Ghost Hunt: Chilling Tales of the Unknown (12 page)

Then he realized: he was looking at the last thing Elizabeth Pratt saw before she died.

Grant stepped into the room. He could sense Jason’s presence behind him, but there was something else. Almost as if there were whispers too quiet for him to hear.

He turned on the audio recorder and spoke aloud. “Elizabeth?
My name is Grant. Don’t be afraid of us. We just want to know more about you.”

He took a step closer to the balcony.

“Are you here tonight, Elizabeth?”

Looking straight ahead, he could make out his own reflection in the balcony doors. It was distorted from the old glass. His face seemed pinched in and wavy. Slowly, he moved closer to the balcony.

“We know your daughter was very sick. You never had a chance to say good-bye.” Grant was concentrating hard. All he saw was the window in front of him, his reflection shimmering in the glass. The rest of the room faded from his vision.

“Elizabeth, are you here? Maybe if you show yourself, you’ll feel less alone….”

Grant’s voice trailed off. His mind went blank. Staring past his reflection, he looked out into the night. He felt a terrible sadness. As if he had lost someone…

Then something grabbed his arm and yanked him backward. He snapped his head around, feeling pressure on his arm—and saw Jason gripping his sleeve. Jason’s eyes were wide.

“What’s wrong? Why’d you pull my sleeve?”

“Grant, did you hear that? Listen.”

They both waited, completely silent.

Grant paid close attention to the sounds in the room. He could hear Jason’s camera running and the grandfather clock
ticking very softly downstairs. The hooting of an owl in a tree. Even the familiar sound of a mouse crawling in the wall.

Then he heard something else. At first he thought it was just a floorboard squeaking. Or an insect buzzing. The sound was high pitched and only lasted a second. Then it came back stronger. A shiver ran down his body. It was a voice, a child’s voice.

“mommy! mommy!”

Grant’s head whipped around.

“Hello? Is anybody there?”

No response.

“Elizabeth?”

After a few minutes of silence, Grant turned off the audio recorder. He looked at Jason.

“What was that?”

“It sounded like a little girl,” Jason said. “It sounded like she was saying ‘mommy.’ ”

Grant nodded. “That’s exactly what I heard.”

“Maybe it’s not Elizabeth Pratt haunting this room,” Jason said. “Maybe it’s her daughter.”

The group met up at the Central Command Center. Lyssa was sitting behind the monitors next to Jen. They’d been watching the camera footage and listening in on the audio all night.

“I know staying at Command Center is important,” Lyssa said. “But it’s nowhere near as exciting as gathering evidence.”

Grant and Jason walked in just in time to hear Lyssa confess: “I never thought I’d be saying this. But I kind of miss being in the middle of things.”

“There’s still one more place we need to check out,” Grant said. “You two up for it?”

Jen turned to Lyssa. She looked excited.

“You’d switch with us?” Lyssa asked Grant.

Grant smiled at her. “Casemate 11 is all yours. We’ve had enough action for one night.”

The door to Casemate 11 was open wide.
Like a coffin,
Lyssa thought. Broken cobwebs lined the opening. Lyssa smelled the frozen grass, felt it crunch under her boots. She shone her flashlight down, lighting up the dirt floor ten feet below. She watched as Jen stepped onto the rickety ladder.

“Do you want me to go with you?” she asked Jen. “It’s tight, but I think we can both fit. You don’t have to go alone.”

“No. The space is too small. I’ll go first with the audio recorder. Then you go down with the video. If we go in together, we might mess up each other’s evidence.”

Jen started to make her way down the ladder. Lyssa watched her image get fainter and fainter until she was gone completely. In her mind she saw prisoners being forced down the hole. She could imagine their fear, knowing they might never come out.

“If you need anything, just yell. I’m not sure the walkie-talkies will work,” Lyssa shouted down the hole.

“Okay,” Jen shouted back.

Lyssa crouched by the door. Her mind went back to the prisoners. She could see the terror on their faces as the door clanged shut above them, blocking out all the light. How they lived stooped over, picking off the slimy bugs that crawled over their skin. They must have whispered to each other, planning ways to escape. But there was no way to escape. They were trapped in the dank blackness of the casemate.

Lyssa could hear Jen down below shuffling her feet. She could even make out a bit of Jen’s voice talking into the recorder.

Then Jen’s voice stopped. A few minutes went by.

“Jen, you all right?” Lyssa called down.

She aimed her flashlight down into Casemate 11. She could see Jen’s footprints leading into the tunnel. None leading back.

“Jen?”

Then Lyssa heard a scream from deep down in the hole.

“Ahhhhhhhhh! LET GO OF ME!”

The scream echoed, and then Lyssa heard the sound of footsteps. Fast footsteps. She leaned over and saw the top of Jen’s head as she struggled to climb the ladder and get out.

Finally, Lyssa reached down and grabbed Jen, and she scrambled out of the hole. Jen threw her arms around Lyssa and caught her breath.

