by JL Bryan
“The scratching sounded again,” Stacey said, and her voice was very low now. “From inside the wall.”
I checked the closet, and again my meter flickered upward, almost two milligaus this time, though there was nothing visible inside. I knelt by the bed and eased up the edge of a blanket to shine my light into the darkness beneath it. Again, I tensed myself for an attack, but found only dust bunnies, and not particularly feral ones. My meter again ticked up a notch.
A banging sounded upstairs, startling me into scampering back from the bed. Stacey gasped, shining her light up at the moisture-damaged ceiling.
“What was that?” she whispered.
I opened my toolbox and brought out our goggles—thermal for me, night vision for Stacey. We strapped them onto our foreheads, ready to drop them over our eyes if we needed them. I cued up a Karamanov symphonic work, a little Eastern Orthodox gospel to blast at the ghost. The right music can be a powerful weapon against troublesome spirits, slamming them with enough emotional energy to jar them for a little while. Or send them running, if you’re lucky.
The banging continued overhead.
I motioned for Stacey to follow me.
We ascended the steep, narrow stairs to the fourth floor, approaching the repeated banging above.
There were only two doors at the top. A weird light flickered below one of them, in time with the banging. The sound clearly came from that direction. I pointed at the door, and Stacey nodded.
I pushed it open. We walked into a room with exposed timber rafters and a slanted roof, which had been the bedroom of the oldest Wilson child.
A bit of light flashed at me, then vanished, and the banging sounded again. I turned my flashlight toward it.
The plywood panel covering one of the narrow, rectangular windows had come loose. A stiff wind was blowing in through the broken glass, whipping the panel so it banged against the window frame, letting in brief flashes of light from outside.
“It’s the ghost of the haunted window,” Stacey said, in such a dead-serious, solemn tone that I had to laugh.
“About as dangerous as your dead squirrel,” I said. I inspected the fireplace with my flashlight and Mel-Meter. Again, it hovered between one and two milligaus.
“That wasn’t the end of the story,” Stacey said. “While the boys were poking around in there, something came out of the corner. I mean it didn’t come from a window, and the only door was the one where I stood. One minute, there’s nothing there at all. Then, all at once, a heavy black mass, like a dark cloud, fills that whole corner of the room.
“Kevin’s two friends backed away. Kevin moved toward it, though, shining his little orange pumpkin flashlight, just a cheap thing from the Halloween section at the grocery store. And the darkness absorbed the light.
“She took shape from the black mist. A woman in a hoop skirt, a bridal veil. Her dress was transparent in the moonlight, so you could see the rotten skin and bones beneath. Her face was decayed, you know. But her eyes were pale blue, and they just about glowed. I can still see them.” Stacey shivered.
I approached the closet door.
“You saw a full apparition,” I said.
“More than full. Overflowing. She looked at my brother, standing right in front of her. Then she bared her teeth and lashed out at him. Her skeletal little hand was like a shriveled claw, and she left scratch marks across his cheek.” Stacey demonstrated with her own fingers across her face. “It was ugly.”
“What did you do?” I slid open the folding door to the closet. A dark, deep space with a low ceiling, more like a crawlspace than a closet, looked back at me, daring me to come play with the spiders and the restless dead.
“We all screamed and ran,” Stacey said. “One of the floorboards broke beneath me, and I fell on my face. I used one of those trees to pull myself up, and I remember the trunk was soft and rotten, and I could feel insects crawling over my fingers, but I couldn’t see them. I had no idea where my flashlight was by this point.
“So I got to my feet and ran back through the house, out the front door with the other boys. Kevin’s friends jumped off the porch and started running for the woods.
“I yelled after them, asking where my brother was. One of them turned and pointed into the house. The other one didn’t even look back.
“I screamed for them to come back, but they were gone, off into the woods. Leaving me there alone, with my brother somewhere inside the house. So I went to the front door and started screaming for Kevin. He didn’t answer me.
“Finally, I just went back inside to look for him, even though I was scared to bits by this point. In one of the rooms, which had about four good-sized trees growing through it, most of the floor was missing. In the dark space below, I could see the pumpkin-orange glow of Kevin’s flashlight pointed at the old rock foundation of the house. It was lying on top of all these broken floorboards. I mean, there was almost no floor left in that room, I couldn’t have crossed through it if I’d tried.
“So I yelled his name, you know, ‘Kevin! Kevin!’ And I thought I heard him groan down there, but I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t see him at all, the way his flashlight was pointed.
“Then I felt the air get cold, like really, really cold. I felt her looking at me before I saw her. She stood on the other side of the open pit, staring at me.”
“The rotten dead bride chick?” I asked.
“Yeah, the dead bride chick. And she spoke to me. It was just a whisper, but I could hear it clearly across the room. ‘Don’t cry for him,’ she said. ‘All men are devils under the skin.’”
“Early feminist thought of the antebellum South,” I murmured.
“Well, she disappeared. Just whoosh, gone. And then chunks of the old ceiling started coming down on me, and the floor groaned under my feet, and it started to sink. She was trying to kill me with that old house.
