by JL Bryan
"Soul food!" Stacey said. "That's a brainy idea. And thoughtful."
I laughed a little. "If there's anything that can glue my soul back into my body permanently, it's probably that macaroni and cheese right there. Thanks, Jacob."
Stacey kissed him. "You are so sweet."
"It was completely last minute. Not as thoughtful as it looked. Mostly I did it for the pun," he said.
"Your puns are so hot." She cuddled against him for another few seconds, then ditched him in favor of running for cups and silverware. "We'll need sweet tea. Nothing else could wash all this down properly."
We ate, and it was nice. The thick, hefty meal was hard to resist, with gravy so thick a turkey leg could stand upright in it. I'm pretty sure it weighed my soul down by several pounds. I really don't see how any part of me could have floated up and away at that point. If anything, I was afraid I'd be too heavy to run from any nasty ghosts we might encounter.
Stacey and Jacob did most of the chatting during dinner. Apparently he hosted an occasional "Bad Movie Night" at his apartment, with some other young staffers from the accounting firm where he worked. He and Stacey argued over which truly awful film they should feature at the next one—he was pushing for something called Future War while she argued for Sorority Slumber Party Massacre 7.
"We can't do that without also screening Sorority Slumber Party Massacres one through six," Jacob said. "That could take hours."
"No, that's the beauty of the title," Stacey said. "There never were any earlier movies in the series."
The conversation stayed light for as long as we could manage, until the big elephant in the room took his place at the head of the table and settled in.
"Any new word about Michael?" Jacob asked. There obviously wasn't any, or we would have talked about it already.
"Holding steady," I said.
"I wish there was something I could do. My psychic abilities, what I have of them, extend only to the dead, not the living."
"But, hey," Stacey said. "Nicholas can look into the minds of living people, right? So maybe he can help."
"I'm not sure he can help with Michael's situation," I said. "He knows about it but hasn't exactly offered."
"It couldn't hurt to ask," Stacey said.
"Nicholas digging deep into Michael's mind might hurt," I said. "At least, I wouldn't want Nicholas poking around in my head without my permission. Though, for all I know, he might be doing that all the time. Just looking at our thoughts and memories whenever he gets bored."
"That's a pleasant thought," Stacey said. "Could be worse. At least it's not the Hoff with his mayonnaise-covered fingers."
"If Michael doesn't wake up soon, maybe I'll ask Nicholas." I checked the time. It was not quite ten, but it seemed late enough to begin. "Jacob, are you ready to check out the house yet? See if you pick up any of those spooky vibrations?"
"We haven't even opened the sweet potato pie yet," he said.
"You got dessert? After all that?" Stacey melted right down out of sight, sliding out of her chair and under the table as though she were as boneless as a noodle. "Can't move. Too full."
"Maybe later." I somehow forced myself up and out of my chair. "I hope my utility belt still fits."
"Fine, but I'm not carrying Stacey." He nudged her with his toe.
"Still too full," she groaned.
"We're starting with that bench by the staircase." Jacob stretched and walked out to the entrance hall.
Stacey and I scrambled after him—okay, we moved like sloths swimming through cold molasses—but anyway, we gathered up our gear and followed, ready to hear what Jacob had to say. We'd detected what appeared to be three little blue entities around the bench before.
Jacob stood quietly over it, running his hand along the back and then up the thick railing where the bench connected seamlessly to the stairs. Either it was all cut from a single massive trunk, or it was masterfully carved and fit to appear that way.
"This was a favorite play area for kids, at some point," Jacob said. "Probably because you can climb up from the bench, through the railing, onto the stairs, back and forth. Slide down the wide banister. We're talking long ago, before modern playgrounds and swing sets, so this was a major draw for kids. It might as well have been made of candy. Anyway, the kids..."
Jacob fell silent for a moment as he trailed his fingers along the banister, and then back down to the bench. "I'm getting a feeling of serious illness. Pain in the head, the stomach. Pain and drowsiness, weakness, feeling helpless...lots of those sensations floating around here."
