by Etta Faire
Raising his eyebrows, he circled me, a dark smoky kind of force. “I know you.” His fading got more color as he circled. I could see the thick waves of his hair now, the deep wrinkles around his eyes. I guessed his age to be around 40. “I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you before.” He shook his head. “You didn’t age. You’re Henry’s nanny.”
“I’m not Eliza. I just look like her.”
“You’re not her, huh? Could’ve fooled me. Not much of a nanny, though. Never did see you watch any kids.” He cocked his head to the side. “Did Henry keep that photograph of you? I mean, her.”
My heart raced. He knew the picture. The one I’d found in one of the scrapbooks where Eliza was naked and dancing on Henry Bowman’s desk, in front of Henry and two other men.
I played dumb and shrugged.
He moved so he was right up next to me. “Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
He was trying to intimidate me, and it was working, but I couldn’t show it. I kept my breathing normal, my heart rate slow.
He was a chilling dark force of cold vibrations that seemed to be able to stand still in one spot and circle me all at the same time. I took a wide stance with my hands on my hips, focusing only on his face. I couldn’t let him know I was afraid.
He went on. “There’s only one photograph with that lady in it, as far as I know, a very specific photo indeed,” he said in a way that made me fold my arms over my bulky sweater. “A dancing picture taken on the day the bears and birds were supposed to sign a treaty. Instead of signing, we were all cursed.”
I hadn’t known anything about a treaty. I was already getting information. Hee-hee. My heart raced.
But something still wasn’t right. I had that photo etched in my memory. The faces of those men. Every hair on their heads, every angle of their brows. I’d already identified one of them as James Hind, the father of the suffragette who didn’t really commit suicide. He’d mentioned something about a curse when he’d heard a gunshot coming from his daughter’s room.
I turned my head to the side. This guy didn’t look like the other man, though. The unidentified, younger one in the picture, although the age would’ve been about right because I’d placed the photo around 1901 to 1906. Feldman was lying.
“I only know about that photo,” Feldman continued. “Because I was the one who took it.”
“I accept,” I said, barely able to get the words out fast enough. A channeling from that day, that moment, was very enticing. I calmed myself down. “I mean, maybe. It does sound like you might be able to tell us a lot. And we need answers. But I also need to check things out to make sure you’re telling me the truth and that you can be trusted.”
I knew by Jackson’s disappearance I was probably going to be doing my own vetting this time.
“Perfect. Allow me to give you some facts,” he said. The man had a crooked smile, and it slowly formed across his horse-long cheeks. He quickly morphed into an almost completely lifelike form now. I could count the pin stripes along his suit if I wanted to, smell the bootleg liquor wafting through his lapels, the remnants of a speakeasy.
He was by far the strongest ghost I’d ever encountered, aside from Mrs. Harpton and Ronald, who might not even be ghosts.
His teeth were a golden shade of yellow and he liked to show them off when he talked, but it was the kind of smile I wasn’t entirely sure was intended to be friendly.
“My death,” he began. “Took place during a snowed-in weekend at my speakeasy in Landover, Wisconsin in 1923. Otherwise known as the basement of the pharmacy on Ninth and Main. It was a private poker game, only my best friends were there. One of them slit my throat, that much I know. I want you to figure out which one.”
Chapter 3
Changing Entities
A humungous purple, glittery unicorn hangs above the entrance to the Purple Pony. And every time I pass under it, I picture it crapping minimum wage on me like sad fairy dust.
I had a master’s degree, yet I was stocking beaded necklaces and incense for barely any money.
At least the inside of the hippie store wasn’t nearly as garish and colorful as the outside. It was surprisingly understated and modern with nice oriental rugs and potted plants all over. It was kind of like the owner herself, Rosalie Cooper, a large woman who looked every bit the part of the peace-loving hippie on the outside with her graying dreadlocks and shapeless dresses adorned with moons. But on the inside, she was a tough businessperson with a no-nonsense attitude.
Not today, though. When I entered the Purple Pony the next afternoon for work, it sounded like someone was snacking on rocks. Rosalie sat over the counter with a bag of Corn Nuts, and I instantly knew something was wrong.
My boss had been doing really well with her New Year’s resolution to “make healthier food choices,” which was what she was calling the diet she was on because she’d read that labeling a diet a diet triggered your body to produce more fat cells in a stubborn retaliation of some sort.
I pretended not to notice the Corn Nuts. “Jackson’s being a control freak again,” I said.
“I told you to sage the crap out of that bastard a long time ago,” she replied, barely looking up. She wiped Corn Nut dust from her gray dress.
I had been right. Something was wrong. The woman only cussed when she was upset, and “bastard” was a big one for her.
“You okay?” I asked.
She nodded along with the crunching. “What did Jackson do this time?” she asked.
I told her all about Feldman Winehouse, including the fact he was a “turning ghost” and how Jackson had pretty much forbidden me to do a channeling with the guy, which meant, of course, I was probably going to do one for sure.
“Controlling jerks are right once a year. Listen to him,” she said.
“What?”
