House of Whispers (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 5)

by JL Bryan

  Maybe I should have questioned him, asked him if he knew anything about the workman who'd died upstairs. Maybe I should have whipped out my little Lois Lane notepad and pencil to really give him the investigative what-for. It's easy to say that, but much harder to pull off when you're looking into the black eye sockets of a man who's been dead and gone for more than a century and a half.

  What I didn't do was break and run, screaming my head off, and I'm going to say I'm proud of that.

  He swiveled on his heel—giving me a moment's relief from that hollow, unblinking death gaze—faced the darkness ahead, and began to march, one foot a little limp and dragging, which added a rasping sound to the heavy boot-clomps. I was willing to bet those were the same clomping sounds Stacey had called about.

  The moaning voices and the unpleasant smells grew sharper. A few candles sputtered to life, scattered at irregular intervals down the hallway. They didn't give much light, but after a moment, I was grateful that they didn't.

  The visuals had arrived, accompanying the other sensory apparitions. I walked down another version of this hallway, the luxurious carpet runner missing, the walls decorated with peeling floral wallpaper.

  Men lay on makeshift wooden cots jammed against the walls on either side, leaving only a narrow aisle along the middle for me to attempt to pass. The bayonet-armed soldier marched on ahead of me, between the cots, but he was taking his time about it. Why not? He had years and years to pass.

  These were clearly the war wounded, missing arms, legs, and eyes, their amputated stumps swaddled in blood-stained cloth rags. They writhed on their wooden-plank beds, seeming to grow more excited as I walked between them. Mixed with my fear was sorrow at the sight of their obvious and extreme pain.

  One man reached out and grabbed at my hip as I passed, and I jerked away. The man's right leg was a stump below the knee, the wet black bandaging peeling away from it. Half his head was swaddled in dirty cloth. His visible eye was pale shades of white, no hint of color at all.

  Others began to grab at me, their moans becoming more intense, like maximum-security prisoners who hadn't seen a woman in decades. They were probably just desperate to establish some contact with the living, to reach out from their private hell in search of compassion, but I didn't want to wait around to see how things developed.

  This was something between a cluster of apparitions and a full-on time slip. A time slip is when a location's past suddenly bleeds through into the present, usually recreating some moment of peak emotional intensity. This wasn't just a recording of the past, though—the souls of those soldiers, or at least fragments of their souls (theories differ) were trapped here, continuing to suffer. I could tell because they were trying to interact with me. I wondered what kept them in the hotel all these years.

  I wanted to dash down the hall, past the horribly wounded souls and their desperate grabs for attention, but Ol' Bayonet Arm marched at half-time. I did not want to push past him and have him walking behind me. If we were going to be in the same room, I wanted him right where I could see him, thanks.

  So I had to move slowly, avoiding reaching hands and amputated stumps, feeling a mix of fear and pity for the wounded men on their cots.

  Another detail I couldn't help noticing: every single one of them had a black slash mark across his throat, not unlike the thin line drawn on my back by what I'd assumed to be a ghostly scalpel.

  Doing my best to keep my distance, I followed the soldier apparition to the far end of the hall, and I managed not to get my soul sucked out or my jacket sleeve torn along the way. The window showed nothing but pure black outside.

  The soldier turned and began to march down the next hall, also lit by candles and smelling of death. I wondered where he was going, and whether he intended for me to follow or if he was going to turn back at any moment and attack me for riding his tail.

  One sagging wooden door creaked open beside me, and Stacey stood in the doorway, looking out from her completely modern hotel room. Strange alien sounds, which I strongly suspected to be a Katy Perry song, drifted out from behind her.

  “Ellie?” she asked.

  Just like that, everything was back to normal, a softly illuminated hotel room corridor appointed with antique knickknacks and fresh flowers, nothing more. It was as if the whole nightmarish scene had been a bubble of illusion, vanishing all at once with a single pinprick.

  Stuff like that will make you question your sanity.

