He didn’t leave when I was just a kid. He was taken!
“Mike? Are you okay?” Mom sounded worried.
I ignored her. I needed the whole story. “What did Taney say to you?” My anger was a tangible thing. Everyone in the room could feel it.
“He discovered this and told me that should you prove to be an asset, he would offer this information to you along with possibility of locating and recovering your father, provided it would benefit his organization.”
Vincent was right. I was ready to take the bastard out. “I’m in. We up the timetable and remove Taney now. What happens next?”
“The territory would be thrown into chaos, but I would control the largest contingent. I can spare a few of my men to watch over you and your mother.”
“Deal. What about Poe”
Vincent nodded, “If we can not remove Taney, then we don’t have to worry about the threat from Baltimore. We will need to lure Justice Taney away from his sanctuary. If you propose a meeting to discuss Poe, he will come and likely bring the majority of his inner circle with him. Our assault must dispose of those that remain and destroy his anchor.”
“Is it his gavel?”
“I believe so.”
Mom, of course, was only getting half the conversation. “Michael,” she began sternly, “just what the hell is going on?”
It took a minute for me to compose myself. “He just said that these Skinwalkers possessed Dad just like this one did to me. I met one in Atlantic City. He’d been in somebody’s body for a decade.”
Karen Ross was a tough, grounded woman. People who know her always say how much grit she possesses. In my history of juvenile delinquency, I’d seen her irritated and angry. I thought I’d seen it all. Minutes before, she’d been crushed. Now that look in her eyes scared me.
Her voice was calm, but that was misleading. “I think you need to tell me everything.”
The predawn hours of Saturday March 17th, ironically Taney’s birthday, found me near his home. The museum wasn’t open for tours until the beginning of April. I recruited a ghost from a local cemetery and convinced her to set up a meeting that I had no intention of attending. Meanwhile, I was once again tempting fate and trying to avoid a breaking and entering charge.
Rusty politely declined to come along and shut off the security system, going on at great length about losing his job and any future jobs if he got caught. I also saw that he was a little scared. Oddly enough, I didn’t need to worry too much about cutting the alarm wire; ghosts are pretty useful when it comes to mucking with electronics.
On the good news front, Chuck Candelmas came up with a gizmo made of PVC pipes that were filled with iron filings, attached to a little air charge, the same kind they use in paintball guns. I called it my ghost gun – deadly to the nearly departed, but not likely to get me busted for carrying a firearm. Mom, of all people, was my getaway driver. The family that committed crime together was the family that stayed together.
Vincent entered through the wall and was in the process of disrupting the security panel while I attacked the back door. My lock picking skills were rusty.
Okay, that was a bad pun.
Either way, I managed to get in the door after a minute. Inside, I heard Vincent’s booming voice. “For the last time, where is Lord Justice?”
“He’s not here, Vincent. Go be pompous somewhere else.”
“Lord Justice left just the two of you here. That’s all?”
Subtle Colonel – very subtle. Stepping into the room with my sword in one hand and Chuck’s invention in the other, I waited until Vincent sunk into the floor before triggering the air charge. The cloud of iron dust was like a blast from a shotgun. It caught one of them, slicing through him. The other ghost faded into an old fashioned ice box, trying to protect himself.
The thrashing ghost was easy enough to finish off. The second one popped his head out of the icebox which gave me the opportunity to hit him with the second cylinder of filings – it wasn’t pretty.
“Where’s your focus?”
“There’s a locked display case in the hallway. The keys are in this drawer.”
A minute later the old leather riding crop was on its way to my mom’s car. I used the keys on the display box that held Taney’s gavel.
The lock clicked and I removed the lid. Reaching in, I grasped the gavel. Something was wrong. This didn’t feel right. Unlike any other focus I’d held, I couldn’t feel any energy – it felt like a lifeless hunk of wood. I cursed myself for leaving my brass divining rods out in the car. It was another setback.