“You heard me. Nobody channels with a demon, and stays human for long,” she said nonchalantly, waddling into the back room. I knew what was coming next. She was going to come back with one of her “big books on everything.”
I was right. When she returned, she was carrying a large faded black leather book with a tattered spine that read The Encyclopedia of Paranormal Activity. “Found this beauty in my garage last year.”
She plopped it on the counter and opened it, licking the Corn-Nut coating from her fingertips as she did.
“I’m not even sure the ghost is telling the truth,” I said. “He may just have said he was turning so I’d let him cut the client line.”
Classic rock streamed from a speaker overhead. Shopping music, even though no one was shopping to it. The upscale hippie store was empty again today. Tourist season wouldn’t really start for another month or two.
She tucked her thick gray dreadlocks up into a bun. “I heard about a man who channeled with a dark energy for just one hour. One hour. He was never the same. They had to mush his food up for him and spoon feed him…”
“You’re making that up.”
She grabbed her reading glasses from their usual spot by the cash register and thumbed through her book. “Listen to this. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but it can change form. Human apparitions are no exception. Harmless human energy can change to a deadly dark force for a number of reasons, but anger appears to be the underlying cause.” She ran a finger along the page as she read.
“Feldman Winehouse is a very angry spirit,” I said. “But then, so is Jackson. And so was the suffragette…”
“Most ghosts are,” she replied. “But when the anger becomes all consuming, it changes them.”
She continued reading. “And according to the book, the known reasons for this dark-force change include: when entities are pushed out of a place they feel entitled to haunt by a stronger, darker ghost. If they have bottled-up hatred for living beings. Or if a supernatural entity passes, such as a shapeshifter, griffon, or omni when he or she was wronged or hurt in life.”
She paused to chuckle. “Shapeshifter. Gri
ffon. Whatever.”
I bit my lip. I’d never told anyone about the shapeshifters I’d seen around Potter Grove, like the one I was sleeping with, but they were definitely anything but laughable, especially not the sleeping-with part, which was amazing. I couldn’t mention that to Rosalie, though. She believed in ghosts, but laughed at shapeshifters.
“What’s an omni?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “According to legend, it’s a shifter that can take on more than one form.” She went on reading from the book. “It looks like after the spirit has successfully turned, the darker energy is commonly referred to as a poltergeist, demon, or, in some cases, a curse.”
I gulped as it hit me. “Last night, Feldman told me he wasn’t able to haunt at the speakeasy he used to own here in town. Maybe that’s why he’s changing.”
“Speakeasy? I didn’t know we had one of those.”
“Yeah, me either. Apparently, it was in the basement of the pharmacy on the corner of Ninth and Main.”
Her face drained of color. “Interesting,” she said, grabbing another handful of Corn Nuts.
“You’ve heard of it?”
“Barely. I think it’s that new restaurant now. Chez something or rather. Sounds expensive and phony.”
“Chez Louie,” I repeated. “We know that place. Well, I mean not personally, but they catered the last seance. Remember?”
“They did, didn’t they,” she said. She shoveled more Corn Nuts into her mouth and crunched away like she was punishing her teeth.
I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and texted Justin that I was in the mood for French cuisine. We were already planning to go out to dinner after I finished my shift. Might as well check out the old pharmacy, see what was going on there that would make it so Feldman couldn’t haunt the place.
Justin texted back: Did you just use the word cuisine? I’m pretty sure we don’t have that in Landover.
My fingers couldn’t move fast enough. “Haha. Just make a reservation at Chez Louie, the new place.”
I looked back at Rosalie. She was pointing at a passage in the book, her finger shaking. “Here’s the part I was looking for,” she said, swallowing a Corn Nut so quickly she coughed it back up again. “Contact, especially channelings or seances, with suspected poltergeists, demons, or curses should not be sought out due to the strength of the entity’s paranormal energy and its evil nature.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means don’t do it, you fool. They’re cheaters and liars, desperately looking for any opportunity to take over a human’s body because they will no longer have even a ghostly one soon.”
Chapter 4
Background Checks
The whole way over to Chez Louie, I tried to think of a good time to tell Justin about the tiny severed foot I now had in my purse.
I couldn’t help but wonder if it was some sort of ominous shapeshifter sign.
“You look beautiful,” he said when I hopped into his truck after work. Just a few minutes before, I’d changed into his favorite black dress in one of the hippie shop’s dressing rooms while quickly finger sweeping my curls into a bun to show off my neck because one time he mentioned he liked my collar bone. Collar bone? Who knew I needed to show that one off more often?
“You look good too,” I replied because the man could not look bad if he tried. Smoldering brown eyes with just a touch of vulnerability. Scruffy dark hair — tousled enough to look sexy without trying too hard.
I stared out the window of his truck, watching the still mostly barren trees drift by in a blur of greenish brown. I unzipped my purse, still trying to figure out a way to segue naturally into this.
After a full minute of awkward silence, Justin finally spoke. “Chez Louie. You’d think someplace with a fancy name like that would be hard to make reservations to. Nope. No problem,” he said, mindlessly picking up the lipstick that had escaped my purse when I was feeling around for the severed foot. His truck was otherwise spotless and he liked to keep it that way. He handed it back to me.
