by JL Bryan
With my leather jacket cut to pieces, I picked a heavy denim one instead and pulled it over my black summer-weight turtleneck. I was in serious danger of getting physically attacked again that night, if things went well.
I met up with Calvin and Stacey at the office, and we hung around the long work table in the back. Files and pictures were spread out everywhere, including pictures of people and houses, Rebecca Barrington’s letters detailing her brother-in-law’s insanity, missing person reports from more recent decades, a few relevant articles from the International Journal of Psychical Studies, and lore and art describing the boogeyman in every culture—always the dark thing hiding in small places, menacing children by night, sometimes hauling them away in a sack. There was no consistency in appearance among these entities, only a common pattern of behavior.
“He never shows his real face,” I said. “He’s always wearing a mask.”
“Isn’t he really that black crawling shape that runs around on the ceiling?” Stacey asked.
“That’s a kind of psychological costume itself,” Calvin said. “It represents how dark and twisted the soul has become over the years.”
“So what if we confront him with his real identity?” I asked. “That might weaken him, or at least confuse him. He’s used to the living always perceiving him as their own worst fears...not as Edgar Barrington, a sick and twisted human being. We could send Stacey to the print shop to get blow-up pictures of Edgar, and we’d need a mirror, too. Maybe confronting him with his real identity, after all this time, would be enough to make him move on.”
“It’s possible, but it may not work,” Calvin said. “We may still have to trap him.”
“Didn’t I see a design for a mirror trap in the Journal once?” I grabbed the nearest tablet to check the web archives of the paranormal periodical—we had a subscription enabling us to access all the back issues at any time.
“That was for catoptric ghosts,” Calvin said.
“What are those?” Stacey asked. “They sound like cats who wear glasses. Instant internet meme.”
“Spirits who use mirrors as doorways,” I told her, my eyes and fingers still busy with the tablet.
“But Edgar uses doorways as doorways,” Stacey said. “Closet doors. Right?”
“That’s why I doubt this is a good approach,” Calvin replied.
“Thanks for the encouragement,” I said. “Here, I found it. Lead glass mirror, with the copper mesh installed over the pane. You capture the ghost’s image in the mirror, then activate the mesh to keep it there.”
“If you ever face a mirror ghost, it might be useful,” Calvin replied. “I don’t believe this is the best entity for testing out new prototypes.”
“Okay, so maybe it’s only part of the solution,” I said. “Even if I can just steal some of its energy.”
“I’m not feeling good about this plan,” Stacey said. “Except the part where I go to the print shop and get giant Edgar pictures. I’m totally on top of that.”
“I think we might have to use this.” I walked over to open the supply-closet door. The big walk-in trap stood in its corner, like a dusty phone booth built out of old stained-glass church windows.
“The bear trap didn’t pay off very well last time,” Calvin said. “I’d like to see both of you walk away from this case alive and intact.”
“I’m the only bait we have,” I said. “Besides the kids, and we obviously aren’t going to use one of them. Edgar wants me. I was afraid he would try to attack you, Calvin, but that was just a distraction to get Stacey out of the house, to isolate me.”
“Maybe he figures he dinged me pretty bad already,” Calvin said.
“And now it’s my turn,” I said. “Come on, Stacey. We have to dismantle this trap and reassemble it over at our client’s house. It’s going to take a while.”
“Sounds like a good time to call Captain Fireman,” Stacey said.
“He’s at work. What about Jacob?”
“Work,” Stacey said. “Unless you want to wait until tonight to set it up.”
“I definitely don’t. Come on.” I grabbed a drill and began disassembling the big trap. We wrapped the glass panes with blankets and secured them in the back of the van so they wouldn’t get scratched or broken.
“I’ll continue studying all of this and hope a good idea leaps up and bites me in the nose,” Calvin said after we were done. He gestured to the spread of documents on the table. “I’ll come over this evening to monitor the mobile nerve center again.” That meant sit in the van. “Good luck, kids.”
“See you soon.” Stacey climbed into the passenger seat, and I started around to the driver’s side.
“Ellie,” Calvin said. I turned back to see a hard, flinty look on his face. He usually kept his emotions below the surface, but I could see Calvin was ready for some revenge against this ghost. “Be careful. And if it chases you into the trap...don’t look back.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll see you tonight. Everything’s going to be fine, Calvin.”
He knew better than to believe me, though. We could all end up dead tonight.
I drove downtown. We stopped at the Speedi Sign, then had a quick dinner of vegetables and rice from a Chinese place while we waited for our print order.
With Michael and Alicia both away at work, along with many of their neighbors, we were able to park right in front of their house. I let Melissa know we were there, and she offered to help. I didn’t see any reason to turn her down. It was the middle of the afternoon, the sun bright and golden with only a few clouds in the sky—exactly the kind of weather that sends many ghosts into hibernation, waiting for darker times.
To make life easier, I picked the lock on Apartment D so we could carry the heavy trap pieces down the short concrete steps and through the vacant apartment, rather than down the long stairway the tenants used to access the laundry room.
During one of my trips between the van and the basement stairs, the clouds momentarily blotted out the sun, turning the world storm-gray.
