Ghost Trapper 12 The Necromancer's Library Read online

  “Or my mother,” Cherise said quietly.

  “I'm sorry?” I asked, confused.

  “Our mother passed a couple of years ago,” she said. “I've been taking care of Aria since then, and it hasn't been easy. Momma had a lot of bills before she died. It was tough. It's still tough. I feel like I'm failing my sister every day. This...” She gestured at the house around her. “This could change everything.”

  “I'm sorry to hear that. And I can assure you that you're not failing your sister here. You're not. But what were you saying about your mother?”

  “I've been seeing her,” she whispered. “Ever since we moved in.”

  “You've been seeing your mother?”

  “Yes. Not all the time. At first, I just thought I heard her footsteps, the way they'd sound when she came in from work at night. I thought I heard them in the library one night. Then another time I thought I heard her voice. Just a few words of 'I Will Survive.' Gloria Gaynor. She used to sing that sometimes, kind of slow and sarcastic, when she was walking out the door to go to work.” Cherise removed her glasses and wiped at the corners of her eyes.

  “I thought it was my mind playing tricks,” she continued. “Then I started seeing her in my room, and in my dreams. She started talking to me. I told myself it was all just dreams.

  “Then Aria started telling me about seeing strange things and wanting to do something about it, and I didn't like that idea at all. I'd never believed in the afterlife, like I said, but suddenly I felt my mother was close, and there to help me and guide me, in a way she really hadn't been in a long time. The way she was when I was young, and she always knew what to do.”

  I nodded. “What kind of advice did she give?”

  “She said this was the right place for Aria and me. Said it was a blessing, all arranged from beyond, and I had better hold onto it with both hands.”

  “Meaning this house?”

  “And all the opportunity it represents. I can't let this slip through. I just can't. And she would comfort me, and tell me that as long as I stayed here, I'd be fine.”

  I nodded. “I told you I saw my father. It's not easy. You want to believe. Just like Marconi wanted to believe he'd summoned Piper. But maybe he didn't do that at all. Does our helpful Dutch occultist have any tips on banishing an aufhocker?”

  Cherise checked. “Light, especially sunlight, and the ringing of bells. Church bells are most effective.”

  “Light and holy music. That's what we use to run spirits off temporarily, but it doesn't defeat them.”

  “She was summoned by a ritual in Gremel's book,” Cherise said, stepping back over to look at the reptile-hide codex again. “Maybe there's something for banishing.”

  “We can't trust his book. If we're right, then his ritual didn't work. It was a trap for summoning something evil and demonic. Any other rituals in his books could do the same. Plus, based on what I read, we don't want to get involved in these rituals.” I shuddered, thinking of the bathtub full of animal guts from which Marconi had summoned the briefly solid—well, liquid—incarnation of his dead wife, or perhaps another entity impersonating her, an aufhocker who specialized in taking on the form of sad weeping women and dead loved ones.

  “Then what do we do?”

  “Can you translate the Dutch guy's notes on the aufhocker?” I asked.

  “I'll do my best.”

  “Maybe there's something in there we can use.” I looked up at the third-story broken railing and window where we'd seen the ghost. “We are going to remove this thing from your house, whatever it takes. I promise you that.”

  One of the narrow, shadowy walkways above creaked, as though someone had been listening to us and was now walking away, but we saw nobody up there.

  Chapter Twenty

  “So, the whole time Marconi thought he was sharing his house with the sad ghost of his dead wife, cuddling with her cold spot at night, feeling guilty for ripping her down from heaven—he was actually being fed on by this thing?” Stacey had conjured up the image of the aufhocker statue from the streets of Hildesheim, the dark hooded figure preying on the young man. “It looks like some... giant evil garden gnome. When garden gnomes go bad.”

  “Gnomes have beards,” I said.

  “Maybe the ones without beards are evil. That's how you can tell.”

  We were back in the spare room upstairs. A drizzle of rain had arrived, making the world outside a cold, dark gray, and completely washing out my level of interest in camping outdoors again. I felt trapped inside the house. And normally, being trapped inside a library on a rainy day sounds great to me, but maybe not this particular library on this particular Saturday.

