by JL Bryan
“But you kidnapped and murdered that girl. So as far as I'm concerned...” I dropped both rings into the ghost trap. “In you go.”
Marconi vanished, and the stamper slammed down again, sealing him inside.
“Wow,” Stacey said, after a long moment. “We actually trapped a ghost. I mean, how often does that actually happen?”
“We trapped two, even,” I said. “Marked for toxic disposal, I'd say.”
“Reverend Mordecai's old mountain boneyard for the evil dead?” Stacey asked.
“Sounds right to me. Jacob, want to go on a hike? Stacey's probably lulled you into enjoying that kind of thing.”
“She almost has, yeah,” Jacob said. “Nature has terrible WiFi, though.”
“Let me see your leg.” Stacey drew a small first aid kit from her backpack and looked over my leg. “I guess I'll have to cancel our bridal registry.”
“I already have a gravy boat, anyway,” I said.
“I really wanted that crystal candy dish. You know, for guests.”
“I'm pretty confused,” Jacob said. “Just tell me whether there's a third ghost who's going to come charging out trying to kill us, or if that was it.”
“There's a third ghost,” I said. “He was pretty evil in life, I think, but he has his own reasons for helping us.”
I explained about Gremel, what I knew as well as what I suspected about why he'd been helping us, as we returned to the library.
We stood at the entrance to the library, shining our lights around the destruction. Fallen bookshelves, collapsed walkways, shattered staircases and heaps and heaps of destroyed books. Broken skulls. The death god Anubis lay cracked on his side, his silver teeth chipped.
“Bad god,” I whispered to the canine form of Anubis as I passed him. My shoulder still ached from when he'd bashed into me; good thing I'd been wearing my leather jacket to protect against his bite. “That's a bad, bad god.”
We headed into the Tomb Room. I propped the door open with a chair again, just to be safe. It was extremely cold inside.
“He's here,” Jacob said in a low voice as I joined him and Stacey.
“At least the grim reaper painting didn't get hurt,” Stacey noticed, looking at the skull-faced soul collectors in their field of dead flowers. “You think that would look good in my apartment?”
“Are you seeing Gremel?” I asked Jacob.
“He's wearing an iron collar and chain,” Jacob said. “I mean, they're psychological, you know, not really iron, but they feel like iron. He's chained to this... this reptile book. Who made this? Salazar Slytherin?” He grimaced as he moved the dried snake-tail bookmark aside.
“Gremel made it,” I told him.
“Ooh, Jacob's a Ravenclaw,” Stacey said.
“Gryffindor,” he said absently. “Though I could have done well in Slytherin. But it looks like Gremel walked on the Slytherin side. This is some dark, twisted...” Jacob paused, looking from the picture of the dagger and chalice to the wound I'd stabbed into my arm. “You've got that thing solidly trapped, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Why?”
“You made a blood sacrifice to it.”
I felt my blood run cold, though not from any of my recent wounds. “Yeah. I mean, kind of. As a trick. Why, uh, are you bringing up that definitely small and unimportant detail?”
“It could create a bond between you and it.”
“Ew,” Stacey said. “Ellie's bonding with and marrying people left and right tonight. I feel less special now. Our engagement is definitely off.”
“What kind of bond?” I asked Jacob.
“I'm not sure. Just bury that trap deep.”
“So that's settled,” I insisted with a nod. “What about Gremel? Can we help him?”
“Help him?” Jacob looked confused.
“He's been helping us,” Stacey said. “Maybe we should help him move on from his eternal curse if we can. It's the polite thing.”
“Every time the book is used, that's another link in the chain,” Jacob said. “The more suffering his book causes, the more he endures, and the longer his curse grows. Maybe each length of the chain lengthens the amount of time of he has to spend trapped on the Earth, or makes his existence more miserable.”
“And that's why he's been helping us,” I said. “The less damage done as a result of the book, the less punishment inflicted on him.”
