Free No Ghouls Allowed by Victoria Laurie Page A

need me to pick you up.” Mrs.
     G. was not to be so easily dismissed.
    “One of the planters dislodged from a third-story balcony and hit the van,” I explained.
    “Oh, my,” Mrs. G. said, her hand going to cover her heart. “None of you were hurt,
     were you?” I noticed that she was looking in her rearview mirror at Heath again as
     if she suspected he might’ve lied to her about the way he got the bump on the head.
    “No, ma’am,” Heath said, sticking to his story. “We were all out of the van when it
     happened.”
    “Well, thank goodness! You know that Porter house is the talk of the town these days.
     I can’t believe Christine hasn’t abandoned the place yet. People are saying it’s cursed.”
    “Yeah, we heard that too,” I admitted.
    Mrs. G. suddenly cut her eyes to me. “Y’all didn’t enter that place, did you?”
    “No, Mama,” Gil said quickly. “We stayed outside.”
    Mrs. G.’s eyes never left mine, which made riding in the car with her a bit precarious.
     Mrs. G. was someone I’d never been able to lie to, and she knew it. “Uh, Mrs. G.?”
     I said, extending my hand to steady the wheel as we began to drift a bit to the right.
     “The road?”
    She sighed and focused back on her driving. After a bit she said, “Mary Jane?”
    “Yes, ma’am?”
    “Did you go inside that house?”
    I tensed and felt Gilley’s and Heath’s gazes on the back of my head. “I did,” I told
     her, trying to leave the boys out of the confession. “But only for a minute. Christine
     asked if I could check out the house because a few of her construction crews had been
     complaining about strange goings-on.”
    Mrs. G.’s brow rose with interest. “And what did you find?”
    I squirmed, picking my words carefully. “Nothing definitive. I’ll probably do a little
     more background research before I go back for another look.”
    “We’re going back?” Gilley squeaked, and when his mother raised her skeptical eyes
     to the rearview mirror, Gilley blushed and flashed her a toothy, innocent smile.
    “I think we might have to, Gil,” I said, turning slightly in my seat to look at him.
     “Christine sank a lot of money into buying that old place, and I can’t very well let
     her keep sending crews there who might get hurt. I think we’ll need to figure out
     what’s causing the activity and do our best to clear it.”
    Gilley frowned and settled down into the seat for a good pout. Heath’s expression
     was unreadable, and I suspected that he felt a little conflicted about committing
     ourselves to another encounter at Porter Manor. I knew he knew I was right, but still,
     it’d be dangerous work; of that we could both be sure.
    “We’ll have to gear up,” he said at last. “We’ll need some spikes and some vests.”
    My sweetheart was referring to the magnetic spikes we used to close up the portals
     the more evil spooks utilized to float between the lower planes and our plane of existence.
     Not all ghosts are bad, of course. In fact most spooks are quite harmless albeit somewhat
     annoying at times. Those spirits were often easy to deal with through conversation
     and persistence and a reminder that their bodies had stopped living, and it was time
     for their spirits to go on home.
    The ones we had to be cautious of were the evil spooks who had no interest in crossing
     to the other side, or what most people thought of as heaven. These more malevolent
     souls enjoyed causing mayhem, and some even lusted for hurting the living. These spirits
     were especially dangerous because most of them had figured out how to create a portal—a
     hole between two planes of existence—that they could travel through, and they’d spend
     much of their time on a lower plane, where most dark energies lurk. Here, they could
     gain power and know-how, and plot against the living.
    Often the only way to stop these spooks was to shut down their portals and lock them
     into the lower realms, and to do this