Murder House

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “No. They didn’t.”

  I sniffed the air. It smelled like Peanut Butter and Tuna…not an overly ambitious sandwich, either. Maybe whoever collected Amelia’s colony had missed one. I dusted myself off and took stock of my current situation. Luckily, my phone survived the fall. “Turn on the flashlight,” I told it, and a blue-white beam lit up the closet extra bright. Bly did the same, and we both aimed our lights up into the hole.

  Bly was muttering, “This is not happening….”

  Unease prickled up my spine—not mine, I realized, but his. I threw a protective balloon around myself, then cocked my head and listened. All I heard was the pelleting of snow against the vinyl siding.

  Or was it the skittering of tiny claws?

  Apparently, rats are like ghosts—I’d rather know exactly what I was dealing with than just sit in the dark and wonder. Normally, I’d offer to flip a coin to see who’d go check it out, but since Bly was scared enough for the both of us, I said, “I’ll do the honors.”

  “But you’re unarmed.”

  I hadn’t been planning on shooting at anything. While I might have passed my most recent qualification at the firing range, my chances of hitting a small moving target in the dark were slim to none. Besides, if there were stragglers up there, they wouldn’t be city rats. They’d be pet rats, like Tuna and Peanut Butter. Or flat rats, like the unfortunate rodent pancake on the closet shelf. “It’s fine. I’ll just take a quick look to see what’s what.”

  Bly shuddered. But he didn’t stop me.

  Armed with my lit phone in one hand and a trash bag tucked into the back of my waistband, I crept up the folding stairs. I didn’t like the feel of them—they flexed—but they did hold.

  If you took a survey on what people thought was the scariest room in the house, I’m guessing the attic would rank at the top of the results. But bare rafters, thick cobwebs, abandoned cradles that rock ever so slightly and creepy dolls—that was the stuff of horror films. Most real life attics held nothing scarier than some Christmas decorations and umpteen years of old tax records. And those were older buildings. New attics were even tamer. Unless the roof was leaking, there was nothing scary to be found. Just insulation and plywood.

  I shone the light up into the rafters. Tough to see. The cross beams cast shadows across the insulation batts. It took a second for my eyes to adjust, but once they did, there was really nothing worth mentioning. The townhouse was so new that even the cobwebs were minimal. No boxes, either. That must’ve been what I was expecting, some old belongings to voyeuristically paw through. I aimed my light upward. The ceiling wasn’t too low, maybe seven feet at the peak, and there was a shop light clamped to one of the ribs. I was in up to the waist already, I figured. Might as well take a good final look before I got back to commandeering the douchebag’s underpants.

  Walking low so as not to brain myself, I switched on the shop light. Shadows resolved into shapes that, initially, I took for plumbing. Until part of me recalled that the water heater wasn’t up here, but in the utility room off the garage. And then I realized what I was looking at.

  The whole attic was tricked out as a giant habitat.

  It was a marvel of engineering, for sure, going up one wall and down another, with vertical, horizontal and diagonal runs—zig-zags and chambers, turrets and wheels. I turned slowly, taking in the elaborate setup bit by bit. What a shame. I might be quick to call Streets and Sanitation to come bait the alley whenever a rat faces off with me on garbage day, but that was different. These were once the littermates of Peanut Butter and Tuna. And it would be kind of sad to see they’d starved to dea—ohmygod.

  The rafters behind me were swarming with rats.

  Live rats.

  “Find anything?” Bly called up.

  “Yeah,” I tried to shout back, but it came out as more of a wheeze. “You could say that.”

  They weren’t greasy gray city rats—they were the Moroccan hamster variety, all different colors: grayish, brownish, white, black and spotted. But while my rational brain tried to reassure my limbic system they were no different from Peanut Butter and Tuna, my lizard brain was having a field day.

  “Oh shit,” Bly muttered, without me even having to explain.

