The Tower

by J L Bryan

  “Just check things out, I guess,” Jacob said. “You know. Just a standard checking. Checklist. Sort of auditing the procedures here.” He made large, meaningless gestures with his hands.

  “We may need to set up some extra equipment in the ballroom,” I said.

  “Not near my patient.” She looked over at me sharply, and Jacob took the opportunity to free his hand. Stacey shook her head at him, frowning.

  “It just happens to be the room on the floor with the greatest potential for external breach,” I said. “Glass on three sides.”

  “They think someone's gonna break in through the windows? On the seventeenth floor?” Orna looked doubtful.

  “It's, you know, anti-terrorism,” I said. “Standard anti-terrorism stuff. They pay extra for it, so we have to do it. But we're not going to set up anything near the patient.”

  “I better keep an eye on all this,” Orna said, but her eyes were actually on Jacob, and she moved close to him as he and Stacey rolled the cart toward the ballroom. We didn't actually have more gear to set up, but it was easier than explaining we were there for a psychic reading.

  Millie, not surprisingly, remained unconscious in the hospital bed. Orna took up a post near the bed and the medical equipment, none of which really belonged among the room's expensive dark woods and marble trim. The heart monitor beeped, low and slow and regular.

  Jacob walked slowly around the perimeter of the room, his eyes closed, holding out one hand.

  “What's he doing?” Orna asked me.

  “Working,” Stacey said. “Keep quiet and let him concentrate.”

  Orna frowned, watching Jacob as he moved, slowly, in a wide spiral, closing in from the windows and walls of the room toward the hospital bed at the center, where she was standing. Then he opened his eyes and looked right at her.

  “Like anything you see?” Orna asked.

  “Okay, come on,” Stacey said. “Are you really flirting with him right now?”

  “Are you really dating your own supervisor?” Orna asked Stacey. “I bet that violates company policy.”

  “We live on the edge,” Jacob said.

  “I bet you do,” Orna said, smiling at him.

  “I'm having a little trouble concentrating with you here,” he said to the nurse.

  “I'm glad it's not just me,” she said, widening her smile a little more.

  “Would you mind stepping out for just a minute?”

  “Oh. Gotcha.” She frowned as she walked past Stacey. “He's a little short and scrawny for me, anyway. But if that's what you're into.” She closed the door behind her, thankfully.

  “Was she for real?” Stacey asked.

  “Probably just bored,” I said. “I doubt she's really that into him.”

  “Thanks,” Jacob said.

  “Aw, did Ellie hurt your feelings?” Stacey asked. “Your feelings for that nurse?”

  “I don't have...I'm just trying to...work here.”

  “Seriously, let him concentrate, Stacey,” I said. “We have a long night ahead.”

  “Yes, we do.” Stacey crossed her arms and watched Jacob.

  He closed his eyes and moved his hand through the air. He wasn't far from the bedside now.

  “There's something that stands right here,” Jacob said. “Like a sentry, pacing and watching. I see him as...red. Burning red. He's guarding her, protecting...maybe. Definitely watching and waiting. Pacing.”

  “Is he here now?” I asked.

  “He was kind of tuned out until we approached this unconscious lady.” Jacob inched closer to Millie, then stopped. “Yep. He's responding to me getting closer to her.”

  “Is he trying to protect her?” Stacey asked.

  “I don't know. He's angry. Territorial. Kind of...very reptile-brain at this point. He's gripping tight to her, he has no intention of going. He's worried I'm going to...interfere.”

  “Interfere how?” I asked.

  “With whatever he's doing, or trying to do. He really wants me to back away from the lady...he keeps calling her the girl...but I assume he means...” Jacob took a few steps back. “Yep. He's sort of shrinking back now, watching us. Watching her, mostly.”

  “Can you sense anyone else in the room?” I asked.

  Jacob was quiet for a minute. “I feel like some of the dead come and go from time to time, like a family of local ghosts...but he's the only one who stays here in this room.”

  “What about her?” I nodded at Millie. “Is she here?”

  “I...she's alive. I don't know things about living people,” Jacob said.

  “Not even when they're out of body?”

