by JL Bryan
“There's a female presence here,” he said. “Very weak. Maybe one of those bundle of tangled, starved-looking figures I saw upstairs. She died slowly and painfully. Something came in here at night and fed on her...something that crawled its way up from deep below, something from underground. It sensed her weakness and crawled up to feed on her energy, like a leech, only a leech gets full eventually. He fed on her night after night, making himself stronger until she died. And she's still here. And she's still his. What little there is of her...he still feeds on her.”
“Who?” I asked. “Who fed on her?”
“Someone older. Male. He's...down there now, far below us. And he's listening.” Jacob opened his eyes and looked right at me. “He's waiting for us. He knows we're here to oppose him. Do we have a plan for that?”
“We're bringing the kitchen sink with us,” I said. “There's a couple of traps on that cart. There's a ghost cannon.”
“But we don't have bait for the trap,” Stacey said. “Not for Clyde. We don't have anything but candles.”
“Then let's try to find some,” I said.
Jacob moved into Lawrence's old room, with toy soldiers made of tin, toy ships made of real canvas and wood.
“This boy's still here,” Jacob said. “I think he might be the oldest ghost in the building, or one of them. This was his room, but he's not really here much of the time. He would like to be...but instead, he's trapped down below. What's under this building? I keep seeing a dungeon-style cave, full of shadows, the souls of the dead who can't get out.”
“Just a basement, as far as I know,” I said.
“Well, it's a little pocket of hell down there, at least for the ones trapped there. This tower is full of bad things. Little nightmares.” Jacob picked up a dusty toy soldier with glaring eyes; a musket with a dangerous-looking bayonet sat on its shoulder. It was lucky that little Lawrence hadn't skewered himself on it long before his unfortunate death in the basement in 1908.
“Hope your tetanus shot's up to date,” Stacey said.
“Someone lured him down,” Jacob said. His ears perked up as though he'd heard something, and he walked over to an ornate ventilation grate low on one wall, its brass surface full of little curls and curves reminiscent of flowers. “He spoke to the boy through here, sometimes just a voice, sometimes just a pair of eyes. Reached out to him.” His eyes closed. His voice became lower, raspy, with a tinge of Clyde's Scottish-slash-Northern-Irish accent. “Come along, boy. There's toys in the basement like ye've never seen. There's games and books...the kind with lots of exciting pictures, and no words to vex ye...come down, boy, it's all yours...”
“Jacob, could you stop doing that? We get it without the voice impression, okay?” Stacey reached out and shook his arm. “Jakey-roo?”
His eyes opened behind his glasses, and his brown eyes had turned an unnatural pale green, like the pale, bloodless eyes of a corpse. “You come down, too, lass. Both of you.”
Stacey gasped and backed off, and his strange eyes shifted to me.
“I told you. I know why the family brought ye here. Ye'll not dislodge me from my place. I'm the foundation of this tower,” said the thing possessing Jacob.
“We'll see,” I said.
“Come on down.” He smiled. “Come on down and let's play. We're all waiting for you.”
Jacob's eyes fluttered and he staggered. Stacey and I steadied him, then he leaned against the wall. “Did I just pass out for a minute?”
“Nope. You were possessed,” Stacey said.
“What?” He straightened up and looked around. “It was the guy in the basement. The crushed guy. We should avoid him at all costs.”
“We have to face him and take him out,” I said. “That's what we're here for.”
Jacob sighed. “Well, at least we got in a nice last meal together. Should we head down to the basement and die now, or prolong things a bit?”
“Prolong things a bit. I want all the impressions you can gather. Information is our best weapon against an entity like this.”
“Plus, there's a 1921 edition of Spells of Magicia downstairs,” Stacey said.
“No. What? Where?”
“We're getting there,” I said. “Anything else here?”
“Sad little boy who got lured down to his death, older girl who got hurt and then fed on until she died,” Jacob said. “Other than that, it's a perfectly nice suite of hidden rooms.”
We returned to the hallway and headed for the elevator.
