A Vision of Murder

by Victoria Laurie

  “Are you ready yet?” I finally complained, holding my nose at the overwhelming scent of garlic. This was getting ridiculous.

  “It’s best to come prepared,” he answered, and it was then that I noticed how shaky his voice was.

  “Oh, brother,” I said and rolled my eyes again. “Dave, we’re not up against vampires.”

  “Who knows what we’re up against, Abby? I mean, something really bad is in that house. It could be a vampire, it could be the devil. Who really knows?”

  I stared at him and saw he was serious. “It’s neither of those two things.”

  “Yeah, well I’m not taking any chances. My mother always said that garlic was the best way to ward off evil spirits, and I figure it can’t hurt to take some precautions.”

  I scowled at him even though my own nerves were starting to get a little frayed now that I thought about what might be waiting for us in that house. Still, I figured we could just dart in, and dart out again. I knew where to look and it was still daylight out.

  Plus, on our way out after seeing Liza disappear in the stairwell, Dutch and I had thought to grab Dave’s drill and circular saw. Good thing too, because now nothing could be used as a projectile. So, what could possibly happen?

  We drove the rest of the way in silence, Dave’s knuckles white as they gripped the steering wheel, and my own resolve dwindling. I perked up, however, when the house came into view. With all the snow covering the worst parts of it, the house seemed much less threatening.

  Dave did his shovel thing in the driveway, zipping back and forth a few extra times as a stall tactic, until I finally put my hand on his arm and said, “How about we just get it over with already?”

  He nodded gravely and cut the engine. We got out of the truck and trudged up the walkway to the house, Dave’s rosaries clinking with every step. I moved to the door and unlocked it, allowing it to swing open as we stood outside for a moment to make sure nothing jumped out at us. Dave stepped forward and raised the spray bottle. Sprrrrrt, went the sprayer. As the moisture fell to floor he looked at me and nodded.

  Slowly we entered the house and flipped on the living room light. Even though there was still plenty of daylight, the interior seemed oppressive and dark. Inching our way into the living room neither one of us spoke, the silence was cut only by the sprrrrt sound of Dave and his holy water. After giving the room a good dousing he finally turned to me and whispered, “Okay, chief, what did you want to check out?”

  I took a deep breath to compose myself and stepped into the middle of the room, closing my eyes and focusing my attention on my intuition. In my mind’s eye I visualized the room and saw the swallow that had been part of my earlier vision enter the room. The bird circled around before coming to rest in the center of the room. I opened my eyes and looked where the bird had landed. Dave was standing right on the spot. “There,” I said and pointed at his feet.

  “What?” he asked, picking up his foot to examine it. He thought I was pointing to his shoes.

  “Under your feet. We need to get this carpet up, Dave. There’s something underneath the carpet I need to see.”

  Dave cocked his head at me looking puzzled. “Under the carpet?”

  “Yeah, right where you’re standing as a matter of fact. Do you have anything on you that could cut a hole in this carpet?”

  “Uh, sure . . . out in my truck. Here,” he said, handing me the spray bottle, “I’ll be right back.”

  As Dave bolted out of the house, I moved to where he had been standing and got down on bended knee to more closely examine the carpet. There were no seams or tears in the fabric, just worn fibers and a few stains. Then, without warning, I suddenly smelled the distinct scent of cigarette smoke. “Shit!” I said jumping to my feet and holding the spray bottle up in front of me, ready to squirt the daylights out of anything that moved. “Dave!” I called in a voice that shook.

  “Right here,” he said from behind me. “What’s the matter?” he asked, looking around as he saw my anxious expression.

  “Do you smell anything?” I asked as I sniffed the air. It was still there, and growing more pungent.

  Dave took a whiff of air. “Nope, not a thing. Why? What are you getting?”

  “Nothing,” I said as I eyed the crowbar Dave had brought back in with him. “But let’s get this over with. I don’t want to be here any longer than necessary.”

