The Monster Museum (Ellie Jordan Ghost Trapper Book 10) Read online

  The Monster Museum

  Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper

  Book Ten

  J. L. Bryan

  Copyright 2018 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 helps me keep writing around our crazy family schedule.

  I appreciate everyone who has helped with this book, including Robert Duperre's beta read. Thanks to my proofreaders Thelia Kelly and Barb Ferrante. Thanks to Claudia from PhatPuppy Art, who created the great cover art for this book, and her daughter Catie, who's done all the lettering on the covers for this series.

  Thanks to my agent Sarah Hershman and to everyone at Tantor Media and Audible 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 Bookworms; Mandy from I Read Indie; Michelle from Much Loved Books; Shirley from Creative Deeds; Katie from Inkk Reviews; Lori from Contagious Reads; Kelly from Reading the Paranormal; Lili from Lili Lost in a Book; Heidi from Rainy Day Ramblings; Kelsey from Kelsey’s Cluttered Bookshelf; Abbie from Book Obsession; Ashley from Paranormal Sisters, Ali from My Guilty Obsession, and anyone else I missed!

  Most of all, thanks to the readers who have 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

  Lullaby

  The Keeper

  The Tower

  The Monster Museum

  Fire Devil (coming in late 2018)

  The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)

  Jenny Pox

  Tommy Nightmare

  Alexander Death

  Jenny Plague-Bringer

  For Johnny

  Chapter One

  “You're not at work tonight, are you?” Calvin asked. In the Skype window, he sat in bright Florida sunlight, palm trees just behind him.

  “Of course not,” I said, trying to use my body to block his view of the cinderblock wall of the workshop behind me, but he'd clearly already seen it. “I mean, I'm just, um, hardly working. As opposed to working hard. You know the old joke.”

  “It's the weekend before Christmas, Ellie.”

  “Right. So it's not like it's actually Christmas. Or even Christmas Eve. We can't all take a month of vacation every time there's a holiday nearby, Calvin. The economy would crash.”

  “And you don't have an active case,” Calvin said. “You've been busy lately. Take a day off. Or two.”

  “I will. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Done.”

  “Not alone?” he asked.

  “Heck no. I've got all kinds of family members crammed into my apartment. Parents, siblings...I just hope my niece isn't stuffing peanut butter in the electrical socket again. You know how stupid kids are.”

  “There's no reason to be sarcastic, Ellie.”

  “Sure there is. It's a psychological defense mechanism to mask my inner pain and turmoil at being alone.”

  “What about your aunt and cousins in Virginia?”

  I winced, thinking of Aunt Clarice and my cousins. The last I'd heard, my cousin Alison was working her way through law school, off and on. Her brothers Tom and Todd were skipping college to try and make their band happen, while also waiting tables.

  I'd lived with them from the age of fifteen, when my parents had died, until I'd finished high school, when I moved back to Savannah to study at Armstrong State. (Now let's have a rest-in-peace moment of silence for my alma mater, recently absorbed into Georgia Southern University. The Pirates shall sail no more.)

  “My family's fine,” I said.

  “You've called them?”

  “I, uh, sent cards. How's your family?”

  “They're fine, we already discussed that.” Calvin's wrinkled brow furrowed a little more. “What are you doing in the office? Just hoping for a phone call?”

  “The holidays are an emotionally active time, right? That can stir up ghosts. And if you've got a ghost in this town...who else are you going to call?”

  “Very funny. So you see yourself as manning the city's paranormal 911 service?”

  “We need a different emergency number, though. Maybe 666?”

  “At least you appear to be in good spirits.”

  “Good spirits, evil spirits, we got 'em all. Come on down to Ellie's Scare Shack.”

  “Of course, this show of good humor could be an attempt to cover—”

  “Over my true bleak emotional state, like I already said?” I asked. “Well, thanks for the cheer-me-up.”

  “What exactly are your plans for Christmas?” Calvin asked. He was good. I'd been trying to avoid that question, and actually thought I'd done a decent job of it.

  “Well, Stacey and Jacob are in Alabama,” I said. “And as you mentioned, my nearest relatives are about five hundred miles away. So I was thinking I'd stay up late, watch the old Rankin-Bass Rudolph, maybe try to trap the three ghosts of Christmas. Christmas Past, anyway. Christmas Present's a little iffy. And Christmas Future? That guy's creepy in all his incarnations. Probably stick him in Mordecai Blake's cemetery with the other evildoers.”

  “The Ghost of Christmas Future only appears evil on the surface,” Calvin said. “But he serves a valuable purpose. Reminding us of our mortality, of the passing nature of our existence, of the universality of death.”

  “Yeah, not a reminder I need.” I looked up at my array of screens, currently paused, showing video picked up from three locations related to my own personal demon, Anton Clay.

