Lullaby (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 7)

by JL Bryan

  Jacob had said the little kid ghosts spent much of their time in a kind of unconscious slumber, under the floors and in between the walls of the house. I hoped the experimental PSI gear would be enough to jolt them awake.

  Stacey and I watched a few tablets and laptops we'd brought upstairs with us. We were primarily watching the readings from inside the nursery. We'd left the door closed, but we still had the kitchen sink in there: thermal and night vision cameras, microphone, EMF and temperature sensors, motion detectors.

  We could also see through cameras that gave us a view of Nicholas and the bench downstairs. All four of us were connected by radio headsets so we could hear each other. That was kind of too bad, because Hayden kept talking about the poison ivy rash he'd gotten on his last case.

  "It's almost ten," I said. "Nicholas, why don't you fire up that gear?"

  "You shouldn't grow too comfortable with giving me orders," he replied, but I saw him getting to work on the screen.

  "But it feels so natural," I said.

  We watched quietly as he activated all the devices. I kept my eyes on the bench.

  "Let us know when everything's on," Stacey said.

  "Everything is on," Nicholas said.

  "So how long does it take?" I asked. "When do the ghosts start boiling out of the walls?"

  "There is no guarantee anything will happen," Nicholas said.

  I listened carefully. I had my thermal goggles and a couple of backup tactical flashlights handy in case things got busy fast.

  Things did not get busy fast. I could hear a mechanical hum as Nicholas blasted the old bench with energy and infrasound.

  I looked back and forth from the monitor that showed the bench downstairs to those inside the nursery nearby. Nothing was stirring.

  Time passed. The house grew even darker, and the nursery much colder, according to our readings. We could even feel the temperature difference leaking out into the hallway.

  "Something's happening down here," Nicholas finally said.

  "What?" I looked over at the greenish night vision monitor, just in time to catch a couple of tiny shapes gliding over the bench. "I'm seeing orb activity."

  "I can hear them," Nicholas whispered.

  I gave Stacey a nod, and she placed earbuds in both her ears to fill them with white noise. If the ghost came out singing, Stacey wouldn't be able to hear the lullaby. I had my own earbuds and white noise ready to go when the time came.

  For now, I kept my ears open so I could listen. So when the children's voices began to rise from the stairs, I heard them very clearly.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The voices were faint—not like they were whispering or trying at all to be quiet, but more like they were very far away. There was laughter and the babble of excited kids, all of it so low I could barely hear it.

  I motioned for Stacey to stay put, watching the nursery over the monitors. Then I approached the stairs. Over the railing, I could see Nicholas downstairs. He was watching the apparently empty bench and stairs.

  The kids' voices were just a little louder here, echoing upward the way they would if several children were running up and down the stairs. As I stepped closer, I heard an infant cry a couple of times. Hannah's infant had died in the fire along with the other two children.

  I tried to stay calm and detached, but my heart went out to these poor kids. Fire is a horrible way to die—I've had plenty of time to think about it. I probably would have burned to death myself if not for my dog leading me out of the thick smoke. He didn't survive long after that; he'd breathed in too much smoke while he wasted time saving my life instead of escaping.

  Nicholas glanced up at me. I put a finger across my lips, just in case he was thinking about talking, then I drew my thermals down over my eyes.

  A blizzard of pale cold spots floated all over the stairs, moving much faster than I usually see them. Sometimes a few would come together long enough to suggest a head, arm, or torso, then fly apart again. I was looking at a number of highly energized ghosts. It was hard to tell how many, but it seemed like more than the three I'd glimpsed hanging around the bench on previous nights.

  I turned to look back at Stacey's red and yellow form through the thermal lenses. She waved one arm frantically, trying to get my attention.

  My first move was to pop the earbuds into my ears and click on the white noise. This left me in a virtually soundless environment, like I was suddenly in outer space.

