by JL Bryan
"Jacob," I said, while they helped me to my feet. "Is my body dead when I'm away from it?"
"Hey, I'm not a doctor, and nothing I say should be construed as medical advice." Jacob held up one hand defensively, while still helping to support me with the other.
“You had a pulse the whole time,” Stacey said.
Jacob pushed open the black steel fire door that let us out onto the street. The rain was still pounding outside.
"We're not done yet," Stacey said. "We still have to hit Anton's other house."
"And then we have to start trying to identify Scary Houdini so we can get him out of our way," I said. "He's too dangerous to ignore. I think he was a serial killer in life, but I don't know if he was ever caught. He traveled around the country, and he'd cut up and bag his victims to hide their bodies."
"Ew," Stacey said.
"Have you guys ever thought about getting into a safer line of work?" Jacob asked. "Cupcake places are popular right now. I see 'em everywhere."
"I don't bake," I said. "If you two are worried for your safety, don't come with me. I'll take care of the old gas station. We've never had any trouble there. I'll just drop you guys back at the gym." I lowered my head and ran through the sheets of rain toward my car.
"Forget it," Stacey said. "If you're getting killed, we're all getting killed together. Right, Jacob?" She pulled at his arm to tow him out into the rainfall with her.
"Um," Jacob said, clambering into my back seat, followed by Stacey in the front. "Sure. Let's try not to make that happen, though. Try to keep it kind of an idle claim that we don't have to follow up on later."
"I'll do my best," I said, then I cranked the engine and charged out into the storm.
Chapter Four
The rain didn't let up as we headed to the outskirts of town, northwest along the Savannah River, and stopped at the boarded-up gas station where Anton's plantation house had stood long ago.
I parked behind the gas station, next to the old drive-through car wash, which was locked down and covered in graffiti, just like the main building.
Along the back of the old gas station were three metal doors, including the two restrooms and the employee entrance, as well as a roll-up garage door to the single service bay.
"Not a good place, is it?" Jacob asked. He looked at the burning skull with spiral red eyes someone had painted on the bathroom door. "Dark. Like a dark pit. Infested with troubled, hate-filled spirits. They hate everyone, even themselves."
"So let's go inside," Stacey said. "Yay."
We approached the back door, umbrellas shielding us from the downpour. Jacob broke off and headed for the ladies' room door, the one painted with the big skull.
"This room first," he said.
"Jacob, you're not here for a walk-through," I said. "You're here to keep Stacey safe."
"And Ellie," Stacey said, pouting. "We're all here for each other. I don't need extra protecting."
"You do if you're walking into places like this." Jacob pulled on the bathroom door, but it was padlocked shut. "I need to look in here."
"Fine, we have a camera in there, anyway. I was going to save the yucky bathroom for last, but if that's what you're into..." I flipped through my keychain, then opened the padlock.
"How do you have a key?" he asked.
"Stacey and I added this lock ourselves. And we broke off and replaced the one on the back entrance." I nodded at the next door over. "A pick and switch. For when you're investigating an abandoned property and don't particularly want anyone to steal your cameras and microphones."
"Don't you worry about the police?" Jacob asked.
"Yep." I removed the padlock and stepped back. "It's bad in there. You've been warned."
Jacob pushed the door open.
"Yikes," he said.
The interior of the bathroom was as we'd last seen it, littered with old needles and dirty clothes, filth caked on every surface, graffiti everywhere. One image, scratched with a knife into a tile, depicted a house on fire, stick figures burning to death like matchsticks inside it.
Our camera stood in one corner, fortunately intact.
"Lots of death in here," he whispered, stepping into the cold room.
Stacey moved in beside him, working at the camera to switch out the battery. That didn't leave room for me inside the bathroom, but I stayed close, trying my best to help keep the door propped open against any invisible nasties who might have wanted to slam it shut with my friends inside. The rain poured down on me the whole time, running in sheets off my hooded black slicker.
