by JL Bryan
The door to the sixteenth floor's third apartment, the one we hadn't seen, was locked with an old-fashioned brass keyhole. I was tempted to try the skeleton key and take a look inside, but I decided to wait on that.
The double doors near the end of the hall were solid oak and matched the others in design, as if they led to another apartment. I stepped through them, into the room used for loading and unloading the service elevator. Stacey and I had come this way when carrying in our equipment. There was no illusion of glamour in here, just plaster walls and an ajar door to a janitor's closet.
I stepped into the elevator and pressed the 1 button. The service elevator was logically the safer choice, built to carry big loads of furniture and other things much heavier than me. It seemed steadier than the passenger elevator. I also felt like I was getting deeper into the soul of the building somehow, into the shadowy inner spaces where the secrets were.
“Okay, ghosts,” I whispered. “We're here if you are. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
I didn't really expect the childish incantation to work, but you never know. I've seen stranger things.
The elevator clanked its way down, one floor after another. It released me into a dim back area of the building's lobby level, a retail concourse that sat mostly empty. I passed Al's Authentic Restaurant, shuttered for the night, the mysterious origins of its authentic cuisine still unexplained.
As I reached the big marble lobby, I could hear the front-desk guy talking on his phone.
“...you gotta do it,” he was saying. “Gotta do it. They can't resist it. Bryan Adams playlist, all the way. She'll melt like a Snickers on a hot dashboard, bro. I'm talking nuts and nougat everywhere.”
I glanced at the front-desk guy as I walked through the lobby. He was somewhere in his twenties, with a frizzy mullet haircut and a feeble attempted mustache that made him look about eleven years old. He reclined in his chair at the front desk, toying with the tie of his dark blue security uniform while yapping away at a Bluetooth in his ear. If he noticed me passing through on my way to the parking deck, he gave no sign.
Outside, the night breeze felt fresh and clean, scrubbed by rain. The traffic was much lighter out on Peachtree Street, the boulevard that twisted through the heart of the city, so there was less smog in the air. I wondered about the air quality in the tower. There had to be a mile of ventilation shafts winding through it, and given what I'd seen of the building so far, it wasn't hard to imagine century-old mold colonies growing like kelp forests in there.
The parking deck was as damp and dreary as ever. The streaks of rain running down the walls reminded me of the time I'd visited Luray Caverns in the mountains of Virginia, along with my Aunt Clarice and her three kids—Todd and Tom, the extremely loud twins who were about nine, and my cousin Alison, who'd been a very peppy cheerleading fourteen-year-old and generally found my dark moodiness repellent. I suppose part of the reason I'd been resistant to Stacey joining us when Calvin hired her was that she reminded me of Alison a bit.
While I hadn't exactly enjoyed the Luray Caverns experience—miserable orphaned sixteen-year-old girls don't enjoy much of anything—the cave visit had stuck with me. I remembered walking deep underground through cathedral-style caverns, water trickling down the sides, making the rocky floor slick. The parking deck had a similar cave-like feeling, though tinged with a lingering oil and carbon monoxide smell.
I fired up my flashlight, just in case. I saw no sign of a garage attendant in the empty booth at the front of the garage.
I headed up the brick-walled staircase, avoiding the puddle on the landing. A few bricks had been deliberately left out of the wall, creating a diagonal series of holes, which let in air and gave a restricted view of the street outside. They reminded me of the arrow slits from the dark swamp castle in Dexter's game.
The van sat on the second floor, among a few scattered old vehicles that were also parked there. Building employees, maybe. I wondered which one belonged to Kid Mustache.
Stacey's backpack lay in the front foot well, forgotten, a retro red and gold Wonder Woman logo patch stitched onto the back. I slipped it on, locked the van, and turned to go. My footsteps echoed through the parking garage. Rain and light traffic sounds blurred into a constant soft rush of white noise outside. I wondered whether anyone would hear me if I screamed. My confidence in the building's security had plummeted at the sight of the front desk watchman.
