by JL Bryan
“Yep. What happened to you?”
“Don't worry, it's just costume blood.” I wiped away some of the fake blood beneath my eyes. “I was betting that doctor guy would be scared of yellow fever, since that's what killed him.”
“Is that just a costume, too?” She pointed to my slashed-open jacket and shirt, and the blood beneath.
“No, that's real, unfortunately.” I was cutting open the other bundles of stained linens and felt revulsion at the smell of old decay. I thought my kitchen smelled bad when I'd been away for two days and forgot to take out the trash, but ripe kitchen trash had nothing on the smell inside those old sheets. I found skulls and bones inside them, but no more living prisoners. Lemmy was pale as she looked at the old bones, and I hurried to cover them up again.
“Is everything okay now?” she asked.
I listened to the howls and shrieks from the other room. “Not quite. What are the odds of you hiding in here until that blows over?”
“Zippity,” she said.
“All right. Let's go.” I led her toward the movable section of the wall. From behind, I could better see the tracks on which it sat. They were of an extremely old construction, wooden rails with iron plating on top. Rusty wheels sat atop them, and an arrangement of gears and pulleys at the back of the wall did the grunt work of moving the wall, amplifying the force applied to the sun-bird panel outside.
Metallic rattling sounded behind us. I turned to see the array of scalpels, knives, and saws jiggling on the countertop, though the counter itself was not moving.
Katherine's ghost remained where I'd left her, staring at the little device that kept telling her life story, paying us no attention.
“Get down!” I grabbed Lemmy and turned my back toward the rows of rusty implements. I brought us both to the floor as the barrage of old cutting tools flew at us. They pelted my back through my leather jacket, but I didn't feel anything stabbing into me. More of them hurtled past us and clattered against the back of the wall and the rusty machinery affixed to it.
When it was over, I turned to see another ghost had arrived—Mabel Lathrop, possibly drawn by the sudden exit of her husband. Her mouth was downturned in an exaggerated frown that reached her jawline on either side. There wasn't even a hint of rosiness in her cheeks now. Her face was white like chalk dust.
“No one can know!” she hissed.
“Everyone will know,” I said. Then I ushered Lemmy to the opened wall and heaved her up onto the altar, getting her clear of the movable portion as quickly as possible. I placed my hands on the altar and began to haul myself up.
The wall surged forward with a metallic screech, ready to crush the lower half of me against the back side of the heavy altar.
I slung my legs up and rolled forward. I just managed to reach the top of the altar before the wall section slammed into place behind me, its outline immediately lost among the panels of hieroglyphs and occult cartouches.
Chapter Twenty
The war raged on in the necromantium, the winds stronger and the cries and howls of the mostly-invisible combatants even fiercer. Nicholas's record player had overturned, and shattered pieces of vinyl lay around it. So much for our Beach Boys soundtrack.
A portion of the room was illuminated by Nicholas. His light-thrower lay on the floor, several feet away from me, sending out a continuous beam that lanced the darkness along a single path to a nearby wall.
Nicholas himself lay on the floor, too. His clothes were on fire, and in that flickering red light I could see Stacey beating him with her jacket, trying to smother the flames. The flames kept roaring back, though, like those birthday candles that relight themselves after you blow them out.
Gregor Zagan stood nearby, his smoldering ash-heap of a body leaking fiery red light here and there through cracks in his skin. His eyes made me think of a jack o' lantern, red flames dancing inside the otherwise empty sockets. Red embers burned in his beard and all over his face.
He held up one hand, facing Nicholas, momentarily focused on stoking the flames every time Stacey managed to put them out.
Ithaca stood at the center of the room, the silent eye of the storm, with her arms splayed out, swaying and muttering under her breath. If she was trying to gain control of the situation, it wasn't working so far.
I was tempted to send Lemmy out of the room immediately, but no path looked safe. The jib door had refused to open even after I removed its hinges. The double doors were on the far side of the room.