  Dave nodded, walked over to me and got down on one knee. “Right about here?” he asked.

  “Yep. That’s the spot,” I said, ignoring the even thicker smell of smoke. I could have sworn I was standing right next to someone exhaling great puffs of tar into my face.

  Dave reached into his back pocket, pulled out a box cutter, and clicking the blade into place sliced a small hole into the carpet. As I watched him a chill began to spread up my spine. Something was in this house with us, and it was angry. “Do you want some help?” I asked, anxious to get the heck out of there as soon as possible.

  “Nope, I got it,” Dave said as he tucked the box cutter back into his pocket and picked up the crowbar. It was then that we noticed the mist.

  “What the . . . ?” Dave asked as he paused and looked around the room that had begun to fill with a smoky fog that had materialized out of nowhere.

  “Hurry up,” I whispered, the hairs on my arms and neck now standing up on end.

  Dave quickly plunged the crowbar into the carpet, and tugged at it. “Spray the bottle!” he called to me as he pushed the crowbar through the thick fabric.

  “What?” I asked him as I glanced around the foggy room. The mist was getting thicker, and the temperature seemed suddenly frigid.

  “Spray the holy water!” Dave yelled, grunting as he pushed at the carpet, which thankfully, began to tear.

  Sprrrrt, I sprayed. Sprrrrrt, sprrrrrt, sprrrrrrrrrrt! Still the mist was getting thicker. It was getting hard to see the floor, and Dave had to wave his hand over the hole in the carpet to see his progress. Finally he had a large hole and he then tore through the thick padding, tearing with his hands to reveal the floorboards underneath.

  “Hurry!” I said, continuing to spray from the bottle.

  “This is crazy! Abby, we need to get the hell out of here right now . . . holy crap!” he exclaimed, bending low over the floorboard and waving his hand at the mist.

  “What?” I asked, bowing to get a better view.

  “Look!” Dave said, pointing to the floor. As I squinted I could see what he was so excited about. There was a small trapdoor in the floorboard, still partially covered by the carpet. I dropped the spray bottle and knelt down next to him, grabbing at a corner of the carpet and pulling with all my might. We had to get that door open and get at whatever was underneath, and we had to do that now!

  Dave took my cue and tugged from his end, pulling the hole larger between us. Just as we were clearing away the padding to reveal the rest of the trapdoor we heard a horrible noise that turned my blood cold. It was a cross between a moan and an angry growl, and it came from the direction of the kitchen. “Hurry!” I said, my hands shaking as Dave clutched at the handle to the trapdoor, a cord forming in his neck muscles as he yanked at the opening.

  It was then that I felt something coming into the room, and my spidey-sense said that it wasn’t happy with our discovery. It slithered into the room like a snake, and it coiled itself around my energy as it overpowered me and overtook my sense of reality. From somewhere deep inside myself I was aware that I had stopped pulling on the carpet. I heard noises, but I wasn’t able to comprehend them, and all I could see, sense, feel and touch was a memory that wasn’t mine.

  I saw a man. He was older and he was very angry. He clutched my throat tightly and yelled obscenities at me as he shook me so hard my teeth rattled. I couldn’t breathe and I knew I was doomed, still I clutched at the hands that circled my neck, trying to form the words that he demanded me to speak, but his anger overtook him and he heaved me with all his might into a wall. I felt my collar
bone snap, the pain was excruciating, and still he would not relent. Suddenly, the man let go of my neck and I was able to take one, ragged, painful breath before he grabbed a fistful of my hair and pulled my head forward, then slammed it back against the wall with such force that my ears rang and darkness threatened to overtake me. The next thing I knew I was lifted off the ground and tossed like a sack of potatoes backward, the stairwell walls slipping past me as I fell through the air and slammed against the pavement in the basement. Then I knew nothing more.

  Chapter Seven

  “Abby!” Dave shouted from someplace that sounded like a tunnel. “Abby!” he yelled again, and I felt small slaps against my cheek. “Abby, come on!”

