by JL Bryan
“So, what did his room look like?” Stacey asked.
“Messy,” I replied. “He sleeps in the turret.”
“That’s romantic.”
“You’re hilarious, Stacey. Can you keep your mind off my love life for a few minutes? Or years, maybe?”
“You have a love life?” Stacey feigned a surprised gasp. “Tell me all about it.”
“Sorry, I didn’t hear that,” I said. “My headset must be going bad. We’d better stay quiet unless we see some otherworldly activity.”
“Now you’re being hilarious,” Stacey grumbled.
It was a quiet night, for a while. We logged the first activity at two thirty-seven in the morning.
“Ellie,” Stacey whispered. “The basement.”
I checked my tablet. The camera’s viewpoint was cut into two stripes by the laundry basket’s plastic-weave design. I could see washing machines and the staircase on one side, a couple of dryers and the two basement doors on the other.
“Where?” I whispered.
“Watch by the last dryer. Maybe it’ll come back.”
After a moment, something flickered, but not where she’d directed me. It was farther back, by the door to the furnace. It was just a rippling curve that appeared briefly in the air, then it was gone.
“What was that?” Stacey whispered, in her best girl-about-to-be-slaughtered-in-a-horror-movie voice.
A suggestion of a shape appeared near the stairs, maybe the dim outline of a small person, but it faded just as quickly.
“I wish we had thermal down there,” I said. I eyeballed the thermal down the hall from me, the one pointed at the door to nothing, and weighed the idea of carrying it down into the basement right away.
“We’ll know for tomorrow,” Stacey said. “Look, there’s a...”
I saw it, and it faded before Stacey could even get the word out. A tiny, circular orb had winked across the room, near the ceiling.
“It’s getting active down there,” Stacey whispered.
We watched for the next half an hour as occasional forms and partial apparitions faded in and out, never very clear or lasting very long, making me think of a weak radio with poor reception, just the occasional hint of a voice or drop of music leaking through the static.
“Are you seeing anything up in the house?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
The strange shapes continued to appear, increasing in frequency for several minutes. Then they stopped cold.
“Is that it?” Stacey asked after a few minutes of inactivity.
The laundry room lay quiet for a bit longer—then something emerged from the door in the rock wall. A dark shape rose from the top of the door, like a two-dimensional cutout made of black cardboard.
“The door,” I whispered.
The dark shape slithered up along the wall, a roughly human-shaped shadow against the many shades of night-vision green. Its arms bent the wrong way at the elbow as it planted its hands on the ceiling.
Then the dark shape skittered across the ceiling, arms and legs bending at sharp angles that reminded me of a running spider.
“Holy cow,” Stacey whispered.
The shape flickered toward the stairs, then it was gone.
“Where is it?” I asked. I was on my feet, ready to move, but I had no idea where to go.
“Not in front of any other cameras,” Stacey said. “We need better coverage of this house. We focused too much on the closets.”
I flipped through the various viewpoints in Alicia’s apartment—the door that led beneath the stairs, the closets in the kids’ rooms—watching for the thing to emerge.
“Ellie,” Stacey whispered. “I think it’s in the hallway with you. It’s walking toward you.”
I checked the feed from the thermal camera pointed at the door to nowhere. There it was. A faint pale blue shape moved in front of the archway, like the shadow of a man taking a walk.
It was moving toward me, toward the kids’ rooms.
Then it stepped out of the camera’s range, still heading in my direction.
I grabbed the thermal goggles from my toolbox and strapped them on as quickly as I could, never turning my back on the invisible figure. I could feel a growing chill in the air.
With the heavy goggles in place, I could see it again—a tall, broad-shouldered male shape, thin and blue. Walking, almost strolling, like it had all the time in the world.
I drew the powerful, three-thousand-lumen tactical flashlight from its holster on my belt, but I didn’t click it on. The light might have chased the thing away, but the entity wasn’t threatening anyone yet, and I was here to observe and learn.
My heartbeat kicked up as the pale figure passed close by me, my fingers trembling with a sudden blast of fight-or-flight adrenaline. The air grew even colder, and it seemed to seep into me, filling me with icy dread. I was definitely looking at something unnatural. If it hadn’t been for my thermal goggles, though, I would have seen nothing, experienced nothing more than a cold draft drifting down the hall.
It stopped outside Kalil’s room.
I tightened my grip on my flashlight, and also found the little iPod mounted on my belt, next to a small portable speaker. I was ready to hit the ghost with both barrels.
The ghost remained where it was, its faint blue shape fading in and out of sight, as if it were breathing in and using up sips of ambient heat in the room. I couldn’t tell if it was preparing to manifest as an apparition or disappear entirely.
“Ellie, are you okay?” Stacey whispered. “I can’t see what’s happening.”
“Mm-hmm,” I hummed back, as low as I could, to avoid drawing the entity’s attention.
After a long moment, it walked on down the hall, then stopped in front of Mia’s room. The light blue blob of its head moved to one side, as though listening to something.
It froze there for several seconds, then vanished.
“I think it went into Mia’s room,” I said. “I’m pursuing.”
