Modern Pantheon: Ghost

by Grayson Barrett

  Chapter 13

  From: L.Garrison@FBI-SI.com

  To: Special Agent John Jonas

  Subject: Emmitt Cane Murder Investigation.

  John

  Given Mr. Amberose's history that strongly implies he is a mage, I started my investigation with him. However, surveillance shows that he was eating alone in his house during the time of the murder.

  There is something it did pick up, however. Surveillance outside of Mr. Amberose's house placed Thomas Amberose and Lance Ruben together in a car a few hours ago. Mr. Ruben sat in his passenger seat armed with a pistol while the two had a conversation.

  My recommendation is to continue this investigation, but turning to Lance Ruben as the main suspect of interest. To summarize last month’s report, Lance has earned billions in marginally legal, impossible to trace methods. His recent dealings with Mr. Amberose imply a connection to the “alleged” supernatural community. I can’t say with certainty that Mr. Ruben was behind Emmitt Cane's murder, but I am have no doubt that he has some involvement the events leading to his death.

  That was the last we spoke to one another for the rest of the drive. The church was just far enough away from the suburbs to make streetlights scarce. Wasting no time, Lara and I got out of the car the moment it stopped; the only delay was when she grabbed a white box from the glove compartment. She handed the keys roughly to Cameron, and started toward the door.

  I was about to get out, but took a long, embarrassed look around. I’m not getting out of a church parking lot in the nude unless I was dead sure Lara and I were the only ones there.

  “You going to be okay?” Cameron said as he got back in behind the wheel.

  “We’ll be fine,” I assured him.

  He nodded. Satisfied by the fact that I was alone, I got out, holding the jacket close.

  The church itself was deserted as Cameron said it would be. The lights behind stained glass were, and the double doors were locked. It wasn’t a large building, but the sizable parking lot made me think the place had a lot of traffic during the day. The door of the church was glass, and had a push pedal inside that allowed an easy way out, but no way in while locked.

  “Hold on.” She held her hand in front of the door as her forehead strained. When she pulled back her hand a few seconds later, nothing happened. Putting her hand forward again, she bit her lip as she thought. It was only forty degrees out here, and Cam’s jacket size was a bit smaller than mine, meaning the neck didn’t completely close around my waist. Obviously, I didn’t wear it like a normal jacket, deciding instead to keep my lower half covered, but the whole ordeal was making me extremely chilly.

  “You remember the equation to calculate inertia?” she asked.

  I did, and let her know.

  “Thought so,” she said, and on her next try, the push-pedal plunged in towards us and the door nudged out. With magic so intertwined with belief, the equation wasn’t her setback. Rather, it was her doubt. By reassuring the fact that she was using the right equations, she had no problems. It would have been easy for me to do it for her if I had a piece of steel, but didn’t want to incur her anger.

  She held the door open for me, and we walked in silently as Cameron returned to the car and drove off. I’d never felt more alienated. Here we were, breaking into a church. Lara in her spectacular, navy dress and me holding a jacket over my cold genitals. Although I was raised Christian, my relationship with God in the past ten years or so has been a bit distant. Yet Cameron was right; a church really was the best way to avoid a ghost. He didn’t know it, but sacred ground of any religion is so full of beliefs that it causes the Equilibrium to solidify. While a church as small as this one would have minimal impact on magic, a place like the Saint Paul Cathedral, for example, could block magic entirely. Those natural defenses mixed with the Christian beliefs of Sanctuary means a double-protection against Gregory Scythe.

  The church itself had a small lobby preceding the actual place of warship. A small, marble bowl for holy water was built into the wall on either side. Feeling like a heathen about to walk into a den of lions, I hesitated in the entrance. Lara, on the other hand, looked indifferent as she walked over to the nearest table unceremoniously pulled off the tablecloth off. “Here.”

  I looked at it like it was on fire. “I can’t wear that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It has a cross embroidered on it.” I flicked my eyes down to it.

  She looked, but shrugged. “You’re not a religious man.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m going to desecrate one of His tablecloths.”

  “Fine,” she looked quickly around, noticed an open door to an office along the side of the lobby, crossed the room, and came back with a robe made for someone twice my width. Hoping I wasn’t going to hell for this, I threw it on.

  Then I realized just how much exhaustion had overtaken me. I saw the nearest bench along one wall and promptly sprawled down on my stomach, ready to collapse.