“Stay close,” I said. I holstered my flashlight, opting to use the rusty bayonet as my primary weapon if I needed one. I adjusted my backpack, then hopped down to the floor. I didn't see Ol' Bayonet Arm himself anywhere—perhaps he was invisible, fighting with the psychic ghosts—so I'm not sure what he thought of me wielding his old arm.
I took Lemmy's hand as we hopped off the altar, then led her in a mad dash to join Ithaca at the center of the room, swiping my bayonet at a couple of white-mask faces that drifted too close. I'm not sure if I hurt them, but they didn't touch Lemmy or me.
“He can't get me here!” Ithaca said, shouting over the wind. “He's worried he'll accidentally slip through the portal to the other side. So are the other spirits. This woman's body protects me from that.” She touched Kara's slender stomach.
“Can you stop him?” I looked at Stacey trying to save Nicholas from the fire.
“Not from here,” she said. “And I'm too weak to step out there. All my people are still against me.”
“What's going on?” Lemmy asked.
“Sorry, I'll catch you up later,” I said. Then I asked Ithaca, “Is there anything you can do? We were sort of counting on you. You talked a good game before we got here.”
“I am sorry,” Ithaca said, looking distraught and lost.
I considered the howling whirlwind of shadows that filled the room.
“Your followers are here because they made an oath to you,” I said. “They promised to return here after their deaths. Right?”
“Yes.” Ithaca looked at me with something like hope.
“Release them from that oath and they can move on,” I said. “Zagan won't control them anymore.”
“But neither will I?” Something about how she asked it made me think of a petulant child who didn't want to share her toys.
“No. They'll be free and gone, and Zagan will be alone.”
“Yes, all right.” Ithaca took a deep breath and waved her hand in a dramatic gesture. “You are all free of your oaths! You may move on to the next world!”
We waited, but there didn't seem to be any results. Well, one result. Zagan turned and began walking toward us, taking notice of what Ithaca had said.
“Be silent,” Zagan said. His voice seemed to snarl right into my ear, as though he stood just beside me instead of several feet in front of me. Ithaca and Lemmy both winced, as though he had spoken directly to them the same unnerving way.
He hesitated at the edge of the circular area outlined by the holes in the floor.
“It's not good enough,” I told Ithaca. “You have to break the oath.”
“How?”
“You have to move on.”
Her eyes widened, and she immediately shook her head. “I cannot. I have so much work left, so many plans, so much to do...”
Zagan laughed. It wasn't a merry Santa Claus laugh, either, but the derisive, soulless chuckling of a demon from a dark, smoking abyss. His jack-o'-lantern eyes flared with brighter fire, as though in amusement.
“She will never move on,” he said. “It is not in her nature. She will linger here for eternity.”
Then he stepped forward into the circle, one hand extended toward Ithaca. From the corner of my eye, I noticed Stacey successfully extinguished the last flames on Nicholas's charred clothes. I worried about the extent of his burns.
Ithaca gasped a little as Zagan approached her, and then she rose into the air, just as Jacob had done right before Zagan had tried to make him into a psy
chic-accountant flambe.
Apparently the portal within the circle didn't worry Zagan at all—he'd only avoided it to give Ithaca a false sense of security, toying with her while he attacked Nicholas.
Ithaca screamed as she rose into the air, and her clothes began to smolder. Zagan laughed again, his jaws dropping unnaturally far. Fire licked out between his crooked, rotten teeth.
“You have to move on!” I shouted at Ithaca. “Take your thoughts and ideas with you, but go! Or he'll kill all of us!” I waved the rusty bayonet at her. “I'm going to take apart Dr. Lathrop's lab. That was the real center of the haunting, wasn't it? All the pain and torture the patients endured there. That's why you built your necromantium adjacent to it. It was the psychic battery for all your supernatural work. That ends now. There's nothing left for you. Choose to move on.”
My little monologue only made Zagan laugh more. It was the sort of laugh you might hear from a sadistic hyena.