“Let me know if it gets dangerous,” Stacey replied.
I opened the door and pointed my unlit flashlight into the room, ready to blast the ghost and hopefully distract it from menacing the girl.
My thermal goggles revealed Mia’s glowing red form in the bed, but no pale blue shape anywhere.
I tiptoed past the sleeping girl and approached her closet. As I reached for the knob on one of the closed sliding doors, I whispered for Stacey to stand by for activating her remote-controlled spotlight, in case I needed an extra-big flood of photons.
I couldn’t help but tremble as I eased the door open. The entity that had haunted the Wilson house and crippled Calvin had the power to dig inside your mind. Not my favorite kind of ghost, not at all.
Nothing immediately jumped out at me, no movie monster wielding a chainsaw, no gray aliens wielding who-knows-what. No Bloody Mary emerging from the shadows like a reflection in a dark mirror.
The girl’s clothes hung on the closet rod, neatly sorted by type and color, her shoes perfectly aligned on the rack below in her mother’s typical obsessive-compulsive way. Tennis shoes, ballet slippers, black formal shoes with little white bows. No ghosts, as far as my thermals could see.
I raised the goggles off my eyes and clicked on my flashlight. I stepped down into the closet, blasting bright white into the dark corners. Nothing seemed amiss, and I didn’t sense any kind of presence in the room. The Mel Meter found no change from the readings I’d taken earlier in the day.
Then I heard something: voices. One sounded like a child, frightened and whispering rapidly. An older male voice cut it off, angry and shouting.
I followed the voices to a wall and pressed my ear against it. It sounded like they were in the next room, but that was in the Fieldings’ apartment, so I had no way to check whether these were auditory apparitions or regular living people. Most likely the latter, though.
I couldn’t make out many words, and the conversation soon ended. I wondered if the Fi
elding kid had seen something. I needed to reach out and speak with that family as soon as possible, but the things I’d heard from Alicia and Michael didn’t exactly make me look forward to it.
When their voices fell quiet, I left the closet, clicking off my light and closing the door firmly behind me. I slipped out of Mia’s room and checked in with Stacey while scanning the hall with my thermals.
“All clear up here,” I said.
“I’ve got a few hints of movement in the basement,” Stacey told me. “Nothing anywhere else. Where did it go?”
“Maybe into the Fieldings’ side of the house,” I said. “I don’t think that was our boogeyman, though. It didn’t move the same way. And it seemed too weak.”
“Another ghost?”
“Nothing attracts ghosts like a haunted house.”
“The laundry room is a crowded ghost disco by night,” Stacey said. “Why would all those spirits be crammed into the same place when they have this huge house?”
“We need to make a broader survey of the house.” I turned the thermal camera in front of the arched doorway so it captured more of the hall beyond. “And monitor the basement in every way we can.”
I watched the strange movements and shapes in the basement on my tablet, occasionally switching to the other viewpoints around the house. I didn’t catch another glimpse of the dark, spidery shadow or the tall pale figure for the rest of the night.
Chapter Nine
Alicia awoke long before her children. It was still dark outside, but the sky was turning purple as we sat down at her kitchen table to give her a quick summary of what we’d found.
“The basement seems to be the most active area,” I said. “We’ll need time to analyze all the information we gathered, but Stacey clipped out some video footage for you.”
Stacey nodded. She turned her laptop to show Alicia some night vision video of the basement in fast forward, with weird half-formed shapes blinking in and out of sight like bizarre creatures in a dark green aquarium. When the clip ended, she backed it up and played the last part in slow motion.
The spiky, spidery black entity crawled up through the door and across the ceiling. Stacey paused it while the entity was still visible.
“That’s it,” Alicia said. “That’s what I saw in the living room. That’s what got me.” She touched her stomach where she’d been scratched. “Oh, it makes me sick just to see it.”
“That was the last we saw of it,” I said. “We think it went into the Fieldings’ apartment over there, if it went anywhere at all.”
“So it didn’t go near my kids last night.”
“No...but there was something else.” I nodded at Stacey, and she pulled up the other clip she’d prepared, the glimpse of the pale blue figure in front of the dead-end door upstairs.
“What is that?” Alicia whispered.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t think it’s the fearfeeder. An old house like this can have a number of ghosts.” I gave her the quick summary of what the entity had done, how it had seemed to stop and listen at her kids’ doors before vanishing. “It could be someone who lived here long ago. Anyway, it didn’t seem very strong, based on the temperature reading. It might be a residual haunting, something that just repeats the same actions again and again. We’ll gather more information as we go.”
“And what about all those things in the basement?” Alicia asked.
“That seems to be the center of activity in the house,” I said. “We’ll monitor it much more heavily tonight.”
“It could be hard to hide that much gear from the neighbors,” Stacey said.
“I’ll try to speak to your other neighbors later today,” I said. “If they don’t cooperate, we can probably still set everything up in the laundry room tonight. It seems like nobody in this house likes to go down there at night, so maybe there won’t be anyone to notice the cameras and motion detectors.”
“That’s true,” Stacey said. “Only Michael went down there last night...and only because you asked him.”
