The Librarian's Ghost Read online

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Sneak Peek

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  About the Author | By Sean Michael

  Now Available

  Coming in November 2018

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  He held his hand in front of Payne’s mouth, relieved when he felt warm air against his palm. Okay, Payne was fine. Still unconscious, but alive at least.

  Will went to the door, turned the handle, and pulled the door… not open. Frowning, Will tried again. Then again. He put his foot on the wall next to the door, turned the handle, and pulled as hard as he could. The fucker didn’t budge.

  Banging on the door with two fists, he called out, “Guys! Jason! Darnell! Blaine! Flynn! Come on, guys. This isn’t funny.”

  He jiggled the handle, trying to see if the door was locked, dammit. Though why they’d lock him and Payne in, he didn’t know. He leaned down and peered through the keyhole, expecting to find it blocked with the key.

  What he didn’t expect was a shiny black eye, full of malice, staring at him.

  The Librarian’s Ghost

  By Sean Michael

  The Supers

  Can love survive the perils of MacGregor House?

  The Supernatural Explorers are back and looking for their next big paranormal case. They might’ve found it in a plea from Payne, a mild-mannered librarian who has inherited the family mansion—MacGregor House. Since moving in a few months ago, Payne’s exhausted the list of ghost hunters and experts in his quest for help. The Supers are his last chance.

  So why does normally good-natured cameraman Will take an instant dislike to Payne? For that matter, why has he felt irritable and angry since they arrived at the site? It soon becomes clear that the answers they seek will be found in the basement—where nobody has gone since Payne was a little boy. As the haunting grows deadlier, things get sweeter between Will and Payne, but all hell’s about to break loose when they breach the basement door.

  Will they be ready?

  Chapter One

  FOR all the Wexford House was two stories with a warren of a basement, there wasn’t a lot of square footage. The Supernatural Explorers had examined the place thoroughly over the last three weekends, and Will Gregson felt like he knew each of the rooms inside and out. There was nothing new to find here.

  It was definitely a creepy place. Old and abandoned with most of its original furniture after the owner’s family—four daughters, three sons, two of their wives, four grandchildren, and his wife—were all wiped out by influenza. That the old man hadn’t also died was a miracle. Or a curse, depending on which story you read. Rumor had it that his mistress had been a witch, and when he abandoned her, she protected him from the sickness that ravaged his family so that he would live the rest of his days alone and mourning. It was a nasty story, but one that persisted through the years.

  The house was said to be haunted by Wexford’s family, which was why they were here. Sure, they were hoping to concentrate on “gay ghosts,” but there were only so many haunted places, so they were doing what they could when they could. Surely those types of cases would come, and when they’d made a proper reputation for themselves, they’d be called in from far and wide to check out gay hauntings. In the meantime, ghosts were ghosts, and they were happy to investigate, especially if the place was in the vicinity.

  So far, the only thing they’d found at the Wexford House was disintegrating furniture and the bodies of various animals that had made their way into the place. Most of them had been dead for long enough that they didn’t smell anymore. Hell, plenty weren’t even identifiable. Though the one raccoon in the master bedroom had been fresh. Pretty damn gross. And while Will might have been morbidly fascinated with something like that as a boy, it wasn’t something he enjoyed now that he was a grown man.

  The dust was playing havoc with his sinuses too. They’d disturbed a lot of it during their explorations. That they weren’t the first ones to do so had been apparent as well, and there were plenty of places where the dust was less thick in variously shaped spots—little circles and squares on the mantel and tables, spots where one might have expected to find various knickknacks. No doubt the place had been ransacked. Which sucked because when thieves stole pieces of history and the Supers—as they called themselves for short—couldn’t find any ghosts, they could have maybe found some interesting museum pieces. It appeared the Wexford place had neither ghosts nor artifacts, so they were doing one last run-through to make sure they hadn’t missed anything.

  A low creaking noise sounded from upstairs, followed by tapping on glass. Will shivered. He knew it was the wind in the trees and the branches hitting the house—it was especially creepy when they tapped at the windows—but that didn’t make it much better.

  “Let’s take one last sweep upstairs where that sound is coming from,” Jason suggested.

  “Yeah, the master bedroom was the only place where I got any sort of hit.” Blaine led the way, moving slowly to try to mitigate how noisy the stairs were.

  Personally, Will didn’t think there were any ghosts to scare off with creaking stairs, but it didn’t hurt to be as stealthy as possible. He avoided the big squeak on step three but managed to forget about the sixth stair until he was on it and it moaned beneath his weight. All four of his companions whipped around to stare at him, and he gave them an apologetic smile. He hadn’t done it on purpose. Blaine was clearly biting the inside of his cheek while Flynn and Jason chuckled nearly soundlessly. He grinned back and put his finger in front of his lips. “Shh.”

  That set them all off, and they abandoned not making any noise in favor of their laughter and getting up the stairs quicker.

