by JL Bryan
118
The Crawling Darkness
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper,
Book Three
by
J.L. Bryan
Copyright 2015 J.L. Bryan
All rights reserved.
Acknowledgments
I appreciate everyone who has helped with this book. My beta readers include authors Daniel Arenson and Robert Duperre, as well as Isalys Blackwell from the blog Book Soulmates. The final proofing was done by Thelia Kelly. The cover is by PhatPuppy Art.
Most of all, I appreciate the book bloggers and readers who keep coming back for more! The book bloggers who’ve supported me over the years include Danny, Heather, and Heather from Bewitched Bookworks; Mandy from I Read Indie; Michelle from Much Loved Books; Shirley from Creative Deeds; Katie and Krisha from Inkk Reviews; Lori from Contagious Reads; Heather from Buried in Books; Kristina from Ladybug Storytime; Chandra from Unabridged Bookshelf; Kelly from Reading the Paranormal; AimeeKay from Reviews from My First Reads Shelf and Melissa from Books and Things; Kristin from Blood, Sweat, and Books; Aeicha from Word Spelunking; Lauren from Lose Time Reading; Kat from Aussie Zombie; Andra from Unabridged Andralyn; Jennifer from A Tale of Many Reviews; Giselle from Xpresso Reads; Ash from Smash Attack Reads; Ashley from Bookish Brunette; Loretta from Between the Pages; Ashley from Bibliophile’s Corner; Lili from Lili Lost in a Book; Line from Moonstar’s Fantasy World; Lindsay from The Violet Hour; Rebecca from Bending the Spine; Holly from Geek Glitter; Louise from Nerdette Reviews; Isalys from Book Soulmates; Jennifer from The Feminist Fairy; Heidi from Rainy Day Ramblings; Kristilyn from Reading in Winter; Kelsey from Kelsey’s Cluttered Bookshelf; Lizzy from Lizzy’s Dark Fiction; Shanon from Escaping with Fiction; Savannah from Books with Bite; Tara from Basically Books; Toni from My Book Addiction; Abbi from Book Obsession; Laura from FUONLYKNEW; Lake from Lake’s Reads; Jenny from Jenny on the Book; and anyone else I missed!
Also by J.L. Bryan:
The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper
Cold Shadows
The Crawling Darkness
Terminal (coming May 2015)
The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)
Jenny Pox
Tommy Nightmare
Alexander Death
Jenny Plague-Bringer
Urban Fantasy/Horror
Inferno Park
The Unseen
Science Fiction
Nomad
Helix
The Songs of Magic Series (YA/Fantasy)
Fairy Metal Thunder
Fairy Blues
Fairystruck
Fairyland
Fairyvision
Fairy Luck
For Christina
Chapter One
“So, spill already,” I told Stacey. We had an appointment with a possible client in fifteen minutes, and we’d just stopped for fair-trade, organic, cruelty-free, artisan-brewed, Third-World-enriching coffee at The Sentient Bean by Forsyth Park. Since I hadn’t brought my own mug, I’d paid the environmental surcharge for a biodegradable to-go cup.
“Spill what?” Stacey asked, sipping her iced chai concoction. Summer was in full bloom in Savannah, and we’d all be roasted alive if not for the towering trees, the live oak trunks lining the streets like thick columns, supporting the cooling canopy of leaf and moss that blocks out the searing sky above.
Of course, there’s also the humidity, which just makes the heat sizzle, my mom used to say.
“Come on, Stacey,” I said. “Last time I saw you, you were getting ready for your date with Jacob. I haven’t heard from you all weekend. So...nothing to talk about?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to hear me gab about my dates,” Stacey said.
“After I spent fifteen entire seconds giving you advice about what to wear? I’m invested now.”