  “So our Piper ghost is a fraud,” Stacey said.

  “That's one hypothesis.”

  “Everything's a hypothesis with you. One day you'll be standing at the altar and the preacher will be like 'Do you take this man?' and you'll be like 'That's one hypothesis.'”

  “Probably. But yes, it's possible the aufhocker is a demonic entity brought in by a ritual that wasn't what it claimed to be. Gremel's book isn't a reliable source, it turns out.”

  “But I thought Gremel was helping us.”

  “His ghost appears to be trying to warn people away from the aufhocker. Especially Aria. I just don't understand why.”

  “And the shapeshifter hockey thing is treating Aria differently.”

  “Aufhocker. And yes, it's acting different toward her. Instead of sneaking in and feeding on her when she's drowsy or sleeping, it takes on a crying-woman form that looks like Piper and tries to draw Aria out of the room.”

  “So the voice we heard in the family cemetery wasn't really Piper?” she asked.

  I thought about it—hearing the voice, then seeing the pale girl in the window as we returned. “It seems likely. The aufhocker tries to look nonthreatening at first, like a friendly person or animal, or a helpless and desperate woman. She begged us for help to make us feel bad for her.”

  “But not very well, because I had to dredge up that audio,” Stacey pointed out. “Piper, or the ghost who pretends to be her, is pretty clear when Aria sees her and hears her crying. She was pretty clear when we saw her in the window, too. And Marconi saw her and talked with her a number of times over the years.”

  “Yeah, good point, Stacey. We wouldn't have seen or heard anything in the cemetery without our equipment. If she was trying to trick us, she wasn't trying very hard. Maybe that one really was Piper's ghost.”

  “And she was saying, 'help, I don't belong here' because the hockey-offer took her place in the house, pretending to be her, while she's stuck out back in the boneyard with her in-laws. Poor girl.”

  I chewed on that a minute, sitting on the edge of the bed. Stacey was still looking at the monitors; she still had mountains of footage and other data from the past three nights to sift through. “So, it's possible that neither Philip nor Piper Marconi are haunting this house,” I said. “It could just be the aufhocker and Johann Gremel.”

  “That... would be weird.”

  “Not as weird as Dr. Weirdman's guide to Europe.” I slid the old trade paperback out of my bag. The glue holding the book together had crumbled over the years, and many of the pages were loose.

  “You're kidding!” She opened to the bookmarked page and looked at the aufhocker statue, the same one that she'd already found on her phone. Dr. Weirdman's picture was taken a little closer, a little more focused on the thing's creepy, goblin-like face. “There it is. The ugly critter we're looking for. From this angle it kind of looks like an evil Smurf.”

  “Hopefully we can catch it before it can harm our clients.”

  “You mean, 'hopefully we can smurf it before it smurfs our smurfs.'”

  “Any word from Jacob?”

  “He's coming. It'll be late this afternoon. Tax season, you know. A busy time of year for psychics. If they daylight as accountants.”

  “We're lucky he's willing to come at all, as far out as we are.
”

  “Yep, he's pretty dream-tastic.” Stacey frowned out at the drizzling rain. “I was thinking of running into town for lunch and snacking materials, but it's so yuck out there. Good thing I've got more granola bars.”

  “We ought to have something better to offer when he gets here. We can't have our psychic bleeding from the roof of his mouth.”

  “Are you insulting my Stoneground bars?”

  “Well, they definitely live up to their name, since they taste like rocks covered in dirt.” I took one from our diminishing supply. It was labeled Triple Nut Flavor; I was pretty sure at least some of those nuts were acorns. With shell.

  We slept in shifts that afternoon, one person staying awake to guard the other one who slept. We monitored the room for temperature and electromagnetic fluctuations that could indicate the aufhocker had returned to feed on us. A thermal camera in the hall watched for cold spots in case the entity wanted to go after Cherise or Aria instead. Both of them retreated to their rooms for part of their Saturday, presumably to rest after the previous night's action.

