Restless Spirits: Chapters 7 & 8
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Chapter Seven
“Lilly Catherine Baird!” bellowed Ruth. She held a leather belt.
“Oh, God,” Lilly whispered, backing up into the wall. “Not again!” She disappeared into the wall completely, but Ruth reached in and grabbed hold of her. She pulled her out kicking and screaming.
“No, mama! Please! I’m sorry! Oh, God, I’m so sorry! Please, mama, don’t!” All of this she screamed while her mother whipped her and dragged her away.
I ran after them. “Hey! What is your problem, lady? Leave her alone!” I grabbed for the belt, but of course, my hand went right through it. I was getting really tired of that. Ruth seemed oblivious to my presence, too intent on beating her daughter into submission. For some reason, the belt didn’t go through her. It landed every time, with a slapping sound that increased Lilly’s screaming and made me sick. “Stop it!” I shouted.
“She can’t,” said Joe, coming over to block me.
“Why are you just standing there? Do something!”
“There’s nothing to be done. This is what she gets for helping you.”
“But I...what?”
“That ain’t even Ruth. It’s a phantom, a puppet having its strings pulled. This is how Lilly died. Now she gets to go through it again. Thanks to you.”
I stared at him in open mouthed shock. “But... why?”
“We try to escape, we try to get through to anybody on the other side, get help somehow, she knows. And then she lets us have it. Either that, or she kills somebody new.”
I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. Not real tears, anyway. “Why her, then?” I looked up toward the second floor and shouted. “Why don’t you take it out on me, you little bitch?!”
“She already did, when Lilly tried to warn you. That’s why you’re here now.” I stared at him as the implication of his words sunk in. His expression softened a tiny bit. “Guess maybe you shouldn’t feel too badly for Lilly after all.”
I sniffled up non-existent snot and turned to look in the direction Ruth had taken Lilly. I could still hear her screaming. Ruth was eerily silent. “So she gets locked in the basement? For how long?”
“Long as it took the first time.”
I shuddered. “We can’t leave her in there.”
“Got no choice. Do you see now? This is why I wanted us to go in the kitchen!” He looked angry. I couldn’t blame him. He turned toward said kitchen and stormed off in a huff. This time, I followed him sheepishly.
“There are not enough words for how much this sucks,” I grumped as we reached the kitchen. “This can’t be my life.”
“It’s not. Your life is over and done with.”
“Afterlife, then. I mean, I knew about ghosts. Or at least, I knew everything that it was possible to know while you’re still among the living. I was a little iffy on the whole Heaven and Hell thing, but I still expected something... other than this.”
“Didn’t we all. But I do believe in Heaven and Hell.”
“Really?”
“Yup. Figure come Judgment Day, we’ll all get sorted properly. Sarah right along with us. She won’t have a say in the matter. All we gotta do is wait it out.”
“Sarah? That the kid’s name?”
“Yup.”
I looked around the kitchen. The light in the middle of the room emitted a soft, yellow glow. The table was a beaten old metal job straight out of the fifties that would probably go for hundreds of dollars in a vintage shop if someone restored it just right. Same with the chairs, one of which was propped under the light fixture. Joe sat down in it. I didn’t try too hard to wrap my brain around being able to sit and climb stairs and not fall through the floor and right through the earth when we could pass through walls and other corporeal objects. Maybe I’d take up studying ghost physics someday. Seemed I’d have the time for it. “What makes the kitchen so safe?” I asked.
“It’s the one room I mustered some control over,” he said, leaning back and folding his arms across his broad chest. I caught myself taking note of the toned lines of his forearms and felt a rush of guilt. “She don’t come in here,” he finished.
I forced my gaze up to the brightly burning light to keep myself from staring and thinking any more inappropriate—not to mention utterly useless— thoughts. “So that’s you doing that?”
He smiled. “Took me a decade to manage that trick.”
“Nice.” I returned his smile. “Why the kitchen? I mean, if she’s so powerful, how come you’re able to keep her out?”
I noticed a subtle repeat of the twitch in his jaw that I’d seen earlier when I asked him how he died. “Don’t know. Just do.”
I didn’t believe him for a second, but I decided to let it go. I could still hear Lilly’s muffled screams and sobs. I closed my eyes. “Where did her parents go? Can’t they help her?”
