The Haunting at Morgan's Rock

by M. L. Bullock

  I could hear something else, though. Scratching, like giant rodents scratching inner walls. And the noise was coming from the elevator shaft. What in God’s name? Even though the menacing shadow watched me from the open doorway, I had to go see for myself. I had to know. What was in that elevator?

  Whispers, pleading whispers. A cacophony of voices reached out to me. Then it all came back to me. I knew why I’d smashed the wall—hit it again and again. I knew why I was so determined to get inside, even now, to lay my eyes upon the interior of that old elevator.

  They were trapped in there. Many, many, many of them. The elevator was full of mournful souls—I had to set them free! The Victrola lurched and scratched a record. I recognized the sad song, appropriately sorrowful for the moment. I prayed to God that the music didn’t wake Megan. I couldn’t protect her now. I couldn’t help her, but maybe I could help them. Even as the thought formed in my mind, something brushed my leg. I looked down and saw a dirty, dingy balloon tap along the floor and disappear into the black hole. It was a dull yellow balloon.

  My agony was complete. The sledgehammer was against the far wall, but I wasn’t going to touch it. I’d terrified my wife already with my destruction and noise. But I could work quietly. Yes, I could tear at the wall with my hands. There were plenty of broken pieces already. If I could get rid of them, I could see inside.

  I’d only taken a few steps when a mass of shadow confronted me. His features remained darkened, but I could see his eyes. And I could see the hate there. Loads of hate. He was in my face, and he was screaming in my head.

  Get out! They’re mine!

  Chapter Twelve—Megan

  “Come with me, darlin’! Pay no attention to that canceled stamp. That bit of wallflower is only my cousin. She does nothing better than stand in corners and look morbid,” Joanna whispered before she kissed my cheek. I could feel her lipstick on my skin. The air crackled around me, but we were moving together. Joanna Storm! I wasn’t her, and she wasn’t me. We were two separate people now! And she was my friend, my confidante, and I hers.

  Yes, this is what I’ve always wanted, isn’t it? To be Joanna’s friend?

  She was leading me around the perimeter of the Great Room; there was a throng of people watching us. Their eyes glistened with admiration beneath the shiny chandeliers. I could hear them whisper about the two beauties of Morgan’s Rock. The admirers held glasses of champagne in their hands…surely this was some sort of party, but for whom? Then I had a thought—would Paden be here?

  No, Megan. Don’t think about Paden. He’s not for you. He never was. He is Joanna’s husband.

  “Don’t be a goose egg! This party is for you. Don’t worry, everything’s jake. Sunshine and roses here. Come with me, Meggie!”

  “Joanna, is it really you?” I felt so sleepy, yet here I was wearing a heavy sequined gown, my stomach flat with no sign of the baby; the dress fit me like a glove. But even that didn’t terrify me; instead, I was confused and curious. I was with Joanna…she would never hurt me, would she?

  “Now you’re on the trolley! Just a few more faces to meet—there are so many here tonight, and they’ve all come to greet you. This is Lalla Guidry. Love the dress, Lalla.” The strange woman with the twist of curls at her neck raised a glass of champagne to me. Others watched me and smiled in greeting, but I sensed that their smiles were empty and joyless.

  Joanna’s grip tightened around my wrist. I winced and tried to pull away. “You’re hurting me, Joanna. Please let me go.”

  I absolutely do not want to be here. I must be dreaming. That’s it. I’m dreaming all this. It’s a horrible dream. But if it is only a dream, why does this hurt so much? I was sure I would have a bracelet bruise.

  “Don’t be a ninny. You have to meet Mr. Gene Agnew. Surely you remember him. He starred with me in Purple Fields of Paris. He likes to think of himself as a ladies’ man, but who are you kidding, Genie? We all know that you prefer leading men to leading ladies, but no matter. We’re so glad you could make it. Aren’t we, Megan?”