  “Okay.” Blaine turned to face him once they’d made the upstairs landing, and Will focused the camera on his friend’s face. “We’re in the Wexler House for the last time. We’re hoping to communicate with what we think might be an entity in the master bedroom. Wexler’s wife and most of the children supposedly died in the very bed that continues to dominate the room. We have our EMF readers at the ready, along with the infrared filter on the second camera. If there’s anything to find, we’re going to do exactly that. Find it. Document it. Deal with it if possible.” Blaine turned back to peer into the master suite. “Will, why don’t you and Darnell go in and do a scan of the room? Then Jason, Flynn, and I will follow.”

  Will nodded, keeping his voice off the audio, which would make it easier in postproduction. (Look at them, having postproduction now!) Despite the last few houses having been disappointing from a ghost perspective, the Supers were doing well. He focused on what the camera was seeing and stepped into the doorway. He did a long pan and scan from the door all the way around and back to it. He didn’t see anything that looked like anything but shadows on the floor and back wall, but he was filming straightforward shots. Jason or Darnell could be picking something up on the more sensitive equipment.

  Blaine and Flynn came in last and spread out across the room, Flynn going toward the window where the tapping was coming from while Blaine headed for the bed where the deaths had purportedly occurred. Blaine had his head tilted in what Will thought of as his listening stance. He waited, following Blaine with camera, holding his breath as if the sound of his breathing would disturb Blaine at work.

  They al
l waited, hushed and still, as Blaine slowly moved around the bed. Even the tapping at the window had ceased, an eerie silence settling around them. The tension built, and Blaine froze, leaning in to look at something, though Will wasn’t sure what. He certainly wasn’t seeing anything.

  All of a sudden came a terrible groaning, making them all jump.

  Flynn laughed, the sound a touch strained. “That’s the wind in that big willow.” The branches began tapping at the window again, stronger than ever the breeze picked up outside.

  Blaine sighed and nodded. “Yeah, it’s nothing but the wind as far as I can tell.”

  “The instruments are pretty damn quiet too,” Jason noted. “Do we need to go back to the basement one last time, or should we call it a night?”

  “The ground is really uneven down there.” Will had almost twisted his ankle on the dirt floor, and Blaine had actually fallen when he’d tripped over an unexpected rise between rooms.

  “I don’t feel anything at all, not even that small hint of something I felt the first time.” Blaine shrugged. “Not proof of a lack of ghosts, of course, but this is our seventh day out here, and we’ve had nothing on any of the equipment either.”

  The sound of a stomach growling punctuated Blaine’s words, and they all laughed.

  “When the scariest thing in the room is Flynn’s stomach, the best thing we can do is pack up and go get pizza.” Jason made his pronouncement and headed back downstairs, the rest of them trooping along after him.

  Will kept filming until they’d not only left the house but were back at the van. Once there, he did one last panoramic shot of the property before turning off the camera and packing it up.

  PAYNE MacGregor watched his pot of soup, waiting for it to begin simmering. He didn’t want it to boil over. Hell, he didn’t want to turn his back on it in case the thing went flying across the room and sprayed everything with hot soup either. It was tomato too, which would be hell to clean up.

  Truthfully, he was at his wit’s end. At first he’d thought he was being absentminded, forgetful. Then he’d begun to wonder if he was losing his mind. None of the workers seemed to notice anything wrong. But he put that down to their being transient. They weren’t there day after day like he was and were hardly likely to notice books and dishes being moved. Things flying across the room seemed to be reserved for him too. And that was harder to put down to his imagination. It wasn’t like things were simply falling off shelves or tables; they were getting some distance.

  Then he’d overheard arguments between some workers over items taken out of toolboxes and hidden. No one claimed ownership of these “practical jokes,” making him think they weren’t practical jokes at all but the work of the same… well, ghost—he was embarrassed to admit the assumption even to himself—plaguing him.

  He took the soup off the stove the moment steam began rising from it and poured it into a bowl as his toast popped. Unfortunately, all but a corner of it was almost black. He was not one for toast that well done, so he put it in the garbage and took his bowl to the library to eat by the fireplace with his favorite books.

  He had to wonder if he was simply being paranoid for believing that the burned toast was the responsibility of his ghost. On the other hand, the toast he’d had yesterday had turned out perfectly, and he was the only who could have changed the setting. Which he hadn’t done.

  One of the books went flying across the room, and he pretended he didn’t see it, concentrating on his soup instead. He would do some work once he’d eaten, put in enough hours that when he did close his eyes, he’d fall asleep right away and wouldn’t dream. At least he could hope that was how the evening played out, but it didn’t mean that was what would happen. He pushed aside the niggling thought that he might have to do something about the strange things going on in the house at some point. Certainly if it got worse than the current annoyances. If not, well, he would deal with it.

  As soon as he’d finished his soup, he set the bowl on his side table, right in the middle of it so it couldn’t accidently fall to the floor. Then he grabbed his laptop and booted it up. In no time he was hunched over it, safely lost in his research.

  Chapter Two

  THE van pulled up in front of the converted barn where Blaine and Flynn lived, and they all spilled out, Darnell carrying the three large pizza boxes and Flynn holding the bags with their sodas.

