by JL Bryan
Her scream grew into a loud, desperate wail, and then the two figures slammed into the basement door hard enough to rattle it in its frame. A crack split one of the door’s small window panes from corner to corner.
I attempted to stand, discovered I wasn’t quite strong enough yet, and tumbled to my hands and knees.
As I knelt there, catching my breath, the door swung wide open. I reached for my flashlight, feeling far from ready to confront the big, bad ghost, if he was coming back for seconds.
Then Stacey dashed into the room, swinging her flashlight, and I let myself relax.
“Ellie! What happened?” She ran over and helped me to my feet.
“Uh.” I leaned on her. I had almost no energy at all. I looked at the open door through which the ghosts had left and she had entered. “Did you see anything out there?”
“Just a cold wind blowing across the lawn. Was that her? The banshee?”
“It was them,” I said. “The banshee and...the other one. He snatched her away. She didn’t want to go with him.”
“So he’s the bad guy?”
“She was feeding on me at the time.”
“So he’s the...good guy? The rescuer?”
“Let’s not assign any morality-play roles just yet,” I said. “Those two are in conflict, and I happened to get in the way. I did get a look at her.”
“The banshee?”
“She’s just a little girl. Or maybe she just wants to present herself that way, but I don’t think she was in control of anything at that moment. I saw some of her memories.” Part of me still felt an echo of her deep sadness, and I wanted to sob as the image of her dying mother rose again behind my eyes, but I kept it inside. “We should look back at the Whalen family, identify any girls who died between the ages of, let’s say, five to ten.”
“Great, can’t wait. Are you going to be okay? You look pretty pale.”
“I’m...” I tried to take my internal temperature, see how I was really feeling. “Hungry. So hungry.”
“I have some raw granola out in the van!”
“I’d even eat that,” I said.
“I’ll go get some as soon as--”
“Now!” I shouted, and Stacey jumped. I felt instantly embarrassed. “Uh...I mean, now. Please. If that’s okay. Sorry.”
“No problemo. Want to come with me or stay here?”
“Stay. They’re gone for now.” And I didn’t feel like walking for even two or three steps, much less hoofing it out the door and around the house.
Stacey eased me down to a sitting position on my mattress. I slumped, exhausted.
“I’ll be right back. Leave her alone, ghosts!” Stacey jogged out the door.
“Nice exorcism,” I said, but my voice was too weak for her to hear.
The room gradually warmed to a normal temperature, with the ghosts gone and the fresh warm air from the open door. I clicked my flashlight and pointed it out into the yard. I saw nothing but grass and the support posts for the second-story porch above the basement door.
I reached for my thermals, but they felt too heavy to handle at the moment. I’d have Stacey check the yard and perimeter with them when she returned. I should’ve had her do that the instant she’d walked in the door, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was thinking like my head was filled with mud.
After Stacey returned, I slouched on the mattress, reluctantly eating dry, loose granola while she went back outside to scan for any active spirits.
“Nothing out here,” Stacey said over my headset, though I could barely hear her over the sound of the hard granola breaking my teeth and shredding my gums. “Wait. Look at that.”
“I can’t see you,” I said. “We’re talking over radio.”
“Right, sorry. Something snapped the top off a fence picket out here. Looks like they hit it pretty hard.”
“Our clients won’t be happy to hear that.”
“It’s okay, I don’t think it’s a load-bearing picket.” Stacey switched off her headset as she rejoined me in the basement and sat next to me while I tried not to pass out. “You took a big risk letting it feed on you like that.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t say it was one hundred percent intentional on my part.” My head was throbbing, and not just the pain of gnawing the granola pebbles. While the agony and cold in my bones had been ripped away along with the banshee, I was left exhausted, with the sort of headache you might get when you’ve been awake for six days and haven’t eaten in three. Well, I imagine that’s what it would feel like.
“You look like you’re about to keel over and die,” Stacey said.
