Chapter 1 - Ghost Trick

The mansion on the edge of Normal, Ohio, was huge and intimidating. Boarded up windows glared upon the yellowed, tangled lawn, whose grass was tall and unkempt. Decaying flowers wilted in cracked flower boxes that slept eternally on rotting oak railings. The roof sloped up sharply in an “m” shape and sighed like a mourner in the cool nighttime breeze, with dormers poking out on the east and west sides. Its tiles were cracked and caving in, weathered away from two centuries of life. Now it was dying with each new rainstorm, each gust of wind rattling the skeleton of its ancient framework and columns.

Standing on the dirt path just before the withering mansion’s main entrance, Jacob Davidson turned around to check out the view. His dark eyes stared out over the hill on which the house had been built, past the dirt path and his old, forest green Ford parked upon it. He could see the entire town of Normal from here, its twinkling lights beating back the encroaching night. It’s beautiful, he thought with a small smile. With the Red and Beaver Rivers hugging the town from either side, their black waters brilliantly reflecting yellow dapples of electricity, it was truly picturesque.

Jacob sighed and turned back to the unwelcoming, melancholy mansion. Compared to the beautiful Normal cityscape of twinkling lights, flowing water, and life, the house looked even angrier at the presence of the boy with chocolate skin; he was the only living thing on the whole hill crest.

He briefly considered whether he’d been spending too much time reading dramatic horror novels. He decided that he probably was.

“I hate this job sometimes,” Jacob muttered as he sighed and walked up the grey stone steps that rose up to the mansion doors. He paused before the tall double doors and patted his back pocket. The hard bulge of his dagger was there, which was good. He didn’t fancy the idea of entering a poltergeist’s lair without a weapon.

He was crazy, after all, not suicidal.

Thus reassured, Jacob reached for the gilded, rusting door handle of the left door and twisted. He met no resistance, which was both good and bad. It was good because it meant that he wouldn’t have to lock pick. It was bad because after the last deaths here, the police had supposed to have firmly locked them. The fact that these doors were unlocked meant one of two things: either someone else had already made it here before him, or something wanted him to enter.

He hoped it wasn’t the latter. He hated that cliché in movies and books.

Cautiously, the teen eased the door open. He winced at its loud groans.

Jacob stepped silently into the mansion and shut the door part-way behind him. It was even darker inside than it was outside, the only light being the small amounts of moonlight which managed to crawl and squirm between the planks nailed over the windows. The seventeen-year-old blinked rapidly. When his eyes had at last adjusted to the lack of light, he slowly moved forward.

He was in a large, rectangular room with partially collapsed staircases curving up either wall. The stale air, chilly and dry, sprang up goosebumps across his arms. He looked to his left and right; the room opened to two long hallways that ran directly along the house’s front wall. There was also a set of double doors on the far end of the room, and another above those, where the staircases met at a walkway. If he remembered correctly, there was also supposed to be two rooms adjacent to this one, whose doors opened out to the halls.

Everything was silent.

“Creepy place,” Jacob observed, continuing forward. He recalled from Normal Public Library’s blueprints of the old mansion that the parlor lay directly through the doors below the staircase. Newspapers from the early 1800’s had claimed that the McArthurs, the late owners of this mansion, had been murdered in the parlor, although their bodies remained undiscovered even now, centuries later.

He crept along the room, across its red velvet carpet, which frayed and had become choked with dust. Upon reaching the doors to the parlor, he paused and slipped his dagger from his pocket. Moonlight caught the steel blade and made the dagger appear to have been forged from silver.

As silently as he could, Jacob turned the parlor doorknob and eased it open. He held his breath and gradually drew into the room beyond. Ghosts didn’t scare him anymore, not after seven years of busting them, but disturbing the thing here before he had a solid, physical layout of the room was just asking for another broken arm and leg. And he didn’t want to have to give his dad the story of tripping down the stairs while getting a midnight snack again. With this thought in mind, Jacob squinted through the darkness to examine the parlor.

It was big, but not as large vertically or horizontally as the entrance room had been. A long dining table sat in the center of the room with six chairs pulled up to either side of its length, as well as two more chairs at either head. All of this sat over a Persian rug, elegantly designed with gold trimming. A low-hanging chandelier dangled over the center of the table. The rest of the room consisted of couches that had once been white but had since turned somewhat yellow; a fireplace, brick and with a protective iron gate separating its hearth and pit; and wooden floorboards.