  Lara stood beside me, leaning against a nearby table. “You alright?”

  In response, I heaved air out of my squished nostrils.

  “Yeah, that’s how I feel, too,” she said, and sat by my head at the end of the bench. Gently, she set her fingers on the back of my damaged hand. “May I see?”

  I offered it, limply. “You know any first–”

  She took it in a two handed grip and heaved. This time my lack of preparation had me twitching in pain, and my voice went unnaturally high.

  “–aid,” I finished. Then, I stared wearily at my hand. Once the queasiness passed I realized I could move it again, and that it wasn’t bent. Not even a little!

  “Yep.” She answered. “Where are you hurt?”

  She had the box she’d taken from the car on the lap of her wrinkled dress, which smelled like chocolate for some reason. The smooth fabric shone even in the near blackness of the church. Neither of us even looked for light switches, since neither of us wanted to draw the cops’ attention. Assuming we hadn’t tripped some silent alarm, we were safe.

  Relatively.

  I offered my wrist, and she rummaged into the box. “So what was with that argument back in the car?” I asked to take my mind off the stings I knew would come.

  “I just don’t trust Cameron,” she answered, putting a cotton ball against the top of the small bottle of disinfectant and flipping it, wetting the ball. “Besides. I just don’t like his idea.”

  “He’s been helping us from the beginning. What’s not to trust? Besides, he had a good point. Everyone believes a church is a sanctuary.”

  “I don’t doubt that he wants to know the truth about what happened to Emmitt, but I get the feeling he knows more than he’s letting on, and that he’s...” She trailed off with a sigh. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just tired. I guess it was a good idea to come here. It’s just that churches always make me feel strange. Like I’m being watched, you know? I’ve never put much thought into religion and God. I haven’t prayed in years,” she said to me timidly. Then in an informative tone, she said, “This’ll hurt.” She dabbed my wrist with an alcohol drenched cotton ball. While it stung, I found it easy to ignore after what she did to my finger. “This is my first time in church since Uncle Geoff’s funeral. You probably hardly remember that.”

  I recalled the time as I closed my eyes. I was only sixteen when I’d first been taken in as her father’s apprentice. I remember the funeral especially well. The sting wasn’t dying down, so I just talked to keep my mind occupied. “No, I remember. I remember because your Uncle Geoff looked a lot like my dad. Scared the hell out of me.”

  “But your father isn’t dead.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, surprising myself with all the sarcasm in my tone.

  “He escaped the Imperium’s capture. You know that.”

  Even with closed eyes, I could still feel her glare. “Maybe Dad isn’t dead, but we know the Guardians aren’t above lying. And the truth is I was a sixteen-year-old kid wh
o knew nothing about how the world works. I’ve always figured they were all just too afraid to tell me.”

  “The Imperium isn’t that bad.” Lara said. “Besides, even if the other Guardians held back, my dad would have told you.”

  “Dad had a lot of enemies.” I closed my eyes again and tried to keep myself comfortable on the wooden bench as she grabbed at my other wrist. Pushing the still attached cuff off the burn, she dabbed at the injury as I went on. “He ran out on more than just the Guardians.”

  She stopped dabbing at my wrist, but kept her cold hand on mine when I stopped speaking. A small, hidden part of me that held back details about my life for years urged me to finally tell Lara about my life prior to living on the farm with her. To tell her about the several months with Dad while we spent on the run, when I’d rarely had the luxury of staying in the same bed two nights in a row, and the months after that living in Brazil. My mind flickered to the horrid gang of people, if you could call them that, who’d finally captured him.

  But the rest of me pushed the thought aside in an instant. Lara was a lot of things, but sympathetic she was not. Still, simply dropping the subject seemed rude. “I don’t know – I always figured Dad would contact me if he were still alive. That he’d let me know he’s okay, at least. It’s been about ten years, and I haven’t heard anything from him.”

  The silence between us remained for a few minutes, and I could tell Lara felt tense, always wanting to know more. Then, she rummaged through the first aid kit again, folded two bandages into long, thin strips and pressed them firmly to the burned insides of each wrist, pushing them underneath the cuffs.

  What business was it of hers to press into my past? I let my eyes close, feeling a peaceful calm enter my body as sleep drew near. If I had the energy to be annoyed, I’d have shown it.

