by JL Bryan
“I know.” Stacey looked at her phones. “Weak cell service, but there's WiFi. Did she mention the password?”
“It's like the whole house is a library,” I said.
“Yeah, you probably love that,” Stacey said. “It definitely looks nice. Like a fancy club from another age, when people would sit around reading for fun.”
“Lots of people still read for fun.”
“Oh, yeah. Lots. There is seriously no signal.”
I sighed, resisting the temptation to pull out antique volumes and leaf through the yellowed old pages. This room seemed devoted to the ancient Mediterranean, full of collected writings from Greece, Rome, and Egypt. A faded map on the wall illustrated Mare Nostrum, or Our Sea, as the Romans called the Mediterranean, with every city and province labeled in Latin. It was riddled with small holes and preserved behind glass, clearly an antique, though surely it didn't actually date back to ancient Rome.
“Here we go.” Cherise entered the room with a pitcher of iced tea and a plate of small, lumpy cookies, badly charred around the edges. “Some are a little burnt.”
“My sister's a total disaster in the kitchen,” Aria informed us, following behind with mismatched glasses for us.
“Go to your room, Aria,” Cherise said.
“No way. These are the ghost experts. And that creepy place upstairs is not, and never will be, my room. It's some dead person's room.”
“I told you, it was just one of Dr. Marconi's guest rooms—”
“Not always,” Aria said. “It was somebody's bedroom in the past. A lot of somebodies who are probably all dead now and haunting the room together—”
“Stop it!” Cherise snapped. She looked at us. “I am sorry, Miss—uh, I didn't quite retain your name—sorry about that, too, I'm bad with names—”
“Ellie Jordan.” I sipped the tea, found it shockingly sweet. “This is good.”
“Anyway. I know you didn't drive all the way here for tea and cookies, but it was the least we could do before sending you on your way—”
“You are not doing that!” Aria shouted. “They're here now. Why not let them take a look?”
“Because I already said no to this. You're not forcing me into changing my mind.”
“You mean the way you forced me to move here, away from all my friends?”
“Aria—”
“There is something in this house!” Aria turned away from her sister and stalked toward me. “Yes, I wrote you pretending to be my sister, but only because I didn't think you'd listen to a kid. But everything I said about this house is true. I didn't lie about that. It's not a prank. We need help.”
“I am so sorry,” Cherise said. “This is all part of her acting out because we moved here. I didn't want to move into this old place, either, but our rent and utilities were a huge part of our budget. Now we can pay down debt, maybe even save a little. It's not forever.”
“Yeah. Just a year out of my life,” Aria said. “My whole senior year.”
“You're in eighth grade, Aria.”
“My senior year of middle school! And I'm stuck at Country-Fried Nowhere Don't Know Anyone Middle.”
“I hear they have a great theater program at Country-Fried Nowhere,” Stacey said, clearly trying to lighten the mood. “And the marching band's pretty impressive. The football program...” She trailed off as Aria showed no sign of finding this amusing.
“Where did you live before?” I asked.
“Athens,” Aria said quickly. “It's a town with, you know, an actual town, not just a gas station twenty minutes away. And the university and all that. It's, like, pretty cosmopolitan, for a small town. And before that, we lived in Columbus, but that was before Momma died—”
“They don't need our life story, Aria,” Cherise interrupted. “All they need from you is an apology.”
“It's fine,” I said. “We really do have a lot of experience with the paranormal.”
“Toldja they wouldn't call me crazy,” Aria said.
“I don't believe in ghosts,” Cherise said quickly, as if the conversation were edging into a dangerous area. “I admit this house is isolated, and neither of us like that. And it's large and old, which means a lot of creaking at night—”
“What I saw wasn't just some creaking!” Aria shouted.
“I understand,” I said. “To be honest, we often find perfectly rational, natural causes for what people think is a haunting. Our minds tend to personalize impersonal things, to find faces in random patterns, to interpret unexpected noises as voices and footsteps.”