  Gene’s serpentine smile sickened me, but at least he didn’t move to touch me. I tried to back away, but Joanna dragged me on. “I don’t understand, Joanna. I shouldn’t be here. I have to go home. Alex will be worried.” I heard my voice shake. I was on the verge of a complete breakdown, but what good would hysterics do me? Nobody was coming to rescue me. Not Alex, not Paden. Nobody. Joanna’s mouth twisted into a cruel smile. She had a true death grip on me now, and her skin was icy cold against mine.

  “Please…”

  None of this made sense. Despite the azure blue dress she wore and the soft feathers perched in her hair, I did not recognize her now—for surely Joanna was a ghost. This cruel entity could not be Joanna Storm. It couldn’t be!

  This is a nightmare! Wake up, Megan. Wake up now before you can’t leave.

  This was a wretched party. Instead of perfume, I smelled something else. The only word I could think of to describe it would be “decrepit.” Most of the faces were now obscured by cigarette smoke. Despite the lively music and the sea of whispering voices, nobody moved. No one danced. All eyes were on me, every move I made. And they weren’t watching me in admiration anymore. I got the distinct impression that they wanted to pounce on me, rip me to shreds, kill me.

  “I am not supposed to be here, Joanna.”

  “Yes, you are, Dumb Dora. All this is for you. We thought you should receive a proper welcome. But here’s someone you missed. I think you know her, the first Mrs. Wagner.”

  The woman who now stood before me wore a gleaming white dress with sparkling crystals, like an old-fashioned wedding dress. Her face…I could see her face! It was Julie! Yes, she had the same delicate features, an angular jawline, a petite nose with pink painted lips. “Do say hello, Meggie. You two have so much in common.” Joanna’s voice went strange—all gurgling and sick—but I couldn’t take my eyes off Julie Wagner. She didn’t have a glass in her hand like all the others did, and like me she looked quite terrified. Her eyes communicated fear in an intense, troubling manner even as her lips were drawn up into a weird, doll-like smile. The grip on my wrist tightened, and I slowly turned to Joanna as a cry of pain escaped my lips.

  But finally, it became apparent—this wasn’t Joanna beside me. She, he—no, it—it had never been the ghost of Joanna Storm. Dan Petit grinned at me as if it were the greatest of jokes. The jolliest of pranks.

  “Stop it!” I screamed at him. Anger rose up from some hidden recess of my soul. “Let me go now!” My scream must have broken the spell because when I woke up, it was clear that I had escaped from Dan. I was sitting up in my bed covered in sweat, but there was no blood on my sheets and thankfully I wasn’t sick. My belly was as it should be, round and large. The baby rested quietly despite her mother’s horrible nightmare. That was no nightmare, Megan. Just look at your feet. I gasped at the sight of my dirty toes. I’d been somewhere, that was for sure.

  “Alex,” I said with a grunt as I awkwardly navigated the tangle of sweaty sheets wrapped around my legs. “Alex!” I couldn’t leave my bedroom fast enough. “Alex?”

  After some searching, I found my husband sitting on the bottom step of the staircase. He was red-eyed, and what was worse was the bloody handprint on the side of his face. A child’s bloody handprint.

  “Alex?”

  When he finally realized I was there, he reached out to me. I didn’t fear him; he was real. He was himself, but something had clearly happened to him. Where had the blood come from? I asked nothing but sat beside him, and we held each other on the stairs. He cried on my shoulder. There had been too much crying lately. Far too much. But for now, we needed to cry.

  “We should go, Alex. Like we always planned to do. Let’s leave Morgan’s Rock today. Right now.”

  Alex shook his head and wiped his eyes with his shirt sleeve. “I can’t leave them. Julie is here. And Zach. They’re here, Megan. He has them all here. They’re trapped.”

  I didn’t
have to ask who he was talking about. He obviously meant Dan Petit. I’d seen him too only minutes ago. At the same time he was working his terrible magic on me, he was also tormenting Alex. How was that possible?

  That’s when we heard the knock on the kitchen door.

  Chapter Thirteen—Sylvia

  “Sylvia! Thank God!” Megan’s flushed cheeks and her husband’s red-rimmed eyes were clear clues that supernatural hijinks were afoot.

  There you go, Sylvia. Always thinking like Sherlock Holmes. I did so love those old movies. And Joanna Storm…she had always been a favorite of mine. Could she be haunting this family?

