The Tower

by J L Bryan

  And that can be terrifying.

  I thought about the hot, reddish ghost upstairs that had chased Hyacinth. Lawrence had been almost seven when he'd died; his ill-fated sister Catherine would have been five. Perhaps the red ghost was Lawrence, and his great-grandniece Hyacinth had reminded him of his sister. Or his mother. Hyacinth was a blood relation to both, after all. Perhaps he'd been pursuing her in a misguided search for comfort.

  Or maybe Lawrence had become an angry ghost, as even innocent children can become after a tragic death and years of existence as a lonely phantom in the shadows. Perhaps he'd contributed to the rapid-fire deaths of his sister, mother, and father in 1920 and 1921. Perhaps the murders had made him larger and more powerful, and that was why he presented as a larger, adult-sized ghost now.

  Or...none of this was right, and maybe the red ghost really was the hippie terrorist Elton Roberts. Or someone we hadn't even identified yet.

  I double-checked my notes. Lawrence had been electrocuted late at night in 1908, in a construction zone down in the basement. Maybe it had been a simple accident, or maybe there was more to it.

  “Looks like I know where we're going tonight,” I murmured.

  “Huh? Is it the Venezuelan place? I'm hungry again.”

  “No. We're going into the basement of the tower to look for the ghost of a dead boy.”

  “Okay. Venezuelan first?”

  “We'll see.”

  I read Lawrence's vague obituary again, and the news story about it; the tragic death of a child in such a prominent family had rated a front-page mention.

  I shivered, wondering what we would find down there—maybe a lost, wandering child-ghost who still didn't understand what had happened to him. Maybe a vengeful, angry child-ghost who'd been stalking his family for generations, taking them down one by one.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We set up new gear on the top floor, focusing on Vance's cult-hobby room with the fireplace. We left the Spirit Mirror sitting out among his texts with a camera ready to capture any images that turned up in it.

  Then came the part I was really not looking forward to at all. Thurmond let us into his unconscious aunt's apartment. In contrast to the dark hunting-lodge atmosphere of Vance's place, Millie's apartment was more eclectic and colorful. Shelves were crammed full of knickknacks, like Hopi kachina dolls and ceramic animals. The paintings on the wall were impressionist in style, lots of bright psychedelic hues depicting natural and pastoral scenes. One of them showed a lady with an umbrella walking through a park, spattered by purple raindrops, the blooming flowers around her reflected in puddles on the sidewalk. There was a dream-like quality to the décor.

  Unfortunately, there was nothing dream-like about the room where Millie lay.

  The hospital bed had been parked in the middle of a parquet floor in a large room, surrounded by windows overlooking the city. It looked like this top-floor space might have been designed as a ballroom to host large parties, but nobody had celebrated here in a long time.

  A heart monitor beeped periodically. A ventilator hissed as it kept Millie breathing.

  I tiptoed toward the unconscious gray-haired woman, as if somehow absurdly afraid of waking her up, even though waking her from her coma was almost certainly impossible, and would actually be a positive thing if it somehow happened.

  Her face was lined with wrinkles. It looked like she'd lived a rough life. Her gray hair lay limp around her head. She seemed frail and birdlike, small in her silk gown and sheets. I thought of her slender apparition; apparently she was still at about her seventeen-year-old size and weight, or had returned to it in the course of her long coma.

  The only sound in the room was the regular beep of a heart monitor.

  “Hello, Millie,” I said quietly to the closed eyes. “Pink Falcon. Is that you visiting the apartment downstairs?”

  “She's not visiting anywhere.” An older nurse with dyed-black hair walked into the room, carrying a Bible bookmarked with a copy of Watchtower magazine. She sat in an armchair near the foot of the bed. “I can tell you that. She doesn't move.”

  “Are you the regular nurse?” I asked.

  “For this week, yes.”

  “The service sends different people,” Thurmond explained to Stacey and me. Amberly had not come upstairs with us. “Nobody likes to stay on, especially not on the night shift. They say it's creepy.”

  “Have you observed anything unusual since you've arrived?” I asked the nurse.

