by Ron Ripley
All Scott cared about was the inappropriate amount of time Courtney, his girlfriend, was spending with a forty-something-year-old guy. Dane being dead didn’t help Scott’s attitude.
But it’s all about ‘Cort’ now, he thought angrily. The pet name caused his anger to flare and his hands to itch. He had never wanted to hit anyone as badly as he wanted to hit Shane Ryan.
It would have been worse if Shane was actually hitting on Courtney in front of him. Shane wasn’t though.
No, Scott fumed, she’s attracted to him. To a God-Damned forty-year-old! he snarled inwardly. Christ, she’s in there helping him cook! She won’t even let me near the stove at her place.
Briefly, he contemplated sucker-punching Shane, but with the idea came the realization that if he didn’t knock the man out, Shane would probably beat the hell out of him.
I just want to leave this place, Scott complained to himself. Get good and far away, then we can figure out what the hell happened to Dane.
The thought of his friend twisted his gut and Scott dropped his chin to his chest.
“Scott,” Eileen whispered. “Did you hear that?”
He was about to say ‘no’ when he did hear something. A creak followed by a soft groan.
From the second floor.
Another creak filtered down, then a third.
Someone’s walking up there, Scott realized.
Eileen turned toward the kitchen door, and he stopped her.
“Wait,” he whispered.
She looked at him, surprised, and she asked in a low voice, “Why?”
“What if the person up there is a friend of Shane’s?” Scott asked. “I’m having a hard time believing all of this ghost stuff. Especially after Dane was killed.”
Eileen hesitated, then she shook his hand off of her. “I don’t believe it.”
Scott watched her leave the room, and then he turned his attention to the stairs. The steps drew nearer. He got to his feet and walked softly over to the railing. The wood was cold and smooth beneath his hand. He held onto it as he peered up into the dim light of the second floor.
A man appeared, and Scott took a nervous step backward. It was the naked man he had seen on the pier the night before.
“Scott,” Shane said, suddenly at his side.
Scott stared at Shane, unable to speak briefly. Then, finally, he managed to stutter out, “He’s see-through.”
“I know,” Shane said. “Go on back, please. Let me speak with Mike here.”
Scott could only nod as he backed up and found himself between Eileen and Courtney. In horrified, but fascinated silence, they watched the scene before them unfold.
Chapter 15: A Conversation
Shane slipped the iron knuckledusters onto his right hand, and he waited for the man at the top of the stairs to speak.
“You should leave,” Mike Puller said.
“I’d like to,” Shane replied. “Can’t though. No reception for the phone. And someone decided to mess around with my ability to connect with the internet.”
“She wants you gone,” Mike said, moving a step closer.
“She can want me gone until Hell freezes over,” Shane said pleasantly. “I’ll leave as soon as I can.”
“You’ll leave now,” Mike said, advancing another step.
“No,” Shane said. “I won’t kill myself like you did, Mike.”
The statement caused the man to hesitate. “How do you know my name?”
“I’m a friend of Amy’s cousin,” Shane said. “I was asked here.”
At the mention of Amy’s name, Mike Puller lowered his head. “I’m sorry she has to carry this weight. I didn’t want her to.”
Puller fixed his eyes on Shane. “Doesn’t mean you get to stay.”
“I stay because I want to. And I’ll leave when I want to. Do you understand me?” Shane asked. He drove all semblance of politeness from his voice. “I’m going to find out what the hell is going on, and then you’re all going to leave. Am I understood?”
Puller chuckled. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
“Cliché much?” Shane asked him.
Puller glared and raced down the stairs at him. Shane slipped to one side, and Mike Puller spun around and snapped, “Think you’re clever? Think she won’t find out about you?”
“Dorothy had best forget about me,” Shane said softly, “and worry about learning to live with the living.”
“The island is hers,” Puller stated matter-of-factly. “The lighthouse is hers. The keeper’s house is hers. You had best remember all of that.”
