Haunted Savannah

Chapter Ten: True Believers

Evening came on quickly, and though it had only been a few hours since she last saw him, Savannah found that she was looking forward to seeing Cory again. Although she normally dressed up a bit for her tours, she found herself spending a little extra time on her hair and make up. As she looked herself over in the mirror, patting her lips gently with a tissue to remove any excess lipstick, she found that she had butterflies in her stomach. Why was she so nervous? It’s not like she was the one leading the tour tonight. She hadn’t felt like this since her first week on the job.

She looked at herself in the mirror, and said aloud, “There’s no such thing as ghosts.” 

Though, deep down inside, she knew it wasn’t potential ghosts that were making her feel so out of sorts.

Savannah was going to be accompanying Cory on one of the later tours, and it was full dark when Savannah got to the prearranged starting point for the tour - just outside Clary’s at the corner of Abercorn and Jones. She’d been standing on the edge of the milling group that had begun to gather at the corner, shuffling a bit from foot to foot, when a finger tapped lightly on her shoulder. She started, and looked to her left, where the tap had come from - but there was no one there.

“Boo,” Cory’s voice sounded from her right, so close to her ear that she thought she could feel the heat of his breath as he spoke. 

Savannah yelped, and Cory chuckled a bit as she hopped back. 

“You!” Savannah hissed, smacking his shoulder lightly as his chuckle turned into a light laugh. 

“Sorry, sorry. You just looked so serious...ghost tours are supposed to be fun, right?” Cory said, and Savannah found herself relaxing. 

“Right, they are.” She said, shaking her head a little, but returned his smile just the same. “Are you ready?”

“After reading through your notes? Yes. More than ready. I can’t believe you laminate your notes.” Cory said, though she missed the teasing tone as she was too busy taking in his get up.

He was wearing black slacks with his purple converse, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and suspenders not unlike her own - though in black instead of green and white striped. He’d brushed his hair, was wearing it slicked back into a bit of a pompadour. He wasn’t wearing his glasses; he must have been wearing contacts. Without them, he looked like an entirely different person, and Savannah now thought she understood why people never seemed to recognize Clark Kent. He even looked, well, fitter. The cut of his shirt and the way he’d rolled up his sleeves hinted enticingly at how he’d look without it. The time he’d been putting in at the gym was definitely paying off.

She’d gone to the gym a few times at the start of the semester herself, but after spotting Cory there she hadn’t been so keen. She was starting to think it was time she started up again. Not because he went, of course. It was just good for her health.

“I mean, the color coded highlighting was already a little over the top…” Cory continued, smirking a bit as he followed her eyeline down his chest and to his belt, which had a skull and crossbones buckle. “See something you like?”

“What? Er, well…” Savannah sputtered, tilting her face back up to meet his gaze. “It’s a good look on you. Vaguely vintage feeling, still very you, and not a distracting costume.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was shooting for.” he replied, giving her a knowing smirk. 

“It’s about time. We should get started, don’t you think?” Savannah said, turning away from him and toward the milling tourists.

Cory called the eight gathered souls together for their evening of true, or vaguely inspired by the truth, tales of ghastly ghouls. Savannah half listened to his introduction while letting her gaze fall upon their charges for the evening - eight people who, aside from the couples who came together, were unlikely to have ever met. She hoped they would all be able to get along.

Most tourists follow are pretty average people; some big and some small. Some with cameras, snapping away at every little thing and rarely capturing anything worth looking back at later. Some who just wanted to enjoy the experience, and some who were only there so that they weren’t getting drunk alone. 

Then, there were the true believers. Every once in a while you encountered them; people who avidly believed in spirits. People who had maybe gone ghost hunting before, or who were using the tour as a way to scope out haunted locations that they wanted to check out in more depth at a later time. Often, this led to people getting arrested or thrown out of supposedly haunted places, but that was beyond her pay grade so she generally didn’t judge; she did, however, try to ensure that no such misbehaviour happened during her tours.

