Ghost College (The Ghost Files Book 1)

by Scott Nicholson

  I approached the piano, feeling a little helpless because I didn’t have any gizmos. I was trying to prove to myself that I wasn’t afraid, that I was a man of science and logic, but my scrotum shrunk tight enough to crack a walnut or two.

  The piano stopped abruptly, and its last notes lingered in the air. By the time I reached the instrument, most of the tones had died away. I touched the seat and it was ice cold.

  I flipped the sheet music back. The name of the hymn was “A Voice Upon The Midnight Air,” and it was old, according to the little notes in the corner of the fold. It had been written in 1840, though it looked like the musical notation had been updated in the last century. Some people just couldn’t leave well enough alone.

  I was one of them. I sat at the piano and, although I could read music about as well as I could read Latin, I pecked at a few keys. I went at it a little faster, the tones clashing as I mixed black and white keys with abandon. But when I went for one of those booming bottom keys that sound like a frog choir at a funeral, it went mute. I pounded again and all I got was a doint.

  I lifted the lid. There, jammed between where the little wooden hammer hit the fat bronze string, was a scroll of paper, crumpled and wrapped with a red ribbon.

  This would make things easier. We all sought those messages from beyond, and here one had conveniently scribbled itself out. I unrolled the crinkled, thick paper and tried to read it. The black letters were done in a stylish calligraphy. I couldn’t read Latin but I could recognize it.

  “Non omnis moriar. Aut viam inveniam aut faciam.” And below that, as if in signature, was “Tenebrosus magister.”

  Ellen was smarter than me and had actually finished college, although she’d studied German instead of Latin. I thought maybe she could translate it, and I didn’t think batteries were going to be much help on this case.

  I was hurrying back to the president’s office, eager to share my alleged encounter, when I rounded the corner and almost slammed face-first into the president himself. He was clutching a big coffee and seemed calmer now despite the caffeine injection.

  I’d always admired a man who could switch from booze to coffee when midnight approached. I’d never been able to pull it off myself.

  “I couldn’t leave my school at such a critical time,” he said. “Have you made any headway?”

  “I know about the Latin,” I said. “But have you heard any talking pianos?”

  He looked confused and glanced at the wing I’d just left. “Students are under curfew on weeknights,” he said. “In their rooms by eleven, in bed by midnight. No one should have been playing.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m thinking,” I said. “No one was playing.”

  He looked past me again. “Where’s your wife?”

  “I thought she was with you.”

  “I can hardly see how you can joke at a time like this, Mr. Drew.”

  “On the contrary. You ever heard of ‘gallows humor’?”

  He closed his eyes and began muttering something that I soon recognized as the Serenity Prayer. When he was done, I gave him the piece of parchment I’d found.

  “Do you guys teach Latin?” I asked.

  He shook his head, squinting at the paper. “This is a progressive institution. We realize most of the mission work will be in Central and South America, so we teach Spanish.”

  “I guess I’ll have to run this through the Internet, then, and hope I find a good translating program.”

  “Not necessary. I studied Latin as an undergrad, when I thought I was going to be a lawyer.”

  I didn’t tell him he should have become a shyster. Even the lousy public defenders I’d known in my former life brought home six figures, and while the president was probably doing okay for himself, he was missing the chance to really sock away some cash.

  “Great,” I said, wondering if I’d need to test the paper and ink for age. That antique look could be contrived with a little bit of heating and careful application of dirt. “What does it say?”

  He cleared his throat and translated. “‘Not all of me shall die. I will either find a way or make one.’ And below that, ‘Dark Master.’”

  “Whoa. That sounds like a pretty heavy promise. Any idea what it would be doing stuck inside a haunted piano, or who this ‘Dark Master’ is?”

  “If I knew, I would have saved a small fortune not hiring you guys.”

  I patted him on the shoulder as I moved past. “Ah, you’re finally catching on to that ‘gallows humor’ thing.”

  I didn’t have time for theories, because the note suggested something around here was only partly dead. And that meant part of its ghost was likely hanging around. I could just picture this Dark Master guy popping out of nowhere, standing on one leg, holding his head in his solitary hand and looking around for the rest of his parts.

  And I’d left Ellen alone for far too long in a place like this, where neither pianos nor presidents could be trusted.

  Chapter Nine

  “You’re too late,” said my wife when I stepped back into the president’s office. “She’s gone.”

  “Hey, you’ve seen one ghost, you’ve seen them all, right?”

  “Close the door and leave the lights off.”

  I did so. Ellen, who had been sitting quietly in the pitch dark—did I mention she was absolutely fearless?—snapped her head around and looked at me. At least, I think that’s what she did. She said, “You’ve seen something else.”

  “Heard something else. And how did you know?”

  “Your tone. Your body language.”

  “But you can’t see me.”

  She didn’t answer me, and I had the impression she was shaking her head. My wife often shook her head at my simple ways. Yes, I should have realized she could read my aura, the faint ghostly radiation that supposedly surrounds most of us. Our soul that is apparently too big to stuff into our bodies.

