Ghost Trapper 12 The Necromancer's Library Page 18

  “You know she tricked you,” I guessed, drawing on one of our hypotheses. I tried to keep my voice level and not scream at the horrifying visage. My blood was like ice in the dead necromancer's presence. “Help us remove her from the house. Then you can move on—”

  The figure vanished.

  A second later, something hit me in the gut, painfully cold, with a lot of force.

  I flew up and back until I slammed into the wall, high enough that my head thumped against the paneled ceiling.

  Suddenly I felt dizzy and disoriented, just as I had up on the walkway. Maybe it was Marconi who'd tried to trick me into going the wrong way. Maybe he'd tried to kill me in the same spot where he'd died.

  I filled the area with a flood from flashlight. Stacey and Jacob fired up their own, taking their cure from me. The room was suddenly blinding white.

  Then Stacey added those ear-splitting church bells to the mix. The volume could have been a little lower, especially in that enclosed room.

  I toppled to the floor, my eardrums more or less rupturing along the way. I landed roughly on my hands and knees. Stacey and Jacob ran to help me.

  “I'm fine,” I grumbled as they helped me up.

  Marconi's ghost didn't grab me again right away; maybe he'd fled, or maybe he was still right beside me, watching and waiting.

  “So, as I was saying, my delicate psychic senses indicate this room might be haunted,” Jacob said. “Regular people like you might not have noticed the little signs, like people being thrown around by invisible forces. But those of us who have the gift can pick up on subtleties like that.”

  “I think we're really upsetting him. Or it.”

  “That was my question,” Stacey said. “Is it really him, or the, you know?” She glanced at Jacob, reminding me why she was being vague.

  “The golf hacker?” Jacob said.

  “You've heard of aufhockers?” I asked.

  “Yeah, just now, when you talked about it. You said it wasn't really his wife, it was a 'golf hacker' or something. I guess it hits the ball into the rough a lot.”

  I sighed. “We think it's a shapeshifting entity. So we're not sure whether that was really the person it looked like or just another illusion. It's been hard to identify which ghosts we might actually be dealing with, or even how many.”

  “We haven't seen this one before,” Stacey added. “So, was that a new ghost or just a new face for the old one? That's the question.”

  “Let's let Jacob keep working,” I said. “If he wants to.”

  “I was just here to help y'all figure out what's haunting this house. Then the ghost threw us against the wall.” Jacob's voice dropped into a deep, serious, movie-advertisement-narrator tone. “And now it's personal. We won't stop until we have justice.”

  “Such a dork,” Stacey whispered.

  “Maybe we should keep moving,” I suggested. I was sure rougher times awaited us tonight.

  Jacob nodded. He went on to check out the bathroom and the dance studio. “Look at that record player. It's like something from the Steam Age.”

  That was his only comment for that area. We continued down the hall, toward the second set of double doors, which would take us into the second story of the library. I'd left them open, but they were closed again.

  I had more thoughts that I kept to myself for the moment. Like how the aufhocker usually took the form of dead loved ones, but none of us had loved Dr. Marconi, and researching the dead necromancer certainly hadn't led me to develop any kind of fondness for him. So I suspected we'd uncovered Marconi himself, not the aufhocker.

  I couldn't be sure, though. There were still too many open questions about this case, and more of them opening up all the time.

  We probably needed outside help on this one. Maybe James Lachlan, the former Jesuit, if he was available. Maybe there was someone more local.

  I even considered the semi-wild Tucker Nealon, but he lived halfway across the country in Nacogdoches, Texas. Also, his last experience with us had left him burned, like physically burned by the worst pyrokinetic ghost I'd ever faced, so maybe he wouldn't care to take our calls.

  The necromancer's library, and the quick translations Cherise had provided, had been a good source of information on the aufhocker, but I'd still found no way to banish the entity permanently. It was said to haunt empty roads, an undead thing feeding on those who traveled alone in the dark, the lost souls of the highway.

  That got me exactly nowhere. It seemed to be an old demonic, though, and that likely meant bringing in an exorcist, if not the Texorcist.

