by JL Bryan
“How about your neighbors on the third floor?”
“I told Michael and Melissa what we’re doing,” Alicia said. “They’re expecting y’all to go up and ask some questions, but I don’t know about cameras...”
“We’ll make that one of the questions,” I said. “Stacey, how much longer up here?”
“There’s a lot to do,” Stacey replied. “We need a few downstairs, too.”
“We need to go up and speak to the third-floor neighbors.”
A wicked smile broke across her face—Stacey thinking of the mysterious hot fireman, no doubt.
“Hey, I’ve got this covered,” she said. “Especially with the kids helping me. Why don’t you go on up?”
“Seriously?” That threw me off-balance for a second. I’d thought she wanted to meet Fireman Michael pretty badly, the way she kept bringing him up.
“Yeah, you can fill me in on the highlights later.” Stacey winked.
My cheeks burned a little as I realized what she meant. She wasn’t interested in the guy for herself, but for me. That made me feel embarrassed somehow.
“I’ll take you up there,” Alicia said. “Kids, put yourselves on Grade A behavior. I’ll be right back.”
Kalil mumbled something and nodded, not even looking up from the technical manual for Stacey’s thermal camera, which he was studying as though he had to memorize it. Mia was showing off her somersaults to Stacey and didn’t respond.
“Mia, what did I say?” Alicia snapped.
Mia rose up from a somersault, held out both arms, and sang out “Grade AAAAA!” dragging out the “A” sound as if it were the dramatic crescendo note of a musical.
“That’s right,” Alicia said.
Alicia led me back downstairs, into the short side hall that provided the apartments shared access to the basement. I opened the basement door and looked down into the flickering darkness below.
“We should really get a camera down there, too,” I said.
“I’m not sure all the neighbors would agree,” Alicia replied.
“Maybe I’ll have Stacey hide one in a laundry basket or something.” But I’m not sending her down there alone, I thought.
“I didn’t want to say anything in front of the kids,” I told Alicia, while we walked up the stairs. “But if this haunting is what I think it is, the entity is very dangerous. It may have taken a five-year-old girl who lived here a few decades ago. It...injured my boss, Calvin Eckhart. Paralyzed him.”
“So my kids aren’t safe here.”
“Is there anywhere they could go?”
She sighed. “Not in town. I could have Mia stay at a friend’s house for a night maybe. Kalil, he’s a little more difficult. He doesn’t have a lot of friends, and he’d rather stay home and read...”
“Have you considered moving out?”
“Naturally, but that’s so expensive. I had to put down a deposit and a month’s rent, and there’s a big penalty if I break my lease, then I’ll have to come up with a lot more money to move...and I didn’t want to take the kids away from their school, but there’s not much we can afford in this district. That’s why I called you.”
I nodded. “From what I’ve read about these entities, they feed on their hosts a long time before taking them, if they take them at all. Bonnie McAllister dealt with it for over a year before she vanished.”
Alicia stopped a few steps down from the third-floor landing. She looked at me, studying me for a moment.
“Can you get rid of this or not?” she asked. “If my kids are in danger, we’ll run, even if we end up homeless and living in the car.”
“If we can’t, you’ll be the first to know,” I said. “You should all be safe while we’re here, because Stacey and I will watch the house at night until this is resolved. We haven’t even verified that this is the same ghost from the other house...but it certainly sounds like it.”
Alicia shook her head, not looking reassured at all. I couldn’t blame her.
“What happened to your boss?” Alicia asked.
“He was attacked while trying to capture the entity. It was evasive—it hid from us for most of the investigation, and then it fought back viciously. At the moment, I’m worried it will remember me, and it just won’t come out at all.” Or it will try to kill me, I thought, but I didn’t see any need to distress her further. She knew the situation was dangerous.
“It usually goes away just before I get there,” she said. “One of the kids screams for me, I go up there...nothing. Except for the times I told you about.”
“How often do they see it?”
