by JL Bryan
Maybe Alyssa's policy would change now that her family had arrived right in the middle of our investigation. I hoped so. Because if the presence of one of the keeper's descendants—Alyssa herself—had been enough to stir up the ghosts, then having four of them under the roof at the same time was sure to attract some activity.
When I caught up with Stacey again, I told her it might turn into a busy night.
We checked the cameras in the big living room. They were pointed out through the two-story glass wall, capturing the jetty of boulders as well as the lighthouse itself. While some of our equipment was reasonably water-resistant, the weather forecast called for high winds and scattered lightning in addition to a torrential rain. We probably wouldn't capture much through the glass, but we would have captured even less through a blurry lens on a camera blown over by the storm.
“Looking good to me,” Hayden said, standing a little behind us as though supervising or inspecting our work.
“I got the kids to sleep. Steffy wanted her own room, so I let her pick one.” Tammy descended the hanging spiral-mobile stairs from the balcony above. She scowled at the lack of handrails. “Have to keep them off this thing,” she muttered.
“How are they doing?” Hayden asked, trying clumsily to ingratiate himself. “Are they, uh...happy?”
“They lost their home where we lived for almost two years, they've been living out of a car for a week, their daddies ain't no help, and now they're in a strange place and don't have any idea what's going to happen next.” Tammy lit a cigarette and shook her head. “How do you think they feel?”
“Um...I don't know...I'm not really a kid expert...” Hayden mumbled, looking out the window.
“I don't think smoking is allowed inside the house,” Stacey said.
“You just let me worry about my sister and what she allows,” Tammy said.
Stacey looked at me, horrified, but I just shrugged. Alyssa was hurrying back within a couple of days now, before the really bad weather arrived and made flying impossible. She could deal with her family herself. So far, Tammy was being nicer to me than Alyssa had been. More helpful, too.
“It's dark out there,” I said. “Shouldn't you be in the monitoring center, Hayden?”
“You mean the van?” Hayden glanced at Tammy, who was half-turned away from him, ignoring him like he was a boring piece of furniture. “I thought, with the storm, I might stay in, you know, make sure everybody feels safe...”
“Get in the van,” Stacey said. “Or are you scared of a little rain?”
“Scared?” Hayden stiffened up and crossed his arms. “Not me. Definitely not scared. Not of rain.” He looked at Tammy again to see whether this impressed her, but she was looking out the glass wall at the rainy night, lost in her own thoughts.
Hayden finally went back where he belonged. Tammy holed up in a small sitting room to watch the Kardashians on TV until she went to bed.
Stacey and I took up our positions in the caretaker's bungalow, occupying the couch that was starting to feel almost like home, tablets and laptops around us so we could check the various video and audio feeds from around the house.
The rain pounded faster, and the world grew darker around us. It definitely wasn't a quiet night. Lightning began to flash over the ocean, followed by low rumbles of thunder.
“You think the hurricane's really gonna hit us?” Stacey asked.
“It's not supposed to land for a few days, if it even happens,” I said. “Anyway, Savannah's usually safe. We're protected by our barrier islands.”
“Yeah, but...we're on a barrier island, looking right out at the ocean from a house that was once destroyed by a hurricane...near a lighthouse that was once destroyed by a storm...”
“That's true. But you know how to swim.”
“Very funny. People died right here, Ellie. During storms like this one.”
“Hopefully that means the storm will bring them out,” I said. “So we can study and capture them.”
“Maybe we should put out some little traps,” Stacey said. “Just bait them with candles. It works sometimes.”
She had a point. We dashed out to the cargo van under our umbrellas and returned with five traps outfitted with clamshell devices. These could be set to close when the temperature inside the trap fell or the electromagnetic energy inside them spiked. Unlike the big pneumatic stampers we prefer to use, the clamshells closed slowly. Those extra seconds can make all the difference when you're facing a powerful entity that's trying to kill you, which is a situation that comes up all too often in my life.
