by JL Bryan
I heard them, though, their groans raised to a general shout as they attacked.
The four of us moved forward, too, though there was no clear target for us in the dark, scream-filled room. It felt good to advance. Maybe the “relentlessly life-affirming” song was having some effect on me—more likely, it was just a relief to have the psychic ghosts' broadcast of intense, dark emotions cut off for the moment.
Crackling energy whirled around the room, raising hurricane-force winds as the ghosts fought it out. A distorted white-mask face swam up in the darkness near me, screeching so loud I thought my eardrums might burst. It vanished, its scream fading into the general melee. A soldier with rusty cables protruding from his elbows and the back of his skull fell to the floor nearby and faded.
“Gregor! Gregor Zagan!” Ithaca shouted. “I command you to appear!”
Zagan wasn't taking orders from her, though. No sign of him manifested anywhere.
I looked through my thermals, but didn't see any hellish heat source floating around. It was hard to tell what was happening—cold spots everywhere, colliding, some swelling, some fading. It was like watching a blizzard in the middle of a brisk Siberian winter, and the room's temperature was definitely below freezing and still dropping. I shivered uncontrollably, the cold air burning every inch of exposed skin on my body. I noticed the area at the center of the room seemed devoid of ghosts, as if they wanted to avoid the ethereal rip there, the ragged portal Ithaca and Zagan's machine had opened.
A ghostly blue figure with a bayonet for an arm approached, stopping directly in front of me. He remained there, stiff and unmoving, as though standing at attention.
I raised my thermals away. With my own eyes, I could see him like a sketchy, faintly luminescent outline in the darkness, a portrait dashed off in a hurry by an artist with a glow-in-the-dark pen.
He extended his bayonet arm and turned to point straight ahead toward the eye of the storm, the empty spot at the center of the room.
I took a breath and nodded, then I turned to Stacey.
“Stay with Ithaca!” I shouted over the howling voices of the psychokinetic storm around us. My hair streamed across my face, getting into my eyes and mouth. “She's the key to everything.”
“Yeah, where are you going?”
“That way.” I raised my flashlight and followed the barely-visible glow of Ol' Bayonet Arm as he led me past screaming white faces and fallen soldiers.
I steeled myself as I stepped into the center of the room.
The soldier's ghost continued on, not even hesitating before he stepped back into the high winds and screams on the far side. I was puzzled, but I followed him all the way to the far end of the room, all the way to the big altar there.
He raised his bayonet-arm and pointed.
I had to lean across the altar and bring my flashlight close to the wall to see the figures and glyphs carved there, but I quickly figured out which one he'd meant. One of the Egyptian-style engravings showed a bird grasping a half-circle in its feet, as though drawing up the rising sun. A cruder version of the same image had been scratched into my hotel room door the previous night—by Ol' Bayonet Arm, I was guessing.
While the wind and ghostly voices roared behind me, I boosted myself up onto the altar and rolled up to a kneeling position. I traced the bird-and-rising-sun design with my fingertip.
“No...” The woman's voice was barely audible, but it was very close. She stood over me, her pudgy red cheeks transparent, a look of horror on her face. She wore a simple dark dress, as if attending a funeral, not a big antebellum hoop skirt like in her portrait downstairs. I recognized Mabel Lathrop, co-founder of the hotel, whose ghost had long been an active but benign presence down in the restaurant named for her on the first floor. She repeated it again: “No...”
“Sorry, Mrs. Lathrop,” I said. “I have to do it.”
I pressed my hand against the bird and the half-sun in its talons. The entire panel of glyphs and symbols around it, about a foot square, sank back into the wall as I pushed.
A grinding and rumbling rose from within the wall, rattling my hands. Then a slab of the wall behind the altar slid back, creating a door-sized opening all the way to the floor. It emitted ear-splitting squeals the whole way. My flashlight found a pair of rusty iron tracks on the floor, indicating that the secret door was moving on unseen wheels.
