by JL Bryan
My goggles also picked up thin blue lines in the bookshelves behind the two cold spots, like drafts leaking through. These were perfectly straight, a rectangular outline in the shape of a wide door.
“There's something behind those bookshelves.” I started toward them, even as Jacob yelled for me to wait.
And then everything started toward us.
It wasn't just books. Some of the more cutting-edge contents of the Tomb Room had been moved out here—blades, swords, heavy candlesticks, bones sharpened and painted with occult symbols, assorted skulls, some animal, some that might have been human. We certainly hadn't seen those before. Maybe they'd come from monkeys or other primates; I didn't have much of a chance to inspect them.
The books and artifacts hammered us from all sides as if flung by tornado-force winds. The heavy Anubis statue slammed into me like an attack dog, the death god's silver jackal teeth biting into my shoulder. I grabbed the statue with both hands and flung it to the floor.
“This way!” I continued charging directly toward the bookshelves, through the hurricane of heavy books and artifacts that struck and stabbed at us.
When I reached the shelves, I shoved the books off as fast as I could, pushing them carelessly onto the floor as I searched for whatever latch or mechanism would open the bookcase and reveal the hidden space beyond. Jacob and Stacey did the same.
Something grabbed me from behind, lifted me off my feet, and carried me upward at a frightening speed.
I barely had time to realize what was happening before I slammed into the pressed-tin ceiling. Then I hung there, suspended. It felt like a freezing cold hand was pushing against my chest, pinning me there like a captured bug. The air was thick and foul, hard to breathe.
The unseen force made it difficult for me to reach the defensive tools on my belt.
“What are you doing with her?” The woman's voice almost boiled over with rage, which was why it took me a moment to realize it was actually the normally very chill Stacey. She stood amid the scattered books and pointed up at me, the enormous diamond of Piper's wedding ring glinting on her finger. “Philip, get your hands off that girl!”
This proved a clever move. Maybe too clever, because I immediately plummeted through the thick, freezing cold space. I barely had time to position my fall so I'd bruise my hip instead of breaking my neck.
I slammed hard into a pile of books. It wasn't quite freefall speed; falling straight through the entity that had captured me had slowed me a little bit. Not enough to stop the impact from lashing my entire side with pain.
Jacob hurried to help me up, while Stacey continued pointing an accusing finger at the space above me.
“You okay?” Jacob asked.
“I'm about ready to check out of this library,” I muttered, drawing my flashlight but keeping it off.
Stacey jumped back against Jacob.
Marconi's apparition had materialized close to her, his colorless eyes staring from the sunken depths of his stony gray face. He reached a dead-gray hand toward Stacey, and she cringed.
Another apparition appeared nearby, not far from me. While the necromancer's apparition was faint and colorless, the new one was strong and clear, a pale blonde girl, her eyes and her silky dress ice blue. It looked like Piper, but had to be the aufhocker wearing her form.
Marconi hesitated and looked back at her.
“Philip!” Stacey snapped, sounding furious. The art school graduate was really in character. “Leave her alone. She's false. She's not me.”
The Piper apparition looked as angry as Stacey sounded. She reached a hand toward Marconi's apparition, as if summoning him.
An eyeblink later, Marconi stood beside the Piper apparition, at her side like an obedient dog.
“No!” Stacey snapped. “She's deceiving you!”
“Show your true form, golf hacker,” Jacob said in a commanding tone.
“Aufhocker,” I corrected without looking. I was already back at the bookshelf, once again trying to find the way through.
I knocked a row of books off one shelf, but one volume refused to budge, even when I pulled hard on it. The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.
I pushed it instead. This brought a soft, satisfying click.
A doorway-sized section of shelves swung inward, revealing narrow stairs that led down and twisted out of sight.
“There's more to the cellar,” Jacob said, his gaze following my light. “I knew it.”
Piper's apparition dropped its jaw and let out a long screeching scream, like she was a banshee instead of an aufhocker. Marconi rushed toward us.
“This way!” I shouted, then bolted down the stairs, with no time to look where I was going.
We arrived in a space resembling the other cellar, with dusty brick columns supporting the house above. The shelves here contained books instead of strange jars of long-forgotten slime preserves.
The entities didn't pursue us immediately. I shone my light around the irregular, shadowy space, while Jacob stood with his eyes closed, trying to pick up any subtle signals, any paranormal secrets hiding in the dark.
“Oh, sick!” Stacey announced. She'd opened a random book from the shelves, and now looked ill, as if she'd taken a deep sniff of a jug full of chunky sour milk. She slammed the cover and returned the book.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Looked like some kind of perverse, gross magical rituals. Graphically illustrated. With bodily fluids everywhere. All the bodily fluids, I think—”
“She's here,” Jacob said, interrupting Stacey, for which I was grateful.
“Who?” I asked.
“Nirvana Girl.”
As he said it, my flashlight found a disturbing tableau near the back of the room: a cot, a small plastic cooler like you might take camping if you're into that, and a steel chain with handcuffs. The chain was padlocked to one of the house's brick supports.
“I thought Nirvana Girl wouldn't come inside the house,” I said to Jacob while trying to process what I saw.
