Darkside Blues: An Occult Thriller (The Ulrich Files Book 3)

by Ambrose Ibsen

  Ulrich wasn't usually one to turn down money, however in this case he couldn't accept. "No, that's fine. I'll collect when all is said and done, Mr. Poole. Because I can't be sure of how things will go, I'd hate to fleece you. When the work is done and you're satisfied with the results I'll accept my payment."

  Shaking Ulrich's hand once again, Michael led him to the door. "That's a stand-up thing to do, Mr. Ulrich. The mark of a true professional. You can be sure that, when this is done, I'll be referring all of my former associates to you for their investigative needs. I have a lot of friends in this city, important folks, who will really take your business to new heights."

  "Thank you, I appreciate that." Ulrich stepped out onto the porch and stiffened at the first wave of cold like a frozen sprig of grass. "I'll be in touch."

  As he turned and started for the Passat, Ulrich couldn't help but notice the slight, leering form of Meredith in the hallway behind Michael. She'd been standing just beyond the foyer, watching him leave with a grimace. He made a mental note to speak to her in private later on and chose to ignore the daggers in her gaze as he marched down the frozen lawn and jumped into the car. There was something about that woman, about her reaction to talk of Vivian's death, that sent up a red flag.

  7

  "Home again, home again," muttered Ulrich, stepping into the living room and locking the door behind him. The apartment was nice and toasty, and as he stripped off his coat he flopped down on the sofa beside the cat, who was lounging happily in a nest of folded blankets. "You've got the right idea," he said to the feline. "It's too damn cold out there for my tastes. You wouldn't much like it." Sitting up, he sought out the television remote and switched on the evening news.

  The night was young. Once he'd spent a bit of time warming his bones and making a light dinner, Ulrich figured he'd start researching the death of Vivian Poole. It wouldn't take him long to get ahold of all the articles detailing the incident from the time--at least, those that Michael hadn't managed to block from publication through his connections. After that, he'd likely take a trip back out to the Prescott Hotel and have a look around. He knew there was probably a way inside the building, and if at all possible, he wanted to get a look at the interior of the place, and of the roof where Vivian had spent her final moments among the living.

  As he'd told Michael, there was no playbook for cases like these. Ulrich was no expert on supernatural phenomena and so often made things up as he went. The spirit he was tasked with tracking down in this case was rather fond of walking around downtown, and so he'd have to go and meet her there, on her own turf. Only there, he reckoned, would he unearth the answers his client sought.

  Searching his cabinets, Ulrich decided on a dinner of sardines, crackers and mineral water. Finger foods, he figured, would allow him to work while he ate. Removing two tins of smoked sardines from the cupboard, Ulrich pried one open and preemptively dropped a few of the oily fish into Beardsley's bowl. As though he were a psychic, the cat dashed into the room and began to devour them with relish. Carrying his laptop over to the card table he used for dining, Ulrich powered it up and cracked the seal on a bottle of Perrier.

  "When this case is over, remind me to pick up a new computer," he mumbled to the cat as the old laptop groaned and coughed to life. The glow of the screen seemed pale and sickly to him, and as of recent its ordinarily feeble performance had become even worse, if that was possible. The fans within the plastic casing whirred and clicked until he was finally able to log into it and pull up a web browser. Beardsley returned to the living room and rubbed against Ulrich's legs in a play for more fish as the investigator helped himself to a handful of crackers.

  Typing "Vivian Poole" into a search engine did very little, to the investigator's surprise. The obituary was there, however the remaining results all appeared unrelated. Taking a pull from the bottle of Perrier, Ulrich pulled up digital scans of the Toledo Blade's December 25th and 26th issues from ten years previous, and succeeded only in finding short blurbs about the incident, scrubbed of identifying details.

