The Keeper (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 8)

by JL Bryan

  I couldn't answer, because I didn't know. The atmosphere in the room seemed cold, almost as if a ghost stood there with us. Maybe it was the ghost of the past, prodding us to reflect on what we'd lost.

  Or maybe it was a real ghost. It's not like that would have been a shocking thing around the office.

  "You're really going to stay?" I trembled, and I didn't know whether it was hope or fear. After losing my parents, there was a big part of me—maybe, like, all of me—that expected to be left alone. Calvin taking off hadn't shocked me, not really. You get close to people, and then they're gone. That's how it goes.

  The idea that he might reverse things and stay meant too much to me. I had to shove all those feelings down. That's something you can get pretty good at if you practice enough.

  "They may not agree," he said. "They've invested a lot of money into the reconstruction downstairs. I can't afford to repay them for that."

  "We'll figure something out," I said. I was going for hopeful, but it sounded a little hollow. Worries and doubts nagged at me.

  My phone beeped. That was Stacey, wondering what I was doing.

  "Maybe keep it to yourself," I said to Calvin. "Take the money and go. I'll just quit as soon as we've captured Anton Clay. Michael wants to move somewhere out west. I could go with him." This skipped over the fact that Michael and I seemed to have reached a dead end in our relationship. I wanted to convince Calvin to steer clear of danger. Even if that meant I had to lose him, too. "Maybe I shouldn't have told you what she did to me."

  "No, this was the right thing," Calvin said. "You should never have kept silent about it."

  I looked out at the empty blue sky, and I wondered.

  Like with anything, though, only time would tell for sure.

  Chapter Twelve

  Calvin and I both agreed we should keep silent about his attempt to reverse the sale. I didn't mention it when I returned downstairs and sat down at my desk, crammed in close to Stacey's. Hayden's desk was placed so that he looked right at us over his computer monitor, like he was meant to keep an eye on us at all times. He kept his on Stacey, mostly.

  We finished up all the boring task-work that the new regime had imposed on us, then wasted no time hurrying out to our cars as soon as we could.

  "What's our next move?" Stacey asked.

  "I'm going to the library," I said.

  "Don't you sleep?"

  "Not if I can avoid it. We need to brush up on our local lighthouse history. And try to find out about Scary Houdini, if at all possible."

  Stacey yawned. "I guess I could library it up with you for a while. But I can't promise I'll enjoy it."

  She followed me downtown, to that hallowed temple of knowledge known as the Bull Street Library. Centuries of local history could be uncovered there, if one knew where to look, and had lots of time to spend doing it.

  "Let's start with the lighthouse," I told Stacey, whispering as we entered the grand three-story foyer where sunlight poured in from high windows. "It's enough of a landmark that most of the history should be pretty easy to put together."

  "You think Scary Houdini will be harder to figure out?"

  "We'll be lucky to find anything on a passing vaudeville-type act. We don't know his name or exactly when he performed at the Corinthian theater. We don't know where he came from or where he went afterward."

  "So, harder, then," Stacey said. “You could've just said it was harder.”

  The library's local history room got us started with the lighthouse's past.

  The lighthouse—the first version of it—had been constructed in 1793 to guide ships safely from the ocean into the south channel of the Savannah River. A chain of small islands divides the river into north and south channels. The south channel is narrower and rougher, but a shorter route inland to the city, where most ships would be heading.

  “The first structure stood about fifty feet high, made of wood and brick,” Stacey read aloud from a local history guide. Reading silently to herself was apparently too tedious for her. “The South Channel Lighthouse warned sailors away from the rocky spur jutting northward from Tybee Island just before the channel entrance—hey, I know that rocky spur!”

  “Yes, we were just there,” I said.

  “The lighthouse was originally lit by spermaceti candles,” Stacey read on. “Ugh, does that mean...?”

  “Yes. Oil from the heads of sperm whales.”

  “The poor whales. And for a lighthouse? Those candles must have been huge!”

  “I'm sure they were. Keep reading.”