Nothing moved. It was still only a few degrees under room temperature.

Breathing shallowly, Jacob shuffled forth with quiet steps.

If he were a dead body, where would he be hiding? It was, of course, entirely possible that the McArthurs’ killer had dragged their bodies elsewhere in the mansion or its grounds, or had even dumped them in either the Red River or the Beaver River. Jacob doubted this, however, despite the police’s conclusion that the latter was the most likely. Last week, a group of kids had been stupid enough to party in this historically haunted house, and the only one of them who had escaped claimed that her buddies had entered the parlor last she’d seen. She’d been about to follow them in, several moments after their entry to it, but had heard a horrible din of breaking objects and screaming from inside it. She’d then ran as far away from the mansion as she could, and upon a police sweep of the area, no bodies or even signs of a struggle had been found.

Jacob knew from experience that ghosts usually could not leave a certain, limited radius from the spot where they died. This radius did tend to vary from ghost to ghost though.

He rubbed his chin in thought. He remembered that his ninth-grade history teacher had once said that the McArthurs’ mansion had at one time been a major stop on the Underground Railroad. Perhaps, then… perhaps there was a secret room around here!

Jacob knelt down on the floor and knocked against it with his left (free) hand. It was solid; since this massive home had no basement, it should be all foundation from this floor to the ground. Not one to give up so easily, though, Jacob moved to a different, nearby spot, and knocked there, too. Nothing.

He spent the next ten minutes on this task, so focused that he didn’t notice how the air temperature inched down one degree at a time. Not until he could already see his breath.

Nearly twenty feet from the parlor doors now, his ear pressed to the floor, Jacob happened to exhale, and he stared when he realized he could see the steam from his breath. He scrambled to his feet quickly. He reaffirmed his grip on his steel dagger.

“Shit,” Jacob cursed.

The word turned into mist that hung in the air for about a second before dissipating. Brown orbs flickered back and forth, scanning the room for abnormalities. His goosebumps grew in number. Nothing was out of the ordinary, however; except for the fact that it seemed the parlor was much darker than when he’d entered it.

He scooted closer to the table, towards the center of the room. He wanted to have as much space to fight whatever was coming as he could.

The floor started shaking and the floorboards clattered loudly. Jacob, eyes wide, nearly tripped and cursed again. One of the white couches pressed against the walls slid forward and lifted off the ground. It flung itself at Jacob from behind him, and a sudden warning chill ran down the self-taught ghost buster’s back. He looked over his shoulder just in time to react to the sight of the flying couch, and hit the ground. The unusual ammunition sailed harmlessly over him. It smashed into the wall with enough force to crack the rotting wood.

“Shit,” Jacob intoned, picking himself off the floor.

The chairs at the table began to creep away from it, and the teen leaped away from them. He swallowed hard. As he’d thought, this ghost was definitely a poltergeist. He’d dealt with several of them in the past, but from the force and velocity of that flying couch, none of them had been as strong as this entity was.

One chair jumped into the air and threw itself at him kamikaze style. He quickly moved out of the way, and it hit the eastern wall, where it exploded into planks and splinters. Kamikaze indeed. Jacob wondered if the chair had been made in Japan instead of the usual China.

“McArthur!” he shouted, dodging another flying chair. “Stop hiding! I’m here to help you find peace!”

The floor rattled more roughly now, and Jacob stumbled. He found himself glad for the fact that he didn’t suffer from motion sickness, because if he’d had it, his dinner would’ve been added to the list of potential projectiles that the poltergeist could use.

“PEACE!?”

The word boomed around the trembling parlor, so loud that Jacob’s ears hurt. It was full of bass and deep as a ravine, enriched with anger. The temperature dropped again, and the teen shivered. Then, before his very eyes, a shining figure, blue and translucent, rose like a column of warm air through the Persian rug and the table.

Jacob narrowed his eyes. It looked just like the picture he’d seen of the McArthur family patriarch. Over six feet tall and sporting an impressive beer belly, the ghost of George McArthur was a moose. His once-handsome face now had a gaping hole in its mangled hair, reflecting its death blow. The living teen swallowed back a gag; whatever had done that to him had incredible strength. The ghost wore a cotton Army coat over a plain V-neck shirt, a pair of dress pants and shoes, and a belt.

