EJ06 - Maze of Souls

by JL Bryan

  “I'm sure it's pretty mild.” I winced as I wiggled my foot back and forth. “Because the feeling is coming back fast. A little too fast, really.”

  “Jinkies, that was one frosty phantom,” Stacey said.

  “Jinkies?”

  “You know, like Velma on Scooby-Doo—”

  “Obviously. But you see yourself as the Velma of our group?”

  “Of course. I handle the high-tech gadgetry, right? That's Velma.”

  “So who does that make me?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. “Daphne?”

  “What's wrong with being Daphne?”

  “Just watch the monitors, Stacey,” I said. “We can't have any more incidents tonight.”

  “Like sneaking into a little girl's room and waking her up by screaming at the top of your lungs?” Stacey asked. “I don't remember Calvin teaching us that technique on training days—”

  “It was pure customer service, that scream,” I said, trying to salvage my dignity. “Making the client aware of a hostile apparition.”

  “Are we sure she's hostile?” Stacey asked.

  “She could have broken my neck,” I said. “Whether that was intentional or not, she's dangerous.”

  I got to work at my laptop, writing down the rapidly-melting details of my vision. Ghosts are energy with consciousness, and sometimes contact with them can transfer emotions, visions, or memories. Some ghosts even know how to manipulate this, making the living feel depressed or violent, or inducing frightening hallucinations. In this case, I didn't think it was intentional. A snippet of the ghost's memory had simply leaked into me.

  “I saw a couple of the men,” I told Stacey, by way of jogging my own memories. “They had pitch torches. Their clothing was definitely eighteenth century. One guy had a tricorner hat. I'm not sure if I was still dying or already dead at this point. There didn't seem to be a rush to take me anywhere.”

  “You?” Stacey asked.

  “The girl in the wagon. I saw the vision from her viewpoint.”

  “Bloody Betty.”

  “Her name wasn't Betty, it was...” It was on the tip of my tongue, but it wouldn't quite drop off. I was sure I could remember it if I tried.

  “Did she give you any ideas about what's going on around here? Or how to get rid of her?” Stacey asked.

  “No, just that tiny look at her life. I assume she's soaked in her own blood, but I don't know if she was injured, or if it was a death during childbirth situation, or what exactly happened to her.”

  “Maybe it wasn't her own blood,” Stacey said. “Maybe she killed somebody.”

  “Considering what an unfriendly ghost she is, I wouldn't be surprised.”

  The rest of the night was fairly quiet. The most unusual readings came from the cemetery—cold spots, shadows, occasional weird creaking sounds. I was glad to be looking at it on video rather than sitting out there in person, watching for disturbing shapes in the fog. As the hours passed, I stretched my legs a few times, taking walks around the dark yard while picking up some extra readings.

  The family was up and moving before dawn. Corrine tended the horses while her mother and younger siblings took care of other chores. Jeremy was off to work in the early darkness, with a long commute to the high school where he taught. Soon all three kids had left for school, too.

  We sat down with Amber in the little general store and showed her the thermal video clip from the previous night. Her eyes grew saucer-sized as she watched the low flood of freezing purple-black spread across the foyer floor toward my red and orange shape on the stairs. She jumped as the dark mass suddenly swelled toward me and swept me off my feet in a not-so-romantic fashion.

  I winced at the sight of my form tumbling down the stairs and landing on the floor, the air mattress protecting my hips but not my head as I sprawled across the boards. It was embarrassing.

  “If you look closer, you can see the ghost's shape...” Stacey backed up the video, zoomed in and played it very slowly, so Amber could see what I'd glimpsed through my goggles. The front edge of the dark mass formed into the shape of a woman from the waist up, her arms reaching out to grab me at floor level, while the back end of her remained a shapeless mist that spread out across the foyer.

  Stacey paused the video when the woman-shape was clearest.

  “Oh, my...” Amber covered her mouth. “You can really see it there.”

  “You're sure you don't have any idea who she could be?” I asked.

