“I’m not sure,” I replied. “If she’s gaining power and abilities, then probably not a repeater. I got the feeling that throwing stones was new, so definitely not a loop of the same actions they’ve seen before.”
“So maybe like the Gray Man?” Teag asked. Everyone around here knows the story of the Gray Man of Pawley’s Island, who appears as a warning when a bad storm is about to hit the Charleston area. That ghostly protector’s actions and locations change, suggesting a personality and sentience.
“A little,” I said. “Just newer at the game, perhaps? After all, the Gray Man’s been around since the early 1880s.”
“Can ghosts learn how to be better at being ghosts?”
I shrugged. “Maybe it’s like everything else. Some people are born knowing what to do, and others have to figure it out by trial and error. I don’t think anyone’s out there giving ghost lessons!”
Kell stopped in another run down area along the edge of the city. Despite all the colorful brochures and magazine articles that focus on the Historic Area, Charleston—like every city—has its less desirable sections, places where people moved away or businesses closed and the neighborhood hasn’t gotten a second wind yet.
We’d circled part of the way around the downtown, and where the first ghost haunted an alley behind a strip mall that had seen better days, this street had office buildings from the 1970s that could use upkeep and some remodeling.
“Back here,” Kell said, as his crew got their gear and set up their cameras and tablets. He looked at Teag and me. “Same kind of thing as before. Been watching this place for a while, but the activity’s picked up lately. Just wanted to see if you pick up anything we didn’t.”
This time, I was nervous as we moved into an alley that appeared to get little recent use. I saw real estate signs out in front of the building and guessed that the outdated office complex sat vacant, and had for some time. That made it doubly odd for the ghost to pick up steam if there was no one around to witness the haunting.
Teag must have been thinking along the same lines. “If a ghost haunts a forest and no one sees it, did it really manifest?” he joked. We had bandied that idea around with Kell many times over pizza and drinks, without ever coming to a conclusion.
“I don’t know about that,” Kell chimed in, “but this ghost seems to know we’re here.”
A cold wind picked up in what had been heavy, humid air seconds before. The gust that swept down the deserted alley made me shiver, and I could see the steam rise from my breath.
Calista began reading off her numbers, as Drew’s night-image camera tried to capture a glimpse of the ghostly presence. Peter mumbled to himself, but the EMF readers he held told their own story, squealing high and shrill.
No orb formed this time, but as I stared into the darkness, I thought I saw a ripple, a barely-there shimmer of light that shouldn’t have been present.
“Did you see that?” I whispered.
“Yeah,” Teag and Kell replied, almost in unison. “Something’s there. That’s new,” Kell added.
The wind swept by us again, cold enough that a darkened plate glass window facing the alley fogged up with the sudden temperature change.
“Look,” I gasped, pointing as something began to take shape in the condensation. As if drawn by an invisible finger, we watched as one dot was joined by a second, then an upturned curve to make a smiley.
“Did you see that?” Calista breathed.
“Did you get that on camera?” Kell asked Drew.
The wind died, the air warmed, and the image vanished. We stood in the middle of the street, staring at each other.
“What the hell was that about?” Teag asked. “Did the ghost just tell us to have a nice day?”
Kell looked to me. “I know you didn’t have much time, but did you get an impression, Cassidy?”
My heart pounded, excited and a little scared by the power that had just made itself known. “No face again, but female, I think. Afraid. Pain.” I looked up. “Whoever killed her wasn’t quick about it,” I said, and then stumbled to the side as emotions caught up with me and I bent over and threw up.
Kell and Teag followed, and Teag laid a hand on my shoulder to steady me. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, feeling embarrassed at the reaction. Kell pulled a bottle of water from his pack and handed it to me, giving me an encouraging smile. “Not surprised a resonance like that would upset you,” he said. If Calista and the others noticed, they were now pretending to be completely engrossed in the readouts of their equipment.
“You still feel up to making the last stop?” Teag asked, with a look that meant he was worried.
I swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. I think we need to. Something’s going on, and I don’t know if it’s all related, but what are the odds?” I knew from the look on their faces that we were all thinking the same thing: “coincidences” usually aren’t accidental at all.
Our last stop that evening was a long-shuttered middle school. We drove back in toward town, but not as far as the main district to get to the school. The hulking building looked like it was built in the 1940s, solid brick and steel. I vaguely recognized it and realized that I had driven past it many times without paying much attention.
Butler Middle School sat, dark and brooding, a little ways back from the road. A chain-link fence cordoned off the area close to the building, cutting off its wide front steps from curiosity seekers and winding around its long footprint. The center of the school stood a story taller than the wings on either side, and I wondered what had led to its shutdown.
“Butler Middle School closed in 1990,” Kell said as we parked behind the building and got our stuff. This time, Kell took out his shotgun, and waited as Teag and I retrieved salt, holy water, and some weapons, including our own shotgun in case this supernatural problem proved more dangerous than the two ghosts.
“From what I’ve found out, the school board wanted a new school with better wiring and amenities, and it would have been too expensive to retrofit,” Kell said. “Then this building took storm damage, and that was the last straw. They built a new building that was closer to the residential areas, and shut down Butler.”
“Why let it sit for over twenty years?” Teag asked.
Kell shrugged. “Old buildings can have lead paint or asbestos, especially ones built back in the Forties and Fifties. That’s safe until you knock the place down, and then dangerous and expensive to contain and clean up. Or maybe the school district doesn’t know what to do with the land and hasn’t had to make a decision. Whatever the reason, Butler’s sat vacant for a long while, but there’ve always been stories about ghosts, even before it closed.”
I didn’t usually consider an old school building to be creepy—not compared to abandoned hospitals or mental institutions or jails—but something about Butler Middle School gave me the heebie-jeebies.
“What kind of ghosts?” Teag asked as we hefted our gear and headed for a place in the back of the fence where thrill-seekers had long ago bent the metal to allow entrance.
“There’s supposed to be a black cat that crosses the parking lot and disappears,” Kell said, leading us across cracked asphalt toward the rear of the building. “People hear dogs barking, but there’s never a dog in sight. A girl on a bicycle rides by and then disappears, but people swear they heard the bell on her handlebars ring. And some people say they’ve seen a boy with a baseball cap and catchers’ mitt sitting on the back steps, in the middle of the night, inside the fence, but he vanishes when they call out to him.”
“Like he’s waiting for a ride that never showed up,” Calista said, and despite her usual too-cool-for-words persona, even she looked a little creeped out.
“Looks like the kind of place Ryan’s group would love,” I said. Ryan Alexander is a mutual friend of Teag, Kell, and me, and he runs a team of Urban Explorers who love to skulk through abandoned buildings, old drainage pipes, mothballed factories, and similar places. They go for the th
rill of discovery, and to document decaying history, but Ryan and his team have often run into supernatural phenomena they couldn’t explain. That’s when Ryan turns it over to Kell and if it’s more than a simple haunting, Teag and I end up getting involved.
“Big surprise—he’s the one who put us onto this,” Kell said. We walked toward the loading dock, and a crumbling brick enclosure I guessed might have been where the dumpsters were once kept. The doors that once hid the trash bins from view hung open and askew on broken hinges.
“Ryan likes to revisit places they’ve photographed every five years if the buildings are still around, to show how decay sets in,” Kell went on. I was a fan of Ryan’s photography. His pictures were starkly beautiful reminders that everything dies and a humbling comment on how we too often expect the world around us to remain unchanged. “He says they picked up a little ghost activity the first time, but when they came back a few weeks ago, the energy had gotten a lot worse.”
“Anywhere in particular?” Teag asked.
“Two areas,” Kell replied. “Here in the parking lot, and in the mechanical room. They had a bit of a close call getting out the last time, so I didn’t plan to go in if we can avoid it, but I thought we might pick something up out here that would shed a little light, especially with what’s happened at the other sites.”
