The Ghosts Of New Orleans (A PARANORMAL RESEARCH AND CONTAINMENT DIVISION (PRCD) CASE FILE) (12 page)

Eloise shook her head. “It was
nothing, it was a kiss, that’s all,” she said.

Sally walked over to Eloise. “Just
one kiss?”

Eloise blushed. 

“Dang, that guy’s a player,” she
chuckled. “So, how much like Jean-Paul is the Major?”

“Shut up,” Eloise answered, and
started walking towards the old house.

“Yep, he’s a player all right,”
Sally chuckled.

The old plantation looked like it
had been abandoned long before the hurricane hit, although there were mud marks
about four feet high on the outside of the house.  The beautiful French windows
with blown plate glass were now rotted pieces of wood that were covered with
pieces of plywood.  The lovely patio was now overrun with weeds and bushes.
Eloise tried the door and found it locked. 

Sally came up behind her with her
small pick ax and knocked out a piece of plywood, stuck her hand inside the
house and opened the door.

Eloise looked at her in surprise.
“You do realize that breaking and entering is against the law.”

Sally shrugged. “So arrest me,” she
said as she stepped into the room.

The inside of the house was dark,
so Eloise clicked on her flashlight and followed her.

Once they stepped inside they heard
the patter of tiny footsteps in the walls scattering in a dozen different
directions.

“Mice?” Sally asked.

“More like rats,” Eloise said.

“Gross,” Sally retorted.

They walked across the ballroom,
the parquet floor now broken and warped.  Long black cables dangled from the ceiling
where, Eloise imagined, chandeliers must have hung.  The walls were empty
except for nails and picture wire.

They continued across the floor and
entered the grand hallway.  The marble floor was covered with several inches of
mud and a particularly angry-looking snake slithered across the floor away from
them.

Sally jumped back, nearly sliding
onto the floor. She grabbed hold of the oak banister to the grand staircase.

“So, which way – up or down?”

Eloise looked around.  It was clear
that the hurricane had left her calling card on the house and everything that
had been below the water line had probably been destroyed.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she decided.
“Delphine had a penchant for attics.”

They carefully climbed the stairs;
wary of rotted steps.  Breaking through one of them would have sent them hurtling
two stories down to the cellar. 

“This must have been a great
looking house in its day,” Sally commented, looking at the gas lamps that lined
the staircase.

Eloise nodded. “It was gorgeous.”

Sally shook her head. “You know,
it’s kind of weird to know that you saw it the way it was. Isn’t this freaking
you out?”

Eloise shook her head.  “I should
be a little more concerned, but really it doesn’t bother me.”

They reached the second floor
safely.  The staircase opened onto a large hall that split off into two wings. 
Sunlight drifted through the cracks between the panels of plywood used to cover
the old windows, giving the house an eerie shadowy look. 

“Okay, first rule,” Sally stated.
“We don’t do the “let’s split up and save time” thing.  We stick together
because if this gets any creepier, I’m going to want to hold your hand.”

Eloise laughed, “Okay, we stick
together.”

They chose to investigate the west
wing of the plantation first.  As they walked down the hall, they could feel
strands of cobwebs brush across their faces.

“Gross!” Sally said, wiping them
away. “I suppose no one has walked these halls for a long time.”

“No one living, at least,” Eloise
said, grinning.

Sally turned and glared at Eloise.
“You know you aren’t helping the situation.  You may recall that my job was
supposed to be in an office, working with a computer.  Your job was the dead
people side of it.  My job description says nothing about dead people.”

Eloise shrugged. “You just didn’t read
it properly. Dead people fit in under ‘And all other duties as assigned.’”

“When we get back, we’re modifying
my job description,” Sally said, wiping another cobweb from her body, “This is
just gross!”

Eloise shone the beam from the
flashlight on the hallway walls. The wallpaper was stained and moldy, but she
could see that at one time it had been expensive damask silk.  Although faded,
Eloise could still make out the rose pattern and gold background.  The carpet
beneath their feet was a faded rose carpet with watermarks from the leaks in
the roof and windows.

The first door they came to was
partially ajar.  Sally pushed it open and then jumped back when a large chunk
of ceiling plaster fell down.

“Obviously, this house could use a
little fix-me-up,” she commented, before stepping over the plaster and walking
into the room. 

