by JL Bryan
"It's barely dark," Hayden said.
"Dark enough. This food looks great, but uh...I ate earlier."
"Oh." Hayden looked crestfallen.
"Yep. Big Chinese buffet place. So..."
"I'm still eating." Stacey was digging into the crusty fried food like it was heavenly ambrosia. Her chin shone with grease.
"Thank you. At least there's one person around here appreciating my fine cuisine."
I poked at my own crazy-greasy fillet with a fork and waited until it was time to get to work. The only good thing about the reek of fish in the house was that it probably smelled more like it had when the ghostly inhabitants of the property were still alive. They likely had eaten fish often, spinach smoothies never.
After dinner and an extensive clean-up period, thanks to the huge mess Hayden had made, it was time to get started.
We managed to convince Hayden to head out to the van and watch the monitors while we did the walk-through. If he noticed anything odd happening, he could let us know.
Finally, we stood in the front room of the house, Stacey recording Jacob on video. We'd turned out most of the lights throughout the place.
Jacob remained silent for a minute, his eyes closed, as if listening, trying to hear distant music around a hillside or through a wall of stone, music that might not even be there at all.
"I think..." Jacob finally said. "...it's almost like...all the activity in this house is jammed into this general area." He indicated the front room where we stood, part of the original caretaker's cabin. "Some upstairs, some downstairs. But most of the house has almost no energies at all, not even a residual...like it's never been inhabited. Like it was just built. It's so weird."
"It's not weird," I said. "You're right on the money with all of that."
"I'll take your word for it." He walked along the front room, feeling the original rock walls, the small fireplace. "Families lived in here. I'm seeing people from long ago, colonial-era, antebellum...tragedy and suffering. Another family takes their place for a while. All the spirits here are pretty old. I feel like they've been drowsing, maybe for a century, but recent events have awoken them."
"Can you tell us any names?" I asked. "Or describe any individuals?"
"There's...the strongest personality is male. I get a sense of a very burly guy, a very salty guy, a guy who'd seen a lot in his time. A guy who liked his whiskey and women. A strong relationship with the ocean. Maybe he was a sailor or fisherman. Then he lived here, so I'm guessing he serviced the big lighthouse out there...okay, come with me."
Jacob led us on a winding course, occasionally bumping into walls and shaking his head. "None of this was here," he murmured, more than once.
Stacey and I followed a few paces behind, giving him plenty of distance while he read the place.
He led us out the side door, into the enclosed hallway, all the way to the area in front of the caretaker's bungalow where Zoe had seen the ghost tromping around.
With an exasperated sigh, Jacob led us back and forth, finally relaxing when we emerged into the garden and could walk more freely. He trampled a flowerbed as if it wasn't there at all.
"This was all just a path through some woods," Jacob said. "He would come out here all the time. This was his regular path. I can feel it like a groove in a worry stone. He'd come out and check the light. He had to keep the light going."
We followed Jacob down toward the beach, along the jetty of boulders.
"The guy's always walking out here. He's been doing it, in one way or another, alive or dead, for...a long time. The lighthouse is his obsession."
Jacob continued along the jetty, very slowly, the great boulders passing like mile markers. The tide was only starting to come in for the night. High tide would arrive just a bit after midnight. The beach lay wide open, the expanse of sand pale and almost inviting in the moonlight. Dark water reflected stars out to the horizon.
As the land narrowed to the rocky spur where the lighthouse sat, Jacob came to a halt.
"There's anticipation," Jacob said. "Yeah, he has to check the light, because it's just fire...it's a long time ago. It's not electric. This guy never saw an electric light in his life. It's just a giant candle, and it can go out. He stops here, sometimes, and looks up..."
The water lapped against the land. Jacob stood with his eyes closed. The night was clear, but the air felt electric.
"There's someone waiting for him in there," Jacob said. "Not all the time, but some nights. He longs for those nights. It's a feminine energy. Not his wife."
