EJ06 - Maze of Souls

by JL Bryan

  I went on down the list, pausing after each name to judge whether the formless cold fog halted in its advance toward the porch steps or reacted in any way.

  “Rebekah Neville Hudstrom. Dead in 1859, age twenty-five. Riding accident. That's all your obituary says. Want to tell me more about it?” I asked. “Were you murdered? Are you still haunting your childhood home?”

  The ice-cold fog continued creeping forward. I stayed behind the railing, away from the steps this time in case she tried to yank me down again.

  “Henrietta Neville,” I said. “Died in 1891, age fifteen. Is that you?” I paused.

  “Ellie, I don't think it's slowing down,” Stacey said over the headset.

  “I agree,” I told her. To the approaching ghost, I said, “I know you aren't Edina Neville, dead in 1903, age eleven. Because I saw a little bit of your life, toward the end. You're from earlier than any of the girls I named, aren't you? You're something older. You've been here a long time. Who are you?”

  I lifted the goggles from my eyes and squatted on the porch, as if the low patch of approaching fog were a small, easily frightened dog that I didn't want to intimidate. It was true that I didn't want to run her off just yet, but mostly I wanted to keep my center of gravity low in case she attacked. Even a weak ghost can use gravity to its advantage—nudging a heavy paint bucket off a shelf in your garage, for example, so it cracks your skull but looks like a simple household accident. Or giving you a push at the top of the stairs, that's an old favorite. Whatever can be done with just a faint shove.

  All my nerves felt uneasy, and my stomach and jaw were both tight with tension. My palms sweated as I drew my tactical flashlight but kept it dark. Something unholy and restless was moving toward me, after all, and my body was sending the usual signals to fight or flee, to panic and scream, all of which must be held carefully inside if you're to have any hope of controlling the situation.

  “Stop,” I said, my voice colder and flatter now, with less pretense of trying to be friendly. It was almost like the voice of the ghost we'd recorded in the cemetery. “Stop there.”

  She didn't stop, and she was only inches from the porch now, her misty tendrils curling up onto the lowest of the three steps.

  So I let her have it.

  I activated both my flashlights, their beams narrowed and concentrated, each one hitting the little splash of fog with three thousand lumens of full-spectrum white light. The light doesn't actually hurt ghosts—though I often wish it did—but it's usually enough to scramble the unwanted presence and send it into retreat.

  My beams came together to illuminate the puddle of icy fog from two different angles. Its tendrils curled back from the bottom step, and the entire fog patch shrunk away into the grass, breaking up into smaller rivulets I could barely see.

  It retreated from the steps. I jumped down to the dirt, pressing the advantage I seemed to have gained. My lights shone like sunbeams onto the area where the fog had been, but now the fog had all melted away.

  I drew the thermals down over my eyes again, turning the world back into a surreal, color-coded temperature map. This revealed the cold entity retreating to the road where it had originated. I chased her, spreading my flashlights to either side, as if I could herd the ghost away from the house.

  The entity's temperature climbed, changing the thermal signature from a formless dark purple to lighter and lighter shades of blue. As the colors lightened, the ghost's form sharpened at the edges, suggesting a woman crawling across the lawn on her hands and knees. She was almost to the road.

  “I can help you,” I said. “You don't have to be trapped here. You can move on.”

  She grew pale and insubstantial as she reached the road, making it hard to distinguish her from the chilly night around us.

  I eased my thermals off my eyes and up onto my forehead with the back of one hand.

  She stood in the middle of the road, partially formed, and what I could see of her was frosty white and transparent. It was a meager apparition, no more substantial than a mist of breath on a cold black window, already fading.

  A ruffled white cap surrounded her face. She regarded me with dark eyes, and I could just see the frown on her wispy, barely-visible lips. I got the impression of a young woman in her teens or early twenties. She wore old-fashioned stays, which is a vest ribbed with whalebone to give a woman the kind of posture and figure that were considered desirable about two hundred years ago.

