The Crawling Darkness (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 3)

by JL Bryan

  “What did you see?” I asked, as gently as I could.

  “The face. Her face. Like a young woman—I mean, older than I was, like in her twenties, and she was really pretty, or you know, she used to be. There was blood.” Melissa traced her fingertips from her eyes down across her cheeks. “Her eyes were full of red, and she was crying blood. Her lips were bloody, too. She was dead, like someone had stabbed her to death through the eyes. And she was just standing there, facing me in the mirror.

  “Then she turned her head a little bit, like she was trying to see everyone in the room—which is weird, because she didn’t have any eyeballs, just bloody holes—and that’s when I screamed. And everybody else screamed, and we all ran out of there.”

  Melissa had long since abandoned her dinner fork. She repeatedly twisted and crunched a paper napkin in her hands, looking stressed.

  “That sounds pretty scary,” I said.

  “Totally.” Melissa nodded. “Hey, you’re a ghost expert. Do you know anything about Bloody Mary? Like who she really is?”

  “My first response would be that most cases are probably a combination of self-hypnosis and the Caputo effect,” I said.

  “The what thing now?” Michael asked.

  “A psychologist in Italy had test subjects look at a mirror in a dim room for ten minutes each,” I said. “They saw their faces change—sometimes into other people, sometimes into monsters. It’s some kind of hyperactive processing in the brain’s facial-recognition software, as far as anyone can guess.”

  “And that scientist grew up to be a guy named Caputo,” Michael said.

  “Sure...on top of that, you all expected to see something scary,” I said. “You’d psyched each other up for it. So, combine those two effects. What did the other girls see?”

  “A scary woman’s face,” Melissa said.

  “Just like yours?”

  “Um...” Melissa sat back in her chair. “Simona said it was like a shriveled old woman with black eyes. Callie said it was more like a skull with red hair.”

  “So you all saw something different?”

  “I guess. You think we just made it all up?”

  “That’s the most likely possibility,” I said. “But there are a couple of others...”

  They both looked at me, waiting. Matching pairs of vibrant green eyes.

  “Your ritual activities could have attracted any loose spirits in the area,” I said. “Your state of mind could have made you more sensitive to seeing them. And there are a few ghosts who use mirrors as a kind of doorway. The symbolism of a mirror attracts them. It can be difficult to explain.”

  “Doorways to where?” Melissa asked, her voice a whisper.

  “Wherever they go when they’re not here,” I said. “Sometimes they’re here, sometimes...there. The other side.”

  “What’s on the other side?” Melissa asked, and Michael leaned in a little, like he wanted to hear.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Who does?”

  The room was quiet for a minute after that, everybody poking at their food but not eating very much. I was a real downer, I guess.

  “So,” I said, clearing my throat. “Is that the whole story, Melissa?”

  “I wish!” Melissa said, perking up again. She hopped to her feet. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  I glanced at Michael, who shrugged, gesturing for me to follow her.

  Melissa led me to a low half-wall under a slanted roof. She knelt by a kind of hobbit door, much lower and wider than a normal door. It sort of reminded me of a barn gate, actually.

  She pulled the knob at one end, swinging it open. I expected to see a crawlspace beyond, or maybe a storage closet with an inconveniently low ceiling.

  Instead, it opened onto another room, with a single bed and wooden dresser with a large mirror framed by ornate little shelves and columns. Dance trophies adorned the shelves, tall plastic figurines colored to look like gold, on plastic pedestals colored to look like wood.

  Melissa hopped down into the room—the floor was a few feet lower on the other side of the door.

  “Watch that first step,” she said.

  “Interesting doorway,” I said, squatting down and swinging my legs through.

  “I think the house originally had multiple attics or something,” Michael said. His voice startled me because it was so close—I hadn’t realized he’d left the table, but now he stood over me, watching me with a little lopsided devil-grin. “Things didn’t line up when they fused all the third-floor portions together.”

