Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

by Richard Bowes

  In the top room, the sensation of fear did not go away, but it did subside considerably. Enough for me to once again move comfortably about the room. Looking out the window, I saw that the light on the water was bright, and night was some time off, and it calmed me.

  It seemed to me that whatever was here was not only dangerous, but somehow the stairs were its main area of strength. This didn’t mean that it was weak away from the stairs, but the stairs were its prime location, and the area where its supernormal connection was most profound.

  I decided not to spend the night in the lighthouse the first night, but instead sent Nora and Gary to the library, and any other source of information they could locate, to find out about the history of the lighthouse. I left the lighthouse several times during the day, and went back as it neared nightfall, and each time, I felt the presence in the building was growing more observant of my actions.

  That night, I watched the lighthouse from a distance, observing the upper windows.

  As the night fell, my vantage point from a nearby hill, where I sat with a cool drink in a lawn chair looking through binoculars, revealed to me a flash inside the upper darkness. I leaned forward. I saw it again. The flash moved before the window in a bobbing fashion, and then it was gone.

  I had an idea that it had raced down the stairwell. I also determined from prior experience, that the light I saw would not be visible up close, and would in fact be the manifestation of the thing if viewed from a distance. Up close and personal, it would be the presence itself that one would have to confront, lit or unlit.

  That night, I retired to the hotel and read the information that Nora and Gary had provided for me, while they shared a room next door. They thought because they each had a bed in their room, that I believed there weren’t any shenanigans going on. Actually, I suspected they had been intimate for some time, and for reasons known only to them, didn’t want me to know. I decided not to question their reasoning, or reveal my suspicions which were founded on evidence, and I’ll add to that statement that they are now married, so anything I’m telling you here does not matter; not that I cared in the first place.

  In the notes they provided, there was nothing particularly interesting about the lighthouse. I read from a book on local history, to see if anything else might stand out as a catalyst for the thing on the stairs. Nothing jumped out at me. There had been a number of shipwrecks, in spite of the lighthouse, including a famous one before its existence in the early seventeen hundreds.

  That offered a note of interest. The problem was, there wasn’t anything of detail on the wreck, other than that an unnamed ship had collided with the rocky shoreline, and that on examination of the wrecked vessel, a man named Greenberg was located alive. All others on the ship were found dead, and due to their condition, it was assumed they had been killed and cannibalized as the ship had been becalmed for weeks at sea, and all food had been exhausted.

  The article said Greenberg had committed the murders with an axe. When they took him off the ship, he said it had not been him who had committed the crime and the cannibalism—but that there was something else on the ship. A demon that he said lived in a brass jug—his words and it was there now, and that it had been assigned to protect him after he did a good deed for an Arab trader. He thought nothing of it at the time, and merely thought the jug given him was a nice item that he would sell when he arrived on the mainland. But the demon in the bottle seemed jealous and upset and chose to protect him, even when he felt he did not need protecting; the mere presence of anyone near him drove the thing in the bottle into a frenzy. Its main purpose was to dispatch anyone nearby, so that it might return to the tranquility inside the jug. That was his story, and as you might judge, it wasn’t taken seriously.

  The ship was in terrible shape. It was searched, but no demon was found, nor was a brass jug located. Most of what could be salvaged was salvaged.

  Nora and Gary’s research showed that the ship dealt in antiquities, and that the crew was well experienced, and becalmed or not, there should have been enough food on board. The survivor was duly tried and hung, and that was the end of him. If he had a protecting demon in a jug, neither jug nor demon presented itself during his last moments as he stood on the gallows.

  I think you might see where I’m going here, as I have discovered in my investigations, that old trinkets, or odd items, like a brass jug, might in fact have some connection to the supernormal. But, since it was not recovered, and there wasn’t any evidence of Greenberg being protected from even so much as a rope burn, there was little to go on.

  I looked over maps and documentation to locate the exact site of the ship wreck, but there was nothing that could be fully determined. On a hunch, I went to the butcher shop and bought some soup bones, and some animal skin, and a pint of calf’s blood, and went to the lighthouse and began to search around the concrete floor near the stairwell.

  I didn’t necessarily expect to find anything, but I did satisfy myself with a thermometer that the air on the left side near the floor was quite cold and it wasn’t my imagination. Still, the cool air there presented a sensation different from that of the garden variety presence one sometimes encounters in these sort of spots: the kind of presence that is commonly called a ghost or spook.

  I climbed the stairs with an uncomfortable consciousness of being observed, and made my way to the top room and closed the door. There, I sat the plastic bag containing the soup bone and skin, removed my shoulder bag, and took out my tools, and went to work.

