by J L Bryan
“A malevolent...you mean Old Concrete-Face?”
“It's possible. It's also possible that Old Concrete-Face is the master ghost of the tower, and so controls many of the others. Including the dead family members.”
“How do we know which ones he controls?” Stacey asked.
“It's hard to say. Probably the ones he killed himself...the ones who died of sudden accidents and strange, incurable diseases. Maybe not the ones who died in the bomb. Gary Brekowski seems to be more independent, although possibly trapped.” I thought of my glimpse of the reporter's ghost, newspapers spilling out of his coat and hat. He haunted the Pennefort dead-file archive, sticking close to the data related to his final story, still on the job after all these years.
“So the ghosts of the family members might be under the control of Old Concrete-Face,” Stacey said. “That would be...who?”
“Ernest and Siobhan, the ones he originally wanted to revenge against,” I said. “His murderers. But before they died, he made sure their children died first. First their son Lawrence in 1908, then Catherine in 1920—he sped Catherine's death along, maybe, when she should have recovered. Siobhan died soon after, then Ernest. That left sixteen-year-old Albert to inherit the family fortune.”
“Yeah, why didn't Albert die? He grew up, had kids, lived into his sixties until the bomber came along.”
“His kids weren't immune to the family curse, though. His ten-year-old daughter fell from the roof in 1957. We can't know which deaths were ghost-related, and which were accidents, but we have to look at the pattern of misfortune and see what sticks out. His son Marcus—Thurmond's father—died falling down the basement stairs in 1984, but he was an adult by then, thirty years old. Thurmond was nine when it happened. Millie's in a coma. Vance died recently.”
“But Vance's son is still alive,” Stacey said.
“Lucky for that guy, he grew up far from the family tower,” I said. “But who knows? Maybe he's still in danger, too.”
The rest of the night did not really unfold as planned.
The idea was that Thurmond and Amberly would take their kids to a movie in the evening, so Jacob could do his walk-through of their apartment while they were away. Then we could go through the rest of the tower, or the floors we were allowed to access, and see what Jacob picked up. I expected him to pick up quite a lot, maybe too much rather than too little.
Unfortunately, Jacob was delayed, by what he described on his phone call to Stacey as “traffic, rain, an accident, and construction—all at once” on his way into Atlanta, after his four-hour drive from Savannah.
We waited out in the parking garage for Jacob's arrival, with lights and holy jingles ready to go. That was a pretty big tip-off that a ghostly presence had been observed in the parking area, and you're not supposed to give a psychic consultant any advance information about a location, but we'd encountered Old Concrete-Face—Angus Clyde, we now believed—out in the parking garage before, and that was during the day. Jacob was arriving after nine on a dark night in December, under drizzling clouds, and we didn't want him alone in there.
It was a relief when the striped mechanical arm finally squeaked open, admitting Jacob in his accountant-gray, fuel-efficient Hyundai. He'd come a long way to help us. I decided we should probably rent a couple of hotel rooms for the night, somewhere miles away from the Pennefort Building, so Stacey and I could rest up and Jacob didn't have to try to sleep, after driving all day, in a building teeming with the dead. He sometimes slept with death metal blaring over headphones to blot out the faces of random dead people who could wander by and stop to speak to him at night. Many of the dead love when they find a medium, a living person who can hear them—sometimes they want help, but apparently many of them just want to tell their sob stories again and again, and of course others like to terrify the living and feed on their fear.
For all those reasons and more, I was ready to start putting a hotel expense on this case. The Penneforts might have been struggling financially, for people who owned a skyscraper, but staying here was getting to be too much.
“Hey, are we tailgating?” Jacob asked, looking at Stacey and me hanging out next to the van. “Is the parking garage haunted?”
“Uh, actually—” Stacey began, and I nudged her, reminding her not to tell him anything. “We are tailgating. But we just ran out of fried chicken. And mashed potatoes. And cole slaw. And...we have no food.”
“I've got cream cheese and chive crackers in the car,” Jacob said.
