The Ghost Hunter's Daughter

by Caroline Flarity

  This is a work of fiction, and the views expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the author. Likewise, certain characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter

  Copyright © 2019 by East Side Press

  carolineflarity.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Thank you for supporting the author’s rights.

  First paperback edition April 2019

  Cover design and formatting by ebooklaunch.com

  ISBN: 978-0-9968450-0-7 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-0-9968450-1-4 (ebook)

  Contents

  PART ONE: Goblin Girl

  Chapter One: The Kingdom of Crap

  Chapter Two: Two Bloomtowns

  Chapter Three: The Anniversary

  Chapter Four: Source

  Chapter Five: Ready to Reenie

  Chapter Six: Puppy Run

  PART TWO: Electrical Ghosts

  Chapter Seven: The New Elf

  Chapter Eight: Dirt Bath

  Chapter Nine: The Pig Man Cometh

  Chapter Ten: Nerdgasm

  Chapter Eleven: hey girl

  Chapter Twelve: Another Level of Sick

  Chapter Thirteen: Emi Is Operational

  Chapter Fourteen: The Energy-Sucking Vampire

  Chapter Fifteen: Freddy

  PART THREE: Another Manic Monday

  Chapter Sixteen: A Not So Special Episode

  Chapter Seventeen: Denton’s Revenge

  Chapter Eighteen: Takeoff

  Chapter Nineteen: Out of Body

  Chapter Twenty: Landing

  Chapter Twenty-One: Bad Juju

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Big Show

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Hangover

  PART ONE

  Goblin Girl

  Chapter One

  The Kingdom of Crap

  Anna Fagan’s mattress shook so lightly it was almost imperceptible. She opened her eyes and groaned. The only thing worse than getting up for school on a Monday was waking up to a Trickster an hour before the alarm went off. Invisible and mischievous, Tricksters were the least dangerous kind of spirit attachment, but annoying as hell.

  The spirit board. She forgot to seal it last night after trying to contact her mother’s soul. A waste of time as always, but at least she tried, unlike her father. Tomorrow was September 15, the eighth anniversary of her mother’s death, an occasion he’d yet to acknowledge.

  Anna could get up and perform a closing ritual on the board, recapture the pesky spirit attachment, but her warm bed and grogginess kept her put. Besides, the mattress had quieted down, hopefully for good. But the moment she faded back into her pillow’s embrace, the shaking began anew.

  “Rock-a-bye baby, on the treetop,” she sang, hoping to irritate it, then allowed the faint movement to lull her back to sleep.

  Soon the Trickster struck again. A prickling chill pulled Anna back from the crest of slumber. A draft from her bedroom window hit newly exposed skin on her arms. Her comforter was being slowly pulled down, perhaps only a few millimeters per minute. Or had she just shifted slightly? Anna sighed. Tricksters were masters of subtle manipulation and had endless patience.

  Most people had no idea that Tricksters existed, attributing their restless nights, lost keys or missing socks to simple bad luck. Anna was all too familiar with Tricksters and their shenanigans, but they could still make her doubt herself. She yanked the comforter up, kicking her feet in frustration.

  “Knock it the frig off,” she said.

  But acknowledging its presence only encouraged it, and for the next half an hour it fiddled with her hair so gingerly that it felt like a fly walking across her scalp. Finally, Anna snapped her lamp on in a gesture of surrender.

  Her bedroom was a bright oasis amid the larger chaos of her father’s cluttered house. Calling it his house made her feel less responsible for the embarrassing condition of the modest colonial on Eden Street. Her room, however, she took full ownership of, keeping it tidy and organized. The walls were splashed with photo collages of her two best friends, Doreen and Freddy, and her dog, Penelope. A framed picture of Anna’s mother, Helen Fagan, sat perfectly centered on the bureau.

