Ghost Trapper 12 The Necromancer's Library
Page 21
Stacey was on top of things, too, but Jacob was panting. Accountant training is very different than firefighter training. Maybe he and I needed to start a support group.
“Are we there yet?” I asked, though I was the one leading the way.
“When we see the two-inch thorns and the poison oak and poison ivy everywhere, then we'll know we've reached the edge of Reverend Blake's Churchyard of Terror,” Stacey said.
“What's the story with this place, exactly?” Michael asked. “Why do you bury them here?”
“There once was a real fire-breathing mountain preacher named Mordecai Blake who went off the crazy-cult rails and took the whole tiny isolated community with him,” Stacey said, not huffing or puffing at all as we trudged upward through dense brambles. “Tell them about the Sinner's Box.”
“It was the Judgment Box,” I said. “If you sinned, or angered Blake—if you tried to run away, or just looked at him wrong—he'd lock you into this wooden box for judgment. You'd be trapped in the dark with some rattlesnakes. If you lived, then God had spared you. If not, well...”
“How many people lived?” Michael asked.
“Not many. And he'd put kids in there. So when the state investigators finally showed up, the preacher and his top followers, mostly his brothers and cousins, committed suicide by snake.”
“Cleopatra style,” Stacey said.
“I don't think they meant it as an homage to Cleopatra, though.” We reached the overgrown church wall, thick with poison ivy, and I pointed over it at the ruins of an old church. Even in the daytime, it was shrouded in shadows.
“They did the group suicide by snake right there, huh?” Stacey shivered as she looked at the ruins.
I moved my finger slightly to point at a loose cluster of boulders near the old church. “And they're buried right there. They always used boulders and rocks, saying that any fancy carved headstones were a sign of vanity.”
“So all those boulders are graves?” Michael asked.
“Great spot for a picnic!” Stacey said, but no one supported her on this.
“Let's get it over with.” I pulled on my gloves and climbed the old rock wall with its covering of toxic plant life.
If it was cold outside the walls, it was arctic inside them. The tree life was thinner here than in the surrounding woods, with many of the trees standing dead among the graves, but the area seemed to get no extra sunlight because of it.
“Ugh,” Jacob said, joining us, his psychic senses probably going haywire. “You definitely found your own private hell for those you condemn.”
“We only put the worst ones here,” I said, defensively. “The ones we can't just let roam free. Who knows what happens to them after that? They could still move on eventually, right?”
“If not, they'll grow ever more crazed inside their traps,” Jacob said.
“The battery dies eventually. Then it's just the leaded glass keeping them inside. And all the graveyard dirt. And the walls of the graveyard.”
“And the spirit of Reverend Blake and his pals,” Stacey said. “They're tough, and they run this joint.”
“I can see that.” Jacob nodded. “I wouldn't want to be here during a new moon. Or a full moon. Or at night, generally. We should really getting out of here.”
We found a spot by the wall and dug. Michael did most of the work, more or less insisting on it, and I was definitely more than okay with that.
We put the two traps in deep. Michael looked down at them—one cylinder containing a pair of wedding rings, including a huge diamond on Piper's ring—and the other containing a very small, bloodstained golden goblet.
“I don't think I want to know,” Michael finally decided, then heaved dirt down on top of them.
Much later, the dirty work behind us in both time and distance, we stopped in a lower, warmer meadow and snacked. At some point Jacob and Stacey wandered out of sight, I assume to re-enact their favorite Highlander fight scene or something.
“You're okay, though, really?” Michael asked me in a low, quiet voice.
“Oh, yep. I'm just worried that Stacey's picnic blanket is going to drown the local plant life.” Her checkered blanket seemed to go on for acres around us.
“How did she even fit it in her backpack?” he asked. “She had other things in there, too.”
“We'll have to watch when she puts it away.”
“Seriously, how have you been? Aside from the picnic blanket and the weeds beneath it?”
“You mean wildflowers?”
He kept looking at me expectantly.
I sighed. “Are you my therapist now?”
“I'm unlicensed, but I'm cheap.”
“An unbeatable combination.”
“I know you've been through a lot—”
“We both went through a lot. So did your sister. How is she handling things?”
“Nightmares about fires and burning buildings. More anger and resentment than usual. Ready to launch off to college in the fall and leave her miserable past behind.”
“Maybe she needs therapy.”
“If you know someone who won't think talking about supernatural possession is itself a sign of a mental disorder.”
“Yeah, that's always a problem.” I picked burrs off the ragged knee of my jeans. “I'm glad you care, really. Maybe I'm not used to that. Maybe I kind of don't expect happiness to last. Or people.” I didn't say anything aloud about my parents dying when I was fifteen, but it was there, unspoken, like a dark cloud hanging over my life. Like always.
“I know something about that,” Michael said. His father had left when he and his sister were young, and his mother had died only a few years ago. “We all lose people, if we live long enough. And nobody ever really expects it. It's the hardest part of my job, the ones you can't save. You see the faces of the survivors, the family members who are just beginning to understand that someone is gone. Yours was worse than normal because you didn't have many years with your parents.”
“We don't have to make this about wallowing in sad memories,” I said. “Let's make it a deep, profound conversation about the impermanence of all things and the preciousness of each unique moment.”
“That's what I'm calling my overpriced greeting card store. Unique Moments.”
“See? You can use humor to deflect from serious topics, too. I'm rubbing off on you.”
“We're rubbing off on each other,” he said.
I was working on something to say back to that, but his bright green eyes linked into mine, and it occurred to me that, yes, I had been quite alone in some ways for several days now, in a dark and scary place—and now we were alone together in this early-spring meadow, and we still had a little time before we had to go home. Those Highlander re-enactments could go on a while.
Michael leaned in close, his lips touched mine, and he was so warm against me, after so many nights of facing the icy cold world of the dead.
The feeling was electric. I both relished and distrusted it. But that was probably my natural loner instinct, more comfortable falling into trouble than into love, like some character in a David Allan Coe song. Maybe it was time to think about changing, to be more grateful for what I had, to see the beauty in life despite the pain, like some character in a Dolly Parton song.
Above, the sky was blue but going purple, the earliest reds and golds of sunset beginning to bloom. For a time, all thoughts of ghosts were chased away from my mind.
FROM THE AUTHOR
I hope you enjoyed this return to the spooky world of Ellie Jordan and friends! I’ve long wanted to write a story about a haunted library, so this was certainly fun for me. It was nice to get back to Ellie and Stacey after a bit of a hiatus while I worked on some other projects.
The next book concerns a haunted campground and should be out a few months after this one. I hope you’ll join in for more haunted adventures! The book is called The Trailwalker.
Here are my usual links:
Newsletter (recommended!)
Website (www.jlbryanbooks.com)
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Thanks for reading!
Also by J.L. Bryan:
The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper
Cold Shadows
The Crawling Darkness
Terminal
House of Whispers
Maze of Souls
Lullaby
The Keeper
The Tower
The Monster Museum
Fire Devil
The Necromancer’s Library
The Trailwalker
Urban Fantasy/Horror
The Unseen
Inferno Park
The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)
Jenny Pox
Tommy Nightmare
Alexander Death
Jenny Plague-Bringer
Science Fiction Novels
Nomad
Writing as Max Carver (science fiction):
The Empire of Machines series:
The Fall of Man (free with newsletter sign-up)
Engines of Empire
Islands of Rebellion
Clash of Colonies