by JL Bryan
An enormous squarish old volume of leather and parchment lay open on the least cluttered table, next to an open laptop in sleep mode. I clicked on the desk lamp nearby, then took a sharp breath.
“Whoa, Yikers' Island. And I thought Bosch was weird,” Stacey said.
The open page depicted a gruesome scene, done in woodcut, of strange people with heads like horned beasts and reptiles. They danced around a gravestone and an open pit where a skeleton reached up as if preparing to climb out of its grave. The handwritten text around the illustration looked Latin, blurry and faded with time, interspersed with equations full of arcane symbols.
“That's not even the worst thing I've seen this week,” Cherise said. “I understand why my sister is scared, why she's having bad dreams and seeing things. She has come in here at least once—without my permission, obviously—and looked around. What kid wouldn't be scared after seeing all this? As if the strange old house wasn't bad enough. Also, it gets so quiet out here at night. You sometimes hear owls, but not much else. Darkness and silence. Those are prime conditions for your mind to run wild.”
“Did she have any problems with nightmares or night terrors before moving here?” I asked. “Any similar experiences?”
“Nothing. I'm sure it's all because of this place.” Cherise frowned at the kneeling sacrifice victim in the book.
Another partially-cleared table was covered with black lacquer, dotted with clumps of red and black candle wax. So many candles had burned here that rows of wax stalactites hung from the edges of the table.
“I'm not sure what all this is,” Cherise said, joining me by the stacks of wax. “I'm not sure I want to know, honestly.”
I looked over the table, then knelt to inspect it more closely. I finally located a keyhole—no knob or drawer pull, just a small keyhole right under the lip of the table, tucked out of sight. “Have you opened this yet?” I asked.
“I didn't know it opened,” Cherise said. “There's so much material sitting out, I can't say I've spent much time searching for more.”
We tried the keys on her ring until we found the one that fit.
I folded open the front panel of the desk, revealing a cavity under the tabletop.
Moving carefully, I extracted the items within: a long ivory dagger with odd symbols etched into the gold-plated hilt, a small gold chalice not much bigger than a shot glass on a stem, and a black glass ball framed in a square of wood.
“What is all that?” Cherise asked.
“Ritual objects,” I said. “This is not a good sign. It looks like Dr. Marconi wasn't just collecting texts, he was putting them into practice, trying them out.”
“But none of it's real, right? I mean, he was crazy to think any of these old superstitions would actually accomplish anything. Right?”
I hedged my answer. “Probably a lot of it's nonsense invented by charlatans and madmen over the centuries. But sometimes, when you reach out in search of spirits, you catch something. It's like fishing – you bait the hook a certain way, you cast the line in a certain place, but you can't always control what comes biting.”
“What would these be used for?” Cherise asked.
“The black sphere is probably a scrying mirror.”
“Like a crystal ball?” Cherise sounded skeptical as ever.
“Right. Maybe he was trying to see the future. Maybe he was trying to summon entities.”
“Entities?”
“Ghosts, demons, angels, pagan gods. You tell me. What do his books cover?”
“Oh, they run the gamut,” Cherise said. “I couldn't say for sure what he was looking for. It seems like he wanted anything dark and twisted.”
I felt around inside the ritual table's cavity and brought out a small wooden rod, a little longer and thicker than a pencil, adorned with strange skulls and animal shapes. Behind this I found a leatherbound book.
“What's that?” Cherise said.
I flipped through the book. It was filled with tight, spidery handwriting almost too compact to read. “I'll read it and let you know. My first guess is this is some kind of journal, or maybe a grimoire. Hopefully it will tell us what kind of supernatural activities he was delving into.”
“A spell book?” Cherise asked.
“And a pretty gnarly-looking wand,” I added, pointing to the carved stick on the table.
“Let me know if you find a house elf, because I could use the help.”
“Do you mind if we set up a camera or two in here?” I asked. “Just in case.”
“In case what? The dead professor is still hanging around?”
“Well... the kind of activities he was engaged in can increase the odds of paranormal activity—”
“Forget I asked. Just do whatever you think will calm Aria down.”
I nodded. “What about the upstairs hall? The section beyond the doors?”
She stiffened. “That's the master suite area. It's close to my room, for one thing. Also, we are meant to leave that area alone, according to my instructions. I don't want to risk forfeiting this situation. We need the income.”
“All right. We'll hold off. My partner and I have plenty to do already, and we want to be settled in and quiet before the early morning hours.”
“That would be nice.” She sighed. “I'll be honest with you: I don't believe in the supernatural. I don't think you'll find any ghosts in this house, but I'm starting to worry that maybe you will. And then I'll have to rethink everything. Now let's get out of here. I don't like being in this room at night.”
We left the tomb room, and Cherise made sure the bookshelf-lined roll-aside door was locked tight behind us.
Chapter Five
It took a few hours to bring in and set up our gear. The spare bedroom upstairs did turn out to be a decent location for our little nerve center of monitors and speakers. Its bookshelves contained impressively old copies of The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as well as Spells of Magicia by M. G. G. Jensen.