“Under the house is different,” Jacob said. “She's connected to this room. She was kept here. Imprisoned. Night after night, something came for her in the dark. Something that tried to invade her. Possess her. It had the face of a dead woman, shriveled and wrinkled, the teeth crooked and sharp, the eyes full of evil.”
I pictured the aufhocker statue from Germany, the hooded goblin-like creature perched on the back of its victim, its face similar to what Jacob was describing.
A table near the cot held empty water bottles and a couple of empty, crumpled potato chip bags. I opened the table drawer.
“Hey,” I said, holding a thin stack of hand-written pages held together by a clamp. They were raggedly torn along one edge, as if they'd been ripped out of something. “I think we found the missing pages of Marconi's journal.”
“They tried, but it didn't work...” Jacob winced, his eyes still closed. “She resisted. She fought. She prayed. The entity didn't succeed in possessing her, and it all started to drag on too long. One day Marconi came down with a knife instead of food and water. The old man stabbed her and stabbed her—”
“That's awful!” Stacey shouted.
“—he made a sacrifice of her. Sacrificed her to the spirit of his dead wife, who became stronger as a result. She helped give the old man the strength to wrap her body, drag it to his car, and bury it in the cemetery out back.” He opened his eyes. “Ellie, behind you.”
I turned, facing the freezing air.
Apparitions of Marconi and Piper stood there, and though I'd expected to see them, I still gasped, my pulse kicking up as I expected another attack. No trace of Marconi's colorless eyes remained in his deep, dark sockets, just empty darkness.
Piper's apparition glowed coldly, her face staring at me with pure hate.
“Uh-oh,” Jacob said. “They're really furious now—”
The psychokinetic attack ripped through the room like freezing tornado winds. The cot and table were o
verturned, and the three of us were knocked from our feet.
Something slammed above us, in the direction of the stairs.
“Did we just get locked in?” Stacey gasped.
I turned my light toward the two apparitions, but they'd vanished.
“Let's go!” I shouted, darting up the stairs. The hidden bookcase door had indeed closed, sealing us in, and showed no sign of budging. It was latched, and the latch wouldn't move.
“They want to kill us,” Jacob said. His voice was deadpan, all his usual humor gone.
I hammered my flashlight into the wood next to the latch. After the third blow, I heard a pleasant cracking sound.
We shoved the hidden door open and staggered out into the library.
Unfortunately, this meant the two angry spirits had plenty of ammunition. Books and artifacts slammed into us from every side.
Over near the concealed, closed door to the Tomb Room, Gremel had appeared just as I'd seen him on our first night here, his body a rotten skeleton, his jerkin grungy and decayed.
“Help us!” I shouted at him.
Gremel pointed one bony finger at the bookshelves behind him. That was apparently the best he could do, standing and pointing.
I bolted toward him, taking heavy blows to my arms as I threw them up to cover my face. More books pelted my back, some of them bursting into clouds of old paper on impact. Something stabbed into my leg. I didn't have time to investigate. It was all I could do to avoid tripping and falling over the countless shifting obstacles underfoot.
The Tomb Room's roll-aside door was closed and locked, despite the fact that many of its more obviously dangerous contents were already out in the main library being flung against us.
I fumbled through the key ring while more books pelted me. My leg was bleeding from a splinter of hard leather book binding that had stabbed me there.
Stacey and Jacob were nearly lost in the gloom and chaos. Their flashlight beams swung erratically as they knocked away flying debris, illuminating little more than glimpses of the madness around us.
Finally, I rolled the door open and lurched inside.
The Tomb Room had never been well organized, but at this point it was in less disarray than most of the library outside, as though the destructive spirits valued the books in this room more highly than the rest.
“Gremel?” I shone my flashlight, but he didn't materialize. Of course, the full-spectrum white light was not ghost friendly, so I snuffed it out and lit one of the many candles using one of the late professor's wooden matches.
There, in the flickering candlelight, Gremel materialized, again pointing with his bony finger, toward the desk nearby.
Toward his own book.
“Yeah, I'm not falling for that,” I said. “Marconi tried your spell for bringing back the dead. All it brought him was the aufhocker. Give me a reason to trust you.”
Gremel hesitated, thinking, maybe. It's hard to read the expression of a thing that's only a shadowy, candle-lit apparition, especially when that thing's face has mostly rotted away.
Then he pointed toward the ritual objects we'd pulled out of the candle-wax table.
I looked, not eager to touch any of it, and saw him reflected in the black crystal scrying ball, his features a little clearer there, though no less rotten.
In the reflection, glinting metallic links floated in the space between his neck and his reptile-hide book.
“You're chained to the book?” I asked.
He quickly raised his rotten, pointing hand toward my face, which was a little horrifying, but which I also took as a yes. If he'd known how to play charades, he might have tapped his nose hole to show I was figuring things out.
“Ah. So you wear the chain you forged in life, like Jacob Marley?”
He didn't respond. Probably much too old to understand a Charles Dickens reference.
“Is that your punishment for creating the book?” I clarified. I pointed to the book, and so did he. “The book is evil. It's a trap for those who use it. Like Marconi.”
