by JL Bryan
"Is someone here?" I whispered toward the dusty dresser and the dark corner beyond it. I drew my Mel-Meter from my utility belt, which I'd strapped on before coming out. There was some electrical activity. The shed seemed a little cooler than the outdoors, but I hadn't taken any readings out there so I couldn't be sure.
I heard it again—a little gasp for air, like the hitching sound you make when you've been crying hard and start to run out of oxygen. I switched the Mel-Meter for a compact audio recorder the size of a slender pen. Stacey watched me and kept herself silent.
"Hello?" I asked the entity that might or might not have been there. "Did you say something?"
No response came.
"I heard you crying," I said. "Who is crying?" I paused, then added, "Why are you crying?"
I heard it again, the hitching sound and then another sob. It seemed to be coming from the dark corner ahead, in the narrow area between the side of the dresser and the wall. I couldn't see anything there. I looked back at Stacey, who was making big eyes and nodding to tell me she'd heard it, too.
Over several minutes, I peppered the ghost with simple questions. I told it I was there to help. My usual routine. I kept my non-microphone hand on my tactical flashlight the whole time, ready to draw it and toast the entity with sunlight-force white light.
Rather than attacking, though, the entity fell silent and seemed to recede from the room altogether. Its cries had been so soft that they could easily have been a trick of the ear or the brain, if I hadn't had Stacey there as a witness. And, hopefully, an audio recording to back up what we'd heard.
We moved one of the main high-powered microphones from the upstairs hall to the shed in order to monitor the area where we'd heard the ghost. My pocket recorder didn't have the memory or battery life to record the area all night.
Out in the van, Stacey downloaded the recording from my pocket mike and looked at visual graphs of the sound waves.
"Yep. Right there." She cleaned it up, amplified it, and played it back.
Sobbing. It was somewhat mechanical and flat, the voice of a dead thing, but it sobbed, and then there were a couple of garbled sounds right at the end.
"What was that?" I asked.
"Already checking it out." Stacey punched it up and enhanced it, like any tech guy in any cop movie.
When I heard the words, I couldn't help shivering. The intonation was lifeless. The voice sounded female to me.
"My babies," it said.
Stacey replayed it with a tap.
"My babies," the voice repeated. Stacey replayed it again and again. "My babies. My babies. My—"
"That's just about enough, Stacey," I said, blocking her hand with my own before she could click again.
"Sorry. I just thought we'd want to listen closely. It's pretty spooky, isn't it? To me, it sounded like she was saying my babies, my babies, my babies—"
"Yeah, I heard it, too. I'm sitting right here."
"You seem pretty jumpy tonight. Worried about Anton?"
"I would need a huge blackboard to write out all the things I'm worried about and the connections between them," I said. "There would still be tons of question marks and variables, too. Okay, let's just keep recording in the shed. Anything happening inside the house?"
"No. The nursery is colder than the rest of the house, as usual, but no concentrated cold spots. Nothing happening near that bench downstairs, either. Maybe they're all hiding from us."
"They could be reacting to the disruption of the household routine," I said. "If we're lucky, they'll get bolder and more active soon."
We waited and watched, but there was no further activity inside the house.
"My mushroom burritos!" Stacey gasped after a while. "We totally forgot. I've got the serious rumbles now." She touched her stomach.
"We have more to do inside, anyway," I said.
"Yeah. Like toast those frozen nachos in the oven." Stacey opened the back door of the van, and we climbed out together. Much later, long after the vegan burritos were heated, eaten, complained about, and forgotten, it was time for us to split up.
"You shouldn't stay inside the house by yourself," Stacey said, lingering near the back door.
"It won't be long. Jacob's picking me up in less than an hour."
"You can wait out in the van with me."
"No. If anyone is watching, I want them to think we've settled into our final positions for the night," I said. "I'll be right here by the back door. I'm not poking around up in the nursery by myself, if that's what you're worried about."