The door into the building was electronically locked, but my plastic keycard got me inside. Though the door was just a mindless computerized object, I had more faith in its ability to keep us safe than I did in Kid Mustache's. At least he noticed me this time.
“Hey, can I help you?” He looked me over as I walked through the lobby. “I haven't seen you before. You new?”
“Yep.” I slowed, but continued toward the hallway at the back of the lobby.
“Mind if I ask where you're going this late?” He stood and approached. “Maybe you'd like an escort.”
“No, thank you. I'm a security consultant. I'm checking for any weaknesses in building security.” Now it was my turn to pause and look him over, as if inspecting him.
“Oh, yeah, my supervisor said something about that. Anyway, you won't find any problems here. I've got everything locked down pretty tight.” He winked at me, and my stomach lurched. “Hey, do you like Bryan Adams? Cause I have this playlist—”
“How long have you worked here?” I asked.
“Almost, like, two months. Got hired through QuickWork. That's a temp firm. But now I'm full-time.” He pointed to the SAFE-T-OFFICER patch on his jacket shoulder. His name tag read PAULY.
“Have you ever seen anything strange in that time?”
“Strange like a total hottie walking in from the rain late at night?” Pauly waggled his eyebrows.
“Is your supervisor here?” I asked, dropping the temperature of my voice by about six thousand degrees. I'm surprised his ears didn't freeze from all the frost I threw his way.
“Whoa, hey, whoa, no need to call Mr. Rutledge.” He backed off a step, raising his hands like I'd attacked him. “Whatever your needs are, I'll serve them. Customer Service, that's our motto.”
“That's not really a motto.”
“It's not? It's on one of my sleeves somewhere.” He checked his powder-blue faux-cop security uniform. “Right there. CUSTOMER SERVICE. And this one says...Virg...wait...Virgil...”
“Vigilance?” I read aloud from his other patch.
“Yeah, I think that's it.” He shrugged. “But, hey, you want me to show you around the building? Like a private tour? There's some weird stuff once you start looking.”
“Really? Do you know much about the history of the building?”
“Oh, yeah. There's all kinds of old-time junk, like, everywhere. That's history, right?”
“Well, I have to get going—”
“If you like old stuff, you should see the basement. It's, like, all crammed up with history and old stuff. It's like that place where they put that Nazi head-melting box in Indiana Jones.”
“You mean the Ark of the Covenant?”
“The huh-whuh?” He scrunched up his forehead like he was really trying to concentrate. Then he relaxed, apparently giving up the effort. “Anyway, it's like that, endless piles of old junk heaped up but you can kinda walk through it. Want to go down and check it out with me?”
“Aren't you on duty at the front desk?”
“We can slip away for a minute. Nothing really happens at night. But hey, maybe you and me can change that.” He winked. “Hey, did you say you like Bryan Adams?”
“I did not. See you later.” Unless I'm lucky. I headed toward the elevator.
“Oh, hey, I have to check your backpack.”
“No, you don't.”
“Yeah, it's like a solid rule here. They're really uptight about B-U-M's. You can't even say the word out loud.” He stepped behind me, and I let him unzip and search my backpack. “Granola bar
s...energy drinks...socks...”
“Are you done yet?” I pulled away from him. “Did you mean they're uptight about homeless people, or—”
“Oh, man, if I let a homeless person in here even once, I'm fired. Dead. But you don't look like one, don't worry. You look real clean.”
“Ew. I'm heading to the elevator now. You'd better get back to your desk.”
“Why do you have a flashlight?”
“I like to spread a little light everywhere I go.” I finally managed to slip away down the hall, and he shuffled slowly back to his desk.
I passed the shuttered, darkened doors of Al's Authentic Restaurant. It closed after 5 p.m. on weekdays, and didn't open on weekends at all. Stacey and I would have to check it out sometime, maybe after we figured out what kind of restaurant it actually was.
Beyond it lay closed retail outlets, dark behind their lowered cage-like doors.