“Thanks.”
“Maybe you should take the rest of the night off.”
“I shouldn’t...” I rubbed my head. My brain wasn’t helping me form words at the moment. “I have to work.”
“You’ve done a lot.” Stacey squeezed my hand. “Come on, Ellie. Just have a quick nap in the van.”
“Not a good idea.” It sounded like an excellent idea. Even the narrow drop-down cot built into our cargo van, normally about as appealing as an ironing board covered with rusty tacks, sounded as nice as a down mattress just then. “They’re paying us to...keep watch...” My voice was slurred, my eyelids dropping.
“I’ll keep watch,” Stacey said. “You need to recover. How good would you be in a fight right now, anyway?”
She had a pretty decent point there.
“Okay. Just twenty minutes,” I said. “Then wake me up.”
“You got it, boss.”
Stacey helped me to my feet and tried to support me as we walked. I drew my arm away from her, determined to move on my own strength. I might have been badly drained, but I could take care of myself.
After walking several hundred thousand miles on rubbery legs, I made it to the van and let Stacey drop down the horrific back-spasm-inducing bunk for me.
“Just twenty minutes,” I said, then I closed my eyes. I couldn’t believe how tired I was. The cold little banshee had really gorged herself on me, but at least I’d snagged a clear glimpse of her. We were on our way to identifying and removing her. If only I could keep my eyes open.
I drifted into darkness.
It seemed like only a minute later when the shaking and rattling woke me up. I opened my eyes and they were instantly filled with bright fire.
“What’s happening?” I mumbled, covering my eyes. “Stacey?”
“We’re just swinging by the park to pick up the cameras,” she said. “And the old railroad tracks.”
“It’s morning?” I sat up on the cot, now vibrating as the van drove. “I just wanted to sleep for a second...”
“You seemed like you needed more,” Stacey said. “And nothing really happened. Except, uh...”
“What?” I stood and stumbled toward the front of the van while Stacey drove us along the paved path into the park, stopping when the pavement abruptly gave way to dirt and weeds. “What did you see?”
“Well...” Stacey climbed out, and I followed her. We started across the open space toward the lone concession stand. “The cameras by the railroad tracks sort of...blacked out.”
“When?”
“Not long after you started snoring.”
“I was snoring? Wait, what happened to the cameras?”
“Lost power, it looks like,” she said. “Batteries drained. I checked the footage just before they turned off, and it caught some shadowy figures near the tracks. Not human. At least, not live humans. So I didn’t exactly want to go running out there in the middle of the night. I hope that’s okay.”
“You could’ve woken me up for that.”
“Oh, I tried.”
“What about here?” I eased open the broken door to the first floor of the concession stand, where a night vision and thermal camera stood on tripods in opposite corners to cover the whole room.
“I didn’t notice any action last night, but I’ll scan through the footage later.”
The cameras seemed intact, w
hich was a relief considering how this place had clearly been visited by a destructive entity in the recent past. We hurried to pack them into the van so we could recover the others ASAP.
I took over the driving, which meant I had to reverse all the way back up the path and out of the park. We went around the park to the stretch of paved road at the very back of the community and followed it until it dead-ended into trees and thorny vines.
Though it was daylight now, the deep woods still felt cool as we walked the overgrown foot path to the railroad tracks. The combination of thick canopy and dense undergrowth made the area feel isolated from the rest of the world, even in the daytime. I had the feeling of things watching us from the shadows.
“My cameras!” Stacey gasped when we reached the green, mossy tunnel that had formed over the old tracks. She ran to the fallen gear. Three tripods had been toppled in the night.
“Anything broken?” I asked, looking up and down the tracks while she inspected the cameras.
“The lenses look okay. I think the weeds cushioned their fall.” She sighed in relief. “Looks like all the ghosts did was drain the batteries and tip them over. Thank goodness.”
While Stacey broke down and gathered the gear, I did some texting on my phone.