“That is completely not what's happening,” Aria told me. “I'm not crazy. Or stupid.”
“I don't believe you are,” I said. “Your emails definitely convinced us you were an intelligent and rational adult. My point is, an investigation can set everyone's mind at ease. Collecting evidence, looking at it in the calm light of day, making things objective—these can settle the situation down. Odds are, we won't find anything supernatural, but we will find the root of your problem.”
I wasn't totally sure I believed this as I said it; Stacey and I both had bad feelings about this place. We'd both felt such a strong urge to make a fast exit that Cherise's initial rejection of us had come as almost a relief.
Anyway, I hadn't come all this way to run from whatever might be haunting this house. Protecting the living against the evil and restless dead, that's my calling, my only real purpose in life. My intuition, unscientific as it was, told me there was something here, something that might be endangering both of them, and Aria had turned to us out of desperation. I wasn't going to abandon them.
“What kind of investigation?” Cherise asked, looking beyond skeptical.
I told her the usual—thermal and night vision cameras, motion detectors, high-sensitivity microphones, devices to detect electromagnetic fields and fluctuations.
She did not appear less skeptical. “You put cameras in our house and watch us?”
“Not in bathrooms or bedrooms, obviously, unless those are the trouble spots.”
“Mine is,” Aria said. “You can stay in my room all night if you want. I don't care. I stay up all night reading anyway, most of the time.”
“Which you need to stop doing,” Cherise said.
“Maybe once I don't live in a house with a freaky crying ghost.”
“There is no ghost!” Cherise replied.
“Then prove it,” Aria said. “Let them investigate and prove it. Or do you think they'll prove me right?”
Cherise opened her mouth to continue the argument, then hesitated. “And if I let them stay one night, you'll let this go? Permanently? Is that what it will take?”
“That's right.” Aria crossed her arms, glaring. “That's what it'll take.”
Cherise looked at me for a long time. “And you're serious about all this, too?”
I nodded.
“All right, I'll do this, only to show my sister there's nothing to fear. But no cameras or anything in or near my room.”
“Of course not,” I said.
Cherise nodded. “So how do we get this over with?”
“You could tell us a little about the problems you're having. Show us anyplace in the house where you've experienced something abnormal.”
“Our life here is abnormal,” Cherise said, shaking her head. “And like I said, I don't believe in ghosts. But I agree this house is scary at night. And cold.”
“I'll tell you everything,” Aria said. “It comes to the hall outside my room.”
“You go on,” Cherise said. “I'm making dinner. Y'all want some? It's just salad and grilled chicken. And you saw how the cookies turned out.”
“No, thank you,” I said, hurrying before Stacey could accept. I didn't want to be any more of a financial burden on these people than necessary. “We'll be happy to listen to your sister for a minute.”
“Well, she will talk for as long as anybody will listen, if not longer, so y'all enjoy,” Cherise said, drawing a scowl
from Aria.
“Come on,” Aria said. “Let's go upstairs. That's where I hear her at night.”
Chapter Three
We headed to the book-lined front hall, which ended at another set of double doors made from the same dark, heavy wood as the front doors. I thought again of ancient temples—the outer courtyard for the public, the inner sanctum with the pagan idols sealed off, accessible only to the elite priests.
Aria led us up the long, straight front staircase to the second floor, lined with more built-in bookshelves that ran like a timeline of English literature from Beowulf to Shakespeare and up through Byron and Shelly. Philip Larkin occupied the final shelf; apparently the late professor wasn't interested in English poets beyond that.
“You said your sister was hired to organize a deceased professor's books and papers, but this place looks pretty organized to me,” I said.
“These are just the front rooms. The back's a mess.”
The upstairs hall was lined with more books. The whole house was a library.
Behind us, the hallway extended to the glass doors of the front balcony. A banister railing walled off the long drop to the stairs we'd just ascended. Experience had taught me to avoid balconies as well as long drops in haunted houses.
