by JL Bryan
“Wait,” I said. “We don’t want to risk the neighbors seeing our gear and getting upset. We have to wait a couple of hours.”
“I doubt anybody goes down there at night,” Michael said. “It would have to be a pretty serious laundry emergency.”
“You don’t think it’s too early?”
“It feels worse the later it gets,” he said. “It’s just going to be you and the other girl down there? You don’t want it to be too late.”
“We’ve been in worse places than this.”
“That’s right. I forgot you’re a couple of hardened, kick-ass ghost hunters.”
“We are. And I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts, so what are you worried about?”
“I said I didn’t believe in horoscopes.”
“What’s your sign?”
“Leo.”
“Figures. Typical Leo.”
“Really?”
“I have no idea.” I did, though.
“Call me when you go down,” he said. “I’ll help you out.”
“Oh, really? What will you do, squirt the ghosts with a fire hose?”
“Yes. Because that’s all I know how to do, squirt things with hoses.”
We circled around to Alicia’s front door, and I heard a rusty metallic creak from the far end, under the shadows of the turret roof. In the light from the house windows, I saw a dark form on the porch swing, which moved slightly back and forth, its chains creaking in time.
“Hello?” I said.
“Ellie! Hi!” Stacey rose from the swing, followed quickly by Jacob. “Uh, Jacob’s here.”
“I’m picking up on that,” I said. I turned to Michael. “You can just drop that in Alicia’s place. Thanks for helping.”
“Let me know if you need me,” he said, glancing at Jacob and Stacey before he walked through the door.
“What were you two doing?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Stacey said. “I mean nothing, uh, professionally speaking.”
“Good. How are you, Jacob?”
“Considering how these things usually go for me, I’m guessing I’m much better now than I’ll be in a few hours,” he said. “Just let me know in advance whether I should expect to get clawed, bitten, beaten, or burned this time. Then I’ll be better prepared for the agony.”
“There’s a slight chance you could end up facing your own worst fear, whatever that might be,” I told him.
“Great. I have so many, I can’t wait to see which one is actually the worst.” He looked over at the house. “So, did they intend to make this place look haunted when they built it, or did it somehow evolve to look more creepy over the years?”
“I’d guess both,” I said. “Before we go in, though, I want to walk around the neighborhood...” I glanced inside, where Michael was talking to his sister. “Actually, I have another idea. Stacey, you take Jacob around the block, and record everything he says.”
“I’ll take video. What are you going to do?”
“Set up our gear in the basement,” I said.
“No way. Not by yourself.” Stacey crossed her arms. “Not after dark, Ellie.”
“Michael volunteered to help me. He might as well pitch in, since we’re de-haunting his house and Alicia’s paying for it.”
“Oh, I totally get it now. Ellie’s into that hot firefighter guy,” Stacey said.
“Really?” Jacob grinned and leaned to look in the window.
“I am not—that’s not the point,” I insisted. “This way, we won’t be working down in the most haunted part of the house at midnight. And it’ll be good to have Michael there in case another neighbors walks in on our set-up, since he lives here, too.”
“So, to be clear, this has nothing to do with you being alone in the dark with that guy,” Stacey said. “Am I getting that right?”
“Absolutely. He can help with the gear and he has emergency training...” I shrugged. “I can have it done by the time you’ve finished casing the neighborhood. Jacob, we’re looking for the oldest thing you can find related to children disappearing—”
“Whoa, whoa,” he said. “You’re not supposed to give specific information or directions to the psychic, you know.”
“I’m giving you some this time,” I said. “We need to identify who this entity is. We don’t need to hear about every ghost and every tragedy in every house on the street. Each one of these houses probably has its own ghosts.”
“Yeah, true. So, missing kids.” Jacob watched Stacey as she stepped inside to grab a camera.
“And old,” I repeated.
“I’ll see what I can do.” Jacob took Stacey’s arm, and the two of them walked down the porch steps. She smiled at him as they strolled away under the streetlamps and the mossy oak limbs, looking like a happy, sappy couple from some old black and white movie.
Michael was still hanging out in Alicia’s apartment, talking with his sister and Kalil.
“Is your offer still good?” I asked him.
“Which offer?”
“Helping me downstairs,” I said, while grabbing some of the gear.
“Sure.”
“You’re going to help her find the ghosts?” Melissa asked.
“I can help, too,” Kalil said.
“Thanks, but I just need one person,” I said. “We’ll be back in a minute.”
Michael picked up the rest of the gear in his arms.
“Careful, some of that’s fragile,” I told him.
“Just like when he brings in groceries,” Melissa said. “He’ll hang like a million bags on each arm to avoid a second trip to the car.”
“It’s worth it, too,” Michael said. He was already to the door before I caught up with him.
Chapter Eleven
Though it was summer and the sun had recently set, the basement air was cold. Michael led the way down the steps, which I liked because it meant he wouldn’t notice me peering down at the gaps between the stairs, watching for a shadowy hand to grab at my feet.
None of the washers or dryers were active, a good sign. I opened each of the washing machines, checking inside.
