Ghost Trapper 12 The Necromancer's Library

by JL Bryan

  “Is that... alive?” I asked, feeling stupid as I heard myself ask the question.

  Cherise smiled thinly. “It's the bookmark.”

  I moved closer. The snake tail was dried and mostly flattened, long dead. I felt a little queasy as I reached out and touched it. It was sewn into the book's spine like a ribbon marker. The whole book was bound in dry, scaly leather. “Is this reptile hide?” I asked.

  “If it's not, it's certainly meant to look that way,” Cherise said. “I found it open to that page.”

  Grimacing, I eased aside the dried snake-tail bookmark, trying not to break it.

  The text was hand-written in densely packed German. I couldn't read it, but the hand-drawn image was gruesome enough. One showed a skeleton on a table or altar, partially wrapped in bits of cloth. Candles burned in its eye sockets. Strange symbols were drawn all over the table where it lay. Another image showed a crazed-looking man cutting his own wrist, the blood dripping into a chalice.

  “I can't say I like the looks of this,” I said, my stomach feeling tight and cold. “What does the text say?”

  “Supposedly, these are rituals for raising the dead, and for banishing them again.”

  “Raising them how? As spirits or, you know, zombies?”

  “It doesn't use terms like that. It does make a distinction between three kinds of souls: fallen, ascended, and wandering. Each requires a different kind of ritual.”

  “Do we know the title of this book? Or author?”

  Leaving the bookmark in place, she carefully shifted the dried, oversized pages forward. She was clearly adept at handling fragile, crumbling texts.

  The first page in the book was illustrated with a three-headed serpent surrounded by text.

  “These are curses,” Cherise explained. “Instead of invoking a muse, it calls upon 'spirits of the infernal realms.' He tells us dark spirits are bound to the book. He also warns that trafficking in dark arts can cost one's soul, for... he writes, 'Souls are the coin of the underworld.' And finally his name is signed here.” She pointed to the bottom of the page.

  I read it aloud: “Johann Gremel.”

  “He calls himself an 'ordained enchanter of the hidden school.' Does that mean anything to you?”

  I shook my head. “I'll check this against Dr. Marconi's personal journal and see what he says. This fits with something he wrote about Piper—that he summoned her down from Paradise, and her ghost seemed sad.”

  “Imagine that,” Cherise said. “You make it all the way to heaven, only to be hauled back down to Earth to live as a ghost. Well, not exactly 'live'...”

  “That's what he wrote. That was why she was so sad, he thought.”

  “So what did he do about it?”

  “I'll let you know when I read that far. It should be more interesting than the property records at the courthouse.”

  “Algebra worksheets are more interesting than those,” Stacey grumbled in my ear, and I turned down the volume on my headset again.

  “Looks like I'll be down here for a while. I'll grab my laptop bag. Do you mind if we prop this door open?” I didn't like the idea of the Tomb Room door being able to roll shut and trap me inside.

  We lugged over one of the room's sturdy wooden chairs, which had leather backs and seats that somehow didn't make them any more comfortable, and propped open the Tomb Room's bookshelf door. It would now be a tight squeeze getting in and out, but at least I wouldn't find myself trapped inside.

  I grabbed my laptop bag from the study and brought out the late professor's journal. I settled down in the chair at the Tomb Room desk, the awful illustrations facing me. Wall sconces lit the room, but sputtered like dying candles. A chandelier hung high above us, beyond the ladders and walkways and upper bookshelves of the room.

  “It doesn't work,” Cherise said. “None of the chandeliers work. Maybe they've been shut down at the fuse box. I didn't go trying to fix them.”

  “Well, I won't start any electrical fires trying to figure it out, either,” I said.

  “I'll be down here working for a while, too,” she said. “I don't like working at night in here, but I don't have much choice because of the deadline.”

  “Great. I'm not eager to be alone in here, either.”

  I flipped through the professor's journal in search of Gremel's name.