  The last thing I needed was to fall down the folding stairs while a dozen rats dropped onto my face. I gathered up all my will and very slowly backed toward the trap door. When you see a rat on TV, they’re always squeaking. Must’ve been overdubbed. The rodents in the rafters were nearly silent, except for the tree-branch-on-windowpane sounds of their tiny claws.

  They didn’t approach me—not like Peanut Butter would have, looking for a handout. But they were in constant motion, like an ant colony, or maybe a school of fish. They moved with great purpose, flowing one over the other as they jockeyed for position. Trying to get away from me, I presumed. After all, they hadn’t seen a human in months, and maybe they weren’t as tame as they used to be.

  Except, they didn’t look scared. If they were, they would run away and hide, like Tuna—and between the beams and the insulation there were plenty of hiding places.

  They looked…busy.

  Maybe their activity was some kind of elaborate trick they were performing in hopes of getting a reward. I watched, fascinated, as they streamed past one another in a huge, undulating mass. They flowed like ink through water, pale rats, dark rats, solid and spotted and hooded. A living kaleidoscope of rodents.

  When the first rat fell from the rafters, I figured she’d lost her grip. But it was followed by another, then another, as rats dropped to the floorboards like paperback novels falling off a used bookstore shelf. I felt behind me with my foot for the exit, unwilling to take my eyes off the rodent swarm for even a second. But my unfamiliar gym shoes were big and clunky, and they felt nothing like my trusty old Chucks with their soles worn thin and smooth.

  And while I stood there groping with my massive sneaker, the rats kept right on dropping and scrambling on top of their fallen comrades. More and more, faster and faster, until soon they’d formed a column that was knee high, then waist high, then more. Until the rat pile was damn near as tall as me.

  Instant regret. Not just the fact that I’d opted to go without a sidearm, but every single choice that led up to me being where I was at that very moment. The decision to check out the attic. To accept the undercover gig.

  To join the freaking FPMP.

  Because no way was this natural. And I’d be a hell of a lot less likely to encounter a gigantic swarming rat pile if I was minding my own goddamn business at the Chicago PD.

  I shivered, and my breath left my body in a frozen white plume. Not just because February in Chicago is cold enough to freeze hell over, either. It wasn’t the thermal cold of winter—it was the sudden cold that heralded a visit from the dead.

  The rats scrambled over one another, moving and flowing. It was physically impossible for them to stay still and hang on, and every few seconds, one of them dropped to the floor with a small thud and a very occasional quiet squeak. But they’d just hop straight back onto the pile and lose themselves in the teeming mass.

  I glanced from the rats to my phone, suddenly convinced that my battery would choose that very moment to die, then the trap door would snap shut and leave me swarmed by rats that would gnaw me to the bone like I was made of tuna fish. The flashlight app looked different from my lock screen, though, and I couldn’t tell how much battery I had left. But there was a button I did recognize—the one to pull up the camera. My hands were shaking so hard, it took three flailing jabs to activate it. Somehow, I managed.

  I took a bunch of shots in rapid succession, hoping I could tear my gaze away, as long as I kept the camera’s eye on the rat pile. But before I worked up the nerve to look for the hatch, I did a double-take at my phone. I thought maybe I’d pulled up the camera roll—and really, it wouldn’t surprise me if I’d fat-fingered something—but I didn’t remember taking any pictures of a woman. And then I realized it wa
sn’t a photo I was looking at, but the rat pile right in front of me, seen through the tiny lens on a small screen. And at that size, they resolved themselves quite plainly into a person’s image.

  My eyes jumped from the screen to the rat pile and back again, but I couldn’t decide which was worse. Neither. Both. All of the above.

  The rats kept tumbling over one another. Moving. Shifting. And the image on my phone moved just like a real person—looking at me, directly at me.

  “Amelia Griggs?” My teeth were clattering and my voice shook. The rat pile shifted, looking pretty much the same. A huge, writhing pile of rodents. “You’re dead. I’m sorry. It’s time to move along.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Bly called up.

  “Just a second.” I thought I sounded almost natural.