“Couple of times a month.”
I nodded. “It hasn’t built to the truly dangerous point. It’s still sniffing around. I spent some time studying these kinds of entities when we investigated the Wilson house—”
“How many kids has this one taken?”
“Just one that we know of, and that was forty years ago,” I said. “We’re researching the history of both streets to see if there are any more cases, but that will take time.”
“I want to get back to my kids.” Alicia knocked on the door to the third-floor apartment. “Mind if I introduce you and run? Or do you need me?”
“I’ll be fine, thank you.”
The door opened, and warm air that smelled of tomatoes, spices, and toasting bread wafted out, reminding me that I’d skipped dinner, too worried to eat.
“Hey, Alicia.” The teenage girl who opened the door smiled at her, then gave me more of a tentative look. She was tall, freckled, and gangly, dressed in glittering jeans and an absurd number of little bracelets.
“Melissa, this is the lady I was telling you about,” Alicia said. “Her name’s Ellie.”
“Hey,” Melissa said, smiling tentatively. “Y’all come on in.”
“I have to run,” Alicia said. “Before my kids drive the other ghost exterminator crazy. You’re still watching them for me tomorrow afternoon, aren’t you?”
“Of course.” Melissa turned and stepped back into the apartment. The place had irregular ceilings, sloping low to the wall at some points. The floor was dark hardwood, like the stairs, with several colorful rugs scattered around. I saw a large saltwater tank, home to some exotic-looking fish. An old-fashioned cuckoo clock, shaped like an ornately carved little rustic cottage, hung on the wall.
I followed Melissa into a living room, where the TV was off but the stereo by the brick chimney—no fireplace, just a chimney from the lower floors—blasted some old blues. “Michael! The ghost hunter person is here!” she shouted, turning down the music.
She’d been yelling through a cutaway wall into a small kitchen, where her older brother stood at the stove, his back to us. The firm muscles of his back were fairly apparent through his thin white t-shirt.
He turned around and I got my first look at him: brown hair, a little shaggy, eyes bright green and intense. A playful, devilish look, especially around the lips. He was taller than me by a head, and I’m not short.
Hot firefighter guy.
Let’s try not to call him that to his face.
“Hi,” I said, while he stepped around to greet me. Clingy white t-shirt, old jeans. “I’m Ellie Jordan, lead investigator with Eckhart Investigations. I’m not sure what Alicia told you—”
“You’re here to look for ghosts,” he said, and there was that hint-of-devil smile again. I wondered if he were secretly laughing at me. If so, at least he had the decency to keep it secret.
He held out his hand, and I took it. Warm, strong, rough around the edges.
“Michael Holly,” he said. His eyes glanced over my face, taking me in with quick little flashes. “Good to meet you.”
I could say that I wasn’t suddenly looking forward to the interview ahead, but I’d be lying.
Chapter Six
“Do you catch a lot of these ghosts?” Michael asked, leading me back to the kitchen, the source of the tasty aromas that had greeted me at the door. His sister Melissa wa
s still in the living room, in body but not in spirit—her eyes were glued to her phone, and her purple thumbnails clacked the screen as she hammered out a message to somebody.
“I do my best. Have you ever seen anything unusual in this house?”
“One second.” He picked up a wooden spoon and stirred a pan of spaghetti sauce with four large meatballs in the center, then sprinkled in a pinch of freshly-pressed garlic. He cooks, too, I heard Stacey whisper in my head, and I wanted to scowl at her for putting me in this state of mind. I was here to work, not make an idiot of myself trying to flirt with a guy who was probably a couple degrees too hot for me, anyway. That kind of thing was well outside my comfort zone.
He tasted his concoction, then nodded. “Do you like spaghetti?”
“Sure...I’ll only take a minute of your time.”
“Have a seat, I’ll bring you some.” He gestured toward a rough-plank table just beyond the kitchen area, positioned in a corner with tall but shallow bay windows on each side. These looked out onto ancient trees, the twisting oak limbs lit by the streetlamps below.