"Okay. As long as you promise to let me know if anything happens."
"I'm not wearing this as a fashion statement." I tapped the radio headset I'd slipped on.
"Be careful." Stacey hugged me before leaving the house. I'm sure she meant well, but it was a little unnerving, like she thought I was in serious danger. I figured I'd be safe as long as I didn't annoy the ghost with another crying baby doll. I would have been perfectly fine with no more encounters at Mackenzie's house tonight—I needed to save my strength for my trip to the old theater later.
The house felt silent and still, for the most part, but not empty. I heard things that could have been natural or not, the occasional creak that could have been a footstep or merely the house settling. Something rattled in the walls, possibly an old pipe, though there was no particular reason for water to be running at the moment.
I'm not great at standing around doing nothing, so I walked around the first floor a bit, taking readings. I waved to Stacey over the camera in the front room, where I'd seen cold spots around the bench area.
"You're not supposed to be there!" Stacey hissed.
"I'm picking up some low EMF readings," I told her. "Nothing major. Maybe I'll just head upstairs."
"Ellie, no!"
"Yeah, I'm kidding." I holstered my Mel-Meter and headed for the back door. "I'm off. Cover me. And wish me luck."
"I hope you have lucky luck," Stacey replied.
I tried to be as cloak-and-dagger as I could, keeping to the shadows as I slipped out the garden gate and over a brick wall into a neighbor's garden. I dashed around, over another wall, then between two houses through a tiny gap barely wide enough for my shoulders. Then across another street, trying to avoid the streetlamps. I carried a pack stuffed with gear on my back, which made things difficult and unpleasant along the way.
It was possible nobody was watching me, and all of these antics were pointless. It was equally possible that they would be watching me on thermal or night vision cameras, rendering the antics both pointless and embarrassing.
Back at the house, Stacey would be trying to distract any unseen observers with the appearance of activity inside. She'd rigged up three small lights throughout the house. As she sat in the van, she could flick them on and off by remote control. The idea was to create the illusion that I was walking through the house with my flashlight, and had definitely not slipped out the back door to continue my forbidden Anton Clay investigation.
I made my way through the darkest alley I could find, tall old houses blocking moonlight and streetlights on either side, and then felt exposed as I crossed the well-lit street to the little park beyond.
It was dark as three a.m. approached, and a chill hung in the air. I could almost feel unseen eyes watching me—maybe a live human criminal lying in wait for a victim, maybe one of the city's countless ghosts, haunting the neighborhood in the depths of the night, watching me cross the street alone.
Maybe there was nothing there at all, and my mind was racing with a little bit of paranoid late-night fear. The presence of ghosts is so subtle that, in this line of work, you have to constantly watch out for your mind playing tricks on you. It's easy to misinterpret stray sounds in the night or small movements at the corner of your eye.
I waited in the tree-lined darkness of the square. A drizzle began to fall, and I was damp all over by the time Jacob's ultra-low-key gray Hyundai arrived. It was the most nondescript sort o
f vehicle, perfect for slipping away unnoticed.
He paused next to the curb, and I dashed out to the car and opened the passenger-side door. I winced as the car's interior light switched on, and I hurried to close the door behind me.
"Sorry I'm late," Jacob said. The dashboard read 3:02. "So I'm supposed to take you to an old theater?"
"Yeah. Anton Clay could be hiding out there. It's the site of one of his old houses."
"Whoa, you're not supposed to feed the psychics, remember?"
"That's for a standard investigation. This isn't one of those."
"What is it?" Jacob drove through the light when it turned green, and we left Mackenzie's neighborhood behind us.
"It's more of a hunt. You're the only person who could help us. It would be stupid for one person to go in there alone, but we had to pretend that we were still at our client's house tonight."
"Why?"
"That's a whole other conversation. The short answer is the new ownership."
"Yeah, Stacey doesn't sound happy with them, either." He looked me over. "Are you sure you're up for this? You kind of look sick."
