by J. Z. Foster
Get out of my head!
The itch dug though his thoughts and sent bits of information away. To where, Richard did not know. The itch fit its claws beneath a layer of thought and pried pieces of him loose.
Richard’s thoughts were dragged back to other times, times in the basement of his club meeting, just after their Dungeons and Dragons games, when their training would begin. His sensei told him of the things from the dark that could pierce the folds of your brain and take what they needed. It needed your name. It needed to know your sins, needed them to play wicked games with you. And now, it knew all their names and their weaknesses. It knew Richard, knew who and what he was: a coward and a charlatan.
Ted’s voice broke Richard out of his internal struggle. “Beth Sanders. Desperate reporter.” Then his voice shifted to something darker. “What the hell are you doing? You ready for the shot?”
She had found a dusty, cracked mirror. Enamored with her broken reflection, she picked small strands of wet hair and smoothed them into uneven fashion, a mockery of the skill she had before. She swayed and lazily turned her head toward Ted. “Oh, yeah, right.” Her dull grin slipped across her face, but she ran one more dusty hand through her hair, leaving a filthy black streak in its trail. “Richard?”
Richard let his hands loosen on his head. The itch, the pain, it had gone as quickly as it had come. He rubbed his necklace and staggered to his feet. “Guys, we have to get the hell out of here. This place is haunted. I’m not dicking around! It’s going to play on our emotions and tear us apart and—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Flat words as Ted brought the camera to his shoulder. “Hold on a second there, buddy. I don’t have the camera on just yet.”
“Dammit! No, I’m not saying it for the camera! You don’t get it. It’s in here with us. It’s playing with our emotions. You’re going to get angry, depressed, scared, more than you’ve ever been in your entire life.”
The camera came to life, illuminating the dusty old house, pushing the shadows back and blinding Richard, who put a hand up to shield his eyes and turned his gaze down. On the floor, he saw their footprints in the dust, only their footprints.
No one has been here in a long time.
The floorboards creaked with each step Beth took toward Richard. Something about her was terrifying, her toy-like grin and makeup running down her face, streaks of grime in wet hair slithering around her head. She looked unnatural.
She came close enough that Richard could feel her breath across his face. “Richard, you said there was something in here with us. What is it?” Richard’s heart thumped in his chest, sending hot blood through his veins as Ted’s camera painted him in light.
They’re not going to listen. They’re enthralled.
Richard took a breath and finally spoke. “There’s a spirit, or a ghost, or something that’s here with us. It’s angry.”
“And why do you say that, Richard? Why do you say it’s angry?” The words dripped out of her mouth, lacking any real taste or emotion. She was a slave to a dark embrace, a puppet moving on strings in a grisly theater.
“Because I feel it clawing into my brain.” He ground his teeth together, less in frustration and more in fear of what might come next.
A forceful gust of wind blew through the house, blowing Beth’s hair farther out of place and slapping the wet strands against her coat and face. She laughed for the camera as she tried to fix it quickly, but succeeded only in smearing more black grime across her face.
Richard’s lungs filled with heavy mouthfuls of the stale, dusty air; his eyes scanned the rooms off to their left and right—nothing but old rotting furniture and moldy rugs. He tried to calm himself, control his breathing, but the scent of the house, damp and musky, sent him into a fit of coughing. He forced himself to take in more of the environment.
The wooden floor was cracked and peeling, along with some of the wallpaper that had been torn down or stripped away crudely. Behind Ted stood the warped wooden steps that led up to the second floor. The steps went up halfway before they turned suddenly to the right and finished in a hallway. It was impossible to see where that hallway might lead from this angle, or what things prowled the shadows of the second floor.
“So what will you do, Richard?” She forced herself closer to him again, trying to get him to refocus. “Are you going to perform a ritual or something?”
A ritual!
Richard had been too afraid; he hadn’t even considered a ritual. “Of course!” His eyes searched across the ground and came to his satchel by the door; he must have dropped it while he was struggling. He snatched it from the floor, his flesh prickled the second his hand touched the leather bag. He felt eyes piercing him from the dark.
