by JL Bryan
This really wasn't going well.
“I have my own relationship with fire, you know!” I shouted, because when you're literally on fire, it's extremely hard to keep your voice cool and controlled. “I hate it. I hate it. I'm afraid I'm going to die in a fire like my parents. Like, especially right now. That's why every time I go into one of these huge old buildings, I'm always noticing the fire safety situation. That's why I'd already noticed the fire hose in the hallway. And that's why I noticed that what you have up here is a standard automatic sprinkler system. It looks pretty old but it must be up to code or the hotel wouldn't pass fire safety or insurance—”
Then it finally happened. Between the incredibly unsafe levels of heat pouring out of the ghost cannon, pointed directly at the ceiling, and the heat rolling off Zagan as I goaded him about connecting with his higher self or whatever and moving on, the sprinkler system was finally activated.
Gushers of water erupted from the ceiling, pouring down into the room. I didn't think the water actually hurt Zagan, but it certainly annoyed him, and had seemed to have scrambled him for a minute on our previous visit.
Hot steam filled the room, blinding me, and I heard him roar. I tumbled down from the air, slamming into wet marble tiles.
Alarm bells clanged all over the hotel.
I scrambled back to my feet and nearly collided with Stacey, who was running in my direction, her hand over the ghost trap to protect it from the downpour. A few candles still burned inside.
“There's an umbrella in my backpack!” I shouted at her as she passed me the trap.
“You thought of everything.” She opened the umbrella and passed it to me. It was just large enough to shield me and the burning candles inside the open trap from the sprinklers. Mostly the trap. I got soaked.
I held the trap out in the direction where I'd last seen Zagan. My thinking was that if he hated water, he would move toward the light of the burning candles, the only spot in the room that wasn't cold and wet. Any port in a storm, I hoped.
A dense, scorching cloud of steam rolled across me, so hot that I had to squint my eyes and turn away from the sting. Gooseflesh all over my body told me I was in the presence of a supernatural entity.
A searing gout of flame roared from the mouth of the trap as the candles within it exploded like a knot in a bonfire. For a second, it looked as though I held a bazooka under my arm.
Then I clapped the lid on top of the flames, gaining painful new burns on my fingers for my trouble. I just hoped the trap wouldn't melt.
Inside the airtight container, the dense red fire turned to black smoke. A moment later, a pale, distorted image of Zagan's face appeared against the glass, the cartoon-simple eyes scowling and mouth open in an apoplectic rage.
“Gotcha,” I said.
Then I figured we needed to do something about turning off the sprinklers before they flooded the hotel, if they hadn't already.
Chapter Twenty-One
The fire alarm meant the hotel was evacuated, so we soon joined the hotel guests and staff out in the street. Frightened and confused people huddled together in their pajamas and bathrobes. Sirens approached, growing louder.
Lemmy spotted her parents, who looked utterly panicked, standing with Madeline and Conrad, the security chief. They shouted and pointed as Lemmy ran over to them.
“What happened to you? Where did you go?” her mother asked.
“Ghosts kidnapped me and tried to possess me,” Lemmy said. “It was super not fun.”
“What kind of hotel are you running here?” Lemmy's dad snapped at Madeline.
“A haunted one, just like you wanted,” I said. “If you want to keep your daughter safe, you might consider safer vacation destinations. Isn't there a big botanical garden back home? She might like that.”
The parents scowled a little, but Lemmy smiled. Then Madeline stepped closer to Stacey and me, looking furious.
“What happened up there?” she asked me. “Is there a fire?”
“There was, but it didn't last long,” I said. I helped Stacey ease Nicholas to the ground. We'd managed to rouse him enough to walk, but he was in pain. Kara sat down with him while we faced Madeline. “The worst of the ghosts are gone, but...you may have a small flood on the fourth floor.” I adjusted my backpack. It was like I could feel Zagan wriggling in there.
“A flood?”
“The sprinkler system. The ghost was a hot one.”
