by JL Bryan
“She would've had some kind of encounter with Piper's ghost. Huh. Why's Gremel worried about Piper? You think maybe Piper's been the dark cloud all along?” Now Stacey stood and paced like me, which really crowded up the spare bedroom's primary pacing zone. I couldn't tell if she was doing it to make fun of me or not. “Maybe there's no ghost of Dr. Marconi, because he totally moved on. But Piper, after being dragged back from the other side, dragged into haunting this house against her will... maybe she evolved over time. But what's with the weeping, if she's the powerful and dominant ghost here?”
“The weeping might have been a useful weapon against Marconi,” I said. “Opening him up emotionally, enabling her to feed on him. In his journal, he describes her always seeming unhappy. She would lie beside him in bed like a freezing cold cloud—”
“And we saw a cloud over Cherise's bed!” Stacey said. “So... Piper's learned to feed on the living, and she's trying to apply the methods that worked for her with Marconi. That's why she's weeping. It's an emotional trap. Wow, we've got it all figured out! Maybe.”
“It's a hypothesis,” I said. “It fits what we have so far. But she's taking a different approach with Aria—drawing her out of the room, down the hall. Like she has special plans for Aria.”
“You mean possession?”
“It's possible. Maybe Piper's ghost is stronger inside the master suite and it wants to lure her in there. Late at night. Alone. The whole incurable-sadness approach worked for her before, with Marconi, so she goes with what she knows. She lets Aria hear her cry and hopes it draws her close. Draws her sympathy and her curiosity.”
“Crying probably works better for that,” Stacey said. “I mean, if the ghost was screaming, or moaning, or knocking things around, that wouldn't draw anyone close.”
“It would put her guard up. While crying could elicit sympathy instead. Especially from someone young and innocent.”
“Exactly!” Stacey said, and we nearly collided in our pacing, so I sat down.
“So we could be down to two active entities instead of three,” I said. “And we should consider baiting the ghost trap for Piper as well as Philip.”
“Let's rummage around in their room for personal things.” Stacey started for the door.
Down the hall, we found the dark doors locked again.
“Do they lock automatically when you close them?” Stacey wondered, tugging on a doorknob.
“The doors at the other end don't. Let's go around. I don't want to risk damaging anything with lock picks if I don't have to.”
We went down the long front stairs and through the first-floor hall, past the now-familiar reading room and study with its massive desk and antique bar, everything upholstered in leather or paneled in wood; it was a few deer heads and a cloud of tobacco smoke short of being an old-time men's club out of the nineteenth century.
The library was dim, with its lights off and many of its windows shuttered. I looked toward the Tomb Room concealed behind its bookshelf-lined door.
We clambered up the steep stairs toward a second-story walkway, up into the late professor's hanging garden of books.
“Is it just me, or does this feel more rickety than last time?” Stacey whispered.
“I think it's creaking and shaking more,” I said, and I wasn't kidding. It felt less stable to me.
I paused to look up at the spot above us with the broken railing where the professor had fallen, where we'd seen the girl in the window. We'd focused some observation gear there the previous night, but hadn't gone through the data collected yet. There were still countless hours of video and audio from all over the house to pore through.
The walkway did seem creakier than before as we approached the dark doors, the rear entrance to the master suite, and heaved them open.
No sunlight penetrated the dim hallway and rooms beyond, any more than over in the Tomb Room. The closed shutters kept the suite dark and claustrophobic-feeling; the rooms here were spacious but somehow felt small, as if the walls and ceiling were pressing in, as if the placed wanted to push us out, or maybe to crush us. The air was stifling and stale, hard to breathe.
We searched for personal items in the master bedroom, which seemed about as personal an area as we could search. We found their wedding rings, recognizable from their portraits. Piper's was in a small chest of pricey jewels. She seemed to favor gold and sapphires, as if to match her hair and eyes. Her wedding ring had an impressive boulder of a diamond.
Dr. Marconi's ring was an easier find, sitting on the dark end table by the bed, golden like hers but with smaller diamonds.
“Man, her ring alone must be worth thousands of dollars,” Stacey said. “Should we use something cheaper?”
“We're looking for maximum sentimental value here,” I told her. “If the black cloud is Piper, she might be drawn to it. If it's Philip, well, he's obsessed with her, so same thing.”
“Unless she was unhappy in her marriage and the ring just reminds her of bad times.”
“Either way, surely she's connected emotionally to it, and might be drawn close enough to check it out.”
We hauled in the big stamper that seals the ghost traps at high speed, taking it in large pieces up the long staircase and assembling it in Cherise's room. We set a ghost trap inside—a cylindrical leaded-glass jar surrounded by electrified wire mesh insulated by clear plastic. The basic design dates back more than a century, but the insulating plastic layer was wisely added somewhere in the twentieth century. We mounted the trap's lid a couple feet above, ready for the stamper to slam it down.
“Are we turning it on?” Stacey asked as I tested the sensors. A spike in electromagnetic energy combined with a drop in temperature would trigger the trap to slam shut.
“We'll wait until tonight.”
Stacey and I napped that afternoon to get refreshed for the night's observation. We didn't want to wake up drained, facing a ghost that was all amped up after feeding on our energy, so we avoided sleeping in the house.
