by JL Bryan
“If you do, pick up some egg rolls,” Hayden said.
I stood and looked up at the monolith of the tower again. Though I was closer now, I still saw nothing, neither a shadowy entity walking along the rocks, leaving footprints in the sand, nor a white gauzy figure at the railing up high. The night didn't even oblige us with rumbling thunder or howling wind, nothing to make it feel like ghosts could be nearby.
As far as we could tell that night, there weren't any.
“This is abnormal,” Stacey said as the sun crept up over the ocean, flooding us with light. We stood in the little kitchen of the caretaker's bungalow, brewing some decaf.
“I know,” I said. “Decaf is pointless, but I'm craving coffee.”
“I mean, how long has it been since we spent the night somewhere and nothing happened?” she said.
“Yeah, that. It's unusual.” I looked for cream or milk in the caretaker's bungalow, found only a bottle of ketchup instead. “Can you check for powdered creamer?” I pointed at the cabinets behind Stacey's head. There wasn't room enough in the kitchenette for me to step around her.
“Sure.” She opened it up and quickly found a large canister of Coffee Mate. The only other item in the cabinet was a can of chicken noodle soup.
“Typically, things have advanced pretty far before anyone calls us,” I said. “Lots of banging doors, voices, screaming, threatening apparitions, broken snow globes...”
“Huh. But things aren't too wild here.”'
“Yeah. Alyssa just didn't have a lot of resistance to the idea of a ghost, and let her assistant call us at the first sign of anything paranormal.”
“I guess she's probably seen stranger things than restless spirits of the dead,” Stacey said. “I mean, she does live in California.”
“And another thing,” I said. “It may not matter, but it was always raining when the ghost was seen before.”
“Oh, yeah! So maybe it only comes out during bad weather?”
“Maybe.” I thought of the white ghost on the lighthouse. I wasn't sure it was the same entity others had been seeing here recently, but it had appeared during the rain, too. Just after the clouds had blotted out the sun, and drops had begun to pour down.
“Then we just sit around twiddling our thumbs until the rain comes back?” she asked. “Good thing it rains almost every day around here. Though it's usually just for a few minutes. Hmm...” Stacey stroked her chin as though she had a beard.
“We should go ahead and start digging into the history of the property,” I said. “Try to figure out who might be haunting it.”
“Who's ready to knock off for a brewski?” Hayden asked, stepping in through the door to the outdoor hall. “Anybody? Stacey? Anybody?”
“Sorry. We have, uh, doctor's appointments.” Stacey headed for the door.
“Both of you?”
“Weird coincidence,” I said, following Stacey out. “It happens.”
Outside, the early daylight was coming down, steaming the previous evening's rain out of the ground. I took a final look at the lighthouse before climbing into the van. Nothing looked back at me. Maybe there was nothing there at all.
Chapter Eleven
Since our only transportation out of there was the black PSI van, we all rode together to the office, Hayden driving. Stacey rode shotgun—having called it on the way outside, not that I cared—and I stayed in the back with the walls of monitors.
While riding back over the series of bridges to the city, I idly flipped through video from the previous night. I caught glimpses of nothing happening in the outdoor hallway, nothing happening in the guest house, nothing happening in the massively expanded main house.
Maybe the weather really was a critical factor. Or maybe the ghosts were spooked, so to speak, by our presence, our setting up of our gear all over the property. I doubted that, because all the recent construction and renovation, plus the presence of Alyssa's employees, had certainly done nothing to send them into hiding. Maybe they'd even been stirred up by all the recent changes.
Regardless, we hadn't picked up anything major, nothing that reached out and grabbed our attention (or our ankles, thankfully. I hate when they do that.). There was still a good possibility we'd picked up something small but significant—a shadow or cold spot that shouldn't have been there, a voice too subtle or distorted for human hearing.