  “Thomas?” she said after a minute, while I was stuck in a bleary haze.

  “Mmm?”

  “I’m sorry for how bad I treated you. You know, back when you moved in with us.”

  An apology? From Lara? That’s a first.

  A familiar childishness arose within me, like it did whenever she was near, but I stopped myself from acting on it. Maybe it was because we were in a church, or maybe because she’d just saved me from certain death and imprisonment, but I decided to be forthcoming.

  “We were young,” I said through closed eyes. “And it couldn’t have been easy for you, either.”

  “But I’m not the same person anymore.”

  “Neither am I – thank God for that,” I said, feeling instantly like a fool for my choice of words while in a church. “Can you imagine me in my Goth outfit, nowadays? Goths and Preps just aren’t meant to live under the same roof. Ugh, those memories of how I dressed still make me shiver in horror.”

  She held an uneasy silence beside me, but didn’t reply.

  “So,” I said, realizing we’d possibly be here for a long time. This was the most rapport we’d had in years, so I decided to shift the focus onto her. “Why become a PI?”

  She snorted. “Dumb idea, I know.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re good at it.”

  She was silent for another moment. I could see she was making the same choice I was a second ago, and asking herself if she should entertain my pry. “Dad tried to train me to be a battlemage, you know. When he decided I wasn’t cut out for it, he took you on as his apprentice instead. After I failed the field exam, I guess this was just my stupid way of trying to show him I could follow in his footsteps. It’s the only cop-like thing I knew I could do.”

  “Oh,” I said awkwardly, since I didn’t know how else to respond. I’d always known there was tension between her and her dad. Yet I never stopped to realize she’d devoted years of her life to a dead-end profession to try to prove her worth. I fidgeted at the thought.

  A minute or two later, a headlight’s glow streamed in through the front doors and windows, making colored patterns on the wall through the stained glass.

  Considering that Lara didn’t approve of Cameron, I decided to jump up before her. I got up and let him in when he approached.

  “Here,” he said, handing me a set of clothing on his way inside. “Don’t know if it’ll fit, but it’s better than, err, that. It’s some of Emmitt’s old clothes.”

  I thanked him, grabbed the medical kit from Lara, and walked off to the restroom. The lights came on automatically, as blinding as a police’s searchlight. It took me a few seconds to blink through it, and was glad there were no windows.

  I threw off the robe, carefully hanging it over the end of the stall door as I pulled on Emmitt’s old garments. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was committing another sin, wearing the clothes of a dead man – this must be that “strange feeling” Lara mentioned earlier.

  Before I dressed, I looked ruefully in the mirror at the wound on my butt and had to hold back another sigh of pain. I suspected I’d have a welt, but this... I’d be lucky to sit down for a month. I’d put more power into the seatbelt hook than I thought I’d ever have to, and the half-moon shaped spot proved that I needed to be more careful. A pure white and heavily painful rash was beginning to poke out on the skin where it made direct contact with the cold metal.

  I knew what I had to do, and took no enjoyment doing it. One suppressed scream of agony later, a burn-cream smeared Band-Aid was firmly in place. I then donned on the ill-fitting outfit. The khaki pants were a bit too short and wide, but they covered my ankles. A belt held them up. The pressed, button-up shirt barely covered my entire midriff. The sleeves fell a bit short, and the shoulders a bit too broad, but they looked pretty slick when rolled up. Overall, I looked like a fairly normal person again.

  The only thing missing were my foci. Clothes or not, I still felt naked without them.

  There were so many different plastics that I never learned anything about. Several mages learned how to imbue cotton, but even plants bore some resistance toward magic. Not enough to prevent a focus from being made, but enough to make the enchantments wear off within days, rather than weeks. Sadly, even the button on the pants was of an unfamiliar metal, so there was nothing I could imbue by memory alone. I took a final look at myself, ran a wet hand through my hair, which got stylishly ruffled in the fray, and walked back into the dark church.

  I couldn’t be sure, but I thought Lara was asleep. She was sitting at the bench with her head on the nearby table, cradled in her arms. I’d seen her sleep that way in the past. She joked once, saying it was the thing she learned how to do best in college. After sitting for hours every day at a desk listening to a boring lectures, I couldn’t blame her. Cameron, however, wasn’t in the lobby. I stared down into the church sanctuary and spotted him just in front of the altar, his head bowed and hands folded.

