Terminal (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 4)

by JL Bryan

Stacey carved away another wall of thorns. As it dropped aside, cold air rolled out over us like a freezing wind from the north.

  “I think we found a...tunnel?” Stacey whispered.

  I poked through into an open space. The oak branches overhead had knitted together, sealed with layers of cascading Spanish moss, forming a long, cave-like environment in the woods. The canopy was just a few feet above my head. The brush thinned to knee-high weeds, making the area much more walkable than the woods around it.

  “What is this place?” Stacey whispered.

  I turned my flashlight down the tunnel in each direction, but I couldn’t see where it began or ended. The darkness of the woods around us didn’t exactly help with visibility, but it seemed to me that the gloomy tunnel of branches and long moss, hanging like witch’s hair everywhere I looked, was absorbing the glow of my flashlight.

  “It’s cold,” I said. “Take some readings.”

  “Forty degrees,” Stacey said, after setting aside the shears and checking her Mel-Meter. “It was seventy-one before we entered the woods. This is not natural.”

  “EMF?”

  “Just a low-level...wait.” The lights flickered on her meter. “Three...five milligaus. Something’s out here.”

  “What do you say, Hunter?” I asked. “Hunter, find the ghost.”

  Hunter waddled a few feet into the weeds, toward the center of the tunnel, then lay down and whined.

  “What is it, boy?” Stacey asked.

  I squatted by the dog and shined my light into the high weeds, flattening them with my hand for a better look.

  A band of rusty iron lay on the ground in front of me. Two bands, it turned out, running in parallel, with the crumbling remains of wooden ties beneath them.

  “The old train tracks,” I said. They ran along the center of the mossy tunnel, obscured by the weeds.

  Hunter sniffed at the track and gave another whine.

  “Should we walk along it?” I tugged Hunter, but he wouldn’t move. I touched the antique wrought-iron rail. It was as cold as a block of ice.

  “Ellie,” Stacey whispered. “What’s that?” She pointed westward along the tracks.

  It took a moment for me to discern what she was talking about. A smudge of red, glowing dully like hot metal, floated several yards away, just a few feet above the tracks. The longer I stared at it, the clearer it became. It was roughly spherical, a ball of low red light that seemed to bounce and shift as it drifted toward us.

  I blinked, half-expecting it to vanish like a speck in my eye, but it remained in place, barely visible but gradually glowing brighter. It wasn’t much, but it was clearly real and unnatural. The air turned freezing cold, making me shiver.

  “Ellie?” Stacey whispered again.

  “Lights off.” I extinguished my flashlight and drew my thermal goggles down over my eyes.

  On thermal, the red ball looked dark and purple, indicating it was actually very cold despite its glowing red color. Blue fragments floated on one side of it, roughly suggesting a human shape.

  We’d found our ghost—or a ghost, anyway. I didn’t know whether this was related to the banshee in our clients’ basement, or the darker, colder thing that I’d chased across the yard, or the thing that had smashed up the concession stand. All I could say for sure was that we were dealing with two to four ghosts in the area.

  “Are you recording this?” I whispered, keeping my eyes on the fragmentary apparition.

  “Oops,” Stacey whispered back. “I mean, yes. Hang on. Hunter, stay.” The dog’s leash made a crunching sound as it landed in the dry weeds. Stacey’s backpack unzipped, and I heard her unfolding the camera.

  I took a cautious step toward the ghost, feeling the usual signs of a supernatural encounter—gooseflesh all over my body, a knot of dread in my stomach, a little voice at the back of my head screaming for me to get out of there right away and find a job doing anything else. Something less scary, like lion taming or working the night shift at an asylum for the criminally insane.

  “Okay, totally recording now,” Stacey said. “It’s just a little red dot. What are you seeing?”

  “One entity.” I gestured for her to be quiet, then took another step forward along the old railroad track, from one crumbling old tie to another.

  The ghost moved closer to me, the ball of extra-icy cold floating somewhere around hip level on the visible jigsaw pieces that suggested a human shape. The ball was about the size of a small pumpkin.

