by JL Bryan
I smiled, feeling pretty awkward, and returned downstairs.
Chapter Seven
“Check this out,” Stacey said. I’d found her, along with Alicia and her kids, in Kalil’s room. She was rigging up a small spotlight that plugged into the wall, and she’d aimed it directly at the closed door of Kalil’s closet. “If anything comes out to bother Kalil, he can switch this on from a control by his bed. I rigged one up in Mia’s room, too.”
She flipped on the spotlight, soaking the closet door in its scorching white glare.
“Looks good,” I said. “But we could have just loaned them a couple of tactical flashlights.”
“True, but then I couldn’t do this.” Stacey tapped her digital tablet. The spotlight turned off, then back on again. “Remote control. Even if they’re asleep when the fearfeeder comes out, I can torch it from the van.”
“Nice.” I nodded.
Kalil sat on the edge of the bed and pressed a button on his end table, wired to the spotlight, clicking it off and on.
“I have one, too!” Mia reminded me, beaming.
“So...how did it go?” Stacey asked with a sneaky grin. She stood and led me out of the room, while the kids stayed behind, taking turns clicking the spotlight. They seemed overjoyed about it, as if we’d given them a powerful weapon.
Ghosts hate bright lights, especially the sun. That’s why Stacey and I carry high-powered SWAT-style tactical flashlights on our all jobs.
Unfortunately, no amount of light will really harm the dangerous ghosts or make them go away permanently—light is just a defense, and it doesn’t always work if the ghost is determined to harm you. It still beats politely asking the monster to go away.
“Come on, I’ll show you what I rigged downstairs.” Stacey led me down the steps, then asked in a lower voice, “So?”
“They said we could put a couple cameras up there tonight. Do we have anything to spare? It’s not that critical. They haven’t had a lot of activity recently—none in the past year, but they have seen things in their closets in the past.”
“What else?” Stacey asked, looking very amused with herself.
“The girl was haunted by Bloody Mary for a while after summoning her at a slumber party,” I said, while Stacey led me toward a night vision camera pointed at the door to the old, sealed-off basement stairway under the grand front stairs. “You know, you look in the mirror and say her name three times...”
“I know,” Stacey said. She stood by the camera, arms crossed, looking impatient.
“It’s consistent with a fearfeeder,” I said. “Taking the shape of something that scared her.”
“That’s all very interesting and great. Now tell me about the fireman. Is he hot?” She snickered. “Hot fireman. That’s pretty funny—”
“Stacey, come on.” I glanced upstairs to see if our clients had come out of the boy’s room.
“Come on, what? Is he datable or not?”
“I guess.” I double-checked the little display monitor on the closet camera to make sure the shot was lined up. I zoomed it out a little. “We want to get the area above the door. It likes to crawl on the ceiling.”
“Your pretend lack of interest is totally not convincing,” Stacey said.
“He has a girlfriend,” I said. “Angelique.”
Stacey snickered. “Is she French or what? An art student, maybe?”
“I have no details.”
“Want me to ask him for some?”
“I do not.” I checked the camera pointed at the dead-end basement stairs under the main staircase, and I made sure the door leading to them was closed tight.
“Milk the sister for information,” Stacey suggested.
“I don’t feel like milking anyone today, thanks.” I heard footsteps on the stairs above us. “This camera looks good. Let’s go set up in Michael’s place. I want a hidden camera down in the laundry room, too.”
“Why hidden?”
“So the neighbors don’t complain. The Fieldings apparently aren’t very friendly.”
“No, they’re not.” Alicia came around to join us. “They only speak to me to complain. Kalil left his bike in the yard, or somebody played their music too loud, or Mia and her friends were practicing their dances on the front porch and the Fieldings had to walk all the way around them to open their door...” She shook her head.
“I have to wonder if their kid’s seeing anything,” I said.
“Good luck talking to them.”