  Amber shook her head.

  “Could Jeremy know? Or does he have an older relative who knows the history of this place? And have you checked the house for any old family records?”

  “We've already been there, done that,” Amber said. “We tried to figure things out before we called you, but we don't have any more ideas.”

  “I've emailed a friend of mine at the Savannah Historical Association, but I doubt he'll have anything for us,” I said. “They focus on the history of Savannah and its immediate surroundings. Stacey and I will probably need to hit the local library, the county courthouse, anywhere there might be records. Stacey loves that kind of research.”

  “I hope we'll get to dig through lots of dusty yellow land deeds!” Stacey said, faking a smile.

  “Don't forget tax records,” I said.

  “My favorite.”

  “In the meantime, Stacey and I should probably get some rest. I saw a place called Old Walnut Inn at the last town we passed. Is that a good place?”

  “I wouldn't know,” Amber said.

  “It definitely looked cheap,” Stacey said. “Like Bates Motel cheap.”

  “I could probably find a place for you to stay here in the house,” Amber said. “We could make up the couch...”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Neville, but I'm sure that would be inconvenient.” I rushed to answer before Stacey could accept the invitation. Amber seemed to be offering reluctantly, being polite but probably not wanting a couple of weirdo ghost investigators camping out in her living room, snoring the day away like unwanted, unemployed relatives. “Is it all right if we leave our gear set up for tonight? That would save hours.”

  “Of course,” she said, trying to smile but not quite making it. “How long do they usually take, these ghost bustings of yours?”

  “Every case is different. I promise we'll move as quickly as possible.”

  Soon after that, we climbed into the van and backtracked a few miles. The Old Walnut Inn, despite its genteel-sounding name, was more of a roadside motel with a peach and pink trim that probably hadn't been updated since sometime around 1961. It was an L-shaped building arranged around a fenced swimming pool area. The pool had long since been filled with cement, yet the outdoor lounge chairs and umbrella tables remained, as if faithfully waiting for the return of the lost water and whatever good times may have happened in decades past.

  The interior was pretty much what the outside implied—outdated, worn, threadbare, the lights reluctant to switch on. The room was clean, though, with a pair of double beds that seemed reasonably comfortable and not gross. Plus it didn't cost much more than we would have spent on gasoline to drive the heavy cargo van home to Savannah and back again.

  Stacey secured the window curtain to keep all the light out, while I removed my sock to have another look at my injury. The reddish fingermarks remained, but the stinging feeling meant that the damage couldn't have gone too deep. Serious frostbite would have left my foot numb, probably blistering by this point.

  Stacey laughed, and I looked over at her. She was reading something on her phone.

  “What's that?” I asked.

  “Just Jacob.” She shook her head as she put her phone away.

  I texted Michael to see what he was doing. His schedule at the fire station shifted unpredictably but usually involved getting up well before daylight, and of course I mostly work the graveyard shift. I'm often going to sleep when he's getting ready to start the day.

  There was nothing from him, though, not even a reply to my quic
k message from earlier letting him know I'd be away from the city for the night. Then I noticed my new message hadn't gone through but had instead gained me an error message with an exclamation point. There wasn't much of a phone signal available out at the farm. It was possible he'd replied long ago and I still hadn't received it.

  We slept for the rest of the morning. I tossed and turned. Anton Clay lived in my dreams, and he had a way of showing up and ruining them, Freddy Krueger-style. An idyllic beach setting with Michael and Stacey suddenly became an inferno, the sky blood-red, the ocean water boiling, the bodies of dead fish and strange tentacled things rising up to cover the ocean all the way to the horizon, their pale corpses washing up on the smoldering sand.

  It was a relief to finally awaken for the day, but I couldn't say I felt particularly rested.

  The only spot for breakfast, especially around noon, was the Huddle House, a diner-style chain restaurant that flourishes wherever Waffle House isn't. They seem to specialize in finding new things to stuff inside hash browns. I ordered the garden omelet since I didn't want to spend all day in bed sluggishly digesting fried potatoes. Stacey seemed to thumb her nose at my choices by ordering the French toast with the strawberry mess on top.

