by JL Bryan
It turned into a large, shadowy mass and rose above us, folds of darkness spilling open like black cloth. It stood nine feet high, draped and hooded in black, its face a dirty white skull.
Death itself.
Alicia regarded it, shivering.
It reached out its skeletal hands, and the flames rose larger all over the basement, sweeping up the wooden stairs.
“You have all made a mistake.” Its voice was a low hiss that seemed to whisper in both my ears. “You have given yourselves to me.”
“I am afraid of you.” That was Calvin, rolling into the room from apartment D, the last of our merry band. “Not any mask you wear. Not anything you pretend to be. Only you, the thing you really are behind all the disguises.” He approached it, showing no fear. That motivated the rest of us to move in closer to the apparition.
The grim reaper shrank back to a normal human size, its skull and cloth vanishing. It stood there, not far from the furnace door, a faceless column of shadows and darkness.
“Show yourself!” Calvin demanded. “Show your true face.”
I reached into the big canvas pocket on the back of Calvin’s wheelchair and brought out something that looked like an oversized vinyl book with a battery compartment on the back. I opened the cover, revealing what Calvin had made for us back at the workshop. A mirror pane was inside, crisscrossed with copper wires, which could be powered at the touch of a button.
“Remember who you are, Edgar,” I said, turning the mirror to face the darkness.
A woman appeared in the mirror—or the decayed corpse of one, the eye sockets empty, the face crumbling to reveal bone beneath, the hair like dried straw.
“Is that Bloody Mary?” Michael whispered. “What my sister saw in her mirror?”
The darkness took the form of the reflection.
“Edgar Barrington,” I said, “We demand that you show yourself.”
“I’ve been here all along,” said a low voice. It raised the hair on the back of my neck, because it came from a place no voice should have been—directly behind me.
Keeping the mirror where it was, I turned back to see Mr. Gray in his crisp old-fashioned suit, regarding me with his dark eyes. He gave a gentle smile. I could feel the cold radiating from him, even as the fires in the basement grew.
“I would not miss this,” he said, filling the air with frost as he walked past me, approaching the entity in its decayed-woman shape. He didn’t go too far, I noted, hanging back from the grave dirt on the floor and the dust lingering in the air.
“You’re Edgar?” I asked. “Not Joseph?” It looked like I’d identified the wrong twin.
“You should know,” he said. “You’ve been calling my name.”
“Wait a minute,” Stacey said. “You’re Edgar. The one who killed the children?”
Edgar gave her an angry look, and a butcher knife appeared in his hand.
“Not that we have to talk about that now,” Stacey added quickly. She pointed her flashlight at the decayed crone. “If Edgar is Mr. Gray, then who is...?”
“Rebecca Barrington,” I said. “Is that right?”
The old crone straightened up, and in a blink she was a beautiful young woman in a light gray dress with puffy sleeves and a sash at the midsection. She appeared all in tones of gray, like Edgar.
Edgar tremored at the sight of her, seeming to grow younger, his frenetic energy palpable in the air.
“Rebecca was the boogeyman?” Stacey asked.
“It was you,” I said to the apparition. “You had Edgar kill your husband and children. You wanted to be free of them.”
“I killed my husband myself,” she said, her voice the same low hiss I’d heard from the fearfeeder before, when it had run away from me the previous night.
“The black widow spiders,” I said, suddenly understanding. “It’s your energy that attracts them.”
She looked at me, her pretty face proud and haughty.
“And you had Edgar kill your children,” I said, looking at him. “He did it...because he loved you?”
“That one knows nothing about love,” Rebecca said with a smirk, her eyes turning black again for a moment as she said love. “He only wanted to be his brother. Successful and popular like his brother, instead of deranged and useless like himself. He coveted his brother’s house, his brother’s wife—”
“You promised to marry me,” Edgar said. “You betrayed me.”
“And what will you do about it?” she asked.
Edgar looked down at the floor, covered with his own grave earth between himself and Rebecca.
