by JL Bryan
“A little...squeak, maybe? I’ll have to analyze...oh, the cold spots are gone now, Ellie. They drifted down the stairs.”
I sat upright in my chair. “Where are they going now?”
“I can’t see anything yet. Watching the hallway cam now...here they come. They passed right through the attic door. They’re...uh-oh.”
“What, Stacey?”
“They just went into Crane’s room. We don’t have a camera in there.”
I stood up, but then Stacey spoke again.
“They came back out already. It looks like they’re moving toward the main stairs,” she said.
I walked to the living room door and peeked out. On the second of the three flights of steps, a dim figure flicked across the window, barely visible for an instant and then gone. It seemed like a pale, thin, short person.
“It’s on the steps,” I whispered.
The front hall where I stood grew noticeably colder. My trusty Mel Meter confirmed something was happening—the temperature dropped four degrees, and I saw exactly the same kind of electrical anomalies I’d observed in the attic. They were short, strong pulses of five to six milligaus each.
I heard something like a whisper. The entity was halfway along the first-floor hall now, and it seemed to be approaching me.
I gripped my flashlight just in case.
The whispering sounded again, much closer, and I felt a cool breeze brush against me, rustling my shirt. I jumped back, but I kept my flashlight off. No need to panic just yet.
“Ellie, the cold spots moved into the living room,” Stacey whispered in my ear. “I think they’re going for the games.”
I stepped in front of the nearest camera, the one pointed at the downstairs powder room, and gave Stacey a nod and a thumbs-up. I didn’t want to speak out loud and startle our ghost into leaving. It seemed to tolerate or ignore me for the moment. Ghosts aren’t always conscious of your presence—they can easily get completely absorbed in their own activities.
I returned to the living room and did my best to skirt around the walls, weaving through furniture on my way back to my chair. The board games sat out on a coffee table in the middle of the room, near the high-powered microphone.
Easing into my chair, I looked at the little display screens of the thermal and night cameras mounted on their tripods, pointed right at the game boards. On the thermal, I saw the patch of cold blue motes Stacey had been talking about. They converged around the board games and grew denser, bits of coldness drawing together into larger blue spots.
On the Candy Land game board, the red player token, smiling and cartoony with its hand upraised in eternal greeting, advanced without regard to the brightly colored squares of the path, sliding heedlessly through the Lollipop Woods and directly to Candy Castle without even bothering to pass through Molasses Swamp.
The red player flopped onto its face, then flew off the board and landed on a chaise lounge halfway across the room, as if someone had thrown it.
Giggling voices sounded from the coffee table, and the cloud of cold dots condensed into two small, blurry figures on the thermal.
Two ghosts. I thought these might be Luke and Noah, the boys who had drowned and now seemed to be reaching out to seven-year-old Crane, who refused to tell me anything about them at all. I could not see anything as distinct as facial features—even their hands looked like shapeless mittens on the thermal camera. Of course, I hadn’t seen any pictures of Luke and Noah Ridley from when they were alive, either, so I had no way of knowing how they’d looked.
They didn’t seem particularly menacing, but that didn’t stop icy dribbles of fear from creeping up my spine. Living creatures, including dogs and cats, have an instinctive negative reaction to encountering the spirits of the dead. It’s a good instinct to have, because the bad ghosts can do truly horrifying things.
The Monopoly money Stacey and I had carefully counted out according to the rules—fifteen hundred bucks per player—now erupted into the air above the Monopoly board. The brightly colored bills rained down like confetti, and the otherworldly child voices laughed again.
The ghosts of young kids might seem harmless, but you can’t count on that. The bad ghosts are stuck in some kind of psychological hell. Otherwise they wouldn’t be here, they would move on. A person who was basically innocent in life can mutate into something twisted and dark over years of existing as a restless ghost. It’s true of children, too—a little kid who was just a bit mischievous when alive might turn into a dangerous prankster ghost, one who thinks it’s funny to push people down stairs or knock over a ladder when you’re standing on top of it. Murder can be just another game to them.
