by JL Bryan
“Well, that’s all much worse than what I was hoping to hear,” Stacey said. “I was leaning toward a ‘solve the old murder, crack the case quick’ scenario, myself.”
“What can you tell us about what’s happening now?” I asked. “With the fearfeeder?”
“That well is definitely where he comes and goes,” Jacob said. “It needs to be sealed tight. Physically and ritually.”
“Do you know how to do that?” Stacey asked.
“You need somebody more experienced than me,” Jacob said. “I’m not trained for it. You need a shaman, a priest, somebody who can bring some power into it. Some of these ancient spirits are hanging around just to keep this place in check, to make the dark things stay down below, but they’re old and fading. Their protection is cracking.”
“I think I know somebody,” I said. “Will that stop the entity we’re dealing with?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s turned some of the closets in this house into possessed doors—computer programmers would call them back doors, secret ways to gain access. So I don’t think it would stop the crawling dark thing at this point. Once you deal with your fearfeeder, though, you need to take care of this well so nothing else comes out, nothing else goes in. When Uncle Murderer from the early nineteenth century killed those children and put their bodies into the well, he made a connection with the darkness inside. One thing all evil spirits understand is blood sacrifice.”
“What kind of connection are we talking about, exactly?” I asked.
“He mingled his soul with an old, old darkness,” he said. “It’s hard to say, only that he grew even more twisted than he already was...and probably a lot less sane.”
“Is there any connection between him and the fearfeeder we’ve been chasing?”
“Possibly. The entity you’re dealing with now keeps its identity hidden. It only wants to make itself visible when it’s pretending to be something it isn’t.”
“Could they be the same entity?” I asked, getting right to the point of my question. “That’s what I need to know.”
“They could be.”
“I know they could be,” I said, feeling myself grow impatient, my calm professional veneer starting to crack. “I’m trying to get a definite answer.”
“I don’t have one,” Jacob said. “It’s possible that his murders tied him here, and he returned as a ghost, but the darkness in the well changed him into something else over time.” He looked around at the laundry room—empty to my eyes, crowded with damaged and mangled spirits to his. “Something has to be done about this.”
“We’re open to suggestions,” I said.
“I’ll tell you if I think of any.” Jacob stared at the closed door to the furnace room.
Stacey and I took the opportunity to double-check our gear, and then all of us left up the stairs, turning out the light behind us.
As I stepped out of the basement door, I could feel the nameless things in the darkness watching, like predatory eyes boring into us from the shadows.
Chapter Fourteen
“Be very careful,” Jacob told Stacey as they stood on the front porch, embracing closely and gazing into each other’s eyes. I was third-wheeling it a few feet away, waiting to go back inside. “There’s a lot of danger in this house.”
“Don’t worry about me, I’m staying out in the van.” She nodded at our cargo van, parked on the street not far away. “Ellie might be in trouble, though.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said when they both looked my way. “Observation only tonight. I promise.”
“Maybe I should stick around, just for a while,” he said. “In case you need me.”
“You can help me keep an eye on all the monitors again,” she said. “You’re good at that.”
“I have spent years sharpening my TV-watching skills,” he replied, and she gave it more laughs than the joke was really worth.
Stacey gave me a questioning look, and I shrugged.
“As long as you keep your eyes on the monitor, not on each other,” I said.
I grabbed my headset from the van and returned inside alone. My first stop was to knock on Alicia’s bedroom door. “All clear,” I said.
Alicia stepped out, telling her kids to wait in her room, and closed the door behind her.
“Well?” she asked. It was a normal enough thing to say at the moment, but the word immediately made me think of the dark, stone-lined shaft in the basement, from which evil things bubbled to the surface.
I had her follow me to the kitchen so the kids couldn’t listen through the door, and then I gave her what information I had. It certainly sounded bleak and hopeless coming out. Her facial expression alternated between skeptical and horrified.
“For now, we think we have some leads on who this entity really is,” I said. “Identifying a ghost is key to removing it, so our odds are now much better. I’ll stay here again tonight and keep watch. By tomorrow night, we should have some hard historical facts to help us trap the ghost.”
“I need you to take care of this right away.” She glanced at the clock on the microwave. It was later than I’d realized, approaching eleven p.m. I didn’t know where the time had gone. “Is it safe for the kids to sleep in their rooms?”
“I’ll stay close to them again,” I said. “Stacey and I will both be watching all night, so you can rest. There was one thing I didn’t mention.”
“Does it get worse?”
“Not this part. The psychic encountered what he called a positive male spirit, here to protect your family specifically. He was not someone who had a connection to this house in life.”
“Gerard,” she whispered. Her husband’s name.
“We didn’t get a name—he rarely picks up on names, unfortunately. Jacob said this male ghost knew he had to move on, the next world was calling for him, but he was stalling and won’t go until he sees you’re safe.”
“What else?” Alicia stared intently at me, leaning closer for any news of her lost husband.
“Did Gerard ever wear any jewelry?”