  “The lighthouse kept ships safe until 1809, when the wooden portions caught fire...what did I tell you?” Stacey beamed. “I'm an awesome detective, huh?”

  “Awesome,” I whispered, reading ahead.

  “It was rebuilt by 1814, sixty feet high, with sounder materials,” Stacey read. “Along with a small light-keeper's cottage. The first keeper to live there full time was a man named William Verish, along with his wife and seven kids...in a two-bedroom cottage, yikes.” Stacey shook her head. “Sounds crowded to me. I wonder if they had dogs, too?”

  “In 1837—” I began.

  “Hey, I'm the reader!” Stacey interrupted. “In 1837, Verish died while bravely trying to keep the lighthouse going during a storm. A ship wrecked on the rocky shore that night, and a dozen people died, in addition to the keeper. More repairs were needed, and the lighthouse was rebuilt higher, to seventy feet, and modernized, at least by 1837 standards.

  "Maintenance of the lighthouse fell to William's wife Matty, and then their eldest son. Looks like it became a hereditary position for a while...probably because it was so dangerous nobody else wanted the job. You think Verish is the creepy old ghost?”

  “He could be.” I thought of the white figure I'd seen decades ago atop the tower. “Or it could be someone else.”

  “Well, let's see who else died miserably around there,” Stacey said.

  As it turned out, there were plenty of unhappy deaths in the history of the lighthouse and cottage. In 1883, a severe hurricane struck the coast, killing three thousand people, and it flooded the lighthouse. The lighthouse required months of repair. The keeper's cottage was mostly wiped away, too, along with the keeper himself (a Sean Verish), his wife, and three out of four children. The lone survivor was his sixteen-year-old daughter, Callie.

  The light-keeper's job fell to a retired naval officer, Fredrick Gorman, who moved into the cottage after it was rebuilt. He held that position until 1920, when the lighthouse was closed down permanently.

  “'Visitors to Savannah can still see the lighthouse by boat, and it is a favorite destination for photographers and sight-seers, especially at high tide when its stairs seem to mysteriously disappear underwater,'” Stacey frowned. “Well, there's nothing mysterious about it, the water just rises up.” She shrugged and continued. “'However, the lighthouse is in disrepair and extremely dangerous. Trespassing in or near the lighthouse is strictly forbidden by law.' Well, that won't keep the ghosts out.”

  “Generally not,” I said. “Unless they're obsessively law-abiding ghosts. Not many of those around. One time there was this cop ghost haunting the house where he'd lived. Very territorial. But his idea of 'the law' was little more...subjective. He wasn't really into the letter of the law...or the spirit of it, either...more like 'the law' was his will, and therefore anyone who crossed him deserved the fullest penalty he could inflict.”

  “Sounds like a real sweetheart,” Stacey said.

  “You don't want to know the kind of twisted things we uncovered on that case. Anyway, it sounds like there's been no shortage of death around our clients' property.”

  “Yeah, and that's just what Welcome to Savannah, Y'all! is willing to tell us about.” Stacey gently closed the battered tourist guidebook. “There could be more.”

  “You dig into it,” I said.

  “Me?”

  “Or you can find try to find our nameless magician, who presumably performed at th
e Corinthian somewhere between 1892 and 1929, when it stopped hosting any stage acts and became a full-time movie theater.”

  “I'll take the lighthouse.”

  “You're welcome.”

  As expected, trying to identify the magician was far from a rewarding task. There was nothing like a list of all acts that had performed during the theater's history, much less one focusing on magicians. That line of research began with the assumption that the magician had performed at the theater at some point. That seemed pretty reasonable, though, since his dusty magic cabinet remained in storage at the theater among other long-abandoned set elements from other long-forgotten performances.

  I dug into the history of the theater as best I could. The records were spotty, but I read about the founder, a wealthy and somewhat eccentric merchant named Franklin McCorn, who intended for the theater to be a center of high culture, offering opera and classic plays for the enlightenment of the city. That lasted a couple of years until McCorn died.