Knowing this, I intended to proceed with caution.
The blue boy-shapes on the thermal camera grew clearer as they played, becoming a little sharper at the extremities. On the night vision camera, I saw a pair of little orbs appear over the Monopoly board and vanish into the wheelbarrow and dog tokens, which then raced each other across the board, tumbled off the coffee table, and landed on the rug. The orbs had been about the size of the boys’ fingertips, which they seemed to represent.
“Ellie?” Stacey said over the headset. “Hey, Ellie? Ellie?”
I scowled. She should have known I wouldn’t want to speak and draw the ghosts’ attention. She would have been watching the feeds from the two cameras in front of me, and I assumed she was getting overexcited about it.
“Ellie?” she said again.
“What?” I finally whispered, sounding just as annoyed as I felt.
On the thermal camera, the blue boy-shapes fell suddenly still. Great. My voice had disturbed them.
Over my headset, I thought I heard Stacey say something about a bathroom.
“Did a faucet turn on?” I asked. That would indicate a third entity getting active, maybe the poltergeist, maybe somebody else.
“Not the bathroom,” Stacey replied. “I said something’s happening in the bad room. You know, the sewing room? Serious temp drop there, like down to forty-six, forty-five degrees. And I can see him on night vision, Ellie. I mean, just an outline, a green shadow surrounded by green and black--”
“What’s he doing?” I whispered. The two boy figures trembled strangely on the thermal screen. If I didn’t shut up, I was going to chase them away.
“He just...opened the door. Now I lost sight of him. The hallway’s turning dark blue, though, and I mean he’s going through there like an ice-cold thundercloud—”
A heavy footstep echoed from the front hall.
On the thermal camera, the two blue boy-shapes raced up into the air above the coffee table, moving all at once as if they’d been sucked away by some paranormal vacuum cleaner.
I looked at the night vision camera in time to see a pair of pale orbs, each as big as a bicycle training wheel, fly into the ceiling and vanish. I’d lost both ghosts.
“Where did they go?” I whispered.
“Right back to the attic,” Stacey answered. “They’re shrinking away into the corners there. It’s like they’re hiding.”
I thought I saw a discolored area on the ceiling where they’d vanished. I walked over to the coffee table and looked up. A big, wet circular patch was spreading there.
A thick drop of scummy, foul-smelling water splatted against my cheek, and I quickly wiped it away. The plumbing wasn’t leaking through the ceiling at all—the boy ghosts were leaving pond-water snail-trails behind.
“Ellie,” Stacey said, her voice trembling. “The cold is spreading downstairs, fast. I think it’s coming your way. It’s like a purple-black fog. It’s freezing.”
He was staring at me from the doorway.
The man was tall and barrel-chested, his entire form wrapped in shadow. I felt a wave of dread like the one I’d felt in the crafts room upstairs, but it was worse now, more charged, like disaster was imminent.
He walked into the room, his face so encrusted with dirt that I couldn’t make out his features. I could hear him
breathing, though. His breaths were deep and ragged, with a strange whistling sound when he exhaled.
“Ellie, he’s right there. Do I need to come in? I’m coming in,” Stacey whispered.
I shook my head just slightly, so she could see my answer on the camera.
Then, in a blink, he was across the room, standing on the opposite side of the coffee table from me. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted—fear had locked up every nerve and joint in my body, trapping me in place less than four feet from the apparition. I was seeing it with my bare eyes, no special goggles or cameras needed.
I studied the dark figure as he looked over the game boards and pieces. I had no choice but to stare at him, really—I didn’t even want to breathe for fear the tiniest movement would draw his attention to me.
He wore an old-fashioned gentleman’s coat with tails, but everything was crusted over with dark earth, from his shoes to his face. The room grew darker, as if a black cloud had passed in front of the moon outside, absorbing the pale light.
Intense cold seemed to radiate from him, as if he were an enormous block of ice chilling the room. Of course, cold doesn’t actually radiate. In reality, he was drawing all the ambient heat out of the room, feeding on it for energy.
