by JL Bryan
“We nearly did,” Calvin said. “We couldn’t identify the ghost, and we couldn’t lure him into a standard trap with just candles for bait. So we set up the bear cage in the attic area on the fourth floor.”
“Bear cage?” Stacey raised her eyebrows.
“We mainly call it that because it’s a bear to transport and set up,” I told her. “We haven’t used it since...well, it’s been a long while.” I walked to a storage closet, which I opened to reveal a roughly phone-booth-sized object draped in a tarp. It stood next to shelves crammed full of soldering irons and baskets of sharp hand tools and spools of wire.
“And it’s big enough for a bear,” Calvin added, watching us from the table. He was shuffling a deck of cards, something he did at times to keep his hands busy. Calvin loved the cards—he had a running poker game with a few old friends from the city police force. He’d worked with them as a homicide detective before retiring to hunt ghosts full-time.
“And even if it works, you barely survive.” I gave him a smile. We were resurrecting an old inside joke from before Stacey’s time, from the day we’d set up the trap after carrying it, piece by heavy piece, up the four stories of the house. We’d tried to use the word bear as many times as we could. “Anyway, we had to bear it all the way up to the attic. That’s when I decided I preferred basement ghosts to attic ghosts.”
“Let’s see it,” Stacey said, walking over to help me pull the tarp off the big trap. While the canvas thudded to the ground, her eyebrows rose. “Holy...you could fit a cow in there. Well, a small one.”
The cage, mounted on a platform with lockable wheels, was indeed big enough for a small cow. It had leaded-glass panes on every side, done in a Victorian array of colors that made it resemble a set of church windows welded together into a cage. Either that or some crazed lighting fixture from the nineteen-seventies.
“There are two doors,” I said, while I unlatched and opened both of them. The narrow doors were on opposite sides of the colored-glass cage, so that you could run straight through it without slowing down—which was pretty much the whole idea. “It’s for ghosts who won’t respond to other kinds of traps, but who will chase and attack any nosy ghost removal specialists in the area. Ghosts who are only tempted by live bait.”
“And we’re the bait?” Stacey asked.
“We hate this trap,” I said. “For obvious reasons. It’s a bear to move and a bear to keep charged. But we eventually had to resort to it for the Wilson case.”
“Did it work?” Stacey peered inside. Fine copper mesh lined every surface, fitting together and overlapping at the corners of the cage. When charged, the layer of mesh created an electromagnetic prison for ghosts.
I looked at Calvin.
“I was the bait,” he said. “Still had my legs under me back then. Ellie had your job, Stacey—out in the van, monitoring the house. There was a lot of scattered activity in that place, aside from the fearfeeder.”
“That’s what we’re calling the boogeyman, right?” Stacey asked. “You were boogeyman bait.”
“Only I didn’t boogie fast enough, it turned out,” Calvin said. His face was perfectly stoic while he made the little joke, framed by his overgrown gray hair and granny glasses. “By this point, the family was out of there for the night, staying at a relative’s place. I was alone in the house, and it was so active....the boogeyman brings his pack of stolen souls with him, you see. He’s looking to add a new one, sooner or later. A child. But first he feeds on the living for as long as he can, until he picks which child he wants to take away with him. Then he’s gone, dormant, like a bear that’s filled its belly for the winter. That’s how these fearfeeders usually operate.”
“So the boogeyman was in this trap?” Stacey said, regarding it with new curiosity.
“By the time the entity finally came for me, I’d been alone in that dark house full of whispering, creaking, and knocking for several hours. I’d seen apparitions of dead children. I told Ellie everything was fine, but...I could feel that place eating into me.” Calvin said. “I should have called it a night. I was too worn by the time it arrived. Worn down by fear.”
Stacey had returned to her chair, leaning on the table and listening to Calvin, her salad long forgotten.
“He pursued me—as he’d already done the night before, as I knew he would do—and I led him right into the trap. Ellie was watching on video and monitoring the trap’s sensors. She had a remote control ready to slam both doors once the entity was inside, just as soon as I ran out the second door. That was the plan.
“He chased me into that trap. While I was inside, just before I made it to that second door, I turned and looked back.” Calvin winced and shook his head. “Never look back, that’s what they say. They’re right. I just glanced over my shoulder—I was wearing night vision goggles—to see if he’d followed me. And that’s when I saw him.”
“What did he look like?” Stacey asked.
“He’d reached in and found something that scared me when I was younger, when I was in uniform,” Calvin said. “Something that lurks in the mind of every cop on the beat, or every time you stop a motorist. It’s the quick-draw devil, the one that gets the drop on you, the one that puts a bullet in you. That random, armed madman who pulls a gun instead of his driver’s license. You never know who it’s going to be. Odds are you’ll never see him at all, but he could show up anytime. He could look like anybody at all.
“His clothes were nothing you’d notice, just the plainest street clothes, gray flannel, faded jeans. His face was about as vanilla-average as any you could cook up, except for two things—his black sunglasses, where I could see two images of myself looking back at me. They weren’t exactly my reflection, though. They were my younger self, in my uniform days, looking scared as all get out, like I’d seen the devil himself rising up from the soil.
