The Tower

by J L Bryan

  “No!” Jacob cried out, with his little remaining strength. “Not that book...it's autographed...”

  The old paper caught fire quickly. Thurmond lowered it, holding the covers wide open in both hands, squinting and grimacing against the blazing pages.

  He held it out toward his father's shrinking ghost.

  “Stop it,” Clyde said. “This is nonsense. This is nothing.” In an eyeblink, he stood next to Thurmond, and he jabbed his skeletal fingers into Thurmond's chest.

  The ghost of Thurmond's father reached into the burning book...and drew out a long, glowing blade of golden light. It illuminated the ghosts again, but in its light, the ghosts of the murdered family members looked a bit less gruesome, a bit more whole.

  “The Lightsword,” Jacob breathed, sitting up. “It's real.”

  “Well, it's probably symbolic of a gift of energy from the living to the dead—” I began, while watching Thurmond go pale and stagger.

  “Sh. Don't ruin the moment,” Jacob said, covering my mouth with his hand.

  “Yeah, it's just like the movie,” Stacey breathed, looking at the glowing sword-shape made of light. “Lady Chastain draws the Lightsword from the Book of All Souls.”

  Clyde backed away, and for the first time, he seemed afraid.

  The dead family closed in around him, and this time, he wasn't able to repel them. They were united.

  “I own ye,” Clyde said. “I own all of ye, by rights—”

  Marcus stepped forward and drove the glowing blade of light through the center of Clyde's skeletal chest.

  Clyde screamed. Beams of golden light erupted from between his ribs, then from his concrete-filled eye sockets, his broken jaws.

  The entire skyscraper shuddered beneath us, as though an earthquake were rocking the city. Everyone who was still standing, including me, got thrown down sprawling across the rooftop.

  With an ear-splitting howl, Clyde ruptured open. Burning bones flung in every direction, out over every ledge of the building, tumbling out of sight.

  The golden light vanished.

  All the burning papers that had been floating around above us were out now, too, and black ash began to rain down, slowly and softly.

  “Dad?” Thurmond hissed, dropped the burning book, and sucked one finger as he looked around. “Dad?”

  There was no sign of his father's ghost, though. Nor any of the others. All the ghosts had vanished, leaving the living behind.

  Vance coughed and flopped like a broken fish, trying to get up.

  “You!” Thurmond snapped, stalking over to Vance. “You were going to kill my daughter.”

  “I...” The old man coughed. “I had reasons.”

  “To protect your own son?” Thurmond crossed his arms.

  “And my grandson. I've never met him, you know. My ex-wife...poisoned my son against me...” He coughed again. “I just wanted to protect them against all this.”

  “I should kill you,” Thurmond said. He picked up the long straight razor, wet with Hyacinth's blood.

  “Honey, don't,” Amberly said. “I mean, heck yeah, he deserves it, but you'll go to prison for life. We can't lose you like that.”

  “You faked your own death,” Thurmond said to Vance. “You made sure we'd lose the house. It was all to force us to come live in the tower, wasn't it? Was Frank Tartan in on it?”

  Vance didn't answer. He just looked away.

  “But the ghosts didn't kill us fast enough for you,” Thurmond said. “Is that right? You wanted to make sure my side of the family got taken instead of yours. So you figured you'd do it yourself. Where have you been all this time, anyway?”

  “An apartment on the thirteenth floor,” Vance croaked. “Under a false name—”

  “Ah-ha!” Stacey shouted, startling everyone. She seemed to shrink a little when everyone turned and stared. “Well, I was saying there had to be something creepy on the thirteenth floor in an old building like this. Turns out it was Vance. Only, you know, alive instead of a ghost. But still pretty awful, am I right? I called it. Just saying.” She cleared her throat as everyone just looked at her quietly.

  “I don't know what to do,” Thurmond said, pretty much ignoring her and turning his attention back to Vance. He tightened his grip on the blood-slick razor blade handle. “Good old Uncle Vance.”

  “Don't kill me. I can just go. I don't have a reason to come back,” Vance said. “The ghosts are leaving, or gone already. I'm legally dead. You won't see me again.”

