The Ghost Hunter's Daughter

by Caroline Flarity

  An alien landscape lay below her, a pale, spongy earth. Crisscrossing over the strange terrain were narrow scarlet roadways and dark purple superhighways. A new world for her to explore! But wasn’t she supposed to be doing something? That’s right, she was in Freddy’s room. She had been trying to get—into his head. Anna was looking at Freddy’s brain.

  Pop. She hovered over Freddy’s sleeping body once more. There had to be another way to reach him. And then she saw it—Freddy’s light-body was barely visible, but it was there, a centimeter or two above his physical body in faint lavender. Anna lowered herself toward Freddy, close enough to kiss him. And then without thinking about it, she did kiss him, sinking her lavender light lips into his. The warm sweet thrill of it made her light-body glow brighter as the Freddy Smell filled her ethereal senses. Freddy, where are you? Pop.

  The main floor of the Bloomtown Shopping Center retreated below her. Anna was riding up an escalator to the second-floor food court. Freddy stood a few grated metal steps ahead of her, his back to her, one hand touching his mouth, wearing his baggy jeans and NASA sweatshirt. Anna walked up the escalator until she was right behind him.

  “Exciting dream,” she said. “What’s next, Target?”

  Freddy glanced over his shoulder, his arm falling to his side, and then went back to staring straight ahead. Maybe he couldn’t see her? But then his hand went to his hair, smoothing his unruly curls. He saw her.

  “Can you hear me?” Anna asked.

  “Duh,” Freddy said, still not looking at her.

  The generic mall music droned on, but the mall itself evaporated along with the merged smell of cinnamon buns, French fries and pizza. They were now riding an unsupported escalator up into the cosmos, surrounded by the black vacuum of endless space sprinkled with the light of countless stars.

  “Where are you going?” Anna asked.

  Freddy pointed above his head and Anna craned her neck back, following his finger. There was a huge zig-zag crack in the space-fabric of the universe. A brilliant whiteness lay behind it. She gasped, instantly filled with yearning. For a moment Anna was willing to let it all go, Doreen, Freddy, Jack, her mother, everything and fly into that light like Mary’s spirit had years ago. But instead she said, “I'd miss you.”

  “You wouldn't even notice.” Freddy’s voice was full of hurt, old and unacknowledged.

  “I don't deserve you, do I? You and Dor.”

  Freddy was silent.

  “Dor’s in trouble. It’s bad,” Anna said.

  He finally turned to her, his brow crinkling. “What’s wrong with Dor?”

  “She needs our help. You have to wake up.”

  There was a grinding sound of protesting metal as the escalator creaked to a stop and changed direction, heading downward. The cosmos began to waver like a heat mirage around them. Anna looked back up at the crack in the universe, unable to stop the tide of grief. Everyone wants to go home. Everyone.

  “Do you think that’s where my mom is?” Anna asked.

  Freddy shrugged. “I can never quite get up there.”

  But maybe Anna could. She had popped into Freddy’s dream, hadn’t she? This could be it, her chance to find her mother, to travel into the very heart of Source.

  “Are you up there?” Her voice echoed up through space. “Mom, where are you?”

  Pop.

  Anna hovered above a single story house with vibrant, chipping paint. It was dark, but she could see a worn soccer ball in the yard with a logo on it. She dropped toward it and read the lettering. Federation Mexicana De Futbol. Anna popped into the house, inside a small bedroom. There were paintings of butterflies on the wall, crude and childlike, but cheerful. A tiny brown dog in the corner of the room jumped up from its bed and bared its teeth at her. Anna was apparently visible to dogs, both living and dead. On the bed, a small body stirred under the sheet.

  “Silencio,” said the sleepy voice of a child.

  Anna knew enough Spanish to understand. Be quiet. But the dog kept on yapping as dogs do. The bed covers were ripped down by a girl, about eight years old, with round brown eyes and short dark hair. The girl sat up, clearly annoyed at the unwanted wakeup call, and gave the dog some serious stink eye.

  “Silencio!”