I nodded along, thinking of Theresa Hendricks, whose four children had died of various diseases in the house during the 1960's. She was still alive. Stacey and I planned to visit her nursing home the next day. Neither of us relished the idea of approaching an elderly woman to ask about her four dead kids.
"There are several kids who died here," Jacob said. "Their ghosts kind of...sleep most of the time. That's odd to say about ghosts, but I see them curled up inside the walls or under the floors, in a kind of heavy slumber most of the time. Sometimes they wake up, and they come out to play right here. When they feel safe."
"Safe from what?" I asked.
Jacob glanced up at the ceiling, then pointed up the stairs. "Something terrible up there."
No surprises so far. We knew about the dead children and the dangerous ghost upstairs.
"I think this stirred everything up." Jacob gestured through to the library-under-construction, bare studs and floorboards left abandoned when the last contractor quit. "Woke up a lot of ghosts who'd been slumbering. But the kid ghosts try to stay quiet most of the time. They don't want to talk to me, either. They came out to look at me—ghosts can sense when a psychic's around—then they dodged back pretty quickly. But I can get a sense of what they do, and how they feel..."
We circled the downstairs, then went out to the shed, where Jacob closed his eyes and nodded.
"There's someone desperate to communicate out here," Jacob said. "She's very faint, like she's exhausted..."
I thought of the apparition erupting, filling the air with the smell of burning hair and skin.
"...but she wants to say something. She's telling me she died in a fire here."
"Can you get her name?"
"What's your...she's not..." Jacob shook his head. "She's telling me the children inside are in danger."
"From what?" I asked.
"The same entity they're all afraid of." Jacob looked up at the nursery window and sighed. "That's where the problem is, am I right?"
"That's the major hauntspot." Stacey nodded.
"What else can you tell us about the lady down here?" I asked.
"She keeps talking about 'my babies.' I think her kids are the little ghosts inside, the ones who got sick and died."
I nodded along, but I was a little confused. Theresa was still alive, in a nursing home. Maybe she was somehow haunting the place while still alive. Such things are rare but possible—doppelgangers, they're called, the ghost of a living person, usually created by intense emotions. Like a poltergeist, but usually highly focused on a person or place, and usually more sharply formed, rather than simply running wild with disorganized, destructive energy. Poltergeists are more likely to emerge from general frustration, unhappiness, or repressed emotion, while doppelgangers usually emerge from a kind of intense obsession.
Hopefully, visiting Theresa Hendricks would clear up some of that. I'd thought the face I'd seen in the shed had resembled the yellowed image of Hannah Gibson Carlisle, but Hannah's children had died of fire, not illness.
There were a lot of loose pieces to put together, and Jacob was throwing a few more our way.
The three of us were quiet and tense as we climbed the stairs. Jacob headed straight for the nursery, as if drawn there by a beacon. Stacey and I stayed close behind, ready with tactical flashlights in case we needed to dispel the darkness in a hurry.
Jacob turned the knob, and the nursery
door creaked open.
I motioned for Stacey to hang back in the hallway a bit, partly so she could get a wider-angle view of the nursery on her thermal, but mostly because I was worried our lullaby ghost would act scary and Stacey would jump out trying to protect Jacob, interfering with this most critical part of his psychic reading of the house.
The nursery was cold, as usual, the windows looking out onto blackness, as though even the nearby streetlights couldn't manage to puncture the gloom tonight. My Mel-Meter ticked up a few milligaus.
I glanced at the row of cabinet doors near the floor, one of them concealing the deep crawlspace where the spirit seemed to retreat when being less active.
Jacob didn't head that way at first. He walked to the crib, brushed his fingers across the top, and shivered. He gave the little stuffed tiger cubs a spin, and mechanical lullaby music played as they revolved.
"This is dark," he said, and I knew he meant much more than the failure of much outside light to seep in through the windows. "The presence in here...she enjoys killing. She enjoys the power, the..."
The cabinet door by the floor, the one that led to the crawlspace, shuddered. It opened slightly and clapped back into place, as though some small animal were trying to nose its way out. I tensed up. Everyone did.