  Quite literally, the suicide outside the Prescott Hotel was referred to in two distinct clippings as an "incident". No indication of death, nor the names of involved parties, were mentioned. In both cases, the articles made mention of the hotel and of a disturbance that occurred outside on Christmas Day. Emergency personnel were called, but the exact nature of the incident was not described. Ulrich could hardly believe his eyes. Michael had copped to having his friends at the paper scrub the news of his daughter's suicide, however he'd never imagined that such a thing could be done to this degree. It appeared that Michael had considerable pull in the city; more than he'd been letting on.

  Next, for curiosity's sake, Ulrich typed Michael's name into the search engine.

  The dearth of results was positively shocking to him.

  For a man with such influence, there should have been at least a few pages of results for Michael Poole. What turned up instead were a couple of token articles about his businesses and a long-ignored social media page that featured generic vacation photos. There was nothing else, though in this nothingness, Ulrich got a gut reaction that something indeed existed.

  Someone like Michael, with means and connections, should have had a considerable digital footprint. The lack of hits seemed to point to a coordinated scrubbing of search results.

  Ulrich leaned over his laptop, chewing a thumbnail as he tried to make sense of this.

  Maybe it's just a coincidence, he told himself. Maybe he's technologically inept, or maybe...

  Maybe he still didn't know his client as well as he thought he did.

  Closing the laptop, Ulrich focused for a while on his food. When he'd had his fill of the sardines, he gave the rest to Beardsley and nursed his mineral water. He couldn't say just why the lack of search results for both Vivian and Michael gave him a bad vibe, but it did. He'd searched for the two of them in the hopes of finding some answers, but had been given only a handful of questions and suspicions for his trouble. Michael had already lied to him once about the nature of this case; who could say whether he was being completely truthful now? Did Michael have something to hide?

  Standing up, the investigator began pacing around the living room. He glanced outside his window, finding a thin veil of snow fluttering in the wind. It was a frigid world out there. For the moment he was safe and warm inside his apartment, but soon enough he'd have to venture out into the savage cold to seek out Vivian. He tried to picture the woman on that rooftop, her body flecked with fresh snow, her cheeks red and chest heaving, before crawling out of her wheelchair and lifting herself over the edge...

  The sound of breaking glass spooked him out of his unpleasant imaginings. The bottle of Perrier on the table had fallen over, cracked, and was now sputtering carbonated mineral water. The seepage quickly overcame his laptop, washing across the vents in the bottom and bringing the thing to a grinding halt.

  Quite literally, the sleeping laptop made a series of terrible popping noises before falling completely silent.

  He knew even before he'd whisked it off of the table that he'd never get it to turn on again. "Damn it! Damn it all!" He tipped the computer on its side and watched as a steady stream of fizzy water dripped out from between its seams. The damn cat, he realized, must have knocked the bottle over while he was busy daydreaming and then dashed off.

  Furious, Ulrich scanned the room. "All right, you savage. You've crossed a line this time. Where are you?" He marched around the living room, glanced under the table and sofa, but couldn't find him. His search took him into the kitchen next, where the cat was stationed in front of his bowl, working over the last of the sardines Ulrich had given him.

  The investigator paused, setting his waterlogged laptop on the counter. "Y-you're still eating?" He looked behind him, to the card table, which was still covered in water and broken glass. "Did you break the bottle, you ingrate?"

  The cat looked up at him as though that were the most rid
iculous question Ulrich had ever asked, and then returned to eating.

  Choosing to go back out into the cold was the hardest thing Ulrich had done all day. Slipping back into his coat and locking up the apartment, he trudged down to the parking lot and started up the car, giving it a good five minutes to heat up before wheeling out of the lot and hopping onto Monroe Street. Traffic had thinned out quite a lot since his last jaunt on the road, and with a bit of finagling he'd managed to find a local station that wasn't playing Christmas music. Nevertheless, he couldn't seem to relax.

  Something was eating at him.

  His laptop had been ruined and he still wasn't sure what'd happened. Once he'd ruled out Beardsley as the culprit, he'd decided that the most likely scenario was that he'd somehow bumped the table while pacing. He had a good deal of trouble buying that explanation however, because all the while he felt, with niggling insistence, the suspicion that he was overlooking something in the otherwise homey scenery of his apartment.

