by JL Bryan
“What would you know of such things? I cast you out!” She raised a hand.
“Yeah, that won't work so well this time. I'm here in the flesh now.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Stacey arrive. She didn't say a word, but began tying a rope to the railing. “You know what else I figured out?” I said to Matty's ghost, desperate to keep her distracted. “When you put that light out...that's what led to the ship crashing out there. That's why all those angry shipwrecked spirits keep hanging around. It wasn't the storm that put out the light. It was you, setting the murder trap for your husband. The ship crashed because of you. They died because of you. That was even lucky for you, wasn't it? Because your husband's mistress was probably counted as one more unidentified body from the shipwreck.”
Matty moved closer and closer as I spoke. I kept my hand on my flashlight, ready to blast her with thousands of lumens, but I doubted that would help much against a powerful ghost in her own lair. The artificial super-bright sunbeam can be an irritant to ghosts, but doesn't really harm them. They can ignore it if they're angry enough or focused enough, and she seemed to be both.
Her apparition was incredibly sharp now, the way I'd seen her when I was out of my body. I could make out the stitching on her white dress, hear the creak of her boots.
Behind her, Stacey was double-checking the little girl's life jacket. Stacey had knotted ropes around her hips; that was how she'd spent her time waiting for Hayden to ferry me over and come back for her.
The interior of the lighthouse was Matty's domain, and it would have been risky, I thought, to try and carry Steffy down into the still-rising water flooding the lighthouse and try to get her out through the underwater window through which I'd entered, which was certainly even deeper underwater by now.
So, instead of doing that stupid thing, we were trying this other stupid thing. There hadn't been a lot of time to plan this out, and I hoped nobody died along the way.
“You do not belong here,” Matty said.
“Neither do you,” I replied.
Enraged, she backhanded me. I felt nothing at all when her ghostly hand passed through my face, as insubstantial as a film projection on a screen. The ghostly psychokinetic energy actually hit a second later, and that was very real. I was lifted up and back against the wall, pinned to it by invisible forces like a kid riding the Gravitron at the county fair.
“This isn't the first time you tried to kill me,” I said. “Do you remember when I was a kid? I almost drowned down there. You saw me. Maybe it was you holding me underwater.”
“I don't need you anymore,” she said.
“How did you cross the ocean to reach Steffy inside the house? You must have quite a long reach. Long enough to hold me underwater when I was a child, while you looked down on me from up here. And maybe that's why your enemies were all so close to the house tonight. Maybe they saw what you were doing. Maybe they were trying to stop you from taking the girl.”
“The girl is mine,” she said. “She belongs here...with...” Matty's image flickered as she turned away.
I steeled myself, ready to bear the brunt of her fury. Hoping to bear it, honestly, because the alternative was for her to go chasing after Steffy and Stacey.
Stacey had taken the girl and gone rappelling down the outside of the tower. The girl was tied around her. Both of them were anchored to the rope knotted to the old railing. My job was to keep Matty away from that rope until Stacey could reach Hayden down in the water and hand the girl over to him.
Matty let out an enraged howl, her body going transparent. She moved toward the knotted rope, and so did I. We looked over the railing.
Stacey was about twenty feet below, with twenty more feet to go before she reached the water and the waiting jet ski. The choppy water rose and fell; Hayden was barely keeping his balance.
“I can still have her,” Matty said. “I will have them both.”
She reached for the knotted rope. I moved to block her, putting my whole body in front of the knots that were keeping the girls aloft.
Her icy hand reached right through my stomach.
“Stop,” I grunted. The dark sockets of her eyes were close to mine, her mouth turned down into a deep frown. Her presence was freezing cold. Her fingers in my stomach felt like icicles piercing through my guts and my spine as she cut at the ropes behind me. “You don't have to...stay here.” Now my lungs were getting cold and freezing up, making it hard to breathe. “You can...move on. The light has been out...for a hundred...years...”
Matty didn't seem interested in moving on, though.
“You do not understand duty,” she said. Her sharp fingers tightened their clutch inside my stomach, and then she began to lift me up. My feet left the floor, and the pain in my gut became excruciating, my entire body weight hung there like I'd been stuck with a spear and lifted into the air.
I couldn't help screaming.
Energy drained from me, making my body go slack, and the lantern of the lighthouse began to glow again with a pale blue light. She was using me as her fuel source now.
“Stop,” I whispered, but it didn't seem likely that she would.
She didn't stop. Neither did she cackle triumphantly, with that eerie bone-scratching laugh the dead sometimes have. There was no mirth in her, not even of the cruel variety. She had her principles and she followed them mechanically. Emotions were background irritants. I'd read her journal and learned what she was like on the inside.
But now she was on my inside, easing me up and then backward, balancing me on the railing as she'd done with her husband's lover, maybe preparing to throw me into the ocean.
With another good shove, she could send me flying down to my very likely death.
I looked down. Stacey and the girl had made some more progress—they were maybe five or ten above the surface of the water. It was hard to judge exactly, peering through rain at a scene illuminated only by intermittent lightning. But it looked like they were moving. That was good. It was good to know they were probably going to survive; it would be a comforting thought as I died here at Matty's hands.