  “You threatened my family. I can't just let you go free.” Thurmond waggled the blade in his hand.

  “Call the police,” Amberly suggested. She held her daughter close; Hyacinth bled from several shallow cuts on her neck and head. “Make him confess to everything he's done.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “Especially the assaulting a kid with a deadly weapon part.”

  “Will you do that?” Thurmond asked.

  Vance took a breath, then nodded. “There's also...more money. I may have drained things a little to force the house sale. It's not as much as you'd hope, but I'll provide the accounts—”

  “Fine, whatever. But you're confessing to the police.”

  “Yes.”

  Amberly ushered her kids downstairs to attend to Hyacinth's cuts. Thurmond stayed behind, keeping watch over his uncle while dialing the police.

  I walked over to Millie, about whose fate nobody really seemed to care. The gray-haired lady lay where she'd fallen on the rooftop, her eyes open, seeming to stare into empty space above my head.

  “I think Pink Falcon's ended her last flight over here,” I said. “It's going to be awkward to explain to the police why she's up here and out of her hospital bed.”

  Then Millie blinked, slowly, and shifted her head to look at me.

  “I'm not dead.” Her voice was a low scratch. “Just trapped in this useless body again. Elton's abandoned me. I can feel it. He's always haunted me, ever since...I killed him. Killed him in my home, and Dad with him. Clyde may have deceived me, but he told the truth about one thing: my family really is evil. And I'm just another member of my family. No better than the rest, worse than some. Even when I tried to be better, I turned out worse. Elton was my only love, and I killed him. He haunted me the rest of my days. The doctors tried to scrub my delusions, but they weren't delusions. When I was weak enough, he trapped me outside my body and wouldn't let me back in. But now I don't feel him. Years and years of hate and fury from him...and yet I feel so alone without him. I'm alone.” She closed her eyes. “I can't move.”

  “So, just to be clear,” Jacob said, sitting up and leaning back against a ledge that overlooked the city. “I carried that gigantic heavy light and that gigantic heavy backpack all the way up seventeen floors for no reason at all?”

  “Well, sixteen,” I said. “I carried it up the first floor.”

  “Seventeen. You're not counting the roof. That's like an eighteenth floor.”

  “Oh, you're such an accountant!” Stacey said, and gave him a quick kiss.

  I looked at Thurmond, who was watching the place where his father had been, the valuable old book burning in a little heap on the roof. He looked drained and unsteady on his feet, having transferred most of his energy to his dead relatives.

  “You okay?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “I'm not going to be okay for a while, after everything I just saw. But...I guess things will get better now. Right?”

  “They should. Jacob, what do you think?”

  “I think it's terrible.” Jacob walked over and looked at the burning remnants of leather and paper. “M.G.G. Jensen didn't like signing autographs, that's the thing. There are less than a hundred autographed copies of her books in the world. That's so sad.”

  “I mean about the ghosts,” I said. “Particularly Clyde from the basement.”

  “Oh, yeah. It's silent as a morgue around here. I'm not hearing any ghosts. Huge bit of advice, though: get some people with jackhammers a
nd remove his skeleton from the basement, just be to safe. Like first thing Monday morning.”

  “I'm on it,” Thurmond said. He looked around and sighed. “I guess my dad's gone, too.”

  “Yeah, dragging off the concrete guy to the other side was a team effort,” Jacob said. “It took the whole family. And they went with him, because that's where they all belong.”

  Thurmond nodded. “I'd better check on Hyacinth, then.”

  “First you guys need to carry Aunt Millie back to her hospital bed,” I said. “Jacob, can you help Thurmond carry her?”

  Jacob shook his head. “Fine. I have still one or two muscles in my back that I haven't pulled yet.”

  The guys carried her down, and Vance stumbled after them, which left nobody on the roof except Stacey and me, surrounded by ashes of burned paper that floated in the air, gradually breaking apart and dispersing in the night wind. The lights of much taller, newer towers glowed down at us. Below, the city spread out into the distance, full of tiny little lights that kept the darkness at bay.