Despite the chill, we slept in Stacey's pretty nice and roomy tent in a relatively clear patch of the weedy, thorny back yard. I had to agree that our sleeping bags were more comfortable than the drop-down cots in the van, and the tent was much less spooky than being inside the house. Stacey was a little too enthusiastic about turning this into a camping trip. At least the mosquitoes weren't out yet.
The alarm woke us at sunset. It was time to go to work.
Chapter Sixteen
“I still think y'all are crazy,” Cherise said, sitting in one of the chairs in the spare bedroom that Stacey and I had been borrowing. She looked over the monitors and laptops set up on the dresser and in the empty wardrobe, showing locations around the house. One now focused on the ghost trap in Cherise's room. “And that contraption is even crazier than the idea that ghosts are walking the house at night.”
“If nothing else, maybe we'll find some solid evidence for you out of this,” I said.
“Are you still saying you think nothing weird is going on in this house?” Aria asked her sister. Aria was pacing the middle of the room, just as I'd done earlier.
“I'm coming around,” Cherise said, averting her eyes like the topic made her uncomfortable.
“Well, we totally appreciate you letting us try, even though it seems wacky,” Stacey said. “I've seen these ghost traps work before. It's all a matter of dropping the right lure in the right spot. Just like fishing.”
“I've never gone fishing,” Cherise said.
“Oh, you should try it!” Stacey told her.
“Okay,” I said, cutting in before Stacey could start planning a fishing trip for all of us. No thanks. “I'm getting into position.”
“Are y'all sure I should stay here?” Aria said. She wore her headphones, but her tablet was darkened for the moment. “Won't the ghosts suspect something if I'm not in my own room like usual?”
“If this goes wrong, we could provoke the entity into an unpleasant response,” I said. “I'd
rather everyone be together.”
“But you'll be alone,” Aria argued.
“Aria, enough,” Cherise said.
“I won't, because you'll all be watching over me,” I said.
“Uh, okay.” Aria didn't look impressed.
“Good luck,” Cherise told me before I walked out of the room. She was wearing my leather jacket as part of a fairly weak bid to confuse the ghosts about who was who.
“Thanks.” I closed the door and walked up the hall to her room. I wore Cherise's extra-long flannel pajama shirt over my own shirt and jeans. I doubted our clothing swap would really fool any spirits for long, but it couldn't hurt.
I turned off the hallway light, leaving the house dark and quiet before I stepped into Cherise's room.
I closed the door and switched off the light. It was time to bait the trap.
The two wedding rings clinked against the leaded glass as I dropped them to the bottom of the trap. Then I lit the slow-burning candles inside.
While most ghosts are averse to too much light, like sunlight or pure white light, they also need to draw energy from their environment if they're going to do anything. This creates cold spots.
Some will feed on the raw bit of fire offered by a candle flame. Long before thermal cameras and EMF meters, my predecessors in the ghost-hunting trade would use candles as ghost sensors, watching for the candles to flicker, dim, or snuff out.
With the trap set, I gave a thumbs up to the night vision camera, then climbed into Cherise's bed and pulled the quilted comforter up to my head, concealing most of my face.
I lay in the dark, letting my eyes adjust to the low, flickering candlelight. The stamper looked out of place among the antique furniture, like some weird spindly robot.
The unfamiliar room soon filed with shadowy, potentially threatening shapes, the way strange dim rooms tend to do. Though pitch blackness is often worse, serving as a blank canvas for the frightened imagination; plus, you won't see anything creeping up close until it grabs you.
My mind was ready to play tricks on me, to tell me that a dark shape occupied the antique chair I could barely see in the corner, and someone tall and slender watched me from the partially ajar closet door. Why hadn't I closed that?
I looked to the cameras pointed at me. The night vision would be showing me in weird shades of green, the thermal probably showing my body in red, oranges, and yellows. It felt weirdly invasive to know they were watching, but of course I was glad Stacey was there if I needed backup.
Time passed. The house grew silent, aside from occasional creaking and groaning. The wind rattled limbs outside whenever it picked up, and it sounded like creatures climbing the outside of the house.
Down the hall, the lights would be out, the three of them sitting in darkness, watching the glow of the screen. We were pretending the entire household had gone down to sleep for the night.
More time passed, slowly. I was alone with my thoughts. I would rather have been alone with some ice cream. I really should have planned my week better.
The house creaked, the shadows shifted in the candlelight like dark figures watching me from around the room. I waited and watched, doing my best pretense of being asleep.
It was hours before it happened.
“Cold spot,” Stacey whispered over headset, her voice crackling with interference though she was just down the hall. “Sliding your way like a penguin down a snowboard slope.”
I tapped the headset's microphone gently to acknowledge I'd heard.
“It's coming in there with you,” Stacey whispered, even lower. “Be careful, Ellie.”
I kept my narrowed, barely-cracked eyes on the door. I really should have closed them completely, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it.
The room grew noticeably colder. The floor creaked not far away—it could have been a footstep.
I shivered, watching, forcing myself to remain still and act asleep.
