by JL Bryan
Spiderwebs matted the walls, and I saw a couple of black widows lowering themselves on threads like floating teardrops of poison.
“Watch for spiders,” I whispered.
My flashlight found a heap of old hand tools piled in a rusted-out wheelbarrow. Shovels and shears, also flaking with rust, were propped against one wall. I doubted these were the tools used by Hernando the maintenance guy. They looked like they hadn’t been touched in decades.
The loose bricks of the floor sloped gradually downward as we approached the back wall of the room, and the smell of death was stronger. My instincts told me to run away.
“What’s that?” Michael squatted on the bricks—I noticed they reflected a little sheen, and the dirt between them looked like it was verging on mud.
He reached out toward a slab of plywood that lay over some kind of hole in the floor, blocking most of it from view. Michael slid it aside. The hole, lined with dark, mossy stones, stretched away into solid darkness below. Cold, rotten air rose from it.
“What is it?” Michael whispered. “A tunnel? A sewer?”
“It could be an old well,” I said. “Some old houses had them in the cellar so you wouldn’t have to go outside in the winter. It’s more common up north, though.”
He rose and stood beside me while I shone my light into the well, but the beam barely scratched the darkness. I rotated the iris on my flashlight lens, making the beam as dense and concentrated as possible, but it only showed us an extra foot or so of mossy stones. The darkness beyond seemed impenetrable. Not a good sign, not at all.
A sigh echoed within the well, so low and soft that I leaned my head closer to hear it. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female, human or just an ill wind blowing through a dark cave.
I gazed down into the depths, trying to see anything at all. My skin crawled, my guts clenched in unease. The animal part of me wanted to flee, to close the door and never look back...but I couldn’t help trying to see deeper into the subterranean world below. It felt like a place full of secrets and horrors.
Eleanor.
The voice echoed upward from the darkness. My complete first name, which almost nobody had called me since my parents died.
I recognized this voice, too. My mother. Just the way she’d said it the last time we’d spoken. We’d been fighting—I was fifteen, bucking for independence, wanting to ride with some older kids to an OutKast concert on a school night. I had a crush on one particular boy in that group. My mom wouldn’t let me go.
“You’ll understand when you’re older, Eleanor,” she’d said. Her last words to me, ever.
“I hate you!” My last words to her. Then I’d slammed the door to my room and never saw either of my parents alive again.
Her voice stabbed into me like a hook through the heart, drawing me toward the deep darkness below.
I bumped into Michael, which jostled me out of my rapt stupor a bit. He was stepping toward the well, too, his eyes fixed on the endless cold black inside. We were both moving that way.
He didn’t seem to notice our collision at all—he just kept staring and easing forward. The toe of his shoe slipped over the edge of the well as if he expected to simply step inside. His face was blank, his eyes wide.
“Michael!” I shouted, snapping my fingers in front of his face. No response. He slid his other foot to the edge of the well while he stared down into it. I planted my hands on his stomach and pushed, feeling the ridges of his abdominal muscles through his shirt. He inched back, then started again, as if I were a minor obstacle to be nudged aside or run over.
Whatever evil lay in the well seemed to have captured his mind. It had almost done the same to me, but seemed to have a stronger hold on Michael. Maybe it was because he hadn’t faced as many ghosts as I had, or because he’d been the one who’d uncovered the well.
Hoping for the latter, I knelt on the cold, damp bricks and shoved the slab of wood back into place, covering most of the hole, except where the wood bumped into his shoes.
Michael jumped as though something had bitten his toes. He finally looked at me, his eyes still wide open, his face chalk-white. He looked like he’d seen a ghost, or at least heard one.
“Are you okay?” I stood next to him, touching his arm to try to calm him. He was shaking.
“We have to get out of here,” he said. Without waiting for me to reply, he grabbed my arm and hurried us both through the door, slamming it behind us. I don’t really like other people hustling me around like that, but again I appreciated that he’d tried to pull me out of danger with him rather than run off and leave me there.
“What did you see in there?” I asked.
“Nothing. But I heard...” He shook his head.
“You can tell me.” I stayed close to him in the dark basement, partly because he was still holding my arm and I wasn’t in a rush to escape his strong grip. I was close enough to smell his scent, a woody oaky cologne mingled with the warm smell of his sweat. My blood was racing from more than fear.
“It was my mom,” he said, his voice so quiet I moved in closer to hear him. “She called for me.”
“I heard mine, too,” I told him. “She died when I was fifteen.”
“My mom died three years ago,” he said. “Pancreatic cancer. She died less than a month after they found it.”
“I’m sorry.” I reached out my other hand to comfort him, but wasn’t sure where to put it. It landed on his chest, where I could feel his heart thumping against my fingers.
“Melissa was just fourteen. It was hard on everybody...” He looked at the closed door.
“You took care of your sister after that?”
“Yeah. My mom’s cousin wanted her to go live with them in Tennessee, but we wanted to stay together.”
“What about your...father? Can I ask about that?”
“That’s easy.” He managed a smile. “That loser left when I was eleven. Melissa was two. She was throwing one of her tantrums, and he said he couldn’t take it anymore. That’s exactly what he said before he left: ‘I can’t take this anymore.’ Then he walked out on us. I’ve barely heard from him since.”