  It was quiet, except for the wind, which blew away all traces that anything at all unusual had happened on that roof that night, other than the blood-spattered Spirit Mirror reflecting the lights from the next tower over.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  After that, we stayed at a hotel.

  While I was fairly satisfied that the tower had been de-haunted, I still wasn't eager to try and sleep there after the horrors we'd glimpsed. We ended up at the seventy-three-story Westin hotel several blocks away, which seemed huge, well-lit, modern, and full of live guests and staff coming and going all night, which was exactly the kind of place I was in the mood for.

  I drew a hot bath and washed out the assortment of new cuts and bruises that I seem to collect with every case. I'd been worried about Hyacinth, but the cuts inflicted by her uncle were shallow. Some EMT types had checked her out when the police came to collect Vance and his confession. The psychological damage from the experience would probably run a little deeper. But she was alive and would be fine, more or less, like the rest of her family.

  My hotel room window looked down on the roof of the Pennefort Building far below. I closed the blinds tight. The police had collected the straight razor and blood-spattered Spirit Mirror as evidence. I'd been pretty exhausted while giving my statement to the police, in which I'd focused on Vance's belief that he had to sacrifice his niece for supernatural reasons. I turned over Vance's notes about his encounters with his dead relatives. Vance kept his word about confessing—I'd even suggested he write it all out while we awaited the police, and he'd done that.

  By the time I sprawled out on my hotel bed, freshly bathed and thoroughly exhausted, it wasn't long before sunrise. Check-out was at eleven, so I'd rented my room for two nights.

  There was still plenty to do before we could leave town, anyway. After I awoke in my luxuriously private and modern room at the Westin, and ate my breakfast at about noon, I started writing my initial report for the clients, to provide along with our invoice. It was going to take several days to finalize that report, though; there was a lot of material to cover.

  Jacob wanted to do some tourist-y stuff that afternoon. I hadn't been aware that there was any tourist-y stuff to do in Atlanta, but apparently there was, and all of it was expensive. Stacey insisted we ride the giant Ferris Wheel in the middle of town, and she even insisted on paying extra to ride in the glass-bottom gondola. You'd think she would avoid heights after nearly being thrown off the top of the Pennefort Building, but nope.

  We spent Saturday and Sunday night checking the Pennefort Building again to see whether the ghosts were really gone, and we picked up no evidence that they were still hanging around. Jacob said the same, using his psychic vibes or whatever instead of our thermal cameras and electromagnetic frequency meters.

  Monday, we collected our gear from all around the building, breaking it down and packing it away in the van. The staff of the building put out Christmas decorations in the lobby, including a two-story fake tree and large pretend gift boxes wrapped in shiny paper. Small white lights glowed all over the tree, and an angel figure perched at the top, watching over the lobby. Green wreaths and red bows adorned the walls. Somebody put a red Santa hat and a fluffy cotton beard on one of the marble lion heads.

  Before we left town, we ate lunch with Thurmond and Amberly at Al's Authentic Restaurant. They arranged for us to have the “Authentic Event Room” at the back for privacy, so we could talk a bit more freely about ghosts and such than we might out in the public areas of the restaurant. The restaurant was much busier than usual; a local news show had run a story about Vance Pennefort's strange arrest and stranger confession, and apparently the Pennefort name was still famous enough to draw a lot of local interest to the building that day.

  As it turned out, Al's was authentically greasy, authentically heartburn-inducing bar food. They had hamburgers, fried onion rings, fried chicken sandwiches, chicken wings—there probably wasn't anything back in the kitchen but a frying pan and a deep fryer.

  “It's been so crazy,” Amberly said. “The police and the reporters. It's a real zoo. We can't wait to move out.”

  “So you're getting the other house back?” I asked, remembering Vance's talk of hiding some of the family money before faking his own death. “The one you were forced to put up for sale?”

  “We're thinking about leaving it up for sale, actually,” Thurmond said. “And maybe selling the tower—well, definitely selling the tower. But we're thinking...maybe somewhere new altogether.”