Teag regarded the shadowy old building for a moment. “And it’s not all the haunted sites that are getting new mojo, just some of them?”
“Yeah, and we don’t know why those particular sites, since we haven’t figured out anything in common.”
“There’s got to be something,” I said. “Let’s see if it wants to put on a show tonight.”
Kell’s team set up their equipment, and Drew panned his camera across the dark, quiet parking lot. Teag kept his bag on his shoulder, but he had the shotgun in his hand. I dropped my athame into my palm, the handle of an old wooden spoon that belonged to my grandmother. It has a lot of resonance for me to ground my magic. I’d learned to always keep it with me, just in case. In my left hand, I held a canister of salt.
“Is that a real cat? Or a ghost cat?” Drew asked, and we turned to catch the back half of black cat disappear behind the dumpster enclosure. A few seconds later, from the far side of the parking lot, the cheery sound of a bicycle bell rang out, all kinds of wrong at one o’clock in the morning.
“It feels like a storm’s rising,” I said, barely needing to reach out my magic to sense the danger. “Something in that building is very dark, sorrow and pain, and it doesn’t like us being here.” The impressions were so strong I couldn’t believe Ryan, and his explorers could have even entered the building, despite them not having any magic or clairvoyance of their own. My skin crawled, and all my gut instincts told me to run.
“Look,” Drew said, pointing. The broken wooden doors to the garbage enclosure began to swing back and forth on squeaking hinges, slowly, and then with enough force to send them banging into the cement block walls. A dog barked, a whine that rose high and frightened, then changed into a warning. Once more, the temperature plummeted, and I caught a glimpse of a ghostly figure on the back steps frantically waving us off.
“Y’all, we need to be gone from here. Now,” I said. I expected resistance, but Kell and the others seemed to be getting the same vibes I was, which were not good at all.
“Keep recording, and we’ll see if we can make anything of it later,” Kell told his team. He brought up his shotgun, as did Teag, guarding our flanks as we moved back toward the break in the fence where we entered.
The sharp sound of breaking glass made us freeze. No one else was nearby, but long cracks webbed across a pane in a window whose plywood covering had fallen away.
The cha-ching of the bicycle bell sounded again, closer, and a cat yowled. The figure I’d glimpsed by the steps had vanished, but I had an impression of a billowing black cloud, welling up from the center of the old school, like a storm tide ready to rush for the shore.
“Run!” I shouted, and that snapped the others into action. I urged Calista, Drew, and Peter to make for the fence, and hung back to guard the rear with Teag and Kell, readying my athame for a fight. “Put a ring of salt around your car, then get in and don’t get out, no matter what you see,” I called to the Drew and the others, and hoped they had time to follow my instructions. The presence had already begun to surge toward us, and I knew we wouldn’t make it back to the car before it hit.
“Stay in the circle!” I yelled, pouring out the salt into a circle around the three of us large enough to give us a bit of maneuvering room. I closed the line and hopped inside, just as the darkness reached us.
Teag and Kell fired their shotguns into the pitch black, freezing cold cloud that enveloped us. I sent a cold white cone of energy blazing from my athame into the midst of the tide. The darkness parted around the rock salt blasts and my streak of light, but it did not dissipate completely. Yet the salt line around our feet held, obliging the gloom to part around us.
Outside the fragile line of protection afforded by the salt, I glimpsed nightmare images and felt fury bordering on madness. The wind grew cold enough to raise frost on the asphalt outside the salt, buffeting the invisible boundary that protected us. We fired again, two blasts and the column of pure magical force punching through the shadows, and we heard a shriek of rage and frustration. Across the lot, the wooden doors rattled so hard I felt certain one would rip off its hinges and come flying toward us.