It would be up to Stacey to analyze the data and try to find those things. And Hayden, too, I supposed. It wasn't the worst thing to have an extra person doing the dreary but necessary work of sifting through heaps of raw data. I enjoy watching hours of footage of nothing happening about as much as Stacey enjoys pawing through dusty old documents at the city archive.
“I don't know if that place is even haunted,” Hayden said as he pulled into the old concrete building housing our offices. It was in a largely disused industrial park area. In the wrecking yard next door, an Oldsmobile was being slowly crushed under a heavy metal plate. “Kinda creepy, maybe, but that's about it.”
“Sorry, but I don't think D-Train would lie,” Stacey said.
“Why? Because he's some big football hero?” Hayden asked her, a little jealously.
“I don't think they're lying,” I said. “We'll find something.” I thought again of the gauzy white figure atop the lighthouse, and immediately shoved the image out of my head. “Maybe,” I added, since there was no logical basis for my certainty, only a feeling. And I don't always trust my feelings. They just aren't trustworthy a lot of the time. Evidence, logic, that's the road to clear knowledge.
Hayden drove around back and pulled in through the garage door, parking inside the workshop.
A couple of the younger PSI types in their dark suits—identical black coats and starchy white shirts for the males and females—sat at the cluster of desks near the back, working at their computers. They glanced up with mild disinterest as we climbed out of the black van. There was nothing to unload, happily, since we'd left every bit of gear at the client's house.
I hated the sight of the outsiders in our office. They reminded me that I was losing Calvin, my teacher, my mentor. Okay, he'd been very reluctant to take on those roles. But I'd just lost Michael, and it was getting to be a pattern, losing the few people I had in my life. I suppose that had always been the pattern for me, though.
This office was full of people I was ready to lose permanently, and as quickly as possible, but Calvin wasn't one of them.
Stacey and I immediately headed for the door, intending to collect our personal vehicles and get the heck out of there before we ran into Nicholas or Kara. Unfortunately, we ran into Nicholas when he emerged from his office.
“How was the observation?” he asked.
“There wasn't much to observe,” I said.
“Your record-keeping shouldn't take long, then.”
I shook my head and headed toward my desk at the back corner of the room—I know a corner office is supposed to be nice, but that doesn't count when the corner is just cinder blocks. Also, an office would include a wall or two. All I had was a desk, zero privacy.
I had to fill out a description of the gear we'd set up, despite the fact that Hayden and Stacey also had to do that. Then I had to fill in a summary of our initial client interview, followed by a report of the first night there. Since I'd mostly just sat around waiting for any sign of the the ghost, and none had materialized, it didn't take long.
Then I headed upstairs. I started toward the cage elevator at one side of the workshop.
“Nobody goes upstairs!” Hayden called after me.
“Yeah, nobody but me.” I stepped into the elevator, closed the metal-mesh door, and moved the lever. The elevator car rattled as it rose toward the ceiling.
There was something I had to tell Calvin.
I emerged into a blank room, empty except for a row of boxes. Calvin hadn't let me help him with the packing for his upcoming move.
Hunter the bloodhound loped toward me from a back room, the fold
s of his jowls bouncing, his tail wagging.
“Hey, little guy,” I said, rubbing his head. “I'm going to miss you.”
Calvin entered the room next, stopping his wheelchair just past the doorway. We hadn't spoken much recently. It was hard to believe how much he'd withdrawn after selling the agency. Or maybe I'd gotten good at avoiding him.
We didn't rush to speak now. I regarded him—grizzled, unshaven, approaching sixty but with eyes that looked much older. He'd seen dark things in his time, pursued ghosts through the old city on his own for years before I'd joined up with him.
He deserved his chance to quit, to retire and watch his grandkid grow up. I didn't want to wreck his future plans for him.
On the other hand, what I had to tell him could have that exact effect. I wondered whether I was just being selfish, trying to keep him close to me. It's hard to read your own motives.
“Ellie,” he said. That was accurate enough, I suppose. That's my name.
“How's the moving out?” I asked. “You think you'll be in Florida by Thanksgiving?”
