Cecilia suddenly sprang to her feet.
“Come on,” she hissed to Kellyn. “We have to get out of here before—”
“Sit down, lady,” Kincaid said, pointing his baton, “or I’ll sit you down.”
Beside him, Faulkner laughed nervously and edged a step away from Kincaid.
Taking the thin sheets that had come from the lumitypes, Abigail knelt down on the stage and uncorked a bottle of some sort of liquid, tilted the bottle to soak a piece of cloth, and then ran this across the flattened sheets. She then held them up to the purple light. Kincaid saw what looked like colorful blurs appear on them, though he was too far away to get a good look.
“I’m getting spectral marks,” she called out in a calm voice. “Nasty ones.”
“Come to me,” Elliot said, and Kincaid knew he wasn’t speaking to any of the living in the auditorium.
Grimes said, “It’s manifesting.”
He pointed at what at first seemed like nothing—until Kincaid blinked.
It began as a face—a mask, Kincaid realized. Wolf-like fangs jutted up from the corners of its lips. One elongated pointed ear aimed up, the other down. A crack ran the length of one side, dividing its features like a scar. Its simian jaw jutted out beyond its thick brow, which hung in a mound over glowing eyes.
Its brow furrowed, and the lips curled into a snarl.
A whining sound came from one of the stationary projectors, and its spinning wheel seized up even as the light unleashed a blinding flash as bright as daylight—Kincaid felt the flash as it drove into his eyes with the force of an unexpected blast of wind—and before the theater went black on him again, he saw the spectral shape jolt into existence around the ogrun mask. It was human. And it was moving.
Cecilia and Kellyn cried out as one. Blinded, Kincaid turned in their direction, desperately trying to remember how far he was from the stage edge. He heard someone move past him, and he followed, probing for the steps. He blinked hard and savagely rubbed one eye.
“Help us!” he heard Kellyn shout.
Blurry shapes. Kincaid found the edge of the stage stairs with one foot, nearly falling but instead letting his momentum carry him down them like a drunk. His teeth jarred at the bottom, but he could see arms flailing just ahead. He raised the baton.
The same malfunctioning Strangelight projector gave another bright flash before its light died entirely. He could smell smoke. Like a perfect painting, he saw the theater manager and her assistant on the floor before the first row of seats, their hands raised in helpless defense as a misshapen ghostly figure hovered above them, reaching for them. The ogrun mask floated where the spirit’s face should have been. Grimes was charging in from the right. His gloved hands were thrust forward as if he were prepared to shove the ghost. To his left, Abigail aimed her lumitype like a cannon, its purple beam moving frantically.
When the world went grey again, he swung at the mask.
His baton connected, sending an explosion of agony lancing up his left arm. It was like striking a stone pillar. But he could sense his target give ground, so he flipped the baton to his right hand and swung again. He could make out the ogrun mask turning to face him, its eyeholes now an eerie blue-green.
Without thinking, he shook his left arm, dropping his pistol from its spring-loaded holster and into his palm. He raised it at the mask.
Abigail’s lumitype beam shifted toward the spirit, Grimes thrust his hands into the specter’s center, and Elliot and Mel moved to protect the pair. Cecilia shrieked as if she were about to die, though the ghost had turned to deal with Kincaid first.
And then it was gone.
Kincaid whirled, certain it was behind him, but it had vanished entirely. The turn gave him the moment needed to shove his pistol back into place before anyone could see it, though he couldn’t be sure of that. He rubbed his eyes once more with his free hand, his baton still raised to strike. Finally, he faced the others again.
“Holy shit,” he muttered.
Mel shook her head. “More likely unholy.” She turned to look at him. “You okay, Kincaid?”
“Yeah, I think so.” He scowled. “But somebody here better get me some goggles before we go through that again.”
Elliot extended a hand to guide Kellyn back to his feet as Cecilia found her way back into the theater seat where she’d been sitting when the attack began. She slumped as if exhausted, but Abigail stepped defiantly up to her anyway.