“Look at that!” Stacey noticed the Jensen book and pulled it from the shelf. “Thurmond Pennefort would freak out if he saw this.” We'd once had a client obsessed with the classic fantasy series and its numerous film adaptations, neglecting his family's crumbling one-skyscraper empire while he obsessively created and painted clay figurines and castles to sell at fan conventions.
“It's probably expensive. Put it back.”
“Just checking the date. Ooh, 1924, not as old as Thurmond's. Check out the bodice on this wizard princess. You think I could pull off a bodice? It doesn't look like the best outfit for fighting dragons.”
“Put it back,” I said again. “We still have a lot to do.”
We set up assorted gear in the upstairs hall where Aria had most of her experiences—thermal and night vision, microphone and EMF meter, every kind of sensor we had. We also set up a few things in the common areas downstairs and in the library.
Cherise didn't want us to enter the forbidden master suite upstairs, and I didn't push it for fear she'd kick us out. She had made it clear that she viewed us as being there to placate Aria's fears and not much more.
I hoped she was right, but Aria didn't strike me as lying or delusional. Maybe I was wrong about that, because I couldn't read minds. Regardless, the professor's death in the library ratcheted up the potential danger factor.
“All systems okey-dokey,” Stacey finally announced. She sat cross-legged in an armchair that she'd dragged from the tightly shuttered window to the open wardrobe, where her array of small monitors occupied the otherwise bare shelves. “It's 11:57 p.m., gear is up, lights are out, clients have gone to bed. It's officially snack time.”
“The most important phase of any investigation,” I said, trying to keep the mood light even though my stomach was knotted. I had a particularly bad feeling about this case. I told myself to stick with the process and focus on the evidence we collected, if any. It would hardly be professional to start jumping at shadows.
Stace
y had brought some really dry granola bars and cans of kiwi-dragonfruit energy drinks. I passed her one of each and reminded myself not to leave her in charge of snacks next time.
Once snack time had passed, we turned off the lights in the room and went into quiet observation time, whispering when we absolutely had to communicate.
“Did I pack any more Stoneground granola bars?” Stacey whispered, apparently deeming this question critical enough to break the silence. I handed her my extra one, since I had no interest in shredding the inside of my mouth with it.
After that, there was much sitting and waiting, watching and listening for any sign of unusual activity. I texted my boyfriend Michael back in Savannah to let him know we'd arrived safely and didn't know when we'd be heading home.
“Why don't they just pop out when we get here?” Stacey complained after an hour or so. “I hate waiting for the ghosts to show up. Especially when it takes days.”
“It's part of the job. Like cops on a stakeout, waiting for the perp to do something interesting.”
“Yeah, but on cop shows, stakeouts are when the characters reveal their inner selves and bond on a deeper level. You should be saying things like 'I'm getting too old for this job' or 'This city is a sewer of corruption and it's never gonna change' or 'Here's some advice for ya, rookie: never drink liquor before nine a.m., and never order the steak down at Greasy's Diner.'”
“And you should be saying things like 'I became a cop because I believe in the system and I want to help people.'”
“And then you say something like 'Listen to me, kid, you need gristle in your gut and spit in your shoes to do this job.'”
“Let's go back to not talking,” I suggested. “We don't want to miss anything.”
“Yes. I'll just stare at this hallway while you play games on your phone.”
“I'm researching Dr. Marconi.”
“Anything coming up?”
“His obituary.” I quietly read over the lengthy text.
“Well?” Stacey asked after a minute.
“It mentions he was preceded in death by his wife, Pipette Overbrook Marconi. Pipette? Anyway, it mostly focuses on his work. 'A historian interested in the fading folkways of the past, Marconi collected tales of myth and magic. His 1973 book Southern Charms and Curses collected many of these.' Then his teaching career, including visiting professorships at Boston College and the University of London at one point, but he was mostly based at the University of Georgia.”
“No hints about, I don't know, why a ghost might push him to his death in his library?” Stacey asked.
“Oh, yep, here in paragraph four. Seriously, let's not jump to conclusions about how Dr. Marconi died.”
“But we're both thinking it. How ghosts like to push people, or push things onto people—”
“So let's keep an eye out and stay away from steep drops.”
“Are you saying...” Stacey dropped into her gruff detective voice again. “'Life's full of steep drops and nasty surprises, rookie. If you don't watch where you're going, you're gonna fall. It's all a metaphor, rookie, a rough, tough metaphor for life in the big rotten city.'”
“You know, I originally had my doubts about hiring someone who went to art school, and I'm glad you're laying those to rest.”
“Because of my fantastic tech skills. The guys at SCAD always assumed I would be some clueless blonde, but I could run cables around most of them. I was president of my AV media club in high school. Also president of the hiking club and Tallapoosa Riverkeeper, but I started those. My grandparents really liked for me to be president of things, and it was usually easier to just start something new than take over something old.”
I nodded and put a finger to my lips. She did an exaggerated nod and put a finger to her own lips and gave me a thumbs up just to really hammer home that she'd gotten the message. Our presence could change the dynamic of the house enough to send any entities into hiding; staying still and quiet was the best way to minimize that. But it got pretty old.