“I shouted to my brother that I’d get help, but I didn’t hear him say anything back. I got out of the house as fast as I could, but my ankle started burning. I guess I’d turned it when I’d fallen through the old board earlier, but I hadn’t noticed yet. I noticed it then. It was all I could do to hobble to the front door while pieces of the ceiling and walls crumbled down on top of me.
“The front porch stairs were old and collapsed, so I had to sit down and slide off the porch. I moved as fast as I could, through the weeds and briars, sort of hop-dragging with my swelling ankle. I looked back, expecting to see the whole house shaking like an earthquake, but it was dead calm. A pale light glowed in one of the windows, like somebody was holding a dim candle. I think that was her, watching me.
“I made it into the woods and kept going. It was maybe a half mile to the nearest road, which normally wouldn’t seem that far, but my ankle was screaming in pain with every step. I had to drag myself through those woods, using low branches to support me. I stumbled that way for a long time, and I kept looking back, sure the lady was going to pop out of the woods and kill me.
“Finally, I made it to a break in the woods, one of those strips they carve out for power lines, you know, with grass growing under it. I followed those out toward the highway. My ankle was killing me. I finally felt some relief when I saw that bright red light, and that big freckled girl smiling down at me...it was a Wendy’s sign.
“I limped inside, all scratched up and dirty from the woods, and leaned against the wall so I didn’t collapse to the floor. The manager called the police and my parents, and he gave me a free chocolate Frosty since I didn’t have any money.
“It felt like forever waiting for my parents and the police. I wanted to go back into the woods with the cops, but they wouldn’t let me. I couldn’t actually walk. My dad went with them, my mom stayed with me. She basically set me in the car and yelled at me.” Stacey sighed. “So why do you keep staring into the closets, Ellie? Is this thing really a closet monster?”
“We’re looking for the boogeyman,” I said.
“Okay, but seriously...”<
br />
“Seriously. Babau in Eastern Europe. Busseman if you want to get German about it. Saalua or lulu in the Middle East. Dongola Miso in parts of Africa. The monster that hides in dark places and comes out to torment children at night.” I peered into the deep crawlspace-closet. Black widow spiders perched in there, watching me from their webs. Ugly little dark-shelled palmetto bugs scurried away from my light. “It’s a species of specter known all over the world.”
“Whoa,” Stacey said. “And it knows what scares you?”
“It feeds directly on fear,” I said. “Remember the Paulding case, with the poltergeist? Poltergeists feed on anger, particularly the frustrations of adolescents and children...probably because their emotions are more powerful and less controlled.”
“Low-hanging fruit,” Stacey said.
“There’s more energy to take, and it’s easier, compared to adults,” I said. “The paranormal journals call these entities fearfeeders or fearmongers, I guess because boogeyman just doesn’t sound sciencey enough. They feed on the emotional energy released by fear, so they’ve developed methods of causing people to feel as much fear as possible. Like I said, they focus on children because that’s where the energy is, but that doesn’t mean adults are immune. Not at all.”
“Great. And things went wrong last time?”
“Very wrong. You never finished your story,” I said. My Mel-Meter had given me readings similar to the other closets, so I closed the door and headed downstairs.
“Right,” Stacey said. “Where was I?”
“At Wendy’s, getting yelled at by your mom.”
“Yeah, so my dad and the police went to find Kevin. I guess the cops knew right where to go. It probably wasn’t the first time kids had decided to sneak into the haunted old mansion in the woods.” She shook her head. “It turns out my brother had landed on some big nineteenth-century nails. His heart and lungs were punctured. He was probably dead before I even escaped the house.”
“Oh, my God, I’m sorry,” I said, touching her arm. I felt genuinely horrified. “You never told us about any of this.”
“I don’t like to talk about it.” Stacey was looking away as we rounded a landing and continued down the steps.
“I understand.”
“I did tell Calvin, though. I just asked him not to tell you.”
“Why?” I looked back at her, but she wasn’t meeting my eyes.
“I kind of felt like you didn’t want me around.” Her voice was so quiet I could barely hear it over our echoing footsteps. “I didn’t feel comfortable with you knowing that about me.”
I stopped and turned back to face her as we reached a lower landing.
“It wasn’t about you,” I said. “I didn’t want...honestly, I didn’t feel like I was ready to train anybody else. I’m still learning so much myself. And you’ve seen how dangerous this work can get. I didn’t want to be responsible for somebody else’s life. Or for their death. I’m really sorry to hear about your brother.”
“It was a long time ago. It doesn’t always feel that way, though.”
“I know.” I didn’t need to tell Stacey about Anton Clay, the fiery ghost who’d burned my house down and killed my parents when I was fifteen. Both of us had lost family members to ghosts. “So you weren’t just some aw-shucks kid who happened to catch a ghost on her video camera. You were searching for them, weren’t you?”
“I’ve been searching for them since my brother died,” Stacey said. “I used to sit alone in my room with a Ouija board. The whole occult thing. I hid it from my family, of course. It would have horrified their United Methodist sensibilities.”
“How do they like you working here?”