  Stacey repeated my name again, and I stumbled inside, closing the door behind me. I was shaking and, I realized, freezing cold, a fact which did not stop me from sweating profusely.

  “What happened?” she asked, while I collapsed onto her bed. “Ellie? What did you see?”

  I took a deep breath, really trying to pull my brains back together so I could form rational sentences again.

  “Well,” I said. “Either there's a convention in town of the most hardcore Civil War reenactors ever, or I just saw the ghosts of those men Abigail Bowen killed.”

  “Did they have anything interesting to say?”

  “Mostly a lot of groaning in pain.” I detailed what I'd seen, pausing to drink some hot green tea she was thoughtful enough to brew. She also wrapped a blanket around me, since I was freezing cold.

  “All that, right out here?” Stacey reached toward the closed door. “They're hanging out in the hall outside our room? What are they doing?”

  “Lying there bleeding, for the most part. Except that one bayonet-armed guy. He's marching up and down. I don't know if he's the commanding officer or he's guarding the others or what. But he's pretty scary.”

  “Huh.” Stacey opened the door and peered out into the hall. “Hard to believe. My cameras cut out—I was trying to get them back online, and re-establish contact with you...Ellie?”

  I'd lain back on her bed, my eyes drifting closed. The spirits hadn't just drained my gear to pull off that big appearance, they'd drained the energy from my body. I felt vulnerable and weak, and I didn't like it one bit. I didn't like the idea of operating in a house where the entities could do this to me.

  “Gotta get back to work,” I mumbled. “After I rest my eyes for a second.”

  Then I zonked out into a deep sleep.

  Chapter Nine

  I awoke groggy and still sweaty a couple hours later, washed in the light of a score of black and white monitors. It took me a moment to get my bearings.

  Stacey sat a few feet away in one of the deeply upholstered armchairs, watching the video array, her headset on.

  “Ugh.” I sat up, smearing away a mat of my long black hair that had stuck to my face. I didn't exactly feel rejuvenated and refreshed after my nap. More like I wanted to go soak my throbbing head in a tub full of ice for an hour or so, then hop right back into bed.

  I rubbed my eyes and tapped Stacey on the shoulder. She jumped—she'd been staring at a complex line graph of audio data displayed on her screen.

  “Hey, you spooked me,” she said, removing her headset. “I'm trying to decipher these crazy inhuman voices from the fourth floor. Not a good time to sneak up on me.”

  “I wasn't sneaking.” I glanced at the clock. Almost three a.m. “Why'd you let me sleep so long?”

  “I didn't have much choice, did I? Does this sound like Latin to you?” She placed her headset around my ears. I heard static, interspersed with a flat, chanting voice or ten.

  “Could be. Sounds like a lot of -us endings. Dominus, spiritus...uh, octopus, maybe?”

  “That's from the fourth floor. Now look at the third floor. I managed to get the cameras outside our room online again.” She gestured to a pair of monitors. The regular camera showed nothing, but the thermal revealed lumpy cold spots alongside both walls where I'd seen the suffering war amputees. “Doesn't look like they plan on going anywhere. I think this one's your eyeless boyfriend.” She pointed to a cold spot drifting slowly down the middle of the hall. “It's like he's pacing out there. Maybe waiting for you to come back,
huh?”

  “Maybe it has nothing to do with me.”

  “They weren't out there last night. Not according to the thermal camera.”

  “The cameras don't always capture everything,” I said. “They might have spent the last hundred years hanging out in that same hallway, and now they're getting stirred up...” I blinked away a flashback of the agonized faces and grasping hands.

  “Because of you? Or us?”

  “More likely because of whatever has all the spirits getting active and destructive around here,” I said. “Madeline's renovations, maybe.”

  “Do you think Ol' Bayonet Arm is the one who's been cutting people? Maybe the murderer we're looking for?”

  “I'd say he makes the suspect list.”