"I did have my soul ripped out of my body earlier. Plus I slept on a couch that turned out to be less comfortable over the long term than I expected."
"You said your soul was ripped out...?"
I filled him in on Kara and her crazy ability.
"And you're just going to keep working there?" he asked.
"No. I'm going to use the resources of the agency to help me capture Anton and help Michael however I can. And then...I don't know."
"Do you think Stacey's in danger there?"
"I'm keeping her away from my troublemaking. That's why you're here, to help protect her."
"Okay. And who's going to protect you?" Jacob looked worried.
"I guess nobody," I said. "But that's how it goes. Do you know where we're headed?"
"The old, boarded-up theater on Broughton Street."
"Yeah, you can probably just take Montgomery the whole way—"
"I know. I live here, too."
"Right. Sorry."
"Are you sure you're up for haunted-house burglary tonight?" Jacob asked. "I'm asking for my own protection, too, since breaking and entering was no longer a requirement for an accounting degree by the time I got to college."
"Don't worry, I know all about it. We'll be in and out in no time. Everything will be fine."
As we drove the fairly short distance to the theater, I hoped what I was saying would turn out to be true.
Chapter Seventeen
Jacob parked in the alley behind the theater, the nose of his car facing the quickest route back to a main road in case we had to leave in a hurry. The dark, drizzling night was unpleasant, but I hoped that would help keep our actions even more hidden. The parking garage across the alleyway contributed plenty of darkness and shadows, too. I hadn't seen any security cameras looking down into the alley on previous visits.
"Okay." I reached up to switch off his interior light, then hefted the backpack in my arms. "In and out as fast as we can, and we stay close to each other the whole time. We don't leave each other's sight even for a second."
He nodded, and I climbed onto the small loading dock and approached the back door, the rear entrance where actors, clowns, ventriloquists, and musicians would have arrived in years past.
I got to work on the locks. Jacob tried to look nonchalant, but he was clearly nervous at participating in this particular act of trespass.
"Thanks for being here," I whispered as I opened the old steel door. "If I didn't say that before."
"You didn't."
I jumped back at the sight of a tall, pale man standing just inside, his arms raised above his head as if charging at me. I turned and collided with Jacob.
Then Jacob clicked on his flashlight and pointed it inside the theater, casting light on a mildewy cardboard stand-up of the Mummy, the classic black and white version from the earliest days of Hollywood. Someone must have left it facing the door as a joke on their way out.
"Don't be afraid," Jacob said. "He probably won't be angry as long as you don't try to steal any of his ancient cursed treasure."
"Hilarious." I straightened up, attempting to regain some semblance of dignity, then dashed inside to disarm the burglar alarm.
The alarm system turned out to be both basic and obsolete, easily disarmed. That made sense, though. It only needed to be good enough to protect against random vagrants and vandals. The empty old shell of a theater wouldn't be attracting master jewel thieves or secret agents, so there was hardly any need to outfit the place with laser grids and armed security drones.
I disabled the alarm system in no time, and we turned our attention to exploring the warren of small backstage rooms. In another era, these had been dressing rooms and prop closets, but now they were just a jumble of dark rooms with junk heaped in the corners. It would be easy to get turned around and lost. Maybe we should have left bread crumbs.
Our flashlights found tattered old furniture and broken plaster columns. There were cracked mirrors along two walls in an old dressing room, surrounded by dead light bulbs, and pieces of masks and wigs scattered on the floor like body parts.
"Lots of ghosts around here," Jacob murmured, almost too low to hear, as if making an unimportant comment to himself.
"Excuse me? You said lots of ghosts?" I paused where we stood, in a narrow backstage hallway.
"Of course. A place this old?" He shrugged.
"Anything that could be Anton Clay?" I asked. "Anything...fiery and creepy?"
"Creepy, yes. Fiery, not so far." Jacob turned his head from side to side, as if trying to listen to someone whispering far away. "There's been plenty of drama here over the generations."