I couldn't see much of the new space I'd just opened up—the slab of wall itself blocked most of my view—but the smell was horrific, even worse than the sour olfactory apparitions down among the yellow fever victims in the basement. It smelled like rotten blood. I don't know how else to describe it.
Beside me, the ghost of Mrs. Lathrop clapped her hands to her face and faded from view. Ol' Bayonet Arm was still standing on the floor, not apparently interested in accompanying me any farther.
I was reluctant to jump down from the altar into the newly revealed room. If someone were to push the slab of wall back into place, I'd be crushed against the back side of the heavy altar, destroying such valuable portions of myself as my ribs, internal organs, legs, and feet.
Still, I didn't have much choice. I hopped down, my boots punching into thick dust and crumbled rust. I moved to one side quickly, shining my light around as I entered the hidden room. I drew my shirt up over my nose to keep the smell from gagging me.
I first encountered a set of wooden shelves built into the brick walls, shaggy with spiderwebs. Bottles and jars with yellowed, illegible handwritten labels filled the shelves. A worktable in front of the shelves was cluttered with filthy beakers and vials.
Next was a set of primitive surgical tools, most of them turned to rust. Wicked-looking bone saws and long amputation knives hung from nails on the wall. I'd seen these kinds of tools in pictures while doing background research for the case, but they looked much more awful in person. The amputation knives looked like something you'd use for hacking through a South American jungle. The bone saws resembled hacksaws with unevenly serrated blades. Ouch. I even found the crude hand-cranked chainsaw, surely one of the earliest models ever built for surgery.
Just the sight of the implements made me ill, but they helped prepare me for what came next.
An array of odd mechanical items were on display in dusty glass cabinets. I opened them for a better look. Here I saw Dr. Lathrop's attempts to build prosthetics for the huge war amputee population of the 1860's. An iron claw sat on one shelf—and as I looked closer, I found it was mounted by a big screw into a broken length of human bone.
A strange cage apparatus stood nearby, with straps, hooks, and ropes around the interior. It looked as if the intention had been to place a human inside and then puppeteer his arms, legs, and head.
I found a rusty wheel with sharp spikes jutting out along the rim and bone fragments at the axle. Then I found a rusty bayonet, its base screwed to an old piece of human arm bone. I'd found a remnant of Ol' Bayonet Arm himself.
It looked as though Dr. Lathrop's medical experiments included attempts to replace amputated limbs with weapons, enabling the soldiers to return to the battlefield like some kind of steampunk Terminators. That certainly would have changed some of our images of the Civil War.
It was also apparent that his weird medical experiments would have been torturous for the soldiers involved. After suffering major injuries on the battlefield itself, they were brought to this hotel, supposedly for help, but instead the good doctor had brought some of them to this secret room.
I found what looked like a waste pail tucked under one workbench, full of bone fragments. That brought a new feeling of revulsion, the idea of Dr. Lathrop casually disposing of human parts and kicking the pail out of the way when he was done.
I'd figured it out when I'd seen that soldier apparition with the wheel in place of his foot. Grant had said Dr. Lathrop had attempted to patent a number of early attempts at prosthetic limbs and other experimental medical technology. I'd begun to wonder if Ol' Bayonet Arm wasn't psychologica
lly projecting a weapon as a part of his body, as I'd assumed at first. Maybe his arm really had been replaced by an actual bayonet while he was still alive, just as the other man's foot was replaced by a wheel. Maybe Dr. Lathrop had been less of a humanitarian than his reputation had implied, I thought. Maybe he'd been a twisted man doing secretive medical experiments on wounded soldiers.
Near the back of the room lay a row of flat wooden cots, most of them holding darkly stained linen bundles the size of human beings. Three wide leather belts strapped each bundle to its cot.
I stepped toward them, weighed down by apprehension. There might well have been bodies inside when this room was last sealed. I told myself that if I opened them, I wouldn't find anything worse than bones after all these years. I did not completely convince myself, but I approached the nearest one anyway, drawing out my pocketknife.
