by JL Bryan
Chapter Seventeen
The quaking and shaking of the house didn't intensify to kill us all, fortunately, but the strange lights and booming, caterwauling voice continued to blare through the windows.
I jumped to my feet, expecting the shapeshifting dark cloud entity to leap on me, but it had melted out of sight.
In the hall, the noise was louder and the light was brighter. It all came from the front of the house. The glass doors to the balcony glowed as if they'd become an otherworldly portal like Carol Anne's closet in Poltergeist.
The voice and music, however, was decidedly this-worldly.
I scrunched up my eyes as though it would help me make out the words. “Is that...?”
“Yep. David Allan Coe,” Stacey said, as we reached the door to the spare room.
Cherise and Aria stumbled into the hall to join us, looking toward the light and noise.
“Country music. This house keeps getting worse,” Aria muttered.
“What's happening?” Cherise asked, covering her eyes.
“Somebody with high beams and a very effective speaker system is visiting you in the middle of the night,” Stacey said.
“Any idea who that could be?” I asked. Cherise shook her head, but not too emphatically.
I walked along the front hall, warily eyeing the balustrade to my left and the long drop to the front stairs beyond it.
The light-filled balcony doors weren't locked. I turned both handles, pushed them open, and stepped outside.
I headed toward the front corner of the balcony to look over the railing at the source of the blinding light and roaring music. The balcony floor felt a bit too spongy and wobbly for my taste.
Below, a large pickup truck had driven up the wide front steps and smashed into one of the front columns supporting the balcony where I stood. Its high beams were on, its driver-side door was wide open, and David Allen Coe sang about how his long hair couldn't cover up his red neck.
Another crash, somewhere below and out of my line of sight, like breaking glass. One of the windows? Had Cherise locked the front doors? I certainly hoped so.
“What in the name of all that's up is happening out here?” Stacey stood at the balcony doors behind me.
“Someone drove a truck into that column. In a related story, this balcony might be collapsing, so let's step back inside.”
In the hall, Cherise and Aria looked understandably panicked. They stared down over the balustrade at the front doors, and they jumped when another smash sounded from that direction.
“Are the front doors locked?” I asked.
“They're all locked,” Cherise said. “I don't want random weirdos wandering in at night.”
“And you don't have any idea who this random weirdo is?” I looked from her to Aria. “Nobody dated a David Allen Coe fan with a pickup lately, did they?”
“Oh, I know you're not looking at me,” Aria said. She asked Cherise, “What about you? Is this a crazed-out friend of yours from school or what?”
Cherise looked uncomfortable but didn't answer.
I walked to the front bedroom where we'd set up our gear and peered out the window. It offered a more complete view of the action: the pickup with its front end wrecked against the column, left there now to idle and to blare light and sound.
The assailant was visible now, a swaying man, unshaven and wild-eyed, who looked like he hadn't seen the inside of a barber shop in a year, or the inside of a laundry room or clothing store in about ten.
He had a case of bottled beer by his feet, and he hurled a bottle against the front wall of the house, where it smashed by the front doors.
“Get out!” he shouted, as I eased up the window pane so I could hear him. This meant we also heard more about David Allan Coe's troubles with being a longhaired redneck. “Get out!”
“That's what everyone keeps saying,” I muttered as the others caught up with me and looked out the window. “This guy, Gremel, and my father. 'Get out.'”
“Your father?” Cherise asked.
“Well, the Mr. Oily-Cloud imitation,” I said. “The same one who kept telling me to throw the softball harder and faster in my dream. 'More speed, more energy,' he kept saying. 'Give me more energy.' And then I woke up drained.”
“Get out of my house!” the man's slurred voice shouted. He drew back another bottle to throw, then seemed to reconsider and drank from it instead.
“I have a guess,” Cherise said. “This guy could be Dr. Marconi's son.”
“The son has a police record,” I said. “Fraud. Drugs. And, I'm going to go way out on a limb and guess he might have something of a drinking problem. We should call the police.”
“Wait,” Cherise said. “I understand why he's mad.”
“Who cares? He can sleep it off in the drunk tank. That's the safest thing for everyone,” I told her.
“Hello?” Cherise called through the open window. “Who's there?”
The swaying man belched and looked up at her. His jeans sagged unpleasantly low on his hips, revealing badly worn underpants that I won't describe.
“Who's there?” he shouted back. “Asking me who's there. Like I don't belong here. You don't belong here, that's who don't belong here, if anyone don't... if anyone... don't you... what were you...what?”
“You're Victor, aren't you?” Cherise shouted.
“Vic. Everyone calls me Vic. This is my house. My family. All the way back...” He described a swooping arc with his arm, sloshing his open beer everywhere, and the move threw him off balance. His pants dropped to his knees, and he tumbled backward off the portico and landed in the winter-bare rose bushes, atop countless cold hard thorns. He let out a grunt of pain that we could hear all the way up to the window, even as Coe began to sing about the ghost of Hank Williams driving his otherworldly Cadillac.
“We should go help him,” Cherise said. “Aria, you wait here.”
