by JL Bryan
I hated spying uselessly on their private moments, so I only glanced over occasionally. The cameras were recording, anyway, in case a ghost hopped out to harass them. The ghosts had never come out when the family was together, anyway; they'd each reported being chased or ambushed when they were alone, with no witnesses. That's how ghosts tend to operate, at least the negative ones who want to feed on the living—like predators, they wait in the shadows until a prey animal is alone and vulnerable. Divide and conquer, and so on.
“I'm getting antsy over here,” said Stacey, who was going through a series of yoga poses to help her wake up. At the moment, she was in bridge pose, looking upside down at the monitors.
“Let's explore the building,” I said.
“Seriously? Yes!” Stacey unbent herself and stood upright. “Let's grab our stuff! Utility belts—on!” She paused, halfway to our gear. “You're not just joking, right? Because you know I want to explore this place. Don't play with my feelings, Ellie.”
“I'm not. I feel intrusive watching them set up their Christmas. It's almost nine, so the office tenants should be long gone. It's a good time to poke around.”
“I love poking around. Poking around is the greatest.”
“Bring a couple of cameras.”
“Of course!” She reached for her backpack. “Exploring the big old tower. Awesome!”
“Don't forget to keep quiet. We don't want to scare off any ghosts.”
“Right,” she whispered. “Awesome.”
We walked up the hall, toward the third apartment here on the sixteenth floor, the one we hadn't looked into at all. It seemed like a reasonable enough place to start.
Our skeleton key opened the door.
Inside, we found a place heavy with soft draperies and curtains, with deep rugs and stiff-backed sofas that looked soft yet unwelcoming at the same time, decorated with sharp wooden spires at the backs like weapons. There was a Victorian feel to the place, with lots of wood trim, and thick, soft carpets in every room, as if someone really wanted to pretend they weren't living in a skyscraper at all, but in more of an old-fashioned country home. Ornate flower vases sat on every table, and several more flower pots hung from the probably-unnecessary wooden crossbeams on the high ceiling, but the vases and pots were all empty, quietly collecting dust in the shadows. Nothing lived in that apartment now.
One bedroom looked fairly traditionally decorated for a well-funded girl-child, with a teddy bear in a sailor suit perched in a rocking chair in the corner, a puffy and lacy canopy bed, a vanity with a large mirror and lots of little decorative boxes. A bookshelf by the bed held vintage copies of Nancy Drew, hardbacks with yellow spines, plus an illustrated Bible and a book of children's poems bound in crumbling leather.
I opened the nursery-rhyme book. The text was arranged in stanzas, the pictures a little odd. On one page, a creepy-looking leprechaun hid behind a tree by the road, clutching a hammer and staring at the shoes of a girl who walked past. On another page, labeled RIDE OF THE DULLAHAN, a headless man in an undertaker's suit drove a wagon made of bones, pulled by six black horses.
The pages were stiff and yellowed. According to the publisher's imprint, it had been printed in Belfast in 1885.
“Siobhan,” I said. “Ernest Pennefort's wife. She was from Ireland.” I did the math. “She would have been five years old when this book was printed. Someone might have given it to her as a child.”
“I wonder how she ended up moving from Ireland to America and getting married to a guy who was building his own skyscraper. And she was only, what? Twenty?”
“Literally half his age.” I nodded and began to set the book down, but Stacey took it from me, clearly fascinated. “And she died about twenty years after that, after seeing two of her own children die. The six-year-old boy and the seventeen-year-old girl,” I said.
“Wow, her life sounds like a real Lifetime Channel movie. One of the dark ones. Just imagine your grandma putting you to sleep with a story like this.” Stacey showed me the illustration of a poem called The Changeling. A very nasty-looking fairy with sharp teeth and pointy ears was lifting a crying baby from its crib. A second fairy replaced the baby with a handmade doll with obvious stitching and hollow eyes.
“I guess Siobhan never met her grandchildren.” I looked at a display of black and white pictures on the wall. They looked like they were from the 1940s or 1950s, and several featured a girl in a dark tunic dress over a stiff-colored white blouse, an old-timey school uniform.