Stacey leaned back in her seat, smiling. She’s a pretty girl, with her blond pixie-cut hair and a body that’s about what you’d expect from a girl who somehow believes that hiking and kayaking are fun weekend leisure activities, rather than the sweaty mosquito-filled nightmares they truly are. It hadn’t taken a massive amount of flirting for her to grab the attention of Jacob Weiss, our new psychic consultant, a young accountant who happened to speak to the dead, but only reluctantly.
“It was fun,” she said. “Blues concert in the park, dinner...”
“The two exact things I already knew...”
“He’s funny,” Stacey said. “I mean on the surface. He’s smart. But you can tell there’s a lot of stuff under there. When he doesn’t know you’re looking at him, his face is almost grim.”
“He’s been through a lot,” I said. “The plane crash.” Jacob had been one of a handful of survivors and awoken to find himself surrounded by the confused ghosts of dead airline passengers who’d been on the plane with him. That event had awoken his abilities to see and hear the dead.
“Did you know he lived in New York?” she asked. “He’s from here, I mean his parents live in Savannah, but he went to school at NYU. He was working at a big firm up there, but he moved back home after the crash.”
“Is he planning to move back?”
“I don’t think he knows. He’s kind of lost right now, I think. Who wouldn’t be, after what he’s been through? I asked him what it was like, hearing all those voices. He took me on a walk downtown, toward Colonial Park Cemetery, and he’d kind of trail his fingers along the outside of a house and tell me things about its history. Just glimpses. ‘There was a girl here, she liked to whistle while she picked flowers, her mom would yell at her to stay out of the garden...’ Things like that. Could you imagine going through life like that, seeing and hearing all those leftover memories of the dead?”
“It sounds distracting,” I said. “How does he drive? Half these streets are built on top of old graves.”
“I didn’t ask.” Stacey snickered. “It does sound crazy.”
“So you had a nice dinner and talked about dead people,” I said. “And then?”
“And then?” Stacey raised her eyebrows. “Who says there’s an ‘and then’? Or that it would be any of your business?”
“So there was an ‘and then’?”
Stacey blushed. “Okay...maybe he kissed me. That’s it. He was a total gentleman, too, with opening doors and stuff. He even pulled out my chair at supper. Who does that anymore?”
“Sounds like he was well-trained by his mom. So are you going out again?”
“I think so. Whoa, check out the giant evil dollhouse.” Stacey pointed.
I parked our detective agency’s blue cargo van on the street near the new client’s house. Stacey’s description was apt. We were looking at a towering three-story Victorian, mostly in the style they call Queen Anne—living in Savannah and investigating lots of old haunted houses, you start to learn a few things about architectural style.
The house was stone at the foundations, solid brick on the first floor, and mostly wood by the time you reached the third floor. It had that crazy Queen Anne shape, with bay windows and gables jutting out on every side, and sunken porches like dark caves fronted with ornate wrought-iron railings—you almost thought a bear or a wolf would stalk forward and peer out through the railing like a zoo animal in a cage. A window-lined turret jutted skyward at one corner, and a matching turret roof capped the corner of the enormous wraparound porch, which ran across the front of the house and out of sight down one side.
Elaborately lathed gingerbread-style balusters, spindling, and overhang lay everywhere, and these would have lent the house a c
harming look if they hadn’t been painted dark red, barely visible against the dark earth tones of the house and trim.
“Needs more pink,” Stacey said. “And yellow. If you just painted it in cheerful colors, it would be so much prettier. Why spend a billion dollars on a house like this and then make it ugly?”
I didn’t reply. My eyes had fallen on another house, visible over brick walls and high wrought-iron fences. It sat on the next street over, behind and one house down from our potential clients. Moss and ivy had nearly swallowed the massive old trees on the lot, making them look like giant monsters wrapped in shrouds.
That other house was tall and narrow, four stories of white brick gone dingy and yellow with age. All the windows and doors were boarded up, giving it the blind look of a mausoleum.
I knew that house. Calvin and I had been hired to remove a very nasty sort of ghost from it about eighteen months earlier.
