She invited them to sit on a floral-patterned couch in a cozy sitting room. Lizzie smelled cookies baking.
“If you don't mind, could you pay up front?” the woman asked, removing her apron. “My apologies for being abrupt, but other guests have left suddenly in the middle of the night.”
“Yes ma'am.” Mr. Long pulled his wallet out and paid with cash. “But you don't have anything to worry about. We won't be frightened by creaky boards and drafty rooms.”
The hostess sighed and gave Lizzie a worried glance. After a pause, she smiled nervously. “I was just baking cookies. Chocolate chip. They're cooling on the rack just now. Let me go and get them.”
Mrs. Davis returned with a china plate deep with cookies. “Help yourselves,” she said.
“Thank-you ma'am,” Lizzie said.
The hostess sat in a delicate wooden chair. As she nibbled on her cookie, she watched her guests with a measuring stare.
“Delicious,” Mr. Long said.
Mrs. Davis narrowed her eyes. “Where is your equipment? Most ghost hunters bring all sorts of gadgetry.”
“We're not hunting ghosts, Mrs. Davis,” he answered. “We're here to prove that they don't exist. We only need our eyes and ears for that.”
Mrs. Davis looked down at the floor. “I used to be like you. I believed ghosts were for Halloween and campfire stories,” she said quietly. “Not anymore. Now I only go upstairs when the sun is bright, and even then I don't stay up there long.”
She put her shaky thin fingers to her lips and looked up at the ceiling. “Something is up there. Something evil.”
“Mrs. Davis,” Mr. Long began, “I'm sure you mean well—“
“I know I should just let you have your way, Mr. Smith, but I'm not very good at this. I never planned to run a...a spook house. Just wanted to have a little bed-and-breakfast to keep me busy, and keep me fed, after my husband died,” Mrs. Davis said. Then she turned to Lizzie, “You don't want to go up there, honey.”
This woman wasn't play-acting. Something up there had really scared her. Lizzie felt the hairs rising on the back of her neck.
“If it were just you, Mr. Smith,” turning her attention back to Lizzie's dad, “I'd probably just let you learn your lesson the hard way. But your little girl...she's so young.”
“We're not afraid of ghosts, Mrs. Davis,” Mr. Long said.
“Neither was I,” she said, looking restlessly around the room. “So when I came here with the realtor, I ignored the creepy feeling I had upstairs. Told myself I was imagining things.
“But it wasn't my imagination, Mr. Smith. My first night here my sleep was interrupted by the sound of a woman crying. I turned on the lamp but I saw nothing. Still there was the crying, and the creak creak of a rocking chair.
“I wasted no time getting out of that room, but what waited in the hallway was worse.
“I saw her, and I know she saw me, because she started to laugh that horrid laugh of hers. It’s the kind of laugh you might hear from a child lifting a cat by its tail—the kind of laugh you hear from a child who likes hurting things. I fainted.
“I woke dazed and disoriented. I had hit my head and I was bleeding badly. At first, I tried to tell myself I'd been sleepwalking. But then I heard that laugh again.
“I crawled to the stairway, and pulled myself up by the handrail. That's when she pushed me. I'm lucky I didn't fall.”
Mrs. Davis sighed in that broken way people do when they are about to cry. Her skin had turned a shade paler, and she looked weaker and older. Turning her head, she looked outside. “It's beginning to grow dark.” Her head shook as if she had palsy.
“Yes,” Mr. Long said. “I guess it's about time we head to our bedroom. We'd like to stay in the room you believe has the most activity.”
“I sleep down here in the antechamber on the daybed,” Mrs. Davis said, now looking back up at the ceiling. “Your daughter can stay down here with me...she can sleep on the couch.”
This sounded like a good idea to Lizzie. If the woman had wanted to scare her, she had done a good job.
But Mr. Long shook his head. “No. We'll be fine.”
“I know what her name is,” Mrs. Davis said, a distant look in her eyes.
“Whose name?” Lizzie asked. Her dad gave Lizzie a slight shake of the head. He didn't want her asking questions.
