by JL Bryan
My feet slid out from under me on the soaking-wet floor. I toppled over backwards.
Right into the water.
The cold hit me hard as I landed on my back on the tub. My hand banged against the stone-tile wall. If the water had been just a notch colder, I would have been crashing into solid ice.
Her voice echoed again, but it didn’t sound dead and flat this time—it was a gleeful shriek, ricocheting off the bathroom walls.
Something slammed into my chest, just below the base of my throat, and shoved me under the frigid water.
My face went under, and I barely managed to take a breath on the way down.
An invisible hand pressed down on the crown of my head, holding me there as I tried to flail my way up and out of the water. It was too strong. I was trapped, and the meager sip of air in my lungs was fading fast.
I lashed out with both hands, having dropped my flashlight somewhere along the way. I could feel a patch above where the air felt unnaturally cold and thick, but my fingers trailed right through it. There was nothing solid to grasp. This is why you don’t want to get into a wrestling match with a ghost.
A painful pressure built in my chest and my head. I could feel my struggles weaken and my arms start to go limp.
My lips wanted to open and suck in air, but I’d die instantly, my lungs filled with near-freezing water. I had to resist.
Spots floated behind my eyelids. This was it, killed by an evil child-ghost in a bath tub. Aunt Clarice from Virginia would never understand.
For a moment, I thought I saw the chiseled, high-cheekbone face of Anton Clay, the ghost who’d killed my parents in a house fire. His irises were red, and a devilish smile played on his lips.
“Now,” he whispered.
I felt a sudden electric jolt in my ears, followed by a searing pain in my right ear that spread to engulf that whole side of my head.
My headset. It must have shorted out underwater and fired a nasty shock from the right earphone, where the microphone and battery wire were located.
Now I’d learn what it was like to drown and get electrocuted at the same time.
All the pressure holding me in the tub evaporated. I pushed my head out of the water and took a deep gulp of sweet, cool, fresh air.
Maybe the electric shock had stunned the ghost, too, interfering with her electrical field somehow. If so, I wasn’t going to count on it to last long.
Feeling my way around in total darkness, I found the faucet and hauled myself up until I was sitting on the edge of the tub. The girl was no longer providing a helpful unholy-white glow to help me see.
She shrieked again, her voice echoing.
I dropped to the flooded floor and rolled onto my stomach. I wasn’t eager to regain my feet on the slippery tiles, which would just make it easy for her to shove me into the water all over again, especially in my current weakened state. I was still gasping desperately for air.
She grabbed at my limbs, but I hugged the floor. It’s a classic act of civil disobedience—refuse to obey or cooperate, no matter what. If they want to move you, turn into dead weight, make them use as much of their energy as possible.
I began to advance through the water, flat on my belly like a Marine in boot camp.
She seized a big handful of my hair and twisted it, sending shooting pains all through my scalp. I cried out in pain, but she had bigger plans than just hurting me.
She slammed my head face-first into the water on the floor, which was just deep enough to cover my mouth and nostrils. They say a child can drown in less than an inch of water. I guess I can, too.
With a great effort, I managed to turn my head sideways. I could now breathe out of one corner of my mouth, but I couldn’t open my lips wide enough to scream for help.
I kept wriggling forward, wondering which device on my belt might short out next. I was guessing the iPod speaker. It could hit me with a nice shock right to the torso.
At last, my fingers found the rough wooden surface of the door. All I’d done was crawl across the bathroom, but it felt like I’d just swum the English Channel.
With all my strength, I shoved myself up to a swaying position on my knees, then felt my way up to the doorknob.
The door opened all by itself, the edge of it cracking into my face at high speed. I heard a pop in my nose, then tasted blood on my lips.
I tumbled back against the bathroom vanity. She’d hit me pretty hard, but she’d also let the water out and allowed in a little bit of light from the hallway. The pool of water spread out across the hallway floorboards and lapped against the baseboard on the far side.
I grabbed the edge of the door, determined not to let it close again, and crawled out into the hall.
She screeched a third time. I felt a cool breeze as she flew over my head, but I didn’t see her. She’d turned invisible.
The night vision camera that had been sitting on its tripod in the hallway, pointed at the faucet inside the bathroom, lifted from the ground and flew at me. I rolled to one side before the heavy camera smashed into the floor where I’d been.
Further down the hall, a kind of whirlwind swept up all my gear. The thermal and night vision cameras pointed at the crafts room door exploded as if they’d been blasted with a high-caliber shotgun at close range. Their tripods clattered to the floor.
Everything else—my mattress, my toolbox, my tablet, my purse, my spare flashlight—slid away down the least-used hallway, the one that housed the two guest bedrooms. They stopped just before they reached the narrow side staircase that led down to the first floor.
I tensed, waiting for her to swoop back and attack me. By habit, I reached for my flashlight, but of course it wasn’t there. I wasn’t sure I could count on the music-blast approach to work, either. The speaker on my belt seemed waterlogged and would probably fry if I tried to switch it on.
My flashlight was still in the bathroom somewhere, and I definitely wasn’t going to do her the favor of putting myself next to the Overflowing Tub of Death again. If she wanted me to return to that room, she’d have to drag me kicking, screaming, and biting.
