by JL Bryan
From here, we passed through a jib door into the hallway outside Ithaca's old bedroom. The hall's overhead lights did not work at all when I tried the switch, so we had to rely on our flashlights, which played over moth-eaten rugs and the dusty old dining chairs that lined one side of the hall.
Jacob touched a finger to his lips, though nobody had been talking. The feeling of being surrounded and watched by an unnatural presence was strong here, and much more powerful and sinister than what I'd felt when surrounded by the soldier ghosts downstairs. Dread permeated my body and brain.
One of the REM pods we'd left in the hall was already flickering its light and letting out a soft woo sound, indicating something was interfering with its little electromagnetic field.
The whispering voices reached my ears a moment later, and Stacey cried out in surprise. They were whispering to all of us, I supposed.
“This...this is...” Jacob shook his head. “This is beyond me, guys. They all know we're here, they know I can see them, they don't want us here. They have something to hide, something very big.”
“We'll get out of here as fast as we can,” I said.
Then I pushed open the doors to Ithaca's old bedroom.
“They're following us, just so everybody's clear,” Jacob said. “These are all very active, very conscious entities. They don't have that lost, confused, isolated feeling most ghosts have. They're working together. They have intent.”
“Intent to do what?” I asked.
“Whatever it is doesn't seem to have much to do with this room.” He gestured toward Ithaca's giant bed and equally large circular mirror. “There's residual energy—and I wouldn't recommend anyone spending the night here—but the real action is somewhere else.”
“Maybe through here?” I led them into Ithaca's enormous walk-in closet. I fumbled around the empty shoe rack until I figured out how to push open the concealed door. Beyond it lay the dark chamber we believed to be Gregor Zagan's bedroom. It radiated heat like a furnace, just as it had before, and seemed filled with a darkness our lights couldn't penetrate.
“Okay,” Jacob said, his voice small and mousy. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Okay, you can close that.”
“You don't want to go in?” I asked.
“Definitely not.” He made several urgent waving motions with his hand, letting me know he was serious about closing the door. I let it swing shut.
“What did you see?” Stacey asked.
“There's a guy in there. Long beard. Weird eyes. Creepy. He looked right back at me, and I could feel him daring me to come in. He's hot. You don't need me to tell you that. Most ghosts are cold, desperately sucking energy where they can. This one radiates. He's been charged up somehow. He brings his own energy. I think he's one of the dominant spirits around here.”
I wanted to ask whether he picked up a female companion for the man, a square-jawed woman about a decade his elder, but that's too leading a question for one of these walk-throughs.
“Maybe we should go around?” Stacey suggested.
“Definitely,” Jacob said. “He's got insane levels of energy. They're all—that's what's crazy about this place, a lot of these ghosts had psychic abilities in life. What this guy has is off the charts, though.”
Stacey and I shared a knowing look, thinking about Gregor. Then we doubled back through Ithaca's room and into the hallway. I was surprised Jacob picked up so few signals about the queen bee of the place. Either Ithaca Galloway was elsewhere in the house or extremely talented at hiding herself.
In the hallway, the REM pods lit up and let out their tones as we passed near them, letting us know that the ghosts were walking with us.
In the cavernous dining room, Jacob paused before the group portrait of Ithaca and her twenty or so followers. This time, I tried to identify Katherine, the girl who'd written the tell-all book I was still reading. I noticed a long-haired freckled girl in her late teens or very early twenties, standing just to the side of Gregor, with his big Karl Marx beard and seersucker suit. The girl wore a lacy dress decorated with dark stones and astrological jewelry. Maybe it was her. I also identified a young man in spectacles and a brown suit, pale but attractive in a sickly, gothic way. He made me think of the poet John Keats, beautiful, gifted, and destined for an early grave. Maybe that was Katherine's sexy—I mean, um, “husbandly”—Scottish tutor, Mr. Fletcher.
