by JL Bryan
“I can’t be tied down like that,” I told him. “I’m a wild animal, remember?”
I left his apartment, feeling unusually tall and very happy at the idea of seeing him again. Hopefully I would live long enough for that to happen.
Since I seemed to be Edgar’s preferred bait, it fell to me to face him.
By midnight, I stood in the laundry room by myself, my utility belt fully loaded, all my gear stocked with fresh batteries. I kept in touch with Calvin and Stacey over my headset, but I still felt alone and vulnerable down there.
I’d switched off the lights, which left the basement in complete darkness. I watched the door to the furnace room on the display screen of a night vision camera. I had my thermal goggles on my head, ready to bring them down over my eyes.
The air felt heavy and cold, as the basement always did after sunset. On the screen, I could see hints and blurs of things drifting past, like pieces of deformed fish floating in a viscous green swamp.
“How does everything look upstairs?” I whispered.
“Dead,” Stacey replied over the headset, also whispering. “I mean, uh, clear. Nothing’s stirring. No dead people hanging out.”
“Okay.” I glanced at the two traps—the regular one half-filled with stolen grave dirt, the candles lit as a lure. The walk-in trap, walled with colored leaded glass, both doors closed for now. I didn’t want to draw Edgar’s attention to it too quickly.
I glanced at the closed door to apartment D, wondering if Edgar’s brother Joseph might make another appearance. I assumed that ghost was more or less on my side, since Edgar had killed him, but you never really know. Blood runs thicker sometimes, even among the dead.
Finally, I turned my attention to the door to the furnace room, also closed. Edgar’s favorite place to pop out in shadowy boogeyman form.
Aside from the open static of my headset, the room was silent for a long time, punctuated only by Stacey checking in.
The room grew colder and colder. Small footsteps approached me from the furnace doorway, but I didn’t see anyone there.
I pulled down my thermal goggles. Specks of cold hung in the air in front of me. As I watched, they drew together and became larger. Individually they suggested nothing, but together they suggested the rough shape of a small child, not much larger than a toddler—a portion of a leg here, a couple of fingers there.
“Who is she?” a tiny voice whispered, so quiet I could easily have imagined it.
More cold spots gathered, and I felt the temperature drop. I could hear other voices in the shadows, their words too low and muffled to discern. It was sort of like being surrounded by people who speak a different language. You don’t know what they’re saying, but you suspect they’re talking about you. Except, of course, these people were all dead.
These were fragments of ghosts absorbed by the well over the millennia, slowly merged into a cloud of lost souls, serving as the power source of the dark forces below.
The cold and the whispering moved closer. The ghosts were investigating me, a reversal of our usual roles.
“It’s looking really active, Ellie,” Stacey said.
“I can hear them,” I said. “They’re all around me. Should I do that thing we talked about?”
“Do it,” Calvin said, cutting in.
“Okay.” I took a breath, then straightened up, looking at the dark room all around me, dense with a blizzard of drifting deep blue spots. I spoke much louder now. “I know some of you here are old spirits,” I said. “Seers and mystics who left pieces of yourselves here, thousands of years ago, to help guard the living against the darkness here. I hope you will understand my intent tonight, and give what aid you can.”
There was no immediate response. Then the room became much, much colder, so fast I could hear the air crack. I was shivering hard—it was arctic.
The cold spots swelled around me, growing larger and darker, many of them phasing into purple. No friendly prehistoric Guale medicine man appeared to offer a hand, or anything remotely like that.
“I think I upset somebody,” I said. I was shivering all the way to my bones, and I literally couldn’t tell if it was cold or from fear.
This was the right thing to do, though. Just as I’d told the kids, the only way to fight a creature who feeds on fear is to resist it with courage. It took all the courage I could muster to stand there alone in front of the furnace door, waiting to face Anton Clay or whatever form the boogeyman decided to take. I felt like I didn’t have nearly enough of that courage, though—all I wanted to do was run away, up the stairs, and out of that house, rather than face the thing on the other side of the door.
