No Ghouls Allowed (16 page)

“Aw, I’m okay,” the older man said with a dismissive wave. “He stuck me pretty good,
but didn’t do any major damage other than nicking my lung. The docs patched that up
and they say that as soon as my blood count is back up to normal, they’ll release
me and send me home.”

I always knew that Kogan was a tough old guy, but he was certainly proving that now
in spades.

“So,” Kogan continued. “Beau here says y’all wanted to ask me about yesterday; that
right?”

“It is, Sheriff,” I said, taking a seat in the only chair in the room, which was to
the side of the bed.

“Well, I don’t know that there’s much to tell. See, y’all left the room and it was
just me and Levi, and we were gonna put Scoffland in that body bag when all of a sudden
there was this weird noise—”

“What kind of noise?” I interrupted.

Kogan frowned. “I don’t know, some kind of compression sound. Like a pop but not a
high-pitched pop like when a gun goes off. This was kinda deeper, and maybe even a
little muffled.”

“We know exactly what you’re talking about,” Heath said. And we did.

Sometimes a spook will literally pop into our realm from one of the lower realms,
and when that happens, it makes a sort of deep
POW
. It’s not crazy loud, and I’ve only heard the sound a few times, but it can be quite
eerie to experience.

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“Well, Levi and I stopped loadin’ Scoffland into the bag, and we were lookin’ around
to see where the noise came from, and that’s when I looked over at him and he’d changed.”

“Changed how?” I said.

Kogan lifted his hand weakly and let it fall like he was frustrated by my questions.
“I don’t know, Mary Jane. He just wasn’t himself, and I could tell right away I was
about to have some trouble.”

“What happened next?”

“He pulled out a knife and he stuck me in the gut.”

“Did he say anything?” Heath asked him.

Kogan seemed to think on that for a moment. “No,” he said. “No, he mostly just started
growling and waving the knife at me.”

“You mentioned a popping sound,” I said. “From which direction did you hear that noise?”

Kogan considered that for a second. “You know,” he said, “now that you’re asking,
I remember that it was coming from behind that wall. The one where the hidden playroom
was.”

“Do you think it could have come from the playroom itself?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Kogan said. “I think it might’ve.”

“And you’re sure Deputy Cook didn’t say anything before attacking you?”

Kogan started to shake his head, but then he stopped. “Wait a sec. You know what?
I think he did say somethin’. It was right before I turned to see him pull his knife.
We were both starin’ at the wall where the noise had come from and Levi says, ‘You
know, Sheriff, I don’t feel so good.’ I forgot all about that once the knife showed
up.”

I dug a little deeper with my next question. “And when you saw him with the knife,
other than acting different, did he also look different?”

Kogan fiddled with the bedsheet. “Now that you mention it, Mary Jane, he did look
different. He looked plumb crazy . . . like, psycho or somethin’.”

“Can you elaborate?” I pressed.

“Well, I guess he just looked unrecognizable. I mean, his face seemed like it belonged
on someone else. It was Levi, but it wasn’t Levi. I ain’t never seen nothin’ like
it. I asked the docs here to check him for drugs, and so far everything’s come back
negative, but he hasn’t woken up and they also told me they’ve done a full MRI and
PET scan and there doesn’t seem to be a reason for either the sudden mental break
or for him to remain unconscious. You knocked him out, Mary Jane, but he’s really
only got a slight concussion from that, and nobody here knows why he hasn’t come to
yet.”

“Can we see him, Sheriff?” I still carried a bit of guilt for being the one to knock
Cook into unconsciousness, and maybe I did want to see him to make sure he was okay.

“I don’t see why not,” Kogan said. “He’s out like a light and handcuffed to the bed.
You should be safe enough.”

“I think I also want to see Cisco,” I said.

“Why you want to see him for?” the sheriff barked.

“Well, sir, because from what we’ve learned so far, there is a very powerful evil
spirit who possessed Cisco and probably Cook too. If we can’t speak to Cook because
he seems to be in some sort of coma, then we need to try to figure out what happened
to Cisco.”

“He’s been sedated,” Beau reminded me.

“Well, maybe we can convince his doctors to wake him up so we can talk to him,” I
said.

