by JL Bryan
Contents
The Necromancer's Library
Copyright
Also by J. L. Bryan
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Necromancer’s Library
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper,
Book Twelve
by
J.L. Bryan
Copyright 2020 J. L. Bryan
All rights reserved
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Also by J.L. Bryan:
The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper
Cold Shadows
The Crawling Darkness
Terminal
House of Whispers
Maze of Souls
Lullaby
The Keeper
The Tower
The Monster Museum
Fire Devil
The Necromancer’s Library
The Trailwalker
Urban Fantasy/Horror
The Unseen
Inferno Park
The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)
Jenny Pox
Tommy Nightmare
Alexander Death
Jenny Plague-Bringer
Science Fiction Novels
Nomad
Writing as Max Carver (science fiction):
The Empire of Machines series:
The Fall of Man (free with newsletter sign-up)
Engines of Empire
Islands of Rebellion
Clash of Colonies
Chapter One
“Those cows over there are super cute. Look, Ellie!” Stacey said, as we passed one of the countless cow pastures lining the highways of middle Georgia. Her short blonde hair ruffled in the warm breeze of the old van's heating vents. Stacey was over the moon to be out of the city and into a deeply rural area of the state—the farmlands of eastern Georgia, a region relatively unknown to both of us.
It had been over three hours since we'd set out from Savannah to meet with this potential client, who lived quite a bit inland, though not all the way to Atlanta. We'd passed many cows, and many horses, and many donkeys, and Stacey apparently wanted to make sure I didn't miss any of them.
“My grandparents' place is just like this,” Stacey said, continuing to talk. “All fields and woods. I've barely seen a building that wasn't a barn or church in the last hour. What town are we going to again?”
“Philomath,” I said. “A tiny old town from the 1800s. There was a rich-kid prep school there in the nineteenth century, but it's long gone. Now there's just a few scattered old plantation houses.”
Stacey shook her head. “We're going to be really isolated out here, Ellie, so I hope this ghost isn't one of the rough ones. Maybe it's an innocent, squeaky little puppy ghost. One that plays with haunted balls and does cute little puppy-ghost tricks. Yes, he does! Yes, he does!”
“And digs up bones in the back yard?” I asked.
“You had to make it creepy.” She frowned and stopped petting her imaginary ghost dog.
“I just hope we aren't driving all the way out here over a loose floorboard or a draft. We can't bill much if there's actual ghost to clear out. And we could use the business.” Things had been quiet around the office in recent weeks, though that wasn't the worst thing after some of the monsters we'd faced around Christmas, including my own most personal of demons. January and February had turned slow, and our calls had been more of the squeaky-door than shrieking-ghost variety.
This call had sounded different.
Well, technically, it was an email, but the person contacting us had described problems not easily explained by a dripping faucet or a squirrel in the attic. Or even a squirrel in the faucet.
“Look at those baby goats!” Stacey exclaimed as we whizzed past another farm. “So fuzzy and squeezable."
“Are we there yet?” I glanced at the map app on my phone, mounted on the van's dashboard to keep things hands-free.
We'd passed the last town ten or fifteen minutes earlier, a tiny, cute, old-fashioned brick place called Washington—I assume named after the president, though I didn't look that up or verify it in any way. Could have been Booker T. or Denzel for all I knew. A clock tower had overlooked the little postcard-photo town square like in Back to the Future.
Beyond that, things had turned purely rural, becoming the woods and farms were now passing, Which are nice enough if you're, say, out for an autumn walk with a hot guy carrying a thermos of equally hot cider, but not if you're running through the forest in the middle of the night while some invisible thing chases after you. Sometimes nature is more Evil Dead than Snow White, in my experience, but then my experience is probably skewed.
“Maybe we'll get to bonfire and camp,” Stacey said as we passed a thick, shadowy stand of woods.
“Can you use 'bonfire' as a verb?”
“Oh, yeah. As in 'it's chilly tonight, let's bonfire.' Or 'let's bonfire and tell ghost stories.' You can bonfire and drum circle—”
“I'm gonna stop you there,” I said, turning up the music a little—Lana Del Ray, Stacey's pick, but I was enjoying it. Definitely better than a drum circle.
The pine trees became thicker and older, the roads rough and bumpy. The only signs of civilization were occasional mailboxes and dirt driveways that snaked out of sight into the woods.
We turned onto the roughest road of all, pitted and potted so badly it rattled and bounced our old blue van the whole way. Nobody had maintained this road in years. We passed the gray shell of a two-story plantation house with empty sockets for windows and doors, its front steps rotted away, its bottom level half-swallowed by weeds and spindly trees.
“No cute animals here,” Stacey murmured as we passed an overgrown field ringed with collapsing fence posts and barbed wire.