  “Whoa,” Jacob said, stopping a few paces short of the closed doors. “That's a seriously decayed old guy standing there. He's pointing behind us. He wants us to leave. He's all bones and his clothes are like... I don't know... something from a Monty Python movie.”

  “A jerkin?” Stacey suggested.

  “I guess. The jerk in the jerkin wants us to leave instead of going into the library.”

  “Don't mind him, he's just warning us it's dangerous in there,” I said.

  “Sounds like the place we need to be, then. Will something try to claw my face off the moment we open the doors?” Jacob asked.

  “Possibly,” I replied.

  “Great.” He took a deep breath, and together we pushed the heavy doors open.

  Beyond, the library was as cold as a meat locker, as though it were filled with carcasses instead of rare books. The lights still didn't work here, and very little moonlight came in from the eastern windows. We'd clicked off our flashlights again.

  Chaos lay all around us. Where the arches had collapsed, books lay strewn down the steep staircases, making them nearly impassable. Dense clumps of them blocked up some of the walkways. The books that remained on the shelves were scrambled and overturned, splayed open to random pages.

  Jacob leaned over the walkway railing to look down toward the first floor, which had become a somewhat post-apocalyptic book landfill.

  “That's one messy library,” Jacob whispered. “Is this the children's area or something?

  “I don't think this library has a children's area,” Stacey replied, also whispering. “The story time would give them nightmares.”

  Maybe it was the near total darkness of the place, but the library felt larger now than it had before. It was certainly colder.

  “What's up there?” Jacob asked, as if something had caught his eye above us. He started toward it, and we knew where he was going right away.

  “The railing's broken,” Stacey warned, following close behind him. “You see the rope, right?”

  “That rope is real?” Jacob said, acting over-the-top surprised. “I thought it was a gho-o-st.”

  “Shut up. Just assume the whole railing is made of toothpicks, okay? It's not safe.”

  “Yet here we go, walking up there.” Jacob cleared some books off a staircase so he could climb to the third floor. Stacey stuck right behind him, watching out for him like a mama bear with a really big cub.

  The going was tougher than before. We had to clear books off the narrow walkways and push shelves back into place to clear the way forward.

  “We should stay back, Jacob,” Stacey whispered, gripping his arm as he made his way, inevitably, toward the broken railing.

  “Isn't that the window where we saw her earlier?” Jacob asked.

  “It is,” Stacey replied, sounding reluctant, as though not wanting to encourage him to investigate the area any longer.

  “Something definitely happened here.” Jacob walked up to the broken railing, which made Stacey cringe visibly. He closed his eyes, and his tone turned serious again. “Right here. He's looking down. His knee and hip ache from when he fell down in the yard a couple years ago, doing some basic shoveling. Old age, frailty, his body's getting useless. Death is with him every day like his shadow. He expects it at any moment, like a knock on the door, letting him know it's over.

  “He envisions falling from here all the way, his body b
reaking on the floor like glass, or like a dead old tree that finally comes crashing down after years of rotting out. And if he dies here, he can stay here, in his library, in his house.” Jacob's brow furrowed. “He's planning on dying and haunting the place. That's literally his plan. He's a real can of squirrels, this guy.”

  Can of squirrels? Stacey mouthed at me, but I could only shrug.

  “He leans against the railing, and it cracks. Wait. There's someone beside him. An apparition. It's someone he lost. She's radiant. Beaming at him. She licks her lips like she's eager to watch it happen, to watch him die. She's pretty, really amazingly pretty to his eyes, he's like dazzled or hypnotized for this last moment because she's so—”

  “Hey, watch out.” Stacey elbowed Jacob back from the broken railing to keep him from the danger of falling, and maybe for other reasons.

  “Then the railing breaks, and he falls. As he falls, he feels free. He hits the floor.” Jacob stood for a long, quiet moment, still much too close to the railing, though Stacey kept a grip on him. “And he stays there, looking at his broken body. She's still there, his wife, clearer than ever. They become part of the house, and they wait.”