Curls of fire emerged all over Ithaca's clothes. Well, I guess they were technically Kara Volkova's clothes. Talking about possessed people gets complicated.
“You owe it to Abigail,” I said. “It's the only way you can make things right.”
Ithaca snarled just a little, though I wasn't sure if it was in response to my words or to the fire that was whipping up all over her.
“How?” she finally asked.
“I'm sure you already know,” I said. “Imagine a trap door opening in the ceiling above you, a bright light streaming down. Then just...move into it. It will take you wherever you need to go.”
Ithaca closed her eyes.
She slumped, all the steel gone from her spine, an unconscious woman floating in the air.
Nothing outwardly dramatic happened, but I felt a sense of the heavy air in the room growing a touch lighter.
Then the room fell utterly silent, and the whirlwinds stopped abruptly, as if something had happened that was so significant to all the ghosts in the area that it drew all their attention.
Zagan turned slowly, looking into the darkness around us, literally fuming as smoke and embers boiled out of his head.
“Stop,” he said, his whispering voice echoing all over the room. “Stop. We have not yet begun...”
Kara, the unconscious woman whom Ithaca had possessed, fell to the floor like a discarded toy, landing hard, trickles of smoke rising from holes in her clothes that revealed angry, deep red skin beneath. I hurried to her, towing Lemmy behind me. I shrugged off my backpack and smothered the little flames all over Kara.
The white masks appeared in the darkness above us, rising toward the ceiling. They unraveled as they rose, losing form, turning into a wispy luminescent fog that faded quickly.
The room had felt slightly different when Ithaca's spirit departed, but when all of her followers rose and vanished, the tone in the room changed undeniably. Warmer, clearer, much easier to breathe.
“They're gone,” I told Zagan. “Every one of them. You can choose to move on, too.”
“I have already moved on,” his voice whispered in my ear, in that creepy and annoying way of his. “To worlds you cannot imagine.”
“I've seen Star Trek,” I said. “I can imagine a lot of worlds.”
Stacey was easing up toward us, her eyes dancing between Lemmy and me on one side of the circle and Zagan smoldering on the other. I was trying not to show my fear of him, but my stupid knees wouldn't stop trembling. I'm pretty sure he noticed.
The darkness around him seemed to stir. Faint outlines of limping, damaged men moved toward him, converging from all sides. They grew clearer as they approached, staring at him with dead or missing eyes, raising the hooks and blades mounted in place of their hands. They looked in worse condition than I'd ever seen them, but they weren't moaning and groaning now. I caught a glimpse of Abigail among them, her scalpel and dress wet with blood.
“My friends have not moved on,” I said. “Gregor Zagan, you are now a prisoner of the United States Army.”
Stacey brought up the Civil War march on her iPod again.
“Your penalty is execution and exile,” I said. “In that order.” The fife and drums made it sound almost official.
The soldiers bellowed and closed in tight around the smoking figure of Zagan. I could only hear his howls as they tore into him.
“Whoa,” Lemmy said.
“You might want to avert your eyes,” I said. “Stacey, how's Nicholas Nickleby doing over there?”
“Mostly alive.” She went back to check on him.
“What is happening?” The woman on the floor, Kara, stirred, then hissed, touching small coin-sized burn spots all over herself.
“I'll have to explain later,” I said, kneeling down beside her.
“She says that a lot,” Lemmy told her.
“No.” Kara sat up, touching her chest, then her head. “Where is she?”
“Oh, Ithaca Galloway? She went, you know...” I pointed toward the ceiling.
“You took her from me.” Kara's petite supermodel face looked seriously angry. I noticed she spoke with a faint East European, possibly Russian accent. As previously mentioned, I'm not well-traveled and don't really know accents.
“Well, it was more of a choice on her part—”
“You have caused me to fail my assignment.” She got to her feet, slapping away the hand Stacey offered her. Kara stepped close to me, her pale blue eyes simmering, her hands balling into fists at her hips. For a second, I seriously thought she was going to punch me right in the face. “This is unforgivable.”
