by JL Bryan
“Ghosts?” Halberson looked between us, his thin white eyebrows raising. “Is that part of your thesis?”
“Eh, the folk culture surrounding ghosts is more my thing than Stacey's,” I said, desperately trying to recover our ever-flimsier cover story of being graduate students rather than private detectives working for the Pennefort family. I hated lying, but it was still probably the best strategy, considering he seemed to view the Penneforts as brutal public enemies. “Anthropology.”
“All right,” he said, not seeming to believe me, but not pressing the issue. “They were mean. Falcon had her own streak of it; every once in a while she'd break loose on Elton, really give him a tongue lashing. But she was always went back to being his pet. Bad choice on her part, if you ask me. They fed each other's craziness.” He put a final bookmark into the 1970 binder before stepping aside for Stacey. “Be gentle with the pages. Those may be the only copies that still exist.”
“Okay, no pressure.” Stacey took a deep breath.
I read through the small type on the old papers, trying to get a sense of who Millie was. She had an illustrated poem on one page, opposite an article where the writer recollected his hitchhiking journey to San Francisco. Millie had surrounded her words with illustrations of shadowy, dark, leering figures that made me shudder. I've seen children's drawings of ghosts before, and these were similar. There was also an incomplete drawing of a girl's face, maybe a partial self-portrait.
he comes to me
whispering truth
in the dark,
my ears burn,
my eyes see more than theirs
my eyes
see you
and your lies
all your lies
-pink falcon
I looked through more poems, with tones that swung from depressed to angry. Here were some pretty strong signs that Millie hadn't been any happier growing up in the tower than Thurmond had been, or Thurmond's kids were today.
I thought of Millie up in the tower now, her body trapped there immobile, lying there like Sleeping Beauty while her soul rattled loose on the upper floors, her ghost either cavorting with her long-dead lover's or being terrorized by it.
Another poem was a gushing love thing, surrounded by long-haired angels and blooming flowers.
YOU are everything
you are mine
and I am all yours
for all time
love always
truth always
your hand on mine
your heart on mine
forever
It went on like that for a while. I guessed it was about Elton.
Millie had another article, arguing that teenagers shouldn't have to go to school, but instead be “free to wander, learning from the clouds and trees just as they learn from books – and books, can't we agree, are better read under the shade of an old tree with the smell of grass around us, than in prison-block schools reeking of chalk and discipline and tie-wearing, knee-bending, authority-licking old fascists...” She was anti-school, apparently, in line with Halberson's claim that she skipped it quite often.
The one that really caught my eye, though, was titled “The Ghosts Of Our Past – How They Rule Us.”
That certainly grabbed my attention.
While Stacey chatted with Halberson, asking him more questions about the old days—anything to escape squint-reading crumbling old newspapers, I guess—I tuned them both out and read Millie's article. It was the last one in the 1968 binder, and it got my full attention.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Ghosts Of Our Past
How They Rule Us
-a truth-speak by Pink Falcon, child of the universe
What I'm about to lay down for you is totally real.
Kids in the street already know this is true—blood spills from the highest places to rain on the poor and desperate in the alleys and valleys of the city below. Down here's a Tight Squeeze; up there it's Easy Air. Up there the vultures look down on those below in search of weakness, cause that's what they feed on, baby. The weakness of the poor. The weakness of the lower class.
Yeah, they want to control us all, the old bloodmasters, the old slave-drivers, and they have new kinds of control. They have their schools and their medicine men with their fake brain science, but we know why they try to change us, always trying to change us into obedient blind apes.
But listen up, all my true brothers and sisters, my tribe! We are the true family, not those false elders with their false scriptures of greed and oppression. We can cast aside these chains of blood!
The older generation DOES NOT OWN US!!! They may own all the THINGS but they don't own the PEOPLE, baby! We are the New and the Now and the Real.
We don't have to become the new vultures in the towers. We don't have to obey their death-voices of greed.
There are other voices. Sometimes it's the small one you almost don't hear, the hand that never claps, like the Buddhist saying. You don't find truth up on high, ruling over people. You find it down below, in the street, and in the dark hidden places.
When I was a child, my eyes were blind. But then I got the truth, baby, and I saw through. I'm not blind now. My eyes will never close again.
I may be a child of monsters, but I won't be a monster. I am a child of the UNIVERSE, if you dig it. I will not be the dragon. I will be the warrior maiden who slays the dragon, with the power of being fully righteous, my sisters and brothers.
Let us fight together! Let us follow the hidden voice of the truth. Into battle! LET US TOPPLE THEIR TOWERS OF POWER!
“Sounds like she had some real family issues,” I said, after reading it. “But I think we knew that.”
“You have to feel sorry for the girl,” Halberson said, looking from where he was feather-dusting his collection of ancient stone weapons and tools. “Growing up in that nest of vipers, she never learned to tell which way was right or wrong. No wonder she was so desperate to escape.”
“We know something about her family's shady business in the 1960's, using intimidation against homeowners and against the Owl. But do you know about anything earlier, maybe closer to the beginning of the twentieth century? Did Ernest Pennefort use the same kind of violent business tactics back then?” I asked.
