by JL Bryan
Nicholas actually took a step in my direction, which led Hayden to half-stand behind his workstation. It was more of a quarter-stand, actually, with a cringing look toward Kara by the coffee machine, as if he wanted to make sure she wasn't going to smack him down like a whack-a-mole.
I shook my head at Nicholas, and he stopped. His eyes even lightened up, returning to their usual blue. They were a darker hue than Kara's, and looked like the eyes of a living person rather than, let's say, the eyes of a corpse trapped in ice for a thousand years. It was going to be hard to think of Kara as an actual human being again, and not some kind of demon.
Stacey and I climbed into the van. She took the driver's seat this time, since I was shaking and cold, sweating on the outside, dizzy, and suffering from a sort of awful emotional hypothermia on the inside. Getting ripped out of your body and then carelessly stuffed back inside brings a whole range of unpleasant feelings.
The garage door rattled up, and we backed out. The earlier drizzle had returned, but beams of sunlight leaked down here and there through cracks in the cloud cover.
I felt disconnected from everything in a way I'd never experienced before. The world seemed like television, flat and glowing, insubstantial.
"Okay," Stacey said as she drove us down the street. "Let's remember I still have zero idea what she did to you. Do you need a doctor? Emergency room? CPR? I'm a fully certified lifeguard, you know. Or I was. I think it lapses after a certain number of years. I can call the country club and check."
I coughed, still shivering and clammy. "No doctor. There's nothing Western medicine can do for me right now. Except maybe the manufacturers of Valium. But we have to work. I don't want to rest."
"That seems like the bare minimum you should do," Stacey said. "Rest, juice, hot bath. Maybe we should go to my place for a few hours. Or yours. I'll keep an eye out while you sleep. I've got plenty to do with the footage we picked up at Mackenzie's last night. So work will get done. Okay?"
"No." I forced myself to think. "We have to go by the hotel and get the keys to Mackenzie's house. Let's do that." I checked myself in the side mirror. Pale, sweaty face, dark hair clinging limply to my scalp. I looked like I'd been lying in bed with a fever for three days. "You go in and get the keys, pretend I'm not with you."
"Got it. You sure you're okay? Anything you want to talk about?"
"In a minute. Right now I just want to put space between me and Kara."
"Look, whatever she did, or whatever she said—"
"Did," I interrupted. "Something she did. Something she can do to anyone, living or dead. That's what she told me."
"What is it?" Stacey could have been annoyed or impatient with my vagueness—I probably would have been in her situation—but her voice was soft. She patted my arm when we stopped at a red light.
"There's something I've only seen mentioned a few times," I said. "Indicated in old and obscure ghost lore, and mentioned a few times in the parapsychology journals. The term was proposed in 1922, by Sir Benjamin Forrester of the London Theophilosophical Society. The same guy who coined the term 'pestilent' as a noun referring to a ghost that induces illness in the living, which is just what we're dealing with over at Mackenzie's house."
"Okay, but I feel like you're giving me a page of Mad Libs here, with a lot of blanks," Stacey said.
"Sorry. My brain is like Swiss cheese right now. Rotten, waterlogged Swiss cheese."
"Ew."
"Kara is a soulhook," I said. "That's a theoretical device that a few eccentric paranormal researchers were pursuing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. People Ithaca Galloway would have known back in her prime. Anyway, Calvin has a text somewhere suggesting that certain people, with innate talents and advanced training, might be 'soulhooks' themselves. There are a few old stories. We'll look at them, if we can find where Kara and Nicholas put them..." I rubbed my throbbing head.
"So what does that mean?"
"She's more than a medium. She doesn't just speak to the dead—in fact, I'm not sure whether she even speaks or listens to them at all—but what she can do is reach out with her mind and grab them."
Stacey chewed on that for a second. "She's a human ghost trap?"
"To some extent, yes. There must be some limit to her power."
"Why do you say that?"
"Just being optimistic," I said. "Everything has its limit. Right?"
