“What?”
“We were going to go into the dining room. Melissa wanted to show us some pictures.”
Cilla had a feeling she should have known this, should have heard it. But her mind had been caught up in recollections, and sometimes they were more powerful than the present.
“I’m coming,” she replied, her words little more than a mumble. She had some thinking to do. She needed to figure out just how dangerous this Paxton Williams was to her.
Chapter Five
Cilla hung back a little as the rest of the group picked through the debris. The dog was leading them from the room, and Cilla paused to glance around at the wounded walls and splintered wood. It was a disaster. And it was frightening. Whatever had hit this area wasn’t the anguished spirit of a mother seeking her lost children. This was done by something angry, and Cilla felt a chill when she thought of the strength behind the blows. It reminded her of the gouge in the wall where the chair had struck it. No, this was something dangerous.
The dining room looked much the same as it had when they had set up their paranormal investigation. The table was still front and center, the sturdy chairs surrounding it. The ungainly set hadn’t been originals in the dwelling. They were likely later additions when the nuns had taken over the home and established it as their convent. That was in the tranquil period of the residence, before the spirits had returned to drive away the last two landowners who attempted to maintain and revitalize the home.
Now Melissa, who was a direct descendant of the family who had built the home, had taken possession of it. They had hoped the hauntings were done after the last paranormal investigation. They were not.
Melissa had a tablet already laid out on the table, and she gestured to all of them.
“Sit. I’ll show you what I’ve gotten. Then we can go down to the basement.”
“To the basement?” Cilla said in an undertone to Smith.
“You remember I mentioned there was something remarkable left behind. Well this tops the clocks easily.”
“In the basement?” Cilla wrinkled her nose. She hated basements. Basements meant damp and spiders. Basements meant dark and moldy. She had experienced her fair share of basements and had yet to discover one which she felt comfortable in.
“These are the shots I took upstairs,” Melissa was reporting. She shifted the tablet to face Cilla, and Cilla slid into a seat. Smith was at her elbow, and after a second, she became aware of an alluring spicy scent which she realized was coming from Paxton who had settled behind her.
“Do you mind?” he inquired, the polite lilt in his tone almost impossible to refuse. She didn’t want to be rude, but honestly, he was stepping in a little too closely.
She didn’t respond but used one index finger to flip through the photos loaded on the tablet. She was familiar with the upstairs rooms. She had been in the dismal little nursery where the lost mother had mourned her children, and a lost spirit had lingered long after. She had ventured through the other bedchambers, most of which held few furnishings. Now they were essentially empty as the remodel of the building was underway.
But she saw something different in the nursery now. Where there had been twin cradles and a rocking chair, there was now a pile of kindling, broken wood and fragments of plaster where the furniture had struck the walls. It was another scene of destruction, another show of fierce anger.
“This was where you placed the waxen dolls, was it not?” The words came from Paxton as he bent over Cilla’s shoulder.
Cilla glanced up. They had discovered the two Victorian effigy dolls in the attic during their first investigation. Cilla firmly believed the mother who had lost her two children to illness had kept the dolls as replacements for her offspring. They had indeed taken the rather pitiful figures, carved and dressed to resemble the lost children, and laid them in the cradles to help coax the spirit of Ruth to speak to them. And it had been successful. Her ghost had ultimately been freed. But now Cilla had to wonder what had been holding it to the earthly plain.
“Yes,” Cilla said quietly, but she didn’t elaborate. The memory was one of the most heartrending. She shifted her attention away from Paxton’s brilliant eyes and looked back toward the pictures.
The mess continued out into the hall, bits of wood, paper shaved from the walls, and plaster dust, but it appeared to stop there. The other bedrooms were not in wonderful shape, but they were no worse than when Cilla had first seen them. The anger was limited to certain spaces, it seemed.
“Is this the worst?”
