Trifles and Folly

by Gail Z. Martin

  “Can you do that deep freeze thing again?” I asked. Teag grinned and nodded. I could see where the skin on one side of his face was blistered from an apple the tree had thrown. It was payback time.

  Teag thrust his wooden staff into the ground among the manchineel’s spreading roots and closed his eyes. Even the air around him grew colder as he focused his magic. I kept my eyes wide open and my athame leveled at the tree. It rustled in the still air, sensing an attack, and as it drew back to hurl more of its poisoned fruit and lash us with its acid-tipped limbs, I let loose with a blast of white, cold power, trained on the trunk of the tree.

  The old tree groaned, or maybe that was a roar of anger. Teag was shaking, his lips tinted blue, as a heavy white frost gathered on the ground, spreading rapidly along the tree’s roots, freezing into the heartwood. The manchineel shuddered and drew back, and that’s when I saw the fifth statue, the key to the Bethany curse. It was a tarnished metallic ball on a pedestal, protected by the hateful tree that had grown around it, and it glowed with a sickly, greenish light.

  I hit the tree with another blast of cold force, and Teag sent a push of magic through the roots, so that a thin, sparkling coating of ice covered the trunk and the lowest branches. Then he sheathed the knife he held in his left hand, and in one fluid movement pulled the silvery rope net from his pack and swung it so that the net draped over the glowing ball.

  A piercing scream rose from the garden itself. The ball pulsed wildly, trapped inside a magically-woven net threaded with strands of silver, soaked with colloidal silver and holy water. The ball blinked like a strobe light, and behind us, I could hear the battle with the zombies reaching a fever pitch as Lucinda’s chant rose to its climax.

  I sent all of my remaining magic channeled through the athame as Teag dove forward, holding his staff like a lance. My magic hit the ball at the same time as the butt of his lance, and the cursed sphere shattered into pieces with an unholy shriek.

  Everything went suddenly still. The air fairly vibrated with old power, and when I looked up, four figures stood at the corners of the garden. One was a tall man, skeletally thin, wearing a tuxedo, a top hat, and sunglasses missing the lens over one eye. Another was a flamboyantly dressed young man with the ashen skin of a corpse, who was wearing a black riding coat and smoking a cigar. The third was the wizened figure of a short old man who carried a cane and wore an old-fashioned black hat. And the fourth was a rakish young man in a black tie and tails, taking a swig from a bottle of rum. I inclined my head in respect to Baron Samedi, Ghede Linto, Ghede Nibo and Baron Cimitere, powerful Voudon spirits, protectors of the dead.

  The four sacrificial victims whose deaths had helped set the garden’s curse and anchor its power now stood in spirit above their graves, one with each of the ghedes. The two Barons and the ghedes lifted their arms, spreading their hands wide, then brought their palms together in a clap like thunder.

  The victims’ ghosts vanished. The curse fell away, unraveling as its final anchors lost their power. Lucinda gave a deep bow to the other-worldly figures in the four corners, and they each raised a hand in greeting, then faded into darkness.

  The Bethany plantation garden, scene of so much death and pain and horror over the years, was just a ruined lawn covered with chunks of broken statuary and scarred by burned or frost-bitten plants. It was as dead as its owners now, no longer able to hurt anyone.

  Behind me, I saw Father Anne standing over the fallen bodies of the zombies, hands raised in blessing, chanting prayers of her own. For an instant, I thought I saw the glowing figure of a man with a head of thick white hair and a full white beard wrapped in a cloak covered with purple crosses. I blinked my eyes, and the vision was gone. Father Anne lowered her hands and turned toward me. She was covered with concrete dust and splattered with zombie ichor, but she managed a faint smile.

  “Saint Cyprian,” she said, answering my unspoken question. “He has been known to help out on occasion, with the restless dead.”

  Lucinda released the warded circle and walked toward us. She looked tired, but her eyes were bright from the power of the working she had raised. “The Barons and the ghedes take a dim view of imprisoning the dead,” she said as she rejoined us. “They’ll see the spirits get where they’re going.”