  Maybe I had, but my adrenaline had shot so high, there was no way Bly could possibly miss it. “Jesus Christ. I’m calling backup.”

  “No—wait. Just…gimme a sec.” If Amelia could understand me, then she wasn’t a repeater. She was a sentient ghost. And call me a closet optimist for entertaining the illusion of free will, but while I’ll salt repeaters faster than a dietetic dinner, I’ve never forced anything sentient through the veil. No one but Jennifer Chance—and that psycho didn’t exactly leave me any choice.

  Sentient ghosts can be creepy—particularly the ones who won’t or can’t speak—and there’s always the chance they’ll sneak under my skin. But I try to reason with them anyway.

  The sweat that would normally bead on my upper lip formed droplets on my long facial hair that crystalized on the ends in the unnatural cold. It dampened my pits enough to roll down my ribs. But I forced myself to stand my ground and say, “Listen, Amelia—I can’t imagine you want to stay here any longer than you absolutely have to. Follow the pull. Cross over.”

  In my peripheral vision, a pile of rats churned, rising and falling in perpetual motion. But when I squinted at the smaller image on my phone, I saw the image of a woman.

  “Talk to me!” Bly called up.

  “Just a sec,” I repeated testily. And then, with my attention divided between the dual images I saw—with my eyes, and on the phone—I said, “There’s something better over there. I promise—I’ve seen it.”

  “That’s it,” Bly said. “I’m calling this in.”

  The rat pile shifted, and in a move that defied gravity, some rats clambered out, body after furry little body, linking together to form the shape of an outstretched arm. They couldn’t hold the position for more than a second, but the gesture was so freakishly lifelike, its meaning couldn’t have been more clear. The final rat curled its naked tail so that it looked just like an index finger. One that was pointing toward the place next door. Toward Sylvester Hale.

  Gravity took hold. The arm fell. Nearly a dozen rodents dropped and scattered, and then the whole swarm broke down. The image of the woman on my phone screen disintegrated. I was too scared of falling down the hatch to back up, so instead, I froze. I pulled in on myself to create a smaller target, profusely thankful nothing could wriggle its way up the hem of those skin-tight jeans.

  I’m not sure when I squeezed my eyes shut, but by the time I pried them back open, the ghostly chill had warmed, and the skittering of tiny feet was silent.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Bly demanded.

  I patted down my slouchy sweater to make sure there were no rats on me, then called down, “I’ll tell you…in the car.”

  30

  I sat beside Bly in our fake Lexus and waited for my phone to charge. He was a bundle of nerves, but since he was no longer startled enough to leak, the apprehension I felt was probably all my own.

  “How many rats are in a colony?” Bly asked—for probably the tenth time. He’d been asking me some variation on it ever since we high-tailed it out of the townhouse.

  And I’d been replying with some variation on I don’t know. “Look, it was dark. And confusing. And I didn’t stop to take a tally. Okay?”

  “Are we talking ten? Twenty? A hundred?”

  At least that, but I knew better than to say. Not when even one live rat would be enough to freak him out. “Would you pull over? You’re driving too fast.”

  Bly laughed humorlessly. “We’re not actually married, you know.”

  But when he saw a grocery store parking lot, mostly empty at 2 AM, he pulled in and parked at the far end, away from prying eyes, and left the motor running to charge our phones and warm our freezing toes.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “The rats weren’t acting like rats.” I pulled up my camera and checked to see if I’d managed to get any shots. It looked like I’d given it a solid try, but most of them were too blurry or grainy to look like anything at all. I showed Bly one of the blurs.

  “What is that?”

  “I think it’s Amelia Griggs.”

  “Jesus.” Bly stared at the steering wheel a long moment, flexing his hands on the grip so hard his knuckles pulsed white. He worked his jaw, struggling to keep a lid on his emotions, then finally said, “You’re telling me there was a fucking ghost there too?”

  That was about the size of it. I shoved my seat as far back as it would go and knuckled my eyes. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

  “We’ve been sleeping underneath a haunted rat colony for the past two weeks?”