Fire trucks arrived, and Madeline spoke with the officials while we turned Nicholas and Kara over to the EMT's. They examined Lemmy, too. Michael was among them and hurried over when he saw me.
“You came,” I said, smiling and reaching out to embrace him.
“I knew you were here. I was worried you were hurt.” He hugged me very lightly and stepped back to inspect my burns and cuts, all business. “Also, I was in the response radius.”
“You know how to melt a girl's heart.”
“What happened? Is there an active situation up there?”
“No, just a very wet passive one.”
“How can I help?”
“Stay close to me. I know I'm going to spend hours trying to answer questions here, and I really just want to collapse.”
“Okay.” He put an arm around my waist as Madeline approached with the fire chief and a uniformed police officer to whom she'd been talking.
Soon we were all back upstairs—Michael, Stacey, the fire chief and the cop, and me. I was doing most of the talking. I didn't hold back for the sake of the authorities. I just told the truth, even though the fire chief, a tired-looking guy with thin white hair, just looked incredulous. At least he was quiet. The cop was a middle-aged woman, and her face remained placid, giving me no idea what was happening inside her mind.
“Dr. Lathrop's hotel was used as a hospital all through the Civil War, for Confederates and then Union soldiers,” I reminded them as we squished our way among shattered furniture and uprooted floorboards along the fourth-floor hall. Madeline was gaping, shaking her head at the destruction. “After the North took over—and maybe even before that, I don't really know—Dr. Lathrop started bringing certain soldiers up to this hidden room for medical experiments. I'm sure a lot of them died in there.”
“What hidden room?” Madeline asked.
“Right through here.” I let them into the necromantium, where a shallow layer of water still remained on the floor. “When Abigail Bowen killed those soldiers, she was freeing them from a long, slow death at Dr. Lathrop's hands. He turned her over to the occupying forces for execution. We're not even sure whether there was a proper trial.
“Of course, Dr. Lathrop goes down in history as a saint for his work with the war wounded and then the yellow fever victims, while everyone thinks Abigail's just some crazy psycho killer. You know, Stabby Abby. Abigail and the soldiers have stayed here ever since, waiting for justice, or at least waiting for the truth to be known.
“When Ithaca Galloway bought the hotel in 1895, she must have discovered this secret room during her renovations.” I climbed up on the altar and pressed the bird-and-rising-sun symbol. The section of the wall repeated its scraping, shuddering retreat, opening an entry into the old laboratory.
Madeline, the cop, and the fire chief all murmured in surprise. The cop and fire chief had already been trading looks about the bizarre temple room with its columns and hieroglyphs.
“Ithaca covered it up and kept it hidden,” I said. “She wanted a very haunted house, because of her interest in ghosts and séances. She refused to help Abigail's ghost get free of the house and move on. She kept Dr. Lathrop's secret in order to keep the house as a major center of supernatural activity. Ever since Ithaca and her followers died, they've haunted the fourth floor, driving away anyone who came up there so they could protect the secret room from being discovered. It kept them powerful as ghosts, I suppose, to have a place like that in their domain. And Ithaca may have felt some guilt for covering up Dr. Lathrop's crimes, almost acting as his accomplice decades
after the fact. The laboratory had become her secret as much as his.”
I explained that Ithaca's ghost had left the house one month earlier, and her old partner Zagan had immediately returned to assume control of the cult. “It takes a powerful ghost to possess a healthy living person,” I said. “I think Zagan recruited Dr. Lathrop's ghost to develop a technique to make it easier. All of the ghosts up here were going to possess living people, guests of the hotel. It seemed like they intended to go after children in particular.”
“Makes sense,” Stacey said, and everyone looked at her. “What? Kids have more life ahead of them. If you're going to all the trouble of possessing someone, why not buy new instead of used?”
“This doorway isn't safe,” I said. “Last time I used it, someone tried to slam it shut on me. Michael, could you grab some of that broken furniture out there?”
