by JL Bryan
When we returned to the hall, armed with both nachos and a Candy Land set, I noticed a plinking sound, distinct from the rain hammering the roof and windows of the house.
“Oh, no,” Juniper said.
I stepped past our thermal camera and looked into the powder room. The faucet was trickling, so I turned the water off. The metal handle felt like ice, burning my fingertips with cold.
“Stacey,” I said, looking at the cameras. “This downstairs faucet turned itself on. Can you back up the footage and look for anomalies?”
“Okay, could take a minute,” she replied over my headset.
“Make it fifty-nine seconds.” I nodded at Juniper. “Let’s head back upstairs.”
We sat down at the crossroads of the two upstairs hallways again, and I tried not to think about the old folklore that says if you have business with the devil, you can meet him at any crossroads at midnight.
Juniper and I started our Candy Land game while the rain poured outside. Candy Land is kind of pointless—you draw cards that tell you where to move your little plastic-person token until somebody reaches the end. The main draw is the candy-themed scenery along the way. It was fun and silly enough to distract Juniper from her fears for the moment. We left a light on at the end of the kids’ hall so we could see the game board.
“I found something,” Stacey said over my headset.
“Go ahead,” I told her.
“On thermal, I could see a little cloud of blue cold around the faucet just before it turned on. It drew back inside the faucet after the water started dripping. We also caught a couple of orbs on night vision.”
“A couple? Do you think more than one entity was involved?” I could definitely imagine Noah and Luke turning on faucets at night as a prank.
“No idea,” Stacey replied.
There wasn’t much I could do with that information—we already knew some ghost was turning on the faucets at night—so I kept playing Candy Land with Juniper.
“Aw, licorice!” Juniper complained with a smile after moving her little yellow plastic guy onto one of the dreaded licorice spaces. “Lose a turn.”
Then the lights went out. Juniper gasped in the darkness.
I immediately grabbed a flashlight and pushed my other one into Juniper’s hands. I pointed mine right at the crafts room door.
Still closed.
The display screens of my cameras didn’t show anything new—just the door, firmly in place. No new cold spots, no shadowy figures, not even the tiniest orb flitting past. The motion detector lay dark, not a single one of its tiny lights flickering.
“What happened?” Juniper whispered.
“It might just be the storm,” I said, and then thunder rattled the house.
It sounded again a few seconds later, then a third time.
“There’s no lightning,” I whispered.
“Ellie, I’m picking up some loud bangs downstairs,” Stacey said. “Are you hearing that?”
“I’ll go check it out,” I said, standing up. “Stay here, Juniper.”
“Stay here by myself?” Juniper cast a worried look at the crafts room door.
“Okay, come with me, but stay close.” I took her hand as we walked down the dark hallway, afraid something might grab her. She didn’t protest at all, but instead clenched my hand tight in her own.
The loud boom sounded again as we descended the front stairs. I still hadn’t seen any lightning.
We followed it to the kitchen. Something as pale as a dead fish smacked hard against the big window by the kitchen table.
“Wait here.” I left Juniper standing by the counter while I approached the window. The pale, fleshy thing slapped the window again.
I pointed my flashlight through the window.
A white, transparent figure stood outside in the rain. I could just discern that it was a woman with pale, soaking wet hair clinging to her scalp and face. Some of her hair was buried under a kerchief, also soaking wet. She wore a heavy woolen dress with a high, lacy neck, also wet and plastered to her body in the rain. She was all blacks and whites, like a faded old photograph.
When she saw me—her eyes were hollow, twin windows to the rain-filled night beyond—her mouth opened wide as if screaming. I heard nothing.
She slapped the window again, harder this time, three quick blows, with that screaming look still frozen on her face.
A loud series of crashes sounded behind me.
