Secrets of the Old Church

by E. A. House

  “You do,” Carrie said. “I think. Why do you have an Ace bandage if you don’t know how to wrap one?”

  “Mom gave it to me in case of emergencies,” Maddison explained, upending her EMF meter, several pens, a packet of tissues, a bottle of aspirin she offered to Carrie, her tape recorder, and a crumpled Band-Aid into her lap before finding the Ace bandage crushed at the very bottom. “She doesn’t like me wandering around in the dark tripping over things, says she had a brother who stepped in a hole in the woods and couldn’t walk out and wasn’t found for days.”

  “Yikes,” Carrie said, trying to flatten the Ace bandage.

  “Which is funny, because I have three uncles and she’s never told me which uncle it was.”

  “I would have thought the wandering around in the dark looking for ghosts would worry her more,” Carrie said.

  “Oh, she doesn’t believe in ghosts,” Maddison explained. Which would be nice, right about now, what with the deep shadows in the corners of the cistern and the feeling Maddison had of invisible eyes staring at her.

  “Speaking of ghosts,” Chris said suddenly, maybe because he could feel the atmosphere, too.

  “No,” Carrie said almost over the top of him.

  “But Carrie, it’s like a giant elephant in the room,” Chris protested. He was halfway across the cistern, still feeling his way around the edge and stumbling over dusty bricks.

  “You are not getting worked up over the ghost of Cesar Francisco,” Carrie said. She shifted a little and bumped her newly wrapped ankle. “Wow, that hurts. There’s been weird legends attached to this church since the thirties—the guy who made the stained-glass windows went crazy from the lead fumes and tried to swim to heaven, there’s a plaque on the Leviathan Window—and people are supposed to have heard and seen strange figures in the water of the cistern after Cesar Francisco disappeared,” she went on, despite having just told Chris not to get worked up over the ghost. “But it’s only been in the past decade or so that the weird stuff has happened. After the cistern was drained—actually after the first couple of boards fell in—some local kids told the police they saw glowing mist and evil red eyes down in the cistern.”

  “Oh, that’s never good,” Maddison commented. She wasn’t sure telling ghost stories was a great idea, but Carrie was likely in more pain than she was letting on and anything that distracted her was a good idea. Also, anything that distracted Maddison was a good idea too, because Maddison was slowly realizing that she had neglected to follow one of her dad’s longest-standing rules. Maddison wasn’t supposed to leave the house without telling someone where she would be going and how long she planned to be gone. She’d never forgotten that particular rule before, and her dad was going to be both angry and disappointed. But more importantly, Maddison was starting to suspect her dad had a concrete reason for that rule, a reason related to treasure hunting and whatever was endangering archivists, and that he was also going to be worried.

  “Right?” Carrie asked, and Maddison dragged her focus back to Carrie and the haunted cistern. “It got worse, too. There were spooky noises at night, there were eerie lights coming from the room where the old cistern had been—at that time the church hall hadn’t been built, so that storage room with the camel?”

  Everyone shuddered at the mention of the camel.

  “That storage room was the church library and they had Bible study in there, so there were people in and out of that room all the time,” Carrie finished. “There are loads of possible ghost sightings, and they still see stuff. Sometimes people walk by and get a whiff of rotting flesh, there are cold spots, and if you take a picture next to the door to the storage room you’re more than likely to see orbs.”

  “And you waited until we got here to tell me this stuff?” Chris demanded.

  “I didn’t expect you to find the old cistern, which has actually been supernaturally quiet since the early two thousands, or drag us all down into it while looking for clues!” Carrie was getting close to yelling.

  “Guys,” Maddison said, trying to interrupt. She was very proud of how even her voice was even though she had just discovered something startling and a bit scary.

  “What am I supposed to do if we meet a ghost?” Chris asked, sounding genuinely irritable and tripping over yet another pile of rubble. He kicked it, scattering bricks everywhere, and yelped in pain.

