by JL Bryan
“Are you sure it's the same entity, not two different ones?”
“How would I know?”
“Okay.” I stepped out and closed the door. “Is there anything else you've experienced? Any other part of the house that bothers you?”
“Yeah, literally the whole house bothers me.”
“I understand, but—”
“Try going down to the kitchen late at night. I don't, because it feels like somebody's watching you all the way down the hall, all the way down the stairs, the whole way there and back. Like somebody's walking behind you, even when nobody's there. And you'll hit a place that's cold. Cold spots are signs of ghosts, too. Everyone knows that.”
I nodded. “Is there any other place you've seen or heard anything unusual?”
“Go back in the southwest library room where my sister does most of her work. There's all kinds of weird stuff back there. Bones. Weird old paintings, old books full of... just sick... ” She shivered. “Don't tell my sister I've ever been back there, okay? I'm not allowed.”
“Okay.” Obviously, we'd have to have a look at the forbidden library room. “We should start by setting up observation gear here in the upper hall. We can use the empty bedroom across from yours as a base to watch and listen. I'd like to have a look in there, too...” I pointed at the dark doors, but Aria shuddered visibly. “But we'll stay out of there for now. Maybe you can show us the rest of the house?”
“Sure. Anywhere but there.” Aria looked at the dark doors a final time, then at the big portrait in the hall. “I think it's her, the lady in the picture. Her name's Piper. One of the paintings downstairs is labeled with their names.”
“And has she died?”
Aria shrugged. “She's not here anymore, is she?”
“We'll look it up.” I studied the portrait of the young couple, wondering how many years ago it had been painted, and what had become of them.
Night was falling outside, and I was eager to set up and get started. With any luck, we could capture some part of what Aria had been seeing and hearing, and determine what might be haunting this sprawling library of a house.
Chapter Four
Typically, I like to fully explore a house and the grounds around it before setting up an observation, and really prefer to do this during daylight hours, but that wasn't happening tonight. Aria, posing as Cherise via email, had begged us to come as soon as possible, and scheduled us to arrive after Cherise returned home from her day job as a teaching assistant in the university history department.
Downstairs, we found Cherise in the kitchen. Even here there were bookshelves, offering recipe books from around the world, plus a few volumes on the medicinal properties of herbs. Cherise sat at the round, rough-hewn kitchen table, picking at a plate of greens and a small piece of unevenly browned chicken.
“How was it?” she asked Aria, in a tone that wasn't particularly welcoming.
“Good. They listened.” Aria took a plate and began picking at her own food, not looking any more interested in it than her sister.
“If you're not going home, you may as well sit down.” Cherise nodded at me.
“Miss Edmunds—” I began, taking a chair.
“Cherise.”
“—we think it would really help your sister if we attempted to document what she's experiencing. We would only focus on the upstairs hall, and maybe a few of the common areas downstairs.”
“Nothing in our rooms?” she asked brusquely.
“Definitely not. However... we would also like to see the rest of the house. Get a real understanding of the place. It's a little confusing from the outside.”
“It's more confusing on the inside, I can tell you that,” Cherise said. “The main library is chaos. I've been at it for two months, and sporadically for about six months before that, and I've barely gotten started.”
“Can you explain a little more about your work here?” I asked. “How did you come to work for Dr. Marconi?”
Cherise sighed and put down her fork. She hadn't been eating much, anyway. Neither of them seemed to have an appetite.
“Dr. Philip Marconi was, many decades ago, a somewhat noted professor of history. His particular areas of expertise included folk legends and mythology. Not exactly religion, but more like... supernatural alternatives to religion. Magic. His reputation was based on some early papers exploring lesser known superstitions and folk tales of the Deep South, disentangling threads and tracing them back to their roots, from Western Africa to Ireland and Scandinavia. His focus included magical charms and curses.”
“Sounds kinda neat,” Stacey said.
