by J L Bryan
The Tower
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper, Book Nine
J. L. Bryan
Copyright 2017 J.L. Bryan
All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my wife Christina, who helps me keep writing around our crazy family schedule.
I appreciate everyone who has helped with this book. Thanks to beta readers Robert Duperre, and Rhiannon Frater. Thanks to my proofreaders Thelia Kelly and Barb Ferrante. Thanks to Claudia from PhatPuppy Art, who created the great cover art for this book, and her daughter Catie, who's done all the lettering on the covers for this series.
Thanks to my agent Sarah Hershman and to everyone at Tantor Media and Audible who have made the audio versions of these books. The audio books are read by Carla Mercer-Meyer, who does an amazing job.
Thanks also to the book bloggers who's supported the series, including Heather from Bewitched Bookworks; Mandy from I Read Indie; Michelle from Much Loved Books; Shirley from Creative Deeds; Katie and Krisha from Inkk Reviews; Lori from Contagious Reads; Heather from Buried in Books; Kristina from Ladybug Storytime; Chandra from Unabridged Bookshelf; Kelly from Reading the Paranormal; AimeeKay from Reviews from My First Reads Shelf and Melissa from Books and Things; Kristin from Blood, Sweat, and Books; Aeicha from Word Spelunking; Lauren from Lose Time Reading; Kat from Aussie Zombie; Andra from Unabridged Andralyn; Jennifer from A Tale of Many Reviews; Giselle from Xpresso Reads; Ashley from Bibliophile’s Corner; Lili from Lili Lost in a Book; Line from Moonstar’s Fantasy World; Holly from Geek Glitter; Louise from Nerdette Reviews; Isalys from Book Soulmates; Heidi from Rainy Day Ramblings; Kristilyn from Reading in Winter; Kelsey from Kelsey’s Cluttered Bookshelf; Lizzy from Lizzy’s Dark Fiction; Shanon from Escaping with Fiction; Savannah from Books with Bite; Tara from Basically Books; Toni from My Book Addiction; Abbi from Book Obsession; Lake from Lake’s Reads; Jenny from Jenny on the Book; and anyone else I missed!
Most of all, thanks to the readers who've supported this series. There are more books to come!
Also by J.L. Bryan:
The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper
Cold Shadows
The Crawling Darkness
Terminal
House of Whispers
Maze of Souls
Lullaby
The Keeper
The tenth Ellie Jordan book will be available in 2018
The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)
Jenny Pox
Tommy Nightmare
Alexander Death
Jenny Plague-Bringer
Urban Fantasy/Horror
Inferno Park
The Unseen
Science Fiction
Nomad
Helix
For Johnny
Chapter One
“Can skyscrapers be haunted?” Stacey asked, looking up from her phone and out at the interstate ahead of us. Heavy gray clouds filled the sky, and it was beginning to drizzle. We were about four hours from home, headed for the crowded sprawl of Atlanta. I had a little trepidation about driving into the big city where millions of people lived; Savannah, our home city, wasn't exactly tiny, but it was a sleepy coastal town by comparison.
“We don't know that we're dealing with a haunted skyscraper. We're just meeting the client there,” I reminded her, keeping my eyes on the road as I drove.
“I'm just asking, like, in theory.” Stacey looked at her phone again. “Because this address belongs to a skyscraper that's about a hundred and twenty years old. So, haunted skyscrapers, yea or nay?”
“Sure. I've seen a few reports in the paranormal journals, but mostly from London, Chicago, and New York. I've never heard of any in Atlanta. I don't think they really have old skyscrapers.”
“Looks like they have a couple, at least, including this one,” Stacey said.
“Well, wherever people have lived—and especially wherever they've suffered—there can be ghosts. We've seen haunted houses, apartment buildings, hotels, theaters...”
“And pyramids! Okay, we've never explored a pyramid, but you just know some of the old pyramids around the world are haunted. Maybe most of them. Or all of them.”
“But again, Stacey, we're just meeting the possible client there. It's an office building.”
“'Built in 1899, the Pennefort Building was constructed by Atlanta businessman Ernest Pennefort,'” Stacey read from her phone. “At seventeen stories, it was one of just a few tall buildings dominating the skyline. Amenities included a doctor's office, dentist, barber shop, baths—baths?”
“Let's wait and see what the client actually says before we research their lawyer's office building. Just a suggestion,” I said. “We don't even know if there's a real ghost involved yet, or just creaky floorboards and groaning pipes.”
“Well, I sure hope something's haunted, because I had to wake up at headache o' clock today,” Stacey said. The prospective client had wanted to meet with us at eight-thirty sharp. In Atlanta. About two hundred and fifty miles from home. No big deal. We'd had to wake up around three-thirty to get ready, meet up, and hit the road.
Driving inland from the coast meant watching the scenery shift from salt marshes and palm trees into cow pastures and pine forests. It had been an easy, fast drive most of the way, down a wide-open interstate through rural country. But now the morning was gloomy and rain was starting to pour.