  Sorren was the last to rejoin us. His skin was already healing where the manchineel had burned him with its fruit and sap. His clothing was torn from the fight with the statues and the zombies, but the wounds were closing quickly. “Nice work,” he said.

  “What about the gnome and the other pieces that were sold off from here?” I asked.

  Sorren nodded at the devastated garden around us. “They lost their power when the curse was broken. They’re just ugly old stone statues that can’t hurt anyone anymore.”

  I still repressed a shudder. Maybe so, but I wouldn’t want one of them in my yard. After this, I was going to take a dim view of any garden statues, for a long, long time.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow and leave an offering for the Barons and the ghedes,” Lucinda said.

  “And I’ll talk with Mrs. Morrissey about having a proper grave marker installed to honor the slaves who were buried here,” Father Anne added.

  I looked across the ruined garden, then up at the bright, full moon. The wronged dead had been avenged. The Bethany’s dark magic was banished. And the restoration project could move on, without endangering anyone, although no one would ever know what we had really done here. Although I was happy we had lifted the curse, I felt the exhaustion of the fight hit me. “Let’s head out,” I said. “It’s way past bedtime.”

  Maybe so, but I tired as I was, I didn’t count on sweet dreams. Not tonight. Maybe never again.

  Spook House

  “WHAT DO YOU make of it?” Kell Winston gestured to the partially furnished bedroom. The four-poster bed was swagged with tattered cloth curtains, and the formerly white linens were splashed and soaked with crimson. A partially dismembered body lay among the tangled bedclothes, and every five minutes, the ‘corpse’ sat up and screamed.

  “I’d be able to tell you better if you can get that thing to shut up,” I replied.

  Kell grinned and flicked a hidden switch on the side of the bed. The screaming corpse flopped back onto the pillows.

  “Tell me again – why, when Charleston is bursting with real haunted houses, someone needs to create a fake one?” I looked over to Kell. He was tall and lean, with light brown hair and blue eyes, and a perpetual tan that made me think he spent all his spare time out on a boat.

  “Because most of those real haunted houses are historic mansions, and they don’t take kindly to having a few thousand screaming teenagers tramping over their carpets and past their antiques,” he replied. He shot me a grin. “Not to mention what they’d say if we tried to spread some fake blood and plastic body parts around, just for atmosphere.”

  The house was an old two-story white clapboard from before World War II. The neighborhood around the house was now commercial, and it didn’t look like anyone had lived in the place for a long time. Maybe that was part of its spooky charm. A big sign out in front read, ‘Are you ready for… The Evil Neighbors? Coming this Halloween. A Thrill Night Production.’ The lettering was designed to look like it had been painted in blood.

  “So what makes you think there’s something here that requires… my attention?” I asked. I had been scanning the house since the moment we parked in the driveway, trying to sense any hint of a supernatural threat. I had spotted plenty of theatrical menaces, from looming monster figures to ghosts that dropped from trap doors in the ceiling, but so far I hadn’t picked up any strong indication that real magic or dark energies were in play.

  I made a slow circle of the room. Kell had brought me right upstairs, past the rooms that were decked out with terrifying tableaus on the first floor, so I figured there was a reason he wanted me to focus here.

  “I don’t want to prejudice you,” he replied. “But we’ve had so
me creepy situations, and I immediately thought of you.”

  Some people might take that the wrong way, but I knew what Kell meant. I’m Cassidy Kincaide, and I own Trifles and Folly, an antique and curio shop in historic, haunted Charleston, SC. Sure, Trifles and Folly is a great place to pick up the perfect one-of-a-kind item to decorate your home or a unique piece of estate jewelry for a gift, but we have some big secrets. I’m a psychometric—I can read the history, emotions, and sometimes, magic—of an item by touching it. Teag Logan, my assistant store manager, has Weaver magic, meaning he can weave power into fabric and weave data strands together—making him one hell of a hacker.