He shook his head. “They can’t get close to her. Not till it’s over. That takes a couple of days, and a few days after that before her mother can look her in the eye again.”
Shaking my head, I sighed and perched myself on the kitchen counter. “So what was with the whole mysterious door thing earlier?”
He smirked. “Like I said. Anything to combat the boredom. ‘Sides, I figured you’d get scared if I just popped out of nowhere at you.”
“And doors opening themselves and lights lighting themselves isn’t at all spooky.”
“Maybe. But also funny. Shoulda seen your face.”
Oh, yeah. This guy was a peach.
“Look,” he said, sobering up, “the rules here are pretty simple: keep your head down and don’t make waves, and she’ll mostly leave you be.” He leaned back in his chair and studied me warily. “Now why do I get the feeling that’s gonna be a real hard thing for you to grasp?”
“Because I’m spunky?” I batted my eyelashes at him.
“Not quite what we called it back in my day.” Before I could come up with a rejoinder, the Bairds appeared. Ruth was weeping, and her husband was doing his best to comfort her. “It’s not your fault, Ruth. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“But I put her down there,” she cried.
“No you didn’t. Not this time...you!” He pointed at me. “This was your doing! You put my girl in that basement!”
Please kill me. Again. “Believe me. If I could kick my own butt, I would.” I got down from the counter. “Which way is the basement?”
“What are you up to now?” asked Joe.
“I’m going to check on her.”
His shoulders shook with laughter, but he wasn’t smiling. “I knew it. You can’t even go five minutes without stirring up trouble.”
“What? I’m just going to look in on her and give her some company. What harm can that do?”
“Plenty,” said Mr. Baird—I still hadn’t caught his first name— “and isn’t she already in enough trouble because of you?”
“Maxwell, please,” said Ruth, providing me with that name. She held back another sob long enough to direct me. “It’s out this door and around the corner.” She pointed to a door that led to a utility room. When she looked at me, I saw pleading in her eyes. Geez. Okay, she had a murderous psychotic break that killed three people, and I got the feeling she wasn’t exactly sunshine and daisies to live with before that happened. Even so, I felt bad for the lady. I wasn’t doing it for her, though. I owed it to Lilly.
I nodded and headed the way she’d pointed. I rounded the corner and found a door. “Lilly?” I called. She had stopped crying, and there was nothing but silence behind the door. “Are you okay?” Stupid question. I gathered up my nerve and stepped through the door. The basement was pitch black, but somehow, I could still see. Lilly huddled at the bottom of the stairs. I approached her carefully. “Are you...can you hear me?”
She looked up at me, her expression tired and resigned. Her face seemed to be thinner than I remembered, like she’d already begun to waste away. “I hear you,” she said. She turned back around and leaned her head against a post. “Nobody’s ever come to visit me in here before.”
I paused on the stairs. “You’re kidding me.”
Her shoulders rose and fell. “Mother and Father can’t. The rest are all too afraid. Except Joe. I don’t think he’s afraid of anything.”
“He sure seems afraid of Sarah.”
“Shh! Don’t say her name! She’ll hear you!”
“Sorry.” I moved down the rest of the stairs and sat next to her. “I mean, I am really, really sorry. I had no idea this would happen.”
“It’s not your fault. I knew what would happen. I wanted to help you.”
I remembered what Joe said—about her help being what got me killed—but I decided not to bring that up. It’s not like it mattered anymore, and besides, the kid meant well. “Think you could tell that to the others so they’ll get off my back?”
“As if they’d listen. They think I’m a child.”
“They’re protective. It’s understandable. You’re not exactly old enough to buy cigarettes.”
“I’m sixteen!”
“Like I said. I bet it gets frustrating.”
“You have no idea! I’ve been sixteen for seventy- five years!”
Ouch. She was right. I couldn’t even imagine that. Still, I said, “Hey, it hasn’t been all that long since I was sixteen. And yeah, one year of that was plenty, thanks.”
She looked at her feet, pouting. I studied her. She was a cute kid—excuse me, young woman. Her clothes seemed a little old-fashioned, even for her time, and she didn’t have on a stitch of makeup. I’m sure that was her mother’s doing. Her black hair hung in natural ringlets down her back, and was so thick and luxurious that I would have keeled over with envy if I wasn’t already dead.