We’d failed miserably.
Now I saw the fate of that house—sealed up, bank-owned, dead to the world. I thought about the family who’d lived there. The Wilsons. Nice family, husband and wife, four young kids. Driven to insanity and grief.
“What’s up?” Stacey followed my look. “Creepy place. Been there?”
“Yes.”
“Not for a pleasant Christmas party, I’m guessing?”
“No.”
“Feel like offering multiple syllables at once?” Stacey asked.
“Not really. Let’s get to work.” I climbed out of the van, grabbing my black toolbox while Stacey shouldered her camera bag.
Happily, Stacey didn’t press me about the Wilson house. There was hardly time to fill her in on that old case before we spoke with our new client. It gave me the chills, though, visiting a house so close to that one. The back corners of their lots actually touched.
I was suddenly extremely interested to hear what our prospective client had to say. And I was worried for our safety.
We passed a cluster of four mailboxes, labeled A through D. The old Queen Anne mansion had been subdivided into apartments. Judging by the mailbox clusters up and down the street, so had a few others in the neighborhood.
The front steps led us up about half a story to the front porch itself, which was wide enough to host a large crowd, provided they didn’t mind sitting in rickety old rocking chairs. A porch swing hung at the flared round corner of the wraparound porch, under the conical turret roof, its chains flaky with rust.
A brass letter “A” was nailed to the front door, which was inset with panes of colored glass and flanked by more colored-glass panes on either side. I rang the bell, half-expecting it to sound like the Addams family door chime.
The woman who opened the door was about my age or a little older—early thirties, tops. She was an attractive African-American woman, her hair done in a hundred tiny braids and pulled back into a ponytail. She wore scorching-weather-appropriate denim shorts and a tank top.
“Are you...” She looked us over in our unseasonably heavy clothes. I’ve been scratched, bitten, burned, and thrown down enough stairs that I wear turtlenecks and my leather jacket when entering a new haunted house, regardless of the heat. Survival before comfort. And let’s just forget altogether about fashion.
“I’m Ellie Jordan, lead investigator with Eckhart Investigations,” I said. “This is Stacey Ray Tolbert, my tech manager.”
“Just call me Stacey!” Stacey smiled.
“Are you Alicia Rogers?” I asked. “We spoke on the phone.”
“Come on in,” she said, but she sounded guarded and gave us a suspicious look. Perfectly normal. Clients spend our first meeting trying to assess whether we’re scam artists or real ghost-removal experts. I spend the first meeting trying to assess whether the client seems sane or not, so that’s fair. A number of people who call us have mental disorders, not ghosts—it’s their neurons rather than their houses that are haunted.
Of course, living with a troublesome ghost can also make you crazy, so I have to judge carefully.
Alicia led us into a grand foyer, dominated on one side by a long staircase running straight up to the second floor without making a turn. The staircase was solid dark mahogany, the railing as ornately lathed as the gingerbread spindling outside the house. The ceiling, two stories above us, was patterned in alternating dark and blond wood, with a red geometrical shape suggesting a rose at the center. A four-level antique chandelier hung from the center of the rose design.
The colored-glass windows flooded the front room with light. While it had been built as an impressive entrance to the enormous house, it looked like Alicia used it as a living room. A sectional couch faced a TV screen hung on the wall next to the large, ornate fireplace, which had been constructed with three different colors of brick in an alternating pattern.
“Gorgeous place!” Stacey said.
“It’s just a rental. So, y’all really do this?” Alicia looked at me, crossing her arms. “You can take ghosts out of people’s homes?”
“In most cases,” I said. “You didn’t give me a lot of details on the phone.” Like, zero details. “What kind of disturbance have you had?”
“Disturbance,” she nodded. “That’s a good word for it. My kids saw it first.” She pointed upstairs. “Up in their rooms. First Mia, then Kalil. Then me.” She added the last in a soft, troubled voice.