“That evil one up there,” Mrs. Davis answered, looking up at the ceiling. “I've done some research—went to the courthouse. They were the Galbreaths. Mr. Galbreath was a local merchant—he owned several riverboats and brought stuff up from New Orleans or down from Ohio. They had a child, a girl. She's the laughing girl, I think. Her name was Elizabeth.
“Same as your name, isn't it?” Mrs. Davis asked.
“My name is Lizzie.” True, Elizabeth was the name printed on her birth certificate; but nobody ever called her that.
“Mr. Galbreath hired a housemaid,” Mrs. Davis continued, “a widower named Edith Sikes. She had a daughter named Amy. Both were invited to live in the house.
“Tragically, before long Mrs. Galbreath grew ill and died. Consumption it says on the death certificate, though I'm not certain what that means.
“Just over a year later, Mr. Galbreath married Miss Sikes. But all was not well. I think something happened to Elizabeth when her mother died...it twisted her somehow and made her evil. In any case, she pushed her new stepsister down the stairs. Amy's neck broke and she died instantly.
“I think it is Mrs. Galbreath that cries at night, and it is Elizabeth, her daughter, that roams the house, looking for another victim to push down the stairs.”
Chapter 14 - Imp
Manuel found it hard to concentrate on his exercise because of the storm. He was trying to raise a feather off the table, but every time he felt he had it, and saw the feather slightly jiggle, another crash of booming thunder would break his concentration. Trailers were bad places to be in a storm, and it made him nervous to hear the fury of it as it pounded down onto the trailer. Being nervous didn’t help his concentration either.
Gordon had called from the grocery store. He said he was going to wait until the storm died down a bit before coming back home. Manuel thought about Gordon riding through the sheets of rain on his motorcycle and he agreed that it didn’t seem like a great idea.
The window next to the door exploded inward, shards of glass spraying the room. Manuel turned and ducked under the table to avoid being cut, then jumped up. The curtains waved in the wind and rain came in through the window. Manuel wondered if the wind was had been so strong to blow out the window...to make it explode.
“On the couch!” Gordon’s shrunken head yelled. “The blighter is on the couch!”
Manuel turned and saw something about the size of a junior league soccer ball on the old threadbare couch. It was black and shiny and had veins in it, giving him the impression of a black head of cabbage. Then it began to unfold. Wings opened up, thin arms and legs stretched out, and a dark face with white eyes and white fangs lifted toward him.
“Don’t just stand there gaping Sparky,” the shrunken head screamed. “Do something!”
Manuel looked around the room for a weapon, but saw nothing to throw, nothing to use as a club.
The imp considered Manuel for a moment, but then looked around the room. When its eyes settled on the bookshelf with the metal doors it darted toward it.
Of course, Manuel thought. The imp was here to steal Gordon’s string of sigils. And no doubt Akers, the Mississippi Congressman, was behind it. At least Akers hadn’t lied about one thing: he had actually been a collector. If he didn’t already have sigils, then he wouldn’t have been able to summon this little demon. But obviously he wanted more demons under his control.
Manuel leapt after the demon.
When it reached the bookshelf it pried one of the doors open, splintering the wood frame and bending the thin metal grill.
Manuel grabbed it around the waist to pull it away, and had just an in
stant to feel the rock hard and cold flesh of the demon before it wrenched around and slashed at his face with its claw. Manuel jerked his head back and it missed his face, but the razor claws sliced through Manuel’s t-shirt and deep into his flesh. Manuel screamed, let go of the imp, and stumbled backwards.
The imp grabbed the chain of pendants from the metal tree. It turned and flashed a brilliant and frightening smile back toward Manuel. It seemed to say, ‘foolish boy, you can’t stop me.’
Manuel nodded and opened his palms. “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s yours.”
The imp squinted suspiciously at Manuel, but then took to the air.
As quick as he could, Manuel reached into the bookcase and grabbed a jar. The liquid was yellow and the animal inside looked like a squid. Spinning, aiming toward the window where he knew the imp would be, Manuel threw the jar.
