EJ06 - Maze of Souls

by JL Bryan

  I didn't answer, because answering would mean letting her hear my voice break; it would mean letting everything out. I had to keep all of it inside or none of it. There was no middle way.

  I climbed into my Camaro—a black 2002 model, a present my dad had bought for himself not long before he died. I was going to drive that car until the wheels fell off. The fire hadn't left much to remember my parents by. Everything had been consumed, from photo albums to Christmas decorations, everything that had meant anything to us as a family. The car and what was left inside it were all that remained.

  My car was pointed downtown, but I didn't have any specific destination in mind. My mind was spinning.

  I had a degree in psychology, but you didn't need one of those to see that Calvin had taken on a surrogate father role for me in the intervening years, teaching me to become a ghost hunter. Now I was losing him, too, just as I'd lost my real parents. Only he wasn't being killed by some evil ghost with the power to start fires, or anything beyond his control. Calvin was choosing to go.

  Of course he was. I wasn't his real daughter, after all, and I'd more or less forced him to accept me into his life with relentless persistence over the years. After my parents died, I lived in Virginia with my aunt Clarice and her family until I finished high school. Then I'd returned to Savannah for college. Poor Clarice was dismayed—my grades had led to acceptance at University of Virginia and a few other places where she'd made me submit applications. I didn't care, because I wanted to go home. Calvin had started his own detective agency by then, specializing in the paranormal. As soon as I moved back, I started showing up every day, pressuring him into taking me on as an apprentice.

  I thought we'd grown close over the years, but I suppose blood is thicker. He was leaving, and I would be completely alone.

  Almost.

  When I reached a long red light, I picked up my phone and called Michael. I wanted to forget about my problems for a while, and he had comfort and strength to offer. I needed him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Michael picked me up for last-minute Halloween shopping. When I opened my door, he smiled and lifted me from my feet, giving me a fairly high-pressure and hungry kiss, like he'd been missing me. I wrapped my arms around his neck, kissing him back twice as hard. Maybe I'd been missing him, too, or maybe I was just desperate for contact, affection, whatever he could offer.

  “It's good to see you,” I whispered as he lowered me, almost reluctantly, to my feet.

  “It's been a long time,” he said, brushing his fingers along my cheek. His fingers almost glowed with heat, or maybe his touch summoned it from inside me...more likely, though, it was just residual fever from his illness.

  “Just a few days,” I said. “You don't have to be so dramatic about it. You're the one who was avoiding me.”

  He stared at me, his green eyes smoldering. I thought he was about to say something, but actually he kissed me again and drew me tight against him. I could feel his muscles through his thin cotton shirt, his scratchy denim jeans, and for a while I forgot everything outside that moment.

  It was a while later when we finally emerged from my apartment.

  “I thought of an amusing costume for you,” Michael said as we descended through the brick stairwell away from my apartment, down one story to the parking lot.

  “Oh, 'amusing'?” I asked. “That's an amusing word choice for you. Are you making fun of me?”

  “You could dress as one of those Ghostbuster ladies.”

  “How creative. And you could dress as a firefighter.”

  “I already have the attire.”

  “Right. The attire. Weirdo.” I climbed into his truck as he held the door open for me. He drives a shiny red Chevrolet pick-up from 1949 that he restored himself. The truck has a curvy, bubbly old-fashioned shape, complete with running boards, and is kind of adorable. As with the mechanized clocks he repairs and refurbishes, Michael's mechanical talents seem to incline toward things that are very old.

  “Don't worry,” he said. “We'll be going to a place where nothing's weird: the Halloween store.” He closed my door and walked around to the driver's side.

  I was glad to be with Michael, since he was one person who wasn't leaving me. Calvin's news had stirred up painful thoughts of my parents, but I hadn't even begun to think about the other consequences—strangers owning the agency.