He turned toward the stairs, but caught only a fleeting glimpse of the pale woman. Her dress was full of holes and her skin was a translucent blue, but it was her that burned into his mind—pained but curious, confused maybe. “She’s here with us now! Did you see her?”
“Yes.” Joy dripped off Beth’s smile as she addressed the camera. “Our expert is reporting clear signs here of spiritual activity. Richard, what do you expect this ritual will do for this spirit? What do you think will happen?”
“I, uh…” Richard’s thoughts were bare, his mind blank in a scattered state of confusion and panic. Ted’s camera light was blinding.
A chill rolled through the room like a flood of oil and cut to Richard’s bones. It dug its fingers into his leg and climbed.
A pained, hollow gasp came from the room next to them as the apparition took form and floated effortlessly inches above the floor. Her gaunt eyes sank deep in her head and pain, fear, and desperation dripped from her taut flesh. Her long hair, unhindered by gravity, floated at all angles, stretching out in web-like patterns. The faded woman howled a low, tortured moan and gestured to them with thin bony fingers, pleading for them to close the distance and join her in the dark.
Throughout his life, there had been occasions when Richard would freeze in fear, or blabber away endlessly. There was a time during his training when his friends had played a joke on him; they convinced him that a ghost was just outside the room. He fell into a chattering mess and pressed himself against the wall, only stopping when they started laughing. Another time, when a man pulled a knife on him, he went stiff, unable to even retrieve his wallet before someone else showed up to chase the man away. He didn’t know when his body would freeze or when it would send him into a blabbering mess. He wasn’t sure he even had a pattern or rationale for how he did things.
Now he was a blabbering mess. “We’re uh, just hanging out here. Thinking about leaving,” he said to the floating specter. “You look busy though, and tired and… How are you?”
She moaned tearfully, silencing him. Something cracked inside Richard’s heart. He felt her sorrow; he felt her tortured existence and the clear hell she lived in, a spirit forced into the world and unable to leave it.
But then he saw the other hand, the one that held the rusted scissors that were slowly opening and closing with only a faint squeak. Chip-chip-chip.
“The hell?” Ted asked from behind the camera.
“Are you getting this?” The reporter couldn’t draw her focus away from the ghost. Richard fell to a knee and dug through his satchel.
The ghost started to glide forward, the ends of her frayed dress licking the floor. She reached out her fingers, cruel things that had rotted to sharp bones, a sharp contrast to her face, which seemed to smooth into an unblemished surface as she flowed toward Beth. Her hand was held out in front of her in a plea for mercy, for compassion, for love, all while her other hand opened and closed the rusted scissors in rapid succession: Chip-chip-chip-chip-chip.
The tortured spirit moaned once more while Beth stood still beside Richard, who focused solely on the pained eyes and miserable face of the woman. A tear dripped down Beth’s cheek. The ghost glided forward and slid her hand over Beth’s face. The reporter shuddered, but did not pull
away. The aberration’s head tilted slightly with curiosity. Her lips cracked as she made a tight insidious mockery of a smile and the hand with the scissors rose up quickly. Richard stepped forward and dashed the spirit with water. It screeched loudly and dissipated, burning away like tissue paper.
“Holy water.” His voice cracked as he spoke to no one in particular. “It won’t hold it for long.” He fell to his knees again and rummaged through the small leather pouches and pockets of his satchel, working open their fasteners as quickly as he could.
“Can those things—that ghost—hurt us?” Beth asked with some focus, as though some part of her was starting to return. She motioned for Ted to focus the camera on Richard.
“Yes!” Richard’s head shot up and he quickly got to his feet. He reached for Beth’s hands and squeezed them tightly. “Oh God, you’re listening now! We need to get out. Something in here has control of you two. Something is not letting you think clearly.”
