Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls: A Ghost Hunter Mystery

by Victoria Laurie

  “So what did happen to you?” John asked.

  I adjusted the backpack and reached for Heath’s wrist where his watch was attached. Noting the time, I said, “I’ll explain it all to you on the way back to the B&B. I think we should regroup and come up with an alternate plan to find Gopher tomorrow. For now we’ll just have to hope that he can hang on, because we need to get the hell off this rock while we can.”

  No one argued to stay. As one we all hurried down the steps.

  Once we reached the van, I explained everything that had happened to me after I’d been pushed into the room by the phantom, and also learned that Gil, John, and Heath had looked through all the adjoining rooms and linking hallways before deciding to go get help—even if that meant making a few calls to the U.S. Embassy.

  “There was no way I was just going to leave you,” Heath said firmly. “M. J., I would have searched day and night to get you back.”

  I ran my hand through his dark hair. “I know.”

  From the backseat Gilley groaned. “You two really need to get a room.”

  I regarded him with a scowl. He could be so frigging annoying sometimes.

  “We still need a new plan to find Gopher,” John reminded us. “Because that whole letting you go in unarmed is clearly not the way to go.”

  I nodded.

  Heath pulled into the driveway of the B&B at that moment and I laid a hand on his arm. “Let’s check in with the girls and then find a restaurant. I’m famished and I have a bit more to share about Lord Ranald Dunnyvale.”

  Chapter 7

  The girls had left us a note that they were out exploring the village, so we in turn left them a note that we were back from the castle, and off in search of grub.

  We found a lovely pub called Sláinte’s, and ordered a round of fish-and-chips and a pitcher of beer. While our food was being prepared, I told the group about the two dreams I’d had where I’d been visited by the spirit of Ranald Dunnyvale, and then what he’d told me down in the crypts’ tunnel.

  “He wants you to personally rid the castle of the phantom?” John asked incredulously.

  “Yep.”

  Heath looked deeply worried. “And he won’t tell you where Gopher is?”

  “Nope.”

  “I don’t like it,” Gilley said.

  “You never do,” I muttered.

  Gilley looked at me crossly. “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing,” I said quickly. “The point is that I don’t think there’s any other way to get Gopher back. We’re not finding him on our own, and we’ve seen how tricky that phantom can be. I think it’s way too dangerous to go back there and continue to explore the castle without knowing a little bit more about what we’re dealing with. We need to research the phantom, and this Alex person.”

  “But the longer we take to do that, the more danger Gopher could be in,” Heath reasoned.

  I knew he was thinking back to the awful time he’d had when he’d been held in the phantom’s grip. I understood fully how difficult it was to be patient and do our homework, all the while knowing what kind of torture Gopher was likely experiencing.

  “I don’t know that we have much of a choice, Heath,” I said honestly. “Gopher will just have to hang on while we figure out how to find him.”

  Our food arrived then and for a little while we ate in silence. Gilley was the first to break it when he said, “Mwt mabt da bkpwk?”

  I smirked. “I personally know that your mother taught you better table manners, Gil.”

  He appeared chagrined. He then chewed thoroughly and swallowed. “What about the backpack?”

  I’d left it in the van and I’d almost completely forgotten about it. Excusing myself from the table, I dashed out to retrieve it and hauled it out of the passenger’s seat. Bringing it back into the pub, I set it on the table with a thud, and unzipped the top.

  I gasped when I inspected the contents.

  “What is it?” Heath asked.

  I tipped the flap so that they could all see inside to the dozens of spikes bound with cord weighing down the pack.

  “Whoa,” said Heath and John, while Gilley whistled appreciatively.

  “That’s why the phantom didn’t come after me when I went down those stairs,” I said, pulling one of the spikes free and testing it against the metal zipper. The zipper clinked against the magnetic metal. “I wondered why it didn’t chase me into the tunnel. And I also remember that Ranald had stayed a good distance away from his crypt when he was talking to me.”

  “Are those initials?” Gilley asked, squinting at the lettering embroidered on the canvas.

  “Yes. They read A. M. N.”

  “Do you think the A stands for ‘Alex’?”

  I nodded. “I do, Gil.”

  Gilley reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “Crap,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That stupid phantom must have drained my charge again. The phone was working fine after I recharged it last night.”

  “Who were you planning to call?”

  “No one. I was just going to make a note to research those initials and see what I could come up with.”

  I glanced back down into the belly of the backpack, spying a small notebook and a pen. I pulled these out and tossed them to Gilley. “You can use these.”

  He caught them easily and began thumbing through the pages. “Whoa,” he said.

  “What now?”

  He looked at me oddly and turned the page around. I squinted at the writing but couldn’t make any sense of it. “What is that?” I asked. “Shorthand?”

  Gilley turned the page back to face him. “No,” he said. “I think it’s a foreign language. Russian, maybe.”

  That surprised me. “See if you can translate it when we get back to the B&B, okay?”

  “On it.”

  “While Gilley’s researching, what do you want us to do?” John asked.