  “Like the mountains,” Amberly said. “Or a nice place on the lake.”

  “How's Millie?” I asked.

  “Not that I care how she is, but she's awake,” Amberly said. “And she's willing to move to a nursing-care facility, thank the Lord. She don't have more than a couple months left, anyhow, or we'd be making her confess to the cops, too. Her arms and legs don't move, so I guess her body's a prison cell as it is. ”

  “I guess I need to get in touch with my cousin Grady and tell him his dad's in jail, in case he's curious,” Thurmond said. “Work out some of the selling-the-tower stuff.”

  “It'll be so nice to meet your long-lost cousin and his little boy!” Amberly said, but Thurmond just shrugged.

  “I'm glad things seem to be improving for your family,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” Amberly said. “Thank y'all so much for everything. It was all pretty weird.”

  “Yep, it usually is.” Stacey glanced at my plate. “You going to eat those deep-fried green beans, Ellie?”

  “Help yourself.” I slid them over to her. There was already plenty of Al's authentic grease collecting in my stomach. I looked at Thurmond. “So, is this place named after Albert Pennefort? Your grandfather?”

  “No, I think it's after the guy who opened it. Alfonso something. It's changed hands a couple times. The current owner is Southeastern Restaurant Systems.” Thurmond shrugged. “I guess they should change the name to Systems's, or something, but it doesn't sound as personable.”

  “I like the fried chicken sandwich,” Jacob said. “Lots of nice crunchy pickles in there. The way it should be.”

  After lunch, I gave the clients an outline of my full report to come. Then Stacey, Jacob, and I headed out to the parking deck. It was still dim, cave-like, and water-stained, but at least the overhead lights didn't flicker quite as severely.

  Jacob's gray Hyundai was parked right next to our old blue van.

  “Looks like it's time to head home,” I said. I hadn't enjoyed my trip, but I wasn't looking forward to going back, either. Life back home had its share of problems, and no one to share them with, except my cat. At least it would be good to see him again. “Ready to load up, Stace?”

  “I was kinda thinking I'd ride back with Jakey-boo,” Stacey said. “I mean, he did drive all the way up here by himself, and that was a long way, especially with the weather...”

  “It's fine,” I said.
r />   “I mean, we'll caravan, you know, and you can call us if you need anything—”

  “I can go alone. It's only a few hours. You act like we're crossing the Sahara or something.”

  “Actually, if you're interested in desert hiking—” she began.

  “Not interested. Have a nice trip. Jacob, thanks for coming out.”

  We split up. I let them pull away first. Then I took a meandering path through the city, past blocks of glimmering skyscrapers, then blocks of old, low brick buildings with plywood windows and graffiti-covered walls. Trees grew from every spare patch of dirt in between. The city teemed with life, with crowds of people on the corners, and wildflowers and tree roots growing up through cracks in the sidewalk, and ivy creeping up wherever it could.

  So many people crammed together, millions of people. So much emotion, so much drama. The city wasn't nearly as old as Savannah, but it must have been teeming with ghosts of its own. I wondered if I could make my escape here, set up shop, leave the drama of home behind.

  Then I found the interstate and headed home, back east to the coast, toward the much smaller and older city where all my personal ghosts and demons still lived.

  THE END

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  I thought it would be fun to get Ellie out of town and investigating a new kind of case. The idea of a haunted skyscraper has long appealed to me, ever since I spent several years working in one at a corporate office job. When working late, I had many chances to observe the vast spaces of the tower lying dark and silent. It was interesting to look into the earliest generation of skyscrapers built in Atlanta during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like the Flatiron, Candler, and Healey buildings, to consider these unprecedented towers rising above a city of horse-drawn wagons.

  Major historical events, including the mayor's race of 1969, have been fictionalized. The two mayoral candidates, Rodney Cook and Sam Massell (the eventual winner) were actually both in favor of desegregation. The governor at the time, however, was famous segregationist Lester Maddox, known for wacky tricks like riding his bicycle backwards, who also believed the Civil Rights movement was an elaborate plot by Russian spies.