“I smoked a cigarette once,” she said.
“Did you now?”
She looked at me sideways, with a mischievous little smirk that only rebellious teenage girls are capable of. “I was at a dance at Cain’s Ballroom. Mother still doesn’t know I went. I climbed out my bedroom window. Patty—she was my best friend— let me borrow one of her dresses to wear. It was last year’s style, but it was still better than anything Mama let me have. Patty did my face and gave me a tube of lipstick, and her brother drove us to the Ballroom, and three different boys asked me to dance. One of them let me try his cigarette. Another let me sip from his gin flask.”
“Lilly! You little scamp!”
She smiled smugly, clearly proud of having broken so many rules and gotten away with it. Then her smile faded and she looked back at her feet. “It was the lipstick that did it. When mama found it, she called me a whore.”
Sheesh. Why didn’t that surprise me?
“We got into a fight... I didn’t know what she had done to Papa. I told her I wasn’t afraid of her anymore, and that I was going to wear lipstick and I was going to bob my hair. That’s when she grabbed the belt and chased me downstairs.”
Oh, man. Poor kid.
“But it wasn’t really her,” Lilly insisted. “Mama was strict, but I know she would never hurt me or Papa.” She sighed, and a long silence passed between us. Then she looked over at me. “Thank you for keeping me company.”
“No problem. I’m not going to get you into more trouble, am I?”
“What else can she do to me? She might come after you, though.”
I cringed and rubbed my neck, but said, “I can take it.”
“You’re strong. That’s good. You need to be to survive here.”
“Heh, survive. That’s kinda funny coming from one ghost to another.”
“I’m serious. You need to be careful.” She looked around, then leaned in and lowered her voice. “Joe said the others are all hiding. But I don’t think so. I think they’re gone.”
Something about the way she said that made me go cold. If I still had flesh, it would’ve had goosebumps. “Gone? Like they got away?”
She shook her head. “I think she did something to them. Something permanent.”
I stared a moment, dumbfounded. She couldn’t be right about that. I mean, what could Sarah do to us that was more permanent than killing us in the first place? Kill us again? How do you kill a ghost? Talk about upping the stakes. “Don’t worry,” I said finally, as much for my own benefit as for Lilly’s. “We’ve got something they didn’t have.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone on the outside. My sister’s a ghost expert. Once she figures out I’m still here, she and her friends won’t stop until they find a way to free us.”
“Or until they get killed and trapped, too,” she said.
“Wow, rein it in, Pollyanna. Your optimism’s killing me. Seriously, you sound like that Joe character.”
“Joe’s smart. He’s the oldest of all of us. He knows what he’s talking about.” She fiddled with her hands as she said this, and I gave her a sidelong look.
“It sounds like someone has a crush.”
Another lesson learned: ghosts can blush. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Besides, I think he likes you.”
“What? He clearly hates me.”
“I think you impress him. You have moxie. Men like that.”
I snorted. “Man, you really are sixteen. You’ve got a lot to learn.”
She sighed and stood up. As she began to pace, I realized how far I’d crammed my foot down my throat. “I mean...had. I’m sorry.” I was starting to sound like a scratched LP.
She shrugged it off and smiled. “It’s okay.” She fidgeted with her hands some more as she took a step toward me. “May I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Will you...can we...that is, it’s been such a long time since I’ve had a friend.”
I smiled, trying to keep sadness or pity out of my eyes. Poor kid. “We can be friends. I have a feeling you’ll make my time here a lot more tolerable.”
She grinned, then looked back at her hands. “How long until your sister comes back?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t imagine her leaving that equipment here longer than she has to. I think once she figures out it’s missing, she’ll be back for it.”
“What do we do until then?”
I shrugged. “We wait. And try not to get killed anymore.”
Chapter Eight
I decided to explore.
After my visit to the basement failed to reap any consequences, Joe had decided to come down and give me a break from Lilly-sitting. Not that I wasn’t enjoying hanging out with her, but she was starting to re-enact the whole starvation and dehydration part of her ordeal, and, well, I was getting squeamish. I’m not proud of myself. But I was relieved to get out of there for a while. When I announced my exploratory intentions, he naturally had something snarky to say about it. Lilly only had more ominous warnings, but I didn’t care. If I was going to be here a while, I needed to test my boundaries and learn this house’s secrets. Maybe I’d turn up something that could help Chris find me a way out of here.