Aria pointed at a portrait on the wall featuring a smiling young couple in front of the house's portico, the rose bushes in bloom and trimmed to a much more reasonable size. “That's him. Professor Marconi. My sister started working for him, organizing his books and papers and junk, right before he died.”
Stacey snapped a picture while I studied the painting. The recently deceased former owner of this house certainly looked professorial—horn-rimmed glasses, beard, brown woolen jacket. The smiling blonde woman beside him was a ravishing beauty, or at least the painter had portrayed her that way. She wore a puffy silken dress that definitely didn't look like anything from the twenty-first century.
“They seem like a happy couple,” Stacey commented. “What happened to her? Is she still around?”
“How would I know? Do you want to hear my thing or not?” Aria asked.
“Of course. Take us through what you've experienced,” I said.
Aria led us down the hall, which was dim despite the overhead lights. Ahead, it ended in another pair of heavy dark double doors, which presumably led into the back wings of the house that we'd glimpsed from outside.
Aria didn't lead us all the way to the double doors, but into a spacious bedroom on one side of the hall. It was furnished with a jumbled mixture of antiques, like the rolltop desk at the back, and cheap modern furniture, like the bed with its shiny, badly scratched faux-wood frame. On the bookshelves, any antique books that were supposed to be there had been replaced with a scattering of bright, worn paperbacks featuring teenage girls on the covers, one walking in the woods with a boy, another apparently attending some kind of college for attractive werewolves.
“So, what happens is I'm lying here.” Aria sat on the edge of the bed. Heavy curtains draped the windows all the way to the floor, framing the night outside. The floor was bare hardwood. “I'll be reading or doing homework—because I don't sleep much at night since we moved here. I slept like a lamb in Athens, by the way, even though our apartment complex could get pretty sketchy at night.
“Anyway, I hear it late at night, usually way after midnight. She cries. Sobbing, like something terrible just happened to her. The first time, I thought it was the TV in my sister's room. The second time, I thought maybe it was my sister crying, so I went to look.
“It was about one or two in the morning, and the house was super dark. And super cold. The heat in this stupid house barely works. My sister's had a guy out to repair it three times and he says nothing's wrong. It's kinda like the thermostat just can't tell when the house is cold. So it's as stupid as everything else here.”
I nodded, jotting notes on my pocket notepad. Stacey was recording the girl, too, and snapping pictures of the room, but I always like a little pencil and paper action for myself. “So you heard crying, got out of bed, and the house was dark and cold. What next?”
“I went out in the hall and turned on the lights.” Aria stood and headed for the hallway, and we followed her out there. “At first it was quiet, and I almost went back in my room, but I heard it again. This girl crying, bad, like she was scared or hurt. Same as I heard the night before.”
She led us to another door, down and across the hall from her own, but didn't open it. “I ran to my sister's room here. Everything out here is guest rooms, three bedrooms and a big weird old bathroom.” Aria pointed to the heavy black double doors at the end of the hall. “Reesey says beyond those doors is the master bedroom where the old professor lived, and we're not supposed to go in there. Like I want to go sniffing around some dead old man's bedroom, gross.” She kept staring at the doors. “Those doors creep me out anyway. You just know there's something bad behind them.”
“Reesey is your sister?” I asked.
“Yeah, I couldn't say 'Cherise' right when I was a kid. So I called her Reesey. Like Reesey's Peesey's candy, which I couldn't say right either.”
“Okay. So, back to the crying...”
“I thought it had to be her, since I heard it both nights. I went down the hall. Opened the door to her room. Nope. No movie, no Reesey. She was probably still down in the main library, working late, trying to meet that stupid deadline.”
“What deadline?” I asked.
“Just that she has, you know, twelve months to get it all done.”
“Or what?” I felt like I was prying too much into their private business, but all of this had apparently been set in accordance with the dead professor's will.