  “Whatever you were planning to do when you met the priest whose church we broke into!” Carrie suggested, also sounding irritable and pained and not at all noticing the strange electronic humming that had just started up. Well, started up at about the point Maddison had tried to interrupt—clearly she wasn’t the only person feeling irritable today. And Maddison was perfectly ready to sit through a blowup, if Chris and Carrie needed one. But now was maybe not the best time?

  “Guys!” Maddison finally said, under her breath but as loud as she could make it. The hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end. “Look!”

  When they snapped their attention back to her, Chris looking sheepish and Carrie mortified, Maddison held out her hand, EMF meter in a death grip. It was humming away merrily, and the red indicator light was showing both their faces in eerie red.

  “It’s probably just because of somebody’s cellphone,” Maddison said uncertainly as Chris switched to a worried expression and Carrie went directly to horrified. “And who knows what kind of Frankenstein wiring this thing could be detecting. But maybe we could just . . . ” she said.

  “Sit over here in a corner and huddle?” Carrie suggested, because her cousin hadn’t waited for a suggestion before bolting from the opposite corner to her side, and was already doing it.

  “Okay, sure, let’s go with that,” Maddison agreed, inching closer. The EMF meter continued humming and she was irrationally glad her back was to the wall. It was one thing to go looking for ghosts, it was quite another to have your EMF meter behave in a way that was only supposed to happen in horror movies. Maddison had never had this happen before.

  “Has anyone ever even seen a ghost with spectral form around here?” Maddison asked. As suddenly as it had started, her EMF meter stopped squealing.

  “Cesar Francisco,” Carrie said into the silence. “Dozens of times. Do you think it was the wiring?” she added, with a nod to the device now lying quietly in Maddison’s lap.

  “No idea,” Maddison said. “Is there wiring in here?”

  “There has to be some,” Chris offered, “because there was a lightbulb on its last legs in here. It died right after we fell in the cistern,” he explained when Maddison poked him and waved in the direction of the surrounding blackness. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more, and in terrible shape. As far as false positives go,” he said, “it’s a safe bet.”

  “Uh-huh,” Maddison said, instead of what she really wanted to say, which was “this is the most interesting thing my EMF meter has ever done, and I am both scared and terrifically excited.”

  IT WAS NOT POSSIBLE TO SIT IN AN AWKWARD HUDDLE in the dark of an empty cistern waiting for a ghost to appear for very long. Chris lasted fifteen minutes after the EMF meter stopped squealing before his nerves got the better of him and he started fidgeting. Carrie lasted fifteen-and-a-half minutes, at which point Chris bumped her injured ankle and she shoved him halfway across the cistern, and Maddison discreetly backed out of the altercation while they were flicking random bits of debris at each other. They didn’t actually notice that her silent preoccupation was foreboding until she finally spoke up.

  “So, um, when we checked our phones for reception did you guys happen to check how much battery you had left?” Maddison interrupted when Carrie had to stop to get brick dust out of her hair.

  “No,” Chris said, trying to remember when he’d last charged his phone. It had been recently, maybe.

  “Yeah, I was at something like eighty percent,” Carrie said.

  “And I was at seventy,” Maddison said. “I’m at six percent right now.”

 
; “Wait, what?” Chris asked, and pulled his own phone out of his pocket to discover that he was running on three percent battery. This, he thought to himself, was unusual even if he had forgotten to charge his phone overnight again.

  “Aren’t malfunctioning cell phones supposed to be a sign of paranormal activity?” Chris asked.

  “Oh, I was hoping you wouldn’t know that,” Maddison said. “I’m kind of impressed that you do. I could explain away the EMF meter going haywire but this is starting to look less like a coincidence and more like a genuine haunting.”

  Chris did not admit to how much research he had done into aliens and ghost hunting while worrying about Maddison storming out on him. Especially since it had probably been equal to the amount of research Carrie had done into the church.

  “The phones might just have run down the battery searching for a signal,” Carrie suggested, not looking terribly convinced herself. Her own phone, since she charged it every night, was still at ten percent, and after a brief argument she left hers on and Chris and Maddison turned theirs off.

  “So that we have some sort of backup,” Maddison said. “Although I hope we don’t need it.”