  The earliest mention was among a number of books Marconi had acquired on a collecting tour of Europe about twenty years earlier. He'd purchased any occult text he could find, searching for ways to contact the dead.

  I had to read again about how he ached from the loss of his wife, how he longed with all his being to reach her somehow, even if the contact was only slight and fleeting.

  It felt a bit different to read this knowing that he'd had a previous wife and a son somewhere who he never mentioned, that he'd met Piper when he was approaching fifty; she was an undergraduate, and his own son was elementary age. Maybe he'd used some form of dark magic on her, or maybe she'd been overwhelmed by his influence and authority, or dazzled by his big mansion in the country. Maybe I was just being a little judgy of others, but I guess I couldn't help feeling that as I read it.

  I wondered whether Piper had come to regret her choice. Maybe her medical problems had arisen and ended her life too quickly for that.

  I also had to note the possibility that a supernatural presence had already existed in the house before they were married. Maybe the young girl's heart problems, which had somehow gone undetected while she earned a degree in dance, actually stemmed from life in a haunted house.

  But one problem with that hypothesis was that Vera had lived there for more than a decade without such issues. She and her son Victor were still alive today.

  Heck, maybe Vera had put a curse on Piper as revenge. That was just a random thought; I had no evidence that Vera was into such things, or that such things actually worked, anyway. But I had encountered some who could bind spirits and then use them to attack others—well, those were ancient Phoenicians who had now been dead for millennia themselves, but surely others could do it, too.

  Marconi wrote, quite a bit later, that the rituals described in Gremel's book finally allowed him to draw Piper's soul into his house.

  I begin tonight with the rites for recalling an ascended soul, Marconi wrote, for a being of such innocence and rare beauty as Piper could surely never be condemned among the fallen. Should this fail, I shall instead follow the formulae for evoking a wandering spirit, for perhaps she wanders, her soul's heart broken at our separation from one another, just as her body's heart was broken in life.

  My eyes rolled a little at his presumption that she would be spending the afterlife pining for him. It sounded like he was projecting a bit. Then again, I hadn't really known either of them, so I didn't know how they'd felt.

  His preparations for the ritual included bathing, fasting, and other topics I skimmed past until I found where he recounted the actual ritual:

  ...after the burning of incense and offerings, after the incantations and the spilling of my blood, I saw her dimly. At first, she appeared only as a reflection in the black crystal, a faint image of her gazing at me from beyond. I felt her presence in the room, a rising energy like the crackling air of an electrical storm.

  More blood I offered, cutting myself with the knife of gold and ivory that took such effort to obtain, spilling it into the golden chalice for her golden soul; I know not whether the blood truly gives sustenance to the spirit, as Gremel wrote in his instructions for the rite, or whether the shedding of blood is of symbolic or energetic importance instead.

  It matters not; the more I gave, the stronger she became.

  Soon I heard her voice—soft, so soft it was nearly drowned by the low hissing burn of the incense and candle flame—but it was she.

  “Who calls me?” her voice whispered, and it sounded true, though her words were stiff and formal. I reminded myself she was a spirit now, and her years in the land of the dead had likely changed he
r, perhaps profoundly. It matters not to me, so long as she has returned. “Who brings me here?” she asked.

  “It is me, my love,” I said. “I have given all to bring us together again. Every day apart from you has been like a chasm of inescapable misery—”

  “Did you really say that out loud?” I asked.

  “Sorry?” Cherise looked up from where she was working across the room. I'd pretty much forgotten she was there, otherwise I would not have been talking to myself.

  “Uh, nothing,” I said. “I found the part where he summoned her.”

  I read ahead, through Marconi's joy at Piper's return, even in her insubstantial ghost form.

  As I'd already seen in my skimming, though, things turned sour. She was permanently sad, despite his desperate attempts to cheer her up, to make their reunion a happy one.

  I have placed her favorite flowers, delicate boat orchids, in every room and endeavored to keep them thriving, though our climate is too hot. I have written her verses describing my love, a love that spans the worlds of life and death. I play her beloved records, Debussy and Auric and Bartok.