  Sitting cross-legged in front of her full-length mirror, Anna ran a flat iron through her frizzy brown hair. She did what she could to mask the inch-long section of waxy pink skin extending from her right temple in a jagged line, dabbing on layers of concealer. The scar turned eight years old tomorrow, born the day her mother died.

  Anna reached under her bed and pulled out the Ouija Queen spirit board, surely the source of the bratty Trickster. She arranged the board and pointer as she’d found them the night before, cursing herself for not salting them before going to bed. Her father, Jack, would have a conniption if he knew she’d borrowed one of his client’s haunted objects, especially one he hadn’t cleared.

  Jack didn’t like spirit board jobs. It was insane, he said, that people who’d never sit on a bench next to a creepy stranger had no problem inviting spirits directly into their homes. Spirit attachments were hard to get rid of, as were the boards themselves. The boards often refused to burn and were known to find their way back into homes perfectly intact after being thrown away, buried, tossed over bridges, chopped up or any combination thereof. But the real reason Jack disliked spirit boards was that they occasionally had more than a Trickster or earthbound spirit attached to them. Dumb teenagers or jealous lovers sometimes took ill-advised dips into the deep end of the dark arts, invoking something with a board that they’d live (barely) to regret: a demon.

  Even Jack Fagan, a veteran paranormal investigator, wasn’t sure where demons came from or even what they were—fallen angels, some said, or embittered lesser gods. According to the less religious, they were supernatural creatures borne from hateful human emotions: evil and deadly thought forms. Most could agree that demons were powerful, vicious, intelligent and often telepathic entities of nonhuman origin who seek, simply, to destroy.

  Anna’s father didn’t take on demonic cases, referring them out to demonologists. One demon per lifetime was more than enough for him—the demon that had, quite literally, driven his wife to her death.

  The Ouija Queen in hand, Anna stepped into the hallway and was assailed by the stagnant smell of dust and mold. With each passing day, the cardboard boxes and broken furniture stacked against the walls swallowed more of the wood floor. Soon the narrow walkway would disappear altogether, and she’d have to clamber over her father’s crap to get to the stairs.

  Anna lifted a canister of salt from a cup holder nailed to the wall and poured a line of salt on the floor along the perimeter of her bedroom door. She didn't want any other intruders traipsing about in there. After shaking salt on the Ouija Queen, she brought the box close to her mouth.

  “I revoke your invitation to enter my private space and bind you to yours.”

  That should keep the little sucker in check. Standing on her toes, Anna slipped the Ouija Queen back on top of the cluttered shelf that ran the length of the hallway, accidentally nudging a stack of magazines that cascaded over her head along with a cloud of dust. Her fingers found something soft and sticky in her hair. A freakin’ spider web! Hadn’t the Trickster been enough for a Mo
nday? Spider webs in her hair would be just what the kids at school needed to confirm her status as Goblin Girl, the ghost hunter’s daughter.

  Anna made her way through the ever-narrowing hallway toward the stairs. After tripping over a book last year and bruising her coccyx bone, she now made a point of kicking any riffraff on the steps down to the hoard below.

  She stepped off the bottom stair and straight into another path, which had become more of a tunnel as Jack’s Crap grew higher on either side. The path made a sharp right at the Mountain of Mail beside the front door and burrowed past the unlivable living room, where towers of dust formed a tenuous skyline in unreachable corners, and mounds of thrift store clothing covered the floor and furniture.

  The path led into the kitchen where her father sat hunched in a chair at the kitchen table, holding a piece of mail. It was a bill. She could tell by the protruding vein on his forehead.

  Jack was only forty-two, but the gray in his salt-and-pepper hair was clearly winning the spice war. Well over six feet tall, he tended to duck his head even when sitting, as if afraid he’d bang into something. With his hopelessly out-of-date jeans and stained T-shirts, Jack still looked like a plumber, even though he’d changed professions years ago.

  “We have to start turning off the lights around here,” he said.

  “But then it would be too dark.” They’d had this conversation before.

  “Open the curtains then.”