  “Stop . . .” I managed as the slapping continued.

  “Oh, thank Christ!” he said, the relief evident in his voice. “Damn, girl! You scared the shit outta me!”

  My eyes fluttered as my senses returned. I became aware that the air seemed crisp and cool, and my bum was wet and growing numb. “Where . . . ?” I asked as I managed to open my eyes.

  “You’re okay,” Dave said. “But man! I thought I was gonna have to take you back to the hospital, and Dutch woulda had my ass!”

  I focused on Dave’s face, hovering above me. I was lying across his lap out in the driveway of Fern Street, and I had no memory at all of what had happened beyond the angry man who had killed me. I shook my head a little and sat up, relieved to discover that I wasn’t dizzy or nauseous. “What happened in there?”

  “Hell if I know, lady. All I remember is you saying, ‘hurry’ and I get that door open and look up and you’ve gone all blank on me. I kept yelling at you, but you wouldn’t even blink, and then you just fell backward in a dead faint. I had a hell of a time getting you outside, you know. You were all dead weight.”

  “No pun intended,” I said as I pushed off from the ground to give my wet butt and sore back a break. It was then that I noticed the box. “What’s that?”

  “That’s what was in that trapdoor,” Dave said like I should have known.

  I reached over and picked up the box. At first glance it looked like a jewelry box, delicately carved out of fine wood. It was dusty, but otherwise unmarred and I noticed an ornate crest engraved in the shape of an eagle flanked by a shield engraved on the top of the box. In one foot the eagle clutched a sword, in the other a small nest with three eggs. I ran my fingers over the crest, feeling the grooves in the wood and taking in the fine craftsmanship. I turned the box over a few times, but couldn’t find a catch or a lid. The box was too light to be solid, but still, there was no obvious way to get inside.

  “So what happened to you in there?” Dave asked, pulling my attention away from the box.

  I looked at him for a long moment, not sure how to answer. The truth was that I had no idea. On a psychic level, it felt like my identity had been overtaken and I’d been forced to witness a horrible crime through the victim’s eyes. I knew the man I’d been looking at was Jean-Paul, because even though he’d been older than any of his newspaper pictures, his facial features had been the same. And, I also knew that the woman he’d killed was Liza, the same woman at the bottom of the stairs. But why? Why had he killed her? What had sparked such anger, and why had I been forced to witness it?

  My intuition buzzed and my attention went back to the box. “I don’t really know, Dave,” I said finally. “But, whatever’s in this box is sure going to help me find out.”

  “Well, you’d better hope so, Abby, ’cuz I’m never setting foot in that house again.”

  I got up and said, “I’m right there with you, pal. Come on, let’s get back to Dutch’s and see if we can’t figure out how to open this thing. Oh, and no mention of my fainting spell or any of the scary stuff to Dutch, ’kay?”

  “Like you had to ask,” Dave said, gingerly getting to his feet. “He’d have my ass in a sling if he knew we hadn’t bolted at the first sign of that smoky stuff. Say, is that what you smelled in there? Smoke?”

  “Yeah, but it was cigarette smoke. It appears that I’m the only one who smells it—and it always seems to be right before all the weird stuff starts happening.”

  “Well, the really weird thing is that right after you fainted, all the mist just disappeared.”

  “What?”

  “Yep, it was there one second and then you plop backward and it’s gone, like it was never there.”

  “Come on, Dave,” I said, heading for the truck. “I’ve got a phone call to make.”

  “Holliday,” came a crisp female voice through the phone line.

  “Hey, M.J. It’s Abby Cooper calling,” I said, relieved that I hadn’t gotten voice mail.

  “Hey, Abby, how’s the ghost busting coming?” she asked amiably.