Footsteps echoed on the narrow steps at the end of the hall. More than one person, as if Eliza had invited her murderous big brothers to join her.
I tensed. Virtually unarmed, I figured my best move was probably going to be running like crazy.
“Ellie?” a voice asked. Female, and not ghostly.
Stacey and Jacob clambered up the stairs, Stacey looking a little scared. She relaxed the instant she saw me.
“Oh, sweet!” she said. “I lost your signal.” She tapped her headset, then seemed to notice I was dripping wet. “What happened?”
“I decided to take a quick bath.” I untangled my headset from my soaked hair. My right ear still had a tender, burning feeling from the shock, and it also had a ringing sound that made it a little difficult to hear what she was saying.
“You had a bath, seriously?” She frowned a little, confused. “You look pretty banged up.”
“No, not seriously. That was just me being hilarious. I met Eliza’s ghost and she tried to drown me.”
“Holy cow!” Stacey gasped. She and Jacob walked carefully around my stuff scattered all along the hallway. “Are you okay?”
“I’m still breathing.”
“Good.” She embraced me. Stacey’s more of a hugging type than I am.
“Looks like the ghost did some redecorating, too,” Jacob said, stepping around my mattress.
“I think these two cameras might have malfunctioned or something, because I lost the signals...” Stacey pointed to the cameras monitoring Isaiah’s door, and she noticed they were broken into a hundred pieces. “Oh, yeah, that’ll do it,” she said.
“She’s a nasty one. Murdered the whole family.” I finally returned to the bathroom and recovered my flashlight. The remote control for the trap, which I’d set down on the bathroom counter while I washed my hands, now lay facedown on the wet floor. I hoped it hadn’t fr
ied like my headset.
I picked up the remote and turned it over.
The display screen was blank.
“I guess this one’s ruined,” I told Stacey as I returned to the hallway. She and Jacob were headed straight for Isaiah’s door. “Stop! What are you doing?”
“Oh, did you miss the whole show?” Stacey asked.
“What show? I was busy with my own show. It was about bathroom safety.”
“We got him,” Stacey said. “He took the bait.”
“When?”
“Just a minute ago. The trap sealed up—I thought you’d done it.”
“It had to be the automatic sensors,” I said. “Isaiah was inside? You’re sure?”
“I can show you the video,” Stacey said. She opened the door, and we followed her inside.
Chapter Eighteen
The crafts room still felt cold and clammy to me, but Isaiah’s presence had been strong, and it would leave residual energy for a while even if he was gone. It was a dark spiritual residue, like a layer of rank oil coating everything. The light switch still didn’t work, so all three of us held flashlights.
“See?” Stacey pointed at the stamper, which had slammed down the lid and closed the trap.
“It’s definitely been sprung,” I said, leaning closer to inspect it. “I’d like to have a look with my thermal goggles.”
“We saw it all on thermal,” Stacey said. “That purple-black cloud shrank and condensed into the trap. He totally took the bait.”
I looked at the little items on the bottom, the rusty miniature locomotive, the old silver dime.
A thin curl of darkness hovered in the air just above the locomotive, like a loose thread taken from a black thundercloud. As I gazed at it, it twisted and disappeared, in a way that reminded me of how Isaiah had turned away and vanished the first night I’d seen him. He’d made himself invisible.
He could hide, but he couldn’t run.
I lifted the trap out of the stamper.
“We still have a few more ghosts to hack through,” I said. “But job one is to get this monster out of our clients’ house. Let’s take him down to the van. Then I want to review that footage, Stacey.”
“It’s good stuff. We should put it on our website,” Stacey said.
“We don’t have a website.”
“We should have one!” Stacey said. “And a Facebook page, and definitely Flickr. And a YouTube!”
“Let’s talk about it later,” I said. Much, much later, I thought.
We carried the trap down the hall, past the camera wreckage strewn all over the floor.
“Jacob, sensing anything?” I asked. “Hit me with some psychic news.”
“I think you got the nasty thing out of that room,” he said. “It’s still pretty bad in there, but it’ll clean up. I can’t say anything else in the house has changed...”
“We’re not done yet,” I told him.
As we reached the main stairs to the front hall, the trap slipped out of my arms. I thought I’d dropped it at first, and felt my heart sink a little as it banged against one of the steps below. I was still damp from the bath tub, so I was the last person who should have been carrying that trap.
It’s the kind of detail that only becomes obvious once it’s much too late.
Then the trap bounced up high, above our heads, until it smashed into the ceiling. That wasn’t natural. It smashed itself along the molding, then careened downward through the air, bashed a hole in the wall, and then banged itself several times against a lower stair over on the middle flight of the stairway. It rose into the air and shook back and forth.
“It’s like a Mexican jumping bean,” Jacob said, watching with a slightly amused smile.
“Um, Ellie?” Stacey asked. “Have you ever had a ghost break out of a trap before?”
“That...really shouldn’t be possible,” I said.
The trap slammed against the wall again, then spun over the railing and sailed high in the air all the way down the hall, finally smashing into the wall above the front door.
