by JL Bryan
“What happened?” Stacey asked, shining her flashlight toward me.
“The battery pack malfunctioned,” I said, grimacing in pain. “Marsh might have—watch out!”
I drew my regular flashlight and pointed it toward her. The crawlers were following Stacey into the cellar, scurrying like rotten spiders on the walls and low ceiling all around her.
“What is it?” Stacey asked.
“Get back! The crawlers are surrounding you.”
“I don’t see anything.” Stacey shined her flashlight around, then reached for the thermal goggles on her forehead.
The crawlers slithered down the wall, into the stairs below her.
“Get off the stairs!” I shouted, but Stacey had no time to react.
The crawlers tore into the rickety old staircase, ripping away the railing, the steps, and the support beams all at once. The cracking of a hundred pieces of wood filled my ears, sounding weirdly like grease sizzling in a pan.
Stacey screamed as the staircase collapsed beneath her. She crashed down to the cellar floor in a storm of broken wood and rusty nails. I heard her cry in pain, then fall silent as a stout beam and a few chunks of railing and stairs crashed down on top of her. Her flashlight rolled away and thumped against the wall. The Gregorian chant ended abruptly, as though her iPod had cracked.
“Stacey!” I screamed, starting toward her.
Dark, cold laughter echoed all through the room. I can’t say there was much mirth in it. I felt ill.
I turned to see the wall of pulsing, flowing darkness had returned, swelling even bigger, and I had to step back a few paces as it grew toward me. My flashlight beam didn’t penetrate it at all.
I tried the ghost cannon again, but it didn’t respond. If Marsh had sucked all the power out of the battery pack, then he’d only grown stronger while putting my best weapon out of service.
A bushel of my enemy’s grain is worth twenty of my own, I thought. That’s from the Art of War by Sun-Tzu, which is the sort of thing Calvin makes me read. I’d just given Marsh twenty bushels’ worth, then.
I shivered as the darkness expanded and thickened. I tried desperately to think of what I could do to avoid getting killed in the next five seconds. If Marsh got me, I would become another of his slave ghosts, haunting and terrorizing anyone who tried to live in the house. He might even make me kill for him.
I wanted very badly to check on Stacey, but if I turned my back on Marsh’s malevolent presence, it could mean death for both of us.
Placing the ghost cannon on the floor, I raised my flashlight toward the darkness again. That was when Marsh lashed out at me. Something huge and hard, like a giant’s hand adorned with brass knuckles, smashed into me head-on, flinging me across the room.
I slammed into the rock shelves at one side of the crypt, banging my rib cage pretty hard, followed immediately by my head. Little bursts of light exploded behind my eyelids.
Then I tumbled and crashed to the rock floor, another hard impact that felt like a slap across my entire body. I shuddered in pain and tasted blood in my mouth.
Though I felt like I couldn’t move, I forced myself up to my knees. I grasped the nearby rock shelf. In the darkness, my fingers bumped against an old thighbone.
“Don’t touch me,” a voice whispered in the air near my throbbing, spinning head.
The deep, almost subsonic laughter rumbled again, so deep and powerful it made my joints ache. I could barely hear it over the screaming pain in my head and ribs and back.
I pushed myself to my feet, but I wobbled and swayed, my balance still out of whack. I almost fell over, but then a hand grabbed me.
It felt deep-freezer cold and wet and squishy, an unnatural combination. In the light from Stacey’s flashlight, and my own flashlight held loosely in my stunned and weakened fingers, I could see what was gripping me.
The wall of darkness had pushed close. From it had emerged the head, arms, and torso of Captain Marsh, but they didn’t quite match the pictures taken of him when he was alive. He was made of dense darkness—it looked like he was carved entirely out of liquid petroleum, the surface of him flowing thick and slow. I could see every detail of his face, which looked like a monstrous version of his portraits, every detail gleaming and black, the beard stretching out from his face all the way back into the wall of darkness behind him, the liquid-black locks tangled and writhing like blind serpents.
