by JL Bryan
“Sounds like she does plan to do that,” Stacey said.
“Then we'll have to figure something out. I kind of hate that Nicholas and his people are helping with this,” I said.
“Well, they did cause the problem by taking Ithaca away from her psychic friends, so they're just helping to clean up their own mess.”
I nodded. That made me feel slightly better.
As we approached Columbia, South Carolina, we hit thick traffic caused by lane closures for road construction. Then dark clouds showed up and dumped heavy rain on us all the way back to Savannah.
Stacey and I desperately needed more sleep, after the previous night's short and unpleasant slumber, but it wasn't in the cards. We stopped by my apartment long enough to check on my cat and make some more coffee. Then we had to pick up the van from Stacey's place. Nicholas and I had traded cell numbers, but I hadn't yet received his promised text message that would let me know they'd arrived in town. I wondered if they'd made some kind of elaborate preparations before coming, or if Ithaca, who'd been attended by servants for much of her life, was not accustomed to moving quickly for anyone.
It was a good thing we arrived at the Lathrop Grand before they did, though, because Madeline was in a rage. Steve at the front desk sent us directly to her office when we arrived, even though it was approaching nine p.m.
“Whatever you're doing is making things worse,” she snapped the moment the door was closed. “Guests are seeing apparitions of mutilated people all over the third floor. There's banging and crashing up on four, but I haven't sent any of my people up there to check it out. I don't want more workplace deaths on my record.”
“That was the right choice,” I said.
“The ballroom has been wrecked, too. Some of the tourists are checking out early because of all the activity. We're losing business.”
“I thought they came because the hotel was haunted,” I said.
“Haunted by a pretty blond girl in one room, with a few stray ghosts here and there. Nobody wants to encounter a soldier with a rotten face and a hook hand on their way to get a mud mask at the spa. You understand the difference? There's charming haunted, and then there's horrifying haunted.”
“I understand, ma'am,” I said.
“What progress have you made?”
I caught her up on the case, and she grew more and more incredulous as she listened. At one point, she broke in, furious. “The previous manager allowed a film crew on the fourth floor? That's a PR nightmare. When is it supposed to air?”
“As it turns out, there is no TV show. That was a cover story for a group researching Ithaca Galloway's work, and ultimately they ended up taking Ithaca's ghost with them. That allowed Ithaca's ex-boyfriend and, um, former co-cult-leader Zagan to return to the hotel. He's a powerful ghost, and he seems to have taken complete control of the fourth floor and all the ghosts up there.”
“Someone took her ghost?” Madeline asked. “Are you yanking my boots here, Ellie?”
“No, ma'am. Ithaca wanted to go with them. She's eager to help them develop devices for paranormal communication, just like she attempted to do when she was alive. One of their investigators allowed Ithaca to possess her.”
“I'm not sure I believe any of this. What can you do about it?” Madeline smiled and glared at the same time.
“The woman possessed by Ithaca is on her way here, along with one of these other paranormal researchers. Ithaca told me she can drive Zagan back out of the house. Zagan is the troublesome element, so things should return to normal once his ghost is gone.”
“Will this be resolved by the end of next week?” Madeline asked. “The bigwigs are coming to have a look at the place and see how well I'm running things down here.”
“If this works—”
“Yes or no.”
“Uh...yes,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “I want to show the bigwigs a hotel full of happy guests. Not an exodus of customers caused by walking corpses in the corridors. I'm under a lot of pressure here, okay, sugar?”
“I understand,” I said.
In our room, we loaded a luggage cart with assorted gear, including the fully charged ghost cannon. The intensely powerful light left no shadows anywhere, but it was heavy, sucked its batteries dry in a fairly quick way, and threw off enough heat to create a major fire hazard. Still, I wasn't going back into Zagan's lair without it.
Stacey dashed around the hotel room, gathering up her discarded socks and bath towels at the last minute before Ithaca and Nicholas arrived.