“I haven’t had the peace I deserve for nearly TWO CENTURIES!” McArthur’s ghost roared, and Jacob thought he heard the hint of a sob in those words. “My killer has made sure of that!”

Jacob’s fists clenched. “Your killer is dead!” he shouted, and was forced to roll under another suicidal chair. Upon returning to his feet, he glared sternly at the poltergeist, who was so surprised that the room momentarily stopped hiccupping hundreds of times a minute. “Give it up already!”

“I’ll admit that I’m surprised you are able to see me even though I’m supposed to be in my invisible form still,” McArthur’s ghost grunted. “That’s a very rare trait to have.” The room rumbled like an earthquake again, even harder than the previous shaking. “But there’s still no way you can help me, boy! Because the thing that killed my family is not dead, and neither it was any mere human murderer! It was a demon!”

Jacob’s eyes widened, and the shock that burned through him was great enough to make him lose his already weakening balance. Had that poltergeist just said demon? As in the literal, evil, denizen of Hell demon?

“That’s impossible!” Jacob shouted, throwing himself out of the path of another deadly chair. The piece of furniture showered him with its splinters upon breaking. “Demons don’t exist!” He knelt up on one knee, then lifted himself the rest of the way. “Hell doesn’t exist! And neither does Heaven!”

He couldn’t believe that something like Hell could actually be real. Because if Hell was real, that meant Heaven was too, and in correlation, God. And if God was real… then why on Earth was He letting all of these poor spirits stay trapped on Earth, and letting all the terrible things in the world happen?

He just couldn’t reconcile it in his head.

“Both do exist!” the ghost insisted. “And if you don’t leave now, you’re going to find that out the hard way, just like that group of teens who came the other week. He’s still here, in this mansion, and he’ll come for you any moment! I’m frankly surprised he hasn’t come already… something must be holding him up.”

‘He’ is still here? Find it out just like the teens from the other week? Jacob blinked and narrowly ducked under a second couch, which slammed into the parlor’s doors and blew them off their hinges. The room stopped shaking, and the dark-skinned ghost buster stumbled from the unexpectedness of it.

“GO!”

Jacob’s eyes fell upon the ghost and he stared.

Tears streamed from its glowing, blue eyes. Quite suddenly, the teen realized something. George McArthur hadn’t ever killed anyone, alive or as a ghost. He’d been trying to protect everyone who’d ever come ghost-sighting here in this mansion. From what, Jacob didn’t exactly know; he still didn’t believe the claim that Heaven and Hell, and therefore angels and demons, were real, so he doubted the thing tying McArthur’s ghost here was a demon. But something terrified the ghost. In all his seven years of busting, he’d never seen a vengeful spirit cry before.

A wave of compassion swept over him.

“That… that thing you mentioned,” Jacob said slowly, gaining more confidence in his budding idea. “It’s holding you here against your will, isn’t it? Keep you from… passing on.”

McArthur’s ghost hesitated. “However true that may be, what are you waiting for? Run while you still can!”

The seventeen-year-old paused, took a deep breath, held out his right arm and hand—his dagger hand—and concentrated. First confusion, then recognition, and finally awe passed over the poltergeist’s features as both arm and dagger glowed with an unnatural, but beautiful purple light. The light pulsed with life and warmth, and the air around it felt warmer. The mansion suddenly didn’t seem as dead and decomposing as it had before.

“That light…” the poltergeist gasped under its breath. “The Right Hand of God… I never thought I’d see that power in my afterlife…”

Jacob raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know what you said just now, but anyway, if you can’t pass on willfully… what if I were to force you to?”

The ghost stared reverently. “That… just might work. You’re one hell of a rarity, kid. You might even be able to kill that demon.”

“Y-Yeah, well,” Jacob stammered, unused to such praise, “I don’t even like My Little Pony.”

“What?” The shimmering, floating McArthur’s brow furrowed.

The teen facepalmed. Right, not the time for jokes and references. “Whatever, let’s just get this over with.”

The poltergeist smiled and held its arms straight out, perpendicular with the rest of its body. It lowered itself to the ground directly in front of Jacob. Its coat fluttered back in some invisible, otherworldly breeze.