After promising to be discreet about it—not that Joe believed I could be discreet, but whatever—I headed out, bypassing the kitchen. I was already getting to know that room pretty well. The bottom floor was pretty basic. Kitchen, dining room, foyer, parlor. There were porches in the front and back that I remembered admiring when I’d first seen the house, but as far as we were all concerned, they didn’t exist. There didn’t seem to be anything special about any of the internal rooms, other than the hugeness of the dust bunnies and the cobwebs. There were a few abandoned pieces of furniture in the parlor—the side table I’d set my computer on before I died, a couple of old La-Z-Boys that were as dusty as they were ugly. It was kind of a shame. This could be a great house in the right hands. Well, except for all the death and horror.
After staring longingly at my laptop for a few minutes, I went to the bottom of the stairs. I suddenly thought of several questions I should have asked. Did Sarah only haunt the second floor? Was I walking into her domain? Who else was in the house? I stood there a long time, thinking long and hard about whether I could take that fall again. I decided that I could. It’s not like it would kill me. Unless...what if Lilly was right about the disappearing ghosts? Falling I could take, but I didn’t want to get zapped into total nonexistence.
Nah. That was impossible. Wasn’t it?
I decided to take the chance. Bracing myself, I went for it, ready to dodge any balls that might fly at me when I reached the top of the stairs. But there weren’t any this time, and there was no sign of Sarah.
Whew.
With the coast clear, I eased on down the hall to the first door I came to and stuck my head through it. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to being able to do that. It was one of the empty bedrooms that I’d already seen earlier, but I hadn’t peeked in the closets yet. This room’s closet was as bare as the rest of it. Passing through the walls to visit the other rooms on this side of the hall didn’t turn up anything, either. These closets didn’t hold any skeletons, metaphorical or otherwise.
The windows in each room looked out on the same blank nothingness that I could see downstairs. I stood at the window in the last bedroom for a while, staring at the milky whiteness beyond it, wondering if I’d ever see the outdoors again. It occurred to me that I could see outside just fine until they carried my body out. The moment my corpse crossed the threshold was the moment these prison doors came crashing down. There had to be something to that, but I didn’t know what. Maybe Chris would, if I could just find a way to talk to her.
With a heavy sigh, I headed back into the hall. There were still the bathroom, master bedroom, and linen closet to check. I decided to start with the master bedroom and backtracked down the hall, checking behind me now and then to make sure Sarah didn’t pop up with a hankering to play dodge ball.
I reached the bedroom door just as Maxwell Baird spilled out of it and through me. I screamed, startled, but my scream was drowned out by Maxwell’s. He stumbled and fell and started crawling down the hall. “Why are you doing this?” he cried.
“I—”
A blood curdling shriek came from behind me. I turned just in time to see Ruth Baird’s ax swing right through me and into Maxwell’s back. I stood there, frozen in place, in the middle of their murder reenactment. Ruth’s ax passed through me to hack at her husband, again and again, blood flying everywhere as his screams turned to horrifying gurgles.
I shut my eyes and backed away toward the door. When I opened them again, I had passed through it into the bedroom.
Geez Louise.
I took a minute to process what I’d just seen. As horrible as that was, I had to admit that I was secretly relieved that Sarah’s attention was clearly focused elsewhere at the moment. Calming myself, I turned around and surveyed the room. It was a nice size and empty like the rest. It had two doors besides the one I had just come through—one stood ajar and opened into the bathroom. The other was presumably a closet. I went over to it and stuck my head in. No skeletons there, either, but there was another, smaller door at the back. Interesting. I passed into the closet and took a peek through the second door to find a creepy-looking set of wooden stairs leading upward. I took them and found myself in the attic.
The attic turned out to be more of a treasure trove than the rest of the house. Clearly, the last owner’s family had been in too much of a hurry when they cleaned the house to bother with the attic. By the looks of some of the goodies stashed up here, that hadn’t been the only family to leave things behind. Once again, it was almost perfect darkness up there, but I could see just fine. I guess ghosts never had to be afraid of the dark.
