by Angie Fox
Nothing.
I shoved my hands into my pockets. “Cripes.” It was worth a try.
Maybe there was a hidden part of the house, or a secret passage. I could really use the ghost right about now. “Help me,” I said, as I ran my fingers over the paneling on the second floor landing. I moved down each stair, feeling the wall as I went. “Help me.”
That’s when Creely nearly ran me over.
“Watch it,” I told her.
“Hey, sorry. I thought you might actually be walking down the stairs.”
“I’m looking for hidden passages.”
She stopped a few stairs below me. “That’s an outside wall, sweetheart.”
“I know that. But wouldn’t this be a great place for a passage? You could make it a foot or two wide in this spot. Nobody would suspect.”
She looked at me like I was nuts. “It’s a load bearing wall. In an old house like this, of course, it would be a foot thick.”
Yes, well some of us weren’t engineers.
She gave me a cock-eyed look, clearly deciding if she should stay and harass me, or if she should continue barreling through the house.
“Come here,” she said, heading down the stairs. “The trick to discovering any kind of hidden room or structural oddity is to look at what you can see.”
“Have you been brewing more tea?” I asked, following her down.
“No, look,” she said, as we stood in the foyer, with our backs to the front door. “If we went outside, you could see that the walls are built in proportion on the outside, so no secret passages there. Then you simply move forward,” she said, leading me through the house. “The sitting room is out. No missing spaces, so to speak. I’ve already checked the dining room.” She shrugged. “I suck at cards.”
We moved farther back into the hallway.
It was old and had these neat woodcarvings.
“Now I wonder what’s behind that wall,” she mused.
Was this a quiz? “It’s the stairs.”
“No. The stairs are toward the front.” She tilted her head, studying it. “That back part doesn’t line up.”
I leaned forward to look.
“See?” She continued, starting to get a little excited. “The kitchen doesn’t go that far back into that space.”
No kidding. I knew Creely was smart, but this was something else. “You think it’s something?”
I checked the kitchen. It didn’t extend back this far. It was true—there was some missing space. “I’ll bet something is behind here,” I said, running my fingers over the carved mahogany paneling.
“Yeah, but how do we access it?” she asked, taking a look into the kitchen.
“That wall is really plain.” It would be hard to hide anything.
“Doesn’t mean they didn’t.”
I heard her checking things out in there while I worked finding anything unusual about the hall paneling.
There were lions with claws bared, fighting what looked to be centaurs. It was like they were in a jungle with these wild looking flowers and plants that sprouting up everywhere. They were as big as the animals. Then you had the cosmos above, with swirling planets and stars.
After a while, Creely joined me. We did a systematic check. It was slow going, and I almost started to doubt, when Creely touched a lever. It had been perfectly hidden in the scrollwork of a toothsome creature holding a battle shield.
“Amazing,” I said as the door swung open on a dark room.
“Logic. These things are never in plants or bunnies,” she said, moving past me, feeling for a light.
There wasn’t one.
Oh great. I was about to go into a hidden, dark room with someone who may be possessed. I blew out a breath. Problem was, I needed to see this through. I’d have to be on my guard.
We heard the back door to the kitchen open, and then my mom’s voice as well as Grandma’s.
“Quickly,” Creely said.
I unhooked the Maglite from my switch star belt and followed her into the secret room.
Chapter Sixteen
The air was stuffy and stale.
“I’m shutting the door,” Creely warned, before it clicked closed behind her.
Darkness enveloped us, save for the beam from my flashlight. “Do we know how to get out?” I asked, shining my light over the wood paneling she’d closed.
Creely’s rusty laugh cut through the gloom. “That wasn’t your goal, now was it?”
Yeek. I hoped she was joking. It was hard to tell sometimes with biker witches. The truly awful thing is that I wouldn’t know whether or not she was out to kill me, until she tried.
It was eerily quiet.
Creely moved slowly through the murky darkness. I had to keep my head about me or I’d put a switch star through her by accident.
A thick burgundy carpet covered the floors. I didn’t see how we were going to get under it in order to check for a marker. Dark wood bookshelves lined the walls. I shone my light up.
The room had two stories worth of shelves, with a walkway on the top level. There must have been a rolling ladder at one point. I didn’t see it now. The room didn’t have any windows. It wouldn’t. We were in the very center of the house.
Unease prickled at the back of my neck. I didn’t like the lack of exits. It made the place feel closed in, tomb-like.
An ornate wooden desk dominated the center of the room. Creely eased into the leather chair behind it. She struck a match and lit one of the thick white candles on the desk.
“You think you ought to be setting fires in here? I asked, coughing a little against the sharp smell of the match.
“At least I’m keeping my cigars in my pocket,” she said, lighting two more candles off the original one.
Fine. As long as we didn’t burn the house down.
Creely took a look at the desk. I kept an eye on her while I searched for any more passages, or any interesting books.
Grimoire of Pope Leo, 1740
Spiritual Lessons from the Brownings
Fléau des Démons et Sorciers I pulled the cracking black leather book off the shelf. It was a black bible. Our library owner may have started off as a hobbyist, but he’d ended up with some pretty twisted reading material.