“What would that solve?” Kogan asked me. “I mean, great if you get him clearheaded
enough to start talking to you, Mary Jane, but he still murdered a man and no judge
in the world is going to accept the evil-spirit-made-me-do-it defense.”

“You’re probably right, Sheriff,” I said, simply to placate him. “And yet I still
feel like trying to talk to him is a good idea.”

“You might get more answers from the coroner,” Kogan muttered.

“Why’s that?” Heath asked.

Kogan eyed Beau, who shook his head slightly. “I didn’t tell them yet, sir.”

“Tell us what?” I asked.

Kogan said, “The coroner finished the autopsy on Scoffland early this morning. He
says that Scoffland was killed several hours before Cisco went crazy and nailed his
hands to the wall.”

“He was killed sometime in the middle of the night?” I said. “How can that be?”

“Don’t know,” Beau admitted. “That’s why the sheriff thinks we should talk to the
coroner.”

“But I thought there were witnesses?” I said, unable to let it go. “I thought the
other construction workers saw Cisco kill Scoffland?”

“No,” Beau said. “Cisco and the other workers all got there around the same time that
morning. Between eight and eight forty-five. They claim that Scoffland’s truck was
already there and the boys split up to go look for him. When they heard the sound
of a nail gun, they found Cisco with it in hand, and Scoffland nailed to the wall.”

“If Scoffland was killed sometime earlier, then how was he killed?”

“A nail through the heart,” Kogan said.

“So he was killed with the nail gun,” I said.

“Yep. Helluva way to go too. I mean, that had to hurt.” The sheriff gingerly touched
his chest just above where he’d been stabbed. He knew better than most what a sharp
object to the chest felt like.

“But now you’re thinking that Cisco didn’t do it?” Heath asked the sheriff.

Kogan sighed, and I could tell he was beginning to fatigue. We had to be wearing him
out after what he’d been through. “I don’t know what to think,” he said. “Which is
why I asked Beau to talk the two of you into helping us figure out what the hell is
going on here. Is this some kind of demonic possession? Or just a big hoax? What I
can’t get my head around is the fact that I’ve known Levi almost half his life. The
boy’s like a son to me, and why he’d attack me like that I just can’t figure.”

“You know what this means, don’t you?” Heath said, and I realized his question was
directed at me.

“What?”

“It means we now have
two
murders to solve. Scoffland’s and Sellers’s.”

The room went silent except for the sounds from the machines pumping strength and
health back into Kogan. He was the first to break the silence. Turning to Beau, he
said, “One of the things they teach you as a detective is that when you discover two
separate crimes at one scene, there’s almost always a connection.”

“You think the murders were related?” I asked.

“I think it might be smart to approach it from that angle,” he replied.

“So we’ll need to keep our focus on Everett Sellers’s murder.”

“If it was Everett’s skeleton we found in the playroom,” Beau said. “With the body
missing, I don’t know how we can be sure it was him.”

“There might be a way to narrow the likelihood down, though,” Kogan said, motioning
for Beau to hand him a folder on the table to his right. “I had Wells bring over the
missing-persons file on Sellers. He had to dig it out of storage, but there’s a photo
in there I want you three to look at.”

We all came forward and gathered round Kogan’s bed. His hand shook as he opened the
folder and began to sort through the contents. It was a thick file filled with witness
statements, maps, and at least a dozen photos. “Ah, here we go,” Kogan said, lifting
one out of the folder to show us. In the picture was a freckle-faced, redheaded youth
of about fourteen, holding a croquet mallet and displaying a forced smile. He was
also wearing the exact same clothing as the body we’d found in the playroom. “This
was taken the morning Everett disappeared,” Kogan said. “In fact, not long after he
and his cousins finished playing croquet, Everett was seen heading off into the woods,
never to be heard from again.”

Heath nudged me and said, “Em, show the sheriff the photos you took on your phone.
I think we’ll convince him it was Everett’s body we found.”

I pulled out my cell and sorted through the images until I found the best picture
of the remains of Everett Sellers. Seeing the photo, I was just as convinced as Heath
that we were looking at the missing boy.

“Same outfit,” Kogan said, looking from my cell to the photo he was holding.