  “Then maybe he's trying to stop us,” Stacey said. “Maybe he's waiting out there to attack—”

  “Maybe we'll be shut-ins tonight.” I stretched my legs and crossed to our heap of gear. I checked the battery in the ghost cannon, the ridiculously intense heavy portable light that can help run off truly stubborn or difficult spirits.

  “Think we'll need that?” Stacey asked.

  “If they do try to come in, let's blast them fast, before they get a chance to drain the battery.” As I returned to the bed, I noticed a roughly Ellie-shaped sweat imprint on the blanket where I'd been lying. Gross. I pulled it off and rolled it up for housekeeping, keeping the sweat imprint on the inside to hide my shame. “Anybody run screaming out of 208 yet?”

  “Not tonight. Kid's wandering the halls, though, like she wants to be anywhere but there. No parents with her.”

  “I think she's more sensitive to ghosts than they are. She's not up here on three, is she?” I didn't want to think about her stumbling into all those mangled, unpredictable soldiers with their hungry eyes and hands.

  “Sticking to one, mostly. And the lounge on two.”

  “All right.” I settled in for the long watch, but I also tried and failed to learn more about the history of the hotel's fourth floor.

  Some general biographical information was available about Ithaca Galloway. According to some of the sketchy details I found, including very old archived articles of the International Journal of Psychical Studies, Ithaca had been born on a struggling family farm in Pennsylvania and had run away as a teenager, then established a reputation as a gifted medium during the Spiritualist heyday. It was not clear whether “Ithaca” was really her given name or an assumed one.

  Her acquaintance with the minor iron magnate from Boston, Archibald Samuel Galloway, began when she purported to speak for his beloved deceased wife and children. All five of his children had died, three of them very young, two as young men in the Civil War. Galloway had made his fortune supplying railroads and factories at the dawn of the industrial age. At the time of their marriage in 1890, Ithaca was thirty-four and Archibald was sixty-three.

  After Archibald's death in 1895, Ithaca wasted no time selling the remnants of the flagging ironworks to Andrew Carnegie's steel conglomerate and moving herself and her coterie of servants and psychic friends down to the haunted Lathrop Grand in Savannah.

  The portion of her life that connected her to the iron and steel industry up north was relatively easy to find. Once she moved to Savannah, the available information plummeted. I could read all about how she'd renovated and modernized the hotel, but nothing about what her life was like there.

  According to one source, she'd died in relative poverty in 1921, her wealth lost, squandered, or embezzled by her accountants and lawyers. The hotel had been sold and went into a period of criminal activity and disrepair before its next restoration decades later.

  I already knew that, though. I was going in circles, getting nowhere.

  On the monitors, Stacey caught some odd things—a decorative dish leaping from the mantel of a second-floor fireplace, splintering when it reached the hardwood floor. A chair in a hallway window nook turned slightly while unoccupied. A cupboard door in the third-floor service area opened for no reason. Just little events, many of them things that would have gone altogether unnoticed by the living if the cameras hadn't been there to capture them.

  The cold spots just outside our rooms cycled between periods of intense frostiness and periods of fading away almost completely, according to the thermal imaging. We remained alert and on edge all night, but nobody tried breaking down our door with ghostly bayonets or cannons.

  In the morning, I met with a very tired-looking Madeline in her office to summarize our progress so far. I'd showered off the cold-sweat residue and changed into fresh clothes.

  Our investigation had raised a number of questions without resolving any, so the meeting was a bit tense. Madeline pulled up a list of complaints from guests and showed them to me on her desktop.

  “Broken flower vase...room disorderly, clothes thrown all over...” Madeline shook her head. “We keep seeing more and more people check out early. Most of these guests like the idea of a ghost, but they don't want to feel threatened.”

  “Anything from 208?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “People who reserve that room usually want to see something supernatural happen. That doesn't always stop them from running away once it does, but the current guests haven't complained so far.” She gave me a hard look. “I can't keep losing guests like this.”