“I don’t think that’s a good place to hide a camera,” Michael said. “Or did you bring something to wash?”
“Ha ha. I’m checking for wet clothes. Wet clothes would mean somebody might be coming back to dry them tonight.”
“Are there any?”
“Nope.” I closed the lid on the last machine.
“Nice detective work.”
“Thank you.” I took a spotlight from the assorted gear he’d laid out on the laundry-folding counter. I found a socket near the laundry machines, turning the gloomy basement into a bright day in the Sahara.
“I didn’t expect to need sunglasses in the basement,” he said, squinting and turning away from it.
“Sorry. I just want to see what I’m doing, and discourage any nasties from bugging me while I do it.” The air felt cold and thick, like refrigerated molasses, as I moved through it setting up night vision, thermal, a remote EMF meter, and a motion detector. Michael asked me about each item of equipment and let me explain it. He had a smile on his face, but I couldn’t tell if he enjoyed my company or was sort of inwardly laughing at me.
Finally, I set up the laser grid projector on its stand near the middle of the room, and I pointed it right at the door in the rock wall.
“Can you kill the lights?” I asked.
“Is this when we see the ghosts?” he asked. He turned off my searing spotlight, then moved to the light switch on the wall and flicked off the overheads.
“I hope so.” I watched thousands of green laser dots become visible on the wall, and I adjusted the projector slightly, centering the grid around the Door to Evil.
“What does that do?” Michael asked, whispering as though the darkness required it.
“If something moves through here, it will black out some of those dots,” I said. “It might detect something too insubstantial to see with your eyes, or eve
n a sensitive camera.”
“And it really works?”
“Sometimes. We can’t count on any of our gear to help one hundred percent of the time. That’s why we threw the kitchen sink at this basement. It’s very active down here, and we don’t want to miss anything.”
“Very active, huh?” He was rubbing his stubbled chin, looking at the grid of green dots.
“Come on, I’ll show you.” I led him through the dark room toward the night vision camera. “Watch the display screen.”
“I’m watching.”
After a minute, a circular orb floated past. Something flickered in the corner of the screen, the shape of a small human arm, but melted away as quickly as it appeared.
“Are you seeing that?” I whispered.
“Those are ghosts? I expected something a little more...obvious. Couldn’t that just be dust in the air or something? There’s definitely tons of that down here.”
“These aren’t the big entity we want,” I said. “They’re probably his retinue. Little spirits, fragments of the souls he’s taken over the years. Let me try something.” I took a deep breath and spoke in a much louder, commanding-you-around kind of voice, stating the name of one girl the boogeyman had taken. “Bonnie McAllister! Bonnie McAllister! Are you here?” I said the name a third time, thinking of Michael’s sister and her Bloody Mary game. “Bonnie McAllister! Can you show yourself to us? We’re here to help you.”
Michael and I watched the screen. I held my breath.
There was a sound like whispering in the air. A young girl.
Suddenly the shape of a greenish, hollow-eyed face filled the display screen on the night vision camera, as if someone were peering right into the lens. My heart doubled its beating, and Michael took a sharp breath and stepped back. The face vanished as quickly as it appeared, and it was gone when he looked again.
“Wow. Did that really happen?” he whispered.
“We’re recording, so we can check.”
He shook his head. “I’ve never believed in ghosts. What was that?”
“A ghost,” I said. “You might say you don’t believe in them, but you also said you don’t like to come down to the basement at night.”
“That’s because it’s creepy.”
“So what? Why were you worried about me coming down here?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? It just feels like a...bad place.”
“It makes perfect sense,” I said. “You want to be a rational, sane person, and you don’t think that fits with a belief in ghosts. On the other hand, you can feel something’s not right when you’re down here. One part of you wants to believe there are no ghosts—but another, deeper part of you knows they’re around.”
“So I’m crazy.”
“No, you’re just like most people I meet. People can believe contradictory things, especially about complicated subjects like death. Think of how many people profess a belief in a heavenly afterlife but are still afraid to die. You have kind of the opposite thing going on.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.” He laughed a little. “It would be nice, though, wouldn’t it? Knowing that people you care about still exist out there. Knowing that we all go on...” He glanced around the dark basement. “Although if the afterlife is just being stuck in a laundry room in an old house forever, that’s going to disappoint a lot of people.”
“If we can get rid of the fearfeeder, these other souls should get unstuck,” I said. “If they’re really his victims, and not other accumulated hauntings—”
Door hinges squealed, and electric light spilled out across the ceiling.
A large, dark form filled the doorway at the top. It shuffled down a step toward us, and the step groaned under its weight.
“Falcon?” I asked, squinting my eyes. “Falcon Fielding?”
“Falcon Williams,” the boy said, his voice high and nasal. “Hoss is my stepdad.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“What are you doing?” He looked from me to Michael, then toward the green laser dots on the wall, his faced shrouded in the dark gloom.
“We’re just checking for any unusual problems down here,” I said.
“I heard you talking to my mom,” Falcon said, as if I might not have noticed him standing there the whole time I spoke with Lulinda. “She didn’t tell you everything, though.”
