What a Ghoul Wants

by Victoria Laurie

  Absent too was the bone-chilling cold that had so enveloped me as I raced down the corridor. And I couldn’t exactly remember if the cold had left the area before I’d reached the room, or some time after—I’d been far too scared in the seconds following my escape into the room to pay much attention. While the air in the hallway was still chilly, it wasn’t anything like the freezing cold that had crawled under my skin and taken root in my insides. I shivered even thinking about it.

  “You okay?” Heath whispered, eyeing me with concern again.

  “Fine. What do we do now?”

  Heath closed the door and took my hand. Leading me back to the bed, he clicked on the bedside lamp and stared hard at the small night table. “Where’s the phone?”

  “What phone?”

  “Shouldn’t there be a phone for us to call down to the desk?”

  I blinked. He was right. “What is it with these VIP digs, anyway? Small musty rooms, no phone to speak of, and no clock either, did you notice?”

  Heath grumbled with irritation as he shuffled around the bed looking for his own jeans and sweater. I watched him until I thought to check my phone for the time, but when I tapped my screen, it wouldn’t come on. “Huh,” I said, attempting a second and third time to get it to work.

  “What?” Heath asked, pulling his sweater over his head.

  “My phone’s dead.”

  “Didn’t you charge it at the airport?”

  I nodded. I had charged it there, so it should still have substantial power now, because I hadn’t used it since. Getting up, I went over to my messenger bag and rooted around for the charger, and then the challenge became finding an outlet. Finally I pulled out the plug from the lamp and got the phone some juice. “It’s three a.m.,” I said once the display came to life.

  “At least we got a few good hours of sleep,” Heath remarked, coming over to slip his arms around my middle. “I’m headed down to the front desk. I think we should let someone know there may be an injured woman somewhere in the castle.”

  I turned in his arms to look up at him, suddenly afraid for him. “But what about that. . . that. . . thing?”

  Heath eyed the door. “I’ll have to risk it.”

  I didn’t know what it was that I’d encountered in that corridor beyond our door, but one thing I did know—it wasn’t human. . . and it almost certainly wasn’t alive. “I’m going with you,” I said firmly.

  Heath shook his head, but I wasn’t having it. Pushing out of his arms, I moved over to my messenger bag again and rifled through it.

  The magnetic spikes we use to combat the worst of the poltergeists we encounter on our ghost hunts were packed away in a large canvas bag that John was in charge of, and therefore were probably safely tucked away in his room. I hadn’t even thought to carry any spikes into the castle, as all I’d wanted to do was get a little shut-eye.

  The best I could do was to come up with a few refrigerator magnets that I had on hand just in case one or two of the magnets glued to the protective sweatshirt Gilley wore came loose.

  In other words, if Heath and I did encounter that thing again in the hallway, we wouldn’t have much in the way of defenses. Still, I also managed to come up with an electrostatic meter, which would measure the electrostatic energy around us as we made our way to the front desk and hopefully give us at least a running start. “Em,” Heath said when I handed him two of the magnets and moved toward the door, “you should stay here.”

  I didn’t even bother with a reply. Heath is one of the sweetest, most chivalrous guys on the planet, but sometimes he forgets that I can be pretty tough too. I opened the door and prepared to step into the hallway when I felt his firm grip on my shoulder. “Me first,” he whispered.

  The old me would have rolled my eyes and defiantly pulled out of his grasp and stepped into the hallway. New me—the me that had been through a lot of rough stuff in recent months—allowed him to go first.

  As we entered the hallway, I turned on the meter. The needle surged a little as the power came on, but then it settled into that comfortable normal range and I breathed a teensy bit easier.

  Heath led the way, slowly and cautiously, and neither of us spoke a word. We moved in the opposite direction from where I’d gone looking for the poor woman I’d encountered in the hallway, and I was grateful that Heath seemed to know where he was headed, because I was very quickly lost.

