by Eve Paludan
“I know,” he apologized. “There’s so much stuff in it to move out. It’s the last room in the building to straighten out before the First Friday Art Walk.”
I tried to hold back tears of fear as I first went into the bathroom and used it to relieve myself, which I badly needed. It had a dingy and repugnant atmosphere. I only needed thirty seconds to myself and then Diego and I carried stuff out of the old bathroom and set it in the hallway. I banged on the walls, looking for secret access panels to other rooms. I even looked in the cabinets, even though they were small and Ellen could not have fit in them.
I began to really panic as Diego and I quickly emptied the bathroom of years of cleaning supplies, trash, and construction debris. It did not appear that Ellen was in the room or that the room had any hidden exits.
Sandy stood with her arms folded in the hallway, tears streaming down her cheeks. I walked up to her and took her by the shoulders. “Sandy, get ahold of yourself. Please! I need you to round up Troy and Angelina and get them to help us while I set up my equipment in the cleared-out bathroom.”
“I’m too scared, Monty. This is a lot harder than reading Tarot cards and writing horoscopes for iVillage or talking on the psychic hotline to women who want to know if their husbands are cheating.”
“My wife is missing, Sandy. I do not have psychic powers. I have electronics. I need you. She could be dying. Please help me!”
Sandy nodded as I set up my equipment. “Troy, Angelina! Are you here?” she called.
“Close your eyes and concentrate and call them with your mind. Imagine that they are just behind a door and the door is opening.” I paused. “I learned that from Ellen. I had to use it once.”
She closed her eyes and opened them suddenly. “Where’s Diego?”
I turned around and looked. “He was just helping me empty the bathroom and stack stuff in the hallway.”
“Diego!” she screamed. And then I started yelling for him, too. There was no answer.
I set up my equipment and checked it but I had nothing! No ghosts. No electric or magnetic or radio frequencies. “It’s like my equipment isn’t even working. Please concentrate on calling Angelina and Troy for help. We need them!”
“I’m trying but…” Sandy was almost hysterical in her crying. “What happened to Diego and Ellen?”
I looked at the bathroom door, a grim feeling spreading through my chest and belly. “They both disappeared in the bathroom. I wonder if it is some kind of vortex?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of that happening outside of the movies, where a room could swallow someone up without a trace.”
“Huh, you haven’t been many paranormal investigations with Ellen and me.”
Sandy asked, “So, has Ellen ever…I know this is a weird question, Monty…but has Ellen ever been dragged through a wall or anything like that? I mean, by a ghost or spirit?”
“Funny you should ask that.”
She looked more scared than ever and crossed herself and started praying in Latin.
I grabbed a rusty metal mop bucket. “Nice thought, but let’s do something. You! Hold onto my belt loops!” I said. “And follow me. I don’t want to lose you, too!”
“What are you doing with that mop bucket?” Sandy asked.
“This!” I walked down the hall with her holding onto my belt loops and stood in front of the glassed-in fire hose that was decades old in the hallway. “Hide your face in my back while I smash the glass,” I ordered. As soon as I felt the pressure of her head in my back, I smashed the glass and pulled out the fire hose, which came out easily. It was heavy. I tied the end around my waist.
“Oh my,” Sandy said. “Are you going into that old bathroom, expecting to be swallowed up, too?”
“Yeah. I learned this trick from movies: If you want to rescue someone, you have to get yourself captured, too.”
“Oh my freaking…you are not Captain Kirk, you are not Indiana Jones. This is real life. What are you thinking?”
“The only way I will be able to find Ellen and Diego is to allow myself to befall their same fate, no matter what it is.”
Sandy shuddered. “This is insane, Monty. You’re insane.”
“Without Ellen, my life would be insane. This is a viable plan. I’ll be tethered. You are my observer. If I disappear through a wall you should be able to see where I went by following the fire hose, unless it gets cut off. If I can’t get out, just use your phone and call for help. It doesn’t do any good for all four of us to get sucked into this abyss.”
