by E. A. Copen
Nate cringed. “They brought him in with the rope still attached so I could see the pattern.”
The rope the guy used to hang himself with wasn’t ideal, but it’d work. It’d just suck to be me.
I held out my hand, and Nate placed the rope in my outstretched right hand. It was a good, strong rope. Braided manila. Could’ve held a guy five times his size. I’d have to burn it to summon the ghost, and I didn’t want to destroy evidence in an ongoing investigation. Once I explained that to Nate, he snipped a piece off the end instead and said he’d write it off as a sample collection. I placed the tiny bit of rope in the center of the circle and used a disposable lighter I’d acquired to light it up.
“John Holzgreif.” I held my hands over the dark smoke rising from the scrap of burning rope. “I summon thee forth. I command you to commune with me in the realm of the living.”
The candle flames surged higher. In the center of the circle, the rope’s fire flashed a brilliant green in response. Lights flickered.
I raised my voice in response. “I call forth the ghost of John Holzgreif! Appear before me!”
The figure that faded into existence over the rope was that of a timid pencil pusher type. He wore a pair of blue pajamas, though the colors had faded in death. A pair of bifocals rested askew on his nose. The dark ring of the noose still bruised his neck.
John’s eyes darted around the circle in a panic. “No, I’m dead! I’m dead!”
“Calm down.” I raised my hands. “You’re still dead, but we need to chat.”
“I’m…” He looked down at himself and patted his thin chest. “Why am I here? Shirley. Oh, God! The kids!” He gripped his face in horror. “What’ve I done?”
“You tell me, John,” I said.
His form sank to the floor cross-legged. “I-I killed them. I didn’t mean to. I loved them. How can I have done that? It’s too late. I don’t know why you brought me here. Send me back. I deserve that awful walk of punishment.”
Walk of punishment? “Let me guess. Burning wasteland with intermittent pits of horror?”
John nodded solemnly.
I almost spat. “Nobody deserves Naraka, John. Tell me what happened. Help me understand.”
He hugged himself and shuddered. “Why? What’s done is done. There’s no undoing it. All that remains is penance.”
“Because maybe your story will help someone else.”
The ghost looked up at me, pushed his glasses up his nose and sniffled. “It all started with nightmares.”
Chapter Five
The ghost of John Holzgrief trembled as he spoke. Nate couldn’t hear him, so I’d have to relay what he was saying afterward. I envied Nate; what John had to say was awful to hear.
“The first one was three weeks ago, the night of the third,” said the ghost, staring at the floor. “I don’t recall details, only that there was a terrible storm in the nightmare, and inside that storm, I sensed a dark presence.”
I held up a hand. “What do you mean, a dark presence?”
“Difficult to explain, but I knew something was there, watching. Waiting. Lurking. After that, my dreams were flood and fire, formless monsters lurking all around.” He shrugged. “It never stopped. After a week of almost no sleep, I found myself nodding off at work. One day, I woke up screaming in the middle of a meeting. They called me into H.R. Told me my performance had been slipping. I lost my job.”
“Fired for being too tired.” I shook my head. What had the corporate world come to? Jobs demanded that you sacrifice sleep for shitty wages and then let you go when you fell asleep at work. I was glad I worked for myself, however meager the money was. “Sorry, go on.”
John’s chest expanded as if he were taking a breath, though he wouldn’t need to. Maybe it was a habit. “I went to the doctor before the insurance could get canceled. She gave me some sleeping pills, but even when I took them, I had the most awful dreams. I started waking up paralyzed with this pressure on my chest like something was sitting on me. Waking up like that left me with such a sense of dread. I thought I was dying. It only got worse after the first time. The next night, it was there.”
So far, that sounded eerily similar to what I’d experienced the night before. “Can you describe it?”
John shook his head. “It was too terrible. Horrifying! Like something out of one of those awful horror movies. Buzzing wings. Long claws. A face like a giant fly. And it had this long tongue.”