She didn’t tell us anything, I thought. “Have you seen anything unusual around the house, Falcon?”
“Yeah. In my fireplace. It’s not a real fireplace anymore, it’s bricked up inside. So nothing can climb down into it. But I see it there anyway.”
“What do you see?” I asked.
I heard him gulp. “My mom gets mad if I talk about it. Hoss slapped me one time and told me to stop. But it won’t go away.”
“What is it?”
He hesitated. “You won’t laugh?” He looked from me to Michael again, as if more concerned about Michael’s opinion of him.
“We won’t, I promise,” Michael said. “We’ve all seen scary things. That’s why Ellie’s here. She’s a...what do you call it?”
“I’m a ghost removal specialist,” I said. “I’ve dealt with ghosts all over the city.”
“It’s not really a ghost,” he said. “It’s more like a...dinosaur.” The boy cringed as he said it. “It sounds stupid but it’s real.”
“Tell me more about it,” I said.
“It’s a skeleton, like at the museum. Skull and ribs and bone claws.”
“What does it do?”
“It stands in the fireplace and watches me in bed. I wake up and it’s there. Usually it doesn’t move, it just looks at me.” The boy shuddered—I could see it even in the dark room. “Then last week, I woke up and it was by my bed. Its skull was looking down at me. It’s like a T. Rex. It barely fit in my room, it was all bent over...” His voice cracked, and I realized he was crying.
“It’s okay.” I walked over and put a hand on his shoulder. He was still a couple of steps from the bottom, so it was an awkward reach. “We’re working to get rid of it. In the meantime...” I told him the same information I’d given to Alicia’s kids—that it wasn’t really a dinosaur, that it preyed on his fear, that standing up to it would weaken it. “Do you have a strong flashlight in your apartment?”
“I think Hoss has a couple in his tool drawer.” He sniffed, wiping his face all along his arm, which I took as a cue to drop my hand from his shoulder.
“Get the brightest one and sleep with it in your bed,” I said. “Fire it at the monster if it bothers you again. Imagine it’s a powerful weapon. But the real weapon is your courage, the real attack is your choice to stand up to it.”
“I’ll try.” He sniffed again. “Don’t tell Mom I told you about it. And don’t tell Hoss or he’ll get mad.”
“We won’t,” I said. “And...maybe you won’t mention what we’re doing down here, okay?”
“They’ll find out,” he said. “They find out everything.” Falcon turned and ascended the stairs, huffing and out of breath by the time he reached the top. He looked back at us. “I hope you can get rid of it. It’s evil.”
Then he closed the door and left us in the dark.
“He doesn’t seem like the happiest kid,” I said.
“I’ve never seen him smiling,” Michael told me. “He always looks miserable.”
“We can’t make him happy, but we can make his life easier.” I drew my flashlight and pointed it at the door, the bright white beam drowning most of the tiny green dots. “We have to close this case quickly, before the boogeyman tries to take one of these kids. We need to get to the heart of it.”
“You want to go in there?” Michael grabbed the doorknob and rattled it. “It’s locked. I could call the management company in the morning, try to get Hernando out here. That’s the maintenance guy, he’ll have a key, but it usually takes a few days before they send him—”
“I don’t even
want to wait until the morning.” I grabbed my toolbox from the counter and handed him my flashlight. “Keep shining that on the door.”
“Okay...” He looked puzzled, but held it for me.
I knelt in the bright light by the door, opened my toolbox, and took out a slim leather pack. I unfolded it, selected a couple of slender steel bypass tools, and slid them into the lock.
“Do you bring your own lock picks everywhere?” he asked.
“Tools of the trade.” There was nothing particularly complicated about the lock, and within thirty seconds, I was pushing open the door into a dark cavity behind the rock wall.
The intense cold hit us first. The air erupting from the darkness was so dense and cold I could feel it pushing against me. It smelled old and stagnant, the smell of things that have lain too long in their own filth. It was like prying open a coffin that’s been buried for years—something I had to do once, unfortunately. I hope to never do it again.
Michael let out an “ugh” sound, and I gagged pretty badly myself. I pushed away from the door and rose to my feet. Then I snagged my flashlight back from him and pointed it inside.
There was, as expected, a furnace, a pot-bellied metal monster squatting in the corner, its copper tentacles snaking away into the ceiling. Its pilot light glowed red behind a small steel cage, the device letting off a low hiss. The thing looked ancient and clunky—no wonder the landlord kept it locked away from the tenants.
For a moment, I thought of Gehenna in the Bible, the place near Jerusalem where children were burned alive in sacrifice to Moloch and other nasty gods. Vanishing children.
Despite the red glare of the bestial furnace, the air was ice-cold, as if something were greedily sucking up every drop of heat produced.
I advanced into the dark space, my flashlight barely denting the gloom. Michael stayed close beside me, protectively, which was much better than leaving me to go alone, and far better than turning and running away. The atmosphere was dark enough to panic most people. I felt almost sick with dread, my muscles tensing up, cold sweat rising all over my back.
The old walls were built from a combination of bricks and irregular rocks cemented together—it didn’t look like the soundest foundation for the three-story mansion above.
