Ghost Guard 2: Agents of Injustice (2 page)

Chapter 2

Faded papers, dog-eared grimoires, and copious printouts from blog sites spilled from her bed onto the floor. Articles copied from microfiche files and reproductions of newspapers long out of print. Even handwritten letters procured by less than honest means. Young women who knew how to shake their moneymakers could get leering, oily, middle-aged men to give them just about anything. Melissa Hardgrove was one of those young women. Sometimes it took unsavory means to fulfill her latest obsession. She didn’t like to think of it as a little skin for the win. She liked to think of it as getting what she wanted. And right now she wanted anything and everything she could find on one Alexandra Petrovic.

“What is all this shit?” Heather Wood
had that look on her face. That same look when she saw geeky Ted Meyer in class, or when she smelled someone fart in the hall. It was that snooty
I could buy you all and have you killed
look. Melissa hated it.

“It’s not shit, Heather. It’s research. You ever heard of research? Oh, wait. You haven’t. What are your grades this semester? Straight D’s?”

Heather blew a big pink bubble half the size of her face and popped it aggressively, squinting hard. Christy
Carmichael
, cheerleader, dance team captain, and all around good girl (so everyone thought), acted as middleman again.

“Play nice, girls,” she nodded at Melissa, who expressed her frustration with Heather through an exaggerated sigh. “Go ahead, Mel.”

“Thanks,” she smiled at Christy, frowned at Heather, and then retrieved a large scrapbook from her bed, cradling it like a precious gem.

“What’s that?” the two other girls said in unison. Mel, opening the front cover, revealed several glossy, black and white photographs from over a half century earlier. The places and themes of the photos varied, but one thing remained constant—images of two people, a young man and woman in love. A wedding photo of grand spectacle and ornate design. Honeymoon photos of frolicking in water. Precious mementos of a time long past, of a love long lost.

“This,” Mel said finally. “Is Alexandra Petrovic’s personal scrapbook.”

“Her scrapbook?” Christy was genuinely confused. “How did you get your hands on this?”

Again, Mel only smiled.

“You slut!” Heather stood straight. “You blew the museum curator, didn’t you?”

“Gross!” Mel almost puked. “No!” then her eyes got sheepish and she quieted to a whisper. “I just flashed him, that’s all.”

“Flashed him?” Christy laughed out loud. “You
are
a slut!”

“Shut. Up!” Mel waved her hand. “I did what I had to do. Guys, Alexandra Petrovic needs our help.”

Heather flipped through the scrapbook pages. Old, tattered images of the world long ago. The clothes were different. The hair styles were strange. She even guessed the way they talked was different.

“Help with what? She’s dead!”

“You know the story,” Mel’s frustration returned in spades. “I shouldn’t have to tell you again.”

“Indulge me,” Heather popped another pink bubble.

Mel recited the tale she had committed to memory. “In 1946, a young inventor named Emile Petrovic turned the scientific world upside down with the development of a method of extracting energy seemingly from thin air. He went on to create a device that utilized this energy to conjure and control certain supernatural beings. It was this device which caught the attention of some sinister forces who conspired to have Petrovic killed. After his murder, Petrovic’s widow, Alexandra Petrovic, made a huge fuss about it, accusing all kinds of powerful and elite people and organizations for her husband’s death. Then, under strange circumstances, the woman died. People say she was wronged, that she was silenced.”

“That’s a really interesting story,” Heather acted anything but interested. “But why do you care so much about Alexandra Petrovic, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Mel. “Ever since we went to that museum and heard the story about her and her husband, I just feel sorry for them. That’s all.”

“Hey,” Heather picked up a printout from the bed, examined the information—some junk from a website that may or may not have been credible—and tossed it down again. “I feel sorry for her too. But what can we do about it?”

“Yeah, Mel,” Christy touched Melissa’s arm gently, almost condescendingly. “This is a little bit…cray-cray.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, because I have news for you,” Mel stopped pretending to hide her irritation. “I think Alexandra Petrovic is here with us.”

“She’s here?” Heather flashed her eyes left to right skeptically. “Now?”

