by J L Bryan
“Makes sense,” I said. “Settle down in the railroad hub, let the trains do the traveling for you.”
“He bought land, invested in a streetcar company, and eventually opened the city's biggest department store. He was an organizer of the 1895 Cotton States Exposition, kind of a smaller World's Fair...he developed real estate, shopping centers, and eventually his own seventeen-story tower. Man, imagine what it would be like to have your own tower.”
“It didn't work out too well for Rapunzel.”
“Yowtch, good point.” Stacey touched her short blond hair and winced, as though imagining a prince climbing his way up.
“Where are you sourcing all this, by the way?”
“Just Wikipedia so far.”
“And where is the Wikipedia article sourced?”
“Couple places. Some Atlanta Constitution articles. Forbes magazine. Atlanta Business Chronicle. And...uh...something called the The Great Horned Owl.”
“The what?”
“I'll check...okay, 'The Great Horned Owl was a radical underground newspaper published in Atlanta from 1968 to 1970. Known for covering the local hippie scene, reviewing concerts, and taking a strong anti-establishment stance. This Wikipedia article is a stub. You can add to it by...' Oh, I guess that's it.”
“Do you see any major tragedies the building? As reported by hippie owls, or otherwise?”
She checked. “Ooh! Back in 1969, a bomb went off in the lobby of the building. The target was a man who was running for mayor, and he was giving a campaign speech there. He survived, but three other people died.”
“See what else you can find out about that. We'd better head back and finish the set-up. Her kids will be home by now. And my kimchi tacos are now, sadly, all eaten.” There wasn't a crumb left on my plate.
“I hope that skyscraper is super-haunted and we have to stay here for weeks, eating at every restaurant on this block. I've got that Vietnamese soup place on my radar for supper. Or breakfast. Whatever we eat next.”
The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and the sidewalks were more crowded as we stepped out, with well-dressed business folk going to and fro among the giant skyscrapers, condo buildings, and parking decks—corporate executives in their native habitat.
The Pennefort Building was decades older than its much taller neighbors, and the contrasts stood out clearly. The newer skyscrapers were sleek and streamlined, smooth and essentially featureless, just rows and rows of black glass windows in gray or black frames.
The Pennefort featured thick columns topped by lavish capitals carved with tiny spiraling plant leaves, and stone lion heads at the corners, among other little embellishments that added up to a lavish facade. Everything seemed dirty, though, streaked by rain and stained by car exhaust over the years.
“It really is a pretty building,” Stacey said. “If someone would give it a bath.”
“It kind of looks backwards in time, design-wise. When this was put up, most of the reference points for impressive, soaring buildings would have been temples, churches, and palaces.”
“Yeah, nobody thought to make them boring until later.” Stacey pointed to a massive gray slab of a building nearby, four times taller than the Pennefort.
We entered the marble lobby, and passed a few business people on their way out for the day. They were a bit more shabby than the crowd outside—an unshaven man in a frayed collared shirt with no tie, a woman in a garish orange pantsuit who reeked of stale cigarette smoke from twenty feet away. They were a pale, heavyset, quiet group, looking worn down rather than happy to be leaving work for the day. They kept some distance from each other, avoiding eye contact as they made their way from the elevator to the parking deck.
I glanced up at the building directory as we passed it. I didn't recognize any of the companies renting office space: Stonefield Insurance, Gregorski Holdings, Al-Farisi Importing. Judging by the directory, a few of the office-level floors were either unoccupied or leased by tenants who wished to remain unlisted. There were also no listings for any floor above 12, since 13 to 17 were private residences.
The skeleton key worked in the old elevator control panel, giving us access to the upper floors.
“So we can access the whole building,” Stacey whispered. “We should go exploring.”
“Maybe not on day one,” I said. I couldn't say I was eager to explore the inner depths of the huge building. It was much bigger even than the largest of the old mansions and hotels where we sometimes worked back home. It would have lots of hallways, empty rooms, stairwells...lots of places to get lost, trapped, or ambushed.