We turned the lights low everywhere and set the traps out like odd, cylindrical glass luminaries. I wasn't sure how to explain them to Tammy—I supposed I could have gone wild and just told her the truth—but that didn't come up. She went to bed, joining her toddler Kyle in the king bed upstairs, the baby sleeping in her car seat, as there wasn't a crib of any kind available. Tammy had lost hers with her apartment, along with other items of furniture that wouldn't fit in her car when she got evicted. She had no money to rent a truck, storage, or a new apartment.
I felt bad for her. Maybe her sister would help her out. Alyssa clearly had a long-standing grudge against her own family, but maybe she could at least help provide the kids a place to live. It would only take a sliver of what she'd spent to buy the old keeper's cottage and transform it into an expansive, luxuriously appointed mansion with a three-bedroom guest house.
With the traps out, Stacey and I retreated again to the caretaker's bungalow. The rain poured, the lightning flashed, and we waited.
Later, we made a foray around the main house and the guest house, using our new handheld scanners to search for anomalies. We found a few weird energy spikes and slight cold spots, but nothing that couldn't have been potentially caused by wiring or drafts.
Even later, I continued my attempts to correlate the travels of the Antoni Brothers circus with any murdered or vanished young women, but I didn't have a lot of data to work with. Maybe our killer magician had been with them a while—if so, it was likely under the name Professor Mystery, which sounded like a pretty plausible precursor of the stage name Aldous the Mysterious.
It was also difficult to find hard data on specific dates and times when Aldous had performed most of his shows. Nobody had been obsessive enough to preserve the exact schedules of every vaudeville theater in the country over a period of decades, apparently. And if they had, they certainly hadn't uploaded that data online anywhere.
Thunder rumbled, and then the lights went out. I actually didn't notice until Stacey mentioned it. The only light we had on was the lamp in the corner, anyway. Our screens had dimmed, moving to a power-save mode as soon as they noticed they weren't charging anymore.
Then we heard the scream. A microphone on the first floor of the main house picked it up, faintly. It must have come from the second floor.
Stacey and I looked at each other for about half a second, then raced out of the little bungalow, up the enclosed hallway, through the lightning-flashes of the storm, to the main house.
I wasn't sure who had screamed. It had been long, wordless, a primal expression of terror.
I gripped my tactical flashlight and led the way into the dark house. The lights didn't turn on. The power was out here.
We heard a commotion upstairs and ran up the dark stairway, ready to face whatever horror had appeared tonight.
Chapter Twenty-Three
By the time we reached the upstairs of the main house, there were more voices, and more crying. One of the crying voices was clearly the baby.
We reached the guest suite where Tammy was staying and shone our lights inside, illuminating the scrambled sheets and blankets of an empty king bed. The baby was missing from her car seat, too.
The cries led us down the hall, to the smaller bedroom Steffy had selected for herself. This one was decorated with a black dog statue sitting on the fireplace hearth.
Steffy was crying, clinging to her mother, wh
o sat on the edge of the bed with the baby in one arm. Kyle crouched on the floor, folded up into an almost fetal position, his whole body hitching as he cried.
“What's wrong?” I asked, shining my light around the room. Stacey went to comfort the little boy, since her mother was clearly overwhelmed with the other two kids. “We heard screaming.”
“Steffy thought she saw something,” Tammy said. “We'll be fine. Nobody's hurt.”
“I did see it,” Steffy said, almost too quiet to hear. She barely managed to whine the words out between her softening cries. “It was real.”
“Can you tell me what you saw?” I asked, moving closer.
“I'm sure it was just her imagination,” Tammy said. “Sleeping in a strange room, in a strange house, that's all—”
“I'm not making it up!” Steffy yelled. “She was here. She was looking at me when I opened my eyes. But I knew she was there even before I opened them. I could feel her. The room was so cold.”