  “For what?” I asked. “What do they wait for, Jacob?”

  “They... they...” Jacob opened his eyes. He gaped toward the window. In a different tone, he asked, “Ellie?”

  “What, Jacob?”

  “Does your research indicate a portal in this house? A gateway to the other side? Like the one that we found under Michael's apartment building?”

  “Nope. Why?”

  “I'm seeing someone I haven't seen...”

  “Who are you seeing?”

  “Jenny McAllister,” he said, his voice a little awed. “She was my girlfriend in high school for a couple months.”

  “Eh, what?” Stacey asked, her forehead furrowing.

  “Is she dead?” I asked. It was a little blunt, I probably should have phrased it more gently.

  “Water skiing accident. She was sixteen. I was supposed to be there, but I kind of hated her cousin who owned the boat, so I kind of backed out of going.” He shook his head. “That guy was a jerk. I tried to convince her not to go. I should have tried harder.”

  “Whoa,” Stacey said. “I did not know this.”

  “Now she's right there, dripping wet in her swimsuit. Her skin's blue. She's begging me to help her—”

  “It's the aufhocker. She's trying to trick you.”

  “I don't know.”

  “Don't believe it, Jacob,” I urged. “You have to fight back. You have to rebuke it. It's taken the form of one lost loved one after another.”

  “Including your dead girlfriend,” Stacey said, sounding somewhat annoyed. “Which I am sorry to hear about. But this isn't her. She's gone. Like Ellie says—rebuke it. Somehow.”

  “You're not Jenny,” Jacob finally said, taking our advice, though his tone was a bit reluctant. “Show me your true face, demon. Show your face and give your name.”

  A throaty growling sounded.

  A dark, shaggy shape slouched before the window, blocking the moonlight. Lurking in the shadows of the unlit library, it was neither wolf nor bear but could have resembled either at a distance, a nightmarish blend of the great predators that hunted our prehistoric ancestors.

  Stacey and I struck with the church bells in stereo.

  The thing snarled and turned to a swirling black fog as it left the walkway, shattering the rest of the damaged railing into splinters. Broken balusters rained down to the snowdrift of broken books on the first story far below.

  The railing across the way shattered, and the thick pile of fallen books behind it spilled to the library floor like water from behind a ruptured dam.

  The spindly walkway support columns cracked, and the entire second-story walkway across from us swung down like it was on a hinge. It dumped out all its fallen books at once.

  Similar cracking sounds erupted right below us.

  “Run!” I shouted, as we all took off, racing to escape the walkway before it could collapse beneath us.

  The next intersection was too distant, though. Our walkway dropped away before we could reach it.

  We scrambled to grab onto the bookshelves in front of us. Some of these random wild grabs turned out to be luckier than others.

  The shelf I grabbed with my left hand turned out to be quite loose, and it slid out of my grasp, along with the overturned books it held. This was not a great outcome.

  I ended up swinging the shelf out into the empty space behind me. The books slid off, and I finally had the presence of mind to release the useless shelf. It fell after the books and cracked loudly when it struck a tabletop below, giving me a taste of what might happen to my backbone should I fall.

  Fortunately, my right hand had managed to grab a hard dividing wall between bookshelves. It wasn't sliding anywhere, but it was vertical and narrow, so my grasp was dangerously awkward and slippery.

  The toe of my left boot had landed atop a row of leather-bound volumes, but there was no telling how strong the bookshelf beneath it was or how long it might support my weight before collapsing, perhaps with some help from the aufhocker who'd apparently had enough of us.

  Farther along, the moonlit shapes of Stacey and Jacob also held onto bookshelves as best they could. Neither had fallen yet, luckily. Like me, they clung there desperately like monkeys on a wall, or like the incredibly cheesy old-time black and white serials Jacob liked to watch, where the hero would inevitably be left hanging on the edge of a cliff; in the old days, the movie audience would have to wait until the following week to see whether the hero survived the next chapter.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The aufhocker remained invisible, or at least out of sight, but we could hear its low growl, and feel the shuddering and shaking as it tore apart the rickety network of walkways and staircases on the second and third level.