And back it went. I’d seen enough dark texts to last me a lifetime.
I turned in a slow circle, my light hovering over the dusty volumes on the shelves.
“Take a look at this,” Creely said, hunched over an old journal with a cracked green leather cover.
“What’d you find?” I asked, moving to look over her shoulder.
“I don’t know. It was behind a false panel in the desk.” The first page revealed it was the personal journal of Stuart T. Russell.
“Hey,” she said, swiping my light and turning the book around so she could get a better angle. “That’s the guy who built this place.” She paged through the journal while I tried to see. “He was a fancy pants railroad baron.”
“You know about him?”
“I like his taste in architecture.” She shrugged. “This isn’t a well-known building, but it’s been on my list of places to see. It says here that Russell broke ground in 1889. Finished in 1891. Ha.”
“What?”
“You want to know what’s funny about that?”
“I will if you tell me.”
“He was a freak about the occult. They like to do things in threes. Three years to build. Three spires along the top of the house. Three main paths in the garden.” She glanced back at me. “Don’t tell me it was a mistake that the herb garden is laid out in a pentacle.”
I’d been too busy looking at the markers.
She pressed the book open to a page filled with pen and ink drawings of spiders. They were creepy looking, certainly ugly with their long legs and fangs. Occult symbols for death and rebirth were etched into their bulbous bodies.
“What is it with spiders in this place?” I asked, running my finger over the yellowed page.
“Spiders are an occult symbol in themselves,” Creely said. “They’re linked to treachery and death in a lot of cultures. Think of the Greeks and how Athena turned Arachne into a spider. Or how the Christians have linked spiders to an evil force that sucks blood from believers.”
I liked this place less and less all the time.
“What’s the point in all of this? A smart guy like Russell had to have a game plan. What did he want?”
“Maybe he wanted to be the best crazy Victorian occultist he could be.” Creely kept paging through the book.
“Give me a second.” I closed my eyes and focused on the book. I pictured it in my mind, I tried to feel the essence of the man who created it. I opened myself to its energies, its power.
Nothing.
I don’t know why I kept trying. Except that I refused to stop doing everything I could, merely because I was compromised.
Creely kept my light trained over the yellowing book as she paged through an array of sun and moon symbols, as well as nonsensical messages written in capital letters.
“See me now.” I read. “I am here.” “Build my garden.” There were pages of them.
“You can read that?” She shook her head. “Of course you can.” Her light hovered over the words. “What language are they using?”
“I have no idea.”
“It looks to me like a code,” she said. “Different occult groups used to make up their own languages.”
It made sense.
Creely paused, thinking. “They’d get messages from an Ouija board and record them.”
“Why was he using a Ouija board?” He had markers. It was the difference between two cups and a string versus a cell phone.
“Maybe he didn’t have anybody to talk to,” she said, missing the point. “I think he was some kind of recluse.”
“That’s sad.”
“Yeah, there was this huge scandal. I forget the story. Then boom, he’s stuck here.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, warming to it. “What happened?” It may help me figure out this house.
Creely thought for a moment. “He may have been the one of the guys funneling money off the top in the Credit Mobilier scandal. No. Wait. Wrong railroad.” She rubbed a hand over her chin. “Lizzie Borden was the one with the axe.”
“These Victorians were a feisty bunch”
She slapped her hands together. “I got it. Russell was the one who killed his virgin bride on their wedding night.”
“What?” I demanded. For the first time in my life, I made a biker witch jump. “We have a dead bride in this house?” Of course we did. Hadn’t I seen her? She was certainly wearing white.
“Nobody ever figured out for sure if he killed her,” she said, backtracking. As if that made a difference. She was dead and I’d seen her.
I walked straight into the darkness, spun back around, and fought the urge to throttle Creely. “When was somebody going to tell me about this?”
“I just thought of it,” she said, defensively. “Now I’m sorry I did,” she added under her breath.
“This is lovely. An occult house with a dead bride.”
“Chill, Lizzie. We’re here for your wedding, not hers.”
Yes, well I didn’t know if the ghost realized that or not.
For all I knew, I had vengeful poltergeist bridezilla on my hands. She was there at the attack, watching me as I choked. “This is a dangerous place.”
Creely set the book aside. “Come on. You could get attacked in Chuck-E-Cheese, so don’t go blaming everything in this house.”
“Tell me about his wife.”
She sighed. “I don’t know. She was way younger than him. I think she lived on a farm north of here. I doubt she came from a hugely rich family because they didn’t do a ton of investigating after she was strangled on her wedding night.”
“Sure. Why would they?” I started to pace. I’d be willing to bet I’d stood on her grave when Grandma and I had visited that farmers market.
Hadn’t we seen the remains of an old farmhouse? Her headstone had been large, and expensive no doubt. Given by a guilty husband? Or perhaps bought by a family who could do nothing else but mourn.
I recalled the inscription on the stone. “Her name was Elizabeth, wasn’t it?”
