by Bryan, JL
She took a deep breath. “First, I am not descended from Hank Grolman, the man who built this place. He’s just a great-great-et cetera uncle of mine. So don’t blame me for this. I’m descended from his brother Garit, one of the brothers he brought in to help run his businesses. But nobody spent the kind of time here on the island that Hank did. They’d come for a few weeks in the winter, instead of a few months. It became…unpleasant. People encountered shadowy figures and strange voices all over the island, but especially in the main lodge. The cost of upkeep was painfully high for a place nobody wanted to visit anymore.
“So we offloaded it onto the state of Georgia and did everything we could to keep people away. The ghosts here are not benign. They are dangerous. That’s why we need to end this restoration project. Otherwise, you’re just endangering people,” Adrienne said.
“But you want to spend the night in the lodge?” I asked her.
“I’d like to spend just one night here, yes. It’s somewhat legendary within my family, as you can no doubt imagine. I was fascinated by it as a child but forbidden to come. Until just now, of course, when I’ve been sent to remove Wyatt.” She gave him a sly look. “You must have been very sneaky with the lawmakers and regulators. Unfortunately, we may have failed to remember to continue purchasing local influence over the years. We believed the matter of the island had been settled permanently, and we had no other interests in the state of Georgia.”
“The political side was pretty cheap,” Wyatt said. “Darika arranged it all. She’s very detail oriented. And discreet.”
“Darika’s very smart. Should I be worried?” She gave him a teasing smile, though her eyes didn’t seem to be teasing at all.
“She’s an effective employee. She’s no artistic genius, though.”
“Neither am I.” Adrienne relaxed and smiled faintly at the compliment. “Tell Farlee I would like to have dinner, after all.”
“Great.” Wyatt tapped at his phone. A loon call shrieked back in response several seconds later. “Hey, ghost detectives, join us for dinner? You can fill us in on some more background.”
“That sounds a little crowded,” Adrienne said.
“And we already grabbed a bite in town,” I added.
“Yep, totally stuffed.” Stacey patted her stomach. “It was amazing.”
“Besides, the two of you will be busy,” Adrienne said to Stacey and me. “Removing all of these cameras from my family’s home.”
I felt a rising panic. While abandoning the island to the dead wasn’t the worst plan—arguably, it was the safest possible plan—something felt off to me. I needed to understand this place. Sooner or later, people would return, even if it was years in the future. My chance to do anything to decrease the danger by removing even one of the many negative entities was vanishing fast.
“If you’re interested, our investigation has uncovered some possible information about Hank’s activities here,” I said. “I’m not sure how reliable it is, and it’s not backed by much evidence, but maybe there’s some kernel of truth, because parts of it corroborate other things we’ve seen.”
“What information?” Adrienne glowered behind her thickly painted makeup. Not a crease appeared anywhere on her face, though. “From where?”
“There was a guy who tried to publish an unauthorized biography of Hank Grolman back in the seventies, but—”
“Oh, not this again. Chalmer Ostrowski?”
“You’ve heard of him?” Wyatt asked.
“Yeah, he’s a stalker. First he tried blackmailing our family. Our attorney still has the letters. But not even the lowliest tabloids would listen to him. He was arrested for breaking into our fishing cottage on Wintertide Island, off Newfoundland. Fortunately, none of us were there at the time. The guy’s just a loon—no offense to your app, Wyatt. He’s spent time in jail, in mental hospitals, often homeless. Just ask my family’s attorney. He’s got it all on file.”
“He also tried to stab me with a fishhook,” Wyatt said. “So, there’s that.”
I nodded. If she was already familiar with whatever Chalmer had to say, then I had nothing to add about it.
“Maybe we could do just one more night’s observation—” I began, in a bit of last-ditch desperation, though I kept it calm and professional on the outside. I hope.
“Absolutely not,” Adrienne said. “Wyatt says you work all night, so spend tonight erasing everything you’ve recorded and packing up all this junk. Then you’ll be ready to leave on the ferry in the morning.”