While we looked over there, a voice rose from the opposite corner of the room, gentle and flat, devoid of life.
The words of the lullaby remained maddeningly indecipherable. I still couldn't make them out, but they sounded as if I should have understood them—sort of the auditory equivalent of having a word right on the tip of your tongue but not being able to recall it.
Jacob turned to approach the sound. I looked at Stacey again, holding my hand out to tell her to stay where she was.
"I can see you," Jacob was saying. He seemed to be addressing a stuffed giraffe on top of a bookshelf in the corner, but I doubted that was his intended audience. "I can hear you, and I can..."
He swayed on his feet, reminding me for a moment of a snake in charmer's basket. His eyes drifted closed. Then his whole body collapsed to the carpet.
"Jacob..." My voice sounded distant to my own ears. I moved toward him, meaning to help, but my legs felt like jelly. My attempt to click on my flashlight failed, too. I watched it slip and tumble from my fingers as if it were moving in slow motion.
As I tried to approach him, my legs seemed unwilling to move, like in those dreams where something terrible is chasing you, but your feet feel like cinderblocks stuck in quicksand. I sank to the floor, and my eyelids seemed heavy.
It was suddenly much easier to just let my eyes close while I sank. The deeply piled jungle-green carpet rose up as if to welcome me into its shaggy embrace.
When my lids finally closed, I found a soft, pleasant darkness waiting for me. The lullaby followed me here, more soothing than anything I'd ever heard. Entrancing.
I lay on my back, somewhere soft. The same room, but decorated much differently—less Toys 'R Us, more bare brick and wood. One candle flickered in a glass holder on a small, roughly hewn wooden table that definitely hadn't been there before.
Then I felt pain in my stomach.
"You'll be fine," a voice whispered above me. I saw her face—youthful, her chubby cheeks framed by thin, uneven blond braids. She was looking at me closely, but her expression was unreadable.
She began singing. Resumed singing, really, because this was the source of the charming lullaby, the one that had brought me to the soft, dark, blissful place—
Something hard smacked across my cheek. Then something else, or possibly the same something, only faster and harder.
"Ellie!" someone screamed. Female. Girl I knew from somewhere...I just wished she would let me sleep...I tried to slap her away with my mind, since my hands were much too limp to move.
She struck my face again, and the scene around me flickered and shifted. The dancing candle flame hardened and brightened into a shaft of searing white burning right into my eyeballs.
"Ellie!" It was Stacey's voice, Stacey's hand shaking me awake. Stacey's hand smacking my face yet again.
"Okay, okay, I'm up," I mumbled, disoriented. She helped me to a sitting position on the carpet. The lullaby had been replaced, or at least drowned out, by some intense classical holy music—Stacey was blasting Mahler's "Resurrection" loud enough to wake the dead, from speakers on each side of her belt.
Jacob sat nearby, legs splayed out, body hunched forward as he gripped his head in both hands, as if suffering a skull-splitting migraine.
"Is he, uh...?" I waved a hand languidly in Jacob's direction, still trying to snap out of my weird lethargy.
"He's not feeling well!" she shouted to be heard over the music. She put one arm under my armpit and heaved me to my feet. Then she steered me toward the door.
I staggered out into the hall, and it was like a breath of fresh air. I still felt tired and drained, but definitely more awake the moment I was out of the nursery. One side of my face burned where Stacey had repeatedly slapped me.
Back in the nursery, Stacey was helping Jacob to his feet. She'd stuck earphones into her ears, I noticed, wisely installing extra protection against the lullaby that had apparently put Jacob and I to sleep. She was probably blasting some Katy Perry or Carrie Underwood into her own ear canals.
Jacob looked even worse than I felt—pale, shaking, doubled over and grabbing his stomach as if somebody were stabbing him there.
I plugged up my own ears and played the "Ode to Joy" that was still queued in there from my encounter with the magician ghost. Then I ran into the room to help Stacey guide Jacob to the door.
Like me, Jacob felt much better once he left the nursery.
"Wow," he said, straightening up and taking a deep breath. He adjusted his thick glasses.
"I agree." I stopped the music in my ears.
