by JL Bryan
I returned my night vision goggles to my toolbox and strapped on my thermal goggles instead, leaving them on my forehead in case we needed them. This ghost, for whatever reason, showed up on thermal much better than night vision.
“Hey, when do I get my own thermal goggles?” Stacey whispered.
“They’re expensive. Maybe after your, um, probationary period.”
“I didn’t know I had a probationary period.”
“Sh,” I said. “It’s after midnight now. Watch for ghosts.”
We kept our eyes on the array of camera display screens. On the thermal camera, the candles showed up as glowing red and yellow spots in an otherwise blue-tinged room. On Stacey’s laptop, we could see soundwaves captured by the high-sensitivity microphone, which could monitor above and below the normal range of human hearing.
I laid my Mel Meter and the remote control for the trap side by side on the floor in front of me, so I could see whether the sensors in the trap showed a lower temperature or higher EMF signature than the room around me.
Then we waited.
The big house lay silent around us, the three flickering candles casting huge, shifting shadows all around the walls, especially where the light shone through the sculptured balusters of the staircase and the second-floor walkway.
After a minute, I heard a creak, and then another. It could have been nothing.
Another creak. Stacey looked at me.
Then a single footstep on the front stairs. Just one, but clear as a drumbeat.
“Did you hear—” Stacey began.
“Sh!” I slid my thermals down over my eyes and looked toward the staircase. A flick of deep purple appeared and vanished at the foot of the stairs.
My viewpoint became more blue, and I could feel the room turning colder around me. More tiny motes of deep-cold purple appeared in the air below the broken baluster, several feet above the three glowing red spots inside the trap. They blinked in and out of visibility. More and more of them began to appear, though, until I was looking at a swirling cloud of freezing cold maybe a foot across.
“Ellie!” Stacey whispered. “The thermal camera—”
I put a finger over her lips, while her eyes were bugging out. We couldn’t risk scaring away the ghost.
The fine purple mist drifted downward and backward under the walkway, as if a light breeze were blowing it to the hallway door. I tensed, ready to see Mercy’s reaction when she found it nailed shut.
The mist hovered there, becoming denser, vaguely beginning to suggest the shape of a woman. Then every particle of it froze at once.
A bang sounded from the door, as if someone had knocked on it angrily.
There was a second bang. Then the mist became animated again, condensing more into a clear woman-shape.
The readout graph spiked on the audio app—the high-sensitivity microphone had picked up something, though I hadn’t heard a sound.
The woman-shape flowed toward the door to the front parlor instead, which I’d closed but not locked or barricaded in any way. She moved so fast that she blurred back into a cloud shape.
She had totally ignored our trap.
“Uh-oh,” I whispered, hopping to my feet and picking up the remote control. “I think she’s trying to find another way around.”
I ran to the trap, carefully reached past the burning candles, and drew out the necklace.
The ghost reached the parlor door, and it swung open with a squeak.
“Holy cow,” Stacey whispered. She grasped her flashlight, but fortunately didn’t turn it on. She couldn’t see the ghost except when it was on camera, near the trap, so the rusty sound of the opening door had surprised her and made her jump a little. “Holy cow, holy cow…”
“Mercy,” I said, stepping slowly toward the ghost, the way you might deal with a spooked horse. “Mercy Cutledge. Can you hear me?”
The purple mist seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then it condensed again into a woman-shape, facing me from the open parlor door.
We regarded each other for a moment, though I could just barely discern the general area of her face.
When she spoke to me, I didn’t so much hear the word as feel it stabbing deep into my brain like the tip of an icicle.
Leave. The word bored into my head a second time, making me wince. Leave.
“Why do you want us to leave, Mercy?” I asked.
She tilted toward me—her whole body at once, as though she were stiff as a board from her head to her feet—and drifted a little closer. She seemed to be examining me. It was an uncomfortable feeling for me, a sense of growing dread.