“Busy over there?” she asked me, probably because I was staring at my phone while she did some of the grunt work.
“Just confirming our breakfast plans with the guys,” I said.
“I’m so not ready to go out in public.” Stacey looked down at her jeans and pink cotton shirt, both of them grungy from the woods. “How long do we have?”
“We’re meeting them in ten minutes.”
“Seriously?” she gasped, looking panicked.
“Nah, I was kidding about that part. We’ll go somewhere super-casual, where nobody cares how we look.”
“There’s nowhere in the world that casual. Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Why would it be a...” Stacey’s expression went from panicked to horrified. “No. Come on, Ellie. No.”
“We’d better get moving,” I said.
Stacey protested vehemently as we hurried back along the trail, but she quickly fell silent—not because she’d calmed down, exactly, but because the thick shadows of the woods created an atmosphere that made you instinctively want to stay quiet for fear of attracting predators.
The banshee was clearly a kind of predator—it had fed on Ember, then on me. After the previous night, though, I was beginning to doubt that she was the most dangerous spirit in the neighborhood. I needed to know about the one who’d dragged her away.
Chapter Ten
Despite what I’d told Stacey, there was actually time for me to drop her off, head home to shower and change, then pick her up again. We saved time by not swinging by the office to pick up our own cars before breakfast.
Stacey groaned in protest as I pulled into the crowded parking lot of a restaurant located on an interstate exit outside Savannah. The building looked like a giant barn made of weathered gray wood, with a wraparound porch where families waited on rocking chairs and porch swings.
A billboard tall enough to be seen from the interstate showed a smiling, grandfatherly rooster in overalls and glasses, sitting on a rocking chair and holding a corn cob near his beak. The corn cob didn’t make immediate sense unless you knew that it had been a smoldering corn-cob pipe in past generations, before massive changes in attitudes about smoking had forced changes in the logo.
The name of the restaurant, as spelled out in the most down-home Hee-Haw font you can imagine, was THE COUNTRY BARN.
“I’m going to kill you,” Stacey whispered. She pulled on a pair of very large, extremely black sunglasses.
“What’s with the Mary Kate and Ashleys?” I asked. “Are you really afraid someone’s going to recognize you?”
“That would be my luck, yes.” She sighed. “Let’s get it over with.”
“That’s the spirit! Let’s go have some biscuits and gravy.”
“Ugh.”
We climbed the porch steps and entered the restaurant, where the décor was aggressively folksy—old farm implements on the walls, along with faded signs advertising livestock feed and paintings of barefoot kids in rolled-up jeans on their way to the old fishing hole.
“Welcome to The Country Barn, y’all!” drawled the hostess, a girl of eighteen or nineteen who wore overall shorts over a checkered shirt. The overalls depicted the same rooster who adorned the billboard. “It’ll be about forty-five minutes, but go on and make yourselves at home! Most people like to browse the gift shop while they wait.”
“Jordan, party of four,” I said.
“You made a reservation?” Stacey whispered, shaking her head.
“Jordan...” She squinted at something behind her podium. “Oh, yes, ma’am. Your table should be ready in about ten or fifteen minutes.” She handed me a black plastic square restaurant pager with an image of Grandpa Rooster on top.
“See?” I said to Stacey. “It pays to plan ahead. Let’s check out the gift shop.”
She sighed and followed me through the propped-open batwing doors into the cluttered Country Barn Gifts and Notions shop.
“I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” Stacey whispered. “Did you tell them?”
“Of course not. That would take about half the fun out of it for me. Look, hillbilly gnomes!” I pointed to a shelf of yard statues, where incarnations of the traditional Germanic sprite reclined in straw hats and patched jeans, playing banjos, jugs, and washboards around their knee-length beards. The gift shop was full of cheesy stuff like that—fake mounted fish and deer heads that could sing songs, flour and sugar jars shaped like wooden barrels and butter churns, piggy banks wearing cowboy boots, faux-folk-art owls and frogs that appeared to be made of spatulas and rolling pins.