  The dog’s barking dwindled to a chastened whine, and Anna floated over the bed to get a better look at the kid flopping back on her mattress. Within moments, the girl was drifting through the gap between wake and sleep, where the veil between the worlds is thin. The girl’s body sagged, her eyelids fluttering shut, and then she looked up at Anna. The child’s eyes, strangely familiar, grew large with shock and fear. The girl could see Anna’s light-body floating above her. But then she tilted her head, her features relaxing, and spoke in perfect English, “Sweet Pea?”

  A tsunami of shock rushed out from Anna’s light-body. It traveled through the room making the butterfly paintings appear to shimmer and dance. Anna knew those eyes! The girl snuggled back under her sheet, her mouth slack, her eyes shut. Anna, on the other hand, had never been more wide-awake. She now understood why Jack had been unable to contact her mother’s spirit, why her mother had never answered Anna’s pleas. Her mother wasn’t in the spirit world. Helen Fagan’s spirit had been reborn. Her mother wasn’t being tortured by the demon who took her life. Helen Fagan was alive.

  From the center of Anna’s immense relief came a piercing regret. She had been blaming Jack all this time, but he was innocent. If only she could go back in time.

  Pop.

  Anna was home, hovering above her father. He sat at the kitchen table, puffs of exhaustion, stress and grief rising off of him. But his dark hair wasn’t speckled with gray and the skin around his eyes was smooth. He was younger than he should be. Anna was in the past. She was a freaking time traveler. The wealth of visible floor space was disorientating. Jack’s hoarding, which had started almost as soon as Helen died, was still manageable. Her father was sprinkling salt into a bowl of water. Jack was making holy water, his lips moving in prayer, “Wherever this salt falls shall be free from the attacks of malicious entities—”

  There was a high-pitched scream. Anna floated after Jack as he rushed out of the kitchen and up the stairs to Anna’s bedroom, knowing what she would see. But it was still a shock to be confronted with her younger self sitting up in bed, her Dora the Explorer pajamas damp with sweat. Anna had nightmares every night for two years after her mother’s death, and Jack was there every time she woke up screaming.

  All these years, she’d punished him for breaking his promise to contact her mother’s spirit. A promise that it was now clear was impossible for him to keep. Yet they had survived, battered and certainly worse for wear, but still together. And now the portals were unraveling what was left of their fragile lives. It wasn’t fair after all they had lost. Grief permeated her light-body. Anna let the emotion wash through her. It was just energy, moving. She set her intention on connecting with the larger, wiser part of herself. Why did this happen to us?

  Pop.

  Anna floated near her kitchen ceiling. She’d gone forward in time but hadn’t quite reached the present. It was the morning that Saul had stopped by to talk to Jack about opening the new office. She observed herself entering the kitchen and saw Jack introduce her to Saul. She’d never seen the top of her head before. It was odd, like looking at someone else. Anna watched her distracted self accidentally pour a glass of holy water. The shadow person entered the kitchen, and Anna’s past-self spit out the holy water, spraying both Saul and the shadow person, who instantly vanished.

  “Why is there holy water in the fridge? It tastes weird,” she heard herself say.

  Saul stood and closed his jacket, quickly hiding the water stains. There was an urgency in Saul’s movements that Anna hadn’t noticed that morning. It was how he closed his jacket after the holy water hit him; the way his jaw clenched as his fingers fumbled for the buttons. Saul was hiding something. Anna zoomed in on his shirt and saw the dark stains s
preading across the wet fabric, saw his flesh pucker and molt through a tiny gap between the buttons.

  And then Anna knew. Saul wasn’t controlled and tortured by an evil energy vampire. It was the holy water that had caused Saul’s chest wounds. It was Saul that was evil, entirely so. Anna zoomed in on Saul’s face.

  “Where are you now, you lying shit?”

  Pop.

  It was reading the Bloomtown Examiner in its sparse living room, legs crossed, khakis pressed, crisp button-down shirt. It looked right at her, seeing her, its skin swimming over an underlying swirling darkness. The Saul-thing bared his teeth in a vile, tongue-flickering grin that Anna hadn’t seen in eight years.

  “Hello, maggot,” it said.

  And then a loud sucking sound, a horrible wheezing and only blackness.

