EJ06 - Maze of Souls Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Also by J.L. Bryan

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  From the author

  Maze of Souls

  Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper,

  Book Six

  by

  J.L. Bryan

  Copyright 2016 J.L. Bryan

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to my wife Christina, who always reads the ugly, ugly first draft of everything.

  I appreciate everyone who has helped with this book. Thanks to beta readers Daniel Arenson and Robert Duperre, Annie Chanse, Rhiannon Frater and Connie Frater, and as Isalys Blackwell. Rhiannon Frater in particular went to a lot of trouble to help improve this book. Proofing was done by Thelia Kelly and Barb Ferrante. The cover is by PhatPuppy Art.

  Thanks to my agent Sarah Hershman and to everyone at Tantor Media who have made the audio versions of these books. The audio books are read by Carla Mercer-Meyer, who does an amazing job.

  Thanks also to the book bloggers who's supported the series, including Heather from Bewitched Bookworks; Mandy from I Read Indie; Michelle from Much Loved Books; Shirley from Creative Deeds; Katie and Krisha from Inkk Reviews; Lori from Contagious Reads; Heather from Buried in Books; Kristina from Ladybug Storytime; Chandra from Unabridged Bookshelf; Kelly from Reading the Paranormal; AimeeKay from Reviews from My First Reads Shelf and Melissa from Books and Things; Kristin from Blood, Sweat, and Books; Aeicha from Word Spelunking; Lauren from Lose Time Reading; Kat from Aussie Zombie; Andra from Unabridged Andralyn; Jennifer from A Tale of Many Reviews; Giselle from Xpresso Reads; Ashley from Bibliophile’s Corner; Lili from Lili Lost in a Book; Line from Moonstar’s Fantasy World; Holly from Geek Glitter; Louise from Nerdette Reviews; Isalys from Book Soulmates; Heidi from Rainy Day Ramblings; Kristilyn from Reading in Winter; Kelsey from Kelsey’s Cluttered Bookshelf; Lizzy from Lizzy’s Dark Fiction; Shanon from Escaping with Fiction; Savannah from Books with Bite; Tara from Basically Books; Toni from My Book Addiction; Abbi from Book Obsession; Lake from Lake’s Reads; Jenny from Jenny on the Book; and anyone else I missed!

  Most of all, thanks to the readers who've supported this series. There are more books to come!

  Also by J.L. Bryan:

  The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series

  Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper

  Cold Shadows

  The Crawling Darkness

  Terminal

  House of Whispers

  Maze of Souls

  The seventh Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper will be available in May or June of 2016

  The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)

  Jenny Pox

  Tommy Nightmare

  Alexander Death

  Jenny Plague-Bringer

  Urban Fantasy/Horror

  The Unseen

  Inferno Park

  Science Fiction Novels

  Nomad

  Helix

  The Songs of Magic Series (YA/Fantasy)

  Fairy Metal Thunder

  Fairy Blues

  Fairystruck

  Fairyland

  Fairyvision

  For The Smiths

  (Jeremy and Christina)

  (not the band)

  Chapter One

  I should have known it wasn't real right away. My childhood home, an unremarkable split-level in the suburbs, had burned down more than a decade earlier. It was impossible for me to be standing in front of the house, or walking up the driveway, or ascending the steps to the front door.

  The door opened as I approached.

  Outside, the sky was blue and the grass was green, the front lawn manicured in putting-green style as my dad had always kept it. My mother's roses bloomed in the first-floor window box. The house looked serene, as it might have on any spring day of my childhood.

  Inside, everything was blackened, reduced to ash and rubble by flames that still sputtered here and there.

  I stepped inside, and the door closed behind me.

  “Mom? Dad?” I called out.

  They didn't answer, but I heard a thumping coming from upstairs.

  I walked up the fire-damaged steps, which wobbled and cracked beneath my feet. Small flames rose and flickered on the steps. They spread up the already-charred wall in little drips.

  My stomach dropped as I approached the fire-scarred door to my parents' room. It was ajar, but only slightly.

  “No,” I whispered. I knew something terrible had happened to them, and that I was much too late to stop it.

  Shaking, I pushed open the door.

  The master bedroom actually looked intact, not charred like the rest of the house. Framed family pictures sat on my mother's dresser. My father's slippers lay on the floor by the bed.

  Two black body bags were tucked into the bed, the flowered coverlet drawn most of the way over them.

  “Mom?” My voice was a hoarse squeak. I was a child again, small as I walked toward the bed where the body bags lay under the sheets. They were zipped tight, and they were definitely not empty. “Dad?”

  I approached the body bag on my mother's side, lying motionless on her pillow. My hand, smaller than it had been in many years, reached out and touched the pull tab of the zipper. It was hot enough to scald my fingers, but I held on anyway, and I pulled. It wouldn't move.

  “Eleanor.” The voice was faint inside the thick black plastic. It was my mother, the only person who ever really called me by my full name. Well, almost the only person.

  “I can't do it,” I told her, still grappling with the hot metal in my small, useless fingers.

