by JL Bryan
They followed the curving front stairs to the second floor. Seth unlocked a tall door by the head of the stairs.
“Are you sure?” he asked her.
“Stop being dramatic,” Jenny said.
The door opened onto a steep, very dusty staircase. Seth flicked on the single electric bulb hanging from a string.
“Ladies first,” Seth said.
“Still not funny,” Jenny told him.
“Scared?”
Jenny scowled at him. She elbowed him aside and started up the stairs, sneezing as the dust puffed up under her tennis shoes.
The steps widened and grew less steep, and began to curve along the wall. Jenny realized it had once been part of one continuous staircase spiraling from the first floor up to the huge windows and skylights of the third floor, all of which were now filled in or boarded up. It must have been a breathtaking entrance hall in its time.
The stairway flattened into a balcony that curved around to the third-floor gallery. Looking over the balustrade would once have given a sweeping view of the entrance hall below. Now the big, empty space in the center was sealed with unpainted boards. Layers of spiderwebs filled the rafters, hiding the ceiling.
“Why did y’all cut it off like this?” Jenny asked.
“My grandfather did it,” Seth whispered. “He was scared of his father’s ghost. He moved my great-grandfather’s room and personal things up here. Then he had workers demolish all the staircases to the third floor and seal them off. He left this part as the only way up. Then he moved his own bedroom down to the first floor, to get away. The last years of his life, he lived in an old servant cottage out back to escape the main house.”
“That’s crazy,” Jenny said.
“He wasn’t crazy.” Seth said it quickly, automatically. Then he added, “I mean, not if it’s haunted.”
“And what if it isn’t?” Jenny worked her way down the hall, which was cluttered with old furniture, stacks of framed daguerreotypes, glass cases with their contents hidden by thick dust. Dust and cobwebs covered everything. The dry floorboards creaked under her feet.
“Doesn’t it feel haunted to you?” Seth asked.
“It feels like it’s full of spiders.”
“Come on. I’ll show you his room.” He led her forward. The hallway turned to the right for a while, then made a U-turn and sent them back to the left. Seth pulled the chain on another hanging light bulb. They faced two doors.
“Uh, hold on.” Seth flipped through the ring of iron keys he’d taken from the office. “I think we need…the left door.” He tried a few keys, until he was able to unlock the left door. He walked in and pulled another hanging light. Another passage snaked away to the left, this one cluttered with dusty shelves, where Jenny saw rows of arrow heads and broken pottery shards.
The twisting passage eventually ended in a T-intersection. Seth turned to the right, but he didn’t look very sure about it.
“Do you know where we’re going?” she whispered.
“I think so. It’s been a few years.”
“Why’s it so…”
“Difficult?” Seth suggested. “My grandfather again. He had the halls and rooms chopped up into a maze. It’s to confuse my great-grandfather’s ghost.”
“Your grandfather was really serious about this.”
“Very serious,” Seth said. The hallway ended at a wall of dust. Seth wiped the dust with his fingers, revealing glass that reflected a murky shadow of his face. “A mirror. We should have taken the door on the right. Let’s go back.”
“That’s the whole hallway?” Jenny asked. It was only about twelve feet long.
“There’s lots of dead ends with mirrors,” Seth said. “Grandpa thought mirrors could trap ghosts.”
Eventually, through narrow passageways, and with a few false starts, they found the double doors to his great-grandfather’s room. Seth unlocked them.
“I haven’t been in here since I was a kid,” he said. “Are you ready?”
“Seth, you’ve got me expecting a skeleton to jump out or something,” Jenny said. “What’s in there?”
“Just a bedroom.” Seth pushed the doors open with a loud, rusty screech.
The interior was full of cobwebs, and very dark until Seth ignited a glass lamp on a tabletop. There were no windows, not even boarded-over windows, so they must be somewhere towards the center of the third floor, away from any of the four exterior walls. As she looked into the gloomy space, she realized one of the brick chimneys passed through this room, but the fireplace was plugged with cement.