  She also wore petticoats, but these were harder to discern because the lower half of her was dark, as though she'd been dipped in some black liquid. As her whole appearance was in shades of white and black, the blackened areas might have represented bloodstains. That certainly fit the glimpse I'd had of her, sprawled in the back of a wagon and soaked in blood.

  The figure was moving away, but she looked back at me just before melting from sight. I continued after her down the road, even after she had vanished.

  “She's a shy one,” I whispered. “Looks like she was moving into the woods.”

  “And you're going to wait and see if our cameras out there happen to pick up something, right?” Stacey guessed.

  “I'm following her. Maybe I'll learn something.” I turned off my flashlights as I walked down the dirt road toward the pitch-black woods ahead. Above me were thousands of stars and a waning moon, so I could easily discern the road beneath my feet. The house and van grew more distant behind me as I walked, and the corn maze came up beside me as I approached the woods.

  “Want me to come with you?” Stacey asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “I'd rather not die alone in the woods. It'll be more fun if you're with me.”

  “Thanks so much.” Stacey's tone did not convey deep gratitude. The back door of the van opened, but she was well behind me and I didn't want to wait. The ghost of Bloody Betty was already out of sight, and I didn't want the trail to grow too cold. Or warm, I suppose, since we're talking about a cold ghost. This job can involve night after night of waiting around for something to happen. When it finally does, I want to grab on tight and see what I can learn.

  My quick, confident strides began to falter as I approached the woods. At night, the darkness where the dirt road disappeared into the shadows of the trees might as well have been the looming mouth of a cave leading down into the underworld.

  “Are you here?” I asked. “Is anyone here?”

  “I'm coming as fast as I can,” Stacey growled over my headset. “Don't go into the dark, scary woods after midnight by yourself, okay?”

  “I wasn't talking to you,” I whispered back.

  I slowed to a snail's pace as I approached what looked like a veil of pure blackness across the dirt road. Not even a glimmer of light passed through the canopy of old trees overhead, their branches knitted together to form a dense ceiling not unlike the canopy that shades just about every street in downtown Savannah. In Savannah, though, there would be lights, crowds, and glowing shop windows. Out here, there was nothing but shadows, wild animals, and the empty dirt road that ran northward toward the river.

  Something moved on the dark road ahead, a shadow within the shadows. It was near eye level, which meant it wasn't another raccoon or stray cat. I'd heard no beating wings to indicate a bat or nocturnal bird, and the shape had seemed larger than that, anyway. It was a person, or maybe a big animal, like a horse or a gorilla. A gorilla seemed doubtful.

  I heard a sound like a flat sigh from the trees beside the road. That's the best way I know how to describe it, a human voice exhaling, long and slow, as if expressing ages of accumulated weariness.

  Another voice, this one more of a low hiss, sounded from the opposite side of the road. Again, I saw movement in the darkness. Either this entity was moving fast, or there was more than one of them around me.

  With my flashlights still off and pointed at the ground, I stepped across the threshold from the moonlit portion of the road into the darkness. It was like moving into another world.

  The
air was instantly colder and heavier, and it seemed to push against me, like invisible icy hands crawling over my skin.

  Leaf-rattling sounds stirred around me, like animals closing in from different directions. Dragging footsteps sounded ahead, as if more than one person approached, their shoes scraping in the dirt, but I couldn't see anyone there. I couldn't see much of anything at all.

  My heart began to hammer, and I couldn't take the strange sounds in the darkness anymore. I clicked on both my flashlights, sweeping them back and forth across the road, from one overgrown weedy ditch to the other.

  A few gray shapes hobbled toward me, coming from the direction of the cemetery down the road. They dissolved as soon as my lights hit them, but that didn't mean they were gone. They were Jeremy's dead relatives, I supposed, some of them with the violent histories I'd read about in the old newspapers.

  Something grabbed my arm, and I turned, jabbing my light at the figure who suddenly stood beside me.

