by JL Bryan
"What happened?"
"Nazis with aeroplanes. You may have heard of it."
"Where are you from?"
"Sorry, I didn't mean to switch the subject." He turned back to me and seemed to give my face a quick look-over. His blue eyes darkened toward amber.
"Was there a subject? And stop trying to read my mind. That eye-color thing kind of makes it obvious. What's the deal with that, anyway?"
"I know you've been pursuing the Anton Clay case." His eyes lightened to blue again and he looked away.
"I don't know what you mean," I said, which seemed like a pointless lie if he'd just looked into my mind. I really had to find a way to defend against that.
"You've placed two other properties under surveillance," he said. "Using equipment you allegedly checked out for use in this case. Hayden is taking inventory now. How much will come up missing, Ellie?"
I sighed. Half the gear we'd taken from the office was out at the other sites. They'd caught us there.
"It did not take long for me to trace the histories of those two properties," Nicholas said. "To find that neither of them seem connected to your current case, but both belonged to Clay when he was alive. Kara has told you to cease that investigation."
"He's too dangerous of an entity. He can't be allowed to run wild. People will die before it's over, Nicholas."
"Are you sure your interest is so much about the public good? It's nothing more...personal?"
"It doesn't matter if it's personal," I said. "I have a city to protect."
"You don't work for the city. You work for us."
"Like I needed a reminder. So what are you going to do? Fire me? Put me in psychic jail? Rip my soul out and stuff it into a bottle on Kara's desk?"
"I had a different thought," he said. "As I do not wish for my life to become consumed by drama and conflict, I prefer to mediate between the two of you. If you continue with your current discrete approach, I will hold off on telling Kara about this. I'll keep it under my shirt."
"You mean under your hat?"
"Probably."
"And why are you doing me such a generous favor?" I asked. "Aren't you scared of Kara and her soul-grabbing little fingernails like everyone else?"
"A bit."
"Has she ever done it to you?" I reached toward his face, making little claw hooks with my hand.
"Never to me personally, no. Though I hear it's awful. That one feels like a raw oyster being sucked out of its shell."
"Don't ruin oysters for me. Just tell me what you're after."
"This entity." He gestured upward, toward the nursery. "From what little you've bothered to report to us about the case, I gather it's a multiple murderer."
"Yep. Well, children do seem to die tragically here. And the place is definitely haunted by a ghost who's very interested in our client's baby. So..."
"It has killed several of the living since its death, correct?" Nicholas said.
"The deaths register as accident or disease," I said. "And maybe some of them really were. But the ghost's influence doesn't seem benevolent." In my mind, I saw the baby doll smashing into the wall again.
"When you capture this ghost, hand it over to me."
"Why? For your secret ghost laboratory up in the mountains?" I asked. I had observed attempts to train and control ghosts there, like psychokinetic ghosts being made to lift heavy stones on command. I'd seen experimental devices that used negative ions and electromagnetic energy broadcasts to force ghosts to appear even when they didn't want to. "You want to see if you can train the evil singing nursery ghost to...do what? Babysit evil children?"
"Our research is meant to help us, the living, win the war against the dangerous spirits of the world," Nicholas said. "In order to learn how to defeat the more violent ones, it helps to have a few of them on hand to learn from, you understand."
"I can't tell if you're being extra condescending right now, or if you're always this bad and I'm usually too busy ignoring you to notice. Okay. So you want me to give you the ghost trap instead of burying it in old Reverend Blake's graveyard up in Appalachia. Hey, I've been meaning to ask whether you guys are related."
"Excuse me?"
"Old Reverend Mordecai Blake," I said. "He was a vicious hellfire preacher in life. We use his old graveyard to bury the more dangerous ghosts we trap. You should know this from the files."
"That graveyard."
"You're a psychic, he was a psychic, you have the same name, so maybe—"
"I will be rushing breathlessly to the nearest genealogist for confirmation."