It hit the imp midair with a crunch that sounded like bones breaking, but maybe it was just the glass. As the glass split and broke away, the squid, which Manuel had guessed was long dead and pickled, wrapped its arms around the imp’s head. The imp fell onto the floor under the window.
The imp let go of the chain of pendants and began trying to pull the tentacle legs off.
Manuel picked up the pendants.
“Take them away,” the shrunken head said.
Manuel headed to the front door. He’d left his bike under the trailer next to the stairs.
“No, no, you stupid git, the sorcerer will be out that way waiting. The back way.”
Instead of a trailer home, Gordon’s trailer was an RV and was made more for camping. It had little doors around the sides for camping gear, big enough for a skinny boy to slide out through.
Manuel ran into the back of the trailer, lifted up the lower bunk bed, and dropped in. Then he crawled to the door, opened up the panel, and dropped out of the trailer into the mud.
The rain still came down hard, and the sound of it hitting the metal of the trailers in the trailer park was deafening. He knew no one could have heard him as he splashed in the mud, nor could they hear him as he ran down into the ravine. The storm also meant that he was almost invisible.
The Mingo River had swollen in the rain, and it surprised Manuel how the force of the river on his legs made it hard to stand. He had heard of people drowning in flash floods and he remembered that now. But he knew this was the only way to get out of the trailer park without someone seeing him leave.
He went with the flow of the river to where it ran under 41st street. There were six square tunnels, and Manuel entered the closest one. As he slogged through the tunnel, in the total black, out of the rain but in the grip of the angry river, he thought of the imp and wondered if it had yet struggled free. It could be out there flying and looking for him now. He had to hurry.
The even concrete floor disappeared from under Manuel’s feet and his footing became uneven. As he fell he remembered the jumble of white boulders piled up where the tunnels ended. His ribs smashed into a jagged rock, and the rushing water dragged him over the boulders, battering and scraping his knees and ankle. He became lost in the roar of the rain and the power of the river. He swam and tried to keep his head above water mindlessly.
But the imp might be free, he remembered. And the imp probably wouldn’t be alone. He remembered the crow, and imagined it circling above now, scanning the ground with its black eyes. That was not an ordinary bird.
He struggled up onto his feet and stumbled to the edge of the river. An asphalt bike and walking trail bordered the river, and it would have made for faster running, but he decided to stay in the ravine for now, hopeful that he would be better hidden here. But he hadn’t ran far when his ankle twisted and his knees cracked on more of the boulders. He’d forgotten about the drainage pipes into the river and the big rocks that surrounded them. Pulling himself up again, he decided he had to risk the bike trail.
His ribs ached and he knew his knees must be bloody, but he ignored the pain and ran hard. He ran through the parks, past tennis courts, past all the houses along the river, under the bridges, until he came to the culvert that took the river under I-44. Sloped concrete walls rose up at least fifty feet on each side, great drainage ditches nearly big enough to drive a car dumped out into the river here, and the trail dipped down low beneath the bridges here.
There was no other way home, without trying to run across the busy interstate in the stormy dark, a prospect Manuel considered only briefly before realizing such an attempt would be suicide.
But he didn’t like the idea of going down into the culvert. The water would be well up over the trail; he would be swimming for sure. He’d seen the tires and the branches and the other garbage floating in the river, and he didn’t like being in the water with that. But the worst part was those big drainage ditches. Whenever he rode his bike past the tunnels, he peddled past them fast and he gave them a lot of room. On those occasions he had looked into them he’d only seen a short ways before they disappeared into darkness. It seemed they must go deep into the earth.
Whatever animals lived in the tunnels, and he imagined there must be raccoons and skunks at the very least, must have been flushed out by now. They would be in the river with him. And it seemed to Manuel that an evil undefined lived in those tunnels, and the image that came into his mind now was of tentacles reaching out from the tunnel, grasping and hungry.
But he had no choice. He saw a log floating in the river and he pounced on it. He paddled with his feet, controlling himself so he wouldn’t be just another bit of flotsam, and he avoided the boulders and the bridge pillars. He looked toward where the tunnels should be, but he couldn’t see them.