“Jewelry?” She laughed. “No, he wasn’t that type. All he ever wore was a little cross his grandmother gave him, and he kept that under his shirt.”
“What color?”
“Gold. Why?”
“The psychic saw that,” I said. “He was still wearing the cross. A memory of it, anyway. Do you have a digital picture of your husband you can send me?”
“I absolutely do.” Alicia flipped through pictures on her phone, looking wistful.
I grabbed my digital tablet from our gear-heap in the corner of the room, and I confirmed I’d received it. Her husband stood on a beach, tall and handsome, looking out towards swollen thunderheads above the ocean.
“Okay, this will take a minute,” I told her. “You might as well put your kids to bed, if you want.”
She nodded and went to retrieve the sleepy children from her room.
Using Google image search, I quickly assembled a photographic line-up of men who vaguely resembled Gerard—late twenties to early thirties, very dark skin. I combined these in a single document, a dozen images with Gerard tucked unassumingly in the lower right corner of the collage.
I put on my headset.
“Stacey, do you read?” I asked.
“Not as much as I should,” she said. “You know, my mom keeps telling me those Janet Evanovich novels are really fun—”
“Never mind,” I said, sighing. “I’m sending you a photo line-up. Ask Jacob if he recognizes anyone.”
“Roger, Wilco,” she replied.
“You totally knew what I meant before, didn’t you?” I asked. “You knew I wasn’t trying to start a conversation about Stephanie Plum.”
“Sorry, transmission’s getting fuzzy. Stand by.” Stacey turned down the volume on her headset, but I could still hear her explaining it to Jacob.
“That one,” Jacob said. “He’s the one in the house, watching over the family.”
“Please note subject has identified the man in the third column, three pictures down,” Stacey said, really overdoing it now. “Is that our suspect?”
“That’s Alicia’s husband,” I said. “So we’ve identified one ghost. Too bad it’s not the one we need to catch. Gotta go.” I stood as Alicia returned down the stairs, staring at me like she was starving and I had a platter of hot, fresh cornbread.
“Don’t you mean ‘over and out’ or ‘signing off’ or ‘good night and good luck’?” Stacey asked. I turned down the volume without answering her.
“We have as much confirmation as we can get,” I said. “The psychic did pick Gerard out of these pictures.” I showed her the collage I’d slapped together.
“So it’s him,” Alicia said.
“As far as the psychic can tell. Some entities, and particularly the one we’re dealing with now, can disguise their identity. I have to mention that for accuracy. But I don’t see why it would pretend to be Gerard in front of Jacob, who doesn’t even know Gerard. Jacob had a very strong sense of this dark entity’s energy, and I don’t think he would have been fooled, but it’s always possible.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m more than ninety percent sure this is your husband, but not a hundred percent,” I said. “I try to be scientific, but this is one area where you’ll want to check your own feelings, if you encounter him. You knew him better than anyone.”
“I sure did.” Alicia looked at me a long moment. “Do you think...?”
“What is it?”
“Could your psychic friend help me speak to Gerard?” She was whispering, glancing up at the closed doors to her kids’ rooms. “I wish I could talk to him just one last time.”
“Probably not tonight—Jacob’s done a lot already, he’s probably drained,” I said. “I’ll ask him about it another time. I can tell you, though, that if his spirit is here, you can talk to him anytime. He’s paying close attention to you and your kids. He’ll hear you.”
Alicia’s eyes shone.
“I’ve spoken to him a lot,” she whispered. “Since he passed. Sometimes I felt like he was hearing me, somehow...”
“He heard you,” I said.
The tears erupted and tumbled down her cheeks. I patted her on the back. She embraced me, and I hugged her while she sobbed a little. I could feel the weight of her life, raising two kids alone while working a demanding job with long hours, and I suppose nobody had held her in a long time. That’s one thing about this job—dealing with a lot of death means we run into some high emotions.
“I’m sorry,” Alicia said, looking embarrassed as she drew back and wiped her eyes. “I guess I’ve been wanting someone to say that for a long time.”
“I understand, believe me. My parents both died in a fire when I was fifteen.” I didn’t want to talk about myself, but I wanted her to know that I was familiar with those extreme feelings of loss and isolation.
“That’s awful,” she said, touching my arm.
“I’m used to it. But the pain still comes back sometimes.”
“I’m so sorry.” She gave me a little smile through her tears. “Maybe that’s why you like Michael so much. A firefighter.”
My first instinct was to deny liking him yet again, but that would have been a lie, and lies didn’t belong in this conversation.
“Is it that obvious?” I asked, and she laughed.
“I should get to sleep myself,” she said. “Thank you for being here, Ellie.”
“I’ll do my best to help your family,” I said. “I promise.”
As she walked away and closed her bedroom door, I felt an even stronger sense of purpose about resolving the case.
“Stacey, copy?” I said, turning up my headset again.
“I’m reading you,” she replied.
“I’m getting into position,” I told her while I climbed the stairs. I’d turned off all the downstairs lights. “How are we looking?”