All the little hairs on my arms rose, as if an electrical storm were gathering right around me. I couldn't see anything, but I could feel something in the room with me, the way you know when someone is watching you from behind even when you can't see them.
The candle mounted highest inside the trap fluttered, and I caught my breath. If the entity entered the trap and we caught it, then determining its identity and motives wouldn't matter so much. We could physically remove it from the house and bury it far away.
The only question would be where to release it. One option was a distant but pleasant old cemetery, like the one full of wildflowers and trees in the ghost town of Goodwell, where an entity could wander openly within the cemetery walls until it finally moved on. The other was to bury the trap, with the entity still inside, in the cursed earth of a certain remote, long-abandoned mountain churchyard ruled by particularly hostile spirits.
For that, it would be nice to know whether the ghost had truly harmed anyone. If it had murdered Dr. Marconi, for example, pushing him through the rickety library railing.
Maybe the railing hadn't truly been all that rickety, I thought. Maybe the ghost was just very strong.
The candle ceased flickering and resumed its solid, steady burn.
“Ellie, it's coming near you,” Stacey whispered.
I said nothing, but shivered as the entity moved closer. I couldn't see it, but after a moment, the candlelight from the trap dimmed a bit—not like the candles were burning lower and going out, but more like some kind of filter had moved into place in front of the trap, like a screen door blurring the view.
I tensed, wondering whether I would see anything at all, whether the dark oily cloud would form above me and try to feed. Sometimes these nighttime creepers will take your blanket and slide it off your bed before they come down on you, but nobody in this house had reported anything like that.
Under the blanket, my fingers rested against my flashlight. If the entity attacked, I would blast it, naturally. I was extremely disappointed that it had skirted the trap and kept coming at me instead.
The room grew colder.
“Ellie?” a familiar voice asked. I gasped a little; partly because it hadn't come from my headset. It seemed to originate on the far side of the bed, deeper in the room, near a bookshelf full of dusty leather volumes. I also gasped because of whose voice it was.
I turned my head.
There he was, the candles casting more shadows than light on him, but I knew him. He wore one of his favorite worn checkered shirts over his broad chest, his mustache like some time traveling species of facial hair from the 1970s, as I'd told him when he'd grown it.
“Dad?” I whispered.
He was looking at me with his dark brown eyes, frowning under the awful yet unkillable mustache. I felt disappointment and disapproval radiating from him.
“You shouldn't be here, pumpkin,” he said, a nickname he'd only used during a few of my elementary school years. “This house isn't safe. It's full of bad things. And doorways to terrible places.”
“But you're free,” I whispered. “I saw. You and Mom.”
“I only came to warn you. I can't stay long. You have to leave this place.”
“I have to protect these people.”
“No.” He smiled, in the same way he'd done when trying to explain some math homework I'd been struggling with. “You don't have to protect anyone but yourself. Get out tonight, and don't come back.”
“What about the people who live here?”
“Their fates are sealed. You cannot help them.”
“What?”
“Ellie, I'm not telling you again. Go!” He was angry and pointing toward the door.
“That's what you're here to say? You traveled all the way here from the other side to tell me to save myself and not help them?”
“Yes.” He smiled, looking happy again. “I can't protect you from what's happening here.”
“What is happening here?”
“Ellie, it's not for you to know.”
I sta
red at the apparition of my father a long moment. “Stacey, please come here.”
“You got it!” she replied, and her running footsteps echoed in the hall outside a moment later.
“What are you doing?” my father asked.
“Just getting a second opinion.”
The door opened. Stacey brought no added light to the room, either by flicking the overheads or drawing her flashlight, which was good.
“Ellie?” she asked.
“What do you see?” I pointed.
Stacey drew in a sharp breath. “It's that oily cloud thing. You want me to light it up?”
“No.” I stared at the apparition. “You're not my father. Show me your true face.”
“Pumpkin, you're confused,” he said, but the voice shifted as he spoke, becoming something higher and scratchier than my father's. His face became distorted, the eyes reflective and black like oil. “You listen to your father, or he'll punish you, little pumpkin.”
“Tell me your name,” I said. “Your true name.”
It cackled. My father's face filled with black veins, then ruptured.
“Is it Philip Marconi? Piper Overbrook Marconi? You don't have to stay trapped here. Whoever you are, we can help you move on. You could be free.”
“I am free,” the increasingly liquid and featureless apparition said. Its voice wasn't especially loud, but it had turned so high pitched and screechy that it felt like fingernails scraping my eardrums. It cackled, the sound of a thing that had not been human in a long time, if ever.
I felt even colder on the inside than on the outside as I realized the entity was perhaps neither Philip nor Piper Marconi, but something much older than either of them.
“Give me your name!” I shouted.
It replied with another ear-scraping cackle. Too smart for the direct approach. Too bad, because its identity would have been news we could use.
As it cackled, unnaturally bright lights filled the windows. A wailing voice boomed like thunder all around us.
Then a loud crash shook the house, as though an earthquake was rattling its foundations. Dust rained from the ceiling. The bed where I sat rattled and shook beneath me. The floor groaned like it would give away and I'd fall right through, and then the shaking roof would come crashing down on top of me.