  “I’ll be up in a minute,” Will told them as he went around to the back. “I need to make sure we didn’t leave anything behind.” He was pretty sure they hadn’t, but he wanted to rearrange how the equipment had been packed. When they finished up for the night, they tended to be wired and simply tossed everything into the back. That always made Will twitch. He might look like a rough-and-ready biker on the surface, but he liked everything in its place. It not only made it easier to find, but things were less likely to get broken or lost if they were properly stored.

  While he might admit to himself that he probably had a touch of OCD, he wasn’t going to say it out loud. He didn’t want to be teased about it. His mother had considerably more than a touch of OCD, and until they’d gotten her meds sorted out, it had been debilitating.

  It didn’t take him long to manhandle the equipment out of the van, then put it back in so everything fit snugly in with everything else. In other words, he Tetrised it. Heavy stuff on the bottom, lighter stuff on top, holes where things could drop and get crushed kept to a minimum.

  Satisfied, he locked up the van and headed inside. The place was nice and warm, and there was a cheery fire crackling away in the hearth. The guys were already a couple slices in on the pizza, but they’d started with the Greek pizza, which he didn’t like thanks to the olives, so no harm, no foul.

  He grabbed a beer and a couple slices of the meat lover’s and sat on the dilapidated easy chair, careful not to rest his elbow on the right armrest as it was wonky. Blaine and Flynn were squished together on the loveseat like there wasn’t enough room for both of them. It was adorable and nauseating at the same time. Jason and Darnell had set up residence on the couch—they knew Will liked the armchair. He wasn’t tall, but he was a big guy, and the thing fit him perfectly with a little wiggle room on either side.

  “I’m going to put the footage together for the Wexford House,” Jason told them around a mouthful of food. “But I think we’ve pretty much concluded that there wasn’t any ghost activity there. Just a lot of dust and noisy trees in the wind. Right?”

  Will nodded his agreement along with the others. Wexford had been a bust, the third in a row after the incredible experience they’d had at the hospital. It wasn’t surprising, really, but it was still a disappointment, and it wasn’t helping their bid for a TV series any. He wasn’t sure how many more episodes would get bought if all they were doing was debunking. Especially as they hadn’t been able to find anything nearby that also fit into the gay ghosts’ niche.

  “So, I’ve got a job we might want to consider.” Jason took a swig of his beer. “It’s a little different from what we usually do, but it’s a paying gig.”

  Flynn grinned. “I like getting paid. What’s the deal?”

  “You know the McGregor Mansion? Apparently the latest owner believes it’s haunted, and he’d like us to come and investigate. He said something about an exorcism, so I do believe he wants us to get rid of the ghost.”

  “We’re not priests.”

  Will recognized that expression on Flynn’s face. That was pure stubbornness. Flynn was right too—they weren’t priests. But they were talking about ghosts here and not demons, which didn’t exist, right? He thought he knew where Flynn was coming from, though. Flynn’s mom’s ghost had hung around since he was little, keeping an eye on him. Not every ghost was bad, and they didn’t all need to be gotten rid of.

  Jason shrugged. “Like I said, it’s a paying gig. And the owner is gay, by the way. Said so right up front. I guess that’s part of why he chose us. He knows we want to film as we go, and there’s a strong pos
sibility we’ll actually find a ghost, which we could really use. I think the production company would be willing to buy several episodes where we don’t find anything if we can provide one every now and then where we do. Once we’ve confirmed a ghost, we can decide later whether we help him out or not.”

  Will had to admit he was all for getting paid. He didn’t want to be a pizza-delivery guy for the rest of his life. “Let’s do it. You did a fine job with the hospital, you know.” The final cut of the show had rocked.

  Darnell grabbed another slice of pizza and added before he shoved almost the entire thing in his mouth, “I’m in. Just point me in the right direction, and I’ll shoot it.”

  “Good deal.” Jason looked expectantly at Blaine and Flynn.

  The two looked at each other like they had some psychic connection or something, which they didn’t, right? Then Blaine nodded. “Okay, but if Flynn says the word, we’re out.”

  Flynn took Blaine’s hand, and their fingers twined together. It was sickening how in love they were. Okay, so it was less sickening and more that Will was fucking jealous. Who could blame him? He didn’t have trouble getting laid or anything, but he wouldn’t mind a steady lover, someone who made him as stupid as Blaine and Flynn were over each other.

  “Okay,” Jason said. “I’ll call Payne MacGregor back and arrange for us to go in and check the place out. I won’t promise more than that initially, but I’ll have all the paperwork set up so we can get his John Hancock on the dotted line if we decide to go for it.” He grabbed a beer and sucked half of it back.

  Will took a Coke for himself, along with another piece of pizza. He had to drive the van home, so he was being good.

  “Payne MacGregor sounds like a name from a children’s book,” Darnell said.

  “Who would name their kid Payne?” was what Will wanted to know. “I bet he got the shit teased out of him growing up.”