He nodded, and soon we were placing shattered tables and chairs in a heap inside the laboratory. Hopefully it would slow down the wall if someone decide to push it back into place.
“Everyone wait until I give the all-clear.” I jumped through the gap into the room, landing near the front corner, away from the movable portion of the wall. Then I took a hammer from my utility belt. I'd borrowed it from a hotel maintenance closet.
I repeatedly struck one of the rusty wheels on the back side of the wall, until it cracked and broke loose. The wall lurched to one side with a heavy thud.
“Ellie?” Michael called. He jumped into the room with me, not waiting for an answer.
“I'm fine.” I swung the hammer again and again, smashing the wheels and gears on the back of the wall, hopefully locking it open.
“This is...awful,” he said, looking around at the old tools and pieces of bone. “Really sad.”
“It was worse than that a few minutes ago.” I walked to the counter and picked up my iPod. The battery was dead. There was no sign of Katherine's ghost.
Then the weeping began.
I turned, expecting to see Katherine. I was surprised to see Mabel Lathrop instead, faintly visible in the corner, dressed in one of her big hoop skirts and crying softly, like an antebellum lady who'd become emotional and had to run off to be by herself. Her hair was immaculately styled with braids that must have taken hours to set. Jeweled rings and bracelets glittered at her plump fingers and wrists.
“Mabel Lathrop,” I said, to get her attention. She stopped weeping and looked up at me. She made no move to resume her very recent attacks on me, but I stayed on guard.
“What will they think of me?” she whispered.
“I suppose they'll think the truth,” I said. “Your husband was a monster...and judging by how you're acting, you knew and covered up for him.”
“I can never face anyone again,” she said.
“That's right. The whole town will know what your husband did. There's no stopping that now. If I were you, I'd move on. Leave town and never come back.”
“But this is my home...” She resumed her sobbing, covering her face with her hands.
Michael stood quietly beside me, watching. I heard footfalls behind us. Madeline, Stacey, the fire chief, and the cop were entering the room.
“You should go, Mabel,” I said. “Unless you want to watch as your reputation is torn to shreds.”
She let out a loud, piercing wail. She turned toward the wall and faded into a thin mist, then vanished.
Madeline and the officials stared at where she'd gone.
“Did you see that?” Madeline whispered to the fire chief.
“This town never fails to surprise me,” he replied, shaking his head.
I pointed out the artifacts of Dr. Lathrop's medical experiments, as well as the pieces of bone still attached, and the pail of bone fragments under the counter. “Once you clear out these implements and bury these body parts, that should put your ghost troubles to rest. This room was the core of the haunting.”
“We won't be able to keep a lid on this, will we?” Madeline said. “Everyone will know the hotel is named after a man who...who tortured wounded soldiers...” She looked in disgust at the rusty claw and hook hands, and the wheels attached to a piece of leg bone. “Americans aren't going to like that much at all. Surely the bigwigs won't like it. There's so much to do before they arrive...”
“Maybe you can get out ahead of it,” I said. “Start thinking up possible new names for the hotel.”
“This is too much,” she said, shaking her head.
I'm glad she was shocked. It was better than being furious at me for flooding her hotel...though I was sure that would come later. Perhaps after she got chewed out by her bosses, those infamous bigwigs of Black Diamond Properties. She'd called them “bigwigs” so many times, I'd begun to imagine them as a committee of cranky old-man Muppets with gigantic powdered wigs larger than their heads.
Still, Madeline would be able to do what no one had done since Ithaca Galloway more than a century earlier, and remodel the fourth floor without fear of ghosts running off the workers. Ultimately, the hotel would be more profitable with more rooms to rent, and her bosses would be pleased, and she would forget about how she had to scramble to get the water cleaned up and pumped out. That was my hope, anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Two days later, Stacey and I returned to the fourth floor with Nicholas, Kara, and a couple of others from Paranormal Solutions who'd brought down some specialized gear. The entire level of the hotel looked different—the broken furniture had been carted away, and huge portions of the floors and walls had been ripped open to let the innards of the building dry.