Spinning lazily, a plastic toy tug-boat big enough for a little kid to ride in, passed by him. It seemed so unreal Manuel wondered if this were a nightmarish dream. Then he saw a rail rising out of the water to his left and recognized it. He swam toward it and soon he saw the bike trail climbing out of the water.
On his feet again and out of the water, Manuel ran again. What little light had come from the twilight sun now was long faded, and the rain still came down in a torrent, so he jogged slowly. The pain in his ribs made it hard to breathe, but home wasn’t too far away now and the idea of seeing his mom encouraged him.
As he jogged up to his porch he wondered how late it might be. Usually it took him about fifteen minutes on his bike, but it seemed like it had been hours he’d been out, slogging through the river, crashing through the grass and bramble, floating on the river, and running on the trail. He knocked on his door, too tired to fumble in his pocket for his keys.
“Manuel,” his mother cried as she opened the door.
He walked in, water dripping off him and puddling on the floor.
“What happened?” she asked. She touched his chest where the imp had swiped him with its claws. “You’re bleeding.”
Manuel sunk down onto his knees and did something he hadn’t done in years. He began to cry.
Chapter 15 — Whispers in the Dark
“Mrs. Davis,” Mr. Long said, “we'd like to go up to our room now, if you please.”
“Have it your way, Mr. Smith,” she said. She led them back into the entryway and pointed up the stairway. “Turn right at the top and go down the hallway. The master bedroom is the last door on the right.”
The staircase began wide at the bottom, followed the curve of the wall up, and grew narrow at the top. The countless steps of those who had lived here had worn splotches of tan into the otherwise dark stained wooden steps.
“Lizzie, I'll put blankets down here on the couch if you decide to come down,” Mrs. Davis said as they began up the stairs. She pointed at the substantial wooden banister. “Make sure you hold on tight to the banister. You hear me?”
Lizzie nodded and obeyed. She stayed very near her dad up the stairs, down the dark hallway, and into the bedroom. He flipped on the light switch. A huge tester bed dominated the room, the curtains drawn up and tied to the solid square posts. The nightst
and had a digital alarm clock on it, the numbers flashing.
“Do you think the ghost really tried to push her down the stairs?” Lizzie asked, dropping her backpack on the floor.
“It's possible.”
“But I thought you said they couldn't hurt you.”
Mr. Long shrugged. “Well...they can do little things. Flip light switches on and off. Open doors. Knock glasses off kitchen counters. I suppose that if they caught you off balance, they might be able to make you fall.”
He walked to the door. “Let's have a look around.”
There wasn't much to see. Each room had a few lonely pieces of furniture. No clothes hung in any of the closets. In a room designed as a library, cardboard boxes sat unopened and the shelves were empty.
After completing their survey, Mr. Long told Lizzie to go to the bathroom and get ready for bed. Lizzie looked out into the dark hallway and swallowed hard. It would be nice if he would come and stand by the door. But he expected her to be tough. At a Tai Kwon Do meet once, another girl had kicked her in the shins in an 'above the waist' competition. But when she told him about it, he said, “Leave the complaining to lawyers and politicians.”
So she went without a word, but broke a record getting into her pajamas and brushing her teeth.
While her father took his turn in the bathroom, Lizzie sat on the bed with her back to the wall, eyes darting around the room. At any moment the ghost could come gliding in, laughing and grabbing her with its icy fingers. It took forever for her dad to return.
When he did, he opened his suitcase and put two flashlights and the Spear on the nightstand. “I'm setting my watch alarm for two a.m. I want to make sure Mrs. Davis is asleep.” Then he turned off the light.
Lizzie slipped under the stiff sheets and lay very still, her eyes open. Before long her dad began the deep, rhythmic breathing that meant he had fallen asleep. Amazing he could be so relaxed. But then he had been doing this for...well, from since he was about her age. He probably was scared when he first started. Maybe he had even felt a little sad, like she did, using the Spear on the ghosts.
Silver light shone into the room from the waning moon. Just enough light to cast shadows here and there. Lizzie stared into the shadows and her imagination filled in the details: a foot, a claw, a face. Perhaps it would be better to close her eyes.