Rugs that Jenny couldn’t see very well were scattered over the raw floorboards. She saw a roll-top desk with a big mechanical adding machine, which had circular ivory buttons set into an ornate wooden box, with a big brass hand crank on one side. Gold and silver coins were scattered in no particular order around it, as if to keep the ghost busy.
An antique sideboard held a porcelain washbowl with a pitcher, a straight razor resting on its leather strop, and several brown medicine bottles lined up in a neat row. There was a wall of grainy photographs, including one that Seth thought was his great-grandfather shaking hands with Woodrow Wilson. In that picture, Jonathan S. Barrett I was a thirtyish businessman, in a stiff felt homburg hat and overcoat, his jaw tight, his eyes like circles of cold iron.
The bed itself was spartan, a simple iron frame and a thin mattress covered with a quilt, not particularly large. A servant bell with a rope was mounted in the wall by the head.
“I don’t see any ghosts,” Jenny said.
“Maybe he’s resting tonight.”
Jenny looked at Seth, and thought about him growing up underneath all of this, with the strange family stories about ghosts and obligations to the dead, passed on through his grandfather and his father. The thing about money was that it really gave you a chance to express your insanity.
Jenny pushed Seth back onto the bed, and the rusty springs underneath groaned.
“What are you doing?” he whispered.
Jenny crawled on top of him, and began kissing Seth’s lips.
“We can’t do this here,” he whispered, after a minute. “Let’s go to the navigator room.”
“We have to show the ghost this is your house now,” Jenny said. “He can’t rule it anymore.” She lifted away her sweater, then unhasped her bra.
“This is really scary for me, Jenny,” Seth whispered.
“That’s why we have to do it.”
He closed his eyes while she undressed him.
It was hot, sweaty work, but Jenny did her best to exorcise the ghost of Jonathan S. Barrett from Barrett House.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Ashleigh watched out the airplane window as the city of Atlanta fell away below her. Ahead of her was New York City and her future.
The right-wing media outlets had gone bonkers for her story, as Ashleigh had planned for them to do. It had everything—Christians suppressed by the secular public schools, kids in danger, and lots and lots of sex. Ashleigh had already done more than twenty interviews with magazine writers, call-in interviews with radio shows around the country, and a few appearances on local TV. She’d been featured on the very popular “RighteousRight” website. Tens of thousands in donations had poured into the PayPal account tied to the Fallen Oak Girls Outreach website. But now she was finally reaching the big time.
Chuck O’Flannery, one of the most-watched pundits on TV, had caught wind of her story. There was plenty to get morally outraged about, and O’Flannery specialized in angry tirades, for which he needed a constant flow of new targets. Ashleigh had hoped he would call, since he had a pattern of obsessing over stories about child pornography or teachers having sex with underage students, often bloviating for weeks over a single allegation of it anywhere in the country. He’d already done some reporting of Ashleigh’s story, complete with the pictures of pregnant teenagers, and of course the one of Ashleigh and friends in swimsuits at Barrett Pond.
Origi
nally, a producer from The O’Flannery Overview Hour had called to arrange for Ashleigh to visit a local Fox affiliate in Columbia, where she would appear on the nationally broadcast program via satellite uplink. Later, O’Flannery himself had called Ashleigh, and Ashleigh was just as charming, flirtatious and sweet as she could be. She giggled at his jokes, and she told him her friends said that he was sexy when he got angry—which wasn’t remotely true, since O’Flannery was least a hundred pounds overweight, and only had a fringe of hair left, and anyway none of her friends watched the news or anything close to it.
The following day, the producer had called back and invited Ashleigh to New York. She’d been upgraded to a live “special guest” and would actually be in the studio with O’Flannery, at his famous interview desk, where he sometimes grilled and insulted his guests without ever allowing them to speak. Ashleigh didn’t think hers would be that kind of interview.
Ashleigh had the window seat on the airplane, with Cassie beside her. Ashleigh’s dad sat several rows ahead of them, since neither Dr. Goodling nor Mayor Winder were about to send their teenage daughters into the legendary sin and temptation of New York without a responsible adult.
