by J L Bryan
“A hippie suicide bomber?” I asked, surprised.
“They think it was more of an accident, like he messed up while setting the timer.”
“Oh, well, that takes less dedication.”
Stacey skimmed a bit more. “So after the bomb, the police raided someplace called 'The Strip' on Peachtree and rounded up a bunch of people over it. 'Anti-war radicals,' the paper says. I guess that means more hippies.”
“So the hot ghost could be that hippie terrorist,” I said. “Does he have a name?”
“The name he gave in his manifesto, which he mailed to the paper the day before the bombing, was 'Free Human.' I'm guessing that wasn't his birth-certificate name, so...” She grew quiet, searching.
“You're doing great, Stacey.” I settled back on the half-circle Art Deco couch. It sure was comfortable. They don't make them like that anymore, at least not in my price range. “Keep at it.”
“Elton,” she said. “Elton Roberts. We still need to look for any earlier news about the tower. There's not much online, but I'm sure the city has some good libraries. Libraries.” Stacey shivered.
“What do you have against libraries, anyway? The library was my favorite place as a kid.”
“They're...intimidating. Like miles and miles of stuff I don't know. And I'll never probably know. And then I think of how clueless I am. And then I think how clueless other people must be, too, so we're all cluelessly trying to figure things out while surrounded by people who are also totally clueless about basically everything.”
“Okay, you have your reasons. It sounds like we have a lot of digging to do. We need to learn about everyone who died in that bomb, and any other deaths in the building since it was built.”
“That's like a hundred and twenty years of history to cover. Could take a while,” Stacey said.
“Yep.” I grabbed my tablet and cracked open an energy drink.
The scene within the apartment was quiet. Thurmond had gone to bed, his thermal image shaking his head at the camera in the hall as he passed it.
Dexter went to bed. I could just see the edge of his blanket as he tossed and turned. Finally, he got up and arranged a couple of threadbare stuffed animals—a donkey and a rabbit—so that they faced the camera in his room. Then he waved at us and went back to bed.
After that, no movement at all, anywhere in the apartment.
The stuffed animals stared at us.
“I wish he'd move those things,” Stacey whispered. “Their plastic eyes are kinda drilling into my soul over here.”
“He probably put them there for your benefit.”
“I don't feel all that benefited. And I'm getting antsy. Should we go down to the twelfth floor and try to find your ghost? Maybe get him on camera? We could bring a microphone, ask questions, check for EVP—”
“We'd better keep an eye on the client's apartment,” I said. “Those are the ghosts we're most worried about.”
“But all these ghosts might be connected. That's a good reason to get up and go exploring around, right?”
“Or this could just be an old building with a lot of ghosts. Have you talked to Jacob?”
“He can come this weekend.”
“Great. We're going to need him.”
A follow-up newspaper story from 1969 shed a little light on Elton Roberts, self-bombing hippie terrorist. He'd been an undergraduate failing his way out of the University of Michigan before dropping out to join the New Front, a group that called for “total political, social, and spiritual revolution,” according to its pamphlets. Nothing too ambitious.
The story also mentioned raids on “The Strip,” which turned out not to be a single location, exactly, but several blocks of Peachtree Street about two miles north of the Pennefort Building. The Strip apparently included head shops and record stores where the hippies would have hung out back out in those days.
If any of those raids led to convictions, I was unable to find them. The story faded quickly from the press. Maybe The Great Horned Owl had covered those events in more detail, but I couldn't find any online copies of the long-lost underground newspaper, which had apparently faded from history.
I did find a number of music reviews from the paper, which had been transcribed on a rock and roll history site. A Hendrix show was “out of sight.” A Johnny Cash special on TV was “fully righteous.” The Allman Brothers Band was “a radical force for social progress.”
I jotted down the names of the Owl articles' authors, muttering each one aloud as I did. Six names in all. It seemed like a long shot that I would find any of them—the paper had been out of print for almost fifty years, and these people had been teens or college age back then. They could be living anywhere by now, or already turned to ghosts themselves. It didn't help that some of the names were undoubtedly pen names; I was pretty sure “Pink Falcon,” a writer who loved Janis Joplin, wasn't any more of a real name than “Free Human.”
I would do my best to find them, though, just as I would do my best to learn what I could about those who'd died in the bomb.
It was a long, research-y night, and I must have dozed off at some point, because I woke with a start in the predawn dark. The apartment was lit only by the glowing monitors.
Stacey was crashed out on the opposite side of the C-shaped couch. The overhead lights were out for some reason; maybe she'd turned them off. We weren't supposed to be sleeping on the job, exactly, but our gear had been recording the whole time.
The monitors flickered and crackled in front of me. A couple had gone dark; the image on one of them kept rolling like it was getting a bad signal. The others looked fuzzy. A lot of electrical interference was going on.
And the apartment was cold.
I sat up straight, squinting, but it was hard to see into the darkness beyond the glare of the monitor bank in front of me.
Shivering, I pushed myself to my feet. The skin along the back of my neck prickled, the way it does when someone is watching you from behind. A ripple of chill bumps spread from my neck down to the base of my spine, as though whatever stared at me was incredibly cold.