  I took the second sleeping shift—so when the screaming began, it woke me up. Fortunately. I'd been having one of my usual nightmares instead of a pleasant aufhocker-induced dream about a dead relative, so I wasn't completely drained when I pushed myself out of bed to follow the screams.

  I was disoriented, though, as I ran out the door and down the hall, barefoot, not taking the time to strap on my boots or utility belt. I did bring a flashlight, though. Stacey ran at my side.

  The screaming came from Cherise's room down the hall. Her door was closed, but thankfully not locked, so we rushed right in.

  Cherise was sitting up, clawing at the air in front of her, looking like she was fighting something invisible while struggling to catch her breath.

  We clicked on the overhead lights and flooded the room with our own high-powered, full-spectrum flashlights.

  Cherise screamed again. The blankets and pillows had been stripped from her bed. She slid backwards across the mattress, propelled by an unseen force, until her back slammed into the headboard.

  Stacey played the music she'd downloaded earlier after we'd learned about the aufhocker. It was a playlist of church bells collected from cathedrals around Germany, largely by bell enthusiasts who'd recorded them and posted them free online. Apparently bell enthusiasts exist.

  I winced as the inside of the room turned into a clanging, clonging belfry. If the holiness of the bells didn't drive the spirit away, maybe they would at least annoy it into leaving.

  Rushing to Cherise's side, I grabbed her hand and shoved my light into the space in front of her, though I still didn't see anything there.

  Cherise clung to me, gasping for air, but not screaming or clawing anymore.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her. “Can you breathe? Can you speak?”

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Let's get out of here.” I helped her to her feet. She winced as if in pain, but had no trouble walking out to the hall with me.

  Stacey remained in the room until we'd left, then hurried out and slammed the door behind her. Her clanging bells kept pealing out from the speaker on her belt, and I motioned for her to dampen it down a little before my skull cracked from the noise.

  She turned it way down, leaving the bells as a kind of atmospheric background, like a church announcing the time in a distant village. And never stopping.

  “What happened?” I asked Cherise, who held tight to my arm.

  “It was him,” she said, and she winced again. “He was on top of me. Crushing down.”

  “Who?” I asked, thinking of the dark cloud. It had usually taken the form of her mother, hadn't it?

  “Marconi,” she whispered. She cleared her throat. “Dr. Marconi. He was on me, and it felt like he was trying to... get inside me. Here.” She loosened a button on her frayed pajama top to show me.

  Three bright red scratches ran from the top of her shoulder to her chest, like something had tried to claw out her heart. Or claw its way in.

  “That looks painful,” Stacey said. “We've got a first aid kit.”

  “Wait, it was the dead professor this time?” I asked. “This is his first appearance, isn't it? We haven't seen him. Neither has Aria.”

  We all looked up the hall to Aria's door, still firmly shut. Despite the screaming and the insanely loud bells, she hadn't stepped out to investigate.

  A worried look passed among us, and we bolted toward her door.

  Cherise got there first, despite her recent injuries, and pounded with both fists.

  She screamed her sister's name, but no response came from within. She tried opening the door, but it wouldn't budge.

  “Aria!” she shouted, kicking the door repeatedly. “Aria, answer me!”

  No answer came.

  “Let me try.” I drew back and stomped the door with the sole of my boot, the way my mostly retired boss Calvin Eckhart had taught me, presumably the same way the Savannah Police Department had taught him.

  The door was old, which unfortunately meant it was thicker and more solid than the interior doors of most modern homes. It took several stomps just to crack it, several more to actually bust it open and send it swinging inward. If only my kickboxing instructors back home could see me now.

  When the door opened, I charged into the room with my flashlight drawn, Stacey close behind me, Cherise right behind her.

  Aria sat at the antique rolltop desk with her back toward us, a math book open in front of her, wearing huge earphones that completely swallowed her ears.

  She spun around with a shock on her face as I charged toward her, her broken door swinging wide behind me.