As quickly as it came, the darkness vanished, leaving us in the wan light of a partly-burned out street lamp. My hand shook as I lowered my athame, but I could feel the temperature of the night air rising. Teag and Kell kept their shotguns up as we scanned the lot. The doors on the enclosure looked worse for the wear but still remained intact. Nothing moved, and the only sounds were the hum of cars on distant, more heavily traveled roads. We were alone.
“Think we can make a run for it?” Teag asked, and I noted that his voice wasn’t entirely steady. Kell had paled, but his grip on the gun remained sure.
I tried to read what my senses were telling me. “I think it wore itself out, for now,” I said. “It doesn’t have the juice to do that again until it recharges. But just to be on the safe side, let’s hurry.”
I smudged the salt and scattered the circle, then we ran to the break in the fence and squeezed through.
“What was that?” Kell breathed as we ran. He motioned for Teag and me to go through, keeping the shotgun leveled at the darkened school until we were safely on the other side. Teag returned the favor, covering him until Kell stood next to us.
“No idea, but something really, really bad,” I said. From what I could see, the force of the strange storm tide had not reached past the fence. An unbroken salt line circled Kell’s SUV, and I could see the frightened faces of his team pressed up against the tinted glass. My RAV appeared undamaged. “Let’s figure it out somewhere else after we get some sleep. Call me tomorrow,” I said, and Kell nodded, gave me a quick kiss, then jogged to the SUV and got in. I relaxed, just a smidge, when I heard the engine roar to life.
Before I got into the RAV, I looked back over my shoulder. Maybe it was my imagination, but the old building loomed even more menacingly as if it felt smug in having run us off. I got in, locked the door, and peeled out, glad to leave Butler Middle School in my rear view mirror.
Unfinished Business
“And you’re sure there aren’t any plague exhibits this time, Cassidy?” Teag teased as we headed into the Lowcountry Museum of Charleston on a sunny summer day. Despite the heat and humidity, I couldn’t suppress a shiver.
“There had better not be,” I warned, knowing he was joking and not entirely amused. “If I pass out or throw up, you’ll be the one making apologies and hauling me out of here.”
I didn’t expect trouble, but it always seemed to find me. When your gift is the ability to read the history and magic of objects by touching them, it doesn’t take much imagination to realize
that a lot of things in museums could set that off in all kinds of not-fun ways. Fortunately, the resonance for many objects had either faded or was never strong in the first place. But other pieces, the ones that have a connection to a tragic, horrific, or emotionally powerful event, can put me into a tailspin. My control over my gift has gotten better with practice, but I’ve been surprised enough to always be on my guard in a place like this.
A few days had passed since our eventful night of ghost hunting. I’d talked to Kell several times, and both he and Teag were doing their best to find information that might shed light on what happened to the two ghostly women, and why the old school had turned into a house of horrors. They didn’t find quick answers, so in the meantime, I figured Teag and I could spare an hour to support our local museum.
Fortunately, the new exhibit, “Textiles: Weaving the History of Charleston,” seemed like a safe bet.
Teag’s Weaver magic and his interest in all things woven convinced me to brave an outing to the museum, a decision I’d already begun to rethink now that it was too late to turn back.
“Hey, look at this!” Teag said with such enthusiasm I could have mistaken him for a kid in a candy store, instead of a guy in his mid-twenties who abandoned his Ph.D. thesis to help save the world from haunted heirlooms. He grabbed my elbow and guided me over to a realistic-looking tableau of a Native American woman sitting cross-legged in front of her loom.
“I can’t get over what beautiful pieces people could make with just a simple loom,” he gushed, eyes alight. “Have you ever tried to use one of these?” he asked me, gesturing toward the frame loom in the recreated vignette.
“No, but I always thought it could be relaxing,” I admitted. “Sort of like the way people who knit find the repetition soothing.”
Teag nodded excitedly. “It is. That’s one of the great things about weaving. And look, the basic design doesn’t change all that much for a long time, until the foot-treadle looms,” he added, leading the way to the next display.
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