“Basement’s a ghost aquarium again,” she said. “And the laser grid has dark spots passing through it, blotting out the dots, about once a minute.”
“And the rest of the house?”
“Total snorefest so far.”
“Keep me posted.” I flicked off the upstairs lights, leaving the house enshrouded in ghost-inviting darkness, and sat on my air mattress.
The first order of business was emailing Grant Patterson, our friend at the Historical Association, with all the details about the house on the corner. We needed to know who had lived there in the first half of the nineteenth century, and I told him about the twin brothers and the two children who would have been reported missing or dead. I added a couple of family names we’d turned up for that lot during our research at the city archives.
The subject line of my email: URGENT. We needed to make some swift progress. I told him that inside the email, too, with copious thanks.
Then I used my tablet to check through the cameras around the house. Just as Stacey said: weird, irregular shapes fading in and out of view on the night vision in the basement. The thermal showed small, drifting cold spots forming and dissolving with no apparent physical cause, all over the room.
Looking up and down the dark hallway, I took in the closed doors, the stairs, the cutaway arches behind me giving a view of the living room below. My eyes adjusted to the gloom, able to see in the pale streetlamp light drifting in through the balcony doors at one end of the hall. The house had fallen quiet.
I wanted to call Michael, but it was much too late to call anyone that I didn’t know to be a confirmed night owl. What would I say? Hi, sorry to wake you, want to chat some more about how you live in a house of horrors built on cursed ground?
There had to be better conversation-starters than that.
Alicia was right—I was interested in Hot Firefighter Guy, but I wasn’t altogether sure how I felt about those feelings. I like to keep people at a slight distance. Like behind a wall topped with barbed wire and surrounded by a moat full of piranhas. I’d always been that way.
Not always. Not before Mom and Dad died, a little voice in my head felt obliged to point out.
So what? That was another life. There was no reason to think about Antonio Torres, the boy who’d invited me to the OutKast concert I’d never attended, how open and fearless my crush on him had been.
It hadn’t been that way with anyone else since then. Not since I’d raised the barriers around myself and installed catapults full of flaming arrows on top.
Since my parents died, I’d resisted being close to anyone, even being unfairly cold to my cousins when I’d gone to live with my Aunt Clarice in Virginia. She already had three kids, but she’d made room for me, anyway. Not that teenage me had appreciated it.
Then I thought of Alicia. She and her husband had clearly shared a deep, strong connection. Then she’d lost him, and it had torn her in half. I’d already lost the people I cared about most in a flash of fire. The flames hadn’t consumed me, but they’d burned me to my core. If I let myself care too much about anyone else, or get too close, I would just be preparing myself to get burned all over again.
My place was with the dead.
I watched the house through my tablet for a while, then I stood and paced the dark hall, moving as lightly as I could so my boots wouldn’t send out resounding clicks from the hardwood.
Stacey had turned down her microphone so I wouldn’t have to hear her chatting with Jacob, or whatever they were doing out in the back of the van together.
I looked out through the glass doors onto the dark cavity of the recessed balcony. Past the wrought-iron railing at the front, the narrow old Wilson house stood in its blind-watchtower fashion in the moonlight. I finally let myself remember that night, but my memories were just terrified flashes.
I’d been in the van, watching Calvin in green night vision on one of the monitors. He’d run into the booth-sized trap, and I couldn’t see what happened inside because the walls were built of that colorful, hea
vily leaded glass.
The fearfeeder had dropped from the ceiling like a cockroach, landing on top of the trap while Calvin was within it, baiting the monster with his life.
It crawled down one side of the booth—just a black mass of darkness shaped like a man—and scurried around inside, pursuing Calvin, just as Calvin had intended.
I’d warned him it was coming. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Maybe that had caused Calvin to pause, to look back rather than running straight on through and out of the trap.
I had not heard any gunshots, nor seen the scummy-looking guy who Calvin had seen, the boogeyman of cops everywhere, the unknown person waiting just around the corner, or maybe in a pulled-over car late at night, ready to blast out the brains of anyone wearing a badge.
That illusion—sight, sound, and all—had been for Calvin, and the cameras and microphones had picked up none of it. All I heard was Calvin grunting in pain over my headset, and all I saw was him falling halfway out of the trap, collapsing, blocking the door so I couldn’t close it.
Then I’d gone running inside and found him on the floor surrounded by his own blood.
I turned away from the house and its painful memories, walking now to the dead-end door in the ornate archway.
“Come on,” I whispered. I touched the flashlight holstered on my utility belt, which I’d strapped on in case tonight turned into more than a simple observation. “Come on, boogeyman, Closet Man. Tell me who you are.”
Something cold passed me, an unseasonably chilly draft. It was over as quickly as it began.
“Who’s there?” I asked. I clicked on my flashlight, but it didn’t reveal anything. I walked over to my toolbox to grab the thermal goggles.
While I fished them out, I heard a tiny creak behind me.
By the time I had the goggles in place, the cold spot was gone. The dead-end door was ajar by just a crack, as though somebody had walked past and opened it.