  My business partner, Sorren, is the biggest secret. He’s a nearly six hundred year-old vampire and for over three hundred years, he and my family have watched over Charleston—and the world—getting dangerous magical items off the market and out of the wrong hands. When we succeed, no one notices. When we miss something, it gets chalked up as a ‘natural disaster’. Kell knows a little bit about my magic, but nothing about the store, Teag’s magic, or Sorren.

  “The problems have all been here on the second floor,” Kell said. “Several of the crew have reported seeing shadows or hearing noises they couldn’t trace back to our equipment. These folks have been doing haunted attractions for years, so they didn’t just let their imaginations get the best of them.”

  I glanced around at the fake blood, realistic-looking plastic body parts, and the wires that I could see with the lights on, but that would be invisible in the dark. “Someone playing a prank?” I asked. “I mean, there are so many props and gadgets someone could rig up the mother of all pranks.”

  Kell shook his head. “Rennie—the guy who owns Thrill Night—doesn’t think so. You’re right about them having all the cool toys. But these folks are professionals, and the equipment is expensive. Putting on a rubber mask and jumping out of a closet? Yes. Rigging some elaborate gadget and cutting into productivity?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so. The people who work on these attractions like what they do. That kind of thing could get someone hurt and get the perpetrator fired.”

  “How did you get involved?” I asked. “You usually have enough to do, dealing with the real thing.” Kell was the head of Southern Paranormal Observation and Outreach Klub (SPOOK), a well-equipped group of ghost hunters who specialized in Charleston-area hauntings. There were enough of those to keep them busy for a lifetime. Teag and I have helped out a few times when Kell’s group ran into something really strange, and I think he’s figuring out there’s more to both of us than meets the eye. That didn’t stop him from asking me out, and so we’re seeing each other, but taking things slow.

  “The guy running the haunted house, Rennie Montague, is an old college friend of mine,” Kell replied. The last name struck a bell. If he was part of those Montagues, they were an old, wealthy, and influential Charleston family. “So when he asked for some ‘technical assistance’, I said yes.” He raised an eyebrow. “And when he offered to donate a portion of the house’s proceeds to SPOOK, I was totally in.”

  “Did anyone get hurt—or anything get damaged—when the strange things happened?” As I walked, I held my right hand a few inches over the bed, side table, and armoire. There wasn’t much furniture in the room, but then again, it wasn’t a real bedroom, just a set for the live-action spook show. I was careful not to touch anything until I knew more about what I was getting into.

  “No—at least, not yet,” Kell said.

  I paused as I came to a dressing table. It was the kind I’d seen in old movies, with a three-part mirror where a lady could do her make-up. I thought I caught a glimpse of motion in the mirror, but when I looked back, there was nothing unusual. “Do you know anything about this piece?” I asked. Although it was old and had some wear, it looked like it was originally expensive.

  Kell nodded. “Just another one of Rennie’s finds. His crew is donating their time, and the other charity that gets part of the proceeds has sponsors for a lot of the equipment. I’d heard Rennie got a local estate auctioneer to donate some of the furniture from inventory that didn’t sell.”

  I wasn’t ready to touch anything yet, mostly because Kell didn’t know how to back me up if I ran into something truly nasty. The dressing table set off my internal warnings, but I couldn’t figure out why. When I ran my hand just above the surface of the mirror’s frame, I had the oddest feeling that the ‘memories’ of the piece had somehow been erased.

  “I can’t say for certain this piece is causing the trouble,” I said. “But it feels… strange. I’m not picking up actual danger, but there’s something about it that makes me uneasy.”

  “It was close to where we picked up a few readings when we brought our crew in and ran our usual tests.” I knew Kell’s folks. They were good at what they did, and they had good equipment. If there were temperature fluctuations, strange sounds, and the EMF changes that tend to accompany ghostly activity, his group would find them. “We didn’t find anything conclusive, either.”