  I started back to join Stacey. The temperature in the hallway became freezing. I watched the environment turn frosty blue through the thermal lenses, and I felt the deep chill biting into my skin.

  The deep purple-black shape emerged through the nursery door. She wasn't showing up as small flecks and spots of cold, but instead it was clearly a female, maybe an inch or two shorter than me. She floated across the floor rather than walking, so maybe that added a couple of inches to her height.

  There are a lot of ghosts in the world, and people can easily shrug off most of their encounters with them. You might hear an odd sound or glimpse a fleeting shadow in your house at night, or find some item in your home that's out of place for no apparent reason, but it's easy to dismiss and forget these events.

  When you encounter a powerful entity, though, it's hard to deny that something has happened. The area around you goes freezing cold, and you might feel unseen hands grabbing at you. You might see a face. Your body will know you're in danger, and all the fight-or-flight responses kick in, threatening to topple the feeble controls of the rational mind and send you running away screaming.

  I felt all of that instantly when the ghost emerged from the nursery. Even without my goggles, I would have known she was there. She seemed fully awake and present now, radiating power. I wondered whether she was singing her lullaby yet. The white noise still hissed in my ears, and that was all I could hear.

  She moved toward me, and I resisted the urge to run. My hand went to the tactical flashlight holstered on my belt, but I didn't draw it. Instead, I stepped slowly to one side, placing the trap mounted in the big stamper between us.

  I shivered as she approached. I couldn't hear the lullaby, but I thought I could feel it, like strange, liquid vibrations in the frigid air.

  In the trap between us, the baby doll sprang to life, kicking and turning its head, opening its mouth to laugh or cry. Stacey was watching the situation and had activated the doll to protect me.

  The ghost of Mati Price hesitated. The dead nanny seemed to evaluate the crying doll for a moment, as if considering reaching into the trap for it.

  Then she turned slightly and continued on toward the stairs, not taking the bait, but also not attacking me right away. She was focused on the loud, boisterous child ghosts.

  Resisting the urge to run back and join Stacey, I watched Mati Price descend the stairs toward the swarming flecks of pale blue. That ghostly host might have included every child who'd died in the house, at the hands of the nanny herself, I believed, from the Gibson children she had killed when she was still alive in 1889 to the Hendricks children she'd murdered as a ghost in the 1960's.

  The room grew even colder. I wouldn't have been surprised if ice crystals had started forming around my eyes and nose.

  The blizzard of cold spots slowed and drifted down to the stairs, winking out as they approached the old floorboards. I could feel the energy shift in the room as the child ghosts were put back to sleep by the lullaby I couldn't hear.

  I looked over at Nicholas. His warm living shape sprawled on the floor behind the array of ghost-summoning gear. The lullaby had knocked him out. I wondered if it had affected Hayden, listening in over high-sensitivity microphones. My headphones continued their hissing white noise, which so far seemed to work as insulation against the singing ghost.

  When I looked back at the stairs to see whether Mati had finished putting the child ghosts back to sleep, she wasn't there.

  She was much closer—right beside me, the freezing deep-purp
le shape of her face only inches from me, staring at me through my thermal lenses.

  My heart stuck in place, and my boots felt glued to the floor.

  She reached out a hand. I felt her cold, dead fingers touch my stomach. Pain flared there, like every muscle was cramping up.

  I turned and ran directly toward the nursery door. Stacey met me there, and we shoved it open and ran inside.

  The ghost stayed close behind us, her freezing shape unmistakable.

  Stacey used her remote to activate the two baby dolls inside the traps within the nursery. The ghost of Mati hesitated, momentarily distracted. Stacey and I stood in front of the open door to the crawlspace.

  Stacey and I looked at each other, and I nodded. She pressed another button on her remote.

  White noise poured out at top volume from all the speakers we'd set up.

  The effect on the ghost of Mati was immediate—I saw her dark form shudder and ripple on my thermals as if she was made of liquid and had been struck by a heavy rock. That probably wasn't going to put her in a good mood.