  “What has happened?” I asked as I waved the taxi away. In a flurry, Megan invited me inside and began to explain what they had experienced. Even though I’d been working with the spiritual world for over forty years, some of the things I heard surprised me. As she spoke, I tapped the atmosphere around me. I did that quietly whenever I visited a new location. Megan was as she seemed, stressed-out and afraid. Her husband was deep inside himself, and I easily discerned his tangled emotions. Anger, grief and guilt. Yes, mostly guilt, but about what? It was strangely empty down here on this bottom floor, but above my head I could see a woman’s face peering down at me from the ceiling. And then, whoosh, she was gone. Yes, that’s where they were gathering upstairs, and there were many, many of them.

  “Alex, tell her,” Megan prompted her husband, who was pouring himself a glass of water. He downed it in a few gulps and put the glass back in the sink.

  I said with as much comfort as I could muster, “It’s okay. Actually, the less you tell me, the better. I’d like to take a walk, if you don’t mind. By myself. I need you two to stay down here or better yet outside.”

  Alex frowned at that idea. “I can’t let you go walking around here by yourself. It’s not safe. I don’t care who you are or what your superpowers might be. This whole place is possessed.”

  “I’ll be quite alright, I promise you. And I am not going alone.” At that, his eyes widened and he raised his hands in surrender.

  “Please, Sylvia. Be very careful,” Megan whispered.

  “You got it. Just have a seat on the porch or stay inside if you must, but don’t come up here—no matter what. I’ll come back down soon.”

  Right on cue, my fractured wrist began to ache, but I ignored it and waited for the couple to leave. I immediately began to walk through the bottom floor. All was as expected here. There was tension, trouble in the marriage, but it was because the two of them were being influenced and not completely honest with one another. Yes, it was no understatement to say things here were “complicated.” But back to the influencer. Yes, they were being influenced by someone dead. But who? I tapped the fingers of my left hand along the wall. Making contact with a place often helped me to connect to the past or the present.

  These poor people. They really had no idea what they were up against. The wife, Megan, she had spiritual intuition and an abundance of creativity. And her husband was certainly a medium of some sort; like so many gifted people, he’d shut that gift down long ago. But gifts as strong as his never completely shut down. It was a part of his DNA, and he would never truly be happy until he acknowledged it. At least that’s what I believed. My husband had been much the same way, not a man to believe in such things until he was forced to. Oh, but what a gift he’d had. Strange that I would think of Levi right now. There will be time for reminiscing later. Focus now.

  Whatever had happened to Alex, it surely had to do with that boy. The child’s death had affected him so deeply that he refused to see anything, experience anything. Know anything. He’d had an inkling, a premonition about it, but he had ignored it. He’d been the one to find the boy. Zachary was the child’s name. He’d found him not sleeping but dead. And his wife too. Oh yes, that had certainly come back to bite him. Yes, that I did know. They were here, but they didn’t want to be. They had been called here and not by Alex. Lulled here. Tricked here.

  But now all these dead worked together, and they were fixated on him. At least some of them. I entered the pantry and went straight to the far wall. Even if I hadn’t seen the footage on television, the tearing down of the wall on the Paranormal Channel, I would have known where the space was located. You could feel an unholy wind blowing down here. Just beyond those boards, Sheetrock and paint. I leaned against the wall and listened.

  No. It was as quiet as a grave. Whatever was stirring here at Morgan’s Rock wasn’t hiding in that room. There was another opening. This barrier was sure. They’d done a good job of undoing the magic, or at least containing it. Someday, if the right person came along, a person willing to dabble in the magic necessary to loose those spirits…then that would be another story. But not today. No, the evil that grew here came from another area.

  Yes, there had been an awakening recently. A horrible, deadly awakening. But why? Suddenly the fragrance of Freya filled my nostrils.

  Freya? I am so happy you are here, I greeted my most trusted spirit guide. She flitted about the floor. I rarely saw her clearly, but I sensed her, knew her emotions like I knew my own. Freya wanted me to leave right now. Leave this place. There were too many dead here. They were all upstairs waiting.