  Yet she draws no pleasure, but weeps, or is silent. Sometimes days pass and I do not see her but only sense her presence like a sad chill; I wish only for her happiness.

  Her only comfort seems to be when I suffer for her, drawing my blood with the knife to signal my continued devotion. I bleed into the goblet, and she favors me by appearing in full flesh, wearing only gauzy raiment like clouds, or nothing at all, for she is pure. Then she smiles, and I feel a sense of her delight in the air.

  At times these manifestations cause me to boil with desire, but there is no satiation, for her body is sometimes restored to its beauty but never its substance. She is like the clouds and the stars, celestial and untouchable.

  Did my eyes roll yet again? Maybe.

  Pages of desperation and despair followed, descriptions of her intermittent apparitions and her ice-cold presence beside him in bed.

  “I'm off to sleep,” Cherise told me. “I hope I don't dream about this stuff. I hope you don't, either.”

  I wished her good night and resumed focusing on the journal.

  Though my love has returned, the pain of loss is only sharpened and renewed, for we cannot touch, and only rarely speak. She is stiff and distant with me then; our old intimacy is gone, buried with her in the grave.

  Misery grows like a tumor inside me. I long to make her whole again, like Eurydice when her beloved Orpheus brought her out of the underworld—then foolishly lost her before reaching the world of the living.

  Should I have the chance, I will not repeat the mythical musician's grave error.

  I squinted. Was he making a pun with the grave error bit? Or was he too somber and serious to even realize it?

  And, much later, his handwriting almost too cramped and spidery to read despite the magnifying glass, he wrote:

  I have failed again. Another attempt that seemed worthy—for a moment she appeared whole, and I touched her. She was soft and damp, warm but cooling quickly. I knew it was temporary, made from the blood and scales of sacrificed reptiles, the black ichor of crushed insects, the innards of strange fish from distant waters. I had collected and mixed these myself in the bath tub, along with the prescribed minerals and incantations, the promises of servitude to the Great Fallen Spirits.

  For this, I had the momentary pleasure of touching her as she rose from the bath of dark fluids, her skin and hair, the surface of her, forming a lifelike illusion. Her skin was spongy, and I knew her to be hollow within; but how I delighted to touch her again regardless.

  “I have come for you,” she said, and for once she was not crying. For once she was not a sad echo of her former self, but blazingly alive, her blonde hair red with animal blood and hanging in wet ropes all over her face and shoulders. Her blue eyes glowed in that perfect face; even with the blood and filth that coated her, I could discern the high cheekbones and full lips, all the features that had drawn me so powerfully and hopelessly to her when we met.

  “But you were probably still married when you met,” I murmured. The date of his marriage to Piper was less than a year from his divorce from Vera.

  I saw then that all miracles are possible.

  “I love you,” I told her, and embraced her. Her arms encircled my neck, her soft lips pressed against mine. I felt her lithe dancer's body against my aged and decrepit one, and I was alive and felt excitement as I had not in so many years. So many years of searching for her, reaching for her, craving this moment again, her flesh against mine again.

  Her touch was not quite as it had been in life—in this form, she had no bones, no true core, simply animal parts brushed over her spirit like warm paint, giving her texture and color. She was dripping wet, and none of it was water.

  Then she was gone.

  Our kiss ended, and I opened my eyes. I was still wet from my face down to my feet, moist with the blood and innards of nineteen animal species. Where the tip of her tongue had slipped between my lips, I removed the crushed black shell of a palmetto bug.

  The conjuring had ended in moments, after weeks of exacting preparation.

  I had lost her again.

  I knelt before the foul soup of decay filling the bathtub and wept.

  This is not enough.

  I must find a way to make her flesh again.

  The next few pages detailed more occult research, more disappointments in his attempts at necromancy.