  She looked at Thurmond in his Lincoln-green vest and matching Robin Hood hat with a tall red feather poking out the top. She glanced at a giant kachina doll, the size of a toddler, standing on a shelf in the corner holding a beaded staff, glaring with its square eyes and triangle teeth. “I suppose not,” she said.

  “Okay. We're just going to set up some monitoring equipment...” I nodded at Stacey, who unfolded a tripod from the maintenance cart we'd borrowed. Our gear was getting spread pretty thin around the building; ideally, we would install a full array to watch and listen in Millie's room, since we suspected her to be the ghost that was bothering our clients the most. Instead, we had to settle for a single night vision camera and a remote Mel-Meter to monitor for temperature changes and energy spikes.

  “What's that for?” the nurse asked, narrowing her eyes. She didn't seem to trust us.

  “Some kind of research study,” I said. “Don't ask me the details, I'm not a scientist. We're just here to set up the camera.”

  “Are you recording me?”

  “Not at all,” Stacey said. “We don't need you in frame. Just Miss Pennefort.”

  “I can live with that.” The nurse stood up and pulled her armchair farther away from the bed, against the wall, and sat down again, apparently not trusting Stacey's assurances about the camera angle.

  “Thurmond, did your aunt live in this tower all her life?” I asked.

  “Mostly. Well, she kind of ran around when she was younger. California for a while, I think. The desert. And when she got back, she spent some time in the mental hospitals. Like, more than one. In and out her whole life.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “Oh...I don't know. I got the impression she kinda fried her brains with a lot of drugs and never really recovered. The Sixties, you know. All that Haight-Ashbury stuff.”

  I nodded. “Do you mind if we look around her apartment? Try to find journals, pictures, anything that could fill in her background for us?”

  “Is that for the research study, too?” The nurse looked at us over her magazine. “What kind of study is this?”

  “Maybe we should talk somewhere else,” I said to Thurmond.

  “Suit yourself.” The nurse continued to stare at us with obvious suspicion. She could tell we weren't being completely honest with her.

  “You can look around all you want, I don't care,” Thurmond said, while leading us to the bedroom. It had more of that Western Native American look, with brightly colored geometric patterns on the blankets, and carved turquoise figurines and jewelry on the dresser. The room was spacious, with commanding views of the city. “This was originally my great-grandparents' room. So it was kind of the master bedroom for the whole building.”

  “It sure looks like it.” Stacey took in the high ceiling and the neoclassical-style crown molding, which didn't exactly match the layer of Hopi and Navajo decorations more recently applied by Millie. She began looking through doors. “Yeah, I knew there'd be an awesome bathroom with a claw-footed tub. And look at this closet...”

  A record player sat atop another dresser, and the drawers below it were full of albums from decades ago: the Moody Blues, Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell. I wondered how often Millie had played the music from her past, sprawled out here on her huge bed, maybe trying to gather up the loose threads of her mind and her past and make some sense of them.

  I wondered how much more confused she might be now, wandering loose from her body at night, perhaps lost somewhere in her me
mories of the past. Falcon, she'd called herself. Not Millie.

  Under the records, I found more pictures. They were crammed into a photo album, but not organized in any way, as if she'd started to put the album together at some point but decided to shove it away in a drawer and forget about it instead.

  Earlier, black-and-white pictures showed private-school girls in starchy collars and jumpers, not too different from the images I'd seen downstairs. Though Millie blended in with her peers on the surface, even wearing the same mid-sixties helmet-bob hairstyle, her eyes stared out from the pictures with unusual intensity. Something was going on inside her mind, something that kept her apart from the other girls; she even physically seemed to keep her distance within the pictures, and wore a hard frown. A rebel teen in the making.

  That rebellion was in full flower in the later, color pictures; long red hair, usually worn in loose braids at each side of her head. Full hippie regalia, gathered with similar types at crowded nightclubs. Images of an outdoor music festival showed crowds of young hippies wearing little to nothing at all, getting doused by hoses in what appeared to be extreme heat. Other pictures showed her in the desert with just a few other hippie types. They seemed to live in a little tent village.