  She grew taller, inhumanly tall, and her thermal signature plunged toward blackness. Yep...not happy. More like on the warpath.

  I looked into the hallway behind her. Presumably the gear was still on, feeding the child ghosts in and around the stairs, but I didn't see any sign of them emerging from the stairway into the upstairs hall.

  "Mati Price, you killed them all." I hoped to distract her, at least slow her down a little bit. "Hannah Gibson Carlisle showed me that she died in a fire. She told my psychic she died in a fire. But the records say she wasn't killed in that fire, and she and her second husband Daniel moved to Barbados a few months later. Daniel Carlisle, the one with the checkered past, who'd once been arrested for forgery. And then he died within a year. Of illness."

  The ghost drifted closer to me, which I didn't like at all. It was weird operating in silence, talking when I couldn't even hear my own voice.

  "So this is what I think," I said. "You and the second husband, Daniel, plotted to murder his wife and stepchildren. Then he would inherit her fortune and you could both enjoy it. Were you having an affair with Daniel Gibson?"

  She was even closer now, towering over me, reaching toward me with both hands.

  "Anyway, it would have been a little too obvious if Daniel married Hannah, and then she and all her children died, and then he inherited everything and ran off with the young nanny. So you devised a different story. Daniel told everyone that you had died in the fire...but actually, it was Hannah that died. You pretended to be her. I suppose you kept yourself secluded from everyone, wrapped in veils when you had to go out in public. Daniel could have told people you were grieving and wished to be left alone. It would have been a tough act to keep up for long, but you didn't have to—as soon as Daniel sold Hannah's shares, the two of you raced off to Barbados, never to return. Is that how it went, Mati?"

  She seemed riveted in place for the moment, standing uncomfortably close to me. Behind her, I saw pale shapes rising from the stairs to the upstairs hall. The child ghosts were approaching—slowly and cautiously, but they were coming. The array of downstairs gear must have woken them right back up again as soon as our speakers starting blasting white noise to drown out the lullaby.

  "In Barbados, it wasn't long before Daniel died and left you with everything. Did you help him toward the grave? Maybe with poison? You must have poisoned them all—Hannah, the children, the baby, and the other servant, Julian. How else would you get them all to stay inside while the house burned down around them? And our psychic said Hannah's children died of illness, but maybe that was induced by poison. They were dead before the fire ever started. Before you started it, Mati.

  "The fire helped you cover up the murders. It even helped you and Daniel disguise the identity of one of the victims. Did you and Daniel poison Hannah, then lay her in your bed in the servants' quarters to be discovered there?

  "And what about those kids? Did you give them arsenic? Did you sing them your lullaby while their stomachs seized up in pain and they lay in front of you dying—"

  She grabbed me now, lifting me from the floor and slamming me back against the built-in bookshelves above the low cabinet, which meant shelves struck me in two places along my spine plus the back of my head. I was stunned, unable to move. My fingers moved weakly toward my belt.

  Then the white noise stopped, all of it. My headphones fell silent, possibly drained or shorted out by the powerful ghost's electromagnetic field. My thermal goggles lost power, leaving me in darkness.

  The speakers all around the nursery cut out, too, leaving only silence.

  Then Mati sang a note of her lullaby, and my stomach seized up and crumpled inward. She might have used any number of poisons, but the stomach pains and other symptoms made me think of arsenic, which would have been readily available in her day.

  Another note sang out, a different woman's voice, also in Welsh, but much louder and more powerful. Our surround-sound circle of speakers amplified it so much that it rattled the windowpanes. Stacey had stopped the white noise to move onto our next weapon. I hoped it would work, especially since Mati seemed a bit focused on killing me now.