“From what I understand, he spent his life collecting all kinds of books, manuscripts, and artifacts—I don't know where he could possibly have obtained some of these antique items, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't entirely legal. Anyway, he collected and collected, but somewhere along the way he stopped organizing and cataloging, and just began piling it all over the place.”
“Did his wife pass away?” I asked.
“Yes, that was Piper, the blonde girl from the paintings. Apparently she died quite a long time ago, and maybe that led to him teach less and become reclusive. Don't quote me on that, though, because Dr. Marconi didn't talk much about his personal life. He definitely didn't talk about her. I only heard that from Dr. Anderson, the professor who connected me with this job.”
“How long had Dr. Marconi been retired?”
“I don't know. Many years, maybe decades. I did not research his personal life, and he certainly did not volunteer anything.”
“What was your impression of Dr. Marconi?”
“I would say he was... grouchy. I thought he didn't like me very much, but he hired me. I came out occasionally, on weekends, to start the job of organizing the chaos. He didn't seem to be in any particular hurry about it when he was alive, just told me to come when I felt like it. Which is why this deadline is killing me.”
“Your sister mentioned a deadline, but she didn't explain it,” I said.
“Twelve months, or she gets nothing! It's like a bad reality show.” Aria scowled.
“Watch yourself,” Cherise warned her. “I don't get nothing. I still get the monthly stipend and free use of the house during those twelve months. But there's a bonus if I get it done in twelve, which would really help us out. The bonus is more than all twelve months of the stipend, so it more than doubles my pay. I'm working night and day trying to get this done, but there's all kinds of books and manuscripts and even scrolls out there, in all kinds of languages, and a lot of them have no paperwork with them.
“So, yeah, I'll just puzzle out some fifteenth-century handwritten Cyrillic so I know how to sort and catalog this crumbling old heap of parchment. Oh, and by the way, when I finally decode it, it'll turn out to be instructions for digging up a dead man's skull and rubbing it with potions to learn his secrets, or something equally pleasant. Because the professor took an interest in some very dark subjects in his old age. I'm sifting through weird funerary rites, spells for raising dead souls from hell and pulling them down from heaven. There's instructions for summoning demons, and for how to get a corpse to speak as long as it's still warm—”
“Stop it!” Aria shouted, standing up. “I don't want to hear this.”
Cherise looked startled, too, as if she'd been desperate to unload and forgotten Aria was in the room. “I'm sorry, Aria. I may not be seeing the kinds of things you're seeing, but this place is getting to me, too.”
Aria drew headphones from her jacket pocket and went to sit with a tablet by the kitchen's brick fireplace, where a few logs were burning. Most teenagers might have headed up to their rooms at this point to escape the adults, but she obviously had reasons to avoid being upstairs alone after dark.
“Do you think this could be my fault?” Cherise asked me. She'd lowered her voice, but was also clearly counting on the girl not hearing us through her headphones. “I really didn't expect the professor's work t
o be so disturbing. His book of Southern lore talked a little about ghosts, but also about healing spells and love charms, and mostly about the cultural traditions, like Gullah root doctors, or the Yunwi Tsunsdi, the magical tiny people of Cherokee legends. His early work was about preserving a record of vanishing traditions. I assumed I'd be looking at that kind of thing. When he first brought me in, the materials I cataloged were quite a bit lighter, in fact, with lots of transcripts of traditional stories and oral histories.
“When he died, it was a shock. It was even more of a shock when his attorney contacted me with the terms of his will. It seemed like a windfall at the time—no rent and a second income? I hadn't really looked at the Tomb Room at that point.”
“The what?” I asked.
“That's what I call it. All those manuscripts about death gods, the underworld, raising the dead. And there's bones in there, with inscriptions and paintings. Animal bones, maybe. I hope. There could be anything hidden in those heaps.” She shook her head. “I can't believe I agreed to this. But we can't afford to stop. We need the extra paycheck.”
“I understand. You're in a tough spot.”
