by JL Bryan
“This...is really good,” Dotty said in a loud whisper after biting one of the miniature crab cakes.
“Hey there,” I said as I entered the room. “I don't know if this is a good time, but they said you'd be bringing some historical items, Mrs. Starch. Would you mind if I look at those now?”
“They're in the car...”
“We'll be more than happy to carry them in for you,” I said.
At last, the time had arrived.
Stacey and I carried in a couple of plastic storage bins and cardboard boxes. The jackpot, at last: centuries of letters and journals, the kinds of things that really helps us establish missing pieces of the past. Of which there were many. I'm not sure how ghost hunters in future generations will do it—they'll probably data-mine dead people's emails and Facebook pages for clues, rather than looking through faded old handwritten correspondence on yellowed paper.
We set up at the table in the little library off the living room. The shelves were neatly organized, with complete matched sets of classics—Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, and so on—that looked like they'd been manufactured together, purchased together, shelved together, and left untouched since. Another shelf offered a matched set of American classics, in case anybody wanted to take in a little William Faulkner, Kate Chopin or Langston Hughes. These volumes looked untouched, too, but they certainly made pleasant decorations.
The seating was great, too, upholstered antique chairs and a small reading sofa by the fireplace, where Dotty sat and sipped a tall glass of sugarless tea.
While I looked through the papers, Dotty filled us in on the history of the lighthouse and her family, with much greater detail than Tammy had been able to give. Most of what I knew was reinforced. One key insight: Dotty happened to know that the lighthouse had switched from giant candles to a more advanced oil lamp during Matty Verish's long, long tenure as the lady light-keeper.
I remembered Jacob mention that the light-keeper who'd gone out to meet his clandestine lover in the lighthouse at night was also very worried about the candle going out. This created a timeframe that made me think William Verish must have been the one slipping out to the lighthouse. He was the man whose ghost Zoe had seen around the caretaker's bungalow, the one Delavius had probably seen on the beach.
William Verish had died going out to the lighthouse during the storm to relight the candle. He'd failed, and apparently that was why the shipwreck ghosts were hanging around, angrily blaming the family for not keeping the light burning on that fateful night.
I still wanted to know the name of William Verish's lover who he sometimes met in the lighthouse. The case felt incomplete without it—but Dotty knew nothing about it, and acted mildly scandalized when I asked if he'd been known to have an affair.
“He died trying to keep others safe,” Dotty said. “There's no cause to speak of him that way. He was a loyal, faithful family man.”
I didn't mention that our psychic's findings indicated otherwise.
“It attacks the memory of my great-great-grandmother, too,” Dotty said. “Matty Verish served that lighthouse faithfully for fifty-nine years, teaching her own children and grandchildren, supervising them...do you know she climbed that staircase to the top just about every day until she died? She was eighty-six then. Her last words were 'go now, keep the light burning.'”
“Aw, that could be a nice metaphor, too,” I said. “Final words of wisdom.”
“It wasn't no metaphor. She was telling her grandson to quit lagging around the house watching her die and go get back to work. Matty was an example to us all. She was a good woman, servant of God and her family, a strict and stern mother. Upright. Not like folks these days, letting their kids run all over.” She made a vague gesture that could have indicated society in general, or Tammy's kids in particular, running around the house as they were. Penny hadn't brought her own kids, thankfully, or the place would probably have been in chaos with so many children running around.
“Fifty-six years,” Stacey said. “Wow.”
“How did she die?” I asked.
“Peacefully, in her bed,” Dotty said. “Surrounded by loved ones.”
“Interesting. That's not the kind of passing that often leads to a haunting. Maybe the ghost in the lighthouse is benign, just a piece of Matty's soul left behind, dutifully trying to keep up the lighthouse even long after her death. But the drowned ghosts could be angry, somehow preventing her from leaving, blaming her and William for their deaths. That could be keeping Matty and William's ghosts here all these years.”
“My goodness, I'd hate to think of them getting stuck here all this time,” Dotty said.
“We'll find a way to set them free,” I said. “The problem is going to be those drowned ghosts on the beach. If we can find a way to trap them or make them move on, then the ghost of Matty in the tower, and the ghost of William who walks around the house and beach at night, might be free to leave, too. And then everybody will be happy.”
“Oh, trust me, child, there's never a time when everybody's happy,” Dotty told me. I couldn't help laughing a little. She had a point.
The private chef Alyssa had hired was making dinner for everybody. Alyssa refused to let Dotty or even Tammy help in the kitchen. She seemed to want to make a point about how she could afford servants to wait on people in her own house.
Dotty helped me find Matty Verish's journal among the papers. All the bound volumes in the storage bin, including a massive family Bible thick with paperwork, had cracks on their covers and spines.
“It looks like the ride over was rough on them,” Dotty said. “Well, they're home now, right where they belong.”
“You want to leave all this here?” I asked, daring to hope.
“I certainly don't want it blocking up my closet any longer,” Dotty said. “I only have the one in my room at the retirement center. I don't like lugging all this around, I just didn't want to throw it out and couldn't find nowhere to put it. Now this house is restored, so...”
