Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper

by JL Bryan

He turned and wheeled away. I wondered if something in particular was bothering him tonight. Calvin was an insomniac at the best of times, but now he looked worried. Maybe it was just the strain of turning the field work over to me and a new girl. He wanted to retire, but I didn’t think he seemed cut out for the crossword-and-shuffleboard lifestyle.

  I finished up, drove home, refreshed Bandit’s food and water, then sprawled across my bed, watching the slow rotation of my ceiling fan. It was hot in my apartment, especially as summer approached, and the window unit sucked electricity like a black hole, so I kept it on low to save money.

  The rough day led to bad dreams, as they often did.

  In this one, I was a kid again, in my childhood home, which was filled with smoke and heat. My long-lost dog, a golden retriever named Frank, was leading me through the fire. I kept my hand on his furry back, because the smoke burned my eyes and I could barely see him.

  We descended the stairs, toward the enormous flames devouring the first floor of my house. As we reached the last step, the man appeared in front of us, cutting off our escape.

  He was handsome, like movie-star handsome, with a long mop of blond hair and chiseled features, his face clean-shaven. He wore a sable frock coat with a matching silk cravat and a fire-red vest, as though he’d just stepped out of the middle of the nineteenth century.

  The only unnatural detail was his eyes. The irises were red, like his vest—but not glowing red or anything so dramatic. It was as if red were a perfectly normal eye color.

  His grin was sly, almost a leer as he looked me over.

  “You belong to me,” he said, his voice a mellow, deep sound over the crackling wood of burning furniture and walls. “You will not forget me.”

  He opened his left hand, and a gout of flame erupted from it, like a magic trick.

  “Come with me,” he said. “We belong together.”

  Then the jet of flame swelled and billowed toward me, engulfing me and the dog before racing up the stairs toward my parents’ room. I prayed my parents had already escaped the burning house.

  I woke with a start in my bed, disoriented and confused until I remembered when and where I was—an adult woman now, living alone in a small brick loft lined with hex symbols.

  Bandit gave a concerned yowl and bonked his head against my chin. I petted the cat and began to cry. I sobbed softly until I fell asleep again. This time, it was mercifully dark and dreamless.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next day was a Friday, and Stacey and I rode out to a potential client’s home, an old brick townhouse on Oglethorpe Street. We traced the groaning, moaning sounds in their walls to a portion of the basement ceiling that had begun to sag, putting heavy pressure on the water pipes. Plumbing and electrical problems are a common source of false alarms from the ghost-happy sorts.

  We called it an early afternoon, since I didn’t particularly feel like typing up the Treadwell report yet. I could do that at home, anyway.

  I had a pretty great plan for the evening, which was to walk down to Gallery Cafe, order an iced thai coffee, and sit out at one of the little tables looking across the street at Chippewa Park. I would catch up on some work reading, specifically the last two issues of the International Journal of Psychical Studies.

  The journal had been published for more than a hundred years, beginning as a niche periodical for professors sharing their research into telekinesis, hauntings, and Spiritualist activities like seances and automatic writing.

  Over time, the academic community of parapsychologists grew smaller and smaller—sometime in the seventies and eighties, embarrassed university administrators began pulling funding from ghost and ESP research—so the journal had evolved to appeal to a more promising market of lay people ranging from ghost-hunting hobbyists to UFO conspiracy theorists. The digital edition pulses with ads for bottled genies, ghost-detecting powder, and zombie survival gear.

  Reading the journal today requires a little bit of sorting wheat from chaff—okay, a lot of sorting wheat from chaff—but it’s still the only place that publishes serious research into spectral activity. Right alongside the latest Bigfoot sighting, of course.

  I began to read about a team who had investigated an allegedly haunted castle in England, but I ended up reading an unauthorized biography of Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. Hey, I can’t work all the time.

  Saturday was not a day off. In fact, I made Stacey meet me at the office at six a.m., which was unnecessarily early—I was sort of hazing the new kid, I guess. It all backfired when I realized it meant I had to be at work early, too.