  My future would be in the hands of those people I'd briefly met from the bizarre and multifaceted corporation Paranormal Solutions, Inc. In order of how much they seemed to dislike me, from most hateful to least, they included: Kara Volkova, a waify-looking creature who hated me for ruining her important assignment while resolving a case; Octavia Lancashire, the sour-looking older woman who'd been introduced to me as a 'general director' of the company; and Nicholas Blake, a psychic investigator who was dangerously close to charming at times, and certainly had been effective at helping me against the particularly violent hive of ghosts that had inhabited the top floor of the Lathrop Grand Hotel. He'd even asked me out. I'd declined; I didn't trust any of them, even if they'd helped me clean up the supernatural mess at the old hotel.

  I tried to refocus my thoughts on the short term. Tonight, we would go to the Lathrop Grand and have fun. I would be with Michael and Stacey. I'd known each of them for less than a year, yet they were now the two people who were closest to me in my life. That's kind of sad. It certainly doesn't say much for my overall social skills.

  We drove to one of those pop-up Halloween stores that appear in strip malls around September and vanish again in November, as if by some sort of retail black magic. This particular shop inhabited a large vacant area that had obviously been a supermarket in its past life, and now it was a shopping maze approaching Swedish-furniture-store levels of complexity. Past the brightly colored kiddie costumes lay a dark, twisting warren of aisles hung with masks and murder weapons. Bats on wires and skeletons on chains swung from the high ceiling.

  “Superheroes are out,” I said, my gaze lingering on a Chris Hemsworth-as-Thor life-size cutout guarding one aisle with his massive hammer. “That's what Stacey and Jacob are doing.”

  “And what would you prefer? Something terrifying? Guaranteed to induce nightmares?” Michael pointed to an impish figure chained behind fake prison bars in what had once been a produce display. The bars and the figure's ragged clothes glowed green under a black light. Its face was a buck-fanged Nosferatu mask, positioned to stare at us as we walked by.

  “Something classic,” I said. An Egyptian sarcophagus opened inside what had once been a glass meat-counter display at the old grocery store. A pretty gross green mummy rose halfway out of it, greeting us with a tinny recorded scream. Then it dropped back into place.

  “It doesn't get much more classic than mummies,” he said. “They're ancient history. Or I could dress as a Trojan.” He indicated a plastic suit of golden armor with a big red mohawk on the helmet.

  “Nope.”

  “Here's a thought.” Michael lifted a detailed latex face from a pantheon of ancient gods and heroes hung along one side of the aisle. It was the goat-god Pan, with a thick, curly beard and dark latex horns. Michael drew it over his face. The god's tongue leered out through open jaws, waggling obscenely in my direction.

  Michael's eyes glinted within the god's eye holes, reflecting the glowing plastic torches around us. The aisle was momentarily empty of other shoppers, leaving us alone with masks of Medusa and the three-headed hellhound Cerberus.

  “Pan's coming for you,” Michael rasped, making his voice hoarse and deep. The god's permanently open mouth seemed to amplify it like one of those big masks used in ancient Greek drama. Michael moved toward me, raising both arms.

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “You can't stop a goat-god who knows what he wants...” He stalked closer, forcing me to grab a big plastic trident from the Neptune-and-mermaids display and jab it at him to stave him off.

  “Get back!” I snapped. “Bad primitive
deity!”

  He charged, and I turned and ran, feeling annoyed with him but also weirdly giddy. I rounded a corner into what looked like the Ye Olde Renaissance Faire section. Crowns, jester hats, princess dresses, shields and two-person dragon costumes hung on display walls topped with cardboard castle-wall borders. Red battery-powered torches lit the way.

  Michael grabbed for me again, heedless of the little cluster of startled middle-school kids over by the Harry Potter knockoff costumes. I ducked under Michael's swinging arm. My kickboxing lessons took over and I landed my sneaker in his side, which sent him stumbling into a rotating rack of medieval weapons. Battle axes and spiked maces spilled all over the floor. One of the middle-school girls decided to scream, then they all screamed, boys and girls, and ran away round the next corner of the mazelike arrangement of aisles. We couldn't have been that scary. The kids probably just wanted an excuse to scream and run.

  Michael seemed to snarl beneath the mask. While he was still stumbling and regaining his balance, I grabbed the Pan mask by both horns and yanked it off his head.

