Damien nodded and the three of us – Frank, the gypsy and myself – broke off and made tracks toward the building.
Chapter Twenty One
We approached the wrought iron fence which though crooked and dilapidated encircled the entirety of the manse like a suit of armor. At the fence’s center there was a gate, and it was ajar. Beyond the gate, standing tall amidst a section of picnic tables and benches, there was a tree. A tire swing hung listlessly from its branches, swaying against a non-existent wind.
I hadn’t even stepped into the manse and my heart was running.
“Amber?” Frank noticed I had stopped moving. He came up beside me and looked over the park, saw the swaying tire, and also stood still.
“C’mon, let’s get this over with.”
Frank and I went across the front yard toward the building but I noticed our trio of footsteps had become a duet. I stopped and turned around and found Madame Aishe staring at the side of the building. Reading her emotional state wasn’t difficult—she wore her emotions on her sleeve—but the intensity of her emotions threw me off. Instead of worry I saw outright dread on her face. Instead of fear, terror. It seemed as though she was incapable of expressing mild emotion, but if what I had learned about ghosts was true, it wasn’t surprising.
I wasn’t a stranger to TV documentaries about paranormal investigators prodding around in the dark with cameras, digital recorders, and a whole host of gadgets with the sole intention of capturing evidence of the paranormal. They filmed in infra-red, giving the show a spooky night-time feel and often times caught strange and inexplicable voices and flying orbs on camera. I had never done any of that myself but it was something that had always fascinated me.
Maybe if I had a friend who was into paranormal investigation I may have given it a try, but I never did. So I settled for enjoying the TV shows whenever they were on, some of them were good, others were downright awful. Especially those which featured “mediums” who could connect with the dead; every spirit was evil, to them, and every evil spirit was a demon.
A lot of it, I thought, was just dramatization—for the cameras, you know. But the field of paranormal investigation was a big one. Hundreds of thousands of people were into it, and many, many more bought into the theories they put out there. One such theory was that a ghost wasn’t so much the spirit of a person, but the echo of that person’s passions. If that was true, it explained why the gypsy seemed terror-struck and totally rooted to the spot where I had only been slightly fazed by what I had seen. The question was, then; what had she seen?
I walked up to her, took her by the hand, and she looked at me. For a moment I thought she was going to scream. She opened her mouth wide, her eyes too. I wanted to back up, to flinch, but I didn’t. I held my ground and comforted her. Told her that I was here, that it was okay.
The gypsy calmed down and nodded. “I am sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
I shook my head. “It’s fine,” I said, “What did you see?”
Now she shook her head. “I would rather not say. But we should get inside.”
“Please,” I said, “I need you to tell me what you saw.”
I turned my gaze upward to try and make out what she had seen but was met with windows and concrete. Some of the windows were dimly lit, others pitch black. Some windows, I saw, had burst open from the inside, and that sent a hundred tiny hands crawling up my back. A set of cream curtains had spilt out of the broken window and was also swaying with a breeze imperceptible to my own flesh.
Had she seen someone standing in one of those windows?
No time to think about that now. I tugged on her arm and we headed up the small stony steps leading to the oaken front door of the building. It was faded coffee with black iron flourishes and a set of golden door knobs tarnished with time. I thought they looked like stars that had burned out; still bright, reminiscent of a younger time, but smaller now, pale and dead.
What, I wondered, would be waiting for us on the other side? Would this Shadow play the subtle game and let us wander before ensnaring us in its trap? Or would it reach out and grab me the moment I turned the knob? My heart was racing, hammering now. I could feel it in my temples, the palms of my hands, and even in my shoulders.
I grabbed one of the knobs and turned, not stopping to wonder if the door would be locked or not. As I expected the door gave way with a groan and a stale breath rushed out to greet me. Hello, it would have said, I’ve been expecting you. But I stepped on inside ahead of Frank and the gypsy and stared at the wonderful décor around me.
There was light in here. It cascaded dimly from candles suspended high up along the ceiling. The light was too high and too dim to show outside, but inside it cast playful shadows around the walls and over the floors and exaggerated the different features I could see before me.
A grandfather clock stood to my right along a wall, ticking away at a slow tempo – slower than what I would have expected a second to have been. Beside the clock I noted a beautiful end table – brown and rimmed with gold – and a tall brass vase, empty save for the broken remains of an umbrella. And along each wall there were gothic, black light fixtures, all devoid of bulbs.
Frank and Madame Aishe entered the house behind me and the door roared shut before they could speak. The candles in the ceiling fixture burned bright and hot, so much so that wax was starting to drip from them. Then the light fixtures on the walls lit up, despite the lack of bulb.
I staggered back, closer to Frank and the gypsy woman. We stared in silence for a moment while the activity around us ceased, and it did. There was light, now. We could see easily enough, though the light was ghostly and pale. A dull brown instead of gold. It was like looking at the world through a sepia lens.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Frank said. The gypsy also nodded.
“Alright,” I said, “We’d better get going and find this thing. Collette doesn’t have enough time.”
