by J L Bryan
Clay's screaming voice rushed away into the distance, fading fast like a passing train at night, like something had snatched him up in its jaw and run away with him.
Elizabeth's laughter didn't fade with his scream, but it ended once his scream was out of earshot.
I was alone with Elizabeth's ghost. Or maybe she'd moved on, and I was completely alone.
Then something hit me.
Then something else. It was painful, like stinging insects were attacking.
Several struck me at once, and I realized it was ice, falling on me from above. Big, painful chunks of hail.
I clicked on my backup flashlight and tried to look ahead through the fog. It wasn't cold fog anymore. It was warm, and smelled like wood smoke.
Melissa groaned behind me, the pounding of high-speed ice helping to wake her up.
She was groggy, speechless, and confused, but I was able to get her standing and walking, though she leaned heavily on me.
Emerging from the smoke, I found myself standing on a paved stretch of blacktop in the woods.
The old house we'd entered was in front of me, smoke pouring from its windows, but it hadn't collapsed into itself like the building in the time slip.
“Ellie!”
Through the smoke, I could see Stacey on the front porch of the house, taking shelter from the heavy hail that was pouring down in buckets. Brenda was with her.
I shuffled toward them, Melissa on my arm. The ice hammered down on me while it put out the scattered fires in the burning house, gradually replacing the wood smoke with steam.
Chapter Forty
So that was it. No more Anton Clay. Whatever strange forces had come along to rip his weakened ghost out of the world, he was truly gone now. I could feel it in my bones. And I'd gotten to see my parents again, in a way, just for a moment.
There was no time to reflect on any of that at the moment, though.
I eased Melissa down onto the porch. It wasn't the safest spot in the world, but it kept us out of the hail. It had been freshly dusted with earth, like someone had put out some burning floorboards a little earlier.
“Where is everyone else?” I asked Stacey.
“Hey, everyone else!” Stacey shouted through one of the window holes. The old window shutters had been smashed open all along the front porch, and the rotten front door ripped off and tossed aside, to let the smoke out. “Ellie's back! And she brought a friend!”
“Keep her away from me!” Brenda snapped, backing away from Melissa, who just gaped at her speechlessly.
“She won't hurt you now,” I said. “Clay's gone. She's as much a victim as you are.”
“Is she?” Brenda looked at Melissa. “Then where are my kids? If you're a helpless victim, tell me that.”
“It might take a while for her to regain her cognitive functions—” I began.
“Your kids are fine,” Melissa interrupted, her voice hoarse and smoke-damaged. “We never touched them. We only took you.”
“You mean Clay,” I said. “You were possessed.”
“Yeah, I guess. But it still feels like I did it.” Melissa coughed. “Watched my own hands do everything.” She looked off into the pounding curtain of hail, her expression dazed.
“Ellie's out here?” Michael emerged from the doorway. Incredibly, Tucker Nealon was leaning heavily on him, wheezing. Jacob followed, helping to support Nealon from behind. When Michael saw me, he rushed toward me, abruptly leaving Jacob with the job of getting Nealon onto the porch floor without dropping him. Jacob managed to pull it off, though.
Michael embraced me. “You're alive!” he said.
“And I brought Melissa,” I said. “Not Anton Clay...just Melissa.”
Michael knelt beside his sister. He looked at her for a long moment, as if not really believing she was there.
While Michael focused on Melissa and her injuries, I had my own moment of disbelief.
“How are you still alive?” I asked Tucker. His beard and hair had burned to nothing. Losing the massive beard was kind of an improvement on his face, actually.
“I had some protection against the supernatural part of the fire.” Tucker rummaged among his symbols, amulets, and talismans to bring out the crab claw with intricate symbols scratched into its surface and stained with colorful dyes.
“The leather duster and vest didn't hurt, either,” Jacob pointed out.
“No, sir.” Tucker coughed. “I'd still prefer to visit a hospital before it's all over, though. Just in case something fatal happened to me while I wasn't paying attention.” He coughed again and gestured at the thousands of pieces of ice crashing down all around us. “Maybe after this.”
