by J L Bryan
Stacey let in a sharp breath at the sight of him.
“I know you will die,” the little boy said. “Because he sent me to kill you.”
Then he vanished from sight.
An instant later, I felt him on me—freezing cold pressure wrapped around my head and upper body, followed by stiff, cold fingers clamping down on my throat with more force than any little boy should have been able to muster. But Lawrence Pennefort wasn't a little boy, and hadn't been in a long time.
I couldn't call for help in the pitch blackness; he was squeezing me so tight that I couldn't manage to suck in even a tiny breath of the freezing air.
Weird little needles seemed to jab me all over my head and neck, wherever he touched me. Electric jolts, I realized, like the time as a kid when I'd touched my tongue to a battery on a dare.
“Where'd he go?” I heard Stacey ask.
The ghost hadn't grabbed my hand, so I managed to thumb the flashlight to life and flip it upward toward my face, as if I were going to tell a spooky ghost story around a campfire.
The boy remained invisible, but I pointed at my face, my mouth working silently.
“He's got her!” Jacob shouted, and he and Stacey both moved closer to me, blasting me with the high-powered tactical flashlights. A thin, transparent apparition of Lawrence's babyish face appeared in front of me. While his invisible hands were crushing my windpipe, his expression was completely calm and detached, almost blank. He didn't snarl or show anger, and he wasn't gleeful. He looked like a little boy watching something boring on TV, too listless to change the channel.
“Unhand her!” Stacey shouted, jabbing her full-spectrum white-light beam at my face like a glowing sword made of sunlight. “Get back, kid! Leave her alone!”
“Name,” I whispered. Well, I didn't so much whisper it as mouth it, because I had zero air in my throat, and what little remained in my lungs was growing hot and pushy, trying to get out. An uncomfortable pressure was building in my head. I suspected that was the blood failing to circulate beyond the ghost boy's vise-like grip on my throat. His fingers burned me, too, with their weak but constant electrical current.
Anyway, I was trying to remind Stacey to say the spirit's name, as that can help you gain a little power over it, or at least get its attention long enough to maybe stop choking someone for a second.
“Release her!” Jacob commanded, and his voice had a kind of extra power to it, maybe some kind of edge he could give it with his psychic abilities. “I command you...uh...what's his name?”
“It's...Pennefort,” Stacey said. “Something Pennefort. Is it Albert? Vance? Ernest? Criminy. I need Ellie's notebook.” She reached into my jeans pocket and flipped through it, shining her light on the little pages while Jacob kept blasting his at the side of my head.
“Lawrence,” I mouthed soundlessly.
“Aaron?” Jacob said aloud, trying to read my lips. I managed to shake my throbbing, about-to-die head just a little, to one side. “Carrie? Barry?”
“Millie!” Stacey shouted. “Wait, no. So many Penneforts. And Ellie wonders why I hate the historical research side of...here. Labyrinth. I can't read...Lawrence! Lawrence Pennefort, you let her go right now!” Stacey really piled on the angry-mother tone, which was probably wise, as far as getting the boy ghost's attention. A mother who made her son dress in full Buster Brown regalia was a force to be reckoned with, psychologically.
At the same time, Stacey twisted the iris on her flashlight, narrowing and intensifying the beam, and stabbed the light directly through the center of Lawrence's pale, dead-looking face.
He released me, and I took a deep suck of freezing air, which was probably not wise, but I couldn't help myself. My lungs burned with the cold, and I coughed out plumes of frost.
The ghost of Lawrence stood in the shadows several yards away now, atop a heap of crashed furniture and broken dishes. Sparks of electricity floated up along his skin like tiny fireflies, illuminating portions of his face as he perched there staring at us. Much of his face remained in darkness under the floppy brim of his oversized hat.
“Come on, Lawrence,” Jacob said. “You don't want to stay down here forever. You want to be free. You want to move on.”
“I can't,” Lawrence replied, a toddler-ish whine creeping into his voice. “He owns us. He'll punish us.”
“Nobody owns you,” Jacob said. “You're free to leave anytime.”
