by JL Bryan
I heard another long, wooden creak from the back stairs leading up to the loft, but didn’t see anything when I turned my flashlight toward it. The banister posts cast tall, bouncing shadows on the walls as my beam moved among them.
“They must like me,” I whispered. “Because they don’t want me to leave.”
“Get out of there!”
“One sec.” I started up the steps. The sixth stair let out the exact same creak when I put my foot on it.
Trembling, I continued upward. Just a quick look around, I assured myself. Then I’m out of here.
My instincts told me that I needed to get out now. For all I knew, I was locked inside, trapped in some malevolent spirit’s hunting ground.
I reached the top of the stairs and quickly moved away from the railing and the half-wall, into the lofty bonus room. It was at least a ten-foot drop to the living room floor below, and it doesn’t take a powerful or sophisticated spirit to nudge you over and let gravity do the rest of the work. Thousands of people die in simple household falls every year, and rarely do investigators bring in a paranormal forensics team to determine whether a ghost might be at fault.
The shadowy loft area had one small window that let in very little light. I found nothing creeping around the bare, empty room, but I definitely felt like I was being watched, probably from the dark doorway to the next room. Naturally, I walked over there and through the empty doorway, which had never been hung with an actual door.
The next room was probably meant as a den or spare bedroom. It was the terminus of the upstairs hallway, which I would have to traverse to reach the source of the footsteps I’d heard below.
I stepped into the hall. A row of empty door-holes lined the left side of the hallway, while the right side overlooked the foyer below. Presumably there was supposed to be some kind of railing along that side, but that had never been added, either. Instead, a long stretch of the hallway’s right side opened onto a straight drop of ten or twelve feet to the foyer floor. The front stairs were the same way, circling down along one wall with no banister on the outer edge, an open invitation to trip and fall to your death.
I clung to the left side of the hall, near the unfinished doorways, as if the hallway floor were a thin, crumbling ledge on a high mountainside.
The first door led into an empty room, about twelve feet by twelve feet with a double-paned window, probably meant to be a bedroom. I checked the rectangular cavity of the closet, found no wraiths in heavy boots, and moved on to the next bedroom and the hallway bath, identifiable by the pipes in its incomplete walls.
I crept along the final stretch of the hall toward the last doorway, keeping close to the wall on my left and away from the dangerous drop to my right.
The air grew thicker and colder, harder to breathe. I forced myself to step through into the final doorway, though it seemed like the air itself was resisting me.
A much larger room lay beyond, obviously the intended master bedroom, with two sets of windows and more door-shaped holes along one wall, leading into a bathroom and a walk-in closet. The whole upper floor, with the doorless entrances to every room, made me think of some kind of cave system or pueblos carved into cliffs.
The air in the master bedroom was even thicker and colder, and I began to smell what my witness had described earlier: whiskey, then a strong tang of rotten meat that made me queasy.
I heard a grumbling, like a rough male voice muttering under its breath. Panning my light around the dark room revealed nothing. My flashlight beam seemed weak, unable to penetrate very far into the gloom, which is never a good sign.
“Ellie, are you still alive in there?” Stacey whispered. I tapped the microphone with my finger, a signal that I was still breathing but that she needed to be quiet.
A floorboard creaked within one of the dark doorways. I stepped toward it, and my flashlight revealed the long throat of a walk-in closet. It was empty, like the other rooms, but something glinted at the very back, on the floor.
I approached cautiously. A floorboard had been pried loose, and in the small cavity below it lay a little rat’s nest of items—or more of a raccoon’s nest, maybe, since raccoons are attracted to shiny objects. It was a heap of glittering jewelry and polished silver antique coins.
I crouched down to examine it. This would make excellent bait for the bandit ghosts, alongside the money recovered from the robbery. Clearly, the ghosts had been attracted to these jewels and coins already.
It was interesting to find this little stash. I’m familiar with a number of cases where ghosts pilfer small objects from the living. Usually it’s a mischievous ghost hiding items like keys or glasses, or maybe a kid ghost who swipes small toys. The stash is usually found, if at all, in the ghost’s lair—the attic, the basement, or wherever it feels most comfortable. Still, I hadn’t heard of ghosts focusing on items of monetary value, or carrying them from one house to another, before this case.
As I reached out to scoop up some of the treasure—the second stash of buried treasure we’d found in this case so far, a new record—I heard another long, slow creak on the floorboard behind me.
I froze, feeling dread. It was right behind me.
I turned my head. The shadowy man stood less than a foot away, looking down at me. His eyes were twin black holes under the brim of his hat. A pale cloth concealed most of his face, but the portion I could see around his eyes looked decayed, bits of skin clinging to bone.
He was a partial apparition—I could see the buttons of his coat but not his hands or legs, or at least those were totally hidden in shadow. I began to swing my light around to get a better look at him, plus blast him with a few thousand lumens as a “back off” warning.
Then something slammed into the back of my head, an unseen fist sucker-punching me right in the skull. I toppled over to my hands and knees. My forehead banged against the wall, but I was so numb from the shock of the initial attack that it took almost two full seconds to register the cracking pain in my temple.