I spun to see Juniper hunching forward, covering her ears. The row of cabinet doors above the counter behind her had opened all at once, by themselves. Dishes, glasses, and coffee mugs flew out and shattered on the kitchen floor, wave after wave of china and porcelain breaking on the tiles until the cabinets were entirely empty.
I grabbed Juniper and stood between her and the falling kitchenware, but the event was already over.
The girl was panting and shaking badly, and swaying on her feet as though suddenly exhausted.
“Is it over?” she whispered, rubbing her eyes. I turned to look at the window. The pale figure had vanished and ceased her banging.
“Maybe.” I approached the window again, shining my light through it, but all I saw was rain, grass, and the swollen pond in the middle of the back yard.
“What in the name of Jesus Jones is going on down here?” Toolie swept into the room in a fuzzy green bathrobe and matching curlers. She took a sharp breath when she saw the destruction in the kitchen, then grabbed her daughter and looked her over. “Was anybody hurt?”
“We’re okay,” I said. “I need the two of you to stay right here.”
“Where are you going?” Toolie asked. “Somebody needs to explain--”
“I’ll be right back.” I ran into the hall, unlocked the glass doors under the stairs, and ran out onto the patio, swinging my light everywhere. I was instantly drenched in cold rain.
She stood by the pond, watching me. She was still transparent, just barely visible, as though she wasn’t strong enough to form a more complete apparition. She was dripping wet, which wasn’t shocking in the rain, but ghosts aren’t really affected by current physical weather. The ghost was soaking wet, as if she’d died by drowning.
“Catherine?” I asked, keeping my flashlight pointed at the ground so it wouldn’t disturb her. I approached slowly across the grass. “Catherine Ridley?”
She opened her mouth in a silent scream, then pointed at me.
No. Not at me—past me, at something above my head.
I turned to look, but visibility was extremely poor, with the heavy rain and the rainclouds themselves blocking out the moon. I swept my flashlight across the house, trying to look into the upper windows.
There. My flashlight skimmed over it, and I brought it back for a closer look.
She wasn’t pointing to a window, she was pointing to the roof.
A boy stood at the back corner of the roof, pale, soaked, and shivering. At first I guessed it was Noah or Luke, but the boy seemed solid, not a fragile-frost apparition like Catherine by the pond. An attic dormer window was wide open, several feet above and behind him.
“Crane?” I shouted. “Crane, is that you?”
I dropped my flashlight beam down and to one side of him, because I didn’t want to risk the glare blinding him into a misstep. He was already right at the edge, the very corner of the roof, with a twenty-five foot drop to a brick patio below. His toes had to be in the rain gutter already.
“Crane, don’t move!” I shouted. What was the kid doing up there? My heart raced in fear—if he fell, there was a good chance he would die.
“Ellie, what’s happening?” Stacey’s voice crackled.
“Stacey, go into the kitchen and get Toolie,” I said. “Right now. Crane’s on the roof and he might fall.”
“Holy cow!”
The van was parked in the driveway, on the far side of the back yard from where I stood. Stacey leaped out and raced to the back door I’d just left.
On the roof above, Crane
stood silently. He’d done nothing to acknowledge my presence, as if he were sleepwalking.
“Crane!” I said. “Listen to me carefully. You need to sit down right where you are. Don’t move.”
“Leave me alone!” Crane shouted back. Right, like I was just going to wander off and make some popcorn while he stood on the brink of death.
Stacey, Toolie, and Juniper ran out from the glass doors, sloshing through puddles as they crossed the patio toward me.
“Where is he?” Toolie asked, squinting up at the roof through the rain.
Juniper pointed her flashlight right at Crane, and he swayed a little. I grabbed her flashlight and changed its angle.
“Don’t blind him,” I told her.
“What do I do? What do I do?” Juniper asked.
“You and Stacey stay right here, keep talking to him!” I said, shouting to be heard over the ever-growing downpour. I grabbed Toolie by the shoulder. “Follow me!” I shouted.