“Or she, I don't know, doesn't get paid everything? I don't really get it.” Aria looked uncomfortable. “But if she gets it done sooner, we move out sooner, so I'm glad she's working late.”
“So her room was completely quiet?”
“Yeah. I even turned on the lights and looked around. Nothing. I told myself it was just my stupid mind tricking me. So I go back to the hall, and I'm ready to run back to my room... and there it is again. The crying wasn't coming from my sister's room, it never had been.”
“Where was it coming from?”
“Further down the hall. So... ” She pointed at the dark double doors.
“From the doors?” I asked. “Did you open them?”
“I was thinking about it. I was walking closer, listening for the voice again. I wanted to ask if someone was there, but I couldn't talk, like I was kind of afraid. But I heard the crying again, one more time, and it was obviously on the other side of the door. And then...”
I waited, but she trailed off, staring at the doors. She was trembling.
“Then what?” I asked, gently as I could.
“I saw it. Her, I guess, but it just looked horrible, like a skeleton had come up out of a grave and started walking around. I mean, it was like a dead body. Rotten old rags for clothes. It showed up all at once, just standing in front of those doors as I got there. And its skull eye sockets were looking at me.”
“Yikes,” Stacey whispered.
“That sounds scary,” I said, looking at the dark doors and imagining the girl seeing such a thing in the middle of the night. I shivered.
“Uh, yeah,” Aria said. “So I ran around the house screaming until I found my sister, down in the main library. She told me it was just a nightmare. I stayed down there with her until the sun came up.”
“I'm so sorry,” I told her. “Have you heard or seen anything since?”
“Yes. The crying comes at night sometimes. Not every night. Sometimes a few nights go by and I think it's all over. I think maybe my sister's right—my imagination, bad dreams, all of it. Then I hear the crying. But I don't go out to check it anymore. I keep my door locked.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. One time I saw her, and she wasn't a skeleton. She was almost like in the paintings, a pretty girl with
coiled-up braids. Blonde hair, I guess, though she didn't have any color at all when I saw her. She was all white. Not like you, but I mean white like zero color, like clouds or flour. She looked so sad.
“I saw her late one night out in the hall. At first I almost thought it was my sister, until I looked right at her. Then I thought it was a regular person, like a living person, who was in our house for some reason. Maybe a friend of Reesey's or something, I don't know. But I kind of knew that was wrong, too, because of the weird color.
“I just froze, I was so scared. I watched her go down the hall toward the doors. And before she got there, she was just gone. It's hard to explain. It wasn't a sudden thing, or a big thing, when she disappeared. It was more like I blinked and missed it. And once she was gone, you know, I was scared but I started wondering if I was just going crazy.
“I ran to Reesey's room, and she was there this time, asleep. And she told me it was just a bad dream. I stayed on the chair in her room. She went back to sleep, but not me. I locked her door and sat there staring at it until the sun came up. That was the first day I was almost glad to go to this dumb new school, because at least I got to leave the house.”
“Wow,” I said. I set down my pencil and flexed my fingers, which had been scribbling furiously. “Did you hear the crying again that night?”
“Not that night, but I still hear it sometimes. I just keep my door locked when I'm home. What I hate most is when I have to go down the hall to the bathroom.” She pointed to the ajar door across from her sister's bedroom.
The bathroom was spacious, about the size of my whole studio loft back in Savannah. People had so much more room for everything out in the country. The antique oval-shaped bathtub had a shower ring and curtain that didn't quite fit right, as if they'd been added decades later. A pair of tall, narrow windows like the ones in Aria's room had become black mirrors with the vanishing sunlight, reflecting ghostly images of me standing in the doorway.
“Have you ever experienced anything in here?” I asked Aria.
“Not in here, no. Only on my way here, or on my way back. I hear her crying. One time she's like a lost, helpless girl, the others she's something from The Walking Dead.”