Near the end of the hallway, through a pair of unmarked wooden double doors, lay the service elevator. Here on the lobby level, the service elevator loading area was part of a warren of rooms devoted to maintenance, mechanical equipment, and storage. This was the backstage area that most visitors to the tower never saw.
We'd glimpsed the basement below us while unloading our gear, but we hadn't explored the cavernous rooms down there. The building's designers had wisely placed the loading dock very close to the service elevator, and we hadn't strayed far from there. Now I was intrigued by what Kid Mustache had said about the basement being filled with remnants of the past. I didn't think Stacey and I needed him to guide us around, though. He probably knew less about the history of the building than we did.
I wasn't heading to the basement now, anyway. The service elevator was still waiting where I'd left it a couple minutes earlier. I stepped inside, the doors closed, and I relaxed. We were probably in for a quiet night, since the family's ghostly encounters had been spread over a few months.
As the elevator rose, I unzipped Stacey's backpack and took out something called a That's It! bar. I read the ingredients: apples and blueberries. That was it.
I bit into the sweet compressed fruit and chewed, enjoying the taste as the elevator clanked its way up, floor by floor.
Then the elevator stopped and let out a simple mechanical ding. No fancy hidden bells chimed for the service elevator.
The doors opened, and I almost stepped out. Then I felt the sudden cold.
I'd stopped on the wrong floor. I looked at the floor indicator inside the elevator car, numbered from B to 17—no fancy Roman numerals here, either. None of the floors were lit up, so I wasn't sure exactly where we'd stopped.
The room outside the elevator was dark and cold. The chilly draft could be a sign of paranormal trouble. I raised my flashlight, ready to blast any baddies with a concentrated dose of white light. I kept it off for the moment, though, because I was here to find the ghosts and learn about them, not run them off the instant I encountered them.
A heap of file cabinets and boxes overflowing with yellowed paperwork took up a corner of the large, dark room outside the elevator. It looked the way all the thoughts in my head feel when they're jumbled together, before I organize them into clear written to-do lists.
Pages blew out from the heap and across the floor like tumbleweeds. Flaking yellow memos and crumbling carbon copies rasped against worn floor tiles.
Shivering in the cold, I looked into the darkness ahead, fighting my fears. Part of me—a pretty large part, in fact—wanted to jab buttons on the elevator control panel and get those doors closing immediately.
It wasn't my job to run away, though. It was my job to stand firm and observe, to face whatever ghosts might haunt the tower.
So I stood my ground, thumb on my flashlight button, and waited.
Seconds dripped past. It seemed long past time for the elevators doors to automatically slide shut, but they remained open.
I barely saw the misty shadow at first. A sheet of very old newsprint scraped across the floor, as if carried on an icy current of air. It advertised a bottle of Dr. Wellman's Indian Elixir Cure-All Tonic. Sounded legit.
The newsprint ad stopped about where the figure's foot would have been. The ghost wasn't a full apparition, but a dim blue mist that roughly suggested the shape of a human being.
It was facing me, and it was moving toward me.
A deep, powerful fear arose in my stomach and spread through my body, colder than the frigid air on my skin. Even animals feel it, the presence of the unnatural, of the dead that should have moved on. No amount of training and experience cancels out that basic response of living flesh to an entity from the other side.
“Who are you?” I asked, trying to sound firm and confident through trembling lips. Sometimes your attitude is all you've got. I gripped my flashlight tighter.
The blue-mist entity moved closer to me, but it didn't grow any more distinct. There were only traces of it, here and there, barely enough to suggest the shape of a person.
It moved closer to me...much too close, and much too fast. A tendril of thin blue mist extended out and touched my cheek. It felt like the cold, stiff finger of a body in rigor mortis. And it was wet.
“Okay, buddy, you're crossing a line,” I said. My biological need for self-preservation had finally overcome my professional need to gather information about the case.
I clicked on my light, and I saw him.