When we reached Amberly's apartment, her kids were home, and Amberly was ready for us to finish setting up cameras.
Twelve-year-old Dexter focused on the giant TV screen in his room as we lined up a thermal camera. He was fairly overweight, like the rest of his family, with thick glasses and a mouth that kept twitching at the corner like a nervous tic. He tried to act indifferent to our presence, but his eyes kept moving to Stacey every time she turned away from him. He kept blushing. She was ten years older than him, but it couldn't have been more obvious that he was developing a crush on her pretty fast.
Stacey caught him looking and smiled, trying to put him at ease. “What are you building there?” She pointed to the black castle with iron-spiked walls that he was constructing onscreen.
“I'm expanding the swamp dungeon.” He zoomed through arrow-slit windows into a bleak castle courtyard with crumbling buildings and an old cemetery inside. Wooden grates covered pits in the muddy ground. Within the pits, shriveled and starved-looking people reached up bony hands through the wooden cage roofs, moaning, as if begging for the slightest taste of food or water. “I need a bigger dungeon to hold more villagers,” Dexter added.
“Oh.” Stacey frowned. “They look like they're really starving. Aw, there's even a bony dog chained up in that one pit. This game is terrible!”
“But...they're all...they're undead.” Dexter was blushing purple, apparently mortified by Stacey's disapproval. “They're zombies I rounded up. And shapeshifters. The dog is a werewolf.”
“Oh, okay. So these aren't just innocent people you're torturing in your swamp dungeon. That's good.”
“I'm not torturing them! I'm trying to protect the living!” His voice grew high and started to crack.
“Okay, sorry, kiddo.” Stacey ducked a little as if to let his outburst fly over her head. “We're pretty much done here, so unless you have questions, we'll be going...” Stacey eased toward the doorway.
“Are you going to watch me in my bed?” He looked from Stacey to me.
“We're just trying to get a look at the heat anomaly you saw,” I said.
“Right.” He nodded. “The heat anomaly.”
“Can you tell us just where you saw it?” Stacey asked. “And maybe what exactly you saw?”
He opened his mouth, then just gaped at her for a moment. His gaze slid over to me. I smiled, nodded, and gave him a big thumbs-up, which was clearly too much, judging by how he drew back from me a little, blinking at me like I was a crazy person who'd just staggered out of the sewer toward him.
“I've seen ghosts, you know.” Stacey put a comforting hand on his shoulder, which made his eyes go wide in awe. “So has Ellie. Have you ever seen anything strange like that?”
“It wasn't a ghost,” he said quickly. “A ghost, that's like a person. A dead person.” He pointed to the pit of rotting, groaning zombies reaching up through the lattice of ropes and wooden beams that trapped them below. The zombie pits didn't look nearly secure enough to me. “What I saw was more like a red ball shape. Like fire. It emerged hither—” He pointed to a back corner of his room. “—and flew yon—” He pointed to his TV screen.
“Where were you?” Stacey asked. “Did it hurt you?”
“I was in bed.” He pointed to his sloppily made bed. His dirty laundry was absent; his mom must have made him clean the room a little bit while Stacey and I ate tacos.
<
br /> “So it came from here, and flew there?” Stacey asked.
“Yeah, and my TV was off, but it made kind of a red pulse when it hit the screen. Then it was gone. It didn't hurt the TV. I checked.”
“What did you think it was when you saw it?” I asked.
“Maybe...lightning? Weird lightning? Doesn't lightning go ball-shaped sometimes? It was red, and it was hot...I could feel that...and it didn't come from the window like lightning probably would...so I don't know.”
“So we can just aim this camera so we get that side of the room in frame...and there you are, complete privacy in the bed and that whole side of the room.” She pointed to his dresser, mirror, and closet. I noticed he didn't have any of his dad's fantasy sculptures decorating his room. A cardboard model spaceship as long as my arm hung from strings on the ceiling.
“I guess that's okay,” he said. “Can I still play my game?”