  “We need to talk to the locals,” I said. “Find out more about what happened at Dunlow four years ago. Kincaid and this Alex guy were obviously doing exactly what we attempted when we first arrived. They were after the gold, but got caught by the phantom. Dunnyvale insists that the phantom was brought to that rock by someone other than him, which means he was likely brought there after Dunnyvale died. Let’s find out when the legend of the phantom first appeared around these parts, and see if anyone can link it to a particular person.”

  Heath polished off the last of his beer and pushed his empty plate aside. “Sounds good.”

  Plan in hand, we paid the tab and made our way back to the B&B.

  Once there we dropped off Gilley and John—who was going to wait for the girls and fill them in and also pick Anya’s brain. Heath and I headed to the coast guard station, figuring that was as good a place as any to start.

  When we entered the station, which was located right in the middle of Dunlee’s port, we saw the constable who had warned us about staying too long on the rock at Dunlow.

  I waved to him as we got out of the van, and he shuffled over. “I hear you’ve lost a member of your party,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Yes,” I told him. “Our producer went missing yesterday afternoon, and we’re really worried about him.”

  “You should be,” he said grimly.

  Heath and I exchanged a concerned look. “We’re here to see if the coast guard has found any further trace of him?” I said, my voice rising to a question for the constable.

  The village cop looked over his shoulder at the station. “They haven’t.”

  “Are they at least still looking?”

  The constable turned his attention to the left and out to sea. “I doubt it. There’s another storm approaching.”

  I glanced at the sky, which was perfectly clear with only a few white fluffy clouds floating on the horizon. “They come in fast and furious here, don’t they?” I remarked.

  “Aye,” he said. “That they do, miss.”

>   “Constable,” Heath began.

  “Call me Quinn,” he said with a kind smile. “Or Constable O’Grady, whichever you prefer.”

  Heath seemed to waver as to which name to call the man, and finally settled on the more formal. “Constable O’Grady,” he said, “we seem to be in a jam here. We’ve tried to go back to the castle to search for our producer, but the phantom keeps attacking us. We need to know more about it. Where the villagers think it came from, how long it’s been haunting Dunlow Castle, and maybe even a little more about what happened four years ago to those other two ghost hunters.”

  O’Grady regarded Heath curiously before he lifted his wrist and looked at his watch. “Well, for all of that, brother, you’ll need to buy me a pint. I get off me shift in about an hour. Come find me at O’Grady’s Pub on Clemens Street, and I’ll tell you all I know.”

  “You own a pub?” I asked.

  “Aye,” he said. “I’ve got seven little ones at home. A man’s got to have more than one livelihood when he’s got so many mouths to feed.”

  Heath and I agreed to meet Constable O’Grady later, and occupied ourselves in the meantime by talking to the coast guard. We found the two officers on duty monitoring a thick patch of clouds moving in from the north-west. “It’s even bigger than the one that came through yesterday,” remarked one. “We’ll need to alert the wharf of the small-craft warning immediately.” Then he noticed us and asked if he could help us.

  “We’re here to ask about the search for our friend,” I said.

  “The man missing from Dunlow Castle?”

  “Yes.”

  The officer shook his head. “I’m sorry, miss, but we’ve found no trace of him. And we can’t rightly go out now. There’s another big storm a-comin’.”

  “Will you go out in the morning?” I pressed. I didn’t want to give up the pressure on the coast guard to help us find Gopher.

  The officer eyed his computer screen, displaying various shades of red, pink, yellow, and green. Just to the south of the wash of color was the outline of the Irish coast. It looked like it was a truly massive storm—something we New Englanders would dub a nor’easter.

  “It depends on that storm, miss,” he told me honestly. “But I wouldn’t count on her blowing herself out by mornin’. She looks like she’ll want to stay and have some fun with us for a wee bit.”

  Heath and I headed out of the station feeling really defeated. “There’s no way to get back onto that island during the storm,” I said. “No matter what we try and do, it looks like Gopher’s stuck there.”

  Heath dug his hands into his pockets, and it was then that I realized the wind had picked up. “I don’t even want to think about what he’s going through,” he said miserably. “Assuming he’s still alive, that is.”

  And then something occurred to me, and I grabbed Heath by both arms. “Oh, my God!” I said. “Why didn’t I think of that before?”

  “Think of what?”

  “I’ve been so worried about Gopher, and I think I assumed that there was no way he could withstand more than a few hours with the phantom. In the very back of my mind I wondered if he had already been murdered, but it never occurred to me to reach out to him using my intuition to see if he’d really crossed over!”

  Heath’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I didn’t think of it either, M. J. But you’re right. We need to see if we can reach Gopher. That way we’ll know for sure if this is a rescue mission, or a recovery.”

  I motioned Heath to the van and we got in and drove at breakneck speed to the causeway. There we got out and I could see that the cobblestones were covered by about two inches of water as both the storm surge and the tide were moving in.

  “We’ll need to get a little closer to the castle,” I said, eyeing Heath to see if he agreed.

  Heath, however, was staring at the causeway. “It’s dangerous,” he said. “You know how slippery those rocks are when they get wet, and the tide’s coming in.”

  “I’m willing to risk it,” I told him. “If you want to stay here, you can.”