A chill ran down my spine. That was exactly what I had seen. So, it wasn’t a dream.
The ghost swallowed. “It… fed on me. Right here.” He pressed a hand to his chest just below his sternum. “I couldn’t move. Couldn’t scream. Could barely breathe as it sucked my power right out.”
“Whoa, hold up there. Power?”
He nodded solemnly. “In life, I had a bit of magic. Not much, mind you. Barely enough to notice. But a little. I was in the same coven as Tim and Darnell. Maybe that’s why it happened. I should’ve quit, but they were the only ones who understood. The witches in the Quarter weren’t willing to even talk to us.”
“Tim and Darnell?” I glanced at Nate.
Nate shrugged and walked away to check something on the computer in the corner of the room.
I turned back to John. “Tell me more about this coven of yours.”
“Oh, we weren’t anything special. Met after work on Friday nights while our wives had their book club. Read books on magic theory. Dabbled a bit. Between the three of us, we could light a candle with a bit of chanting, but that was as serious as it got.”
I nodded and filed that bit of information away for later use. Could be whatever this was targeted John because of his involvement with magic. That would connect the attack on me and might explain Remy’s nightmares. If Emma’s were connected, though, it didn’t explain those. She didn’t have an ounce of magic.
I cleared my throat. “Okay, John. Nightmares. Job loss. You were stressed as hell. How’d that lead you to kill your family?”
“I didn’t mean to!” He put his head in his hands and sniffled. “After I lost my job and started seeing that thing, I started hallucinating too. I couldn’t tell if I was asleep or awake, not unless I was in pain, so I started carrying some of Shirley’s sewing needles with me. Every time I saw something, I’d prick my finger until it bled. I’d heard in a dream you don’t feel pain.”
That was a common misconception, especially when in a deep sleep. Some people slept so soundly, even needles under their fingernails didn’t wake them. He’d have been better off with a watch or a slip of paper. In dreams, the only two things you can’t do are read and tell time.
“That night,” John continued, “I took a double dose of my sleeping pills and went to sleep just like every other night. Woke up about two in the morning with my hands around Shirley’s neck. She was trying to get me off of her. Scratched me up good. I remember looking down at her and trying to stop. I loved my wife. But then her face transformed into that monstrous creature, and I knew I was dreaming. I screamed for it to leave me alone and held my hands tight until it quit fighting me. Then I got up to check on the kids. Except they weren’t my kids. The monster was back, and it was inside them. I-I had to get it out, you see.”
His eyes shifted to focus on something far off. “They never woke up. I knew how to do it so they wouldn’t have to suffer long. I was strong, a lot stronger than them. Children are such fragile things. I thought once they were all gone in the dream, I could wake up. But I never did. It turns out, I wasn’t asleep. Even after they were gone, I could still hear it, scratching around in my head. When I realized what I’d done and that the nightmare would never end, I put on my glasses, arranged my family so they would be found nice and neat, wrote a note explaining myself, and hanged myself. That’s everything.”
I thought I was going to be sick. Even though it wasn’t his fault, I couldn’t help hating this man for what he’d done. He’d murdered two innocent kids and his wife, people he was supposed to love an
d protect. There had to have been something he could’ve done, some way he could’ve prevented this from happening.
Hate the monster, Laz. Not the man. I took a deep breath. “Is there anything else I should know? Anything at all?”
John shook his head slowly and stopped, facing the swinging doors. “Please don’t disturb my family. They’ve suffered enough, and coming back isn’t easy. I deserve the pain, but they don’t.”
I nodded and released the spell binding him to this plane. “You can rest now.”
John’s form faded into nothing.
I closed the circle and glanced at Nate. “Anything on those names?”
He frowned and pushed away from the standing desk. “Well, if any of those names did match, I’d be prevented from telling you thanks to HIPAA laws and other laws governing the rights of the deceased. However, I’m not prohibited from telling you that, as a matter of public record, the second family massacre was the Williams family. Both the Tribute and the Advocate report a Darnell Williams as the perpetrator.”