“Oh, sure! Just pretend we're not even here. You might not even see us again tonight,” Stacey said.
He frowned a little—maybe he didn't want to pretend Stacey wasn't there—and we told him good-bye and moved on.
His ten-year-old sister, Hyacinth, was more openly fascinated with us, or at least by our equipment. She was a pale girl with thick glasses, dressed in colorful tie-dye and shiny insect-themed plastic jewelry; both kids seemed to resemble their father much more than their mother.
Hyacinth stood behind the thermal video camera on its tripod, watching her glowing red fingers on the camera's small screen. She made a long-eared bunny shape with her hand.
“I am the evil red rabbit!” she said in a creaky, grating voice, while the finger-bunny hopped onscreen. “I'm coming to murder your carrots!” Then she held up a finger of her other hand, making a long reddish shape on the screen, and spoke in a squeaky, high-pitched voice: “No, no, don't murder me! I'm a good carrot! I'm a special carrot!”
I wasn't sure what to make of the girl's thermal finger-puppet show, but Stacey just about fell over laughing. That only encouraged the kid.
“Record me!” she said to Stacey, then she ran around and stood in front of the camera. “So I can see myself all red and glowy.”
“You can see that right now.” Stacey flipped the camera's screen vertically so Hyacinth could see herself on camera.
Hyacinth planted her hands on her head and stuck out her fingers like antlers. “I am the Great Red Moose of the North!” She stomped in place, up and down, as if running across the tundra. “The Moosus Borealis.”
Stacey found this hilarious, too. I made myself smile. Maybe it was just the sleep deprivation, but all I could think about was the kid stumbling and crashing into our expensive and highly breakable equipment while using it as a toy.
“Make sure you don't bump against it, or knock it over,” I said.
“I wasn't!” The girl backed away, looking horrified. I'd thought my tone was pretty quiet and even, but she acted like I'd bitten her face off. “I'm sorry!”
“Hey...it's okay,” I said, lamely attempting to calm her back down. These kids sure had a lot of buttons that were easily pressed.
“Yeah, so it picks up heat, like I explained,” Stacey said. “Didn't you see something hot out here?”
“Uh, only a guy made of fire!” Hyacinth looked dead serious now, not goofing around anymore.
“Can you tell us about it?” Stacey asked. She was clearly better with these kids than I was. “We're here to help with it, so the more we know, the better we can do our job.”
“Sure. Well, this one night, I woke up and went down the hall to the bathroom. When I started to come back, I heard footsteps coming behind me in the hall, like following me to my room. But there was no way anybody could be there, so it scared me to hear it. I kind of wanted to look back, but I didn't. I just kind of froze up and stood there. I guess that sounds stupid.”
“No, that's totally normal,” Stacey said, smiling.
“Well, I felt the heat push against me. Like when you're standing by a bonfire and it flares up. Like that year Mom really pushed me into Girl Scouts, and we had to do junk like go outside and sit around at a fire. So it was like hot and pushing me, like a hand, you know?”
I nodded, forcing a smile. Even her casual talk of camping bonfires triggered a rush of terrible memories. I'd felt that terrible push of heat rolling off a fire the night my parents were killed. I'd felt it again at the more recent fire, out at a client's farm. I could still see the ghost of Anton Clay looking out at me through Michael's eyes, filling them with malevolent light.
Then I'd summoned the horseman ghost that struck them down, Michael and Anton together. Michael was out of the hospital, recovering fine from what I'd heard. As for Anton, there was no sign, but he was out there somewhere.
“What happened next?” Stacey asked Hyacinth, bringing my attention back to the present.
“That's when I turned back...and I saw it. I don't know what it was. It looked like an explosion shaped like a person. Not like a person on fire, but more like a person made of fire...I know that's crazy.”
“Did it interact with you at all?” I asked. “Did it speak?”
“It didn't say anything. It just rushed at me like it was going to burn me up. So I ran into my room and locked the door, and I screamed for help. The doorknob got hot. Like they talk about in fire safety—don't open the door if the knob's hot. Then the door started shaking, and there was yelling and banging out there. But that turned out to be my parents. Because I was, you know, screaming in the middle of the night. But I still wouldn't unlock the door until the knob was cold again. That's fire safety.”