“Let go of me,” I whispered.
“No.” Her grip tightened, and I realized she wasn't going to throw me into the water; she was going to just kill me here, gouging and crushing my insides with her icicle fingers.
That sounded like a worse way to die than drowning.
“Fine,” I said. “Then hold on tight.”
I pushed off the railing and fell backwards toward the black, frothy waters below. I fell with the sheets of rain. Lightning cracked directly over the tower, seeming to strike the narrow point of the lighthouse roof above.
Matty kept her grip on my guts. Her pale, white face was close to mine, her white-blond hair streaming out behind her, her dark eye sockets widening.
Perhaps she realized, at that last instant, what was about to happen. Or maybe she didn't see it coming. Either way, it was too late for her.
I smashed into the water. After a fall of thirty or forty feet, it felt like concrete.
Then we plunged deep under water, Matty and I. My flashlight rotated slowly as it sank to the bottom, providing a very small amount of visibility as it went down. Just enough to create a world of watery shadows instead of complete darkness.
Then the dead arrived.
Henrietta appeared first, greenish-white and bloated, seaweed trailing from the chains coiled around her. She reached out one chained arm, dragging a rusty anchor behind it, and approached Matty as if to seize her.
The others emerged all around me, some of their faces rotten down to bare skulls, others looking recently drowned. Several wore rusty chains.
All of them were victims of Matty's murder plot, inadvertently killed so Matty could make her husband's death look like an accident in the storm.
Matty had put out the light, creating the darkness that led them to crash and drown.
Now they surrounded her.
The water spun so fast that I lost track of
which way was up. Corpses seemed to swarm all around me. I tried to remind myself they were only apparitions.
They felt solid, though. Slick and cold, like dead fish, but solid.
I tried to swim away, but something was caught around my leg. A rusty chain. It was Henrietta's, attached to the anchor that had dragged her down to the ocean floor.
My air was running out fast, and I was so turned around in the dark water that I wasn't even sure which way to go. Matty had drained me pretty badly before the fall.
I grabbed at the chain, barely able to see it, and began pulling at it, trying to figure out how to unwrap it. It clung to me like a snarl of seaweed. My fingers scrabbled over the rusty surface, unable to accomplish much of anything.
The water shifted and grew colder. I was swept backward as if by a sudden strong tide.
The cluster of the dead grabbed Matty with their rotten hands, crowding in around her, ready to tear her apart.
All around, in the dim gloom afforded by my sunken flashlight, I watched as long, thick shadows rose from the ocean floor. Slimy, rotten timbers pulled themselves upright around the crowd of the dead. Sheets of ripped, hole-ridden cloth unfurled from them.
The crowd of the dead were surrounded by bits and pieces of a wrecked ship, pulling itself into a skeletal frame. Giant holes gaped in the sides, but I could at least discern the very clear shape of a boat now. The dead were inside it, their skin rotten, their bones bare, a true skeleton crew. At the moment, running out of air and close to death myself, it was hard to appreciate the pun. It seemed like I might be joining them after all.
I watched the apparition of the broken ship drag its way along the ocean floor, pulled by an invisible current that I could not feel at all.
The wreckage and its dead passengers moved westward, up the river channel, the way the ship was meant to go before it crashed. West, the direction of sunset and death.
The ship faded from sight after traveling several yards, resolving into the darkness of the underwater world as though it had never been there at all.
That left me, hanging out with no air and a ghostly chain wrapped around my body.
Henrietta floated toward me, her flesh greenish-white and waterlogged, rotten and nibbled by fish. This must have been how Steffy had seen the ghostly woman in her bedroom. No wonder the girl had been terrified.
The chain pulled me forward.
I closed my eyes. I was trapped here—whatever happened now was beyond my power. I'd done my best to save the girl. I hoped we'd succeeded there, since it looked like I was about to pay for her life with my own.
Darkness closed in, and I moved faster, letting the chain take me where it would, since I couldn't get free of it.
I crashed through the surface. Air rushed in through my nose and lips, flooding my lungs.
When my eyes opened, I found myself moving toward the shore. The chain was towing me into shallow waters.
I stopped not far from the back patio, on my hands and knees in a few inches of salt water. I'd been pulled almost all the way out of the ocean. The rusty chain was gone from my leg now, completely vanished.
Unable to hold myself up, I collapsed facedown into the water, only a couple of feet from the lights of the house. I was all out of strength, too weak to even lift my head. I very well could have died there, drowning in water no deeper than a puddle, but a pair of large, strong, warm hands lifted me out. Delavius.
As he carried me toward the light, I succumbed to the darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I woke sometime later. It was still dark and raining outside, and my head felt like someone had slammed a few sturdy bricks against it. My whole body was throbbing. Matty had really taken a chunk out of me. My chest ached the most, I decided, probably from that whole near-drowning situation earlier.
Gradually, I sorted out that I was wrapped in a blanket, lying on the huge couch in Alyssa's living room, my cheek resting on something scratchy and warm. Stacey's denim-clad lap, I realized as I looked up at her. She was dozing a bit, too, her eyes closed.