“Well, maybe not now, but—” Melissa reached under her bed and produced a small wooden box.

“What is that?” Heather almost wretched at what Melissa pulled from the box. “Ewww!”

There was one item, one precious and highly useful item, useful to Melissa and her plans. A little white magic. A little spirit conjuring. The item: one lock of hair. Black as night.
Shiny and clean even after being shut away in the scrap book for over half a century.

“Is that what I think it is?” Christy leaned closer with indelible interest. “Is it?”

Mel smiled haughtily and placed the hair, bound in a purple velvet ribbon, on the open diary, just above the words written in an antiquated, slightly bent, small sloping script.

“Mel, what the hell are you doing with a dead lady’s hair?” Heather turned pale. “This whole thing is starting to really creep me out.”

Melissa glared at her. “I want to contact Alexandra Petrovic. She needs help. I can feel it.”

“What do you mean you want to contact her?”

“Just watch,” Melissa kept her eyes on her work. “Okay,” she looked at Christy, and then at Heather. “Here goes,” she read: “When the time comes for me to speak from beyond the grave, I will not speak. I will shout. I will shriek from the heavens about the injustices brought upon me and my husband. I will return from the grave and make it known to the world what has happened, and then there will be justice for Emile Petrovic.”

When she finished reading, Mel inhaled deeply and added her own words. “Alexandra Petrovic, hear us. Alexandra Petrovic, come to us,” she nodded eagerly at Christy. “Alexandra Petrovic, hear us,” then at Heather, “Alexandra Petrovic, come to us,” getting both girls to repeat with her, however reluctantly: “Alexandra Petrovic, hear us. Alexandra Petrovic, come to us.”

While they chanted, each girl began to take notice of subtle changes in the atmosphere inside Melissa’s rather large, rather cluttered bedroom. First it was a reduction in temperature. Barely noticeable initially. Then the mercury dipped radically and the girls saw their own breaths.

For some unexplained reason, the girls stayed put and kept reciting. And the more they repeated the words, the more strange things began to take place. Odd noises. Crackling plastic like footsteps over empty Skittles wrappers. Or maybe it was the licking of flames at the door. But nothing was on fire, and nobody was walking around. Melissa sat cross-legged, holding the antique diary in her lap. Christy was seated on her knees with her iPhone now skillfully aimed at Mel. Heather stood between them, her head on a swivel.

Whispers and wind all around them. Their hair tussled in the strange and unearthly breeze. Their skin tingled at the static in the air, forming an energy field almost physical.

The girls couldn’t help noticing the shock of black hair from the deceased woman begin to vibrate on the scrapbook page. Funny too, because the page itself wasn’t moving. Only the hair, and only a little. Then a little became a lot. Bouncing and dancing and spinning. Then, against all laws of physics, it stood on end and, most amazingly, began to grow.

A tiny lock, only three inches long, became four, five, six. A foot. Two, three, four feet, until a sinewy thread of hair became a flourishing and flowing full head of beatifically baneful tresses. Flowing left to right, top to bottom, becoming a dark cloud of individual fibers.

After that, a strange and unthinkable thing happened. The fibers formed a figure, a three dimensional shape, long and lean, slender and supple. The shape took on human form, the soft, sleek features of a woman. Wide hips and a curvy waist and the telltale twin mounds where breasts should be. The head and neck and arms were all evident under the flowing and coursing striations of hair.

None of the girls screamed at what happened next. Not even one peep, which was curious given the sheer and unending terror that had taken hold of them all. It was a paralyzing fear. The unutterable hideousness of what they witnessed made them sit mute, watching the supernatural event unfold as if witnessing the moon explode over their heads.

Melissa had a moment of clarity borne from the knowledge that she’d done it. She’d summoned the spirit of the doctor’s widow, and now, in full form, the woman was here, before her, waiting for something. Maybe a further invitation.

Melissa shot to her feet as the hauntingly beautiful woman’s form gyrated slowly and softly, cocooned by a husk of dark hair, encircling her like the fibers on an ear of corn.