Stacey didn't have an immediate answer for that as she pulled into the EconoQuality Rooms and Value Suites where Mackenzie was staying. While Stacey went inside to find the room, I waited in the van with the passenger side seat laid back as far as it would go, and basically I tried to settle back into my body.
My own body didn't seem to fit as well anymore—too tight here, too loose there. I felt sick, and the afternoon sunlight was an intense orange. Stacey seemed to be taking forever. I wanted to get moving. Moving made me feel less sick than sitting still.
Just when I thought I couldn't stand it anymore, Stacey finally emerged from the hotel again, smiling and strolling like she had all the time in the world. I wanted to bite her head off as soon as she opened the driver-side door, and I just barely had enough presence of mind to realize that she hadn't actually done anything wrong.
"Here, I got you an Aquafina." Stacey unscrewed the cap from a plastic bottle and passed it over. The water was blissfully cold when I sipped it, fresh from a refrigerator somewhere.
"Thanks. How's Mackenzie?"
"Coping. A little freaked out, but I think she copes by organizing and working. She's got a suite with two bedrooms and living-kitchen area. Balcony, too, though it just looks out on the highway. Anyway, she's got all her computer stuff set up right there in her bedroom, and the other bedroom is the kid's, of course, and the nanny's there—"
"Did they have any problems on the way out?" I asked. "Supernatural encounters, that kind of thing?"
"If she did, she didn't tell me. And she probably would have. Right?"
"I would hope so. Thanks for the water. It's a huge help." I sipped more as Stacey drove us along. Despite everything, I could spare a moment to feel relieved that Mackenzie and baby Dylan were out of that house. There seemed to be at least one dangerous entity dwelling there, and the fight could get nasty before it was over.
Stacey and I fell silent as we passed the simple tree-lined emptiness of Pulaski Square. We turned a corner and looked at Mackenzie's house, a lovely and charming enough home on the outside, not extravagant but definitely quite expensive, considering its age, condition, and neighborhood. It blended in with its neighbors, half-hidden behind little gardens and immense oak trees in the front yard, just like the houses around it.
It was only after we parked and stepped out of the van that I felt a tremor of the darkness waiting inside for us. The windows seemed like hooded eyes now, the curtains drawn tight to keep the house's dark secrets inside.
"Okay," Stacey whispered. "Now it's just us and them."
"Good."
We stepped inside and quickly made an orbit of the house, making sure all the gear was intact, with fresh batteries, ready to start recording at dusk.
One nice thing about the client's absence was that I didn't have to appear presentable, or even coherent. My current condition had me looking awful and mumbling to myself a lot, trying to piece together my thoughts. Stacey asked me a number of concerned questions, but I didn't feel like discussing the world-shattering thing that had happened to me, not yet. I just wanted to focus on the work in front of us, which seemed a much more manageable issue.
That soon brought us to the other nice thing about the client's absence—there was nobody to notice me stretch out on the huge, deeply cushioned couch out in the main living room when all the exhaustion finally caught up with me. With Stacey keeping watch nearby, I slept deep and hard. My dreams were like a labyrinth of nightmares, haunted by Anton Clay at one fiery turn after another—but now Kara made it into my dreams, too, and seemed just as terrifying as
the ghost that had killed my parents.
It was a relief to finally awaken from nightmares of smoke and scream, until I remembered I was in a house that seemed haunted by some old ghost that liked to prey on the living, and that the sun was almost down.
"How'd you sleep?" Stacey asked, chipper as ever, looking up from the tablet on her lap. I used to think that her default chipper mode was merely annoying. It's still annoying, sometimes, but sometimes I also see it as a kind of superpower, almost awe-inspiring, the way she can bounce back from having some dark and monstrous ghost trying to strangle her in a basement to getting excited about the new ice cream flavors at Bruster's.
"I always sleep badly," I said. "Anything happening here?"
"Nothing much, except the not-surprising cold temperatures up in the nursery. Brr. Terrible place for a baby to sleep, if you ask me."