Down on the sixteenth floor, we headed for the vacant Victorian-fashion apartment full of empty flowerpots so Jacob could look at the old book in Marcus's room right away. I figured that would stop him from rushing impatiently through the other rooms.
“I can't believe it.” Jacob tiptoed over to the old hardcover book, as though afraid he would startle it and send it scampering away into hiding. A long, sinewy dragon was etched into the leather binding.
“It's autographed,” Stacey whispered.
“You're kidding.” He reached out with a single finger and gently lifted the cover. The author's faded signature was on the title page, which was designed to look like a piece of medieval art, a triptych of a dragon, a red-haired witch gazing into a crystal ball, and a knight on horseback with a glowing sword. “It's real,” he breathed. “It's all real. I can't believe they just have it out like this. It should be under glass, in a special climate-controlled room or something. Wow.”
“Okay, so...on with the psychic reading?” I asked. “There are a lot of floors in this tower. We aren't hitting all of them, but the basement's waiting for us.”
“Yeah.” The look of wonder drained from Jacob's face, and he looked pale. “We should get going. But someone is very lucky to have this.”
“Maybe it was significant to Thurmond's father. Let's take it with us.” I picked up the book and tossed it on the cart with our other gear.
“Careful! We don't want anything tragic to happen to it. It's very fragile.” Jacob touched the book gently, inspecting it for injuries.
We kept exploring the old apartment. Nothing stood out to Jacob in the room of Edith, Albert's wife who'd lived to an old age, or in Vance's childhood room full of sports trophies.
Though Millie's room was the most stripped-down, Jacob had a much bigger reaction to it. He looked at each of the walls, the ceiling, and the floor.
“That hot, red ghost likes to spend time in here,” Jacob said. “Just kind of...obsessing. Over a girl, I think. What are you calling that ghost, anyway? Hotty McBurnface?”
“Elton,” I said.
“You guys should've called me in way earlier. I could've done better than that.” He stepped toward the closet and closed his eyes. “So anyway...Elton comes in here and burns. It's hard to say whether he's burning with desire or fury, so it's probably both, and maybe that's all mixed up for him at this point. I just see him standing here on fire. He is not what you'd call 'emotionally stable.' This isn't his main place, though. He stays upstairs, near the lady in the hospital bed, most of the time.”
I nodded; we knew Elton and Millie had a complicated, possible hostile relationship.
Jacob grew quiet when we entered the room of Miriam, Millie's older sister who'd died after falling off the building's roof in 1957. He circled the place slowly, walking past the teddy bear in the rocking chair and around the canopy bed, then looking at the big vanity mirror. He skimmed over the Nancy Drew hardbacks and touched the old book of nursery rhymes Siobhan had brought with her from Ireland.
“She loved this book even though it gave her nightmares,” Jacob said, touching the crumbling cover. “All the kids did. Generations of kids. But the little girl who lived here...it was the same story. Whispers in the night. Fairy lights, like in this story...” He gently leafed through the pages until he reached an illustration of a drowsy-looking girl walking through the forest, following a glowing fairy, who looked like a tiny young woman with a wicked smile. “She followed a light out of here o
ne night; it was whispering and giggling, like the fairy in the story. It led her upstairs...all the way out to the roof...and then—oh, no. The girl went over the edge. He grabbed her and pushed her over. She was just a kid.” Jacob shuddered and turned to Stacey and me. “We have to stop the thing in the basement.”
“We will,” I said.
We finished off by walking through the Art Deco apartment that Stacey and I had made into our headquarters. Jacob didn't pick up anything extra there, just the continued sense of background hauntings. He still seemed unable to sense any trace of the girl-ghost of Millie. I knew he could see the living when they were out of body, but apparently he couldn't pick up any trail or energy they might have left behind, the way he could with the ghosts of the dead.
We had to skip a few floors because they were private and residential, and the family had told us not to bother them. Apparently those tenants were older, probably old enough to consider the Pennefort Building an elite place to reside, having grown up when the Penneforts were prominent public citizens rather than reclusive types presiding over the remnants of a fallen empire.