He raised his dirt-encrusted right hand over the game boards, palm down, almost as though he intended to say a benediction over Marvin Gardens. He said nothing.
A long, narrow organic shape, almost like a tongue, extended out of his hand toward the game boards. It was leathery, and despite the lifelike way it nosed among the scattered pink bank notes, I slowly realized that it was a kind of bizarre belt. Sharp buckles, prongs, plates, and hooks jutted out all over it, like some kind of awful torture whip from a dungeon museum.
The shadow man raised his arm, then brought the belt down on the game board with a crack. The belt grew as long as a bullwhip, sprouting new buckles and prongs all along the way, the metal gleaming in what remained of the moonlight.
He swept his belt-whip back and forth, and it snapped like a snake, its buckles jingling as it knocked the game boards and all the pieces onto the floor, as if this ghost were out for vengeance against Uncle Pennybags and King Kandy.
When all trace of the games had been removed from the coffee table, he fell still, and again I could hear his heavy, uneven breathing.
Then his head tilted up toward the wet green stain on the ceiling. I heard a sound that reminded me of a dog sniffing a dead animal.
His head lowered, and he looked at me.
In a blink, he was standing on my side of the table, less than a foot away from me. I could hear his breath, but I couldn’t smell him at all, for which I should probably count myself lucky. He looked like a corpse that had clawed its way free of the earth. From this distance, I saw the right side of his head was misshapen, as if part of it had caved in.
Now he was staring right at me with the empty pits of his eyes.
My heart pounded in my ears. I wanted to scream. You never get used to seeing monsters like that.
With as little movement as I could, I tilted the lens of my flashlight toward his head and lay my finger on the power button.
He raised his right hand with the long, buckle-studded belt, and I had a feeling he meant to whip me with it.
I turned on my flashlight, blasting a narrow three-thousand-lumen beam right at his head. His heavy breathing turned to a choking, gagging sound as the concentrated light struck him full force.
His whip arm twitched, jangling all the metal pieces on the elongated belt.
I widened the iris of my flashlight lens, bathing him in a flood of light. A wet, angry snarl gurgled in his throat, and he slowly turned away from me.
As he rotated, I saw a hole in the left side of his head. I could see all the way through it, right through his head. I thought of Isaiah Ridley, dead of a gunshot wound.
He kept turning away, and he was kind of turning inward, twisting in on himself in the relentless glare of my light. Then he was gone. Into the gray zone where we couldn’t follow, maybe, or perhaps getting ready to leap at me from another angle.
I turned back and forth, widening the iris even more so my flashlight was more like a searchlight.
“Ellie?” Stacey whispered.
“I think he’s gone,” I said. “It’s getting warmer in here.”
“What did you see?” she asked.
“What did you see?” I asked her in return.
“A huge cold spot...like a column of cold, eight feet high, purple and black. On the night vision, it seemed like some kind of silhouette, fading in and out.”
“I saw him, full apparition,” I told her. “I think it’s Isaiah. And I don’t think he’s friendly.”
Chapter Eight
Gord was the first member of the household to awaken. At about six a.m., he rolled out of his first-floor bedroom and into the kitchen to brew some coffee. He invited Stacey and me to join him. I accepted but tried not to drink too much, since I was hoping for a nap at my apartment this morning. I figured a few sips of coffee wasn’t going to stop that from happening.
“How did it...go?” he asked, while Stacey and I sat at the kitchen table with him.
I gave him a quick summary of what we’d seen, including what we’d discovered about the ceiling “leaks” and the two figures who’d played with the board games. Stacey opened her laptop to show him the relevant bits of video—the thermal images of the boy-sized ghosts, the little orbs moving the game pieces.
“We’ve figured out the wet spots on the ceiling, at least,” I said. “These two ghosts leave them behind when they travel between the floors. I think they were running from another ghost, the one upstairs in the crafts room. We caught some glimpses of him on camera, but I saw him in person. He...doesn’t seem very nice.”