We sat on the porch to wait out the hail storm.
Michael opened his backpack and provided first aid to everyone who needed it. He even had a portable oxygen bottle, which was nice for those who'd breathed too much smoke. He had previously loaded up on burn treatment supplies on our way across country in search of the fiery ghost.
He bandaged my hands carefully, gently, his gaze warm and steady.
“Thank you,” I said. “For being who you are.” I placed my thickly bandaged hands on either side of his face.
“You feel like a mummy,” he whispered.
“Beware the mummy's kiss,” I whispered back, then leaned in and kissed him for a long time. Long enough, I hoped, for him to forget I'd said something that goofy.
“Oh, isn't that a movie?” Stacey asked. “Beware the Mummy's Kiss?”
“It should be,” Jacob said. “If we start writing the screenplay now, we'll probably be done by the time this hail stops.”
“Ellie,” Melissa rasped through her smoke-damaged throat. “Watch where you're putting your mouth.”
I turned toward her, remembering that when she'd last been in control of herself, she'd also been opposed to my relationship with her brother. It sounded like we were back to that.
“I'm sorry, Melissa—” I began.
“That's my brother,” Melissa said, and then she smiled with her soot-darkened face. “There's no telling where he's been.”
It took a moment for me to process what she'd said, and then I snorted out a laugh. It was a terrible snort, like a horse sneezing.
While the storm came down, we talked over what had happened, each of us collecting pieces we'd missed. Michael, Stacey, and Jacob had last seen me go into the fireplace room after Melissa and Nealon. The doorway to that room had collapsed in a burning heap, and they'd spent the time since then trying to reach us.
Only Brenda and I had experienced the full time slip back to the nineteenth century and the Peshtigo fire. When the river had disappeared as the time slip fell apart, she'd found herself in the hail storm in front of the old house. Stacey had tended to her while Michael and Jacob searched for me and rescued the exorcist.
“One thing I still don't understand,” I said, looking at Melissa. “Why did Clay seek out your father?”
“Oh.” Melissa looked down at the porch floorboards. “Um. That was me.”
“You?” Michael asked. “You swiped money out of the savings account and hired a sleazy private detective?”
“Well, the non-sleazy ones are more expensive,” Melissa said.
“That's true,” I said.
“I was going to put the money back,” Melissa said. “You know, eventually. Then Clay took more out once he got control of me. That guy likes to spend.”
“Why did you want to find Dad, anyway?” Michael asked. “We hate Dad.”
“You hate Dad,” Melissa said. “I had no memories of him. I didn't expect him to be...great, or anything. I just wanted to see what he was like.”
“But you weren't going to talk to me about it?” Michael asked.
“I was,” she said. “Eventually. Once I made up my mind what to do. But then you got hurt, and then...he started to take over. A little bit every day.” She touched the side of her head. “I'm so glad he's gone. He really had me trapped in there. It w
as awful.”
“I'm sorry.” Michael moved over and hugged her. I could have hugged her, too, but I didn't know if she'd welcome that, so I stayed where I was.
“I should have seen it,” I said. “It's my job. I should have known you were possessed right away, Melissa. But...I wanted to believe it. That was my blind spot. I wanted to believe that you liked me. I wanted to believe we could all be a kind of a...family.” I winced as I said it, maybe from revealing way too much, making myself way too vulnerable.
Tucker Nealon whistled. “That was a big whoop-up for sure, missing that one. You sure you're cut out for this line of work, Ellie?”
I shrugged. “Maybe none of us are. Or do you always nap in the fireplace?”
“It's a cold night out,” he said.
“Right.” I looked at Melissa, more interested in her response than anything Tucker Nealon could have said.
She looked at me for a long moment, then nodded, gave me a weary smile, and rested her head on one of her big brother's shoulders.
“I'm sure we can work something out,” she said, yawning and closing her eyes.