  I first placed the bone on the floor, and placed the stretch of hairless animal skin beside it. I set up a camera in a shelf in the room, the sort sometimes referred to as a nanny cam—a hidden device parents use to make sure their nannies are acting appropriately with their children. I then placed a mirror on the floor beside the bone and the skin, moved back, and drew a circle with blessed chalk. Now, the blessing isn’t necessarily a Christian one. In this case, the chalk had been blessed by an African wizard who chanted over it with words of juju; to simplify, juju is an African term for magic and spells. I drew a large circle about ten feet in circumference with white chalk, and inside it I drew around its edge symbols of power in other colors of chalk, each blessed by different priests, wizards, rabbis, and so on. These symbols do not belong to any one theology, but are universal in the supernormal. I covered the inside of the circle with flour, not blessed, just plain flour, and then placed another soup bone and piece of skin in its center. I sprinkled more flour all around the circle so that it was next to the first soup bone and skin I had laid out. I then poured the flour on the floor as I backed toward the door and the stairway. I sprinkled it on the landing, stopped and looked down the stairs. It was not yet night, so I hadn’t been followed up the stairway and forced to exit by means of the fire pole, but I certainly felt the thing’s attendance in the lighthouse.

  It could see what I was doing, I was sure. But if this thing was what I thought it might be, its nature and design would consign it to certain decisions. I went down the stairs, and I will tell you quite frankly, it was hard to do. I found near the bottom that I was leaning away from the side where it was cold. But as a last test, I stuck my hand out in that direction, and felt the air hit me as briskly as if I had poked my arm into a meat freezer. I kept it there, and the cold turned so cold it felt hot. My arm began to feel singed, as if I were too close to a fire. I pulled it back before the heat became too intense.

  I went out into the daylight, and I was grateful for the heat of the sun.

  As I was, in a sense, gaining artillery range on my specter, I didn’t stay in the lighthouse that night either. I felt I needed another night of information before I made an attempt to remove the thing. I knew too, that if I was right, what was in the lighthouse would make a deadly enemy. I didn’t take this lightly.

  Next morning, I took Nora and Gary with me, for they had been lying quite low in their bedroom, doing what you might expect. They were not altogether eager to go, whic
h had nothing to do with facing danger, but had a considerable amount to do with their libidos.

  Inside the lighthouse, I showed them the cold-hot spot, and then we went upstairs. The flour on the landing was disturbed. There were marks in it that looked hoof-like in spots, dog-like in others, and there were those other marks I had seen in the photographs that reminded me of nothing I could describe.

  In the room, the flour was bothered as well, and in fact, it looked as if something had rolled in it. The bone and skin were there, but they had changed. The bone had grown meat on it, and the skin had grown fur. The mirror was cracked. When I picked it up, the image of the intruder—as I expected—was still frozen in the glass.

  I showed it to Nora and Gary, and I would try here to describe what we saw, but it was indescribable. I will come back to that later.

  The circle was only slightly disturbed, and I could see where the chalk had been pushed at, but not actually broken. Inside the circle the symbols were as visible as when I wrote them, and the bone and skin there had not changed at all, except to putrefy a little. I had them removed, and refreshed the circle where it showed some minor contact, and then I examined the nanny cam.

  There was nothing present in the film but the flour being disturbed and the mirror cracking. Whatever had caused this was invisible to film. I knew that in person it would not be invisible, but would have a very visible and menacing presence.

  We went away and had lunch and waited until it was close to an hour before dark.

  We went up the stairs, and this time the air was very cold and uncomfortable, in that dry ice manner.

  At the top, I had Nora and Gary get inside the circle and sit down cross-legged. I sat with them. They had actually brought a sack lunch with them, with bottled Cokes, and though I started to admonish them for it, they had brought enough for me as well, so we all sat their eating fried chicken from a bag, drinking Cokes.

  As we ate, I said, “It hasn’t been deadly before, but tonight will be different. We have caught its image in the mirror. It can’t tolerate that.

  “You call that an image?” Gary said.

  “What we are dealing with is a jinn, or something like one. A demonic presence that resides in another dimension, and enters into this one by way of a device to which it has been confined. Like a brass jug.”

  “The Greenberg story,” Nora said.

  “Bingo,” I said.

  “The demonic figure I’m talking about has the power to regenerate meat on bone, hair on flesh,” I said. “But do not let that fool you. This is not a positive power in the universe, or the dimension from where it came. It hates being in the jug, or bottle, or container, but it’s cursed to be drawn to just that. It can come out if called, or if the container is destroyed, but it must return to a container if one is presented to it.”

  “You mean if the jug were found, it would have to go back inside?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “There is an ancient line by an anonymous Arab wizard that reads something like, ‘And when the mouth of the container is presented, and a request is made, then to its prison it must return.’ ”

  “But we don’t have the jug,” Nora said.

  “No, we don’t. And that presents a problem. All I have are protection spells, and one juju spell that has proved powerful in other situations; I hope it will serve us as soundly this time out.”

  “Hope?” Gary said.

  “Well,” I said, “having not tried it on a jinni, having never dealt with one before, I must consign the idea to that area labeled: Speculation.”

  Long shadows had begun to crawl across the floor.

  “How did you know it was a jinni?” Gary asked.

  “I was clued by the air at the bottom of the stair. Supernormal manifestations often present themselves by a chilling of the air, even in the hottest of places. But this spirit, its air is so cold it burns. That is the trait of a jinni; they are often credited with the hot winds that blow across the deserts of the Middle East. That face you saw in the mirror. That is only a momentary presentation. It can shift its features, its shape. It is powerful. At some point, a commanding wizard, someone who understood dimensional spells, trapped this creature in a brass jug, and then, he consigned it to the protection of someone he felt he owed a favor. Someone, who unfortunately, thought the idea of a jinni in a jug was all talk.”