“These are the ones bothering us,” Jacob said. The whispering hadn't stopped as we walked, and it seemed to urge its way deep into my brain, trying to make me panic. “They don't look too much like their living selves anymore. The ghosts have evolved...not necessarily in a positive way. But they're more connected to each other and more organized than most spirits I've seen. They want us to leave now, by the way.” He pointed to Gregor in the picture. “That's the hot one. I don't know how he got so charged up with power.”
“What about her?” I indicated Ithaca on her dark throne capped with the goat-headed men. “Anything?”
“There are traces of a presence that might have been her.” Jacob shrugged. “Like I said, I'm trying to look past the residuals to the active hauntings.”
I found it hard to believe that, while Ithaca's bearded boy toy and their cultish followers were all haunting the house, Ithaca herself, who'd been so obsessed with ghosts while she was alive, had vanished altogether. Maybe we just hadn't found her yet.
I asked specifically about the people I suspected to be Katherine and her young tutor, and Jacob nodded. “They don't like me looking at this picture. It's like I'm seeing them all naked. They're trying to scare me with their appearance. They look like...well, monsters.”
“Let's go into the necromantium,” I said, and immediately the whispers surged around me and the temperature plummeted until I could see my breath in dense white plumes. I was sick with dread now, despite my attempts to act professional.
I swept my flashlight around and poised my finger against my iPod, ready to hit them with holy music. I couldn't be sure any of this would help—a determined and powerful ghost can brush off my basic defenses if it's intent on something, and all these ghosts seemed fairly determined and powerful. I just wasn't sure what their intentions might be.
“Wow, they didn't like that,” Jacob said. “They're insisting we leave now and never return.”
“That would make billing our client a little awkward,” I said, trying to sound like I wasn't in the grip of a growing, irrational terror. Maybe not all that irrational, either, under the circumstances. “Let's go.”
The air felt thick and charged, like just before a thunderstorm, as we proceeded down the hall to the big double doors. I could practically hear the energy crackling around us, even with the endless swirling rush of whispers filling my ears. I began to hear individual words now, but not pleasant ones. Death. Die. And my least favorite: Ellie.
“Are we sure this is a good idea?” Stacey whispered as we reached the doors to the necromantium. The camera trembled in her fingers. She's not easily scared, but the energy of these ghosts was eating away at us emotionally. It was probably intentional on the part of the ghosts. “I mean, they're being pretty clear about what they want. What if they...?” She didn't finish her sentence, but it was clearly going to end in attack us. Or maybe kill us.
“Jacob, do they want to tell us who's been cutting people? Who killed the worker in this room?” I tapped on the door to the necromantium, and the whispers keyed up a notch in my ears. I was really going to lose my mind if they didn't shut up soon.
“They aren't open to answering questions. Except...oh...” Jacob grabbed Stacey's arm and pulled her behind him. He was gaping at something over my shoulder.
I felt it even before I began to turn around. In the freezing hallway, the approaching wall of heat was hard to ignore. It welled up from behind us, from the direction of, among other things, Gregor Zagan's furnace-like bedroom.
“Zagan,” I said. The heat seemed to hesitate in its approach for a moment, then
rolled forward again, like a slow billowing cloud of roasting hot desert air. Darkness came with it.
“Okay,” Jacob said. He sweated heavily, his face dripping, and he removed his glasses. His cheeks and hands were flushed, as if Zagan were scalding him from the inside out. “Can you tell us who...?” He blinked and nodded as though he'd been interrupted, then turned to me. “The bearded gentleman has indicated, very strongly, his opinion that Abigail Bowen is behind the recent problems.”
“His opinion?” I asked.
“He doesn't claim to have witnessed it himself, but he thinks Stabby Abby has been up to her old scalpel-swinging tricks again.”
“Okay,” I said. Zagan's ghost surprised me with his apparent cooperation. I'd been expecting something closer to a sudden pyrokinetic attack that engulfed us all in flames. “Are there any, uh, witnesses among the ghost community here?”