“You're a liar!” Lawrence's face lit up with glowing worms of electricity that seemed to crawl behind the ghostly tissue of his face and the skull behind it, lighting up both, just a little. “He's going to kill you. Then you'll see.”
“Tell him to come out and face us,” I said. I gestured to Stacey, and she nodded and moved for the biggest item on the cart. “Instead of hiding behind a child.”
“I am not a child!” Lawrence's face lit up with tiny, bright seams of lightning. They crawled up his nose and cheeks and along the underside of his hat brim. More crept down through his puffy, lacy, multi-layered bowtie, moving unnaturally slow for electricity. I kept thinking of glow worms instead.
Lawrence was scowling now, his mouth turned deep down at both corners, teeth bared.
He moved at supernatural speed and was on me in an eyeblink. I raised both my flashlights and turned them on, crossing the beams at his core.
At the same time, Stacey fired up the ghost cannon, the most powerful and hazardous portable light source we have. It can unleash more than a million lumens, comparable to the most powerful spotlights in the world, but the power runs out pretty fast. It can also start fires because of the intense heat it throws off. We generally avoid using it, since we're generally investigating ghosts in creaky old mansions around Savannah, with a lot of aged wood in the structure, and clients prefer us to not burn their houses down in the course of removing their ghosts.
The cannon doesn't help us catch them, anyway. The cannon is for driving them off. I didn't want to get bogged down in a confrontation with any Junior Demon Scouts when our real target still lay ahead.
“Hey, Lawrence! Go into the light,” Stacey advised him, while popping on a pair of solar-eclipse-strength sunglasses.
Then she switched it on and lit up the basement like daytime. Daytime at high noon in the deep desert. I'd closed my eyes and covered them with my hands, and I'm pretty sure I saw my finger bones through my eyelids. It was bright.
At the same time, we hit him with some old-time Catholic monastic music, since his mother, Siobhan, had been an Irish Catholic.
There was no particular response—no screaming, no last-minute taunting, but no attack, either, no icy little-boy fingers clutching my throat, burning me with low-voltage jolts.
Stacey shut down the cannon after ten seconds, but Jacob and I kept our flashlights on.
The boy ghost had vanished from his perch on the rubble-heap. I looked around but didn't see him, and his voice didn't come screeching at us out of the shadows.
“Well?” I asked Jacob.
“He's coming,” Jacob said.
“The little boy?”
“No. We chased him off, but that doesn't matter. The real problem is him.” Jacob pointed.
I followed with my flashlight beam. He was pointing at the door to the long-abandoned custodian's office, where we'd seen the doorman's skeletal ghost in the chair, looking real as life for a moment.
The door was closed tight. MAINTENANCE MANAGER was stenciled on the outside, or had been originally, but most of the letters in the word MAINTENANCE had, somewhat ironically, fallen apart and crumbled away over the years, leaving only traces and discolorations on the door beneath. MANAGER remained quite clear, though.
“Yep,” I said. “That's his spot. His body must be buried below that office, or somewhere very close to it.” I surveyed the wreckage of years past. “Anybody got a bulldozer?”
It turned out nobody did, so we set to work, with much grunting and frustration, pulling and pushing aside old dining chairs with moth
-eaten padding, a scalloped-back couch with two busted legs, and then a fire-damaged desk. I wondered if it had been in the lobby when that bomb went off.
The only upside was that the haunted basement was freezing cold, so that kept us cool during all the heavy labor.
“Come on, Clyde!” Stacey shouted at the closed door at one point, as she was moving aside a small washbasin on a pedestal. “Come out here and face us! What are you doing in there all by yourself, anyway?”
The door didn't budge.
“He was never shy before,” Stacey grumbled as we continued heaving furniture.
When we'd finally cleared a wide enough path for the cart, we approached the closed door, single file. I kept my flashlight on the concrete floor, watching for debris that could trip us up. Broken glass and porcelain lay everywhere.
I reached the door first, then hesitated.
“Should we knock?” Stacey crowded in close behind me and pointed her flashlight around me at the door.