“This’ll hurt a bit,” the high school junior warned.

McArthur’s trapped soul nodded. “Do it. The pain of being dead for over a century alongside your family, but being unable to spend your afterlife with them, hurts more than anything you could ever do to me.”

The teen pointed his dagger at the poltergeist’s chest—right where its heart would be if it were alive—and hesitated. It was far easier exorcising a ghost when it was the bad guy, when it had killed people, and he could consider it a monster. McArthur was far from a monster; he was just a sad, trapped soul, doomed to wander the Earth. His hands trembled. He swallowed dryly.

“Are you sure about this?”

McArthur stared at him with wide, pleading eyes. “Yes! Do it—do it now! Before that demon catches onto what’s happening here!”

Jacob’s gaze hardened, and he nodded resolutely.

“Fine. Here goes.”

His right arm and his dagger thrumming with supernatural energy, shedding that brilliant royal purple glow, Jacob stabbed the poltergeist right in its chest. Light exploded from the ghost’s bod, pure and white, as an agonized howl filled the room. With each passing second, the light grew brighter and brighter, until Jacob was forced to turn away from it. When it finally faded away, and the parlor was swathed in shadow once more, he looked back.

McArthur’s soul was still there, bent over his steel blade. But it was no longer composed of the periwinkle of ghosts; rather, it was a divine white, transparent and fading from sight. A single tear dropped from its eye, and it wore the most serene smile Jacob had ever seen in his life.

“Thank… you…” the purified spirit of George McArthur said, the words filled with kindness and undertones of bass.

Then he disappeared from the Earth, for good, and Jacob let his hand fall stiffly to his side.

He’d never been thanked for his work before. It felt… nice. Jacob gazed solemnly at his dagger, which dripped with black ectoplasm. Ghost blood. He wiped it on the fraying Persian rug.

There was still work to be done here. Even if McArthur’s ghost hadn’t told him about the other… supernatural (not demonic!) entity living here, Jacob would’ve known now. Despite the poltergeist having passed on at last, he still felt evil lurking nearby. It was inexplicable; it had never happened before. But the stale air was thick with the feeling of danger.

Keeping himself on high alert, he slowly left the parlor, whose doors were still off their hinges. Jacob poked around their wreckage, as well as the yellow-tinged, white couch that had broke said doors.

Now that the poltergeist was gone, the house was silent.

The teen, his arm and knife no longer glowing purple, winced as a particularly loose board he stepped on groaned. He froze, glancing around carefully for signs of movement, and relaxed. He continued forward much more carefully, an elephant walking on the frozen lake surface.

A metallic ringing resounded throughout the mansion.

Jacob froze again. He strained his ears. Silence followed for several moments, before the ringing surfaced again. It seemed to be coming from his right, and was loud enough to be either in the conjoining room or the floor directly above it.

A terrible din of wood crunching and crumbling and raining down on a floor reached Jacob’s ears. He jumped a mile and swiveled to his right. That had definitely come from the room next door this time. The high schooler’s breathing slowed, his dark skin nearly matching the light level of the entrance hall. The metallic ringing, like a crowbar slamming against a lamppost, was back again, the interval between each reverb much smaller. His ears hurt from the commotion.

For a split second, the massive building was silent again.

And then the wall exploded inwards from Jacob’s perspective, shattered bits and pieces of oak raining on the floor beneath the collapsing staircase. A dark object, thin and tall, flung through the wreckage. He had just a split second to see that it was a person with a bald, white head, and a top hat and black fur coat, before said person collided painfully with him.

Jacob and the unidentified flying albino tumbled back, cursing and flailing. They rolled dizzily across wood and carpet. Finally, in a mess of tangled limbs like earbuds in a pocket, they crashed into the left wall, and their momentum was abruptly (and painfully) cut off.

“Fuck, that guy hits hard,” a smooth, cool voice grumbled. “Does he not know the meaning of hold back?” The man atop Jacob paused. “And actually, isn’t this landing much softer than it should’ve been?”

“Get,” Jacob growled, unable to see thanks to the newcomer’s fur coat blocking his vision, “the fuck… OFF ME!”

