by JL Bryan
A folded piece of brittle, yellowed paper lay among the fragments.
“It looks like this was hidden inside the back cover,” I said. “Matty, or somebody, pasted liner paper over it.”
Stacey held her flashlight for me while I lifted the paper and unfolded it, forcing myself to move slowly, slowly, to avoid ripping it or worse, making it crumble into illegible fragments.
“My dearest Henrietta,” Stacey murmured, reading over my shoulder. “Hold the freaking telegram. Have we run across a Henrietta on this case yet?”
“I can check the notes later,” I said. “But I don't think so.”
We continued to read:
I was so pleased to find your last note - I am not a man of words but your letter was poetry, and would truly arouse any man's ardor – your beauty - I can not wait to touch you again – and will hold you firm to your promise to give me the finest crabs, clams, and oysters out of your husband's next catch -
“So she was a fisherman's wife!” Stacey said. “The mystery lover. Henrietta the fishwife.”
Lightning cracked outside, disturbingly close. I heard a crash, like a huge limb falling to the ground, or maybe a whole tree.
“Why would this be in Matty's journal, though?” I asked.
“Maybe Matty found it and discovered he was having an affair,” Stacey said. “Maybe he died and never delivered it. Let's keep reading!”
The sailors say a great storm is coming - I have seen many, and they overspeak the danger of this. Meet me in the tower to-morrow night – and we shall again repeat those things that you described so fully in your last letter – you must come or I will suffer – wait for me there, and I shall use the storm as reason to stay there with you until the sun returns – you shall be my sun in the night, and the return of day shall bring only darkness as you leave me – meet me there to-morrow night – my love
Your obedient and faithful servant,
Wm. H. Verish
“You know, it's funny,” Stacey said. “You've had that book in your hands all this time, and it was already falling apart, but you almost totally missed the most important part.”
“I still wonder how this letter fell into Matty's hands, and why she concealed and kept it this way,” I said. “And why William's ghost wanted me to see it. Assuming that ghost is him, which is where we are at this point.”
“Well, he definitely wanted you to see it,” Stacey said.
“If he wanted me to see it any harder, it would have snapped my sternum. Which way did he go?”
Stacey pointed, and we ran. The house was still cold.
I checked each room with the handheld scanner. By the time we reached the huge living room, the scanner's power was fading, and the screen flickered. I slapped the side of it as if that would help.
Lightning and thunder continued outside, closer than ever now.
“Uh, Ellie?” Stacey said, stepping closer to the glass wall.
“Hang on. This thing's fizzling out. So much for PSI and all their fancy tech.”
“Ellie, you should probably, uh, come look at this...”
“What is it?” I moved closer to where she stood at the glass wall. I could see nothing through it. The night outside might as well as have been an ocean of black ink.
Then lightning flashed, and I saw.
The churning, foaming water had risen. It wasn't even peak high tide yet, but nobody had told the ocean. Dark water had swallowed the entire beach. Most of the rock jetty was out of sight, the boulders submerged. The garden area was flooded. Salt water reached all the way up to the back patio, only a few feet away.
“Wow,” I said when it fell dark again. “That's...some serious floodwater.”
“No,” Stacey said, her voice very quiet.
“You don't think that's serious? If it rises any higher, this house is going to turn into a saltwater aquarium.”
“I mean...that's not even...the water's just part of it.”
I looked again, waiting for the next burst of lightning to fire up the night.
When it did, I barely held in a scream.
They were out there, looking in.
I didn't have time to count, but there were somewhere around ten people out there. All of them wore decaying rags, their bodies pale and bloated, their faces rotten. Some had chains around their arms and legs.
They stood along the edge of the patio, where the water had risen. The ocean had moved close to the house in the storm...so they gathered close, too. I had no doubt that if the house flooded, the ghosts would come right in.
They vanished with the lightning.
“Okay,” I said, more than a little shaken. “So, we want to keep those guys outside—”
Then it was time for tonight's scream—long, high-pitched, and ending abruptly in a way I didn't like at all.
We rushed up the swaying spiral of the back stairs, and we even beat Delavius to the upstairs hall.
The scream didn't repeat. The three of us checked into the bedrooms with our flashlights, since the power was still out.
I opened one door and found Dotty in her bedroom, snoring. The scream hadn't woken her, and neither did my light. In the next room, Penny unleashed profanity at Stacey for waking her up, so I supposed she was unharmed, too.
Delavius checked on Alyssa, then Zoe. Alyssa was still up. That wasn't surprising. She had the memory of the rotten dead woman walking into her room to keep her company at night.
Tammy and her younger kids were awake in their suite, but groggy and confused.
“Who screamed?” Tammy asked, while picking up the crying little baby. Kyle blinked around, rubbing his eyes.
“Ellie!” Stacey shouted, at the top of her lungs. I could hear the edge of panic in her voice, and I knew she'd found something wrong.
I ran over to meet her.
She stood in the little bedroom where eight-year-old Steffy had slept.
The window was shattered, that was the first thing I noticed. Rain poured in from outside, soaking the carpet. Broken glass lay everywhere, glinting in the beams of our flashlights.