“Most manifestations target the team,” she said in a flat voice. “We’re the perceived antagonists, and they’re often drawn to Elliot when he calls them. Clearly, that didn’t happen here. I want to know why.”
“Not now, girl,” Cecilia said, covering her eyes with one hand. “I’ve just been through a most traumatic—”
“You tell us what’s going on here,” Abigail interrupted, “or you can start doling out your refunds.”
On the stage, the director Faulkner, his face pale, sat up from where he’d fallen during the tussle. He cleared his throat. “Perhaps this manifestation knows who here is out to ruin its thespian aspirations.”
Cecilia considered Abigail’s glare, and when the investigator held her ground, the red-haired woman sighed dramatically. “All right, then. I might have—well, I might have antagonized it just a bit. When it first appeared. And I want to reiterate, just a bit.”
Abigail pushed her glasses up her nose and crossed her arms, and Kincaid smiled to himself. For as much as she looked like a girl trying to be a woman, and despite Faulkner’s assertion that she was a rank amateur at dealing with ghosts, Kincaid was liking Abigail Thorpe more and more. She knew exactly what she was doing.
Seeing the investigator’s impatience, Cecilia finally began to talk.
• • •
“IT FIRST APPEARED ON THE OPENING NIGHT of Pride of Cathmore,” she explained. “But we were already in trouble. Faulkner had insisted the production needed a real draw, so I had spent more than half the run’s budget getting Berek Ofstad to play the lead.”
She paused for effect. When none of the Strangelight team reacted to the name, she sighed. “Savages.”
“He was in Rime of the Dirgenmast Captain,” Grimes muttered. “Two years ago, the man won the Sunbright Award for playing—”
He stopped and looked around at the others as they stared at him. He glowered back. “What? I go out sometimes.”
“Well,” Cecilia said, wringing her hands, “he accepted the offer and attended rehearsals, but when it was time to step into the footlights, Berek Ofstad was a no-show. Personally, I was relieved to have our budget spared. Of course, Faulkner here went into histrionics, though our patrons were paying to see the play, not the lead egomaniac. So, we opened with an understudy—and a ghost.
“At first, even the audience failed to comprehend what they were seeing. It first showed itself as the floating mask. I assumed it was a last-minute effect of some sort when I noticed it. But I knew we had an issue when it attacked the understudy.”
Abigail began to speak, but the manager waved her off with one trembling hand. “‘Attacked’ may be too harsh a term. ‘Harassed’ is more appropriate. It repeatedly dove at the young man until he was half-tempted to flee the stage.”
“And the audience loved it,” the director Faulkner interjected with exaggerated passion. “For the love of Morrow, they cheered. We were headed for a standing ovation.”
“All semblance of theater had been utterly abandoned,” Cecilia asserted. “We had become vaudeville.”
The director shook his head as she continued. “I had the curtain dropped. Ah, don’t give me that look, Faulkner—the understudy was in danger. The production was in danger.”
“Ticket sales have hardly suffered.”
“And that’s why we proceeded with the next night’s performance.” Cecilia sniffed indignantly. “And five more. As long as it has remained harmless, I’ve allowed it. But last night, we had another incident. Another attack. And this manifestation,
as you call it, has become more…real…”
“Corporeal,” Elliot offered.
“More corporeal. And more aggressive, obviously. Well, I could not jeopardize the safety of our patrons any longer. This needed be dealt with immediately, so I sent word to Blackwell Hall. Your reputation precedes you.”
Abigail had been making notes while the manager spoke. Now she looked up at Cecilia. “Who did the ghost attack last night?”
“Just an extra,” Cecilia said, “who promptly quit, of course. Still, no one who can’t be replaced.”
Kincaid, who had stood by silently the entire time, resisted the urge to call her out. He knew a lie when he heard one.
• • •
WHILE THE OTHERS REARRANGED their spectral gear to completely encircle the stage, Kincaid followed Abigail to the theater’s head office. She took a seat at the desk and began to rifle through files.
“Miss Thorpe,” Kincaid said from the doorway.