  Chapter Twenty

  Landing

  There was a whirl of color and then the heavy weight of bones and flesh gluing her to the carpet. Anna was back in her body, sitting cross-legged in front of her mirror. The wheezing came from the back of her throat as she sucked in air. Exhale, damn it! She’d forgotten how to breathe! Anna managed a few shaky breaths and then sprang to her feet only to crumple to her knees, unused to the force of gravity. She stood on her third attempt, threw on jeans and a hoodie, and picked up her phone. It was one o’clock in the morning. She had to get to Doreen. Freddy could back her up. His house was on the way. Go.

  Anna rushed into the hallway and peeked inside Jack’s bedroom. He was curled up and snoring. Relieved, she gently shut his door. Now wasn’t the time to tell Jack about Saul—about what Saul was.

  Her feet barely grazed the steps, but Geneva’s white sandals at the bottom of the stairs stopped Anna cold. She peered through the hoard piles in the living room and saw a sliver of blonde hair. Geneva was sleeping on the couch again. Her presence made Anna uneasy in a way that bounced between irritation and hope.

  Once outside, Anna broke into a run down Eden Street, dodging toppled over trash cans (hopefully that wasn’t Jack’s doing) and a car parked askew. A police car sped past with its lights off and distant sirens wailed from the east and west. She got to Freddy’s in less than a minute and brazenly reached for the doorknob. Please let it be open. It wasn’t. Screw it. She rang the doorbell and knocked. Gloria, Freddy’s mom, came down the steps in her bathrobe, peering through the tempered glass before opening the door.

  “Anna Fagan, what in the—”

  “I have to see Freddy.”

  “It’s the middle of the night!”

  “Sorry!” Anna darted past Gloria and up the stairs, bursting loudly into Freddy’s room. Startled, Freddy sat upright in bed. There in his closet was the portal, still visible but faded. Anna could see portals without Emi. She was still connected to Source.

  “You remember?” Anna asked.

  Freddy nodded. “Dor needs us.” He threw his sneakers on. “Let’s go.”

  They ran down the steps, avoiding Gloria as she wondered aloud just what in the holy hell they thought they were doing. The two of them sprinted past several houses on Eden Street and then came to a stop, panting, in front of Doreen’s house.

  “Why are we here?” Freddy asked.

  “It’s her mom,” Anna said. “She’s wounded and there’s a portal under her couch.”

  “Like that thing above Geneva’s bed?”

  “Yep. I told you about it yesterday, but you were a little…out of it.”

  He looked away from her. “Anna, I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t worry about it. There’s a portal in your room, too. A big one. The demon must have been there. Was anyone strange in your room?”

  “Yeah,” Freddy said as they reached Doreen’s front door. “Some real estate guy came by to look at it.” His eyes narrowed, perhaps remembering what she’d told him about Saul. “Wait. Did you say ‘demon’?”

  “I’ll explain it all later.”

  The front door was open and they didn’t bother knocking. Freddy followed Anna into the darkened living room. It reeked of bedpan and sweat. Cindy was asleep in a sunken mound on the couch. Anna could see the woman’s tongue lying thick inside her slack mouth. As Cindy snored, the TV broadcast a hissing, flickering static, giving sound to the portal mist spitting into the air from underneath the couch. The mist was so faint that Anna could barely see it. Freddy, she knew, couldn’t see it at all.

  “Is that…?” Freddy trailed off. Bloated and filthy, Cindy was almost unrecognizable.

  Anna knelt beside the couch and peered underneath. The pool of blood confirmed it. Everything she’d experienced while out of body was real.

  “It’s her back,” Anna said to Freddy. “She’s bleeding. Call the paramedics. I’m gonna get Dor.”

  When Anna entered Doreen’s bedroom, her friend was sitting on her bed, hugging her knees.

  “You came,” Doreen whispered. “I thought I heard you. My…my mom.”

  Anna put her arms around Doreen. At first unyielding, she slowly leaned into Anna’s embrace.

  “Freddy’s calling for help,” Anna said.

  It took forty minutes for the ambulance to arrive. Two medics, one tall and broad-shouldered, the other smaller and mustached, wheeled a stretcher into Doreen’s living room. Both men had dark circles under their eyes.