  “Grant just got back to me,” I told her, skimming Grant's email while waiting for my eggs full of peppers and tomatoes to get cooked and find their way to our table. “He doesn't have any information on the address—the farm is too far from Savannah. So it looks like a real poking-around sort of day. You can sift audio and video footage from last night, see what we missed. I'll be looking into old paperwork in old buildings.”

  “Okay, I like that arrangement,” she said. “I hope you find something worthwhile. Nobody seems to know anything so far.”

  “It's a long shot,” I said. “Even if there is something to the legend of the Hessian horseman, it won't be easy to find records from the eighteenth century, especially in a place this far from any large city. There may not be anything to discover.”

  “I'll work extra hard to find any ghostly faces or voices in our data, then.”

  “Are you saying you're usually lazy about it?”

  “Ha ha.” Stacey chewed her lip, looking worried, and not even the arrival of French toast seemed to cheer her up. “What if we can't find any history on this one, Ellie? What do we do then?”

  “Then we observe the ghosts and try to figure out what they want. Bring in Jacob for a psychic reading. Let him know we might need him soon—like, as soon as he can make it up here. He might be our only hope at getting a clear picture of what's going on down at the farm.”

  The nearest courthouse and library were both located in the city of Sylvania, the county seat, population three thousand. Stacey rode in the back of the van, already at work on the previous night's data, while I let the GPS guide me into a cute little village of colorful, old-fashioned masonry buildings, centered on a town square with a fountain and trees. It was a little reminiscent of the squares of Savannah. I was surprised to see how cheerful and alive the town seemed. Many of these little old towns that I see are desolate, with lots of empty shop windows.

  My first stop was the courthouse, where I could research the history of land deeds in the county. Records were spotty, as I expected, especially since a fire had destroyed the courthouse in 1897, but some of the paperwork had been saved.

  I collected any names of female residents of the land that I could find, paying extra attention to those who'd died young, since that can point to tragic or violent deaths that might lead to a haunting. There was a Henrietta Neville who died at age fifteen in 1891. A Ruth Neville died in 1853, just seventeen years old. The yellowed death certificate, handwritten in a barely legible scrawl, offered no details, only mentioned a vague “head injury.”

  Some of them cross-checked with the handful of names I'd been able to collect at Jeremy's family cemetery. There was Hiram Neville, born in 1746 and buried in 1823—I'd seen his big headstone, mostly eroded and sunken, but his name and year of death had been a bit legible. Judging by his advanced age and the size of his grave marker, I was guessing he'd been something of the family patriarch during his era. Hiram was the first to own the land, receiving it in a decree from the royal governor of Georgia in 1770, probably in exchange for some sort of cash payment. He was also interesting to me because he would have been alive during the American Revolution, during the time when Hessians were riding around Georgia killing rebellious colonists for the British Empire.

  I also found a death record of a Rebekah Neville Hudstrom, buried in 1859. Edina Drayton Neville, age 11, died in 1903 of polio. In 1943, Minnie Neville, aged twenty, died in a horseback riding accident.

  I had to wonder how many layers of hauntings we faced. Was the horse-mounted ghost really a Hessian soldier or somebody from later years? Was the horseman connected to the bloody girl ghost at all, or were they separated by generations? Once a place is haunted, it tends to accumulate more ghosts over the years, the energy growing denser and darker like a spiritual black hole. Nothing attracts a ghost like a haunted house, Calvin says.

  I jotted notes, took snapshots of old documents, and put together what sparse history of the Neville farm I could. I desperately needed more information about the eighteenth century in particular.

  The courthouse offered only some bare-bones information, but it was better than nothing. I traced the history of land ownership all the way from Hiram Neville to Jeremy's deceased great-uncle and then to Jeremy himself.

  Outside, Stacey lounged in the back of the van with her headphones on, staring at the array of screens. With the windows open and the van's rear door ajar, the interior was pleasantly cooled by the autumn air.