As I rounded a bend in interstate 75 heading into the city, I had to slam the brakes as I encountered a solid wall of cars and a sea of red brake lights. Stacey whipped forward toward the dashboard, but her seat belt caught her.
“Hey, great driving!” she snapped.
“Sorry. It suddenly turned into a parking lot.”
“It says 'traffic normal.' Even though the road is all red.” Stacey peered at the digital map on my phone, which was mounted on the dash. “Looks like our six-lane highway is merging with a crowded three-lane road...”
“Therefore, logically widening into a nine-lane road up ahead?” I asked, hopefully.
“Not at all.”
“Ugh.” I shook my head. Our destination was only six miles away, but it might as well have been six thousand miles in the standstill of morning rush hour.
“Maybe traffic will clear up,” Stacey said.
As if to answer her, a crack of thunder sounded overhead, and a blinding onslaught of rain hammered down on us.
“Not likely,” I said. “Check your phone and see if there's a back way.”
“A back way...to the dead center of Atlanta...” Stacey frowned. “I mean, I'll look, but I can't perform miracles. Say, maybe the ghost in the skyscraper is doing this, already trying to stop us, throwing obstacles in our path.”
“Yeah, I don't think the ghost is controlling traffic.”
“Don't mock the traffic demon,” Stacey said, in a cheeseball faux-Vincent-Price voice. “He haunts traffic lights, torturing you by denying you any hope of a left-turn arrow...any hope at all...He is road rage made flesh—”
“How's that shortcut coming?”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry.”
By the time we reached the Pennefort Building's parking deck, smack in the middle of the crowded, gridlocked city, we were already half an hour late. I barely glimpsed the tall old building as I pulled into the deck beside it. My main impression was that it stood in the shadows of newer, taller buildings all around it, like a tree stunte
d by lack of sunlight. It felt as though we'd entered a lower, darker spot in the high and sprawling cityscape.
I shivered.
“Do you feel that?” Stacey asked, as I pulled into the dark space of the parking deck. I had to stop at a striped metal arm that blocked the way. I lowered my window, punched the button on the gate machine outside the van, and waited.
“I feel it,” I said. “I'm telling myself it's just colder and darker because we're in the parking deck, and maybe the cloud cover up there got thicker with the rain rolling in. Perfectly logical explanations all around.”
“But you don't believe that.”
“Not completely.” I punched the button on the rusty metal machine again, but it failed to dispense a paper ticket or raise the gate arm.
I punched it again, and again, and again. The machine looked decades old, and none of its little exterior lights showed any sign of life.
“Problem?” A man leaned over the rusty ticket machine. He startled me into jumping, and I may have let out a small sound like “yip!” He was graying, hefty man, somewhere in his fifties, I guessed. He wore a uniform that seemed more suited to an old-fashioned doorman than a parking lot attendant—charcoal gray suit with a vest and tie, matching peaked cap reminiscent of something a cop or military officer might wear. It had to be hot as all get-out during the Georgia summer. Lucky for him, it was December, therefore merely balmy rather than roasting.
“Sorry,” I said, not totally sure whether I was apologizing for banging the machine so hard or for my jumpy reaction. In my line of work, when someone sneaks up on you out of nowhere, they tend to be spirits of the dead. They're often coming at me with ill intent, too, as I invade their space and try to kick their ghostly keesters to the curb. It keeps you jumpy. “You scared me. The machine seems broken.”
“It'll do that, lass,” he said. His voice had an echo of a long-buried accent, something Irish or Scottish, maybe. Or Welsh, even, if I knew what a Welsh accent sounded like. “Sometimes you can't get in, sometimes you can't get out. Place has a mind of its own.” He banged his fist on the back of the machine, and it spat out a long strip of paper, as if sticking out its tongue at me. He ripped it off and handed it to me. The time and date were stamped in weak, barely-visible ink.
At last, the gate arm began to rise.
“Be safe, now.” The man smiled and touched the brim of his cap.
“Thank you,” I said, then pulled ahead.
The parking lot was aged and crumbling; its better days were decades past. Rainwater streamed down from above, following wide water-stained streaks down the interior walls to gather in puddles at low points on the concrete floor. There was a smattering of faded graffiti nobody had bothered to clean off. Every second or third overhead light seemed to be either flickering or altogether burned out, or maybe they were just switched off to save energy during the day.
“They are seriously pinching pennies on the maintenance here,” Stacey whispered. I nodded.
Many of the parking spaces on the first level were marked RESERVED in red letters on rust-edged metal signs. A number of other spaces were labeled VISITOR ONLY – 2 HOUR LIMIT. I wasn't sure whether we qualified, so I drove up and around to the second level, where the parking spaces seemed much less particular about who parked in them and for how long.
“It's weird how not-crowded the parking deck is,” Stacey said. “On a weekday morning? Am I right?”
“You've got a point.” I picked a spot as far as I could from the drips and the water stains.
We headed down a concrete stairwell, avoiding a puddle of greenish water on the landing, then followed a short, dimly lit corridor into the main building.
A pair of heavy glass double doors led us into a lobby that was seriously impressive, in an ancient-Greek-temple sort of way. The room was three stories high, with tall rectangular windows on three sides; rain gushed down most of them, sending blurry, watery light dancing across the marble walls.