“He says we do not need investigate this floor any longer,” Jacob said. “All the answers are downstairs, with Abigail and her dead soldiers.”
“All righty,” I said. “Tell him we just want a quick peek in here and we'll be gone.” I tapped on the door to the necromantium again.
“He forbids it,” Jacob replied quickly. “Says it's off-limits to the living. For our own protection.”
“How can he forbid anything? How's he going to stop me?” I asked.
“He can,” Jacob said. “He can stop us all. He has more than a dozen other ghosts under his command. They're the ones who've been telling us to leave. Now they're crowding around him, and the energy level is climbing...like he's charging them up...this is not looking good, kids.”
“Why doesn't he want us to go in there?” Stacey asked.
“He's a real authoritarian. Doesn't like to explain himself, or to be disobeyed.” Jacob looked at me, soaked with sweat now. Stacey and I were sweating pretty hard, too. The temperature had gone from dorm-room refrigerator to funeral bonfire in a matter of seconds. “Your call, Ellie,” he said.
I looked in the area where Zagan was standing—which I identified by the rippling heat waves, an extremely rare thing to see from a ghost—and then shrugged. Without announcing my decision, I shoved open the double doors to the dark temple-style room and walked inside, my flashlight playing across the fat columns with their hieroglyphs and demonic sigils and whatnot.
Jacob and Stacey followed, and Jacob immediately staggered after crossing the black granite threshold. We hurried to grab him from either side.
“What...is that?” Jacob was staring straight ahead at the center of the black temple room, to the place where the sunken holes in the floor might have once held the supports to Ithaca and Zagan's wacky attempts at a talk-to-the-dead machine.
The whispering rose around us to a cacophonous, chanting sound. It was almost like the opening of 2001, the eerie sound when the chimps are checking out the black obelisk. The whole room seemed to hum and echo with the otherworldly voices, bouncing off hieroglyphic cartouches and strange serpentine figures wrought in glimmering brass on the walls.
A wave of heat began to swell in the room, signaling Zagan's approach.
“Quick, Jacob,” I said. “What do you see?” My first impression was that our cameras and other gear had been shattered and strewn across the floor, roughly in a wide circle around the center of the temple, as if someone had wanted to sweep off just that particular area where the mysterious machine had once stood.
“It's all ripped open,” Jacob replied, still staring at the empty space while the air grew dense and clammy around us. “Remember the well in your boyfriend's basement? This is like one of those, but bigger. Cruder. A hole torn in midair, creating a ragged doorway. Someone did this deliberately, and without much skill.”
The ghosts began to appear around us, the apparitions probably fueled by Zagan's vast store of superheated psychic energy. They were, as Jacob had mentioned, not fully human in appearance. Their faces were all white, as though bled of any color, and the flesh had a wrinkled and hardened look, like weird masks.
Three of them pressed in close to me, all but their faces cloaked in dark shadows. Pinpricks of fiery light burned like tiny coals deep in their eye sockets. One raised a dry, mottled white hand and reached slowly toward my face.
“Ellie?” Stacey whispered. I forced myself to look over at her, surrounded by even more specters than me. The rest were clustered around Jacob, but at a distance. Maybe he had some psychic technique of holding them at bay.
Or, more likely, they were saving him for the hellishly hot entity that now entered the room, turning the place into a cavernous smokehouse.
He walked in amid the heat, first presenting as a twelve-foot-tall shadow that nearly reached the vaulted ceiling. Then he shrank down, slowly thickening into a large male human form covered entirely in ash, his thick beard smoldering. Glowing pinpoints of light burned in his eyes as he approached. Bootprints of ash smoked on the granite floor behind him. I wondered what would happen if he walked on one of the rugs or carpet runners downstairs.
He stopped close to me, and the other ghosts held me in place for his examination. I could smell him, a stink of burned hair and skin. Trails of smoke escaped his cracked, ash-coated flesh, as if deep fires still burned inside him.