“Why?” Stacey curled her lip. Then he got close enough to embrace her, and she kissed him, the curl fading a little, but not completely. “Ew. You taste like those crackers.”
“We need to hurry, gang,” I said. “The family's due back. We're running late.”
“I know, my fault,” Jacob said. “To the extent I can be held at fault for insane walls of traffic stretching on for miles through the rain and all the blocked-off places where they were either building a new road or destroying the existing one.” He caught the tense, serious expressions on our faces. “Look at you guys. Is it haunted...?” He closed his eyes and held out a hand.
“It doesn't count if you use clues like that,” Stacey said. “Like our facial expressions. That's what fake psychics do. I've been reading up on it. So I can call you out when you're faking.”
“Sh,” he replied. “There is something out here. It's faint, but...” He opened his eyes. “I don't believe we're going to have a fun time up in that tower.”
“We aren't,” I said. “So let's get it over with.”
We headed inside.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Pauly the SAFE-T-OFFICER gave Jacob a cool, upward-nod thing when he passed, then glared at him with obvious jealousy after he passed with Stacey at his side. I gave Pauly a wave and a smile, but he didn't seem to take much consolation from it.
“Kind of a ghost town in here,” Jacob said as we led him toward the service elevator, past the small newsstand, the lunch-only restaurant, and the bare, gated retail spots in between. “That building directory didn't have a long list of company names, either. It seems like prime real estate. Doesn't exactly feel like it, though.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You know. Bad vibes. It just feels like one of those cursed locations, the strip malls that sit half-empty despite everything else flourishing around them. Only on a much bigger scale.” He squinted at one of the marble lion heads that decorated the hallway, then up at the ceiling above. “Where do we go first?”
“The client's apartment.” We stepped into the service-elevator area, where Jacob's eyes widened at the sight of a maintenance cart we'd loaded with ghost-hunting gear, including lights, speakers, and traps. “You guys are armed for bear out here. I thought this was just a walk-through tonight.”
“It's whatever the ghosts decide to make it,” I said.
“I guess it kind of always is,” Jacob said.
We rode the elevator up to the sixteenth floor and hurried into the apartment. Jacob whistled in admiration as he looked around Thurmond's studio at the tall clay figures painted in careful detail. “This is all from Spells of Magicia, isn't it? That's Scarletta the Witch with her cursed pitchfork, Tolliford the Semi-Wise Gnome...Holy smack, is that Darkchasm Castle?” He looked at the tower painted to look like black rock, with little skeletons visible inside the barred dungeon windows. “That's the coolest thing I've ever seen!”
“It's nine hundred bucks if you want to buy it,” Stacey said.
“Eh.” Jacob moved on, looking at the other figures, the blue and purple frost dragons, and the fire giants with their hammers and red beards and really big pectoral muscles. “Not a lot of ghost activity in here lately.”
We walked through the apartment. He slowed as he passed Hyacinth's door, then led the way inside, gaping. I couldn't say for sure whether he was detecting something paranormal, or just staring at the insect images decorating the walls, some of them blown up and dia
grammed. A plastic potted tree stood in one corner of the room, and Hyacinth had glued a huge variety of plastic bugs to its leaves and stems.
“There are a lot of quiet spirits in this building,” Jacob said. “They're faint to me, at least in this apartment. I get the sense of a family, generations of a family...some of them trapped here, some of them...” He shook his head. “I'll have to check out the rest of the building. This apartment is a common pathway for the old ghosts...but one of them comes through here the most. He's different. I see him as reddish, hot...and seething with anger. Like he's about to explode.”
Stacey elbowed me and nodded and gave a thumbs up, out of his line of sight, in case I'd failed to notice him saying explode while talking about the ghost of Elton the bomber.
“Why does he come here?”
“I see him chasing...something...through the apartment. I can't tell what.” He shook his head. “Doesn't matter. He's interested in the girl who lives here now. He's getting interested, anyway.”
“Ew! That's not good!” Stacey said.