Then she began to dissolve into mist, the mass of her floating back toward the parlor door, tendrils of her reaching back into the dark parlor. I was losing her, as if she’d decided I was of no further interest.
“Mercy.” I spoke calmly but firmly, as if I had some kind of unquestionable authority. I held up the silver teardrop. “Is this your necklace, Mercy? I found it for you.”
The mass of purple mist hesitated, then drifted my way again.
“Ellie,” Stacey whispered. “Ellie, I can see her. She’s manifesting.”
I raised my thermal goggles and parked them on my forehead. With my own eyes, I could see a wispy, transparent image of Mercy floating towards me, the hollow holes of her eyes fixated on the necklace dangling from my fingers. Her dark dress faded into nothingness somewhere around her hips, and her legs remained altogether invisible. She seemed to be wading through the air toward me.
Her face wore a blank expression at first…then contorted into extreme anger. Ghosts’ facial expressions aren’t limited by minor details like the boundaries of skin and muscle. They are pure energy and emotion. Sometimes they can give you a look that goes beyond the extremes of what living human faces can manage.
That was the kind of look Mercy gave me now, her eyes turning into triangular slashes that made me think of a jack-o’-lantern, the kind that’s carved with the intent to scare rather than amuse. Her mouth, too, deformed into a huge angry frown that slashed down either side of her chin while also baring her teeth and snarling.
She darted toward me, and I braced myself—she was fast and filled with rage. Her voice rang in my head, just a raw, wordless screech.
Then she vanished.
After a few seconds, Stacey whispered, “What happened?”
“I’m not sure.” I drew the thermals back on, looking around the room. It was all still unnaturally cold, tinged with blue, but I couldn’t find the dense mass of cold purple anywhere. “Oh, no. I hope she didn’t pop over to the east wing to haunt Lexa again.”
“Without using a door?” Stacey asked.
“Ghosts don’t need doors. Sometimes they think they do, or they do it out of habit, or they just like to scare everyone with a nice slam—”
She hit me all at once, from every side—a heavy, icy cold weight that sent me sprawling on my back, hard enough to knock the wind out of me and rattle the hardwood floorboards when I landed.
The ghost trap remote skittered out of my hand, away into the deep shadows below the walkway. I closed my fingers tighter around the necklace.
“Ellie! Are you okay?” Stacey ran toward me, slicing up the darkness with her tactical flashlight.
“Lights out!” I managed to gasp, though I could barely breathe. It wasn’t just getting my lungs hammered to the floor. The frigid air now seemed much too thick, choking me as if I’d swallowed about a yard of thick, scratchy flannel. The ghost was pushing in on me from all sides.
I felt the necklace bite into my fingers like a cutting wire as Mercy tried to reclaim it.
“What do I do?” Stacey asked, standing over me with her flashlight extinguished, her face full of anguish in the sputtering candlelit.
“Take it,” I forced myself to croak, waving the necklace at her.
Stacey squatted beside me as I lay choking on the floor. She took my hand, then slipped her fingers under the necklace. I made sure she
had a tight grasp on it before I opened my hand and let it go.
She ran to the trap and held the necklace above the glowing candles.
The ghost stayed on top of me—all around me, really—keeping me pressed to the floor while I fought to breathe.
“Hey, ghost lady!” Stacey shouted, waving the necklace. “Is this what you’re looking for?”
The pressure on me continued, so Stacey clicked on her flashlight and jabbed the beam into the space above me, where the darkness seemed to absorb the light. Not a bad move this time. I doubted any flashlight would chase the ghost away at this point—Mercy seemed pretty determined to get her property back.
The pressure finally eased, and I felt the cold mass rush away toward Stacey.
I pushed myself to my feet, gratefully taking a few deep breaths. Then I ran into the dim area under the walkway, where I’d last seen my remote bouncing away.