She gave a hollow laugh. “I am protected against you, even if you wished to harm me. But you could never wish that, could you, Edgar?”
He still hesitated, the butcher knife in his hand.
“Kill them, Edgar.” She pointed right at me. “Kill all of them for me. And then I may accept your affections.”
The ghost of Edgar turned to me, a hard glint in his eye. Michael tried to grab him, but the apparition became insubstantial. Michael stumbled through, then stood between me and the child-killer’s ghost.
“Now,” Rebecca urged, her beautiful face flickering, revealing glimpses of her skull beneath her skin.
Edgar turned toward her...then advanced, placing one foot directly on the scattered earth, then the next.
She frowned, and it was a deeper frown than would be possible on a flesh-and-blood human face.
I noticed she stood in a clear spot, surrounded by the spilled earth, and hadn’t moved much from there since she’d first appeared to me as Anton Clay. The dirt on the floor wasn’t taken from her grave, but it was taken from the family plot where she was buried. I wondered if that made her want to avoid it, too.
Edgar took another step. His form decayed rapidly as he moved toward Rebecca’s ghost. His flesh seemed to dry and crumble, and his clothes began to rot, revealing bone underneath.
Still he walked toward her across the dirt of his own grave. Halfway there, he fell to his knees, his apparition falling apart as if catching up to the actual condition of his body over in the old cemetery. The soles of his shoes split open, showing bony remnants of feet within.
Rebecca hissed, stepping back as Edgar’s corpse-like ghost continued crawling toward her. He let out bone-shuddering grunts and groans, and moved slowly, as though it were causing him great pain but he was forcing himself to continue onward. His face was little more than blots of gray flesh clinging to his skull. Veins of rust spread across the butcher knife.
“Stop him.” Rebecca looked around at us, all of us staring in a kind of shock as the ghostly drama unfolded. “Someone must stop him.”
“I don’t think we will,” Stacey said.
Rebecca screamed, her form flickering as if she wanted to escape but couldn’t.
Edgar collapsed to the soil, no longer able to support himself on his hands and knees. He dragged himself forward, his form no more than rags and crumbling bones now, his butcher knife turned entirely to rust. He gave one last groan and stopped cold, lying facedown in the dirt. Then only disconnected bone fragments remained, half-sunken into the soil.
Rebecca laughed, and she looked healthier somehow—less grayscale, a little more color, her cheeks flushed.
“Who else wants to try?” she asked, smiling around at the rest of us, her teeth just a tad sharper than before. “You think you know who I am, but you know nothing of what I am, of the old things below us, the gifts they have given me...the horrors they have shown me...”
“You don’t belong here,” I said. “You need to cross to the other side.”
“This is my home,” she said. “I belong nowhere else.”
I’d chosen to confront the fearfeeder with its true identity in hopes of reaching the man inside the monster—or the woman inside, as it turned out—and encouraging the spirit to move on. It didn’t sound like that was going to happen tonight.
I stepped closer to Rebecca, holding up the mirror so she would
have to face her own reflection.
She hissed at me, the sound purely animal, making me think of hissing cockroaches I’d seen on TV once.
“Look at yourself,” I said. “See who you really are.”
Then I pressed the button to activate the electromagnetic grid. It gave off a slight hum, and I could feel the energy buzzing in the air around me.
“You wish me to admire my own beauty?” Rebecca asked with a sour smile.
I held the mirror a bit longer, but she did not react at all. Calvin had been right—this mirror trap was not effective against non-catoptric ghosts.
“Uh, never mind,” I mumbled, putting it aside. “Stacey, grab the broom.” I gestured to the row of washing machines. In a gap between the last machine and the wall sat a push broom, dust pan, and a yellow mop bucket, all of them dusty and hung with spider webs.
Stacey nodded and jogged past me to fetch it. I kept my eyes on Rebecca’s ghost while Stacey handed me the broom.
Then I began to sweep the scattered earth toward Rebecca, banking it up one side and then the other, moving the barrier closer in around her. She backed toward the charred door behind her.