I took the service elevator and met the two of them at the loading dock in the side alley. Nicholas heaved a few hefty plastic storage cases onto the empty luggage cart I'd brought them, transferring them from the black Land Rover in which they'd arrived. I supposed Ithaca had to travel in luxury and comfort. She waited in the sport-utility vehicle, looking bored, while he did all the heavy lifting.
When we finally reached our room, Stacey had changed into a crisp new outfit—boots, jeans, and a light turtleneck under a Patagonia peacoat jacket to protect against scratches and cuts—and had managed to freshen her hair and make-up, too. I don't know how she moved so fast. Maybe it was her version of putting up a wall against our enemies-slash-temporary-allies at Paranormal Solutions.
“I do not like that painting,” Ithaca said as soon as we entered the room. She pointed to a picture of a cat playing in a patch of wildflowers. “It's childish. Unfit for my hotel.”
“Feel free to complain to the management,” I said. “Are we ready to move?”
“We do not need any of this.” Ithaca swept her hand at the two carts full of gear, our stuff as well as Nicholas's. “I can handle Zagan myself.”
“Consider it a simple show of force, then,” Nicholas said. “He will see we're prepared to fight.”
“It seems more like a show of weakness to me, but I won't stop you from bringing your toys if you insist on following me.” Ithaca reached for the door, then hesitated. “Abigail has surrounded your room with her soldiers. You should move with caution.”
“I knew about that. Any chance you could coax some of them over to our side? Seems like they could help out against aggressive ghosts,” I said.
“There is no chance and no need,” Ithaca said. “I told you every ghost in this hotel knows its place. The soldiers and their murderess do not go to the fourth floor.”
“But you initially said Abigail might be behind the murder of that workman—” I said.
“Never mind that. I did not know Gregor was a factor here. I will take care of him now.” Then she opened the door and walked out, not even glancing back to see if we were following her.
We rode the freight elevator up to four, and Stacey used a strip of duct tape and a pebble to keep the DOOR OPEN button depressed so the elevator car wouldn't leave without us.
Ithaca sighed as we entered the decrepit, half-demolished service area. “They've let it go to ruin. I would never have allowed this.”
“They were actually trying to fix it up,” I said. “It's hard when ghosts keep killing the workers.”
“I told you, we never harmed them. Only frightened them.”
“Still, if you want the place to look nice...”
“In all the years since my death, it has always appeared to me just as it did when I was alive,” Ithaca said. “Only now, with these living eyes, can I see what's become of my home.”
I led the way toward the jib door that would take us right into the necromantium, but it wouldn't budge.
“Never mind,” Ithaca said. “We ought not enter like servants.” She stepped through another door into the hallway, and we rolled our carts after her.
The hallway was still cluttered with wreckage, from cracked coffee tables to shattered chunks of hefty old wooden bedframes, so it took some time to navigate around the mess. It was dark and cold, with no working lights, and it grew colder as we passed along it toward the main double-door entrance to the dark temple. Our
REM pods were flashing and wooing all along the hall.
The double doors wouldn't move, either. As I tried to unlock them with the keys that Earl, the custodian, had provided me, the shadows grew thicker around us.
“Let us in!” Ithaca snapped.
The strange, distorted white faces began appearing, each with a pair of red embers burning deep inside its otherwise empty eye sockets. The faces seemed clustered around Ithaca, and I wouldn't say any of them were smiling, despite the return of their original cult leader who had brought them all here in the first place. The hallway grew so cold my fingers began to turn numb.
The whispers rose all around us, loud and angry. Ithaca's haughty look began to show signs of cracking.
“Go ahead,” I urged her. “Take control of the ghosts.”
She raised her hand and opened her mouth to speak. All the faces vanished, leaving us surrounded in a darkness that our flashlights could barely penetrate.
Then Ithaca made a gagging sound and fell to the floor. I followed with my flashlight beam to find her writhing on the floorboards, eyes rolled up into their sockets, grabbing at her throat while spittle bubbled from her lips.