“Are you in a hurry for me to leave?”
“No. But I understand.” I sat down on a cardboard box. “There's something I should tell you. But don't think I'm trying to trick you into staying here or anything. I could use one last piece of advice here.”
“Is it Anton?”
“He's lying low as far as we can tell. The problem is...Kara.”
“Oh. Yes.”
“What does that mean?”
“You don't like the new organization taking over,” Calvin said. “Ellie, I've tried to explain—”
“You have explained it fine. Did you know Kara was a soulhook?”
“She is?” Calvin took this in. “That's...extremely rare. I've only heard a few accounts. Some of them very antiquated. Have you witnessed this?”
“I have.” I hesitated to go on. Calvin studied my face with his weary eyes.
“What was it like? The Book of Incantations describes it as like catching a fish in a river with your bare hands, by moonlight. Slippery and invisible, even to those who have the touch.”
I took a second to remember the book he'd referenced, a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript of which he had a copy. I'd seen images of the original, currently stored in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It resembled the kinds of books monks used to make, drawn in elaborate calligraphic Latin, but rather than being illustrated with images of saints and angels, the pages were adorned with illustrations of twisted, demonic creatures, vaguely humanoid with horns, fangs, and misshapen faces and bodies, their feet reptilian or cloven-hooved. I shivered to think of them. It was some serious Hieronymus Bosch-level sickness.
“Well, it was a lot like being a fish caught on a hook, actually,” I said, ready to let the truth out. Maybe it would make Calvin change his mind about leaving. I still wasn't sure whether I wanted to do that. If he stayed, that would be better for me, but worse for him. All he wanted anymore was to reconnect with his family. He'd shown very little interest in the pursuit of ghosts since the birth of his grandson down in Florida. Maybe I was being selfish by telling him. “I could feel her nails punching right through the center of my....well, my thoughts and feelings, everything. My consciousness. My soul.”
“She caught you?” Calvin looked perplexed. “How...?”
“Just ripped me right out through my face, pretty much. With her fingernails.”
“A soulhook is someone who can catch a ghost with no tools, no equipment,” he said. “Not even a medieval mirror box is required. You're saying she can do it to the living? Remove the soul from the body?”
“And stuff it back in again when she's done,” I said. “She threatened to stuff it into a ghost trap next time.”
“Why did you not tell me?” Calvin rolled closer, his face darkening. He was usually stoic on the outside, so this was a real storm of emotion from him. “Ellie?”
“You've sold the agency to monsters,” I said. I guess I wasn't in the mood for subtlety. “I've told you about their weird research experiments with ghosts—”
“—and I explained the necessity—but, Ellie, this is something on a different scale—”
“You made the choice to leave,” I said, and now I was the one biting back a rising of storm of emotion. “You're basically gone already. I didn't think you'd care.” I bit my lip before I could spill more of how I felt and risk turning into a pathetic weeping ball of...weeping patheticness, I guess.
"Are you hurt?" Calvin asked. "Did it cause any pain? Or lingering problems?"
"It hurt pretty badly. Like being impaled and humiliated at the same time...because she was looking right at me, while I was stuck there like a useless jellyfish on her fingernails." I shivered and felt sickness swirling in my guts. "Pain? Yeah. Lingering problems? You bet."
"Like what?"
"I'm like a dusty Wacky Wall Walker."
"What are you talking about?"
"Did you ever play with one? I guess not. They're like sticky, gummy little creatures, like a red octopus. The gimmick is you throw them against the wall and they stick for a second, but then gravity starts to pull them down. They seemed to walk down the wall. Gravity is competing against the sticky gunk on their tentacles."
"And so you're saying..." Calvin's eyebrows were up slightly, and he was looking at me like he really had no idea what I was saying.
"It works great at first," I said. "It really looks like it's walking its way down the wall. But eventually it gets covered in dust, carpet lint, dog hair, old Play-Doh crumbs, whatever you might have on your childhood floor. There's a little less sticky stuff available. Eventually it doesn't even stick to the wall because it's so covered in junk. So it just hits the wall and falls right to the floor."