The next few seconds were an annoying fiasco in which Jacob and the man lying on him attempted to untangle themselves. When they had finally managed this, they quickly got to their feet, grumbling and muttering.

“How many times have I hit the floor now tonight?” Jacob mumbled furiously. He rubbed his elbow tenderly; that particular fall had scraped some spots of skin off his elbow, which throbbed red and bled slightly. “This better not become a damn habit.”

“Sorry about that,” the man who’d been flung through the wall said, sounding sincerely apologetic. “I didn’t expect there to be anyone still alive in this mansion tonight.”

Jacob looked up from his throbbing elbow, ready to accept the apology, and stopped cold. His jaw nearly hit the floor.

Standing in front of him was not a tall, bald, albino person, as he’d first assumed. The top hat and long fur coat that sat on the newcomer’s body were real enough. And the slick, baggy dress pants which hung around the… thing’s legs looked just as solid as the black Calvin Kleins which concealed his feet. There was no blue glow, suggestive of a ghost, around him. But the face underneath the top hat, as well as the form beneath the unbuttoned coat, showed the newcomer’s true appearance.

“A… a skeleton,” Jacob gasped, his voice hoarse and disbelieving. “You’re a moving skeleton… in clothes like a private detective in an old black-and-white mystery movie.”

The skeleton blinked. How it was possible for the skeleton to blink, Jacob didn’t know, and was frankly too stupefied to ask.

“You can see me?” it said, eye… sockets wide. “I don’t look like a normal, but admittedly very handsome, man to you?”

“Of course not!” Jacob barked. A sudden burst of rage flowed through him, and he grabbed the walking, talking skeleton by its collar. He then shoved it against the wall. He was surprised at how little effort it took to do so; but then again, skeletons didn’t have nearly the weight of a normal person thanks to being all bones. The teen lifted up his dagger—which he’d remarkably managed to keep a grip on while tumbling across the floor—and held the sharp steel to where the skeleton’s neck should’ve been.

His arm and dagger glowed purple. The skeleton’s eyes widened.

“The Right Hand of God,” it gasped, awed much like the late ghost of George McArthur. Its skull turned up from Jacob’s empowered arm to his face, and empty sockets connected with dark orbs. “I see now. Who are you?”

“The name’s Jacob Davidson,” Jacob snarled, and he pressed his dagger closer to the skeleton’s throat. “But I’m the one asking questions here. Who are you, and why the hell have you been keeping poor George McArthur’s spirit from being able to pass on!?”

“Agent Skul Mann, FBI,” the skeleton introduced itself automatically, as if it had said this a thousand times before. It then reached into its pocket, and Jacob tensed for a moment before it withdrew a leather wallet. It let the wallet fall open, and sure enough, there was an FBI badge with the picture of Jacob’s captive on it. He squinted through the darkness of the mansion. It looked legit enough, but Jacob still had severe doubts.

“What’s a skeleton doing in the FBI?” he wondered skeptically.

“I’m one of their best guys in the Supernatural Relations department,” Agent Mann said easily. “And, by the way, I’m a revenant. Not a skeleton; there’s a major difference. I came to this mansion on a report of demonic activity.”

Jacob was silent, thinking. The poltergeist had seemed to be talking about some other person also entering the mansion that night, and the doors were unlocked when they shouldn’t have been. Still, though…

“Give me one reason why I should believe you.”

The ironically named Agent Mann opened his mouth to reply, but he didn’t get the chance. Something heavy shook the floor, and behind Jacob, the wall through which the supposed FBI operative had fallen crumbled. An arctic wave of darkness rolled into the mansion’s entrance hall, full of danger and evil. The stench of sulfur permeated the air.

“Jacob Davidson,” the revenant said in a low and serious voice that offered no question, looking at something above and beyond Jacob’s head, “if you wish to live to see the morning light, let. Me. Go.”

“You,” an angry voice boomed, shaking Jacob’s soul to its very core. “You lost me my toy, human. You know not the forces you mess with. You know not the powers that prey in the night. You know not the might of Hell’s finest soldiers. But you will.”

Then, as Jacob turned his head to see what new terror had been unleashed in the dying mansion, another wave of darkness swept over them. It snuffed out all the light in the room. It was so cold that even Jacob’s bones shivered.

And that was the end of the world as Jacob knew it.