  We went to work moving the heavier equipment, like the stamper, out of the van to save gasoline on our long upcoming trip. We took out the cameras so they wouldn’t be unnecessarily jostled on the road. All we left inside was the array of built-in monitors and the trap rack, which had been emptied except for the one holding Mercy.

  Our destination was about two hundred miles away, westward across the broad, sun-drenched coastal plain, far from modern civilization. I drove us out of Savannah and into the pine forests of the hinterlands.

  “You forgot to tell me where we’re going,” Stacey said.

  “Goodwell.”

  “What’s that? A town?”

  “It’s a really lively place,” I said. “Maybe we’ll grab lunch at a trendy new spot.”

  “But you said we were doing ghost disposal.”

  “If there’s time.” I pressed the accelerator and turned on the radio.

  The view alongside the highway for the next three hours went like this: trees, cows, cotton, pecan and peach groves, cows, tobacco, corn, hay, cows, cow pastures, and cows. The view was sprinkled with old barns and tin-roofed sheds, the occasional lone, scorched chimney in a field, and some cows. Many of the towns were gas-station hamlets with a couple of whitewashed storefronts, though the really bustling places featured a Hardee’s or a Dairy Queen.

  Amateur mistake: I’d forgotten my MP3 player for the van, so we were stuck with plain old radio. This was not easy when Stacey thought modern country was the bee’s pajamas, and half the stations in the area played nothing but. Far too much Taylor Swift was heard that day.

  “So how did you get into this work?” Stacey asked, when I’d turned down the radio to mouse-whisper volume. Unfortunately, by removing the music, I’d opened the floodgates for conversation instead, and it seemed she was going to lead with some personal questions.

  “I saw a ghost when I was fifteen,” I told her.

  “Really?” Her eyes brightened. “What kind?”

  “A dangerous kind.”

  “Where?”

  “At my house. My parents’ house.” I looked out the window. A pair of horses, one black and one brown, grazed near a pond in a field bright with wildflowers.

  “What happened? Did you get rid of it?”

  “Sort of. It’s trapped now, anyway. Look, Stacey!” I pointed out the window as another pasture rolled into view. “Cows!”

  I guess she took my not-so-subtle hint to change the subject, because she started filling me in on the latest Project Runway instead.

  We turned off onto semi-scenic Route 230 through Unadilla, another town where the storefronts were empty and only the churches appeared to still be in business. That was the last town we would see.

  The roads grew progressively worse, bumpy and full of potholes. By the time we reached Goodwell, there were weeds growing up through the streets.

  If Goodwell ever had a sign announcing itself and welcoming folks to town, it’s been gone for years, maybe fallen over and devoured by weeds along the roadside somewhere. It was a town that had grown up by a mill on the Flint River. The mill itself was now just a roofless, asymmetrical stone ruin.

  I stopped at the central crossroads in town, among a handful of boarded-up brick buildings. The gas station was so old that the pumps were mechanical rather than digital, and high grass had grown up all around them. A railroad track ran through town, but given t
he size of the pines sprouting between the rails, it was obvious nothing had come down the track in years, probably decades.

  “There’s nothing here,” Stacey said, looking around at the dilapidated little town.

  “Almost nothing.” I smiled and pulled around the corner. The old white church was crumbling, with pieces of its outer wall rotten away to reveal the timber bones beneath.

  Behind the church lay the graveyard, enclosed by a waist-high brick fence with a wrought-iron gate. Rows of oaks with spreading canopies cast shadows over tall weeds and wildflowers, among which you could spot an occasional little granite gravestone, if you looked hard enough.

  I parked next to the gate and stepped out of the van.

  “Why are we way out here?” Stacey hopped out and glanced around. The empty town lay silent in every direction, a few of the buildings already half-eaten by kudzu vines. “This is kind of creepy, Ellie.”

  “I’ll tell you why,” I said, opening the back door of the van. “The graveyard has a good, sturdy brick wall and a gate that should remain standing for a long time. Want to grab the trap for me?”