“And here I just thought he was a nice old rotten ghost in a jerkin,” Stacey said.
“He wasn't being altruistic. It was just self-interested damage control,” I said. “Trying to keep himself in the higher circles of Hell and out of the lower ones, I guess. Would destroying the book help him?”
Jacob nodded. “But if there's no book, it can't cause any more pain, and his chain can't grow any longer. Am I right? So it feels weird to say it, but in this case we might think about a small book burning. Just this one book. Okay, he's pointing his bony finger right at my face—”
“That means he thinks you're onto something,” I said. “Sounds like he likes you.”
“Great. Well, let's burn it somewhere outside, because evil spellbook dead-reptile fumes can't be healthy. Also, once the sun's up, somebody needs to open all those windows.” He pointed up at the walled-off area around us, creating the three-story Tomb Room with all its heavy dark shelves. “This place still crawls with little entities, slumbering, and some of them might be dangerous. These books and artifacts are dangerous. Something has to be done with them.”
“We have a very large safe for this kind of material in the basement back at the office,” I said. “Can you help us identify what needs to be quarantined?”
Jacob nodded. “Bear in mind, I have to be back at work Monday morning.”
“We have time. Our client's on track to inherit the place. All she has to do is take care of the library.”
“Could be problems with that,” Stacey said.
We walked out into the mounds of destroyed books, the snowdrift of loose and torn pages. Knowledge, history, stories, myths, and poetry lay hopelessly mixed, the thoughts and ideas of thousands of years mingled together in a great babble of confusion.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“These are the missing pages from Marconi's journal,” I said, spreading them out on the kitchen table in front of Cherise, amid sunlight and coffee cups. “They're pretty disturbing.”
“That's nothing new at this point,” Cherise said. She took a long sip of coffee. On my advice, she'd left her younger sister with a friend in Athens for the day. Too many concerns remained about both the structural and spiritual integrity of the house, and I also wanted to give Cherise the chance to filter what Aria heard about all this. Stacey sat with us. Jacob dozed upstairs in our borrowed bedroom.
“We learned he kidnapped a college student for the aufhocker to possess—for his wife's spirit to possess, he thought—but the student resisted too well, and eventually they murdered her,” I said. There was no easy way to say it.
Cherise winced. “Here in the house?”
“Yes. Down in the hidden room below the library. And they buried her in the cemetery out back. It was her voice we recorded out there, asking for help.”
“That's awful.”
“Since that possession failed, they made a new plan: you. He told Dr. Anderson he preferred someone female. And someone 'deserving' who was in financial need.”
“She was going to possess me?” Cherise asked.
“That's why he wanted someone full-time here. Someone they could constantly work on and gradually take over, with a timeframe of weeks and months instead of days—this period of weakening the living is called oppression, and it lays the groundwork for actual possession. But then they found out about your sister.”
“I brought her with me a couple of times,” Cherise said quietly, a look of guilt on her face. “She was supposed to help me. Ended up sitting around with her headphones and tablet the whole time.”
“The aufhocker w
anted to possess your sister instead. So that led to the new plan—Marconi would die and leave you the house.”
“Dr. Marconi actually planned to die?” Cherise asked.
“And then come back. By possessing your body, while the aufhocker—who he believed to be his wife—possessed your sister's.”
“His plan was for him and his dead wife to take over a pair of sisters? That's... bizarre. And sick. In so many ways,” Cherise said. She had the flat affect of someone repeatedly hit by shocking information until she couldn't do much more than take mental notes for later.
“True. He wrote it would deepen their connection to be siblings instead of married partners. He said it would be a 'profound reincarnational relationship' in the journal. In other places he called it 'soul play.' Kind of like 'role play' but—”
“I'll read it for myself. Sometime. Maybe.” Cherise glanced at the journal pages like they were dead rats on her kitchen table. “At least things fit together now. He gave me his whole estate because it wasn't going to be me living my life. It was going to be him, wearing my body like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.”