I swayed, trying not to fall over altogether. The ghosts decided to help me with that, I suppose, because the next thing I felt was a hard boot kicking up into my guts. It lifted my whole body off the ground in the most painful way, with its sharp toe caught under the lower lip of my rib cage. I howled in agony.
The inhumanly strong kick sent me flying up and back against the closet wall. The flimsy particle-board sheet splintered on impact. My head bounced against the ceiling. It must have done some damage because white plaster dust spilled down all around my face.
I fell toward the floor, unable to see anything below me. My flashlight had fallen from my hand and gone dark, as if they’d sucked all the energy out of it.
Rough, unseen hands grabbed me all over my body. There must have been two or three unseen assailants. They punched my face and stomach, then grabbed my hair and slung the side of my head against the wall. Somewhere through the ringing pain between my ears, I was vaguely aware of Stacey’s panicked voice over my headset.
The ghosts flung me out of their closet, away from their stash. I banged into the ground and rolled until I hit the far wall.
Nothing happened for a moment, except Stacey shouting that she was on her way. I didn’t have the strength or the air to reply.
Then the house groaned. Sure, houses groan from time to time, but this was like a deep, aching voice rising from every joist in the house, shuddering the air all around me. It was like being trapped inside a speaker cabinet while a group of angry, disturbed ghosts try to moan out some karaoke. I could feel my bones trembling in their sockets.
Hands grabbed me again in the pitch darkness—the cowboys weren’t done with me yet. I kicked and punched uselessly as the entities closed in around me. The air grew much thicker and colder now, like someone was shoving frozen cloth into my nostrils and down my throat. I couldn’t manage to choke down even a sip of air.
They were going to kill me. I felt my body go limp, out of oxygen. Fists and boots continu
ed to pound as a black fog rolled across my brain. I began to lose consciousness.
“Ellie!” Stacey shouted. Her boots thumped toward me down the hallway. One nice thing about the ghosts slamming me all over the place, I supposed, was that Stacey had no trouble determining where I was inside the house. I comforted myself with that thought while choking to death.
I wanted to call out, to warn her there were multiple strong entities in here, but I could do nothing except fight to draw air against the immense pressure crushing in around me.
The room turned blinding white, every grain of plywood and particle board seeming to transform into a glowing filament of light. I was sure I was finally dying. Go into the light, Carol Anne.
Then I gasped and pulled in a huge breath of cold, whiskey-scented air. Maybe I wasn’t so dead, after all.
“Ellie!” Stacey set down the bulky ghost cannon, the heaviest light-thrower we have. She’d brought the searing brightness, but she’d brought the fire hazard, too, because the room was nothing but dry, exposed wood.
She ran over, helping me sit up while I enjoyed the glorious feeling of drawing more fresh oxygen into my lungs.
Breathing again brought another wave of agony from my bruised body. The ghosts had fled from the intense light, but there was a chance they’d recover and return. The ghost cannon is also very unreliable, and the batteries don’t last long.
“What happened? You look awful,” Stacey said.
“Go,” I croaked. “Go now.”
“No way. I’m not leaving you here, Ellie. Never.” She put an arm around my shoulders and hugged me.
Yeah, that hadn’t been my intention. I’d meant we both needed to go now. The lack of a clear subject in my sentence had made Stacey think I was being noble or self-sacrificial for her sake. Actually I was just having trouble speaking.
She helped me up to my feet. As I was finding my balance, the ghost cannon cut right out, plunging the room back into darkness.
The house shuddered with another deep groan.
“Go,” I said. Then, to clarify: “Let’s go.”
“That’s right, Ellie! We’re both leaving together.” Stacey tried to help me, but the return to darkness had fueled a nice, useful panic that got my legs running.
She grabbed the ghost cannon as we left the room, muttering angrily as she tried to activate it again. The hallway was gloomy, lit only by touches of moonlight seeping in from the big windows over the front door. I kept close to the wall again, avoiding the open drop to the foyer floor below.
Then Stacey screamed and pitched over onto her side, the wrong way, toward the drop-off. I tried to catch her, but wasn’t close enough or fast enough on my feet at that moment.
I’d lost one flashlight, but I carried two on my utility belt, so I drew the second one and fired it up, aiming it at Stacey and expanding its iris so that light saturated the area around her.
The light revealed the same apparition I’d seen in the closet, dust gray, a pale cloth hiding its face. Its hollow skull-eyes looked down at Stacey, and then it began to reach its bony hand toward her. One solid push and Stacey would be over the edge, in danger of breaking a limb or her neck if she landed the wrong way. The bulky weight of the ghost cannon wasn’t going to do her any favors, either, whether she landed on it or it landed on her.
Stacey screamed again when she saw the thing assaulting her.
“Leave her alone!” I shouted again. Remembering the train robbers’ names would have been an extremely useful thing right then, so naturally my brain completely blanked on them.
He leaned closer to her, reaching toward the golden stud in her earlobe as if he meant to steal it.
Stacey desperately thumbed the ghost cannon switch, trying to torch his head with a million lumens, but the device wasn’t cooperating.