“We were about to head down to the basement. Do you happen to have a laundry basket we can borrow? Maybe a few towels to hide the camera?” I asked her.
“Sure. How was your talk with Michael and Melissa?”
“They’ve seen things,” I said. “We’re going to watch their closets, too, just in case. I’d like to get cameras all over the house. What about Mr. Gray? What’s he like?”
“Quiet as a mouse,” Alicia said. “You just see him coming and going. He’s an older man who lives alone. That’s all I know.”
“Maybe I’ll pay him a visit tomorrow,” I said.
We grabbed our last cameras while Alicia brought us a laundry basket stocked with towels and a couple of blankets. Then Stacey and I headed out into the short side hall that connected three apartments with the porch and the basement.
I opened the basement door, and we looked down the wooden steps into the dim room below. One dryer was thudding along, rocking a little on the concrete floor. The hanging fluorescent bars swayed, casting shifting shadows that faded to complete darkness around the corners and edges of the room. The air was unseasonably cool.
Neither of us was in a hurry to start down the stairs. The air had an unpleasantly familiar heaviness, a cold thickness I’d learned to associate with strong, active ghosts. Goose bumps crawled up along my spine.
“Hey,” Stacey said, “Let’s go do the third-floor apartment first. Good idea, am I right?”
“The basement’s not going to be less creepy if we come back later,” I said.
“But we’ll have less gear to juggle, in case we need to run out of the basement in a hurry.”
She had a point there. We’d had some bad experiences in basements in the past. Ghosts are drawn to the dark underground areas of a house like bats to a cave. Maybe it reminds them of the graves where they belong. If we were going down there, I preferred to travel light.
So we went upstairs instead.
In the apartment, Stacey managed to distract Melissa by enthusiastically asking about the clownfish and anemones in the aquarium. Maybe it wasn’t even an intentional ploy—Stacey does wildlife photography as a hobby. It fits right into her deplorable camping-and-hiking lifestyle.
She went to set up a tripod in Melissa’s room, leaving me to handle Michael’s room by myself. As he led me in, I noticed he’d crammed his dirty clothes into a laundry basket in the corner.
“So you’re going to watch me sleep?” he asked while I set up.
“Just the closet,” I said. “You won’t even be in range.” I glanced at his bed curtain, still swaying in the night air. “I can tell you’re really into privacy by how you sleep surrounded by windows.”
“I close the windows,” he said. “If it’s cold. Or...whatever.”
“Uh-uh.” I looked at the digital display screen. “Okay, if Closet Man pokes his head out, we’ll see it.”
“You’re probably wasting your time up here,” he said. “I only saw it once.”
“Do you know any of the other neighbors very well? Besides Alicia and her kids?”
“Not really. I met Hoss Fielding when he moved in—”
“Hoss?”
“Henry, but he prefers to be called ‘Hoss.’”
“I find that hard to believe,” I said.
“Me, too. He’s a tall guy, seems like a car salesman or something. His wife is always scowling when I see her. Sometimes we hear them yelling at their kid.”
“What about Mr. Gray?”
“
I barely know that guy. Good neighbor. I’m surprised he puts up with the rest of us.”
I sighed—I’d hoped he could help me talk to somebody who lived in one of the other apartments, but apparently the Fieldings were no more friendly to him than to Alicia. I would have to approach them cold, with a simple “Hi, I’m looking for ghosts in your building, can we spy on your apartment?” I couldn’t see that going very well.
Then I glanced at his overstuffed laundry basket.
“Were you planning to wash those tonight, by any chance?” I asked.
“Uh...not really. I don’t like to go down to the laundry room.”
“I can see that.”
“It’s not that I’m lazy. The basement is just...” He shrugged.
“Scary? Spooky? Creepy?” I suggested.
“Right. It’s like someone’s watching you down there.”
“That’s just what Alicia told me,” I said. “We have to go set up a camera in that room. I was thinking it would be convenient if you happened to be on your way down there.”
