Restless Spirits: Chapters 5 & 6
You’re reading Restless Spirits, a supernatural thriller in which a paranormal investigator becomes the subject of her own investigation after a routine ghost hunt goes horribly awry. Need to catch up? Click here for all of the chapters posted so far.
Chapter Five
I fell and remembered.
After I got off the phone with Chris earlier that afternoon, I packed up some equipment and came straight over here. The house was about a twenty-minute drive from our office in east Tulsa. Once I arrived, it took a few more minutes rooting through the overgrown weeds in what was once the flower bed to find the plastic rock that held the key. The weeds probably did more to hide the key than the rock did, as fake and obvious as it looked.
I always expected to feel something whenever I stepped inside a house we were investigating. It just seemed that they should all feel different somehow. I was always disappointed, and this house was no exception. I let myself in, pausing at the threshold, waiting for that elusive feeling to hit me. Looking back, it seems even more likely that I should have felt something, some atmospheric sense of foreboding, considering what I was walking into. But, as usual, it felt no different.
I sighed, swallowing any latent jealousy over Chris’s ability to sense these things, and brought in the equipment. It wasn’t much—just a tape recorder for electronic voice projection, a few wireless webcams, and an electromagnetic field detector. Gus would bring in all of the high-tech stuff when he and Chris arrived. I set the rest of my stuff on the floor and turned on the EMF reader. It read normal.
Man. For a local legend, this house was pretty disappointing so far.
I also brought my laptop, of course. I found an abandoned side table to set it on and booted it up, then spent about ten minutes hooking up the cameras to make sure they worked. I positioned a few around the living room, saving the rest for other parts of the house. Lastly, I put a blank tape in the recorder and turned it on. “Testing. This is the Baird house, Tuesday, March sixteenth, four-twenty-three p.m. Ron Wilson speaking. I’m in the living room at the front of the house.” I held up the microphone. “Is anyone here with me?” I asked the empty room, then paused for an answer. This part always felt silly, but it got some interesting results sometimes. “If you are here, can you tell me your name?” I waited another moment before rounding out my list of routine questions with, “Can you do anything to make your presence known?”
That last question made me a little nervous, especially since I was by myself. But nothing happened. I shrugged and went to set the tape recorder on the fireplace mantle, then opened my camp chair and took a seat at the computer. I found the file with my research notes and began writing my impressions of the place. I had expected some spooky atmosphere to provide some inspiration, but other than being a little run-down and neglected, it wasn’t very atmospheric.
I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my face, trying to think of what to type next. I had at least another hour before Chris would arrive. I might as well make the most of it. When I opened my eyes, a new word appeared on my screen—one I hadn’t written:
Lilly
I jumped up from my chair fast enough to knock it over. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, and I was tempted to freak out. Instead, I reminded myself that I was supposed to be a professional and swallowed my fear. “Lilly? That’s a pretty name. Can you tell me something else?” As I spoke, I reached for the EMF. Its meter was all over the place. I looked back at my notebook as new words appeared on the screen.
help us
Somewhere, a child cried. It sounded like it came from upstairs. I glanced at the ceiling as chills stood every hair on my body at attention, then looked back at the screen.
GET OUT
The phrase repeated itself, again and again, scrolling across the screen in an unbroken chain:
getoutgetoutgetoutgetoutgetoutgetoutgetout
I licked my lips. “Believe me, I would like nothing better right now.” Chris was right, as much as I hated to admit it. I shouldn’t have come here by myself. But I couldn’t leave until I’d checked out the source of the crying.
The first rule of a ghost hunt is to make sure there’s no natural explanation for alleged supernatural phenomena. That includes making sure no one living is hanging around the site. I hadn’t done that. I had stupidly assumed that, since the house was locked up and all the windows were intact, it would be empty. If I’d given it more than two seconds’ worth of thought, I would have remembered from my own childhood how kids had a way of getting into places they didn’t belong. Especially spooky places like this that cried out for a good old double-dog dare. So for all I knew, there could be a living, breathing child upstairs who needed a hug and a cookie, followed by a stern talking-to.