Stacey and I had buried Zagan's trap in the “bad ghost” cemetery, located in the ruins of an old churchyard in the virtually inaccessible Appalachian ridges in northwest Georgia. If Zagan's spirit ever broke free of the ghost trap, he would still be trapped within the cemetery’s rock walls, an area ruled over by the ghost of a long-dead crazed preacher named Mordecai Blake and his followers.
Some unfinished business remained at the hotel, though, so we now carried equipment into the necromantium and closed the door. I hopped up on the altar and looked into the secret lab room behind it. It was nothing but bare bricks and floor, everything else had been removed. The pieces of bone were taken for forensic examination before disposal. The Savannah Historical Association had accepted the collection of Civil War-era medical instruments, as well as my written report on what had really happened with Dr. Lathrop's torturous experiments and Abigail Bowen's desire to free the wounded soldiers from their pain.
Kara was still furious with me for convincing Ithaca to leave her body and move on. She was extremely curt with both Stacey and me. Oh, well.
Nicholas was just as chatty as ever. Like Kara, he had a number of first-degree burns and a few second-degree ones, but it didn't stop him from working.
We had to set up some of the gear designed by Ithaca, arranging things like a positive ion pump and electromagnetic field generators, tuned to certain frequencies, around the circular area at the center of the room.
“You think this will really work?” I asked. The idea was to shut down the rip between worlds that Ithaca had apparently torn open long ago while trying to create her machine.
“It is a reversal of the process that punctured the hole,” Nicholas told me. “It should be sufficient to patch things up and prevent unwanted beasties from slipping in and setting up shop in your newly ghost-free hotel.”
“We haven't made our final inspection, so we're not sure it's one hundred percent ghost-free just yet...but thanks, Nicholas, for helping us mop things up. For all your help. You too, Kara. I'm sorry you both got hurt.” I didn't mention that they'd more or less caused the problems in the first place, but our client had received good value beyond fixing the problems Nicholas and company had caused. We'd removed a pile of ghosts, including the two most dangerous with Zagan and Dr. Lathrop, and we'd completely liberated the top floor of the building.
Kara kept her eyes on the generat
or in front of her, pretending not to hear me. I wondered how long she'd bear a grudge against me, and whether that was going to affect my life in any way.
“We're pleased to help,” Nicholas said. Kara heard that, judging by the brief, angry flick of her eyes in his direction. “I hope all of this has changed your mind about combining with the Paranormal Solutions fam...corporation. You can see we're not monsters. We're all in the same line of work, with the same goals.”
“Are we?” I asked. I looked at Kara and the technicians from their company, who were starting to break down and pack up the hefty gear. “How much of this was a set-up?”
“I'm sorry?” Nicholas asked.
“We followed a short trail of fat bread crumbs right to your secret research facility,” I said. “Why would you go to the trouble of creating that fake film company to hide who you really were, but then give out a phone number tied to the physical address of your ghost lab? Why not get a burner cell phone for the Metascience Productions business card? Seems like a no-brainer.”
“I shall forward that advice to our Director of Operations,” he said.
“Come on,” I said. “You knew removing Ithaca Galloway, the master of the house, could cause problems and chaos. It's like snatching away the alpha wolf and leaving the rest to fight it out for dominance.”
“An interesting comparison, though we are discussing electromagnetic remnant personalities of humans, not live wild canines—”
“You knew the hotel would probably hire Eckhart Investigations if there were problems. And you made it easy for us to find you—but you disconnected the phone so we'd have to drive all the way to your facility.”
Kara let out a derisive snort, without looking up from her work as she finished packing away the gear.
“That's an elaborate conspiracy theory,” Nicholas said. “Have you heard the one about the aliens who built the pyramids?”
“Yeah, from your logo designer.” The emblem of his company was a pyramid with a tilted, Saturn-like ring near the top.