“Why be polite?” I reached out and turned the handle.
Or tried to, anyway. It was locked. I fished out the old skeleton key, inserted it, and turned.
Nothing. Still locked.
“Okay, it looks like this is a picker. Stacey, keep your light on the lock for me.” I knelt in front of the door and took the set of lock picks from my utility belt. They were a professional thief's tool set, but always useful for detective work. Especially when you find an old locked room in a basement full of moans and groans and screams, and nobody has the key. That kind of thing happens.
I moved in, probing the old mechanism, hoping it wasn't rusted out or...
“Frozen,” I said. “It feels frozen. It won't budge—”
Then the handle rattled. Before I could get away, the door flew open. The edge of it bashed me in the face and sent me tumbling back. I sprawled on shattered dishes and glassware, stars bursting behind my eyes. Not my lucky night.
“Ellie!” Stacey jumped after me to check the damage to my head, and I wanted to tell her not to worry about me right then, to turn back and focus on whatever had slammed the door into me, whatever was emerging from the room.
But I was stunned, and unable to concentrate properly, unable to make my mouth move.
“Get back!” Jacob shouted, raising his light toward the figure.
Clyde, looking like a beefy middle-aged doorman with a gray pallor rather than a skeleton full of concrete, touched the brim of his hat when he saw Jacob. “I see ye've brought a friend. And ye see me verra well, don't ye? Ye've got the ken, haven't ye? I could use one of ye in me stable.”
“I'm not a horse,” Jacob said, looking annoyed.
“I've ridden tougher men than you.” Clyde moved closer to him. “Ye'll be an easy break.”
With Stacey's help, I was finally sitting up. Against her protests, I fought my way to my feet. Blood was leaking from my nose and didn't seem to have any plans of stopping anytime soon. I swayed a little, but kept my balance.
“You have a right to be angry, Mister Clyde,” I said. “I know Ernest Pennefort had you killed, and he buried you in the wet concrete when they laid the foundation for this building. He probably thought that would hide the body forever. And it's kept your bones hidden this long. But not your spirit. Of course you were angry. But you can't keep on like this. You can't keep seeking revenge generation after generation. It's unjust.”
“I canna?” He smiled, revealing broken teeth with blobs of dried concrete between them. “And why do ye think ye can tell me what I can't and won't do, little lass? Ye'll be mine soon enough. Ye all will.” He looked up at the ceiling and slowly smiled. His teeth were broken and riddled with concrete. “I'll feed well tonight.”
“It's not about revenge anymore, is it?” I asked. “It's about you growing more powerful. You reach out to the children and trick them into coming to you, into dying at your hands. You leave enough of the family alive so that they can keep breeding. Like a herd of sheep.”
“And I am their shepherd.” Clyde looked at me with his broken-toothed smile. “Even now, the shearing and butchering begins. Yet you're all the way down here. You're going to miss the whole show, sweet girl.”
Then Clyde was gone.
“What...was that?” Stacey asked. She pointed her flashlight into the custodian's office, finding nothing. “Where'd he go?”
“Upstairs,” I said. “He waited for us to come down here, and now he's going up there after the family. Let's move!”
While we ran to the door, I tried to call Amberly on my cell phone, to warn her that something might be happening, though I wasn't sure what. My phone couldn't find a signal, though, maybe because we were in the basement.
We rolled our cart of gear back to the service elevator, and Stacey repeatedly jabbed the UP button while I tried to get a signal.
“Doesn't look like the elevator's listening to us,” Jacob said.
I watched the floor indicator above the service elevator. The elevator car climbed from the first floor to the second...to the third...moving slowly, not responding to Stacey's frantic button pushing.
“Come on, come on,” she muttered.
The elevator reached the sixteenth floor, where our clients lived. It stopped there.
And it didn't budge.
“We can't keep waiting. Let's run up to the lobby level and take a passenger elevator.” I reached for the ghost cannon, with its heavy backpack power supply.
“Let me get that,” Jacob said.
“No, you focus on using your psychic-voice-thingy,” I said, while shrugging on the backpack. “I'll focus on ghost blasting.”