“Really sorry about that,” I said. “Hey, on the bright side, we exorcised a whole pack of troublesome ghosts from this hotel, I mean some really dangerous ones—”
“This has nothing to do with me!” She threw up her arms in frustration. “We agree to help you, and you betray us.”
“Excuse me? I was basically just trying to survive, because your pet ghost turned out to be not very helpful at all until I convinced her to move on—”
An angry roar surged from the mob of spirits. The floor shook like an earthquake.
Union-blue blurs flew out in every direction, turning to faint traces of fog at the edge of the room.
Zagan rose up like a pillar of ash and fire, swelling in every direction, reaching a height of eleven feet. His roar shook the room. He was really trying to intimidate us, and it was really working.
We ran back from his swelling form to avoid being enveloped by it. I don't even want to know what that experience might have been like.
His appearance was only crudely human now, fire licking from his eyes and jaws, more flames peeking out from beneath his charred, flaking flesh.
I'd really hoped that someone would have dragged Zagan off to the other side with them by this point—Ithaca, their cult followers, or maybe Abigail and her soldiers, somebody. He looked as tough as ever, though, and I had just one last-ditch desperate move to try.
I grabbed the ghost cannon from where Stacey had left it on the floor, near Nicholas's overturned record player. I switched it on and pointed it straight up. The powerful beam glinted off the grimy pressed-tin ceiling and spread out, flooding the entire room with white light. No shadows, nowhere to hide.
Zagan watched as I drew the ghost trap from my backpack. I hoped he didn't have any idea what it was.
“You like fire, don't you?” I asked him, using a firestarter to light the candles mounted along the interior of the trap. I'd packed it with extra candles in advance, in case I needed to try luring Zagan with it. I gave this gambit about a two percent chance of working. Maybe one percent. “It seems like the demonic entity you met packs a lot of firepower. So how does it work? You summon him, he kills you, then you're like his servant for eternity? Sounds like a raw deal.”
“You know nothing,” he said.
“What was your plan? Have the crazy doctor develop some kind of streamlined possession technique? Place your psychic friends network into the bodies of hotel guests as they cam
e and went? Mass possession to bring your cult back to life, back to the flesh? Do I still know nothing?”
“I do not need them.” As he spoke, I rose off the ground, levitating as Jacob had just before Zagan torched him. Yikes. Giant unseen hands seemed to stretch out my arms and fingers to either side of me, like a mockery of the Crucifixion. The ghost trap dropped from my fingers and rolled away across the floor. “You have done nothing to harm me. I could turn this world to cinders if I wished.”
“I bet that's an exaggeration,” I said. I certainly hoped it was. “I think you can only act under the command of the demon who consumed you. I think you are a slave. Or more like a...pet.” I winced and hissed in pain as spots all over my body began to burn, as though someone had shoved hot coals underneath my clothes, next to my skin. I forced myself to hold it together, rather than do the natural thing and scream and kick in pain. I could do nothing to put out the fire, except to hold my focus on Zagan and keep talking. I spoke faster, using the words to distract me from my pain.
Zagan's black-ashy surface boiled and bubbled, emitting larger flames. Maybe I was making him angry.
Smoke curled from my sleeves, my shirt, and my jeans as I began to burn.
“You can still be free,” I said. “Your true soul can move on. You can always choose. Let go of the power the demon gives you. Let go of your plans and desires. Move on! Be free!” I was screaming in pain, not because I felt like I was reaching the crescendo of some great speech.
More fire erupted all over him, so that he looked like a walking mass of lava, little veins of fire cracking open here and there. An awful roasting heat rolled out of him.
I did not get the sense he would be moving on. I kept talking, not because I thought it would help at this point, but because if I didn't talk, then one hundred percent of my attention would have to focus on the fact that little flames were popping up all over me.
Stacey, Kara, and Lemmy lay on the floor, struggling, as if he'd simply pinned them there with brute psychokinetic energy. Only Nicholas wasn't struggling. He was either unconscious or dead.