The room was spacious and had an
attached dressing room, so Eloise assumed that it was the master bedroom.  The
room was bare except for a cherry-wood washstand in the corner.  The four large
paned windows were covered with plywood and the large paneled walls were
peeling and moldy. A thick layer of dust covered the floor. 

Sally moved to the wall and started
knocking.

“What are you doing?” Eloise asked.

Sally turned to her and rolled her
eyes. “Checking for secret passageways, of course. Duh,” she replied.

Eloise shrugged and walked to the
other wall and started to knock. 

“Um, Sally,” Eloise said after a
few minutes of knocking. “What’s the knocking supposed to do?”

Sally turned and placed her hands
on her hips. “Who trained you anyway?” Sally asked. “I thought secret passage
knocking was covered in Investigating 101.”

“Well, I wasn’t trained to be that
kind of an investigator,” Eloise replied, feeling a little miffed. “So sorry if
I don’t know all the cool stuff.”

Sally grinned. “That’s okay; I only
learned it because I watched
X-Files
all the time. What you’re looking
for – or better, listening for – is a hollow sound in the wall.  So, if you
knock and it sounds pretty solid, but right next to it sounds hollow – you
could have a secret passageway in the wall.”

“Or you could have a house beam and
then lathe and plaster,” Eloise commented.

“Well, yeah, you could have that
too,” Sally admitted and then turned around and continued knocking.

They knocked their way through the
entire west wing – each bedroom empty and dilapidated.  At the end of the wing
was a narrow door that opened to a staircase to the attic.

“Okay, which way do you want to
go?” Eloise asked. “Up the attic stairs or back across to the east wing?”

Sally shrugged. “Let’s go up, I’m
tired of knocking.”

The narrowness of the stairs forced
Eloise and Sally to climb them single-file.  Eloise went first, shining the
beam of her flashlight first down on the step in front of her and then to the
side to ensure the tall narrow walls on either side were solid.  Cracked
plaster hung between the exposed beams, little had been done to cover up the
original construction.

At the top of the stairs, Eloise
found another door – this one heavier than the one below - with a wrought iron
latch that had a large chain and bolt threaded through it.

“Someone didn’t want anyone
upstairs,” Sally said, shining her flashlight on the door.  She handed Eloise
her small pick-ax.

“Go for it,” she said. “It’s
probably rusted through anyway.”

Eloise maneuvered the pointed edge
of the pick ax between the body and the arm of the lock.  Then she pulled down
with all of her might. The lock held, but the latch that was attached to the
door splintered and pulled away.

“Do it again,” Sally encouraged.

Eloise lifted up and then once
again pulled the pick-ax forcefully downward.  Then latch gave way with a snap,
hurtling Eloise past Sally down the staircase.  Eloise grabbed for the railing.
Splinters scraped her palms, but she held tight.

“Wow!  Good catch,” said Sally,
then turning she started up the remaining stairs. “Now, let’s see what we have
here.”

She started to push open the door,
when Eloise grabbed her arm and pulled her back.

Sally jumped. “What?!?”

“Okay, wait. Before you open, let’s
think of the person who locked this door,” Eloise said. “I don’t think that she
was the kind that would just let you walk in if you happened to break the
lock.  Remember, she had a bad experience with that once before.”

Sally leaned back against the
stairway wall.  “You’re right, she probably has it booby trapped,” she said.
“So, what do we do next?”

They thought about it for a moment. 
Then Eloise got an idea.

“Wait here,” she said, before
turning and running down the stairs and back down the hall.

“Like there was anywhere else I’d
go,” Sally called after her.

A few minutes later Eloise was back
with the cherry washstand they had found in the first room.

“Okay, just what are you going to
do with that?” Sally asked.

“Stand back and watch,” she said.

Eloise turned the stand on its side
and holding on to the base, thrust the legs against the door, opening it wide. 
A large ax, anchored above the door, swung past the doorway.  The ax crashed
into the legs of the washstand, easily cutting through them with the weight and
obvious sharpness of the blade.  Sally blanched and leaned back against the
wall.

“Remind me to thank you every day
for the rest of my life.”

Eloise exhaled sharply.  “This is
one really not-nice lady that we are dealing with,” she said. “We should both
try to remember that in the future.”

