“If you’re looking for the spot where the event investor killed himself, I think you’re on it,” I said, and Calista actually flinched, looking down as if she might have stepped in something nasty.
“Starting to get readings, people!” Drew called from out on the lawn. “It’s showtime!”
Drew’s meter glowed red and began to whine, signaling that it picked up fluctuations in the electromagnetic frequencies that often accompanied ghost sightings.
“Getting something on the audio,” Calista said, pressing her fingers against the receiver in her ear. “We’ve got a hot one tonight.”
“Son of a bitch, will you look at that?” Pete’s whisper had us all turning toward where he stood. Pinpricks of light rose from the grass like fireflies; only this was the wrong time of year for lightning bugs. “Fairy lights” the lore called them, or “will-o-the-whisps.” You could chase them but never catch them, and those who tried came to grief.
“Over there!” Kell pointed, snapping photos with his own modified camera as Pete went for video footage. I saw two young men dressed in white linen suits and boater hats strolling down one of the gravel walkways, deep in conversation, their images glitching now and then like a bad video feed, or wavering and then disappearing altogether.
“What are you picking up, Cassidy?” Kell asked me quietly. I knew he realized I saw a vision since the death grip I had on the railing would have been a dead giveaway.
“I see the scene from the postcard, only like it’s real,” I replied. “Nothing dangerous.”
But that wasn’t exactly true. The hair on the back of my neck rose, and I felt a prickle against my skin like a storm rising. I looked around at the resonance served up by my contact with the railing, but nothing seemed amiss or threatening. Yet there was something… waiting.
“Hey!” Drew yelled and staggered back once, then again. “Something’s pushing me!”
“Get off me!” Pete hollered, stumbling as if someone shoved him hard from one side.
“Watch your hands, freak!” Calista slapped at empty air in outrage.
“We need to get out of here,” I said to Kell, drawing my iron knife in one hand and pulling out a canister of salt in the other. Just then, I felt cold hands in the middle of my back pushing me forward. The wind had kicked up from nothing to gusts that whipped my hair into my eyes.
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Kell agreed. “Everyone, pack up!”
I held on to one of the bandstand columns and looked out over the empty park, no longer seeing the long-ago vista. The temperature plummeted, and my breath misted in air far too cold for the season this far south. Just outside the glow of the streetlights, I caught a glimpse of movement. Darker shadows glided just on the edge of the light, and I wondered if it was the same thing I saw at the Archive. I figured the odds were good, but that didn’t tell me what we were up against.
Calista packed her gear, swearing as unseen hands battled her. Pete and Drew continued their work, though they stood back to back against an invisible threat.
“Levels are off the charts!” Drew reported as his EMF scanner squealed, its read-out glowing bright red.
“Getting blurs and movement,” Pete said changing a look up from his camera. “But what I see with my eyes isn’t showing up on the display.”
A gust of wind swept around the base of the bandstand, catching something shiny and swirling it into the air. I bent to pick it up without thinking and froze as my hand closed around a crumpled, empty cigarette carton.
This time, the vision hit me hard. I saw the park through someone else’s eyes. A glance down took in long legs that weren’t my own over boots far too big for me. I saw hands strike a match and light a cigarette. A man’s hands, with broad palms and long fingers, and an old, deep scar just below the right knuckles.
The cigarette glowed against the twilight sky. No one else was in sight, and the man took a long drag, resting. He fidgeted as if afraid someone would see. His thoughts churned restlessly, and I could feel his unhappiness. He felt poised on the brink of making a big decision, and I sensed he didn’t like any of his options.
The wind picked up, tugging at his clothes and making him shiver. He pushed away from the bandstand, almost finished with his smoke. He shivered in the sudden cold. Too late, he recognized that he was no longer alone.
“Who’s there?” He tried to sound defiant. “Quit screwing around with me. If you followed me, have the balls to admit it. I told you, I’m done with this kind of bullshit!”