  Stacey lifted the trap out of the rack, and I slammed the door. She winced. The slam was startlingly loud in the quiet town, and few crows squawked and flew off from a nearby roof.

  We walked to the cemetery’s front gate, and I heard a distant rumble. The day had grown overcast, and low, ominous gray clouds filled the sky.

  I thumbed through my keys to find the one marked Master Lock, and I slid it into the gleaming padlock holding the gate closed.

  “Wait, how do you have a key?” Stacey asked.

  “Who do you think put the new lock on there?” I pushed the gate, and it squealed open. I led Stacey into the shadowy graveyard, along weed-choked traces of gravel that used to be a path. Saplings, thorns, and other brush had sprouted among rows of headstones. “I think I’m the only one who ever comes out here. I certainly hope so.”

  “Do you bring all your captured ghosts here?”

  “It’s ideal,” I said. “An abandoned cemetery in an isolated ghost town. The nearest town is twenty miles from here. It’s a perfect wildlife sanctuary for ghosts.” I stepped under the heavy, leafy arms of an old oak tree. A bench was barely visible beneath it. I pushed aside some thorny brambles growing around it.

  Another ghost trap lay open among the weeds under the bench, its lid lying beside it. I picked it up. Written in black marker on a slice of red tape at the top was the name SAMUEL BRASWELL.

  “Did that ghost escape from his trap?” Stacey asked.

  “Nope. The ghosts we bring here get released.”

  “Seriously? Is that safe?”

  “Remember, we’re dealing with conscious beings here, or at least semiconscious ones. They usually can’t escape the lead-glass jar at the center of the trap. Unless they’re very dangerous, it’s cruel to lock them in a trap forever. They could be stuck for centuries, or even longer.” I tapped the empty trap I’d retrieved. “Mr. Braswell here was a dirty old ghost—he liked to rummage through women’s underwear and sock drawers, or show up nude in their mirrors. Can you imagine stepping out of your shower to see a transparent, saggy old man watching you from the medicine cabinet?”

  “And he’s out running around?” Stacey cast a worried look at the deep shadows of the graveyard, which only grew gloomier as the heavy clouds darkened overhead.

  “He wasn’t violent. He never attacked anybody, never even touched anybody. As long as they aren’t violent, we can release them here. Graveyards like this—an abandoned graveyard in a ghost town—have some kind of, I don’t know, emotional or spiritual gravity that keeps them here. We don’t know why it works, exactly, but it works.”

  “You don’t think Mercy is dangerous?” She looked uncertainly at the sealed trap in her hands. “She attacked us!”

  “Only when I deliberately taunted her. She hadn’t attacked Lexa or anyone else. She acted like she was just trying to scare them away, being territorial about the house. Even when she attacked me, she didn’t do any permanent damage. She’s not a biter or a scratcher, or…” I hesitated, then I said it. “Or a burner.”

  “A burner? Is that what it sounds like?”

  “Yeah. A lot of the ghosts you’ll encounter have some level of psychokinetic ability. They can throw glasses or slam doors. If they can do that, they can also physically attack people. On a rare occasion, you might be unlucky enough to meet a pyrokinetic ghost instead, one who can start fires. Usually, those are ghosts who died in fires themselves.”

  “It sounds like you’ve met one.”

  “I have.” Ready for a subject change, I put Samuel the Dirtball’s empty trap down on the bench and took Mercy’s trap in my hands. I popped open the panel on top with my thumbnail. Inside was a little mechanical dial with numbers at the edges. I cranked it to 2, then tossed it under the bench where the other trap had been. “In two hours, a cartridge of gas is going to fire and blow open the lid. You want to be out of here before it opens, because the confused ghost might glom onto you. That’s the only ride out of this cemetery.”

  Leaves rustled around us. The wind was picking up, and the air smelled like rain.

  “So that’s it? We can leave now?” Stacey asked. The graveyard seemed to be making her uncomfortable, but I understood. I definitely wouldn’t want to be there after sunset, when so many of the spirits I’d captured began to stir. They’d probably react like convicts who’d found their arresting officer wandering around the prison.