“Bring me some? Oh, no, you don’t have to do that,” I said.
“Suit yourself, but it’s going to get awkward with the two of us shoveling spaghetti in our faces while you watch. Plus, there’s garlic bread.” He pointed to a small bread basket, where slices of toasted, buttered French bread were nestled in the white cloth. The meal was Carb City—how could he eat like this and still look good in a t-shirt?
He transferred the spaghetti into a large serving bowl, then carried that and a big salad out to the kitchen table. I found myself carrying the bread to the table for him. It was all weirdly domestic.
“Here you go.” He pulled out a chair for me, facing one of the big windows, the one that looked out over the sidewalk and street. “Melissa! Come set the table. Melissa!”
Melissa looked up, jarred back into our own dimension by his voice. “What?”
“The table,” he said again.
“Is she having dinner with us?” Melissa squinted at me.
“You don’t have to—” I began.
“She’s just going to watch us eat, but give her a plate and fork in case she changes her mind,” Michael said as he returned to the kitchen.
“Oh...kay.” Melissa gave him a you’re-a-freak-look, one eyebrow raised, and began setting the table. “You have to excuse my brother. It’s the firefighter thing. I think all the smoke goes right to his brain.”
I smiled at her while she sat down.
“So, have you ever—” I began, ready to start talking ghosts. Anything to keep me from watching Michael’s shoulders move inside his shirt.
“Beer? Or wine?” Michael offered. He opened a cabinet and looked inside. “I mean, uh...beer?”
“Just water, thanks,” I said. “I’m technically at work right now.”
“That’s right. On duty.” He pressed a glass against the filtered-water dispenser in his refrigerator, then set it in front of me, alongside the empty dish and silverware Melissa had put out for me. Now it would be weird if I didn’t eat. It was like I’d been sucked into a Venus flytrap of Southern hospitality.
As Michael sat across from me, holding a bottle of a local microbrew called Southbound, I considered that maybe I wouldn’t mind being trapped here. For a little while.
We served ourselves family-style, using tongs for the salad and a giant spoon for the spaghetti. I assumed they weren’t crazed psychopaths who invited people into their homes for poisoned garlic bread.
“You should grab one of those meatballs,” Michael advised me, pointing to them as if I couldn’t see where they were. “I learned that recipe from my friend Serge at the firehouse.”
“Oh. Is he Italian?”
“Russian, I think. But he makes great Italian meatballs.”
“I’m not really that hungry—” But I was, that was the problem. The food smelled amazing, and I didn’t want to go into pig-mode just now.
“Try it.” He served one big meatball and a nest of saucy noodles onto my plate. Now I really had to eat it.
I did, and it was good. Spicy, right up on the edge of too spicy but without going over. My stomach growled.
“What did I tell you?” he asked.
I nodded, because I wasn’t about to open my noodle-and-sauce-filled mouth. I took a sip of water before answering.
“It’s good. Do you learn all your recipes from the fire department?” I asked.
“Most of them. We spend all night waiting for calls. Occasionally we have to go put out a burning building or respond to a car crash, or a heart attack...the rest of the time, we’re cooking and eating.”
“Which could only lead to more heart attacks,” I said.
“Exactly.” He smiled. “So how exactly do you do it?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“The ghost thing. Same kind of work? Hang around waiting for supernatural emergencies?”
“It’s a lot of watching and listening,” I said. “I guess there’s a good amount of waiting. That’s what we’ll be doing tonight in Alicia’s apartment.”
“Have you seen anything there yet?” Melissa asked, looking up from her phone at last.
“We’ve only just started. What about you?” I looked from her to Michael. “Have either of you seen anything strange in this house?”
“I saw my brother in a Speedo once,” Melissa said.
“Not true,” Michael countered. “I only wear trunks.”
“Anything scarier than that?” I asked.
“Scarier than Speedos?” he asked.