To Savannah’s well practiced eye, they had a true believer with them tonight, and one with an entourage even. She was wearing a peasant blouse paired with a flowing, tiered patchwork skirt that skimmed the top of her sandaled feet, and a black lacey shawl that reminded Savannah a bit of a spider’s web. Her wavy blonde hair cascaded over her shoulders and down her back, so long that a small child might be able to use it as a rope swing if she’d put it in a braid. She was plump, with a ruddy complexion, her cheeks rosie from either too much sun or too much to drink, and in the city that was a toss up. On her arms she wore a multitude of chunky metal bangles painted in a rainbow of colors. They clinked every time she so much as shifted an inch.

She had a couple of younger women with her, similarly dressed, though they did not look like her. Instead, they looked like assistants. One of them was scrolling through her phone, and blowing a piece of bubble gum as they waited for the tour to start, occasionally tapping away at some message or another.

Savannah didn’t have a bad feeling about this woman; she tried very much not to make snap judgements about people, especially when her tips depended on it. But, she was vaguely wary of them. She’d been burned a few times by true believers who thought they knew more than her, and did not want a repeat of that particular performance. Though, since Cory was the one leading the tour, and for some reason people tended to behave more with male guides, she felt she probably didn’t need to worry too much.

When the introduction was over, Savannah looked to Cory and gave him a brief nod of approval. He seemed bolstered by this, the nerves he’d professed to in her texts the day before seemingly assuaged. Soon, he was leading them onward down the cobblestone streets under the flickering gaslight of the street lamps above.

Savannah kept to the back of their group, happy to let Cory take the lead, and happier yet when it became obvious that her really did have a good handle on the route. Something seemed to have changed as he spoke to the small group; he was livelier and more engaging than she could remember seeing him before. It reminded her, of course, of his brother.

Before thoughts of Shane could start to overwhelm her, the blonde woman took a few steps back, coming up alongside her. She stood next to Savannah for a few heartbeats, before slowly turning her head to look at her. Savannah thought she could hear the creak of the woman’s neck as it turned.

When the woman spoke, her high girlish voice made Savannah’s jaw tighten. It was like nails on chalkboard, with just enough of a rasping lilt to make it unsettling. That bit was probably intentional.

“You have the look of an unwitting conduit about you.”

“I’m sorry…?” Savannah said, her voice turning up at the end to make it a question, though she was keeping it low so that they didn’t interrupt Cory, who was motioning animatedly to the Marshall House Hotel, which they were currently standing in front of.

“Me too, sweetie. Being a conduit for the spirits is a miserable task, isn’t it?” the woman said, tittering lightly at Savannah’s blank expression. “That nice young man did say you have been a ghost guide for years now. Surely you’ve seen or heard...something? Come now, you can tell me. Madame Moira is a psychic, after all.”

“Well, if you’re a psychic… I don’t need to tell you, do I? Shouldn’t you already know?” Savannah replied, her tone sweet and friendly. She even tilted her head and smiled in the faint innocent way of a girl who had spent a long time pretending to be more naive than she was in order to drive off unwanted attention.

“Mmmm…” the woman replied, her lips pursing, face taking on a sour expression. She moved back toward her companions, whispering heatedly to them. They glanced at Savannah, but didn’t seem all too concerned, returning their attention shortly to Cory, who was now motioning for them to follow him inside.

She was relieved that the woman was no longer interested in her. Psychics, or ghost sensitives, occasionally tagged along on ghost tours, but were usually pretty harmless. They craved attention more than anything else, and Savannah thought Cory could probably handle being talked over a bit; that was something you had to get used to when guiding larger, drunker, groups anyway. Savannah felt psychics weren’t nearly as difficult as the ghost hunters, with their various body cams, EMF readers and other gizmos that did nothing but buzz or screech ominously whether or not ghosts were actually present.

Savannah trailed after the group, pausing just after they pushed through the double doors to the marble tiled lobby, and fished her phone from her purse. That odd bit of interaction reminded her that she needed to text her landlord still. A broken doorbell might not be an auditory manifestation of ghostly activity, but it was very annoying.

Absorbed in tapping away at her phone, Savannah didn’t notice the kerfuffle until it was already in progress.