DO NOT GO UPSTAIRS
The computer was yelling at me now. I really wanted to listen. I’m not too proud to admit that I was spooked. It took some effort to put on my skeptic’s hat, but once I did, it occurred to me that I could be getting pranked. Someone with a Wi-Fi could be hacking into my computer and typing that stuff. I didn’t know how—that was Gus’s department. I didn’t know why, either, but I could think of plenty of reasons. Gus and Chris could already be here, screwing around with me to teach me a lesson. Or maybe they just thought it would be funny to set this up with the Paranormal Society. Who knew? One thing was for sure, though: I was a lot more paranoid about the living than I was about the dead.
So I went upstairs.
I saw her at the other end of the hall, sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up and her face buried against them. “Are you Lilly?” I asked.
She looked up at me and sniffed, the tear tracks on her little freckled face doing me right in. “I don’t have anyone to play with,” she said, exposing a gap where her front baby teeth had fallen out and making my neglected ovaries ping. “They all ran away.”
“You shouldn’t be here, sweetie. Come downstairs and we’ll call your parents to come get you.”
“I want to play.” There was steel in her voice.
I sighed, and my ovaries settled down. “This isn’t a safe place to play. Now come on. Do you have any friends in the house?”
She lowered her head, pouting. “I don’t have any friends. They all run away.” She pulled a red ball out of her overalls. “I just want to play catch.”
Remembering the Waverly, I shivered at the sight of the ball but put on a brave face for the kid’s sake. “I’ll play catch with you. Just come outside with me first.” She stood up. I stood by the stairs with my hand outstretched, waiting for her to come over and take it.
Instead, she threw the ball. You already know the rest.
Chapter Six
“Am I in Hell?” The question came out muffled, what with my mouth kissing the floor.
“No, it just seems that way.” Kitchen Guy’s voice sounded really close. I turned my head back around the right way and saw his face hovering above mine. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Waving him out of my face as I would a fly, I sat up, only then realizing there were others standing around me in a half-circle. “Um, hi?” They gave me room as I got to my feet. Not that they needed to, since as far as I could tell, we were all pretty intangible. Ghost etiquette, I guessed. Or because, as Gus demonstrated earlier, having another person pass through you just felt plain ooky. “I’m Ron,” I said, mainly because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Mrs. Baird stared at me disapprovingly. Nothing new there. An overweight, balding man in an old- fashioned double-breasted suit stood beside her. He nudged her and said, “See, Ruth? I told you he was a man.”
My hand flew up to my hair. I kept my curls short, but not that short. I looked down at the plain blue tee-shirt and checkered capris I’d been wearing when I died. Great. I’d get to spend eternity dressed like a GAP ad. At least it was a cute GAP ad, and definitely a feminine-looking one.
“Papa, hush!” said a pretty young girl standing over to the side. “That’s just the fashion nowadays.”
“Yeah! And Ron is short for Veronica,” I said, pushing my chest out a little further.
“Won’t see me making that mistake,” said Kitchen Guy. I turned in time to catch him hide his smirk behind an expression of innocence. “Name’s Joe,” he added. I gave him an appraising look, now that I knew he had neither killed me nor terrorized my sister. He was okay looking, I guess. I mean, if you go for that whole broad-shouldered, square-jawed, ruggedly handsome type.
“Fashion.” Ruth spat the word like she’d spit out a bug in her coffee. “I don’t approve of the way these modern girls parade themselves around, putting themselves on display and dressing like men.” Again with the man thing! Playfully tomboyish, I could grant them, but I’m anything but manly. Anyway, I got the feeling there wasn’t much that Ruth Baird did approve of. “As for you, young lady,” she said to the girl, “you will not speak to your father in such a rude manner.”
“Leave the girl alone, Ruth,” said the balding guy. “Doesn’t she suffer enough because of you?”
Okay, harsh. And also awkward. But he had a point. Giving him a look that said he might as well have just slapped her in the face, Ruth faded into nothing.
“Papa!” said the girl. “You know it wasn’t her fault.”
He sighed a gruff, irritated sigh, tugged on his suit jacket, and then he also disappeared.
“How’d they do that?” I asked.
Instead of answering my question, the girl just looked abashed as she stepped forward. “I apologize for my parents. They’re from a different time.”
I shrugged it off. “Don’t worry about it.”
