by JL Bryan
I climbed the creaky staircase to the second-story walkway, using my hands on the stairs in front of me; the staircase was nearly as narrow and steep as a ladder.
Approaching the dark doors to the master suite, I drew out my set of lock picks again.
I didn't need them. The doors weren't locked on this side. They were heavy, though, and it took some effort for me to pull one open.
The space beyond was pitch black. I clicked on my flashlight and turned it to its dimmest setting before entering.
It was a continuation of the upstairs front hallway. It had probably all been a single upstairs hall at one point, but later walled in to create a private lair.
The rooms were cold; my Mel-Meter confirmed it, along with elevated electromagnetic readings.
Actual photographs, not paintings, hung on the walls here. Some featured Marconi at faculty and university functions in decades past; he had one picture with a chubby silver-haired guy who, I'm pretty sure, was the state governor when I was a kid, but the picture wasn't labeled. There were also a couple of framed newspaper and magazine articles related to his book on Southern lore.
The opposite side of the hall featured pictures of Piper, performing in a variety of irregular avant garde costumes, lots of modern dance kinds of stuff that I really don't know about, but it definitely looked hard and uncomfortable, her body contorting into strange shapes.
The pictures spanned back to her childhood, showing her as a young girl dressed as a tiny ballerina, or tap dancing in sparkling clothes, or wearing heavy makeup in beauty pageants. She'd apparently won Miss Okefenokee twice, at the Little Miss levels and later the Teen level.
There were even actual pictures of the couple from their wedding, Dr. Marconi looking distinguished and gray, not the youthful version of his face looking out from the portraits around his home.
I saw no pictures of the late professor's ex-wife, which wasn't shocking given that he'd remarried, but there were also no pictures of his son Victor, not at any age. Dr. Marconi showed more interest in his second wife's childhood than his son's.
“I'm upstairs,” I whispered to Stacey over my headset.
“Cold spot is doing that hesitating-in-the-hallway thing again. I hate when the ghosts go still like that. Come on, do something, cold spot. Be a good spot.”
“Anything on night vision?”
“Not a thing.”
“Keep me posted.”
I explored cautiously along the hallway, finding a sizable linen closet, then a bathroom with a large dark marble tub. I wondered if that was the same tub Marconi had filled with animal parts and blood for his unsatisfying summoning. The stain-splotched tub back at our cheap motel suddenly grew more appealing by comparison.
Another door opened onto a large bedroom, the king-sized bed shrouded with dark curtains like a stage; I almost expected the curtains to part, revealing actors or marionettes inside. A couple of chairs offered a sitting area by the bedroom's fireplace, surrounded by more bookshelves. Another painting of Professor Marconi and Piper hung above the fireplace. The windows were shuttered, keeping the room in deep shadow.
My EMF meter indicated elevated activity in here, and I felt more than a little unsettled, as though I wasn't alone in the room, though I saw no one. Perhaps the old bedroom was Piper's ghostly lair, the place from which she emerged, weeping, late at night.
Or perhaps her lair was the next room, the last one in the private suite, a dance studio with golden-hued hardwood floors and mirrored walls. A big stereo cabinet with a record player and cassette slots stood in one corner, a 1980s relic that had probably been high end in its day, suitable only for vinyl-loving hipsters in our modern world. A huge selection of records and cassettes occupied its shelves. One end of the room had bookcases with volumes on dance and music.
A layer of dust coated everything, indicating the room hadn't been touched in decades.
I imagined Piper here, her golden hair tied back in a sweaty ponytail as she practiced, utterly unaware that her heart would soon blow out. I wondered how that had been discovered, and exactly where she'd died—here in the house? Or in a hospital?
The entire suite was kept permanently dark, the windows shuttered tight in every room.
“Ellie, it's getting colder, and it's moving,” Stacey whispered.
“Toward Aria's room again?” I stepped toward the dark doors dividing this master suite hallway from the guest hallway out front.
“No. Cherise's.” Stacey took a breath. “Ellie, it just passed through Cherise's door. It's not in the hall anymore. It's in the room with her.”
I shivered, not liking the sound of that.
It took some effort to unlock and heave open one of the pair of heavy dark doors that led from the front of the master suite into the upstairs hall.
“A strange new presence has emerged from the dark doors,” Stacey intoned over my headset as I stepped out of those doors into the hall where our cameras watched. “Female. I can see her on night vision. On the thermal, she's red hot, one of the hottest ghosts I've ever seen.”
“Well, thanks.” I looked at Cherise's door, uncertain what to do. If it had been Aria, I would have knocked immediately, because she'd been reporting serious trouble with the ghosts.
Cherise, though, hadn't really wanted us here at all and was only allowing us to investigate for her little sister's peace of mind. She'd been insistent that we stay out of her personal space, which was generally reasonable but now seemed risky. What was the entity doing in her room? And which entity was it?
I leaned close to the door, feeling a little icky about trying to eavesdrop. There was nothing to hear, anyway.
Stacey spoke up just as the hallway grew colder and my skin began to crawl.
“Ellie...behind you.”
I turned.