Searching online, I dug up what I could on the late Dr. Philip Marconi. Memorial pages posted by the university and a few academic and historical societies to which he'd belonged went into greater detail than the obits. Marconi had been eighty-one when he died. His wife Piper had died more than three decades before him.
The internet provided plenty of details about his early and external life, but little insight into his later life, few clues about the man who'd become a reclusive collector of occult manuscripts and memorabilia. The death of his wife was an obvious possible trigger for an interest in the dead; maybe he'd hoped to contact her spirit in the afterlife. Then again, maybe he had already been into it before she died.
A couple of blogs and Instagram accounts had documented the historical buildings of Philomath, particularly The Globe, one of several Greek Revival plantation houses built during the antebellum cotton era.
One place mentioned the current house as The Taylor House and called it less historically significant than The Globe or the preserved church. The house had been “purchased some years after the Civil War by New York native Lucio Marconi, who was then investing in war-cheapened land in Augusta and Athens, and sought to establish himself midway between the cities. His family's extensive changes to the original house have greatly reduced its historical value.” The article also noted that “the house is private property. Tourists and photographers are not welcome.”
Stacey elbowed me, yoinking me out of my internet rabbit hole. She pointed at the monitor displaying the thermal camera feed from the hallway outside.
“Cold front moving in,” Stacey whispered.
A cold spot had formed near the dark double doors at the back of the hall, an area of deep blue no larger than my hand, but definitely there, like a tiny polar vortex floating at doorknob level.
We held our breath, watching.
It didn't move fast, but dead things need not hurry, I suppose. Especially when they're caught in a repetitive loop of activity, as they often are.
The cold spot moved up the hallway, away from the doors.
Nothing appeared on the night vision camera; all seemed perfectly quiet. The sensors in the hallway picked up a falling temperature, but no motion. An EMF meter reflected a minor electrical fluctuation. The temperature and electrical changes together would have been enough to trigger one of our ghost traps to shut, if we'd set one up.
The cold spot drifted up the center of the hallway, growing colder and larger, as if focusing its energy and preparing to act.
It passed Cherise's closed bedroom door and the bathroom across from it.
As it drew even with our door and Aria's, it came to a halt. It lingered in the middle of the hall for a long time, and I wondered if it was sensing our presence.
“Eyeball check?” Stacey mouthed to me after a few minutes, pointing at her own eye. Sometimes the living eye can detect things gadgets can't.
I held up a finger. Wait. We were lucky to see anything at all on our first night. I didn't want to run the ghost off by charging out there, unless it threatened our clients.
After a few more minutes, the cold spot began to move again.
It headed toward Aria's door.
I was on my feet, moving toward the door from our room to the hall, my eyes glued to the screen. My hand went to the tactical flashlight holstered in my utility belt, the ghost hunter's sidearm.
The cold spot stopped outside Aria's door. I was ready to charge out there if it passed through into her room.
It didn't, though. It remained stationary, doing nothing at all for several more minutes.
I decided eyeballing it might not be such a bad idea. I motioned to Stacey that I was stepping out.
The hall was definitely colder. Little bumps rose all over my arms, and I felt some apprehension.
I closed the door tightly behind me and stood in near absolute darkness in the hall; anything could have grabbed me and I wouldn't have seen it coming. I kept my flashlight off,
though; I was trying to observe the entity, not annoy it into hiding.
My eyes adjusted gradually to the moonlight slipping in through the balcony doors. Watching Aria's bedroom door, I tapped my headset's microphone, signaling Stacey for an update.
“Cold spot's still there,” her voice whispered in my ear. “It's looking agitated now, kind of spinning and drifting back and forth.
I stared at the dark rectangle of Aria's closed door, seeing nothing, but definitely feeling the cold.
“Getting colder...” Stacey whispered.
It emerged from the darkness all at once, like a pale fish swimming up from black depths. The eyes and mouth were dark holes, just suggestions of shapes, and the skin was like dry bleached paper stretched taut over bone.
I've seen my share of apparitions, ranging from sad and helpless ghosts to those distorted by their own twisted psychology into monstrous and inhuman things. I can't say I've ever fully grown accustomed to it. The instinctive physical response doesn't help; our bodies can sense something supernatural and dangerous, just as animals can, and tell us to flee.
This particular one was chilling, a partly formed dead thing, and had appeared only inches away, its phantasmal face moving toward me at high speed.
I clicked on my flashlight, more of a defensive reflex than a conscious choice.
Three thousand lumens of full-spectrum white light hit the apparition like a tidal wave, washing through its filmy, frosty substance while it rushed toward me.
For an instant, I had a clearer look at it, and more details did nothing to improve its appearance. It wore a rotten cloth hat, leather tunic and high boots, the clothes cracked and decayed. Much of the entity's shape was hidden under a dark cape or cloak.
Those were the clothes. The entity inside was downright cadaverous, only bits of skin left on its skeletal face with its empty eye sockets, and on its skeletal hands.