His eyes, pure black like the rest of him, stared into mine. His mouth opened in an unnaturally large grin, like the jaws of a crocodile, the teeth widely spaced and sharpened into points.
Marsh pulled me toward him. I resisted with all my remaining strength, which wasn’t much. I planted my feet on the floor and leaned back away from the horrible specter, while dark laughter burbled out of his maw. If he’d let me go, I would have fallen and smacked into the rock floor, but I guess he didn’t know about judo and turning your opponent’s strength against him.
I called out Stacey’s name, but my voice was weak. She didn’t respond. I couldn’t see her, but as far as I could tell, she hadn’t moved since the staircase collapsed around her.
I heard Jacob shouting in pain upstairs, but I couldn’t help him, either.
The hideous shape of Captain Marsh gave me another hard pull, and I stumbled. I just barely managed to plant my feet again and resist getting drawn into the inky black wall.
His face grew larger, expanding to more than twice the natural size of a human head. His jaws spread open, and he laughed again.
“Come to me,” his black-oil mouth said. “I’ll make you eternal.”
I didn’t know how much longer I could hold out—his strength was massive, while my own was currently somewhere around the level of a kitten drowsy on too much warm milk.
I dragged my feet as far from him as I could, so I was leaning toward Marsh and the darkness from which he’d half-emerged. If he let go of me, I would fall right on my face, probably breaking my nose on that stone floor.
My grip tightened on my flashlight.
“Okay,” I told him. “You murderer. You want me to come to you? I’m on my way.”
I pushed hard with both feet, leaping toward him while he yanked on my arm with all his force. His liquid-black jaw dropped in a wide open frown, and confusion wrinkled his forehead.
I flew right through him, into the blackness beyond. My guts turned instantly sour, and I was both nauseous and dizzy. The air was cold and thick as polluted water, almost impossible to breathe.
This was the belly of the beast.
I managed to land on my feet, only to stagger forward and trip over the rock mound at the center of the room. I crashed face first into Marsh’s coffin, feeling the rotten lid rip beneath me like old paper.
Cold, sharp hands grabbed at my legs. At first I thought it was Marsh’s skeleton seizing me, but there were too many hands for that. I heard a few male voices—they were panting, with a lusty sound I didn’t like at all.
The crawlers, I realized. They’d taken out Stacey, and I was next.
I felt a frigid tongue lick the back of my neck. It felt like the rotten skin was sliding off, leaving a residue on my flesh.
I shouted and swung my flashlight at them, which didn’t help much, but it got me moving again. I kicked, then pushed myself forward on my hands and knees. The crawlers grabbed at me everywhere, keeping me from standing. Between the thick, heavy pressure of the air and the grisly ghosts, I was barely able to move…but I did keep moving, inch by inch.
It was eerily silent now, like the dark depths of the ocean where no light has ever been. Even my own breathing was muffled.
Pulling myself across the rocky floor with my fingers, knees, and toes, I finally reached the wall. Hands grabbed my hair and ripped at my clothes. My jacket was torn away, and unseen claws and teeth sank into my arms, back, and neck.
Biters and scratchers. I detest them all.
I drew myself up the uneven rock wall. At least one of the crawlers was
right on my back, his arms locked around my waist in a disgusting embrace, so I wasn’t able to stand.
I didn’t need to stand, though.
My hands scrabbled over a slick, crumbling surface. Years of accumulated black candle wax.
I managed to reach a little higher, and my hands closed around the base of the ugly little idol.
With an angry grunt, I pulled it out of its niche and brought it crashing to the ground. It slammed into the rock floor beside me.
The entire house shook now, as if a major earthquake had struck it from below. Dust and grit rained down all over me from the ceiling, and I thought I could hear timbers creaking and groaning in protest. The whole cellar roof was about to come crashing down on top of me, bringing the full weight of the house with it.
A deep snarl thundered and echoed through the room, making my eardrums pop. The thick, foul air rippled and splashed around me.