“Well, yes. He was basically giving it all to himself. Once they fully possessed you and Aria, they'd have decades of life ahead. He didn't want to leave all his wealth behind. You know what they say about money and material things, that you can't take it with you? He wanted to take it with him, into his next life.”
“As me.” Cherise shook her head. “I never liked that old man, honestly. You're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, or of your employer, at least where it might get back to him, so I haven't said much, but he always made me uncomfortable. I wanted to believe he was this frail, harmless elderly man who loved books, but his eyes... he had the most evil look, especially when he was watching me and he thought I didn't know it. I started to think he was undressing me with his eyes. Turns out he was thinking about my body in even worse ways than that.” She shivered. “I don't know if I can come back here. I definitely can't live here anymore.”
“I wouldn't recommend it until we can get all those windows open, maybe burn some sage, and get the house blessed by your preferred religious leader. And clear the occult stuff out of the Tomb Room. We have a place to store things like that. As for the rest of the collection, I could put in a call to Grant Patterson at the Savannah Historical Association. He can probably put together some people to help you reorganize and salvage what's left of the library. Maybe even repair some of the books.”
“But you probably want to look at repairing the house, too,” Stacey said.
“I'll call Marconi's lawyer tomorrow,” Cherise said. “He's the executor, so he's the only one who can pay for all that. All I have is the stipend. Then it's over. Obviously I can't finish this project. Too much was destroyed, and I can't continue here. I won't inherit the house, but who wants it, anyway?”
“Nobody in their right mind,” Stacey said. “But, hey, that still leaves Vic Marconi. He'll take it if you don't want it.”
“If I don't complete the job, the estate will be broken up and donated. He still doesn't get the house.”
“That brings us to something else we found in the hidden room.” I handed over a thick three-ring binder.
Cherise opened it. Her brow furrowed. It furrowed deeper and deeper as she turned the pages. “This is a catalog of Marconi's collection. I was supposed to spend a year compiling this.”
“That was just busy work to keep you spending long hours in the haunted library,” I said. “He figured he would have you completely possessed in a matter of months. Once he had control of you, he'd go down to the hidden room, retrieve this, and present it to the lawyer. As you, he would then become the full owner of the entire estate. There's a CD copy in the back flap.”
Cherise looked between me and Stacey and the book a few times. I doubt she was having trouble understanding me, but the implications for her were enormous.
“So, I turn this in,” she said. “And then I get it all. I could do it tomorrow.”
“Exactly,” I said. “All of his personal and investment properties become yours.”
Cherise continued staring at the binder, her mouth open.
“In light of this information, we'll probably charge you like crazy for this investigation,” I said. “If that's okay.”
“Oh, sure,” Cherise said, still thumbing through pages. “Yeah. Easy come, easy go. You've earned it.”
“You'll barely notice the dent in your fortune, I promise.”
Cherise just stared at the binder. “Okay. Wow. Thanks.”
“We'll get started packing up our gear.” I nodded to Stacey, and we both stood up. We had plenty of work ahead, squaring away all the threads of this case.
We left Cherise there in the kitchen, quietly looking over the binder and the journal pages, processing all we'd told her—the good, the bad, the unexpected.
Outside, in the small fire pit Stacey had dug in the back yard, the last ashes of Gremel's book lay cool and gray, and a light rain began to fall through the sunlit morning.
I didn't know whether Gremel's soul was free—the man had clearly done his share of evil in life—but at least his book wouldn't cause any more suffering, and the chain on his soul would grow no longer.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The office of Eckhart Investigations is not in a pretty building, nor in a pretty part of town—our neighbor is an auto salvage yard—but for some purposes, it's really the best place. For one thing, the rent is cheap, and Calvin has an apartment on the top floor, though he primarily lives in Florida now.
The basement holds an eight-foot, lead-lined steel safe that's best kept isolated from civilization. It's meant to hold dangerous artifacts, to quarantine them from the world.
