The funtime show, p.15
The Funtime Show, page 15
part #19 of GhostTrapper Series
“Be careful with that puppet,” I told Stacey as we walked out of the woods. “I think Agnes's soul might be trapped inside.”
“Oh, yikes! Sorry, Agnes.” Stacey turned the puppet right side up and carried it like a baby. “Wait. Is Agnes a good guy or a bad guy? Is she dangerous?”
“She seems pretty harmless from what we know of her,” I said. “She was the heart of the show, I think. Her husband built the puppets, but she was better at giving them life, making them seem to have a soul.” As we passed under the deck to the basement door, I added, “I had a glimpse of her death. It matched what Evelyn told us earlier—suicide by pills.”
“Well, you could get all kinds of crazy pills back then,” Stacey said. “But why'd she do it?”
“I don't know.” I opened the basement door and prepared to confront the cold spot that had pursued Maeve, presumably the same entity that had played the show earlier.
The basement was silent now, and while it wasn't exactly warm, the concentrated cold spot was gone, or at least hidden away somewhere. I peered through my night vision goggles, then took temperature and electromagnetic readings, but the entity had gone to ground.
We closed the basement door and returned through the side bushes to our van.
Inside the van, we laid the puppet face down on one of the supremely uncomfortable drop-down cots. I spread open the gap in the back of her multi-patched dress for a closer look at the faded symbols painted inside. “Get some high-resolution pictures of these to send Calvin.” Maybe our retired boss in Florida would have some insight to offer.
“I'm on it.” Stacey brought out a digital camera while I jotted down the details of my brief vision before they could fade from my memory. “This is so bizarre,” Stacey said. “Like she's tattooed all over, but only on the inside. Like she's hiding her personality from the world. You really don't see a lot of puppets with tattoos, now that I think about it.”
“If what I saw was real, then Agnes's soul might have been stuck inside this puppet for decades,” I said.
“That's not cool,” Stacey said. “Unless she's evil, maybe?”
“I got the sense Irving was driven by grief,” I said. “He didn't want her soul to leave.”
“Or maybe he was an extreme control freak, and didn't want her to escape him,” Stacey suggested.
“The real question is how Irving knew how to do it,” I said. “It's not like Agnes was slowly wasting away of a chronic illness. She tried to end it suddenly and quickly.”
“And Irving was immediately like, hey, I'm grabbing a paintbrush and a puppet to trap her soul before it floats away,” Stacey said. “Which is not the standard response most people would have in that situation.”
With Stacey's image surveying complete, I pulled the back of Polly's dress together to hide her innards, as though protecting her modesty. Then I propped her up on the narrow cot in a seated position. If there was a long-suffering soul trapped in there, I wanted to treat it with respect, even if I was also wary of its manipulations.
“There was something else,” I told Stacey, while turning my attention back to the monitors to watch the house's current activity, but there wasn't much happening within the limited scope of our cameras.
“Huh?” Stacey had been staring back over her shoulder at Polly Patches, who seemed to be watching us from behind while we watched the cameras. She forced herself to turn to me and make brief eye contact. “What else?”
“I don't know. Something huge. I had the impression it was controlling Irving with these long, dark ropes, like he was some kind of…I don't know…”
“A puppet?” Stacey asked, looking nervously back over her shoulder at Polly again.
“I was trying not to go for the most obvious. But yeah, Irving may have been under the influence of something dark and powerful, at least when he was in the act of capturing Agnes's soul.”
“Hmm.” Stacey was still gazing back over her shoulder.
“Like maybe Irving called on it for help,” I continued. “Or maybe he had an established relationship with a demonic—Stacey are you even listening to me?”
“Am I what?” Stacey finally shifted her gaze to me. “Sorry, Ellie. But it's just sitting there, staring at us.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “You don't think it would sneak up on us, do you?”
“If she bothers you that much, I'll move her up to my seat.” I picked up the puppet again, carefully avoiding Polly's spell-inscribed interior.
“Yeah, that's better. Maybe not the driver seat, though. That's too close to the brake and gearshift. And the ignition.”
“Seriously, Stacey? You think the puppet is going to come to life and drive the van?”
“I don't think that. I just don't want to worry about whether it's going to happen.”
“Then I'll put her in your seat.” I sat the puppet down carefully, making sure she stayed upright, then rejoined Stacey in the back.
“Now I can just see one arm and part of its head,” Stacey said. “I feel like it's going to lean over, look at us, and start talking—”
“It's not going to do any of that.”
“How do you know? It could be an entity with psychokinetic powers. It could throw the dang puppet at us.”
“What do you want to do? Put her in a ghost trap?”
“That'd be lovely, Ellie, thank you.”
“Go ahead.” I handed Stacey one from the van's store of equipment.
“You want me to do it?”
“I don't want to get bitten if she fights back,” I said.
“Bitten?” Stacey blanched, but she took the trap and approached the puppet. “Hey there, Polly, or Agnes. We're just going to put you in here for, you know, your own safety while we sort out what's going on.” She picked up the puppet. “And sorry about the cracks on your face, too. That's my bad.”
Then she paused slightly, as though waiting for the puppet to reply.