  The curtains burst into flames, the fire spreading unnaturally fast across the wall, cracking picture frames and igniting furniture.

  The body bag folded upright, as though the body inside—my mother—had just sat up inside.

  “I can't do it!” I screamed, while the fire spread to the bed and swept across it, setting alight the pillows and sheets on which my dead parents were resting.

  “Eleanor,” another voice sang out. The other person who liked to call me by my full name.

  I looked toward the bedroom door, past the flames that had quickly engulfed the whole room. He stood just outside the door, a shadow at first, then his features glowing red with the reflected glare of the fire. Anton Clay, dressed in his dark frock coat and silk cravat, watched me with a smile on his lips. He looked haughty as ever, a man who'd died young, burned to death by his own hand. Of course, he'd taken a number of others with him, including a lover who'd spurned him. He'd murdered her whole family, too.

  “Help me,” I said, as if I didn't know better. I was desperate.

  I looked back at the bed, but
it was burned to cinders. No blankets, no body bags, just a heap of dark, with smoke-blackened box springs and bones poking out here and there.

  “Ellie!” That wasn't a voice from my childhood. It was the screaming voice of Stacey Tolbert, who'd worked for me at Eckhart Investigations for several months now, helping me to find, trap, and dislodge unwanted ghosts from our clients' homes.

  I ran toward the scream, out the doorway and down the hall, Anton watching me with his arms crossed, relaxed and smiling, reflected fire dancing in the depths of his eyes.

  The hallway no longer seemed to be part of my parents' house. I was running through some kind of smokehouse, smelling of fire and meat, a building that might have been found on Anton's old plantation. It was long and dark, lit only by fire visible through tiny, barred slits in thick wooden doors. The air was acrid and thick, hard to breathe.

  “Ellie!” Stacey stood behind one door, her face close to the bars. She screamed as the smoke closed around her, swallowing her up.

  “Ellie...” Calvin's voice rasped weakly through another door. That was my mentor, retired police homicide detective Calvin Eckhart, who taught me what I know about ghost hunting, which is a pretty good amount by this point. I could barely see him through the barred hole, surrounded by smoke and fire, slumped down in his wheelchair like he was already dead, the metal spokes of the wheels sagging in the heat.

  I tried both doors. They were locked and woudn't budge; they might as well have been made of stone. I opened my mouth to speak, to tell Stacey and Calvin I was trying to save them, but smoke filled my lungs. I coughed, then lost my balance and fell to my knees. I was useless.

  I could hear their screams inside the doors, but only briefly, and then they fell into low whispers, like the ghostly voices of the dead.

  The sound of heavy chains scraped across the floor toward me. Anton Clay appeared from the smoke, grinning wickedly. He dragged my boyfriend Michael on the chain behind him, heading for a door to another fire-and-smoke-filled cell.

  “No,” I managed to cough out. I willed myself to rise up, to stand up and confront him, but my body was much too weak. I couldn't pick myself up off the floor.

  Anton paused, looking down at me. Michael waited obediently, wincing at the glowing hot chain around his neck.

  “I will take them all, Ellie,” Anton said, his voice smooth as silk. “Come to me, or I will take them all from you. I will make you come and beg to join them.”

  There was a shudder, and burning timbers fell from the smokehouse roof. The entire building was on fire around us.

  Anton snapped his chain, and Michael dropped to all fours. I couldn't help Michael, and he couldn't help me. I was powerless to move.

  “Remember you are mine,” Anton whispered, leaning in close to me, our lips almost touching. “Always.”

  I awoke in a sweat. I lay in my bad, in my little brick studio apartment, my cat watching me indifferently from a chair. With the blackout curtains up, I couldn't tell whether it was day or night.

  After some deep, blissfully smoke-free breaths, I took a moment to remember what was true and what wasn't. My parents really were dead. Anton Clay, a ghost from almost two centuries ago, had burned our house down around them, and I'd barely escaped. I had encountered the ghost on my way out, and he had looked at me, and he'd haunted me ever since.

  That was years ago, though, when I was fifteen. This wasn't the past. Stacey and Calvin weren't dead, and neither was Michael.

  I'd simply had yet another dream about Anton Clay and how he wanted me dead. I didn't know whether my dreams had any connection to the real ghost, or whether he even thought of me at all. In my dreams, though, he was obsessed with finding me and killing me.

  It can be hard to separate the reality from nightmare, especially when my waking reality is filled with its own nightmares. I don't need old ghosts pursuing me out of my past. I have enough of them in my present and my future.

  I tried to put aside all thoughts of Anton Clay as I got ready for work.

  Chapter Two

  “By my calculations, this place is halfway between Savannah and Augusta,” Stacey said, glancing at the van's GPS display. “So that puts us about an hour away from civilization in either direction.”

  “It's not an hour from all civilization,” I said. “There was a little white church back there. And a gas station a few miles before that.”

  The particular stretch of highway on which I drove was admittedly pretty remote. High pine trees lined either side of the blacktop. Here and there, we passed a mailbox, usually close to a driveway of sand and gravel twisting out of sight somewhere behind the pines.