Rummaging through a small desk in the corner, I found faded yellow schoolwork, each one with the name “Miriam Pennefort” in neat, perfectly executed cursive.
“It's the girl who fell off the roof when she was ten,” I said. “This is her room. It looks like it hasn't changed since she died.”
“Well, I just got the chills,” Stacey said.
“Seriously?” I tensed up, reaching for the flashlight on my belt.
“No, not like that. I just mean...kinda wrong, poking around the dead girl's stuff.”
“Yeah.” I looked at the pictures again. The dark-haired girl wasn't smiling in any of them. In one, she stood stiffly with her parents—Albert, the man whose statue I'd seen in the park, and his wife, Edith, whose name I'd noted. She'd died slowly, of an illness not detailed in the newspaper, decades after her husband died in the bomb.
It was her room we explored next, which I deduced from the bulky old wheelchair, the adjustable hospital bed, and the shelf of pill bottles. Further poking confirmed it with paperwork and prescriptions; Edith Pennefort had lived in this room, and gradually died here, passing away in 2002. I wondered if she'd read the old book of creepy nursery rhymes to her four children, who would've included not just Miriam who'd died at ten, but Millie the wild hippie girl, Thurmond's father Marcus who'd died down in the basement at age thirty, and Thurmond's uncle Vance who'd just died six months ago.
Edith's room décor was like the rest of the apartment, but doubled down: the curtains were puffier and crammed full of floral designs, and the wallpaper and every bit of upholstery in sight were also covered in tiny flowers. Empty, brightly colored flower pots crowded the little tables and sat atop the dresser and the wardrobe, and small empty ones hung in front of almost every window. There were three ornate birdcages, also empty.
“Lady liked her flowers,” Stacey said. “It must have been a real rainforest in here when she was alive.”
“It looks like this whole apartment was pretty well preserved by Edith until her death, then left alone by the family since then.”
“And it does seem like a place where ghosts would live. Did you see the green Formica in the kitchen?” Stacey shivered. “I wonder why Edith and her kids stayed down here on the sixteenth floor. I mean, if everyone else in her husband's family had died by 1920, and Albert and Edith lived here with their kids in the forties and fifties...that's kinda weird, right?”
“Maybe it was more private, in a way. Visitors might be interested in seeing the top floor, or the view from it, but not so much the second floor from the top.” I thought about it some more. “There could be other reasons. If Albert grew up on the seventeenth floor, he might have preferred to avoid it because it was full of memories of his dead parents and siblings.”
“And didn't Albert and Edith mostly live in another house, anyway? The one where our clients were living until a few months ago? So this was just the family's back-up apartment.”
“Right. For when they just couldn't bear to travel six miles to the house.”
“Hey, one place in the city, another in the suburbs. Bet they never had to sit in traffic.”
“Sure, though I doubt traffic was very heavy in 1950,” I said.
We explored the rest of the apartment. One room clearly belonged to our client's recently deceased Uncle Vance, or at least a 1950's teenage version of him. Black and white pictures showed a tall, broad-shouldered, muscular boy in a school uniform with a jacket and tie. WESTMINSTER CLASS OF '61, one group
picture was labeled. Judging by its sprawling castle of a campus, Westminster was one expensive high school. There was a sizable collection of sports trophies; Vance had played baseball and football, and thrown shot put.
The room that had to be Millie's had been stripped of any decorations and most of its furniture, leaving only thumbtack holes and bits of adhesive gum on the walls. The bed mattress lay bare, and generally it felt like we'd just stepped into a motel room inhabited by a drug addict.
A couple of cardboard boxes in the closet held some memories, like a yellowed poster for the Atlanta Pops Festival of 1969, advertising bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Grand Funk Railroad. A crumbling issue of The Great Horned Owl lay beneath, featuring Pink Falcon's review of the festival (“beyond magical, beyond transcendent”) and a political cartoon by “A. Truthteller” showing Richard Nixon surfing on a nuclear missile.
“Millie's still alive, but I guess she chose to live upstairs,” I said. “And couldn't decide what to do with her old stuff.”