“Even if...” Cherise went quiet and shook her head, as though in disbelief. “If it's what you think it is—”
“I haven't personally observed anything yet,” I said.
“—what Aria thinks it is, anyway. Even if it were real, is it always necessarily bad? Isn't every old place said to be haunted?”
“Hauntings are common, but most are benign,” I said. “You could live in a haunted house for years and only encounter the ghost once or twice, if it's not active or low energy. They tend to dwell in the dark places of the home that people usually avoid. But sometimes the entities are dangerous.”
“It's hard not to work in the big library every night without thinking about how he died in there,” she said, her voice soft.
“Who died in there? The professor?”
“Yes. He fell from the third-story walkway in the library. The banister broke. It was a long fall, and he was elderly.” She glanced at the hardwood floor, which wouldn't have offered a soft landing.
Stacey and I looked at each other in alarm. Household accidents involving a small push and a lot of gravity are a common way for ghosts to act out murderous intent. If the house had an active haunting, a recent accidental death could be a major red flag.
“I didn't realize he'd died in the house,” I said. I was torn between trying to explain what I knew and not trying to come across as someone trying to frighten her. Cherise hadn't invited us here, and the idea of avoiding the whole situation by deciding to call us paranoid superstitious kooks and kicking us out had to be tempting for her.
I was scared of triggering that response, which would leave the two of them alone with any dangerous spirits that might be in the house. Not that I'd concluded any were here, but as the Magic 8-ball sometimes tells us, signs were starting to point to Yes.
“We'll need to look at the main library,” I said. “And this 'tomb room.'”
“That's actually the western wing of the main library.”
“The side of the house that's shuttered up?” I asked.
“Yes. It gets very dark in there. There's a chandelier, but it doesn't work.”
“We also need to investigate the rest of the upstairs. Beyond the dark doors.”
Cherise didn't reply to that. She tapped her sister on the shoulder to come with us, but Aria opted to stay near the small kitchen fire. Smart move. The kitchen often has the strongest, freshest, most positive life energy in the house. Ghosts usually prefer the dark and less traveled spots, haunting attics and basements among the not quite discarded artifacts of the past.
While the sisters spoke briefly, I quietly tugged open a sliding door and had a peek into the dining room. A long black table for twelve sat under a silver chandelier that could have held a major fire hazard's worth of candles. A cold, empty stone fireplace backed up to the kitchen one. Overall, the theme continued of heavy materials with minimal adornment.
Another portrait of the young Marconi couple hung over the fireplace, much bigger than the one in the upstairs hallway. This one showed them in autumn, surrounded by richly colored trees, the house in the background.
“They sure liked getting their portraits painted,” Stacey whispered, snapping a few pictures.
Cherise took out a large key ring and led us, with clear reluctance, out of the kitchen and down the first-floor hallway. More poetry and literature lined this hall, a fair amount of it French or Italian, followed by a section of biographies.
She paused at the pair of dark doors at the back of the hall, as though reluctant to go on. “I ask that you not touch anything in the library rooms. Some of it is quite old and fragile, and you'd be surprised how precariously the professor left all of it stored. Try to keep to the established paths, and watch your step, too, because there's plenty of tripping hazards. It gets worse the deeper you go.”
“Thanks for the warning,” I said.
She nodded and heaved open the door.
I'd thought the book-lined front hall was impressive, but what lay beyond those dark doors stirred as much envy as it did fear of whatever dangerous entities might dwell in the home.
“This is the reading room,” Cherise said, indicating a room with numerous lamps, small tables, and matching leather sofa and chairs. The shelves here offered a small selection of books and a number of periodicals arranged by year and date, mostly academic publications. “The fireplace over here was bricked up. Maybe he wanted to protect the collection from any risk of smoke damage.”
“A room just for reading,” I said. “I guess the lawn chair on my balcony is my reading room.”