  “They are open, Dad. Your things are blocking the sunlight.”

  That’s what Anna called Jack’s Crap to his face. He didn’t like the words junk, clutter, hoard, pile or crap and especially objected to the term recyclables. They were his things.

  Ignoring her dig, Jack placed the bill back into the envelope. It would be tossed atop the Mountain of Mail in no time.

  The kitchen was, aside from Anna’s bedroom, the only room not entirely cluttered with Jack’s things. He used the kitchen table as his workstation and two of the four chairs were still usable. The floor space in front of the basement door was remarkably clear as well, but the door was padlocked. Jack kept the dormant objects down there and had the only key.

  Jack became a big deal within the world of paranormal investigators due to his theory that haunted houses were actually homes containing haunted objects. Therefore, houses could be free of unwanted supernatural activity by identifying the object and cleansing it of its spirit attachment. He went on to prove this premise in a series of investigations that led to paying clients and, unfortunately for Anna, the attention of the scornful local media. As a kid, she begged her father to let her tag along on his investigations, but now wanted nothing to do with them. Jack had given up on trying to contact her mother’s spirit, so she didn’t see the point in helping him communicate with randoms.

  Someone knocked on the front door.

  “Who’s here this early?” Jack said. “Take a peek, please.”

  Freakin’ Christ…. Anna made her way back into the foyer and peered through the sliver of window still accessible over the Mountain of Mail.

  “It’s a blue SUV.”

  Jack mumbled something obscene under his breath about the BHA.

  He no longer opened letters from the Bloomtown Homeowners Association. They were tossed unmolested atop the Mountain of Mail. The blue envelopes stood out due to the blood-red text stamped on each one: “Final Notice!!” The exclamation points were handwritten with a red marker as if someone at the BHA was on the verge of popping a vessel. In the past, Jack always mowed the lawn after a threatening letter or two. But now that the front yard was a full-blown extension of his Kingdom of Crap, mowing the lawn was no longer an option.

  Anna had no interest in dealing with whomever Jack was clearly dreading from the BHA. She pushed her way inside the cramped bathroom just off the kitchen to do a last hair check. The tiny bathroom was stuffed with winter coats and boots of varying sizes, the result of the manic “bargain” shopping her father couldn’t resist.

  Leaning in toward the dusty mirror, something hard poked into her ribs, an old set of skis protruding from a pile of coats stacked on the toilet. Anna elbowed the skis out of the way and refocused on the mirror.

  The tip of her nose immediately went numb as her breath hit the glass in an icy fog. A black figure, featureless and human-shaped but impossibly tall and skinny, sprouted from the stack of coats like a mutant weed. It loomed over Anna for a moment, hunched and no-faced, before shooting out of the bathroom, taking the arctic air with it. She stuck her head out the door and watched it lurch up the steps and turn right toward her dad’s bedroom. Shadow people popped up occasionally in the Fagan house. Despite their name, they weren’t thought to be human spirits. They were, however, attracted to spirit activity, and there was plenty of that in Jack’s house. Maybe she should warn her dad about his new roomie.

  “Dad! There's a shadow person upstairs!”

  “Enough with the yelling!” Jack yelled from the kitchen. “We have company. Come say hello!”

  Anna made her way, rather begrudgingly, back into the kitchen.

  Jack stood by the kitchen table, fake smiling, too wide, too much gum.

  “Remember Saul?” he said. “From Bloomtown Realty?”

  “Yep. Hi.”

  If Bloomtown had a town mascot, it was Saul Gleason, a popular real estate broker who looked like he’d jumped out of a Gap ad. Saul had the whitest teeth she’d ever seen. He sat in her chair at the table, wearing a blue blazer atop a polo shirt the color of withered grass.

  “Well, look at you,” Saul said. “Growing up to be a lovely young woman.”

  Anna had to squeeze by Saul to get to the refrigerator. He smelled like cologne and toothpaste, pleasant but overly sweet. She searched the fridge for the half-empty can of dog food she’d left there yesterday.