“Yes, it’s just the nursery and the kitchen.” Melissa glanced up from the tablet. “I’ve locked the door upstairs, so no one goes in. The electrician said it wasn’t safe to have people going back up there. But this isn’t all. Not by a long shot. Do you want to go downstairs now?”
Cilla felt her stomach plummet. Then she drew a deep breath. She put one hand down to rest on the dog’s silky head and nodded. “Might as well,” she conceded.
The stairs to the basement were off the wrecked kitchen, and Cilla felt like she was going back in time with every step she took. She knew the history of the house. She knew when it was built, when it had been abandoned by its owners, when the Sisters had moved in. This cellar, however, seemed different, as though this part had been built a century before.
“How old is this section of the house?” Smith asked, taking the words from her thoughts.
“I don’t know,” Melissa answered, her voice muffled like the walls were sucking the warmth from her voice.
“It does appear older than the rest of the house,” Paxton murmured.
Cilla heard his words, and something struck her as right, the combination of his proper accent combined with the ancient stones at her side. Yes, she would bet money that not only was the basement significantly older than the rest of the home, but it had been built by an Englishman. She shivered at the thought. It wasn’t normal for her to pick up such a blast of insight. Spirits speaking to her was one thing, but this insistent knowing was another. And it didn’t make her feel any better to realize she was having these epiphanies more frequently.
“What did you want to show us?” Cilla knew her voice sounded brittle, but she couldn’t suppress the discomfort she was experiencing.
“This way,” Smith’s voice was ahead of her. Cilla realized she had slowed her steps, and while Smith and Melissa were already walking in the cellar area, she was still on the bottom step. Behind her, Paxton hovered like a sentient shadow, and next to her, Fargo stood at attention, the strip of fur from the base of his tail running up his back to his collar, raised with tension. At least she wasn’t the only one who was feeling it.
She stepped to the cool floor and recognized it was produced from a pattern of ancient bricks laid side by side, and the only grout was a layer of dirt and sand ground between the slabs. Time and erosion had worn away at the floor making it dip with hollows and uneven bricks. Cilla had to keep her attention towards her feet, even after the lights had been switched on.
Lighting in the dank space had been minimal. There were bare bulbs hung from wires strung between joists made of knotty wood. They shed a murky light in splotches down the length of the space.
The cellar had been partitioned at some point since its original construction. The walls were panels of cheap wood that almost reached the ceiling beams but not wholly. Whatever the purpose for the partitions, they hadn’t weathered the time well, and one had fallen to leave a flat panel of wood that they stepped over, making an incredible clatter in the tight space.
Melissa led them through a doorway, and then she stopped. Even in the poor lighting, Cilla could see that the other girl’s face had lost some color.
“I found this this morning. I haven’t let anyone except Bernard come down to see it. I didn’t want any of the construction workers to know it was here, but I thought he might be able to tell me if any of them would be capable of doing it.” She didn’t step into the little room, but rather, step
ped aside so Smith, Cilla, and Paxton could go forward.
“Oh, my God,” Smith said, his voice strangled.
Paxton was silent, and Cilla had to force herself to do the same, to refrain from crying out, from cursing in shock.
“It’s not an actual skeleton,” Melissa said quietly as though to steady her audience.
In the middle of the room was an antique armchair, the velvet upholstery a deep burgundy, the carved arms a darkened wood. Sitting like a crowned member of royalty was a figure, a skeleton with guts of straw and mud, and a makeshift plaster face that had slid from the skull so its painted eyes were focused somewhere to the left and on the floor. The face had been washed white, like a clown, with dark red lips in a cupid bow and wide long-lashed eyes of deep blue. The skull beneath was the color of mud, as was the rest of the figure down to the naked bones of the feet.
“What do you mean not real?” Cilla breathed the question.
“I mean, we studied it meticulously. It’s not a skeleton. It’s made of something chalky and it crumbles if you touch it, like plaster or clay.”