I had barely taken three steps into the hallway when a loud crackling sound caught my attention. The crackling was replaced by an electronic static, then by the whirring sound you might hear in the space between radio stations. Then the sounds quieted down, and someone spoke.
“Welcome,” said the voice. It was mechanical, distant, but feminine. I couldn’t find the source of it but I got the distinct impression that the voice was coming out of some kind of old PA system, out of speakers built into the wall somewhere. A distant, echoed laugh. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Who are you?” I asked into the ceiling.
“Who am I? But you already know, don’t you red witch?”
Frank nudged me and we continued to walk down the hall. “You’re the Shadow,” I said, “You realize that you’re killing her, don’t you?”
“Oh but I do,” it said, “Unfortunately, you mistake me for an entity that cares.”
“You should care. If she dies, you do.”
“And you know this… how?” more and more the voice was beginning to sound like Collette—that delicate, sweet, soft voice of hers. Like honeyed silk, only without the French accent.
“There are rules,” I said, “Rules that not even you can avoid.”
“Yes, rules, indeed. But every game has different rules and this is a game you, my dear, have never played before.”
“Why don’t you come out and show me how to play, then?”
“All in due time, red witch. First, I would like you to become better acquainted with my mansion. Meet my guests. Drink some wine, eat some croissants. Please, make yourselves at home. You are, after all, not leaving anytime soon.”
“I could tear this whole house down if I wanted to,” I said, my voice low and threatening.
“Ah, but you won’t. Because then you’d be killing all of them, too.”
“All of who?”
When we turned the corner into the parlor I saw them.
Chapter Twenty Two
The parlor
was easily three floors high with a veranda that ran all along the left beyond which I could see the closed doors leading to other bedrooms. The room was easily as long as a regulation size tennis court, at the end of which sat a fireplace that could eat a car. But the size of the place wasn’t what struck me. It was the amount of people standing around. Some were sitting at the oaken table which stretched for miles across the room. Others were standing by the stacks, some leaning over the veranda, and others, still, sitting on arm chairs arranged around circular tables. Their faces, every last one of them, were glassy and expressionless. None of them moved or spoke. They were like statues, save for the odd twitch or blink.
“As you can see,” said the voice, “If you tear this mansion down, you seal the fate of every last soul in here. And I know you care, don’t you red witch?”
“I don’t owe these people anything,” I said.
“And yet you care nonetheless. This is part of your humanity, a trait I do not possess.”
“Why are you showing me this?” I said.
“Because I want you to see what I am doing here. I want to show you the extent of my power, my influence. I want to offer you something.”
“Offer me what?”
“Acheris.”
My heart jumped into my throat, squeezing my windpipe and taking away my ability to breathe. I turned to Frank in search of guidance, but he could only mouth the words “I don’t know.”
“Ah, Frank,” said the voice, “When I see you, I don’t see a pawn. I see a Rooke. Or a Bishop, maybe. The wise one, the guide. Unfaltering, unwavering. I see experience, a man who has tasted the darkness and returned – whole – to warn the world about it.”
“Oh stop it,” Frank said, in a mock voice. “You’re gonna make me blush.”
“I can bring them both back, Frank,” said the voice. “Although maybe this would be a gift you can share with Damien.”
Frank’s eyes darted around the room. For a moment, a split second, I saw his composure crack. I heard what the voice had said, I knew what it had just implied. It was talking about Joanna and Lily. Lily was Damien’s sister but the pair of girls were Frank’s best friends. His coven.
I took Frank by the elbow and squeezed, shaking my head. “Fuck you,” Frank said. “You’re gonna have to do better than that if you want to play with my head, you twisted little piece of shit.”
“You would stop insulting me if you could only see past your own perceptions of what is possible and what isn’t. Even you don’t know just how vast the world is, how powerful magick really is.”
“We’re done talking,” I said, “Show yourself and face us or I’ll tear this place apart – I swear to the Gods.”
Silence, now. My heart was racing, my skin was on fire, and the Power was coursing through me ready to strike. Would I really tear this place down? Probably not. I doubted I could so much as start a campfire with my mind or fling an arm chair from one side of the room to the other. Not without succumbing to extreme exhaustion. But I bluffed all the same.
“Think about my offers,” said the voice. “Just, think about it.”
A screech, a crack, and the voice was gone. It was like the Shadow had just… hung up on us. And there was no way to trace the call.
I turned to Madame Aishe. “Do you know who these people are?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I believe they are lost souls,” she said, examining the closest one – a man in his thirties with a pair of broken spectacles and a white buttoned shirt on. “I do not recognize them, but they look… like they’re spellbound.”
No one was moving. They truly were like statues. I passed in front of many of them, staring into their glassy eyed faces, and got nothing from them. No intelligence, no emotion, no movement. It was a strange thing to see the dead look even more dead. How was it even possible?
But it was. The Shadow was magick, and its power was necromantic – power over the dead. This thing had all of these ghosts under its control, and if I didn’t act fast it would take Madame Aishe too. But there was something else, too, something that Frank noticed.
“Come take a look at this,” he said.