“Okay,” I whispered. “Let's see what we've got.”
One of the human-sized linen bundles a few feet away let out a small grunt. It twitched back and forth on its cot, held in place by the big leather belt. I got the impression of a human face moving beneath the old bloodstained cloth.
Reluctantly, I moved toward the linen-wrapped body, raising my knife. It continued shifting under its heavy straps, and it appeared to be breathing heavily.
I stretched out a piece of rotten cloth near the head, and I curled my lip as I cut open the linen around the face, expecting to see undead eyes staring back, or maybe just a long-forgotten skull encrusted with black corpse dust.
Instead, I saw a girl, her face flushed red, her mouth tied with another dirty strip of cloth. Long brown hair, panicked brown eyes—I recognized her, though her Boy George hat was nowhere to be seen. A few sharp pins jutted out here and there, in her cheeks and around her neck, like some mad acupuncturist had attacked her face.
“Lemmy!” I said, pulling the filthy gag from her mouth. “How did you—”
“He's back!” she screamed, looking over my shoulder.
I didn't even have time to turn around. Something slammed into my side, something that felt squishy and jittery as it pressed against me. I stumbled away from Lemmy but managed to catch myself on a table full of rusty instruments. I shrugged my backpack off and let it land on the table behind me.
A hot streak of pain burned across my chest. I looked down. My jacket, shirt, and skin had been sliced open from the front of my collar bone out to the edge of my shoulder. Blood welled up from the long, narrow cut. I had a matching cut on my back.
“Dr. Uriah Lathrop,” I said. “I wondered where you'd been hiding. I didn't know you had your own room.”
While I spoke, I grabbed the rusty bayonet arm with the piece of bone still attached. A blade is, of course, generally useless against ghosts, but I thought this one might have some potent psychic energy attached. It had belonged to the same spirit who'd guided me here, though I couldn't help noticing that he hadn't accompanied me into the old laboratory. That wasn't a big confidence-builder.
The dead doctor who'd founded the hotel began to materialize in front of me, appearing as a white shadow in the dark room.
“This is where you brought wounded soldiers for your experiments,” I said. “How many suffered here? How many died on the tables in this room? They were nothing to you. Just Lincoln's fighters, Yankees, foreign invaders. Who cares how much pain they endured, as long as you got to pursue your research?”
Now his features began to grow more distinct. His face was pinched, framed by thick muttonchops, his lips almost too thin to see. His eye sockets, like the spirits of the psychic cultists, were empty except for burning red embers deep inside. His whole body shuddered like an old film reel, as if he were overflowing with nervous energy.
He held an antique scalpel with a horn handle, its long blade wet with my blood.
“Looks like you've been feeding on Zagan, too,” I said. “Why? What does he want from you?”
“They're trying to possess me,” Lemmy said.
“The doctor is trying to possess you?” I asked her. Dr. Lathrop's ghost stood between me and Lemmy. I would have to deal with him before I could get back over there and cut her free.
“No. Her.” Lemmy turned her head, the only part of her that wasn't strapped down. I followed her gaze to a dark corner of the room.
She faded as soon as I looked at her, but I glimpsed the waxy white face of the spirit I believed to be Katherine Moore.
“I saw you, Katherine,” I said. “I finished your book, you know. I even made a little audiobook version for you. Want to hear it?”
I touched my iPod, and the robotic female began to recite Katherine's memoirs, starting with her childhood in Ireland, the death of her mother and brother, and her arrival in Savannah as a destitute girl whose family had died on the way over.
Katherine's apparition returned, clearer than before. Her waxy mask-face managed to show fascination and wonder as she floated closer to me.
Dr. Lathrop, meanwhile, was eyeing me along his scalpel, one eye squinted, like a butcher planning his cuts, his entire form still shaking and jittering.
“You stay back,” I told him. “There are things you don't know about me.”
Then I crushed the heels of my hands into my face, just under my eyes. I curled my lower lip into my mouth and bit down on the skin below it.