“You told me what it was, but I had no idea it was so,” Smith’s words seemed to fail him. “Melissa, it’s so authentic.”
“Where did it come from?” Cilla looked from Melissa to the individual nearest her, Paxton, who had drawn closer to the macabre object.
“I don’t know.” Melissa looked at Cilla, her eyes wide, her hands fidgeting before her. “I came down in this basement two days ago. There was nothing down here. All these rooms were empty. Then I came down today and saw this.”
“No one else has been here during that time?” Paxton’s voice interrupted Cilla thoughts.
“I don’t know for sure,” Melissa went on. “I haven’t had any of the construction workers down here for more than a week. We had it cleaned out, and the foundation repaired. That was a couple weeks ago. Later they worked on a few of the floor joists. Since then, most of the work has been continuing upstairs.” She turned and faced at the skeleton. “There is no way they would be able to get this down here without me knowing,” she continued frowning. “Unless they came at night.”
“You haven’t been staying here all night, have you?” Cilla’s voice sounded appalled, and she felt bad that she let her emotions show with such transparency.
“No,” Melissa admitted. “I’ve kept the hotel room for now. As long as the plumbing is still in such rotten shape, I have to wait.”
“Then someone might have slipped in last night or the night before.” Smith was standing off to the side, but Cilla could see he had his camera out.
Cilla drew closer to the shape in the chair. “I can’t imagine how someone would have gotten this down the stairs in one piece,” she announced haltingly. She bent, using her cell phone flashlight to look more closely at the figure.
“It looks so much like a real skeleton,” Smith observed. They had all drawn closer. “This, whatever this is that he’s stuffed with,” he began, “what do you suppose it is?”
“It looks like rubbish,” Paxton said softly, standing extremely close to Cilla.
“But there are no seams, no signs of how this thing was put together,” Cilla said, bending even closer.
“Perhaps we are looking at this in the wrong way,” Paxton’s tone was abruptly strained and eerily quiet. “Maybe no human made it.”
The ensuing day dawned cool and blustery. Cilla had struggled to fall asleep the night before, but when she finally drifted off, she slept deeply and dreamlessly. She was grateful when she got up with the alarm. She had another job to attend to, a paying job this time.
She considered wearing her ‘queen of the dead’ outfit for Brandon’s benefit. However, he had seen her in everyday clothes already when he visited her house. The mystery was past. She had the impression she didn’t need to impress him anymore. He was freaked out enough as it was. Her staging was unnecessary, much like preaching to the choir. He was already a believer. And he was positive he had some ghosts in his building.
Smith came by to pick her up. She hadn’t called him to tell him she wasn’t dressing up, so he was driving the black sedan, decked out with his hat and jacket. His face fell when he saw her coming, dressed in her jeans and sweater.
“What’s this?” He climbed out and moved up the walk to meet her. “We’re going to see Brandon, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” she replied calmly. “Smith, we already met him. I’m not going to get dressed up for him, and it might freak him out more than he is. He knows what I look like, and I don’t have to talk him into anything.”
“Yeah,” Smith looked rueful, and Cilla grinned. “You’re right, I guess.”
“We can still take the ghost mobile,” she added grinning.
“Sure,” he stomped back to the car like a disappointed little boy.
Cilla was still smiling when she climbed in the front seat.
Smith turned the key, and the engine fired up. It was an older car, but a good one, and Cilla hoped it would last them a few more years. By then, either her spirit business would pick up enough to buy something else, or she would be locked up in the funny farm. There didn’t seem to be a lot of options between the two.
“Well, what do you think about Brandon’s building?” Smith cast her a sidelong glance as he drove.
“I think it possible there is something lingering,” she answered evasively. She had spent quite a bit of time the night before pondering the question. Between his photographs and the not-a-skeleton in Melissa’s house, she had a lot to think about. Did she think Brandon had photographed a ghost? There were plenty of possible natural causes for the phenomena they had seen in the pictures. There were also several ways that the photos could be deliberately engineered. Today was just a time to get the story of the place. They would go back during the night to try their hand at actual contact.