  “Ow!” He scowled at me and grabbed at his head. “You ripped out some hair with that.”

  “Sorry, but you're evil when you're disguised as a horned god.”

  “And you're pretty violent when you're shopping,” he said, rubbing his ribs where I'd kicked him.

  “Beating you up was just a quick reflex,” I told him. “I couldn't help it.”

  “Because I scared you so much?” He smiled.

  “I've faced much scarier things than you,” I said. “And defeated them. I'm pretty sure I sent a few of them right to Hell, assuming it exists.”

  “You won't take me so easily,” he said.

  “We'll see.”

  I watched him suspiciously, not entirely sure whether I was playing or actually feeling suspicious. He was acting odd today, but maybe he was just trying too hard to be funny. Off his game. Or maybe I was off my game and failing to behave like a normal person in a normal social setting. That seemed pretty likely.

  I didn't want to think about it too much. I just wanted to enjoy my day off and pretend that my life wasn't full of problems. Was that really too much to ask? It would be great if my brain would stop working overtime in search of problems—analyzing and criticizing every single interaction between Michael and me, for example, looking for signs that I was running him off, or that he was going to leave me, as people so often do. Fifteen or twenty minutes of mental peace every now and then, that's all I ask.

  We cleaned up the mess we'd made before moving on. The next aisle offered an array of science fiction masks and costumes, from Star Wars knockoffs (I saw “Chawbacco” and “Hans Sulu”) to huge masks that looked like the aliens from Alien and the predators from Predator. Motion detectors activated strobe lights, pew-pew laser sound effects, and weird wormy extraterrestrial creatures that hissed as we walked by. Flying saucers hovered overhead.

  “There's no choppa to rescue us,” I said, looking up at the tiny spaceships.

  Michael nodded, looking puzzled but not asking what I meant. At least he didn't try to insist on dressing as Flash Gordon, or dare to point out the Princess Leia slave-girl outfit. I would have jabbed him with a light saber for that.

  We passed through a narrow gap at the end of the aisle, thick with fake spiderwebs, and into a dim, cave-like dungeon environment. A werewolf head snarled at us from inside a cage. A sickeningly realistic corpse was chained to some kind of arcane torture device made up of wheels and spikes. Recorded screams played around us. Demon and devil heads watched from the walls, with small red Christmas lights glowing inside their slitted eyes. More red firelight glowed among black cardboard stalagmites and stalactites.

  “This is pleasant,” Michael commented. “Homey.”

  “Sure, if you're the devil,” I said.

  “Have you ever met him?” Michael asked.

  “Who? The devil?”

  “With your job, I thought it might have come up.”

  “I've seen weird stuff, but never a devil. I've met some ghosts who seemed like devils, though—”

  A pale, glowing blue shape emerged from the shadows above, cackling with high-pitched laughter. Its empty black eye holes and formless black smear of a mouth reminded me of many specters I've seen.

  I gasped as I stepped back, my hand reaching for the tactical flashlight on my utility belt, except of course it wasn't there. I don't go out in public wearing a utility belt equipped with flashlight holsters and other ghost-related gear, and that way people don't stare at me like I'm a lunatic.

  Michael caught me from behind, slipping his arms around me. I felt him shaking, and then I realized he was laughing.

  The glowing blue sheet-ghost, suspended on a thin cable that wasn't visible in the darkness overhead, turned and rolled back the way it came, still cackling. It was just another decoration activated by a motion detector.

  “Is that one of those much scarier things you bragged about defeating?” Michael asked.

  “The face was realistic. For a second.” I tried to pull away from him, but he held me firm. I smiled, and my head was turned away from him, so I didn't bother trying to hide it. “I saw a dead man just the other night with eyes like that.”

  “Should I be jealous?” he asked, and I laughed. I was feeling a little giddy now, between the momentary scare and getting trapped in Michael's arms.

  A couple of teenagers rounded the corner and gave us disgusted looks as they passed, as if they'd just left the Victorian age and found our embrace to be an affront to society itself. More shoppers followed, so we moved on, trying to behave more like adults.