Creely shook her head. “I have no idea.”
“Yes, well, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen her ghost,” and cripes—I had her grave dirt in my locket. I had to get rid of it, but not here in the house. Somewhere away from the markers. “She wants me to help her.”
“Don’t.” Creely said, closing the book and stuffing it into the back of her jeans. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with in this house.”
Understatement of the year.
The kicker was, I couldn’t control that. I just had to be on my game, and hope for the best. How sad to reach a point where a gothic bridal ghost was the least of my problems.
I stood for a moment, hands on my hips, thinking. I couldn’t worry. Or wait. The only thing I could do to change any of this was to find that third marker.
“There’s something we’re not seeing,” I told the biker witch.
Creely grinned, like it was a challenge. “Then let’s hit this sucker.”
We attacked Russell’s office. We picked the locks on the main desk drawer and Creely cracked the combination on a safe hidden behind some books. We found a metal case with another magical diary of sorts. This one had an art nouveau type pentacle, which made Creely roll her eyes.
There were handmade talismans, a round altar cloth with the light and life cross and the six-pointed star on it. We came across a few wands that Creely declared ‘no better than twigs’ and a crystal ball with a crack down the middle.
“Amateurs,” the biker witch muttered.
“When did this guy ever have time to run a railroad?” I asked, as we laid out all the stuff on the desk.
“I don’t think he had many guests in here,” she said, eyeing the bookshelves.
I followed her gaze and saw that the ceiling was painted with a scene from revelation. Or at least I hoped it was biblical. I cringed inwardly. It sure wasn’t white magic.
Finally, I crawled under the desk and was rewarded with a handful of dust bunnies. And a few spiders. Ick. At least these were alive and of the normal variety. I rubbed my hands on my dress.
“Come, oh bride to be,” Creely said, as she started blowing out the candles. A chill ran though my veins and I stood as fast as I could. Then again, if Creely had wanted to kill me, why hadn’t she tried already?
The biker witch stood by the wall that opened to the hallway. “As much as I like insane nightmares, I think we’ve seen all there is in here.”
No. This couldn’t be the end of it. I tried to think, to imagine where else we could go.
I stood thinking for a moment. “Creely, do you need a couple of big stone walls to support a house like this?”
She shone the light at me, catching me in the face. “Care to be a bit more specific?”
“Stop,” I said, as she lowered the Maglite. I blinked back the dots in my line of vision while I tried to picture the U-shaped bend in the basement. “Would you need two parallel load bearing walls about fifteen feet apart?”
“No.” She began heading for the exit. “What’s going on?”
She had no idea how tired I was of that question.
“I think there’s a room directly below us.” There had to be. “It’s at the center of the house, walled in on all sides. I have to get down there.”
She sighed, checked her watch. “You know your mom’s throwing you a wedding shower in about a half hour.”
I’d totally forgotten. “What day is it?”
She gave me an exaggerated bug-eyed stare. “Call in the necromancers, hell’s heated up.”
Ha, ha. “The wedding shower can wait.”
The biker witch snarfed. “Have you met your mom?” She ran a thumb along the scrollwork on the wall, searching
for the hidden lever.
“Creely. This is important to me. I’m the bride. If I want to find a secret room instead of sit there and get presents, it’s my choice. My wedding.”
She turned to me, looked me up and down. “Well, why the hell not?” She dug through her front pocket and produced a book of matches. “Gotta keep the bride happy.” She handed me my flashlight on the way over to the desk. Then she relit the largest white taper candle and held it aloft. “As my gift to you, I will get you into the secret room under the creepy occult mansion.”
“Thank you,” I said, meaning every word. “It’s so much better than hand towels.”
She gave me a long look, the candlelight accenting the lines on her face. “Let’s hope you still feel that way once you’re down there.”
We searched the bookcases again. We searched the floor. And then I saw a book on Pluto.
“Don’t read,” Creely said, inspecting the bookcases, trying to find a hidden lever.
“Don’t worry,” I said, opening the first page.
She stopped searching. “Is this a demon slayer instinct?”
“More of a gut feeling. This is a book on a planet—”
“Pluto’s not a planet,” Creely said automatically.
“—shelved with a bunch of books on demonology. I paged through and almost dropped it when I saw the center of the book had been cut out, and a key neatly inserted. It was made of iron and nearly as long as my hand.
“It would be hard to lose that one,” Creely said.
“Hard to hide it, too.” If someone went through all this trouble, it was probably important. I tucked my Maglite under my arm started digging it out.
“Give me your light.” Creely snatched the light, nearly making me drop the book. Which made the key pop out. Okay, two birds…
She shone my light into the space where the book had been shelved. “Bingo.”
There was an antique keyhole built into the wall.
“That wasn’t so difficult, was it?” Creely asked.
“Speak for yourself.”
I handed her the key and she inserted it into the lock. Then I stood back, my right hand on my switch stars as she pushed the door to the bookcase back. It resisted for a moment. The hinges groaned as the door reluctantly swung back into a darkened stairwell.