  His face was full of holes. That was my immediate first impression, a face the color of dust with holes eaten into it by moths or mice. I could see bone through the dry, rotten face, all along the jawline, as well as several teeth, and the sharp point of one cheek bone. The eyes were hollow. It was a visage like that of an old corpse that had come shuffling out of its grave.

  The apparition wore a wig that screamed eighteenth century, gray and thick, covered with dust and cobwebs and tied with a tattered black ribbon. His breeches and waistcoat, though threadbare, also indicated a ghost from that era.

  I managed to take all of this in while also screaming my head off. He had, after all, grabbed my arm and didn't let go and back away when I illuminated his crumbling face. I pulled, but he held on tight, his eye sockets fixed on my face.

  “Go,” he rasped in a voice that could almost have been mistaken for a handful of dry leaves rubbing together in the wind.

  I don't think he meant go ahead, make yourself at home in these woods. Come visit our bones and headstones! We love company. That wasn't the tone I was picking up on here.

  His fingers dug into my arm, and his skull face with its thin coating of ruined flesh moved closer to mine.

  More shapes lurched down the shadowy road, shuffling my way.

  This might have been a great moment to learn more about this particular ghost and his restless friends, but I was a little bit terrified that he was going to kill me right there, just as I'd joked about with Stacey. It didn't seem as funny this time.

  I slapped the iPod on my belt.

  A storm of sound filled the road, a religious cantata by Georg Böhm, one of Johann Sebastian Bach's teachers. I played a fast-paced section of the song, loaded with timpani and trumpets as well as violins and voices (the title was "Warum toben die Heiden," if you were curious). I had to holy up the place fast if I wanted to run off a whole gang of vicious ghosts right on their home turf.

  Stacey arrived just as the ghost with the powdered wig vanished. She dashed right into the spot where he'd been standing, as though she hadn't seen him there at all, and swept her flashlight around, her jaw set, ready for battle.

  “What happened, Screamy?” she asked. “Why'd do you break out the Beethoven?”

  “It's Böhm,” I said.

  “Like I'm going to know right off the top of my head.”

  “I think you might have stepped right into a nasty-looking ghost,” I said.

  “What? Where?” Stacey jumped and backed up, swinging her flashlight around crazily, like someone who's just walked into a spiderweb.

  “They were all over the place.” I turned down the music and told her what had happened, keeping my voice low. “They seem to have backed off. Maybe they'll leave us alone for now.”

  “Let's not say things that could foreshadow getting attacked, okay?” Stacey said. “Like 'I think we're safe for now' or 'It looks like the evil ghost is gone.' Or 'I'll be right back, you wait here.'”

  “Very funny,” I said, but I didn't feel like laughing. The atmosphere in the woods was still thick and clammy. The spirits might have pulled back a little, but I doubted they'd gone far, and I was sure they were still watching us. We were intruders in their territory, after all, the land where they'd lived and worked and died, where their flesh and bones had long since mingled with the soil and groundwater, and their spirits still lingered long after their lives had ended.

  “Any sign of Bloody Betty?” Stacey asked.

  “She seemed to disappear,” I said. “Maybe into the cemetery. I don't know, but I lost track of her.”

  Stacey and I backed away from the woods, walking so close to each other that our arms brushed together. Once we were several paces out into the moonlit area, we turned and ran, fleeing the ghost-crowded wilderness as quickly as we could.

  Chapter Nine

  On the bright side, we weren't having any trouble finding evidence to confirm that the Neville farm was haunted. This was definitely not a case of groaning floorboards, moaning pipes, or bats in the attic. These people had a major situation on their hands, and that meant a paying job for us.

  On the dark side, we weren't dealing with simple nuisance ghosts. Bloody Betty, whatever her real name might be, had enough power to knock me over. The ghosts in the road and the woods were strong enough for a bit of auditory as well as visual manifestation, and at least one of them could touch me with his rotten hand. I had a feeling there was a lot of power in that old ghost who'd confronted me, just from the clarity of his appearance and the strength of his grip.

  Stacey nicknamed the old colonial-era ghost Wigglesworth, after his dirty old wig.