"Ohhh," Stacey and I both said at once. We looked at each other and snickered. Jacob smiled a little, too.
"Are you saying he's having an affair?"
"That's what I'm seeing. He's coming out here to check on the light, making sure it keeps burning...and that's where he meets this other lady. I don't know how many times it happened, but it was more than once." Jacob resumed walking, getting close to the lighthouse now.
He didn't hesitate, but started right up the slick, barnacle-encrusted stairs, up and around the dark granite tower.
"Watch your step," I warned them both as we ascended. "Keep close to the wall, away from the edge." That seemed obvious, but Jacob could lose touch with the real world, sometimes, drawn into a trance by his visions of the dead.
Stacey looked worried. She knew this as well as I did, and she stayed close behind him, holding out a hand as if expecting him to tumble and fall.
"There's more of that anticipation, that excitement as he climbs the stairs," Jacob said. "Even when she's not here, he thinks of the times when she is. He feels guilt, but it kind of excites him, too...He's a man accustomed to discipline, to prayer, to righteousness, you know. And now he has this lover."
"Can you tell us anything about her?" I asked.
We reached the archway blocked by the barred gate. We could ascend no farther, at least not without breaking and entering. We were already trespassing on federal land.
Jacob touched each of the bars in turn, in a way that sort of made me think of changing the stations on a car radio, searching for a signal while driving through rural countryside, or flipping channels with a remote, searching for something halfway decent to watch.
While he did that, I peered into the shadows beyond, where the staircase turned up and out of sight. My white-silhouetted friend wasn't there, as far as I could see, and I didn't feel any cold spots forming within. I even reached a hand inside, trying to sense anything, maybe trying to lure her out, but there was no response.
I'd been asking questions the last time she came to see me, and this time I was completely quiet. I couldn't start with that again right now without interfering with Jacob's reading of the place.
"Something's in there," he finally said. His voice was low, as if he wasn't completely happy to be making the announcement. "I think it's trapped."
"Can you tell if it's male or female?" I asked.
"It's not sharing anything with me..." Jacob's eyes were shut tight, squeezing as if to keep any light out. "I want to say female."
"The same female that the light-keeper was coming out to meet?"
"Yes. No. Maybe. Sometimes..." Jacob bared his teeth. "Ugh. She doesn't want to give me anything. She's retreating high up into the tower..." He finally opened his eyes. He tried giving the heavy barred gate a shake, but it didn't budge. "I don't suppose anybody has a key to this thing."
"It doesn't come with the house," I said. "I guess the government was willing to sell the old wreck of a cottage, but not the lighthouse."
"Or maybe she didn't want the lighthouse," Jacob said. "That would be a major liability, insurance-wise, and a monster of an expense to upkeep. Who would want to own it?"
"You're so smart, Jacob." Stacey took his hand and laid a kiss on him.
"I could have told you that," Hayden muttered over the headset.
"It's not just me she's avoiding," Jacob said. He released the bars and backed away from them. Then he looked d
own at the water lapping against the land below, close to the lighthouse, gradually drawing closer as the night darkened and deepened. "It's...come on, let's get away from here."
"Why?" I asked, but Jacob just took Stacey's hand and started down the steps.
I remained where I was, looking down toward the water slowly drawing in on all sides of the lighthouse. I couldn't see anything, but maybe if I listened, there was something irregular among the sloshing liquid of the ocean, something that might have been a footstep, a whisper...
"Now, Ellie!" Jacob actually came back up and grabbed me with his other hand.
"What are you seeing?" I asked.
"Torment. Come on!"
"Come on!" Stacey added, grabbing my arm to pull me along.
"Okay, okay. Less abusively, please." I started down the steps, spurred by whatever nameless horror Jacob was seeing below. I don't always trust people who claim to be psychic—typically my trust level starts at zero, and tends to drop from there, and that applies to most people and not just psychics—but there are definitely people with real abilities in the world, and experience had made it clear to me that Jacob was one of them.