She blinked and held the same unconcerned expression. “What do you mean, Richard?” She pulled free and fluttered her hand toward Ted. “Make sure you’re getting this!”
She’s desperate. She can’t do anything but think about how she can use this for her career. She’s lost, and so is Ted.
Even then he could see her focus fading, going back into the mists. “Just be ready. That won’t hold it for long.” Richard retrieved a crucifix from his bag. It had a long metal wire loop coming from it—a thing he often used for show but now prayed had some real use. He hung it on the doorknob and then reached into the bag to pull out a few flat-bottom candles. He placed one near where the ghost had been, another by the stairs, and then ran past Beth and Ted to place one on the other side of the door, creating a triangle around them.
“Richard?” said Beth.
He struck a match and began lighting each candle, one by one, as he chanted in Latin, a language he knew very little of, but had memorized a few short chants.
“Da ex manes praesidium! Da ex manes praesidium!”
“Richard, what are you doing?” Her voice had sweetened, as if she enjoyed what was happening.
He didn’t know how to force Beth to understand, to explain to her the danger they were in. So he didn’t. He went back to work while Ted followed him with the light of the camera, painting his shadow against the old walls of the house.
Richard ignored them until the last candle was lit. He then slid down the front of the door and lay back against it, huffing. “I hope that works…” His pulse thumped in his ear, the pounding of it drowned out his thoughts of Beth and Ted. Richard didn’t meet their gaze, but instead searched the shadows behind them. The candlelight flickered, and the shadows crept and danced.
God, I hope this works.
Beth leaned down to him, close enough that he couldn’t ignore her. “Richard? What did you just do? What’s happening now?” A curious smile stretched across her face.
He swallowed and took a deep breath. “It’s a shield. It will keep the ghost out of here until I can think of what to do next.” He rubbed his tired eyes. “I have to, uh…” The words slipped away, his thoughts lost to the exhaustion of the moment. Beth leaned farther down, prompting him to speak. His head felt as if it was filled with lead and he could raise it only slowly. “I’m going to…” The words wouldn’t come.
This isn’t supposed to be real.
“Exorcise the ghost?” Her head shifted to give the same plastic grin to the camera.
Richard licked his lips and slowly nodded his head. “Just stay inside the triangle.” He waved his hands toward the candles, their only source of protection from the horrors of the house. He slumped down farther, pulled an old, leather-bound book out of his bag, and laid it out in front of him. With careful fingers, he passed through the crisp, aged pages, reading each section carefully but as quickly as he could.
Beth bent down alongside him, pausing for a moment to smooth the wrinkles on her pants. “What are you looking for?”
“It’s not...” He shook his head. “It’s not so easy as just saying a few words. I have to identify what type of ghost it is and find the right passage. We should have thirty or so minutes before it’s back again. So we just have to stay calm and focused, and we should be okay.” A gust of cold air blew through the house again, as if to prove him wrong. He saw the candle flicker. “Or maybe it was thirty seconds?” He considered for a moment before throwing caution to the wind. He began to tear through the book faster.
“How do you think she died?” he asked Beth and Ted, hoping that they could provide some insight, however small. “We need to know how she died to exorcise her if we don’t know her name.”
“I don’t know.” Beth looked over his shoulder at the book with a joyful and curious smile.
“There were scissors, right? A torn dress?” Richard wiped away the sweat that had formed on his forehead, even as the chill of the room grew stronger.
Oh God, what should we do? She’s reforming…
“What about her hair?” Beth asked absent-mindedly, warm vapors coming from her mouth as the room grew colder.
Richard shivered and pulled the collar of his jacket tighter. The temperature was plunging by the second; the ghost would be here soon. “What about it?”
“Didn’t you see how it waved? How she was blue? She floated?” The excitement grew in Beth’s voice.
“Yeah?” Richard was dumbfounded.
“Does that mean she drowned?”