When the pilot announced that electronic devices were now permitted, Cassie opened her laptop and connected to the plane’s wireless hotspot. She downloaded the email from the Girls Outreach website into her Outlook Express.
“Radio show in Tennessee,” Cassie told Ashleigh as she clicked through the messages. “One in Texas, one in California, all want interviews. Tons of new PayPal donations. Volunteers who want to help the girls. A guy in Rhode Island who wants to date you. You’re invited to give talks to groups at Liberty University and Bob Jones University. Lots of churches, too. And some groups want to use Abstinence is Power! in their own churches and schools.”
“Up the recommended donation to fifty dollars for the video,” Ashleigh said. “Let’s do all the radio shows. I want to do appearances, but I only want to talk to big groups where I can reach a lot of people. Smaller groups of important people are okay. Is there anything from The Covenant yet?”
Cassie checked. She gave Ashleigh an apologetic smile. “Nothing yet.”
“Goddamn it!” Ashleigh said. “What the fuck do I have to do to get their attention?”
“Maybe the O’Flannery appearance will take care of it,” Cassie said.
“It better. I’m not putting my hands on that fat piece of shit for fun.”
When they reached LaGuardia airport, there was a driver waiting with Ashleigh’s name on a sign. He stacked their luggage on a rolling rack and carted it out for them, then loaded them into the trunk of a black limousine. He held the door while the three of them piled inside.
“Ashleigh, this is impressive,” her dad said as the limo rolled away from the airport. He’d worn his best suit, and now he was looking out the window and shaking his head, either at the vast crowds or the amazing scale of the city. “Your mother and I couldn’t be prouder of you.”
“Everything I know, I learned from you, Daddy,” Ashleigh said.
“I don’t know. I’ve never pulled anything on a national scale like this.”
“Maybe we can get you a TV show,” Ashleigh suggested. “Televangelists make buttloads of money.”
“That’s not a bad idea, sweetie,” her dad said.
“Want me to look into it?” Cassie asked. “I’ve got producers calling from all over. I bet you could at least get a radio show, to start.”
Dr. Goodling looked between Ashleigh and Cassie, smiling like he was at the pulpit and getting ready to pass the collection plates.
“You girls are brilliant,” he said. “I really will be surprised if you two don’t end up ruling the world one day.”
“We’re working on it, Daddy.” Ashleigh winked at him.
They arrived at the studio building, a huge black skyscraper, with an hour to spare before the live broadcast. The O’Flannery Overview Hour started at eight PM Eastern time every weekday.
Ashleigh was whisked into a make-up room, where a girl with spiky blue hair and a nose ring went to work on Ashleigh’s hair. A slender, handsome young man did her makeup. Ashleigh was pretty sure he was a gay, and she was glad her dad wasn’t in the room to make remarks. She didn’t want a single enemy at this cable news channel.
She watched the show’s intro segment on a monitor in the green room with Cassie and her dad. O’Flannery went on an angry rant about the deteriorating morals and lack of patriotism among kids these days.
“But there are exceptions,” he said. “I’ve been telling you folks about a disgraceful situation down South, where a loony lib high school principal decided to ban a student abstinence campaign. Well, these kids learned their lesson from him. They started humping like wild monkeys, all over the place. Nearly a hundred girls pregnant, and that’s a fourth of all his students.
“Tonight’s special guest is Ashleigh Goodling, the pretty young lady who wasn’t allowed to teach her peers about abstinence. She’s become the face of Christian teens in this country and their struggle against the left, so you know she’s getting persecuted by all the usual moonbats. Well, we don’t persecute young Christian girls here on the Overview, we embrace them. She’ll take us behind the scenes of this national scandal, after this quick commercial break.”
