by JL Bryan
“So what can we do?” Stacey asked.
“One possibility would be to try and figure out what happened to Zagan's body. There must be some record of a flash-fried skeleton left out in the open in 1912,” I said.
“Unless Katherine buried it or something and just didn't mention it in her book,” Stacey said.
“It still might have been discovered since then. We could dig into county and Forest Service records and see what comes up.”
“What would you do with his body if you found it?” Jacob asked me. “Or do I not really want to know?”
“It could give us some leverage over him. Maybe lure him into a ghost trap.”
“I can't wait to hike around the mountains looking for old bones,” Stacey said. “Can we do it at midnight under a full moon on Friday the 13th?”
“You're the one who loves hiking so much,” I said.
The hotel seemed unusually calm the rest of the night, as far as our monitors could tell. Cold spots remained in the corridor outside our room. We caught glimpses of Lemmy, roaming unsupervised, her parents either asleep or perfectly willing to treat the whole hotel like a big daycare center.
Around four in the morning, we were exhausted and decided to catch some sleep. In my room, lying in my bed, I could hear occasional strange sounds, like boots pacing outside my door. Above, on the fourth floor, crashing and banging sounds echoed every few minutes. I did the math and figured the room above me was, quite possibly, the ultra-hot chamber that had once been home to Gregor Zagan. I felt so defenseless there in the dark, I didn't even want to close my eyes.
My door banged and rattled in its frame, as if someone were trying to get inside. Then I heard a scratching sound, like a large cat trying to claw through the wood.
I got up, half-scared something would reach out and grab my feet from the space beneath the bed. I hate when they do that.
The little peephole in my door offered a fish-eye view of the hallway outside. Nobody appeared to be there, but I knew better.
I finally tiptoed back through the connecting door and slipped into bed beside Stacey, who was sleeping soundly with Jacob on the other side of her. Comforted by their presence, I finally caught a shallow, short nap, though I could still hear boots in the hall and strange noises upstairs. If I hadn't been drained to the point of collapsing, I surely wouldn't have been able to sleep at all.
I had garish dreams of ghosts, Zagan on fire, and, weirdly, I remember watching a strange, angular bird pulling the sun up over the horizon.
Chapter Fifteen
“You're in luck. The phone number is registered to a warehouse complex near Flat Rock, North Carolina.” That was how Calvin greeted me when I blearily answered the phone less than four hours later. The chirping sound of my cell had startled me awake. I'd left them in my jeans in the other room, so I'd had to do a mad dash to catch the call.
“The phone number?” I asked. My phone was almost out of power, so I fumbled to plug it into the wall charger.
“Metascience Productions? It used to be very important for me to research that phone number. Did something change overnight?”
“Uh, yeah.” I looked at the hotel room's coffee maker, wondering whether I ought to brew something strong and resign myself to waking up or if there was some slim chance I'd be able to sleep again. “No, still very important. Stacey and I never found any information about them.”
“Neither could I. These buildings belonged to a trucking company that flatlined during the gas crisis of the 1970's. Warehouses, a repair yard. They don't seem to have been used for much since then. They currently belong to a holding company registered in Delaware.”
“So it's a fake address, then? Nobody lives or works there?”
“It's possible. It's also possible this production company has leased it. Maybe they're looking for trucker ghosts.”
“Thanks, Calvin. At least it's something.” I filled him in on the case so far.
“If somebody found a charred skeleton at Blood Mountain, there will be records,” he said. “If not, you could spend years searching and digging.”
“I don't think the client would be thrilled to pay for that,” I said. “Can you hang on a sec? I'll try this number from my room phone.”
I put the cell phone on speaker mode so Calvin could listen while I dialed the number from the production company's business card. I didn't see any other way to gain more information about these Metascience people and what they might have seen, or what they might have stirred up in the hotel.
I held my breath as the phone rang, then blew it right out again in frustration when I heard the voice answer.
“The number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in service,” the recording said. “Please check your number and try your call again.”
“Well, that was anti-climactic,” I said, hanging up the landline. “Disconnected, Calvin. Nobody there.”
“Perhaps they've moved on.”
“It doesn't make sense. If they were just there to investigate the place for ghosts, why would they put the phone number on their business cards? Why would the place even have a phone if it's been out of business for forty years?”
“All good questions,” Calvin said. “I could not find any listing for a 'Kara Smith' in the area, either.”
“So what do I do?”
“You may already know.”
“As long as I don't have to drive all the way to North Carolina—”
“I'll follow up the Blood Mountain lead while you do,” Calvin said, and I snarled silently.
“Okay,” I told him. “I'll funnel some coffee down Stacey's throat and we'll go. Can you do me one other favor, Calvin?”
“What's that?”
“Don't sell the agency while I'm out of town. I'd hate to come back and be unemployed.”
“You wouldn't be unemployed—”
“How much longer do you think they'll let you stall?” I asked. “And are you stalling because you really haven't made up your mind, or is this just a negotiation tactic for more money?”
“Both,” he said. “Meaning I'm not sure.”
“Well, when you figure out my future, let me know.”