“You’re scared of the basement, too.” He gave me his little devilish grin.
“I’ve had bad experiences with haunted basements. But if you’re too busy, that’s okay. I was just checking.” I moved toward his door.
“Hold on. I didn’t say I wouldn’t go.” He grabbed his laundry basket and followed me out.
Melissa and Stacey were back in the living room.
“What’s up?” Melissa asked her brother. “Doing some night laundry?”
“Just keeping the ghost hunters safe,” Michael said, glancing at Stacey, who grinned.
“Sure.” Melissa looked me over. “You’ve got my brother washing his clothes. That’s amazing.”
“Don’t act like I never do it.” Michael stepped out the front door of his apartment.
“He never does it,” Melissa whispered to me. “Not until his socks are walking around on their own.”
“Thanks for all your help,” I said, giving her a smile.
“I know about the stuff Kalil and Mia are seeing in their rooms,” Melissa said, suddenly looking serious. “They’ve told me about it. I hope you can take care of it.”
“I hope so, too.”
Stacey and I followed Michael downstairs. He was waiting by the open door to the basement.
“Ready?” he asked, already turning to start down the steps. I followed, noticing that this was my least favorite sort of staircase, wooden steps with no vertical risers, just dark gaps between the stairs where someone could reach up and grab your ankle.
The room was bigger than it had looked from the doorway. I clicked on my flashlight and swept it around the dark, dusty corners, finding lots of spiderwebs. Three of the walls were old brick, while one looked like stones crudely cemented together. Two basement-level doors led out of the laundry room, and I asked Michael about them while he dumped his laundry into a washing machine.
“That one connects to Mr. Gray’s apartment,” he said, pointing to the door set into a brick wall. He turned to the other door, in the rock wall. “That’s just the furnace, I think.”
“Mind if I look?” I approached the door and found it coated in dust and spiderwebs. It didn’t appear to get much use.
“It’s probably locked,” he said.
I tried the cold, grimy handle, but it wouldn’t turn. I wiped my hand on my jeans.
“Who would have the key?” I asked.
“You’d have to call the property manager,” he said.
“Hey, what do you think about right here?” Stacey asked me. She was positioning Alicia’s laundry basket on a counter that ran along one wall. “I can get...most of the room from here.”
“Try to include this door,” I said. “And as much of the ceiling as you can.”
“Okay, but these aren’t exactly ideal conditions.” Stacey propped the camera on a rolled towel to tilt it upward, then packed in the other towels and blankets around it. She stepped back to look at her work. “That’s probably the best I can do.”
“You know, you’ve kind of trapped me here,” Michael said.
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“Now I have to come back in half an hour to move my clothes to the dryer,” he said. “Or I’ll get sour laundry issues. What if the ghost gets me?”
“I can come back with you if you want,” I said. I thought he was kidding, but I wasn’t totally sure. “And Stacey will be watching on the camera, too.”
“I’d better give you my phone number so you can tell me if you see any ghosts down here.” He was grinning—I still couldn’t tell if he was kidding.
“Good idea.” He told me his number and I saved it in my phone. Then I fished a business card out of my pocket and handed it over. “The second one’s my cell number. If you see any ghosts anywhere in the house, call me.”
“And you’ll come bust the ghost?” he asked.
“Maybe.” I took a last look around the cold, gloomy basement with my flashlight, then I headed upstairs.
Chapter Eight
“So, you gave him your number,” Stacey said. She sat in the back of the van while the monitors came to life one by one, showing the feeds from the cameras we’d set up all over the house. The kids’ room showed up in both thermal and night vision.
“I gave him my work number.” I stood on the driveway, talking to her through an open door at the back of the van.
“Do you have another number?”
“It’s just in case we see ghosts,” I told her. “We condemned him to return to the laundry room, remember? And he’ll let me know if he sees anything tonight.”