  “Let's move!” I shouted to Stacey. “But carefully,” I added.

  “Oh, this is just like free bouldering,” Stacey said. “Which I don't like. Give me a harness if I'm going up steep rocks, you know? I don't want to bash my brains out—”

  “More moving, less explaining,” I suggested.

  We climbed sideways across the bookshelves—me, then Jacob, then Stacey. Some of the shelves broke under my weight, but some didn't. It was a game of Russian roulette as we slowly approached the next walkway, which itself was badly sloped, some of its supports broken.

  Once there, we hurried to the next staircase, only to find it smashed to bits. We continued onward toward the next one.

  Something cold and hard, and unfortunately familiar, hit me just below the rib cage, slamming me back into Jacob and Stacey.

  We sprawled together in a tangle on a walkway that was as springy as a rope bridge but really shouldn't have been.

  The tall shape loomed over us, gray Greek mask of a bearded face, eyes sunken deep, a cloak of darkness shrouding his body. The necromancer.

  I gestured for Stacey to turn off her church bells. They weren't keeping the necromancer away, and my head was pounding from them.

  “Philip Marconi,” I said. “You were deceived. Gremel's book is a fraud. You did not draw Piper down from paradise, but summoned a dangerous and deceptive spirit into your home. You must feel it by now, especially as a spirit, that she who shares your home is not truly... uh, hello? Dr. Phil?”

  Marconi drifted through the air, past me and Jacob, and now seemed to orbit Stacey slowly, his deep eye sockets fixated on her. The hints of actual eyes seemed to glimmer within the depths, for the first time, gray lights in deep caverns.

  “Why is he doing that?” Stacey whispered through a wide, fake, toothy smile. “What did I do?”

  “I don't think it's anything you did.” I drew a small object from my jeans pocket, then took Stacey's hand. I slid it onto her ring finger.

  “Uh, Ellie?” Stacey held up the diamond wedding ring. “I mean, first off, this is really
a complete surprise—”

  “Shut up. You kind of look like Piper.”

  “I do? Thanks.”

  “Yeah, blonde hair, similar build. Now look at him.”

  Marconi drew closer to her. The eyes within his sunken sockets seemed clearer now, dilated black pupils, irises as stone gray as his face.

  “Great. He likes me,” Stacey said, without a glint of happiness in her tone.

  “Send him after the aufhocker,” I said.

  “Okay. Marconi, go attack the aufhocker! Like, now, please.”

  Marconi drew back a little. It was hard to read his stone mask face.

  Then another support must have gone out, because our walkway lurched hard and sloped sharply to one side.

  “Help us!” Stacey screamed, and the thing drew back further and vanished.

  “Good enough for me,” Jacob said.

  We got moving, struggling for balance on the tilted and wobbling walkway, then clambering down a loose staircase cluttered with books that made us trip and stumble at every step. We reached a second-story walkway, which immediately collapsed.

  We dropped a full story through empty space and landed hard atop the fallen avalanche of books. Hardcovers. Paperbacks would have been better. I really would have preferred a periodical section with nice, soft newspapers and magazines.

  “Groan,” Stacey finally said. “My ribs. I got rib-poked by some kind of Encyclopedia Occultica.”

  We got to our feet and walked as best as we could, the poor old books forming a shifting, quicksand-like surface as we trudged over them.

  “Jacob, any idea where they went?” I asked.

  “They haven't left.” Jacob turned and pointed at a relatively undisturbed section of bookshelves built into the wall. “They're standing there. The old guy and the blonde girl. Watching us.”

  “Why there?” It seemed like a fairly random section of bookshelves, a reference area full of old dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atlases, all in suspiciously good order compared to the rest of the room.

  “I'm not sure,” Jacob said. “They look furious, though.”

  I drew on my thermal goggles.

  Through them, I saw the cold spots where the entities stood, one a deep blue, the other a tumorous purple-black, extra large and extra cold. I guessed the bigger, darker, colder one was the aufhocker.