Capsules of stage blood, concealed under flesh-colored latex. After figuring out that Dr. Lathrop might have been one of the dangerous ghosts in this haunting, I'd bought the blood capsules for ten bucks from the Halloween aisle at Target—good thing major holidays begin several weeks early at those large retailers. When I looked at him again, blood appeared to streak down my face from my eyes and mouth, making me resemble a yellow fever victim in the final throes of the awful disease.
“I have yellow fever,” I said. “I was sent here to infect you.”
The doctor's spirit hissed and recoiled, retreating several feet from me without even bothering to move his legs. Strings of leather wormed their way from behind his head, two burrowing forward through the hair above his ears, two more coming up and around his chin and through his muttonchops.
They met at his nose and mouth and thickened, forming a mask that covered the lower half of his face, studded with little lengths of pipe that were supposed to act as air filters.
“Yellow fever killed you,” I said. “Remember that? I bet you do. I bet it was miserable and terrifying, feeling your body slowly die around you.” I reached into my backpack and removed a standard cylindrical ghost trap, about two feet long, made of leaded glass encased in copper mesh encased in insulating plastic.
I popped open the lid and dumped out a heap of toys onto the floor. The rush of cold was palpable as the ghosts flooded out.
Five pale children in ragged clothes suddenly stood around the room, bleeding from their eyes, noses, and mouths.
I advanced on Dr. Lathrop, brandishing my bayonet (well, I sort of wiggled it at him, anyway). The children giggled and joined in the game, closing in on the mad doctor's ghost from all sides.
“You're forgetting something,” I said. “The mask never worked. It did not keep the fever away from you.”
He straightened up, though, and approached me, swinging his scalpel and slicing the air, as if taking a practice run for what he intended to do to my throat.
“You're the one who's been cutting people,” I said. “Did you push Valentino from the ladder, too, to keep your lab secret? Or was that Zagan and the others, protecting their temple? It doesn't really matter. You're all working together. You've accepted Zagan as your master.”
I took a chance and leaped at him, swinging the bayonet at the leather strands that held his mask to his face. The mask might not have worked in real life, but he still believed in it, and his beliefs held more weight just now. For that matter, yellow fever isn't spread by human-to-human contact—and I was counting on him to still be unaware of that fact, too, so I could play into his mistaken beliefs.
; Unfortunately, this particular gamble did not pay off. My bayonet swept uselessly back and forth through his semi-transparent face. I heard him chuckle beneath the mask, and then he raised his scalpel hand, ready to cut me with surgical expertise.
His hand was empty, though.
He hesitated with his arm raised, apparently confused by the missing scalpel. He'd definitely been holding it a moment earlier.
Four quick slashes appeared in his face and throat, slicing apart the leather straps. The mask toppled off, and his smirk instantly changed to a look of horror.
I saw her for just an eyeblink then, standing beside him. Abigail had taken the surgeon's scalpel from him. Stabby Abby had some experience wielding that particular tool herself.
I charged at Dr. Lathrop again, and the dead children joined in the game, surrounding him. His skin turned a jaundiced yellow, and blood poured from every hole in his head. He shriveled as he fell to the floor, his body almost skeletal when it landed.
“Stay dead this time,” I told him.
The children stood over him in a ring, fascinated as his apparition shrank away to nothing. Then they scattered to the walls of the room, laughing. Their laughter lingered for a few seconds after they disappeared.
Katherine's ghost was getting clingy, standing way too close to me while listening to her own story being read back to her. I removed the iPod from my belt and set it on the worktable, deciding to let her hang around there and listen all she wanted. Keeping her busy took one of Zagan's followers out of the fight, at least.
Then I returned the ghost trap to my backpack, ran to Lemmy and cut her free. She shuddered as she looked at the filthy sheets in which she'd been wrapped. More of the strange needles and other bits of old iron were implanted around her skin, and I gently pulled each one out.
“You okay?” I asked her, helping her to her feet.
“Totally not.”
“I wouldn't think so. You said they were trying to possess you?”