“He used to wear Crocs,” Melissa said.
“I thought we weren’t going to bring that up again,” Michael replied, looking solemn.
I smiled, keeping my mouth firmly closed. Spaghetti is a poor choice for a date meal—you’ve got noodles and sauce constantly on the brink of spilling everywhere. Not that I was on a date. It almost felt like that, though, some sort of nineteenth-century Victorian date where we had to be chaperoned by his sister because unmarried men and women couldn’t be trusted alone.
I shoved that sort of thinking out of the way as best I could.
“How long have you lived here?” I asked them, attempting to steer the conversation back on course.
“Two years?” Michael glanced at his sister. “Two and a half?”
Melissa shrugged and looked down at her food.
In that silence, I could feel something heavy hanging in the air between them, like a dark cloud over the dinner table. It probably related to how they’d ended up living here in the first place, brother and sister with no parents. I decided to back away slowly from that topic—they’d only just met me, and I had no right to ask about their personal tragedies.
“Have you seen anything unusual in that time?” I asked. “Other than questionable swimwear?”
Michael looked at me for a long moment, his lips parted, forkful of spaghetti forgotten halfway from his plate. He was studying me again with those intense eyes, but I had no idea what he was thinking.
Then he turned to look at Melissa, as if expecting her to speak.
“Go on, Mel,” he finally said. “You want to tell her?”
Melissa sighed and poked at her spaghetti for a bit before looking up at me.
“It’s kind of...embarrassing,” Melissa said. “I’m not even sure it was a ghost. More like a nightmare I kept having.”
“Now it’s just a nightmare.” Michael shook his head. “That’s not what you used to say.”
“Well, it’s been a while...”
“Can you tell me what happened? From the beginning?” I asked her.
“Okay.” She took a breath. “Okay. So, I was like fifteen, and I was at my friend Callie’s house. She was from my dance group. I do modern dance and ballet. Anyway, a bunch of us slept over there, and when it was really late, somehow we decided to play Bloody Mary. You know that game? You stand in front of a mirror and say ‘Bloody Mary’ three tim
es, and this crazy ghost lady is supposed to appear.”
“Sure,” I said.
“So we crowded into her basement bathroom—that’s where we were hanging out, you know, down in the basement, there’s some old couches and a TV and stuff. We turned out the lights and lit a candle, this pink thing that smelled like cotton candy.
“We’re all kind of spooked already, and we started daring each other to say it, because nobody wanted to start. Finally we decided to all say it at the same time. We were kind of whispering it, and it was creepy, like six girls going...” Her voice dropped into the softest possible whisper. “‘Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary...’ We whispered that three times.” Melissa threw a worried look at each of the big bay windows that flanked her, turned into partial mirrors by the dark night outside. I realized she’d been afraid to say the name a third time, even now as she recounted the story.
I found myself leaning forward, waiting to hear what happened next, my delicious spaghetti totally forgotten.
“Then we waited,” Melissa said. “Angie—that’s this other girl—started making little ‘woo-ooh’ ghost noises and we told her to hush. Then we whispered about it and finally decided to do it again, but we had to say it louder this time. Simona was already freaking out and wanted to leave, but we wouldn’t let her.
“Anyway, we did it again. We said the name three times, but louder, like a normal talking voice,” Melissa said. “Then we got braver and did it again, and again, and by then we’re all like trying to be louder than each other and just yelling it at the top of our lungs. Like we totally forgot her parents were asleep upstairs.
“I really don’t know how many times we said it, but then there was this thump outside the door. She had a dog, so maybe it was the dog trying to get in, or maybe not...But nobody was thinking about the dog, you know? Not right then.
“So we all got quiet, totally frozen, and I was watching the door in the mirror So I could see all of us there in the mirror, but the girls at the back were just dark shapes because the candle was burning down.
“I’m looking and looking at the door in the mirror. That’s when I saw her.” Melissa chewed her lower lip, falling silent.