If he responded, it was probably in German on an auditory frequency I couldn't detect without enhancement. As it was, he went back to our usual method of communication, him pointing and freezing while I did the rest.
I'd assumed he was telling me to follow his own banishment spell for the summoned souls, and maybe he was, but I trusted that about as much as I trusted my cat around a tuna sandwich while I was out of the room. It obviously hadn't gone right for Marconi, who'd summoned a shapeshifting demonic entity when he'd wanted his wife.
Regardless of what he meant, he was pointing to the page that had the illustration of a dagger and a cup, which got me thinking. I looked at the implements on the table, recalled Marconi's journal, and nodded.
There are methods that I prefer to avoid in this work, paths I prefer not to walk. I like the ghost traps because they're distant, clinical, technological. And I like it when spirits move on, or get forced to, because that's convenient.
What I truly hate is the kind of thing I was about to do next.
I picked up the golden goblet and the ivory, golden blade with the golden hilt.
The pale blonde Piper apparition stood before me almost instantly.
I touched the tip of the blade to the skin of my wrist.
The beautiful apparition licked her lips as a drop of blood welled up on my flesh.
Out in the library, silence had fallen. I heard Jacob and Stacey speaking to each other, but couldn't make out their words.
I looked at the crystal ball again. In its reflection, the Marconi apparition was faintly visible, standing in the room with us. Watching.
“You want a sacrifice, aufhocker?” I asked, since I had no real name for the entity, only its type. “Come with me.”
Carrying the blade and cup, I returned to the main library.
“Ellie, what's happening?” Stacey asked. They both looked battered but definitely alive.
“I'm trying something. Come on. Everyone follow me.” I meant that message for all of them, the living and the dead.
We pushed our way out through the first-floor dark doors. Despite my injuries, I only stopped a moment, long enough to draw the long sliver of dried leather book cover from my leg. Stacey wanted to stop and bandage me, but I brushed her off. “Not until it's over,” I whispered.
I limped up the front stairs, leaving droplets of blood. Maybe they would whet the aufhocker's appetite, keep it hot on my trail. Jacob and Stacey helped me drag the big stamper from Cherise's room to the master suite, into Marconi's old bedroom.
I'd already removed our previous bait, the wedding rings. Now I placed the small gold chalice at the bottom of the trap, and again touched the bloodied tip of the ivory blade to the broken skin on my wrist.
The aufhocker appeared right away, still wearing Piper's form.
I was pretty sure that if I dripped a little blood into the goblet, she'd focus herself down on that sacrifice, that primitive offering of flesh to spirit, long enough for me to snap the trap shut.
But I wanted one more thing from her first.
“Show me my father again,” I said.
The Piper apparition looked at me with her pale blue eyes.
“My father. If you want anything from me, let me speak to him again.”
She smiled. Smirked almost. Then she was gone.
“Eleanor.” My father's ghost stepped out from the shadows of the old wardrobe, like he was just dropping by from Narnia. He was smiling, relaxed, wearing a blue work shirt and jeans. “It's good to see you.”
“You, too, Dad. I want to give you something.” I held out my pierced wrist and squeezed, making the blood well up. “That will make you strong again. That will bring you back. Won't it, Daddy?”
“Yes.” He stared transfixed at the blood and licked his lips. “Yes, it will, Pumpkin.”
Shivering, trying not to cry, I turned my arm and let the blood drip into the golden chalice down at the bottom of the trap. “My
offering,” I whispered.
My father vanished. It had never really been him, but it still hurt, strangely, to see the illusion go.
I reached out to close the trap, but the aufhocker's presence triggered the temperature and electromagnetic sensors before I even touched the control. The trap closed automatically, the lid slamming shut.
Inside, a black fog filled the innermost leaded-glass layer of the trap.
I looked toward the bed curtains. “Did you see?”
The curtains shifted.
Marconi appeared in the shadows, barely visible.
“Did you see?” I repeated. “It was not Piper. It never was. It was an illusion.”
I gestured at Stacey without looking away from Marconi's apparition. I had to force the aufhocker to shapeshift in Marconi's presence so he would see the entity's true nature.
I had no idea how he might react to this news, but a violent lashing out seemed possible.
Stacey picked up on my gesturing and unloaded the trap from the stamper. The strange, oily-black cloud inside it momentarily formed a suggestion of a scowling, hooded, goblin-like face glaring out at her.
She grimaced and set it down quickly, and the fog within vanished from sight, the entity either choosing to go invisible or possessing too little energy to keep up an apparition.
Stacey replaced the first trap with a spare stored on the stamper's side.
Marconi advanced on Stacey, his interest in her possibly rekindled by the discovery that the aufhocker was a fraud. The guy was desperate to see Piper one way or another.
“Take off the ring, Stacey,” I told her, holding out my hand.
“Does this mean we're not engaged anymore, Ellie?” She pouted as she gave the diamond ring back. “It all happened so fast.”
I drew Dr. Marconi's ring from my pocket and held both wedding rings out toward the ghost, who drew close to them.
“You could move on,” I said. “Let go of this world. Move on up, or down, or wherever you're supposed to go.”
He kept his sunken eyes fixed on the rings.