In the sudden intense glare, he became momentarily visible. The white light revealed a man with a cadaverous face and tangled, bristly beard. His clothing had a bizarre Mad Hatter appearance, his hat threadbare, his coat ill-fitted, his ascot ill-tied. Yellowed, crumbling old newsprint jutted and spilled from under his coat and his high collar, from every gap in his clothing, like the stuffing of a carelessly built scarecrow.
His arm was extended out, his rotten hand touching my cheek.
Then he was gone, vanished as ghosts often do when hit with a huge dose of light. The coldness in the air began to fade.
The elevator doors shut, and the car began clanking its way upward again.
The floor indicator came back from the dead, too, lighting up 13, 14, 15, and finally 16. I'd heard that old buildings often left out the thirteenth floor because of superstition, but they hadn't bothered with that here.
The doors opened on the sixteenth floor, and I hurried out, glad to be back among the living. I could still feel the cold, wet spot on my face where the blue-mist ghost had touched me.
Chapter Eight
“Ew, you got ghost on you,” Stacey said, checking out my face after I told her what had happened. “Hold still and let me snap a few pictures.” She walked around me, clicking her camera.
“It's still cold.” I traced my finger over my cheek and it came away smudged.
“So that makes three,” Stacey said. “Two in the clients' apartment, the hot one and the cold one. And now another one down on the thirteenth floor.”
“The twelfth floor. Where the Pennefort family's offices are.”
“Oh. Well, there's probably something spooky on the thirteenth floor, too. I mean, there kinda has to be, in a creepy old building like this.”
“I'm not aware of any such law, so let's focus on what's actually been observed.”
“Okay. So the ghost you saw on the thirteenth...I mean, the twelfth floor...the paper ghost, he was a coldy. And the one in Amberly's hallway is a hotty. So probably not the same ghost. And the one that keeps jumping out at Amberly is a coldy, but Amberly thinks that one is female.”
“And mine was definitely not,” I said. “He looked like he might have been homeless, using newspaper as insulation.”
“I found a possible lead on the fire-guy. I've been looking through digitized archives of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,” Stacey said. Our firm subscribed to several newspapers so we could search their online archives, though often the digital archives didn't go back nearly far enough in time for our purposes. “The year was 1969,” Stacey continu
ed, as if narrating a play or a documentary while she looked at her tablet. “Hair was long. Fringed denim was in. The Doors were on the radio. Love beads were—”
“Got it, Stacey.”
“So in the middle of all that, there was a mayor's race going on in Atlanta. One of the main candidates...” She checked her pad. “Palmer Madden, an outspoken segregationist who owned a chain of local restaurants called Pa's Barbecue Place. He was supported by Albert Pennefort, son of Ernest and ruling patriarch of the Pennefort family by that time. Madden set up his political offices in the Pennefort Building.
“So that's where it gets crazy. Palmer Madden was going to give a big speech in the lobby of the Pennefort Building...only it got bombed by some radical hippie Weathermen types. They didn't like his views on civil rights and Vietnam—there was even a twenty-page manifesto, but the newspaper didn't publish much of it.”
“I guess they wouldn't. Were there any casualties?”
“Three dead, fifteen injured. Among them were campaign workers, journalists there to cover a press conference...and Albert Pennefort himself died.”
“Did the politician die?”
“Nope. Madden didn't win, either, but he stayed pretty visible in local politics...here he is in 1983, protesting the Martin Luther King holiday...” Stacey showed me a black and white image of a scowling gray-haired man in a pig costume, holding a sign that read “No Holiday for Marxist Luther King!”
“What's with the costume?” I asked.
“I guess he had one lying around from his barbecue restaurants. His political career kinda fell apart in later years. And he died a few years ago.”
“Okay. If we see a ghost dressed like a giant pig, we'll know who to suspect. What about the bombing? Who did it?”
“Wait, lemme flip back...Apparently, it was a group called the New Front, kind of a Weather Underground knock-off, like I said. They planted bombs in government offices, ROTC buildings, things like that. The main bomber guy actually died in the explosion, too, along with Albert Pennefort.”