  “What are you doing?” She lifted one earphone, unleashing a storm of brassy old-time jazz music. She looked to her sister, who'd charged in right behind us. “What's happening?”

  “I saw him,” Cherise said.

  “Who?” Aria removed her headphones and jumped to her feet. “The skeleton guy? Why's my door broken?”

  “Because you weren't answering it,” Cherise said.

  “Did you consider texting me?” Aria held up her phone.

  “I was distracted.” She pulled her pajama shirt aside to reveal the scratches.

  Aria gaped while Cherise told her what she'd seen. Stacey grabbed antibiotic cream and bandages for the scratches.

  “I don't think you should stay in this house anymore, Aria,” Cherise said. “You have to leave.”

  The timbers of the house let out a low moan below, as if protesting this statement.

  “We both have to leave,” Aria said. “That's what I've been saying this whole time. This place is bad. Just bad.”

  “I can't. I need this job.”

  “You're kidding. Even after that?” Aria pointed to the scratched area over Cherise's heart, now covered again by the flannel.

  “I can't give up on this,” Cherise said.

  “Even if it kills you?” Aria asked. “Because that's what happened to the last guy who lived in this house, didn't it? It killed him. That library is full of evil things, and you know it.”

  “Maybe you both should pack up and stay at a hotel tonight,” I said. “Our psychic will be here soon to help us investigate. It may stir things up. I don't want to see either of you get hurt.”

  “We can't move out,” Cherise repeated.

  “It's just for tonight. There's a very inexpensive motel outside Athens—”

  “—where you don't want to stay,” Stacey hurried to add. “Pay the extra ten bucks for the Holiday Inn Express or whatever, trust me.”

  “I'll be ready in ten minutes,” Aria announced, grabbing a small suitcase from under her bed and then grabbing clothes from her dresser. “Why aren't you getting packed, Cherise?”

  Cherise still looked undecided.

  “I'll help you,” I offered. “Stacey, you stick with Aria. We don't leave either of them alone until they're packed and in the car.”

  �
��This feels like a bad idea,” Cherise said, after I'd steered her out to the hallway as gently as I could. We started toward her room. “You don't think any harm will come to the library while I'm gone, do you?”

  “I wouldn't think so,” I said, a little confused by her priorities at the moment, considering she'd just been attacked by one of the library's resident ghosts.

  “Good.” As we reached her room, she lowered her voice. “If you get rid of the bad one, does that mean I won't see my mother again? Awake or asleep?”

  “Well,” I began, which was just a placeholder word, because I wasn't sure exactly how to navigate this treacherous-sounding emotional minefield. “The aufhocker is a deceptive ghost. It pretended to be Stacey's brother, and my father—”

  “I know, I know,” Cherise hurried to interrupt, as though she didn't want to hear me spell it out again. “I know it's not really her. But I was almost getting used to seeing her again. Sometimes I just hear her voice in the library, or smell her perfume when I'm lying asleep at night, and it comforts me. When I see her out of the corner of my eye, or dream about her, it feels like she's back, stronger and wiser than ever, ready to protect us and guide us, instead of all that being on my shoulders now. How do I guide my sister when I'm only a step or two ahead on the path, and I don't know where any of it leads? The responsibility's exhausting. Being alone with no help is exhausting. At school, I'm surrounded by people my own age whose biggest fear is which keg party they're attending this weekend. And I'm over here trying not to wreck Aria's life permanently through some mistake or oversight while also trying figure out how not to wreck my own.”

  “I'm sorry,” I said, sort of awkwardly patting her shoulder. I'm not the greatest at this kind of thing. “But you definitely have to understand—”

  “When I thought my mother was watching over us, I felt like there was hope. Like there was a plan. And like I said, I didn't believe in anything, spiritually, before we moved to this house. My mother did, and my grandmother, but I just couldn't bring myself to have faith. There's so much suffering, so many horrors inflicted by people on people... I don't know. It's almost better to believe there's nothing out there than to believe there's some all-powerful being who just watches it all. Just watches and lets it happen.