I felt like all the air had been knocked out of me. I looked over at Wyatt, but he nodded along, not wanting to argue with his fiancée.
“Sounds like that’s for the best,” Wyatt said. “We’ll find another place for the wedding. There’s still time, right?”
Adrienne hesitated, looking around the room full of dead South American animals, like a long-neglected natural history museum.
“I don’t know about the wedding, Wyatt,” she finally said, then walked stiffly out of the room.
Wyatt stared after her, looking shocked and pained, like he’d been stung by a scorpion. I wondered if Adrienne was a Scorpio.
Before leaving, he looked back at us.
“Wyatt, I’m sorry—” Stacey began.
“You’ll take the ferry in the morning. This is over.” He looked around the card room, a place of leisure for the dead, full of their sort of pleasures—cards, ashtrays, wild animals hunted for sport rather than food. “Maybe it’s all over.”
He trudged out of the room, going after Adrienne, perhaps hoping to salvage some of what he’d lost.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Stacey and I spent hours breaking down our nerve center and collecting all the gear around the house that we’d set up only a few days earlier.
The case felt like a wasted effort, a total defeat. The dead had won. They would continue to dominate the island, endangering anyone who came ashore, perhaps collecting new souls over the years, becoming ever more haunted, an ever-deepening whirlpool of spiritual darkness.
While Stacey and I worked, carrying out Wyatt's orders to surrender and retreat, we felt like the house was watching us all night. This was especially true in the enormous dining hall, between the heads on the wall, the dozens of empty chairs at the long table, the fireplaces and nooks where shadows gathered.
I could smell the echoes of old smoke in the room, though as far as I knew it had been decades since any fire had been built here. Maybe I heard the distant voices singing their drinking song for a moment, or maybe I just remembered it particularly clearly.
The heavy, cold feeling of an unseen presence pervaded the master bedroom where the towering shadow had run off some workers. A glance through our thermal camera, before we turned it off and packed it up, revealed a sizable cold spot in the room’s corner. Maybe that was Hank Grolman himself, watching in amusement as one of his living heirs threw us out.
“If Chalmer’s right, then some awful crimes would be going unpunished and kept secret here,” Stacey said as we descended the stairs from the butler’s pantry to the wine cellar.
“I know.” I widened my flashlight’s iris, chasing away shadows as we navigated the cold catacombs below, past the meat cellar.
Something inside me recoiled as we crossed through the broken hole in the wall into the long-hidden passageway beyond. We passed the partly demolished staircase to the nailed-shut trap door above. Perhaps the royally decorated bull elephant had once rolled back on its platform to reveal the steps below, the titan of the land giving way to the wealthy and powerful members of the secretive hunting lodge.
The air grew thicker and colder as we followed the horned-skull sconces along the wall to the black steel vault door.
While Stacey hurried to break down our recording gear, I took a final look over the strange antique bank-vault lock, something that would take tools and skills I didn’t have to crack.
We holstered our flashlights and switched to small belt-
mounted lights, leaving our hands free to carry the gear we’d collected, ceding the basement to its ghosts.
“They sealed up this place, then made it illegal for anyone to come to the island,” I whispered. “Whatever happened down here, Adrienne’s family wanted to make sure nobody ever found out about it.”
“Every family has its secrets, I suppose,” Stacey said. “Though they usually aren’t this well-hidden.”
A male voice whispered, somewhere close by. I couldn’t tell where it emerged, only that it echoed down the corridor to where we stood, like a message to us.
Male voices answered, also quiet as whispers. They moved in a kind of rough melodic unison, though without much sense of rhythm. Chanting.
The air grew thicker and colder, like we were in the dark water at the bottom of a deep lake—a place I’d been fairly recently, at a haunted campground—and every nerve ending in my body was screaming at me to run. I felt the entities’ presence like electricity in the room, boiling over, a storm waiting to erupt. I expected apparitions to appear around us, or worse, a violent psychokinetic attack.