  “Never mind,” I said. “And shut your eyes, I’m flicking on the office light. Not all of us can see auras. Most of us need real light.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I flicked on the light switch and caught my wife slowly opening her eyes. I really, really hoped she hadn’t had her eyes shut the whole time. And she only just now shut them to spare them from the piercing glare of the returning light.

  Jesus, what if she’d really had them shut the whole time?

  My wife never ceased to amaze me.

  I caught her up to date on the player piano from hell and the note, which she took from me. She studied it and made out a few words on her own, but for the most part we relied on the university president’s translation, which seemed accurate enough.

  Then again, what the hell did I know? He could have recited the recipe for crawdad jambalaya and I wouldn’t have known any difference.

  “So what do you make of it?” I asked.

  “It’s a dark entity. Perhaps even a highly evolved dark entity.”

  “Demonic?”

  She held up the brittle note. “I doubt it, since it—or he—obviously has human origins.”

  “What do you mean by ‘highly evolved,’ exactly?”

  “It means that in life he practiced very dark arts. Satanism, black magic, perhaps even sacrifices. In fact, I am certain about the sacrifices.”

  “The girl?” I suggested.

  She nodded. “We’ll make a ghost investigator out of you yet.”

  “He sacrificed her?”

  “Hard to say for now. Let’s give it a strong ‘maybe.’ I do feel her death had been for a darker cause.”

  “Perhaps a sort of blood sacrifice that went awry?”

  “That would explain a lot.”

  I shook my head. “I hate when that happens.”

  Ellen ignored me. “Anyway, such highly evolved dark beings rarely move on, or they resist moving on.”

  “Because of what’s waiting for them on the other side?”

  “Maybe,” said my wife, but she spared me the there�
�s-no-heaven-or-hell spiel. But to sum up, my wife believes—and since she claims to talk to the dead, she might very well have solid secondhand evidence—that what’s waiting for us on the other side is generally good, even if someone had been wicked bad. The bastards of this world are shown the error of their ways and given another chance at redemption.

  Myself, I didn’t like that deal. It didn’t sound fair. Bastards should roast. Maybe not forever, but for a while.

  I said, “So after death, he returns to roam his old haunts, so to speak.”

  “Often. Such beings will generally return to those locations that hold the most significance to them. Not unlike other spirits. But also they are drawn to their memory of power. Theirs is an ego game.”

  “Tell me more about Sophia, the ghost girl.”

  She did. Sophia had been the daughter of a headmaster here, long before the current building, back when the structure had been used as a traditional school for the new affluent in Orange County. Of course, affluence in those days was measured in horses, not stock portfolios.

  “But her memory is sketchy,” added my wife.

  “I can barely remember what I ate for dinner,” I said.

  “Chocolate pancakes,” said my wife drily.

  “Oh, right,” I said, smiling. No doubt wistfully.

  “Anyway, her memory is pretty well shot. She barely remembers who she is.”

  “Or was,” I corrected.

  “Either way, most of what I gleaned from her was my own sensations coupled with flashes of her own random memories.”

  “If I could be you for one day...”

  “Then you probably wouldn’t be a skeptic,” finished my wife.

  “So did she die here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Hard to say, but the basement seems to hold a lot of importance.”

  “Maybe that’s where he keeps her.”

  “Maybe.”

  My wife could be jaw-droppingly accurate, or frustratingly vague. Such is the way of the medium. I grabbed our gear. I may not be a psychic, but I knew how to follow up on an investigation.

  I said, “Then let’s head down and see what we can find.”

  “Only one problem,” she said.

  Damn. I should have figured that was too easy. “Let me guess. There’s no basement anymore.”

  Chapter Ten

  I was about to head off and round up Headphone Boy to see if he had a shovel, but I couldn’t see spending the next six months digging holes beneath the building’s foundation in the hope of striking paranormal gold. Besides, the president wanted this job done tonight.

  “So, we can’t go down there, and that means we only have one option,” I said.

  “Yes,” my wife said, a little too eagerly.

  “We have to raise the dead.”

  She rubbed her hands together. “I’m a little out of practice.”

  “Christ,” I said, fighting an urge to slam my Trifeld against the wall. “Do you want me to go fetch you a crystal ball and a pointy hat?”

  “You watch too many cheesy movies,” she said. “You know I don’t go in for all that. Besides, there’s a universal law that says everything you do comes back threefold.”

  “You mean, you bring one dead person back and a couple more might follow?”

  “Well, that’s a simplistic manifestation, but that might not be a bad thing. If we can summon Sophia and the dark master, then maybe we can reconcile the conflicts of their spirits and they can go on to the next plane.”

  “One problem with that. Who is the third ghost?”

  She shrugged and grinned a little. “That’s why they pay us the big bucks.”

  I was torn between letting her go through with her little game and just grabbing a vacuum cleaner from the janitor’s closet, running it a few minutes, and reporting to the president that all his worries had been sucked away. But I’ve always taken pride in my work, even when I wasn’t sure what the job was, and Ellen was in this business because of a calling to serve.