“I’m sorry. Melissa was lucky to have you around, though.”
“I might have gone crazy without her,” Michael said.
“A lot of guys wouldn’t have done that—young, single, and choosing to take care of your younger sister? You’re a good brother. You’re a good person. Aren’t you?”
His bright green eyes looked into me, and I could feel so much in the small space between us. Fear. Sadness. An attraction like a live wire, drawing us ever closer together. At least, I know I felt that on my end.
I looked up at him, my eyes adjusting to the darkness enough that I could discern the features of his face, his nose and lips. It was an intense moment, and my toes actually curled in anticipation of what might happen next.
My phone beeped several times, and the ring told me it was Stacey calling.
I couldn’t help a small sigh before I answered. Michael and I were still looking at each other, but the sudden, sharp feeling of intimacy and need was already starting to fade, broken up by the outside world’s interference. I retreated back into my more familiar, less exciting professional shell.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“You should probably get over here,” Stacey told me. “Jacob found something. Early eighteenth century, he says. And he’s kind of acting weird.”
“Like violent weird?”
“No, no, like he climbed the fence and he’s pacing somebody’s front lawn, and I’m pretty sure they’re home...Jacob! Get back here! They’ll call the cops!”
“I’ll be right there.” I hung up after she told me the address. It was the big, brooding Tudor house where the Larsen family had lived, where seven-year-old Kris had vanished about twenty years earlier.
I looked back at Michael.
“Bad news?” he asked, probably because of the disappointed look on my face.
“
Just the usual weirdness. I have to get to work, though. Maybe we should talk later?”
“Sure. You’re all done here?” He glanced around at the cameras and microphones I’d set up around the room. “You don’t need five or six more cameras?”
“I think it’s enough.” I hurried out of there, stuffing all my confusing feelings back inside, the psychological equivalent of getting dressed on the run.
Chapter Twelve
I caught up with Stacey at the old Larsen house, which sat on the corner lot two doors down. Stacey stood on the sidewalk, softly calling for Jacob, who’d jumped the fence and was currently making himself at home among the shrubs and flower beds, pacing back and forth.
“She’s here!” Stacey called as soon as she caught sight of me.
“Finally.” Jacob tromped up to the fence, standing between two huge azaleas. “This guy was crazed. Seriously crazed.”
“I’m guessing you found something,” I said.
“He did it right here.” Jacob backed up several steps, until he stood in a crushed-gravel path that wound through the flower beds and tree islands of the house where he was trespassing. A balding, gray-haired man stood in a window of the house, glaring at Jacob, clearly able to see him in the light of the streetlamps.
“Uh, Jacob, there’s a guy watching,” Stacey told him. “He looks like the type who’d come out waving a baseball bat. Or, you know, a twelve-gauge.”
“He lured the kids out here one at a time,” Jacob said, looking at me. His arms were stretched out, his fingers splayed open as if catching information from the air. “It was all screened by trees then, an arbor with big shrubs around it. The house was different, too, completely different. He did the boy first, waking him up in the middle of the night with a made-up story about...buried treasure.” Jacob nodded, as if double-confirming that in his mind. “He took him out to the trees where nobody could see them. There was a lot of moonlight. When he pulled the knife and stabbed the boy in the gut, he could see the anguish in the boy’s face. Not just the physical pain. The boy trusted the man, and the man betrayed him.” Jacob took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “That made the man feel something. Glee. Power. He reduced the boy to nothing but pain and hurt. Then he killed him. And he enjoyed it. It surprised him how much he enjoyed it.”
“How did he know the boy?” I asked.
Jacob concentrated, his eyes closed. “Family member.”
“His father?”
“Not exactly. But almost.”
“How is ‘almost’ an option?” Stacey asked. “His uncle?”
“Maybe. But not just...they were twins. He and the little boy’s father were twin brothers. They all lived in this house.” Jacob pointed toward the heavy, dark house where the homeowner stood at the window, glaring at us while talking on a phone. “So, for the boy, it was almost like being murdered by his own father.”
“What were their names?” I asked.
Jacob shook his head. “I’m not good with that. Names, dates, numbers...”
“Give me a time period,” I said. Stacey had already mentioned one, but it’s always good to ask again. And again. Calvin had taught me that.
“Eighteen...twenties? Thirties? He’s wearing an old patched-up frock coat. I think he has money, though. They’d have to, with that house. Well, not that house, but the one that used to stand here, with full wraparound porches on both levels, an antebellum place.”
I started jotting details on my pocket notepad. Though Stacey was recording him with a handheld video camera, I didn’t want to comb back through that footage for key details. He was giving us some fairly good, specific information. Hopefully it was relevant to our case.
“So he kills the boy and leaves him here,” Jacob said. “He goes back in for the little girl, the sister. Tells her something about magical creatures or fairies in the woods. He brings her out here, shows her the brutalized body of her dead brother. The little girl screams in terror, and he relishes it. She starts to run, he grabs her hair. She’s crying and shrieking like a little pig. That’s how he thinks of it when he snaps her head back and draws the blade across her little throat. It’s just like killing a pig. He always thought the kids sounded that way when they whined and cried.”