I had the same impression when his cracked, sooty lips parted, letting out a curl of black smoke and an intense heat.
When he spoke to me, it wasn't from his cracked and smoking mouth, though. His voice whispered into my ear, intimately, and I was flooded with revulsion.
“I forbade you,” he said.
Then Jacob levitated from the floor, moving toward the high ceiling above. His limbs were extended out to their full lengths, as if to render him as exposed as possible. Even his fingers straightened, then spread apart forcefully, making him grunt.
“Told you so,” Jacob managed to cough in my direction. Tiny curls of smoke rose all over his arms, neck, torso, and legs, as if someone had spitballed him with flecks of hot lava. He cried out as small tongues of fire appeared under the smoke, burning out through his clothes and into his flesh. It looked like his whole body would ignite.
“Let him go!” Stacey shouted, which I was just about to shout, but she was quicker. “Right now!”
“Your problem is with me,” I told the ghost of Gregor Zagan. “Believe me.” My gaze shifted to one of the ghosts holding me. I was fairly certain that two of my captors, based on the look of their mask-like faces, were Katherine Moore and her Scottish friend, Edward Fletcher. Maybe they'd taken an interest in me after I'd asked about their pictures in the dining room. “Katherine, I'm reading your book. I have the last copy that hasn't been destroyed. It's good.”
The ghost to which I'd spoken drew back just slightly, as if I'd surprised her. I touched my iPod and charged toward her.
I wasn't taking any chances on the holy music. I filled the room with Benedictine chants at top volume, radiating a very church-like atmosphere in my immediate vicinity. I managed to pass through Katherine's ghost, feeling a weird mix of confusion and hate and loneliness, and charged on toward the apparition of Zagan.
Fire streaked all along Jacob's jeans and shirt. He struggled uselessly in the air.
The white-masked apparitions had lifted Stacey off the floor, too, and all she could do was scream.
I leaped at Zagan. I can't say I cared for the crumbling, ashy smile that crawled across his face as I launched myself toward him.
Then I felt like I was being burned alive.
I screamed, and I was conscious of being flung, and even more conscious of slamming painfully into one of those stupid columns that were in the way everywhere. My hip cracked into it, then my head an instant later.
I fell to the floor about as gracefully as a yak dropped from a helicopter. I smacked into the marble tile and nearly lost consciousness.
When I managed to look up, Zagan didn't seem to have moved at all, except that he'd turned his head to look directly at Jacob and smile as the supernatura
l flames spread across him. Stacey screamed at the sight of him.
My head ringing, I managed to push myself to my hands and feet. I seemed to have escaped my ghostly captors for the moment, though I doubted it would last. I'd also landed not far from the open doors through which I'd entered.
My immediate concern was pulling Jacob out of the fire. I managed to crawl out into the hall and regain my feet as I approached the fire-hose station near the servants' jib door in the hallway.
The hose was there, and looked as though it had been for decades. The big old-timey spigot handle was badly spotted with rust. I hoped the hotel had kept up its fire safety inspections over the years.
I gripped the round handle, gritting my teeth, and finally got it to shriek and to turn. The coiled-up hose began to fill with water. I grabbed the nozzle and ran, praying the old hose wasn't so rotten that it would rip or burst. I couldn't afford to move slowly. I paused only to draw the thermals from my belt and strap them onto my face.
The ghosts who'd been my recent captors met me at the door, blue shapes through my lenses. They didn't stop me from unleashing a solid blast of water at Jacob and soaking him, the thermals helping me aim for the most serious hotspots first.
Then I turned on Zagan. The dark, purple-black mass that seemed to be his energy core wasn't in the same place as his apparition, but hovered above the central space of the temple like a black sun, not far from Jacob, radiating purple-red waves of heat as he looked down on us all. If I'd gone by Zagan's ash-skinned apparition, I would have missed the spirit's real location in the room.
I lifted the hose and hit the big superheated mass, for whatever it was worth. The cooler temperature might suck out some of his radiant heat.