Fortunately, the puppet didn't.
Stacey set it down inside the cylindrical trap, our standard type. She sealed it and slid the switch to activate its electromagnetic field, hopefully trapping the entity inside.
She finally relaxed a bit after that.
“Check the cameras from the woods first,” I told Stacey, while sitting back and cracking open a bag of allegedly healthy apple chips. “See if our Skylight Peeper got stirred up by all that digging.”
“You got it, boss.”
While she brought up recent recordings, I checked out the current situation around the house.
“Basement entrance,” I said, pointing. The shadowy Peeper was there, more solid than I'd ever seen him. He stood at the basement door under the deck, again trying to enter. He shook the door in its frame, like he was stronger tonight, or more strongly motivated.
“I can confirm a dark shape moving around the wrecked cairn after we left it,” Stacey said.
“That must have been him.” I watched him slap the window to the basement bedroom, and we could hear it over the microphone inside.
“He's all riled up,” Stacey said. “Maybe he resents getting his rocks knocked. Are we heading to the house now?”
“Maybe. Do any of the doors look open to you?”
“Nope,” Stacey said, after looking at each door along with me.
I texted Iris: Skylight Man is back. Keep all doors and windows shut.
“There's a cold spot in the basement bedroom again.” Stacey pointed at the thermal camera. “Do you think the two entities are talking through the window? Or getting ready to fight?”
On the screen, the dark figure drifted out from underneath the deck, then up along a deck support post.
“He's so much more elegant going up,” Stacey said. “He looks like a cockroach when he climbs back down.”
“Nobody tell him he can float right through the deck,” I said, watching him take the long way around, up and over the deck railing before approaching the glass doors to the kitchen and Jim's office.
The light to Jim's office was still on. I wondered whether that meant he was burning the midnight oil, or had just left it on by accident. I wondered if Iris had taken little Maeve up to his office to let him know something had happened, or if she was handling it on her own. It was frustrating to have so little idea of what was going on inside a client's house.
The Peeper's dark form approached the master bedroom balcony on the top floor, but Iris had taken my advice and left the outdoor light on, which seemed to keep it at bay. It skirted the balcony and approached the skylights, but the interior lights were on, too. Iris wasn't allowing any darkness in her room tonight.
Apparently preferring to avoid the light, the entity drifted to the side and out of camera range.
We watched the other entrances it hadn't tried, like the front door and the exterior door to Cameron's garage apartment, to see where it would pop up next.
“There's so much we can't see,” Stacey whispered.
A dark shape crossed in front of the van's windshield.
Our van's wall of monitors was built just behind the front seats, with a narrow gap for accessing the front of the van. The monitors blocked my view of most of the windshield, as well as the windows in the front doors, so I only saw the dark shape for a moment before it was out of sight.
“There's someone out there,” I said quietly.
“That's not my favorite thing to hear in the middle of the night,” Stacey whispered back.
I drew my flashlight and crept up between the front seats. While we carried the tactical flashlights for their powerful white light, which can annoy or repel dark entities, they could also be used as a weapon against the living if needed. The flashlight shell was hard aluminum, and its front edge was beveled for breaking glass. That edge could deal some damage to a guy's face, too.
I reached the front of the van and saw the dark shape walk past the front passenger window.
“He's big,” I whispered.
“Is he a living person, like a cop here to harass us, or…other?” Stacey whispered.
“Other, I think.” I moved to the van's back door and reached for the handle. “I'll try to make contact.”
“I'll come with you.”
“Wait until I call for you. Or until you hear me scream.” I opened the back door and looked out. I didn't see the entity, so I dropped to the driveway.
I tensed, flashlight drawn but unlit, waiting to see whether the ghost would come flying around the back corner of the van to attack me.
No immediate attack came, so I backed away from the van for a wider view.
The shadow figure was no longer on the passenger side of the van where I'd last seen it, but I could still feel something watching me, and the outdoor environment was unnaturally cold.
Then it moved, and it wasn't where I expected. The shadow stood on top of the van, barely visible in the dim red glow of the night sky.
Stacey, sitting just inside the open back door, cringed when she realized I was looking at the spot directly over her head. We'd disabled the van's interior lights since we were trespassing, so she was lit only by the glow of the monitors behind her.
Is it right above me? Stacey mouthed, pointing straight up.
I nodded slowly. She bared her teeth and began quietly preparing a defense with light and sound in case the entity decided to swing down and join her.
“Who are you?” I asked the entity.
The figure crouched low on top of the van, going back into giant-cockroach mode.
Stacey tensed like she could hear or feel his movement, though she couldn't see the entity from where she was. She grimaced up at the top of the doorway. He did look poised to crawl inside with her.
But we knew this guy wasn't great with doors and windows.
I motioned for Stacey to close the door.
She looked puzzled, either not understanding what I thought was a very clear pantomime of closing a van's rear door, or not sure why I'd want her to do that.
I repeated my amazing and very clear van-door pantomime again. She either got it this time or decided to trust my judgment, because she reached out, keeping her eyes turned upward in case the entity pounced, and pulled the van's rear door shut in a swift movement that looked quite a lot like my pantomime had.
