by JL Bryan
My EMF meter detected a spike in activity ahead.
“Piper, are you there?” I asked the empty space in front of the window. “Did you hear us outside?”
No obvious response came. Stacey's hands trembled as she held the camera. She glanced through the broken railing to the floor far below, where Cherise and Aria watched us—from a safe distance, as though concerned we might fall and land on them.
I was feeling apprehensive, too, but I had to believe it was significant that Piper had showed herself to us right after we'd visited her grave. I just didn't know whether she was reaching out for help, or warning us, or threatening us.
“Do you have a message for us? We're listening.” I spoke softly, gently, as though coaxing a frightened animal. I kind of hoped Cherise and Aria couldn't hear me from down on the ground floor as I tried to strike up a conversation with an invisible person, because I'm sure it sounded crazy. And they didn't need more of that in their lives. “Piper? Would you like to say something? Or show us something?”
There was a long silence. The walkway creaked, though neither Stacey nor I had moved.
“Is this where your husband died?” Pause. “How did he die?” Pause. “Do you miss him? Is that why you cry? What troubles you?” I was trying to think of emotional, evocative questions that might elicit a response. “What do you want? To move on? To return to the other side? Do you miss being there?”
I crept ever closer to the window. My EMF meter displayed stronger readings at every step, giving me hope that the entity was still there. There were no wires or outlets that I could see, nothing that might have given off misleading electrical readings. Lighting was meant to come from the chandelier a few meters away, and it was turned off.
“The inscription on your grave reads 'To love beauty is to see light.' What does that mean to you?” I asked.
“It's Victor Hugo,” Stacey murmured, looking at her phone with one hand while recording me with the other. “The Les Misérables guy.”
“We can help you leave this house,” I said. “Don't you want to move on? Leave these people alone?”
When it seemed clear that we would have no repeat appearance from the girl in the window, I turned and started back along the walkway.
“We'll add a camera and microphone up here tonight,” I said. “Let's head down and tell Cherise—”
All the lights on my EMF meter lit up as an unseen energy crackled the air around me. Suddenly I grew dizzy and disoriented, my senses distorting like I'd been jabbed with a needle full of nightmare-inducing hallucinogens.
The bookshelves and walkways and steep staircases suddenly made no sense, an elaborate Escher sculpture of a room with no clear up or down. My head spun. I wasn't sure where I was going, but I kept looking at that broken railing and thinking how I needed to get away from it.
I took a step, and then another, but it was all wrong because the broken railing grew closer, and I could see the long drop beyond, the tunnel of books and ladders spiraling down to the impossibly distant floor.
Unseen hands grabbed me.
I fell what seemed like the wrong way, but it must have been the right way, because I slammed into bookshelves instead of toppling through empty space.
One shelf dug painfully into my lower back; another cracked into the base of my skull. I wasn't falling, but I thought I might be crushed to death against those shelves full of books. Ground into pulp fiction was a thought that whirled through my confused brain.
Stacey was holding me, gripping my hand tight, shouting.
“Ellie, can you hear me? Ellie, snap out of it!”
And then, as if her words and touch were an incantation of some kind, I did snap out of it.
I slumped against the bookshelves, gripping Stacey's hand. A thick, almost waxy cold sweat coated my skin, as if my body was fighting a severe illness.
“Are you okay?” Stacey asked, her shift in tone indicating she'd noticed that I'd shifted back to normal, more or less.
“What happened?” I whispered.
“You, uh, wandered over to the railing like you were going to jump,” Stacey said.
“We need to get out of here right now.”
“Sure. There's your EMF meter.” She pointed to where I'd dropped it on the walkway near the broken railing. “No, wait! I'll grab it! You just... walk that way. Stay tight to the bookshelves.” Stacey was talking to me like I was demented, and I guess I had been, for a moment.
She walked with a hand on my shoulder, following close as I traveled the narrow walkways and climbed down steep stairs, finally reaching solid ground below.
“Everything okay?” Cherise asked; I couldn't tell whether her concern was for my well-being or over the possibility that I was a lunatic who'd somehow talked her into letting me wander her house at night. There was probably room for both concerns.
“Yes,” I said, trying to look and sound professional despite my trembling knees and the outbreak of cold sweat. “We picked up some strong readings up there.”
“You saw her standing where the old man fell and died?” Aria asked. “She pushed him, didn't she? The ghost killed him—”
“We don't know any of that for sure,” I said, trying to calm her. It was strictly true but sounded a little hollow to me after what I'd just experienced. Maybe I'd glimpsed Dr. Marconi's final moments in life—confused, perhaps manipulated by an entity into walking right into his death like I'd almost done. “But your rule about nobody going up there is a solid one, because there's no way those rickety old walkways and ladders are safe. Unfortunately, we do need to stick some gear up there since it's an obvious haunting hotspot—”
“A hauntspot, we like to call those,” Stacey chimed in, somewhat inaccurately, since only one of us prefers that term, and it's not me.
“—but we'll set it at a safe distance,” I continued, railroading over Stacey's interruption.
“What exactly did you see again?” Cherise asked us.