No answer came. He glanced around, more nervous now. “I mean it! Go away!” I could tell that he thought he knew who lurked in the shadows, but I feared he was wrong.
He dropped the cigarette and ground it out under his shoe, squaring his shoulders and heading down the bandstand stairs, unaware of the shadow that followed him. He looked over his shoulder, aware on some level of the danger, but he searched for human faces, not an inhuman threat.
Overhead, the streetlight flickered and faltered, then went dark. I heard the man cry out in fear and pain, felt him drop the crumpled cigarette pack, then everything went black.
“Cassidy!” Kell’s voice sounded from far away.
“What’s going on with her?” Calista asked, the edge in her voice between fear and annoyance.
Kell didn’t answer, and my attempt sounded more like a groan than actual words. I felt Kell pull me up and wrap an arm around me. “We’ve got to get you moving, Cassidy,” he urged, barely hiding his fear.
“I saw him,” I managed. “The missing guy. He was here.”
Kell steered me toward our parked cars, keeping me on my feet. “We knew that, Cassidy. Before we came.”
“No,” I protested woozily. “I saw him—I saw what happened to him.”
“That cigarette pack? You got a vision from it?”
I nodded, trying to ignore how the movement made the world blur around me. “Something chased him and took him. Not human. Not normal.”
“What’s she saying?” Drew asked, jogging up alongside us. “Did she touch something? See something?”
“Yeah,” Kell replied. “Give her some space. I’ll fill you in later.”
We got back to the cars without incident. The black shadows didn’t follow us outside the park, but I knew they could go farther if they wanted to. Hell, I’d seen them all the way across town. Kell got me settled in the passenger seat of his car while he went back to talk to the SPOOK team. We had all worked together enough times that I knew the others were concerned for me, even Calista despite her tough-as-nails façade.
Kell talked with them for a few minutes, calming them down and reassuring himself that they were all right. I had no idea whether their instruments registered even a fraction of what happened out there, but I knew none of us questioned that we’d been at the epicenter of paranormal activity tonight.
Kell came back moments later. “Don’t let them go back out there tonight,” I said, finally catching my breath after the vision.
“Don’t worry. They won’t. They saw enough for one night,” Kell reassured me. “C’mon. Let’s get you home.”
I felt absurdly grateful that Kell had given me a ride that night since I didn’t feel steady enough to drive yet. My thoughts spun, trying to put the pieces together. So many questions and not enough answers. Before I knew it, we were parked in front of my house.
“Thanks for coming along tonight,” Kell said. “Although I’m sorry it turned out the way it did.”
I managed a smile and stretched up to kiss him. “That’s all right. I think we saw something important; I’m just not sure what it meant.” I felt the adrenaline crash, and suddenly I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
Kell chuckled. “Go to bed, Cassidy. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Some date,” I muttered, too exhausted to consider doing anything else but awake enough to feel disappointed.
“Next time, I promise we’ll go someplace un-haunted,” Kell replied, walking me to the
door.
“Where’s the fun in that?”
He gave me another kiss, one that promised a much better evening on a future night, and then I went inside and closed the door behind me, sagging against it. Baxter jumped at my feet, anxious for attention. I scooped him up into my arms and collapsed onto the couch. As soon as Bax settled down, I dug out my phone although I knew it was too late to call Teag.
Need to know everything you can find out about the missing guy, I texted. Think I saw him in a vision. Definitely our kind of thing. I added, remembering the creepy opaque shadow and how it seemed to swallow up the frightened young man. Bax nestled under my chin in comfort. I kicked off my boots, pulled a throw down over us, and fell asleep right there, too tired to bother going upstairs. I suspected tomorrow was going to be a busy day. We had a shadow to catch.
Scandals and Serial Killers
The big cloth banner read “Scandals of the Worlds’ Fairs.” It draped across the front of the Museum of the Lowcountry like a tabloid headline.
“What do you think?” Alistair McKinnon, the museum’s curator, had a pained look on his face as we stood together on the sidewalk, looking up at the banner.