  I lifted out a long necklace, coated with dust, made of beads, little shells, and tiny Zodiac charms. It had been hung with a couple of feathers, but these were bare stems now.

  “I wonder if we could bait a ghost trap with these,” I said. Then I frowned. “I'm not sure we should try to trap a ghost who's still technically alive.”

  “What about Fire Guy?”

  “I wouldn't mind trapping him at all. We just need to figure out what he wants.”

  “Maybe he needs to understand he's dead,” Stacey said. “The police thought the bomb was an accident, right? So in his mind, you know, his death was a total surprise. Maybe he doesn't realize it happened.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Even after all these years?” Thurmond asked. He'd remained in the bedroom doorway, so quiet I'd nearly forgotten he was there, as if he were a ghost himself. “You don't think Elton Roberts could have figured out by now that his plans blew up in his face?”

  “Literally!” Stacey said. “He was planting a bomb, and it literally blew up in his face!”

  “Hence my joke,” Thurmond told her.

  “Right.” Stacey blushed and looked away. “Duh.”

  “Ghosts can obsess over their moments of death, replaying them again and again,” I said. “That can actually grant some murderous ghosts power over their victims; at the moment of death, the killer had control over the victim. The dynamic can continue into their ghostly existence, lasting for years. Even centuries, if nothing breaks the cycle of suffering, if none of the ghosts wake up to their true condition.”

  “Sounds like a miserable way to spend eternity,” Thurmond said.

  “I'd imagine so,” I said.

  “What about...the others?”

  “What others?”

  “Dead people who don't turn into ghosts. Where do they go?” he asked.

  “That question is way beyond me. Consult your religious leader.”

  “The closest thing I have to that is M.G.G. Jensen, and she died years ago,” Thurmond told me with a small smile. “But she wrote that love is magic, and magic lives forever. Unless the Horned Orcs and Scarletta the Witch steal it and hide it under Darkchasm Castle, obviously.”

  “Well, there's your answer,” I said.

  “Too bad I don't have a Lightsword to fight these ghosts off. You know, like Sir Garalt and the Shadow Walkers.”

  “If only.” I tossed the unsorted pictures and the beaded necklace onto the maintenance cart on which we'd brought the cameras.

  “Ghosts really do make me think of the Shadow Walkers in the fourth movie,” Stacey said, and I tuned out the conversation after that, focusing all my attention on rummaging through Millie's stuff.

  I wondered whether, at some level, Millie knew we were here, exploring her apartment.

  Help us, she'd said.

  If it had really been her at all.

  I glanced at the gray-haired unconscious woman in the bed one last time before we left, and I wondered.

  Chapter Nineteen

  After managing a bit more sleep—still taking turns, one napping and one watching for the return of the girl-ghost that we suspected to be Millie—Stacey and I waited until midnight and headed down to the lobby. Our intent was to set up a camera monitoring the area where the bomb had gone off almost fifty years earlier, to see whether any of the several people who'd died in that event made an appearance at the site of their death. It was a public, well-lighted area by day, but by night it was empty and cavernous, watched over by marble lion heads that seemed more menacing, somehow, than they had during the day.

  We wanted to discreetly set up the camera in an out-of-the-way nook and then continue on downstairs. Unfortunately, discretion wasn't in the picture with Pauly on the night desk.

  “Hey, it's the interior decorator ladies!” Pauly called out, adjusting his blue SAFE-T-OFFICER tie as he approached. “What's up, what's up?”

  “We're security consultants,” I reminded him.

  “Huh?” He scratched his mullety head. “What's with the camera?”

  “We're testing the building's electronic surveillance systems for blind spots,” I said.

  “Wha?” He scratched his feeble mustache. “So, what are you two doing down here so late?”

  “We're testing...” I shook my head. “We're thinking about painting the place orange.”

  “That would be...” He looked around, gaping at the high ceiling above. “...yeah. Cool. So...” He paused and gave Stacey a long gaze. “You into Bryan Adams at all?”

  “Yeah!” Stacey said. “How did you guess?”

  “We're leaving now,” I said. “Leave my assistant alone.”

  “I'm not really her assistant, exactly.” Stacey said, as I started toward the elevators. “We're kinda partners now. We've been through a lot together. Serious foxhole-type stuff.”

