by J L Bryan
“Ew,” Stacey said, as we followed a narrow, twisting path through more junk and debris. “Ew, ew, ew. What is wrong with these people?”
“The tower has seen years of neglect, it's true.” That wasn't my voice. That was a man's voice, somewhere behind us, and we both jumped. We managed just enough professionalism to not actually scream.
“Hello?” I looked back, shining my flashlight among the heaps of junk but finding only old appliances.
“Could you hold yer torch down a bit, lass?” the voice said. “There's little enough left of my eyes as it is.”
“Oh, sorry.” I pointed the light at the floor. I had a pretty good idea who this was, but not why he was down here so late at night. “It's a lot brighter than a regular flashlight.”
“Thank you.” He stepped out, dressed in his gray doorman's suit with the old-fashioned peaked hat, the same old man who'd helped us with the wonky parking lot gate. We hadn't had any trouble with it since.
“Hey, it's the parking attendant guy!” Stacey said, clearly relieved it wasn't a hostile ghost. Then she frowned. “Wow. You're working late. And there's not a lot of parking spots down here in the basement...”
“My duties extend deep inside the building,” he said. “I am the night manager.”
“Really? Nobody mentioned you to us,” I said.
“That's no surprise. The family would probably kick me out if they could. You see how they've stuck me down here and forgotten about me.” He pointed across the room.
I aimed my flashlight in the same direction, but I had to step from side to side, peering around piles of junk before I saw what he was talking about. Beside a couple of metal racks full of rusty tools and cans, there was a door that stood slightly ajar. My beam fell on the edge of a desk and office chair in there.
“That's your office? Down here with all the junk?” Stacey's lips curled. “That doesn't seem, like, fair. Or good for your health. Can't you at least get the trash cleared out?”
“The building has been short-staffed for years. Albert Pennefort was the last competent member of the family, if you ask me. Vance had...appetites. Gambling, for instance. Things truly fell apart in his hands. But then, he was an unruly child, destined to bring the family to ruin.” A little smile touched the man's lips.
“It sounds like you've been here a long time,” I said.
“Years and years. The Penneforts would probably rather be rid of me altogether, but who would take my place? Nobody with a sound mind. I'm a part of the foundation here, like it or not.” He smiled again, but his light green eyes were cold. “They can't get rid of me, and I won't leave. Do you understand me? And there's nothing two little girls like you can do to dislodge me from my position.”
“We're only here as security consultants,” I told him. “We are not here to change out the management of the building.”
“Aren't you?” He was glaring at me now, no trace of even his small smile remaining. “Then why are you down here?”
“We're...just checking the security—”
“You're not!” he snapped. “You're lying.”
“Maybe we should go,” Stacey said.
“In a minute,” I said, staring back at the man, refusing to be intimidated by him. He was in his fifties, heavyset, with a paunch visible through his uniform. I could possibly take him with a couple of well-placed jabs and kicks if he tried anything untoward. Realistically, though, I'd probably just bash him with my tactical flashlight; its hard aluminum shell was designed to make it a useful backup weapon in a pinch. “What else can you tell us about the Pennefort family?”
“Everything,” he said. The room seemed to grow colder as he stared at me. “I know everything about them. Every dirty secret. And there are many. Their crimes are legion.”
“Okay, that's what I want to learn about,” I said. “Tell me about the family's crimes.”
“That would take an eternity,” he said.
“All right. Just the highlights, then. What can you tell us about the boy who died down here in 1908? Lawrence Pennefort?”
“Bright little Lawrence,” he said. “Such a clever mind—reading and writing by age three. Such hope he gave his parents. He would have been the light of his family. Beautiful little boy. Red hair, like his mother. Beautiful.” The man's mouth twitched, then snarled a little.
“His mother? But she's been dead for almost a century. You couldn't have known either of them. Siobhan died in 1920—”
“Siobhan,” he hissed, his lips drawing back from his teeth as if in disgust. Too far, revealing too much skull, yet with no ripping of the flesh.
“You're a ghost,” I said.
“Siobhan, the harlot,” he whispered. “A false, painted one, that lass. False as a mule in a bonnet.”
“Huh?” Stacey asked.
“What's your name, spirit?” I asked.
His teeth, already bared, lengthened now, especially at the canines, as though he intended to take a chomp out of my arm. His eyes turned into black holes.
“Damn you,” he said, his accent coming to the fore, no longer a distant echo in his voice. He grew taller, trying to intimidate me. “Ye will not exorcise me from my place, witch! Ye'll join me instead.”
He reached toward me, his fingers lengthening, and I raised my flashlight, lancing him with a blast of white light. Stacey, now a veteran of facing horrible things in dark basements, did the same.
I also touched my iPod and hit him with some Gospel music, a little “Nearer, My God, to Thee” to drive back the threatening ghost.
He rose and twisted, into a kind of black dust-devil shape, letting out an angry howl.
Then he was gone.
“That guy was one solid apparition,” Stacey said, as I turned down the music, but didn't turn it off. “Where'd he go?”