The second thing I noticed was that Steffy was gone.
“Her bed's soaked,” Stacey said. “It can't be from the rain, the window's way over there. And, anyway, it's definitely not rain water...”
I moved closer, looking at the bed with her. Steffy had been replaced by a puddle of rank, murky ocean water, sand, seaweed, and broken oyster shells.
Twisted sheets, blankets, and damp pillows were strewn across the floor, between the bed and the broken window.
I ran to the window and leaned out, sweeping my flashlight over the yard below. Visibility was poor. Steffy wasn't down there, as far as I could see, but I couldn't see very far.
Behind me, Tammy began screaming for her daughter.
“Come on.” I grabbed Stacey, and we ran downstairs and out in the downpour. The broken window looked out on the front lawn and driveway, so we searched out there, sloshing through rainwater that was ankle-deep and much colder than I would have expected from a tropical storm.
We found no sign of Steffy on the ground, though any sign of impact or footprints in the mud would've been washed away almost instantly. On the bright side, we didn't find Steffy's corpse lying down there with a broken neck, so things could have been worse.
“Where is she?” Tammy was close behind, frantically looking for her daughter in the darkness and pounding rain. She yelled the girl's name over and over.
A cold hand grabbed my shoulder.
I cried out as I turned and jabbed the flashlight, hoping to drive back whatever spirit had grabbed me. It wasn't a spirit, though, unless David Hasselhoff had died a sudden, tragic death and his ghost had for some reason flown straight to Tybee Island, Georgia.
It was Hayden, cold and wet from the rain, having just run through it from the van.
“Are the monitors working yet?” I asked, yelling to be heard over the storm.
“No, but that is.” He pointed up
at the roofline of the house.
I followed his finger with my gaze, then backed up for a better look.
“Whoa,” Stacey said.
“Yeah,” I replied.
Tammy, standing alongside us, looked but said nothing, her mouth open.
Every night of the investigation, the lighthouse had stood there, a dark tower visible only by the stars that it blotted out or the lightning that temporarily lit it up. Not tonight.
“Has it...ever done that before?” Delavius asked, startling me as he joined up.
“Not in a hundred years,” Tammy said.
High above, a flickering light glowed within the lantern room of the lighthouse. It wasn't a bright beacon, but pale and weak. Bluish. Ghostly light.
“Does anybody have binoculars?” I whispered.
“I do,” Delavius said.
We all ran through the house in just a few seconds. Through the glass wall at the back, we could see the huge swells of the ocean crashing against the lighthouse, sometimes swallowing more than half the tower. Foamy water ran over the patio stones, too.
I didn't see the dead people out there, but there was no reason to believe they'd gone away.
Delavius opened the door and looked out at the mysteriously glowing pinnacle of the lighthouse through the binoculars. Then he shook his head and passed them to me. “I can't see anything with all the rain.”
When I looked through, I had the same problem. I could see the blurry, ghostly glow of the lighthouse, but not much else. I tried to focus on the railing and the lantern room area, but it was hopeless.
“You don't think...?” Tammy gaped up at the light. “You don't think Steffy's up there somehow, do you?”
“I don't know,” I said. “Everybody...search the houses inside and out. Try to find her.”
“What are you going to do?” Stacey asked.
“I'm going to try and get a better look at the lighthouse. Come with me.”
While everyone else searched, I led Stacey up into the bedroom where Steffy had been. Rain continued pouring in through the window.
“Smells awful,” Stacey said, holding her nose while she looked at the puddle on the bed again.
I dipped my fingers into the dirty, salty water and then held it to my nose, wincing at the rancid smell. It wasn't like water scooped right from the free-flowing ocean—it was more like something that had been trapped inside a vault for years, stagnating, breeding slime and exotic bacteria.
“Ew!” Stacey said. “Why are you doing that?”
“I'm hoping it will put me in touch with the girl, or with whatever took her,” I said.
“Why would the ghosts want to take Steffy? I get they have a grudge against the light-keeper's family because of the shipwreck, but—”
“Right now, I'm not worried about why, I'm worried about where. Keep a lookout, Stacey.” I sat down on the floor and leaned back against the wall.
“A lookout?”
“Make sure no nasty ghosts show up and bother me, or try to possess me while I'm out.” I closed my eyes. “I'm going for a closer look at the lighthouse.”
“How are you going to look without your eyes? Or...oooh! You're going to do astral projection?”
“Please don't call it that,” I said, without opening my eyes. “New Age terms kind of bother me.”
“Okay...so you're going on a meditative spirit journey—”
“I'm stepping out of my body,” I said. “Just for a sec, so I can fly over the water without getting drowned.”
“Isn't that dangerous? Especially with all those angry ghosts out there?”
“Less dangerous than trying to swim in those huge storm waves. We'd probably drown before reaching the lighthouse.”
“But if the shipwreck ghosts grab you and you can't make it back to your body—”
“Then I'll be dead,” I said. “Or my body will continue in a persistent vegetative state. So wish me luck.”
“Be lucky.” She squeezed my hand.
I concentrated.
Here, I met a problem. I'd never deliberately left my body behind. I'd been ripped out by Kara and, after she'd loosened me up, by Aldous the Mysterious and his tricky fingers. I'd found myself drifting out of body in my sleep. This was new, though.
