Ghost Trapper 12 The Necromancer's Library Page 17

  He stared for a long while, blinking and shaking his head, Stacey nudged him.

  “I can't understand her,” he muttered. Then, louder, looking ahead into the cold darkness, he said, “I'm sorry. You have to slow down. I'm catching every fifth word here.”

  “What are you seeing?” I asked.

  “There's a girl here. Not a residual, either. She's here. Talking so fast the lower part of her face is all blurred.” He turned his gaze back to the emptiness. “Yeah, again, you'll have to slow down. I can't understand anything.”

  “What does she look like? Aside from the blurry motormouth?”

  “She's young, like maybe a teenager,” he said. “Brownish hair, freckles. Died fairly recently, considering how old this house and cemetery are.”

  “How can you tell she's recent?”

  “Well, her apparition is strong and clear, not a faded echo. Also, she's wearing one of those Nirvana shirts with the x'ed-out eyes, so she can't possibly go back any earlier than the 1990s, but probably even more recent.”

  “You're quite the Encyclopedia Brown on that one,” Stacey said.

  “I would get you more details if she would slow down to a pace that actual humans can understand.” Jacob closed his eyes. “She's speaking in images instead of words. Her memories, it's so awkward when they just give you their memories... she's walking down the street, past big brick buildings with white columns. She's wearing a backpack, going to class, coming from class. Students flood the sidewalks and the streets around her. Headphones on. Twenty One Pilots playing. Everything seems to move in time with the music. All right, so... oh. Later, much later. Same street, but dark and deserted. No music.”

  Jacob walked with his eyes closed past the handful of grave markers to the open grassy area beyond, presumably the site of future graves.

  “She's sick. Stumbling. Too much to drink. She's never had a drink before. And she's lost. She's a freshman. All the buildings are unfamiliar. Where did her roommate go? She's wandering through campus alone. It's very late, she doesn't know how late. She's full of regret and guilt and starting to panic.

  “Headlights on the road. They slow down. She's worried it's the police, but it's not. Just an old man, looks like a professor. He seems friendly, frail, non-threatening. Offers her a ride.

  “At some point, she realizes the car ride's gone on much too long. She couldn't have been this far from her dorm. Now there's no town in sight. There's nothing, it's all dark. She panics, he tries to soothe her. That doesn't work, so he jabs her with something painful and bright. Electrical. Then she's out.

  “Her next memory is waking up in a dark place. There.” Jacob opened his eyes and pointed in the direction of the house, though we couldn't see it through the woods. “She wants us to go there. She has something to show us.”

  I glanced at Stacey. Brown hair, freckles? Nirvana t-shirt? It didn't sound like Piper, but it didn't sound like anyone else we'd heard about, either.

  “I am so confused,” Stacey whispered to me.

  “Oh, I don't mean she woke up right there in the woods,” Jacob said, apparently thinking she'd been talking to him. “Back at the house.”

  “The house is a little messy,” I told him. “And potentially dangerous. I can be more specific if you want—”

  “Not yet. Just tell me to duck if a ghost throws an ax at my head, that kind of thing.”

  “What else are you picking up around here?” I asked.

  “Nirvana Girl is pretty much the star attraction,” Jacob said.

  “Can you ask her name?”

  “What's your... yeah, I can't understand that. She's just squeaking. Talking much too fast. Slow down! She's not slowing. This is one chatty dead girl. Probably was chatty in life, hasn't had anyone to talk to since... well, since they buried her. Right here.” He pointed at a weedy patch of the open, not-yet-used area of the cemetery.

  “With no marker?” Stacey asked.

  “Exactly. Why would they do that?” Jacob turned and looked past us, up the path toward the gate. “She's waiting for us over there. She wants us to go up to the house with her.”

  “Yeah, I thought I felt an extra chill pass through me,” Stacey said. “Come on, Nirvana Girl, don't walk through me again, okay? It's weird.”