Boxes, old crates, the requisite steamer trunks, and more modern storage bins stood stacked up among scattered pieces of furniture from pretty much every era of the last century. A Victorian settee bumped up against a ‘Sixties mod coffee table. An art deco headboard sat propped against one wall, and some ugly paintings that screamed ‘Seventies leaned against that. This was a vintage furniture lover’s heaven. If someone could get up here and perform some restoration, they could make a small fortune selling this stuff on eBay.
I heard a hum at the back, and as I drew closer, it sounded more like someone murmuring quietly, as if praying or talking to themselves. After the stuff I had seen so far in this house, I was definitely afraid of what I might find, but curiosity trumped fear and I followed the sound anyway. Behind a stack of boxes marked “Ellen’s things,” I found an old man sitting on a milk crate. I recognized him right away from the newspaper obituary Chris had clipped and stuck in her file on this place. Ed Farley, the house’s previous owner. He had been electrocuted in a freak Christmas light accident that also took out his dog. He seemed to be talking to a picture that sat on an old TV console in front of him.
He didn’t notice I was there, so I decided to let him be. So there was one of the other ghosts accounted for. The rest had to be around here somewhere. Maybe they weren’t all visible. Or maybe...aw, heck, I didn’t know. I just refused to believe that Lilly was right about what Sarah could do.
Deciding to leave further attic exploration as a project for later, I started to backtrack when a dog barked behind me. I turned to see a Jack Russell terrier leaping several feet off the floor while it yapped its little head off. Take that, everyone who ever said dogs don’t have souls. “Whoa there, cutie. Settle down,” I said.
“Who’s there?” called Ed Farley. He came through the stack of Christmas boxes and stopped short. “Buster, heel. Who are you?”
Buster stopped jumping and went to sit at his master’s feet.
“I’m Ro—Veronica,” I said.
“You’re new.”
“Yeah. I got here yesterday. You’re Ed, right?”
He seemed startled that I knew his name, but he just nodded then went back through the boxes the way he came. Buster got up and followed him. I did, too, but I went around the boxes. “You were the last one to live in this house.”
“I left it to my kids,” he said, settling back on his milk crate. “I thought one of them would move in here, but they packed up all my stuff and never came back.”
“They found out about the house’s reputation,” I told him. “They got scared.”
His face lit up and he craned his neck to look up at me. “You know my kids?”
“Um, not exactly. I just know of them. We had to get their permission before we could investigate—”
“We? We who? There someone else here? You’re dead, aintcha?”
“Well, sure, now, but I wasn’t before yesterday afternoon.”
“Then do you know why my kids don’t sell this God-forsaken place if they’re not going to live here?”
“Well, I mean, it is haunted,” I began, but he just stared up at me, and I didn’t think he needed to know about the feud that broke out between his children because of this house. “No, not really. I’m sorry.”
Again, he nodded and turned back to the picture I’d seen him talking to earlier. Up close, I could see it was of a pretty lady who looked to be in her fifties. “Is that your wife?”
“Ellen,” he said. “She passed on the year before I moved into this place. I always thought I’d get to see her again after it was my time to go.” He sighed.
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I. ‘Course, maybe one of these days, I’ll get up the gumption to turn that little monster over my knee and then she’ll send me to wherever she sent the others. Maybe that’s where I’ll find Ellen.”
I felt vaguely ill. “The others? You know what she did with them?”
“Not for certain,” he said, “but I saw her take out Jim Feldman, and before that, he told me he thought she did something to his Linda.”
Jim Feldman and Linda Vasquez. More names I knew from the records. Another murder-suicide, this time by shotgun. They left behind a baby who ended up in foster care. At least somebody got out of this house alive. That baby should be about forty by now.
“What did she do to Jim Feldman?”
His face turned ashen. “I don’t rightly know. It was like...well, like she swallowed him up and spit him out, and he faded away and was never seen again. That’s the best I can explain it.”
I nodded and crouched beside him. His dog came up to me and wagged its tail. I wished I could pet him. “She was pretty,” I said, pointing to the picture.
“She was my everything,” he said.
“I don’t think she sent Jim and Linda to wherever Ellen is waiting for you.”
He sighed. “I don’t either.” He turned his full attention back to the picture as Buster lay down at his feet. I removed myself quietly and made my way out of the attic. Buster didn’t follow me that time.
Chapters 9 and 10 coming Thursday! Click here for the About and Navigation page.
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