She smiled thinly and led us past a small study, with an impressive desk and various fancy-study must-haves like an antique telescope and globe.
The hallway ended at an immense three-story room, honeycombed with bookshelves from the floor to the dark, distant recesses of the high ceiling. A maze of narrow walkways and staircases nearly as steep as ladders connected the floor to the upper reaches of the bookshelves.
Squinting, I discerned the glint of chandeliers in the cavernous darkness high above, but Cherise left these turned off. Probably hogged a fortune in electricity, if they worked at all. Instead, she touched a wall switch that illuminated several lamps scattered through the room.
“He called this his hanging garden of books,” Cherise said. “Unfortunately, a good deal of it is more like a jungle.”
I saw what she meant. Ahead of us lay heaps of unsorted materials piled on tables, on chairs, on the floor, crammed haphazardly into half-empty bookshelves. It was nearly a solid wall of old books, yellow papers bound with twine, loose yellow papers bound with nothing, not to mention shipping crates and wooden boxes of all sizes. A black jackal-headed statue with gilded ears and obsidian eyes stared out solemnly from among the stacks nearby, a statue of Egyptian death god Anubis drowning in paper and packages like an overwhelmed postal worker at Christmas.
The situation grew worse as I looked west, toward the shuttered-up side of the house. Precarious-looking stacks were piled much too high.
“Don't touch anything,” she reminded us before leading us down a narrow, twisting path through heaps of unsorted papers.
“It's Hoarders meets Book TV,” Stacey whispered, taking pictures.
“Is this where Dr. Marconi died?” I asked.
“He fell from the top walkway.” Cherise stopped to point upward.
I gazed into the dimness above, my eyes slowly adjusting to it. There were two levels of narrow walkways running alongside the upper-story bookshelves, connected by a jumble of staircases, like a game of Chutes and Ladders designed by M.C. Escher.
“You can see the broken railing where he fell,” Cherise said. “They tied it off with rope. The attorney said someone would be out to fix it eventually. It's been two months now. I wouldn't go up there at all if I were you. Those old walkway
s are half the reason I don't allow Aria in here. Climbing around on those would be tempting for a bored kid, but any of it could come crashing down.”
With my gaze, I traced what must have been the path of the man's fall from the broken railing down to a floor rug half-buried in collapsed stacks of paper and clutter. “He must have landed there,” I murmured.
Cherise shook her head. “Poor old man, living alone out here with nobody. I heard his housekeeper found him, and he'd been lying there two or three days.”
I shivered. I may have envied the late professor's library, but I didn't envy Cherise having to work in the place where he'd died. Though I guess it had become my workplace for now, too.
“The really disturbing material is through here. Don't touch anything,” she reminded us before leading us down a final narrow, twisting path through heaps of unsorted papers to a solid wall of bookshelves.
Cherise reached into a bookshelf and touched an odd little keyhole built into the back, where a book could have easily concealed it, though none did at the moment. She slid a key into place and turned it.
With some effort, she rolled aside an entire section of bookshelves, which turned out to be a concealed door into a dark hidden chamber beyond. I don't suppose any extravagant home library would truly be complete without a secret door built into it somewhere.
“This is where I was told to begin,” she said. “They said my catalog would be evaluated after twelve months.”
“By whom?” I asked.
“They didn't say.”
The hidden chamber was cold, even more so than the rest of the house. It was three stories as well, with more of the walkways and ladders, but divided by a solid wall from the rest of the library.
More densely packed and completely unsorted papers and books waited here, along with an assortment of strange artifacts. Dusty glass cases held the bits of bone Aria had mentioned, some adorned with faded red paint and crumbling feathers, others carved into strange shapes. One jar held the coiled skeleton of some horned lizard. Another held a few brown recluse spiders, corked inside, surely dead long ago from suffocation or starvation. Strange statues were scattered among the collection, too; some looked Aztec, others Middle Eastern, and still others I couldn't begin to guess.