  His heirs, more interested in profits than fine arts, opened the stage to whichever acts would draw a crowd—bawdy musicals, comedians, ventriloquists, even a burlesque show or two. McCorn was probably rolling in his grave long before the place closed down and re-opened as a more sedate movie palace in the 1930s.

  In my mind, I could still see the magician ghost clearly—invisible in person, visible only in the mirror, his grinning mouth framed by his devilish Van Dyke beard, clad in a top hat and tails. Mostly I remembered his fingers. They'd been impossibly long, like the tentacles of a giant squid, but bony, knuckle after knuckle after knuckle under cold skin, representing what had likely been highly trained and talented fingers in life, practiced at making coins and playing cards appear and disappear.

  I tried to shake off that memory.

  The magician ghost had to go. He was seriously hampering our ability to investigate the site of Anton's old townhouse. His presence drowned out more subtle readings, Jacob had explained to me at one point, which would make it easier for Anton's spirit to hide there. This was on top of the countless residual hauntings; the old theater had hosted its share of emotional highs and lows over the years, as theaters tend to do.

  The magician had also been a serial killer in life, and his ghost was just waiting for its chance to claim more victims. I couldn't leave a menace like that running free.

  I read newspaper articles about the theater opening, closing, re-opening again, closing again. I sifted through years of newspaper ads for the Corinthian, day by day, reading about the performances scheduled there, noting down every stage magician who appeared.

  It grew into a long list, mostly just names in a list of billed acts. I jotted down any name that sounded magician-y: Benedetti the Strange, Mr. Mysterious, the Amazing Melvin, and way too many others.

  Again, I thought of the time I'd been tangled with the magician entity's essence, briefly glimpsing disgusting and horrifying moments from his life. He'd traveled widely, crossing the country by rail, performing in small towns and big cities...occasionally plucking a victim for himself, typically a girl he'd eyed from the stage during his performance. Innocent young ladies of the nineteenth century, some naive enough to be starstruck by any well-dressed man who happened to stand on a stage and amuse crowds with his talents.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated, trying to tease out any hard details at all. Exact names and dates can be hard to nail down in situations like these, which is why it's easy for people to dismiss even talented psychics as frauds. Of course, it also makes it easier for fraudsters to claim to have psychic powers, so there's a two-way street going on there.

  So I'd picked up a number of things about him—the narcissistic love of the crowd and applause, coupled with a hollow interior, a stunted emotional self that only lit up when it encountered extreme feelings. Like being cheered by a bunch of strangers in a dim, lime-lit theater that smelled of sawdust and cheap liquor. Like finding a girl, the right girl, the special girl, picking her out from a crowd...there wasn't always one, but when there was, he made his plans. Sometimes he sought to charm and delight; other times, he stalked and killed like a predator in the back alleys of dark, early-industrial cities, places where anyone could disappear without a trace. Maybe they were dead. Maybe they hopped a train and vanished forever, as people could do in those days before Social Security numbers and dense information systems.

  His thoughts had come momentarily alive in my mind, as though some trace of the magician's essence still inhabited a few of the darker folds of my brain. I knew he wasn't stupid; he kept to the bigger cities when hunting victims. If he were truly sharp, he would have avoided performing in the same cities where he committed his crimes, but I didn't think he'd gone that far. He needed the crowd, after all, just as much as he needed his nighttime bloodsport. Nothing else made him feel anything.

  I thought I was going to be sick.

  "Hey, you okay over there?" Stacey asked, turning toward me with concern in her eyes. She was looking up from her phone, which she must have found more interesting than the old black and white newspaper article projected on the microfilm reader in front of her. "Scuse me for saying, but you kinda look like you're gonna ralph all over the library. I'm pretty sure librarians hate that."

  "I'm fine," I said quickly. "Just sickened by Scary Houdini. I had a glimpse inside him, you know. There's some stuff I can't unsee. Stuff that will probably haunt my nightmares for years."

  "Oh, great!" Stacey said. "Is that helping with your research?"