"There's no word on whether he had freaky color-changing eyes, though," I said. "I'll have to dig into some seriously dusty microfiche for those kinds of details. All right, so you want the ghost trap at the end of this case. So what? That's not something you'd have to hide from Kara."
"Kara and I have relationships with different researchers inside our organization," Nicholas said. "We have different...areas of occupation, you might say."
"I might, if I had any idea what you were talking about," I said. "You could be more specific."
"True. Anyway, a strong, dangerous spirit like this is quite valuable. As a research subject, of course. So I might like to route it to one lab, while Kara might have preferred to route it to another. That's all. Simple internal corporate politics that would be of little real interest to you, I'm sure."
"Sounds pretty interesting to me," I said. "Give me all the inside dirt on your company. I've got a notepad right here."
"We have an understanding, then? You deliver the dangerous entity to me—directly to me—and I'll keep quiet about your unauthorized side investigation. And by 'unauthorized' I actually mean 'expressly and unequivocally forbidden right to your face by Kara—'"
"I get it," I said. "Whatever keeps things running smoothly. It's hard to care what happens to a child murderer after you catch her. As long as it doesn't involve letting her go free again."
"I can assure you it would never involve that."
"All right. We have an understanding."
"Fist bump?" Nicholas held out one fist expectantly, a solemn look on his face. I couldn't tell if he was kidding or just being extremely awkward.
"I guess." I touched my knuckles briefly against his, feeling a brief spark of revulsion when our skin made contact.
Something creaked in the night. The door to the shed was open. It seemed unlikely Stacey and I would have left it open, with the expensive big microphone in there.
I approached the shed, under the shadowy canopy of sprawling trees, gnarled oaks that had been old long before I was born. It was lightless inside.
I drew my flashlight and pointed it into the darkness as I stepped close to the open door. It was cooler inside the shed than outdoors. An earthy, wormy smell hung in the air.
"Hello?" I asked. "Who's there?"
"It seems you have plenty of work with which to occupy yourself," Nicholas said. "Have a good evening."
Then he walked away, apparently off to the van.
I didn't expect much from Nicholas, but I really wouldn't have expected him to take off and leave me alone the moment something creepy happened. "Way to supervise, supervising investigator," I muttered under my breath.
Stepping forward, I swung my light from side to side, illuminating old hand tools and a shiny red lawn mower that looked like it had never been used. Mackenzie had mentioned that a landscaping service came by each week to tend the gardens and tiny square lawn.
"You can speak to me," I said, glancing over to make sure the big microphone was on. "I'm here to listen. We heard you say something about your babies. Are they here? Are they in danger?" I paused for a minute, hoping the ghost was giving some kind of reply. "We can help, if you need help. Just let us know what's keeping you here—"
A soft moan sounded in the room. I didn't need special microphones to hear it. The sound was like a high wind rushing between tree branches.
My blood turned cold, and my who
le body tensed. The door hinges creaked. If the entity had opened the shed door, then it could close the shed door—but now I was inside the shed, and alone, thanks to Nicholas ditching me.
The door began to ease its way closed, as if nudged by a light breeze. I had a split second to decide whether I wanted to escape or take my chances being shut in alone with the ghost.
I bolted back toward the shed door, and it picked up speed, whooshing its way toward the jamb. I wasn't going to make it. I tried a last desperate dive, like Indiana Jones dodging that giant boulder, only it didn't quite work out as well for me.
The shed door slammed shut before I smacked into it. I fumbled at the handle, gripping my flashlight in the other hand, feeling the room turn icy cold, like some kind of frost-breathing imp was breathing right down the back of my neck.
I couldn't get the door to open.
Turning away from it, I swept my flashlight across the shed again. It felt like something was close, maybe close enough to touch my face, but I couldn't see anything.
After a minute, I turned off my light. The entity had not attacked me, not yet...and to be fair, I had put a bit of energy into inviting it to talk. I would have preferred talking with the door open to give me an escape route, though.