Then we arrived.
Maybe it was just the late afternoon light, but the day seemed darker as we approached the house ahead, the brick mailbox marked with our client's address in crooked brass numbers. We turned off onto the broad half-circle gravel driveway, which was more weeds than gravel.
It was a huge Greek Revival house, with four massive box columns across the front and a balcony above the front door. It was old, but not a sun-bleached ruin like the last house we'd passed. Abandoned gardens full of briers filled most of the space between the house and the fields, which had been neglected for so long that tall firs had sprouted up in them.
“Wow,” Stacey said, looking over the aged structure. “How old do you think it is? The plantation days?”
“It's definitely antebellum.”
“It must cost a fortune to maintain,” Stacey said as we parked
on the gravel drive, next to a beige Toyota Tercel that looked almost as ancient as our van.
“Maybe that's why so much of it's sealed up.” I opened the door and stepped out into the shadows of the house. It seemed like it had been cared for with something of a triage approach in recent decades, fixing only the worst problems and letting others linger. The white paint was peeling, poison ivy crept up the walls, and most of the windows on the western side were shuttered tight.
Normally it's a pleasant feeling to step out of a car at the end of a long road trip, knowing that whatever might lie ahead, at least it wouldn't involve sitting and staring at the road any longer. That goes double when you've departed the city traffic for fresh green country air.
However, this beautiful but decaying old mansion, its white facade tinted orange and red by the slumping afternoon sunlight, gave me a tight feeling in my gut and a sudden urge to jump right back into the van and hightail it out of there.
“I just got the total creeps,” Stacey whispered, her eyes looking over the expansive house. Vines grew along the sides and corners, another sign of neglect. The trees nearby were shaggy with poison ivy.
Wide brick stairs led up to the portico, framed by massive columns holding up a triangular pediment roof. The overall effect was like an ancient temple, erected for some mysterious purpose out in these overgrown fields, its crumbling condition indicating that its priesthood and its god had long fled.
I shook off those thoughts as best I could. The whole point of Greek Revival style is to resemble ancient Greek temples, of course, so the feeling that the house loomed over us like a dark temple wasn't so mysterious. Still, it did look forbidding in that reddish light, the pointed roofline and sprawling wings outlined against the darkening sky like something predatory.
“Don't let your mind play tricks,” I said. “Creepy doesn't mean haunted. Facts, not feelings. If we need feelings, we call a psychic.”
“Yeah, too bad Jakeroo is slammed with tax season. It's not a good time of year for him to try to get away from work. And, you know, that was a solid three-hour drive here.”
“I'm definitely aware,” I said, giving my back a stretch before approaching the front door. “What if we really, desperately need Jakeroo?”
She winced, I assume at me repeating the pet name. “He says if we really, desperately need him, he might be able to sneak out here on a Saturday night.”
We made our way carefully up the steps, watching for loose bricks. Apparently keeping up the main approach to the house landed in the top level of house-maintenance triage and was deemed worthwhile, unlike peeling back the poison ivy or repainting.
I pressed the front doorbell. The button and plate were simple, functional brass, no attempt to be ornamental or look like some deity's divine doorbell, as though the house's era of austerity had set in by the time electricity arrived.
The woman who answered looked somewhere in her late twenties, like me. Black braids framed her pretty but tense face. Her dark, tired eyes stared at me through bottle-thick glasses. She wore a long coat over a faded vintage dress and patched old jeans, an eclectic ensemble that seemed suitable for a young academic. From her emails, I knew she was a graduate student and teaching assistant at the University of Georgia, about thirty miles from the house.
“Can I help you?” she asked, frowning and completely guarded, as if she'd been expecting no one at all.
“Hi. I'm Ellie Jordan, and this is Stacey Tolbert. We're from Eckhart Investigations in Savannah. May we speak with Cherise Edmunds?”
“That's me,” she said, looking more troubled rather than relieved. “What's this about? I sent in that car payment.”
Feeling awkward, and more than a little confused, I said: “We had an appointment for six p.m. today.”
“What kind of appointment?”
Now I was getting annoyed. “We exchanged several emails with a 'Cherise Edmunds' who asked to meet us at this house at this time. She was very specific about the time, because we wanted to come in the morning instead, as we drove a hundred and ninety miles to get here. And now we're here.”
“Emails?”
I reached out to Stacey, who smiled gently as she brought the emails up on her tablet and showed them to Cherise. “Right here, ma'am. Five messages from someone calling herself Cherise Edmunds. We're supposed to investigate some, well, troubling issues with the property?”
Cherise read over the tablet, her lips pressing tightly together as she rapidly absorbed the text. Finally she looked up at Stacey, then at me.