I took a deep breath and held my ground.
“Should we go ahead?” I whispered.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Calvin replied.
I took another deep breath, then I picked up the mason jar half-filled with Edgar’s grave dirt and I unscrewed the lid.
“Hook up the relay to the speaker, Stacey,” I said.
“Consider it hooked.”
I turned on a small spotlight and pointed it away toward the wall, giving me enough light to see. Then I stepped closer to the door and knocked three times, pounding as hard as I could with my fist.
“Edgar,” I said. “Edgar Barrington. I command you to come up. Come out and face me.” There. That sounded like something out of a tough-guy movie, maybe a cowboy standing outside a saloon, challenging an old enemy to a duel.
My voice boomed beyond the door, on a slight delay. Stacey had installed a small but powerful speaker next to the well, which amplified my voice into a roar and sent it echoing down into the darkness below.
“Nothing so far,” Stacey whispered.
“Edgar Barrington!” I repeated, hearing my amplified voice like rumbling thunder as it bounced around inside the well. I took a pinch of the grave earth in my fingers and cast it at the furnace room door. Little clumps of dirt and tiny pebbles rattled off its surface. I didn’t know if the gesture would help me gain control over Edgar, but it was an idea. “Present yourself.”
My voice seemed to echo for an unusually long time—or maybe it was something down below, answering me.
“Ellie, I’m losing power,” Stacey said. “The camera watching the well is dead. Everything’s shutting—”
“Wait for me,” I told her. Then my headset died, the power robbed by one ghost or another.
The floor shuddered, and then flames boiled out around the door to the furnace room, a billowing conflagration that swept around all the edges of the door and began to eat into it. The heat surged out into the frosty room.
I watched as the fire spread in streamers across the door, until I could see nothing but a rectangular doorway filled with flames. I heard the whoosh of the fire, felt the heat on my skin, smelled the crackling wood of the door itself.
Wild, uncontrolled fire. I loathed it.
A streamer of fire extended from the billowing flames and anchored itself to the brick floor. Then another, moving like a candle flame stepping from one wick to the next. The shape of a man emerged, standing on those flickering legs, the head like a floating torch.
It burned down quickly, showing me charred flesh, eyes with red-rimmed pupils, the stained teeth of a grinning skull. Tongues of flame still flickered here and there among his soot-encrusted coat and vest.
Anton Clay, in one of his less handsome forms.
Courage.
“That’s a nice trick,” I said, my voice shaking as I tilted the jar and drew a line of earth along the floor as a barrier between us. “You’d be a hit at Burning Man.”
His jaws opened, and an actual tongue of flame moved in his mouth, flickering among his teeth, licking them and staining them black.
“Eleanor,” spoke a voice from inside the flame. “I knew you would return to me.”
While he chatted, I took the opportunity to move around one side of him, sprinkling a thick line of earth perpendicular to the first one. I poured i
t all the way to the wall, then snapped the jar forward, throwing a long dash of it between Anton and the furnace door, cutting off his main path of retreat.
“Do you really believe that will work?” he asked. He was back to the usual mask, the pretty face and spotless silk garments he’d worn in life.
“It’s from your grave, Edgar,” I said. In my mind, I’d imagined drawing a circle of earth around him, but what was emerging was more of a sloppy rhombus.
Now came the most dangerous part: I had to circle back around him, keeping my distance, so I could enclose him with earth from the other side.
“You don’t understand who I am at all,” he said. “I am myself, Anton Clay, merely using our friend here as a vessel to reach out to you—”
“I don’t believe you.” I eased around to the other side of him, ready to finish surrounding him with the ring of dirt.
Then he moved, faster than my eye could follow or my brain could react, suddenly standing less than an inch from me, his eyes burning into mine.
The jar of dirt exploded in my hands, slicing up my fingers. I barely had time to close my eyes before splinters of glass peppered my face. It felt like getting stung by a swarm of angry bees.