  We returned to the van, where I remained inside with Stacey for a couple of hours, watching and listening. After my close encounter with the dead but not departed members of the Neville clan, I didn't want to be alone again, not until the sunrise drew a little closer.

  By now, we weren't surprised that our sensors were finding heavy activity in the cemetery. It was all stuff that would make hard-nosed skeptics turn up their hard little noses, like indistinct shadows and the soft walking sounds that came and went, but there was a lot of it.

  We seemed to have successfully turned Bloody Betty away from the house for one night, letting Maya and the rest of her family have some peace, but I was worried about the scale of the haunting we faced and how to deal with it.

  I had a little bit of a cheer-up moment when my phone buzzed and I saw it was Michael. It was about five a.m., time for him to get ready for his shift at the fire station. I hopped out of the van to pace the yard and enjoy a little privacy while we talked.

  “Ghost-nappers,” I said. “You kill 'em, we grill 'em.”

  “That...doesn't even make sense,” Michael said, laughing.

  “It's been a long night. I think I deserve a C for effort.”

  “It's a cold night,” he said. “I'm thinking of starting a fire.”

  “It's like sixty degrees and almost sunrise, but okay. You know I think fires are horrible and pretty much the opposite of romantic, right?”

  “I still think I can change your mind about that.”

  “Not likely.” I didn't like the sharp tone that I heard in my voice. He was just trying to be jokey and playful, and probably didn't consider just what a sore spot he was poking there. My relationship with fire is a little more than sore spot. It's more like a deep hatred infused with fear, infused with more hatred. Still, my first instinct was to rip his head off, and I needed to dial that right down before I said something I regretted. “Where have you been the last couple of days? Avoiding me?” I asked. So much for dialing it down.

  “Sick,” he said. “I had the worst fever.”

  “You should have told me! I could have come over and taken care of you.”

  “Sure. Until you got sick. Then I would have to take care of you. It's the circle of illness.”

  “I wouldn't have minded,” I said.

  “You haven't heard me describe the symptoms yet,” Michael said. “But I ha
ve to warn you, they may be disturbing to hear about, and impossible to unhear.”

  “I'll trust you on that. I don't need all the gory details.”

  “They weren't gory, so much as gooey, and I would say the color was—”

  “Okay, got it,” I said. “Are you feeling better now?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Do you think you can make it to the Halloween thing at the Lathrop Grand on Saturday? Because I wouldn't mind an excuse to avoid it—”

  “I'll be fine. I look forward to it.”

  “Really? You didn't say that last time we talked.”

  “It's a Halloween ball. We can make it fun if we have to.”

  I heard the creaking of a door opening. While talking on the phone, I'd wandered several paces across the front lawn. Now I turned and pointed my flashlight—right at Jeremy. He gave me an annoyed squint before raising his worn, travel-stickered briefcase to block the glare.

  “I have to go,” I whispered into the phone. “I just annoyed my client. He looks grumpy.”

  “I'm dying to see you again,” Michael said.

  “Keep taking that fever medicine.” I hung up, then shouted “Sorry!” at Jeremy. He shuffled toward me, on the way to his car for his pre-dawn commute, portable glow-in-the-dark Cthulhu coffee mug in one hand.

  “Did you catch any Deadites?” Jeremy shouted, though I was only a few yards away. He seemed pretty drowsy, a big red clump of hair sticking up in the back.

  Jeremy tossed his briefcase in the car, then stepped closer to me instead of getting in the car and driving away. I gave him the best smile I could manage.

  “You know, Deadites?” Jeremy asked. “I'm sure someone in your profession is familiar with the Evil Dead movies.”

  “They're a core part of the ghost-hunter curriculum,” I said. “It's a mail-order course.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But, seriously, we encountered several out on the road to the cemetery.”

  “They do like to hang around the woods, menacing people,” he said, sounding almost apologetic for his dead relatives and their behavior. “If only we could control them, we'd have the best haunted-farm attraction in the state. Maybe the tri-state area.”