After we hung up, I truly began to wonder if Michael might have a point about just taking off and starting over somewhere new.
I returned to Stacey's room and shook her awake. Jacob was gone, probably off to work. He was an accountant by day, and nobody at his job knew about his supernatural nocturnal activities. I suppose he's constantly cooking up stories to explain the scratches, bruises, and burns dealt by the ghosts.
“Huh?” Stacey blinked, looked around, and sat upright. “I can't believe we managed to sleep here. We must have been exhausted.”
“I hope that means you don't plan on going back to sleep,” I said. “We might have a slight road trip today.”
“Oh, no, not the road trips. Another abandoned insane asylum? Or maybe a prison that housed only serial killers and venomous clowns before being destroyed by a pack of vampire werewolves?”
“Try a trucking company warehouse.”
“That doesn't sound so bad.”
“It's in the mountains, and it's been abandoned for decades...”
“I knew it! Ugh. You plan the worst vacations.” She hopped out of bed. “When are we leaving?”
“When can you be ready?”
“I'll need coffee,” Stacey said. “And possibly a jelly-doughnut injection. I'm seriously exhausted.”
“Staring at the lines along the highway for a few hours will perk you right up. And you can look forward to those mountain roads with the thousand-foot drop-offs just an inch past the guard rail.”
“We should take my car,” Stacey said. “It's more mountainy.”
I didn't want to argue with that. It was a four-hour drive to the remote address Calvin had given me. I'd figured I could make it in three in my Camaro, but Stacey drove a hybrid Escape, an SUV that would be handy to have if the roads got
rough once we left the highway, or if things went sour and we had to make a quick escape down old mountain roads. Our agency van was too sluggish and gaz-guzzling for the journey. Google Earth indicated a broken, weedy blacktop leading up to the chainlink surrounding the old warehouse complex, and I wasn't sure how the van would handle that, either.
I showered while the hotel room coffee maker gurgled. I called Madeline to check in and let her know we were following up an out-of-town lead, mainly so she wouldn't be surprised when she saw it on the expense report. She was lucky the place was close enough that we didn't have to buy airline tickets.
“We're buried in guest complaints this morning,” she said. “There are broken items all over the hotel, and some of these are valuable antiques, Ellie. Monetary value is just draining right on out of this place. Guests are checking out, terrified. They're talking about dead children and mutilated soldiers.”
“Those are common apparitions in this hotel,” I said.
“We've never had so many complaints at once. Y'all must have really stirred things up.”
“I'm pretty sure that the key to solving your problem is removing Gregor Zagan's ghost,” I said. “We're working on some promising leads. In the meantime, make sure nobody goes up to the fourth floor. Zagan has all those ghosts under his control, and they're turning into a very territorial bunch.”
After I hung up with her, Stacey and I packed up a few pieces of basic equipment. On the way out, I slowed as I passed the door to my room. An odd stick figure had been scratched into it, a sketchy bird grasping a half-circle in its feet. I wasn't sure what to make of it, but it reminded me of the dream I'd had earlier in the morning. Maybe it was a warning, or a threat.
We drove to Stacey's apartment building to fetch her car. We bought some spotted bananas and a few other snacks at a gas station on the way out of town. I remembered to bring music this time, so I didn't have to spend the whole trip listening to the new Britney Spears album. We spent half listening to The Clash...and half listening to Britney.
We hit open farmland pretty quickly, which eventually gave way to the tall pines of a national forest. The Appalachian mountains appeared on the horizon, looming ever larger as we approached. The road grew steeper and the drops beside it grew larger as we approached our destination. We had a few minutes to appreciate the rich autumn colors of the forested mountains.
Flat Rock was located in the foothills, near a couple of highways and just off the interstate. We didn't pull off into the village itself, but continued along a small road toward the higher peaks ahead.
As promised, the final stretch of road to the old warehouse complex was broken and weedy, bouncing us as we drove to the padlocked chainlink gate topped with rusty barbed wire.
The row of cinderblock buildings within had accumulated a fair number of vines over the years, and the gravel parking area was choked with weeds and wild shrubs. More vines had nearly buried a small guard shack just inside the gate. The gray, ugly buildings within the fence looked out of place against the background of huge old trees and ancient granite rock formations that surrounded it.
“Looks like nobody's here,” Stacey said. “Oh, well. Let's turn around and head back.”
“It can't hurt to look around,” I told her.
“I can think of several ways it could. There's getting stabbed by vagrants, bitten by rats or snakes, run down by ghosts driving ghost trucks—”
“I've never heard of ghosts driving ghost trucks.”
“Says the girl who recently jumped onboard a ghost train.”
“That was a psychokinetic visual and tactile apparition pooling energy and traumatic memories from several entities—”
“Uh-huh. Ghost train,” Stacey said, peering at the overgrown buildings. The sky had grown overcast above us, but the weather app hadn't mentioned rain. “So...do we go over the fence or through it?”
“Through it. I'm not dissecting rusty wire while trying to keep my balance fifteen feet in the air.” I grabbed gloves and bolt cutters from the Escape and searched for a good spot to cut. About twenty feet from the gate I found a loose panel near a heavy limb that had fallen on the fence, partially crumpling it.
