toward the floor again, keeping my gaze locked with her dark, empty eyes. Her dead-white lips remained as flat and expressionless as the rest of her face.
I reached under my bed, and something sharp grabbed my wrist, snarling. Cats, always there to help.
“Let go!” I whispered, shaking my cat away. My fingers closed around the reassuring solid aluminum surface of my flashlight. I raised it toward the balcony door, but the face melted away before I could blast it with light. I hesitated, leaving the flashlight off, waiting to see if the face was really gone.
In moments like these, just after your glimpse of the supernatural has ended, when your skin is still cold with sweat and shock, the rational mind is sometimes desperate to assert itself. It was possible I’d imagined the apparition. I was alone, there were no other witnesses, and I’d captured no images of the strange face. I’d just awoken from a troubled sleep—of course, all my sleep is troubled, filled with nightmares of fire and the flat voices of the restless dead.
Actually, there had been one other witness.
“Thanks for the warning, Bandit,” I whispered. The cat let out a quick snarl, keeping himself hidden below the bed.
I slowly sat up and placed my bare feet on the creaky old floorboards. Flashlight in hand, I crossed to the glass balcony door and looked out.
My light revealed nothing on the shallow balcony outside, except the usual folding lawn chair that took up more than half the floor space out there. The balcony was just big enough for one person, one cat, one cup of coffee, one paperback or magazine. Nice black iron railing, though.
I was tense, expecting the face to jump out at me as I stood close to the glass.
Encountering nothing, I hurried to close the thick blackout curtain across the balcony door. I tied it to the matching one on the opposite side—none of those inch-wide gaps of darkness between the curtains for me. I usually keep them shut tight at night, but I’d obviously forgotten to do it before falling asleep.
Once the curtain was in place, I checked my other windows to make sure their curtains were completely shut, too. I didn’t want Lady White Mask looking in at me again. I even covered my mirror with a spare bedsheet just to be safe.
I didn’t sleep well. The face kept appearing every time I closed my eyes, floating in the darkness behind my eyelids just as it had floated in the darkness beyond the glass door.
Resisting the urge to call another human being for comfort at four in the morning, I turned on the television instead. Waking up Michael or Stacey to tell them I was scared of a ghost would just make me look silly. I hunted ghosts for a living. If ghosts had heads, my walls would be covered with mounted ghost heads. Okay, that sounds pretty scary and kind of gross, but anyway, I could handle a little late-night fright by myself.
I searched for some programming that would definitely not make me think of the unhappy dead or strange faces peering into windows. I landed on a PBS show about meerkats, little adorable fuzzy creatures that build elaborate tunnel warrens. Perfect.
As meerkats eventually gave way to orca mating songs, I still couldn’t shake the creepy feeling inspired by that face, nor could I figure out who it might have been.
The next morning, as scheduled, Stacey and I traveled to the home of one of the city’s most famous ghosts, the sweet-faced, golden-haired young lady named Abigail Bowen—or, more colloquially, “Stabby Abby.” The site was one of the must-see locations on any major ghost tour of Savannah, but I'd never investigated it before. I wondered if Stabby Abby was the same entity who'd showed up on my balcony the night before. I hoped not. That ghost had a bit of a reputation, as her nickname would suggest.
Chapter Two
“So we’re trying to catch a really big fish this time, huh? I wonder why they'd want to get rid of such a famous ghost. Seems like it would be bad for business,” Stacey said as I eased the van down Gaston Street, alongside the sprawling tree-shaded green space of Forsyth Park. A number of sizable antique homes lined the street, most of them residential, a couple of them converted to bed and breakfasts or schmancy office space.
"We don't know that they want us to get rid of her," I said. "There could be other problem ghosts. Plus, it's almost October, so they could be bringing us in for some kind of Halloween publicity stunt. Maybe they'll want us to find some video or audio evidence of Stabby Abby they can share with tourists."
"And you're okay with that kind of publicity-stunt work?" Stacey asked.
"I'm always okay with working for a five-star luxury hotel. At least the checks probably won't bounce."
We parked in an alley a few blocks from our destination and hoofed it up the shady, tree-lined sidewalks, passing mansion after mansion, garden after garden.
The Lathrop Grand dominated most of a city block, a four-story behemoth of faded brickwork with prominent verandas and balconies on the second and third floor, their wrought-iron columns and balustrades brimming with intricate black curls. The hotel was one of the city's oldest and had been featured as a haunted and/or historic destination all over the basic-cable spectrum, from SyFy and Chiller to the Travel Channel and Destination America. It was a beautiful and genteel old place believed to house a number of ghosts, including Stabby Abby herself. She was a famous murderer, but her ghost was said to be mostly benign, though over the years she'd terrified a number of guests into taking a very early check-out time, like two or three a.m.
The hotel attracted guests from all over who hoped for a glimpse of the ghost. Maybe it would be our job to provide that. I couldn't say for sure, because the hotel manager had been very cagey on the phone, asking for discretion while disclosing no details.