Marble was everywhere, actually, maybe local Georgia marble judging by the lavish quantities that had been used. A boxy marble arch framed the revolving door leading to the sidewalk outside, where a thin crowd of pedestrians hurried past, but none of them joined us in the cold, quiet lobby of the Pennefort Building. Outside, it was bumper-to-bumper traffic, horns blaring, crowds of people trying to cram their way from one place to another.
Inside, the lobby looked deserted, and the only sound was the rain on the windows above.
The layout of the old building was fitted to a triangular lot, so it was narrow at one end—the one where the revolving door was located, where most people would have entered the lobby in 1899—and the building grew wider and wider as one walked deeper inside.
That was what Stacey and I did, crossing the ever-widening lobby toward the enormous marble staircase rising to a second-floor gallery at the far end of the room.
The only other person we saw was a small elderly woman behind the counter at a newsstand, over at the back corner of the lobby. She didn't look up from her Soldier of Fortune magazine, though our footsteps echoed through the room.
We approached the long desk at the center of the lobby, where one might expect to find a receptionist or security guard in most large buildings, a human face for visitors to approach. Three empty office chairs greeted us, parked in front of three dusty, boxy desktop computers that had to be fifteen or twenty years old.
“Looks like there's nobody here,” Stacey said. “Not even a 'ring for service' bell.”
“It's not a hotel,” I said.
“What is it, then?” She looked around at the marble mausoleum of the lobby.
“Offices and apartments, I think.” I pointed to the building directory mounted on the wall, a simple black display board with movable white letters. “The Pennefort Group, Suite 1201. That's us.”
“I guess we just head on up,” Stacey said.
We passed the newsstand, where the lady still acted as if we didn't exist at all, even though it seemed like her spot was struggling for customers. Maybe it was just a slow time of day. A couple of other retail stores lay empty and dusty behind drop-down gates along that side of the lobby, with no hint of what they might have once been.
At the elevator bank, I was half-charmed, half-worried to see that the floor indicators looked original, with ornate mechanical arrows that pointed along semi-circles of gilded Roman numerals, running from I to XVII.
I pressed the button and waited. The marble-lined corridor continued onward, into the depths of the building. A sign on a stand down the way advertised AL'S AUTHENTIC RESTAURANT. It sat in front of a pair of glass doors looking into an unlit room beyond. The smaller print on the sign informed us that it didn't open until 11 a.m. It didn't specify just what the restaurant was claiming to authentically be.
Beyond that, the corridor was decorated with busts and marble lions and mirrors, 19th-century elegance lit by dim, flickering fluorescent bars above.
Echoing chimes rang out as the elevator arrived.
“Bells?” Stacey asked, looking up at an ornate grate alongside the elevator shaft. “Were those real bells ringing inside the wall?”
“I hope the elevator cables and pulleys aren't as old as everything else in this building,” I said. “If we weren't already late, I'd be tempted to take the stairs.” I don't know who I was kidding. There was no way I was hoofing it up twelve floors' worth of stairs without an extremely good reason.
The elevator door slid to one side, its wooden panels slipping underneath each other as it opened. The elevator had some old-timey brass fixtures and gilt-edged mirrors, but threadbare carpet and a musty smell.
“Could be worse, right?” Stacey said. “I mean, at least there's not a guy driving the elevator with a lever in here.”
“Of course there's not,” I said. “Because that would involve us encountering another living, breathing, talking human being somewhere in this building.”
The elevator buttons weren't the modern ligh
t-up kind, but brass circles mounted in a polished wooden panel, their numbers hand-engraved in a delicate calligraphy that made them a bit hard to read.
I pressed 12. The brass button slid back inside the wooden panel and clicked into place. It stayed there even after I removed my finger.
The unseen bells chimed again, and the wooden door slid closed, extending its panels back into place.
The elevator car rattled as it rose, and the floor seemed to sway.
“You feel that?” Stacey asked.
“Yep,” I said, a little tersely, not wanting to discuss the potentially dangerous elevator at length, at least not while we were still riding inside it.
“This place is creeping me out,” Stacey said. “It's so...empty. And cold. And just...wrong. You think it's haunted or what?”
“I would need evidence before issuing a professional opinion.”
“What about an unprofessional one?”
“Maybe it is. Maybe we're about to find out.”
More bells chimed as we reached the twelfth floor. The brass 12 button popped back out of the control panel.
Here we go, I thought, with very little idea what awaited on the other side of the sliding door.
Chapter Two
We stepped into the twelfth-floor elevator lobby, looking professional—black business attire, no utility belts or backpacks, just perfectly normal laptop bags. For the moment, we could have been accountants or lawyers to the casual observer. Nothing about us screamed paranormal investigators.
More marble and gilt décor met us as we emerged from the elevators. A sculpted lion head sat in an alcove nearby. A few portraits hung on the walls, men in top hats and three-piece suits with stiff collars, women in silky dresses with puffy sleeves and high waists, outfits dating from around the turn of the last century.
