Read Online Rancor: Sinister Attachments, Book 1 by Connie Myres - Free Book Online

new lock, but I can’t get a hold of Mr. Zimmerman. Have you seen him?”
    Ethel blew a puff of smoke and adjusted the green scarf wrapped around her head. “He’s usually in his apartment on the third floor. You may have to just go up there.”
    Maggie nodded.
    Ethel rolled the ashes into the ashtray sitting on the small table between the two rockers. “No one else will tell you, but I will. This place is not all that it seems.”
    “I know about the building’s history, but that was then and this is now.”
    “True, but sometimes then is now, and now is then.”
    “I don’t know what you mean.”
    Ethel rocked back and forth. Back and forth. “I wanted to tell you to watch that friend of yours. I get a bad feeling about her.”
    “You’re not the first one that’s told me that,” Maggie said. “An old lady at the grocery store said the same thing.”
    Ethel laughed and coughed at the same time. “That must be Claudia. We go way back. When I was a receptionist here, back in the sixties, Claudia and I used to belong to a group called The Seers. We would have séance’s right here in the basement of this building during the sixties. We were quite powerful back then; now we’re just a couple old hags. I don’t think she even knows I live here.”
    “What did you do in the séances?”
    “We communicated with spirits,” Ethel said, smiling as if recalling the memories were pleasurable. “Claudia and I would take turns being the medium in charge of the séance. People would come from all around to speak with their deceased loved ones or have us tell their future. We made quite a living helping people,” Ethel puffed the cigar. “But we were not frauds, not our group.”
    “Do you still have séances in the basement?”
    “No, absolutely not.” Ethel’s pleasant thoughts must have turned to bad memories because she stopped rocking, and the hand holding the wood tip quivered. “We innocently contacted something evil, something from Hell and have not held a séance since then . . . not anywhere.”
    “What happened?” Even though Maggie did not necessarily believe in the paranormal, her interest was piqued.
    Ethel stared off into the distant blue horizon, where the lake blended with the sky. She took a deep breath and said, “We used a crystal ball back then. I still have it, but I don’t touch it now. There would be anywhere from three to six people who would sit around a table in, what we called the scrying room, in the basement. This place was a psychiatric hospital back then. Claudia and I were good friends with the manager, mostly because we got into contact with his deceased wife, making him happy so he let us do the séances here . . . As long as we would contact spirits for him whenever he asked. So time went on, and all was well until . . . January of 1969. That was when something other than the dead relatives of clients came to us.”
    Ethel paused and then continued. “A couple came to us, wanting to speak with their deceased daughter who had died of influenza. They were heartbroken and full of emotion because of their grief. Anyway, it was my turn to use the crystal ball. Claudia lit candles and dimmed the lights because it helped me go into a trance. I was having difficulty contacting the little girl, probably because she was in heaven—it is only when souls are in purgatory or are earthbound that I can communicate with them. Anyway, the couple was sobbing, almost out of control, so I went into a deeper level of trance, and that was when the crystal ball turned black, and I mean the blackest of black. An inky black that seemed to draw goodness toward it, absorb it, and then release evil in exchange.”
    Ethel’s hand trembled so bad she dropped the cigar onto the deck’s peeling paint. She picked it up, drew in a deep breath of cancer, and continued. “My hands were pushed away from it as I came out of the trance. The evil had taken over the crystal ball, and there was nothing I