  At last we came to the riffraff door, and beyond that, the large staircase I remembered climbing wearily several hours earlier. We went down the stairs side by side with Heath still holding tightly to my hand. “Did the meter register anything on the way here?” he asked quietly.

  “Not even a small surge,” I said. Sometimes the needle on one of our gadgets will bounce if the location we’re in has quite a bit of electrical current running through it—like a modern building made to house a lot of computer equipment or wiring, but these old buildings usually have fairly low voltage capacity, and that keeps the meters pretty flat.

  It’s a good thing too, because then we know to trust them—when those needles begin to bounce, it’s because some spook is on the move. But our whole way to the front hall not much had registered, which in its own way was a little odd, because these castles usually come with a whole host of spiritual activity, and I knew we’d seen something spectral when we’d first entered the main hall upon our arrival.

  Still, I didn’t dwell on it overlong; I was just grateful to reach the front desk, but that relief faded the moment we stood in front of it and discovered that no one was manning it.

  I rang the bell and Heath and I both looked around, but no one was there to help us.

  Heath pulled out his phone from his back pocket and tapped the screen, but his phone didn’t light up or come on. “My phone’s out of juice too,” he said with a puzzled expression.

  “That confirms it,” I said. “Whatever that thing was that chased me down that hallway was definitely spectral. It drained both our phones and all the lights in the hallway.”

  Heath nodded. “We’ll have to get the scoop on what else might haunt this castle ASAP,” he said, looking around the desk as if he was trying to find something. Leaning over the high counter, he finally came up with what he’d been searching for. “Got it,” he said, holding up the phone triumphantly, then digging around until he’d located a phone book.

  “Who you gonna call?” I asked, then followed that quickly with “Do not say you’re calling Bill Murray or I will have to hurt you.”

  Heath chuckled as he thumbed through the first few pages of the directory before lifting the receiver. The phone was one of those old-fashioned contraptions with a rotary dial. “I’m calling the police.”

  My jaw dropped. “For reals?”

  Heath nodded and held up a finger, indicating someone on the other end had answered. “Good morning, sorry to call so early, but I’m a guest at Kidwellah Castle, and I think a female guest at the hotel has been hurt.”

  Heath proceeded to tell the person on the other end of the line as much as he knew before he began to ask me questions. What did she look like? Where exactly had I seen her? What seemed to be the extent of her injuries? Did I know her name? Where was she now?

  It went on like that for a bit until I took the phone and answered all the questions myself. It turned out that I was talking to the secretary of the Penbigh police. She seemed a very thorough woman, intent on discovering if in fact she had sufficient cause to wake the poor fool who would have to come out and search for the injured lady I’d seen.

  Finally she asked, “Will you be there to greet the constable on duty, miss?”

  My gaze landed on the desk clock tucked to the side of the check-in counter. It read three thirty a.m. “Yes,” I said, holding in a sigh. “We’ll be here.”

 
After hanging up with her, Heath and I settled in for the wait, finding the two thrones set up near one of the the armored knights to be kind of comfortable. “Still tired?” Heath asked once we’d taken our seats.

  “Very. You?”

  Heath yawned. “Yeah. All this travel wears on you, doesn’t it?”

  The sigh I’d been holding in escaped me. “How many more shoots do we have until we get a break?”

  Heath rubbed his eyes. “Three, maybe four more after this one, I think.”

  I was quiet for a while after that. Mostly I was so homesick I could barely stand it. We’d had a chance to head back to the States about three weeks earlier, but our visit to New Mexico—Heath’s home state—hadn’t been even remotely pleasant. It’d been as much work as one of our shoots, in fact.

  And although I’d been in the States, I hadn’t been home. I missed Boston. I missed my condo. But mostly I missed my sweet bird, Doc—the African gray I’d had since I was eleven—and of course my Boston friends something fierce. And while I’d spent a few quality days with Doc while we were in New Mexico, the short visit with him had only emphasized how much I’d missed his little feathered self, and it was a thousand times harder to leave him when we boarded the plane back to Europe.