  I kept my light in my hand, ready to blast the ghost with three thousand lumens if it turned hostile.

  It didn’t seem to react to us, though. It ambled forward along the tracks, neither slowing nor gaining speed as it approached me. Maybe it was a residual, reenacting a memory from when it was alive, virtually unaware of anything outside its own mind.

  I stepped aside, off the tracks, deciding to observe rather than interfere.

  The fragmentary ghost shuffled forward. I wondered how many years it had spent walking up and down these tracks, lost in some emotionally charged memory from life, some tragedy or death.

  When it reached the spot where I’d stood, it paused. The icy ball rose up to the level of the ghost’s head, then above it. I thought of someone holding up a light in order to see better, as if it were studying the railroad tie where I’d last been.

  “What’s it doing?” Stacey whispered.

  “What are you seeing?”

  “Just the little red light,” she said. “It’s...floating there. Rising up. It’s creepy, Ellie...”

  The thermal apparition grew completely still, the ball of light fixed in place, floating a foot or so above its head.

  I heard a hissing, rustling sound from somewhere down the tracks. It was definitely approaching us, and fairly quickly.

  My thermals showed nothing but the deep-blue air whirling toward us as a stiff wind approached.

  “Ellie...” Stacey said. Hunter whined. The dog was a red shape hunkered on the ground by my feet, shaking hard.

  I lifted the goggles away. With my own eyes, I could see the faint red ball of light hovering above the tracks.

  The hissing and rustling approached, and now I saw that it was the wind itself, blowing along the tracks through the leafy tunnel, rustling the dry weeds and the long grassy tongues of moss hanging from the trees. Limbs brushed together.

  The wind picked up, and it had an acrid taste, a hint of fire and smoke. It blew harder and faster, crashing the limbs together, the gnarled old oaks letting out the deep, disturbing groans of massive trees rubbing together, a sound I usually associate with a heavy storm blowing into town.

  Hunter barked, then dashed away from the tracks, back up the trail from which we’d emerged, his leash trailing behind him like a racing snake in the weeds. Stacey chased after him, calling his name.

  “Stay here and record!” I shouted to be heard over the rising, howling wind, which now tossed my hair back and forth across my face. Something cracked in the canopy above, and then a mossy limb as long as my whole body broke loose and fell into the weeds alongside the tracks. It splintered into chunks on impact, revealing years of rot within.

  “But Hunter--” Stacey shouted back.

  “He’ll be okay! He’s good at avoiding danger.”

  “Shouldn’t we be avoiding danger, too?” Stacey asked.

  “No. Get this on video.”

  “Get what on video?” She raised her camera toward the tracks. “The wind? I don’t think--”

  Whatever she said after that, I couldn’t hear it, because the main brunt of the icy wind finally hit us, drowning out all sound with its own roar. The wind sent us both staggering, blasting us with hurricane speeds. I stumbled over another fallen branch and fell backwards, landing hard on the ground.

  Stacey yelled something and I waved her away—I wanted her to keep recording. She held her camera out in front of herself, blindly, using her other arm to protect her eyes from the cloud of dust and leaves.

&nb
sp; The roaring wind began to flag as the brunt of it blew onward down the tracks, leaving eddies of swirling breeze in its wake. The limbs, leaves, and moss continued brushing against each other for another minute, like a crowd of whispering voices, fading slowly into silence.

  “Well, that was weird,” Stacey said. She offered me a hand as I stood, but I shook my head.

  The red light drifted onward down the tracks, trailing after the blast of wind, until it vanished out of sight.

  “Is there such a thing as a ghost train?” Stacey asked.

  “We’d better talk to Calvin. This calls for immediate research.”

  “Boring research sounds great right now. Especially in a well-lighted area with other people and hot chocolate. Can we please get out of here?” Stacey was shivering hard in the freezing air, and she looked frightened. I’m sure I looked the same way.

  “Let’s go find Hunter,” I said.