“We'd better focus on moving our feet,” Stacey said.
“Grab the texts and shove them in your backpack, Stacey,” I said. “The old books, everything.”
“Do we have time?” Stacey asked.
“It's the only connection we have with some of these spirits.”
“I'll take care of it.” Jacob took Stacey's backpack from her, then carefully slid the super-early-edition of Spells of Magicia inside.
“Yeah, I bet you will,” Stacey said. “You'll probably cuddle the book to sleep later tonight, too.”
“If that's what it needs.” Jacob moved the Irish nursery rhyme book into the backpack, the loose pages of The Great Horned Owl, some of the old files, and Vance's journal of his occult activities.
He shouldered the backpack himself. Stacey took the backpack I'd originally been wearing, and our game of musical backpacks was complete.
The three of us hurried up the stairs, leaving the cart and most of our gear behind. The ghost cannon slowed me down pretty badly, but we only had to climb two flights to the lobby level.
We jogged up the hallway from the rear maintenance area of the first floor out to the lobby as fast as we could—as fast as I could, really, because the others had to keep waiting for me. I glanced into the empty restaurant as we passed it, as if expecting ghost waiters and hostesses to come wandering out.
I huffed and puffed toward the closet-sized passenger elevators.
“I could carry that—” Jacob offered, reaching for my super-heavy gear. I also had my utility belt on with as much as I could carry; I was not happy about abandoning our cart of gear downstairs. The best-laid plans, and all that.
“Got it,” I grunted back. A marble lion head on the wall seemed to glare as we passed.
We reached the gilded-looking doors to the passenger elevators, and Stacey pressed the UP button several times.
“This one's on floor sixteen,” I said, looking up, then over at the other one. “They're both sitting on the sixteenth floor.”
“Not if my thumb has anything to say about it.” Stacey rammed the button harder.
“I don't think it's going to help,” Jacob said.
“An elevator has to come,” I said, shifting uncomfortably under the weight on my back. “It has to.”
As it turned out, it didn't have to. The indicator arrows above the elevato
rs pointed stubbornly to XVI, with no sign of budging.
“It's the ghost,” I said. “Clyde. He's controlling all the elevators. He's going to make us take the stairs up sixteen floors.”
“He's more evil than I ever suspected,” Jacob said.
“Race you guys!” Stacey said cheerfully, and I tried not to scowl at her. “Jacob, it'll be great practice for all those steps at Macchu Piccu!”
“You guys are going to Macchu Piccu?” I reluctantly trudged toward the stairs.
“Heck yes!” Stacey beamed.
“Eventually,” Jacob agreed, more or less.
“It's one of the top hiking destinations on my barrel list,” Stacey said. She held the stairway door for me as I stepped inside. These were the public stairs, with nice wood paneling and little crystal light fixtures, not like the wider concrete back stairs we'd taken up from the basement. We passed a large, ornate ventilation grate with a curlicue design, and I couldn't help thinking of what Jacob had said, about Clyde's ghost whispering to Lawrence through the grate in the little boy's room: Come along, boy. There's toys in the basement like ye've never seen.
“You mean bucket list?” I asked Stacey.
“Oh, I have way too many to fit in a bucket.”
I shook my head and started for the stairs.
For half a second, I considered calling in Pauly, the uniformed rent-a-warm-body at the front desk, for some added backup with a flashlight, or at least as a mule to help carry some gear. He was hardly prepared to face this level of paranormal risk, though, so either he'd end up slowing us down, or he'd end up in danger that was way over his head. Way, way over his head. So I did him a favor and left him alone. We were already lucky he wasn't pressing battery charges against Stacey.
I climbed the stairs, my backbone groaning with each step under the weight of the backpack and the ghost cannon in my hands. One stair at a time, I reminded myself.
I struggled my way up to the first landing, then turned and struggled my way up to the next. One floor down. Fifteen to go before we reached our clients.
“This isn't going to work.” I knelt, set down the ghost cannon, and shrugged off the backpack. “Jacob, let's switch. I'll take the book bag. Sorry.”