They cautiously entered the attic,
their flashlight beams trained in front of them.  The attic was long and
narrow, running the entire length of the house, with exposed lathe
crisscrossing the ceiling and a small window at each end.

Eloise walked to one end and pulled
the plywood off the window.  Daylight poured into the attic and instantly the
room was filled with hundreds of dark objects flapping through the air.  Sally
screamed and dropped to the ground, her arms covering her head.  Eloise quickly
moved away from the window and used the plywood as a shield as the angry bats
circled madly until they found the hole in the window and exited.

Finally, when the last bat had made
its way out of the window, Eloise put the plywood down. 

“Sally, you okay?” she asked, her
eyes adjusting to the bright light.

“Yes,” Sally replied, brushing dirt
and dust off her clothing. “But I just learned that my fight or flight response
is definitely flight.”

“El, look!” Sally’s eyes had
adjusted quicker and she could see that they both stood in the center of what
could only be described as a torture chamber.

Skeletal remains lay scattered
around the room.  In one corner, a pile of about two dozen human skulls stared
with unseeing eyes at Sally and Eloise.  Long tables lined the length of one
side.  Arm bones and leg bones lay loosely against the shackles that had once
imprisoned them.  A body cage had a pile of bones lying at the base, the skull
balanced precariously on the top.

“Did she just leave them here to
starve to death?” Sally asked.

Eloise shook her head.  “I don’t
know, but for their sakes, I hope not.  What a terrible way to die.”

Sally turned to Eloise, confused.
“Wait, what do you mean you don’t know?  I thought that you talked to dead
people.”

“It’s kind of like sound waves,”
Eloise explained. “When you and I talk, the sound waves come out of our mouths
and are clearly audible by those within a certain distance.  However, once they
move beyond that close contact, the waves decrease in volume and get softer and
softer – they never really go away, they just keep getting softer.”

Sally nodded. “I read about that - 
a Benedictine Father - Marcello Pellegrino Ernetti  invented a method of
recovering sound waves from the past and converting them into visual and
acoustic reconstruction of history.”

Eloise shook her head, “Wow – you
really are brilliant.”

Sally continued, ignoring Eloise’s
comment, “Ernetti's theoretical approach was based on Aristotle's concept of
the disintegration of sound. Aristotle believed that light and sound waves don’t
disappear after being produced, but are transformed in some way and remain
present indefinitely. According to Ernetti, sound waves subdivide into
harmonics that can be recovered with appropriate instruments.”

Eloise nodded. “Exactly – the same
is with the spirits of the dead. When death is recent, the spirits are easier
to reach. It takes less power to be able to help them. But when they’ve been dead
for a long time…”

“It takes a more powerful receiver to
contact them,” Sally finished, nodding her head with understanding.

“Of course, there are exceptions,”
Eloise said. “Like Maria Leveau, because she receives power from all of those
who believe in her and keep her memory alive.”

Sally walked slowly across the room
and stood next to one of the tables.  A tiny skeleton of a child was strapped
with leather thongs to the coarse wood. 

“And so, what happened to all of
them?” she asked, her voice breaking as she gestured around the room.

Eloise walked over to Sally and
placed her hand on Sally’s shoulder.  “Well, perhaps they moved on without any
help.”

Sally turned, tears shining bright
in her eyes. “And if they didn’t?”

Eloise shook her head. “We’d need
someone with more power to finally set them free.”

Sally brusquely wiped her sleeve
across her eyes. “Well, then the least we can do is make sure that someone
helps avenge their deaths.”

She pulled a Swiss Army knife from
her pocket and pulled out the largest blade.  She bent over the table and cut
the leather thongs that still bound the little skeleton.

“I know it doesn’t mean much now,”
she said softly, “But I feel better doing it.”

Eloise placed her arm around
Sally’s shoulders and gave her hug. “It means a lot.”

Sally sighed deeply. “Okay, what
now?”

“I suppose we could knock,” Eloise
replied with a little smile.

Sally smiled back. “Great idea.”

Starting at one side of the attic,
Eloise and Sally worked systematically down the walls, knocking and looking for
anything that might give them a clue about the current plans of Delphine.

Finally, they came to the corner
with the skulls.  They stood in front of them and shined their flashlights down
through the pile.  A glint of metal reflected the light back at them, making
one of the eye sockets look like it glowed.

