by JL Bryan
"You've got cameras all over," he said. "What's wrong with those? Not good enough?"
"They don't catch everything," I replied. "Plus, ghosts are sometimes more responsive to an actual living presence."
"We got three living presences in the house already."
"I suppose it can wait," I said. "You guys still planning to leave town tomorrow?"
"We'll be in and out over the next couple weeks," Delavius said. "Alyssa is the only one who likes to stay at the house. If it's just me or Zoe, you'll find us staying at the Atlantis Inn. It's on the opposite end of this island, in a crowded spot, pretty much as far as you can get from this house without actually leaving the island."
"Because of the ghosts?" I asked. "I thought you only saw one out on the beach, and it didn't bother you."
"Didn't bother me? I can't even look out there without getting chills. Every night I sleep here, I lie in my bed thinking about it. Mostly I don't sleep, I just think about when I followed that walking shadow along the boulders toward the lighthouse. And how it disappeared." He shook his head. "It bothered me plenty."
"I just meant, it didn't attack you," I said. "Or Zoe. All it did was appear, then disappear again."
Delavius looked at me with his eyebrows raised for a long moment, like he was judging just how crazy I was.
"Listen," he finally said. "You think anybody wants to hang around here until we get attacked? Maybe in your world, the stuff we've seen isn't much—maybe you've seen worse—for a regular person who doesn't hang around haunted houses using...whatever those things are..." He gestured toward our scanners. "What I saw was scary enough to bug any normal person. That's all."
"Gotcha," I said. "And you're right. We're not normal. So, in light of how worried you are about the haunting, maybe you should let us in?"
"Yeah! We can check the house for ghosts, and then you'll get some peace of mind," Stacey said. "We can even check your room, so you can sleep easy, knowing nothing's there." She frowned. "Unless of course, there is something there...have you ever felt like someone was watching when you were alone in there? Or even feel something touch you, like a cold finger, or a cold breath on your neck—"
"I can already tell I'll be sleeping better." Delavius shook his head and retreated into the house, disappearing into the shadows again. Most of the lights were out; apparently D-Train was maneuvering by the moonlight seeping through the windows, plus a lamp or two deeper inside the house. "Come on in. Let's see what you can see."
We followed him into the massively expanded old house. I peered at the antique decorations, some of them just artifacts, like a rustic old hand-operated butter churn, complete with the wooden churning stick, or whatever they call it, just parked in a corner of the kitchen like Alyssa Wagner or her staff would be using it to whip milk.
A snug downstairs sitting room with some built-in bookshelves had a similar element, a big old metal milk can parked next to the fireplace, with a bouquet of bright orchids growing out the top. A hand-stitched quilt hung on the wall like a tapestry, its squares depicting birds and flowers. The piece looked ancient, the threads stiff and worn.
"She must have had a decorator scavenging antiques for her," Stacey said. "Like that globe on the bookshelf. It looks super-old."
"Alyssa was pretty involved in all that," Delavius said. "You'd think she would just hire someone to remodel and redecorate, then move in when it's done." He glanced out in the hall as if to make sure nobody else was there, listening. "Or, you know, spend all the money, throw a party or two, and then never visit again, like a lot of these Hollywood folks. She's got a place in Manhattan where she hasn't been in almost a year. Place in Aspen, it's been more like two and a half years. But this house is special to her. You can tell. She's intense about it. She usually doesn't care—houses, boats, cars, she wants them fancy but doesn't care about the details."
"They're just status symbols," Stacey said, nodding sagely, like she'd been studying the psychology of the rich and famous for years.
"Yeah, but not this one. This one's personal. She's gonna be really unhappy if it goes wrong and she has to give up on the house."
"Any idea why she cares so much?" I asked.
"Maybe her family. Maybe something from her childhood. I don't really know."
We moved into the kitchen, with a massive restaurant-size stove, fully modern but styled to look like an old Franklin-type stove from the 1800s. The refrigerator, freezer, and most everything else were tucked behind rugged cabinet doors. The counters were all butcher block, looking like antique tabletops complete with years' worth of knife scratches and chop marks. The hanging light fixtures were elaborate black iron sculptures.