Adrenaline surged through him. “Yeah! Maybe.” Richard pieced through the book’s yellowed pages to rest on a section that read ‘Drowning,’ written at the top in decorative black ink. A picture fell below the words: it was a large rippling lake. There were words written in Old English and others in Latin, still more in languages long dead and lost on Richard. He placed a finger beneath one section and began to recite the words in their ancient tongue Another shriek echoed through the house.
Ignore it, keep reading. Keep reading.
His guts twisted into knots and the strength in his knees began to melt. He bit his lower lip and forced himself to focus on the pages, on the ink, on the paper, anything to stop from thinking of the shrieking terror that would have him.
He recited more of the Latin incantations, his large finger trailing beneath them in an effort to aid his focus. “Da ex manes praesidium! Disperge manes!”
A gust blew in and flowed upstairs, where it took form as an aberration: the shrieking woman. The moment she finished her manifestation, she began to glide down toward them with a hideous moan and the accompanying sounds of her rusted scissors, chip-chip-chip-chip-chip.
Richard’s concentration broke; his gaze was drawn toward her hollow stare. Ted finally spoke from behind the camera. “Sounds like you’re pissing her off, Richard.”
Richard shook his head hard to refocus and returned to the book. He began his recitations again, louder this time, in an effort to drown out her cries.
“Da ex manes praesidium! Disperge manes! Da ex manes praesidium!”
The ghost’s feet did not so much as touch the stairs; only the frayed ends of her dress slid across the steps as she descended. She moaned quietly and slowly raised the rusted scissors, chip-chip-chip-chip.
Richard raised his voice and blurted the words with what little strength he could wrench free from the knots of fear in his stomach. He turned his mind blank, a canvas for only the words to be painted on.
“Defendat nos a malo! Removere mortuus!”
The recitations found ground, visible in the pain that cracked across the wretch’s face. The ghost whiplashed from side to side, thrashed by some unseen force. Its face twisted, swirled, and contorted in inhuman movements. Whatever youthful beauty she had once had now melted from her face to a worn and taut-skinned horror. The lips shrunk away, exposing crooked teeth; eyelids melted into hollow, solid-white orbs. An unseen force gripped her and pulled her to the floor, her limbs thrashing like an animal as it did. Struggling against the force, sh
e hissed in anger and whipped her hands out to the stairs, using her nails to drag herself down the steps, finally stopping at the base of the stairs in front of the candles.
It’s working! She can’t get through!
Ted swung the camera to film her, bathing her in its bright light. Despite the chaos erupting across her face, she stared at Ted with a zombie-like fixation. “The hell?” Ted gazed back through the camera with only a few feet and the candlelight between them.
What is she doing?
Richard allowed himself only that one thought before he returned to the recitations, his finger still tracing beneath the words. Somehow, reading made the shaking stop, and he was afraid what might happen if he stopped reading.
“Removere mortuus!”
The aberration shifted from side to side. Her expression melted from anger to one of sorrow and pain with the movement of the muscles beneath her slim face. Her hand rose in front of her and extended toward Ted, but when her fingers came above the candle line, white, scentless smoke sizzled from her index finger like charring meat. She hesitated, then brought her hand up to her eyes to look more closely at it, though she didn’t seem hurt, only confused and curious.
No, something’s happening.
The ghost’s eyes shifted away from her hand to fix again on the cameraman. Richard bit back the fear that leaked in even now and stopped reading, his eyes once more drawn to Ted and the ghost, how they simply stood and scrutinized one another. Richard could see her thin stub of lips begin to move as she tried to speak, but she could only emit a faint whisper, ghostly words without a language. Ted’s head twitched and jerked. He pulled the camera from his shoulder and set it down on the floorboards.
“Ted? What are you doing?” Richard watched as Ted slowly bent down toward the candle to inspect it closely. “Don’t listen to her, Ted.” His words were meek and maybe only a whisper.
“Why did you stop filming?” Beth’s lip curled, showing her teeth. “Pick that camera back up again, dammit!” Ted paid her no mind; he reached out toward the small flickering flame.