“Okay,” Sandy said. She twisted her long blonde hair nervously. “Monty? I’m really just a cab driver with a little bit of premonition ability. I like to read Tarot cards and write horoscopes for women’s websites. I can even connect with loved ones at a séance. If this was a movie, I would be known as The Good Witch of the North who doesn’t do much but look pretty and give advice to someone on a quest. I didn’t sign up for this physical and psychic battle against evil entities. It is so out of my league that I am about to wet my pants with fear.”
“Hey, don’t you know how special you are? You found a ghost girl and got her in your cab. You are a full-blown psychic, lady. This is your destiny. Jump on it and take a long ride. You are my main asset at the moment in finding Ellen and Diego. Time is critical. Tick-tock.”
Sandy nodded. “I’m terrified, Monty.”
“Don’t be afraid of it. Ellen’s life, and maybe Diego’s, too, may depend on what you can do with your sensitive abilities. You can save a life tonight. Maybe two of them. But you have to screw up your courage and do this with me. I am counting on you. There’s no one else.”
“I’m really just a cab driver!” she protested.
“And I’m a college dropout. This is our chance to both be heroes.” I opened the bathroom door and my skin prickled with fear. I was afraid for my equipment to be sucked away, so I only had an empty backpack with me, for Troy’s bones, if I found them, and my Android phone.
“Oh, this bathroom is an evil hole. I’m coming, Ellie!” I shouted. I ran into the bathroom with the fire hose tied around my waist. I thought of her, over and over, trying to manifest some journey to her side.
Suddenly, I felt myself scrape through a hole in the universe and I was falling into the darkness. I bounced off the walls of dirt and landed with my leg twisted under me. I was in complete blackness and also terror. From far away, I could hear a woman screaming and realized it was probably Sandy, panicked and petrified. I hoped to hell that she would figure out how to get me out of here once I found Ellen.
I didn’t feel like I was in another dimension. I felt like I was in a hole of dirt, as if the floor had somehow opened up and swallowed me. Underneath me, there were sharp things poking me. I carefully moved my leg and reached underneath me, only to feel something chilling under my fingertips. They were bones. Ribs to be exact. But there was no flesh on them. It was a small body, and the shreds of old clothing were scattered all around, as if rats or crabs had torn up the corpse. I scrambled to get off the body, the bones snapping like twigs under me. It was horrible. I shuddered, trying to shake off the heebie-jeebies.
“Ellen!” I screamed. “Ellen! Are you here?”
As my eyes adjusted, I saw two sets of eyes looking at me in the dark, as two diaphanous shapes floated in concern, not three feet from my face. One of the sets of eyes was a set of green eyes and the form seemed to be a young woman in a flapper dress with trolley tracks on it.
“Angelina,” I said. “Help me.” I reached out a hand and that was my mistake.
The other set of eyes glowed red in the dark. That had to be Troy. Angelina held Troy protectively in her arms, at least, she held his diaphanous form close to hers.
It was a mistake to reach out. Troy shrieked and I felt a punch to my nose from a little ghost’s fist that left my nose bleeding profusely. Oh, he was quite a little scrapper!
“Argh!” I screamed, touching my nose in shock. “That hurt so
bad! Angelina, say something to him. Don’t let him hit me again!”
“Troy, no!” Angelina said. “He’s a good man! He helped me find where you were.”
I used my shirt to staunch the flow of blood. “I think he broke my nose,” I said to the shifting and separating spears of white mist that was the two ghosts in the deep dark hole where I was. “Ow!” I closed my eyes and realized I was seeing stars from being hit so hard.
“He was scared,” Angelina said in her tiny fairy voice. “He doesn’t understand and he’s pretty upset that you crashed in on top of his dead body. You crushed his bones.”
I tried to keep myself from puking, too. I didn’t know which smelled worse, landing on what I thought was a corpse that had been aging for years, or the putrid fire scent of Troy’s poltergeist form. I said, “I’m sorry, Troy. I didn’t mean to land on your bones. I fell in. How did I fall in?”
Angelina looked up. “There was a trapdoor in the bathroom that led to a speakeasy. There was a ladder but now there’s not.”