“The other thing was his smile. Sly. Knowing. Because he had the drop on me.
“I barely had time to notice his weapon—it was a fat, six-barreled pepperbox revolver, like something out of the back room of an antique store. He was already shooting at me, the barrels rotating and blasting hellfire.
“I felt those things tear through my chest and stomach, hot metal slugs that slowed and rolled as they passed through me. He fired all six shots and never missed one. I was on the floor of the cage, with my blood everywhere. There was no chance for Ellie to close the trap, because I couldn’t move—my legs were useless already.
“The armed madman shriveled up and turned into the entity’s real shape, the faceless black shadow. It crawled away across the ceiling, upside down, like a bug. Its movements are all jerky but almost too fast to see.”
“It shot you?” Stacey was horrified. “Ghosts can shoot you?”
“The bullets were just an embodiment of my fear,” Calvin said. “They didn’t exist for long. Nobody ever found a single one of them, either in the room or inside me. Ectoplasm bullets...there when you need them, gone when you don’t. The ghost was just punching holes in me with its psychokinetic energy. Got me right in the central nervous system.”
“That’s terrible!” Stacey said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m used to it,” Calvin said. “It’s been about eighteen months now. Anyway, that eventually led to a job opening for you, so it all worked out.” He forced a smile.
“And so he got away,” Stacey said. “That’s the one we’re dealing with now? We’ll get him for you, Calvin!”
“I appreciate your enthusiasm, but this is a tricky entity,” Calvin said.
“I kept trying to capture it by myself,” I told Stacey. “Calvin didn’t want me to, but I spent the next week at that house. The family finally told me to give up, because they weren’t coming back.”
“That was the one good thing about what happened to me,” Calvin said. “It convinced that family the house was too dangerous for their children to ever set foot in again. They escaped with all their children. Another family hadn’t been so lu
cky.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe he got the drop on me.”
“What happened to the other family?” Stacey asked.
“The McAllisters. They lived in that house in the early seventies. They had a child go missing, six-year-old girl. No evidence, no sign of a break-in, no leads. Most kidnappings are done by people who already know the kid—the perp’s identity is something you figure out in the first thirty seconds. There was nobody like that in her life. The girl had screamed about demons in her closet to the point where her family brought her to a kid psychiatrist. Then, one night, they tuck their little girl into bed and she disappears before sunrise. Nobody ever saw that girl again.”
“We aren’t just looking for violent deaths this time,” I told Stacey. “Now that we know it moves from house to house, we have to look for missing children connected to all the surrounding houses, going back as far in time as we can dig.”
“So basically we’re just going to live at the library every day until we solve the case,” Stacey said. “We’re still identifying the past owners of all the houses.”
“Let me see what you have,” Calvin said, glancing at our notes. “I’ll start checking missing persons databases for all the families who’ve lived at those addresses, but that will only take us so far back in time. I can ask my friends at the department to look through older missing person files, but we’ll need to give them much more specific details than what we have here.”
“How can we find out about the older cases?” Stacey asked.
“Maybe call your boyfriend,” I said, and she blushed a little. “We can have Jacob check the house, then walk around the block and see if he picks up on any missing kids over the centuries. He probably won’t be able to give specific names and dates, but at least locations and eras. That could narrow it down.”
“So we should bring him in soon?” Stacey asked. “I’ll call him.”
“As soon as possible,” I said. “If he could come tomorrow night, that would be great.”
“Why not tonight?” she asked. “I mean, if he’s available.”
“We have enough to do tonight, setting up the observation gear and trying to talk to Alicia’s neighbors,” I said. “If we wait and get a clearer picture of what’s going on, we’ll have a much better idea of how we want to use Jacob. Well, I guess we all know how you want to use him, Stacey, but—”
“Change of subject,” Stacey said, blushing now. “Away from my love life. So how do we trap this guy, or this thing, when you haven’t been able to do that before?”
“That’s why we’re looking into missing-child cases,” I said. “The oldest cases might give us a clue about the origins of the fearfeeder.”
“You mean the boogeyman? But we’re not even sure if he’s human, right?” Stacey asked.
“We’d better hope he is,” Calvin said. “If it’s a demonic, it could prove impossible to trap him.”
“Well, yay,” Stacey said. “Can’t wait to get started.”
Chapter Five
Evening was already coming on, darkening the street with shadows as Stacey and I returned to Alicia’s house. We had to park halfway down the block, since only street parking was available.
“Can’t wait to carry this junk all the way to the house,” Stacey grumbled as we hopped out of the van. She pulled the strap of her camera bag over her shoulder. We’d be making a few trips to bring in all the cameras and tripods.
“What are you complaining about?” I asked. “I thought you liked going on long hikes with a heavy pack on your back.”
“That’s different,” she said, while we walked toward the big Queen Anne house. “That’s in the woods or the mountains.”
“Then pretend you’re in the mountains,” I said. “Problem solved. Look, deer! And...monkeys!”
“There are no monkeys in the Appalachians,” Stacey said.
“So it’s an exciting adventure already.” I led the way onto the porch and rang the bell.