  As we started up the trail, I glanced back. The weeds had sprung up again, concealing the old railroad tracks. For a moment while the wind had blasted through, flattening all the weeds to the earth, I’d seen it laid bare, the two rails dark with decades of rust, the railroad ties pulverized by weather, time, and termites, lying crooked under the wrought-iron rails like the teeth in a crazy man’s smile.

  Chapter Five

  We followed the trail back to the road, and my heartbeat finally slowed as we emerged from the cold woods into the warm night, flooded with the reassuring chirrups of swarms of crickets and katydids. We could see the lights of the inhabited streets ahead.

  “Hunter!” I called. “Hunter!”

  The dog didn’t respond. We finally found him on the front porch of a half-built house on the next street. One exterior wall was completely missing, revealing two stories of square lumber caves within.

  Hunter lay on his back at the top of the porch stairs, paws in the air, eyes closed. Drool leaked from his mouth, and he snored and chuffed. Fast asleep.

  I poked him gently in the tummy, and he snorted, sniffing, and opened one eye. He took his time rolling over, pushing to his feet, and stretching.

  “Okay, let’s cut back through the park,” I said. “It’s faster than walking around.”

  “Are you crazy?” Stacey asked. “With the furniture-smashing ghost loose in there?”

  “I’m kidding,” I said. “Let’s stick to sidewalks and streetlights. I’d like to get back to the clients’ house by midnight.”

  “Is it that late already?” Stacey glanced at her phone, then at a street with a few unoccupied houses and a number of empty red lots. “I don’t like this place. With a haunted house, you can try to run outside and escape. Here, the ghosts are already outside, just wandering the streets.”

  “It’s going to take a while to put together what’s happening here,” I said. We walked on the outer rim of the roundabout, following a curved sidewalk past streets that grew more and more developed, with white picket fences enclosing the weed-choked lawns of half-finished houses, until we reached the well-lit inhabited streets near the front of the community.

  At the clients’ house, Stacey and Hunter climbed into the van. The bloodhound slurped up more water from his portable water bowl, crunched some kibble and treats, then sprawled on the narrow drop-down bunk and resumed his snoring and drooling, while Stacey brought the array of small monitors to life. Our cameras and microphones had been recording the basement area while we were away.

  Leaving Stacey in the van, I walked past the closed garage doors and around the side of the house, where I reached over the picket fence gate and slid open the deadbolt. As a security measure, the fence wasn’t exactly the Great Wall of China.

  “Headset check,” I said.

  “Check on that check,” Stacey answered.

  In the backyard, I approached the basement door and unlocked it with the key Ember had given me. Before stepping inside, I took a quick look around the yard and toward the street beyond, where the shadowy figure had vanished the night before. I didn’t see anything, and my thermal goggles had nothing to add.

  When I stepped into the cold basement, I immediately heard sobbing and crying. It sounded like the banshee was back, louder than ever.

  Clicking on my flashlight, I approached the stairs where I’d found the banshee huddling the previous night. I didn’t need any special ghost-detecting equipment, though, to see Ember sitting on the unpainted wooden steps. She was draped in a panda-print maternity nightgown, hunched forward as far as her belly would allow, her hands covering her face as she sobbed.

  “Ember?” I approached her carefully, more or less the same way I’d approached the figure on the railroad tracks earlier. “What’s wrong?”

  She looked up at me, her eyes and face red, still gasping through her mouth as if she couldn’t stop herself from sobbing.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “My...” Her chest hitched. “My mother’s dying. I’m going to be all alone.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I climbed up the steps, but there wasn’t room for me to sit beside her. I sort of stood there awkwardly and took her hand. Her fingers squeezed mine.

  She was cold, like she’d just taken her hand out of the freezer.

  “What am I going to do?” Ember whispered, rocking back and forth. “What am I going to do? I can’t do anything! I don’t know how to...” Her lip trembled, and she covered her eyes again, sobbing.

  I eased my heavy, boxy thermal goggles down over my eyes.

  A haze of cold blue surrounded Ember like a dense fog, rolling and swirling along her skin while she shuddered with her crying.

  “Leave her alone,” I said, doing my best tough-guy voice.