“It’s a bit salacious,” I allowed.
Alistair winced. “It’s practically clickbait,” he said with a sigh. “Welcome to the art of peddling history in the modern era. We’ve got TV to thank for it. Unveil a new archeological find and everyone yawns. Reveal some of history’s dirty little secrets, and the tickets sell out in minutes.”
I grinned. “Then you’re lucky that history has such juicy gossip. Admit it; the banner is good marketing.”
Alistair gave me a long-suffering look and nodded. “I know. And we all win when ticket sales and memberships go up. It just seems so… sordid.”
I clapped him on the shoulder. “As if sorting through old bones and reading dead people’s diaries and letters isn’t?”
Alistair and I are old friends and professional colleagues. We call on each other’s expertise regularly for appraisals and restoration advice. Alistair knows a bit about my gift, but not the whole truth. Actually, that’s not completely right. He did have an encounter where he witnessed far more than was safe for him to know, and Sorren used his vampire mojo to alter a few memories.
“Why the sudden interest in Worlds’ Fairs?” Alistair asked as we headed up the steps.
I thought about the incident in Hampton Park the night before and repressed a shiver. Teag texted me early, letting me know he was on the trail of the information I requested, and I told him that I wanted to stop by the museum on my way in. “I saw the display at the Archive,” I answered truthfully. “It got me thinking.” Quite the understatement, but true nonetheless.
Alistair laughed. “I’m actually surprised you haven’t come across any of the memorabilia at the store. Sooner or later, everyone decides to clean out their old stash of great-grandpa’s souvenirs.”
“I don’t recall anything,” I replied as we went inside. “Maybe the fair was unique enough that people wanted to hang onto the items. Mrs. Morrissey didn’t seem to have any trouble getting folks to loan her what they had.”
“Mrs. Morrissey could charm the gold out of Fort Knox,” Alistair said. “Why doesn’t that surprise me at all?”
We walked into the large room reserved for rotating exhibits. Another large banner hung over the entrance. “Were the Fairs really that scandal-prone?”
“See for yourself,” Alistair replied. “You know, we’re also pointing up the technological advances unveiled at each of the fairs, but that wouldn’t draw the crowds nearly like a hint of scandal. And any time you’ve got a high profile, big money event, there’s going to be something that goes wrong or someone who misbehaves.”
Near the front of the room, a series of bold, graphic paintings caught my attention. “Are those Andy Warhol paintings?”
Alistair grinned. “Not originals, no. But that’s a copy of his 13 Wanted Men artwork for the 1964 World’s Fair. It caused such a scandal that the Fair organizers had it covered over in silver paint before the Fair even opened. Warhol recreated it elsewhere, but it never actually appeared at the Fair itself.”
I moved closer, intrigued. The enlarged black and white photographs were clearly mug shots, taken from the front and side. “What was so scandalous? These look like they came from the police blotter.”
“They did,” Alistair replied. “And it’s an odd tale. Some people say that the Fair feared legal trouble from the accused men. Others said it was political, or glorifying violence. There are even some whispers that the way the photos are arranged, so that the men seem to be looking at each other, put the censors on alert that it was some kind of gay message.”
I almost laughed, then remembered what things were liked back in 1964, and realized that was no laughing matter. “Really?”
Alistair shrugged. “It’s possible. Warhol liked to push the limits, and he made no attempt to hide his own orientation, despite the times.”
I squinted at the black and white mug shots, trying to imagine a censor reading forbidden love into such stark images. “Makes you wonder why some things were so much on the censor’s minds,” I remarked.
“That’s always the case,” Alistair replied. “Of course, to play up the scandal, we’ve got profiles on all of the thirteen men—they weren’t angels. They deserved their place on the Most Wanted list.” I trailed down the row of photos, clippings and personal effects linked to each of the hardened criminals featured in Warhol’s ill-fated display. While the initial set of art prints didn’t elicit a reaction from my gift, I kept my distance from the small cases containing the wanted men’s belongings and didn’t pause too long in front of the headlines describing their crimes.