“Drunks are dangerous,” I countered, but she was already starting for the stairs.
Sighing, I followed after, wondering what made her so concerned for the lunatic who'd just driven his truck up onto the front porch like some crazy character from a David Allan Coe song.
Stacey and I drew our flashlights, ready to use the beveled forward edge. Designed for SWAT and military use, the tactical flashlights were capable of bashing in windows and the occasional face as needed. I hoped it wouldn't come to that.
I glanced back at Aria, who watched over the balustrade.
“I know,” Aria said. “Wait here. That way the ghosts can sneak up behind me and kill me while you're all distracted with Jimmy Smokes Crack out there.”
“He's more likely smoking meth. You be ready to call 911 if we need it,” I said.
Aria nodded and held up her phone.
We headed downstairs. Cherise swerved into the parlor and opened the window there, not quite willing to give up the protection of the locked doors just yet. I had to approve.
“Vic?” Cherise asked.
A groan sounded from outside. “I got stuck,” he said, his tone whiny and miserable.
“Stuck how?”
“Stuck right in my dang... stuck all over. I can't get up. Help me. Please.”
“Weren't you just yelling and throwing bottles at the house?” I asked. “How are you making demands now?”
There was a long pause before he answered, and when he did, his voice cracked like one of his beer bottles. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. You got to understand.”
“I get the feeling he's been through his share of angry break-ups followed by weepy, drunken pleading for forgiveness,” Stacey said.
Outside, he struggled and kicked in the rose bushes, lying almost upside down in them, not making much progress in escaping.
He moaned again. “Why, Dad? Why?”
I had to admit, he was going from scary to pathetic fast. The dropping-pants-and-falling-off-the-porch gag had really diminished him.
Cherise sighed and went to the front door.
I led the way out, my flashlight ready in case it turned into a fight.
“Watch out for broken glass,” I reminded everyone. Shattered bottles littered the portico, filling the air with the yeasty smell of beer.
The truck was still idling against the column, its front tires parked on the wide stairs.
Beyond that, past the broken bottles and the edge of the porch, Vic lay moaning, tangled in the thorny bushes, or at least too intoxicated to pull free of them and stand up. He was like one of those knights and princes who'd totally failed to reach Sleeping Beauty through the enchanted hedges.
“What are you doing here, Victor?” I asked.
“It's my house,” he said, voice slurred, eyes looking up at the stars above. “It's not... fair. My grandfather was born here. My great-grandfather... I think. This was my house. The only good part of my life was here. Now he left it all to...to you.” He turned and glared at Cherise. “Why you?”
“You're confused,” I said. “Cherise doesn't own the house. She's only staying here while she catalogs your father's collection.”
“Is that what she told you?” He closed his eyes and chuckled.
“Yes. She just works here temporarily.”
“Just the help,” Victor said, gesturing aimlessly with one hand. “Don't ask me, I'm just the help. No, no. He picked her. He wrecked all our lives for the girl behind door number two. Then she died. Now he left it all to girl number three.” He opened one eye and squinted it at Cherise. “I get it. You're cute. Brainy. His type. But he was so old, and you're like a kid. Didn't it make you feel sick, doing that with him?”
“Whatever you might be implying, I never did anything with Dr. Marconi!” Cherise snapped. “He could barely get around with a cane. Not even a cool Bond-villain cane, I mean he had one of those kind with four rubber feet.”
“So he was old and easy to push around,” Vic said.
“I did not push him around, either.”
“Then why you? I suffered from him my whole life and got forgotten. So why you?”
“I don't know,” Cherise said, quietly, looking at the ground.
“He didn't leave her everything,” I tried to explain again. “It's just a temporary job, organizing his things.”
“He sort of did,” Cherise said, even more quietly.
“What?” I turned to her, confused.
“That's the bonus. If I get the books organized and cataloged in twelve months, the house is mine. And all the land, which is a couple hundred acres. I become the owner.”
“The library, too?” I asked.
“It's my test, to make sure I'm up to it.”
“But do you really want to be stuck here?” Stacey asked.
“I don't know about that,” Cherise said. “But there's some other things that come with it, too. Real estate.”
“Old strip malls and rundown apartment buildings,” Vic said. “Mostly in Augusta.”
“So his business interests, too?” I asked.
“All my family's stuff, she gets,” Vic said. “I get nothing. I can't even get out of this bush. Can anyone help?”
“Wait.” I walked over to the truck, killed the engine and stereo, turned off the headlights, and pocketed the keys. Then I walked down the stairs to the ground.
“If we help you out,” I said, “No attacking, no beer bottles. You do literally everything we say, or it's right back in the rose bush you go.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I guess that that's fair.”
The three of us hauled him out, which involved raking him across many more thorns, but given how he'd made his entrance, I wasn't too concerned for his well-being.
We finally got him down to weedy dirt, where he lay, scratched all over, his pants unfortunately still down around his knees, his ratty boxers badly frayed. Those droopy tangled pants would keep him from getting anywhere too fast, so despite the unpleasant visuals I didn't really want to help him with that situation.