  Excruciating pain surged from my stomach, and my whole body went into convulsions. There was intense crushing pain in my head, too. Maybe I was about to die of ectoplasmic arsenic poisoning. Of course, there would be no trace of actual arsenic, and it would be ruled death by illness, just like all of poor Theresa's children who'd died in the 1960's. Theresa herself hadn't understood that Mati was the one killing her children, not comforting them. Maybe Mati's ghost had entranced Theresa to some extent, too, and fed her the impression that she was some kind of angelic presence in the household.

  It seemed to me that Mati's lullaby, the one she perhaps sang to the children after she'd poisoned them and before burning their house down, had evolved into some symbolic expression of her power as a ghost. She used the lullaby to put the child ghosts into a slumber whenever they grew too active. They were her prisoners, and her song was the chain that held them in place.

  "Is it working?" Stacey asked. I was still in too much pain to answer, still pinned hard against the bookshelf with my feet dangling uselessly in the air.

  Stacey had simply taken the old recording we'd found of the Welsh song and reversed it. The song played at regular speed over the speakers, but exactly backwards.

  A lot was riding on this having some effect on Mati and the child ghosts. Maybe it would break her control over them, at least temporarily.

  I heard a screaming sound. Then I toppled to the floor fast, no longer held in place by the ghost's psychokinetic power.

  Since my thermals were blacked out and powerless, I hurried to pull them off my head.

  In the dark room, I could see the white-faced ghost of Mati, the same I'd been encountering in the nursery all along, but she was more filled in and fleshed out now. She wasn't quite as detailed as I'd seen her while under the spell of the lullaby, but I could tell it was the same face.

  The ghosts of children, more than half a dozen of them, crept up behind her. They were almost as clear as she was, charged up by the gear downstairs, and maybe emboldened by the reversed lullaby.

  One small girl of six or seven held an infant in her arms. The infant ghost was neither crying nor babbling, but intently staring at Mati's back with dark eyes, a very adult scowl etched into its face.

  That was my reminder that, while they might have been tiny children when they died, some of these entities were now more than a hundred years old, and possibly quite dangerous themselves.

  "Why did you keep killing after you died, Mati?" I asked. "Was it guilt that drew your ghost back here? Or do you just get a kick out of repeating yourself, out of murdering any children you can put your hands on—"

  She screamed again and swelled toward me, reaching out her pale hands...but she didn't quite make it.

  The child ghosts swarmed over the murderous
nanny. They were smaller than her, but they outnumbered her. Their grins were sharp, their eyes full of malice, without a speck of pity in sight. These were not innocent little children, not anymore. Decades of after-death suffering had long since stripped that from them.

  They tore into her as if she were a living person, with sharp teeth and grasping fingers, climbing all over her like a pack of wolves tearing into a buffalo.

  The ghost of Mati broke away toward the wall...only to encounter the ghost I'd seen out in the shed, the ghost of Hannah Gibson Carlisle, emerging to meet her. She and all her children had been murdered by Mati. Now, with Mati weakened and her children empowered, Hannah's ghost had returned to the house. She emerged from the wall and stalked toward Mati, looking about as hateful and furious as I've ever seen a dead person look.

  Mati screamed, losing shape now, actually for a moment reminding me of the distorted face in Munch's famous The Scream paintings. She whipped from one side of the room to the other, her pursuers closing in around her.

  From another wall emerged a large, dark shape, taller and more broad-shouldered than any of the others, the face unclear but the body definitely male. I thought of Julian Vasseur, the male servant who'd died in the fire. Mati must have poisoned him and left his body to be consumed by the burning house along with Hannah and the three little children.

  Mati screamed again and became even less distinct, like a trapped whirlpool of pale energy with nowhere to go. Her victims were, for the moment, unleashed and free to gang up on their long-time prison warden.

  I had a pretty good idea how this would play out. Her victims would drag her off to the other side, and the dangerous ghost would be out of the house for good.

  That wasn't my plan, though.

  Not bothering to regain my feet from my fall, I turned and opened the little cabinet door leading to the crawlspace. Our data indicated that it was the nanny ghost's preferred lair.