"Well, we're trying to make it less terrible. Okay. We need to figure out our game plan for tonight." I pushed myself up to a sitting position and rubbed my eyes.
"Ooh, there's a game plan?"
"We have to get some eyes and ears into that old theater. The bars in that area close around two a.m., so I figure we need to get in and out of the theater sometime between three a.m. and sunrise."
"But what about the case here?"
"That's not even the problem—our gear will still be recording while we're away. The problem is that we have to assume Kara is watching us. They've spied on us before. That means our best bet is for one of us to slip away, out the back, and try not to get noticed, while the other person stays here."
"Wait, that's a terrible plan," Stacey said. "One of us is going right into Anton Clay's new lair alone? At night? That's suicide."
"Not only that, but we have to leave the van out front so it won't be too obvious that one of us left."
"So...I grab some cameras, call an Uber...?"
"We need Jacob's help," I said. "He'll have to pick me up a few blocks from here and go to the old theater with me."
"Wait, you're going? And I'm staying?"
"Exactly. But you're calling Jacob. Tell him we need a favor."
"We're always needing favors. But haven't you been through enough today, Ellie? Like way, way more than enough? Maybe you should be the one who chills here watching the monitors. Jacob and I can handle a little set-up by ourselves. Heck, you usually make me do all the wiring, anyway, while you just sit around kind of making comments about how I could do it better—"
"It may be more than a little set-up," I said. "There could be fire and pain involved."
"So what's new about that?"
"You're staying here. It's my problem to deal with. Anton's my boyfriend."
"Huh. I'm pretty sure you got at least one part of that sentence wrong. Maybe two."
"What?" I replayed what I'd just heard myself say. "Ugh. Anton's my responsibility. My boyfriend is in a coma because of him. The whole situation is basically all my personal problems twisted together. I'm dealing with it myself, not you. That's my point."
"Right. And you're talking like you've suffered major head trauma. Also, once you get Jacob involved, then you're stepping into my personal life, too."
"That's why you shouldn't date co-workers."
"He's not a co-worker. He doesn't get paid. So he's more like...an intern. An intern who's a couple years older than me."
"And you're still the new, less experienced girl. And I'm still your boss."
"Are you, though?"
I opened my mouth to answer before I realized she had a point. Maybe our old mentor/mentee sort of relationship didn't mean much under the new ownership.
"Why don't you just agree with me this time, and then we can argue about something else later? I'm texting Jacob." I reached for my phone, but Stacey whipped out hers first and started tapping.
"I'll get him here. Just promise you'll keep him safe. And yourself safe, too. Should we make up a dummy to look like you?"
"I don't think—"
"Yeah! We can prop it up in the nursery window. I bet Mackenzie has a mop around here. And a permanent marker to color the mop strings, make them darker like your hair. Then we can put your jacket around it, maybe your glasses—"
"Uh huh. I'll take it under serious consideration. Do I smell coffee?"
"Might be cold by now." Stacey pointed toward the kitchen, and I stretched my cramped legs before shuffling over to the long bar dividing the kitchen from the living area. Still drowsy, I barely managed to pour the cold coffee from the steel pot and into a promotional mug with the Pfizer logo. I rummaged for cream in the refrigerator, settled on almond milk, the closest reasonable substitute.
"Oh, yep," Stacey said, watching my struggles with basic self-feeding, or at least self-caffeinating. "You look ready to take on a whole theater full of angry, fire-breathing ghosts."
"I'll be ready after my coffee."
There was a little bit of lull-time while we waited for it to get late. Jacob agreed to come pick me up at three in the morning on the far side of Pulaski Square, so I had all of that to look forward to.
I wrote to Grant Patterson at the Savannah Historical Association to see what kind of background he could dig up on Mackenzie's house. I was particularly interested in whether he could help me find any information about the ultimate fate of Daniel and Hannah Carlisle, after they lost their home and their children in the fire and then moved away. Considering a big, deadly fire was involved, I also wanted to know if Grant could find any connection between them and Anton Clay.