“Kara!” Nicholas shouted, clearly more concerned about his teammate Kara than the ghost of Ithaca riding within her. He dropped to her side to help her.
Something grabbed at my sleeve, and something else grabbed at my ankle. The hands felt like iron. Things were falling apart, fast.
I grabbed the ghost cannon from the cart beside me and activated it, flooding the hallway with searing, intense white light that allowed no shadows anywhere.
Unnaturally thin figures shrieked in the light, scattering from Ithaca/Kara's unconscious form like ants hit with a bug bomb. They slipped away into the walls and floorboards, but I could still hear their angry, insistent whispering all around me.
Nicholas lifted Kara's trembling, unresponsive form from the floor. Stacey helped him position her onto the cart with his gear. Then they were off, each retreating with a luggage cart. They couldn't move very quickly, though, because of all the broken furniture debris and the uneven floorboards that had popped up during the mini-quake that nobody on the lower floors seemed to have noticed.
I covered Nicholas and Stacey's exit, walking backwards and sweeping the hot ghost cannon back and forth, from one side of the hall to another, but it took much, much longer than I would have liked.
“Above you!” Stacey shouted. She was working the wheel of her luggage cart free from where it had caught on a loose, upwardly jutting floorboard.
A dark, cloudy mass was forming near the ceiling over my head. I raised the cannon, blasting it like a clay pigeon, and the mass let out a shrieking hiss as it shrank away into the crown molding.
I brought the light back down just in time to shove back a few more pale ghosts, who had approached me during the second or two that I'd swept my light toward the ceiling. They were alarmingly close to grabbing me, but the light sent them into a squealing retreat.
We worked our way around the corner of the hallway, then retreated into the service area through a jib door. The shadowy spirits passed through the wall on either side of the door, spreading out as if they meant to surround us. I had to sweep my light back and forth in ever-widening arcs, which kept me from really concentrating on any of them.
Behind me, Stacey and Nicholas rolled the carts into the waiting elevator. I backed into it after them, still struggling to keep the host of spirits at bay.
Stacey ripped the tape off the DOOR OPEN button and began furiously jabbing the DOOR CLOSED button instead. The whispering of the shadowy crowd of ghosts rose to a cacophonous roar, and then the brass doors finally snapped shut, leaving us in sudden silence.
“How is she?” I asked Nicholas, but he didn't answer. His full attention was on his fallen friend, checking her pulse, then trying to rouse her by shaking her. I took that as a sign that she did have a pulse.
The elevator shuddered as it left the fourth floor. We returned to our room in defeat, our secret weapon unconscious and drooling a little as we transferred her from the luggage cart to the bed. At least she was still breathing.
Chapter Eighteen
“If she doesn't wake up in five minutes, I'm taking her to the hospital,” Nicholas said. He'd inspected the unconscious girl and found no major wounds, aside from a small bruise on the side of her throat.
“What do we do now?” Stacey said. “Go search for Zagan's body?”
“Calvin hasn't found any information about it yet,” I said. “We'll have to improvise.”
“I'm afraid I haven't done much of that since the theatrical society at university,” Nicholas said. I struggled to imagine him carrying out comedic skits based on suggestions from the audience.
The girl on the bed began to cough, and Nicholas touched her shoulder. “Kara?” he said. “Say something, Kara.”
Her eyes opened.
“It's Ithaca,” she growled, pulling away from him. She rubbed her throat as she sat up. “They turned on me. He's turned them all against me once again. They've abandoned me now, just as they abandoned me during life...”
“Ghosts do tend to repeat the same patterns again and again,” I said.
“I am not some filmy residual haunting, perpetually throwing herself from the widow's walk!” Ithaca snapped at me. “We all came together after death, just as we planned. They fulfilled their oaths to return to me. He has ruined everything. He even brought that backstabbing Katherine back with him. We must destroy him.”
“That sounds great,” I said. “Do you have any specific ideas?”