“Good luck talking to Lulinda Fielding.” Alicia shook her head. “I’d volunteer to introduce you, but she’d probably be less likely to speak to you then. That woman’s a beast.”
“I can’t wait,” I said. “In the meantime, we’re going to dig deeper into the history of the neighborhood and see what we come up with. It’s important to try and find some physical item that can be used to lure the ghost, something that had emotional significance in his life.”
“I hope you can find a way to solve this mess,” Alicia said. “My kids need to be safe in their home.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said. “We’ll get to work.”
As the sun rose, we shut down our gear, retrieved the laundry basket with the hidden camera from the basement, and headed out to the van.
I dropped Stacey at her apartment and forced myself to attend an early-morning kickboxing class. Once I was there and felt the stress burning out of my tense muscles, I was glad I did it.
Then it was home, feed the cat, sleep for a few hours so I could get back to work with fresh energy.
By noon, I was back at the office. Stacey was already there, the little go-getter, reviewing footage with Calvin.
“Interesting,” he said as I pulled an extra chair up to the video editing station, where three large monitors faced Stacey like a three-sided mirror in a department store. “I wonder who our mystery guest was.”
“I heard something in the next apartment—” I began.
“Stacey told me. You need to get access to that apartment right away.”
“Apparently the residents aren’t the sweetest people in the world,” I said. “Have you found anything?”
“A missing person file from 1994,” he said, grabbing a stack of printouts from the long work table nearby. He rolled over to me and tossed them in my lap. The top page had a black and white image of a smiling boy with chunky braces, wearing a school-picture-day Izod shirt. “Kris Larsen, eight years old. Vanished one Friday night in September, never seen again. His family lived in the house that backs up to our client’s. They first thought he’d slipped out and gone to a friend’s house, but nobody saw him or head from him that night.”
“Was there any mention of closet monsters?” I asked, skimming over the brief summary from the missing-person database.
“Not in the police report, but that’s not an area that your typical cop is going to explore,” Calvin said. “We aren’t exactly trained to consider supernatural perps.”
“Maybe you should be, in this city. Does his family still live there?” I thumbed through more pages.
“Moved in 2001,” he said. “The parents now live in Texas. Fourth page.”
I flipped through papers and nodded. Too bad they were so far away. I would still try to contact them, but people have a funny way of not wanting to talk about sensitive and highly personal subjects with strangers who call them on the phone. They’re even less responsive to emails than phone calls. Face to face is always much more effective, but we didn’t have the time or budget for a plane trip halfway across the country.
“What else?” I asked.
“There’s another one from 1985,” Calvin said. “Bradley Carson, age twelve. It’s hard to say whether this was related. The kid disappeared for several days but was found again. I tried to track him down, found out he spent some time in a state psychiatric hospital after that. That’s all we know about him so far. I have a friend searching for that old case file.”
“Which house?” I asked.
“Next door to the client’s. Now, we already know about Bonnie McAllister, six years old, missing in 1973,” Calvin said. “I gave Stacey a copy of the file to study.”
I nodded. I’d just about memorized that file during our previous, ill-fated investigation. The little girl Bonnie had seen an old-fashioned devil in her closet, horns and hooves and red scales, the whole package. Her parents had responded with therapy and, ultimately, psychiatric
meds. After fourteen months of the occurrences growing from once or twice a month to every single night, the girl had finally vanished and was never seen again. The case was still open.
“The databases we can access get spotty a few years before that,” Calvin said. “You’ll want to contact Grant to see what he can dig up at the Historical Association archives, but this is too wide a net to hand him. A dozen addresses over two centuries.”
“Jacob said he can come tonight,” Stacey said, grinning like a schoolkid hopped up on Pixy Stix. “I can walk around the block with him and see what he picks up.”
“I’m sure you won’t mind,” I said. “Try not to distract him along the way.”
“I won’t!” Stacey gave me a sly smile and looked at Calvin. “Ellie met an interesting guy. He lives in the building we’re investigating.”
“That’s a fascinating turn in the case,” Calvin said. “Let’s hear more.”
“There’s nothing to hear,” I interrupted. “Stacey’s been pushing me at this firefighter guy since she first heard of him.”
“And she likes him,” Stacey added, not helping things at all. I felt more embarrassed than annoyed, so maybe I did kind of like him.
“Sounds promising, Ellie,” Calvin said.
“When did everyone become obsessed with my private life?” I asked. “Don’t we have a dangerous ghost to catch here? Let’s go call on our next witness.”
I grabbed the piece of paper with the Larsen family’s phone number on it and walked over to my desk, where I could sink beneath the walls and out of sight for a minute. Nobody answered my call.
“Let’s load up, Stace,” I said when I stepped out. “We need a full array for the basement, but I don’t want to lose any of the camera positions we’ve already established.”
“Look, she’s all business now,” Stacey said, and Calvin actually chuckled.
“Stacey, just assemble the gear,” I told her.
“Yes, sir, captain, sir.” Stacey grabbed a thermal and a pair of motion detectors. “Hey, should we go full-on laser grid? Really watch every square centimeter of that basement?”