"Whoa," Stacey said, poking around. "She really went period piece on this whole thing. Must've cost an extra fortune. Guess those Superhero League checks were super-sized."
"What does her family have to do with this place?" I asked Delavius.
"Well, they're all from Georgia," he said. “Some small, rural place. I'm not sure where.”
"Alyssa Wagner's from Georgia?" Stacey shook her head. "No, I looked her up. Celebrity research, I'm good at that. Her father was in Special Forces. She moved around the world, eventually going to an elite boarding school in Switzerland—"
Delavius smiled and nodded. "Yeah. That's what I meant to say. All that's true."
"None of it's true," I said. "That's what you're saying."
"That is definitely not what I'm saying."
"But you just told us—"
"Look at the time, y'all." He made no movement to check his gold Movado watch or his phone. "I shouldn't be running my mouth here. Close the door on your way out. It'll lock itself."
"I really need to know about her family," I said.
"And I need to keep my job. She hired you, right? You can ask her. Just make sure my name stays out of the conversation."
"Can I just ask one more—" I began.
"Nope. Good night." He hurried away down the hall.
"Wait, we never checked your room for ghosts," Stacey said.
"I'll take my chances." He closed and locked the door to his small first-floor suite. It was located near the front door, so he could respond quickly to any threats.
"I feel like he was kind of ditching us there at the end," Stacey said to me.
"Yeah, clearly," I said. "He let slip some classified information about his employer."
"Ooh, classified." Stacey nodded quickly. "So you think Alyssa Wagner is...secretly a spy?"
"A...what?" I asked. "No. I mean she clearly has a false public biography, probably put together by a publicist or her agent or somebody. Her employees aren't supposed to let slip any information to contradict that. Delavius slipped up, but that helps us. There may be something personal connecting Alyssa to this place. Something she doesn't want to tell us about."
"Well, if she doesn't want to tell us, how does that help? She's not paying us to investigate her."
"Yeah, that does make things awkward." We passed through the dining room and out into the huge ultra-comfy movie theater of the living room. "There's nothing happening again tonight. Let's check out and lay low for a while." Wandering around the client's house while she was home, whispering gossip about her, wasn't the most comfortable situation for me.
We left by the side door, and I heard it lock itself as we walked away, as though some ghost had thrown the deadbolt to keep us out. Though Delavius had told us it would do that, it was still spooky to hear, as though some invisible force was glad to see us depart the old light-keeper's house.
Chapter Fourteen
"Maybe we should split up for a while," I suggested to Stacey as we walked the final stretch of the outdoor hallway toward the little caretaker's bungalow at the end. "You watch this spot, I'll go where Delavius saw the ghost."
"Splitting up is a good way to make the ghost pop out and attack you, though, isn't it?" Stacey asked.
"At this point, I'd just about welcome it, provided the gho
st was fairly weak in the psychokinetic department. So far, this place is showing no sign of paranormal activity."
"So we're acting as bait," Stacey said. "Each of us."
"It won't be the first time. So you take the bungalow, I'll take the beach."
"Aw, I knew you had a soft spot for the outdoors."
"Huh?"
"I mean, you never go hiking with me, except when we're disposing of a nasty ghost at Reverend Blake's cemetery. So you're not that into deciduous forests...but something about the beach brings out the romantic in you. Am I right?"
"Nope," I said. "I just want a closer look at the lighthouse.”
“Okay, sure. Just don't get too close. It's rickety and old, remember."
"Thanks for the reminder." I clicked on my headset. "Let me know if you see anything in here."
"Oh, you mean like the dark shadow of an undead lighthouse keeper?" Stacey asked. "Yeah, I'd probably mention something if that happened."
"Good. Keep your ears on."
"Ladies!" Hayden's voice crackled over our headsets. "So glad to hear you transmitting, finally. I was wondering whether I should run in there for a rescue extraction."