  Me, I tended to ignore higher callings, because they entailed responsibility, and all I wanted was the next round of chocolate pancakes.

  “Okay,” I said. “The black candles are out. Do we have to leave the lights on for this?”

  “Turn them off for a moment to set the mood.”

  “Gladly.” I clicked them off and crossed the room, and she was in my arms, and I got a good nuzzle or two in before she pushed me away. A little reluctantly, but a push nonetheless.

  “That wasn’t the mood I was talking about,” she said.

  “Hey, I can’t be in a dark room with my wife without at least giving it a try,” I said.

  “Work before play, dear.”

  “Oh, all right,” I said. “I guess we need to record all this so we can prove to the president this actually happened.”

  “No,” Ellen said. “They’ll just drain the batteries again.”

  “Well, if you summon them, and they don’t have a power source, they’ll have to draw it from somewhere else.”

  “Or someone else.”

  “You’re looking at me, I can tell. Even in the dark.”

  “It’s the best way, honey. I can’t afford to weaken because I need all my senses. And I have a feeling this Dark Master guy isn’t going to like playing in my sandbox.”

  “Great, so I just invite a demon into my body so you can get a whack at him?”

  “I doubt if you’ll get possessed.”

  “Doubt? I thought you knew how these things were supposed to work. You’ll risk my eternal soul just to close one little case?”

  “Hey, it’s not like you’re using it. When was the last time you were in church?”

  I reminded her of the haunted Lutheran church we’d cleared two months ago. Maybe we were becoming specialists. A Jewish synagogue, a Buddhist temple, and a Unitarian retreat and we’d soon corner the market on religious horror. Still, rubbing up against spirits, whether good and bad, took a piece of you every time, one way or another.

  Despite my skepticism, I was feeling old and vulnerable. “Okay,” I said. “In the interest of science and a paycheck, I’ll do it. But I’m not going to like it, and I’m going to bring it up later.”

  She found me in the dark and gave me a nice kiss, one with softened lips that meant she’d clocked out for the duration of it. When she finally came up for air, she said, “I won’t let them hurt you, love.”

  Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one who was about to hang a “Space For Rent” sign on her head.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s have a séance.”

  Chapter Eleven

  We decided to move the séance elsewhere, to an empty office on the first floor, an office that struck my wife as particularly important. For reasons, of course, that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  Anyway, Ellen and I were now sitting around a kidney-shaped conference table. God only knew what else was sitting here with us.

  Nothing, of course. You are alone with your wife in a candlelit room. That, and nothing more.

  But as was often the case with me, especially during some of our stranger cases, as the nights wore on I found my rationale going out the window.

  Anyway, sitting there, in that empty office with black candles flickering, with the recent memory of that damn piano playing itself, it was easy to imagine someone or something else sitting around this table with us.

  Maybe I should just quit being a skeptic. Screw it. Sign me up. I’m on board.

  Except just thinking those thoughts didn’t sit right with me. If ghosts were real, then where the hell were they? Where’s that clear, undisputed video of a ghost walking down a damn corridor? Where’s that jaw-dropping image of an entity standing in frame, clear as a bell, and then disappearing—the same report we hear time after time on our investigations?

  I’d been doing this job for five years, investigating some of the most haunted places in Southern California,
and never once had I seen a goddamn ghost.

  Yeah, I’m skeptical. And I will be until proven otherwise.

  Still, that damn piano did play by itself.

  Creepy as shit.

  “I feel you’re getting tense,” said my wife. “Don’t project negative vibes. Take a deep breath, calm down. You need to be open to invite them in.”

  I wondered if my wife had any clue how crazy that sounded. I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes.

  “Focus on your breathing,” Ellen said.

  “Focus how?”

  “Anyway you want, but it’s important that you focus on your breathing.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the fastest way to clear your thoughts.”

  “Of course. I should have known.” So my brains were tied to my lungs. And all these years I thought my brains were in my pants.

  I focused on my breathing, whatever the hell that meant. Having no clue what I was doing, I simply noticed the process of air entering my nose and mouth. The way one nostril seemed slightly backed up, because the mildew in these old places was hell on my sinuses. The way my lungs expanded. The way the air whistled through my nose with each intake, so lightly that no one but me could hear.

  Before I knew it, I was in a rhythm, and I felt as open as I would ever be.

  “The girl is here,” said my wife. “But keep your eyes closed, Monty. Good. Keep focusing on your breathing. Now, imagine a door opening in your mind, and standing behind that door is a little girl.”

  I did that. Or I tried to. The door seemed to waver in and out of my thoughts. Sometimes it was a door. Other times it was just nothing. Once it was a trash-can lid. Other images came and went. Stream of consciousness at its best.

  Door. Think of the door.

  Another door came in view. A school door, perhaps. With a number on it. Etched into the wood. The door then turned black. Then turned white.

  God, my mind was all over the place.

  “Focus on your breathing again,” Ellen said. “Keep focusing on the door.”

  I did as I was told. Until I realized I never mentioned anything about the door.