"That makes sense. It is a theater."
Jacob shook his head at me. "Plenty of emotions, plenty of ghosts. Unfortunately, that means it's a good place for a spirit to hide, like Anton. It could take a while to pinpoint him, if he's here. Especially if he wants to stay hidden from us. If he wants to come out and attack us—well, this is a pretty good spot for that, too."
"What about these other ghosts? Are they hostile?"
"I can't tell yet. They're just starting to notice we're here. Imagine the room is full of shadowy dead people looking at us and whispering to each other."
"Great. Any thoughts on where we should set up observation gear?"
"It's all pretty haunted."
We made our way out to the creaky floorboards of the stage. The musty red curtains were drawn behind the proscenium arch, blocking our view of the house area beyond. More curtains walled in the side and back of the stage, creating something like a padded room in an insane asylum, only with much more brocade.
"Watch out for the trap door." Jacob tapped a square on the floor with the tip of his tennis shoe. "There will be a trap room underneath. Feels pretty stuck right now."
"Are you sensing anything below the stage?"
Jacob thought about it with his eyes closed, then opened them and shook his head. "Weird. If I were a ghost haunting an old theater, I would definitely call dibs on the trap door and the area below the stage. Seems like a neat area to haunt."
I pointed my flashlight upward into the vaulted cavity above the stage. A network of ropes and beams hung like a worn, collapsing spider's web around a rickety wooden catwalk that looked lopsided, as though some of its support ropes had rotted. This fit pretty well with the decayed, slumping skeletons of old wooden scaffolding tucked into the wings on either side of the stage. All of it seemed loosely held together by masses of dusty cobwebs.
"We should probably try to avoid going upstairs," Jacob said, following my gaze into the darkness above the stage.
"Why? Do you sense something up there?"
"I'm just looking at the basic safety issues."
"There must be stairs somewhere. We have to go up to the top floor, Jacob. Someone saw a man up there. And fire, or at least light that l
ooked like fire. She said it all vanished in an eyeblink."
"You know, you're really not supposed to tell me—"
"I'm not worried about leading information or false positives right now." I used my flashlight to part the musty, mildewy red curtain at the back of the stage. Behind it lay an old movie screen, now home to patches of dark green mold. "Also, maybe don't breathe too deeply around here. Let's check out the rest of the first floor."
"So we can find those stairs and make our way up to the room where your stalker is waiting to burn us alive," Jacob added. "I'm lucky to have friends like you."
"You're definitely not. Good luck is not something I spread wherever I go." I used my flashlight to part the front curtain and led the way out.
The stage floor jutted out through the proscenium arch and a few feet into the house, so that even when the front curtains were drawn, a narrow forward lip remained where someone could stand and make announcements or introductions.
I shone my light out over the dark space where audiences had sat for decades, laughing and crying, or possibly booing and hurling things in discontent. The front rows of worn seats had been ripped out, presumably to create a dance floor in front of the stage during the theater's brief run as a nightclub.
The theater wasn't huge, yet it had a cavernous feel, as dark theaters often do. The darkness, the curtains, and the jumble of hidden rooms added up to make the building seem much larger on the inside than it had appeared before we entered.
I hopped down the three feet from the stage to the house floor. Jacob, more cautious, sat down on the edge of the stage and scooted off, preferring to get dust and grime on his jeans rather than risk a bad landing. That was probably wise—the floors in these old places can be unstable, broken, or slick with leaked rainwater and slime.
"There's a lot of stuff here," Jacob said. His flashlight swept the room. There were no working lights now, and not a drop of light from outside leaked into the theater.
"What kind of stuff?" I stepped around a busted row of old wooden seats that looked like somebody had kicked them to pieces for fun.
"I'm getting glimpses everywhere, most of them just remnants and place memories, but lots of them. Emotions and experiences are etched into the whole environment."