I rounded the back corner of the house, lugging a heavy, blanketed chunk of thick, colorful leaded glass in both arms. In that gloomy moment, I saw the man for the first time, though Michael, Alicia, and the others had reported seeing him regularly.
He stood next to the open cellar doors, gazing down at the steps as though confused, his long fingers slowly scratching at his temple. He stooped with the posture of an old man, and his hair was gray, and Michael was right about the gray pallor of his skin. His suit and his wide-necked tie appeared in lighter and dark shades of gray, too. The impression was of an old man broken down by worry and care, but if you looked more closely at his face, he didn’t look elderly. He looked prematurely aged, maybe by stress or illness.
I could see how he’d acquired the nickname Mr. Gray at some point, long enough in the past that the tenants, moving in and out each year, had learned it from each other without realizing that some earlier tenant had coined the name, probably as a joke.
He turned his head slowly toward me. He was a conscious entity. He knew I was there.
He gave me a gentle smile, and if I hadn’t known it was a ghost, I would have thought him some kindly, sickly, possibly heavily medicated man standing there in the garden. As it was, the smile chilled me. Just the sight of him chilled me.
“Joseph?” I said. “Joseph Barrington? That’s your name, isn’t it?”
His smile faltered, and his mouth dropped to a flat line. The kindly look gave way to a blank, cold mask.
“Your brother killed you, didn’t he?” I asked. “Edgar. He killed you and your children.”
The sunlight swelled again as the interfering cloud moved on, and the apparition melted into nothing amid the rising light.
“I hope you don’t mind if we use your apartment for a minute,” I said to the place where he’d just stood.
“You okay?” Melissa asked, rounding the corner with another chunk of the trap wrapped in a blanket.
<
br /> “I was just talking to Mr. Gray,” I said. “I guess he didn’t feel like replying.”
“He doesn’t speak much,” Melissa said. “He usually kind of smiles and nods and keeps walking. My brother told me Mr. Gray’s a ghost. Is that true?”
“It’s true.” We walked down the steps and through the bare apartment to our growing array of trap pieces, laid out on blankets across the floor. “He’s the twin brother of the ghost who’s been menacing your house.”
“He seems so nice,” Melissa said. “I thought he was maybe kind of senile since he never spoke, but you know, he was always dressed nicely and well-groomed, so I figured he wasn’t desperate for help.”
“People are often dressed and groomed well for their funerals,” I said. “He was probably buried in that suit.”
“Stop! You’re giving me chill bumps.” She set her parcel on the floor, and a portion of the blanket fell back, revealing a colored-glass corner. “What are you building down here? A ghost blender?”
“A trap,” I whispered. Then I glanced at the furnace-room door and held my finger to my lips.
Stacey came with the final pieces, and we considered different spots to set up the big booth trap. While we discussed it, the door creaked open at the top of the laundry room stairs.
Lulinda Fielding stood there with a basket full of laundry.
“Oh,” she said, stopping on the top step to look down at us. “What are y’all doing?”
“Sorry for the mess, Mrs. Fielding,” I said. “We’ll have it straightened up soon.”
“I can still get to that washing machine.” She continued down the steps. “I ain’t rearranging my whole day for y’all.”
“We understand, ma’am,” I told her.
She looked among the three of us suspiciously while she loaded up the laundry machine. The silence in the room was uneasy.
“You’re helping them, Melissa?” she finally asked, when her clothes had begun washing. She leaned back against the machine and folded her arms, looking hostile.
“Yes, ma’am,” Melissa said.
Lulinda looked at the open door to the ghostly Mr. Gray’s apartment, and she sighed and her shoulders sagged. She brought out a pack of Eve cigarettes and packed them against the palm of her hand, but made no move to take one out and light it.
“I saw something once,” Lulinda said. “After we moved in, before Falcon started seeing things. I never put it together with him seeing that dinosaur skeleton in his fireplace, because it was a different thing. But y’all coming around here got me thinking.” She looked down at her cigarettes, looked up at us, and put them away.
“What was it?” Melissa asked her.
“In my closet one night, not two or three weeks after we moved here,” Melissa said. “He was in there, looking out at me. My granddaddy. I was so scared that night, thinking he was back from the dead.” Melissa hesitated, then seemed to make a decision and went on. “He used to be real bad to me in life. I got scars. I tried not to smile at his funeral. I was still a kid then, and I thought, if he knew how happy it makes me to see him dead, he’d come back and haunt me.”
“How many times did you see him?” I asked.
“Just the once,” she said. “But I could see him standing there as plain as I see you right now. He was staring at me the way he got when he was drunk, just before he slapped me around.” She took a deep breath. “But he never came back. I thought it was just a nightmare.”
“How often does Falcon see his monster?” I asked.
“Too much. Way too much.”
“It targets children,” I said, remembering that Michael had only glimpsed it once, too, right after moving in. “It’ll check around on any new residents of the house, but it’s looking to feed on children. They have more energy to take.”
“Feeding on them? It’s feeding on my boy?”
“Exactly.”