Toolie, Juniper, and Crane already stood at the living room door, drawn by all the noise. They looked at the three of us charging down the stairs.
“What in the Lands’ End catalog--?” Toolie began.
“Everybody duck!” I shouted, while Stacey and Jacob followed me down the last flight.
The trap hurtled down from the ceiling, rushed toward us, and crashed into the hardwood floor right in front of Toolie, giving the floor the kind of deep dent you might expect from an angry, stamping elephant. Then it flung itself against an old high-backed chair hard enough to crack the armrest.
It spun toward us, and we ducked as it sailed past and smashed through the glass pane of the back door under the second flight of the wraparound stairs.
Stacey and I reached the shattered door fast enough to see the cylindrical trap slam into the brick patio.
The lid blew off, and it was as if someone had smashed open a tank of liquid nitrogen.
Cold white smoke flooded the patio in an expanding circle, turning the layer of rainwater coating the bricks into a thin sheet of ice. More ice encased the wet patio furniture, and rows of icicles formed on the slats of the wooden chairs and tables.
A powerful gust of freezing air rushed in through the broken door, blowing my hair straight back. It felt like a blast of wind from an arctic hurricane.
It carried with it countless little raindrops frozen into glittering beads of ice. These pelted Stacey, Jacob and me like buckshot, nicking our hands and faces while we tried to dodge aside.
When the wind stopped, we glanced around the hallway, waiting for the next attack.
Toolie and Juniper stared at us open-mouthed from the threshold of the living room. Gord approached them, rolling his oxygen tank, and leaned against the wall.
Crane wasn’t looking at us at all, but up at the wraparound staircase behind us. He slowly raised one pointing finger.
I turned to see Isaiah’s ghost flicker up the second flight of steps, visible only for half a second before it vanished again. It flickered again on the third flight, then it was gone, probably down the upstairs hall and back to its lair.
“He escaped your trap,” Crane said. A flat, toneless declaration.
“It looks like...” I didn’t really know what to say, so I opened the shattered door, stepped over the broken glass, and retrieved the trap and lid from the rapidly dissolving layer of ice that covered the brick floor of the patio.
The lid was distended and puckered. It had taken great force to do that, twisting the hard plastic and the copper mesh until the trap was uncorked. The dangerous ghost had escaped like a genie from its bottle.
I carried the ruined trap back inside.
Everybody was looking at me—the family, plus Stacey and Jacob—obviously expecting me to have some answers.
I didn’t have any. The best I could do was try to play it off and hopefully keep everyone from panicking.
I took a deep breath and sighed, trying to look frustrated rather than afraid.
“Looks like we’ll have to do this the hard way,” I said.
“What’s...the hard way?” Gord asked.
“There’s really no time to explain,” I said, which was better than stating the truth: I have no idea what to do right now. “Stacey, we need to grab some gear from the van. Jacob, can you hang out here and keep an eye on the family?”
“Did that ghost really get out of the trap?” Toolie asked me.
“It did,” I said. “But we’re going to take care of it.”
I tried to look as confident as possible while Stacey and I grabbed our umbrellas and walked out the door.
“What are we actually going to do?” Stacey asked while we trudged through the heavy rain. Sheet lightning illuminated the yard around us. The pond had grown to swallow most of the grass and now lapped at the brick patio like the edge of a lake.
“I sort of have an idea,” I replied. “I don�
��t know if it will work.”
We gathered back in the living room, by the light of our flashlights, since all the power in the house was still off.
“Stacey, let’s see if the camera in the hallway caught anything,” I said. It was the only camera that the trap might have passed on its path of destruction, but it was aimed at the faucet in the powder room, so I didn’t have a lot of hope.
Stacey grabbed the thermal camera itself from the hall, and I watched the display screen as she reversed the recording. She stopped when something flickered across the screen, then played it in slow motion.
The trap tumbled past in midair, its interior purple-black, filled with the ghost of Isaiah Ridley.
A greenish blob accompanied it. Blue spots speckled the green blob, growing larger as it expended energy flinging the trap around the hall and trying to pry it open.
The blob and the trap tumbled out of sight.
“It was the poltergeist,” I said. I felt a little relieved—we hadn’t met a ghost who could break free of a trap, at least. If we had, it might mean the traps were getting obsolete.
“Why would the poltergeist want to break him out?” Stacey asked.
“It’s hard for me to find its motivation,” Jacob said. “Since it was never human...”
“Maybe it needs the ghost of Isaiah.” I looked up at the ceiling over the front door. The crafts room, Isaiah’s lair, was just beyond the ceiling. “This is starting to make some sense.”
“It is?” Stacey asked.
“Stacey, you’re going to hang onto the ghost cannon.” We’d brought the enormous, powerful, generally unstable and unreliable device in from the van. It was a hefty but allegedly portable source of light, bigger than a bazooka, with as much lumen-power as a Vegas spotlight.
“Cool,” she said. I helped her strap on the heavy battery pack, which she had to wear on a harness on her back. “We’re going up to his room, then?”
“You’re staying down here to protect our clients,” I said. “I’m taking Jacob with me.”
“But I want to come with you,” Stacey protested.
“That’s an order, Stacey.”