  “So you picked up something—just not much?” I asked because I was getting the same kind of ‘readings’ from my psychometry. The pieces of furniture gave off a jumble of impressions, probably from multiple owners and hard use. Not all of the energy was happy, but nothing seemed dangerous or dark. The dressing table was the only thing that felt odd. I kept looking back at it, but nothing strange appeared in the mirror. Just in case, I snapped a photo with my phone.

  “Yeah,” Kell said. “We picked up snippets of conversations, a few temperature changes, a couple of EMF flutters, but nothing to indicate a ghost—or ghosts—with enough power to manifest in a way that would send seasoned people running like scared kids.” Kell paused and watched as I completed my circuit. “How about you?”

  “This isn’t a new house. I figure it’s about a hundred years old, give or take,” I said. “It would be unusual in a house that age if someone hadn’t died here of old age or illness, or left some kind of psychic impression. I’m not getting a happy vibe off the stuff that’s here, but it’s more weary than bad.” I paused. “Was any of this furniture original to the house?”

  He shook his head. “Sometimes there’s a piece or two left behind in a house, but Rennie told me they mostly buy from yard sales, get stuff cheap since they’re going to beat it up.”

  The four-poster bed was not only splashed with fake blood, but someone had cut into the posts to make it look like they had been hacked with the machete that was sticking out of the sit-up corpse. I could see why they wouldn’t want real antiques.

  “Let’s see what else is up here,” I said. “Maybe it’s something in one of the other rooms.”

  I followed Kell out into the hallway. Down on the first floor, workers bustled like backstage on opening night, which it sorta was, since Halloween was coming up soon. Carpenters, electricians, and painters moved around each other carrying lumber, tools, ladders, and cans of paint. Other people had bolts of fabric, naked mannequins, and plastic body parts; decorations to turn a tired old home into a house of horrors.

  “This is the nursery,” Kell said, leading me into the next room. “It’s not as far along. Rennie’s waiting for a new shipment for this room and a couple of the others.” An old-fashioned bassinette had been rigged up with a motor underneath so that the monster baby inside could pop up. Wind-up toys on the dresser and bookshelves had wires coming out of the bottom so they would turn on and off by themselves. I could see the switch that made a rocking chair move on its own.

  “The bassinette has some negative energy attached to it,” I said. “Sadness. Loss. I’m betting there was a real death connected to it.”

  “Dangerous?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No. Just sad. If you were sensitive and you spent much time in here, I think it would rub off on you.” I picked up on enough of the emotion without touching the bassinette. I had no desire to be plunged into a long-ago tragedy.

  “Do you know anything about th
e history of the house?”

  “Rennie didn’t seem to think it was anything out of the ordinary. Just a good house in a good location.”

  I figured I’d get Teag to do research when I got back to the shop, and ask Sorren some questions too. Between the two of them, we’d be able to figure out the house’s secrets. Then we walked into the next room, and I stopped at the doorway so sharply that Kell almost ran into me.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Someone died in this room,” I said. “There’s a deep sadness and darkness. I’m guessing the person committed suicide.”

  “You can tell all that without stepping into the room?”

  I gave him a look. “That’s why I’m not stepping into the room.” I searched my feelings and stretched out my magic. “It was a young person, consumed by problems that seemed too big to handle. Now, there’s regret.” Unfortunately, people find out too late that some decisions can’t be undone.

  We headed back downstairs just as another man was coming up. He brightened when he saw us. “Kell! Thanks for coming. Is this Cassidy?” A man I assumed was Rennie bounded up to shake hands. He was in his mid-twenties, with reddish blond hair and green eyes that were not too different from my own Scots-Irish coloring. Rennie was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans and looked like he was working right alongside his crew.

  “Rennie, meet Cassidy Kincaide. Cassidy, this is my old friend, Rennie,” Kell said.

  “We’ve got some all-new thrills and chills for this year that we’ve never done before,” Rennie said. I had to give him credit for enthusiasm. He sounded like a kid on Christmas. “It’s a really competitive industry,” he continued, “even for charity houses like this one. The guests don’t want to see the same thing they saw last year. So we’re always trying to dream up new scares and tread that fine line between really cool and totally tasteless.”