“Leave her alone!” I shouted. The apparition’s head snapped toward me, and though its eyes were black and empty, I could feel its cold, hellish stare.
Somewhere in my brain, a pin dropped, a connection was made, a little cellular gear turned in its socket.
“McCoyle,” I said. “James McCoyle. Is that you? Or are you one of the O’Reilly brothers? Liam? Sean?”
The apparition drew itself up tall, gaining a foot or more in height as it did so—ghost’s appearances can be flexible like that—so that it towered above me. It studied me, as if trying to decide what to do.
Two dark, faceless shadows, the size of broad-shouldered, broad-waisted men, rose in the doorway behind him. Maybe the O’Reilly brothers, responding to their names.
By then, Stacey had enough time to regain her feet. We backed away slowly, together, and the three ghosts advanced on us.
Stacey tried to make a break for it down the front stairs, but I pulled her back. The lack of any railing made it too risky, too easy for the ghosts to try and kill us both.
“This way!” I shouted, right in her face, probably a little too loud in my general panicky desire to survive and escape. I yanked her arm, and we took off down the hall, past the bedrooms, across the loft and down the back stairs.
The ghosts had helpfully locked the back door, which slowed us down. I heard creaking footsteps on the stairs behind me, but I didn’t turn around.
I pushed open the door, and Stacey and I burst out onto the back porch at a full run. We didn’t stop running until we were across the lawn, through the gate, and leaping into the van.
Stacey heaved the ghost cannon in back, cranked up the van, and spun out as she accelerated into a tight curve, turning a fairly impressive one-eighty in the middle of the street. I could smell our tires burning.
We rocketed away from the house, then Stacey slammed on the brakes, flinging me against the dashboard. I’d forgotten my seatbelt. Should have listened to Safety Bear.
“What is your problem?” I asked her, disentangling my hair from the air-conditioning vent.
Stacey didn’t say anything, but she was white as a sheet. One of those sheets cartoon ghosts wear.
Wordlessly, her hand shaking, she pointed ahead through the windshield.
In the middle of the road stood Captain Neighborhood Watch himself, Cecil Nobson, clad in his official fishing hat and khaki vest. He’d parked his golf cart sideways in the middle of the road, and placed one bright-orange traffic cone on either side of it, creating a roadblock across the uninhabited street. We had to be the targets of it, considering we were the only people here.
He clung to the slender roof-support column of his golf cart as if his life depended on it. I could see the expression on his blanched face clearly, because he was only inches from the grill of our van.
Stacey, speeding as fast as she could down the street, had nearly crushed the man to death against his own golf cart.
Chapter Twenty
“Good Lord have mercy!” Stacey said, flinging open the driver’s-side door and leaping out. Reluctantly, I climbed out the shotgun door. Why had I let Stacey drive? Oh, because the ghosts of three dead men had just beaten me to a soft and gooey pulp.
I stumbled toward Nobson, who still cringed and trembled against his golf cart. Stacey ran toward him, rubbing his arm.
“You...you could have...” He swallowed, then straightened up, shaking Stacey away. “You could have killed me! Do you know the speed limit on this road is twenty-five miles an hour?”
“Uh,” Stacey said. “I think I was going about that.”
The cloud of smoldering tire residue in the air seemed to contradict her.
“What are you doing out here, anyway?” I asked, ready to put him on the defensive. “Blocking up a road like this isn’t legal.”
“I’m on official neighborhood watch business.”
“Doing what?”
“Don’t try to deny you two were up to something. I got it all on video. The two of you breaking into that house. Just what were y’all doing in there?”
Stacey looked at me, probably curious to see how I was going to answer that. I know I was.
“Oh, yeah!” Stacey said, nodding her head like a little Garfield in a car window. “You can go look at those on the fence.”
“Or maybe we should call the police and let them sort it out.” He reached for his cell phone, mounted at his belt next to a can of pepper spray.
“You’ll just annoy them,” I said. “There’s been no forced entry into that house. The locks are still intact, I can promise you. All they’ll see is a man with too much time on his hands setting up weird, totally illegal little roadblocks in his own neighborhood.”
“You clearly aren’t familiar with subsection C of the community charter,” Nobson said. “I am the law here.”
Stacey snickered—I could tell from her guilty look that she knew better, but couldn’t help herself—and he flushed dark red.
“So you’re saying that if I bring the police out here and have them search that house, you’ll have no problem with that at all?” He spoke through gritted teeth, giving me a taste of the dark side of Cecil Nobson, neighborhood compliance officer.
He did have me there, though. I didn’t want anybody going into that house tonight, not even annoying little Captain Neighborhood Watch himself, considering how violent the ghosts inside were. I strongly doubted he would believe me if I explained it was dangerously haunted, the robber’s roost of a gang of dead bandits. The police wouldn’t, either.
On top of that, if the ghosts didn’t attack the police, they would discover a stash of stolen jewelry taken from all around the neighborhood. Considering Stacey and I had just left the house—and our friend here had caught that on camera—things could only get awkward from there. If we tried to keep Nobson and the police out, especially with some flimsy story about a ghost, we’d only look even more guilty when the coppers found the loot (see, I was already thinking like a criminal).