I looked at the tie-dyed clothes and bright plastic beads strewn around the room. Maybe Hyacinth's choices in clothing and accessories reminded him of Millie when she was a teenager. If Elton was confusing Hyacinth and Millie, then he could be developing a creepy attraction to Hyacinth, or maybe he was considering attacking her. It all depended on how Elton's ghost felt about Millie, but either option gave me the shudders.
“We'll have to deal with him right away, then,” I said. “We can't wait on that.”
We continued on. Jacob stopped in the doorway to the master bedroom and stared around at the incredible amount of Spells of Magicia décor: armored goblins and knights and trolls, pointy-eared ladies in very ribbony dresses, framed posters of magical forests and castles.
“This is great,” Jacob said. “This is how I want my bedroom.”
“For real?” Stacey asked. “Don't you think it kind of...drives one theme into the ground, a little bit? Maybe you could break it up with a nice landscape or something.”
“Like the Valley of Enchanted Fruit?” He pointed to an orchard glowing in the moonlight.
“Maybe,” Stacey said.
“Or the Labyrinth of Kordoc, the Evil Toymaker?” He pointed to a steampunk-looking nightmare maze on another wall, full of clockwork tunnels and black smoke.
“Anything paranormal in here?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jacob said. “By which I mean, no. Not much. The same background echoes of ghosts like I feel everywhere in the building, but nothing's nesting here. Just Fire Guy passing through at high speed from time to time.”
I frowned. Amberly had seen the female ghost, the one we believed to be Millie, emerging from her closet more than once. Maybe Jacob really couldn't sense as much about those who were still alive.
He also didn't have a word to say about the old dining room full of new storage boxes, which was the other place where Amberly encountered the female ghost. This seemed to support the idea that it wasn't exactly a ghost at all, but Millie wandering free of her body.
We managed to finish walking through the client's apartment and cleared out just before they got home, actually passing them in the hallway. They all looked a little damp, Thurmond and Amberly and Hyacinth and Dexter, like they'd been caught in the rain on the way out of the movie theater.
“How did it go?” Thurmond asked us.
“Yeah, did you see any dead people?” Dexter asked. He smiled at Stacey, then looked at the floor and turned red.
“Thurm, why don't you take the kids on in?” Amberly said. “I'll be there in a second.”
“I want to hear what the ghost hunters saw.” Dexter looked at Jacob. “You're new.”
“Dexter, go play Bonecraft,” Amberly said.
“Yeah, you can make some new zombies and chase the vampires with them,” Thurmond said, steering the boy in through their apartment door. Dexter looked back over his shoulder and frowned.
“You, too,” Amberly said to Hyacinth.
“Did you see the red ghost?” Hyacinth looked at Jacob, then at me.
“Yep,” I said. “We're going to do all we can to get rid of him.”
“Go on,” Amberly said, and Hyacinth nodded and reluctantly stepped through the door. Amberly closed it, then looked at me. “Well? What did he see?”
I summed up what we'd figured out about the red ghost being Elton, and possibly confusing Hyacinth for Millie.
“You might want to leave the apartment until we capture him,” I said. “Maybe get a hotel room, or go stay with family.”
“For how long?” she asked.
“I'm not sure. A few days, maybe.”
“A hotel's too expensive. We can pack up tonight, maybe go stay with my sister in Gainesville tomorrow. If her husband lets us. He might, just for a chance to laugh at us.” Amberly sighed. “I'll talk it over with Thurmond.”
“We're going to have a quick dinner break, then walk through the rest of the tower later in the night, when ghosts tend to get more active,” I said.
“It gets really quiet on the weekends,” Amberly said. “There's so few people here, especially since they cut most of the weekend staff. Just lots of empty hallways. But you feel like someone's always there...just around the corner, maybe. Or just behind you, watching you. I can't wait until this estate mess gets straightened up and we can move out of here. Thurmond always trusted old Uncle Vance to handle things right—'Uncle Vance went to business school,' Thurmond would say. 'He knows what he's doing.' I guess he didn't, though. All Vance learned in business school was how to blow lots of money in Atlantic City. And it seems like you wouldn't need business school to learn that.”