  We passed stands of thick old Lowcountry oaks, the Spanish moss hanging so thick and long from their curled limbs that it nearly touched the ground. Moss-caked cypresses grew around murky ponds just large enough to conceal an alligator or two.

  “Are we there yet?” Stacey asked, fidgeting impatiently in her seat.

  “Don't make me turn this van around, kids,” I replied. “Aren't you supposed to be navigating?”

  “The van navigates itself.” She pointed to the GPS again. “I'm supposed to be looking for hand-painted signs hanging on trees. Like that one, maybe?”

  A wooden sign mounted between two pines certainly matched the client's assurances that we “couldn't possibly miss it.” The hand-painted plywood billboard advertised a place called Pine Hollow Farm, conveniently located just 1.2 miles ahead on the left past Old Neville Pond. Jack o' lanterns and a smiling, dancing scarecrow adorned the sign. Supposed attractions of the farm were advertised inside scattered cloudbursts: “CORN MAZE!” “PUMPKINS PICK-UR-OWN!” “FALL FUN!”

  A smaller board with the words TEMPORARILY CLOSED hung on the front of the sign.

  “Sounds like they've got a real tourist resort happening out here,” Stacey said. “Or they did.”

  “There's another one.” I didn't have to point to the next big slab of wood. Like the first, it was attached to roadside trees by ropes, not nailed in place, presumably so it could be removed when Halloween season ended.

  “HAYRIDE in the HAUNTED WOODS!” the sign offered, along with cartoony ghosts and gravestones. A skeletal horse drew a black wagon. “PINE HOLLOW FARM, JUST .6 MILES AHEAD ON LEFT – PAST OLD NEVILLE POND.” Another board that read CLOSED TODAY hung on the front of the sign.

  “That looks seriously haunted,” Stacey said. “It's going to take Pac-Man and a mouthful of power pellets to eat all those ghosts.”

  “Maybe we can just haul them away in that horse-drawn death wagon.”

  Another sign suggested we “STOP AT THE PINE HOLLOW GENERAL STORE TODAY!” for such treats as “ORGANIC VEGGIES” “HOMEMADE JELLY” and “BOILED PEANUTS.” It assured us we were only .3 miles from the turn-off at the pond. No CLOSED sign had been added to this one.

  “Any idea what we're facing out here?” Stacey asked.

  “The lady said something's been tormenting her kids and scaring visitors to the farm,” I told her. “Not in the way they're supposed to be scared, I guess. They've seen figures in their house and around the grounds. That's about all she wanted to say on the phone.”

  “Sounds like some real trouble. Never fear, there's another sign...” Stacey pointed to a wooden billboard ahead, mounted on posts instead of temporarily tied to trees. This one had a couple of painted horse silhouettes and offered horse boarding and riding lessons. A big arrow on the sign pointed down a dirt lane that snaked away between the pines.

  “That must be Old Neville Pond.” Stacey pointed to a low body of black water with cypress trees at the edges. It didn't look much larger than a cheap plastic kiddie pool. “Not as major a landmark as advertised.”

  “Maybe it used to be bigger,” I said. “You know, global warming and all.”

  I turned down the sandy dirt lane and soon passed rows of greens waiting to be gathered from the field. Beyond a small apple orchard and the pumpkin patch promised on the sign, we reached a cluster of sm
all, fairly decrepit wooden buildings surrounded by gardens. A stable with a corral sat farther back on the property. Three horses wandered in the corral—one large and white with brown spots, including a big white star on its forehead; another, smaller horse looked paint-splattered with red; a third was even smaller with a golden coat.

  “Aw,” Stacey said. “This reminds me of my grandparents' house.”

  I thought of visiting my own grandmother in her apartment full of weird big-eyed children paintings and a standing cloud of cigarette smoke. Stacey's family farm sounded like a much happier environment, certainly a healthier one.

  One cabin-sized building stood at the front, with a wide front porch and a sizable dirt parking area. The sign above proclaimed PINE HOLLOW GENERAL STORE in a jaunty Hee-Haw font next to an almost lifelike painting of a cornucopia.

  An OPEN sign hung behind the screen door leading inside. We parked and climbed the three steps to the porch, passing rows of aromatic green herbs growing in little potted plants along the porch railing. Pumpkins carved into jack o' lanterns also decorated the porch, the candles inside them currently unlit since it was daytime. Rocking chairs flanked the front door.

  “Hey, it looks like a Country Barn,” I said, referring to the chain of kitschy, faux-folksy restaurants owned by Stacey's family.

  “Hush your mouth.” Stacey opened the screen door, jingling a bell at the top. The wooden door inside was propped wide open, inviting us into a place that was recently built but was intended to look old and rustic. Jars of the previously-advertised preserves and jellies sat on one wooden shelf. Other racks offered small baskets of seasonal produce—apples, pumpkins, squash—and tourist bric-a-brac like keychains and t-shirts advertising the corn maze and haunted forest of Pine Hollow Farm. The smell of hot apple cider permeated the room.