by JL Bryan
Instead, he stopped and shook his head.
"There was a woman's voice," he said. "Singing. Me and two of my guys heard it."
"It couldn't have been...a recording? Television? Mackenzie, maybe?"
"No. This came from inside the walls of the house, while we were taking them apart. Inside the walls. It just came and went like a bad radio signal. And the room got cold." He shook his head and backed away toward his truck.
"What was she singing?" I asked.
"A lullaby."
"What were the words?"
He opened the door to his truck and looked back at me. His face was pale now, the anger replaced by plain fear. "If I tell you, then you'll back that thing out and let me on my way?"
"You got it," I said. I tossed my keys in the air and caught them for emphasis. Unfortunately, I just barely caught them on the tip of my finger, and then they sailed off and landed in the client's flower bed. The move was, therefore, not half as gangsta as intended.
"We all heard it, but none of us could make out the words. So get moving. Now!" He climbed into his truck and slammed the door, either eager to flee the place where he'd encountered the ghost or angry with me for dragging the story out of him. Maybe both.
He cranked his engine immediately and gunned it as I returned to my seat. I let him out as quickly as I could.
"He heard a woman's voice singing a lullaby," I told Stacey as we pulled back into the driveway. "Inside the walls of the house. So he and his guys are quitting the renovation. Did you see that coming, too?"
"Nah, but that's for the best. You don't want to know the whole future or life gets boring. That's what we psychics think, anyway."
"You're not psychic, Stacey."
"Jacob says everyone's a little psychic. Even dogs and cats. And hamsters. I must be at least as psychic as a hamster, right?"
"Okay. You're as psychic as a hamster. Now let's get to work." I led the way toward the side door, which remained open except for the outer screen. It was getting late in the day, and I liked to get started before dark. After dark, you never know when the ghosts might show up.
Chapter Nine
Mackenzie met us at the door, looking exhausted. Little Dylan was squirming and crying in her arms, face red, feet kicking inside the paws of his tiger pajamas.
"Aw, he's so cute!" Stacey exclaimed, reaching out both arms as if to snatch the infant from his mother. "Can I hold him?"
"Uh...If you want." She passed over the wailing baby, looking a little bemused at Stacey's eagerness to hold him close while he kicked. The baby actually did settle down a little bit.
"Thanks! Aw, hi wittle...what's his name?" Stacey asked.
"Dylan," we both said.
"Hi wittle Willon!" Stacey said, really overdoing the baby voice. Her gushing, grabbing response to the kid was genuine and apparently perfectly normal. Neither Kara nor I had given such a reaction. Maybe Kara and I hated each other because we were too alike? Nah. No way. Too pop-psychology. Kara was definitely evil, I was sure of it. I just had to work out the minor details, such as finding actual solid facts to support my opinion.
"So your builder guy quit for good?" I asked.
"He didn't explain why," Mackenzie said. "Not to me. I overheard him talking to you."
"Yeah, I kind of muscled him into spilling the details there."
"He wouldn't give me a reason at all. It turns out he saw a ghost in my home but wasn't going to tell me. That seems like the kind of thing you ought to mention to a person."
"I agree," I said. "Wow, Dylan really likes Stacey." The baby was cuddled up tight, almost forgetting to cry while she cooed at him. "Anyway, as I said, we'll set up cameras and other gear to help us look for the source of your problem. We'll have to do the nursery, of course, and the upstairs hall. And that room where the contractors heard the voice. Do you have any other problem areas you'd like us to study?"
"Problem areas." Mackenzie shook her head. "You make it sound like...I don't know, termites, or dry rot, or something. There's something walking around my house at night, looking for my baby." She shuddered. "It's like it all sank in today. After you came out, and I had to say everything out loud, all at once...and then overhearing what Curtis Ray just said to you about hearing that same voice..."
"That's why we're here," I said. "I promise we will find it and get rid of it. It may take a few nights, but we'll do it."
"Yeah, we wipe out the paranormal pests so you don't have to!" Stacey added. That drew a puzzled look from Mackenzie, and a slightly annoyed one from me, but baby Dylan actually giggled as if he understood. I wished the baby wouldn't encourage her.
We took a quick tour of the house, familiarizing ourselves with the layout and looking for the sort of dark, remote spots where spirits like to hide. The room under reconstruction was on its way to becoming a family library. Mackenzie rattled off plans for bookshelves up to the ceiling, a padded reading nook built around a large window, chairs that would flank the fireplace. "It will basically be the best room in the house," she explained, "The one where everyone wants to be, because it's full of sunlight and books and comfortable chairs. The old parlor walls were in bad shape, anyway. This room needed the work. And continues to need it. As soon as I find another qualified contractor who seems halfway trustworthy. Curtis didn't just quit, he refused to refund the deposit. Can you believe it?"
"I'm sorry to hear that," I said. I looked around the bare wooden studs of the room, the recently exposed old hardwood floor. Dust was everywhere from the destruction of the walls. The large windows were masked over to protect the glass, leaving the room in deep darkness even during the day. "We'll definitely keep watch in here."