“Go,” Shane said. “You’re boring the hell out of me. Go put some clothes on.”
Mike Puller snarled with rage and hurled himself at Shane.
Shane didn’t bother stepping aside. He adjusted his position, raised his right fist up and brought it smashing into Puller’s face. The ghost’s eyes went wide as the iron struck him.
A short scream pierced the air, and Mike Puller vanished.
Shane lowered his arm and wondered, tiredly, When is Amy going to check her damned email and see I haven’t written in?
He sighed as he walked away from the stairs. Courtney, Eileen, and Scott all stared at him as he approached.
“What’s wrong?” he asked them.
“You punched a ghost,” Courtney said.
“Only worked because of the iron I had on. These knuckledusters,” he said, slipping them off and putting them back into his pocket, “their iron, and a friend of mine gave them to me. Back when we had a little run-in with some other, equally unpleasant ghosts.
“Come on in the kitchen,” he said as he passed by them. “I’ll tell you what little I know about what can slow a ghost down.”
They followed him, and as he and Courtney finished the preparation of the MREs, he told them about iron, and how to use it.
Chapter 16: Going Down
Scott was sulking in a corner, they had survived the night and the morning had slipped by uneventfully. Eileen lay on the sleeping bag, and Shane wasn’t sure if the girl was awake or asleep. She was quiet, and she had cried again after they had eaten. Courtney had spoken with Scott, and whatever it was had resulted in his new bad mood. Courtney sat beside Eileen, her hand on her friend’s shoulder. When Courtney saw Shane looking at her, she smiled.
Shane smiled back.
“When are you going to go into the cellar?” Courtney asked.
“In a little while,” Shane replied.
“What do you think you’ll find there?” she said.
“I’m hoping I’ll find Dorothy,” Shane said.
“Are you nervous?”
“Of course, I am,” Shane said gently. “I’d be a fool not to be. I don’t know what I’ll run into down there. I know I’ve got a minimum of three ghosts to deal with, possibly more. It all depends on how many others Dorothy and Clark have bound to them. No, I’m not looking forward to this at all, Cort.”
“Do you need me to go downstairs with you?” she asked. The fear was thick in her voice.
Shane smiled at her. “No. No, but thank you. I want you, Eileen, and Scott up here, where it’s safe.”
He stood up and stretched.
“Shane,” Scott said bitterly, “what do we do if you get taken?”
“Set the house on fire,” Shane replied. “And hope someone sees you and comes out to investigate.”
He left them, passed through the kitchen, and went out the back door.
It was nearly mid-day, and the sun was strong and true. The island was warm, smelling sweetly of saltwater, and Shane wondered what he would find in the cellar of the house.
He walked around to the bulkhead, pulled it open, and set the locks. The stairs which led down were steep and narrow, the ledge of each barely more than ten inches deep. Webs clung to the corners, as did shreds of grass and the carcasses of long-dead insects. At the bottom was a tall, narrow door made up of long, thin boards bound together with old iron. Like the doors of
both the lighthouse and the keeper’s house, the door before him had once been blue as well.
Shane took a deep breath, calmed his heart rate, and armed himself.
Carefully, he descended the steps, reached the bottom, and thumbed the latch, swinging the door open.
Nearly pure darkness waited for him inside. The smell was rank and musty, a foul odor which threatened to burn the insides of his nose and caused his eyes to water. The daylight illuminated a small patch of earth which served as the cellar’s floor. He stepped in cautiously, allowing his eyes to adjust to the limited light.
After several minutes of trying to adjust to the dark, he could make out rough shelves of canned and jarred food. In the ceiling above, he could see joists and the faint outline of a trap door. His skin crawled as he stepped in further. To the right, he saw four small boxes, one stacked on top of the other. At the bottom of the pile, though, was a fifth, larger box.
Shane stared at them. Blackness pulsed around them and sought to pull him closer. To drag him in.
