by JL Bryan
“Or eBay,” Stacey said.
“Yeah, maybe.” I lifted a book of medieval incantations written in Latin and shook my head. “He was really digging. He really must have seen ghosts.”
“Why would he stay here?”
“Maybe because the ghosts were his family members,” I said. “Vance's parents were dead, of course, two of his siblings had died, the last one still alive was unconscious on life support...Was Uncle Vance married? Did he have kids?”
“I don't remember if anyone mentioned it.”
“Well, there's no sign of any spouse here now. So he was living alone, with nobody to keep him company except the ghosts of his family.”
“Wow. That's...sad. And then he died.”
“Heart failure, officially,” I said, after checking my notes. “Just like his grandfather who built this place.”
“That could easily be a form of death by ghosts,” Stacey said.
“Exactly. But we can't jump to conclusions about that.”
“Yeah, but still...he was clearly dealing with ghost issues here.”
“I think you're right. Too bad he didn't call us, or somebody professional. This is a dangerous area for amateurs.” I opened a cabinet door built into one of the little tables, and what I saw inside gave me the chills. “Very dangerous. Look.”
“What's that?” Stacey stepped over for a closer look.
I brought it out, a wooden box engraved with rune-like symbols. A black glass bowl was set inside it at the top. There were carved outlines on each of the box's four sides to show where people could put their hands.
“They were popular back in the sixties and seventies, mostly,” I said. “This was probably another eBay purchase. Unless he actually bought one back in 1970 or so. It's called The Spirit Mirror.”
“So it's for talking to ghosts? Like a Ouija board?”
“For seeing them, mostly. A Ouija board for the TV generation.”
“How's it work?”
“Up to four people can do it. Which made it the perfect 1970's party game, I guess. You put your hands on the sides where these hand outlines are, then you gaze into the black glass...don't actually do it, Stacey.”
“Oh, sorry.” She took her hands away, but kept looking into the black glass. “I can see my own face, but it's really distorted.”
“Imagine you're at a party, the lights are low—maybe just candles—and some guy in a turtleneck and a big seventies 'stache just read the spooky start-up incantation or whatever from the instruction manual,” I said. “Now you're all quiet, looking at dim reflections of your face in the glass...eventually you'll start to see things. Your face changes. Maybe it starts to look like someone else's face entirely. You start to feel like you're not looking at yourself at all, but looking through the glass at a stranger—a stranger who's looking right back at you—”
“Okay, Ellie, I get it!” Stacey turned away from the black mirror. “You told me about this. The Caputo effect. It's how people conjure Bloody Mary at parties. Been there, done that, got creeped out.”
“So it looks like Vance was dealing with some pretty heavy ghost issues at the end of his life,” I said. “He even tried to tell Thurmond about it, but Thurmond treated it the way most people do when they hear about ghost trouble—shrug it off as someone else's delusion, then forget about it as quickly as possible so they don't have think about death or the afterlife any longer than they have to.”
“But which ghost?” Stacey asked. “Was it really his father? Or something messing with his head?”
“I think it's a symptom of something older than his father. Whatever it was that wiped out Ernest and his wife and his first two kids, leaving only Albert to survive.”
“Do you think Albert killed them all?” Stacey asked. “And covered it up?”
“Well, he was born in 1905, so he would have been about three when his brother died of playing with electrical wires, and fifteen when his sister died of bone infection after the riding accident. So he would've had to be malicious and murderous from the time he was a toddler, and good at covering up his crimes, too.”
“All right, it was just a theory,” Stacey said.
“You mean a hypothesis.”
“Whatever, brainface. So what do we do with this stuff?”
“I'll take his notes to read later,” I said, gathering up scattered papers. “I hope, after this case, we can ask for some of these books for our archives at work. He's got some rare materials here.” I looked at the concave black glass of the Spirit Mirror in its rune-inscribed box. “And if Uncle Vance was trying hard to get in touch with the ghosts, he could have really stirred things up. Activities like this can awaken entities that might be slumbering and fuel those who aren't. He might have really amplified the supernatural activity in this building before he died.”
“Like picking at a scab until it bleeds.”
“Right.”
“Or when you're a kid, and you've got a loose tooth, and you just keep pulling and twisting it, you know, wrenching the roots of your tooth around and slowly ripping them—”
“Okay, Stacey, yeah. My point is, these things Vance was doing might not have even been aimed at getting rid of the ghosts. Maybe he wanted to get in touch with them and give them even more of a presence.”
“Because they were his fam,” Stacey said.
“Yeah...Anyway, we should probably get a camera or two in this room. Maybe leave the Spirit Mirror out and record it. If Vance was using it to talk to ghosts, we might catch some movement in there.”
“Maybe even Vance himself, now.”
“Let's keep moving.”
We found Vance's bedroom, double the size of any we'd seen down on sixteen. The art on the walls seemed dark and aggressively masculine: fox hunts, ships on stormy seas, battlefields. We found just a few family pictures. Vance was broad-shouldered and looked taller than his father Albert, who'd been chunkier than lean, handsome Ernest, the founder of the dynasty. The Pennefort men seemed to grow larger every generation.