“Listen, uh, guys,” I said shakily to the invisible but very real presences crowding the underground corridor. It was hard not to consider how isolated we were down there, and how far we had to run to reach the floor above, and then to reach the outside. “We were just leaving.”
Stacey gaped, trembling visibly. The shadows grew thicker, into a black fog, swallowing our flashlight beams, absorbing all light and warmth and air.
“Run!” I shouted.
Animal snarls arose. Claws scraped the floor and jaws snapped. Men’s voices shouted behind them, seeming to urge on the animals’ pursuit of us.
Stacey and I raced up the hall.
Ahead of us, dark hooded shapes descended the old stairs as if the trap door above were wide open instead of nailed shut. The hems of their dark robes flowed like black oil over the rough brick stairs as they moved soundlessly down to join us, perhaps meaning to cut off our retreat.
We swerved wide around the foot of the stairs. Stacey slowed as she ducked through the brick hole in the wall, and the weight of our retrieved gear kept us from moving at top speed.
The entity slammed into me from behind, and I smelled it before it struck me, a heavy, rotten carcass of wet meat and sharp claws, jaws snapping at my ear.
I shouted a warning half a second before crashing into Stacey, and we both sprawled across the floor of the main cellar corridor, landing hard and in a confused tangle that made it hard to reach my flashlights. Our tripods and camera cases clattered to the floor, adding to the confusion.
My hand was conveniently close to one of Stacey’s flashlight holsters, though, so I drew one and clicked it on, washing the attacker in a full-spectrum white blast.
Nothing was there, as far as I could see. I swung the flashlight beam up and down the hall.
“Ellie, you’re bleeding!” Stacey said. “On me, a little. But that’s okay.”
“Sorry.” I sat up, taking a deep breath. “Are you hurt?”
“Just mildly banged up, mostly by your tackle.” She stood up, brushing herself off, as I did the same. “What was that all about?”
I looked back the way we’d come.
In the distance, a hooded figure stood at the vault door as if guarding it. He held a small lamp made from a goat’s skull, perhaps taken from one of the wall sconces, swaying on the chain that served as its handle. The skull's eyes glowed dull and red from the coals inside. The lantern light painted the hooded man's shriveled, dead face in a shifting red glow; his eyes, nose, and mouth were deep, dark holes.
The red light of the lamp died, and he vanished.
“I think he’s gone,” I whispered.
“You’re looking bad back here, girl.” Stacey gingerly touched my jacket.
I became aware of a huge patch of pain across my lower back, like I’d just gotten a cheap tattoo on spring break. “How bad?”
“Like a three-clawed tiger got you.”
“Ugh. Always three scratches, every time.”
“I thought we were about to get ripped apart.”
“Maybe they know we’re leaving, and just moving us along.”
“Then maybe we should hurry in case they change their minds,” Stacey said.
We dashed through the wine cellar, up through the butler’s pantry, and around the annoyingly labyrinthine course to the front door. Stacey insisted on walking behind me to cover my injured rear, and I wasn’t going to waste time arguing about it. The claw marks stung with every step I took.
Outside, Gary leaned against his security cart, idly looking into our van’s open back door as if admiring how messy it was in there, wires and cables hanging everywhere. He’d watched us carry out and stow away loads of gear while holding his post.
“Done yet?” Gary asked, watching Stacey strap some cameras down into place inside the van. I kept facing him so he wouldn’t see my injury, which involved a rip in my jeans that ran from the waist down through a back pocket.
“It would have gone faster with some help,” Stacey said. “You must have been tired from carrying Adrienne’s entire Princess-Vespa-sized luggage collection.”
“Hey, Spaceballs, good flick.” Gary popped a stick of JuicyFruit in his mouth. “Yeah, I felt like Barf the Mawg for a minute, carrying all those bags upstairs. And she keeps calling me ‘the driver’ like I’m not head of security for the whole island. But the boss man says to do whatever makes Adrienne happy, though that’s probably a lost cause, if you ask me. Off the record. Don’t go repeating that comment to anybody, that’s not an official notarized Gary comment. It’s just, well, some people aren’t prone to happiness. I’d probably feel sorry for her if I thought about it long enough.”