The cadaver man was there again, his shadowy, skeletal face staring at me from hollow sockets, his rotten cape draped over his rotten jerkin.
Having glimpsed him before, I managed to hold in a scream and resisted the urge to reach for my light. I had loaded up some Deep South Gospel music on my iPod Touch, too, which had seemed my best bet for evil-repelling music when going into an old plantation house. For Baron von Jerkin, though, I would have probably gone with something a little more medieval.
I held still, avoiding any sudden moves, silently regarding the dead thing before me and generally trying to act like it was a nervous horse I didn't want to scare off, while my own nerves were quite rationally screaming at me to run away.
It started to reach toward me again, which didn't help, but I held my ground even as its bony fingers moved toward my face.
“Johann Gremel?” I asked.
His movement paused. For a moment the shadows on his face grew thicker over his bones, like skin growing back. Dark, round shapes moved in the eye sockets, the suggestion of eyes.
“Why did you tell me to leave?” I asked.
Gremel—assuming that was his name—resumed reaching his hand. He extended one bony finger, almost like he meant to gouge me in the eye.
Then he pointed past me, at the closed door to Cherise's room.
“Is there another spirit in there?” I asked, wondering if he even knew English, not that it always matters when dealing with the dead. Most of the time they aren't listening, anyway. “Is it Piper? Or someone else?”
If he heard my questions, he didn't respond. He kept pointing, not moving at all. The dead, when they manifest, have an eerie stillness. They lack all the little movements of the living—breathing, slight movements while shifting one's balance, fingers twitching and tapping.
Gremel stood like a gruesome statue, pointing his finger at the door as if he had nothing else to do for all eternity.
I turned sideways, looking at the door but definitely not wanting to turn my back to the ghost. I knew Stacey was watching out for me, but she was also hanging back, being professional and silent to avoid chasing away the ghost.
Apparently the ap
parition was just going to keep pointing, like the ghost of Christmas Future showing the way to my lonely grave, so I had little choice but to go ahead and check on Cherise.
I knocked on her door, hoping she was okay and that she wouldn't get angry and throw us out of her house. Also hoping the entity inside wasn't presenting a serious danger, to her or to me.
No answer came.
I knocked again, louder. “Cherise? Hey, I'm really sorry to bother you. Cherise?”
Still no response. I kept looking at Gremel, and he kept pointing.
“Fine, fine.” I muttered, and I tested the doorknob.
It turned, and the door opened.
Cherise lay in a four-poster bed that matched the antique wardrobe and dresser; it was my first glimpse of the room where she stayed.
She was deeply, solidly asleep, dressed in checkered flannel pajamas, arms and legs splayed out, snoring softly. Moonlight crept into the room from the window.
A strange black cloud with an oily surface, vaguely shaped like a person, hovered above Cherise as she slept.
It was the posture of a predatory entity preying on the living. If the black cloud was Piper, she'd certainly evolved into something very different since her death a few decades back.
I turned on my and twisted its head into floodlight mode, soaking the shadowy entity in all the white light I could summon.
In the surge of light, I could see something like an oily tentacle connecting the shape to Cherise's face. Feeding on her. Sucking the life out of her.
“Cherise!” I turned on the room's overhead light. “Stacey, come!”
With the lights on, the dark oil-cloud shape had vanished, but Cherise didn't respond to my shouting. She wasn't moving at all.
I ran to her and gave her a shake; she was as unresponsive as a rag doll. I checked her pulse, feeling my own rise in panic. She was alive, thankfully, but her pulse was low and faint.
I shouted her name again.
“What's up?” Stacey barged in, swinging her own light around. “You okay?”
“She's not waking up,” I said, shaking Cherise. “Something was in here, feeding on her, and now she's not waking up—”
“I'm up, I'm up,” Cherise moaned softly, covering her closed eyes against all the light.
“What's everyone yelling about?” Aria rushed in, still dressed in her school clothes despite the late hour, clearly wide awake.
“We saw something,” I said. “We followed an entity into your sister's room.”
“Why are you in my room?” Cherise asked, anger creeping into her voice as she looked at me between her fingers. “I never wanted you in my home. You can't be in here!”
“I am so sorry, Cherise,” I said. “But an entity came into your room. I saw it, and I think it could be very dangerous—”
“Enough! Get out of here. All of you.” She waved at us, sounding furious and exhausted at the same time. “Turn that light off. I have work tomorrow.”
I turned off the overhead as well as my flashlight, and nodded at Stacey to turn off hers. The dark cloud didn't return, though that didn't necessarily mean the entity was gone. Aria had turned on the hallway lights, so we weren't plunged into darkness. I didn't leave the bedroom, though; I was extremely reluctant after what I'd just seen.
“I'm sorry,” I said again. “I was worried about you.”
“What did you see?” Aria asked me.
“An entity came into this room.” I held back on details, since they would only frighten her more. “I followed it.”
“Was it the crying girl? Or the jerkin guy?”
“The jerkin guy was the one who insisted I check on her. Did either of you see him in the hall?”
Stacey and Aria looked into the hall, then at each other, then back at me, and shook their heads.
“Why are you still in my room?” Cherise groaned.
