by JL Bryan
Ithaca glared at me, and I stared right back at her, until she finally gave a curt nod.
“I will speak to her,” she said.
“Apologize and beg.”
“If I must.” Her lip curled in disgust. “Gregor must be cast out. I will not let him succeed in this new betrayal.”
“That's the spirit,” I said. “Stacey, Nicholas, you two stick with Ithaca for now. Keep her safe.”
“And what are you doing?”
“I'm going shopping.” I stepped back into the room to grab the keys to the van.
Less than an hour later, I returned to the hotel and went straight to the basement. Stacey had texted me, saying Ithaca had gone down to the second floor and was having a tense conversation with Abigail Bowen's ghost. It mostly occurred on a psychic level, ghost to ghost, so Stacey couldn't hear much of it herself.
I texted Stacey that I was going into the basement and she should come get me if she didn't hear back in fifteen minutes. Jacob had said the ghosts in the basement weren't immediately dangerous, that their main threat was causing illness over a long period of exposure. Earl clearly suffered some of that, his watery eyes and runny nose echoing the facial bleeding of advanced yellow fever.
I wasn't headed to the custodian's room tonight, though. Instead, I walked toward the mechanical thumping of the laundry room, but I didn't go inside. I opened the door to the long, dark tunnel of the laundry storage closet, where Jacob said the more adventurous child ghosts liked to hang out.
I closed the door behind me, leaving myself in complete darkness except for the display screen on my Mel-Meter. The device indicated possible presences as I walked deeper into the narrow room, with the electromagnetic readings ticking up a couple of milligaus while the temperature dropped slightly. If the ghosts were there at all, they were far from powerful.
Still, I didn't need them to be powerful. I just needed them to be present.
When I'd walked about halfway through the long room, I knelt on the floor, removed my backpack, and pulled out several items I'd purchased at Target. These included a couple of soft cloth dolls, a wooden yo-yo, a set of jacks, marbles, dominoes, and wooden building blocks. I'd wanted items that resembled nineteenth-century toys as much as possible, made of wood instead of plastic. A company called Melissa & Doug seemed to focus on manufacturing such retro toys, fortunately.
Then I lit a few candles, enough to draw the ghosts close and feed their energy. Dim, fiery light and shifting shadows now danced across the high stacks of neatly folded towels and pillowcases on either side of me.
“Okay,” I said. “Olly olly oxen free. All are free, all come to me.”
The first part of that phrase was an old phrase for kids playing hide and seek, a general announcement that the game was over and all the kids could emerge from their hiding places. I knew its usage went back to at least the early twentieth century, but I couldn't be sure whether kids who'd died in Savannah’s yellow fever epidemic of 1876 would recognize the phrase. I hoped so, or that they at least received the intent behind it, that I was calling them out in a friendly way. “All are free” was an alternative phrase to “oxen free” in some places. I added “come to me” because that was what I wanted the ghosts to do, and hey, it rhymes.
I remained crouched on the floor, making myself as small and nonthreatening as possible, as if trying to make friends with a wary animal. I repeated my little chant.
Far away toward the end of the long room, near the door to the rarely-used and nearly forgotten stairwell, a small, shadowy head leaned out from behind a stack of blankets and seemed to look at me.
Chapter Nineteen
“Please,” Ithaca was saying, kneeling on the floor near room 208, her back slumped as though in defeat. Not a great sign regarding the progress of the negotiations. “Please.”
Stacey and Nicholas stood several yards away from her, silently watching, the worry plain on their faces.
“How's it going?” I whispered to Stacey as I crept up beside her. She jumped, then turned to me.
“Don't do that,” she whispered back. “Ithaca's trying, but Stabby Abby's not cooperating.”
I removed the hefty thermals from my utility belt and strapped them on over my eyes. I could see the slumped, kneeling form of the girl Kara, possessed by Ithaca, glowing red and yellow. Not far in front of her, a cold blue shape levitated about a foot off the floor. A woman. Abigail.