"Please. Like you haven't been watching and listening the whole time." I pointed to the nearest tripod-mounted camera, broadcasting a night-vision feed from the outdoor hallway to the van where Hayden sat. "Like some kind of digital stalker."
"It's my job! I'm supposed to be looking for ghosts. And hey, I think I see one now! Right behind you, Ellie."
I rolled my eyes and turned to look at Stacey.
"She's so hot," Hayden said. "Blond, must have died young..."
"Ew," Stacey said. "You're talking about me? Like I'm dead?"
"I didn't mean—I was just saying—"
"Let's have radio silence for a while," I said. "Walking around and running our mouths hasn't gotten us anywhere tonight."
"Sounds good," Hayden hurried to say. "As long as Stacey thinks it's a good—"
"I do," she interrupted.
"Okay. Silence starts now, unless anomalies are observed," I said.
"What if the anomaly is a total babe-of-my-dreams who's really good with electronics?" Hayden asked. "That's not just anomalous, it's a once-in-a-lifetime chance to—"
"Get fired for harassment," Stacey finished for him.
"Uh...maybe that radio silence thing now," Hayden said.
"Sounds perfect."
When their conversation finally ended, I stepped through a glass door decorated with organic steel curves resembling marsh grass, and like the curlicues on the front door, it was so pretty you almost couldn't tell it had a security function. Should anyone try to break through the glass walls or doors of the outside hallway, they'd encounter a difficult-to-penetrate layer of sharp steel marsh grass. Breaking into the hallway wasn't as easy as it looked, anyway; the glass was bulletproof, the same stuff you'd find in the windows of a dictator's limo.
Outside, I turned the audio down on my headphones, so I could still hear Stacey or Hayden if they spoke up, but I didn't have to listen to the minute details of Hayden's nose breathing.
Night insects buzzed in the trees. A row of palms screened off the ocean to one side of me, adding some security against boat-borne paparazzi.
I walked through a garden abundant with autumn flowers. Orange and red oak leaves carpeted the ground, crunching under my boots as I passed below spreading limbs. Few trees look as if they contain as many occult secrets as big ancient oaks like the one in Alyssa's garden, its gnarled arms curling and spreading in all directions, the thick Spanish moss adding curtains and more dark shadows. For a moment I thought of the Corinthian theater, with its twisting back warren of little rooms, its years of ghosts and secrets so thick that even a powerful spirit like Anton might be hiding among them, his energy camouflaged by the presence of so many others.
My enemy had gone underground. When I was awake, Anton was nowhere to be found. I could only find his burnt remnants, like a trail of ash leading nowhere. The site of my old house had been churned up for possible construction—a terrible idea, but I wasn't sure how to persuade the project owners to leave the cursed piece of property alone. Hadn't they read about all the other houses that had burned down in the same spot? Didn't they care? Those would be the sorts of questions I needed to ask.
The company, A&G Properties, was low-key, a little house-flipping concern that was also in the house-rental business. It was located in Augusta—I just needed to head to their offices one morning. When you're bringing news of bad ghosts, it's best to do it in person. Something like that sounds way too crazy by email, and people naturally assume it's just step one in some bizarre Nigerian prince banking scam, only with ghosts.
Thinking of my old house and my long-lost parents, I strolled out to the beach, walking next to the long row of boulders leading toward the lighthouse promontory. It was the natural path to follow, like a low fence made of rock, fairly inconvenient to cross.
I walked out along the damp sand toward the dark water. I tried to see the spot where I'd almost drowned, but nothing stood out. It was all sand and rocks, water and stars. I must have been fairly close to the lighthouse, though.
I looked at the lightless old tower now. The tide was trickling in, water puddling near the base of the boulders, but I could still walk out toward the lighthouse. The waves were so shallow that they only soaked the bottom inch or so of my boots.