I willed myself to turn, to put the glowing monitors to my back and face whatever might be there. I knew it had to be something, and it was strong to enough to interfere with the room's electricity.
I stared into gloom as my eyes adjusted, slowly resolving the darkness into more distinct shapes, into tables and picture frames.
At first, I saw nothing unusual, though I was still sure I could feel someone watching me.
Then, as my eyes adjusted more, I could see the deeper darkness grow more distinct. She stood in a doorway that led to one of the apartment's bedrooms, just an outline, a solid black shadow person. She was facing me, I thought.
Another reason she'd been hard to see was that she wasn't moving at all. She was so still that she might have been a cardboard cutout propped up in the bedroom doorway. I knew she wasn't anything so benign, though. Cardboard cutouts don't scramble your TVs, and they don't have a freezing-cold stare that burns icy holes into your back.
“Stacey,” I whispered. “Stacey, get up.” I needed to stay rational and not panic. That was going to be easier if I wasn't alone with the entity.
Stacey didn't respond; she was out cold. Great. I could still scream, of course, but that might run off the entity.
Moving slowly, not taking my eyes off the pitch-black woman-shape in the doorway, I picked up a digital voice recorder and switched it on.
“Hello,” I said, whispering. “Can you hear me?” I paused. “What's your name?” Another long pause. “Why are you here?”
That was good. Taking some concrete, professional action gave me a sense of control over the situation. I wasn't just sitting around being haunted, getting acted upon by the ghost. Maybe my sense of control was an illusion, but hey, sometimes your illusions are all you've got.
The black cutout shape didn't move at all. I could see the bedroom beyond illuminated slightly by the dim glow of the sm
all monitors behind me. I could only see the ghost as an impenetrable blackness.
Still, she was sharp and clear at the edges, enough that I got a sense of a young woman, slender, her hair in long braids at either side of her head.
“Who are you?” I asked, keeping with the basics since she wasn't really answering. Not in my range of hearing, anyway; audio analysis might reveal a thing or two later. “Do you need help? How can we help you move on?”
She didn't answer...but she did move, finally. She turned sideways—and it was unnatural, her whole form rotating, her legs completely still, her braids shifting slightly. Her feet were a couple of inches above the floor, I realized, and it looked like she was wearing boots.
The shadow-woman slid out of sight, deeper into the bedroom, her arms and legs limp, her whole body as passive as a side of beef on a meathook, getting moved from one side of the refrigerated truck to the other.
I followed the shadow figure to the bedroom and looked inside.
The dark shadow was clearer now, in contrast to moonlight leaking in from the bedroom windows. I still saw no colors or details—just a girl with long braids, maybe a teenager, maybe a college student. I naturally thought of the hippie terrorists who'd bombed the building.
She was drifting past the windows, toward the bedroom wall.
“Wait,” I said. “I want to talk to you. And I want to listen. Don't you have a story to tell?” I held out the voice recorder, a bit optimistically. Her only apparent response to me so far had been to turn and leave. “Look, I know I may not be the most interesting person to talk to, but at least there's no chance of you dying of boredom, right? Want to tell me how you died?”
The girl-shape continued on, again almost passive, as if carried on an invisible conveyor.
She reached the wall, and then she was gone.
I reached out and touched satiny wallpaper where she'd vanished.
“Good talk,” I said to the blank wall.
Clammy fingers closed over my hand, pulling my palm flat against the wallpaper, splaying my fingers wide. It felt like she was grabbing me, and even trying to pull my hand right through the wall. She gripped me tight, with icy fingers, the nails sharp as vulture talons.
“Let go!” I screamed, which is the natural response to unwanted grabbing and gripping. It didn't seem to help.
The dark oval of her face rose from the wall, as if studying me with her unseen shadow-eyes.
“Stacey!” I screamed, while pawing my way along the wall with my free hand. The light switch was just out of reach. I pressed myself against the wall, trying to reach further along it, which brought my face dangerously close to the ghost's oval-of-darkness face. “Stacey, wake up!”
When my arm was fully extended, my fingers brushed the round dial of the dimmer switch. I pushed the edge of it with the tip of my middle finger, just barely able to reach it.
It rolled clockwise, and the light fixture above turned bright white, multiple bulbs illuminating the room. There was a snap, and a shower of sparks blew from one bulb like a firework fountain, creating extra-bright light until it went dark.
The light was on my side, though. The shadow-woman was gone, driven back into darker corners of the building. My hand was free. The featureless pitch-black oval of her face had vanished. Nothing remained but the worn blue-and-gold wallpaper, full of interlocked arching shapes vaguely reminiscent of metal fence gates and musical notes.
“Hey, I dreamed you were yelling my name.” Stacey wandered into the room, rubbing her eyes.
“I was yelling your name.”
“What happened? Are you trying to climb that wall or something? Or like...just hugging it?”
I was still flattened against the wall, hand extended over to the light switch. I stepped back.
“Someone was here,” I said.
“Not a pizza guy, I'm guessing.”
“She went through this wall.” Beyond the light switch lay the door to the bathroom. I stepped through, and a shadowy woman stepped toward me from the darkness within, but it was just my reflection in the big mirror over the sink.