I was very interested to find a photo album, which featured a wedding photo for Vance and a pretty blond woman, and then images of them with a young son—a baby in one, a preschooler dressed as Kermit the Frog in another, a kindergartner visiting Disney World in another.
The photo collection ended abruptly, it seemed, with several blank pages left in the album.
“I hope something terrible didn't happen to the kid,” Stacey said.
Checking the inscriptions scribbled on the backs of the pictures, I was able to trace some of the major events of Vance's life: married in 1980, age 37. Son, Grady, born in 1985. The last picture was in 1992, the chunky blond kid trying to ice skate at an arena full of Christmas decorations.
“The kid was six or seven years old in this last picture,” I said. “The same age as Lawrence, when he died in 1908.”
“Amberly and Thurmond didn't mention anything about Vance having a wife or kids,” Stacey said.
“They didn't say a lot about his family at all,” I said. “But we're never going to identify these ghosts or their motives without piecing together the history of this building. And that means the history of the Pennefort family. Are you sure you didn't read anything about Vance's wife or child in the papers? That would have been after 1960.”
“Well, maybe I missed something. We did stop early to come back and meet with the client. But I definitely was looking for obituaries from the Pennefort family, and I double-definitely would have remembered a kid dying. And I can say that even though I'm completely overwhelmed trying to remember who is who in this family.”
“We'll draw a family tree later,” I said. “That tree seems to stay pretty well pruned by accident and illness, anyway.”
“Yeah. We really have to stop these ghosts, don't we? Not just from stalking the apartment, but from...well, maybe killing the family members over the years. Right? I mean, we're not just talking about cold spots and creepy-crawlies, we're talking about a dange
rous killer ghost in the mix somewhere.”
“But which one?” I asked. “We have so many names already.”
“Can we leave this apartment now? It doesn't feel right.”
I nodded. If Vance had been contacting the dead here, night after night, there would be traces of ghostly energy all over the place. I was pretty eager to get going, too.
We stepped out into the central hallway of the seventeenth floor.
“Are we going to go poke around in the unconscious lady's apartment?” Stacey asked. “That feels kind of wrong.”
“I was going to skip it for now,” I said. “I get the feeling the family doesn't want us exploring up here...that's why I didn't ask permission.”
We walked past the ornate doors of the passenger elevator to the front end of the hall for a look around. Like the music room below, this room was positioned at the narrow end of the building's acute-triangle shape. Glass windows on three sides looked out over the city. A few threadbare, dusty chairs sat here, one turned on its side; I had the feeling it had been lying on its side for quite some time, maybe even months or years.
Then we started back, again passing the door to the apartment where Vance had spent his final years, directly across from the one where Millie was spending hers. Her door had a brass keyplate, like Vance's, which meant the skeleton key would probably get us in there if we absolutely had to do it. I personally hated the idea of bothering a sick, elderly person who was clearly in fragile health...but I couldn't ignore the possibility that the ghosts of the tower, perhaps even her own ancestors, were holding Millie's soul captive somehow, or perhaps posing a threat to her as she lay there defenseless. Maybe they were keeping her trapped in an endless nightmarish sleep so they could feed on her energy. Or maybe her condition was purely medical and had no supernatural cause.
Halfway to the doors at the back, which would take us to the maintenance and service-elevator area, we passed another door. I slowed and doubled back for a closer look. It was located on the same side of the hall as Millie's current apartment, the half of the floor we hadn't explored.
“I don't think there's a third apartment, Ellie,” Stacey said.
“Yeah, but...” I opened the door, revealing a linen closet with a few shelves stacked with towels and sheets. I set down the papers full of Vance's ghost research so I could search inside.
“Ooh, do you think the linen closet's haunted?” Stacey asked, shining her light in there. “Because that would be pretty convenient spot to haunt, if you were a ghost. You'd always have a fresh supply of clean sheets!”
“Ha ha.” I shoved aside a heap of super-soft cotton sheets and silken pillowcases, feeling momentary jealous—those sheets felt really, really comfy. “Don't you think this is a weird spot for a closet? It's not inside either apartment, but it's not close to the service elevator, and it breaks up the whole symmetry of the hallway.”
“I guess. Look out, you're crumpling up all their stuff. You're getting it all messy.”
“You hold it, then.” I scooped out an armload of sheets and heaved it at Stacey. She barely had time to drop her flashlight before catching the sheets.
“Hey!” she protested, but she didn't elaborate.
I thumped the back of the closet wall. Hollow.
I lifted away the shelf and handed it to Stacey to balance on top of her precarious pile of premium bed clothing.
A small brass plate lay behind it, just big enough for a concealed keyhole.
“What's happening? I can't see a thing,” Stacey said from behind her swaying pile of laundry topped with a wooden shelf.
“Hang on. There's a keyhole.” I slid the skeleton key into it and turned it.
There was some resistance...then a scratchy click as the lock gave way.
The rear wall of the closet opened into darkness.
“Whoa,” Stacey said. “How'd you know that was there?”
“This isn't the first time I've seen a closet used as a false front to hide secrets. If you have a hidden room in your house, a closet is a natural place to hide the access point.”
