by JL Bryan
“We haven’t talked about it.” Donna took a long pull on her cigarette as soon as her neighbor was inside the house. “She can be cagey.”
“You were about to tell me something else about your experience,” I said, hoping that was true.
“Oh. That’s an interesting word for it.” She paused, then sighed. “I didn’t even tell the police all of it. I didn’t think they’d believe me.”
“What did you leave out?”
“It’s not important. Probably just me being tired and confused. But I could swear...as I watched the masked man walk off down the hall, I could just about see through him. I could see the big hallway window on the other side of him.”
“That’s very interesting.”
“You probably think I’m crazy now.”
“I don’t. Something about this community is crazy, but it’s not you.”
She laughed and crushed out her cigarette in the angel’s bucket, coughing again as she straightened up. “That’s all I can tell you, really. That’s all there is.”
“How long has your son been seeing this person?”
“Off and on...months, I’d say. More of it since Evan left us. And now I’m scared of it. I want to leave this house, but we can’t move. We can barely afford to stay, only because my parents are helping...”
“Has he seen the figure again since you called the police?”
“Just three or four nights ago.”
“What does he tell you about it?”
“That he’s a bad man. That he could hurt us. I don’t see how my son’s nightmares are going to help you, though. Or me telling you I saw a ghost.”
“It helps a lot,” I said. “There are ghosts in the area. I’m here to get rid of them.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you yanking my toes?”
“No. It’s one of my firm’s specialties, actually. This area has a lot of haunted houses.”
“Uh-huh.” Despite everything she’d just told me, I could see the suspicion creeping into her eyes. Denial. If she accepted I was a ghost-hunting professional charging her neighbors money to de-haunt their houses, it also meant she had to accept the reality of the ghost she’d seen. It was safer to dismiss me as a crazy person or scam artist. Her voice became coldly professional, a distant and formal tone clearly developed at one job or another. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to get back inside now. You have a nice day.”
She retreated into her house and closed the door. Good thing I hadn’t introducing myself as a ghost exterminator right up front.
I tried her next-door neighbor’s house, wondering if Tammy Lee or her baby had attracted hungry ghosts, but Tammy Lee had no interest in talking to me and shooed me away from her door before I could finish explaining why I was there.
A number of doors closed in my face pretty quickly that afternoon. Not even my pantsuit could make me seem like a normal human being, I guess. Some people did speak to me, though. From Mr. Nobson of neighborhood watch and homeowners’ association fame, I had a small list of people who’d been robbed or encountered intruders in their homes.
Checking the symbols carved into fences gave me more leads. People who’d been robbed—always of jewelry or coins—had marks indicating wealthy person (a small top hat by a big triangle) and already robbed (hash lines that resembled a tilted split-rail fence). Those were standard hobo signs we’d learned about from the internet.
Houses with bread-head figures always had kids, and one of their moms told me she’d seen a dirty, diseased-looking man in their garage, which they used for storage rather than parking, but he’d just disappeared when she turned on the lights. Her daughter, eight years old, had reported seeing a strange man of the same description a few times late at night, in her bedroom and in the kitchen.
Those were the kinds of stories I heard throughout the afternoon, from those occasional neighbors who were willing to talk.
Late in the day, I approached the uninhabited house where Stacey had seen the dark figure enter through the front door the previous night. The house sat at the end of a street where two houses were occupied, several stood vacant, and some were only wood frames, their unfinished rooms and interior staircases open to the weather.
The yard was red earth, with occasional clumps of weeds and scrub brush laced with briars. The house looked mostly finished aside from a couple of empty window holes. Two full stories, including a second floor above the garage that connected to the second floor of the main house by a glass-walled sunroom.
As I’d been doing all day, I walked around to the back of the fence. It had an unusually large number of carvings for an empty house. The symbols included danger (a rectangle with a dot inside), man with gun (a triangle holding up sticks arms, as if to say “Don’t shoot!”), and keep out (which looks like an inverted “Y”). Among these were others we hadn’t found in the keys on the internet, like a crude skull and crossbones, though that one seemed fairly self-explanatory. Somebody was serious about telling the other spirits to stay out of the house.
I called Stacey. “Are you on your way yet?” I asked.
“Uh, working on it,” she said. “I was planning to get there by sunset. Do you need me there? Is something up?”
“Just checking. Come as soon as you’re ready.”
“Roger that,” she replied in her super-serious movie-action-hero voice.
After I hung up, I looked up at the house for a minute. Vines had snaked their way up the walls over the years of neglect, and some of them encircled the windows. I could see nothing inside, with the windows reflecting the red glare of sunset.
I slid the rusty bolt, and the back gate opened with a creak that sounded very loud on the quiet street, announcing my presence to anyone who might be inside the house.
The brambles and weeds in the yard slowed me down as I approached the back door. It was locked, so I stepped up onto the rear deck and looked into the windows, cupping my hands around my eyes. The glass panes felt as cold as the freezer doors at the grocery store, though the house’s air conditioning unit was a weed-choked box on the side of the house that had probably never been used.