“My name is Lilly, by the way.”
“Lilly? The Lilly who hijacked my laptop Lilly?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“No, it’s cool. Can you show me how to do that?”
“I...I suppose I could try...”
“Don’t you think you ought to take some time to get settled first? Get your bearings?” asked Kitchen Guy. Excuse me, I mean Joe.
I looked at him. “You say that like you think I’m staying here.”
He laughed, and I scowled at him. “You are staying here,” he said. “Just like the rest of us. Got no choice.”
“It’s true,” said Lilly. “She keeps us here. Everyone who died in this house in the last century is here. We’re all trapped.”
“She who? You mean that brat upstairs?”
“She ain’t no child,” said Joe. “Make no mistake about that.” He was no longer laughing.
“She’s a monster,” whispered Lilly.
“She’s three feet tall!”
“And she killed you,” said Joe. “Killed all of us. She keeps us around so she can do it over and over again.”
“Keep your voice low!” said Lilly. “She’ll hear us!”
“Okay, wait.” I pointed at Lilly. “You, I know about. Your mom locked you up and let you starve to death after she hacked up your dad and did herself in.” Only after I blurted that out did I realize I could’ve used a little more sensitivity.
Lilly shook her head. “It wasn’t her fault. She was driven to do it. All of it. That... thing got into her mind. It whispered in her ear night and day until she couldn’t take it anymore.”
“So, you’re saying this pint-sized cutie is basically Damien in pigtails?”
“I don’t know what that means,” said Lilly.
“She’s evil,” said Joe. “She’s powerful, and she’s bored. That’s a mix don’t bode well for anybody. That’s all we need to know.”
“What about you?” I asked him. “I don’t remember you in any of my research on this place. How’d she get you?”
His jaw twitched. “Never mind that. Let’s get you back in the kitchen where it’s safe.”
“What makes the kitchen so safe?”
He looked at me like it was the first time he’d ever been asked, and he hadn’t prepared an answer. “It just is,” he said. “Now come on!”
“No.” I went to my laptop, where it still sat on the table in energy save mode. “You might be fine with letting some kid dictate your afterlife, but I’m not. Now, we’ve got all this stuff here that can detect us, and my sister will come back for it eventually. I just have to figure out how to be, you know, detectable.” I tried to switch the computer back on, but of course, my hand went right through it. It beeped wildly and then shut off completely. The acrid smell of electrical smoke drifted up from it. “Oh, crud. I think I just killed it.”
“That happens, sometimes, to electronics,” said Lilly. “It took me forever to get the hang of turning things on and off without frying them.”
“But you could type. Can you show me how?”
“I...I’m not sure. I’m the only one of us who’s been able to do that sort of thing. I’ve tried to show the others, but they’ve never gotten it.”
I sighed. That wasn’t good news. “How many others are there?”
“‘Bout a dozen of us,” said Joe, “give or take. Most of ‘em stay hidden, out of the way.”
“Why don’t you guys?”
He shrugged. “Been here as long as we have, boredom’ll drive you insane. Getting killed on occasion breaks up the monotony.”
That was possibly the most upsetting sentence I’d ever heard. I imagined a near-century of either re-enacting that fall again and again or letting the fear and boredom drive me out of my mind. I couldn’t take that. I couldn’t even take a week of that. “I have to get out of here.” I went to the EVP recorder on the mantle. “Lilly, can you turn this on?”
“Okay.” She headed over while Joe shook his head.
“It’s a fool’s mission. You can’t get through, even if you get that thing going. She’s got us cut off.”
“Lilly got through to me.”
“She’s a special case.”
“Then she can get through to my sister.”
I looked at Lilly, and she nodded. “How does this work?”
I pointed out the record button. “Push that, and speak into the microphone, here.”
“And it’ll capture what I say?”
“It should. Just tell my sister that I’m still here, and I need her help. Better repeat it until the tape runs out, to be sure she gets it. It usually only captures snatches of speech.”
“All right.” She did as I instructed, while Joe stood by, his arms folded.
“Are you always this pig-headed?” he asked me.
I gave him a wry smile. “My last boyfriend sure thought so.”
“What happens now?” asked Lilly. Before I could answer, her mother came barging into the room.
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