"The dead are climbing over each other in here," Jacob said. "Three, maybe four of them. It's hard to tell. They're pretty thin and deteriorated. Not strong individuals, exactly, but not nice."
I thought of what our research into the history of the gas station had turned up. Police had found four dead bodies in this bathroom over the past decade, mostly junkies. The dark energy of Anton's old property seemed to attract misery and death.
"Are any of them Anton Clay?" I asked. "If not, we can ignore them."
"He's not here," Jacob said. "Not in this room, anyway. I would've mentioned that first, while pulling you both back to the car as quickly as possible."
"Okay, then let's head in." I led them in through the back door, which seemed heavier and more reluctant to open than it had the last couple of times.
We walked past the garage area, with its oil-stained concrete and dark sunken cave of a service bay. Jacob looked through the door to the car wash, shrugged, and kept walking.
The convenience store area lay dark and desolate. Preservative-packed snack cakes in cellophane and plastic bottles of soda remained on the shelves that hadn't been hauled away. The imitation food that would probably survive a nuclear Armageddon.
Jacob walked in a slow circle around the room while Stacey worked at the camera. I held Stacey's flashlight for her, and Jacob kept his own light turned off. His eyes were closed.
The room was dim, the air warm and stale. It hadn't circulated in years. All the windows were barricaded with plywood on the outside and lined with old newspaper on the inside. There might have been a busy, well-lit road just beyond the parking lot, but here it was stifling darkness, like we'd wandered through a crack into another world.
The rain pounding relentlessly on the roof only increased the feeling of isolation and dread. Nobody would hear us if we screamed. Nobody would see us if we staggered outside, bleeding to death. We would just be vague, blurry shapes in the blinding rain, completely invisible to passing motorists.
"There's someone here," Jacob said, and then came the explosion. In the quiet, dark room, it sounded like a gunshot, making us all jump.
The loud pop was immediately followed by the sound of glass cracking overhead. One of the dead fluorescent panels had shattered in a spiderweb pattern. Splinters of glass were still spilling loose.
A strange dark fluid soaked the ceiling around the shattered light. It was fresh and dripping. I took it for blood at first glance, but it was more orange than red.
"It came from back there." Stacey pointed her flashlight at one of the remaining shelves. It was four feet high, and long enough to create a narrow aisle behind it running most of the length of the store. There was plenty of room for someone to be hiding on the other side.
"Who's there?" Jacob shouted. He armed himself with a can of ravioli before approaching. Orange fluid had puddled on the top level on our side of the shelf, making a sizzling, hissing sound as if boiling. Crumbs of broken glass continued to plink down from the ceiling, splashing into the fizzy orange puddle.
"Are you sensing something?" I asked Jacob.
"It's behind the shelves." Jacob stepped around the end of the long shelf to look, and I stayed close behind him. He was the one armed with the ravioli, after all.
On the other side of the shelf, the source of the bubbling orange fluid became instantly clear. A two-liter bottle of an orange soda called Papa Naranja had apparently
ruptured at the top, sending its plastic cap flying up into the ceiling with enough force to smash the light fixture. Foam continued sputtering up and out of the bottle mouth, but the bottle was mostly empty now.
Jacob nudged the fizzling bottle with one finger. The label depicted a guy who looked like a smiling Mexican Santa Claus in sunglasses and a broad-brimmed hat under a stylized orange sun. Papa Naranja himself, perhaps.
"It's like somebody shook it up until it exploded," Jacob said.
"It would take a lot of force to blow the lid off an unopened two-liter," I said. "Or a lot of focused psychokinetic energy, whipping it into a supercharged frenzy."
"The one who did this went that way." Jacob pointed down the narrow aisle between the metal shelf and the nearest boarded-up window.
"You can see the ghost?" I asked.
"No, footprints." He pointed to the orange-soda prints on the floor, leading away from the erupted bottle.