Stepping toward the cold specter-shape, I held out my hand. My fingers tingled and grew numb as they passed through her shoulder.
Abigail's head turned to look at me.
Images burst into my mind. I saw her as she'd looked when she was alive, her ragged linen dress sopping with blood, the red-coated scalpel dripping in her hand. Soldiers lying on cots and floor pallets, their throats cut.
Her face was much clearer and more detailed than I'd ever seen it before, and now I recognized her.
“It was you, Abigail,” I said. “You came to my apartment the night before I started this case. You knew I was coming. You reached out to me.” I could see her clearly in my memory, peering in through my window from the darkness outside, her face white and smooth, her blond hair also a ghostly white.
She drifted closer to me, touching her icy fingers against my outstretched hand.
“I think I understand everything now,” I said. “Ithaca Galloway didn't share the truth while she was alive, like you wanted her to do. But I will. I'll make sure everyone knows what really happened here. I'll tell them how you were bringing mercy and ending their pain. You must have sensed that I was the person who would finally do that. I'm not here to use you like Ithaca did. I'm here to set you free. But first I need your help. You know there's an evil man upstairs who must be dealt with. Come with us. Bring all your soldiers. Everyone's suffering will end tonight, if we work together.”
Abigail's blue shape floated in place for a moment, as if she were thinking things over. Then she turned toward Ithaca, and her temperature plummeted, darkening her from blue to purple.
“I know you don't trust her,” I said. “You don't have to. We all happen to be on the same side right now. After tonight, you'll never have to see her again. You won't be trapped here any longer.”
I held my breath waiting for a response. None of the other people in the hall made a sound.
Then Abigail's color returned to a mild blue, and she sank down to the carpet. Her fingers touched Ithaca's head.
“Please,” Ithaca said, looking up at her. “Forgive me.”
Abigail removed her hand from the other woman's head, and the air in the hallway turned icy. Abigail's temperature wasn't dropping this time, though.
Behind me, blue shapes had appeared in two long rows along the length of the hall. Some of them slumped, many were missing limbs, and a few dragged themselves along the floor, unable to do more than slide and crawl. One stood ahead and apart from the others, directly in front of me, his right arm tapering to a long thin line about the size of a bayonet.
“She called in the cavalry,” I said, letting myself enjoy a brief moment of relief. They were ragtag, badly battered, probably not nearly as equipped for supernatural warfare as, let's say, a group of dead psychics with a powerful, possibly demonic leader...but they were here for us, ready to fight.
“Okay,” I told the others, removing my thermals. “If anybody asks, 'You and what army?' just point to these cold spots along this hall.”
“Who is going to ask us that?” Nicholas said.
“Nobody. It was supposed to be like a joke. Let's just get moving, okay?” I shook my head as I led the way. Abigail and the dead soldiers followed us invisibly, freezing the air around us.
We again took the elevator to the fourth floor and pinned the DOOR OPEN button, but this time we planned to travel lighter, leaving the luggage carts in the elevator and taking only what we could carry in our arms or backpacks. Ithaca was unusually subdued, some of her haughtiness drained by her recent act of contritio
n to Abigail's spirit.
“We had such dreams,” Ithaca said quietly, looking out into the semi-demolished service area. “They all turned to nightmares.”
“Take this.” I held out a tactical flashlight to her. I could see the initial look of feeling insulted cross her face, but her features quickly softened and she accepted the tool.
“I do not need it to see,” she told me quietly.
“Then use it to help us see,” I said. “And it's a minor defensive weapon against ghosts. It probably won't help much at this point, but it can't hurt.”
She nodded.
I'd expected the psychic ghosts to be waiting for us as we emerged onto the fourth floor, but the place was silent and had an empty feeling. The ambient temperature was normal, not unnaturally low at all, at least until the cold front of about fourteen soldier ghosts plus Stabby Abby rolled out from the elevator with us. I didn't hear anything from the REM pods out in the main hallway.