Calvin was in town, watching from his wheelchair as Stacey and I finished loading the worst bits of the necromancer's library onto the shelves within the safe.
We'd quarantined the ritual dagger, plus assorted books and other items Jacob had identified as harboring particularly negative energy, and also the statue of Anubis. Jacob said it really wasn't all that cursed, but I didn't trust it. I wanted that death god idol kept in the pound.
“It's quite the shocking story,” Calvin said, looking up from the Athens Banner-Herald he was reading. “Ridley Lovett, a student missing for three years. Found murdered by a professor and buried in his yard. They've exhumed her from the cemetery now and returned her remains to her family. Hopefully that will give her peace. It's certainly not justice. The poor girl, kidnapped and stabbed to death because an old man couldn't accept the natural order of things. Not like me. I've already got my grave picked out.”
“You've got plenty of years left, Calvin,” I said.
“How are you holding up after such a rough case?” Calvin asked, looking from me to Stacey. He'd originally hired her to assist me as he'd eased back from working the cases himself. “It sounds psychologically demanding. This entity made it personal for everyone.”
“We're great,” Stacey said. “We don't fear the dead. The dead fear us. Right, Ellie?”
“Right.” I watched Stacey depart through the door to the concrete stairwell beyond.
“She's working out fine, isn't she?” Calvin asked.
“Is that an apologetic tone I'm detecting?” I asked. “Yes, she's fine.”
“I'm sorry I wasn't there for you on a case this dangerous.”
“Nah, I can handle an old bookworm and his demon girlfriend. It's the books I feel bad for. Anyway, I had a dead German wizard helping me. One tiny little blood sacrifice into the aufhocker's favorite goblet, and boom, she was in the trap. I mean it. It wasn't necessarily a female spirit.”
“What blood?” Calvin's eyes widened and went to my bandaged arm.
I shrugged. “I was the handiest source. Jacob said later it was a bad idea, that maybe I'd bonded with the aufhocker like a divorced dad taking his kids to Legoland.”
“If it escapes, it might come looking
for you,” Calvin said.
“Well, I can name a long list of entities who'd like to come after me for some revenge. These two will be buried alongside some of them.” I gestured at the two ghost traps on the rack in the corner, one holding the necromancer's soul and two wedding rings, the other holding the aufhocker and the golden chalice stained with my blood. We had stored these down here, keeping them far away from the empty traps in the storage room and van upstairs. “Let's hope they don't all get together and start a band. The Ungrateful Dead.”
“Bury them deep.”
“That's just what Jacob said.”
“A little of your essence might be going down with them.”
“Not reassuring, but I'll try my best to forget it. Anything else?”
“One more question. Chinese or pizza?”
“Pizza,” I said. “After the week we had? Definitely pizza.”
I busied myself with the task of picking and ordering pizza for the three of us. It was the most pleasant thing I'd done all week.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I wasn't looking forward to the hike to Reverend Mordecai's graveyard—I never do—but Stacey decided it could be turned into a fun event with boyfriends and picnic baskets. I agreed to it, provided we didn't picnic anywhere near the old burial ground itself. Apparently people used to picnic in cemeteries in the nineteenth century, but it's definitely not for me. Even if it was, I would never pick that particular cemetery.
So, a couple of weeks after winding down the case, we found ourselves spending a Sunday afternoon high up in the northwest corner of our state, in an area where the rough, steep land kept human settlement sparse.
It was March, which can mean winter or spring in Georgia, but it was definitely chilly at the high elevation we'd reached. I hadn't dressed thickly, knowing I'd be sweating bullets on the long, steep hike along an overgrown trail that barely existed outside the imagination of local rabbits and deer.
Indeed, I was damp with sweat. Michael walked beside me in a long-sleeved white t-shirt, looking like he was enjoying a downhill stroll on a cool day. He carried a shovel but didn't even bother using it as a walking stick, which he totally could have. I guess the firefighter training prepared him for extreme situations like this. He also seemed to enjoy going to the gym. Weirdo.