“What are you?” he asked softly.
“We’re death,” a little girl answered.
“So our father called us,” a boy added.
“Our mother too, Frederick,” a different girl corrected.
“Yes, Jane,” Frederick said.
Another child, an infant, let out a wail.
“You’ve awakened the baby,” the little girl chided.
“Jillian,” Jane said, “the baby never sleeps.”
“It’s why we’re here,” a man said.
“Yes, grandfather,” Jane agreed. “It is why we’re here.”
“Why are you down here?” Shane asked.
“Punishment,” their grandfather answered. “The children for being children. And myself for having the audacity to try and come between them and the discipline their parents sought to administer.”
“They killed you,” Shane said softly.
“Poison,” the grandfather said sadly.
“Drowning,” Frederick said cheerfully.
“Strangulation for the girls,” Jane said.
“Who did it?” Shane asked.
“Father and mother,” Jillian said, sounding as if she believed Shane to be a little too stupid.
Shane held back his exasperation and asked, “Could you tell me their names?”
“Mother and father,” Jane said. “We knew them as nothing else.”
“My son-in-law was Clark Noyes,” the grandfather said. “My daughter was Dorothy.”
“Where is she?” Shane asked. “I’ve come down here for her.”
“Down here?” the grandfather asked, surprised. “Why would she be here?”
“She doesn’t like the cellar,” Jane said confidentially.
“She hates the dark,” Frederick said. “Grandmother used to punish her by locking her in the cellar. For days on end, she would weep in the darkness. The door would be locked, and Mother would starve. Her disobedience kept her stomach empty, kept her in the cold depths. Grandmother sought to teach our Mother, although she would not learn.
“But, in the end, Mother took her anger out on Father. But only after Mother and Father had punished us,” Frederick finished, laughing.
“How?” Shane asked.
“In the lighthouse,” Frederick said, seeming happy to have Shane to speak with. “Oh, in the lighthouse, all the way up at the lantern. She brought him his coffee one dark night and knocked him unconscious. A terrible blow.”
“Oh yes. She strapped him to the light, face first. She stitched his eyelids open, and over hours and hours she burned out his eyes. We could hear the screams from the top of the tower down here in our wooden tombs.”
“It took days for him to die,” their grandfather added. “I’m not even sure how many, only that he suffered tremendously. He would grow silent, and then my daughter would think of some new punishment for him. Some horrific bit of torment to inflict as much pain as she could on him.”
Shane swallowed uncomfortably at the idea of torture. “Do you know where I could find her? Would it be in the lighthouse?”
“No, not the lighthouse,” the grandfather replied. “Not if she can help it. She despised the lighthouse.”
“Where then?” Shane asked.
“The second floor,” Frederick answered.
Shane stiffened. “The second floor of the keeper’s house?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“It’s only a large room up there,” Shane said softly. “There’s nothing.”
“Perhaps not now,” the grandfather said. “When we first moved into the keeper’s house, there were two bedrooms in the loft.”
“Mother’s room looked out over the sea,” Frederick said.
“She loved to see the shore,” Jillian added.
Of course, it’s the second floor, Shane thought numbly. It’s where she came down from. Just because the cellar felt bad didn’t mean she was down here.
The bodies are here.
Her own father and children, whom she murdered.
It’s the death and the torture I felt. Their memories are sifting up through the stairs and into the back of the house.
And she’s upstairs.
Upstairs!
“Thank you, for your time,” Shane said as politely as he could. “I must go upstairs. I must see if Dorothy is in her room.”
A scream from above cut him off and he was plunged into darkness as the cellar door slammed closed and locked itself.
Shane knew exactly where it was, and he threw himself at it, battering the wood as he sought to claw his way to freedom. A second scream rang out, and he managed to rip the old and rotten door off its hinges.
Biting back his anger, Shane went barreling up the stairs and into the sunlight.