The entity scuttled toward her, then slapped on the closed door as if frustrated that it hadn't acted more quickly on its chance to get inside the van, apparently unaware of the relationship between snoozing and losing.
“Calm down, pal.” I approached warily, like a cop confronting a violent drunk, in no particular hurry to get close to the dead thing.
“Where is she?” Its voice rumbled in a low, flat monotone common to the dead.
“Who?” I asked.
“Where is she?” he repeated, in that hyper-obsessed way ghosts have, with the same intonation and everything. It was possible the guy had only one thought, played on an endless loop. Again, he asked, “Where is she?”
“Are you looking for Agnes Moreland?” I asked, trying to prod things along. “Or maybe—”
In an instant, he was down from the van, standing directly in front of me, towering over me and blocking my way to Stacey, hopefully not trying to divide and conquer by attacking us one at a time. He had a wet, earthy smell that was recently familiar, reminding me of the dirt below the cairn.
He was definitely a dead thing, appearing as a tall, broad-shouldered walking corpse that had already surrendered the majority of its flesh to the earth. The crumbling remains of his face leered down at me, most of his teeth visible, his eye sockets hollow. He was much clearer than I'd ever seen him, maybe a result of messing with his cairn.
“Where is she?”
“I don't know who you mean,” I managed to say, keeping down my rising panic at the appearance and closeness of the entity. Among the tattered, mud-stained ruins of his clothing, I saw the faded shape of a clover over his heart.
“Are you Sean McCormick?” I asked.
He turned his head from side to side, as though sniffing, though he had no nose, or maybe listening, though he had no ears.
“She's not here,” he whispered, trying out a new line for a change.
Then he turned toward our client's house and vanished.
I ran to the van and opened the door. “Stacey, hand me some thermals and come with me.”
Stacey was out in a flash, ready to run.
We tracked the retreating cold spot through the yard and all the way to the demolished cairn in the woods, where it sank away.
“Do we uproot it like a poisonous vine, or what?” Stacey said.
“We're not digging it out now, because we don't want it to get active again,” I said. “The family's been through enough tonight. This entity needs to stay quiet and out of the house, though. Do you hear me, Sean?” I directed this last into the soil below the cairn that I'd helped pull apart. I couldn't be sure the entity was listening, or would obey me, but it couldn't hurt to try.
“That was Sheriff Shamrock?” Stacey whispered.
“Based on the shamrock badge, it was either him or a leprechaun law enforcement officer,” I said.
“Why's he here?”
I shook my head, because I didn't know.
We watched the woods for a while, but the entity didn't return, so we made our way back to the van and resumed the night's watch.
Chapter Twenty
I texted Iris to ask how Maeve was doing, but also to see whether the girl had given any more of an explanation of why she'd been digging up cairns in the middle of the night.
She was upset for a while and then fell asleep, Iris replied after several minutes. I didn't get much out of her other than the whole thing was supposedly the puppet's idea.
I glanced at Polly Patches, seemingly harmless inside the ghost trap, like a toy still in its packaging, although the puppet looked too worn for that, with hairline cracks across the face where Stacey had thrown her after wrenching her off my arm. From a distance, they looked like old-age wrinkles.
Could I speak with her? I asked. Maybe tomorrow?
Then I held my breath, hoping I hadn't upset Iris with that request. I'd already met the girl—however crazily and briefly—so we had that going for us.
“What's happening over there?” Stacey asked.
“I'm hoping to talk with Maeve,” I said. “It's getting a little late to keep trying to hide our presence, anyway. That cat's already out of the bag since I ran into Maeve outside.”
“I don't know why anyone would try to keep a cat in a bag, anyway,” Stacey said. “A cardboard box works better. Amateurs.”
After a long pause, Iris's reply came. Maybe in the afternoon. I don't want her getting upset before school. I'll need to introduce you to all the kids.
Okay, thanks, I wrote back, and I didn't hear from her again.
The rest of the night went relatively smoothly, without many signs of activity.
We left at the first hint of daylight, though I didn't feel great about leaving my clients with the strange entities hanging around their house. At least Polly Patches couldn't whisper crazy ideas to any kids while sealed in our ghost trap in the van. We left her in the van in the parking garage, too, because we didn't really want the puppet in our apartment with us.
I went to bed, where I'd gone from loving the thick red bed curtains to not loving how much they reminded me of Irving's theater curtains in the basement.
As I lay there, drifting uncomfortably in and out of sleep, I became half-convinced that characters from the show had gathered outside the curtain, and they were moving and whispering, as if they'd followed us home. More likely, they were just echoes of my bad dreams.
I didn't want to open the curtain to check, though.
Eventually, I got up and had a late breakfast from the fruit and snacks we'd stashed in the apartment refrigerator. We couldn't eat pizza for every meal, as appealing as that might have been. Taylor Swift blaring in the other bedroom made it clear Stacey was up and getting ready for the day.
Calvin had left me a message to call him about the symbols we'd found. As I sat down on the couch and prepared to call Calvin back, Stacey emerged from the bedroom and let out a gasp of horror.