I drew my own flashlight to help me search. The night vision goggles would have been extremely useful at this moment, but unfortunately those were across the large room in my toolbox, and I didn’t have time to grab them.
Stacey lowered the necklace into the trap, and then the ghost struck her, an invisible force sweeping her off her feet and knocking her to the ground. She cried out in surprise and pain.
The necklace clinked against the lead-glass bottom of the trap.
A moment later, the first candle, the one near the opening at the top, snuffed out. Then the second, halfway down. It looked like Mercy was inside the trap, but I wasn’t able to close it.
I fought back panic as I searched for the remote. I finally found it in one dusty, cobwebbed corner and snatched it up.
When I turned around, the final candle had been snuffed out, and the necklace itself was rising quickly toward the top of the trap, curling and twisting in the air like a levitating snake.
There was no point checking the readouts on the remote—the ghost was definitely in there. I slammed my thumb down on the red button.
The stamper hissed as its piston arm drove down, slamming the lid into place. The necklace slapped against it, then tumbled downward and landed on the bottom of the cylinder, draped over the blown-out candle.
On my remote, the temperature and EMF readouts turned blank. This meant the battery pack at the bottom of the trap had electrified the layer of copper mesh, creating a charged field around the leaded glass jar nested inside. Ghosts couldn’t pass through it, and neither could the wireless signals from my sensors within the trap.
“Are you all right?” I asked Stacey, helping her up from the floor.
“Couldn’t feel better if I tried,” Stacey said, but her shaky voice didn’t match her words. “Did we get her?”
“I’m pretty sure we did.”
Stacey and I leaned close to the trap to peer through the side.
“It looks empty,” Stacey whispered.
“That’s normal. You can’t always see—”
A face appeared on the glass, so suddenly there was an audible slap even through the thick inner layer of glass and the hard plastic shell on the outside. Stacey and I jumped back.
It was Mercy, a simple image of her face painted in frost, with holes for her eyes and her distended, angry frown. Her hollow eyes seemed to regard us for a moment, and then the whole face faded, like a blast of condensation melting away from a window.
“Okay.” Stacey’s voice was still shaky. “I’d say we got her.”
And that, more or less, is how you trap a ghost.
Chapter Fifteen
As soon as we were done, I texted Anna to tell her about it. It was approaching one in the morning, but Stacey and I had no particular desire to spend the rest of the night camped out in the old foyer, even though the room felt much warmer, lighter, and less oppressive. If Anna was asleep, she’d wake up in the morning with an explanation on her phone about what had happened and why we were gone.
Anna was still awake, it turned out. She and Dale met us in the east wing kitchen, Anna in a cashmere bathrobe, Dale unapologetically dressed in an old tank t-shirt and boxer shorts, which wasn’t the prettiest sight in the world.
We sat at the kitchen table, our clients glancing between the empty-looking glass that we’d set out like a centerpiece and Stacey’s laptop, where they watched our struggle to capture the ghost. Anna was pale, her hand covering her mouth, shaking her head.
“That looks terrifying,” she whispered.
“I don’t see anything.” Dale flicked his finger against the clear plastic shell of the trap. “Kind of looks like an emperor’s new clothes situation to me.”
“You shouldn’t have any more trouble with her,” I said. “Your doors will stay closed at night now.”
“They’d better,” Dale grumbled. “What’s this going to cost me?”
“We’ll send you an invoice in a few days,” I told him. “That’ll be long enough for you to see that Mercy is gone.”
“Lexa will be so happy,” Anna said. “I feel relieved. Thank you so much.”
Dale tilted the ghost trap back and forth, frowning, as if trying to shake up the ghost. He froze when a tendril of pale mist flickered inside, visible only for a few seconds before vanishing. He looked up at me with a bleach-white face, and I wondered what he’d seen from his angle.
It must have been more than a glimpse of white vapor, because he let go of the trap and leaned away from it.
“Get it out of here,” he whispered. “I don’t want to see it anymore.”