Chapter 17: Dorothy Comes In
Courtney did her best to ignore Scott. He had tried to pull the whole ‘I’m your boyfriend, you can’t talk to him’ speech earlier, but Courtney wasn’t having any of it.
She sighed, shook her head, and focused her attention on Eileen. Her friend was still laying on Shane’s sleeping bag, in and out of sleep, from what Courtney could tell.
Courtney removed her hand from Eileen’s shoulder, brushed back a bit of hair from her friend’s forehead, and felt an unnatural heat emanating from her flesh.
Oh no, does she have a fever? Courtney thought.
Muffled voices came from the cellar.
Children’s voices.
Courtney looked over to see if Scott had heard them as well. His wide-eyed, surprised expression was enough of an answer.
Footsteps came down the stairs, and Courtney turned in time to see a woman finish her descent from the second floor. The woman’s face was cold, merciless. There wasn’t hate in her eyes, only disdain and disgust.
“This is my home,” the woman said, facing them.
Courtney gasped, shivering as she found herself looking through the woman.
“We don’t want to be here,” Courtney said, her voice not nearly as confident as she would have liked. “We want to leave.”
“But I don’t want you to leave now,” the woman said, smiling bitterly. “I like your company. In fact, I’m not sure I want any of you to leave. Ever. There’s so much work to do to get the lighthouse ready. I need to be stronger. And for that, I need you. All of you.”
She walked into the room, towards Courtney.
Courtney scrambled to her feet. Her heart beat ferociously in her chest and the impulse to run and fling herself into the Atlantic threatened to destroy her self-control.
“Get out of here,” Courtney said, mustering all of the force she could. “Leave us alone.”
“Soon enough,” the woman said softly, “I will leave you all alone. But not yet.”
Courtney was suddenly in the air, thrown back against the wall. Her breath was knocked from her, and she collapsed to her hands and knees. With her head spinning and gasping for air, Courtney heard Scott scream in terror. B
eneath them, a door slammed shut.
Managing to take a deep breath, Courtney looked up and saw the stranger kneel down beside Eileen. Eileen, in turn, was sitting up, a groggy, confused expression on her face. Then she screamed as she saw the woman, who let out a pleasant, almost beautiful laugh.
Courtney tried to get to her feet, but only managed to collapse onto the floor. Her head spun too much from the force of the throw and she couldn’t regain her balance. In horror, she watched as the stranger reached out, grasped Eileen by the head and smiled.
Eileen screamed again, tried to twist away, but the ghost kept a firm grip on her.
Something shattered outside, and the sound of running feet could be heard.
The woman slipped her thumbs onto Eileen’s eyelids, and Courtney couldn’t turn away as the stranger began to pry Eileen’s eyes out of their sockets.
Eileen’s screams turned to shrieks while Scott vomited and wept. Shane thrust open the back door. Courtney crawled forward, determined to stop the woman.
Then Shane raced out of the kitchen and past her.
“Dorothy!” he yelled.
The woman snarled at him. “You’re all going to die,” she hissed. “And sooner rather than later.”
Even as Shane reached Dorothy, she grinned and twisted Eileen’s head sharply to the left. The result was instantaneous and sickening. A dry, brittle snap.
Eileen’s shriek ended abruptly, and she went limp.
Shane dove at Dorothy, his right hand smashing through her. With a howl of pure hatred, she vanished. Shane landed hard, rolled, and thudded against the wall, small pieces of plaster dropping onto him.
Courtney finished her crawl to Eileen. Her hand shook as she reached out, touched Eileen’s neck, and sought a pulse.
There was none to be found. Dorothy had killed her.
Blood dried slowly on her friend’s cheeks, her eyelids misshapen after the destruction of the orbs beneath.
Courtney began to shake uncontrollably. She pushed herself back and sat down. Shane moved closer, wrapped an arm around her, and pulled her in close. He said nothing.
She suddenly remembered Scott and looked over to him. He was passed out on the floor.