“Come a little closer,” she said, holding out her hand as if to grab me. “Just one step.”
Not being a total sucker, I held back. When I’d banked up the dirt as close to her as I dared, I raised the broom like a battering ram and charged at her.
Rebecca shrieked and dodged aside as best she could, but she wasn’t my target.
The wide wooden head of the push broom slammed into the charred door behind her, knocking it open to reveal the darkness of the furnace room. She snarled and grabbed for my broom as I pulled it back, but she didn’t move fast enough.
My idea was to keep sweeping the dirt toward her, driving her back into the well. Then I would surround the mouth of the well with her grave earth to keep her trapped inside until we could seal it tight. It wasn’t a perfect or satisfying solution, but it was all I had. We’d failed to make her move on, and the experimental mirror trap had failed, too.
“Stay back,” Rebecca hissed.
“You’ve been haunting this neighborhood for so many years,” I said. “Terrorizing and killing children. Do you drag them down into the well with you? Is the bottom of the shaft littered with their bones?”
“Leave us alone,” Rebecca said, and it was as though something else spoke through her, something plural, with many voices. “We will kill everything you love.”
“That’s sweet,” I said, sweeping more earth toward her.
“Drop your broom, little witch,” Rebecca said.
“Careful, Ellie,” Calvin warned.
“I can handle her,” I said. My words brought a sneer to her lips.
“Someone’s coming,” Jacob told us. His eyes were closed.
Above us, the door at the top of the stairs blew open, bringing in a flood of light from upstairs. A warm wind swept down the stairs, snuffing out fires as it swept through the room.
“You can’t,” Rebecca said, whispering to the wind as it approached her, blowing out the rest of the fires and churning up grave dust from the floor.
“Who’s here, Jacob?” I asked.
“The man who guards the children,” Jacob said, finally opening his eyes. I looked at Alicia.
“Gerard?” Alicia whispered, watching the swirling dust in the mysterious wind.
“No!” Rebecca screamed, holding up her arms and inching back toward the charred and broken door to the furnace room. “Make him go away!”
“I don’t see anything,” Stacey said.
The mysterious wind struck the low wall of earth I’d heaped up. I staggered back and out of the way as the dirt rose into a dark whirlwind, obscuring my view of Rebecca Barrington. I thought I could hear her screaming through the whooshing roar of the spinning air. My hair blew every which way across my face.
“What’s happening?” Michael had to shout at me so the wind didn’t swallow his voice. He pulled my close, protectively.
I just shook my head and shrugged in response: I have no idea.
The wind slowed, dropping into low eddies on the floor. As the churning dirt sank in the air, I saw Rebecca again, encrusted in earth but still standing. She even seemed taller, until I realized she stood on top of a mound of collected soil.
Rebecca grinned at me, a vicious look on her pretty face. I took that as a bad sign.
“That Negro ghost has been pestering me,” Rebecca said. “Ever since that slave family moved into this house.”
“Excuse me?” Alicia said.
“Yeah, hey, rude,” Stacey added.
“You cannot kill me,” Rebecca boasted.
“We don’t have to,” I said. “You’re already dead.”
Something groaned beneath the floor. A pair of skeletal arms, wrapped in black rags and the shriveled remnants of old flesh, emerged from the heap of soil and grabbed Rebecca by the legs, its sharp fingers hooking deep into her ephemeral clothes and skin.
She screamed as the arms pulled her down. She dropped waist-deep into the earth, as though the dirt were several feet deep instead of just a few inches.
The head and shoulders of a corpse emerged, staring up at her. Enough of his face remained that I could recognize Edgar, his face decayed in such a way that it had a permanent deep sneer on the left side.
His hands moved up to Rebecca’s throat.
“No!” she screamed. “Not with you!”
“Now we shall be wed,” Edgar’s voice whispered between his crumbling jaws.
Then he sank back into the soil, pulling her down with him.