“So you're here for what, exactly?” I looked at his truck. Tennessee plates. “Did you drive all this way tonight?”
“I heard you talked to Mom,” he said. “A bunch of questions about Dad. She said you might call me.”
“We might have,” I said.
“I got a right to know what happens to my family's home,” he said. “I got a right to... at least... be part of this for a while. Have one last look. Take a couple things. Nothing important. Just things that matter to me.”
“Well, that's something better discussed during business hours, by email, and while sober,” I said. “Not by driving into the front of the house and throwing beer bottles at it. So here's what we'll do—”
Whatever I was going to say didn't matter, because flashing blue lights approached from around the next crook in the road. Two police cars.
They flew right up to the house and parked in the driveway.
“Who called the police?” I asked.
“I did. Duh.” Aria stood in the doorway, looking out with approval at the approaching police. “Like I was going to just wait around and see if Jimmy Smokes Meth turned out to be a good guy.”
“Good would be kind of a stretch,” Stacey said, looking at the destruction he'd caused. “Pathetic, maybe.”
The county police approached us, and we knew we still had a long night ahead.
Chapter Eighteen
There were complications. Local police had trouble understanding how the man named Marconi, the late professor's son, was not the owner of the house. The house had belonged to their family for more than a century, closer to a century and a half, and the local sheriff knew this quite well.
Still, there was little doubt Vic was drunk and had driven his truck into the house, which would tend to get a man arrested even on his own property.
So the police hauled him away and a wrecker hauled off the truck to the impound.
By the time it was all over, it was nearly sunrise. Aria went off to her room as the early-morning light brightened the sky.
“At least I don't have class on Saturdays,” Cherise said. “I'm exhausted but too jittery to sleep. So it's coffee and back to work in the library for me.”
I nodded. “I'll be around, too. I can't say the tent in the yard feels like the safest spot after all that.” I looked at Cherise a moment. “So it's true? You inherit everything if you do the job?”
“Yes. I don't understand why Dr. Marconi would give me so much. At first I didn't know he had a son, so I thought maybe he just had no one else. Then I heard...” Cherise shrugged. “Is it strange I feel a little guilty?”
“No. It's strange that he left you everything, but his conditions are even stranger. Why do you have to organize and catalog the library in twelve months if you're going to own it yourself anyway? On day three hundred and sixty-six, you could heap up all the books and burn them if you wanted to. So what's the rush?”
“The lawyer said it was meant as a test,” Cherise said. “To make sure I'm worthy of the inheritance. Marconi's words.”
“Well, considering his son would probably blow it all on meth and beer and David Allan Coe records, I kind of see where he was coming from,” Stacey said.
“What happens to the estate if you don't finish in time?” I asked.
“It gets broken up and donated to a list of academic foundations.”
“And you're sure there's no reason why this man you met less than a year ago would leave you everything?”
“Like I said, I don't know! If you're accusing me of sleeping with him, like Victor did, the answer is still 'no.' And also 'gross' because he was in no condition. He could barely hobble around. He was shriveled and hunched. He probably shouldn't have been living alone. He could have—well, he did have an accident.”
“Before he died, did he tell you about his intentions with his estate?” I asked.
“Oh, no, I always thought he was about to fire me because he was so cranky.”
“This doesn't make sense,” I said.
“Yeah. That's what I've been thinking the whole time,” Cherise said. “But I figured he was some crazy, lonely old guy, and what could I do? Turn down an estate that could provide for me and my sister for the rest of our lives? And all I had to do was organize a library? How could I say no?”
“You couldn't,” I said, mulling that over. “It was basically an offer you couldn't refuse.”
Cherise smiled a little. “It was. And that's why I have to get back to work.” She headed inside, and Stacey and I followed, closing the front doors against the last chill of the dying winter.
While Cherise headed for the library, Stacey and I went upstairs to regroup. Piles of work awaited us in the form of research, video, audio, and other heaped-up data that needed to be sifted.
“Make sure Jacob's still coming tonight,” I told Stacey as I dropped into a chair, feeling both exhausted and keyed up. “I need a medium's perspective on this place. We're back at square one with the dark cloud. We can keep baiting it with Piper and Dr. Marconi's rings, but it didn't really respond to that. After seeing it up close, I think the dark cloud might be something older, maybe something conjured up by Marconi's experiments in necromancy. Either that, or Marconi managed to corrupt and twist himself so hard in life that his soul was already nearly demonic the moment he died.”
“Well, the weird ritual room seems like the place to make that happen,” Stacey said. “He spent years and years doing who knows what occult craziness in there.”
I nodded. “I'm supposed to talk with Dr. Anderson later this morning. I can't exactly grill him because he's Cherise's superior at the history department, but I want to know about his last conversations with Marconi.”
“All righty, I texted Jacob. Though if he was a real psychic, he would have texted me first.”
We got to work. Stacey mostly analyzed footage and checked for anomalies in the collected data. I mostly looked through Marconi's journal and various property records and newspaper stories printed out at the courthouse and library.
