Page 23 of Ghost Hunters 2

“Why couldn’t you go back?” Jillian asked.

George turned his head and glared at her. “Because I took the life of a man that was beating my mother to death. He thought he caught her cheating on him again and this was the last straw. According to tradition he began beating her in front of the family she’d wronged and they all stood there and let him do it. When I couldn’t bear her screams anymore I tried to stop him but I couldn’t. He was too caught up in the moment and before I knew it I had my knife in my hand and I had plunged it into his chest.”

“What did your family do then?” Jillian asked.

“My grandfather walked over to my father and took my knife out of his chest and put a streak of my father’s blood on my forehead. Then he and my three uncles took my father’s body away and everyone disappeared. I was left there alone with my mother. When I went to check on her she was dead. My father’s beating had killed her.” George reached up to his forehead and searched for the streak of blood that stained his soul. The blood wasn’t there but he felt it all the same. “I left the bayou that night and I haven’t ever been back.”

“Come on man, your family must have moved on from that,” Dino reasoned.

George looked at him and shook his head. “No, they haven’t and they never will. Bayou people are set in their ways and ain’t nobody going to change them.” George slipped into his native creole accent. “My mother never cheated on my father. He was nothing more than a jealous fool. He had a mean streak in him a mile wide but she loved him. When he had a little drink in him he got mean and that night he had more than a little in him. Earlier that day we caught a gator in the swamps and we were celebrating the catch, when he started in on my mother. My Grandmother, Chanti, was a voodoo queen. Yet she refused to help my mother or me when we needed it.”

“So that’s what made you so vengeful?” Jilliasn asked.

He slowly shook his head and refused to say any more.

“Many of us have lived with lies, accusations and even fury,” Bane said. “But you came here and took it out on these two women. They gave you a chance here and you literally burned their home down.”

He paused and started at Bane. “What happened in the past stays in the past, nothing can be done about it.”

“But the past doesn’t have to keep repeating itself,” Jillian argued. “The circumstances of that night forty years ago have changed. We found where you hid Tilly and she and Matthew are together again. Tilly has also forgiven her sister.”

George shook his head. “That doesn’t matter anymore. I put a curse on the Inn and all the people in it. The fire will happen again and this time your souls will join ours. You dug the bag up and that means it is in the Inn itself. So now, it will never return like all the years before and just like me, you all cannot leave.”

Dino approached the back door and tried the handle. Like George told them the door was sealed shut. Like it was solid and the door wasn’t really a door anymore.

Bane disappeared for a few minutes and when he came back he said, “We can’t get out either door. The front door is sealed too and all the windows are black.”

Suddenly, they all heard barking.

And then the strangest thing happened...George shimmered and disappeared.

Dino looked over at Bane to ask, “I thought he couldn’t leave?”

Bane cocked his head at him and shrugged. “Hey, I’m new to using voodoo. Maybe I should have just punched his face in, then rubbed his blood all over the watch.”

Dino scoffed. “You can do that, he's a ghost.”

“Dino, you just admitted that there are ghosts!” Jillian exclaimed.

Dino shook his head.

Now, Poppy came in.

Jillian saw her and gasped then she knelt down to pick her dog up. “Poppy! Where have you been?”

The little dog happily licked her face.

“Ok, that is where the barking came from,” Tilly said. “I was afraid that... Sammy. I mean...” She sighed.

Jillian looked at the pup’s paws. “He’s got grass like what’s in the backyard.” Then she looked up at Dino. “What about the door we found downstairs?” she suggested. “Poppy must have come in that way.”

“We can try it,” Dino told her with a shrug as he grabbed the flashlight.

Bane raised his flashlight too and they headed out.

Jillian fed and watered her dog and kept petting her.

When the guys returned Dino shook his head. “The door is shut tight. We couldn’t even get the hinges loose.” He then leaned in and whispered to Jillian’s ear, “A lie for Georgie to hear.”