  For some people, “personal demon” is just a metaphor. In my case, it refers to an actual malevolent ghost from 1841 who tried to kill my whole family just because we happened to live on the spot that he haunted. He'd burned the house down around us, and I'd only escaped through the smoke because of our dog. My parents weren't so lucky. Even my dog had died of breathing the smoke.

  One of the screens played a night vision video of the site of my old house, which had been left alone for more than a decade, but some kind of construction was underway there now. Construction seemed to have stopped for the holidays.

  The paused image showed rain spattering into muddy trenches where the ruins of my house had been. The company had yet to start building anything. Maybe Clay had cursed them. Maybe their funding had run out. Or maybe they'd just stopped working for the holidays, to spend time with their families like normal people.

  My house had been the site of Clay's death, where he'd burned down the home of his lover while she was inside, along with her husband, children, slaves, and Clay himself. I couldn't imagine choosing fire as a means of committing suicide; it seemed like almost any other way to go would be better than burning alive.

  Another screen showed thermal images from a boarded-up convenience store just outside of town, where Clay's own large plantation house had once been located. A third showed paused video from the long-shuttered old theater where Clay's town house had stood.

  “What about that young man you were seeing? Mike? The fireman from the fearfeeder case?”

  “He had second thoughts about relationships where he gets possessed by evil dead plantation owners who set things on fire.”

  “You haven't spoken to him since the corn maze case?”

  “Nope.” This was strictly true, but also kind of a lie. My eyes went to my phone, where there were messages from Michael I hadn't returned. “It's probably for the best. I'm kind of a hazard to the people around me.”

  “That sounds like an excuse for being alone the rest of your life.”

  “More of an explanation,” I said.

  A dog barked, and Calvin jumped a little. “Calm down, Hunter!” Calvin shook his head. “Seagulls. Every time one lands outside, he thinks it's the end of the world.”

  “Well, it's been great chatting with you, Calvin,” I said. “Merry Christmas to you and your family down there. I'll email you the end-of-year paperwork once I get it wrapped up.”

  “Don't work too hard.”

  “Right. What else am I going to do?”

  “Take care of yourself, Ellie. Remember you're only human. No matter how tough of a poker face you put up. You spend your work surrounded by death. Don't forget to live while you're still alive. You have all eternity to be a ghost.”

  “Well, Merry Christmas to you, too, boss.”

  After the Skype call ended, I picked up my phone. I read the text from Michael Holly:

  Let's get together and talk.

  He'd left a couple of voice mails, too, but it was easier to read texts. They were less persuasive than the sound of his voice.

  The more recent texts, about one a day, grew more detailed.

  I'm sorry. I need a chance to make it right.

  Then:

  I was posses
sed by that evil ghost. You wouldn't believe the things I saw. The things Clay made me see. The people burning alive in their homes. The kids screaming.

  Then:

  I could feel the heat. And I could smell them burning.

  I shivered. Six different houses had burned down on the site of my home. First the plantation house with Clay's fiery murder-suicide, then four other families before mine. Had Anton been filling Michael's head with those memories?

  That would be horrific for anyone to experience. I wondered if it had been even worse for Michael, trained to rescue people from fires and provide emergency medical care, to watch helplessly as fathers, mothers, and children burned to charcoal, trapped inside the fire.

  I wondered whether Michael had seen my parents die.

  Let's talk. I miss you.

  I played his latest voice mail: “Hey. If you want me to stop, I'll stop. Just tell me one way or another. Please don't, uh, ghost me. No pun intended.”

  “That was totally intended,” I whispered.

  “I don't want us to end here, though,” Michael said. “I feel like there's more ahead for us. I hope...you feel that, too.”

  I sat alone in the dim room for a while, then I played the videos on the screen, watching shadows for hints of the restless dead. The only place Jacob had sensed Anton Clay was at the old convenience store, a place where police had pulled more than one dead body out of the men's room over the years. Still, Jacob had said Anton's presence was more of a residual. His main presence was...elsewhere.

  “Where are you?” I whispered to the screens, to the dead man who'd killed my family and destroyed my life. “Give me a clue. Just one clue. And I'll come find you.”

  My phone rang, as if in answer to my demand, and I jumped a little.

  I looked at the screen. There he was, wearing a goat-horned Pan mask in a snapshot I'd taken at the Halloween store only a couple of months earlier. It seemed like years had passed since then.

  He was so strong, I thought. So alive. Unlike the other guy who had an obsessive interest in me.

  I clicked the green ANSWER icon.

  “Hi, Michael,” I said, for the first time in weeks.

  Chapter Two

  “Ellie?” He sounded surprised.

  “Did you dial a wrong number?” I asked. “Is this a pocket dial? You can admit it.”