The rest of the house offered a few evocative possibilities for ghost nests—notably the attic, accessible only by trapdoor, the ceiling up there so low that you could only move on hands and knees through the old boxes and cobwebs. There was also the garden shed tacked onto the back of the house but not really part of it. I could see a rectangle of mismatched brick where a door had apparently connected the shed to the house at some point, but had been bricked in long ago.
"What do you know about the history of the house?" I asked Mackenzie as Stacey and I set up gear in the stripped-down former parlor.
"They say it was built in 1891," Mackenzie said. "And that's it for history, really. When we bought it, our focus was on the physical condition of the house, not the sentimental aspects. We wanted something we could update and make our own."
"We'll be checking into that history tomorrow," I said. "Hopefully, tonight will give us some clue about what we're looking for."
After we finished that room, we headed upstairs and wired the front hall with thermal and night vision cameras angled toward the door to the master bedroom. If the ghost rattled her doorknob again, we'd catch footage of it.
Mackenzie eventually went back to work in her office, the baby dozing in a front-slung harness while his mother did incomprehensible things involving software code and protein molecules. She clearly had no interest in joining us as we walked into the jungle-themed baby room.
A toothy purple hippo grinned at me from a bookshelf, next to a stuffed crocodile with a plush stomach that was big and round, as if it had recently killed and eaten something. The overly happy toy animals looked vaguely threatening. Anything would have, in the stiff, strange atmosphere of that room. I was just glad Mackenzie hadn't gone with a bunch of clown decorations to make the room look "happy."
Stacey and I worked quietly and methodically. This was the clear center of the haunting, both by the client's experience and by how the place felt. The room seemed to suppress any desire for joking or chitchat.
We gave it the works—cameras, microphone, motion detector—and then tested the reception to the array of monitors in the van out in the driveway, where Stacey would sit and watch all the hotspots for signs of activity.
I would spend the night inside, in the nursery, waiting and watching and just hoping that th
e pale dough-faced ghost made an appearance. I was eager to draw it close, deal with it, and get on with pursuing Anton Clay.
Stacey and I made a quick run to shop for last-minute supplies—sandwiches, mostly, but a few other things as well. The sun was setting by the time we returned to the client's driveway.
For a moment, Stacey and I sat together in the back of the van, looking at the array of little monitors built behind the front seats. They showed the key rooms in the house in glowing shades of gray—the deconstructed old parlor on the first floor, the upstairs hall where the entity had walked and rattled the door, and of course the nursery itself.
We hadn't wired any other rooms in the house. We could have, just in case, but we also wanted to save a portion of our gear aside for our forbidden investigation of Anton Clay's old properties. That was why I'd deliberately brought more than we needed.
The microphones inside picked up Mackenzie's voice, followed by a recording of what sounded like Elmo from Sesame Street singing about his feelings. Either that, or it was the most bizarre ghost I'd encountered yet.
"It's almost dark," I said, looking toward the windshield. "I should take up my position."
"Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes, pilgrim," Stacey said.
"I...am just not responding to that." I opened the door and stepped out.
"All systems are nominal here," Stacey said. "We are go for lift-off."
I slid the door shut behind me, then switched on my headset. "Mike check," I said.
"Mike?" Stacey replied in my ear. "Anybody seen Mike? Anybody seen Mike with the check?"
"Okay. Going inside."
"She's going inside, people. Everybody in position. Blue team, man the fort. Red team—"
I turned down the volume on Stacey's voice as I walked into the house. I left the side door unlocked in case Stacey had to come running inside with a ghost cannon or something later in the night. You never know how these things might escalate.
Upstairs, I found Mackenzie in her office, looking more tired than ever, with baby Dylan cuddled in her lap, drowsing off to a video of singing Elmo.
She paused the video. I stayed silent and waited while she carried the sleeping baby down the hall, to put him in the small crib next to her bed. She emerged from the master bedroom and eased the door shut.
"I don't like to expose him to a lot of video," Mackenzie said, "But someone recommended that video in a mom's forum. It puts him right to sleep every time. Like morphine for babies. Except, of course, not so harmful and somewhat less addictive."
"It seems to work. We're all set up for the night. So...I guess I'll be in the nursery if you need me."
"I hope I won't." She smiled a little, then it faltered. "I mean, because of...if I needed you, it would be because of the, you know, and I hope it doesn't, you know, come over to my room..."
"Right, I understand," I said.
I quickly filled her in on what we'd been doing, mostly just to reassure her that a lot of things were being done. My gaze wandered over her bookshelves as we talked. I'd forgotten to bring a book, in all of the confused sloshing around that my life had become.
"Would you mind if I borrowed something to read?" I said. "Sometimes the ghosts don't really come out on cue, and there's a wait. I usually bring something, but today was hectic..."
"Of course, read anything you want. I need to wrap up here." She swiveled around in her chair and immediately resumed typing at her computer, her fingers flying at high speed right away, as if she'd merely been on a brief pause from work mode. She didn't look back again.