  “We can leave.” I picked up the empty trap and examined it. We’d have to check it for water damage, but it looked reusable.

  Calvin called us on the drive home.

  “Ellie,” he said, “I just got off the phone with Anna Treadwell. She’s very upset.”

  “Why? I haven’t even sent their bill yet.”

  “She says things have taken a turn for the worse, and I mean much worse, Ellie. Noises all over the house, screaming, destruction of property.”

  “I definitely trapped Mercy,” I said, looking at the trap with a sinking feeling. “They must have another ghost. A house that old—”

  “You’d better get over there now.”

  “We’re three hours away!”

  “You can do it in two. Fix this, Ellie.” He hung up on me.

  I hate it when an open-and-shut case fails to shut.

  “Let’s get moving,” I said, which was just in time anyway, because the clouds had begun to spill a light rain, and it didn’t look like it would stay light for long.

  “What’s wrong?” Stacey asked, while I stomped down the gravel path to the gate. “You look like somebody kicked you in the stomach.”

  “We have to go back to the Treadwell house,” I said. “It was more haunted than we realized.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  It rained and rained the entire way home, pounding on the roof of the van and sloshing down the windshield too fast for the aged wipers. Visibility was poor, but fortunately we were traveling a highway though the middle of nowhere, which makes for pretty light traffic.

  The storm surrounded us all the way to Savannah, unfortunately, where it was dark as night even though it was afternoon, and raging rapids flooded the gutters.

  When we reached the Treadwell home, Anna opened the door, looking tense, like a woman who’d just stepped out of a shouting match.

  “You made it worse!” Dale shouted, entering the hallway behind her before she could say a word. He had an open beer in his hand, and from the slurred sound of his voice, it wasn’t his first. His sixth or seventh, maybe. “It’s all worse!”

  Down the hall, Lexa sat on the steps, peering around the corner at us.

  “What happened?” I asked, looking at Anna instead of her husband.

  “The house was quiet after you left Thursday night,” Anna said. “Peaceful. But on Friday, the workers were here late finishing the hallway, and then—”

  “All hell broke loose!” Dale shouted
, sagging and bumping his hip on the dining room table as he leaned against it. The table was blocking the security door again. He set his beer down and heaved the table to one side of the hall, audibly scratching up the hardwood. His beer can toppled over in the process, spilling foamy brew all over the tabletop.

  Dale didn’t appear to notice. Rather than clean up his beer, he staggered toward the security door and grasped the heavy deadbolt. Lexa watched him from the stairs nearby, saying nothing.

  “Dale, don’t open that!” Anna shouted, but he ignored her. I heard the rusty scream of the lock, and then Dale pulled the door open, but the hallway into the main house was too dark for me to see anything. I didn’t want to go running over there until I knew what was happening.

  “What happened when the workers were here Friday night?” I asked Anna.

  “You may as well see for yourself.” She gestured toward the doorway, and walked alongside me as I went. “They were just packing up—they’re supposed to come back Monday and start on the kitchen, but I don’t think they will. Just as they were leaving, they said every door in the hallway slammed shut, like something wanted to trap them inside. I heard it, too. Loud bangs that shook the house, just like after that fake funeral.”

  “Yeah,” Dale said as we approached him. He glared at me. “Just like that.”

  “They had to force a door open to escape,” Anna said.

  “Hey, Lexa!” Stacey did a big smile-and-wave, still trying to charm the little girl.

  “Hey.” Lexa looked at her sandals, as if trying to dodge attention.

  “After the doors slammed…this happened.” Anna led me through the doorway.

  The hallway, which had been on its way to a new, modern look last time we’d been here, now resembled a bomb-cratered war zone. Holes the size of bowling balls dented both walls, and the new molding and a portion of the ceiling had been cracked and shattered.

  “They said the holes just appeared one after the other, like something was making footprints on the walls,” Anna whispered. “Something huge and invisible that didn’t care about gravity. They ran out of here. I only got the story later, over the phone.”