I turned and ran for the door, not waiting for a response. Toolie was kind of husky and probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with me, anyway.
I ran through the kitchen, down the hall, and up the stairs, leaving behind muddy bootprints. Each second felt like an hour, and I was certain Crane had already slipped and fallen, that I was already too late.
The upstairs hallway also seemed to take far, far too long to traverse. I bolted up the attic stairs, past the spot where I’d fallen and gained some nasty bruises earlier that night. I stumbled over debris from the broken railing.
As luck would have it, I then had to run all the way to the far side of the attic to reach the open dormer window. Rain slanted in through it, collecting in a puddle on the attic floorboards.
The window sill was at shoulder height for me—how the heck had the kid managed to get up there? I had to find a sturdy wooden chest and drag it over. I might have been able to do a pull-up and heaved myself over the sill, but it was slippery, and so was the steep roof outside. I didn’t want to slip and die if I could avoid it.
I placed one foot on the chest. As I brought up my other foot, the entire chest slid sideways and slammed into a roof support post. I lost my balance and toppled to the floorboards, banging my elbow so hard that my left forearm turned numb and tingly.
I thought the chest had simply slipped in the water beneath it, but then I heard the laughter of an unseen child in the air nearby.
“Stop!” I shouted, pushing myself to my feet.
“You stop,” a childish voice whispered back at me.
I didn’t have time for this kindergarten-level debate. I shoved the chest back into place, clambered on top of it and up onto the windowsill.
The pitched roof below did not look welcoming. A sheen of water ran down it, turning it into a slick ramp that would take me straight into oblivion. The rain was still falling hard and heavy.
I eased my leg out into the rain. My calf boots weren’t the worst things I could have been wearing, I guess, but I would’ve traded them for cleats in a second. Or those clawed shoes worn by the guys who work way up in the tree tops. Yep, a pair of those would’ve been great.
I climbed out legs first and stayed on my hands and knees, since it seemed less likely I’d break my neck that way.
“Crane!” I called out, not too loudly, because I didn’t want to startle him. I crawled slowly toward the boy, feeling like I’d slip and fall any second. Maybe charging onto the roof after the kid wasn’t the best plan, but it was all I had.
He turned to look at me, and that was when I saw the shape standing beside him on the roof.
The figure was made entirely of a strange hollow space where no raindrops fell, like the Invisible Man standing out in the rain. This looked more like a boy than a man, just a little taller than Crane himself. Noah or Luke, I assumed—whichever one hadn’t been hanging around in the attic, waiting to shove the chest out from beneath me.
If the ghosts could push that heavy chest, then they could push me, and it wouldn’t take much to send me sliding down over the edge.
“Crane, back away from there,” I said, still inching my way toward him.
“But they’ll call me a chicken,” Crane said.
“Who?”
“Noah and Luke. They dared me to do it.”
“Crane, you’re in a dangerous place right now. You could die,” I said.
“They said it doesn’t hurt that much.” He looked down at the patio below, maybe at his sister, who was shouting at him to back up and go inside.
I had a hard time swallowing while I digested what he’d just said.
“You mean Noah and Luke want you to die?” I asked.
“So I can be like them.” Crane nodded.
“You can’t do that, Crane.” I was easing closer and closer on my hands and knees across the roof, but I didn’t want to rush. I could have startled him, or lost my footing. “You still have a long life ahead. And your family will miss you.”
Crane looked at the invisible boy-shape in the rain beside him, as though listening.
“I’ll still be in the house,” Crane said. “I’ll just be a ghost.”
“That’s not the same. And remember, your family can’t see and hear ghosts like you can. They’ll barely know you’re there.” This was cutting into my heart a little, trying to talk a seven-year-old boy down from suicide. “Believe me, you don’t want to die, Crane.”
The boy-shape in the rain beside him turned toward me.
Then it charged.