We swept the heaps of junk with our flashlights, but found only junk.
“Is he gone?” Stacey asked.
“It's still cold in here. He might still be around. Let's check out his office.”
I started up the narrow, almost impenetrable path toward the ajar metal door. It looked like it might have been a custodian's office, years earlier, maybe decades earlier.
Stacey kept close. I could feel her warm breath on my neck. I didn't blame her, though; the ghost had freaked me out, too. He had been watching us the whole time, ever since the moment we'd arrived in the parking area of the tower. He'd even come out during daylight hours to have a look at us, as if he'd known our purpose already. And I hadn't even suspected he was dead until halfway through our conversation in the basement.
“So who is he?” Stacey whispered. “A creepy old janitor?”
“He looks more like a doorman, by his clothes. Sh.” I turned off the holy music so I could listen more carefully. As I drew closer to the open office door, the air became even colder, as if I were approaching an open freezer.
“I've got a bad feeling, Ellie,” she said, her breath turning into a visible cloud as she spoke. “Ellie?”
“Quiet.” I reached out to the door and pushed it all the way open. It was heavy, and it creaked on rusty hinges.
The interior looked more or less like I'd expected; a long table with scattered papers and cleaning supplies, a file cabinet in a corner, janitor's supplies. A yellowed desk calendar on the table, covered with illegible notes and scribbles, was dated 1971. Not long after Albert's death. According to the dead doorman, that was about the time the Pennefort empire began its slow decline.
All of that was fine. What was not fine was the chair.
It was a battered old office chair, its high back to me. From this angle, I could only see a little bit of the chair's left arm.
An elbow rested on it, clad in what looked like a worn gray suit.
The edge of a peaked hat poked just above the top of the chair's back.
It looked exactly as if the dead doorman were sitting in it, facing away from us, pretending he had no idea we were there.
The room w
as freezing cold.
“El...el...” Stacey said, and I nudged her to be quiet. I was feeling the same sick roiling, rising panic in my guts, a sign that something awful and unnatural was dangerously close, in striking distance.
I reached out one shaking hand toward the office chair, touching the edge of it, not far from the peaked cap.
Then I swiveled the chair around and backed up, shining my light at it full blast.
The chair was occupied.
Maybe it was the same guy. It was definitely the same uniform.
But his skin was gone.
A skeleton wore the doorman's uniform. The jaw was wide open, with most of its teeth broken, and it was filled with what looked like dusty gray rock. The eyes were filled with the same gray, lumpy stuff.
Now we both screamed. There just wasn't any helping it.
Stacey turned and fled. I backed up, keeping my eyes and my light on the skeleton. I was waiting for it to move, to reach out to grab me, to speak to me...just about anything it could have done would have been unspeakably horrible.
Then I blinked, and it was gone. Like it was never there. There was just an empty chair, facing me.
That wasn't reassuring. It just meant he could jump out at me from anywhere at all. I turned and ran as fast I could along the narrow path through the junk.
The heaps of junk began sliding and crashing over. Pipes clattered to the floor; a ceramic sink fell and broke in two; a set of dusty glasses upended and flew at me. I ducked and dodged as they pelted me, one after the other, shattering against the sleeve of my leather jacket as I held up my arm to protect my head.
Stacey turned back when she heard the noise, practically blinding me with her flashlight. “Ellie? You okay?”
“I think the night manager wants us gone!” I caught up with her just as a heap of dining chairs crashed down, blocking the narrow path just behind me. If I'd been two seconds slower, they would have buried me.
We raced to the door to the stairs while more junk toppled to the floor. The dead man was throwing a serious tantrum, and it seemed like he had plenty of energy with which to hurl things at us. His apparition had been so sharp that we'd taken him for a living person, at least in the shadows of the basement, and in the dim parking deck during a sky-darkening storm.
He was a powerful ghost...whoever he was. He seemed to hate the Pennefort family, and Stacey and me, too, for that matter. Maybe he understood why we were there.
As we reached the door to the stairs, it opened.
A dark shape lurched out, blocking our way. It reached toward Stacey, who was closer to it.
Stacey screamed and stabbed forward with her tactical flashlight, hopefully driving the entity to disappear again.
I did the same, just in time to see Stacey ramming the front end of her flashlight into the face of SAFE-T-OFFICER Pauly.
Pauly screamed and fell to his knees, his hands covering his face. “Why?” he cried. “Why?”
“Oh...oops! Sorry!” Stacey knelt beside him to check on him.
I turned back, sweeping the basement with my flashlight beam. There was a lot of freshly-stirred dust, and junk was still tumbling loose here and there, but the storm of angry energy seemed to have stopped chasing us for the moment.
“What did I do?” Pauly whined. “I was just coming down to check on you girls.”
“Let me look at you.” Stacey pointed the light at his face, revealing a bloody half-circle in his cheek, like Pauly had just been initiated into some weird moon-worshipping cult. “Yikes.”
“Is it bad?” Pauly asked.
“Uh...no?” Stacey replied, not being very convincing.