“What are you waiting for? Destroy it! We don’t have much time.” Vincent demanded running back through the wall.
A menacing voice interrupted us, “Yes, by all means, destroy it Mr. Ross.”
I turned to face Roger Taney, dropping the useless gavel back into the case – so much for doing this the easy way, but it saved me a trip back to the car.
The grizzled looking specter stared at the two of us with disdain. “I find myself at a loss to explain the scene before me. Would you care to enlighten me?”
I pulled out my pipe wrench, recalling how Eva had thwarted Vincent’s blade once before, but drew the blade as a secondary weapon. Vincent growled, “While I lived, I idolized you and was duped into servitude. I will serve you no longer!”
Taney was unconcerned at Vincent’s blade waving angrily. “Oh, so this is a resignation. That explains your traitorous actions, Colonel, but what of Mr. Ross?”
“David Michael Ross, Senior.”
Taney’s eyes narrowed. “Well played young Vincent. I salute your cunning. I want you to understand that before I unleash my full wrath upon you. As for you, Ferryman, it seems I shall be making a deal of my own with the caged beast of Baltimore. You dare to stand in the middle of my domain and threaten me?”
Throwing caution to the wind, Vincent lunged at Taney, stabbing with his saber. The blade never found its mark, impacting instead against a flaring shield of energy surrounding Taney. Almost lazily, Lord Justice snapped his hand out and a wave of energy blew Vincent through the wall and filled the room with the roar of gale force winds. I struggled towards him as books pelted me with unerring accuracy. My iron dust was useless in this psychic maelstrom. A gesture from his hand and a knife lifted from the counter and headed straight for me.
I parried it with the wrench. Despite the roar of the wind, I could hear him clearly, “Bravo Ferryman. Let’s see you block this!” Instead of another small item, he banished a chair at me.
Getting hit by a wooden chair was slightly more painful that it looks on all those wrestling shows. I tumbled back into the unforgiving wall, losing all that forward progress and my grip on the saber, which flew out into the hall, beyond my grasp. The wind intensified and more objects were hurled at me: silverware, plates and mugs; I needed to shut it down. Wind in a confined space? I emptied my pockets and the last PVC tube of iron filings adding a little bit of charged “grit” to the air. Seconds later little flashes started appeared around Taney and he winced in pain. I was right! The filings were too small for him to keep track of. As quickly as it had come, the psychic wind subsided.
Wasting no time, I charged forward, brandishing the wrench like a mace. The temperature dropped so fast, I could see my breath in there. Taney dived through the wall as my wrench slammed into the brickwork. I followed him into the hallway, where he touched a whip mounted on the wall beneath a display about slavery. Just like Eva and her blanket, he pulled a ghost image of it and lashed at me.
Ever been whipped? I’m not talking about kind that kinky people pay some kind of dominatrix for, but the real deal? Yeah, it hurts, but I stumbled through the pain and smashed the iron wrench into the ghost. It was his turn to feel the pain.
He responded by literally throwing me back down the short hallway and drew back to hit me with the whip again. He never made it, though. Instead, Vincent caught the whip and yanked as hard as he could. It marked the first
time I was ever truly relieved to see Strong Vincent, even without his sword.
Off balance, Taney spun towards Vincent and leapt. Fueled by adrenaline, I jumped to my feet to keep the pressure on him while wondering how many more concussions I was about to add to my lifetime total.
The two of them struggled, with Vincent quickly being overpowered and forced to his knees. I was in mid-swing with the wrench when Taney swung a new weapon at me – Strong Vincent.
Here I’d been moaning about getting hit by a wooden chair a minute or two ago! Try about a hundred and seventy-five pounds of well aged and seasoned ghost. We collapsed in a painful mess and I lost my grip on the wrench – damn it all to hell!
I pushed the stunned Vincent off of me and into the staircase as the ghost of an eighty-two year old man pounced on me with a supernatural ferocity.