I nodded. “If you ask me, these books and papers belong right here, in this very library room. We'll organize it and find a place to store it.”
“It will be nice to put them aside for good,” Dotty said. “None of my children or grandchildren seem to have room for them.”
“Personally, I can't wait to read them,” I said, which made her smile a little.
The family members ate in the dining room. I had a glance at the meal, and everyone had a plate with a little tepee of asparagus and what looked like smoked salmon. Nobody but Alyssa seemed particularly thrilled with it. The kids studied their food like it had just landed from Mars.
Stacey, Hayden, and I ate fruit and sandwiches in the kitchen with Delavius and Zoe. That was much more agreeable, both in terms of the food and the lack of tension and drama, which seemed to radiate so thickly from the dining room that you could feel it upstairs or out in the garden. Us servants spoke in low voices, as if we'd get in trouble should the lady of the house detect our presence while we ate.
Fortunately, that drama kept them all busy while Stacey and I shut ourselves in the library and read. Hayden was somewhere, keeping Tammy and the kids busy, maybe. We heard shouting more than once among the family members, but as none of it seemed to have anything to do with ghosts, we stayed in the library and kept out of it.
Matty Verish had left a few diaries behind, old leather-bound volumes, the spines and covers cracked and flaking. I turned the dry, stiff yellow pages gingerly to avoid tearing them. I skipped the one she'd begun in childhood and moved to the second one, which Matty had begun on the day of her wedding to William Verish.
Stacey, meanwhile, busied herself with an assortment of old correspondence, which first had to be sorted by date and author. She wasn't thrilled with this.
As I read, I developed a sense of Matty's personality—stern, deeply concerned with moral uprightness and with working for the benefit of the city's poor and orphans. She was industrious, the sort of person who got
up long before dawn and stayed productive every moment of the day. Her entries fretted over sins like idleness and drunkenness and how to avoid them. These were her concerns even in her early twenties, and they seemed to deepen through her life. She never missed church, and neither did her husband or children, and she kept the family engaged in every sort of volunteer work. In her journal, she was often critical of the morality of herself and of nearly everyone she knew.
Matty had written at least twice a week, from age fourteen until her death at age eighty-six. I wondered how many people do that anymore. Journaling seems like a good way to live your life more consciously, to deepen your understanding of yourself and others, to reflect on your experiences and to grow in wisdom. (Yeah, I don't do it, either. Seems like a smart idea, though.)
There were no entries for the date of her husband's death, or for several days afterward. I could believe that the loss of her husband had caused such distress that she'd lacked either the time or emotional strength to keep her journal entries going.
The entries picked up about a week later, when she related notes on a sermon she'd heard about fortitude. We must be as constant as stone, as faithful as the sun and seasons, as unyielding as the Lord himself.
The entries that followed over the years continued the themes of piety, charity, and endless concern about virtue. She related significant events regarding her children, the city, the weather—always a huge concern—and brief stories about the sailors who called on her at home after seeing her at the lighthouse. If she ever felt attraction or had a romance with any of them, that certainly didn't make it into her journal.
She wrote less and less about her thoughts and feelings as time passed, and the journal grew more and more about recording external events, almost like newspaper articles about her life. The introspective young woman in her early twenties eventually became a creature of duty and habit. I could see her climbing the spiral stairs of the lighthouse every day, unswerving in her responsibilities, accepting of all that she'd suffered and all that she had to do.
There was something that felt very old-time about her, the rock solidness of a person who did what was required of her with little to no complaining or self-pity, even in her private journal. It seemed impossible to me that a person from twenty-first century America would have lost so much and worked so hard without any griping.
I barely noticed when Zoe opened the library door and informed us that Alyssa and most of the family members were going to sleep for the night. The thunder and lightning were back tonight, as was the rain. It was one of those never-ending deluges, and the weather folks said we shouldn't even bother looking for sunlight for a few more days.
Matty's handwriting grew difficult to read in her last year, and the thoughts behind the written words less organized. She sometimes wrote about her husband as if he were still alive, her children as if they were still babies, even though they were grandparents themselves by that point.
“When are we going to be done?” Stacey asked. “My eyes are getting itchy from reading all this faded cursive writing.”
“You can take a break if you want,” I told her.
“I feel weird not sitting out in the van monitoring things,” she said.
“Come out and join me,” Hayden said over our headsets, which we'd activated as the hour grew late. “Keep me company in the rain.”
“Uh, I didn't mean I wanted to feel more weird,” Stacey told him. “Ellie, can't we just do a lap around the house, looking for ghosts?”
“There's nothing stirring,” Hayden said over our headsets.
“Can we look anyway?”
I sighed, then stood and stretched. “Maybe it's not a bad idea to walk around for a minute.”
Then thunder crashed, and the lights went out. By this point, we were used to it. The house was isolated, not located near anything but trees and sand, on top of being out on an island, so it made sense that something like power could be less reliable than we were used to. The power company would be much more focused on keeping power running to the houses and hotels east of us, not on the one isolated building on the northwest side on the island.