  “Oh, really?” He looked down at her more carefully. “I'm still not getting anything. If she's wandering outside her body, she's not doing it right now, or else she's keeping herself hidden from me.” He shrugged.

  “Is the burning red ghost a danger to her? Or to anyone living?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah,” Jacob said. “He could lash out. He's constantly on edge, ready to blow up.”

  “Ohh!” Stacey elbowed me and pointed at Jacob. “See?”

  “You're sure you don't feel another presence in this room?” I asked, hoping for some word about Millie's condition. “Nothing?”

  “Sorry.”

  I reached inside my jacket and drew out the old necklace of beads and shells I'd found in Millie's childhood bedroom. I let it dangle in the air. “Can you tell me anything about this?”

  “That's psychometry,” Jacob said, making no move to touch it. “Not really my area of expertise...oh! He cares about it.” Jacob turned toward the hospital bed. I thought I could sense heat from that direction. “Yeah, he wants that. He's starting to move toward you...”

  “Good,” I said. I tucked the necklace into my palm, then took a ghost trap from the cart. It was a standard type, a cylinder of leaded glass lined with electrically charge mesh, and a layer of clear insulating plastic on the outside.

  I dropped the necklace into the open end of the trap and held it out toward the hot spot. “Is he still interested?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but...he's cautious. There are a lot of living people in this room right now.”

  “Okay. Stacey?” I nodded, and Stacey gave me a little salute before reaching down to the lower level of the rolling cart.

  Jacob helped her to heave out the heavy stamper, the pneumatic device that could slam the ghost trap shut, either remotely or in response to sensors inside the trap. Typically, the trap was triggered by a combination of sudden electromagnetic activity and a drop in temperature.

  “Set it to automatic,” I said. “Hot instead of cold.”

  “You got it, captain,” Stacey replied. She backed away once the sensors were on and the trap was loaded into the stamper. The lid was ready to slam down as soon as Elton's ghost entered the trap.

  Then we left the room quietly, turning out all the lights.

  “Y'all done?” Orna asked, looked up from her magazine in the next room. She sat next to a monitor where Millie's vitals displayed in real time.

  “Yeah...you might want to stay out of there as much as you can, until we get back to you,” I said.

  “Right. Because of the ghosts.” She looked back at her magazine. Stacey and Jacob continued past her, rolling the cart along, and she didn't spare him a glance this time.

  “You're really not bothered by the ghosts?” I asked. “Or you don't believe us?”

  She shrugged. “They aren't bothering me. My grandmother died right after I was born, and she used to come into my room and sing me to sleep until I was five or six. I still remember. Toward the end, she was kind of falling apart, you know, a lot of holes in her body. It got to where I could see the moonlight through her. I asked her to stop visiting me, and she did. I kind of feel bad about that sometimes. But I was starting to see her skull through her skin, you know?”

  “Okay.” I hadn't expected all of that. “Have a good night, then. You can call my cell if you need help. We set a t
rap for a ghost in there.” I handed her my card.

  “You can do that?” She tucked the card into her magazine as if intending to use it for a bookmark. “Trap ghosts?”

  “Sometimes. Not as often as we'd like.”

  “Man, you guys are good security people. Are you from the same company as that cheesy idiot who works the front desk here? The one who plays 'Summer of '69' every time I walk by?”

  “Nope, totally different company,” I said. “No affiliation at all.”

  “I actually kinda hit him in the face last night. Accidentally,” Stacey said, while opening the door out of the apartment. Jacob wheeled the cart of gear out into the hall for her. A real gentleman, that guy.

  “Seriously?” Orna asked. “He told me he got a black eye from saving an elderly lady from a mugging. Which I didn't believe.”

  “Nah, he just startled me.” Stacey followed Jacob out. “I wasn't getting mugged. And I'm not that elderly.”

  “Have a good night,” I said to the nurse, who shrugged and went back to her reading, blissfully indifferent to our paranormal work.

  We lingered in the hallway for a bit, watching the video feeds from the ballroom. The ghost of Elton Roberts faded in and out of view on the thermal camera, pulsing hot as he approached the trap with the necklace inside, then cooling as he backed away. He was clearly interested in the jewelry, but he was being cautious and not straying too close.