"They're not big," I said. "Maybe a woman or a child. And they're spread out, like the person was running away."
"They come out over here," Stacey announced from the far end of the shelf, shining her flashlight on the floor. "And they lead..."
We followed the orange footsteps to one of the glass doors along the back wall, where bottles of soda and beer had once been sold. Many of the shelves had been removed. The darkness of the walk-in cooler lay behind them.
A small orange handprint dripped on the glass door in front of me. I leaned close and pointed my flashlight through the dusty pane. The footsteps continued on the other side of the glass door for a few paces, then faded out. The orange soda had probably run out.
"Did anybody see this door open?" I asked.
"Nope," Stacey said. "Didn't hear anything, either."
I looked slowly back and forth, panning my flashlight beam along the back wall of the old cooler. A few scattered cardboard boxes remained. The floor was scattered with dead flies and a few flattened cigarette butts.
"I think it's gone," I said. "It's completely dead in there—"
The face came from nowhere, smacking into the glass as if it had been hurled. The skin seemed loose and lifeless, the color of dead fish. Its eyes were dark, black pupils set into plain white, no iris that I could see. Its lips smeared against the glass, revealing crooked little teeth.
It was inches from me, seeming to snap at me like a wild animal from inside the glass. The entity looked male, smallish, with lots of energy. Its fingers scrabbled against the glass, close to the door handle.
I backed off, ready for a fight, but the entity was already gone, like it had never been there. Only its sticky orange handprint remained.
"Did you see that?" I asked Jacob.
"It wasn't Anton," he said. "Maybe one of the ghosts who died out in the bathroom."
"I saw it, too," Stacey said. "It was pretty yuck. I'm done with the gear, so if you guys want to vamoose, we can."
"Is there somewhere else we need to look?" I asked Jacob.
"I want to say no," he said. "Unfortunately, a 'no' wouldn't be true. Come on."
He led us back the way we'd come, past the open door to the walk-in cooler, past the dirty little office with the hubcap-turned-overflowing ashtray on the desk.
"At least we're heading toward the back door," Stacey said. "That's a good sign."
Jacob slowed and turned, though, leading us into the small garage area. He continued to the grease-stained yellow stairs leading down underground.
"Oh, no," Stacey said. "Jacob, you're accidentally heading down into the mechanic's pit."
"That's where I'm sensing something." He clicked on his flashlight before starting down. His footsteps rang out on the aluminum stairs.
"Stacey, keep watch from up here," I told her while I followed him down. "Don't let anything sneak up on us."
"Okefenokee," Stacey said, but she looked worried despite her glib response. She stepped closer to the long, narrow rectangular hole in the floor and pointed her light down.
"Don't get too close to the edge," I warned her.
Then I reached the bottom of the stairs.
The pit was larger than I'd expected, and much darker than upstairs. It wasn't just a narrow space to give access to the undercarriage of a car above. It was also like a cellar, with built-in racks and tool shelves, all of it picked clean now. The only decor was a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar pinned to one wall, dated 1993.
"Does it feel warm to you?" I asked Jacob. It wasn't exactly an oven in there, but I could feel the difference.
"I'm picking up something," he said. "But it's more like a residual."
"Is it him?"
Jacob closed his eyes.
While I waited for his answer, I glanced up at Stacey, who pointed her flashlight down to give us extra light.
"It's Anton," Jacob said, and I spun, looking around for signs of the deadly ghost.
"Where?" I asked.
"Just a residual," Jacob said. "He's not really here, consciously. But there is a fragment of his personality here, like a memory. A trace of him. It's jumbled in with residuals of others. I think they're his family, others who've lived here...and slaves. Definitely slaves." Jacob drew in a hissing breath through his teeth, the kind of sound you might make if you'd touched a hot stove with your bare hands. "He used to burn them. Brand them. Their spirits are gone, I think, but their pain and suffering still echoes."
"Do you think Anton has been here lately? Or could he be returning here sometime?" I asked.