“They've fallen back,” I said. “They're waiting for us somewhere.”
“Then let's go find them.” Stacey heaved the huge ghost cannon from our luggage cart and pointed it in front of her, squinting. “Do I look like Rambo?”
“You kind of look like Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits,” I told her.
Nicholas opened one of his black plastic cases and snapped together two thin aluminum poles to form something that looked, to me, like a slightly modified floor lamp about four feet long. A convex fitting surrounded the light source at the end, as if to focus and channel the light. A trigger was built into the side.
“What you packin' there, pardner?” Stacey asked him.
“Standard high-impact light thrower, one hundred thousand lumens at a blast. And what about your comically unwieldy piece of illumination there?” He nodded at the ghost cannon.
“A million to a million and a half lumens, depending on its mood. No big deal.” She smirked. Nicholas's eyebrows rose in surprise. With his detached demeanor, that was practically the equivalent of screaming and running circles around the room with his hands in the air.
“It burns out fast, though, and hasn't had much time to recharge, so let's not depend too much on it. And we also want to avoid burning our client's hotel to the ground, if possible,” I said.
“Do not dare to damage my home,” Ithaca said, her face darkening.
“Like I just explained, that's what I want to avoid. Okay, let's stop sitting here like ducks in a barrel. Stacey, go.”
Stacey tapped the iPod on her belt, blasting a Civil War march she'd found. The fife and drums, I hoped, would help keep the Union soldiers focused on the task at hand.
I approached the jib door to the necromantium and wasn't surprised to find that it still wouldn't budge. Removing the hinges took a minute, with the military music providing an odd soundtrack to my efforts at unscrewing the rusty old things and prying them loose.
With the hinges gone, I pulled hard on the handle again. No luck. The jib door was plastered shut by psychokinetic energy.
“I guess we go around to the double doors,” I said. “At least they open inward.”
So far, we were still in the light of the propped-open elevator, but it began to flicker behind us.
Then I heard a small plink, like a pebble dropping on brass.
“Hey, was that— ” Stacey said, and then the elevator doors closed, leaving us in darkness. Stacey, Ithaca, and I all turned on our flashlights, while Nicholas ignited his long aluminum wand, putting out a searing white glow. He was considerate enough to point it away from us before switching it on.
“Aren't you supposed to say Lumos Maxima! when you light that thing?” Stacey asked.
“Yes, a Harry Potter reference. Very amusing,” Nicholas said, not looking very amused.
Nicholas had also brought a heavy-looking black box made of hard plastic, in addition to the long glowing light-thrower tucked under one arm. I reached over to grab the box for him, but he waved me off.
“Keep yourself safe, is all I ask,” he said, lifting the box.
“How gallant,” I said. “Which seems out of character.”
“I'm quite gallant. You hardly know me.”
“Right. Okay, forward march everyone, or whatever they say.”
We started up the hall, four warm bodies trailed by a small host of dead men. We still encountered no resistance, except for the broken furniture all over the place. Maybe Zagan was investing all his power in keeping the doors to the necromantium closed. Or maybe he was lying in wait to ambush us.
When we reached the double doors, they once again refused to open. The key wouldn't even turn inside the lock.
Nicholas and I placed our lights aside, and Stacey and Ithaca helped to light us as we selected a painfully heavy rosewood coffee table from the scattered furniture pieces strewn across the floor.
“That's a valuable piece,” Ithaca said. “It's from the Orient.”
“Feels like...a good battering ram,” I said, my teeth gritting with the effort of holding the thing. Stacey moved to help, but I shook my head. “Stay with Ithaca.”
Nicholas and I backed up as far as the hallway would allow. An open door looked into an empty bedroom cell behind us, the slats of a broken chair heaped across the threshold.
“On three?” Nicholas asked me.
“Make it two.”
“One, two...”
We charged forward, slamming the end of the heavy table into the double doors. They let out a cracking sound and sank inward an inch or so before rebounding. The lock held, but we'd bashed a deep furrow in both doors just above the handles.