A gentle breeze came at me across the ocean, smelling like salt and fish. The night was clear again; the Weather Channel kept warning about a major tropical storm forming a few hundred miles south, maybe even a hurricane, but the rain here seemed to have stopped altogether. Maybe all the rain clouds had been sucked down to the Caribbean for a moment...probably to return black and heavy with thunder and lightning.
Okay, so I'm not an expert on how weather works.
I walked through the sloshy, sandy puddles of the spur of land. The base of the lighthouse, plus the countless boulders jutting up all around it, were covered in shells, barnacles, and oysters, as if to make the area even less welcoming. If you were to trip and fall too close to the lighthouse, there were thousands of sharp edges and points waiting to slice you up.
I could see the bottom stair, wet and green with seaweed, the ocean water starting to gather around it. Slipping off the exterior steps would send you crashing into all those hard, sharp shells and rocks.
The lighthouse's exterior steps, permanently damp with the constant ocean spray, wound up about twenty feet above the low-tide ground level before reaching the archway that led inside. Presumably, the stairs continued to spiral up inside the tower, too, until they reached the lantern and walkway at the top. They might have collapsed into disrepair over the decades, though, making the lighthouse inaccessible.
I held up the scanner and took some readings in front of the lighthouse. Thermals were more than a little thrown off by the constant spray from the ocean. Night vision didn't reveal much. I clicked on the scanner's built-in flashlight and tried to look at the arched entrance to the lighthouse above, but the light was too weak.
Switching to my trusted tactical flashlight, I threw a powerful beam that brought out the entrance in sharp detail, twenty feet above.
The archway was outlined by small stones cemented into the big slabs of dark Georgia granite that formed the bulk of the lighthouse's outer walls. A metal gate was built across the entrance; it was sloppily constructed, I thought, a little too wide and too short for the opening.
NO TRESPASSING, read the sign on the front of the gate. FEDERAL PROPERTY, another added, to let you know you weren't just committing a local crime if you entered.
Given the lighthouse's visible prominence at the intersection of river and ocean, and a century or so of general neglect, it was surprisingly free of vandalism. Maybe the bombardment of rain and ocean water scrubbed any attempts at spray painting.
Up close, in the glare of a powerful tactical flashlight, the lighthouse d
idn't look nearly so solid and permanent as it did from a distance. Hairline cracks ran up and across the granite faces, and some of them weren't quite so hairline. More like thumb-line. I could have stuck my biggest toe into some of those cracks. I wondered if the inside of the lighthouse leaked when it rained.
I circled the tower slowly, carefully, stepping into water between the sharp, shell-encrusted boulders. It was lapping up to my ankles here. The tide was moving in, but I probably had a good hour or more before the lighthouse was really cut off from the rest of the island. Even then, it would be a shallow walk back across to the beach.
At the front of the tower, about halfway up, a small arched window looked out across the ocean. I tightened up the iris on my flashlight and pointed the concentrated beam at the window. It had no glass, only empty frames where the glass had been. It wasn't barred like the door below; presumably any burglars or vandals would have given up before climbing fifty feet of wet granite to reach the small window.
I certainly wasn't going to try climbing the outside of that tower myself. I'm not King Kong.
Higher still, at the top of the lighthouse, was the railing of the walkway, encircling it like an open-roofed cage. No ghostly figure stood there tonight, outlined among the stars. The handheld scanner didn't reveal much when I held it up, but even the window was probably too far away for a small thermal camera to discern anything meaningful. If any ghosts wanted to make themselves known to me from up there, they would have to give me a shout, or at least a nice glowing apparition
"I'm going for an EVP session," I said into my headset. "I'll be radio silent for a minute."
"As opposed to...?" Hayden asked. It was a rhetorical question, or at least a sarcastic one.
"Just letting you know. And Stacey. Mainly Stacey." I turned down the volume, so any response he made was sadly missed by me.
I set the handheld scanner aside on a boulder for the moment, since I didn't have a place to secure it on my utility belt. I kept my trusty tactical light in one hand, then took out a sensitive digital voice recorder with the other.