“You can call me Abigail,” she answered without looking up. “Shouldn’t you be guarding the team?”
“For the moment, I’m guarding you. And I need to talk to you about Cecilia.”
“I already know she’s lying, if that’s it.” She flashed him a smile that softened her tone. “I had Mel check her with the spectral residue detector while she was distracted, and she lit up with it. Evidence of shed ectoplasm. The ghost attacked her last night.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason it attacked her an hour ago. She knows exactly what this ghost wants, and she’ll tell us when she gets desperate enough.” Abigail held up a playbill for Pride of Cathmore. Across its top, in capital letters, was the name BEREK OFSTAD. “She either knows what happened to him or she was responsible for it. And that’s why he’s haunting this theater.”
“So, Berek Ofstad is dead, she knows what happened to him, and now he’s trying to get revenge from the grave?”
Abigail said, “If it were that simple, we’d have a lot more ghosts among us. A desire for revenge might encourage an angry spirit to linger, but there’s usually something deeper going on. If I were to guess, I’d say he wants to be reunited with his—”
Kincaid sneezed three times in sharp succession, and Abigail’s grey cat, Artis, jumped up onto the desk between them, its fur standing on end as it hissed. Kincaid reached for the baton on his belt.
“Uh oh,” Abigail said.
A frigid wave swept the office as a blizzard of papers exploded all around them. Behind Abigail, a tall black bookcase lined with scripts teetered forward. Kincaid lunged, grabbing her arm and pulling her away as it collapsed where she had been seated. She tore herself from his grip and dug into her satchel, pulling out her lumitype with its mounted light.
“Team!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “I have it! It’s in here!”
A playbill swept across Kincaid’s vision as he finally spotted the hideous ogrun mask as it descended from the far corner of the office’s ceiling. A blue-green glow emanated from its blank eye sockets and the crack that ran the mask’s length. Behind it expanded a spectral body shape, its arms and legs slowly becoming defined. As he watched, the shape contorted into a broken fetal position.
Footsteps in the corridor. The office door slammed of its own volition, and Kincaid heard the lock click into place. He looked at the playbill floating to the floor, then up at the incorporeal shape.
“Ofstad!” he cried. “Berek Ofstad!”
He thought the manifestation hesitated and then the pounding at the door began.
“We’re breaking it down!” Grimes called from the corridor, and when the first blow struck the door, the ghost disappeared.
Abigail got back to her feet just as the lock splintered and Grimes fell into the office. Elliot was directly behind him, his sensory deprivation hood covering his head, and Mel brought up the rear, Elliot’s resonance box in hand.
“It’s gone,” Abigail breathed, twisting to take in the rest of the office. “Get the lights ready. It’s coming back any min—”
From across the lobby and beyond the auditorium doors came a shrill shriek of pure terror. A deafening boom followed, then a second.
“Oh no,” Abigail groaned. “It tricked me into calling all of you.”
As one, they turned back the way they’d come and ran. But Kincaid knew they wouldn’t make it—a diversion almost always worked when it came to doing bad, bad things.
They burst through the swinging doors into the auditorium as Faulkner shrieked again and flung himself at the torso of the enormous warjack costume that lurched across the stage toward the orchestra pit. The ’jack was a complete fake, Kincaid knew; it was nothing but wood and strips of metal glued to make it look real. And it shouldn’t be moving at all. But the sickening blue-green glow that oozed from it told him exactly what was happening.
The costume’s great forearms were raised to its head level as if making an offering to an unseen god, and propped between its arms hung the unconscious body of the Majestic Playhouse’s manager, Cecilia.
Blood ran from one of her ears, and the sizable bruise that covered most of that side of her face was already a shocking purple. One eye was already puffed beyond opening.
Cecilia’s assistant Kellyn swung a lighting stand at the costume’s legs, the impact a dull thud beneath the next booming step the prop automaton took. He bellowed at it without words. The director Faulkner threw his arms around the warjack’s midsection and braced his feet as if to stop its forward momentum. Instead, he slid backward toward the stage’s edge.