  "Not as much as you'd think. There's a possible lead I ran across..." I looked back through my notepad. "There's actually a local history book that apparently has a lot to say about the theater district's history, at least the movie-palace era. I tried to reserve it for checkout, but it was listed as 'missing' on the library's database. I'll have to check with an actual librarian about that."

  "So are we any closer to capturing him?" she asked.

  "I'm wondering whether his magic closet thing stored at the theater would fit inside a booth trap," I said.

  "But don't we hate those things? They're heavy, they take forever to assemble...Calvin lost his legs during an attempted capture with one...you almost got killed by the boogeyman, too. I mean boogeywoman. That's a lot of little downsides, Ellie."

  "It's just a thought. Maybe PSI has something as big but easier to deal with."

  "Problem. Kara doesn't want us investigating Anton."

  "But Hayden and Nicholas are covering for us there," I said.

  "Which I find more than a little suspicious."

  "Me, too. But we can't wait until we've unraveled all their scheming and counterscheming. Capturing Anton takes priority. So maybe we take the big booth trap and say it's for ourselves. We can point out that it's more big, impressive gear for which we can bill our rich client. Kara wants us to run up the bill, so we run it up."

  "Okay. And then we smuggle the huge trap into the old theater? All the way upstairs?" Stacey shook her head. "It's too dangerous."

  "Or we drag the magic cabinet out of there," I said. "Normally we'd just bring it to the workshop to examine it. Calvin could look at it, and Jacob..."

  "But then we're up against the forbidden-to-investigate-Anton problem..."

  "Right, so we'd have to take it elsewhere. Hopefully that's the anchor to which the magician's ghost is attached."

  "So we just burn it," Stacey said. "Right? Take it far from the theater, burn it...maybe sever the ghost's connection to the physical plane?"

  "Maybe," I said. "But if it doesn't work, then he'll go right back to the theater. And we'll have lost the only significant possession of his that we have, our only leverage."

  "So...take the cabinet out of the theater and bury it?" Stacey asked. "In one of our ghost-town cemeteries?"

  "We could do that. But he's too vicious to bury out at Goodwell." That was a little rural town, long-abandoned, with a sturdy wall around its wooded cemetery. We typically released the less harmful, nuisan
ce-type ghosts there, to wander freely among overgrown gardens until they can work out how to move on. "You didn't see through the magician's eyes like I did. You didn't feel through his...skin and his...heart." I shuddered.

  "Reverend Blake's place, then?" Stacey asked. That was the remote, rock-walled mountain cemetery where we condemned the more dangerous souls, sealing them into the ground, in territory controlled by the powerful ghost of a dead snake-handling mountain preacher.

  "That sounds more appropriate."

  "Okay," she said. "We have a plan."

  "We need Jacob," I said. "I hate to say it, but maybe Calvin, too. We need all the help we can get."

  "Because Scary Houdini is so territorial. He doesn't want anyone else in his theater."

  "I wish. It's not that he wants us to stay out...it's more like, he wants us to come back. He was a serial killer in life, Stacey. He likes young women. And it's probably been years since he had a chance to claim a new victim."

  "So he wants to creeper-kill us?" Stacey said.

  "Yeah. I can't read his mind, but just from the memories I glimpsed...yeah, there's a good chance he's craving an opportunity to kill you and me. He almost got me last time. In fact, you should probably stay out in the van while—"

  "No way," Stacey said. "If we're doing this, I'm staying at your side in there. I don't want you to get yourself killed while I'm just sitting out in the van watching it on video like a coward. I would be, like, totally annoyed with myself forever if that happened."

  "Well, I'd hate to annoy you," I said. "All right. So maybe going in as a team and removing the magic cabinet is our best option. We'll talk with Calvin and Jacob and see when we can arrange for them to come with us."

  "Yeah, Calvin should be the one watching the monitors in the van, duh," Stacey said. "I mean, he's old, and retiring, and all that."

  "Did you find anything about the lighthouse?"

  "It's been closed since 1920, like we already read. Since then, there have been rumors of it being haunted. A lady in white was seen at the railing.”