"Are you okay?" Stacey screamed at the top of her lungs into Jacob's face. He cringed a little, and I popped an earbud free of her left ear. Beyoncé blasted from its tiny speaker. Well, that might have been my third or fourth guess.
"Let's try talking at a normal level," I suggested, while Stacey pulled out her other earbud. "Jacob, you feeling better?"
"Yeah. There was so much pain for a minute there, like all my organs were getting crushed," he said. "But I feel better now. Pretty much anything would feel better than that. I got a good look at the ghost." He described the same young woman I'd seen leaning over me, singing.
"It sounds like we're dealing with a kind of weaponized lullaby here," I said. "Wasn't the kids' nanny from Wales? We should be researching Welsh lullabies."
"Welsh? That would explain why nobody can ever understand the words," Stacey said. "It's a different language, like Irish, right? It kind of sounds English, but isn't."
"Your singing blond ghost is pretty riled up now," Jacob said. "She thinks you've been teasing her. And tormenting her. And now she feels threatened."
"So she's lashing out with her music," I said.
"Kinda like a disgruntled teenager," Stacey added.
I looked into the dark nursery again, but I didn't see anything. I closed the door firmly, wishing I could lock it from the outside.
"Let's go downstairs," I said. "I don't want Lullaby Lucy following us out here for another attack."
"Why stop downstairs? Let's all go out to the van," Stacey suggested.
"Why stop at the van? Let's all just go home for the night," Jacob said. "Seriously. Haven't you collected enough data for now?"
"We have to move through this case as quickly as we can," I said. "We have an obligation to the client."
A low, soft voice said something behind the closed nursery door, the words too quiet for us to make out. We all looked at the door.
"The van sounds good to me," I added. "Let's get out there. Go, go, go."
We descended the stairs. I felt rattled. We'd known the ghost was strong, but apparently it had psychotropic as well as psychokinetic abilities. Not on
ly could it throw a baby doll around, it could also dig into our minds, enough to weaken us, even put us to sleep. Most of the ghost's victims had been children who'd died slowly of disease...not adults who'd been killed while awake. We hadn't been prepared for how much immediate danger the ghost represented to us.
Outside, while Stacey watched the monitors and tried to find anomalies in data we'd already collected, I put in my earbuds and started looking up Welsh lullabies and nursery rhymes on my laptop.
It didn't take long to find what I was looking for. I downloaded a recording of a woman singing the old song, then let it play out loud over my tablet's speaker so Stacey and Jacob could hear.
Their conversation stopped immediately and they turned to listen, Stacey wide-eyed, Jacob looking ready to flee.
"That's the one," Stacey whispered.
"'Ar Hyd y Nos,'" I said. "It's a Welsh folk song, sometimes used as a lullaby. The title means 'All Through the Night.'"
"And she can use it to put us to sleep," Jacob said.
I nodded. I remembered Mackenzie talking about how sick and lethargic she'd been feeling, with stomach cramps and headaches.
"Maybe she uses her song to feed on the living," I said. "Some ghosts use fear or other emotions. The lullaby could be her way of reaching into us and drawing out energy. I know I feel exhausted now."
Jacob nodded in agreement. "She might even use it to drain the other ghosts in the house, the children. Remember how I said they're usually slumbering? She's the one doing that, keeping the child ghosts trapped there, keeping them docile."
"Like a spider with a web full of bugs. So how do we use that against her?" Stacey asked, looking at me.
"This calls for immediate sitting back and thinking quietly," I said. "I'm almost too worn down to think, actually. I feel like Lullaby...uh...Lindsey?"
"Lucy, I thought," Stacey said.
"Anyway, she really drained me." I looked at the English translation of the lyrics on my screen. Darkness is another light that exposes true beauty. It was a song about stars and night skies. A good choice for bedtime, I supposed.
I played the song again, closing my eyes and listening. The singing ghost must have been Mati Price, the Welsh girl who served as nurse to Hannah Carlisle's three children and had died with them in the fire. Also dead in the same fire was Julian Vasseur, the West Indian man who served as the general household servant.