A production assistant led Ashleigh out to O’Flannery’s interview desk, which was shaped like a wide “V” with his massive, reinforced chair on one side and three guest chairs on the other. The P.A. directed her to the chair closest to O’Flannery, since she was the only guest. O’Flannery was already in the opposite chair to face her. The studio lights made him sweat profusely, and two ladies were hurriedly mopping his face with towels and touching up his makeup.
Ashleigh felt very confident and calm as she approached the huge man. She wore her favorite black blazer, now with a flag on the lapel for her TV appearance, and under that, a new white blouse with a neckline that let Ashleigh seem modest while letting America know she had a great rack. She also wore a golden necklace with a cross pendant, with three little diamonds on the crossbar. Her abstinence ring was freshly polished. Extra tanning bed sessions had turned her skin the color of dark honey, and now the studio staff had done a great job with her hair and makeup. She looked professional and sexy.
O’Flannery saw her approaching. He placed both hands on the desk and heaved himself to his feet. His eyes bounced up and down her body a couple of times, and he smiled over his triple chin and held out one meaty paw towards her.
“Welcome to my kingdom, Miss Ashleigh,” he said.
Ashleigh ignored the offered handshake and instead hugged him tight around the neck, squishing her body against his monstrous gut, and sighed as if meeting him fulfilled some lifelong dream.
“Oh, thank you for having me, Mr. O’Flannery,” she gushed. “It means so much to me, and to the kids back home…”
“Save some of that for the show,” he told her.
“Thirty seconds, Mr. O’Flannery,” a producer announced.
“Gotcha.” O’Flannery smacked Ashleigh’s ass. “Have a seat.”
Ashleigh clung to him, pumping her love out through her fingers and into his neck folds. She put her mouth to his ear to sink an extra last-second burst into his brain.
“I’m so nervous,” she whispered. “I’ve never done anything this big before.”
“You’ll be fine, baby.” He patted her ass again, and this time gave it a squeeze. Ashleigh gave him her best smile as she took her chair.
“Welcome back to The O’Flannery Overview Hour,” he said. “My special guest is Ashleigh Goodling of Fallen Oak, South Carolina, population nine thousand. Thanks for coming today, Ashleigh.”
“Thank you for having me, sir.”
“Let’s start by telling the Overviewers at home a little about you. You’re the head of the Christian club at your school, is that right?”
“Yes, sir. I’m also very active in cheerleading,
and I’m our student council president. Next year, I hope to be a freshman at Georgetown.” She held up both hands with fingers crossed, and gave her most nervous-looking smile.
“You’re a very well-rounded young lady.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ashleigh giggled.
“Ever been to New York before?”
“Oh, goodness, no. I didn’t know cities could be so big! I hope to see the Statue of Liberty while we’re here, because she’s so inspiring, and also Ground Zero, because such important things happened there.”
“We hope you enjoy your visit. Now, for the Overviewers at home, give us a little background on this teen abstinence story.”
“Gosh. Well, teen pregnancy is such a major problem, even in little towns like mine. Our group decided to promote the only moral choice, abstinence, at our school. We thought teens would listen to other teens. We planned to reach them through posters, brochures, and a video we made with kids from school.”
“But this loony lib principal rejected all of that. He’s obviously a liberal, right?”
“Oh, sure. I mean, he hates abstinence. He’d rather see his students having sex instead of learning Christian values. That doesn’t sound very conservative to me.”
“It absolutely does not!” O’Flannery thundered. “Would you say his rejection encouraged all this crazy sex the kids were getting into? I’ve heard there were after-school sex parties.”
“Yes, sir. Definitely. It’s hard enough to say ‘no’ when you’re a teen. I mean, I’m not perfect. I get tempted all the time. Your body wants it. That’s why you have to rely on your mind, and on prayer. When adults set the example, and they say abstinence is bad, it just tells us to go ahead and give in to our urges.” Ashleigh made herself look very agitated while she talked, as if she were craving sex right now, and gosh darn those strong religious values that kept getting in the way.
“We actually have a clip of this Principal Harris. This is from the press conference he didn’t want to give.” O’Flannery pointed at the camera with a pen.