We were walking into this meeting fairly blind. Fine with me—as I'd told Stacey, I didn't mind the whole whisper-drama routine on the manager's part as long as the hotel could afford a sizable fee. Many of our clients are people struggling financially, trapped in their haunted homes by mortgages or the simple cost of moving. Consequently we can't realistically bill them too much, and our fees tend to arrive in small, irregular payments here and there.
Stacey and I passed window boxes full of pansies and snapdragons, mounted under large spotless panes that offered glimpses into the spacious hotel lobby. A brick archway marked the front entrance to the weathered but stately old hotel. The glass double doors under the arch didn't make a sound when we pushed them open.
The lobby was two stories high, with a grand staircase sweeping up to the second level, all of it glowing in the late-afternoon sunlight and echoing with soft piano music. The floor was marble tile, mostly white but interspersed with the occasional square of pink or black. A huge, empty fireplace loomed at one side of the room, its mantle decorated with bowls of bright flowers and baskets of miniature pumpkins and Indian corn.
We made our way past a sitting area with straight-backed chairs and a Victorian-style sofa arranged on a muted rug—overall, the lobby looked like the parlor at somebody's wealthy grandma's house. There were more flowers, plus mirrors and fragile china and porcelain decorations, including a few creepy dolls in stiff dresses perched on one bookshelf.
"Of course, we cannot guarantee that any guest will see a ghost," said a voice with a lilting accent that immediately conjured images of sunlight and sparkling ocean water. The smiling young man behind the front counter, dressed in a black blazer and tie with his hair in a number of short braids, sounded like he was from somewhere in the Caribbean. He faced a middle-aged couple across the counter.
“We asked for the most haunted room you've got,” said the male half of the couple—denim vest, faded Black Sabbath t-shirt, gray ponytail and beard. His wife wore heavy black eyeliner and dark gray eye shadow, and her long, poofy salt-and-pepper hair looked as if it had been glued in place with half a bottle of hairspray. She wore Doc Martins and tight black jeans with a studded metal belt under a crop top, clearly happy to let her belly muffin out all over the place.
“Room 208 itself has been reserved for months, of course,” the clerk said, smiling a little wider. “It's our most requested room. We have you in 212 on the same hall.”
“What about the fourth floor?” Big Hairspray Lady asked, her voice hushed, as if speaking of an ancient curse, or maybe somebody who was expected to die in the very near future.
“The fourth is still closed for renovations,” he told them.
“But we can explore around? Take all the pictures we want?” Ponytail Man asked, thumping a camera bag strapped over his shoulder.
“Of course,” the clerk replied. “Except for the fourth floor. But you're welcome to photograph the library, the art gallery, the courtyard—”
“We want the haunted areas,” said Big Hairspray Lady.
“Ghosts have been seen in every hall, on every floor,” the clerk explained. “And in the stairways.”
“Have you ever seen one?” Ponytail Man asked the clerk.
“I've heard them,” the clerk said with a grin. “They like to walk around late at night.”
“I bet you're more sensitive because of your background,” Big Hairspray Lady said.
The clerk's eyebrows rose just a hair. According to the little gold bar on his lapel, his name was Steve. “My background?” he asked.
“Aren't you Haitian? Or Jamaican?”
“Crucian,” he said, his professional smile beginning to falter a bit.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means I'm from Zimbabwe,” he replied, keeping his face perfectly straight. I tried not to laugh, since “Crucian” refers to someone from the Caribbean island of St. Croix, thousands of miles
from Zimbabwe.
“Oh, well, Africa is very spiritual, too,” the woman said. “Lots of people who still talk to the spirits of nature and ancestors—”
“Let's get moving, Carla,” Ponytail Man nudged her, glancing back at us. “There's a line.”
“We'll talk later,” Big Hairspray Lady said to the clerk, whispering loud enough for the whole room to hear.
“I look forward to it,” the clerk replied, smiling as Ponytail Man and Big Hairspray Lady walked off to the elevators.
Steve the clerk gave Stacey and me the same broad, professional smile and said, “Welcome to the Lathrop Grand...y'all.” The last word came after half a beat, as though he were still learning to tack it onto the greeting, a mismatch for his island accent. “What can I do for you?”
“I'm Ellie Jordan with Eckhart Investigations,” I said. “We have an appointment with Madeline Colt.”
“Of course. Just a moment, please.” He picked up a phone from behind the counter, punched a button, and turned slightly away to murmur into it. His accent might have been fresh from the sparkling waters of the Caribbean, but he clearly wasn't new to the hospitality industry, with such powers as speaking low enough that we couldn't hear him from two feet away, while apparently his boss on the other end could hear him fine. He nodded before hanging up. “She's on her way,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“So, Saint Croix sounds nice,” Stacey said, giving the young man a big smile. “I think my cousin has a house there. That's the one with Blackbeard's Castle, right?”
“You mean Saint Thomas,” he replied. “Saint Croix is the one with the nicer beaches and prettier girls.”