“No problem.” I stood, and Stacey stood with me. “We’ll just gather up our things and go.”
“Good.” Dale walked to the refrigerator and cracked open a can of beer. “Sooner the better.”
“What will you do with…the ghost?” Anna asked as I lifted the trap from the table. It was labeled with red tape and black marker—MERCY CUTLEDGE, plus the current date.
“We have a disposal method,” I said. “She’ll be very far from here. We’ve never had a recurrence of the same ghost after removing it. You can rest easy.”
“It was so nice to meet all of you,” Stacey said. “Tell Lexa we said bye. Such a sweet girl.”
“I will.” Anna gave a weary smile.
Dale chugged down at least half his beer, then stared coldly at us. I understood. He hadn’t wanted to believe his house was haunted—he was more comfortable with the idea that his wife and daughter were going crazy. Now that it was over, he wanted us to get the heck of out his life so he could get back to pretending none of it had happened. Some people just find denial more attractive than adjusting their beliefs to new information.
I hadn’t mentioned the single word we’d caught on the high-sensitivity microphone. It was the one thing Mercy had said to us. After cleaning up the audio, Stacey had determined that word to be murder.
We cleared out as fast as we could, though it took several trips to the van. It was close to two in the morning by the time we backed the cargo van out of the driveway. Mercy’s trap was in the rack behind us, alongside the empty traps.
“We did it!” Stacey looked elated rather than tired. “We actually got one.”
“It’s a good feeling, isn’t it?”
“Think of how much better their lives will be from now on.” Stacey had a warm little smile on her face. “I think I love this job. I knew I would, but knowing that I really helped people, especially that little girl…” She shook her head. “I could use a drink, what do you think?”
“I could use about fifty hours of sleep,” I replied.
We drove out to the office, where I parked the van inside the garage door in the back. I told Stacey to go on home, and she looked reluctant as she walked to her green Ford Escape hybrid SUV, a vehicle that made her feel environmentally friendly when she was hauling her kayak out to some national park. Stacey was brimming with excitement, and I guessed it would be a long time before she slept.
It was Stacey’s first successful ghost grab, and maybe I should have celebrated
with her, but I was worn down from the extremely long day.
I went to my little cubicle at one side of the workshop, where I forced myself to type out quick notes about all we’d done that day. Later, I would flesh it out into a full report to send along with the invoice. Clients like to see something for their money besides an apparently empty glass jar.
“Ellie,” a voice said, making me jump. I turned to see Calvin, who’d crept up behind me as quietly as a ninja, despite his wheelchair. “How did it go?”
“We got her. Clients happy, money on the way.” I hoped.
“And Stacey?”
“She did a decent job.” I gave a quick recount of how she’d handled the asylum, plus the ghost in the Treadwell house.
“Sounds more than decent.”
“She’s good,” I admitted. “She needs more training, but she’s got the stomach for it. Maybe the brains, too. We’ll see.”
“It’s almost as if I knew what I was doing when I hired her.”
“She’s not bad.” I shrugged. I was actually a little more enthusiastic about Stacey’s performance, but I knew where this conversation was going, and I didn’t want to encourage Calvin too much.
“You’ve been avoiding me. I’m assuming it has to do with the psychic,” Calvin said.
“We don’t need a psychic. We just wrapped up the case without one. I think Stacey is enough.”
“Technically, you’re my employee,” Calvin said. “I haven’t died yet.”
“Don’t talk like that!”
“As long as you work for me, I expect you to listen,” he said.
I slumped in my office chair. “Okay. What do you want?”
“You already know.”
“All right.” I sighed. “Next job, if it looks like a real haunting…we’ll bring in your psychic guy and let him look around. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough.” Calvin nodded. He looked exhausted and old, almost elderly.
“I need to go home and sleep. You should do the same,” I said.
“Later. I’ve got some paperwork here. You go on.”