“Who doesn’t seem nice?” Toolie walked into the room wearing a blue pantsuit, full make-up, and a tag that identified her as a manager at Sir Sleepmore Mattresses. “I saw somebody made a mess in the living room.”
“Two ghosts did that,” I said. “I think they might be your son’s invisible friends.”
“Are they dangerous?” Toolie poured herself a cup of coffee.
“It’s too early to tell, but they didn’t act that way,” I said. “On the other hand, there’s a ghost in that room upstairs--”
“Stop!” a boy’s voice snapped, and I jumped a little in my seat.
Crane stood at the open door to the dining room, wearing Buzz Lightyear pajamas. His hair stuck up in clumps, and he stared at me with dark, angry eyes.
“Crane? How long...have you been there?” Gord asked.
“You have to leave,” Crane said, staring at me with a fairly creepy intensity for a seven-year-old.
“That’s very rude, Crane!” Toolie said. “You apologize.”
“They’re making it worse.” Crane looked from me to Stacey.
“Making what worse, Crane?” Stacey asked, in the measured tone of a guidance counselor.
“All of it. Noah and Luke say you’re making him mad.”
“Making who mad?” I asked.
Crane glared at me, then stomped away into the dining room.
“Crane! Come back and apologize to these ladies!” Toolie called after him.
“No!” he shouted from somewhere deeper in the house. I heard his footsteps stomping up the stairs.
“I am so sorry,” Toolie said. “We’ve all been snapping at each other lately...”
“No need to apologize,” I told her. “Anyway, it looks like his invisible friends really might be ghosts. That’s more than a kid should have to deal with.” I’m really defensive about kids having to face the supernatural, probably because of my own history. I hate to see ghosts stalking or threatening children.
“Oh, goodness,” Toolie said. She glanced at the time on the microwave. “I need to get to work, but I want to hear more...”
“We’ll be back later this afternoon,” I said. We’d also caught some
poltergeist activity in Juniper’s room, but there wasn’t time to go into that. “We can go over everything then.”
A big crash sounded upstairs, followed by a scream, startling everyone. Stacey, Toolie, and I ran upstairs to find Juniper in her room, sitting up in bed. Her bookshelves had toppled over, spilling paperbacks and comic books everywhere. The shelves were only about four feet high, but they were heavy enough to do some damage if they’d landed on somebody’s leg or foot.
“Are you hurt? What happened?” Toolie ran to embrace her daughter.
“What do you think?” Juniper pointed at the shelves. “That could have killed me!”
“Were you asleep?” I asked.
“Yeah. I guess I’m up now.” Juniper sighed. “It was so loud.”
“I wish I wasn’t running late for work...” Toolie said.
“We’ll help her straighten this up, Mrs. Paulding,” I said.
“Oh, thank you,” Toolie said, sounding genuinely grateful. “Junie, call me at work in a couple of hours, will you?”
Juniper nodded, still staring at the mess made by her possible poltergeist.
Stacey and I hung around long enough the heave the bookshelves back against the wall. Fortunately, Juniper didn’t worry about organizing or alphabetizing her books at all, so it didn’t take long to clean up the fallen books.
We got out of there as quickly as we could, because precious sleep time was dribbling away. We left our cameras and microphones turned off but still set up for the following night.
“What do you think?” Stacey asked me as we drove away.
“I think they have a ghost or two.”
“Duh.” She looked at me expectantly. I’d given her a brief idea of the shadowy man I’d encountered in the living room, but she could obviously tell I’d held something back. Now that we were out of earshot of our clients and their children, Stacey clearly wanted the gory details.
I quickly recounted the man and his bizarre belt-whip loaded with a crazy number of buckles and prongs, and how he’d used the whip to angrily slap the games off the table.
“No wonder the two kid ghosts ran away,” Stacey said. “Maybe they’re afraid of him. I can’t believe you stayed in there by yourself the rest of the night.”