Down and around we went, three times around the tower, counterclockwise in the moonlight, widdershins if you're into witchcraft. It's the direction of bad luck and dark magic, so they say. My luck was pretty bad anyway, so I doubted I had much to lose.
We hit the small patch of land that remained around the lighthouse base, but Jacob wasn't satisfied. He pulled us along the jetty, along the narrow path of sand that remained above water, and didn't slow until we arrived at the wider beach.
I turned back, still not sure what he was freaking out about.
As a low, flattening wave of black water flowed up the beach toward us, something emerged from it. It was shadowy, but had the general shape of a person on their hands and knees, crawling out of the water. It didn't have the detail of a real, living person.
Then the wave receded, and the shape was gone, as if it had just been a momentary optical illusion created by the intersection of moonlight and incoming tide.
If I'd been alone on the beach, that might have been exactly what I would have told myself.
But I wasn't alone.
"Jacob?" I said.
"Nobody should go out into the water," he said. "Not even the shallow part, not even during broad daylight on the most sunny, cloudless day you can imagine. Nobody should ever swim from this beach."
"Why not?" I asked.
"When I look out there...right there, in the rocky shallows along the beach...it looks like...do you remember the swimming pool in Poltergeist? The rotten bodies coming up through the water, grabbing at people—"
"Yes!" Stacey said, cutting him off.
"There are a bunch of dead people right there," he said. "They're rotten and bloated. They're stuck, they're trapped. Some of them are even wrapped in chains."
I shivered, thinking of the shipwreck and the dozen people who'd drowned, the slaves particularly doomed by their shackles.
"They're surrounding the lighthouse," he said. "Moving in with the tide. They'll be crawling all over it when the water reaches it. I think....maybe they're the reason the other one is trapped inside the lighthouse. Maybe they're waiting out here for her."
"Why?" I asked.
"I couldn't tell you, but I don't think it's because they want to have a surprise tea party," Jacob said. "They are angry, vengeful dead. Nobody should go out there among them. They might drown people just for fun, or to make a statement."
"Can you tell how many there are?" I asked.
"They're really squirming around and through each other," he said. "I'd say...more than a couple...maybe ten or twenty? That's very rough, don't quote me."
"I won't."
"Back up some more," Jacob said, as the next wave of water crawled a little higher on the beach, coming a little closer to us.
I looked out at the water, imagining dead people crawling in the shadows. Had one of them grabbed me when I was a kid? Had it wanted to drown me, to make me join their number haunting the rocks around the beach and the lighthouse? From what Jacob had said, that sounded very possible.
I shuddered as we backed away from the water. A potent and unpleasant mix of feelings swirled inside me—the icy fear of a child who'd brushed against death, the knowledge that the things that had grabbed me were still out there, only a few paces away.
The dark shape that had rolled in with the tide on its hands and knees might well have been the same thing that had grabbed me years ago.
"Is there anything else?" I asked Jacob. "Or are we done here?"
"We can be done here," Jacob said, softly, as if he'd heard the fearful tremble in my voice.
The three of us stayed close as we moved away from the beach, back to the relative safety of the house. We took up our spots for the night in the caretaker's bungalow. Jacob eventually snoozed in the bedroom, being an early-to-riser rather than a night owl by nature, while Stacey and I sat out in the living room, watching video feeds over laptops and tablets, researching what we could.
I tried not to think about the things Jacob had described in the water, spirits lingering among the sharp rocks, in the shadow of the dead lighthouse all these years.
Chapter Twenty
After daybreak, I made it home, fed the cat, adjusted the blackout curtains, and hit the bed. My cat sat on my chest and probably tried to steal my breath like in the older, darker fairy tales.
My rest was abruptly interrupted a few hours later, unfortunately, by the arrival of a sizable new wrinkle in our movie-star case.