Something slammed into the center of my chest so hard my breastbone creaked. It knocked me backwards, sending me across the room until my spine slammed against the metal side of a laundry machine.
I crumpled to the floor, aching all over, unable to breathe, unable to see. A thick layer of dirt coated my face, and I was afraid to wipe it away from my eyes because of all the little glass pieces in my hands. I wasn’t excited by the idea of scratching out my eyeballs.
Slowly, I eased up to a sitting position, still struggling to draw air. I didn’t even want to open my mouth for fear of choking on dirt and glass. My nostrils and sinuses already felt coated in the gritty soil.
I pulled apart the snap buttons on my denim jacket, pawed my shirt tail loose, and used it to wipe my face. I opened my eyes as soon as I dared.
A cloud of dark earth floated in the room like a brown fog, dampening the floodlight, which was turned aside and on its lowest setting anyway.
He stood several feet away from me, not far from where I’d been when he sent me flying. He was a dark shadow in the fog of dust, facing me, standing perfectly and unnaturally still, in the way that dead things can. Watching me. Waiting.
Sneezing and coughing out dust, I rolled to my hands and knees and crawled backward along the row of washing machines, away from him. He turned his head slightly, but made no obvious move to attack, like a cat letting its prey squirm before it moved in for the kill.
I placed my hands on the washing machine and slowly pulled myself to my feet. Pain flared all over my lower back, making it hard for me to stand straight up. My hands were wet with my leaking blood. I could feel it all over my face, too, warm and fresh. I wondered how many cuts I’d suffered. My arm with the burn injury was throbbing harder from getting knocked around.
“Come closer,” he said, still looking and sounding like Anton Clay. “You belong with me, my lost lamb. We’ll make a glorious fire together. Your ashes will mingle with mine. I have an eternity of sweet burning to share with you.”
I could scream for help, but I still wasn’t ready to do that yet. Not until I’d worn him down, at least.
“You forget who you really are, Edgar.” I reached my fingers into the inch of space between the washing machines, hoping none of the black widows that thrived in the basement were waiting there, ready to bite my fingertips. The last thing I needed was a dose of painful venom on top of all my injuries.
I found the sheet and pulled it out. We’d had Speedi Sign print us a blown-up version of the picture of Edgar’s corpse, and this was mounted on cheap corrugated plastic so it wouldn’t roll up or flop around.
“Look at yourself,” I said, swaying on my feet, barely keeping my balance. Spots of blood from my face dripped onto Edgar’s picture, painting open red sores on his dead face. “You’re dead, Edgar Barrington. You have to move on. This world belongs to the living.”
A sneer twisted Anton’s face, baring his teeth, his face like a snarling dog’s.
“Such an ugly picture,” he whispered.
Then my floodlight went out, plunging the basement back into darkness. I had my thermal goggles on my head, but their lenses were caked with dirt and I didn’t exactly have time to stroll over to my toolbox and fish out the wipes.
I reached for my flashlight instead, but before my hand closed around it, the large picture in my other hand burst into flame. It went up all at once, as though it had been dipped in lighter fluid and ignited with a blowtorch. The fire seared my hand and my face, singeing my hair.
I shouted in pain, dropping the ball of fire to the floor. The plastic curled and melted in the heat, like a human body curling into the fetal position when the cremation fires hit. Noxious burnt-plastic fumes rose around me, making me cough, and I staggered closer to Anton.
“And now, an end to our story,” Anton said. A gout of flame rose in his palm. With it rose thin trails of fire all over the basement, tracing the outlines of the walls and the laundry machines, similar to what had happened in Alicia’s apartment.
He didn’t have to be close to me to strike me with fire. The burning picture had made that clear.
I took a deep breath and shouted as loud as I could: “Now!”
At the far side of the room, well behind the glowing figure of Anton, the door to the vacant basement apartment swung open.
Stacey ran out, swinging a flashlight and glaring at Anton. A stethoscope hung around her neck, bouncing as she ran. She’d brought it to listen at the door in case our electronic equipment failed again, which it had.