It became an odd roundish shape, like an elongated ball, as it flew at me through the sheets of rain. I didn’t have time to grab my flashlight from my holster. I didn’t have time to do anything except try to tighten my grip on the slick shingles, the rainwater coursing around my fingertips in a rushing creek.
The thing struck me hard, striking me like a bowling ball launched from a catapult. I toppled and slid down the steep roof, my arms and then my head going right over the edge.
Stacey turned her flashlight on me, shouting my name, and Juniper pointed.
The bricks far below shimmered in the light from the kitchen windows, coated in a sheen of water that would do nothing to soften my face-first impact against the patio.
I grabbed onto the overflowing gutter and felt it creak under me. I tried to dig my toes into the shingles. I’m not sure if that helped, but I’d stopped sliding, and my skull had not bashed open on the hard red surface below.
I looked over at Crane, who remained right at the corner of the roof, staring at me. He looked scared now, where before he’d had more of a distant, hypnotized look on his face.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t move.”
I pulled myself back from the edge and crawled toward him. I held out my hand.
“Come on, Crane,” I said. “Come inside with me.”
He glanced from me to the bricks below, as if indecisive now. I looked out for the ghostly boy-shape in the rain, but I couldn’t find where he was. Not exactly comforting.
“Crane!” his mother’s voice shouted. Toolie had finally made it up the stairs and to the attic window. I wondered if the other boy-ghost had delayed her somehow, or maybe she’d been there shouting the whole time, but the high winds had eaten up her voice.
He turned his head at the sound of Toolie shouting for him. Now he looked flat-out terrified, not indecisive at all, as if the craziness of what he’d done was finally sinking in.
“Come on, Crane,” I said. “Take my hand.”
The boy slowly reached out to me. His fingers were cold.
I helped him to his hands and knees and pointed him back to the open window. Then I crawled along behind him. If he slipped, I would either stop him from falling, or I would cushion him when we slammed into the bricks below. Too bad there was nobody to cushion me—that was one major flaw in my idea.
He inched his way up the roof. I was tense, waiting for one of the boy ghosts to strike at him, or at me.
Crane made it up the window, th
ough, and Toolie grabbed him as soon as he was in reach. She grunted as she lifted him inside.
I crawled in after them, easing my feet down onto the chest, watching the shadows suspiciously.
Toolie was shouting at Crane, who cringed, and then she hugged him.
Outside the window, two hollow boy-shapes stood in the rain, watching me. Noah and Luke might have been children when they’d died, but we couldn’t afford to think of them as benign, mischievous little Caspers anymore.
They had tried to convince Crane to kill himself. They were now the enemy.
I closed the window and latched it shut, and the boy-shapes vanished.
Chapter Thirteen
A little while later, Stacey and I sat in the living room along with the entire family—the excessive clutter of furniture meant everybody had comfortable seating.
Toolie had made Crane change his clothes, and now he sat beside her on an antique Edwardian chaise while she dried his hair with a SpongeBob towel. Gord watched his son from a nearby chair, clearly worried. Juniper drowsed in one of the high-backed chairs, looking drained.
“I still don’t understand why you’d go up there,” Toolie said to Crane. “Have you lost your mind?”
“They said it would be okay,” Crane whispered.
“Who said?” Gord asked his son. “Your invisible...friends?”
Crane shrugged. “They’re not invisible to me.”
“Crane, those boys are not your friends,” I said. “Nobody who wants you to die is your friend. That’s a good general rule of thumb in life.”
“They just want me to be with them,” Crane said. “They want me to help them.”
“Help them with what?” I asked.
Crane fell silent.
“Answer her, Crane,” Toolie said. “I mean it.”
“Just help them,” he whispered. “They don’t want me to talk about it.”
“I don’t give two saltines and a bowl of soup what they want,” Toolie said. “Promise me you’ll never do anything like that again, Crane. Promise me.” She turned his head to make him look her in the eyes.
“Okay,” he said, but there wasn’t a lot of conviction.