“I wouldn't be surprised,” Halberson said. “Ernest was a snake-oil salesman, and I mean that literally. He peddled patent medicines by wagon, until he figured out the magic of magazine ads and mail order. By the time the Pure Food and Drug Act put an end to the patent-medicine era in 1906, Ernest had already established himself in real estate, retail, the streetcar company, and other interests. Dr. Wellman's Indian Elixir Cure-All Tonic was well behind him by then.” Halberson shook his head, smiling faintly, maybe at the naivete of an earlier era. Then the smile vanished. “Gary Brekowski was putting together something juicy about Ernest, though, not long before he died. The Pennefort thugs busted up the Owl offices a few days after the bomb in the Pennefort Building. They left a wreck. None of us managed to put Gary's notes and the story together before they finally came back and burned us down. Our January '70 issue was our last. Brekowski had been our dogged investigator, anyway, an idealistic journalist. Most of us were just kids, you know, out to have a good time, and not that interested in digging through dusty old libraries and city archives, breathing in dust while looking for clues on faded old paper.”
“Tell me about it,” Stacey muttered.
“So that story died with the Owl. Not that the legit papers would have run it. Why expose a scandal about such a prominent family? They really were prominent back then, tied into all the backroom deals, hooked into city politics, as real estate developers have to be. That's not so true anymore, of course. The local media today wouldn't cover up a story about the Penneforts. They might ignore it, though, on the grounds that nobody really cares about them anymore. They retreated into their tower and stayed there while the city grew up around them and left them in the shadows.” Halberson se
emed to take a little satisfaction in that.
“What was the story?” I asked. “The one that never got published anywhere?”
He smiled at me for a moment, maybe the history teacher in him enjoying a rapt audience. Stacey was listening closely, too.
“It was about Ernest...and Siobhan. You see, Siobhan was a young and pretty lady. And Ernest, well, he wasn't her first husband.”
“So, she was divorced?” Stacey frowned. “I see how that could be a scandal back in the day, but...”
“Not divorced. Annulled. After two years of marriage to one...one...” He blinked a few times, then nodded. “Clyde. Angus Clyde. That's it.” He tapped his head. “I used to have a memory like a card catalog when I was young. The older I get, the more cards seem to go missing. But that's it—Clyde, like the river in Scotland.”
“So he was Scottish?” I asked.
“Scottish by descent, probably, but they came from Belfast. Clyde worked as a doorman and security at Ernest's mansion in Inman Park, which no longer exists. Ernest was a wealthy bachelor by this time, with his own skyscraper going up downtown. Clyde's young wife Siobhan served as maid and kitchen help. She caught the eye of Ernest. That's the story.”
“Keep dishing!” Stacey said. “We need details. So they had an affair or what?”
“What we know for certain is that Siobhan was a devout Catholic, and Ernest Pennefort had to pay a great deal to have the original marriage annulled. He complained about it in a letter that Gary dug up.”
“What did Clyde think of that?” I asked.
“That's hard to say, because Angus Clyde seemed to have vanished from history.”
“Maybe Ernest paid him off somehow?” I said. “Enough to leave town and not come back?”
“It's possible, but Gary didn't seem to think so. Gary thought Ernest Pennefort's solution might have been a little more permanent.”
“He thought Ernest killed Clyde?” I asked. “But then why bother with an annulment?”
“To hide the fact that Clyde was dead,” Halberson replied. “To make it seem like the man had just left town instead of getting murdered.”
“So they never found the body?” I asked.
Halberson shook his head.
“Ooh, I know where it is!” Stacey said, suddenly hopping up and down and waving her hand like a kid eager to give an answer in class.
“Settle down, Stacey. What did Clyde look like?”
“I wouldn't know that,” he said. “If any pictures of Clyde exist, I never saw them. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't any.”
“Was he older than her?” I asked, thinking of the hefty middle-aged man in the ritzy house-servant's uniform. “Like...significantly?”
“It's possible.” Halberson shrugged. “Remembering his name was enough of a trick for me. I'm afraid I don't have any more rabbits left in that hat. I've told you what I remember. If Gary's notes still existed, I'd be happy to let you read through them, but unfortunately they were lost in the final fire that put the Owl out of business. February, 1970.” He shook his head and looked past me—at the framed Hendrix poster on the wall behind my head, maybe, or more likely into his own past. “Things really seemed like they'd reached a boiling point in those days. A rising tide of...something...but I guess every tide that comes in must go back out again. We were young. It's hard to believe we were ever that young.”
“There's nothing else you can tell us about Mr. Clyde?”
“Who?” He started for a moment. “Oh. No, not the disappearing Mr. Clyde.”
“Do you mind if I read more of Millie's writing?” I asked.
“Please read to your heart's content,” he said. “You may be the last people who ever read that newspaper, after all. We once believed in it so much. We thought it would help change the world. Naive kids.” He chuckled, but it was a sad kind of chuckle.