  Cindy woke up in an ornery mood, snarling at Freddy to quit gawking at her. The medics fired questions at her, but she refused to speak to them, only nodding or shaking her head in response. To free Cindy from the couch, the medics used a pair of shears to cut into the cushion attached to her back. They wheeled her outside on the stretcher, lying on her stomach, a blanket covering the portion of bloody cushion still fused to her skin. Cindy was loaded into the ambulance and Doreen climbed in after her.

  Freddy stepped one lanky leg into the back of the ambulance and turned to Anna.

  “You coming?”

  “I have to go home and check on Jack,” she lied.

  She couldn’t tell him that the demon that caused her mother’s death was still in Bloomtown. Freddy would insist on helping and she knew what the demon was capable of. It was too dangerous, and Anna wouldn’t put her needs before him, or Dor, again.

  She walked back down Eden Street to her house, avoiding shards of glass from broken beer bottles. Once inside, Anna followed the newly dug path to the back of the living room. Curled up and sleeping atop a pile of thrift store sweaters, Geneva looked child-like and vulnerable. Anna wondered if she was doing the right thing by involving her, but there wasn’t another option. Jack hadn’t fully recovered from the basement fumes, and she wanted to keep Freddy and Dor as far from the demon as possible.

  Anna woke Geneva, summoning her to the kitchen so they could talk without their voices carrying up the stairs. They sat at the table.

  “It worked,” Anna said, wasting no time.

  “Anna, slow down. What worked?”

  “The mirror gazing. You were right. I left my body, saw Doreen and went to Freddy’s. Popped into his dream! And from there I went to Mexico and saw my mom. She’s okay! She’s a little girl now, but she still loves butterflies and remembers me. But the thing is, Saul, I saw him, too. And I know what he is. He’s a demon, Geneva. The same demon that killed my mother.”

  Geneva gaped at her, her eyes still foggy with sleep.

  “You’re saying that you had an out-of-body experience, and this somehow led you to find out that Saul is a demon?”

  Anna took a deep breath and explained everything again as calmly as possible.

  “So,” Geneva said, after listening quietly. “You thought about someone, and then you—you just appeared there?”

  Anna nodded. “Instantly.”

  “And this Saul-thing…it's the same entity that…that…”

  The words hung in the air. Killed your mother?

  Anna nodded.

  “The story it told about the Ouija board in the shack? Total bull. Saul isn’t controlled by some energy-sucking vampire. It’s a full de
monic possession. Who knows if there’s anything left of the real Saul. He probably vacated the premises years ago.”

  “Your dad,” Geneva said, her voice tight. “We need to wake him.”

  “No way.”

  “I’m not sure I’m comfortable—”

  “He’s sick, Geneva, from the basement and has a head injury. I can’t let anything else happen to him.”

  Geneva exhaled, deflating a little, perhaps relieved that they wouldn’t have to tell Jack about what Saul was, at least not now. She was letting Anna have the reins, deferring to her new authority.

  “You look exhausted,” Geneva said. She pushed her chair back and went to the sink, filling a glass with water that she handed to Anna. Anna tipped it toward her mouth without looking at it. She retched as soon as the liquid hit her throat, gulping another unfortunate mouthful. Anna shot out of her chair and leaned over the sink. Her body ejected the liquid from her nose and mouth as quickly and thoroughly as possible. When there was nothing left to throw up, Anna dry heaved, struggling for breath between each convulsion. Geneva stood beside her, holding her hair back until the jagged waves of nausea passed.

  “What did you give me?” Anna asked when she could finally talk.

  “Nothing!” Geneva said. “Just water.” She picked up Anna’s half-empty glass and held it up to the light. “Here, look.”

  The water in the glass was a murky and dark.

  “It’s freakin’ mud! Can’t you see it?”

  Geneva was dumbfounded. “See what?”

  Anna felt the steam go out of her. Geneva couldn’t see it. It was plain old water to her.

  “I must still be connected to Source,” Anna said. “The water, my body rejected it.”

  She turned the faucet on. The water spilling into the sink was an inky sludge.