  I hadn’t planned to go further than the lobby. I’ve already pressed my luck, but I ought to at least thank Cameron. Shifting uncomfortably, I decided to go over and join him.

  “I used to come here twice a week,” he said, as I was halfway down the aisle. His voice was hardly above a whisper, but in the serene silence he may as well been shouting. “I considered Father Conwell as my closed friend.”

  “Twice?”

  “Once on Sunday, of course. But again on Tuesday, where Father Conwell would read the scripture with me and answer any of my questions. My father was jailed. Mother wasn’t around, and I rebelled against the world. Everyone said I needed a therapist, but Emmitt refused to get me one. Instead, he sent me here. At first everyone thought that Uncle Emmitt was cheeping out. Didn’t want to pay a shrink.”

  “Is that what he did?”

  Cameron smirked to himself and nodded. “Yes, but I’m thankful for it. I wouldn’t have suggested coming here unless I was absolutely sure it would be within his wishes. He glanced up at the crucifix. “Are you a religious man, Thomas?”

  “I looked through the Bible a few times.” I said, coming up beside him. “It’s never been my calling. I take it you are?”<
br />
  He gave a small nod as he said, “After what happened to my dad, I was lost. Alone. But Tuesday evenings with Father Conwell brought me meaning. We don’t live just to live. There has to be more. Evolution teaches us that the sole point of our existence is to pass along our genes, but the theory says nothing of morals. When I was at my lowest, at a point where I thought nothing in the world mattered, Father Conwell showed me otherwise. Do you believe in destiny, Thomas?”

  “No,” I said without thinking – I didn’t need to. Not about this issue.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Having a destiny implies that we have a course that’s already locked in for us. Like we’re going down a path surrounded by impassible walls. It implies we don’t have a choice in our actions. However, it’s our choices that make us into the people we are. Our choices are what have an impact on the world.”

  He nodded, listening to what I said and processing it before responding. “Adam and Eve each ate a piece of fruit from the tree of knowledge. Before then, one could argue, that they had two and only two choices – obey God, or not. After that first bite, the knowledge they gained allowed them to look at the consequences of their actions. It forced them to make their own choices. One way to interpret this story is that by taking a bite of that apple, they’d given birth to their soul.”

  I tilted my head, not because it was a new take on the story I hadn’t heard, but because it was essentially the version of the story I was taught.

  The Imperium tells us that free will is the driving force behind magic, and for once I agree with them. A strong belief can cause magic to manifest. This is because when we pour our belief into something, we’re pouring our free will into it as well. While the Equilibrium bats down all beliefs except the most specific ones, it is still those beliefs that enact magical changes.

  “The existence of the soul is the one part of the Bible Father and I argued about,” Cameron said.

  “You don’t believe in the soul?”

  “I believe that I was born with a purpose. That the universe has some plan for me.”

  “And what is that plan?”

  “Currently?” Cameron smirked to himself. “To discover what this plan is. I’ve lived an unlikely life, Thomas. I was born in the slums, but every year I go on, I get more and more. I never asked to meet Emmitt Cane – resented it, even, because it meant separating myself from my father. I never asked for my job at Cane Industries, but now people look at me with a fearful contempt. Every action I make leads me, in the end, to some greater purpose. The closer I come to whatever that purpose is, the more convinced I am that I am here for a specific reason.”

  “So quit.”

  He turned to face me.

  “Quit your job. Take a vacation. Do something for yourself. Luck can be deceiving. Sometimes you get what you work for. Sometimes you don’t – either way, you’re the one that, in the end, controls your actions.”

  He looked back at the cross, silently.

  “I’m not saying you should do these things, but the point is, you can. Some people do have a purpose, but no one is born with one. Find your own purpose. Don’t have someone else choose it for you.”

  “Maybe you can, but not me,” he said with a gentle smile. “I’ve always known I’m here for a reason.”

  He bowed his head again and closed his eyes. Religion and politics have a tendency to pull people apart. I’d just met Cameron, and already felt the beginning of a friendship, and didn’t want to ruin it.

  I considered joining him in prayer, but a mixture of emotions stopped me. Instead, I patted him lightly on the shoulder. “I’ll be in the lobby.”