“How old are your kids?” I asked.
“Kalil’s eleven, Mia’s nine.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“About six or seven months. We moved here a few months after my husband died. I couldn’t afford the old place anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Drunk driver,” she said. “We had to move to a smaller place. I know this room doesn’t look small, but it’s really most of the apartment. My room’s through there.” She nodded at a closed door near the foot of the stairs. “Kitchen’s back there, kids are upstairs...and that’s all there is to the apartment. We were lucky we could afford anything, and the rent was so low. I thought it would be a new start for us. Listen to me ramble on. So how does this work?”
“We can start by looking at the places where paranormal activities have been witnessed,” I said.
“The hauntspots,” Stacey said, and I wanted to give her an annoyed scowl. She’d made up that word and was trying to make it stick.
“Yes...where should we start?” I asked. “Where was the activity first witnessed?”
“Mia’s room. Come on.” Alicia led us up the stairs. Along the way, I noticed pictures on the wall—a young girl in a ballerina costume, a boy with strap-on glasses wearing a karate outfit. A family portrait showed Alicia next to a broad-shouldered, smiling man I assumed to be her deceased husband.
The family photos were interspersed with paintings—brightly colored swamps at sunset, jazz men on distinctly French Quarter street corners.
“Are these from New Orleans?” I asked.
“Oh, yes.” Alicia smiled a little, looking back over her shoulder. “Gerard was from Louisiana, and we used to go to New Orleans for Jazz Fest every year, before the kids were born.” She smiled, very slightly, and continued up to the top of the stairs.
The upstairs hallway was as luxurious in construction as the rest of the house—high molding engraved with intricate little leaves, paneled walls alternating between dark and light wood, polished hardwood floors.
The hallway had clearly been truncated when the house was divided into apartments. It was short, with just a few doors.
“I told you there wasn’t much to the apartment,” Alicia said. “Up here, it’s just the two kids’ rooms, a bath, a linen closet. Apartment B has the rest of the second floor. They’ve got half the first floor, too. Hard to imagine one family needing this whole house for themselves back in the day.”
She led us into a room that clearly belonged to a young girl, the pink bedspread fluffy and lacy and home to a nest of plush giraffes and pigs. Like the rest of the home, it was sp
otless and tidy, the toys, books, and dolls stacked away in cubbyhole shelving, organized by type. A big mirror, its frame pink and engraved with flowers, reflected the tall arched window, which was trimmed in smaller panes of colored glass. Cheerful Disney-animal prints hung on the bright yellow walls.
“This is Mia’s room,” Alicia said. “She saw it first.”
“What did she see?” I asked.
“The Closet Man. That’s what she called him.” Alicia approached the closet, which had a pair of narrow double doors that slid aside into wall pockets.
The closet was deep and narrow, like a short hallway. The walls were rough brick instead of the smooth yellow-painted surfaces of the bed room, the floor sunken so I had to step down as I entered it. Old houses are full of weird, unexpected features like that.
Dresses and jeans were arrayed neatly down one side of the closet, completely sorted and separated by type, and I’m pretty sure the blouses and dresses were in ROYGBV rainbow order by color, too.
My Mel Meter spiked up to six milligaus as I passed through the door—a very high reading, especially on a bright summer day.
“Your daughter certainly keeps things organized,” I said. “You said she was nine?”
“Mia?” Alicia laughed. “That girl will have this room trashed in three minutes after she gets home from her friend’s house. Kalil’s the neat one. This is my work, thank you.”
I laughed. “Of course, it’s normal for kids to be afraid of the closet, but this closet is particularly unusual. I could see it stirring anyone’s imagination.”
“That’s what I thought,” Alicia said. “That’s what any parent would think. Closet Monster Syndrome, my mother called it. She would prescribe 200 cc’s of hot chocolate, followed by bed rest.” Alicia smiled. “She was a nurse, too.”