  The three of us—four, counting our invisible dead companion—left through the cemetery gate, deliberately leaving it open. Closing it might have caused the cemetery to reclaim her in some way, and we couldn't have our nameless surprise witness vanishing back into her grave.

  Dry leaves crunched as we walked. At times, I thought I could hear extra footsteps beside me, but I resisted the temptation to turn and look, worried my glance might send the ghost flying away into the night like a startled bird.

  As we approached the bend in the road where we could see the back of the house in the distance, Stacey and I slowed to look through the break in the trees.

  The same window glowed again, the same pale blonde girl looking down at us. Her eerie glow vanished with a faint cracking sound, though it must have been fairly loud if it reached us.

  “I just saw something in that window.” Jacob pointed.

  “We all saw something in that window,” Stacey said. “But thanks for playing.”

  “It was watching us. It was... brrr. Even the other ghost caught a chill off that one, I think. Its gaze was ice cold. That's no typical ghost up there, is it?”

  “It does appear atypical,” I said, trying to keep it vague. And succeeding, I think.

  We crunched onward through the chilly, shadowy woods.

  “Is she still walking with us?” I asked Jacob as we approaching the van.

  “Yes, but I don't see her hopping in the van,” Jacob said. “Especially since getting into a stranger's car didn't exactly pay off for her last time.”

  “Okay. Stacey, take the van. We'll meet you at the house.” I passed her the keys.

  She climbed in and backed the van into the road, careful not to turn on the headlights until they were pointed away from us.

  I couldn't help feeling a moment of unease watching her drive off, leaving us alone on an abandoned road with a strange spirit we’d just escorted out of the cemetery. Now who was doing necromancy?

  “Which way does she want to go?” I asked Jacob.

  “Right through the rusty barbed wire fence,” he said. “Not really that considerate of the living.”

  We helped each other over the fence without getting spiked or gored, so that was an accomplishment. Then it was a matter of walking through high weeds, over ground still bumpy with the memory of furrows from when the place had been a working farm long ago.

  “Watch out for that rock,” Jacob said, right as I tripped over it. He caught me before I could sprawl onto my face. Too bad he hadn't been in the library earlier.

  We crossed the overgrown field. Occasionally the moon and stars glowed down on us for a moment or two, only to be obscured by clouds again, leaving us with just our flashlights to guide us.

  “This house you're investigating has serious issues,” he said. “You've probably picked up on that by now.”

  “Something attacked us right before we came out,” I told him. “So, yep. Active haunting. With a big side dish of serious emotional issues.”

  “It amazes me that you keep going into places like this, after all you've been through inside of them.”

  “You've been through plenty of it with us.”

  “True. I mean, ever the since the crash, I've had to deal with the dead. Sometimes they follow me home and harass me when I'm trying to sleep.

  “One time I was in a meeting at work, the clients over here and the senior partner over there, and one of the company's founders was standing over in the corner trying to get involved. Ben Ewanowski. He'd been dead almost a year, died at his desk at age ninety-one. He'd died on an April sixteenth, the day after tax season ended.

  “Anyway, he was such a workaholic that he hung around a couple years after he d
ied, still trying to manage his biggest client engagements, issuing instructions to staff members who couldn't hear him.

  “Being ignored fueled his temper, which hadn't been that great in life. He'd go on these angry tirades nobody but me ever heard. Sometimes he'd lash out and a book would fall mysteriously from a shelf or papers would slide off a table. And I'd have to sit there and pretend I was as clueless as everyone else, because talking to invisible people at work can have a negative effect on one's career.”

  “I do it all the time,” I said.

  “Different career path,” he said.

  “I can't recommend mine. The pay varies widely by case, and sometimes it's a long wait between good checks.”

  “Never mind the money; seeing the dead and fighting the dangerous ones only made me appreciate the logic and predictability of accounting. It went from a safe but boring job to a refreshingly safe and boring job compared to what I do with you and Stacey.”