  “Find anything?” she asked, waving at her monitors. “I didn't.”

  “Not much on my end.”

  “No dead girls, huh?”

  “Some dead girls, but not much information about them. Maybe the library has more.”

  “Sounds like an exciting adventure.”

  I did have some better luck at the library, as it turned out.

  The library was, naturally, smaller than those where I usually did my research back in Savannah, pleasant and sunny despite the spiderwebs and bats hanging from the ceiling. Cutesy foam tombstones and plastic coffins decorated a large table that offered “Spooky Reads” ranging from classic Shirley Jackson to more modern and kid-friendly R.L. Stein offerings. I would have found the little faux-graveyard a little more adorable if it hadn't reminded me of the need to deal with restless things in the real one over at the clients' farm. Even in the daylight, just the memory of that swampy, isolated family cemetery was disquieting.

  The librarian on duty was a middle-aged woman dressed in a bee costume, with a black and yellow striped top and a headband with shiny antennae that bounced as she moved. It wasn't quite Halloween yet, but I supposed she was really into the season. A long felt stinger wagged at the back of her black stretch pants as she turned to face me.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, studying my face as if struggling to recognize me. “New patron?”

  “I'm from out of town.” I introduced myself and passed her a business card.

  “Oh, a private investigator!” The librarian's voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper, though we were alone in the room as far as I could tell. “Are you solving a murder? I just love those Kinsey Millhone mysteries.” She pointed to a “Staff Pick” shelf where Sue Grafton novels were prominently featured.

  “Nothing that exciting, I'm afraid, unless I run across an unsolved historical murder.”

  “That would be exciting!” The librarian's eyes lit up. “How can I help?”

  “I'm researching a local farm. The new owners are trying to learn about their ancestors who lived there.” I gave her the address of the farm, but avoided mentioning any ghosts.

  “Oh, the Nevilles, of course! Amber is such a pleasant young woman. Her daughter always makes a wreck of the children's room. She's a little red-hai
red devil. Oh, she's not malicious about it, like some of the little...well, little patrons...that come in here. She's just so enthusiastic to read it all, you see. And then there's her son. So you must be interested in the horseman ghost.”

  “Have you heard about it?” I asked.

  “Well, I didn't grow up here,” she said. “I'm from Moultrie originally. After Amber and her family moved in and opened up that place for a tourist trap, I mean tourist attraction, you just about couldn't avoid hearing something about it. Most people don't think anything of it, of course.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “Just that there's a ghost on horseback riding up and down the old roads out there,” she said. “They say he'll clobber you if you get in his way.”

  “Anything about his identity?”

  “Something to do with the Revolution. I want to say he was a Hessian—whoever came up with that tale didn't do anything but knock off the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, if you ask me. I don't believe a word of it, but I suppose it's fun to have such a local story. And of course there was that big battle not far from here. Big in Revolution-era terms, I mean, not so much in modern times. The Battle of Brier Creek, they call it, and serious history buffs from all over the country come here to see it. So we librarians are expected to know about it, you see, by those visiting buffs.”

  I wanted to cringe at her multiple uses of the word buff, as in history buff, movie buff, whatever—that word always rubs me the wrong way. I'd say it was one of my “pet peeves” but that term is another one of my, um...things that annoy me. That wasn't the librarian's fault, of course, so I kept a smile on my face and my mild irritation under my hat. Metaphorically. I wasn't wearing a hat.

  I intended to ask her more about the local Revolution battle, but she saved me the trouble by launching right into it.

  “...big defeat for the American side!” she was saying. “The patriots were trapped between Brier Creek and the Savannah River, you see. The British moved in, and hundreds of Americans died. Nobody even knows for sure how many. It was an awful sight, I'm sure. The victory encouraged the British to stay quite a bit longer. The British might have retreated and given up on the South if not for their big victory at Brier Creek. That's why the occasional history buffs come. It was a turning point in the war...”