  “It’s pretty neat,” I said. Melissa’s room was small and rectangular, with a pair of windows in one of the long sides of the room. Her single bed lay under one window, but the other window was mostly blocked by the big dresser and its mirror, which were jammed against the foot of her bed. It didn’t seem like the most logical use of the space.

  “My dresser used to be over there,” she said, pointing to one of the short ends of the rectangular room. Then she pointed to her bed. Her headboard was against the other end of the rectangular room, next to her closet. “When I was in bed, I could see the mirror. It reflected my bed and my closet. So at night, if I woke up, I’d see myself and the closet beside me, too.”

  “Okay,” I said, nodding for her to continue.

  “About a month after that party, I woke up one night, and my room was really, really cold,” she said. “It was August, so it was still hot outside, but I was freezing. My teeth were actually chattering together. I didn’t even know that was a real thing until then. And it wasn’t just the cold—I felt like something was watching me, or like somebody was in the room with me.

  “I saw her in the mirror. The doors of my closet were like half open...” Melissa demonstrated, positioning the two doors. “So I couldn’t see right into my closet, I could only see the inside of it in the mirror. It was Bloody Mary again, like she’d followed me home or something. Standing in my closet. Watching me from the mirror with her bloody eyes.

  “I couldn’t move. I was seriously frozen, not just from the cold. It felt like all the strength was draining out of me while I just lay there, looking at her in the mirror. I was too afraid to even close my eyes.”

  “What did she do?” I asked.

  “She stood there for a minute, watching me. It seemed like it lasted hours, but it couldn’t have been that long. Then she was gone, just like that. The room slowly got warmer, but I could still barely move at first. My muscles were like jelly. I was so tired, but I was still more scared than tired, so I turned on the lamp. I stared into my closet, but there was nothing there. I left the light on and somehow fell asleep later, after telling myself it was just a bad dream. The next day I saw a dress hanging in my closet, right about where Bloody Mary had been, and I told myself, yeah, I just was half-asleep and got confused.

  “But it happened again a couple weeks later, and then again. Freezing cold. Bloody Mary watching me from the closet. I started sleeping in the living room. Finally Michael turned my dresser so I couldn’t see the mirror at night, even though he had to jam it in between the wall and the foot of my bed.”

  “Did that take care of it?” I asked.

  “Sort of,” she said. “A couple of times I thought I heard a footstep in my closet. One time I heard some of the hangars kind of rattle together in the middle of the night. Why would they do that? I didn’t open my closet to look. But it started happening less and less. It’s been a year or something now since the last time. I haven’t thought about it in a while. I guess I blocked it out. Everybody thinks you’re crazy if you talk about seeing ghosts.” She shrugged.

  “Believe me, I know exactly what you mean,” I said.

  “Do a lot of people think you’re crazy?” Michael asked.

  “More than I’m comfortable with.” Do you think I am? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. “It comes with the work.” I looked at Melissa again. “Is that it?”

  “Is that not enough?” She frowned.

  “Do you h
ave any idea why it might have gone away? Did anything change in your life around then?” I drew my Mel-Meter and leaned into the closet, but I didn’t find any unusual readings, not even a ghost of a ghost.

  “I don’t even know why it was here,” Melissa said. “I figured she followed me home from Callie’s party or something, then haunted me for a while until she got called away.”

  “Called away?”

  “Sure. Think of how many kids are out there doing ‘Bloody Mary.’ It must be, like, thousands every day. Every weekend, at least. I guessed she finally got distracted. I didn’t really think about it, I was just glad she was gone. But no, I don’t think anything special happened in my life to end it.” Melissa seemed to be concentrating very hard.

  “Did anything change around the house?” I asked. “Somebody move in or out?”

  “The Fieldings moved in last summer,” Michael said.

  “Do they have kids?” I asked.

  “They have a boy. He’s like nine or ten,” Melissa said. “I tried to get some babysitting work from them, but they didn’t hire me. They’re not very nice. They think they’re better than everyone else in the house, I guess because they have the biggest apartment.”

  I nodded. I wanted to speak to them now, especially the boy, but that sounded difficult to arrange.