  “Right,” he said, a hint of irritation in his voice. “Like I’m just going to let you cruise out over the causeway without help.”

  “Then let’s stop talking about it and get going, sugar!”

  Heath and I sloshed our way onto the cobblestones and I hurried as fast as I could without taking too many risks. The water was freezing and my feet were soon numb with cold. It took us about fifteen minutes to reach the island, and from there I could just make out the line of thick dark clouds on the horizon.

  “We’ll have to work fast,” I said, noting the fading light and that the water on the causeway was inching up more and more.

  Heath closed his eyes and lifted his chin in the direction of the castle. I did the same and in my mind I called out as loudly as I could to Gopher.

  There was no response, save for a cold prickle on my forearms. I opened my eyes again and thought I saw the phantom’s dark figure swaying in the wind at the top of the rock. In the distance I heard Jordan Kincaid’s voice yell, “Alex!” But that was it.

  Heath was still deep in concentration, and I wondered if maybe he’d connected to Gopher. My heart sank with that thought, because even though I was prepared for it, I still didn’t want anything awful to happen to our producer.

  A few seconds later, Heath opened his eyes, a grim look set firmly on his face.

  “Anything?”

  He took my hand and turned me around to head back across the causeway before speaking. “Nothing,” he said. “I tried reaching out to Gopher and kept hitting a brick wall.”

  “I think he’s still alive,” I admitted, noting that I’d felt exactly the same thing. “And I also think we’ll find him.”

  Heath stepped onto the watery cobblestones and paused. “When?”

  I shrugged and slogged my way forward. “I don’t know. But soon.”

  “I hope it’s in time,” he told me.

  I couldn’t have agreed more.

  We were late getting to O’Grady’s. By the time we made it back to shore, our pants were soaked and I was shivering with cold. Heath drove us back to the B&B, where we changed quickly, told Gilley what we were up to, and left a note for Meg, Kim, and John before hustling to the pub.

  We found Quinn sitting comfortably at the bar, a tall pint of dark ale in front of him. “There you are,” he said when we came to sit next to him.

  “Sorry,” Heath and I said together. “We were delayed.”

  Quinn didn’t appear to mind; instead he asked us to pick our poison. Heath ordered a beer while I went with a vodka and cranberry. “Now, if I remember, you want to know all about the phantom.”

  “Yes, please,” I said, just as my drink arrived.

  “It’s a dark tale,” he began dramatically, and motioned for us to follow him to one of the booths. “But one worth the tellin’ if you think it will help find your friend,” he added as we sat down.

  After taking a long sip of ale, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and told us what he knew. “The first time I heard of the phantom was about twenty years ago. I was a young lad then, just back from holiday at me cousin’s further up the coast, and me mum told me that some poor bloke had died that very mornin’ while out explorin’ Dunlow Castle.

  “The poor chap was a Frenchman who’d come across the legend of the hidden treasure a bit before that, and in his research he’d discovered an old letter written by Ranald Dunnyvale’s second wife to her cousin, describing the last words of her husband on his deathbed.

  “According to this Frenchman, Dunnyvale’s final words gave away the exact location of his treasure. So the Frenchman came here to look for it, only telling us in the village that the gold was hidden in a secret location, and with the aid of the original blueprints to the castle, he was sure he’d find it.

  “After searching the castle top to bottom for near a week, he claimed to have discovered the secret location, but he needed to return
to France for a spell to tend to some urgent business.”

  Quinn paused here to take a long pull from his pint, and outside we all heard the first rumble of thunder.

  “Storm’s comin’,” I heard Heath whisper.

  “Aye,” said Quinn. “And she’s likely to be a moody little tempest from the weather reports I’ve seen.”

  But I was anxious to hear more about Quinn’s story. “You were saying about the Frenchman?”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, wiping his mouth again with his sleeve. “Where was I? Oh, I remember—he’d returned to France. Well, we weren’t sure he’d come back to our village after that, truth be told. We were a wee bit skeptical of his claims, but return he did a bit later. With him was another bloke, who was not from France, as I remember, and they and one other chap they’d hired to carry the heavy equipment set off for Dunlow.”

  Another loud rumble of thunder reverberated against the walls and tinkled the glass bottles on the shelves. This was immediately followed by the drumming sound of a hard rain on the roof.

  Quinn squinted through the windows and signaled for another pint of ale. “Now, here in the village, we had our doubts about the Frenchy’s claim. I mean, we’ve lived here all our lives, and most of us had been to Dunlow a time or two. Never had we seen any sign of this supposed treasure, but being naturally curious, we waited to see what the Frenchman and his friends would bring back.

  “Not in our wildest dreams did we think that the three men would release a demon like the phantom!” Quinn said with a slight shiver.

  “What happened on that rock that morning exactly, Constable?” I pressed. I wanted to know what the Frenchman had done to call up the phantom.

  Quinn shrugged. “I only know what I was told,” he said. “And that was that on that terrible day the Frenchman did discover where the gold was hidden, but when he went to take a few handfuls, the phantom was released. It chased him off the cliffs, drove another man quite mad, and left the third a cripple.”

  “How did the village react?” Heath asked.