  Or someone.

  Driving down the dark streets, Ulrich didn't feel alone in the car. There were hardly any other cars on the road, and repeated glances into the other seats proved them all vacant, as expected, but still the weight of another presence seemed to press into him. If he focused hard, he almost fancied he could hear their breathing.

  No, you paranoid idiot. It's just the sound of the heater, nothing more.

  Try as he might to deny it, Ulrich was beginning to worry that his new apartment was haunted. Even if one were to ignore this newest incident, there were others, similarly baffling in nature, that gave him pause. Certainly a good many of them could be attributed to the mischievous cat, but not all. Often he'd encounter pockets of unnatural cold in his rooms, despite the newness of the heating system. Other times he'd hear footsteps from the living room while laying down for bed. He told himself that it was merely the sounds of the neighbors, and it may well have been, but in those moments when he was gripped by fear in the darkness of the night, his mind couldn't help but wander.

  I'd much prefer to deal with one ghost at a time. Had he opened himself up to some kind of supernatural attack because of the work he'd been taking on as of recent? If in fact there was something wrong with the new place, then how might he set about fixing it? These and other questions accosted him as he neared the Star Diner.

  Don't get carried away, he thought, rolling to a stop and parking at the curb. He looked out at the Star Diner, half of the letters in the neon sign out front blinking weakly in the cold. Peering into the windows, he noticed there wasn't a soul to be seen inside, aside from the waitress and a couple of kitchen staff. But that wasn't where he was headed. His destination lay farther ahead. Enough of this ghost talk. It'll only make you jumpy. You're going into a shuttered hotel, and that jumpiness could get your dumb ass hurt.

  The Passat powered down. Sitting in the driver's seat, collar of his woolen coat up next to his ears, Ulrich tried to get his fill of the warm air. Then, quickly, so as not to lose his nerve, he threw open the door, stepped out of the car, and started walking towards the Prescott.

  Ten years ago, almost to the day, Vivian Poole had thrown herself from the roof of that hotel and died. Just what did he hope to find there, after all of these years? Ulrich kept his head low to keep the wind out of his face and stared down at the sidewalk, retracing the steps he'd taken earlier that evening when first trailing Vivian.

  Or, perhaps more accurately, Vivian's ghost.

  Gulping down his nerves, Ulrich wondered if the old building might yield some clue. It had been closed for a long while, and any relevant evidence had probably been scrubbed from the scene by the passage of time. But there was one thing, he realized, that might still exist there.

  Vivian's spirit.

  Why, he wondered, would the ghost walk the same trail between the Diner and the hotel each evening if not because that building held some significance to her? In his previous dealings with the supernatural, Ulrich had noticed a tendency for the spirits of the dead to remain in the places where they'd died. Such was the case with Dr. Siegfried Klein at the infirmary in Moonville, and so too was it with the spirit of Veronica Price at Exeter House. It was early, perhaps, to declare this a hard and fast rule of the dead, but Ulrich felt fairly confident that his search of the Prescott would yield something of note.

  The cold bit into him. He walked as fast as he could, pounding the pavement underfoot, and glanced up only occasionally to see how much further the hotel was. To his dismay, it never seemed to get any closer. Soldiering on, the cold reached through his slacks and left his legs numb. He began to jog, avoiding the iciest sections of sidewalk and wincing away the burning in his cheeks.

  Finally the sidewalk opened up into an intersection, and across from him stood the shadowed facade of the Prescott. The closer he got to it, the more its immensity blocked out the chilling wind; something for which the shivering investigator was incredibly thankful. It seemed inconceivable to him that the abandoned building would not have been utilized by the city's homeless population sometime over the years, and so he set off in search of a side door or low window that might have been previously forced.