“Be calm!” Grimes shouted. “Everybody, be calm! It can feed on your fear!”
The big man dropped his goggles over his eyes and activated his gloves. They sparked when he pressed them together and chased after the others.
Elliot skidded to a halt at the back row of audience seats and snatched his sound-making mechanism from Mel as she raced past him. It activated, emitting a low whistling sound that increased in volume. He slammed it down on a seat and turned the apparatus toward the stage. Then there was a sudden high-pitched screech from the device and a choking noise as it cut off. This was followed by a lick of flame from the top and a stench of burning caustic materials. Mel managed to smother it with a section of canvas, putting out the fire. Elliot let out a disappointed wail.
“I only had one of those,” he cried.
Sprinting down the aisle past Abigail and Mel, Kincaid reached the stage just ahead of them and leapfrogged onto it to land on both feet. The warjack costume took another step away and raised Cecilia’s body above its head. Faulkner lost his grip and fell at the costume’s feet, hastily rolling to the side to avoid being stepped on.
Kincaid dropped his baton and flicked his left wrist. The pistol up his sleeve sprang into his hand. He aimed it at the warjack’s head.
The gunshot was exceptionally loud in the nearly empty auditorium.
The bullet tore through the costume’s wooden face as it half-turned toward him. Splinters like daggers exploded from the right side as the bullet tore through the shell of its head. For an instant, Kincaid thought he could see the hideous face of the ogrun mask like a skull beneath the wood, but then the warjack smashed Cecilia down past the stage’s edge and into the orchestra pit below, out of Kincaid’s line of sight. He heard the woman careen into the seats there. She moaned once.
Then the massive warjack deliberately tilted forward and tumbled off the stage.
The manager never made another sound as the weight of the costume crushed her beneath it, the thunder of its impact a horrifying, wet sound. Kellyn wailed in horror and sank to his knees. Abigail and Mel shouldered past Kincaid and the assistant, racing to the edge of the stage to stare down at the devastation below.
Grimes came up the stage steps, his footfalls heavy. Kincaid looked back at him, but the jammer wasn’t hurrying.
“It’s gone,” Grimes said in a low voice. “Elliot is still trying to call it back, but for the moment, it’s hidin
g again.”
Kincaid slowly reloaded and reset his pistol, ignoring Grimes’ unwavering stare, and retrieved his baton. He attached it to his belt once again then crossed the stage. He already knew Cecilia was dead; neither Abigail nor Mel had gone down into the orchestra pit to rescue her from beneath the weight that had fallen atop her. But he still had to be sure. He didn’t want to be, but he had to be sure he had actually failed to save her.
“You never open fire without my express direction,” Abigail said as she passed him. “We have special bullets for—”
He kept moving. She could lecture him later.
Faulkner had lost his bowler, and his long hair was wildly spread across his bald head like an incomplete toupee. The director looked at Kincaid as they passed each other on the stage.
“After this tragedy,” Faulkner whispered, “do you think we’ll still be able to open tonight?”
• • •
THE OTHERS COULD HARDLY LOOK AT Cecilia’s crushed form after they wrestled the warjack costume off of her, so Kincaid took responsibility for finding a tarp to cover her with. By the time he’d returned from the stage’s wings with one, Abigail was already well into Kellyn’s business. He half-groveled as she spoke; had Kincaid not known better, he’d have guessed Abigail had been hitting him. If Grimes had been doing the interrogation, he’d know that was what had happened.
“I already know it’s the ghost of Berek Ofstad,” she was saying. “What I need to know now is, how did he die and who did it?”
“It was an accident,” Kellyn moaned. He sounded on the brink of a breakdown, Kincaid thought.
Abigail seemed to think the same thing—she summoned Elliot and held a whispered conversation with him. The caller pulled off his deprivation hood and cleared his throat. He joined her at Kellyn’s side, murmuring something to the man that seemed to calm him quickly. His breathing became more normal, his eyes less frightened.
Wicked Ways: An Iron Kingdoms Chronicles Anthology Page 5