  “Maybe they won’t renew us for another season,” I said quietly.

  Heath laid a gentle hand across my neck and began to massage the tense muscles there. “You miss your bird.”

  “I miss him like crazy. But I also miss home, you know?”

  Heath’s expression became clouded with guilt. “My family and their troubles took up all the time you could have spent in Boston, Em. I’m really sorry.”

  I waved a hand dismissively, even though my eyes were starting to mist a bit. “None of that was your fault, Heath. Gil and I volunteered to go with you to your uncle’s funeral, and we also insisted on staying when things got dicey.”

  Heath leaned back and closed his eyes. “Maybe this shoot will go by quick,” he said wistfully.

  “Well, it can’t go too quickly. If it unrolls like Dunkirk, we’ll be in trouble with the network again.”

  “That place was a total bust,” Heath agreed.

  I leaned back too and closed my tired eyes, wishing the constable would get here already. Within a few moments I had inadvertently dozed off.

  Only a short time later the sound of someone yelling startled me awake. “Arthur?” a male voice shouted. “Arthur Crunn, are you here?”

  Heath and I both shot out of our chairs like bullets. I was so out of sorts that it took me a minute to figure out where I was, and that was further complicated by the tall lanky fellow with a thick mustache standing in the front hall holding a flashlight and giving us a quizzical look.

  “I say,” he said, “but you lot look a bit worse for wear.”

  I attempted to smooth out my hair and collect myself. “Who’re you?” Heath asked brazenly, and by the look of his sleepy face I knew he’d nodded off too.

  “Who am I? Well, young man, I am Inspector Lumley,” the lanky fellow with dark brown hair, pale skin, and a long thin nose said. For emphasis he pulled out a small leather case from his coat pocket to flip it open and reveal his identification. “Is the manager of the hotel, Arthur Crunn, about?”

  “Inspector?” I repeated. “I thought a constable was coming to meet us.”

  “Yes, well, he was, but he was waylaid by the dead body floating in the moat, you see. Called me immediately to come have a look.”

  My jaw dropped. “Dead body?”

  “Yes,” the inspector said, wrinkling up his nose. “Terrible sight that. And the reason I stand before you now. So, allow me to repeat myself: Is the hotel manager, Arthur Crunn, about?”

  Inspector Lumley had more of an English accent than Welsh. His enunciation was most crisp and clear, and I wondered if he’d moved here from someplace closer to London. “No,” Heath told him. “When we came down here, nobody was around.”

  The inspector pivoted on his heel to turn his attention to the front desk and took three purposeful strides to it in order to peer around it and see for himself.

  “Was the person in the moat a woman?” I asked, afraid that the battered woman I’d seen outside my room had come to a bad end after all.

  “No,” the inspector said, raising his hand to shine his light into the small hallway behind the front desk. He then turned his attention to me, his brown eyes shining with intelligence. I had a feeling not much got by him. “Why do you ask if it was a woman?”

  I took a small step back, uncomfortable under the inspector’s intense gaze. “We called the police about a woman in distress.”

  “Woman in distress?” Lumley repeated, his eyes squinting as they assessed me head to toe. “I wasn’t told of any woman in distress. I heard only that there was some sort of disturbance here at Kidwellah.”

  Heath wrapped his arm across my shoulders. “We’re guests here at the hotel,” he said. “About an hour and a half ago my girlfriend woke up to the sound of someone crying in the hallway outside our door. When she opened the door, she found a woman huddled there who appeared to have been beaten, and she also seemed too afraid to accept M. J.’s offer of help. When M. J. woke me to let me know what she’d seen, we did a quick search for the woman but couldn’t find her. We then came down here to find some assistance, saw that the front desk was unmanned, and called the police.”