The lights were out in the room, but electric light came from surrounding rooms. Shadowy shapes stood at the glass wall, looking out at the rainy night. Alyssa and her sisters. They weren't fighting at the moment.
“The girl,” I whispered. My voice was raspy. My nostrils and throat felt caked with salt. I like salt as a garnish, but this was a little much. “Where's the girl?”
“Huh?” Stacey's eyes fluttered. Her fingers stroked my stiff, salty hair. “Hey, Ellie.”
“Where's the little girl?”
“Upstairs,” she whispered. “She's fine. Zonked out like you.”
“Good.”
“You'll have to explain what happened out there,” she said. “When you're feeling up to it.”
“I'm not sure I understand all of it myself.” I coughed, and this drew the attention of the three sisters at the window. Three sisters, I thought, like the fates in ancient Greek myth. Or Cinderella and her two evil stepsisters. My brain felt a bit unhinged.
“Ellie, thank you,” Alyssa said. “For saving my niece. I can't imagine what would have happened if y'all weren't here.”
“Thank you,” Tammy said. “Y'all saved my little girl.”
“Everybody lived? Nobody died?” I asked.
“You came closest,” Stacey said. “I thought we lost you out there. How'd you make it all the way back to shore?”
“It was really a...chain of events,” I said, giving up on trying to speak too much right now.
“If there's ever anything I can do for you,” Alyssa said. “Just let me know.”
“There's one,” I said. “Any chance I can just lie right here for the rest of the night? I'm not sure I can move. My bones feel like lead.”
“Of course, honey,” Alyssa replied, more of her native accent slipping into her tone. “I'll have the chef come out and make breakfast in the morning.”
“I'll make breakfast,” Penny said. The oldest sister finally looked at Alyssa with something that was neither anger nor contempt. “I'm cheaper.”
“Me, too,” Tammy said. “We'll all help. That's how family works.”
“Great, great.” I half-waved my hand, uselessly and pointlessly, trying to recognize that they'd found a little note of reconciliation among themselves, having gone through this family crisis together and all that. Then I closed my eyes.
I suppose Henrietta had been trying to warn us about danger to come. She had appeared to Steffy, the girl Matty had intended to kidnap and transform into the new lighthouse keeper—a courtesy paid by past victim to intended future victim of Matty, I supposed. And Henrietta's green, dripping apparition had also appeared to Alyssa, the new owner of the place, in an extra attempt to warn everyone. Finally, Henrietta had helped me out of those stormy waters—regardless of her rusty chain wrapping around my leg, there was no way I could have swum to land in my exhausted condition, in those treacherous waters. Henrietta had saved my life. I hoped she'd been able to move on herself now.
I thought about when I'd visited as a child. It must have been the ghost of Matty trying to drown me, reaching out with her psychokinetic powers just as she'd reached across the water to grab Steffy out of the house through the window. Maybe she'd wanted to drown me so my spirit would join her...maybe she would have tried to make me the new keeper. She seemed unwilling to let herself move on without finding a fresh replacement for her duties.
Before I slipped again into unconsciousness, I managed to open my eyes one last time. Through the glass wall, I could see the waters had receded some. Moonlight fell on the lighthouse from a break in the rain clouds.
The tower was dark again, as it was now meant to be. It would stand there unlit from that night until the time of its destruction, whether by human hands or by wind and water. It belonged to a lost age, a time that was already being forgotten, an empty shell without a purpose, without even ghosts to haunt it anymore.
I closed my eyes and dre
amed.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Breakfast, prepared by the Starch family, was utterly free of kale, arugula, or other snooty ingredients. There was fresh fruit, pancakes, homemade biscuits made by the clan's grandmother that pretty much blew my mind.
The long sleep and potent meal, accompanied by coffee, left me energized, eager to help break down and pack up all our cameras and other gear.
Once it was all loaded into the huge black PSI van, I shook Hayden's hand. We stood in the driveway, along with Stacey, enjoying a sunny break in the days-long rain. The house, trees, and stone pavement were all shiny and wet, having enjoyed a deep scrubbing from the sky. Some birds were chirping. The ocean lapped peacefully against the shore.
“You really came through again,” I said to Hayden. “Nice job with the Waverunner.”
“Heck yeah it was,” Hayden said. “But you know that wasn't anything. You came down the hard way from that tower.”
“Good thing I had a pack of angry ghosts reaching upward to break my fall,” I said.
“Maybe I had a rope, but I also had a kid, you know. So I probably deserve a medal.” Stacey looked at Hayden. “I don't mind working with you too much, you know that? Even if you do look just like David Duchovny.”
“I look like David Hasselhoff,” he said, annoyed.
“He admitted it!” Stacey jumped up and down, pointing at him. “Did everyone hear that?”
“Personally, I'm ready to go home and crash—” I began, casting a longing look toward my old Camaro.
“Uh, one thing,” Hayden said. “I just got a message from the office. We all have to report there right now. Kara wants to see us.”
“Seriously?” Stacey scowled. “After a night like that? Besides, I didn't get any message—” Then her phone beeped.
Then mine did, too.
“Ugh,” I said. “Let's just get it over with or she'll come break down the door to my apartment.”