  “No, I've just gotten used to you not answering. I was waiting for, 'Hi, this is Ellie, leave a message or whatever.'”

  “Want to just give me your message? We can pretend I'm a recording if you want. Leave it at the beep.”

  “Ellie, we don't have to pretend—”

  “Beep!” I shouted, interrupting him. I don't know why I did that. Too many hours alone staring at grainy video, looking for hints of the dead.

  “You're crazy, Ellie.”

  “I know. I mean, I haven't had my mental health evaluated since I was fifteen, but at that point things were...not good. I'm guessing my sanity hasn't picked up in the intervening years.”

  “It's good to talk to you again,” he said, tactfully steering the conversation away from questions of whether I was fully crazed or not.

  “My last impression was that you didn't want to do that,” I said. “In the hospital. Are you going to tell me that was the painkillers talking?”

  “No. That was me. I think. But I want to see you again. Come over for dinner? I can make my world-famous spaghetti.”

  “World famous, huh?” I remembered the first time I'd had dinner with him—at his place, with his sister, while I was investigating the boogeyman in an apartment below his. Spaghetti. He'd been cooking it anyway and invited me to join them when I knocked on the door to ask, more or less, whether they were having trouble with a dark shape crawling across their ceiling and stirring up their worst fears. It turned out they hadn't, much. The boogeyman—boogeywoman, actually—preferred to feed on the energy of children. Even Michael's seventeen-year-old sister had been a bit old for her, when there were actual children available. “Have they heard of this world-famous spaghetti in Mongolia? Zimbabwe? New Zealand?”

  “Yep,” he said. “But it's only available at my apartment. And Melissa's out with friends tonight, so we'll have the place to ourselves.”

  “So no one can stop us from blasting Kenny G records at ear-bleeding volume?”

  “No one. We can let the soft fluffy jazz roar all night.”

  I hesitated. Something about “all night” made me think, maybe.

  “Does Melissa still hate me?” I asked.

  “She hasn't mentioned you. I don't think she hates you.”

  “She blamed me for what happened to you out at the farm. And she wasn't wrong. That was my fault.”

  “If I hold my breath waiting for Melissa to be happy, I'll die of hypoxia,” he said. “Come on over. Have dinner.”

  “I don't know. How about...coffee? The Sentient Bean?”

  “Coffee? That's a real knife in the eye. Have we fallen that far apart already?”

  “Okay, let's make it the same place and time, but call it lunch,” I said. “I could go for some Greek tacos.”

  “Lunch. That sounds much better. But it's a little late in the day for lunch, so...”

  I sighed. “Okay. We'll go to dinner at the Bean. Same tacos.”

  “You got it. I'll be out at your bleak industrial park in about thirty minutes.”

  “How'd you know I was at work?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Meet me at my apartment,” I said. “Hour and a half.”

  “That's definitely dinner.”

  “Don't push it. You broke up with me, remember?”

  “Through a cloudy, drug-filled haze, yes. And I'm sorry. But...it was a mistake.”

  I wasn't so sure. Maybe we weren't that great together. Certainly he was safer without me. His job might have involved risking his life to save people in danger, but it didn't involve exposing his soul to all the twisted evil that lies out there in the darkness, waiting for us to turn out the light.

  For that kind of deep soul-level danger, he had me.

  I should break it off, I realized. I'm saying no.

  “Listen,” I began.

  “See you then,” he said, maybe not hearing, maybe choosing not to. “I'm happy you said yes.”

  “Me, too,” I said, which wasn't at all what I'd planned to say.

  He hung up the phone, putting the conversation out of its misery. A real act of mercy, I think.

  Feeling torn, I looked at the screens, the blobs of thermal and night vision imagery where I was searching for signs of a dead man, the audio speakers where I'd been listening for spirits in the static.

  I'd lost track of Anton Clay, and he didn't seem to be pursuing me. I wanted to take comfort in that, but I'd be deluding myself if I thought the threat was really gone.

  He was out there somewhere, on the loose, plotting something. And if it didn't involve me, it undoubtedly involved his usual favorite...burning down a house with a family trapped inside.

  Jacob had helped as much as he could, using his psychic abilities to help us study the sites most associated with Anton, but Anton just wasn't there to be captured.

  I played the videos and got drawn into them, watching the shadows, though there wasn't much to see.

  For a moment, I forgot that I'd made plans with Michael and failed to break them.

  When I remembered, I decided not to call it off. The thought of spending the rest of the night alone with my cat, thinking about ghosts from my past, was too much.

  I thought of how it felt when Michael embraced me—tall, strong, confident, wrapping me in warmth.

  “It's only coffee,” I murmured to myself, as I stood, stretched, and walked toward the exit.

  But we both knew it was more than that.