Rebecca shrieked and thrashed, sending up dust as she disappeared into the earth, but she was already growing pale and insubstantial. Her final scream sounded distant. As her fading head descended into the dirt, she gave me a final look of pure hatred.
Then she was gone. A low mist clung to the heap of earth, crawling among the pebbles and flakes of red dirt.
“Stacey, grab the trap,” I whispered. “We need to sweep this up before one of them leaks out. I don’t trust either of those ghosts.”
Stacey hurried to remove the small trap from the stamper. It was still half-filled with earth, and three candles were mounted above them. She blew the candles out, removing them from the trap and dropping them to the basement floor as she walked over to me.
“I’ll bandage you up,” Michael told me. “After I spend an hour picking the glass out of your skin. Come on.” He reached for me, but I pulled back.
“Not until we’re squared away down here,” I said.
Stacey and I knelt on the floor, collecting the dirt from Edgar’s grave, which now held both Edgar and Rebecca, together at last, to remain that way for centuries or more if the trap lay undisturbed. Now it was the boogeywoman’s turn to suffer her own worst nightmare, being trapped with her brother-in-law, the man whose advances she’d spurned with contempt, after he’d done the dirty work of murdering her poor children for her. The kids had spent their short lives unwanted and unloved.
I saw Calvin watching us silently, his face as expressionless as stone.
“How are you feeling?” I asked him.
He nodded slightly.
“We finally got him,” I said. “I mean, her.”
“You got her,” Calvin said.
“We all did,” I said. “We defeated her by standing together.”
“You and Stacey did a fine job. You always do.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t think you need me anymore. This investigation proves it. You succeeded where I failed.”
“Only because we learned from last time,” I said, feeling concerned. He seemed melancholy, not a normal state for him.
“I’ve trained you as best I can, Ellie,” he said. “Maybe it’s about time for me to pack it in.”
“And do what?” I asked. I noticed Alicia and Jacob speaking quietly to each other across the room.
“Retire. Move. Sit at the beach.”
&n
bsp; “We’re near the beach. Get a place on one of the coastal islands. That would be healthy,” I said. I tried to sound calm, but his words panicked me.
“I have family in Florida,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I took the trap, now brimming with soil, over to the stamper. I placed the lid on the trap, then brought the pneumatic arm down for good measure, sealing the two murderous ghosts inside.
“Gerard?” Alicia gasped. She was staring upward at something I couldn’t see. Or someone, I supposed, standing just in front of her. She raised one hand and seemed to caress the empty air. She nodded a little, as if listening, and tears crept out of her eyes and down her cheeks.
The rest of us fell silent. Michael was close to me, clearly impatient to do something about my injuries.
I wondered what Alicia was seeing and hearing. She looked entranced.
Finally, she whispered, “I love you, too, baby.” Her hand fell back to her side, and she looked down at the floor, crying softly to herself.
I walked over to hug her, and she embraced me.
“He said he’ll always watch over us,” Alicia whispered, low enough that only I could hear her words. “He said he’ll be waiting for me. He said...love is the only thing that lasts forever.”
“You big sweetie,” Stacey said, punching Jacob in the arm. “You helped her talk to her husband one last time.”
“All I did was warn her that he was coming,” Jacob said. “He asked me to do that.”
“I can’t believe Rebecca was the boogeyman the whole time,” Stacey said. “And Edgar was just hanging around, waiting for his next chance with her.”
“She would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for us meddling kids,” Jacob said. Stacey snickered and leaned against him, and he placed an arm around her.
“Thank you,” Alicia said, stepping back from me. “All of you. I have to...go sit down.” She turned and started up the stairs, swaying uneasily on her feet as if she’d just suffered a major shock. I supposed she had.
“We still have to do something about that old well,” Jacob said.
“I’ve called a specialist,” Calvin said. He still had that sad look as he stared at the blackened remains of the furnace room door, clinging to the door frame by a couple of hinges. The doorknob lay on the floor amid charred bits of wood.