Anton turned toward her, hissing as if he’d been stabbed in the back.
Then Anton was gone, but the flames still burned along the walls and machinery. I thought of the lint-encrusted dryer exhaust vents, usually one of the biggest fire hazards in the home. I wondered if Michael would be proud of me for knowing that.
A woman appeared in Anton’s place, shrouded in a bridal veil that had withered and yellowed into something that looked like mats of old spiderwebs. I could just see the outline of her head and wide hoop dress within, impenetrable shadow-shapes the firelight couldn’t seem to reach.
She turned toward Stacey. Where Anton had held a flame in his palm, the bride figure crushed a handful of dried flowers, their petals falling to the brick floor like flakes of skin. The bride matched Stacey’s description of the ghost that had killed her brother.
“Anton!” I shouted, visualizing my lifelong tormentor. “Anton Clay!”
The dead bride turned back toward me—and once again, it was Anton in his fine coat and vest, his face distorted in a look of intense hatred, his irises glowing red. The scattered flower petals on the floor burst into flame, illuminating his polished black boots.
Stacey knocked on the closed door to the colored-glass booth, and Jacob stepped out. Our psychic friend removed his glasses and glared at Anton.
Anton’s face ruptured open and his clothes erupted in flames. What remained of the clothes shifted to charred rags. One arm was broken in three places, and the other was missing. The figure became taller and wider, not resembling Anton at all by the time he turned to face Jacob.
I didn’t recognize this new figure, but I could guess—one of the plane-crash victims who’d been on board with Jacob, one of the mangled spirits who’d approached him as he lay in the wreckage.
I’d told everyone to think of their deepest fear, then imagine flinging it at Edgar like a rock. He had the ability to take on our fears, but now we were forcing him to do it.
Changing its shape, shifting from one apparition to another, had to drain the entity’s energy, making it weaker and easier to manage. Hopefully this would soften it up and prepare it to move on when confronted with its real identity.
On top of that, as I’d told the kids, the best way
to fight a fearfeeder was with courage. What could be more courageous than intentionally facing your own deepest fears?
“You’re terrifying,” I said, approaching the monster, who now looked like some hunched, snarling Frankenstein mutation, trying to be three different things at once. “You can horrify anyone with their worst fears. Anyone. Why does the boogeyman always disappear before your parents can look inside the closet? Why do you keep running away as soon as other people come to help? You did it upstairs in Mia’s room. Then again last night.”
The thing grunted and fell to its hands and knees. Its face stretched out like an animal’s snout, and sharp rows of teeth grew along its upper and lower jaws, ripping their way out from its gums and emerging bloody.
It hugged the floor, its legs thick but stumpy, and it began to grow a thick, fleshy, reptilian tail.
“An alligator?” I said, backing up as the jaws snapped at my ankles. I looked over to see Michael emerging from the trap, staring hard at the shapeshifting entity on the floor.
“My dad,” he said. “Before he left, he took me to one of those cheap alligator farms for tourists. Held me over the fence and said he’d feed me to them. Laughing.” Michael hadn’t taken his eyes off the beast. “Good old dad.”
I’d hidden the other people carefully. The big booth trap had been activated, the mesh within creating a barrier for electromagnetic energy. Ghosts couldn’t escape it. I was pretty sure they couldn’t perceive anything inside it, either, so I’d hidden people there. Instead of using the booth as a trap for the ghost, I’d used it a hiding place from the ghost. I sort of got the idea from Superman II.
Since there hadn’t been enough room in the trap for everyone, Stacey had taken the less secure position of waiting in the vacant apartment. Since that seemed to be the domain of Joseph’s ghost, we were hoping that Edgar’s ghost would tend to avoid it.
Now Alicia emerged from the booth, where she’d been crammed in with Jacob and Michael. She stared at the alligator-man writhing and snapping on the dirt-coated floor, and it changed again.