  Yeah, aside from that. “It means Hale might have been bullshitting me about the whole story of his dead lover’s visit, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a medium. If he really did kill Amelia—”

  “And you think it’s murder? Jesus Christ.”

  “Hale’s not blogging about a rodent infestation, he’s claiming to have visions of the dead. Even if it’s just cold spots he’s feeling, or creeping sensations across the back of his neck—hell, that’s as good as Richie ever was. And that clown was the FPMP’s top medium for how many years?”

  “Whether or not the old man’s a medium, if he murdered Griggs, that changes the investigation completely. You’re the one who’s ex-homicide—what now?”

  If we were looking at murder, the clear course of action would be to turn it all over to the Chicago PD and leave it at that. But if I did, I could guess how it would pan out. The local homicide detectives would invite Hale for a little chat, and a hazmat team would come deal with the colony. My biggest concern was the rats. Not because I felt any sentimental attachment toward them—they were nowhere near as cute when they were swarming—but because they were tied directly to the ghost. People who punched out early got really hung up on seeing justice served. Just look at how obsessed the toilet ghost was on his liability concerns. If Hale ended up like most of my collars—acquitted—Griggs might get angry and hop into another host. A human one.

  Or, worse, if even one rat got away, maybe her spirit could ride along and travel pretty much anywhere. It wasn’t enough to just file a report and walk away without making sure everything was truly settled. Not without expecting to find a haunted rat pile lurking in the shadows every time I turned on a light.

  “Let’s just take a breath and consider all our options before we do something that can’t be undone.” I tapped strychnine poisoning into my phone and discovered the symptoms basically mimicked natural causes. Of course they did. And it could be ingested, absorbed or inhaled, which made accidental poisoning another possibility. I closed my eyes and racked my brain. “Amelia’s ghost literally pointed the finger at Hale—so, maybe she’ll vacate the premises if I get him to admit what he’s done.”

  “Right—’cause he’s been so forthcoming with you thus far.”

  As I scrambled to think about a plausible angle I could use to get inside Hale’s head, I realized I still had a rat up my sleeve. “I never did tell him about the dead rat in the closet, and that’s a discovery that would make a real neighbor totally freak. It’s got bonding experience written all over it. Vulnerability, surprise, the whole nine yards. We wait for sunrise, then head over there with the rat—and whi
le I’m making a big stink, you get him to trust me—”

  “Whoa—hold up. You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  Pretty sure I did. “Nothing big, just smooth stuff out between us so he’ll drop the games and confide in me. We both know you can do it without breaking a sweat. It’s natural to minimize your Psych mojo—if anyone can relate, it’s me—”

  “Not gonna happen.”

  I sighed. It fogged up my window. “Is this another one of those teachable moments? Because I get that you’re trying to make a competent agent out of me, and don’t get me wrong, as frustrating as your lack of hand-holding can be, I even appreciate the vote of confidence. But this situation is all kinds of fucked. It’s tough to just brush it off if you die before your time. The dead don’t think like regular people think. They get obsessed. Sometimes they turn into complainers—more annoying than scary. Amelia Griggs is powerful, though, and she literally pointed the finger at Hale. If we exterminate the rats and wash our hands of this without getting to the bottom of things, we might just piss her off. And then we end up with a vengeful spirit situation.”

  We were both quiet for a moment, then Bly said, “That’s a thing? Vengeful spirit?”

  “You tell me. You were there when Jennifer Chance tried to electrocute me over a GhosTV.”

  Bly sagged back against his heated leather seat. “You and me, we’ve been through a lot together. Never mind the fact that you put up with me and my…lousy taste in music.”

  I thought for sure he was going to mention the sleep-talking. Maybe, in a roundabout way, he was. “There’s only so much classic rock a guy can take.”

  Bly drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, and eventually said, “Making a good impression on a stranger is one thing—they have no preconceived ideas to override. But you two know each other, and tinkering with that dynamic is way more invasive. Of course I can sweeten Hale’s disposition toward you. But I won’t.”