  “And not that I don’t enjoy being stuck in a well with the both of you,” Carrie said, “but we really do need to figure a way out of here, preferably without getting arrested for trespassing.” She was holding her phone on her lap, and looked appropriately grim and glowing in the blue-white light. The same light was making Maddison look ethereal, which was just not fair. Chris sighed.

  “I still think our best bet is going to be making a pile of junk and climbing up it,” he admitted. “This cistern isn’t very big, and from what I can tell it’s full of junk.”

  “Yeah, did you find anything interesting when you examined every inch of this space in the dark?” Carrie asked with a hint of cheerfulness.

  “No,” Chris admitted. “Not even the remains of Cesar Francisco.”

  “Don’t joke about that,” Maddison said darkly, joining Chris and giving the pile of bricks he was standing next to a poke.

  “This looks like a good place to start piling bricks,” Chris offered.

  “Yeah, actually,” Maddison said, and started kicking more bricks over. “Just try not to annoy”—she dropped her voice—“anything.”

  Chris paused with an armful of lumber and a dubious look for Maddison. “Tell me you don’t feel like we’re being watched,” Maddison demanded in a whisper. “That EMF meter didn’t go off by mistake, and I don’t think the temperature is what’s giving me goosebumps!”

  “I don’t really think there’s a ghost or even a skeleton in here,” Chris said. “There aren’t even any closets!” It was a terrible joke and it fell flat; he could feel Carrie giving him an unimpressed stare from all the way across the room.

  “Yeah, I know, that was terrible,” Chris admitted. “But you don’t have to kill me with your eyes, or whatever you’re doing with that death glare. I can feel it from all the way over here, you know.”

  “Uh, Chris?” Carrie said.

  “Yeah?” Chris was now wrestling an armful of dusty wood into a stack and Maddison was shifting the debris already against that wall into a more solid pile, so they both had their backs to the wall they’d left Carrie sitting against.

  “I’m . . . over here?” Carrie said, from directly beside him, and Chris stifled a scream. If she was right next to him, and Maddison was right next to him, then who had just been giving Chris a death glare? “I found Maddison’s headlamp,” Carrie continued while awkwardly angling herself so her back wasn’t facing the other side of the cistern. Chris couldn’t blame her. His heart was pounding, and it felt like it was stuck in his throat. “But, uh, that was about a second before I started limping towards you, and I haven’t been glaring?”

  Wordlessly the three of them turned cell phone flashlights on the far end of the cistern, revealing absolutely nothing in the cistern except Chris, Carrie, Maddison, and a lot of old bricks.

  “Clearly it was just the wind,” Chris said weakly.

  “Staring at you?” Maddison whispered.

  “Well, sometimes we personify the elements,” Chris protested, not sure where he was going with this comment and wishing the hair on his arms would stop standing up in fright. “So it stands to reason.”

  But what it stood to reason he never had to invent, because right at that moment a light but unmistakable breeze picked up and everyone froze. It came from the opposite side of the cistern, where they had just been sitting, and it carried with it the faint smell of dust and dirt and death.

  “Okay, not a personification of nature,” Carrie whispered, backing up against the wall as the air on the opposite side of the cistern grew brighter and brighter and settled into a human figure and Maddison gave a strangled squeak and then said, “They’re real,” in a choked voice.

  Chris was frozen in shock, but Carrie had an iron grip on his elbow and must have had a similar one on Maddison’s, because she was able to drag all three of them backwards despite being the only one injured. Then something rolled under her feet and her legs went out from under her, and the fact that she’d only had one good foot to start with, combined with her death grip on Maddison and Chris, dragged them both over right along with Carrie when she fell. Maddison yelped, Chris tried to but nothing came out, and the now-glowing figure got more and more distinct, and closer and closer to them, reaching out one hand like it was trying to touch them or point at them or—or something, Chris wasn’t sure at the time, terror chasing every other thought from his mind. Later, he would think he heard, very distantly, a sick and horrified sort of moan from Carrie, but he was never sure if it was his imagination filling in the gaps. All he knew at the time was that the ghostly figure repeated its reaching action, more insistently but no more comprehensibly, all the while glowing and wavering brighter and brighter. The strange dank smell got stronger and Chris felt his ears pop—and suddenly a brilliant electric light flared on and the ghost was gone.