The twelfth floor housed the Pennefort family's private offices. We couldn't access those, so we kept to the public areas at first, walking up and down hallways with one or two unmarked doors each. An occasional narrow, black-glass window reflected our faces but offered no view inside.
Our access card did open a door to a suite of empty offices opposite the family's. Inside, a couple of broken office chairs lay on the carpet, below large craters in the wall where the chairs had apparently been slammed and broken. A few cubicle walls were scattered around the open space. Wires hung from askew ceiling panels. Dust covered everything. An inspirational poster featuring a bird flying in a sunrise hung askew on the wall, pinned by one remaining tack. DREAMS CAN COME TRUE IF YOU BELIEVE, it said.
“Another thoroughfare for the ghosts,” Jacob said. “I don't see how anyone could be comfortable in this building over the long term. There's a constant cold background of shadows. Living here, you might feel drained, depressed, listless, have trouble focusing, but never really know why. But then, I guess people can get used to anything. And after a while, you're just slowly sinking and maybe don't even bother trying to pull free. You're like Artax in the Swamps of Sadness—”
“Stop,” Stacey said. “Never mention that again.”
“Sorry. So, if you remember when Simba's father dies—”
“Come on!”
“This place is just constant, low-grade misery,” Jacob said. “I can't imagine putting cubicles and corporate memos on top of that. I imagine working in this office was a gray soul-sucking purgatory for everyone involved. I hate jobs like that. Anyway, depressing. Let's go.”
We'd taken the passenger elevator down to the twelfth floor, but now headed for the service elevator to continue our downward journey. I'd been saving that area for last.
Jacob reacted immediately to the file graveyard of overflowing cabinets and boxes.
“This guy can't let go of his work,” Jacob said. “He says there's enough evidence to put Albert Pennefort in prison for life.”
“Does he realize Albert Pennefort's dead?” I asked.
“Hey, do you realize that guy's dead?” Jacob shook his head. “He's not listening. He's diving back in, swimming in all that old information. He doesn't want to let go. He doesn't want to hear the guy's dead. But he knew enough to sort of plug his ears and not listen to me.”
I nodded. “If he understands Albert's dead, then he'll be free?”
“Maybe. If that's the main thing holding him here, then yeah.”
I looked among the heaps of paperwork. “Where's he most attached?”
“I guess...that file cabinet?” Jacob pointed to a big steel one that contained records from the 1900s. Those would have been files and records created and handled by Ernest Pennefort—stalwart commercial baron of early Atlanta, remembered as a patron of the arts and promoter of industry and such—and possible murderer of his wife's first husband. “He says that one has the power to bring them all down, even their statues.”
“Okay.” I pushed aside heaps of boxes, feeling the increasing chill in the air as I approached the old cabinet. I thought I could feel a little resistance, too, and I remembered how he'd touched me, marked me with his ghostly ink.
I opened a drawer of stiff, dry, crumbling old files...then lifted the lot out and tossed them onto the maintenance cart.
The air stirred around me, freezing, moving enough to blow my hair back from my face.
“He doesn't like that,” Jacob said.
“I'm doing him a favor. I'm doing you a favor, Gary. You reached out to me, remember? You knew I was here. Let's bring them down, Gary. Let's bring them all down together. Come with us.”
The spinning agitation in the air slowed, then stopped. The deep cold spot remained.
“Okay,” Jacob said. “He's scared, but he's with you. I think.”
“Good,” I said. “We need all the help we can get. Thanks, Gary.”
I moved a second drawer's worth of files onto the cart, then a third. A quick glance showed me a lot of papers signed by Ernest Pennefort himself, in the earliest years of the building's existence. I hoped the files would help keep Gary's ghost attached to us.
“Our gear cart's turning into a library cart,” Stacey said. “Old files, old newspapers, nursery rhymes...and that old book—”
“Extremely rare and valuable,” Jacob said. He stuffed some of the old files in around the Magicia book to keep it padded while it rode on the cart.