“Would you excuse me for a moment?” she asked, her tone suddenly angry. Without waiting for a response, she stepped back and heaved the heavy dark slab of the door back into place.
We could hear her yelling at someone inside, though we couldn't make out the words.
Stacey and I looked at each other, at a loss for words of our own.
Chapter Two
“I feel like the intros could have gone better,” Stacey said. She glanced uncertainly around the portico and its high columns. The house, even in its heyday, had tried to be impressive more than beautiful, everything about it heavy and bold like a newspaper headline. “Maybe we should head back to the van for water and snacks? Or even back home to Savannah?”
“Maybe so.” I turned and looked out over the overgrown front yard to the pitted old road and the fields of brambles and scrub pine beyond. It hadn't been obvious before, but now I could see how the house had once looked out over gardens and fields of crops, a commanding position from the top of an incline almost too subtle to discern.
“If we start driving now, we can get home before midnight,” Stacey said. “Which sounds like a great plan to me, honestly. Never mind how freaky this place already makes me feel—and it's going to be so much worse after that sun finishes setting—the facts and evidence plainly show this lady doesn't want us here. Sounds like somebody pranked her. And the sooner we remove ourselves from that awkwardness, the sooner we can be back at our homes, in our slippers, watching our Netflixes.”
“You make a strong point.” I listened, hearing voices yell distantly inside the house. The massive vault-weight front doors kept it all fairly muffled. “Let's give it five minutes.”
“Any chance of whittling that down to two?”
“Three.” I shrugged and strolled along the wide portico, seeing what I could see. There was no seating out front, though I suppose a couple of rocking chairs might throw off the austere, regal, home-to-a-minor-deity look the house was meant to convey. Hanging a porch swing from the roof overhang, about three stories up, was probably a daunting proposition, too. Maybe the balcony, supported by the two central columns, would have been a safer bet, but that would have interfered with the approach to the dark, heavy front doors.
Thorny bushes grew up around the porch and over the edge of it—roses, but not in bloom, so they looked more like razor wire. Beyond that lay an old barn half-swallowed by the woods.
It was growing darker and colder fast, and clearly we weren't wanted here. The apprehensive, knotted feeling in my gut only grew stronger.
“Okay, let's go,” I finally told Stacey. “Before they call the police on us or shoot us as trespassers.”
“Great idea!” Stacey bolted to the brick steps, as eager to escape as I was.
Then one of the heavy doors creaked open. The woman named Cherise stood there, looking furious. “Did y'all really drive all the way from Savannah?”
“Yes, ma'am,” I replied.
“Please don't call me that.”
“Okay, sorry. Just trying to be polite.”
“I don't think that's necessary after what we put you through. Why don't you come in for a minute? I have some tea and a couple of cookies. It's the least I can offer after Aria's prank.”
“Who?” I asked.
“My baby sister.” Cherise grunted as she hauled the massive dark door open wider.
A teenage girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, stood inside, her features
dark and pretty like her sister's but currently twisted into an angry scowl, presumably from the heated argument.
“Hi,” the girl said, looking carefully at us while we entered.
“Don't just say hi! Apologize,” Cherise told her.
The teenage girl rolled her eyes, in standard teenage fashion. “I'm sorry,” she said without an ounce of sincerity. “Sorry my sister's a screaming nutcase.”
“Don't make it worse,” Cherise said.
“How much worse can it get?” Aria snapped back. “I already live in the world's scariest house in the middle of the woods. I already have to go to school with a bunch of weird country kids who all hate me. I already have you calling me crazy, when you're the one who's crazy, pretending nothing's wrong with this house—”
“Enough.” Cherise turned to me. “I am sorry. Why don't y'all have a seat, and I'll be right out with the tea?” She gestured toward an open door to a front parlor. Then she grabbed her sister by the arm. “Come on.”
“Sure thing,” I said, which sounded awkward, but so was watching family members fight with each other, especially when I was the object of the fight, for reasons unknown.
Because of that whole situation, I didn't even comment on how awestruck I was by the entrance hall. Bookshelves lined the walls from the age-warped hardwood floor to the high ceiling. They even ran up alongside the long, narrow staircase to the second floor. The entire hall was a bit narrow because of the protruding bookshelves on either side, but it was glorious; I was easily looking at a thousand books or more.
I nodded at Stacey and we headed into a front parlor furnished with antique wingback chairs accompanied by end tables with lamps. Books filled every space from floor to ceiling here, too.
“This is amazing,” I whispered to Stacey, looking over the antique books on one shelf. The faded letters on the leather bound spines told me they held the Iliad, the Theogeny, and the plays of Aeschylus, among other ancient Greek works.