“We should go upstairs,” I said. “Immediately. It's dangerous down here.”
“No joke,” Pauly said. “Girls are hitting everyone in the face as they come through the door.”
“Aw, let me help you up,” Stacey said.
Pauly accepted her hand, and seemed a little unwilling to let it go once he was standing.
We took the elevator back up to the lobby, taking the cart with the gear we'd intended to set up. Our cameras would likely just end up smashed if we left them down in the basement. We had plenty of confirmation that the basement was haunted, anyway, and maybe it was the most haunted place in the whole building. We hadn't seen any sign of Lawrence, but if we'd been looking for a powerful entity with some kind of vendetta against the Pennefort family, we seemed to have found it.
Back in the lobby, Stacey opened a first-aid kit behind the desk and attended to Pauly's bloody cheek. He hissed and moaned and groaned as she disinfected and bandaged it.
“Why did you follow us?” I asked him.
“I mean, I saw you two took the elevator down instead of up, and I was like, whoa. So, after I microwaved some Ramen and munched that, because I was hungry, I took the stairs down, and I was just about to check. Make sure you girls weren't hurt or anything, you know? What were you doing? Cause it looked like you were knocking stuff over and just making the mess even bigger.”
“We didn't!” Stacey said. “It was the ghost.”
“Wha?” He shook his head. “Anyway, I better not get in trouble for that mess. I didn't do it.”
“You'll be fine,” I said. “Come on, Stacey.”
“Uh, maybe the blond one should stay here with me,” Pauly said. “In case I pass out from bleeding and stuff.”
“You're not going to pass out from bleeding,” I said. “The blond one's coming with me.”
“You two need to be more careful,” he said. “Stop going around hurting people and then leaving them all alone by themselves.”
“We'll bear it in mind.” I steered Stacey back toward the elevator.
“You think maybe I should hang out with that guy?” she whispered as soon as we were out of earshot. “I did kinda bloody him.”
“He shouldn't have been stalking us.”
“Well...yeah.”
“You already bandaged him up, and that was really nice of you. If you stick around, he'll just keep plying you with his Bryan Adams playlist. He called you 'the blond one'.”
Stacey shivered as the elevator doors closed. “Maybe he's confused.”
“I get the sense he's used to that by now.” I stepped into the cargo elevator, rolling the cart with our unused gear back into it with me.
“You're in a salty mood,” Stacey said.
“Getting ditched when we see something scary will do that to me.”
“Huh? Oh, sorry! I just assumed you'd run, too, when we saw the dead guy full of rocks.”
“It wasn't rocks. It was concrete. The dead doorman's eyes were full of concrete. Just like the concrete floor of the basement. Like the foundation of this building.”
“Whoa. That's a big coincidence, huh?”
“I doubt it,” I said, shaking my head.
We reached our floor and returned to the Art Deco apartment to pull ourselves together after what we'd seen in the basement. We would rest, but not sleep—not me, not in that building, not at night, not ever again. The image of the skull wouldn't leave my head, the eye sockets filled with blobs of concrete, the teeth broken where wet cement must have been shoved down the dead doorman's throat.
Chapter Twenty
Back in the apartment, we tried to get back to a calmer state of mind with some basic grunt work. There was a lot of data to be reviewed from all of our gear, a lot of footage to look through. In a typical haunting, we might take hundreds of hours of footage, sound recording, temperature fluctuations, and a paranormal entity might show for half a second. Software can help speed along some of this analysis...but not nearly enough of it.
I also had accumulated quite a lot of personal material from our clients' relatives, everything from childhood pictures to Vance's ham-handed attempts at paranormal investigation.
Unable to glean deeper meaning from Millie's hippie-era photographs—and a little annoyed with Stacey ooh-ing over shirtless pictures of Jackie Duperre in his twenties�
�I turned to Vance's notes.
It seemed he'd really applied himself to the task. While his early notes were clueless, based on random notions about ghosts from movies like Poltergeist, he'd clearly begun to read deeply and widely on the subject. His attempts to communicate with the dead, besides the spirit mirror, included lighting candles and asking the ghosts to signal him through making the flames flicker or grow, and also trying to do automatic writing, inviting spirits to speak through him.
Vance hadn't called in a medium, though, or a paranormal investigator, or anyone else. It seemed he'd wanted to keep these activities to himself. Maybe he was worried about his family's reputation, even as he struggled to cope with their restless ghosts.
“They are here,” his notes read at one point. “Not just my father, I think. But all of those who died here, generations of us. The building keeps us, and we keep it.”
And another page: “Something darker lurks beneath, holding us here. I fear for myself. I fear for my son, and now his newborn; may the tower never reach out, never draw them down into its cursed nature.” So far, so good on that score, as far as I could tell, considering Grady and his kid still lived thousands of miles away in California.
“I wonder what Jacob's going to think of all this,” I said. “The place is overrun with ghosts. I hope he can find something useful.”
Stacey didn't answer. She was listening to her headset, eyes on her screen, with a glazed-over look that told me she hadn't found anything interesting so far. Fortunately, she had a long way to go.