“Weird,” I replied, finally placing my fingers on the bony thing. “You know what else is weird?”
He turned his head to the side, tapping a hand along the steering wheel to the Green Day song playing in the background. I pulled out the scruffy foot with the surprisingly cute toe ring and watched as his eyes widened for a second.
He stopped tapping and his mouth dropped open just enough to see his canine teeth. The car behind us honked and he looked up to notice the light was green.
“Shelby doesn’t want this to get out, so you are hereby sworn to secrecy,” I said as we moved through the intersection.
“You can’t do that, Carly. You can’t swear someone to secrecy without their consent, especially not after you tell them the secret.”
“What does this foot mean?” I asked, ignoring the mansplaining. “And I know you know what it means.”
He stared at the road ahead of us, so I continued. “Bobby took all their savings from their mattress bank and left this grouse pin in its place.”
“How much?”
“Shelby guesses about three thousand.”
“Shelby should have said something sooner.”
“I also happen to know this pin is a sign,” I said, watching his face, looking for any trace that he also knew it was a sign. “I don’t know what it’s a sign for, but I was hoping you could tell me all of that.”
He didn’t flinch or answer, and we sat in silence the rest of the way to the restaurant. As soon as we pulled up to the location the GPS said was our destination, we knew something was wrong.
The parking lot to Chez Louie was pitch black, not a single light was on. No street lamps. No lit signs or restaurant lights.
Justin opened his door slowly and looked around. “Wait here,” he said.
I practically jumped out of the truck and ran to catch up to him. He was trained to think like a cop. I was trained to think like a person who’d watched way too many horror movies in life. And everybody knows the person who stays in the car always gets it first.
He didn’t seem to mind me walking closely beside him like I was glued to his arm, which was good because there was no other option.
The sound of our footsteps shuffling along the gravel was just about the only noise in the parking lot as we made our way through a night only slightly darker than that time just before God announced we could have light.
A cold breeze blew through my curls, sending a shiver up my spine. I tapped my phone’s flashlight app on, but it really didn’t do much except illuminate my feet as I tripped along toward the restaurant.
Justin pulled the front door open slowly, turning his head this way and that. A nervous male’s voice shouted into the darkness. “Just a few more minutes, folks. We are working to fix the p…p…problem.”
Just like me, most of the people in the restaurant had their flashlight apps on, casting an eerie glow along the annoyed patrons’ faces. About four of the wait staff scurried around with candles and lighters.
A small person, probably a woman (my eyes hadn’t adjusted to zero light yet), came rushing toward us. When the figure got close enough, I could tell she was waving her hands around.
“Uh, I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice cracking a little. “We’re not seating right now. We’re… uh… having some technical problems with the lights. They just shut off about five minutes ago. I’m sure we’ll get them on in a second, if you want to wait.”
“So they suddenly went off?” Justin asked. I could tell his police training was kicking in. “Nothing else weird?”
The woman went on. “It’s crazy. The ovens and fans work. We’ve checked the circuit breakers. It just seems to be the lights themselves.”
Justin turned to me. I could tell by his expression in the light of his phone he wanted to stay to make sure everything was safe. I wanted to stay too, for my own this-has-to-be-paranormally-caused suspicions.
The woman poi
nted her flashlight toward the booth by the front door. “You can wait here if you want.”
We didn’t sit down. We moved into the dining area where the manager was still trying to keep the situation under control, pretty much just repeating the part where he was sorry and sure things would be taken care of soon.
“Crème brûlée on the house,” he said like he was expecting applause. He didn’t get any.
I definitely got the sense something paranormal was here, strong and unknown. I could almost feel the intensity vibrating off the floor and the walls like it was oozing up from the basement where the old speakeasy used to be.
Whatever it was must’ve been the reason Feldman couldn’t haunt at his speakeasy.
The lights flickered a few times then came back on. Mild applause filled the dining area and the bald, short manager laughed awkwardly. “See? I told you we wouldn’t be eating by candlelight all evening. Enjoy your meal.” He hurried off.
The hostess from before smiled her relief as soon as the lights came on. She was already holding our menus and showed us to a spot by a window. I counted the patrons, only eight tables were filled in the whole place, but then it was a random Tuesday night.
The restaurant didn’t look anything like a pharmacy now. The walls were done in a soft golden yellow with dark red wooden trim and wine bottles all along the back wall. The smell of garlic made my stomach rumble.
“The garlic shrimp was amazing at the seance. This place catered it,” I said to my boyfriend.
Justin nodded, shifting his gaze up from his menu every once in a while like he expected a gunman to pop out from one of the large potted plants along the back wall.
“It’s thirty-five bucks,” I said, louder than I expected, when I found the item I loved on the menu. “No wonder this place is empty.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he replied. Justin always paid, because he was the one doing a much better job at adulting in our relationship. He had a career and a great job with benefits and time off. I was the one working minimum wage with student debt. Still, I felt guilty ordering something so extravagant. I searched the menu for something else.