“But?” Smith was persistent, and he could read her.
“But I don’t know for sure. We’ve seen plenty of photographs which looked like something. I won’t know what to think until I’ve been there, listened to it.”
“True,” Smith agreed. “But did you get any gut instincts about the guy?”
“You mean, do I think he really believes what he’s saying? Yes, I do. He looked genuine enough, but more than that, he looked freaked out. It’s hard to put that on.”
“Yeah, I thought so too.”
Smith’s tone made Cilla look at him more sharply.
“You know about the photos though,” she said narrowing her eyes. “Is there a way it could have been tampered with?”
“Well,” Smith squinted through the windshield, “yeah. The shapes wouldn’t have been too hard to manipulate. I mean, it’s not like I assume it was photo shopped. That would be super simple to do. No, the way it came out on his cell phone pictures like that, I think he had to have taken a picture of something.”
“Because?”
“Because like you mentioned, he believes it. If the pictures had been manipulated, he would have to know it, been part of it. You can’t make that happen unless you work at it. So, if the shadows in the pictures aren’t something that someone added to his already taken shots…” Smith’s voice drifted off.
“Then someone set up the shadows there at the building. And how ever they did it, it was good enough to fool Brandon while he was there.”
“Right.”
Cilla leaned back. “And on to the next topic.”
Smith glanced in her direction and then back to the road. They were turning onto the interstate, the landscape rushing by as they headed downtown.
“We have to figure out what’s going on with Brandon’s place, since he’s already given us the retainer.” She thought fondly of the money in her kitchen, still laying in an envelope on the little desk by the telephone. She had warned her aunt and uncle of its presence. She didn’t want them to find the stash of cash and get any ideas. It was strange for her to have payment in that form for either of her businesses.
She supposed Brandon had paid in cash because he hadn’t wanted a paper trail, or an electronic trail, to lead back to him. There were lots of people who were embarrassed by the spiritual. It didn’t offend her like it previously had. She had had years to get used to being an embarrassment.
“Two hauntings at once,” Smith mused. “It doesn’t happen often, but it always makes the days go faster.”
Cilla turned and made a face at him, and he laughed.
Brandon must have been in the building, but when Smith hammered on the door, no one came to answer. Cilla glanced at her longtime friend with mild concern. She didn’t want to go snooping around the building without Brandon, but the place was pretty big, and there was a fair chance he hadn’t heard their knock.
She tested the doorknob. Unlocked. Brandon was probably upstairs somewhere. She let the door swing open, and she and Smith strolled inside, stopping in the front passage. The place had most recently been employed as an office for a paper supply company, and the rooms were still cut up into convenient little cubbies fit for desks and wooden chairs. The floors were a pale grey tile, the ceilings tall with exposed pipes in several places where the tin tiles had fallen. The electricity was on in some areas, but the original lighting wasn’t functional. Someone had put an old floor lamp in the first section, and it bled a little additional light to further boost the sunlight leaking from the windows. A few of the panes had been replaced with wood rectangles when the glass had broken. It wasn’t a great repair, but at least it had kept out the worst of the weather.
“Brandon!” Cilla called. Her voice was swallowed by the space.
“Hello!” Smith walked a few more steps into the room, glancing through the open doorway to a short hall beyond.
“He must be here,” Cilla said, feeling a shade of annoyance. Why would someone tell them to meet him and then not show up?
“Hey!” Smith called, one foot on the step.
Cilla felt an odd prickle. The chill seemed to start at the base of her spine and creep up her back. “Stand still,” she ordered Smith, her hands out. She paused, listening, feeling. The itchy sensation crept up her arms, the millions of nerves springing to life. The mental quirk, the one that told her something otherworldly was going on, spun into high alert.
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