“Okay, should we go—ping!” Stacey said.
“Go ping?” Jacob asked.
“The trap sent its pinging sound. Maybe it caught Elton.” Stacey grabbed her tablet from the cart.
“I still think you should've gone with Hotty McBombface.” Jacob looked over her shoulder.
Stacey pulled up the most recent details from the thermal camera, by way of the portable server up in our borrowed apartment. “Yep, there he is.”
I watched on replay as the hot red shape of the ghost finally moved into the trap, and the stamper slammed shut. The hot spot churned inside the closed trap.
“Should we go collect it?” Jacob asked.
“I like it where it is for now.” I punched the down button by the service elevator. “We've got other fish left to fry.”
“Don't make me hungry,” he said.
“I'd rather be fishing,” Stacey said.
It took a minute, as if the building were reluctant to help us, but the elevator finally rattled its way down.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
We continued Jacob's walk-through, floor by floor. In the corporate office levels, Jacob said the feeling of darkness and coldness grew gradually thicker. We could only walk through the public hallways on those floors, accessing the elevators, stairs, and bathrooms. Everything else was locked up, and naturally we weren't supposed to go nosing around in the private business of those, well, private businesses. He didn't find much new in the areas we were allowed to access.
The basement waited for us, drawing us inevitably down toward it like a black hole.
We didn't speak as we stepped out of the service elevator into the basement. One wheel of our maintenance cart squeaked as we rolled out of the car into the darkness. I'd barely noticed the squeak up until then, but now it sounded loud as thunder, announcing our arrival into what was probably the tower's most haunted floor.
The elevator doors rattled shut behind us, and we stood in a cold, complete blackness. Not even the red EXIT signs burned; they'd been extinguished by ghosts who clearly cared nothing about fire codes.
Stacey and I clicked on our flashlights and rolled the cart into the depths of the basement. The air was icy, and I shivered despite my leather jacket.
“It's not this cold outside,” Jacob whispered. “You don't need me to sense the ghosts down here. There's something ahead...”
Collapsed heaps of
junk lay before us. Some of the narrow trails that had existed before had been obliterated when things came crashing down at me. There was no easy way to roll the cart full of gear through it.
Small footsteps approached us. The hairs on the back of my neck stood.
“You can't escape him. Nobody ever does.” The voice was small, low to the floor, distant but crystal clear. A child, I thought. Maybe a little boy.
“I hear a child's voice,” Jacob said. He gestured toward a distant corner. “He's saying we won't escape him—”
“I heard it, too,” Stacey said.
“Lights off,” I said, and all the flashlights went out, restoring the solid darkness.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Stacey whispered, as we stood in the cold, seeing nothing.
“No,” I whispered back. “But let's watch and listen.”
The basement only grew colder.
When the boy appeared, he was small, only partially formed—a pale curve of a child-sized head, a portion of arm. He was low to the ground and crawling slowly. He stopped several feet away and raised the transparent, featureless blob of his partially formed face.
“He's going to make you one of us.” The boy's voice still sounded distant and soft; I had to strain my ears to make out the words. I recognized it, though. He'd been the voice rattling the closet upstairs, near his old room. “He's going to kill you like he killed us. Then you'll be his.”
“No, that won't happen,” I said. “We're here to help. Stay with us. We'll help you get free. You and your whole family.”
“You'll never leave this place. You'll die.” The boy rose from the floor and became much clearer, a full apparition, almost lifelike, and the freezing air grew even colder as his appearance sharpened and filled out. He wore a dark 1900's Buster Brown-fashion suit, with bloomer pants and a huge starchy white collar, and a big puffy bowtie, plus a wide floppy-brimmed hat over pageboy hair. His face was soft and pretty, but pale and cold, the lips a hard flat line, the eyes too dark and mature for the rest of his appearance. He was like a life-sized evil china doll. He'd been a boy for only a few years, but he'd been a ghost for more than a hundred.