I approached, and he was staring at a woman – she was young, maybe in her late twenties – and she, like the others, was also glassy eyed and lost in a daze. But something was different about her. A kind of pale glow shimmered around her. Not quite like a halo, but more like an aura. It was muted, pale and blue, but it was there. Not all of them had it, but she did.
“What do you think that is?” I asked.
“It is their energy,” said Madame Aishe. “The closest they have to a life force. It is the necromantic power that animates them. Us.”
“Do all ghosts have it?”
She nodded.
“So then why do some of them show it and others don’t? You don’t.”
“No,” she said, “The intelligent ones keep it hidden from the rest of us. If one can see your life force, they can steal it.”
“Steal it?”
“A ghost can consume another ghost in order to become more powerful. It is akin to cannibalism, but it is possible. If they have the power to see your aura and interact with it.”
“And they’re showing it because they can’t defend themselves,” I said. “But why?”
“Because that’s how this Shadow is staying alive while Collette dies,” Frank said. “It’s using them. Feeding off them.”
I swept the room and noted the number of ghosts with auras around them. It seemed, now, like they all had one. Seeing their auras was like seeing a planet’s atmosphere from space; a bright thin line of light tracing the body’s extremities. Some had an aura which was vibrant and fresh, while others were subdued and muted.
“It’s feeding off them slowly.” The thought alone turned my stomach inside out.
Frank nodded. “That’s what I’m getting. It’s savoring them. Rationing them. I guess they don’t all taste the same.”
“That is not it,” Madame Aishe said, waving her hand, “Their auras regenerate after a time. It is recycling them… that way, it will be able to use them indefinitely.”
“Is there a way to free them?” Frank asked. “Maybe we can wake them up or something. Maybe they can even help us!”
“I doubt it,” said Madame Aishe, “Whatever magick holds them is strong. I am simply happy it has not also affected me.”
I stared at the woman ghost before us. She was pretty, and I couldn’t see any distinguishing marks on her body. I guess I thought the wounds they died with would show somewhere, but I was wrong. Or maybe her wounds were internal. Maybe she hadn’t suffered any wounds before dying. I didn’t know. All I knew is that I had to get her out. Her and everyone else trapped in this mansion.
“All magick can be countered,” I said.
Frank checked me a look. “Listen, witch, I know you’re going to get all gung ho about this, but do you have any idea what you’re going to do?”
“I’ll carry them out one by one if I have to. Maybe if we get them far enough away it’ll break the spell.”
“Shake enough of them loose, and the Shadow will starve,” said Madame Aishe, all wide eyed with excitement.
I nodded. “That’s the plan.”
“And just how are we going to get all of these people out? There’s gotta be fifty or sixty of them in here. You think the Shadow’s just going to let us walk out of here with them?”
“No,” I said, “Shit, Frank, I don’t know. But it’s all we have.”
Frank, now, nodded too although it took him a moment to muster the gesture. Was it… fear… I saw on his face, now? I wasn’t used to seeing Frank afraid. I couldn’t remember the last time I had even seen him afraid. Certainly not earlier on with the spiders. That wasn’t fear. But his brows were furled, now, and his leer was gone. His lips were thin, eyes narrow. More than once I caught him looking over his shoulder.
“You are not used to so much death,” said Madame Aishe.
&nbs
p; Frank turned to her. “I’m alive, so… no.”
“It would do you well, then, to see these people as alive. They were once, after all.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Stand back,” I said.
Frank stepped away, urging Madame Aishe to move back with a gentle nudge of his hand.
I surveyed the room and took a quick guess of the number of people in here. Fifty sounded about right. That gave me an idea of the kind of power I would need to use. I closed my eyes and took a breath, clenched my palms into fists and allowed the Power to work through me. Buzzing tingles sent my skin flying into a frenzy of goose flesh as I steadily concentrated on producing more power, more energy.
I wouldn’t move them one by one – they would all go at once.
When I opened my eyes I thought I had lost a foot in height. Only it wasn’t that at all. The ghosts surrounding me were floating, now. Levitating a clear foot off the ground. They were all floating!
Frank stared on in awe. His jaw would have dropped all the way through the wooden floor if it weren’t attached to his skull. “Alright,” he said, throwing his hands up in defeat, “Yours is bigger than mine. You win.”
The slightest knock to my concentration could’ve caused my magick to come crashing down like a house of cards, but it held. And it held strong. I could feel it oozing out of me in waves, pulses that travelled all across the length of the massive room. I felt like I could’ve ripped the whole damn mansion out of its foundations and lifted it up to the world of the living if I wanted to.
I turned my head up to the ghost woman to my left and pictured her floating toward the front door behind the rest of her… people. Using only the power of my mind, visualizing what I wanted to happen in my head and then willing it to be real, I spun the woman with a huge, invisible finger, and nudged her in the back so that she would float.
She moved, and so did the others.
They were moving! At the edge of my senses I felt for the front door to the mansion and swung it open, despite being far enough away that the distance between me and the door would have left me a little out of breath if I tried to run for it. Frank and Madame Aishe began to walk behind the ghost woman who had been closest to me, and I followed the three of them, watching the catatonic phantom as she drifted listlessly across the room.