“Sally, there’s something behind
the skulls,” Eloise said.

Sally shook her head. “I did not
want to hear that.”

Eloise knelt down and lifted the
top skull gingerly.  She carefully placed it a few feet away.  Then she moved
on to the next skulls until she could see the top of a steamer trunk. 

“Well, this could be what we’re
looking for,” Eloise said.

Sally knelt down next to her and
helped her move the skulls.

In a few minutes, they had the skulls
safely moved and had revealed the entire trunk.  Eloise tried lifting the
latch, but it was locked tight.

“Maybe there’s a key somewhere
around here,” she said.

She started to feel around the
beams for a nail with a key.  In the meantime, Sally pulled out her Swiss Army
knife and began to work on the lock.  In a few minutes, Eloise turned from her
searching because she heard the sound of the latch being released.

“Where did you learn that?”

“
MacGyver
re-runs,” she
said.

They slowly opened the trunk, wary
of what they would find inside. The first thing they saw was a dozen quart
jars.  Sally pulled one out and wiped the dust from the outside.  She nearly
dropped it when she saw that the bottle contained a preserved human heart.

“This is so sick,” she said,
carefully placing the bottle outside the trunk on the floor, “I’d suggest that
it might be Delphine’s, but from what I can see – she never had a heart.”

They continued to pull the bottles,
all containing preserved human parts, out of the trunk.  Below the bottles was
a false bottom. Eloise tugged on the corner and pulled it out.  Lying below was
an assortment of surgical tools.

“Ah, her little black bag,” Eloise
said, picking up a rusted scalpel. “It sure looks like she packed carefully.  I
wonder if she figured she’d come back to use them?”

They removed the tools and checked
the trunk for any more hidden recesses.

Sally shook her head. “Nothing - no
papers, no letters, nothing to help us figure her out.”

Eloise looked down at her watch.
“We’re running short on daylight and I really don’t want to try to find our way
back to the SUV in the dark.”

“We could bring Bert and Ernie back
with us tomorrow,” Sally suggested.

Eloise shook her head. “Remember
the prime directive from Paul.  There is no way they are going to go along with
breaking and entering.”

Sally stood up, walked away from
the trunk and stood in the middle of the attic. She placed her hands on her
hips and took a deep breath.

“Okay, if there are any spirits
left here, we want you to know that we’re on your side. We want to stop
Delphine before she hurts anyone else,” she said, “So, if there is anything you
can do to help us – let us know right now.”

Suddenly, from the other side of
the attic, they could hear a large piece of wood fall to the floor.

Sally gasped and jumped. After a
moment, she took a deep breath and said, “Okay, that’s really good, thanks!”

Eloise hurried over to the other
side of the attic and found that the piece of wood had been hiding a small,
deep shelf.  She shone her flashlight beam into the opening and found six
leather-bound books.  She lifted out the top book and flipped it open.  Page
after page was handwritten in calligraphy.  Eloise turned to the front of the
book and read aloud, “The personal scientific journals of Delphine Lalaurie,
January 1, 1835.”

She turned to Sally. “Good job,
looks like we got a winner.  Let’s take these books back to base and see what
we can find out.”

Sally smiled and then said aloud,
“Thanks for your help – we won’t let her win.”

With the journals stored in their
backpacks, Eloise and Sally walked back to the window at the end of the attic.

“I want to replace this plywood, so
our visit isn’t too obvious,” Eloise said, moving to lift the piece of wood
back in place.  She looked out the window before covering it, gasped and
dropped the wood on the floor.

“What, what is it?” Sally asked,
moving next to Eloise and peering out the small window.

“There are hundreds, maybe
thousands of spirits down there,” Eloise said.

Sally squinted and stared down at the
ground below them.  “Down there?” she asked, pointing to what looked to her
like acres of empty grounds.

Eloise nodded. “I have no idea what
they are doing here,” she said, “They can’t have all died here during the
hurricane, there are just too many. Oh, no!”

“What?” Sally asked, “What’s oh,
no?”

Eloise turned back to Sally, her
face blanched. “Delphine is down there with them,” she said.

“Where?” Sally asked, and moved
closer to the window, “Oh crap!

Sally turned back to Eloise. “Does
Delphine have long black hair and a really long dress?”