I wasn't sure what to do, but I had to figure it out fast. Getting the girl to safety was all I cared about at the moment. For all we knew, she could be under the water somewhere, already drowning...or already drowned.
I took a deep breath and tried to calm my mind. Then I tried to remember what I'd done before, how I'd willed myself from the old theater to Kara's house. I hadn't pictured the building or the location I wanted to visit, but the person.
I conjured up an image of Steffy and focused on it as fully as I could. It was hard trying to calm my mind down when the little girl was in some unknown danger.
Slowly...painfully slowly...I began to rise. I felt myself rise up and up, toward the ceiling. Everything was completely dark.
I had no eyelids to open, but I imagined opening my eyes, and suddenly I could see the room clearly, more so than my actual physical eyes had been able to manage in the intermittent glow of lightning.
Stacey crouched on the floor, next to my body as it sagged against the wall. She couldn't stop me from falling over, but she made sure it happened in a slow, controlled way, cupping my head in one hand as she eased it down to the carpet.
I moved through the walls, already drifting toward the lighthouse outside as if pulled by a current.
Outside, I passed over the huge, churning swells of water, and the heavy rain lashed right through me. Lightning cracked all over the sky.
Pale, angry faces looked up at me from just beneath the surface of the water. They were crowded together and reaching up at me with their bloated, greenish-white arms, some of them dripping with rotten seaweed, some of them bound in rusty chains. I'd seen them as apparitions on the back patio, but now they seemed real and solid as if they were alive and physically present. My perception of ghosts tends to be much sharper when I'm traveling around in ghostly form myself.
The faces and hands below were horrifying, and I began to slow and sink, as though my fear were weighing me down.
I looked back toward the house. My form was little more than a suggestion of mist—if I'd been an apparition, I would have called myself a very weak one. The living couldn't even see me at the moment, not unless they had psychic powers.
A faintly glowing line, again almost too dim to see, stretched back across the water to inside the house, keeping my soul connected to my body. I'd read about that in books about out-of-body experiences. It could lead you back to your body if your wandering soul got lost...but if it got severed, you could be cut off from your body permanently. Dead. You'd be dead.
Knowing all this, it wasn't exactly comforting to see the decayed hands of the dead rising from the water and reaching for the spectral tether like cats clawing at a long, long strand of yarn.
I panicked a little at the sight of that, and sank even closer to the water. I seemed to grow less substantial the farther I traveled from my body, like I was unspooling my spiritual substance as the tether lengthened, getting weaker the whole time.
Maybe my previous experience, confronting Kara while I was fueled by a dangerously high amount of stolen soul power, had made me reckless and arrogant. I'd thought I would just fly out to the tower and back, never mind all the dangerous entities in between, never mind that I was pursuing a girl they'd gone to a lot of trouble to steal.
The panic and fear continued weighing me down, and the crashing, storm-whipped water over the ocean swelled toward me. The hands of the dead reached up from the water as I sank toward them. They looked ready to receive me, to devour me. I wonder if they knew I was a morsel they'd just barely missed years ago.
Steffy, I thought. Focus. Where is she?
I conjured the girl's face in my mind, in the greatest detail I could manage. It probably would've helped if I'd
known her a little better or a little longer. We didn't have the same psychic connection that Kara and I unfortunately seemed to share, so it wasn't quite as easy or fast.
As I concentrated on the little girl, I moved forward again, energized by having a clear motive. I willed myself up and away from the roiling water and the restless dead who seemed to want me to join them in their watery grave.
I passed through the wall of the lighthouse and floated up, up, past the area I'd been able to see through the barred doorway, up through the spiral stairs. The ocean water outside sounded like the fists of some watery giant pounding on the tower, the booms of immense wave impacts echoing up and down the high enclosed space.
Water gushed in through the little arched window, I noticed as I rose past it. At low tide, that window was forty or fifty feet above the ground. The interior of the lighthouse was flooded, the water level rising and rising, swallowing the interior stairs. I wondered if it would rise all the way to the top if the storm grew intense enough, turning the lighthouse into a giant water fountain.
Someone was on the upper stairs, walking ahead of me. He looked like a broad-shouldered shadow.
I got a closer look as I rose up through the lighthouse. He wore a dark uniform with a boxy hat. Up close, he was no longer a shadow. I could see the face, weathered by salt and sun, the dark beard just starting to be touched with gray.
He made no response to my presence, but reached the very top of the stairs and headed outside.
I hurried to follow. There was no door at the top, just a few hinges and bits of rotten wood clinging to the doorway.
We emerged onto the walkway that encircled the top of the lighthouse.
“This will be your job,” a woman's voice was saying, which startled me. She stood at the railing, dressed all in white, her hair blowing in the breeze. She was a tall, strong-looking woman. I wouldn't have wanted to get into a fight with her, but it looked like that was exactly what would happen. Because Steffy stood just beside her, soaking wet, shivering, looking naturally terrified of the storm all around us, the long drop to the dangerous ocean, the dead woman standing beside her...overall, not a great night for Steffy.