Calvin continued gazing at me like he expected this to make sense sooner or later.
"So that's me," I said. "That's my soul. All covered in dust, not really sticking the way it did when it was new."
"Your soul...feels loose?"
"Well, I definitely feel a little distant from reality lately. A little dissociated. But I mean it literally. My soul sometimes slips out and goes wandering. I even traveled from my apartment to the hospital where Michael was. So that's about forty, fifty miles..."
"You're having out-of-body experiences?"
"Exactly. But I don't want to. I hate it. I just find myself floating out there and I have to dive back into my body. My soul's lost some of its sticky stuff, and I have to try harder to hold myself together."
"This is not good, Ellie. Someone with that kind of power, wielding it in such a way...did she give any reason for doing this to you?"
"She was just trying to establish dominance," I said. "Letting me know she's the boss. I guess it worked."
"That's insane," he said. "You should have told me right away."
"I thought about it. But I was worried you..." wouldn't care was the truth, but that would have revealed way too much of my own fear and insecurity. "...wouldn't understand," I said.
"Ellie, I understand astral projection perfectly well," he said, making me wince at the New Agey term.
"Anyway, I'm hoping the stickiness grows back. I definitely don't want to ask Kara for help with it. Or be in the same room with her ever again."
Calvin shook his head. "These people...I had no idea."
"Well, it's not your problem, anyway. Need help packing?"
"I can't leave things like this," Calvin said. "I researched PSI before selling the agency to them. They didn't seem so dark at the time."
"They were also offering you a big check, so that could color your opinion of them," I said.
Calvin sighed. "Perhaps they'll consider giving me a refund."
"Seriously? You would take the agency back over this?" I asked.
"Of course. How could I leave you and Stacey in such hands?" He shook his head. "Retirement may have to wait."
"But I know you want to move on. To be near your family."
<
br /> Calvin looked at me for a long moment. "Did you think I would knowingly abandon you to this kind of danger?"
"Well...you did knowingly abandon me," I said. "You know this work is dangerous."
"Which is why I repeatedly insisted that you avoid it. But you were a stubborn child. Camping out at my doorstep, insisting that this was your life's purpose—"
"And it is." I felt my back stiffen and rise as I said it. "And I'm going to continue whether you're here or not."
"I'm going to speak to them about reversing the sale," he said.
"Won't they miss you at the old folks' home where you were moving?"
"It's not an old folks' home." He looked mildly annoyed. "It's an age-restricted community."
"Right. Huge difference."
"Some of the homes are fully detached. With lawn areas."
"How about yours?"
"I'll lose my deposit." He shrugged. "Let's go downstairs."
"You don't want to talk about this with Kara," I said. "She'll rip your soul out through your nose."
"Nicholas, then."
"Nope, he's beneath her. Organizationally." I don't know why I felt the need to add that. "Um, so he'd just report it up to her."
"Octavia Lancashire," Calvin said. "I can call her office in Baltimore."
I nodded, recalling the graying, pinch-faced woman who'd been introduced as the general director of Paranormal Solutions, Inc. She had seemed no friendlier than Kara, in fact more threatening, her voice low and husky as a werewolf's.
"That's probably your best bet," I told him. "If there is a good bet. Maybe it would be safer..."
"Safer to do what?"
"Just let it lie," I said. I had a sudden stab of fear for him, what could happen to him if he crossed these people. "Maybe you should go, Calvin. They might...punish you."
"If that's the fear, then they certainly aren't people I want to leave you with," he said. "This whole situation needs to be straightened out."
"Do you really think they'll sell it back?" I asked. "Is there anything that requires them to? Kind of a buyer's remorse period?"
"I doubt it." Calvin sighed and looked out a dusty square window from which the curtains had been removed. The huge black PSI van sat out in the parking lot below. "What have I done to us?"