  “You've help a lot,” I said. “Even if you're only a weekend warrior against evil.”

  “Accountants fight evil, too,” he said. “Untidy records. Wasteful expenditures.”

  “I forgot about the exciting wasteful expenditures.”

  “They're everywhere, often invisible, and can be very draining. Just like ghosts.”

  “I can't tell whether you're making your job sound interesting or mine sound boring. Here's the next barbed wire fence. Who wants to go first?”

  We managed to climb over more barbed wire without any slashing, stabbing, or tetanus-inducing incidents.

  Stacey waited for us by the van, pacing and kicking gravel, clearly impatient. The house was completely dark, no sign of electrical life inside. Cherise's car was gone.

  “Took y'all long enough,” she said. “What's the plan, Ellie?”

  “What does Nirvana Girl say?” I asked Jacob.

  “She's actually hanging by the fence.” He pointed back the way we'd come. “She's afraid to come any closer.”

  “Why?” Stacey asked. “I mean, she's already dead, what's the worst that can happen?”

  “I don't know, but she's not budging. She's just nodding and kind of hopping around. She wants us to go in. Even though she refuses to.”

  I looked toward the fence, but saw no sign of the girl. “Oh, come on,” I said. “Easy for her to say.”

  “She's showing me images of books, lots of books. A library. She wants us to go the library?” Jacob rubbed his head. “Now I'm confused. Did she die with a book checked out or something? She can't move on until she clears up her overdue fines?”

  “This house is at least seventy percent library,” Stacey said. “She probably just means to go inside.”

  “Oh.” Jacob looked at the big temple-like house with new interest. “Sounds cool.”

  “You're such a box of Nerds,” Stacey said. “Actually, I wish we had some candy right now.”

  “We have plenty of Stoneground bars left,” I said. “We should just chuck those at the ghost.”

  “Not even the dead could survive that,” Jacob agreed.

  “Whatever, they're stuffed with nutrients and good times,” Stacey said. “That's the Stoneground Pledge.”

  I looked at the dark front doors, last seen slamming themselves to trap me inside, with more than a little apprehension. We were probably all feeling it, hence the desperate joking. I was worried about leading my friends in there to face the dangerous entity inside, but it was up to us to deal with it, to protect Cherise and Aria like we protected all of our clients. The money was terrible, but the work was a powerful calling.

  “Okay,” I said. “It's hazardous in there, so let's load up.”

  We grabbed backpacks from the van and filled them with gear. I hung my thermal goggles around my neck in case I needed them. Though called goggles, they don't much resemble the little plastic things for swimming; they're more like a solid heavy brick that affixes fairly unpleasantly to one's face.

  Once we were ready, the three of us ascended the stairs to the portico. Jacob pointed at the damaged column with some concern.

  “Did a ghost do that?”

  “It was a Ford F-150,” Stacey said.

  “Someone should probably get that fixed.” He turned toward the door again. “There's nobody home, correct?”

  “Nobody alive.” I opened the door and stepped inside.

  “Well, that's a pleasant way to describe it.” He walked in, passing the flashlight over the bookshelves in the high entrance hall. These hadn't been rearranged crazily like the ones in the actual library. “Do they have lights in this place?”

  I flipped the switch on the wall. Nothing happened. “Looks like we're stuck with darkness. Sorry.”

  “At least it's warmer than a freezer in here,” he said. “But not by much. Colder inside than outside, that's never good...”

  He explored, looking into the parlor lined with classic texts, the dining room with its immense dark slab of a table, where we hadn't spent much time. He looked around the kitchen, investigated the pantry, found a twelve-pack of lunch-sized Fritos, ripped one open and snacked on it.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Haven't had these in a while.”

  He opened the cellar door by the kitchen, and we went down. It wasn't a full basement, more like a walled-off area with some shelves and a floor among the brick foundations of the house. It looked like a storage place for forgotten old jars full of forgotten old funk, plus scattered rusty hand tools on a mildewed bench.