The inside of the house was far from finished. Floors were bare plywood, walls looked like particle board. It might have appeared nice on the outside, but it looked like the house was actually built on the cheap.
Bare wall studs and wiring were visible in one room. In another, clearly the kitchen, the cabinets had all been smashed and lay in ruins on the counter, reminding me of the wrecked concession stand at the nonexistent baseball field.
More of the assorted danger and keep out signs were carved all over the walls, much bigger than the thumbnail-sized marking on the fences. I took snapshots with my phone, feeling a little spooked. The place was definitely some kind of center of activity among the spirits.
I wanted to pick the lock and explore inside the house, but the sun was getting low in the sky. Calvin’s voice in my head steadied my eagerness, reminding me that walking alone into a nest of ghosts, with no back-up at all, was always a fairly stupid move.
Reluctantly, I walked away from the house and back through the gate, even locking it behind me as if to hide the fact that I’d been there. I was pretty sure they knew. As I departed down the sidewalk, I could feel something watching me from the house, but I only saw empty windows when I looked back.
I passed one empty house after another, attractive and modern two-story homes with badly overgrown lawns, most of them flawed in some way—a gaping hole where a window or door should have been, an unfinished roof, an exposed attic. The houses had an oddly soulless feeling to them, hollow shells that had never been home to anyone, except for the wandering spirits of the dead.
Stacey texted me. She was on her way. Tonight, we’d do our best to remove the banshee from our clients’ home.
Chapter Nineteen
When Stacey arrived, we carried a trap into the basement, along with the pieces of a pneumatic stamper that could seal the trap at high speed.
<
br /> We assembled the stamper, and I set it to close automatically if it sensed a temperature drop combined with an electromagnetic spike, indicating the ghost might have entered the trap to investigate the bait.
“Are we setting up cameras by the tracks again tonight?” Stacey asked. “It’s getting dark.”
“No, I’m more interested in watching another place,” I said. I told her about the house. “We’ll go over there after dark so there’s less chance of somebody spotting us.” I didn’t want to draw curious neighbors, for one thing, but I was mostly worried about somebody breaking or stealing the expensive thermal camera. “Let’s finish the trap first. Banshee Girl doesn’t usually show up until after midnight, but we’ll leave it burning for her in case she makes an early appearance.”
I’d written Sophia Preston’s full name on an index card in heavy black marker, and I dropped that to the bottom of the cylindrical trap. I weighed it down with some small items I’d picked up earlier in the day—marbles, bright ribbons, a couple of finger-sized Melissa and Doug wooden dolls with a simplistic design and materials that I thought might seem familiar to Sophia’s ghost. Modern plastic toys would be alien to her.
“I don’t know,” Stacey said. “The kid lost her parents and died a miserable death feeling all alone in the world. You really think she’ll care about toys and ribbons now?”
“Maybe there’s enough of a kid left inside her,” I said. “I’m open to suggestions if you have any.”
“Nope, just nitpicks and criticism.”
“Calvin couldn’t find out much about her. It’s not easy on Sundays when all the libraries and institutions are closed. We’ve picked up that her mother died of an illness. Back in those days, it could have been influenza, tuberculosis, a rusty nail, goat bite, anything.”
We lit the candles arrayed in a spiral up to the open top of the trap. Ghosts hate light if there’s too much of it, but seem to feed freely on fire and ambient heat. The candles would, hopefully, draw Sophia’s attention and lure her inside, along with the weak bait we’d scraped together. Then the lid would slam down, triggered either by my remote control or by the temperature and EMF sensors within the trap.
Then the banshee would be sealed inside the cylinder, walled in by leaded glass and electrically charged mesh, and we could take her away to a better life. Or a better post-life, anyway.
With the trap set, we left the basement and drove over to Town Park Way, where the house I’d investigated earlier was located. Only the first two houses on the street, facing the roundabout and the community park, appeared inhabited. Beyond them, the streetlights were off, probably disconnected to save power. The empty houses ahead lay in darkness, barely touched by the weak moonlight.
We parked at the end of the street—not a cul-de-sac, just an abrupt dead end that gave way to pines and undergrowth. Jacob called Stacey as I was getting out, in time to save her from helping me unload the cameras and tripods.
As I started toward the empty house, she hopped out of the driver’s seat and grabbed my arm with such force that I nearly lost my balance.
“Careful!” I warned her, adjusting the cumbersome gear in my arms.
“Sorry. Listen, Jacob says that...uh, well, you tell her, Jacob.” Stacey held her phone to my ear.
“What?” I asked, mildly annoyed at the delay.
“Hey, Ellie. So I looked up some things. First, those gold coins are worth more than five dollars each.”
Not exactly the shocking news of the century. “How much?”
“More like four to five hundred bucks apiece,” he said.
“We have twenty-four of them.”
“Easily ten thousand dollars,” he said. “And then I looked up the situation with the banknotes. National banknotes were completely replaced by modern money, Federal Reserve notes, in the 1930’s.”
“So they’re worthless?”
“No, technically the Treasury will accept them at face value.”
“And you say ‘technically’ because...”