  The main entrance was out of the question. A quick rattle of the rusted chains that held the doors shut proved them too sturdy to break. Around the corner, a cloudy glass door was fastened with a similar length of chain, and it, too, would have been too difficult to force. Ulrich's break came when, navigating the building's rear, he discovered a basement-level window sitting very slightly ajar. It was an old-fashioned style of window, the kind bound in a thick, metal frame, with two handles that pushed outward. Kneeling down and tracing the ice cold outline of the window with his fingers, he found there was just enough space for him to stick a digit or two in.

  Slowly, so as to keep himself from getting his fingers crushed, Ulrich pried the window open. It gave with a terrible creak, and when he let go it remained open, the hinge locking out. Peering through the open window, he found he could make out very little of what awaited him within. It was a space pregnant with darkness, and the air that escaped was fouled by dust. Taking out his cell phone, Ulrich activated the flashlight app and stuck it just inside the window.

  A drop of some six feet separated him from what appeared to be a concrete floor. There was nothing else to see from this point, but he was pleased, at least, that he wasn't going in blind. Glancing up and down the street, he made sure that there were no passersby to see him breaking in and then began the difficult work of managing his lanky frame through the window. He succeeded by slipping himself into the building like an envelope dropped into a mailbox, and landed with a thud. Ulrich chose to leave the window open so that he could find his way back, though as he looked at it from the inside of the Prescott, the moonlight coming in dimly from the opening, he wondered just how the hell he was going to climb back out.

  Worry about that later. Maybe you'll find an open door somewhere.

  The space he now found himself in was indeed a cellar. Within the beam of his flashlight he captured mainly a vast expanse of cold concrete floor, with some doubtful shapes lurking further in. Those shapes, he soon learned, were old materials bound up in dust-colored sheets. A quick peek behind the fabric revealed stacked bed frames, chairs and more that had once been used in the hotel. Ulrich navigated the stacks, neat and altogether unmolested, and breathed a sigh of relief. The air here was dusty as could be, but at the very least he was no longer being buffeted by the wind. Flexing his hands till the feeling returned, Ulrich continued deeper into the basement level in the hopes of finding a stairwell.

  What he found instead as he meandered further were footprints.

  Several pairs of them.

  Pausing, Ulrich bent down to have a closer look at them. As best he could tell, three different pairs of shoes had made tracks in the dust. He followed the tracks a short way and realized that they were leading him towards the stairwell he sought, though the spring in his step was gone even as the large
metal door labeled EGRESS came into view ahead.

  His suspicion had been right; there had been people in this building since its closure, and judging by the seeming freshness of the tracks he'd just found, they'd been there recently. Hesitating outside the door to the stairwell, Ulrich wondered just who he might encounter on his tour of the Prescott; whether he might run into some dangerous vagabond. There was a very real possibility of a confrontation, and it dawned on the investigator that he hadn't really come prepared for a scuffle. Locking his fist around the cold metal handle of the door, he eased it open as gingerly as he could and gave the stairwell a pass with his light.

  The footprints continued even here, blended together into a muddled stream up the stairs and around the bend to what Ulrich presumed was an entry door to the ground level of the hotel. You're playing a dangerous game, he thought, stepping into the stairwell and closing the door softly behind him. He cringed as the metallic fixtures clanged discordantly and then waited for some minutes as if he expected a savage vagrant to materialize from within the shadows. When his noisy entrance into the stairwell drew no obvious reaction, he started up the steps.

  Coming to the Prescott during the day would have been safer, saner than this reckless little night errand of his. Though, to come during the day, when the sunlight was bright and the abandoned hotel was little more than an empty building, would be to miss out on his quarry.

  What he was searching for only came out after dark.

  Hiking up the stairs, sneezing for the dust he kicked up with every step, Ulrich arrived at the door that would lead him to the first floor. He paused outside it, glancing through the little rectangular window that sat within it, and wondered if every floor was worthy of exploration. If I were Vivian, where in this hotel might I choose to stay? During her final days, Michael had claimed Vivian had been a guest at the hotel, though which rooms in particular had been reserved for his friends and family was impossible to say. The next best bet if he wished to make contact with a stubborn spirit, he realized, was the roof she'd plummeted from.