“I took pictures.” I brought out my phone and flipped through the 48 images I'd snapped in rapid succession. The first several were useless, showing the ground, the toe of my boot, a nearby tree.
Once they lined up on the window, they showed some hint of what I'd seen. The first pictures of the windows, when the camera was still zoomed out, showed a pale bluish glow and a hint of a figure standing within.
As the images zoomed in, the glow faded and vanished. Closer shots caught a couple of faint orbs in the window, which can indicate spirits, but can also be nothing but dust or water vapor. Maybe we'd find something interesting when we examined the orbs more closely on Stacey's computer, but the resolution was already pretty chunky on the extreme zoom-in.
The closest pictures showed nothing but a dark window. No glow, no face, no orbs.
“Did you get anything, Stacey?” I asked.
“No, the stupid camera was packed away and I didn't have time. That girl was just there and gone.”
I nodded. “Aria, would you mind describing again the crying girl you saw in the hallway? Unless it upsets you—”
“Seeing it upsets me. Talking about it makes it a little better. It's people telling me not to talk about it that's upsetting.” She scowled at her older sister.
“Enough,” Cherise said. “I believe something unusual is happening. It's that or I have to think you're all crazy. As I said, maybe I haven't seen what y'all have seen, but I've had my share of strange moments in this house, too.”
“Like what?” I asked, eager to get her to open up, to provide whatever insight she could into this house.
“Just working in the library late at night,” she said. “All the old woodwork up there. It creaks. It groans. It's probably something to do with the humidity and temperature changes from day to night. The bookshelves are anchored in the supports that hold up the house.” She pointed to some of the massive wooden columns. They were dark wood, not white like the portico columns out front, but otherwise they mirrored the shape and size of those
front columns. There were actually more columns in here than out front. “Other times, I feel like I'm being watched, sometimes from above, or sometimes like there's someone behind me, looking over my shoulder while I read those creepy old books. But there's nobody there, it's just a feeling. And sometimes...” She glanced at her sister.
“Don't worry about me,” Aria said. “I'm the one who's been telling you there's problems, remember?”
“Sometimes, I feel those drawings in the books are looking back at me,” Cherise said, her voice dropping low as if reluctantly admitting to something shameful. “The strange masked people. The drawings of the risen dead. The contorted beasts, the monsters. The... demons.” She covered her eyes and shook her head. “I can't keep doing this. I'm so drained.”
“You think you're tired, try being me,” Aria said.
“The loss of energy can be another sign of a haunting, too,” I said. “Negative entities can feed on the living, and you may feel the drain physically, mentally, or emotionally.”
“How about all of the above?” Cherise asked, smiling thinly, without much humor.
I nodded. “I recommend you let us stick around a while longer. I'll need to dig into Dr. Marconi's personal records as well as his research.”
“His study should have all that.” Cherise gestured toward the hallway where we'd passed the reading room and the study earlier. “Dig away, I don't care.”
“It would be faster—and much cheaper—if we stay here on the property during our investigation,” I said. “It's a long drive from home, and even cheap motels start to add up after a couple days.”
“We could camp! There's tons of neat woods,” Stacey said, as if we hadn't just suffered through a creepy walk to the cemetery through those supposedly neat woods. “We could bonfire, toast marshmallows, tell ghost stories—which Ellie and I know a lot of—”
“That really wasn't where I was going with this—” I began.
“If you're worried about whether I brought camping gear, fear not,” Stacey said.
“It's just chilly at night—” I began, again.
“That's why we bonfire!”
“I don't believe 'bonfire' is a verb,” Cherise said.
“Thank you!” I said. “Anyway, we have bunks built into our van, and we really only need to sleep during the day. It would just be nice, if it's not too much trouble, if we could stay out there.” The van's accommodations were basically terrible, but not necessarily more terrible than our last motel room. Cleaner, too.
“Stay in the extra bedroom!” Aria said. “Your stuff's already there, and I need more people in this house. Especially ghost experts.”
“That's us,” Stacey said. “We can tell stories about the haunted hotel, the haunted corn maze, the haunted old mansion in Savannah, the other haunted old mansion in Savannah, or the other other—”
“I don't want to hear ghost stories. I want you to do your job and get rid of the ones we have,” Aria said, coldly.
“Aria, don't speak to them like that,” Cherise said. “You're welcome to stay in that spare room.”
“Yes!” Aria said, quickly. “We need you here. I'll make you breakfast every day!”
“You will catch up on sleep,” Cherise told her. “Now that they're here, you can rest and let someone else think about these things. You just think about school.”
“How could I not?” She rolled her eyes. “It's the only thing you ever talk about.”
“Because you can't afford to do poorly. Your middle school performance determines your placement in high school, and your performance there determines your college options, and what you do in college—”
“Blah blah determines the rest of my life, so if I screw up now I won't get buried in a fancy enough coffin when I'm dead,” Aria said.
“Aria!”
“We should get to work.” I nodded at Stacey, and we walked out to the van for more monitoring gear.
“Are you sure you're okay?” Stacey whispered to me outside. “What exactly happened up on the walkway?”