  “Funny you should ask,” I began, then I filled her in on what happened at the Fern Street house. I had to lower my voice as I talked to her, because Dutch was downstairs with Dave and the two were trying to figure out how to open the mysterious box we’d discovered, and I didn’t want Dutch to hear the additional details around unearthing the thing.

  “That’s quite a tale, Abby,” M.J. said when I’d finished.

  “What do you make of it?”

  “Well, for starters you definitely have one nasty poltergeist on your hands.”

  “Thanks for the news flash,” I said flatly.

  M.J. laughed and replied, “You’d be surprised how many people I help who simply want to hear that they’re not crazy when they see stuff fly through the air and have all kinds of strange encounters. But let’s talk through the sequence and see if I can’t give you a feel for what happened. First, you smelled smoke, but no one else did, is that right?”

  “Yes. I first smelled it the other day when my boyfriend and I were in the house together and we saw the woman at the bottom of the stairs, the one who was murdered in the house. Dutch, my boyfriend, swears he never smelled anything unusual, but I know I got a good whiff. Then, today, when Dave and I were there, the minute we started digging at the carpet I smelled it again, only this time it was like someone was standing right next to me, puffing on a cigarette and blowing the smoke right in my face.”

  “I see. . . .” M.J. said. “One of the little oddities of ghost hunting is that not everyone attracts them.”

  “I’m sorry?” I asked, not understanding. “What do you mean, attracts them?”

  “Well, there’s a theory out there that I tend to believe myself, and it says that human beings emit individually unique electromagnetic wavelengths, similar to how no two humans have identical fingerprints. Some people emit low wavelengths, and others emit high ones. It’s no coincidence, Abby, that you’re a psychic and are attractive to the spirit world. I’ll bet you can sense when your spirit guides are around, huh?”

  She’d hit that one on the head. “Yes, yes I can,” I said, “but what does that have to do with being attractive to ghosts?”

  “It’s the same type of thing, really. Your energy is easy for those in the spirit world to be around. They can get near enough to you to be sensed or seen and this makes you more sensitive to their presence. Ghosts are no different than people really, they love attention. In fact, they’re starved for it. This man, Jean-Paul you said?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know if he was a smoker?”

  I instantly remembered the photograph I’d seen in the library of a young Jean-Paul holding a cigarette between his fingers as he leaned against the brick wall of his jewelry shop. “Yes, he was,” I confirmed.

  “So it’s a pretty safe bet that he’s the one who’s been giving you grief. Now, the mist that you saw come into the room, that is a phenomena we like to call ghost juice but you may have heard it by its more proper name, ectoplasm.”

  “Ectoplasm is real?” I asked. I’d heard the term from Bill Murray in the movie Ghostbusters, but thought it was a made-up word.

  “It sure is. Now it is rare for it to show up to the degree that you and your friend saw it. Tha
t takes a lot of energy, so the other thing we need to be aware of is that this Jean-Paul dude is feistier than most. It’s also not unusual for you to see ectoplasm one minute and have it disappear the next, that’s actually a common occurrence and why a lot of my clients think they’re one step away from the loo-loo farm.”

  I chuckled as I listened. I liked this woman and her very practical, down-to-earth approach. It helped that she didn’t seem rattled, scared or suspicious of my story. It made me feel a lot better about what I’d experienced. “So I’m attractive to this Jean-Paul guy, and that’s why he tried to . . . what? Kill me?”

  “Not necessarily,” M.J. said quickly, “even though I’m sure it felt like that. I think what happened was that you discovered something that he’d been protecting for years when he was alive, something so precious to him that even in death he couldn’t let go and so continues to guard it. When you guys started digging he must have been very angry and that’s why there was so much energy swirling around, giving off the ghost juice. You must have really worked him into a good lather. Then, when that didn’t scare you off, he showed you what happened to the last woman who got too close to his little treasure, and he took you through her experience. Very frightening for you, I’m sure, but again, you must hum at an electromagnetic frequency that allows him to jump into your energy and shake things up. Are you sure you’re not a medium too?”