“A speakeasy? Down here?”
Suddenly, I heard a snarling sound and every hair on my body stood up. In the darkness, I smelled a horrible animal smell, with fetid breath so bad that it seemed like he probably ate his own waste rather than drank blood.
I shuddered. “Oh, no. The chupacabra!”
Angelina turned around. “Oh, what a sweet dog!”
“No, Angelina! Don’t! He’ll suck your blood!”
“I don’t have blood,” she said.
As the thing with red eyes snarled at her, she kneeled down on the wet ground and patted the dirt. “Come here, you poor thing. Nobody wants you. I know how that feels. Nobody wants me either. Come here, I’ll be your friend!”
It showed its rows of teeth and they were horrible in the gloaming darkness, like the kind of childhood nightmare that you want to believe that you can wake up from, if only your mom will come and wake you and hold you. I felt like shrieking but my tongue froze as this brave girl reached out and let the damned thing sniff her hand.
“I’m an outcast, too, poor doggie. Just a girl turning tricks on the sand under the pier. I know that you think you are ugly and nobody likes you, but that’s just a way of bullying you, and hurting you. I’m not going to hurt you. Come here.”
And I was shocked to see it crawl to her submissively and close the lips over its teeth and then roll over on its back.
She scratched the thing’s belly and it whined like no one had ever scratched its belly in its miserable life. Angelina said to me, “I’m going to take my friend here with me into the light, so you can go in peace. Goodbye, Monty,” she said.
“Wait! How do I find Ellen and Diego? How did you get out of here when it was a speakeasy?”
“In low tide, we just walked down the tunnel to the sea.”
“Is it low tide?”
But she was already going, taking the dreaded chupacabra spirit with her into the light. At the last minute, it looked back at me and growled and she dragged it by the scruff of the neck through a window of light that was so quick that it was like a flashbulb in the darkness.
For a moment or two, I seemed to lose consciousness, and then I woke up on the pile of bones, and screamed and screamed because it wasn’t a dream. And my nose was broken and bleeding and hurt like hell.
I stuffed all of the bones that I could feel, Troy’s bones, I hoped, even his skull, into my empty backpack. I tried not to think about what it was and just marveled that the bones were picked clean by crabs and bugs over decades and decades, some eighty-ish years.
“Monty!” I heard Ellen screaming my name from far away.
“How am I even hearing you without my equipment?” I asked. But then they were gone. Maybe I had hit my head. Maybe I was in a coma. Maybe I was imagining this whole thing.
Above my head, light began to show through in slivers and from a long way up, I heard Sandy sobbing and calling my name. I heard banging and screaming.
She pulled up the length of fire hose around my waist until it was taut. Then fresh air and light came as the tunnel opened with light above me and I saw a tiny silhouette of Sandy’s face far above me. I shielded my eyes from the clumps of dirt and linoleum falling from above. I had a feeling that she grabbed the ax from the fire hose area and was tearing up the floor. I was pretty scared that the tunnel was going to collapse with me at the bottom and I yelled up three words:
“Nine! One! One!”
And then the shaft above me mostly collapsed, just as I ducked out of the way. God, I hoped she heard me scream nine-one-one. My nose was bleeding like a mo—like a serious blood vessel was busted. And it hurt so badly that I almost got sick all over myself. I tried to use pressure on my neck vein but the nose still bled, wet, hot and sticky over the front of my shirt. I wadded up my shirttail and gently pressed it to my pounding, pulsing nose and then tried to figure out which way to go to find Ellen. I knew I needed to be rescued. But if Ellen and Diego were down here somewhere, that was more of a priority than my own rescue. I was on my way to finding them, I felt it.
I looked for Troy’s ghost but I didn’t see him. I realized that I did see a faint light receding down another tunnel that connected to the shaft that I fell down. Was it the will-o-the-wisp or ghost fire from organic matter igniting? I didn’t know. I tried to follow, but I’m tall so I had to crawl with the backpack of Troy’s bones.