Granted, he was inhumanly strong, but I was in excellent shape. If he’d done his homework, he’d have known that I was a wrestler. I made certain that my touch was every bit as painful to him as his was to me. We grappled in that hallway and I demonstrated every dirty trick I had ever learned, probably in the span of a minute.
Elbows, knees, gouging fingers, and enough biting to make a certain boxer proud were exchanged. In close combat, we were evenly matched. Somewhere along the line, in between the screams, he must have realized that he’d given away the advantage. I’d say it must have hit him like a ton of bricks, but it would be more apt to say that it hit him like a booted foot in the side – a blow delivered by Colonel Vincent. Tag team style, now that’s what I was talking about! After delivering a series of kicks while I kept him pinned, he screamed in agony and I got my first clue.
The house creaked and shuddered. That little gavel wasn’t his anchor. The god dammed house was the anchor!
“The house Vincent! His anchor is the damn house!”
I was more than content to play anvil to Vincent’s hammer, but my observation gave Taney that desperate strength people always talk about. The wind picked up again and the hallway rattled. We rolled again and I felt something against my head, the ghostly bullwhip.
“Vincent! The whip! Choke the bastard!”
Had any of this been caught on tape, I have no idea what it would have looked like, but Vincent wrapped it around our enemy’s neck while I kept Taney’s arms busy. There was a heat bursting inside my veins – it felt like an energy building, it was filling me with strength. Taney was weakening and I was getting stronger.
“Ross! You’re glowing! No! Remember what happened to Porter!” Vincent screamed.
Taney was frantically thrashing about and the house grumbled in protest as its master began losing. I was engaged in a fight of my own to keep the energy that was inside of me from breaking loose.
The feeling like I was about to be sick started deep in my guts. Whatever it was, it wasn’t going away and holding it in only seemed to make it hurt more. Time was running out and something was going to happen … something big.
“Run” was all that I could mouth at Vincent – and he did. Taney was starting to smoke where I touched him - the whip around his neck simply melted into nothingness.
“Fool! You’ll kill us both!” Taney shouted.
“Good!” I screamed back. The glass in the windows and display cases shattered and my entire body felt like it was on fire. My arms shook violently and I felt the overwhelming need to vomit. I don’t know what Taney saw in my eyes, oblivion, or perhaps Armageddon, but whatever it was, it terrified him and he went slack just before my body heaved in a violent spasm.
We were bathed in an all-consuming brightness, so brilliant that it hurt. Somewhere in the middle I let go of Taney and clutched at my chest. He tried to stand and run, but the nova surrounding me made him burst into ghostly flames.
The house shook violently in the shockwave, clearly in danger of collapsing. I was in a bad way, but I was still alive. Call me an opportunist, but sacrificing my life no longer held the same allure it did a few seconds before. Crawling, I made it to the front door. It was hanging on the top hinge. Rising to my knees, I pushed my way through it and managed to move another fifteen feet forward while my heart thudded uncontrollably in my chest.
With the roar of the Roger Brooke Taney house and Francis Scott Key museum collapsing and dawn’s light shining, I somehow found my way to mom’s car and fell into the back seat. My last thought before I blacked out was how beautiful the sunrise looked.
“Can you describe your attackers, Mr. Ross?” A police detective, thankfully not Wycheck asked.
“No, I was just out for a jog this morning. Something hit my head and I don’t know much after that.”
Mom asked from her chair next to my hospital bed, looking every bit like Sally Fields in that one movie with Julia Roberts. “Do you think you’ll be able to catch them?”
Here I’d always thought my ability to tell a bald-faced lie was thanks to the old man. It turned out Mom might really be the source of it. Who knew?
The detective shook her head. “Without any visual identification probably not, though you might remember something in a few days, but with a concussion, it’s doubtful?” She smiled at me and made a small joke, “If I had those kinds of answers, I’d have been in med school and not the police academy. Here’s my card, Mr. Ross and I’ll be back in touch in a few days to see if something does come back to you.”