  “We should learn a lot today,” I said, telling her about our scheduled visit to the Historical Association and how Jacob was coming to pick up any psychic readings. I didn't mention that I'd be meeting Michael for antiquing and a late lunch before any of that happened. I'm entitled to a sliver of personal time here and there. “In the meantime, have you done anything about the situation in 208?”

  “What situation?” She looked genuinely puzzled. I tried not to gape at her.

  “I told you Abigail's ghost might be getting violent. I've been cut. Several of Javier's people got cut. You didn't mention that when you first told me what happened up there.”

  “I was a little more concerned about that poor dead worker.”

  “Valentino?”

  “Was that his name?”

  I held back a sigh. “Listen, it's clear that the parents in 208 want to stay near the ghost, but the kid is scared. She wandered around the hotel all night to avoid that room.”

  “Conrad told me he saw a kid out alone, but he just told her to return to her room.”

  “I think you should offer them the connecting room. It might help keep the girl safe.”

  “Have you been talking to them about your investigation?” Madeline's smile, very slight to begin with, vanished from her face.

  “The girl chatterboxed me,” I said, shrugging, as if I couldn't have helped talking to her. “She was desperate for someone to talk to, I guess. I didn't reveal anything, but she told me something was in her room. Watching her, then touching her arm.”

  “That's just Abigail.” Madeline waved a hand. “The parents wanted the most haunted room. If they wish to change, they can ask the front desk—”

  “They aren't aware of the current risks,” I said. “What are you going to do if that kid gets seriously hurt by the ghost?”

  “I could do with a few less kids around the hotel, honestly.” Madeline shook her head. “That was a joke. All right, I'll see about making arrangements.”

  “Thank you,” I said, feeling a little relieved. “I do have one more question. The head custodian mentioned he'd warned a woman about going up to the fourth floor, that she was part of some group. Javier said he didn't have a female on his crew. Any idea who Earl was talking about?”

  Madeline thought it over, looking annoyed by the question. “I don't think the other contractor had any female workers, either. I believe I would have noticed.”

  “Could you give me their contact information?”

  “Why don't you just go back and ask Earl himself?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, then closed it again. I couldn't just say that the basement was creepy, not wi
thout calling my professional ghost-exterminator credentials into question. I didn't want to say out loud that Earl unsettled me, either, because then I'd just sound mean. He was just a sickly old man.

  “I suppose I could,” I had to admit. “Just trying to save an extra trip downstairs.”

  After meeting with her, I passed by the front desk in the lobby. Steve, the guy from St. Croix, was on duty. I waited until a couple of guests left and he was completely alone before I approached.

  “Hi again,” I said, approaching Steve, who gave me a warm smile.

  “Hi again. What can I do for you?”

  “I just have a question. How long have you worked here, Steve?”

  “About three months.”

  “Okay.” I quickly summarized my question about female workers in the crews Madeline had hired to renovate the fourth floor.

  “I don't think so,” he said.

  “Any idea who Earl was talking about?”

  “Not...” He shook his head, then his eyes widened. “Unless he means the camera crew, because there were a couple of women with them.”

  “What camera crew?”

  “One of those TV shows, you know. Ghost Finders, Ghost Seekers, something like that. They filmed upstairs a month ago. It was the last week Gary managed the hotel, just before Madeline and the new owners took over. I remember the old-timers talking about it, because nobody was supposed to go to the fourth floor, especially not the media. Strict rules from the old owner. Some people said...I don't know if it's true, but maybe Gary took a bribe from the TV producers to do it. He was about to lose his job. We were all worried about losing our jobs when Mrs. Colt came, but Gary knew he would be fired to make room for the new general manager.”

  “Do you have any contact information for the ghost-show people?”

  “I can check....” Steve worked at his keyboard for a minute, frowned, clicked the mouse, and shook his head. “I don't even see a record of their reservation. It was definitely that final week. Maybe Gary did take a bribe...oh, yes.” He finally smiled and looked up at me.