“Got any ghost stuff?” I asked Stacey.
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t think so.”
“Maybe over here. This area looks supernatural...” I approached a corner loaded with figurines of angels and sheep with halos. A rack of postcards offered nature pictures paired with Bible verses. Next to that was a section with audiobooks and kids’ travel games.
Country Barn restaurants could be found at interstate exits from Arkansas to Florida, each location basically identical to this one.
The black square in my hand lit up and vibrated, then let out a low cock-a-doodle-doo! Just in case I’d missed the lights and vibrations.
“Table’s ready,” Stacey said, snatching the pager from me and heading back to the hostess station.
“But we haven’t looked at the snowglobes yet,” I protested as I followed after her. “Hey, that one has Grandpa Rooster in a hammock.”
“You’re so funny.”
“There you are.” Jacob stepped forward from the crowded front area, where he’d been standing near one of the benches inside the front door. The benches were packed full of elderly people, maybe from the two small retirement-home buses parked outside.
“Jakey!” Stacey said, in a semi-squealing tone I’m not sure I’d ever heard from her before. She embraced him and kissed him full on the mouth, which drew a few sour glances from the elderly ladies on the bench.
“Hey,” he replied, blushing just a little from the sudden public display of affection. “Did you have a good night? Catch any ghosts?”
“Not yet.”
“I haven’t eaten at one of these in years,” Jacob said, looking at the densely packed rural kitsch all over the walls. “Still looks exactly the same.”
The hostess led us to a picnic table made of rough-hewn planks of brown plastic. Rooster-and-chicken salt and pepper shakers perched at the center of the table, next to the upright spindle that held the communal paper-towel roll.
“Why’d we pick this place?” Jacob asked as he and Stacey sat across from me. “Is there a haunted house nearby? A haunted gas station?”
“You don’t l
ike catfish biscuits?” I asked Jacob, feigning shock.
“Should I?” he asked.
“Ellie picked this place,” Stacey said. “To prank me, I guess.”
“Oh, because they don’t make everything out of quinoa and organic black beans?” Jacob asked.
“Because I’m kind of from The Country Barn family,” Stacey said. “My great-grandfather opened the first one in Montgomery in 1931. It really was an old barn. They had to keep it simple and cheap because of the Depression—chicken, biscuits, vegetables. Eventually they opened a second one, then a third, then about sixty more...” She was blushing scarlet. “I don’t like telling people.”
“Why not?” Jacob asked.
“Because the place is so silly. They used to call me Barn Girl or Rooster Girl at school. And the food’s kind of not the healthiest in the world.”
“Not healthy?” Michael arrived through the crowd, grinning at me. I couldn’t help smiling back like a goofball at my firefighting semi-boyfriend guy. I felt flushed and wished my face would tone down its reactions a little. I stood to hug him, and he joined me on my hard plastic picnic bench. “I saw today’s special is deviled eggs and hash browns on Texas toast with sausage gravy. I don’t even understand how they came up with that meal. I’ll have to order one.”
“Are you feeling suicidal or something?” Stacey asked with mock concern.
“Just hungry.” Michael was looking at me as he said it, his vibrant green eyes seeming to burn into me. I knew he had questions I couldn’t easily answer—like why I’d been avoiding meeting him in person again, though I always did my avoiding regretfully, with some excuse.
The thing was that I really clicked with him, and this feeling of familiarity led me to expose myself in a way that felt dangerous. There was no simple way to explain the war inside my heart and mind, between all the inner voices that wanted to stay safe, shielded, and detached from other people as much as possible—the voices that had been in control for years—and the smaller, more fragile part of me that wanted to get closer to him.
So this was the halfway solution I’d devised, meeting him again as part of a group. Seeing him without getting too close. It made no sense at all and just showed how crossed my wires really are.