"Hello?" I said into the pitch darkness, my voice quivering, not as bold and confident as it had been a minute earlier. "Do you have a message for me?"
I gripped my flashlight tighter, resisting the urge to summon its glow and dispel the darkness while I waited for a response.
Nothing happened for a long moment, except for the shed growing noticeably colder. It was beginning to feel like a meat locker.
The face rushed up to me like a luminous fish rising from the deep, eye sockets blank, mouth a dark line, the nose barely suggested. It was a ghost-face, unfinished, lacking in detail, requiring great energy to appear even in this partial form. That was why the shed had grown so cold; the ghost had been sucking in the power to present itself.
"Who are you?" I asked.
The features sharpened a bit. It looked like a woman's face.
"I may not hear you right away," I said. "But if you speak, you will be heard. I promise you."
The face rushed toward me, distorting and distending as it approached. Pieces of a torso and arm were visible now, also pale but beginning to glow a reddish hue from deep inside.
The arm lunged for my face.
My nerves were already keyed up, and the sudden aggressive move by the ghost was just too much for them. I screamed. I hate when they make me scream. It's so unprofessional.
The stink of burning hair and skin filled my nostrils and mouth, gagging me. Maybe it was nothing but an olfactory apparition, a ghost-smell, but it was thick and strong enough to make breathing difficult. Fire is particularly terrifying for me, for obvious reasons.
I raised my flashlight, ready to spear the ghost with a glowing beam. Hey, I told her I would listen. I hadn't invited her to choke me to death.
The misshapen ghost smacked into me, hitting me with a wave of pressure and scalding heat, as well as more of that unwelcome burning stench. She was hitting me with all the heat she'd just drained from the air around us, making me feel the fire all over my skin.
I panicked, horrified—it was as if the ghost knew just how to get inside my head and claw right into the depths of my psyche, as if she'd been in contact with Anton Clay somehow, and he'd sent her my way with instructions on how best to toy with me.
Or it could have been a coincidence. Lots of people die in fires. Maybe this ghost was just one more of them.
I flung myself against the shed door, pounding and screaming like a crazed animal, so scared of burning alive that all sense of reason had fled from my brain.
The door wouldn't open. Of course not, because they never do when you're trapped inside a room with a ghost. I drew back and gave it a hard kick, hoping those kickboxing muscles I'd been building would finally pay off.
It shuddered on impact, but still didn't budge, as if someone had padlocked it from the outside. Maybe Nicholas, in which case I would definitely kill him if I saw him again.
Taking a deep breath, I drew back and kicked again as hard as I could.
The door flew open, and it didn't have one thing to do with my hard kick. It opened by itself, and my leg plunged through open space with all the force I'd been able to muster.
I hurtled out of the open door and sprawled on the little back lawn outside, landing on my back facing the night sky above. A little "ugh" sound escaped my lips, along with all the air in my lungs.
"Whoa, bro." The Hoff leaned in over me, removing his sunglasses now that he was outside. "Did you see that? It looked like the big disaster scene from a bobsled movie. She just flew out and smacked the ground, bam. What was that bobsled movie called?"
"Are you okay?" Stacey was already kneeling beside me, checking me over
"Not sure," I mumbled. "Let me know if you see anything that's broken, bruised, or bleeding." I pointed my flashlight back into the dark shed. It didn't look the least bit threatening now—just a lawnmower, a couple of rakes, a garden hose, and not even very many spider webs.
"What attacked you?" Hayden pointed his own flashlight into the shed, joining his beam to mine. "Was it the leaf blower? Did somebody leave it on max blast?"
"You're hilarious, Hasselhoff." I accepted Stacey's hand while she helped me up.
"And you're just lucky we came out here when we did," he replied, while stepping into the shed to check over the microphone installed there.
"That's debatable." I brushed grass off my pants and nodded at the house. "How did it go in there, Stacey?"