  The final page offered only a few quickly scrawled lines:

  I have failed. There is no path forward. The rest of my miserable years shall be spent without more than a ghost of her, until I finally lose my form and join her.

  The only hope of true reunion lies in my death.

  I reread those lines a few times. Was there a chance Dr. Marconi had killed himself?

  Ragged little ridges of paper were visible just ahead of this final page. I ran my finger down the middle of the book.

  Someone had torn out pages here.

  Dr. Marconi himself? Cherise, who had the thick ring of house keys with the desk key? Some unknown third party with secrets to hide?

  Whatever it was, I was missing some part of what he'd done in his further attempts to resurrect his dead wife—an important part, most likely, because someone had gone to the trouble of striking it from an already fairly grisly record.

  I checked the hidden cavity in the desk, but there were no loose pages in there. The golden-handled ivory dagger and golden chalice were; I pictured the elderly man puncturing himself, bleeding into the chalice for the sake of summoning his wife's ghost down from above.

  It was hard to picture clearly, though, because there weren't many recent photos of Marconi available. Just those paintings of himself and Piper, of which I'd counted five around the house.

  Having finished the journal, I squeezed past the propped-open door and the clutter around it and strolled through the main part of the library. I looked up at the broken railing, but there was no sign of the pale ghost girl.

  “Stacey, any updates?” I whispered over the headset. I didn't want to run off any ghosts who might have been thinking about manifesting. Besides, the quiet library environment almost compelled me to keep my voice down, as though some irritable librarian would emerge to shush me.

  “We have some indicators ticking in the upstairs hall again. No clear cold spot now, but overall temp is down compared to the rest of the house. The EMF meters are registering activity, but I'm not seeing or hearing anything. Cherise went to her room a while ago. How's it going down there?”

  “I finished his journal. We also found one of the old necromancy texts he was using. Written in German by a guy named Johann Gremel.”

  “Could he be our angry German in the jerkin?” she asked.

  “If his ghost is somehow attached to his book, then yes,” I said. “But there's no reason for him to be territorial about the house.”

  “Unless he's decided he like
s it here,” Stacey said. “Do we know how long he's been here?”

  “His grimoire has been here for a couple of decades. Marconi acquired it at an estate sale in Bavaria.”

  “So maybe he's claimed the house for his own. Killed the owner for it. Maybe he's a super book dork like you and wants to haunt that library forever.”

  “There's definitely a lot of maybes at this point. The flip side: maybe he's just trying to warn us. And Aria. Maybe he's just being a helpful Harry in all this, and we're focusing on the wrong ghost because he looks scary.”

  “A scary Harry, yeah,” Stacey mused. “So you're thinking Piper might be the dangerous ghost? Maybe she grew to hate old Professor Marconi after their marriage, and came back as a ghost to shove him off that balcony.”

  “Or maybe Gremel killed Marconi, and Piper's weeping because of it,” I said. “And here's what's behind door number three: Marconi could have been suicidal.” I caught her up on the salient points of his journal.

  “He summoned her into a goop of bug guts and lizard blood?” Stacey gasped after I recounted the gross parts.

  “And fish organs,” I reminded her.

  “That is... not romantic. Never mind Hallmark Channel Halloween. It's more like Hallmark Channel Chainsaw Massacre.”

  “So a lot of this comes down to what Marconi was doing in his final years, and most importantly those last days of his life. It sounds like he was mainly a hermit. Who had contact with him? There's Cherise, and whatever mutual contact landed her the job. Piper's mother is still alive, too. Maybe she was in touch with him—”

  “Ellie, we have activity upstairs,” Stacey interrupted. “The cold spot's back, and moving fast.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Did the cold spot emerge from the master suite into the upstairs hall again?” I looked up toward the closed set of dark doors on the second floor, the rear entry to the master suite.

  “That's a big yep.”

  I decided to take a shortcut and also have a look, finally, at what lay within the master suite area. Cherise was reluctant to let us investigate that portion of the late professor's home, but it seemed critical to me.