That comment left me feeling a little somber as I turned back to the crumbling newspaper to read more of teenage Millie's thoughts and rants. Halberson's basement stairs squeaked as he climbed up them, and I heard the sound of dishes clanging, then a whistling tea kettle.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I was quiet on the drive back to the Pennefort Building, trying to piece together what we'd learned. Millie had been a verbose kid, at least in writing, with an apparent seething hatred for her own family. I wondered how deep that had run. Was it deep enough to arrange her own father's murder on purpose? Had she wanted Elton to time the bomb to kill Albert Pennefort? Or had that been an accident, as the police and papers claimed? Apparently his manifesto had been written with the idea that the bomb had killed no one, because it had threatened that “people could die next time, if this lesson by the New Front is not heeded!” That much had been printed in the regular newspaper in the days after the event.
Police had launched raids along the Strip—the four-block hippie colony that the city's power structure probably wanted to bust up anyway—in search of more New Front members that they'd never found, in the process sweeping lots of hippie types into jail on unrelated charges. Most of them were released. I'd read up on all that in the regular newspapers, with a little help from our friend microfilm, but now I was trying to fit it in with Halberson's views and what I'd read in the underground paper.
“So, we're both thinking Old Concrete-Face is actually Doorman Clyde, the first husband of the hot Irish maid, am I right?” Stacey said. “And they killed him, tossed him in the wet cement, and built the tower on top of his unmarked grave.”
“Sounds like we're on the same page there,” I said.
“So he's been haunting them ever since...and their children...and their children's children...” She shivered. “When's it gonna be enough, guy? You're dead. Let it go already.”
She fell silent as I drove into the dark space of the Pennefort Building's parking deck. I reached out and punched the parking-meter machine, remembering how the doorman had showed up when we first arrived. Sure, it was dark in there, but he'd been a solid apparition, as solid as a real man. He'd had gray hair, though—or maybe it was just a thick dusting of gray concrete. An apparition that convincing could indicate a powerful ghost; he might have grown quite powerful, too, feeding on generation after generation of the family.
The machine didn't respond. Stacey and I didn't speak, watching it. Finally I punched it again, then a third time.
A cool breeze blew out of the dark cave of the parking garage ahead, the few active fluorescents sputtering and flickering like firelight.
I tensed up and reached for my tactical flashlight. Then I turned up the high beams on the van, flooding the garage with all the light I could summon.
My heart raced, as I expected to see the doorman again, either in his more pleasant form...or as a skeleton, the dried concrete bulging from his eye sockets, the teeth broken where his murderers had stuffed him full of wet cement as they sank him deep into the tower's foundation.
Instead, there was nothing ahead but concrete, scattered cars, and water stains on the walls.
The parking ticker rattled to life beside me and spit out a ticket. It was completely blank, as though the machine had finally run out of ink.
The metal arm raised, admitting us inside. We parked and hurried toward the main building, keeping our eyes out for Old Concrete-Face—or Doorman Clyde, I suppose we now knew to call him. There was every reason to suspect he'd been hanging around these years, exacting his revenge again and again, growing stronger all the while.
Our reception in the lobby was chilly, too, because Pauly was back on duty, his cheek ringed with a bruise where Stacey had jabbed him.
“Hey, Pauly! How's the, uh, face wound?” Stacey asked, pouring on the sweetness. “Everything good?”
“No. I look like this!” He pointed to the circle of purple on his face.
“Oh, yeah. Well, hey, it's not that bad. I am sorry about bruising you. Hey, lucky I didn't hit you in the eye and blind you! Am I right?”
“Yeah. Luck
y.” Pauly's voice couldn't have been much flatter. I've heard dead people speak with more enthusiasm.
“Okay...we'll see you around!” Stacey said.
“I'll try to avoid it,” he replied.
We had a couple of hours until Jacob arrived for his walk-through of the building, so we headed upstairs and resumed analyzing the previous night's video and audio, looking for anything out of the ordinary. This process can take weeks for some locations, especially with as many cameras, microphones, and other gears we had recording all over the Pennefort Building. Stacey had set up our server in one corner of the room, and it was gorging on feeds from everywhere, piling up huge haystacks through which we needed to search for the occasional ghostly needle.
One such needle that came up was an image that appeared, briefly, in the Spirit Mirror in Vance's old study. Stacey called me over to look at it.
“Here,” she said, pointing at the video of the black bowl in its wooden frame. “This is in real time.”
Something pale moved across the black concave mirror, like a blob of milk crossing over a puddle of oil. It was there and gone in less than two seconds. There had been no movement in the room, nothing that should have caused that reflection.
“I see it,” I said.
“Now, closer and slower...”
I watched the slow-motion replay as the white shape floated into view. It was a face—badly distorted, like a reflection on moving water, but I could see the dark patches of the eyes and open mouth. I couldn't say much else about it—whether it was male or female, or whether it was attempting to speak or to scream—but it was a face.
I shivered.
“Do you think that's what Vance was seeing before he died?” Stacey whispered. “The ghost of his father?”