“Sounds pretty intense!” Stacey said.
“Yeah. I hate this place. I miss our house.”
“Hyacinth, stop bothering them.” Amberly joined us in the hall, still clad in her Renaissance Fair dress and riding boots. I guess that was just casual housewear for her.
“She's not bothering us,” Stacey said. “She's been very helpful.”
“She needs to be helpful to her grades and go do her math homework.”
“I hate math!” Hyacinth said.
“I get up every day and do things I hate. Welcome to life.” Amberly took her daughter's arm and led her into the girl's bedroom. She closed the door, and much yelling ensued from both of them.
Stacey and I looked at each other and began to back away slowly. Before we could fully make our escape, Amberly emerged from the room again, her face flushed red.
“I'm sorry,” she said to us, her voice low. “We never used to fight like that. But ever since moving here...”
“There's no need to apologize, ma'am,” I said. “We're all set up here, so unless you have any questions or concerns, we'll just rest up for tonight's observation.”
“Ma'am.” Amberly shook her head. “Sure, go do what you need to do.”
After we stepped out of the apartment, Stacey whispered: “She doesn't want us to call her 'ma'am.'”
“Yeah, I remembered that a second too late.” I opened the door to our borrowed apartment, wondering what the night ahead would bring.
Chapter Seven
“It's all quiet,” Stacey said, parked on the half-circle sofa in front of the array of little monitors.
It was ten p.m. Stacey and I had managed to nap, and now we were up, checking on our clients. Amberly and Hyacinth had gone to bed. The males of the family were still awake, Thurmond in his studio where we couldn't see him, Dexter playing video games in his room. Dexter kept stealing glances at the camera, clearly conscious of being watched.
I checked the apartment's kitchen and found it bare, which meant no coffee. And we had a long night ahead.
“Hey, did we get coffee?” I asked Stacey.
“Yikes. I don't suppose we're super-lucky and that newsstand place is still open. If they are, I hope they have Sour Patch Kids.”
“I doubt it's open.” I was already checking my phone. “Looks like most places in walking distance close at four
or five, probably when all the office workers go home. We even missed the Starbucks and the Dunkin' Donuts. There's a diner a few blocks away. There's an Anatolia Cafe and Hookah Lounge...they don't actually mention coffee, it looks like more of a bar...”
“I do have some Hi-ball caffeine water,” Stacey said. “And trail mix. And fruit bars.”
“Where?”
“In my hiking pack.”
“Where's that?” I looked among the gear we'd brought up.
“Uh...still in the van. Want me to go grab it?”
“No, I want to take a look around the building while it's deserted. I'll bring my headset in case anything interesting happens.”
“And don't forget to take pictures!”
“I'm just going downstairs, Stacey. I'm not rafting down the Nile.”
“Oh, but that would be amazey-crazy! We should do it sometime!”
I grunted grumpily. “Trip to Egypt: yes. Rafting: no. I'll be back in a second.” I stepped out, making sure I had the skeleton key with me. I also brought my tactical flashlight. It could blast three thousand lumens of full-spectrum white light, like having a raw sunbeam in your hand. That can be great for chasing away ghosts, but it also has a pretty severe blinding effect on the living. Should anyone try to attack me as I stepped out to the parking deck, I'd shine it right into his eyes, half a second before slamming the beveled cutting edge around the lens into his face. The edge was there on the flashlight to help SWAT and Special Forces types bash through glass windows, but it could do some pretty serious damage to flesh and bone, too.
I didn't take the passenger elevator but instead walked deeper into the building, down the long hallway to the service elevator at the far end, which was the wide end of the roughly triangular building. I didn't know why the building was triangle-shaped, narrowing to little more than door width at one end, but a couple of the other old buildings in the area were like that. Maybe it related to some arcane zoning law of the nineteenth century.