“Then let’s hope he sees a ghost,” Stacey said. She smiled, straightening up on the narrow cot where she sat. “Hey, we could Scooby-Doo up a fake haunting so he’ll have to call you!”
“We’re not Scooby-Dooing anything.”
“You sure? It would be a fun harebrained scheme. We make a sheet ghost and hang it on a clothesline, see, and run that past his bedroom window—”
“How are your monitors looking?” I asked. “Any adjustments needed? Any malfunctions?”
“Fine, go all Sally Serious on me.” Stacey turned to the bank of little monitors built at the front of the cargo area, then checked her laptop and nodded. “All systems nominal, Captain. The Enterprise awaits your orders.”
“Are your signals strong?”
“You know who I think was giving off some strong signals tonight—” Stacey began, and she looked like she was about to laugh.
“I’ll mark that as a yes.” I switched on my headset and walked away toward the big wraparound porch. “Testing, testing...”
“You could at least close the door behind you,” Stacey said over my headset, while slamming the van door where I’d been standing.
“I thought you might enjoy the fresh night air.” I glanced up, but I couldn’t see any stars because of the row of wrought-iron streetlamps along the sidewalk. The old house towered above me, its small turrets, protruding windows, gingerbread trim, and recessed porches creating a labyrinth of shadows across its facade. Even at a casual glance, this place looked like a haunted house.
I returned through the front door. Alicia was in the living room, waiting for me.
“The kids are in bed,” she told me. “I made you some coffee in the kitchen. Just help yourself.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’ll probably go to my room, too. With you and your friend here, I might actually be able to sleep tonight. Wake me if anything happens.”
“I will. Good night, Alicia.”
She yawned as she walked into the first-floor bedroom and closed the door. I heard the sound of running water as I climbed the big entrance-hall staircase, like she was having a bath.
The doors to the kids’ rooms were closed, and the upstairs was silent. I was camping out on my air mattress in the hallway to stay close to them, and I’d already placed my toolbox of gear and my digital tablet beside it.<
br />
I picked up the tablet and flipped through the various camera feeds. I couldn’t see the kids, but I could see their closet doors were closed tight.
There was one camera in the hall, a thermal pointed at the door to nowhere with the decorative archway. Alicia had seen the entity leave through it. I glanced from the thermal image to the door itself. Nothing happening so far.
With a smile, I checked on Michael’s closet door. Then I looked at his sister’s door, then the laundry room, and the door to the dead-end basement stairs. Everything was coming in fine. Calm and quiet.
One end of the hallway terminated in a pair of narrow glass doors that led out onto a sunken porch. I stepped through them. Outside, I found myself in a small outdoor area, paved with brick and surrounded by solid walls on three sides, with an iron balustrade overlooking the garden below.
I had a clear view of the old Wilson house towering on its small lot, the moonlight painting the peeling exterior the color of washed-out bones.
I shivered at the sight of it. If this really was the same entity, I wondered how it had changed in the past couple of years. Was it weaker or stronger? Would it remember me?
“We’re going to stop you this time,” I whispered. “We’re going to catch you.”
The house stared blankly back at me, its windows and doors plugged with plywood.
Michael returned to the laundry room a while later, and Stacey made sure to alert me of the fact. I selected the night vision camera in the basement and watched him on my tablet. If anything supernatural jumped out of the shadows to grab him, I’d want to know about it.
He smiled and waved at the camera when he arrived, but glanced nervously over his shoulder a couple of times while he changed over his laundry. He gave another wave when he left, and said something, but we didn’t have a microphone down there to hear.
“Did you catch that?” Stacey whispered over my headset.
“I think he said ‘no ghosts.’ Or maybe ‘yo-yo.’”
“Yeah, probably ‘yo-yo.’ Because that makes sense.”
Michael turned off the light as he reached the top of the basement stairs, and the camera adjusted, showing me the basement in shades of green, penetrating the shadows so I could watch the two closed doors.