  “Maybe he gave it to her,” Stacey murmured. “He was her boyfriend, right?”

  “Don't feed the psychics,” Jacob said.

  “Oops. Well, we can get moving for now. The trap will ping me if it goes off.” Stacey pulled on her headset.

  Then we headed across the hall, to the dark faux-hunting-lodge apartment of Thurmond's uncle Vance, the recently deceased patriarch of the family. I expected Jacob to find a good bit there, considering how Vance had obviously been experimenting with the occult and speaking with the ghosts of the tower in his final months.

  It turned out my expectations were completely accurate.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Wow,” Jacob said, as we walked through Vance's apartment. Wooden paneling and heavy overhead beams created that hunting-lodge feel. The leather couches and a lingering scent of pipe tobacco lent it a clubby atmosphere. “This is not what I expected up here.” He skirted around a bearskin rug—it looked real to me, and probably was—and soon found his way to the sunken fireplace room. He stared at the granite-slab fireplace flanked by marble jackal-dogs, as if a fire were churning in its cold wrought-iron grate.

  “See something?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Obviously this guy was into...all kinds of creepypasta.” Jacob said, pointing to the open book with the woodcut of the man kneeling in the graveyard, a spirit rising from the coffin in front of him and holding out its hand in cold benediction. “Or whatever they called it before the internet. Creepy culture. But he did a lot more than read. This room is thick with all kinds of cold, dark, rotten energy...imagine spiderwebs everywhere. Only they're thicker, and heavier, and kind of goopy like animals guts.”

  “Ew,” Stacey said.

  “Sorry. This was a major crossroads. A lot of spirit activity here, a lot of...unnatural attempts to summon the dead.” Jacob peered into the Spirit Mirror. “Yeah, this thing's a bad idea. Y'all haven't been using it, have you?”

  “Just Ellie,” Stacey said. “She comes up here alone, after midnight, and puts her fingers in the hand grooves, and she invites evil demons to take over her body. It hasn't worked so far, but she's trying.”

  “Ha ha,” I said. “We haven't been using it, but we've been recording it on camera.” I nodded at the tripod tucked back in a corner, next to a cabinet displaying some kind of antique bow and arrow.

  “Someone's been using it heavily, and with a lot of energy and focus,” Jacob said. “And it's basically opened a door to the other side. I bet spirit activity has been much busier since they started monkeying with this. And they're still trying to make it wider, I think.”

  “Who is?” I asked.

  “Your client, or whoever's been using this thing. They need to stop right away.”

  “Do you think it's been very recent? Could it have been...days ago? Weeks? Months?”

  “Definitely not months,” he said. “The last few days. Someone's been talking to the dead a lot through here...particularly this older guy, I see him as badly burned, maybe he died in a fire? Or wait, no...he was crushed?” Jacob shook his head. “I see one guy standing behind the other guy. Maybe the crushed guy is controlling the burned guy, like a puppet, making him speak...” He abruptly turned away from the Spirit Mirror. “This is intense.”

  “You're sure someone's been using it in the last few days?” I asked, feeling confused. Vance had been dead for months. Had Amberly or Thurmond been using the Spirit Mirror? It seemed like they would have mentioned it, somewhere in the course of our days-long paranormal investigation.

  “Yep. But they've been using for a long time,” Jacob said. “In an addictive way, even. Obsessively.”

  “Wow, these things work way better than most talk-to-the-dead toys,” Stacey said. “Not that I've tried that many, but my cousin had this black skull phone, and you could ask it yes or no questions, and a recording would play, supposedly a ghost, and say things like 'Not Likely' or 'Never!' Kinda scared me. It was old, too. You could hear the cassette tape click and rewind inside.”

  “Can you tell us anything about the person who's been using the Spirit Mirror?” I asked.

  “Nah, sorry. Only the effects it's had on the dead. Which has been stirring them up, waking them up, and inviting them out. I can't tell you who did it or why. But they should definitely stop.” Jacob looked around the dark, sunken room, trimmed in wood and stone. “The dead are watching us now. They know we're here, studying them. I see a small crowd of them, like shadows. They're all silent, just watching. Like maybe they're bound and gagged. Or maybe they just have nothing to say. Let's just step out of here for a minute, if you don't mind...” Jacob moved toward the door.