“Those old bank notes are extremely rare now. Among currency collectors, they could be worth ten to twenty times their face value.”
“So that’s...” I felt my mouth drop open. “Jacob. You’re telling me that we don’t have twenty-five thousand dollars in the safe, we have...a quarter million dollars or more?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. Well, expect some discounting because coin dealers have to make a profit, but yeah. A few hundred thousand.”
“I...don’t know what to say,” I replied, because that was the truth. After scraping by from month to month for years, an amount like that doesn’t even sound real, especially in reference to a bag of cash you just basically found on the ground.
“Ellie?” Jacob asked. I’d about forgotten he was still on the phone.
“Yeah,” I said. “Great. Thanks, Jacob.”
After we hung up, I returned the phone to Stacey.
“Isn’t that amazing?” Stacey asked, with an exciting squeal creeping in at the edge of her voice. “Holy cow!”
I admit the thought What do you care, you’re rich anyway? might have flickered across my mind, for one-tenth of second. She was excited for a different reason than me, I guess, just the discovery that it was so much more valuable than we thought. Like buying something cheap at a garage sale and learning it was a precious antique.
“Okay,” I said, trying not to look too stunned in front of Stacey. “Stay here and keep watch on our clients’ house. I’ll go set up the cameras.”
“But you’re not going inside the house, right?”
“If I scream your name, come and help.”
The house looked larger at night, a looming dark mass casting the area around it into deep shadow. It seemed to absorb the moonlight that fell on it.
My heart was already thumping as I unbolted the gate. I nudged it open with my hip so I could carry the cameras into the yard. The yard seemed stonier than I remember, tripping me up as I walked.
I set up the night vision camera in the front yard, facing the front door, lowering the tripod until it was concealed behind the picket fence as much as possible. The black windows of the house seemed to watch me, waiting.
Around back, I pointed the thermal camera at the rear door. It registered a slight coolness radiating from the doors and windows, as if the air conditioning were running hard inside, though the actual outdoor unit remained as silent and overgrown as ever.
With the camera set into position, I again climbed the three wooden steps to the back porch and peered into the dark windows.
“Uh, Ellie? What are you doing?” Stacey asked over my headset. She must have been watching me on the thermal.
“Just looking.” Since I could see absolutely nothing, I turned on my flashlight and pointed it through the windows. The house looked somehow worse now, the plywood warped and stained, doorways sagging as if water-damaged, the destruction in the kitchen more thorough. Maybe the high beam of my tactical flashlight revealed things more clearly than the low-burning afternoon sunlight had. If not, then the ghosts had a heavy presence that distorted the house by night.
My flashlight again found the large warning marks carved into the kitchen walls, with every hobo-script symbol for danger and death. Something important was happening here.
I drew the lock picks from my jacket pocket and went to work on the back door, pushing it open a minute later. Its hinges let out a harsh squeak, loud as an alarm bell, and I winced. Cool air drifted out over me.
“Ellie?” Stacey said. “Did I just hear a door open? Because it looks like you’re messing with the door...”
“I’m just taking a quick look,” I whispered. “If I scream your name, come help me. That’ll be our secret code.”
“I should just go in there with you. The banshee probably won’t hit Ember’s place for a while, right?”
“Keep watch anyway.” I stepped inside the house, sweeping my beam around. Nothing pounced on me or bit my face ri
ght away. I left the door open behind me in case I needed a fast getaway.
The first room I entered was probably intended to be a living room, with a brick fireplace flanked by windows looking out onto the back yard. The ceiling soared above, a full two stories, and a staircase ran along the back wall to an upstairs loft area with a half-wall, which would almost certainly be called a “bonus room” on the sales brochure.
Everything was bare wood, with more of the cheap particle-board stuff mounted on the walls. A faint lumber smell still lingered in the air.
The plywood floor bowed and creaked under my boots as I walked from one barely-built room to another, checking for monsters in closets and the kitchen pantry. I’d decided not to bring my bulky thermal goggles with me, because something told me I might want to escape this house at a run. If I had, I likely would have found a cold ghost-residue all over the shattered cabinets, like the concession stand. They seemed to have been smashed with the same sense of unfocused anger and frustration.
The ceiling creaked, as if someone in a heavy shoe or boot had taken a step in the room just above me. I froze, listening.
A second creak sounded, then a third. Definitely like a person walking up there. I traced my flashlight beam across the ceiling, following the creaking steps.
They stopped as suddenly as they’d begun, leaving the house silent again.
Cold sweat broke out all over my skin. I already felt jittery. I wasn’t alone in the house, and whatever was upstairs probably wasn’t here to sell Girl Scout cookies.
I remained still and listened.
A moment later, a loud bang sounded from the living room, and I, being a tough and experienced ghost hunter, jumped and screamed. I just hadn’t expected any sounds from that direction, since I hadn’t heard anything descend the stairs.
“Ellie?” Stacey asked.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, while making my way back to the living room. “I didn’t scream your name. Remember your instructions.”
“Okay, but why the shouting?”
The back door was now closed. The banging sound had been somebody slamming it into place.