“Nobody said you're making it up, Steffy,” I said, which drew a scowl at me from her mother, for some reason. Maybe she didn't like me trying to comfort her kid, or maybe she really thought Steffy was making up something for attention. Maybe Tammy was just exhausted and frustrated because her first chance to sleep in a nice bed in several days was interrupted so quickly. “Can you describe it to me? You said it was a her?”
“Yes. I think she was a mermaid. A bad mermaid.”
“There's no such thing as mermaids,” Tammy snorted. “Steffy, you need to hush your mouth and get back to sleep.”
“She was dripping wet,” Steffy continued. She pointed to her face, red and soaked in tears. “She was leaning over me, and her face was awful. Her hair dripped on me. The water was cold and smelly.”
“Can you tell me anything else?” I asked. “Like what she was wearing?”
Tammy blew out a long, exasperated breath, as if my questions were just making things worse.
“Seaweed,” Steffy said. “She wore seaweed. And chains, rusty chains. Maybe some kind of old clothes. Mostly the seaweed. She smelled like rotten veggies. Her skin was all white and green and puffed up. Her eyes and mouth were just black, like holes...” Steffy let out another cry, then started weeping loudly again.
“Gee, thanks a bazillion,” Tammy said to me, patting her daughter's back. “That's such a big help.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Sometimes if we talk about what scares us, it helps. I was just listening.”
“Oh, yeah? Well sometimes if you swat a kid on the behind, they hush up and get back to sleep like they're supposed to.”
“I don't want to sleep in here anymore,” Steffy said.
“You said you wanted to be a big kid and sleep alone,” Tammy said. “Now you want to give up on that?”
Steffy pouted but didn't answer. Tears still leaked from her eyes.
“Your mind's gonna play tricks on you in the dark, girly,” Tammy continued. “That's all it is. Your imagination.”
I had my doubts about that, but I didn't know whether I should mention it in front of the little kids, who were having a miserable enough night as it was. Stacey was hugging little Kyle on the floor, his face buried in her chest.
“Here you go.” I handed Steffy my tactical flashlight and drew my backup from the holster on my other hip. “This will help you while the power is out. And if you see anything scary at all, just point the light like it's a weapon. Ghosts and monsters hate the sun. This flashlight is as powerful as a sunbeam.”
“Wow.” She looked over the hefty anodized aluminum flashlight, then held it close with both hands. “Thank you.”
“There, now you can get back to sleep,” Tammy said. She gave me a little scowl over the girl's head. “I know it's a new place, but there's nothing here to be scared of.”
I found that an odd sentiment, since Tammy had just told me a few hours earlier that she was sure the place was haunted, that her grandmother had said something about ghosts coming in from the outer darkness of the ocean. Maybe Tammy was just trying to calm her kids down, which made sense. Telling them the place might be haunted wasn't going to make anybody's night go easier.
“You got to be tough,” Tammy was telling Steffy. “Lots of people gonna say you can't be tough, or strong, or brave, just because you're a girl. And they're wrong. You don't have to jump at shadows in the night.”
“It wasn't no shadow,” Steffy said. “It was a dead mermaid lady. I saw her face right above mine. She was standing over me like she wanted to...I don't know what she wanted...”
“She wasn't real,” Tammy said again.
Tammy got Steffy back into bed. I discreetly took some readings around the room, but whatever had been here must have moved on already. I listened to the girl for any added clues about what she saw, but that wasn't easy when her mom kept telling her to be quiet and get back to sleep.
We didn't have any hard evidence, but clearly the girl had seen something. Maybe it had been her imagination—what she'd described didn't match anything anybody else had witnessed. However, kids were more sensitive to ghosts, and these were probably the first kids to enter the old house in decades.
Also, Steffy's description naturally made me think of the shipwreck and the restless dead Jacob had described in the water, their pale shapes slithering over each other, dragging their chains.
If what Steffy had seen was real, then it was definitely the most frightening and intrusive entity anyone had witnessed in the house so far.