“Same hair too,” Beau said, noting the ginger hair on the skull.

“It’s him,” I told them, knowing it in my heart.

And then Beau focused on me intently. “Is he speaking to you?”

I blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“Everett. Is he talking to you? You know, from beyond the grave?”

“Oh,” I laughed. “No, Beau. I’m not sensing his spirit. I just feel it in my gut that
it’s him.”

Kogan seemed to focus on me intently too. “No, no, Mary Jane, I think you’re missing
Beau’s point. You talk to dead people. Can you . . . you know, talk to Everett and
see if he can point the finger at his killer?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way, Beau, and besides, I haven’t felt a whisper
of that boy’s spirit. Granted, I’ve been wearing a vest full of magnets, which alters
the magnetic field around me and isolates me from any spectral energy, but even when
Heath and I were first at the house, we didn’t pick up on the spirit of a young boy,
and certainly not one who’d been murdered.”

“Do we know if it even was a murder?” Heath asked suddenly.

We all switched our focus to him, and it was Beau who answered him. “We do. I know
we no longer have a body, but when I was studying the skeleton yesterday, I saw that
the back of the boy’s skull had a big, round dent in it.” Beau then lifted the photo
of Everett out of Kogan’s hands. “The dent was big enough to have been made by one
of these,” he said, pointing to the mallet in Everett’s hands. Then he tapped at my
phone a little and said, “And if you look carefully here at this photo that Mary Jane
took of the body, you can see this oblong dark stain which moves outward from the
boy’s skull. If I had to guess, I’d say that was the blood pool from the blow, which
seeped into the wood.”

I made a face, glad I hadn’t noticed that. Then I had another thought and motioned
for Beau to give me the phone. When he did, I began to tap through the images myself.

“What’re you looking for?” Heath asked.

“A croquet mallet.”

Beau moved to stand behind me and peer over my shoulder. “Wouldn’t that be some good
luck if it were still in the playroom?”

I sighed as I reached the last picture, which was the one I’d given Gilley of the
Ouija board. “No sign of the mallet,” I said, but Beau had put a hand on my arm.

“Hey, is that the board you were talking about?” he said, pointing to the image on
my screen.

“Yes. That’s the Ouija board.”

He nodded and then the dawn of understanding lit up in his eyes. “You think that’s
how that demon showed up in my picture of Scoffland? Like, maybe it was called there
by that Ouija board?”

“I do, Beau. And I think it’s also how that same demon showed up forty-five years
ago.”

“Forty-five years ago?” the deputy said. “You think there’s been some demon living
in that house for forty-five years?”

I nodded, then shook my head. I wasn’t sure. I only had my out-of-body experience
with my mother to go on, but I suspected the Sandman had made at least two appearances
in the last half century. “All evil spirits need a portal to travel through,” I explained,
and by the wide-eyed expressions of both Beau and Sheriff Kogan, I knew I had their
full attention. “A portal is a small window made of electromagnetic energy which can
thin the veil between our plane of existence—the physical world—and a realm that’s . . .
well . . . lower than ours.”

Beau gulped audibly. “You mean like . . . hell?”

“Well, yes, maybe. The lower realms can house truly demonic energies, and they should
never be trifled with. Ouija boards have the ability to create a sort of peephole
by using the energy of the user, or users, to create a focused opening between the
two realms. Energies that haunt the lower realms know this, and they often hunt for
these peepholes to send scary messages, because fear can amplify the energy being
pumped into the planchette, and that can then be used to create a bigger hole.

“If that focused energy becomes large enough, then the peephole can turn into a window
big enough for the evil energy to climb through. It’s incredibly dangerous for children
to play with Ouija boards for exactly that reason. They’re too easily scared and too
naive to know when to let go of the planchette and step away from the board. Often,
they don’t think to back away from the board until well after the portal has been
formed and the evil spirit is let loose to wreak whatever havoc it wants to. And once
it’s out, it’s very hard to put the genie back in the bottle.”

“So—so—so—,” Beau said, stuttering now because he seemed quite frightened by what
I was telling him. “You mean to tell me that this board”—and he tapped my cell phone
for good measure—“is the way that
thing
is coming and going?”