  I reminded her that I’d investigated places like this before. I truly had. It wasn’t unusual to see multiple dead in one place.

  All…trapped.

  “Trapped?” I asked as I paused at the bottom of the first staircase. I wasn’t in the best of shape, and pushing someone down the stairs was the joy of many a mischievous spirit. Oh, and this place had more than its share of mischievous, devious spirits. The stairs creaked beneath my tennis shoes. I patted my pocket and was relieved to feel my hematite charm on my person. Sometimes I forgot to bring it. Not that it would do much good here. As I cleared the second floor, my anxiety ratcheted up. It’s the elevator—that’s where I have to go. It’s further up. I paced the hallway of this level, but there wasn’t a soul here. Not even residual energy. It was like someone had taken a giant vacuum cleaner and pulled it all out. No way was Megan or Alex strong enough to do that. Maybe if Alex were more developed, he could manage some of that, but not to this extent.

  I saw the balloon again, the same dirty balloon I’d seen in the hospital parking lot. And where there was the balloon, there would also be the boy. The poor boy! I believed he needed my help.

  Freya floated in front of me, her face downcast and hidden from me. She shook her head and whispered furiously in my mind. I die. We die. No. Stay here.

  I recalled Freya’s strange message on the refrigerator again. It had been something similar. How strange it was. Did she mean that I was going to die? Freya was already dead, so what was she so afraid of? Surely she was just being overly sensitive. Overly cautious. I practically ran up the second flight of stairs. My tennis shoes felt heavy, as if I’d walked into an invisible glue factory.

  Oh, this is where you all are—why are you hiding? I’m not going to hurt you.

  A cacophony of voices cried out to me. They warned me to leave, to go. They sounded disjointed, hopeless. My attention was drawn to the far end of the hall, at the broken wall. That is where he keeps them, a woman whispered in my ear. I could see her to my left, on the balcony.

  Oh, Joanna. Nice to meet you. My name is Sylvia.

  But Joanna’s response was disappointing. She shook her head and floated away. She vanished from the porch; it appeared that her power was limited here in her own home. Something had truly been awakened. Was it a thing or a human spirit? Or both?

  Freya hovered beside me; she moaned and cried. He’s putting them in there. They don’t want to be in there. We die too.

  I stared harder at the gaping hole at the end of the hall. I could hear machinery moving. Clack, clack. Was that old elevator actually coming to life? Even as I thought the question, it began to rise and the choir of tortured voices grew louder.

  They were coming closer! I was about to meet them. All of them!

/>   A shadow passed at the end of the hall, from one closed door to the other. It passed back and forth as the elevator clacked louder. So close now. So close. It whirred back and forth as if it were some sort of spiritual engine. It was a man, a shadow man. No, not really a shadow man, just a man sold out to evil. He was made of all things evil.

  LEAVE NOW!

  The shadow’s growl did not really surprise me. Anything that went about in the form of a shadow was never good. But he wasn’t a demon or any other type of nonhuman entity. Just a very strong human spirit. But no matter how strong he was, he could be defeated. Yes, he was angry at my thoughts. He was an angry, malicious spirit that fancied himself a soul collector. And he was so strong and skilled that he could actually hold those spirits in place, at least for a time. But why? Why would he want to do that? I had to get to the bottom of all this. Maybe I could coerce him into talking with me.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  The elevator stopped, and I watched in horror as the wall began to crumble before me. Many hands poked out of the decaying wood beams and dusty old plaster. Dead hands. And there were faces and limbs, all gray and dead. All in one mind, under the control of his mind. They snapped their teeth and growled as if they were animals. All the pity I had for them vanished. They were lost and completely under the shadow’s control.

  And they were coming for me. All of them. As the wall gave way, I could see the dozens of dead people who began to fall out on the floor. They made their way toward me, some crawling and others walking—one man in the back appeared ready to run at me. To jump me! Oh God! I’m not ready for this.

  “Stop it!” I screamed in my most commanding voice. I had to convince them that they must obey me. As I yelled at them to stop, Freya whirred past me and raced toward the opening, a scream on her lips.