  “I see this is where they kept their old-time cobweb collection,” Jacob said. He walked to one wall, frowning. “Is this the whole cellar? There's nothing else down here?”

  “It looks like this is it,” I said. “We haven't really gone under the house.”

  “The clients didn't report any activity down here?” Jacob asked. He sounded a little perplexed.

  “I'm not sure the clients ever came down here at all,” I said.

  “Yeah, who would?” Stacey asked, grimacing at the strange dirty jars that her flashlight couldn't penetrate.

  “Are you picking up something, Jacob?”

  “Maybe. It's faint.” He looked at the wall and shook his head. “Let's keep going.”

  Next, we headed upstairs to check the bedrooms before entering the library. The entities in the house were laying low so far, but I figured entering the library might provoke them again.

  Upstairs, we kept our flashlights off, depending on the pale light through the glass balcony doors and the windows.

  “There's some activity here, but it would be hard not to guess that based on all your equipment.” He stood in the middle of the hallway and turned his head slowly, like it was some kind of radar dish taking readings. Sometimes I don't know if he's serious with this stuff or playing it up.

  He extended his arms. Closed his eyes. Wiggled his fingers.

  He looked in at the bedrooms, but was mainly interested in the Magicia books on the shelves.

  “Wow, this is a rare edition,” he said. “Check out those swamp dragons.”

  “Put it back,” I said.

  Finally, we ended up back in the front hall after he'd walked through all the front bedrooms.

  “No reason to go anywhere except dead ahead.” Jacob pointed at the dark doors.

  “Dead ahead? In a haunted house?” Stacey asked him. “So funny.”

  “What? That joke killed at the Winchester House.”

  “I know entire dads who wouldn't laugh at that.” Stacey's face went serious, though, as she looked at the dark doors, probably remembering how they'd bulged and flown open, the lock breaking, the icy air filling the hallway. Now the doors stood partially open, and it was hard not to imagine something watching us from the darkness within.

  Inside, the length of hallway was filled with shattered glass. Only a few pictures remained on the wall, all of them askew, some flipped backwards.

  “Looks like good times ahead.” Jacob stopped only a few paces into the master suite.
“Yeah, this place is definitely active. The entity here is an older man, very strong energy. Much stronger than the typical active ghost. He's territorial, like this is definitely his house, or at least it is now. He spends a lot of time in here.” Jacob opened the master bedroom door.

  The heavy curtains around the bed rustled, as though something moved inside them.

  “He doesn't like any of us being here,” Jacob said. “He looks old and frail... oh, but now he's showing himself as young and handsome.”

  Sounded like Marconi, I thought, looking at the painting on the wall that falsely portrayed him as youthful alongside his second wife.

  “Now he's really yelling—” Jacob began. The bed curtains shifted.

  Jacob flew back off his feet and slammed into the wall. It wasn't too far, and he landed on his feet, but it was definitely shocking.

  Stacey shouted and ran to him, while I stepped toward the spot where he'd been, ready to blast my flashlight.

  “Philip Marconi,” I said, trying to act like I was in control, despite the fact that I so plainly wasn't. “Professor. Necromancer. You hoped and believed you summoned your wife Piper, but she was a fraud. An aufhocker pretended to be the ghost of Piper while it fed on you. Did you discover the truth, Dr. Marconi? Did the aufhocker murder you?”

  The room grew even colder. In the shadows ahead I saw a figure that was tall and lean, much taller than the Gremel apparition had been. It was a featureless shadow at first. As it shifted toward me, floating rather than walking, its face came into view in the moonlight.

  It was Marconi's face, or a version of it. I recognized the general appearance from his pictures, but this face was the color of stone, the eyes and mouth deep and dark like the features on an ancient Greek drama mask. He appeared to be wrapped in robes made of shadows.