I found several photographs at the bottom. Several hippie kids stood in front of a cluttered bulletin board, the guys with beards, all of them long-haired and smiling. Some of them looked like high school kids. The back of the photograph read: Owl Staff, '69.
“Hey, that's the guy we just saw in prison.” Stacey pointed to a lean, shirtless long-haired boy with intense green eyes and a devilish smile. “Whoa, Duperre was hot.”
“I wonder which one was Millie,” I said. “Or if she's even in the picture.” I pocketed the photograph. I shivered and felt a little weird about taking stuff from someone who was still alive, but I had been hired to protect Millie's family members. Surely she'd be in favor of that, had she been able to give an opinion.
“We need to find out more about her,” I said. “Jackie Duperre said Millie helped the terrorist, Elton Roberts, plant a bomb in her family's building. It sounds like he seduced her—psychologically, at least. Then Jackie said something about her going into psychiatric treatment.”
“Sounds like her family was trying to pound her mind back into shape. Away from Culty McBombface Hippie Roberts.”
“That nickname is way too long to stick.”
“Whatever, it's a good one.”
Stacey led the way into another room—clearly a boy's, but without sports trophies. Pictures from the same private school showed a lanky boy with thick glasses, resembling Thurmond. This was Marcus Pennefort, Thurmond's father.
“Look at that.” Stacey lifted the widest, tallest hardback volume from the crowded bookshelf. “It's Spells of Magicia. The first Magicia book. And...it's autographed by Professor M. G. G. Jensen herself. This must be worth a fortune!”
I checked the publication date of the book: 1921. A second printing. The author had been a University of Kansas history professor, I knew, and it was sometimes said that Spells of Magicia was a sort of parable about the first world war. I didn't know much more about it than that. From the movies, it just seemed like a lot of handsome muscular knights and ladies in heaving bodices. And dragons. So many dragons.
“You're right, this is probably very valuable.” I gently returned it to the spot from which she'd taken it. “Like, enough to eat up our whole fee if we damage it, probably.”
“Gotcha. Well, I guess Thurmond's dad was into the whole fantasy thing, too. Maybe making all those wizards and castles and stuff helps Thurmond sort of feel connected. Must be hard to lose your parents when you're a kid.”
I didn't say anything, just kept moving down the hall, but Stacey gasped.
“Ellie! I didn't mean to bring up your—”
“Then don't.” I started toward the front door of the apartment. “If we're any closer to identifying the girl ghost in Amberly's apartment, I can't see it. It could be Siobhan, Catherine, Miriam, maybe even Millie herself.”
“But Millie's still alive.”
“She could be walking out of body.”
“Oh, yes! Maybe her life as a hippie trained her to do wild, psychedelic stuff like astral projection! You know, one too many Grateful Dead shows...hey, Ellie, maybe you could do your out-of-body thing—”
“No,” I said quickly. I'd slipped out of my body more than once, usually unintentionally, thanks to an evil Russian psychic named Kara who'd loosened the bond between my soul and flesh. “I don't want to ever do that again. It just makes me vulnerable to attack by ghosts, anyway. That's not an option. Especially not in a place that could have this many ghosts walking around. Or in any place, ever.”
“Okay, got it. It's a grouchy subject with you. So...what next? The basement?”
“Upstairs,” I said. “That's where the girl ghost went. If the ghost isn't Millie herself, then the ghost might be posing a threat to Millie. The woman's just lying up there, unconscious, defenseless. Maybe she's possessed, for all we know.”
“Seriously? You think Pink Falcon's possessed?”
“Let's stick with calling her Millie.”
“Sure, if you want to be boring about it.”
We returned to the hall, locking the door behind us. Then we entered the service stairwell, full of unadorned concrete and steel rails, and climbed up to 17. A modern electronic scanner was built next to the door.
“Hope this works,” I held out the plastic SAFE-T-DOOR card in front of the sensor. It didn't respond, the tiny red light staring at me like an ultra-small demonic cyclops, daring me to try and enter.
“Well, that was over fast,” Stacey said, turning to go.