“So what's inside this hidden room?” Stacey asked.
I pointed my flashlight through the concealed door at the back of the closet. “Looks like...cobwebs. Lots of them. Let's go check it out.”
“But I'll have to put all these nice sheets and stuff on the floor! They'll get dirty.”
“That's the kind of sacrifice we have to be prepared to make, Stacey,” I said.
Then I led the way into the darkness behind the hidden door.
Chapter Fourteen
Stacey and I remained silent as we looked at what we'd found.
A hallway lay beyond, or part of one. The remnants of a richly patterned carpet lay on the floor. It had been ripped ragged along the far end of the truncated hallway, just twenty or so feet away from us.
The hallway had been walled in. No attempt had been made to finish off the newer wall with any kind of sheetrock or paneling, at least not on this side. It was just bare wooden studs all the way across.
Three doors remained. I looked into the first and found a very old-timey bathroom, with legs on the bathtub and the kind of toilet where you had to pull a chain at the top.
Stacey stayed close to me, close enough that I could feel her trembling.
“This is so weird,” she whispered.
I pushed open the door to our right, revealing a room with a single bed, a big map of the world on the wall, tall lead soldiers with nasty-looking metal teeth and bayonets, a small wardrobe, a bright yellow toy chest, and a rocking horse with a moth-eaten mane.
The bed was neatly made, and a single old black-and-white photograph lay on the bed, showing a laughing boy of four or five in an old Buster Brown suit: floppy hat, high collar, giant fluffy bow tie.
“Lawrence,” I whispered. “The little boy who died in 1908. The tower's first victim, possibly. Or possibly just a kid who got too curious.”
“Or maybe he's the evil one,” Stacey said. “Six-year-olds can be evil. I've seen it.”
We crossed to the other bedroom, and at this point I wasn't surprised to find plenty of evidence that it belonged to Catherine, Ernest's daughter who'd died when she was seventeen. A painting depicted her posted on a horse, dressed in formal riding gear, a haughty set to her jaw. A photograph showed her in a school uniform not too different from the one her niece Miriam would wear to her elite private school thirty years later, a dark tunic dress with a high-collared white blouse. I wondered if Miriam had been wearing that when she'd fallen from the roof of the building.
“So...I'm guessing the parents, Ernest or Siobhan, or both of them, wanted to leave these rooms just as they were when their first two children were alive,” Stacey said.
“They would have done it with Lawrence first,” I said. “Then the precedent was set when Catherine died. And later...” I stepped out and looked at the wall built across the hallway. “Somebody wanted to remodel, maybe, but didn't want to be the one to disturb these old rooms. So they just sealed up this part of the hallway. Like a big crypt. Only with no bodies inside. Maybe ghosts, though.”
Stacey shivered. “Maybe these rooms are haunted by the people who used to live in them. So the later family members didn't want to upset the ghosts, but wanted to seal them in.”
“Maybe. If Vance figured out the tower was haunted, then others who lived here must have, too. They must have suspected it, at least. Even Thurmond says he found it scary living here as a child, and he never wanted to move back in. He seems reluctant to admit more...but he knew more. I wonder if he's heard things from other relatives besides Vance.”
“He's so tight-lipped about his family's past,” Stacey said. “But I guess there's a lot of reason to be. A lot of tragedy. And a lot of bedrooms that belong to dead people. A few more generations, and there won't be any room for the living.”
“Assuming the ghosts don't kill off the whole family by then,” I said.
“Shouldn't we wa
rn them?”
“Yes, but Thurmond already knows about these deaths. He knows this isn't a good place for his family. Even if he doesn't want to talk about why. We just need to figure out how to solve this for them, that's our job.”
“Okay. Can we solve it somewhere else? Do we need to put cameras in here, too?”
“We'll go back to our apartment, grab a snack and a coffee, then come back up here with cameras and microphones,” I said. “If any of these old rooms have paranormal activity going on inside them, it might help us zero in on which ghost we're actually dealing with here.”
“Because we know she likes to come up here,” Stacey said. “What room would be directly above the dining room?”
I thought it out, imagining the floor plan below us and around us as best I could. “Somewhere in Millie's apartment.”
“Oh. Well, we can't go in there. I liked that part about snacks and coffee, though.”
“They're core elements of detective work,” I said. “Calvin taught me that.”
We stepped out into the seventeenth-floor hallway, replaced the shelf and sheets in the closet, and closed the door. Then we started toward the service area near the back of the seventeenth floor, intending to take the same stairs we'd used to get here.
We moved quietly, as if afraid to awake the long-unconscious woman in the other apartment. We were almost to the doors to the service area when a quiet thump sounded behind us.
“Did you hear that?” Stacey asked.
We looked back. Another soft thump.
“Which door is that coming from?” I started back up the hall.
When it sounded again, we both saw it: the linen closet door, the one with the hidden rooms behind it, bumped in its frame. It was as if someone inside were trying to open it, but didn't quite have the strength to do it.
Thump...thump...thump...the door rattled in its frame now. The round knob turned back and forth, squeaking, but the door stayed shut.
“Hello...?” I approached the door, watching it rattle faster and louder, watching the knob twisting.