“Maybe she was just looking to wash her ghostly hands,” Stacey said. “Or take a ghostly bath.”
“If she continued through this room, she might have ended up over in the client's apartment,” I said. “Let's check the monitors. That girl ghost is a walking cold spot.”
Chapter Nine
Our monitors were working fine again.
We caught a cold spot on the thermal camera, large and deep blue. It drifted through the clients' master bedroom and blinked away when it reached the closet. Thirty seconds later, the cold spot appeared in the dining room, passing through the unpacked boxes like they weren't there. Amberly and her family seemed reluctant to fully unpack and move in; they were eager to get back to their regular home.
“Check out the night vision,” Stacey whispered.
A dark shape flickered past, visible for less than a second. We held our breath, watching, but nothing else happened.
“Let's see what we got there.” Stacey went to her laptop, pulled up the footage from the night camera, and reversed it. Then she played it in slow motion.
The dark shape on the recording wasn't as clear as it had been in person; it mostly looked like a patch of blurry shadow, maybe as someone walked past an unseen light source, definitely not a video that was going to change the beliefs of any devout skeptics.
The shadow passed in front of the windows...then rose up and off the floor.
“Whoa. Is she flying?” Stacey clicked the video forward a couple of frames. As the shadow-shape faded, it also rose from the floor, losing form and vanishing as it approached the ceiling.
We both looked up, at the ceiling right above the couch.
“She went upstairs,” Stacey said.
“I guess that's not surprising. These top two floors were always the family's private residence. If the ghost is connected to the family, it might wander all over.”
“So we need to set up some gear up there, too.”
“That's going to be a touchy subject with the client. She doesn't seem to want us going up there at all.”
“But we have to be able to go where the ghost is.”
“I know. We'll talk to them. Maybe sometime after sunrise, though.” I looked out the nearest window and felt relieved to see the early, bluish light that foretold the coming of daybreak. After my encounters with the dead during the night, I couldn't have been happier to see bright sunlight drenching the world.
Although, in a building that large, there were still plenty of dark places, places that hadn't seen daylight since the beams, walls, and floors had enclosed them more than a century earlier. Places where unsettling things could thrive in darkness and isolation. Add in some deaths and drama, and you had the potential for one massive haunting. This tower dwarfed the grand mansions and hotels of Savannah, where it could take days or weeks to sift through the signs of a haunting, identify the ghost, and draw up some kind of plan for capture or eviction.
I was beginning to worry that this tower was overrun with ghosts. Two close encounters on the first night of an investigation, with two visual apparitions plus physical contact, was a lot of activity even in my line of work. Many ghosts have to be teased or tempted out, or you have to wait patiently for several nights before you see any sign of them. They're great at vanishing and going silent when they want to. Then they show up in full form when you're most vulnerable, like when you're in bed, or when you're home alone at night.
It was a good thing Jacob was coming. Hopefully he could help us identify which ghosts were actually bothering the family.
“We should go get some breakfast,” I said. “Because we have a long day ahead.”
“You mean dinner, because it's almost time to sleep.”
“We already slept.”
“For like two hours!” Stacey protested.
“You don't feel rested?”
“Come on, Ellie.”
“All right. You sleep if you can. I just got grabbed by a dead girl and pinned to the wall, so I'll just sit here wide awake with my eyes open, hoping nothing else jumps out at me.”
“Thanks, Ellie! You're a pal.” Stacey ran to the bedroom, then hesitated. “This is where the ghost went, isn't it?”'
“Yep.”
Stacey sighed, and her shoulders slumped. “Let's go get breakfast.”
A little while later, having changed clothes and freshened up, we took the elevator down. The lobby was more crowded than I'd previously seen it, with little knots of grim-looking people in business-casual attire waiting for elevators. Their mood seemed anxious. None of them seemed particularly happy to be on their way to work in the offices and cubicle warrens above.
We headed out the revolving doors, drawing a few frowns from the assembled office workers, as if Stacey and I were going the wrong way on a one-way street.
The world outside was lighter in every way, the sun bright, the temperature cool, the air scrubbed fresh by rain. It was a warm December in Georgia. The real cold wouldn't slip in until January, if then.
Christmas decorations hung on the lampposts outside, red bows and green wreaths dotting the street, probably hung by some local Chamber of Commerce type of group. 'Twas the season to encourage shopping, after all.
I tried to avoid thoughts of Christmas. I'd have to send a card to my aunt in Virginia, maybe a cousin or two, and that would be that. With any luck, I'd be too busy working to notice Christmas Day as it came and went. The holiday was still a few weeks off, anyway.
While Stacey had taken her turn in the shower, I'd found a very promising-sounding coffee shop nearby. We had to cross Pennefort Park to get there, but I figured that might give us some added insight into the Pennefort family.
We stepped through a granite archway and inside the low rock wall around the park's perimeter, which served more as decoration than security.
The park had a couple of statues. One of them was a bronze life-size rendering of Ernest Pennefort himself, mounted on a pedestal, his arm outstretched over a large granite fountain beside him. The fountain looked like it had been turned off for some time, so it was probably a less dramatic effect than intended.