“No Tim?”
Nate shook his head.
“Thanks, Nate,” I said, bending over to collect the candles.
“Don’t thank me. Thank Google.”
He put away the body while I swept up the salt and put away all the odds and ends. The connection was shaky at best. Two out of three of the killers belonged to this coven of male hedge witches, but the first one didn’t seem to, nor did I. Plus, I was way more powerful than your average hedge witch. Emma had said there was no connection in the families’ history, but if two of the three were hedge mages, and I had magic, then I was willing to bet the last one was gifted in some way too.
That gave me two things I knew about this monster. One, it targeted men with magic, and two, those men had families. It could be the pattern extended beyond that. Maybe there were single male wizards as victims too. They might not have been connected by the media and the police, but I had to consider all the possibilities.
When Nate came back, I asked if any other suicides had come in recently, specifically male suicides.
He frowned and waited for me to remove the ward on the door so we could pass. “Statistically, men are almost twice as likely to commit suicide, you know. But no, aside from those few cases, hasn’t been any in lately. I expect the number will spike over the holiday weekend, though. This is the time of year for them.”
I followed Nate to the elevator. Most people marked Thanksgiving with family and a big meal. Without family, it’d be a lonely time of year.
A pit opened in my stomach as I thought of my father’s body again, lying in the prison morgue. Normally whenever I thought of him, I hated him, but that time, I felt guilty. For all the terrible things he’d done, he was still a human. It’d always been my policy to treat the dead with respect. Just because I knew him, and knew what kind of person he was in life, did that make him undeserving of basic human decency? What’d it say about me that I was considering letting the state bury him in a cheap grave on prison grounds rather than taking responsibility? Him being a terrible father didn’t excuse my being a bad son.
“Lazarus?” Nate waved a hand in front of my face. “You okay?”
I blinked and shook my head clear of the cobwebs. “Yeah. Sorry. I was just wondering if maybe I shouldn’t look for connections outside New Orleans Parish. Maybe there’s a wider pattern I’m not seeing, especially if this extends outside the city proper.”
He tilted his head to the side and squinted at me from behind his glasses. “What makes you think that?”
My mouth opened and promptly snapped shut. Why was I thinking that? Just because my father committed suicide didn’t mean he was connected. He didn’t fit the profile. He hadn’t killed his family and had no magic. Plus, he’d been over a hundred miles away and behind bars. His death wasn’t connected.
Then again, he had hanged himself just like John. Sometimes, as killers got better at their work, they changed their M.O. No, the timeline didn’t fit that. No matter how I tried to make all the pieces fit, there was always one that wouldn’t.
I rubbed my face. “My father’s suicide. I’m wondering if it’s connected.”
“I’m really sorry to hear that.”
“I’m not,” I snapped. “He’s been dead to me a long time. I just wish he’d done it some other time. I can’t focus on all this. His ghost keeps getting in the damn way.”
Nate paled. “His… ghost?”
“No, not his literal ghost.”
Although, that was possible. Electronics going off on their own, strange dreams, the feeling of a presence, general unease… Those were all signs of a haunting. That’d be like him too, haunt me after death. At least that was something I knew how to deal with.
I sighed. “Just feels like there’s a connection is all.”
“You know if you need someone to talk to, just to unpack this, you can always call.”
The hallway suddenly felt awkward and small. I cleared my throat, stared at the floor, and nodded. “Thanks.”
“Anytime. And don’t let Leah scare you. She wouldn’t be so hard on you if she didn’t like you, you know.”
He walked me to the side exit of the building rather than the front. It was almost nine, and he was expecting D.J. to come in at any time. Neither of us wanted to run into him.
At the door, he paused. “I don’t pretend to know how your powers work, or to understand how hard this is for you, but—”
“You’re going to suggest I talk to his ghost.”
He nodded.