Her hand balled into a fist, drawing up a lump of blanket into her fingers.
“I cannot fight them all at once,” she finally said.
“Maybe it's time to recruit some reinforcements,” I said. “Are you sure you can't speak to the soldiers?”
“They are loyal to Abigail.”
“And?”
Ithaca didn't speak.
“You're not pals with Abigail?” I asked. “I don't get it. You bought the hotel because it was haunted, but you never communicated with the ghosts who were already here?”
“We communicated,” Ithaca said. “We had a disagreement.”
“Which was?”
Again, she chose not to answer.
“When our psychic spoke to Abigail, all she seemed to care about was explaining why she'd killed those men. She insisted it was an act of mercy. The soldiers themselves wanted very badly for us to speak to her,” I said. “So what does Abigail want? She wants it known that she didn't kill them out of hate, or because they were on the other side of the war, but because she wanted to help them. Maybe she was misguided, but the soldiers don't seem to hold a grudge against her. You say they're loyal to her?”
“Abigail will never help me,” Ithaca said, her voice more subdued than usual, less domineering.
“You still haven't explained why.”
“Because I did not help her.”
I nodded, seeing the bigger picture now. “You didn't want to help her, because you didn't want her spirit, or the soldiers' spirits, to move on. You wanted this hotel to remain haunted. You could have helped, you could have told people Abigail's side of the story, but you preferred to keep her ghost trapped in the house. So she hates you for that.”
“We did what was necessary for our purposes,” Ithaca said.
“We can't get to Zagan without help.” I opened the door and stepped out into the hall. It was easy to find the cold spots where the soldiers were lurking. I turned out the lights.
“Hey, whatcha doing there, Ellie?” Stacey asked, standing in the open door behind me.
“Do not go to them,” Ithaca said, elbowing her way past Stacey to join me. Stacey stuck out her tongue at the back of Ithaca's head after she'd passed.
Ithaca's presence seemed to stir the spirits in the hallway, which I didn't mind one bit. Shadows formed along the walls, and the characteristic moaning and groaning
of the amputees returned.
“Are you here to help me or not?” I asked the shadows. “Now's the time.”
The temperature plunged as the bayonet-armed soldier I'd seen before appeared directly in front of me.
“If you intend to attack me, do it now,” I said. “I need to get my friends and enemies lists straightened out.”
He stood unmoving, unresponsive—but not attacking me, I noticed.
A scraping, shrieking rusty sound rose from the floor. A shadowy figure crawled toward me along the carpet runner, indistinct at first. As it grew closer, I saw it was another badly mangled soldier, a portion of his face burned, an amputated arm replaced by a crude and rusty iron claw. As he crawled, one of his legs dragged uselessly behind him. At first I thought his foot was enclosed in a trap or leg iron, like an escaped prisoner. As he pulled himself closer, I saw it was some kind of heavy wheel made of iron and wood. Two wheels, actually, one each screwed into the broken, exposed nubs of his tibia and fibula, then connected through the bones by an iron axle.
Not surprisingly, his face was contorted in excruciating pain. He looked up at me as he clawed his way close to my boots, and I stiffened up, ready to move if he attacked.
Instead, he melted down into the carpet like a shadowy puddle. I heard his groan of pain as he shrank away.
“I think I know what to do,” I said. “Stacey, is there a late-night toy store open around here, by any chance?”
“Uh...” Stacey thumbed at her phone. “There's a Target on East Victory that's open until eleven. We might be able to make it if we disregard speed limits.”
“Okay.” I turned to Ithaca. “You need to go down to the second floor and make nice with Abigail Bowen. Apologize, kneel, beg and plead for forgiveness for how you mistreated her—”
“I will not beg!” Ithaca snapped.
“You will beg, or you will surrender to Zagan and let him have his way. Let him control your house and your people for centuries to come, while you exist as an outcast. You know you were wrong to refuse to help Abigail's ghost move on. Time to make amends. Otherwise, you have no allies among the dead here.”