I inched along in the dark and I banged my head on a metal pipe and saw more stars. I took a quarter out of my pocket and banged on the pipe. An SOS, to let Sandy know that I was alive. It was the only Morse code I knew. I waited a moment, and from far away, heard an echo of the SOS on the pipe. Sandy knew I was alive and needed help. Dear offbeat Sandy. If we made it out of this labyrinth nightmare, I was going to thank her over and over.
I kept crawling, squishing bugs and little crabs pinching me and feeling spiders crawl on me and breathing through my mouth because my nose was still bleeding a lot. My knees were killing me. At one point, I had to stop and puke. Twice. It was just too much pain. I couldn’t give up though. Somewhere in this hellhole was Ellen, my love. And that guy who got us into this mess, Diego Francisco.
When I ran out of fire hose on my crawl, I untied it from around my waist and reluctantly left it behind. Then it wasn’t so reluctant, as part of the tunnel collapsed behind me as I shoved my big body through the open side, as fast as I could. I was still bloated from my chocolate pancake feast and kind of regretting the indulgence. I crawled as fast as I could away from the billows of dirt and dust and stuff. I hoped my rescuers wouldn’t freak out when they dragged up an empty fire hose with no Monty at the end of it.
Nose bleeding, but slower than before, I crawled as fast as I could, following the faint lights from a white mist and calling out, “Ellen! Diego!” but not hearing a reply. What I did hear was…the sea.
Chapter Seventeen
Was the tide coming in or going out?
I had no way of knowing. The sound of the sea was joined by the sounds of hooves clopping and this time, I wasn’t scared of the poltergeist horse. I squinted really hard and then thought to use my phone. Signal reception still wasn’t working underground but I had previously forgotten that I had an app on my Android called “Flashlight”—now it was coming in handy, even without having any cell reception underground. It lit my way quite well and I no longer had to crawl. What I did do was put it in a plastic bag in my pocket, a Ziplock. I always carried a couple of them in my cargo pockets. The truth was, I usually had Milk Duds in the Ziplocks, but they happened to be empty. I realized that I could stand and did so. I used my Android to follow the will-o-the-wisp light and hoped it wasn’t a ghost, leading me to my death.
Suddenly, I heard a voice in my head. It was Ellen’s voice. She said, “I’m waiting for you, Monty. Keep coming!” And she said it over and over.
I sent her a mental telepathy message back: “I love you, Ellen. Hey, how do I know this is you and not some evil entity?�
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I don’t know if she got it or not, but I heard her say, in my mind, “I saw my dead father for the first time when I was seven years old. It was traumatic. I’ve seen him plenty of times since then.” And then there was a pause. “I finished college, as you know, but you didn’t, Monty. You really should have paid your library fines.” That was weird. I didn’t even know that Ellen knew that about me!
Then I heard Ellen’s voice say, “Not finishing college has never held him back. He’s very sharp and we are amazing business partners, friends, and of course, spouses. He’s the light of my life.”
And then I heard Diego say something about Sandy and realized they were talking about us. Out loud! I was thrilled.
“Ellie!” I shouted so hard that I likely bloodied my throat. Tears came to my eyes. I ran through the tunnel toward them, crunching little crabs as I went, bumping my head, too, and saying, “Sorry! Sorry!” because I didn’t want to kill the little crabs but there were a zillion of them and there was nowhere else to run but on top of them.
I could see human shadows by the light of my Android and I smelled perfume and suddenly, I was in Ellen’s arms and my poor broken nose was bleeding all over her while she hugged me and kissed me and wept! And I wept, too! There went my man card!
“Monty!” she cried and covered my bloody, dirty face with kisses. “Oh no! What happened to your nose?”
“Troy broke it. He punched me,” I explained.
“The ghost broke your nose?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “His fist was fully manifested. Unless I was hallucinating after I fell through the trap door.”
“Why would he hit you?” Diego asked.
“Well, I was gathering up his bones and I think he didn’t understand that it was to try and help him.”
“Monty,” she said. “Hold me.” I did.
“Where are we?” I asked Diego.
Diego grabbed my hand and put it on a grate. “End of the road.”