  “What?” Ember asked, the red and green thermal image of her face turning up toward me.

  “I think the ghost is feeding on you,” I said. “Come on. We have to go upstairs and turn on all the lights.”

  “I like it down here,” she whispered. “It’s dark and sad.”

  “I’m serious.” I took her arm to help her stand up.

  “Don’t make me.”

  I lifted the thermals off my eyes and looked at her. “I probably didn’t explain this clearly enough, Ember. The ghost is surrounding you and feeding on your energy. That means it’s feeding on your baby’s energy, too.”

  Ember winced as if I’d slapped her, but then she nodded.

  I helped her to her feet and stayed close behind her as she ascended the steps, feeling a bit like her overprotective husband.

  “What’s up in there?” Stacey asked over my headset.

  “We’re leaving the basement now,” I said. “Let me know if you see anything unusual.”

  I turned on every light switch we passed. In the living room, I switched on all the lamps while she sank to the couch.

  “Ember, I’m really sorry about your bad news.” I sat down beside her and patted her shoulder. “You have to stay out of the basement.”

  She closed her eyes and slumped against me, still crying softly, her tears and nose juices soaking the denim sleeve of my jacket. I let her rest her head on my lap, feeling pretty uncomfortable with the whole situation.

  “My mother,” she whispered against my jeans.

  “I’m so sorry. Did you just find out?”

  “She was sick,” Ember whispered. “Now she’s gone and I’m all alone.”

  “You’re not,” I said. “You have...” I panicked for half a second before I remembered her husband’s name again. “Tom. And the baby.”

  “Where am I going?” Ember asked, her eyes still closed. “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “You’re going to be fine. Maybe I should go get Tom—”

  “No.” She grabbed my hand, gripping tight with her chilly fingers. “Don’t leave me.”

  I drew the goggles down again. The nimbus of pale blue remained, though it had diminished up here with all the lights on.

  “Ember, listen to me,” I said. “The ghost is still with you. I wish
I could just spray it with Ghost-Off, but that doesn’t exist, so I’m going to need your help.”

  She let out a soft whimper and kept her eyes shut, resting her cheek on my leg, almost like a little kid.

  “What do you do when you’re sad?” I asked, while trying to think of an answer to that question myself. “What music makes you feel better?”

  “Mother,” she whispered.

  I didn’t think she was referencing either the John Lennon or the Pink Floyd song, or at least I couldn’t imagine either one being comforting at this moment. What was it she’d been singing to herself the other morning, when she’d been happily cooking breakfast in the sunlight? Something by Cyndi Lauper?

  I wrangled my phone from my pocket and typed the singer’s name into my YouTube app. I picked a playlist, then set the phone down on my knee, next to Ember’s ear, the volume low. She settled down and stopped sobbing part of the way through “Time After Time.” By the time it reached “True Colors,” she appeared to be asleep.

  My thermals revealed that the entity had settled, too, but still clung to her like a filmy blue mist. The ghost was really obsessed with Ember. At least Ember was away and asleep now, less vulnerable to the spirit drawing out her misery in order to slurp it down.

  I slipped out from beneath her softly snoring head, replacing my leg with a couch cushion to prop her up. I reclaimed my phone and killed the music.

  “Keep watch on her, Stacey,” I said. I found the nearest camera, a night vision on a tripod near the basement door, and moved it to the living room.

  “Ten-four, good buddy,” Stacey said.

  Ember had left a distinct wet patch on my jeans legs, so my first stop was at the bathroom to clean off my client’s snot of sadness.

  Then I tiptoed upstairs, where I found the linen closet and took a couple of blankets. I glanced into the open door to the master bedroom to see Tom still asleep, ruler-straight on his side of the bed, blissfully unaware of his wife’s distress.

  I returned to the living room and laid the blankets over Ember. She murmured in her sleep and shifted on the couch. She seemed at peace.

  A rattle echoed through the house. It fell silent for a few seconds, then it happened again, louder and more insistent. It sounded as if someone were at the front door, aggressively shaking the doorknob and trying to get inside.