  “Wait. I need you to describe every individual you see,” I told him.

  Jacob looked at the empty fireplace. “They're thin and weak ghosts. Just shades, I want to call them. And they're all kind of tied together in a bundle. I guess there's a couple of guys, couple of females, couple of small ones that could be kids. Maybe they're family. They aren't presenting very strongly...and now they're retreating, because they know I'm seeing them and talking about them...they're gone. None of them were very clear.”

  I nodded. Maybe they represented the lives that Clyde's ghost had taken over the years, like Ernest and Siobhan, their children Lawrence and Catherine, Albert's daughter Miriam who'd died at ten, Albert's son Marcus, who'd died as a young man, leaving Thurmond fatherless. Maybe Vance, too, who'd recently died of heart failure like his grandfather Ernest. They would be weak and frail, most likely, fed upon by Clyde's ghost until they were just a faint echo of energy, trapped here, unable to escape the place where they'd lived and died. Maybe they were the black mist we'd seen on seventeen, too weak to fully appear, their voices just a cluster of indecipherable whispers.

  If Ernest and Siobhan had indeed murdered her first husband, then Clyde's revenge on them was understandable. But if he'd also been involved in the deaths of their children, and their children's children, that was getting into serious malevolent-ghost territory. He'd kept feeding on the family, generation after generation.

  Maybe Clyde had been growing weaker, though, or less focused on revenge. If he'd been responsible for Vance's death, he'd at least allowed Vance to live to an old age first, and his adult son Grady was still alive, though possibly that was because he'd lived his life thousands of miles away from the tower. Millie, too, had lived to an old age and was still technically alive, though it sounded like she'd been disturbed most of her life, maybe more sensitive to the presences in the building than other family members.

  The la
st family death that seemed like it might be caused by ghosts was Thurmond's father, Marcus, falling down the stairs to the basement back in 1984. Had Clyde gone dormant since then, feeling that his revenge against his murderers and their family must be complete?

  Or had he waited, biding his time, letting the family grow like a farmer watching his crop...waiting until there were more souls to harvest? Was he evolving into something demonic?

  Jacob led the way through the rest of the apartment, shaking his head. “Why do people go out of their way to summon ghosts? I spend half my life just trying to get the ghosts to shut up. They have a lot of time on their hands, you know. No jobs, no sleep, just wandering aimlessly, repeating their most intense memories, looking for living people to harass...So it's just two apartments up here?”

  “Oh, there are a couple of other rooms,” Stacey said, with a sly grin. “Ready to see them?”

  “Why are you saying it like that?” Jacob followed her out to the central hallway.

  We opened the small, out-of-place closet, removed the shelves, and pushed open the hidden doorway to the darkness beyond.

  “Flashlights,” Stacey said, passing one to Jacob.

  He clicked on his light and looked through at the walled-off stretch of hallway behind the closet. “Interesting place to put a hall. Somebody might want to have a word with their interior designer. Why would you...oh, it's haunted, isn't it?”

  I shrugged. “Want me to go first?”

  “I got it.” He ducked through. Stacey and I followed, leaving our cart of gear out in the hall since it wasn't going to fit through the small closet.

  He looked in at the room that had belonged to Catherine, where she'd lived and died, and he closed his eyes. “There are a lot of pictures hanging in this room,” he said. “I don't want to be too influenced by them...”

  He wandered toward the middle of the room, holding out his hands, splaying his fingers like they were radio antennae searching for signals.

  “There's a female presence here,” he said. “Very weak. Maybe one of those bundle of tangled, starved-looking figures I saw upstairs. She died slowly and painfully. Something came in here at night and fed on her...something that crawled its way up from deep below, something from underground. It sensed her weakness and crawled up to feed on her energy, like a leech, only a leech gets full eventually. He fed on her night after night, making himself stronger until she died. And she's still here. And she's still his. What little there is of her...he still feeds on her.”