“And what can y’all do about it?” She looked around at the blanket-wrapped pieces spaced carefully around the floor.
“We going to remove it,” I said. “I hope you and your husband don’t have a problem with that.”
“What is this thing, really?”
“The ghost of a man who used to live near here,” I said. “Edgar Barrington. Ghosts sometimes find ways of feeding on the living. It makes them more powerful, but also distorts them from a lost human soul into...something else. In this case, a creature that feeds on fear.”
“And you know what you’re doing?” Lulinda asked me.
“I’ve removed ghosts many times before, all over the city,” I said, speaking with a lot more confidence than I felt. Our plan was shaky, and I had nothing but doubts about it.
“I hope you get this one,” she said. “I’ll try to keep my husband from bothering you.”
“We’d really appreciate it,” I said.
“And stay out of my laundry.” She pointed to the chugging machine and climbed back up the stairs. She wore cutoff denim shorts to showcase her long legs. The back of her shirt read SALTY DOG CAFE.
“Okay,” I said when she was gone. “I think we should place the big trap in the back area of the room, between the furnace room door and the door to Apartment D. I want some room to maneuver in front of both doors. We set the cameras far back in the corners, out of the way...”
It took a long time to prepare the room, especially since we had to carry all our gear down from Alicia’s apartment and set it up all over again. It was too much equipment to leave unguarded in the laundry room all day, especially when Hoss Fielding still didn’t seem to want us there at all.
We also brought the big pneumatic stamper down to the laundry room again, and I loaded it with the trap filled with Edgar’s grave dirt. Then I set the stamper to automatically slam the lid down onto the trap if it detected signs of a ghost inside. Hopefully, Edgar wanted to rest in peace and would be drawn to the earth of his own burial site, so that we could trap him and remove him from the house.
By nightfall, Stacey and I were sweaty and exhausted. I closed up the doors to Apartment D. We’d kept the cellar doors open all day to keep us fueled with fresh air.
Then I caught up with Alicia, who was home from work, and went upstairs to see Michael—strictly because of my burned arm, of course.
Chapter Twenty
“How are you feeling?” he asked. I sat on the small couch in his living room, with a view of the tree-lined street outside.
“Tired,” I said. “Worried.”
“About tonight?”
“There’s plenty to worry about,” I told him.
“How does your arm feel?” He finished undressing the wound, revealing the four dark red finger marks. They were long and thin, like those of Joseph Barrington when I’d seen his ghost in the back garden. Edgar’s twin.
“Not great,” I said.
“The blisters have shrunk,” he said. “That’s good. I’d say you’re fine as long as you don’t get grabbed by another burning hand in that same spot.”
“I wish the odds of that were lower,” I said. “I’m calling him out tonight. We’re taking him down.”
He brought me to the kitchen to rinse my arm in water again, then he applied a fresh burn dressing, which brought a welcome new dose of that cooling gel.
We were standing in the same place we’d been when he kissed me. I looked up at him, drawing my wounded arm close to my side.
“Listen,” he said. “Sorry if I surprised you with that. I don’t always think before I act. Sometimes I save the thinking for later.”
“Do you go through this with everyone you treat?” I asked. “The kissing and apologizing?”
“It’s not part of the standard procedures,” he said.
“Really? You don’t get kisses when you come sweeping through the window to rescue some pretty girl from a fire?”
“Make the pretty girl into a forty-year-old fat cigar smoker with a walrus mustache who got lodged behind his steering wheel in a fender-bender, and yes, t
hat happens sometimes.”
“I came back,” I said. “I must not have been too upset.”
“Maybe you came back for revenge.”
“Definitely,” I said, thinking of what Edgar Barrington’s ghost had done to Calvin. “And I’m going to take it right now.” I reached my hands on top of his shoulders, rested my fingers on his neck. “Wait. What about your girlfriend? Angelique?”
“Angelique?” He looked confused.
“Your sister mentioned her.”
“I haven’t talked to her in months. She said she was tired of worrying about my job, about me going into dangerous situations and getting hurt. I think she was seeing somebody else, though. What about you?”
“I spend a lot of time running into dangerous situations and getting hurt,” I said. “We could share war stories.”
“I’m asking if you’re seeing anybody. But I have to warn you, if you’re not married or dating a friend of mine, you’re fair game.”
“You make me sound like some wild animal you’re hunting,” I said.
“I like a girl who understands what I’m saying.” His hands were on my hips now, drawing me closer to him.
“Right now, the closest thing I have to a boyfriend is the ghost of a nineteenth-century slaveowner who wants to set me on fire.”
“You can do better,” he said. Then he kissed me again, holding me close to him. It was longer and slower this time, and all around much more interesting. I was absorbed for a minute in the touch and taste of him.
“I should go,” I pulled back from him. Just like last time. “We have some stuff to finalize downstairs. I’ll call you before the action starts.”
“You’re always running away,” he said.
“Oh.” I laughed a little, but kept moving toward the door. “It’s just bad timing.”
“Okay. But—and I don’t want to pressure you—I’m looking for something a little more long-term than thirty seconds. Maybe a five-minute relationship? Ten?”