Still, the house was heavily haunted, too, so there was that to consider.
“Hayden?” I asked. “Anything?”
“—problems—can't see—” his voice crackled over the headset. “—some—also—”
“Can you repeat that?” Stacey asked. “You're making slightly less sense than usual.”
A hiss of static filled my ears, and Stacey and I both winced and turned down our headsets.
“We'd better go check on him,” I said.
“Out in the storm?” Stacey frowned but went along with it. We pulled on hooded rain slickers to keep the gear on our utility belts from frying in the rain.
We stepped out the front door, to where the big black van sat in the turnaround. Lightning arced overhead. I drew the opening of my hoodie tight around my face, preparing to run from the porch to the driveway. It was like a waterfall out there, and not just at the edge of the porch roof, but the whole way across.
“Hayden?” I said again, hoping very much to get an all-clear back from him so we didn't have to go plunging into the storm. The only response was static.
Out in the driveway, the van began to lurch on its axles, side to side, like someone was getting slammed around inside.
“Let's go.” I put a foot on the top step, ready to plunge into the downpour, but Stacey grabbed my arm.
“Uh, wait,” she said.
“What?”
“Isn't the rule usually...you know...if the van's a-rocking, don't come a-knocking?” Stacey asked. “Maybe he did get what's-her-name, Tammy, interested in him.”
“Despite all our observations and expectations to the contrary?”
“Maybe she's lowering her standards out of desperation.”
“You really think Hayden would have sounded so bored if that was happening?” I asked. “He probably would have turned off his microphone instead of checking in with us.”
“Unless it was a clever ruse—”
“Come on.” I started down the steps and dragged Stacey out into the storm with me.
When we reached the van, I wrenched open the side door, and we jabbed our flashlights ahead of us. I really didn't know what we would find—Hayden in an amorous embrace, his curly perma-perm dripping with sweat, or maybe a rotten, bloating ghost choking him with its chains—but either way, it was almost certain to be a horror show.
Within the van, Hayden leaped up and down, punching the wall near a bunch of blank monitors. Most of them were off; those that were still on glowed a dead blue.
“Whoa,” Stacey said. “You keeping it sane in here? Or not?”
“These things just blipped out like somebody hit the van with an EMP bomb,” he said. “Did you guys ever watch Dark Angel with Jessica Alba?”
“Must have missed it,” I said.
“Anyway, everything's dying.”
“Any chance you got struck by lightning?” I asked.
“I doubt I would have missed that, Ellie.”
“All right. Well, you don't look dead, so we're heading back inside. Keep up the...good work. Maybe try less kicking.”
“You'd be surprised what a good kick can accomplish. If computers were animals, they'd be mules.”
“That makes no sense,” I said. “Good night, Hayden.”
We closed the van door and ran back through the rain to the shelter of the front porch. We took a second to remove and shake off the rain slickers—it's not nice to drip rainwater all over your client's expensive antiques. Lightning popped in the sky, then again, and again, forked like a jagged dragon's tongue, assuming dragon tongues are glowing, yellowish, and very thin.
“It's freezing all of a sudden,” Stacey said, as an icy wind picked up and flung rain at us.
“Yep,” I replied.
Then we opened the door and stepped into the house. It was even colder inside than out.
<
br /> Chapter Thirty
We found the library in disarray. The old papers and cracked volumes had been scattered across the floor as if by a tornado.
“Turn off your light for a second,” I said.
Stacey and I extinguished our flashlights, leaving the room pitch black.
“It's cold,” Stacey whispered. “I feel like someone's in here with us.”
“Shh,” I said. I picked up one of the portal thermal scanners with the tiny screens that Hayden had provided us. It powered on, but it sputtered, like the battery was almost drained.
On the little screen, I saw a deep blue blob concentrated in one corner, floating over the old volumes I'd been reading. I wondered whether the old books might be haunted themselves, bringing their own ghost with them.
I walked toward it.
“Careful,” Stacey whispered, like I needed a reminder.
The deep blue shape on my screen resolved into something like a man in a boxy cap, or the upper half of him—really just a head, partial torso, and one arm. The cold shape darkened, and the air became arctic. He was drawing in power, solidifying.
I reached for my flashlight to defend myself, and then it attacked.
Well, it flung something at me, which smashed into me just below the collar bone. I grunted, but the amazing power of my turtleneck shielded me from the worst of it. I would probably still get a bruise, though. The object thudded to the floor at my feet.
I clicked on my light and found myself facing a partially formed shadow figure, possibly the one Zoe and Delavius had seen.
For a moment, I could see his face—bearded, his eyes hollow, a navy blue cap on his head.
Then he vanished.
“Brr,” Stacey said. “He just went past me.”
I turned my light toward the floor to see what he'd hit me with.
It was Matty Verish's journal. The cover had shattered into little dried-leather jigsaw pieces all over the floor.