“That’s awful!” Stacey said.
“Why is he killing them?” I asked. It was weird how Jacob would slip into the present tense when picking up psychic information, as if the tragic events were somehow still happening, again and again, centuries later.
Jacob shook his head. “His mind is a black cloud. He’s crazed. I’m mainly picking it up from the kids’ perspectives. It’s really a place-memory, not a ghost.”
“What’s the difference again?” Stacey asked.
“A ghost is a lost soul, or a lost piece of a soul,” Jacob said. “Place-memory is like an emotional scar. Trauma can leave a permanent mark on a place. And there was definitely some trauma here. He took the bodies through the woods...” Jacob almost walked into a very obvious seven-foot-high brick wall, stopping himself at the last second by reaching out both hands to stop the collision, as though the wall had walked into him. “Where did that come from?”
“You mean the giant wall?” Stacey asked.
“I didn’t see it a second ago. Lost in the past.” He shook his head.
“You should probably consider climbing back over the fence.” I nodded at the gray-haired house owner, stepping out onto his porch with a scowl on his face and a rifle in his hand.
Jacob turned and waved at the guy. “Sorry. Lost our...Frisbee. I mean our cat. Whose name is Frisbee.”
The guy didn’t reply. Maybe he figured he’d let his glare and his gun speak for him. A real Ted Nugent type.
We helped Jacob scramble back over the fence, and he immediately walked past the wall and scrambled over the next iron fence, into another neighbor’s yard. At least we were getting closer to our client’s house. Soon, he might not be recklessly trespassing at all.
“He carried the bodies through here, through trees and scrub,” Jacob said. “He felt alive, like he’d...turned from a shadow into a real person.” Jacob shook his head. “That’s the best I can understand. He felt more real because he’d killed those kids.”
“Cuckoo, cuckoo,” Stacey whispered to me. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure whether she meant the 19th-century child murderer or Jacob himself, who plunged heedlessly through a small hedge, following the path of his vision with little regard for present-day obstacles.
“He took them down to the old well—”
“Look out!” Stacey called, just before Jacob could crack his knee on one support of an iron fence. He glared at the fence as though annoyed by its existence, then heaved himself over into the front garden of Alicia’s house. There wasn’t much actual garden left, because much of the area had been paved to provide a small parking area for the tenants.
“Right past this tree...” Jacob said, appearing to walk around a large invisible object. He pointed at the towering, irregular Queen Anne house where Alicia and Michael lived. “Through the brambles, into the old well. Hardly anyone used that well, anyway. The water tasted sour.” He looked up at the conical turrets and shadowy recessed balconies. “This house wasn’t here yet. It was just the woods and the old well. I guess there’s no well anymore.”
“That’s not exactly true,” I said. “Michael and I just discovered one in the basement.” I didn’t add any more information, didn’t mention how it had drawn us toward it with whispered voices and a kind of morbid but irresistible fascination—I wanted to see what Jacob would learn on his own.
“Seriously?” Stacey asked. “I wouldn’t drink from that basement.”
“I’d better go check it out,” Jacob said, starting for the porch.
“Can you do a quick walk-through of our client’s apartment, too?” I asked. “I’d be much obliged.”
“You and your fancy talk,” Jacob replied.
“Since there hasn’t been any activity in
Alicia’s bedroom, I was going to have the family wait there while he checks the apartment,” Stacey told me. “Less interference with his Spidey senses.”
“Good idea,” I said, thinking back to Michael and I discussing the activity in his bedroom, or the lack thereof.
We climbed the steps to the front porch.
“Looks like Alicia’s home,” I said, glancing in through one of the windows. “Go ahead and quarantine the family, Stacey.”
“And should I set up a perimeter?” Stacey asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, it just sounds good. Like from a zombie action movie.” She covered her mouth with one hand and imitated a crackling radio. “Quarantine the area and set up a perimeter.”
“Just go,” I said, and she huffed a bit as she walked inside.
“I’m getting a really dark feeling from this place,” Jacob said. “From all the houses I’ve passed on this block.”
“Then you’re on the right track,” I told him.
He looked worried, a deep frown etched on his face.
“That was a grisly murder I just saw,” he said. “I’m guessing I won’t enjoy the rest of this, either.”
“I heard you and Stacey had fun the other night,” I said, by way of trying to lighten the mood.
He just gave me a puzzled look, like he couldn’t figure out why I’d bring that up at this exact moment.
“Just making conversation,” I said, then Stacey returned from inside and opened the door for us.
“Come on in, y’all,” she said. “The family’s sequestered.”
“Hey, nice word choice,” Jacob told her as he stepped inside. “Much nicer than ‘quarantined.’”
“Thanks.” Stacey took his hand and looked up at him with a kind of mock awe, as though his joke compliment had swept her off her feet. “I worked on it all night. I hoped you would say something.”
“Are you recording, Stacey?” I asked. She could flirt on her own time.
“Oh, yep.” Stacey raised her camera and pointed it at Jacob. “Action!”