  “So what do you think? Was I haunted by the ghost of Bloody...” Melissa glanced at the dark, reflective window again. “Of her?”

  “I don’t think that’s exactly it,” I said. I looked to Michael. “What about you? Ever experience anything strange or unexplained in this house?”

  Michael shrugged. “Just a creaky old house being old and creaky.”

  “That’s not true!” Melissa said. “What about that one time in your room?”

  “I told you that was nothing,” Michael said.

  “That’s not what you said when you told Angelique about it.” Melissa looked at me. “He won’t admit it, but he saw something. I heard him tell his girlfriend.”

  “It was not a big deal,” Michael said.

  “I’d like to hear it anyway,” I said. Girlfriend? Of course he had one.

  “Come on.” Melissa heaved herself up through the low half-door, back into the living room. I followed, feeling a little silly as I crawled on my hands and knees a few paces until I could stand without banging my head on the steeply sloped ceiling.

  “Where are you taking her?” Michael asked, hurrying to cut off his sister.

  “Your room.” Melissa pointed to a door tucked on the far side of the brick chimney, almost out of sight.

  “There’s no reason to do that,” he said.

  “I just want to show her the closet—” Melissa tried to dodge around him, and he stepped sideways to block her. There was some wrestling as she tried to push past him, grinning the whole time like she was playing the world’s greatest prank.

  “You really don’t have to show me,” I said.

  “See?” Michael said, relaxing a little. “She doesn’t even want to see my room.”

  Melissa took advantage of the moment to dodge under his arm and open his door.

  “Wait!” Michael said, hurrying after her.

  “Wow, your room’s a wreck,” Melissa said, snickering.

  “Just let me...can you wait here a second?” he asked me, looking flustered. He’d been laid-back and calm so far, but his little sister apparently knew how to annoy him. Not surprising. I was an only kid, so I didn’t have the pleasure of a sibling making my life more difficult.

  “What are you hiding in your room?” I asked. “A gorilla?” I don’t know why I said gorilla. Guess I thought it would be funny.

  “I’ll be right back.” Michael stepped into his room, and I heard him rummaging around in there. Melissa stood outside the door, giving me a smile.

  “He’s just hiding his My Little Ponies,” Melissa said.

  “I am not!” he shouted from behind his mostly-closed door, and Melissa cackled.

  “Just leave the My Little Ponies out where I can see them,” I said. “They’re not that scary.”

  Michael opened his door. “Okay. Come on.”

  I stepped into his room. It was a very artist-in-a-garret situation, cramped under a sloping roof, except that it flared out at one corner. Two steps led up into the corner, but most of the area at the top of the steps was hidden behind a heavy blue drapery, like an old-timey bed curtain.

  A breeze shifted that curtain, giving me a glimpse of the foot of his bed, which apparently sat on a small raised platform surrounded by arched windows in one of the house’s turrets. The windows were open to let in the cool evening breeze.

  I quickly turned my attention away from this odd-but-fascinating sleeping arrangement and looked at the narrow workbench set up on one side of the room, where Michael was standing. Tiny gears, cylinders, and disks were spread across the table, along with some odd little hand tools and spools of wire.

  At one end of the table stood something that looked like a fanciful Bavarian dollhouse, with colorful wooden flowers trimming the bottom edge. A second-floor balcony with large doors sat under a clock face with Roman numerals.

  “What’s that?” I walked around and saw the exposed back, full of intricate little mechanisms.

  “It’s just an old automaton clock,” he said. “I kind of...fix them up. It’s extra money,” he added almost apologetically, as if embarrassed.

  “Automaton?” I asked. “Like a cuckoo clock?”

  “Exactly. But this one’s a gnome clock.” He lifted up a wooden disk with four little gnome figures mounted around the edges. “Every hour, the balcony doors open, and one of these four guys pops out, depending on the time of day.” One gnome leaned on a shovel, as if hard at work. Another snoozed on a mushroom bed, his hat low over his eyes.

  “You made this?” I asked, and he laughed.