“Everybody has their problems,” Stacey said. “Even if they’re rich and have amazingly long legs and look like one of these goddess statues.” She nodded across to the garden nook where Artemis stood, her short marble tunic revealing the tension in her lifelike sculpted leg and hip muscles, the smooth planes of her face reminding me of Adrienne’s touches of plastic surgery and her stark white makeup and hair coloring, as though Adrienne aspired to look like a marble goddess instead of a real human being.
“It’s been a long night,” I said. “See you around, Gary. Or not, most likely, since we’re leaving in the morning.”
“I’ll hold the fort,” he said, saluting lazily with just his forefinger. “Sleep tight.”
“It could happen.” I yawned, not for the first time, exhausted from gathering all our gear. I circled to the van’s side door, putting me out of Gary’s line of sight, and strapped down the tripods I’d been carrying.
We pulled away from the lodge. It stood dark against the night sky like the empty castle of some forgotten king, a grand mansion for the dead.
At the corner of my eye, a hellish red light glowed dimly in one of the master bedroom windows, outlining a tall, shadowy figure there, perhaps the long-deceased master of the estate watching us depart.
When I turned to look, the window was dark, as if it had only been a mirage conjured by my own mind.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Where’s Darika’s golf cart?” Stacey asked as we parked at the chambermaids’ cottage and hopped out. Darika’s cart was indeed nowhere in sight.
“Good question. It’s late for her to be out running around.” At three in the morning, a few hours still remained until dawn. “There’s something on the front door.” A folded piece of paper jutted out above the doorknob. I opened the door and caught the paper as it fluttered free.
Stacey pointed her flashlight at it. “The Rogue and the Prince? What does that mean? Sounds like historical romance. Especially printed in that curly-swirly font.”
“I think she ripped out the title page of a paperback novel. Here’s the actual note.” I turned it so Stacey could see the handwritten cursive on the back. Even dashing off a note on unlined paper, Darika had some flawle
ss penmanship.
“What’s it say?” Stacey took it from me and read aloud. “‘I can’t take it here any longer.’ Wow, were we bad roommates? Did you leave your dirty dishes in the sink again, Ellie?”
“Very funny. Keep reading, you note-snatcher.”
“Fine. ‘It’s so cold in my room, and they won’t stop whispering. I’ll be sleeping on the couch in the guest house if you need me.’ Who wouldn’t stop whispering? The chambermaids, you think?”
“Maybe Adrienne’s return has stirred up the ghosts even more,” I said.
“I wouldn’t want to spend the night alone here with Foxy Chambermaid prowling around. She may seem harmless, but you know how that goes. She’ll probably turn out to be obsessed with revenge, and murdering the living will be one of her top three favorite hobbies.”
“That would be our typical luck.” I headed inside. I had to pump the light switch a couple of times before the lights sputtered to life. It was cold in the living room, colder in the bedroom. Reaching for my sleeping bag, I said, “I’m just going to collapse.”
“You are not!” Stacey drew our first aid kit from her suitcase. “Get those clothes off so I can take care of you.”
Reluctantly, I lay on my stomach and let her pull off my damaged jacket, shirt, and jeans.
“Ew,” she said. “Not only do you have claw marks on the lower back, there’s teeth marks up near your shoulder.”
“Great. Now I’ll have to get a paranormal rabies shot.”
“Ha! Just keep up that sense of humor while I do this.” She slathered antibacterial ointment across my back, and I hissed even though her touch was gentle.
She bandaged me up and wrapped my sleeping bag over me as a barrier against the unnatural cold. “Now just take two aspirin and avoid being attacked by any more evil spirits until morning.”
“I’ll do my best, doc,” I mumbled. My eyes were already closed. Worn out, and with only a few hours to rest before it would be time to get moving again, I quickly fell into an uncomfortable sleep. The chill in the air was aggressive, forcing its way under my sleeping bag so I only seemed to grow colder as I fell asleep, as if I were being lowered into a deep well, or maybe my own grave.