“So it was the crying girl?” Aria asked again, understandably pressing the issue.
“I didn't see a girl. What I saw was more of a dark cloud.”
“What does that mean?” Aria asked.
“It means you should all get out of my room!” Cherise drew a pillow over her head.
“Cherise, can you remember what you were dreaming about?” I asked. “Did you have any nightmares?”
“No. I was having a really nice sleep and perfectly fine dreams until I woke up to this nightmare of you people still not leaving my room.”
“Okay, if you really want us to go—” I began.
“Yes. That's the underlying subtext here,” Cherise said.
“We can talk in the morning.” I nodded at Stacey and we hurried out to the hall.
“Is it really safe to leave her alone in there?” Aria asked.
“She was pretty insistent,” I said. “So there's not much we can do. Maybe the entity will lie low the rest of the night, after all this attention from the living.”
“Maybe I should stay with her tonight.” Aria stared at the door in concern.
I didn't want her to do that, precisely because of the entity I'd seen. I would have preferred for Cherise to leave that room for the night, too, but we'd strayed perilously close to getting thrown off the case altogether.
“That could scramble our investigation,” I said. “We need everything to be as normal as possible.”
“Normal? In this house?” Aria shook her head and returned to her room, but I doubted she would sleep.
Chapter Thirteen
I stayed in the spare bedroom with Stacey the rest of the night, watching for any evidence of the dark cloud's return, though of course we wouldn't see it if the thing had simply lingered in Cherise's room. It could be in there, feeding on her now, and I was helpless to stop it or even to go back in there without angering Cherise.
This frustration kept me pacing up and down the bedroom floor, restless and worried.
“Don't you have something boring to read?” Stacey finally asked, clearly annoyed at my constant nervous motion.
“Plenty.” I forced myself to sit down and review the material I had—Marconi's journal, the investigator database information about the professor and his family members: his ex-wife Vera, his estranged son Victor with the criminal record, his second wife Piper.
Piper's mother, Annalee Waldrum, was a veteran of four divorces and lived in the small town of Folkston, more than two hundred miles south of us. It was even south of our hometown, Savannah. Any farther south and Piper would have been a Florida girl instead of a Georgia one.
Annalee's marital history complicated her legal and economic ones. There was much bad credit, a repossessed car, an eviction from a duplex. She'd lived in several towns scattered across south Georgia and north Florida, but seemed to have settled back in Folkston in recent years.
Piper's childhood was becoming clearer—absent father, a mother who was present but not necessarily providing a stable environment. A weird tangle of beauty pageants and poverty, an extreme emphasis on the young girl's appearance and ability to perform for others.
Not long before sunrise, I met with Cherise down at the kitchen table.
“We have to piece together their last known mental states as best we can,” I told her. She was still groggy as she drank her coffee at the kitchen table, still clearly annoyed at us for barging into her room the night before. “When you worked with Dr. Marconi, did he seem depressed to you?”
“I'm not sure I'm qualified to diagnose that,” Cherise replied. “He didn't seem happy. He seemed mostly tired. He was pretty brusque with me, to be honest—all about the work, not a lot of pleasantries. But if he was emotionally troubled, he didn't discuss it. Mostly he laid out instructions and watched quietly while I worked. After a few days, he stopped bothering to watch and just reviewed my work before I left. Even then, he just grunted. The only sign he was happy with me was that he didn't fire me. If I didn't come for a few days, he would call to make sure I was still coming back. The schedule was pretty loose.”
“How
exactly did you end up with the job again?”
“A professor in the history department told me about it.”
“Do you think we could speak with him?” I asked. “He may have been one of the last people to speak with Dr. Marconi. Maybe the only one who might be able to give some insight into his mental state and what his concerns were near the end of his life.”
“I could ask, but...” She shifted and looked out the window, appearing uncomfortable. “I'm not sure how to say who you are and why you're involved. I'm sorry. I realize you take your work seriously, but it will sound strange to him. Dr. Anderson is an older, no-nonsense kind of guy. And he's on my dissertation committee. I don't want him to think I'm...” Cherise made a vague gesture so she didn't have to say stupid or naive or superstitious or totally nutty.
“I understand,” I said. “We are a licensed private investigation firm. I could frame it as though we're doing a brief overview on behalf of the professor's estate. Tying up questions about his death and his property.”
“Wouldn't that be dishonest?”
“I'm equally happy to tell him I'm investigating paranormal entities for you in the late professor's home.”
“Let's go with the first thing.”
“Okay. I plan to contact his surviving family members, too, but given their relationship—or lack of one—I'm not hoping for much. None of them live nearby, and it's usually easier to get them to open up in person.”
“Did we see any more ghosts last night?” Aria entered the room dressed for school, backpack on her shoulder, and poured herself a large mug of coffee, to which she added much milk and sugar.
“You're drinking too much coffee for your age,” Cherise said.
“Get the ghosts out of this house, or us out of this house, and I'll stop.”
“You know I can't quit,” Cherise said.
“That's how I feel about this coffee.” Aria took a long, noisy slurp.
“We both need me to have this job. We have to survive.”