Ithaca shook her head, frowning at the overall destruction of her property, but didn't say anything.
Nicholas and I charged again, then again. On the fourth try, the doors burst open and spread wide, opening onto a freezing, pitch-black space beyond.
We heaved the table into the room, to the side of the doorway, where it could help prop one of the doors open in case the ghosts tried to slam them and trap us inside.
Then we marched into the room. I have to admit, by this point the stately fife and drums had me walking a little straighter, as though I were there to represent some higher and greater purpose than clearing the way for a real estate investment group to renovate and monetize the fourth floor.
The darkness choked down even on Nicholas's intensely bright beam. My supposedly high-powered tactical flashlight was of almost no use at all. The black fog effect—when a place is so filled with hostile ghosts that almost no light can pierce the darkness—is usually a harbinger of evil things.
The white mask-faces appeared, all in a single straight line just ahead of the temple's halfway point. They had completely blocked off the center of the room where the crazy machine had once been, where Jacob said there was a crude portal enabling spirits to cross back and forth.
I looked with my thermals and saw them like a wall of ice, like the face of a glacier, a solid band of deep blue across the room. I did not see any heat to signify Zagan. I wondered where he was.
Our soldiers spread out to either side, their cold, mangled shapes arranged in a ragged line. Stacey's fife and drums thumped on, filling the moment with a weird sense of historical significance.
The psychics launched the first volley. The room filled with whispers. Mind-shattering panic filled me instantly, with a feeling of intense dread and a near-certainty that I was about to die if I didn't leave the room. I heard the gasps of the other three in my party as the wave of terrifying emotions hit them, too.
“Hold steady!” I shouted, faking confidence that I didn't feel at all. Stacey raised the ghost cannon with a questioning look on her face, but I shook my head. Better hold that for an even bigger emergency, like Zagan's arrival.
“I'll...take care of this,” Nicholas managed to say. His voice trembled with fear. I wondered if mine had, too. I lifted my thermals off my eyes so I could see what he did next.
He stepped forward, slightly ahead of our gro
up, and set his black box on the ground. I took his glowing staff when he handed it to me.
He lifted the lid and unfolded the device within. I saw a hand crank on the side. Then he raised a steel phonograph horn with a flaring flower shape and aimed it directly at the wall of whispering ghosts, who continued broadcasting their emotional attack on us.
A hand-cranked phonograph made sense—the ghosts couldn't drain it like an electrical device. It also seemed bulky, cumbersome, and easily broken to me. I hoped Nicholas knew what he was doing.
He set a black vinyl record onto the turntable, then flipped aside a lever that was set against the crank. Apparently the phonograph had previously been wound up, and the little lever had acted as a brake to stop the crank from turning until he was ready.
Stacey lowered the volume on her nineteenth-century marching music, making room for whatever he was about to try.
Nicholas picked up the needle arm and moved it to the rotating record. I felt a growing sense of terror, sure this wouldn't work, sure we would all be killed.
The needle touched the record, and the music came out at a surprisingly loud volume.
The opening strain of “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys filled the room.
“Are you serious?” I snapped at Nicholas. “We're all dead.”
“It works every time,” Nicholas said. “It's relentlessly life-affirming.”
I looked up at the line of ghosts, expecting them to be charging at us with intent to dismember and disembowel. Instead, their white mask-faces were badly distended and twisted, and they seemed to back away in a scrambled, haphazard retreat.
“Every time,” Nicholas said again, winking at me. “It is my unproven opinion that Brian Wilson may have functioned as a sort of divine conduit—”
I slapped the iPod on my belt, playing an authentic Union bugle charge that some Civil War reenactors in Tennessee had been kind enough to record and share with the world on their website.
Our line of soldiers charged. I felt the surging rush of energy more than I saw them—without my thermals, in the near-total darkness, there wasn't much to see but an occasional glimmer of movement.