Tammy focused on getting her other kids back to sleep. When she rejoined us, closing the door to her suite firmly behind her, she shook her head apologetically.
"Kids," she said.
"She wouldn't be the first to witness a ghost in this house," I said, my voice low. "We talked about this. Maybe we shouldn't dismiss what she's saying."
"Well, maybe it's a ghost and maybe it's her brain playing tricks on her," Tammy said. "You can't believe her every time she sees a monster in the closet. If you had kids, you'd understand. Soon as they can talk, they start talking about seeing scary things in their rooms at night. Steffy's seeing things all the time."
"Maybe she has abilities," I said.
"Excuse me?" Tammy's eyebrows raised. "What do you mean?"
"Like...psychic sensitivity. It's very normal in young kids," I hurried to add. "Lots of them outgrow it as they get older."
"My daughter's no freak," Tammy said. "She's just got a busy mind. You should see her drawings."
"Could I?" I asked.
"Yeah, let me just unpack the whole car looking for them." She shook her head. "Y'all can go on back to work now."
"If it's all right with you, we'd like to put a camera in the room where Steffy is staying," I said. "It's sometimes possible to catch hints of paranormal activity on video, especially if you use a highly sensitive night vision camera."
Tammy shook her head, looking insulted. "That'll just encourage her. Make her think what she saw was real."
"I suspect it was real," I said, whispering lower than ever. "It's very likely. I have some experience with these things, and others have seen things recently—"
"Did they see a dripping mermaid?" Tammy chuckled.
"No, but that's consistent with the history of the property. There was that shipwreck right out there, during a storm. And here we have a storm again tonight. That could bring out ghosts associated with past storms in the area."
"Now you're some kind of ghost expert."
"I've worked at a number of haunted properties," I said. "Just about every building downtown has a ghost or three."
"Well, don't go stirring my kid up over it," she told me.
I frowned. "Maybe just in the hallway, then. We have to do our best to document this if it returns."
"I'm telling you, she makes things up and scares herself," Tammy said. "She'll be fine."
"All right. We'll be around if you need us."
"I'm sure we'll be fine." Tammy headed back into her suite and c
losed the door.
Stacey and I took some readings, then moved a thermal camera on a tripod up into the hall. We did our best to keep it discreet, placing it behind a potted plant next to the double doors at the very end of the hall, the ones that led into Alyssa's master suite. Stacey and I had peeked in there briefly, and it was luxurious.
The decor in the master suite was colorful, palatial Hollywood Regency, in contrast with the somber restored-antique look of the rest of the house, as if Alyssa needed a shiny pocket of Beverly Hills for herself, concealed behind the stone walls and formal dark wood. It had been a jarring contrast to open the stately oak doors and get an eyeful of glittering pink and gold.
We hadn't gone far inside the master suite, though, because we weren't supposed to be setting up cameras in her private rooms. No ghosts had been seen in the main house, anyway—not until the one that had awoken Steffy just now.
After the thermal cam and a microphone were running in the upstairs hall, Stacey and I headed downstairs.
"Are we really going to let that little girl sleep alone in the haunted room?" Stacey whispered as we headed toward the side door. "That ghost sounded awful. Way worse than what people were seeing before."
"We're watching more closely now," I said. "We know to look out for it. There's not much else we can do. We can't exactly go against the kid's mom's wishes, not unless that entity comes back and causes immediate danger."
"Yeah, but...it feels wrong. After all we've seen, you know? These spirits can be murderous." She frowned, and her eyes went distant for a moment. We'd both lost family members to ghosts. Somehow Stacey managed to put up a kind of cheerfulness anyway, while I tended toward dark and brooding. Of course, she'd only lost one of her siblings, while I'd lost both my parents and had no siblings—but it was unfair to think of it that way, I knew, to treat personal losses like factors in a math problem, comparing one person's pain to another.