After cutting a gap in the fence, we strapped on backpacks with the most essential gear and ducked through into the overgrown gravel yard. This was beginning to feel like a bad idea. I briefly wished to be corpse-hunting around Blood Mountain instead.
“There's nothing here,” Stacey said, kicking a bit of gravel across the lot. “I think this is going to be a dead end.”
I advanced toward the largest dilapidated warehouse, wide and squat with a row of three garage doors large enough to admit eighteen-wheeler trucks. Wires hung from shattered exterior spotlights overhead. A metal door with a narrow strip of reinforced glass looked like the easiest way inside. I peered through the window.
“See anything?” Stacey whispered.
“No.”
“Are we breaking into every single building?”
“If we have to.” I drew my set of picks from my jacket pocket and worked for a minute to pop the rusty lock. The steel door screeched as I pulled it open to reveal a dim, cold space beyond.
We clicked on our flashlights and advanced into the spacious warehouse. The concrete floor was, not surprisingly, in poor condition, cracked into chunks that wobbled beneath our feet. The air was colder than it should have been, and I definitely felt that unpleasant sense of being watched by invisible eyes.
A battered heap of a big rig was parked along one wall, with a shattered hole over its driver-side windshield. The grill and headlights on that side were mangled, and the hood curled up in a rusty snarl above them. It looked like the truck had plowed into something serious, maybe a concrete pylon, and then been left abandoned here when the company closed. The wall mounts and the remnants of a long tool bench indicated this must have been a repair area.
“What did I tell you?” Stacey whispered. “Ghost truck. It's chilly in here.”
“I'm just going to take a closer look,” I said, moving toward the truck.
“Yeah, you can't go wrong doing that.” Stacey swept her light around the room, over metallic debris and a couple of old tires.
I grabbed the exterior handle on the non-wrecked side and stepped up to peer into the cab. A fuzzy rabbit's foot hung from the bulging, misshapen dashboard. The driver's seat and headrest were stained with spatters of something dark.
A heavy thud echoed from somewhere deep in the warehouse, followed by a footstep.
“Ellie...” Stacey whispered.
I nodded and hopped down to join her.
We waited, expecting more, but the warehouse had fallen silent.
“Let's go check it out,” I whispered.
“Admit it. You just want to get us killed, don't you?”
We made our way through the debris, toward where I thought the sound had originated. Our footsteps echoed as if to advertise our presence.
We navigated around several tall metal racks that had been shoved together in a jumble, blocking our view of the rear area of the warehouse.
On the other side of that jumble, two figures stood in the shadows near a wall of the warehouse, not moving. They appeared to be watching us. I shouted to Stacey and turned my flashlight on them.
“Boo!” one of them said, raising his arms as if to scare me. They weren't ghosts, but obviously flesh and blood living people. I didn't recognize the husky, thin-lipped man in the black imitation-cop private security uniform, but I definitely knew the one who'd spoken. He was around my age, short black hair and sky-blue eyes, his face permanently shaped into a haughty look, his lips born to make condescending and dismissive smiles.
“Nicholas Blake,” I said. “From Paranormal Solutions. You're the one who spied on Stacey and me.”
“Seriously?” Stacey asked, looking from me to him. “I don't get it.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked him. He seemed amused.
“I will tell
you what I am not doing,” he said, his Oxford accent crisp and precise. I couldn't determine if it was real or an affectation. I've never been to England. Or anywhere north of Virginia or east of the Georgia coastal islands. “I am not engaged in criminal trespass and destruction of property, which is more than either of you can claim.”
“We thought it was abandoned,” I said. “Isn't it?”
“Is this sort of complete disregard for the law a standard procedure for Eckhart Investigations?” he asked.
“I go where the ghosts lead me,” I said. “They don't care about laws.”
“While we might debate the importance of a particular law in a particular instance, surely you understand that Western society depends on a general framework of individual property rights governing our interactions with one another, without which peaceable society would be virtually impossible—”
“Okay, Encyclopedia Brown. We came here to speak with Metascience Productions, if it exists. I didn't know I'd be running into you people. I guess Metascience is one of your, what, subsidiaries? Or just a plain false front?”
“More of the latter. It does not exist beyond a few business cards.”
“Which brings me right to another question—why would you go around pretending to be some nonexistent company claiming to film ghost documentaries? Why not just use your own name?”
“We like to maintain a bit of distance for special research projects,” he said.
“Is that what this is?” I gestured at the mostly-empty warehouse. “What are you doing here? And what were you doing at the Lathrop Grand Hotel a month ago? It must have been after you first approached Calving about buying the agency.”
“Typically I would reply that you should remove your nose from my beeswax, as you say over here,” he replied.
“I've literally never heard anyone speak that combination of words before.”
“If we hadn't recognized you on our security monitors, we would have simply contacted the local constabulary about the break-in,” he said. I couldn't help but notice Stacey breathe the word constabulary under her breath beside me. “Because of the unique nature of our relationship, it was decided that discretion would be the wiser course.”