  “No, I just find old ones and fix them,” he said. “Some of them are in really bad shape. I like restoring these old things, bringing them back to life...”

  “He’s a freak,” Melissa said, watching us from the door. “Just tell her about the ghost, Mikey.”

  “I don’t know if it was a ghost.” Michael sat down behind the bench and toyed with a weird little tool, like miniature pitchfork with the outer tines bowed out into a “C” shape.

  “What did you see?” I asked.

  “I was up here working one night, on this owl clock I’d found at an estate sale. Its eyes and wings moved when it hooted the hour. That’s what it was supposed to do, anyway, but this thing was missing half its parts. I had to replace the weights, the pendulum rods, the winding chains, the eyeball mechanism. It was a great piece, though, made by Shaefer Brothers of Philadelphia in 1887—”

  “Nobody cares, Michael,” Melissa interrupted.

  “I thought it was pretty interesting,” I said.

  “Oh-kay...” Melissa shook her head and gave me a perplexed look, as if I’d spoken an alien language.

  “Anyway,” Michael said, “I was sitting here working on that Shaefer owl clock one night. It was around one in the morning, and I had all these problems with the owl wing I was trying to fix. I was totally focused on this, but then out of the corner of my eye...” He pointed over to his arch-shaped closet door. “I saw the door open. And I was pretty sure a shadowy head leaned out and looked at me.

  “I turned, and it dodged back into the closet.” Michael dashed across the room, reenacting for my benefit. “I ran after it, but when I looked in the closet, nothing.” He started for the door. “And that’s it. That’s all I saw.”

  “How long ago was this?” I asked.

  “Two years, at least. Pretty soon after we moved in.” He stood near his bedroom door, waiting for me.

  “It was inside this closet?” I reached for the handle and pulled it open.

  “Hey, don’t—” he said, and then a couple weeks’ worth of dirty laundry spilled out onto my feet. Jeans, socks, t-shirts, boxer shorts. There was a
reassuring lack of Speedos. He’d probably jammed it all in there at the last minute.

  Melissa cracked up.

  “Oops,” I said, then I drew my Mel Meter again and checked the closet, holding it over the dirty laundry. “I’m not picking up any sign of a ghost in here.”

  “Mike’s socks probably ran it off,” Melissa said.

  “Can we go back to that part where we were out in the kitchen having a good time?” Michael asked.

  “I probably need to get back downstairs, anyway,” I said. “I guess we’re done checking out your, uh...stuff.” I backed up, shaking his underwear off the toe of my boot, feeling more than a little embarrassed. For both of us, really.

  “We’re setting up cameras and microphones all over Alicia’s apartment tonight,” I said, while making my way out of his room. Michael closed the door behind him, and I caught him giving his sister a quick scowl. “It’s a long shot, but if we have any extra cameras, could we set up one at each of your closets?”

  “A camera in my room?” Melissa frowned. “Who’s going to be watching it?”

  “Mostly my tech manager, Stacey,” I said. “She’ll be watching the whole house.”

  “Okay, a girl,” Melissa said, relaxing a bit.

  “We won’t be looking at you,” I told her. “We can position it right at the closet door.”

  Melissa shrugged and looked at her brother.

  “Just the closet?” Michael asked. “I don’t want anybody stealing my secret gnome-clock repair techniques.”

  “You’re such a dork,” Melissa whispered.

  “So that’s a yes from both of you, right?” I doubted we’d see much activity in their apartment, but I wanted to cover as much of the house as we could. Apartments B and D, the Fielding family and Mr. Gray, weren’t available to us, so I wanted to get a foothold in Michael and Melissa’s apartment. It wasn’t just an excuse to come back and see Michael again. Though I couldn’t say I minded that aspect of it at all.

  “I suppose you can check our place for ghosts if you want,” Michael said. He gave me a crooked smile, and the cuckoo clock on the wall sprang to life. Its little door opened and the wooden bird popped out and made its “cuckoo, cuckoo” sound several times, as if to say the idea of looking for ghosts was a bit insane.