  “You two have a visitor upstairs?” Saul asked.

  “No biggie,” Jack said. “The house may need to be cleansed.”

  Anna opened the produce drawer, now occupied by a package of tube socks. Damn. Jack made a Costco run. Never a good thing.

  “Now that you mention it,” Saul said, “this place could use some sprucing up.”

  Someone was confronting Jack about his hoarding? Anna strained to hear every word.

  “Not cleaned,” Jack said, “cleansed. A clearing out of any wayward entities. It's a casualty of the trade. They tend to…collect.”

  Saul shifted in his chair. “Ghosts?”

  “Earthbound spirits, yes, but other things, too.” Jack said. “We don’t know what some of them are, exactly. It’s possible they might bleed through from other dimensions.”

  Saul cleared his throat. “You know that spooky stuff isn't my thing. But, hey, everyone's gotta make a living. But Jack…the state of this property, now that concerns me.”

  Anna lifted the package of tube socks. Bingo. The dog food. Her beloved beagle wasn’t allowed inside these days due to Jack’s worsening dog allergies. Further complicating things, Peeps recently birthed a litter. The puppies would be given away once they were old enough. Anna already dreaded it.

  “Things may look unorganized,” Jack said, “but everything has a purpose, and if I need something I know where to find it.”

  Like you found Mom? She didn’t say it. It was a low blow.

  Saul raised an eyebrow. “Moldy newspapers have a purpose?”

  “There are articles I may need to reference.”

  Anna took a jug of water from the fridge. “There’s this thing, Dad, a research tool you may not have heard of. It's called the Internet.”

  Jack pointed a finger at her. “Tone.”

  “It’s a joke, sheesh,” she said, grabbing a glass from the cupboard.

  Saul cleared his throat again. “I was telling your dad that with new staff he’s going to need an office, and a nice little ranch just opened up on Washington Street.”

  Any appreciation of Saul evaporated in a flash.

  “In Bloomtown?” she ask
ed. New staff? New office? It was bad enough having the town weirdo for a father, but now he was expanding?

  “Saul's getting us the first couple months rent-free,” Jack said.

  Anna tensed. What did he mean us? Her father needed an office because he’d crammed the house with junk and was too embarrassed to have clients over. But instead of saying anything, she occupied her mouth by pouring a glass of water and taking a swig. The walls of her throat constricted.

  Anna tried to force a swallow just as the shadow person entered the kitchen with a loping stride. It stopped short, crouching behind Saul, who was clueless to its presence. Oh no. She couldn’t get the water down. The need to breathe took over and Anna spit the water out, spraying both the shadow person and Saul. The shadow person instantly evaporated.

  Saul jumped up and closed his blazer, hiding the wet spots.

  “I am so sorry!” Anna said, mortified.

  “Accidents happen,” Saul said evenly, his fingers working the buttons on his blazer.

  Anna examined the jug of water, noticing for the first time its telltale green lid. “Why is there holy water in the fridge?” She wiped her tongue down with a napkin. “It tastes weird.”

  Jack used holy water to pry unwilling spirits from the objects they attached themselves to. If a spirit refused to budge, he used it to bind them to their object, inhibiting their ability to cause trouble. But even bound spirits were always free to cross into the great mystery of Source. Jack’s connection with Source had dwindled considerably, so he could no longer make holy water himself. He now bought it pre-blessed, which was expensive given the volumes he used.

  Saul was in a sudden rush to leave. “You two can think about the extra office space. Good to see you, Ms. Fagan.”

  “Sorry again about the spitting.”

  Saul flashed his Chiclets at her. “Not a prob.”

  Jack followed Saul to the front door. Their voices carried from the entranceway.

  “Look, I bought you some time from the bank,” Saul said. “But we're gonna have to get an inspector in here to get that new office loan approved. Which means you're gonna have to—”