  “That would be Greenberg again,” Gary said.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “For whatever reason, the protector of Greenberg, this jinni, felt that it had to protect its master from, well, everyone. It didn’t judge if they did anything to Greenberg or not. Its nature is ferocious, and it’s a nasty sort of creature. It’s possible it did what it did just because it could. So it ran rampant on the ship, and my guess is somehow, after all the slaughter, Greenberg—its master—was able to have it go back in the jug, where it was stopped up tight.”

  “Like a fly in a Coke bottle,” Nora said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “I’m surmising a bit, but after it was contained in the jug, the ship ran aground, having no one to sail it, and the damage the jinni did looked like ax murders and cannibalism. It wasn’t. Greenberg told them the truth. But no one believed his story, and he was hanged for the crime. I don’t think even he understood what he had. He popped the cork, the jinni came out, and started to ‘protect him.’ It was so full of passion and hunger and anger, it tore the crew apart. Greenberg most likely had been given a spell by the Arabic trader, and though he had thought nothing of it at the time, he remembered it, and by speaking it, he caused the jinni to return to the confines of the jug. But too late for the crew.”

  “Where’s the jug?”

  “Ah, and here I speculate again, though quite well, I venture to say. It was lost in the shipwreck, buried in the sand, and in time sand was packed over it. The jug was sealed, and so was the jinni. The lighthouse was built on top of the jug, and where Reggie reinforced the stair rail, near the bottom, he broke the concrete and the jug was underneath. He didn’t see it, but it was there, and as he worked—”

  “The stopper was popped free,” Gary said.

  “Yes, but it had been confined for some time, and it no longer had its master, so it had been learning on its own how to be free, how to use its own will. That’s why it had only been a sensation, a sound, a glance, up until now. After I saw it had the ability to grow flesh on a bone, hair on skin, I felt it had come back to itself, so to speak. And with one of its many images trapped in a mirror, it will be angry; a jinni does not like to show any part of its true self in a reflection.”

  “Being back to itself is not good, is it?” Nora said.

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “There is little in the supernormal universe nastier than a jinni on the loose.”

  I looked outside.

  “We should have evidence of that shortly, so I suggest you do not get outside the circle. Not a finger. Not a nose. Not a toe.”

  “Can it break through?” Nora asked.

  “We will soon find out,” I said, and removed a couple of thick incense candles from my bag, and lit them. The incense was supposed to contain powerful properties to combat evil. I hoped they did. I had never before had the opportunity to use them.

  It was then that we heard the footsteps on the stairs.

  I could feel Nora close to me, shivering, or maybe it was me shivering, or the both of us. Behind and to my left, I could hear Gary. He was breathing like a horse about to make the grade.

  Outside the door, we heard the jinni stop. We saw its shadow move along the floor, and slide under like an oil spill. The shadow quivered in the candlelight. The jinni paused. Then the door started to buckle, and there was a sound like a wind blowing through a canyon, followed by a brisk scratching noise. From the vigor of the scratching, it was obvious that it had gained tremendous strength in just the few days we had been there. The room filled with a stench like carrion. It turned warm in the room. But my guess was that outside the circle it was even warmer. I saw
the paint on the walls beading.

  Then the door sagged in the middle, creaked at the hinges, and blew across the room. It smacked into the field around our protective circle and bounced to the side and skidded across the floor, hitting the runner at the base of the tall window glass. The circle, if it held, would keep out anything that was brought about my supernormal means. I tried to let that reassure me.

  “You two,” I said, “get behind me.”

  They didn’t hesitate.

  It came into the room in a whirl of shadows. The whirl made dust rise up and twist about, and the dust hit the field around our circle as if we were behind glass. The jinni leaped right at us, so fast it made me jump. It hit the force field, bounced back, whirled in a tight spin of darkness, and came again.

  This time the field wobbled and the chalk circle dented slightly. I reached into my bag and brought out the blessed chalk. I reached out to tighten the circle, and felt it touch me.

  I don’t know how to describe its It was a horrid touch. I know that sounds very . . . Lovecraftian, or Poe-like. What is a horrid touch? What does that actually mean? But I have no other words to describe it. I can only say it was like black electricity leaping through my bones, topping out at my skull to the degree that I thought the summit of my head might blow off.

  And it had only been a touch. My finger was smoking and blistered from the burn.

  Around and around it went, marking the circle I had drawn. Out of the whirl, long fingers, spiked with nails like daggers, touched the field, and the field ripped. I pulled a paper from my bag and started to quote the spells the juju man had given me; they were written across the page in chicken blood and were easy to read even by candle light. My reading them made the jinni howl all the louder. I don’t know if it was in anger or pain, or both.

  It bounced again and again against the chalk wall, causing the chalk to dust slightly, and move. The circle was not holding. I had not only foolishly put myself in this bad position, but I had put my friends in the same position as well.