A swarm of tiny glowing orbs appeared in the darkness around me like luminescent fish. They quickly grew, taking the forms of the second-floor ghosts, the ones who weren’t quite as decayed as the crawlers, like Mr. Junkie and the assorted prostitutes.
They all had a pale glow, their mouths downturned in exaggerated expressions of fury, their skulls still visible through their faces. By their glow, I could also see the dark crawlers on the floor around me.
The ghosts closed in around me like a pack of hungry hyenas, grabbing and slashing at me from all sides. I didn’t have long to live.
I pressed one hand against the fallen statue to hold it in place. Then I raised the other, which still held my flashlight. The light was useless deep in this spiritual darkness, but those little raised steel ridges around the lens…those would work just fine. I hoped.
I brought the flashlight down as hard as I could and smashed into the bug-eyed face of the statue. I heard an audible cracking sound—I’d chipped it, at least.
Marsh’s roar sounded again, and the cellar floor rumbled. Was that a trace of pain in his voice? I hoped so.
I smashed the idol’s face a second time, then a third. The house was shaking and creaking, spilling more dust all over me, making me cough.
The next time I brought my flashlight down, there was a much louder crack. Half the idol’s head broke away and hit the floor. The broken chunk of god-head looked like one of those big stone flakes cavemen used as knives and hand axes.
Marsh’s voice howled again, and there was definitely pain in it this time.
The ghosts closest to me vanished, as though someone had grabbed them all and flung them aside.
In their place rose the black-oil head and torso of Marsh, emerging again from the darkness. Both his large hands plunged toward my throat. His face twisted in inhuman fury.
“Captain Augustus Oliver Marsh,” I gasped, still choking on dust. “You are forever banished from this house.”
I seized the broken flake of the idol’s head. As Marsh’s form reached me, I stabbed the sharp chunk of the idol directly into his oily black heart.
Marsh’s face melted into an expression of horror. His freezing hands grabbed at mine, but I wasn’t budging. I managed to slide the stone fragment in a little deeper.
“There,” I whispered. “You believe in the power of this idol—now I turn it against you.”
He gave a long, shrieking howl that rattled the skeletons on the walls, knocking one out of its bunk and onto the floor, where it smashed into pieces.
The heavy darkness shrouding the room began to lift and scatter like a thunderhead breaking apart. The horde of ghosts backed even farther away from me.
Marsh shrank away from me, too. The oily black surface of his skin ruptured, and the darkness shrank into patches all over him. Beneath that surface, he was a pale ghost like the others. He no longer seemed bigger and stronger than the rest.
He clutched his thick gray hair in his hands and let out a keening wail as he looked at the broken idol.
“Your power is gone,” I said.
He looked at me with his transparent pale eyes going wide, his jaw dropping, his enormous beard drooping around his face like that of an elderly, defeated lion.
“No,” his voice rasped. Then, pathetically, he pleaded, “Don’t hurt me.”
“It’s not me you have to worry about,” I replied.
Rustling, whispering voices rose all around us, like the last dead leaves of fall. The ghosts were closing in, some walking, some crawling—but not toward me this time.
Augustus Marsh, steamship captain, mass murderer, and part-time occultist, watched warily as they approached.
“Get back!” he ordered them. “I am still in command. Get back!”
“That’s not exactly true anymore,” I said. “You know it. And they can feel it.”
The horde encircled him slowly, closing in around him. They still seemed hesitant to step too close.
“No!” he said, holding up one hand palm out. “I command you, I command…”
“You thought you’d live forever,” I said. “But you’re already dead. It’s time to accept it.”
The horde moved closer to him. One crawler, a badly rotten hobo ghost, was the first soul brave enough to reach out and grab Marsh. Marsh flinched and leaped back, right into the arms of more of his former captives.
Expressions of wrath twisted all their faces. As they pounced on him, I was reminded again of a pack of starving hyenas leaping on a carcass.