"The presence of his residual means he can probably pop in and out of this place anytime he wants," Jacob said. "For a ghost, the shortest distance between two points is the path of greatest emotion."
"Eh, what?" Stacey asked overhead.
"I can see that," I said. "When I drifted out of my body, I went right to Michael's hospital room, even though it's about thirty miles from my apartment. I don't remember crossing any ground on the way there. I did glimpse some of the city on my return trip back to my body, but it was really fast."
"For the ghosts, emotional connections are pathways," Jacob said. "And sometimes people are doorways. You're trying to understand how he got free after all these centuries." He approached a far corner of the basement, holding out one hand. "Why Anton is no longer trapped at the place where he died. The site of your old house, Ellie."
"Got something new to offer?"
"Maybe it's you." Jacob opened his eyes as he turned toward me. "You escaped him. That gave him the extra desire to move, to find you."
"But what gave him the power to do that?" I asked. "Why was he trapped on the same spot through the burning and rebuilding of five different houses, and suddenly he's free?"
"There's the new construction work at your house," Stacey said, her voice echoing down from the glowing light above, like a transmission from a UFO. "That could do it."
"Maybe," Jacob said.
"We could head over there," I suggested. "If Jacob's game."
"Not tonight," he said. "The weather's too rough."
"But you have such a fine umbrella," I said.
"An outdoor area is hard enough to read," Jacob said. "Ghosts cling much more tightly to human-made structures. Energy and sunlight flow freely outdoors, and they don't like that. Typical ghosts would rather hunker down in some confined underground hole where they can focus on themselves and their own problems without distraction."
"All right, all right, just say you don't feel like it," I told him. "I've had enough for one night, too. So Anton isn't really here, but it would be easy for him to come here, is that right?"
"His residual presence is strongest down here," Jacob said. "Again, it's not exactly the ghost himself. It's more of a place-memory, a construct."
"I gotcha. Stacey, let's move a thermal down here. Then we can split."
"You mean make like a banana?" Stacey asked.
"Yes, Stacey. We can make like a banana."
We set up the gear and hurried out the back door as
quickly as we could.
"We're going to have to clear these locations," I said, once we were back in the car. The rain had not let up at all. "The theater, at least. We need safe and easy access until the Clay case is resolved."
"At least we have time," Stacey said. "We're between clients."
"If only that meant we had tomorrow completely off, like in the old days," I said. "Instead—"
"—employee training," Stacey said, rolling her eyes. "Headed up by two of my new least favorite people."
"As long as there's no new case, we'll have plenty of time to work on this." I pulled out onto the highway. "Let's go through all the audio and video we've collected so far."
"Tonight?" Stacey asked. "In one night?"
"As much as we can."
"That's a sizable infodump!" Stacey said. "It'll take hours. A lot of hours. And snacks. A lot of snacks. And caffeine. A lot of—"
"And we can't do it at the office," I said.
"Oh, that's right," Stacey said. "So, my place or yours?"
"Which place has more screens?"
"I've got heaps of screens and speakers and junk. I just hope we find something."
"I hope so, too."
I wondered where else Anton could have gone. Maybe he was just doing a good job of hiding from Jacob, who wasn't exactly a master-level psychic. He was still adjusting to his abilities. He hadn't been born with them, but found he had them after surviving a plane crash.
Maybe Anton had crossed over to the other side and would never be heard from again, except in my nightmares. I allowed myself a wry smile at that thought. My luck was never that good.
Chapter Five
Stacey's apartment was a place I rarely visited, and for good reason. She'd graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design the previous spring, but continued to live with a couple of her college roommates. This kept the place rowdy.
She lived on the top floor of a three-story apartment building filled with more college students. The ivy-coated brick building wrapped around a courtyard where somebody was always playing a guitar, banjo, or ukulele, day or night, the strings echoing off the inner walls. It was like a dorm, but with fewer rules.