“I was completely disoriented. I could have sworn I was moving away from the broken railing, that I was specifically trying to walk away from it. Somehow my body did the exact opposite of that.”
“So maybe something was oppressing you?” That's when ghosts get pushy and problematic, and maybe start to influence your behavior, but aren't quite possessing you. Yet.
I nodded. “I think you're right. Oppression. There was an energy surge, like the EMF meter detected the entity when it reached into my brain to scramble it up. Or whatever it did.”
“And we're thinking it's probably the same entity that killed the professor?”
“I have to admit there are some fairly exact parallels between what happened to him and what happened to me.” I looked at Stacey. “Thanks for saving me.”
“Pfft. That's an exaggeration. Let's just try not to die on this case.”
“Sounds like a good plan to me.”
We headed back inside to prepare for our second night of observation, feeling more worried about our own safety than before. It can be a dangerous job; sometimes they're really out to get you.
Chapter Eleven
Reluctantly, we clambered up into the stairs and walkways of the “hanging garden of books” again, carrying cases of gear, but we stayed far back from the window and broken railing area, though along the same walkway.
While Stacey adjusted the thermal camera, I looked behind us at another book-lined wall spanned by more confusing walkways and ladder-like staircases.
The walkways converged below us, on the second floor, at a pair of heavy dark wooden doors that matched other pairs throughout the house.
“That must be the back entrance to the master suite,” I said.
“Also known as Ghost Central Station, right?” Stacey said. “Where the girl always sees the ghosts coming and going.”
I nodded. “Though I wonder whether they're really coming from the bedroom or just passing through it on the way from the library.”
“Huh. Let's point a camera that way.”
Soon we were done. Stacey sat in the nerve center upstairs, keeping watch over everything like a guardian angel with an Alabama accent, connected to me via headset so she could let me know if the house became active as the hour grew later.
She had a tendency to chat, though, so I kept the volume low while I did my research.
First priority was learning about the mysterious first wife. I sat at the desk in Marconi's study with my laptop, pulled up the P.I. database, and plugged in what I knew about Vera Marconi—her name, her spouse, the house in which I sat as a former address.
There she was. Birth, marriage, divorce. She was still alive, residing in Arkansas.
“Whoa,” I said aloud.
“I know, right?” Stacey said, apparently thinking I'd been listening to her. “So I told Jacob, you don't wear a plaid tie with a plaid shirt, even as a joke, because visually it's just too painful—”
“Did you know they had a kid?”
“Huh? Who?”
“Marconi and his first wife, Vera. Their son is Victor Marconi, now forty-four years old. And yikes, multiple arrests. Writing bad checks. Um, and crystal meth, about ten years ago.”
“Yikes,” Stacey agreed.
“Still alive. His obituary didn't even mention a son. Maybe they were estranged.”
“That's sad.”
I poked around, sifting through bits and pieces of the late professor's family history, trying to see if anything might shed light on this apparent haunting by his second wife and some other entity.
His antique wooden filing cabinets held his personal papers, portions of which were fairly organized, but a lot of loose papers were crammed in at random, sometimes crumpled up and jammed in between file folders—bills, bank statements, and other items dated in no particular order over the past ten years or so, as if he'd grown increasingly disorganized with age.
One thick folder he
ld the paperwork about Piper's medical problems. I read through bits and pieces of it. A congenital heart defect had gone undetected until her heart began beating irregularly in her mid-twenties. They'd monitored the condition closely, but ultimately there was nothing to be done, and her death came soon after her diagnosis.
The professor's financial records were murky—maybe Jacob could help us clarify them—but it appeared he owned scattered real estate in a few towns, largely Athens and Augusta, from which he received rental revenue. He'd inherited a portfolio of stocks and bonds that had diminished significantly over the years, maybe from the expensive renovations and his own spending on his collection of obscure texts and artifacts.
Footsteps echoed out in the library, and I stiffened up, wondering if one of the ghosts was walking near.
“Ellie?” A voice asked behind me, and I jumped a little. I turned to see Cherise. “I didn't mean to startle you.”
“I'm fine. Just jumpy. Is everything okay?”
“I found something. It might relate to that German voice you recorded.”
“Oh, great.” I stood and stretched. “Not that I wasn't having a fun and fulfilling time reading through insurance records. What did you find?”
She led me out of the study to the western part of the library, where she unlocked and rolled aside the door to the Tomb Room. Which, I assume, is not what Dr. Marconi had actually called it.
The darkness and heaviness of the room assaulted me almost immediately. I could smell old incense and smoke, and the sealed windows meant none of that had ever escaped. I tried to keep my eyes on Cherise and not the dusty cases of bones and or the brutal Aztec-looking statue with a head like a jaguar skull with a snake's tongue.
“This was sitting out on the desk, which is one of the clearest spots in the room. I think the items on his desk might have been things he was actively using. As opposed to the heaps.” She gestured at the precarious piles all around. The second and third story shelves above us were just as chaotic and unorganized.
I followed her to an open book on the desk, then recoiled at the sight of a snake tail winding across the page, its tip curled in a small loop on the dried parchment.