I skimmed over volumes of medical journals and programming, then found something that looked slightly more interesting, a history of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and startups. It was a nice, thick hardback, too, promising hours of reading if it was good.
Mackenzie didn't look up or acknowledge when I told her I was leaving. She was absorbed in her screen. I had no idea what she was looking at. The code seemed to me like an alien language that somehow just happened to use our same numbers and letters.
I crossed the hall to the nursery and closed the door.
Chapter Ten
The feeling of stiff, stale air was even thicker now that night had fallen. The animals watched from the shelves and from within the bars of the crib, baring their triangular plush teeth at me. Stuffed lions, pastel tigers, and teddy bears, oh my.
I dropped into the flower-and-vine-printed loveseat in the corner, near the dark windows and their gauzy curtains. My gear was close by, in a backpack on the floor.
I turned off all the lights except the small lamp on the end table beside the loveseat. The lampshade was printed with silhouettes of giraffes and elephants, in keeping with the room's overall jungle theme. It looked as though the whole room had been purchased as a package, actually, from the crib sheets and window curtains to the stuffed animals and the purple-elephant rug. It all matched. Decorating the baby's room had probably been done in less than five minutes, maybe with just one click on a website.
"Stacey, give me a status update," I said.
"Well, I'm feeling a little hungry, but I can't decide if I want half my turkey on rye or just a granola bar. Also, I'm getting bored out here."
"So nothing's happening anywhere else in the house. That's what you're telling me in the most roundabout way you can devise."
"Exactly."
"Update me if anything changes."
I sat back and tried to relax as I read, but the atmosphere in the room worked on my nerves and made me feel a little more jittery with every minute that passed. I resisted the urge to open a window and try to bring some fresh, living air into the room. It wasn't a good idea to alter the environment at all, since that could reduce the odds of the lullaby ghost putting in an appearance.
The Silicon Valley book helped me pass the time with stories of innovation, intrigue, rivalries, and fortunes made and lost. I probably wouldn't have selected a business history book on my own at the library or bookstore, but it was pretty good.
Stacey reported when Mackenzie went to bed, around ten-thirty.
I took occasional breaks to stretch my legs and take readings around the house with my Mel-Meter. Electromagnetic levels were elevated in the nursery compared to the rest of the house, while the temperature was about ten degrees lower. I knew the presence was more than faint or residual if it had been strong enough to rattle the door to Mackenzie's room a few nights earlier.
More likely, the ghost was just dormant, present in a general way but not focused or active, maybe even not aware of much at all. I don't know if ghosts really sleep, but they can have periods of inactivity lasting days, months, or even years, until something changes and jolts them awake.
I wondered whether the ghost in Mackenzie's house had been active before Mackenzie and her husband arrived to renovate, or if the renovations had awoken it. Then again, considering the entity's apparent obsession with Dylan, it could be the baby's presence that had awoken the ghost, if it had indeed been dormant in the first place. I would need to learn all about the history of the place to help me put the pieces together.
Sometimes you get lucky and things get busy on the first night of an investigation. That's not unusual, because a haunting has to progress into seriously troublesome territory before most people call us.
I hoped things would happen fast tonight so we could get moving on the case. Unfortunately, this was feeling more like the kind of situation where I'd be waiting, watching, and waiting some more. It could go on like that for days, the presence almost there but not quite manifesting. Hopefully, I'd be able to identify the ghost quickly so I could effectively bait it, trap it, and get back to my search for Anton Clay.
Around midnight, I decided to try and liven things up by asking questions in hopes of provoking a voice response from the entity. Even if I didn't hear any answers, it was possible the high-sensitivity microphone we'd set up would capture subtle ghostly sounds and voices. I told Stacey what
I was doing so she would stay quiet.
I turned off the little lamp, turning the room dark. My eyes gradually adjusted to the gloom offered by the faint glow of a distant streetlight somewhere outside.
"Is someone here?" I asked, as if trying to get a response from a planchette on a spirit board. By the way, I don't recommend those at all—they're a good way to attract entities with dark intentions.
Nobody answered, as far as I could tell, but the microphone had a wider range of hearing than I did, and everything was being recorded.
"What is your name?" I asked. After a long pause, I followed up with "Why are you here?" Then, after another minute: "What do you want?"
I circled the nursery with my Mel-Meter as I spoke, checking for fluctuations in energy and temperature. The stuffed animals seemed to take on a sinister appearance in the near darkness, as if they were living creatures crouched in the shadows, watching me. I shook my head, trying to shake off my absurd fear of the fluffy toys. My heart thumped in my ears. I could understand why the baby hated the room.
"Who are you?" I asked again, pivoting slowly to address each of the four corners. It was a critical question. Getting the ghost's name, or even a portion of it, could save us a lot of time.
My eyes fell on the low cabinet doors along the wall. Like the animals, and basically everything in the room, they seemed somehow more than they appeared, doors that would lead, not into little storage cabinets, but into dark and unearthly places, awful places.
I stepped close to the row of little doors. My arms grew bumpy. Something roiled in the pit of my stomach. These were biological warning signs that something dangerous lurked nearby.