“What happened?” Lyssa could feel Jen’s chest heaving in and out.

“I was down there… It was so dark. I was asking questions. And then I felt something. A tickle on my neck.
Something
was tickling me. It raced all over my neck and onto my face. Then it started to scratch my face!”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know, Lyssa. I don’t want to know. It’s so dark down there, even with the flashlight.”

Suddenly Lyssa felt a small prickle on her face. It moved down to her chin, down to her throat. It felt like fingertips touching her. She jumped back. Frantically she grabbed at her neck.

Crunch.

She opened her hand. A crushed fat spider sat in the middle of her palm. “Yuck!”

Jen smiled and let out a sigh of relief. “That thing must’ve crawled off of me onto you,” she said. “Didn’t it feel exactly like a hand?”

Lyssa laughed. “Yeah, totally. I’ve never been this happy to see a dead bug in my life.”

She wiped off the spider on the side of the door. She put new batteries in her flashlight and turned it on.

“I guess it’s my turn,” she said.

She put her foot on the ladder. The rung flexed beneath her weight. Step by step, she went lower and lower into the ground until she reached the floor.

She hopped off the ladder and hunched over. In one hand she held her flashlight. In the other she held the video recorder.

Slowly she made her way into the tunnel. Victor was right. It was like a maze. There were sharp turns every dozen feet that led to larger areas.

Lyssa didn’t know what to look for. So she just kept walking straight ahead, very slowly, stopping at every curve, every cell. She didn’t want to miss anything by going too quickly. After a few minutes in Casemate 11, her flashlight started to flicker.

That’s strange,
she thought.
I just put in brand-new batteries.

She knocked its side, hoping the beam would return to full strength. She saw the floor in front of her dimming.

She called up to Jen, “My flashlight is acting funny.”

But Jen didn’t answer. Lyssa figured she must be pretty far into the tunnel if Jen couldn’t hear her.

Then there was a sudden flash of light followed by complete
black. Lyssa shook the flashlight and flicked the switch a few times. But it was completely dead.

She flipped out the screen of the video camera and set it to night mode. She kept going forward, farther into Casemate 11. She came to a strange window cut out of stone with iron bars blocking it off. A metallic rusty smell filled her nose. Lyssa stopped to examine the cell.

She looked at the screen of the video camera. It was the only way she could see in the room. There wasn’t much inside—a few rocks, little pieces of chain. She was getting ready to move on when she heard something behind her. Something that made her blood freeze.

It came from back near the ladder. A scraping noise. Like a person crawling on the ground.

“Jen?”

No one answered. But Lyssa could still hear the sound. She could feel a soft movement in the air. Her nose tickled. Something was moving around, kicking up dust.

“Jen, is that you?”

Lyssa turned, still looking at the camera screen. But she couldn’t find what was making the noise. She moved toward it, placing each step slowly. The screen she was looking at was small. What if it wasn’t picking something up? What if there was something it couldn’t see hiding in the darkness?

“Anybody there?”

The scraping noise moved, coming toward her. Closer. It sounded like metal scratching against the brick walls.

There was a new noise now. A panting sound. Someone was definitely down there with her, crawling toward her. But no one was on the screen.

“Hello?”

Lyssa held her breath. Even though it was cold in the tunnel, she broke out into a sweat. She couldn’t remember which way she came from. Which way was out.

Then the noises abruptly changed direction, as if they were going through the walls. Then it was quiet.

Lyssa set the camera down on the ground. The light from the video screen lit up the inside of the tunnel. It cast long shadows up against the ceiling. She turned her head to get a final look at the inside of the cell.

A shock jolted her against the wall. A flash of heat rushed to her ears as she let out a bloodcurdling scream.

Staring back at her was the scowling face of a man.

She saw him clearly. He had a big black mustache. His hands gripped the iron bars of the cell. Lyssa groped for the camcorder. But by the time she turned back around, the man was gone.

Lyssa rushed as fast as she could toward the ladder. The tunnel seemed to close in on her as she felt her way forward.

“You’re almost there,” she told herself. “You’re almost there.”

When she was finally aboveground again, she walked right past Jen. Jen said a few words to her, but Lyssa barely heard them. She barely saw the brick walls of the fort around her.

Though she knew she was aboveground, standing outside in the moonlight, all she could see was the face of the man with the mustache. Staring at her. As if he wanted to kill her.

Her walkie-talkie clicked and she heard Jason’s voice. “Lyssa, Jen. Are you guys there?”

Lyssa shook herself out of her daze. She pressed the speak button on the walkie-talkie. “We’re here,” she said quietly.

“You don’t sound so good,” Grant said. “What went on down there?”

“I saw something. A man’s face.”

Bit by bit, she returned to reality. She looked over to Jen.

“Let’s get back to Central Command,” Jen said. “Then you can tell us what happened.”