At one point, I tried again to explain to Stacey what I'd been through.
"So, basically, she forced you to have an out-of-body experience," Stacey said. "Do we call the Monroe Institute or what?"
"While I'm mildly impressed you've even heard of the Monroe Institute, no, I think this is beyond their normal area of research. She ripped me out of my body and shoved me back in, and I can't really say which one of those was more painful."
"Did you see anything while you were out of body?" Stacey leaned forward on the couch, like a camper ready for a ghost story.
"Like what?"
"You know. A bright light. Dead relatives. Major religious figures, angels, dragons—"
"No, no. It wasn't a near-death experience."
"But it sounds like she almost killed you. So, technically, that was pretty near death—"
"Don't make it extra-complicated, Stacey."
"Okay. So did you see the back of your own head? I bet that would be super-freaky."
"No, but I did see my own body collapse to the floor without me inside. Like an empty sock puppet. That was super-freaky enough."
"Cool! I mean, sorry Ellie, that sounds awful."
"It wasn't cool at all. I'm still hurting from it. I'm...a little scared of the idea that I'll probably have to be in the same room with her again at some point. And I don't know if I'll be terrified or if I'll just attack her on sight."
"Speaking of attacks, I found a deep freezer in the shed out back."
"With a...dead body in it?" I asked.
"No, food. Lots and lots of frozen food. You know, most people would have guessed 'food' first, before 'dead body.' Anyway, there's some vegan burritos and stuff on top, but there could be so much more."
"Mackenzie's not paying us to eat her food."
"No, but if we bought takeout food for tonight, we could technically bill her for it, right? We're actually saving her money by munching down stuff she bought at Costco."
"If you say so. I'm not hungry. My stomach feels sloshy and squishy."
"That'll save even more money. Come on." Stacey crossed the kitchen and opened the door to the back yard.
With planters, paving stones, and high brick and wrought-iron walls, the area behind the house was more of a snug enclosed courtyard than a lawn. It was centered on a set of wrought-iron chairs and tables that matched the fence. There was a tiny patch of grass, no bigger than a rug. It probably took ten seconds to mow.
The sh
ed jutting out from the back was built of solid, heavy planks painted to match the trim of the house. The shed had no windows and could be accessed by a single door, currently closed. An outdoor floodlight at the corner of the house illuminated the seating area, but the shed lurked back in the shadows, as if it had withdrawn itself from the pool of light and into the wider darkness of the night.
"You came out here by yourself?" I asked, feeling a chill as we approached the shed door.
"Yeah, I walked in the yard during the afternoon. Watching you snore got a little boring."
"You should have been analyzing last night's data."
"That was another thing that got boring. Lullaby Lucy didn't answer any of your questions. Not as far as the mike picked up." Stacey opened the door. It let out a squeak as we entered.
The dim interior smelled earthy and sour. Clay pots of soil lined shelves on one wall. A plentiful assortment of sharp, rust-spotted garden tools stood along the opposite wall. Lawn mower, leaf blower, nothing surprising. We'd checked the shed in our first inspection of the house but hadn't seen much.
"See, look." Stacey lifted the lid of the white, coffin-sized deep freezer. Fog erupted as the icy air within hit the humidity without.
"Yeah, I noticed the deep freezer before, Stacey. It just didn't occur to me to go pawing through it."
"I'm more enterprising. What do you think? Artichoke dip with pita slices? How can we say no?"
"Like I said, I'm not hungry..." I walked past the freezer, toward an old dresser at the back of the shed, stained by engine grease. I thought I'd heard something back there.
"You haven't heard all the options! There's mushroom stroganoff—"
"Sh." I reached the dresser. It looked hand-made, but badly, the little drawers and doors not quite lining up, not quite the same sizes. I opened one drawer and found a dusty assortment of odds and ends—PVC pipe, lug nuts, a spool of wire.
"Now who's getting nosy?" Stacey asked.
I ignored her, which is sometimes more effective than actually asking her to be quiet.