Alicia smiled when she opened the door, though it looked like she was struggling to make the smile happen. The TV was blasting in the living room behind her, some singing-kids show that was probably on Sprout or the Disney Channel.
“Hi!” said a young girl by Alicia’s side, who I recognized as Mia from her pictures.
“Mia, this is Miss Ellie and Miss Stacey,” Alicia said.
“Nice to meet you, Mia!” Stacey gushed, while I nodded and waved.
“Are you the monster catchers?” Mia asked.
“That’s us,” I said, while Alicia ushered us inside.
“How do you catch them?” Mia asked.
“We have special traps,” I told her.
A boy with thick glasses watched us from the couch. Math textbooks and worksheets cluttered the coffee table in front of him. Math camp, I remembered. I would’ve hated that as a kid.
“And this is Kalil,” Alicia said.
Kalil stood up and offered his hand.
“Hello, it’s nice to meet you,” Kalil said, as professional as any business executive. Stacey and I shook his hand. “Please let me know if I can assist.”
“You’re the future astronomer, aren’t you?” Stacey asked.
“Astrophysicist,” he corrected. “I want to help search for Goldilocks planets.”
“What are those?” Stacey asked.
“Like the Three Bears,” he said. “Not too hot, not too cold...not too close or far from its star, but just right. A planet must have liquid water for life as we know it to emerge.”
“That’s interesting—” Stacey said.
“There could be as many as forty billion planets the right size and location for life,” Kalil said. “That’s just our galaxy alone.”
“Amazing!” Stacey said, looking genuinely impressed. “Huh. That gives you a lot to think about.”
“Want to see me do a cartwheel?” Mia asked Stacey, as if jealous of the moment of attention Kalil was getting. The girl didn’t wait for an answer, but went right into three cartwheels that took her all the way across the living room.
“Very nice!” Stacey clapped.
“Okay, kids, they have work to do,” Alicia said. She turned to me. “What’s next?”
“We’ll set up our observation gear to try to get a look at what’s happening here,” I said. “Cameras, most importantly. We need to place those in the paranormally active areas of the house.”
“The hauntspots,” Stacey said, making me cringe a little.
“He’s in my closet,” Mia said, looking very serious now. “Fleshface. You have to get him!”
“That’s the plan,” I told her. “Mrs. Rogers, we’d like to put gear into both kids’ rooms for us to watch overnight, if that’s all right with you.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “Call me Alicia, though. I’m not that much older than you, am I?”
“No, ma’am,” I said, and she rolled her eyes and laughed a little.
“I’m surely not that old, either,” she said.
“What kind of equipment do you use?” Kalil asked.
“I can tell you all about that!” Stacey said. “Especially if you help me carry it in from the van.”
“I want to help, too!” Mia said, stepping in front of her brother.
“Great,” Stacey said. “Let’s get moving.”
Alicia followed us outside. With her help, and the kids carrying tripods, we brought in the gear in just a couple of trips.
I frowned at the purple sky above, while the last orange embers of the sun died away somewhere beyond the west end of the street. It was better to set up during daylight hours, so you don’t have to go into the hauntspots after dark when the ghosts might be getting active.
Hauntspots. Stacey’s word had crept into my thoughts like an unwelcome party guest.
“Let’s start in my room,” Kalil said, after we’d deposited our gear in a heap in the living room.
“No, my room!” Mia countered. “I have the worst ghost. You just have aliens.�
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Kalil cleared his throat. “Have you ever encountered extraterrestrials?” he asked me, dead serious.
“Not so far,” I told him. We lugged gear up the stairs. “We think that what you’re dealing with has the power to take the shape of whatever you fear. That’s why you each see different things.”
“Aliens could be real,” he said. “The universe is probably loaded with species more intelligent and capable than we are.”
“I certainly hope so!” I replied, but he didn’t seem to find it funny.
“If there aren’t aliens, then what’s in my closet?” he asked.
“It’s a kind of electromagnetic entity imbued with consciousness,” I said, thinking he’d dig the scientific terms.
“Huh?” Mia asked, pausing by the door to her room, holding a tripod in both arms.
“A ghost,” Stacey said. “A ghost that can pretend to be other things.”
“Oh,” Mia said. “Like Fleshface.”
“Exactly. It’s not really Fleshface. Fleshface is just a made-up character from a movie,” Stacey said.
“Maybe.” Mia did not look convinced.
We set up thermal and night vision cameras in her room, pointed at her closet door, along with a high-powered microphone and EMF and motion detectors. We didn’t want to miss anything in the kids’ rooms.
Stacey explained to a very curious Kalil how ghosts draw energy from their environment, creating cold spots and shapes we can detect on thermal, and how we use EMF meters to check for unusual electromagnetic activities.
We moved on to Kalil’s room.
“We’ll watch your kids as closely as we can,” I said to Alicia. “But the house is full of blind spots, and we won’t be able to fully track the entity’s movements unless we can get your neighbors to agree to cameras, too.”
“I don’t know,” Alicia said. “I really don’t know the Fieldings or Mr. Gray. What do we say? ‘Hi, remember me from the mailbox and the laundry room? Can I set up cameras to check your apartment for ghosts?’”