I nodded, not sure how to respond, so instead I said, “You might consider sleeping together in the same room for the night. The entities in this hotel are very active.”
“I hear you,” Amberly said. “But I'm just about too tired to do much tonight. We all are.”
“We'll be up all night,” I said. “Just call my cell if anything bothers you, and we'll come right away.”
“Hope we don't have to. Good night.” Amber yawned as she closed the door.
We took Jacob out to dinner, partly as compensation for his long drive, partly just to get ourselves out of the tower for a while.
All of the cute little restaurants in the area were designed around weekday lunch crowds. It was Friday night, though, so this spot near the center of downtown was dark and dead, the office workers gone, and the restaurants and small shops that catered to them were all shuttered with their signs switched off. The skyscrapers around us seemed darker than unusual, many of the interior lights switched off for the weekend; they rose above us like towering monuments to dead emperors.
Pennefort Park stood empty and lifeless, too, inhabited only by statues of Ernest Pennefort and his son Albert, the trees strung with creeping poison ivy, a couple of night birds watching from the limbs. The park had been fairly mediocre by day. By night, it looked like a great place to get mugged by the living, if not attacked by the dead.
The nearest restaurant we could find open was several blocks away, facing the much larger Olympic Park where some part of the Olympics had apparently once happened. It was a crowded place called Park Bar, and I didn't expect much from the food, but it was pretty much one of the best hamburgers I'd had in years. I couldn't really enjoy it, though; I was nervous about the night ahead. And about other things.
“Have you talked to Michael, by any chance?” I asked Jacob, during a rare lull in their conversation. He was eating a chicken sandwich with salsa and guacamole. Stacey leaned over and took a bite of it when he looked at me.
“Not really,” he said. “Or at all. We're not best buds. He doesn't exactly call me up and invite me to play foosball with the firehouse guys. And I don't think to invite him to my Risk games.”
“Okay, I get it. But you're sure Anton Clay isn't possessing him anymore?”
“Clay was gone l
ast time I saw him,” Jacob said. “He left some damage in there, though. Some scar tissue. Michael may not ever be the same.”
“Yeah, I get that feeling.” I sipped my Coke Zero, dumping some extra caffeine into my system for the night.
Jacob seemed at a loss for what to say, and for a while we were stuck with the background chatter of the crowd, lots of people our own age out for a fun Friday night. We blended in pretty well, I suppose; you wouldn't have known we were on our way to face down evil dead things in an old tower later on that night.
“Hey, did you hear they're coming out with a new Killer Poodles movie?” Stacey asked Jacob, apparently trying to lighten the mood. I'd never heard of it, but guessed it was some kind of terrible low-budget horror movie series.
“It's not a sequel, though,” Jacob said glumly. “It's a reboot.”
I grew restless, ready to get away from small talk and back to work. While the ghosts hadn't directly attacked any of the family members yet, I was worried about them, especially Hyacinth and how Jacob said the ghost of Elton was starting to focus on her. Getting rid of the bomber ghost was top priority.
Chapter Twenty-Five
We started on the top floor, in Millie's apartment. I wanted to see whether Jacob sensed the hot ghost up there, too, where we'd already encountered it.
The nurse with the pink-streaked hair and black lipstick was there again. She'd gone with a strawberry-scented chewing gum tonight.
“More security stuff?” she asked, looking dubiously at our cart full of electronics, lights, and speakers as we entered from the hallway.
“Yep,” I said. “This is Jacob. He's our...supervisor, and he's here to check things over for us.”
“Supervisor?” The nurse looked him over with interest, then held out her hand and gave him a wide smile. “I'm Orna. It's a bird thing. My mom was real into birds.”
“Oh, I'm...Jacob. Good to meet you.”
“So what are you planning to get into tonight?” Orna asked, her black-painted nails lingering in his palm while he tried to pull away.