“I haven’t...totally told them what I do,” Stacey said. “They think I’m a production assistant for a company that makes commercials and stuff.”
“So you haven’t told them at all.”
“They’d think I was crazy. Or into Satan or something.”
“That’s what my Aunt Clarice thinks,” I said. “She’s the one who took care of me after my parents...”
“She thinks you’re into Satan?”
“Probably.” I snickered. “She thinks we’re all crazy, selling pure craziness to people even crazier than ourselves.”
“Sounds about right,” Stacey said.
We climbed back out the window. After the relentless heavy darkness inside, the sunshine outside came as a blinding shock.
Chapter Four
I wanted to speak with Calvin about the new case right away, but we also needed to spend some time at the city archives for background research before it closed at five p.m.
Our first job was to sort through the property titles of the house and identify who had lived there and when, establish a complete history of ownership. This process was about as much fun as it sounds—lots of old file folders and faded type on yellowed paper.
“Done,” Stacey sighed, when we’d traced the owners back to the house’s construction in 1889. It had most recently been acquired by Keystone Properties, a company whose sign I’d seen on small apartment and office buildings around town.
“Now, all the neighboring houses,” I said.
“You’re kidding.” She slumped back in her hard wooden chair.
“Now that we know the entity is mobile, we have to cast a wider net,” I said. “The Wilson house wasn’t built until 1925. There wasn’t a house there before—the area where it stands was part of the garden belonging to the house next to it. That’s why the house is so tall and narrow, because the lot is small. We investigated the older house next door last time, the one that used to own the property, but it didn’t give us any good leads. Now we know to look all around, at houses on both streets.”
“That’ll take forever,” Stacey said.
“Let’s get digging,” I said, approaching the row of file cabinets. A rotund, middle-aged archive clerk with a walrus mustache watched me from a desk.
“Don’t re-file anything,” he said, for the fifteenth time that afternoon. “We have a very specific system. Leave it all on the table when you’re done.”
“I will,” I assured him, also for the fifteenth time.
He raised the Better Homes and Gardens magazine he was reading, but he kept his eyes on me, clearly suspicious that I would attempt to re-file something if he glanced away for a moment.
I returned to our table with another heap of folders. Stacey gave just the slightest pout at the sight of them.
“This is great,” I said. “We’ll have to find something, finally.”
“Yeah, great,” Stacey said, in a not-so-thrilled tone of voice. She didn’t immediately leap to open the folders and start searching. “So, what about this alleged hot fireman guy?”
“What about him?” I sat across from her again and began reading through more exciting property-title records.
“When do we get to talk to him?”
“We need to get this done, Stacey. The archive’s closing soon.”
“I know that! I just meant, you know, he lives in the building, too, so he might have witnessed something. And his little sister or whatever might have seen the ghost.”
“Right, witnesses. That’s why you’re so interested.”
“I’m all business.” She winked. “Still...hot fireman guy. Just think about it.”
I slid her a stack of folders. “Just think about tracing the ownership of the old Greek Revival house on the corner.”
She sighed and got to work.
The walrus-mustached clerk began clearing his throat about ten minutes before closing time, and he kept clearing it. We’d churned up a heap of stuff for him to re-file.
When I said it was time to go, Stacey jumped to her feet and all but flew to the door.
“Sorry about the mess,” I said to the clerk as I walked past him, giving him an apologetic smile.
“You didn’t re-file anything, did you?” he asked, looking suddenly alarmed.
“Not one piece of pa
per, I promise.”
“We have a very specific system here.”
“I understand.”
He hefted to his feet as I left the room, and he hurried to close the door behind me.
We drove out of downtown, to the fairly scary-looking industrial district where our office is located. The largest area of the office is the workshop in back, where we park the van and store all our gear. I sat down with Calvin at the long worktable in at the center of the room while Stacey poked around in the refrigerator. Hunter, Calvin’s bloodhound, nosed around her, clearly curious what she might do with the food.
“Who wants salad?” she asked, grabbing out lettuce and a tomato.
“I’m not hungry,” I said. I’d been dreading telling Calvin about the new case.
“You look upset,” Calvin said.
“I know you must have noticed the location of our new client,” I said.
“I did.”
“I think it’s a fearfeeder,” I said, and then I filled him in on the details.
“That sounds like our old friend the boogeyman,” Calvin said, with a smile that didn’t have the least bit of humor. “Maybe you should just advise the family to move. Leave this case alone.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “Neither would you, in my position.”
“You can’t place yourself into that kind of danger.”
“Pickles, anyone?” Stacey asked. “I like bread and butter pickles on my salads, but other people seem to hate that...” She looked at the haggard expression on Calvin’s face, then at whatever fear or anxiety was showing on mine. “What are we talking about? Why does everyone look like we all just got called for jury duty or something?”
“Did you tell her what happened during the Wilson case?” Calvin asked me.
“I thought I’d let you explain,” I said.
“Are we sure nobody wants salad? I brought Bacon Bits.” Stacey shrugged, then sat down with a bowl and started crunching. “So what’s the mystery? Ellie told me you never caught the ghost last time.”