  The next aisle was brighter, and the costumes more densely packed, as if the store were growing desperate to sell you something, anything, before you reached the check-out counters. All kinds of costume sets were jammed together—clowns, police officers, prisoners. The costumes offered for women included the obligatory sexy-cat and sexy-nurse costumes, but also some head-scratchers like a “sexy” Darth Vader with a black miniskirt, and a “sexy” Richard Nixon outfit with a mask, tie, and hot pants. Weird. The pickings for anything decent as well as inexpensive were pretty slim.

  “How do you like this?” Michael grabbed a Founding Father costume, with a colonial-era wig and plastic waistcoat. It looked like something Hiram Neville would have worn. All he needed to add was a skull mask.

  “That's a definite no,” I said quickly.

  “There's also this.” He picked up another costume nearby, a basic pirate outfit with a hook, sword, and Jolly Roger hat. “I could be a pirate, you could be my captive princess. Look, we can get you some chains with this prisoner costume.”

  “I can't say I'm excited about playing the damsel in distress, even if it does involve chains,” I said. “I'd rather be a pirate with you. A co-pirate.”

  “Co-pirate?” He seemed to puzzle over the word for half a second before nodding. “We could conquer the savage seas together.”

  “That's what I'm saying.” I lifted a different pirate costume, though it was also from the men's side of the aisle, since I couldn't see myself wearing the skull-print plastic microskirt and Jolly Roger tank top offered as the only female pirate-costume option.

  The pirate costume I picked came with a neat plastic telescope with a skull-and-bone design, which tucked into a holster on the black plastic belt. There was also a sizable stuffed parrot to mount on my shoulder, but it looked ungainly and I figured I would leave it off. The weapons included both a cutlass and a long-nosed plastic pistol.

  “I can work with this,” I said. “I'll just have to go home and get my boots.”

  We stood next to each other, looking at our reflections in the nearby mirror and holding our plastic-wrapped costumes out in front of us.

  “We'll terrify high society tonight,” Michael said with a smirk.

  “I think they'll understand we aren't really pirates.”

  “Not after we swoop in and burn the place do
wn.”

  “Not funny. At all.”

  “With charm, I meant. Metaphorically.”

  “So we're going with the pirate costumes, then? Because I can finally see the exit.”

  “Yes,” Michael said. “And we'd better get out of here before the decorations scare you again.”

  “Ha.”

  “I think I see a roll of crepe paper sneaking up behind you.”

  “You did realize that my last laugh was sarcastic and not genuine, right?” I asked.

  “We should just forget the ball,” he said. “Spend the night together, away from everyone else.”

  “Be antisocial rather than go to a crowded party? Don't tempt me.” I headed for the cash register with the shortest line. Michael stood close, his hand on the small of my back, seeming a bit more possessive than usual. After missing him for a few days, it felt reassuring.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The exterior of the Lathrop Grand hotel glowed with jack-o'-lanterns arrayed along the brickwork and the wrought-iron balustrade on the second floor. The pumpkins weren't carved with scary or silly faces, but incredibly elaborate little scenes depicting statues and landmarks from around the city. The hotel must have hired professionals to create them, or maybe students from the art school.

  We passed through the lobby, toward the sound of a live jazz band in the ballroom. One doorman in a top hat, tails, and a simple skull mask took our invitation, which was printed on silky paper; a second identically dressed man opened the door to the ballroom for us.

  The ballroom was crowded and loud with music and chatter. Lighting mostly came from actual candles in actual black candelabras, keeping the room full of shadows. The crowd dressed at the formal end of the Halloween spectrum, men in devil masks and black ties, women in fanciful ball gowns and feathered masks.

  Plenty of jewelry glittered out there. I hoped I wasn't underdressed. I wore the plastic props from my store-bought costume—hat, sword, pistol, and even the ridiculous bird—but I'd replaced the cheapo plastic pirate coat and thin polyester pirate pants with real trousers and a blousy shirt from the thrift store.