“What’re you doing!” Christy dropped her iPhone on the floor and scrambled to her friend, trying to pull her away from the menacingly hovering entity. A giant spinning and seething tangle of black hair in the shape of a statuesque woman. She had to tread carefully to avoid the specter, and looked away when it became too much, tugging and tugging on Melissa, desperate to keep her friend from getting too close.

Melissa wouldn’t budge. She was anchored to the floor, feet sunk in concrete. Then, as if propelled by some unseen and supremely powerful hand, she lurched forward, straight for the unearthly manifestation.

“Melissa! Stop!”

She wouldn’t stop. She stepped straight into the moldering heap of hair, its sinewy strands closing in on her neck and shoulders, arms and legs, pulling her in with the speed and forcefulness of a monster in some cavernous deep sea abyss. Melissa disappeared into the blackness. At that moment, the most terrifying in either of their lives, both Christy and Heather believed without a doubt Mel was gone, sucked into some preternatural vortex, never to be seen or heard from again.

Melissa didn’t move or speak or otherwise indicate she was in any pain or suffering from some unspeakable evil. That meager fact alone helped to at least bring the two witnesses, who were paralyzed with fear, back from the precipice of complete insanity.

All that changed with one, blood-curdling shriek.

Melissa screamed as loud and as long as either of her friends had ever heard her scream. And that was saying something, since Mel was on the South Ridge Varsity Basketball Cheerleading Squad. Her tenor and her manner told a completely different story than when she would cheer for the Skyhawks, though. Screams of murder, of deathly terror, of desperation from somewhere beyond the grave.

“Oh my god! Mel!” Christy no longer feared the unknown entity. Call it stupidity. Call it loyalty to a dear friend. She just couldn’t allow Mel to die. She tried reaching Melissa, but when she got close, things changed dramatically. The hair, tangles and tangles of it, weaving this way and that, reverted and reversed upward and inward like someone slurping in a plate of spaghetti. Rapidly the hair disappeared, so fast it was a blur, until Melissa remained, all alone, with nothing surrounding her except her own sense of disorientation. And, just when her friends were counting their blessings that Melissa was okay, she stared at them both and issued a strange statement.

“Who are you? Where is my husband?” She scanned left, right, up, down, in search of an unseen person. “Where is he!”

“W-w-where is who?” Christy shook uncontrollably. Heather was stupefied.

“Emile! My husband!” Melissa’s eyes, strangely, were no longer blue, but deep, dark brown. And they pierced into Christy with the ease of a hot ice pick through brain matter. “Where is he! I need to find him!”

With that, Melissa, or whoever it was inside the seventeen-year-old’s body, began peering under and over and between things that weren’t even there. She looked up, and her dark eyes grew immense. Her expression was the only thing by which the two other girls had to gauge what was happening. It was all they needed. Terror. Pure and simple. Every inch of Melissa’s being exuded it.

“They have him!” she screamed, turning and watching some unseen thing at some faraway yet still threatening distance. “They have him! NO!”

She threw herself toward the door again, and this was where both of Melissa’s friends intervened. Heather rushed and stood in front of her while Christy approached from behind and hugged her gingerly. When Melissa shrugged her off and pushed Heather aside, the two girls got serious, and each took an arm, forcibly keeping her in the bedroom.

“NO!” she screamed. Over and over she screamed. “NO! I must help Emile!”

Christy was taken aback by the strange things her friend said, and the way she said it. Somehow they coaxed her into sitting on the chair at her vanity as she continued to babble on and on tremblingly about Emile and saving him from some enigmatic entity.

“Emile?” Heather tilted her head like a confused spaniel. “Who’s Emile again?”

“Weren’t you paying attention?” Christy huffed. “It’s Alexandra Petrovic’s husband. The inventor who was supposedly murdered.”

Heather had already been trembling like a leaf. But now, thinking what she was thinking, she turned into a shuddering fool, teeth chattering so loud Christy heard it. She had an inkling of what was actually happening. Her mind wouldn’t go there. Her fragile psyche denied the possibility. She was genuinely perplexed, and asked the question: “Why is she talking like that?”