Mom took me to a hospital and claimed she found me after a mugging near the house. The fact that I was still alive constituted the good news. The bad news was the FBI, the ATF, and several other agencies were combing the wreckage of the collapsed museum. The local news channels were already speculating that with the 150th anniversary of the Dred Scott decision some radical activist might have detonated a bomb there.
Definitely bad news, but it was offset by Colonel Vincent’s arrival. He took care of my prints on the front and back doors. My pipe wrench and what was left of the PVC ghost gun were safely offsite. The new boss of the ghost territory assured me that the investigation in Fredrick would be sufficiently hampered. The fact that the power went out on that block a few minutes before and the reports of swirling wind gusts caused one of the “weather guessers” to speculate about the possibility of a microburst. I knew that they wouldn’t find any explosive residue and it would likely be attributed to a storm or an old building collapsing. So I wasn’t too worried.
Vincent’s assurance that five of his men from Gettysburg would be here in a few hours to act as my bodyguards took a load off my shoulders. Two were going to watch directly over me and the others would protect the house and Mom. Half the contingent from Gettysburg was coming down to help Vincent assert his control over this territory.
There was one thing that really did worry me and that was my heart. My little explosion, whatever it was, made my ticker palpitate and get out of rhythm. They were keeping me overnight and treating me with medicine, but I was told that they were prepared to shock it and “reboot” me if the medication didn’t work. I knew enough about computers to not really like that analogy.
It sounded eerily familiar to what happened to Porter and what might have happened to Edgar Allan Poe. Both of them were older and lacked my stamina. Were I not in such good shape, it might have killed me too. Vincent said he was almost a hundred yards away at my Mom’s car and could feel it when everything let loose. He said that he was severely weakened, but would recover.
Reynold’s scabbard and both our phantom swords disintegrated along with everything else in the vicinity. I apologized for costing him his sword a second time.
“It was a small price to pay for my freedom. I shall endeavor to learn my predecessor’s trick with the whip and find myself a new sword and perhaps something more manageable for my ally.”
“If we have time, we can go up to Susquehanna – I know the ghost who rules the valley. She may have a pointer or two for you.”
Vincent looked surprised. “You know the Witch of the Valley?”
“Witch of
the Valley? Oh make sure you’re on the right side of the barrier if you ever call her that, Colonel Vincent!” I chuckled while picturing Eva’s reaction to that title. The trip would be worth it just to see the look on her face.
Rockville was safe, for the moment and I’d triumphed. As soon as Colonel Strong Vincent consolidated his power here, I planned to go looking for the Skinwalker that possessed my father.
Baltimore? I had neither plans nor desire to go there and nothing William Henry Poe could do was going to make me. He could rot in hell for all I cared.
Episode 12: The Battle of Baltimore
Back in Iraq, the average day consisted of hours of tedium spiced with seconds, minutes, and sometimes hours of fear and panic. It led to a lot of interesting conversations, including the ever popular, “What would you do if you only had one minute to live?”
Yeah, it was morbid, but living in a war zone can do that. If you don’t understand, there’s probably nothing I can say – you just had to be there.
My answer to this deep question was almost always something stupid, involving a woman or in some cases multiple women. It never involved gasping in pain, lying flat on my back in a muddy graveyard, shaking uncontrollably, or staring up at the night sky while a cold rain pelted my face.
I wasn’t into deep reflection while I was in Iraq – I was too busy staying alive. Here, however, I learned that heroic sacrifice was overrated, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Five full weeks since the Roger Brooke Taney Museum mysteriously collapsed, I looked to be in the clear. After the police found no traces of explosives, the only rational explanation was that the building had a structural flaw that finally gave out during a storm. A myriad of politicians, including the Mayor of Fredrick and a couple of Supreme Court Justices made some nice speeches and talked about the future of the land and whether it would be appropriate to rebuild.
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