"I didn't let him mess up too much of our gear. He tried. With his mayonnaisey fingers. Plus he kept asking me out. Like ten times in ten minutes. I should write the word 'no' on a big sign so I can wave it in his face next time."
"You're missing out," he said.
"I don't think so. Especially not when the offer is to go see a...what was it? A martial arts cage match?"
"You'll catch it later on YouTube and be sad you missed it," Hayden said.
"Maybe you could invite Kara instead," Stacey suggested.
Hayden blanched like Stacey had just told him that Dracula was standing right behind him. He fell silent, and I was okay with that.
"What happened to your guy?" Stacey asked me.
"Nicholas ran off as soon as we heard the noise in the shed. He's probably in the van hiding under a blanket. You should go check on him, Hayden. And take him home. Or maybe take him out for ice cream to make him feel better, since he was so afraid."
"Hey, ice cream actually sounds pretty sweet right now."
"Go on," I said. "You're done here, right?"
"Yeah, but I could still hang around, you know, in case things get dangerous—" Hayden attempted to sling an arm over Stacey's shoulders, and she tossed an elbow into his ribs as she dodged it.
"My boyfriend's on his way over," she said. "So, if I needed a guy's protection, I have it. Not that I need it."
"You seem confused," Hayden said. "Maybe you're not sure about this other guy anymore. Now that you've met me—"
"Your breath smells like cold cuts."
"Go on, Hoff," I said. "You and Nicholas have wasted plenty of our time already. We have work to do."
"Think about it, Stacey," he said, while moving way too slowly toward the driveway. "It could be a thing, you and me."
"How could I resist poetry like that?" Stacey asked.
He winked, then returned his dark glasses to his face, stumbling a few times as he left the back yard for the driveway. A minute later, I heard the huge black van pull away.
"What really happened in there?" Stacey asked, pointing her flashlight toward the open shed.
"I had an unpleasant encounter," I said. "No lullabies. I'm going to double-check the old photographs, but I think it was Hannah Gibson Carlisle."
"The main lady, huh?"
"What
I could see of the face really resembled her. There wasn't much to see, though. We can check the recording to see if she answered questions again. Is Jacob really coming over?"
"Yeah, I meant to tell you, but I got distracted by our nosy guests. Jacob's pretty worried about our case, after the whole thing with Scary Houdini trying to kill you last night."
"That's not really our current case, though. Houdini's not going to show up here."
"I don't know...aren't magicians all about doing what you don't expect them to do?"
"He's probably pretty tied to that theater," I said. "Most ghosts don't wander freely."
"But Clay does, now. You think Houdini is protecting Clay?"
"He's making it hard to investigate the theater, anyway. So if Clay is hiding out there, then Houdini is protecting Clay from us, whether he means to or not."
"Sounds like we need to give that stage magician the hook, then," Stacey said. "You know, like in old vaudeville plays, the hook—"
"I got the reference, Stacey. Anyway, we won't be diving into the theater tonight. We've got our hands full. I hope Jacob can tell us something useful."
I led the way back into the house. Above me, the nursery window curtain seemed to flicker, as though someone were just inside, watching us from the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-One
Jacob showed up soon after our unwanted guests departed. He surprised us with a few anonymous styrofoam takeout boxes radiating rich, heavenly scents, stewed vegetables mingled with fried and roasted meats. We carried everything to Mackenzie's kitchen table, where a picture window looked out on the walled garden in the back.
"Oh, goodie, brilliant idea!" Stacey said. She flipped open boxes, revealing mounds of collard greens, black-eyed peas with rice, crusty baked macaroni with thick clumps of cheese, okra and tomatoes stewed together, plus fried chicken, a turkey leg, and cornbread.
It all smelled incredible—my mouth was watering, my appetite beginning to return for the first time in days.
"I stopped by Little King on Montgomery," Jacob said. "I figured, with what Ellie's been through—her spirit getting ripped out of her body and stuffed back, and everything—she could probably use some—"