Hayden, who was dutifully staying at the posh mansion to carry out our house-sitting obligations—not that he minded it one bit—called me repeatedly, and finally I pulled myself out of bed to answer.
"Yo," he said, when I did. "We have kind of a problem."
"Tell me you accidentally caught one of the ghosts and just need help disposing of it," I said.
"Yeah, no. Yeah. You should probably just come down here. Explaining would take a long time, and then you'd still have to come. Because I don't know, bro. I'm not trained to handle this whole, you know, region of activity and issues."
"What are you blabbering about?" I asked, sitting up and rubbing my eyes. Three hours of actual, solid sleep? Four? Definitely not enough.
"They're here at the front gate," Hayden said. "Meet you right here. Right now."
"Huh? They? Who's there, Hayden?" I asked my beeping phone as it disconnected, because he'd seriously just hung up on me.
I grunted as I got dressed. I had no idea what was going on, but if Hayden was actually claiming that he was too incompetent to handle the situation, I had no choice but to believe him.
I angrily made instant coffee, angrily pulled my unwashed hair back into a ponytail, angrily laced up my boots and drove angrily out of the city and over the bridge to the client's house.
The little unlined road split off from the highway, branching toward the northern spur of the island, obscured from the main road by an ever-thicker screen of pine and palm trees.
By the time I reached the gate blocking the road—the client's house was still out of sight here, around the bend and obscured by thick trees and high fences—I had some sense of the scope of the problem.
Hayden stood just inside the gate, leaning against the black PSI van, which he'd pulled up and parked. He seemed to be cringing as much as leaning, actually.
Another car sat on the outside of the gate, turned slantwise, blocking the entire road in front of me. This actually wasn't an amazing feat, considering how far the weeds had encroached on either side of the road, but it was clear that whoever had parked that way intended to make themselves a nuisance. Nobody could get in or out of Alyssa Wagner's estate unless that car moved.
The car itself looked saggy and ill, a rust-spotted Plymouth hatchback that might have been twenty years old. One window was cracked and partially patched with cardboard.
/> I parked my own twenty-ish Camaro behind it and got out.
A small family—the hatchback's passengers, I assumed—sat on one side of the road, under the shade of the trees. A towheaded boy of three or four toddled among the wildflowers there. He tried to pull a flower free, failed, and collapsed to his knees wailing. His sister, a few years older and wandering nearby, looked over at him and stuck out her tongue.
Also wailing was a baby in a car seat, which had been removed from the car and set in the weedy shade. The baby, in a stained zebra-striped onesy, was getting the attention of the only adult on the scene. The woman, a little older than me but not by much—maybe thirty—was lifting the baby out to comfort him (or her, I really didn't know yet).
With the baby in her arms, the woman rose to face me as I approached. She was pretty and blonde, with so much make-up that it actually seemed to dampen her looks. She wore a pink leopard-print dress over black leggings and high heels.
"What's up?" I asked, glancing from her to Hayden.
"This lady says—" Hayden began.
"I can speak for myself," she said. "I know this is my sister's house. I don't know if she's hiding from me in there, or if it's just a bunch of servants waiting for her to come back like in Beauty and the Beast. But y'all need to let me in. I need to see her. Even if it's just for a minute."
"Well, she's out of town right now," I said.
"You call her," the woman insisted. "You call her and tell her I'm here."
"I'm sorry, I didn't get your name yet."
"And I didn't get yours," she countered. "Hang on." She focused on sliding a bottle into the baby's mouth.
"I'm Ellie Jordan," I said. "My agency is helping to provide security for this property."
"This property is my family's," the woman insisted. She really was strikingly pretty, even through her excessive makeup, and it wasn't hard to see a resemblance to Alyssa Wagner. This woman could just as well have been the movie star in the family, if looks were all that mattered.
"We haven't been authorized to allow any visitors," I said.