Chapter Forty-One
We celebrated New Year's Eve a few days late, out on the beach at Tybee Island. At least this meant that we had the place pretty much to ourselves, and the sort of people who'd be out on the beach that fine cold winter evening weren't likely to be oversensitive about fireworks and noise. If they could handle the January wind off the ocean, they could handle a few Black Cats.
Stacey and Jacob were there; Stacey brought a couple big picnic thermoses full of hot chocolate.
Michael and Melissa both took a near-pyromaniac joy in setting off the fireworks—the bigger and louder, the better. You could really see the family resemblance in their big smiles and the crazed gleams in their eyes. Some of Michael's fire department friends came along, too, with their significant others, because it turns out those guys are really, really into fireworks themselves. I stayed well away from their heated bottle rocket war.
Calvin came out, too, since he was in town that weekend. He looked healthier and happier than I'd seen him in years. Florida and grandparenthood were good for him. They had to be better than chasing down the restless dead in Savannah's neighborhoods full of stately, beautiful, badly haunted old mansions.
We invited Grant Patterson from the Historical Association to come along, too, but he said he loathed getting sand in his sandals. He implored me to meet him for lunch and fill him in on the monster museum case. He'd originally sent me on that investigation, just a couple of weeks earlier, though in some ways it felt like years had passed since I'd left the coastal city of Savannah for the hills of Tennessee.
It was good to be back home where I belonged. It was even better to feel that there were people I belonged with. That was a nice change.
I eased back from the others as the fireworks picked up; they're not exactly my favorite form of entertainment. I stood close to the water, as if seeking safety from any potential fires.
“How is your New Year so far?” Calvin asked. He approached me in a beach wheelchair, which had huge, wide tires, a little reminiscent of those giant floating tricycles you can rent at some beaches.
“I can't believe Clay's gone.” I looked out at the stars and galaxies filling the sky above the ocean. “He's always been out there, waiting for me, stalking and menacing me inside my own mind. I know most of that was my own memories and fears. He was really a simple little ghost, until just recently.”
“He was extremely dangerous,” Calvin said. “Don't fool yourself about that. If he'd been simple, we would have taken him out years ago.”
“So what were we waiting for?”
“For you to become stronger and wiser.”
“Oops,” I said. “Turned out it was Anton Clay who got a lot stronger and wiser right there at the end.”
“No,” Calvin said. “He grew stronger, but not wiser.”
“So how many more years were we going to put off dealing with Clay? According to your original plan?”
“I can't say.” He smiled, very slightly. “Maybe I was too afraid to ever put you in that kind of peril. You were only a girl when you started camping out at my office door and demanding I teach you. A girl who'd lost her parents. A girl who never smiled, and never had a reason to.”
“Sounds like me. I was eighteen, though. I was an adult.”
“You're barely older than that now.”
“I'm turning twenty-seven this year,” I said. “It's been a busy eight years.”
“The older I get, the younger you seem,” he said. “What will you do now?”
“Now?” I thought about it. “Now, I'm going to get some more of Stacey's homemade hot chocolate before I freeze to death. Then I'm going to watch the rest of these fireworks with my friends and act like I really enjoy it. Because I enjoy being with them.”
I looked out at the dark universe above, and the countless small lights scattered throughout it.
“And tomorrow,” I added, “I'll go into work, take inventory, and make sure we're ready for the next case.”
He gave me a thin smile that didn't really reach his eyes. It was like he was proud of me and sad for me all at once.
I headed for Stacey and her thermos full of life-giving chocolate.
“Happy New Year, Ellie,” Calvin called after me, lingering behind as I went ahead. “To all of you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You too.”
Maybe it really would be a happy one, this time.
We could only hope.
FROM THE AUTHOR
I hope you enjoyed this two-part “road trip” story with Ellie and Michael facing some of their personal demons along the great American highway.
Future ghost adventures are coming, so please make sure you'ved signed up for my newsletter to hear about new Ellie Jordan titles as soon as they come out. (You’ll immediately get a free ebook of assorted short stories just for signing up.)
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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