Medium Well Done by Eddie Jones

Author:Eddie Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eddie Jones
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

14

REASONABLY PRICED BURIAL BOXES

“You sure this is the place?”

“St. Paul’s AME,” said Jaz. “Nine people died when it burned down.”

“Did their spirits tell you this?”

“The Internet.”

We were standing at the end of an alley between The Candy Shop and an art gallery called How Great Thou Art. In front of us lay a small floral garden with nameplates embedded in dirt. A little further stood the remains of a stone chapel. Charred brick walls sprouted from amidst weeds, and vines clung to front porch columns supporting singed beams.

Jaz showed me a web page on her phone. “Church bombing. Some guy locked the doors, threw bricks through stained glass windows, and tossed in Molotov cocktails.” Jaz pointed behind the remains of the church’s foundation. “That must be the portico leading to the basement that Officer Crowder mentioned.”

A stone archway built into the church’s outer wall stood near where the church butted up against the next building.

After locking our bikes to a tree, I activated my phone’s flashlight app and pushed open the archway’s wooden door.

Before us, stone steps led down into blackness.

“I get that you don’t believe in spirit speak, but studies have shown that psychic bonds between mothers and daughters are so strong that they will feel things in the same way. Reason being the pair will often share the identical anatomy in the part of the brain that governs the emotions.”

“Not sons, though?”

“Apparently some males have trouble connecting.” She faked a smile. “Your sister says you have that problem.”

I decided at that moment that I would avoid speaking to my sister for the rest of my life.

“You should know that Jesus spoke to unclean spirits. And the Holy Spirit is supposed to live in his disciples, so if I were you, I’d be careful about mocking something a lot of people accept as fact.”

With me leading, we descended into the low, narrow tunnel. “Boy in my neighborhood back in Kansas called it a holy ghost.”

“Ghost, spirit, same thing,” Jaz replied.

Not an expert on the differences between ghosts and spirits, clean or otherwise, I let the comment pass. Also, I kept walking into spider webs, and while spiders don’t freak me out like they do some people I know—my sister being one of those people—my mind went to tarantulas. Even though tarantulas are normally found in dry, desert areas, which the staircase clearly was not, I kept thinking, What if a pet tarantula got loose and mated with a black widow? How quickly would someone die from its bite?

With that happy thought, I aimed the beam of my phone’s light up at the silken netting.

“So,” I said, thankful to reach a short landing free of spider webs, “do you believe spirits haunt places?”

“Spirits? Yes. Spirits of the dead? No.”

A few more steps down and we reached a dank, dark passageway that smelled of mold, urine, and rotten garbage.

“Unclean demonic spirits need to inhabit a living thing,” said Jaz.

Rats squeaked and ran at the sound of our footsteps, their claws clicking on cobblestones.

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