Apparently they’d taken it easy on me, maybe resisting Marsh’s orders to stop us with whatever shred of individual will they’d had. While I couldn’t see Marsh through the crowd, but I heard snapping, ripping, gnashing, and a lone voice screaming as they tore him apart. There was so much pain in it that I almost felt sorry for him, until I remembered he’d personally murdered every ghost in the room.
Well, almost every ghost. He hadn’t killed Mercy himself, either when he was alive or when he was a murderous spirit.
Now I felt Mercy rising in me, glowing with the thrill of victory.
She didn’t leave my body then, but that was okay. We still had unfinished business.
The swarm of ghosts began to swirl faster and faster. Marsh screamed as they ripped into his essence. They became a moaning, biting whirlwind of pale, misshapen faces and hands, no longer looking human at all.
They dragged Marsh down to the rocky floor, next to his own coffin.
I caught one last glimpse of him there, shriveled and bitten, whimpering as his freed prisoners tore away what little he had left.
Then they took him down through the floor, deep below the ground, hopefully all the way to Hell. I pointed my flashlight and watched the last curls of ghostly mist fade among the cemented rocks, making sure they were really gone.
Then the room was quiet. The temperature was already rising, from deep freeze to mildly cool.
“Stacey?” I ran over to the collapsed staircase, where she lay among broken heaps of wood and exposed rusty nails. She bled from her nose, she had several large bruises, and her eyes were closed.
I touched her shoulder and rubbed it gently, not wanting to disturb any injuries she might have sustained.
“Stacey? Stacey? Are you awake?”
“Ugh.” She squinted her still-closed eyes. “I’d rather not be.”
“Are you hurt?”
“What do you think?” Stacey asked.
“Where? Is anything specifically bad?”
“No, just…” Her eyes opened. “My arm. Oh, my freaking arm. I think it’s broken.”
“Which one?”
“The one I landed on,” Stacey said. I moved my flashlight around and saw her left arm tucked and twisted beneath her. “Good thing I’m a righty,” she added. Spunky girl.
“I’m sorry,” a voice groaned above us. It sounded like another ghost. I pointed my light up there.
Jacob knelt in the doorway over the collapsed staircase, barely able to grasp his flashlight. The poor guy looked like someone had dunked him in gravy and throw
n him into a pit of lions. His clothes were shredded, much like mine, and red scratches crisscrossed all the bared flesh, as well as his face and neck.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I tried to hold them back, but…”
“Don’t apologize,” I told him. “We would have been dead ten minutes ago without you. You saved us. Are you hurt? Can you walk?”
“Only if I really have to,” he said, then he slumped against the doorframe. “What do we do now?”
“I guess we’d better call an ambulance,” I replied. I brushed my fingers across Stacey’s head, kind of an attempt to comfort her. It was less awkward than it sounds. She gave me a pained smile.
“Don’t forget the coroner,” she added, glancing at the skeletons in the wall. “I wonder if funeral homes give discounts for mass murder.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The next afternoon, Stacey and I sat at the dining room table in the east wing of the house, facing the Treadwell family, just as we had on our first visit. It was a sweltering June day outside, and golden summer light flooded the house. All the dark shadows had been chased away.
Jacob was back at work, where hopefully he had a good explanation for the numerous scratches on his hands and face. Attacked by a pack of feral cats who’d dragged him through thorn bushes, maybe. Anything was more believable than the truth. He hadn’t exactly advertised his unwanted psychic-medium abilities around the accounting firm, since he did not want to get fired or sent on mental health leave.
All of us had stitches. Stacey had fractured her wrist, and the hospital had splinted it before releasing us early that morning.
It had been a busy day, with the police gathering reports about the dead bodies we’d found. The coroner’s office was still at work in the main house, exhuming bodies from the crypt.
Now, Stacey and I finally had a chance to sit down with our clients.
I laid out the story for the Treadwells, leaving out some of the more scandalous or scary details for Lexa’s benefit. Everything would be in my final written report…which, I suspected, they were no more likely to read than they were to watch the DVDs Stacey had prepared of ghostly apparitions and activity all over their home. Still, people liked to get a hefty package of stuff for their money.