Then there was a beep. The angry red eye turned a pale green, and a heavy lock thunked open. I hurried to grab the handle before the door changed its mind about letting us in.
Chapter Thirteen
Uncle Vance's apartment on the seventeenth floor turned out to be the antithesis of Edith's on the sixteenth. Where his mother had liked thick, soft, billowing, floral-print everything, Vance seemed to prefer hard surfaces with lots of dark wood and rock. The smell of pipe tobacco hung in the air.
While the apartment we'd just explored was crammed full of small rooms, this one had been ripped open and expanded, made into a dark and spacious man-cave for Vance. The furniture was black, the TV was huge, the office cluttered and disorganized.
A large fireplace dominated one room, full of heavy gray granite slabs, though it was gas-powered and the logs were fake. Black marble dogs flanked it. They looked lean, with sharp heads, like jackals. Wooden floors set at different heights created a rambling, up-and-down feeling as you walked through. The fireplace room was sunken, for instance. Again, pains had been taken to make it seem like a country place, though this was more like the hunting lodge of a foul-tempered prince than a happy farm manor.
Papers were scattered all over the enormous brown-leather couch and the tables in the fireplace room. Some were held together by large clamps, others strewn around as if a wind had blown themout of place. Some were held in place by uneven stacks of books.
“What's all this?” Stacey picked up a piece of paper, then turned it toward me. The handwriting was difficult to read, written sloppily and hastily, barely fit for human consumption. “Here, Ellie, you're good at reading old handwriting.”
“It's not old.” I took it from her.
“Okay, but it's still hard to read.” She picked up a hardcover book and began leafing through it instead.
I tried to decipher Vance's handwriting, but I could only pick out words and phrases. I read: “...watching me from the door as I lay in bed...Father is displeased...Father wants me dead...Father waits for me in Hell—”
“Yikes, stop reading that aloud! Looking at this book is bad enough.” Stacey showed me what looked like an old woodcut of a man kneeling at an open coffin among tombstones. A shadowy female figure stood upright in the coffin, extending its hand over the man's head in some kind of apparent blessing from the dead. “It's all about summoning ghosts, demons, and angels. And the later chapters are supposedly about controlling them and making them do your bidding. Hey
, what would be scarier? Summoning a demon and trying to order it around? Or summoning an angel and trying to order it around? I mean, sure, you might get a chubby little baby-cupid angel with wings, but what if you get the vengeful kind with burning swords and stuff?”
“Let's just avoid engaging in arcane rituals altogether,” I said. “So it looks like Vance was researching the supernatural. Thurmond said he was talking about seeing the ghost of his father, Albert, just before he died.”
“But why would Albert Pennefort want to haunt his own son? Or threaten him?”
“I don't know. Maybe Albert's ghost is confused and angry. He could have been desperately trying to reach out, but only succeeded in scaring Vance instead. Or maybe...”
“What? What comes after 'maybe'?”
I shrugged. “Pennefort family members have been dying tragically here for generations. Something malignant might be killing them, collecting them...and controlling them.”
“Something like a demon?” Stacey showed me another page in the book, a gruesome pen-and-ink drawing of a horned beast with three jaws, each one chewing up a naked human in its sword-like teeth.
“Or an old and dangerous ghost. We need to dig deeper into the history of this land and see what was here before the tower.”
“Ooh, you think it was an old burial ground or something?”
“I have no idea. But we'll look into it on our next trip to the library. Expect to see lots of dusty, yellowed old paper printed in tiny fonts.”
“Ugh.” Stacey shook her head. “Hopefully not illustrated. Look at this picture of a lady getting sacrificed on a pentagram altar by a guy in a devil mask—”
“I'd rather not.” I picked up a crude sketch, suggesting a human face. It had been scribbled all over, as if to indicate wounds or burns, leaving one eye staring at me. I shivered and put it down, then looked through the stack of books. “He's got everything from pop-ghost literature—including Hauntings Down South by the guys from the Haunted Highways show—to some obscure old stuff you'd have to find through a rare-book or occult-literature specialist.”