I tucked my hands into my pockets and stared through the glass door at the parking lot outside. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I’d avoided talking to the man for going on two decades. The last time we spoke, he’d been screaming at me for crying. I’d accidentally risen my dog Buddy from the dead back before I knew what I was doing. My old man shot my dog, dismembered him, and then burned the corpse to ash. I was twelve. Of course, I was upset. But he had it in his head what I really needed was a good beating to teach me a lesson.
My resolve hardened. “Why? He’s dead. He died the way he lived, as a worthless, unapologetic criminal. Talking to him after death isn’t going to convince him to apologize for mistreating me.”
Nate frowned. “I’m not saying you should expect an apology. That’s unlikely. But it’s clear this is hurting you. You’re not going to heal this wound unless you address it.”
“I’m not forgiving him.”
“You don’t have to. But you do have to forgive yourself.” Nate clasped my shoulder and squeezed. “Nothing you did or didn’t do would’ve changed how he treated you. Dead or alive, that’s on him. Kids aren’t responsible for earning their parents’ love. Whatever you think you could’ve done to get him to love you, forgive yourself for not doing it and accept that it wasn’t the case. His inability to care doesn’t devalue you as a person, and it doesn’t make his death unworthy of grieving. We are, all of us, worthy of love.”
I didn’t say anything. What was there to say? Just remembering all the shit that Bill Kerrigan had done made me too angry to think. I hated him more than anyone. If I accepted what Nate was saying, I had to accept that my father mattered. It was easier to dismiss him as if he’d never existed. Yet his death had thrown him front and center into my life, and now everyone wanted to act like I owed him something. He was the man who’d beaten me so bad I nearly died. I didn’t owe him shit.
But maybe I owed someone else a little something. “Thanks, Nate. For everything.”
He nodded and pushed open the door for me. “Any time. Good luck at the dinner with Emma’s family.”
I walked to my car, wishing the weather would match my mood. The gray morning had begun to dissipate. Sun peeked through the clouds, and gulls called in the distance. Cars drove by in a steady beat. The city came alive while I was dead inside.
I sat in my car for a long minute, deciding what to do. It was Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. Eve
ryone else would be rushing around to prepare for their feasts. The roads would be packed. That was a good reason to call it an early day, right?
No, if I head home and try to nap, I’ll just lay there feeling guilty, I thought and pulled out my phone.
A quick search on the internet to find a phone number and a couple of taps later, a man picked up on the other end. “Correctional Institute for Women. How can I direct your call?”
“Hello, my name’s Lazarus Kerrigan. Can you tell me what your visiting hours are today?”
Chapter Six
The Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women was a stone’s throw from Elayne Hunt where I’d been incarcerated or about twenty miles south of Baton Rouge. It’d been a long time since I’d made that particular drive, and it left me with plenty of time to reflect on that fact.
While I hadn’t seen my father since that fateful day, I had seen my mother a handful of times. She was doing life for a handful of felonies thanks to the repeat offender law. Unlike dear old Dad, we used to talk once a month before I went inside. When I went to prison, I was so broken up over my failure that we fell out of contact. She sent me two letters while I was in lockup, neither of which I answered. I hadn’t seen or heard from her since.
At the prison, after turning in my keys, wallet, and cell phone at the check-in station, the guard walked me to a long room set up with plastic tables in a row. Cheap plastic chairs attached to the tables in a way that was meant to seem decorative. It made them look like kindergarten tables. Cameras watched me from every corner as I scanned the room and took in the familiar personalities. There was the weeping woman prisoner in one corner, desperately gripping the hands of a boyfriend or brother across the table from her. A wizened middle-aged type sat in the middle of the room, arms crossed, talking to an appeals lawyer, the kind with the cheap suit and bad cologne. From the look on her face, she didn’t want to be there. The grandma holding her grandbaby, the lady sitting nervously, waiting for someone who said they’d come but probably wouldn’t… They were all familiar to me, though I’d been housed with their male equivalents.