  It didn’t faze me that Heath had left out the part about some paranormal creature almost beating our door down; I would’ve left that part out too. And I couldn’t be sure, but I suspected that Inspector Lumley had stopped listening to Heath’s explanation halfway through the story. The moment he mentioned the battered woman, the inspector seemed to frown and look elsewhere. “I shall have to have a talk with my secretary,” he muttered distractedly. “She should know better than to discharge a constable for calls of that sort from here. Still, I suppose that sending Niles over to take the report did lead us to the body in the moat. . . .”

  Heath and I exchanged looks of confusion. What the heck did he mean by that? “Sir,” I said, catching the inspector’s attention again. “I can assure you that our call to your station was very serious. The woman I saw in the hallway outside my door had been beaten, and she was so distraught and obviously traumatized that I still fear for her safety.”

  Lumley’s expression was almost bored. “Yes, well, I can’t very well do anything for that poor woman now, can I?” he said.

  “Excuse me?” I said. Was he serious?

  Lumley pulled out his cell and began to tap the screen with his thumb. “Ma’am,” he said to me. “The woman you saw is deceased.”

  I gasped. Next to me I heard Heath gasp too. “You found her body too?” he said.

  Lumley placed the phone to his ear. “No,” he said, a slight smirk tugging the ends of his mustache up. “But if you travel across the moat and out to the graveyard on the highest hill next to the keep, you’ll find her headstone.”

  I turned to Heath and mouthed, “What the hell does that mean?”

  We couldn’t ask Lumley, because he was already talking into the phone. From the sound of it, he was trying to reach the hotel manager, Arthur Crunn, and had gotten his voice mail. “Arthur, it’s Inspector Lumley. You must call me back immediately. We’ve found a body in your moat, and I must speak with you at once.”

  Lumley hung up the phone and placed it back inside his pocket. He seemed to catch our expressions, because he said, “Don’t tell me you’ve come all the way to Kidwellah without hearing of the ghosts in residence? I thought that was why all you Americans come here.”

  Heath and I both shook our heads. “We know very few specifics about who haunts this castle,” I said without offering up any details about our TV show or our psychic abiliti
es.

  Lumley checked his watch and sighed. “Well, I’ve no time to explain the late Lady Catherine’s appearance outside your room tonight, miss, but suffice it to say that there is nothing anyone can do to help her now. And if you’ll excuse me, I must get back outside. If you happen to see Mr. Crunn, please send him immediately to the north side of the moat, all right?”

  I nodded numbly and watched as the inspector strode away.

  Heath and I stood there for a few beats trying to make sense of it all. At last he said, “I think we need to find Gopher. He should know more about this late Lady Catherine.”

  “Good plan,” I said, truly shocked that I, of all people, hadn’t figured out that the woman in the hallway was a ghost in the first place. Then again, I was operating on very little sleep and a major case of jet lag. “Do you know which room Gopher’s in?” I asked Heath.

  My sweetheart frowned. “No.” Pulling out his cell phone again, he tried in vain to get it to turn on before asking me, “You don’t happen to know Gopher’s number by heart, do you?”

  I shook my head. Heath looked around before he seemed to think of something and then he moved to the other side of the clerk’s desk and opened up the logbook—apparently the hotel staff still did things the old-fashioned way, without computers.

  “Should you be looking through that?” I asked nervously.

  “Probably not, but it’s the only way we’ll know what room Gopher’s in. Ah, here it is, room two-oh-two.” Heath then picked up the phone receiver and dialed the number. I could hear the ring from the receiver Heath held to his ear, and then Gopher’s raspy voice barked, “Yeah?”

  “It’s Heath. We’ve got a situation. You need to meet us in the lobby right now.”

  It took a little convincing to get our producer to cooperate, but finally he promised to meet us in the front hall in ten minutes. I thought we had a ten percent chance of seeing him, as I was sure Gopher would likely fall back asleep.

  Heath made his way again over to the set of throne chairs, but I forced myself to stand. If I sat down, I knew I’d be out like a light.