  “Yeah, cool!” Pauly trailed after us, even after we passed the front desk where he was supposed to be sitting. “Like Fox and the Hound. I get it.”

  “Aw, I love that cartoon!” Stacey gushed.

  “Why do you keep encouraging him?” I muttered, too low for him to hear.

  “He just keeps saying interesting stuff. Sorry.”

  “Hey, that restaurant's closed,” Pauly called down the hall after us, as we passed the locked entrance to Al's and the empty retail shops beyond it. “Pretty much everything is. Most of it's, like, always closed.”

  “Thanks for the heads up,” I said. “I think you missed your chance to sit down and get back to work.” I pointed back toward his desk.

  “Nah, they call this 'making the rounds.' I'm supposed to do it, like, every couple hours, I think? I kinda zoned out during the training video.” He resumed strolling after us. His powder-blue SAFE-T-OFFICER uniform shirt had come untucked on one side, but he didn't seem to notice. “Hey, want to come watch me make the rounds?”

  “Uh...no,” I said.

  “I was asking her.” He pointed to Stacey.

  “Sorry, we're way too busy.” She gave an exaggerated shrug, like her inability to hang out with him was far beyond her power.

  “Hey, that goes to the service elevator and janitor stuff,” he said as I opened the double doors near the end of the hall. “You missed the good elevators up front. This is why you need me to show you around.”

  “We're fine. Bye, Pauly.” I made sure to close the door firmly behind us, to make it clear we didn't want him following.

  We headed down to the basement with some gear on a rolling maintenance cart. The plan was to take some video and pictures and carry out an EVP session like the one that had yielded some response from the girl-ghost. We also planned to leave a camera down there, but I didn't know where. The stories about the little boy's elect
rocution hadn't included any convenient floor maps showing exactly where in the basement he'd died. Maybe we'd find some clues to that by looking around.

  The elevator doors opened and we stepped out. Nearby was the roll-up garage door to the loading dock, locked down for the night. Stacey and I knew that area well from loading in our gear.

  The other way lay darkness.

  “Okay, what's the game plan, Coach?” Stacey whispered.

  “Just observe and record.” I led the way deeper into the basement. It was too dark to see anything. I turned on my flashlight but tightened up the iris so I didn't flood the area with light.

  We passed maintenance and janitorial equipment first, but nothing that looked like it had been used in the past decade or so. A mop bucket, once bright yellow, was encrusted with dried black filth. A tall wooden mop handle jutted out of it, leaning against the concrete-block wall. A wide push-broom stood beside it, thick with cobwebs. There was a shelf with paint cans, roach spray, rags and buckets, and tons of other exciting custodial odds and ends.

  “Ew,” Stacey whispered. “Is that what they use to clean the building? It looks like it would just make everything dirtier.”

  “They probably use the supplies from the first-floor maintenance area,” I said. “Those look newer.”

  “So maybe the custodial staff avoid the basement,” she said. “Maybe it's too spooky for them. Maybe they've seen things.”

  “Maybe. Too bad there aren't many long-timers for us to interview. That rapid staff turnover isn't helping us.” We'd talked to a couple of building staff members, but most people seemed to have worked there no longer than Pauly or the nervous receptionist we'd met on our first day.

  The basement was pretty much how Pauly had described it—a huge, tightly packed storage area somewhat resembling that place where they stored that Nazi head-melting box, but that enormous room in the movie had been relatively well-organized, full of neatly stacked crates and boxes. Here, I saw heaps of decaying furniture, lamps, precarious stacks of moldering magazines and newspapers, lamps, and piles of cardboard boxes, and, as we continued deeper into the mess, piles of trash bags full of stuff I didn't want to investigate too closely; they radiated a rotten stench. There was a massive old record-player cabinet that I suspected had evolved into a deluxe apartment complex for bugs or mice. We passed a rusty old stove shoved into one corner with assorted lengths of pipe and coils of wire piled atop it. There were even sinks, bathtubs, and toilets in one area. It was like Hoarders on an industrial scale, with years of junk shoved down here and forgotten.