  “Good heavens, that’s an awful smell,” said a completely unfamiliar voice directly above him, and Chris craned his neck backwards to see a pair of glasses attached to an angular but still-young face, and—oh no.

  The face was attached to a clerical collar.

  THERE WERE WORSE THINGS THAN BEING CAUGHT in an “Authorized Personnel Only” part of a church you didn’t attend by the priest of the church after you had broken through the floor of the side storage room. Being discovered in an “Authorized Personnel Only” part of a church you didn’t attend by the priest of the church and the eternally nosey father of your friend and awkward crush, for example, was worse. Having it happen after you had just had a soul-bearing conversation about suspecting him of complicity in the tragedy that befell your aunt went beyond description. Dr. McRae just seemed to have an uncanny ability to turn up everywhere, in this case in the side storage room of the local Catholic church, with the local Catholic priest and the largest high-powered flashlight Chris had ever seen.

  It only made things worse that the first thing out of Dr. McRae’s mouth was, “Mads, did you fall down a well?” His tone of voice was exasperated but fond as he braced himself on the edge of the cistern and grabbed Maddison’s outstretched arms without needing instruction. Chris had never known that Maddison’s dad called her an adorable shortened version of her name; it made the man far too human. Dr. McRae pulled Maddison up and out of the cistern with apparent ease, although he must have hauled a little too hard because he pulled her over on top of him and they fell down in a heap.

  “Ow,” Dr. McRae said, muffled. “That was ill thought out.”

  He was acting eerily like Professor Griffin, Chris thought, and this was not at all fair.

  “Carrie’s ankle is twisted,” Maddison said as she got shakily to her feet, and then there was concern on Dr. McRae’s face, and he and the priest, who introduced himself as Father Michaels and was far more young and energetic than Chris had expected, bustled over to
the edge of the cistern and started trying to pull Carrie up without injuring her further. Or at least they would have if Carrie, dead white and with a look of absolute horror on her face, hadn’t refused to move.

  “One of you needs to go call the police,” she said instead, and when Chris gave a strangled squeak she gave him a look of anguish and explained. “When I fell I put my hand down on—on a hand.” She swallowed. “And I have a horrible feeling the round thing I can feel under my back is really a skull.”

  “Yup,” the woman with a tight gray bun and “Coroner” on her jacket said, letting Detective Hermann pull her out of the cistern and peeling her gloves off. “It’s a body.” Detective Hermann, who’d arrived in record time, sighed and produced a roll of caution tape, stopping Father Michaels in the middle of a slightly rambling account of who had been in the church’s back rooms in the past year.

  Chris was inclined to think that the body—the very old and mostly desiccated dead body that they had been sharing a cistern with for over an hour before Carrie discovered it—was Cesar Francisco. It only made sense, as they’d found it in the church’s old cistern and it was not a fresh corpse. Father Michaels, however, seemed sadly resigned to the idea that the body could be anyone’s.

  He’d been the one to help Chris pull Carrie out of the cistern while Dr. McRae and Maddison called the police—which meant that Chris didn’t have any idea what Dr. McRae had told the police about what they’d found, so that was another thing to worry about—and then he’d dug an ancient and lopsided folding chair out of the junk in the back room so Carrie didn’t have to stand on her twisted ankle, and when the police had arrived he’d explained how few people ever went in the church’s back rooms and exactly who they were with enough detail and precision that Detective Hermann looked impressed. “The camel scares a lot of people away,” Father Michaels admitted. “I use these rooms for storage—my grandmother’s dishes, in fact. It’s too dark and the floor isn’t very sturdy, but my grandma left me two whole trunks of good china dishes when she passed and I haven’t got any room for them in the rectory, and ceramic dishes aren’t going to be hurt by a little dark and dust, so they’ve been living back here,” he said. “My grandfather’s copies of Dickens shouldn’t be out here,” he added. “But he used to write dirty limericks about the characters in the margins and when I had the set in the rectory every time I turned around someone was flipping through them and getting scandalized.”