Even without getting close, I sensed a darkness that hung over the dead men’s possessions. Anger, alienation, vengeance, and a demand to be seen, to be acknowledged radiated from the mundane items like watches, wallets, rings, and tie tacks. I backed away, eager to move beyond the reach of the unsettling resonance.
He led me to the next section, and I startled to look up at a huge metal man. It had the retro-futuristic look that made me think Flash Gordon and picture pulp magazines from the 1930s. Smooth, golden metal skin covered the robot. He had a broad, boxy chest, cylindrical legs and arms, and a face that had blocky, almost sculptural features.
“Meet Elektro,” Alistair said. “He was the star of the 1939 World’s Fair. This is the real Elektro—on loan from Mansfield, Ohio. He even had a metal dog.” Alistair laid a hand on the huge robot’s bulky arm. “Elektro could walk, say several hundred words, and smoke a cigarette.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I guess he doesn’t have to worry about his lungs.”
“He’s quite remarkable,” Alistair said, patting the robot fondly. “Believe it or not—there was no person inside, pulling strings. Elektro was the real deal—run by electricity and vacuum tubes.”
I looked up at the smooth, emotionless face. “He reminds me of a golem.” I’d read tales of large hollow men made of clay and animated by magic, and I knew enough about the supernatural to believe they were true.
“You aren’t the first to say that,” Alistair said. “But to my knowledge, no one’s seen him move without permission. In fact, he spent about fifty years in a box in an abandoned museum before the new owner reopened the place and dug him out of the crate.”
The impassive metal features made me vaguely uncomfortable. “What’s the scandal?”
“On a mild scale, I’ve heard that some of Elektro’s recorded phrases sound a bit sexist by today’s standards. Not really a surprise,” Alistair said. “But the real scandal was a lot darker, and it didn’t have anything to do with Elektro. There was a bomb at the UK pavilion. After all, war had started in Europe, and New York was getting around four hundred bomb threats a week. A few bad explosions, too. In this case, the police removed the bomb and took it somewhere else to defuse it, but it detonated and killed the polic
emen who tried to disable it.”
“Sounds like something ripped from today’s headlines,” I remarked. I wandered past the wall of pictures and information about Elektro toward the somber collection of newspaper articles and photos showing the bomb’s damage.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Alistair agreed.
Around the next corner, I confronted two life-size, wax figures of men in nineteenth-century garb, one of whom held a gun pointed at the other. “Is that supposed to be President McKinley?” My history geekiness came in handy sometimes.
“Very good,” Alistair said as if I were a star pupil. “But even the people who vaguely remember that William McKinley was shot don’t know it happened at the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in the Temple of Music.”
“At a World’s Fair? Wow.”
Alistair nodded. “It gets even more interesting. The president’s secretary was afraid of an assassination attempt—the setting was too public—and tried twice to cancel, but McKinley insisted. An unemployed anarchist shot him as he went through the receiving line, and McKinley died a few days later. The killer got the electric chair.”
I tried to decide which seemed more unsettling, the seven-foot robot or the hyper-realistic wax figures depicting an assassination in progress. Behind the figures loomed another display wall of photos and headlines, as well as a Victorian man’s coat in a glass case, with a card noting that it was the one worn by McKinley when he was shot.
My eye followed the banners to the one proclaiming the Charleston exposition. “What do you have from the exposition here?”
Alistair chuckled. “Nothing that rivals Elektro or McKinley’s assassination, thank heavens. But two of the investors ended up going bankrupt, and the press coverage in the day was lurid. Of course, when the press begins digging, there’s no telling what they’ll find, and they hit pay dirt. One of the men was having an affair, and the other had fathered a child out of wedlock with his business partner’s wife. And one of the show’s promoters turned out to be nearly insolvent due to gambling debts.”
Trifles and Folly 2 Page 33