Liz was the only one of the group still standing by doggedly.
I walked over to stand beside her and looked out the droplet-smeared window at the large Vista Walk gardens and paths, now jumping with rain, the edge of the California Cabanas Building misted in the distance. “Tired, Mom?”
She grinned at the jellied panes. “Better watch out, you might get used to calling me that.”
I traded her a wan smile of my own. “Too late to start now. Why didn’t I call you that as a kid?”
“Oh, you did. Rarely.”
“Rarely?”
“When I wasn’t embarrassing you. The crazy woman in the gypsy dresses and black-dyed hair.”
“But it wasn’t dyed.”
“Still isn’t. But they didn’t know that. The neighbors. Your friends at school. Think we should go outside, check-out the pool area, the sundeck?”
“You said you thought Nathaniel was still in the building somewhere.”
“What do you think?”
I rolled it over. “I think I should listen to my mother.”
“What if she embarrasses you again?”
“It would be the first time. You never embarrassed me, Liz, I was crazy about you, really, just didn’t want to show it. Dad, on the other hand…”
She turned then and looked longingly into my eyes.
Then she called to the others. “Okay! Nothing here! Let’s roll! Got the lower level to comb!”
Mr. Adams groaned. The others stood, milled, Donna looking hollow-eyed and fragile again. Put your arm around her! I tried to telepath to Byron, but he was looking pretty fragile himself. Katie glanced my way, turned and led the others toward the door. Liz and I started after them.
Halfway to the door, still looking straight ahead at the backs of the others, Liz slowed and gripped my arm without turning. “It’s you, Elliot.”
I came up short, swiveled to her. “What--?”
Still not turning, she squeezed my arm once. “The boy’s here. In the Ballroom.”
My heart knocked. “You can see him?”
“I sense him. But he’s closest in spirit to you. Like the cards say. Don’t know why, just is. The others are in the way--blocking the energy. But you can see him, find him. It’s up to you, Elliot.”
And she left me there.
At the door, next-to-last to leave, Katie cast me a worried look, but Liz was insistent, and no one resists Liz.
I turned and faced the dark, cathedral-sized cavern alone.
Silence.
But not quite.
A low level of dull energy buzzed somewhere inside me like an errant cicada.
I walked back to the antique clock and looked up: 11:50.
That’s when the cold settled over me like a shroud, puckering my skin, lifting my hackles: something was going to happen.
Thud
I jumped a foot high at the soft sound.
Turning around, I realized I hadn’t jumped at all except in my mind. I scanned the enormous Ballroom. Everything looked the same as before. But something kept catching my eye, some smallest thing just enough out of place, out of symmetry.
My eyes kept coming back to the same vacant chair. Its shape.
I approached apprehensively, half-expecting some small crouching animal. Then I saw the handbag, on its side, the mouth open and draping the lip of the hardback: Katie’s handbag. She’d forgotten her purse.
I came up, bent, and lifted it from the cushion; I could feel that something wrong sensation immediately and—in a moment—realized what. The bag was too light. The carpet ball.
I pulled the leather mouth wide from its draw strings, reached inside in shadow and felt around. No carpet ball.
But there’d been a thump…and the handbag was still on the seat of the chair.
I craned around.
Finally I saw the antique sphere, a darker dot against the darkened floor of workman’s dust, sitting silently where it had rolled.
…get out of here…
Now, why should I think that?
I was close to Nathaniel—his presence was almost palpable—why should I think of fleeing?
…that’s why you should think of fleeing!
“No,” I said to no one.
I took a breath, walked an even stride to the onyx sphere. I looked down at it a moment, then bent and picked it up.
Thunder struck the room like an atomic blast.
A rain-swept window burst bright with an explosion of coruscating colors, like an aberrant display of lightning that illuminated the entire Ballroom with an eerie, momentary palette of rich, unearthly hues.
I hissed reflexively and looked down: the carpet ball burned like a branding iron in my palm.
Then everything went black as a bottomless well.
Down which I was spiraling, end over end…
…end over end…
…end over--
TWENTY-SEVEN
I woke in deep shadow, stretched on my stomach, the onyx ball still gripped in my hand.
Yellow-green lightning from the window lit the hotel carpet beneath me in a stuttering strobe.
Somewhere behind me—distant as an endless corridor—came echoing voices: a man and a woman. Katie and Byron? Liz and Adam returning to the Ballroom down the lobby hallway?
The dim voices grew louder, turned to arguing, the man’s a threatening basso, the woman’s bordering on the shrill.
“…but why not? It’s our last chance! I’m shipping out tomorrow!”
“You had your last chance some time ago! Now take your hand from my wrist!”
I pulled my upper half up by the heels of my hands, lifted my head and felt the blood freeze in my veins…
Two pale, transparent figures appeared out of the gloom before me, not twenty yards away…a pair of translucent specters locked in an uneasy embrace, struggling together before the fireplace mantle, slowly solidifying even as their angry voices gained strength and clarity. The woman was all in white, from shoes to the crisp hat atop her haystack of pinned hair. She looked like a World War I nurse with a big red cross on her long white apron.
The man she confronted had the face of a panther.
I scuttled backward into the deeper shadow of a big easy chair I hadn’t noticed before, blooding pounding in my head, rushing in my ears.
“…I will not let go until you come with me, Lucy! Till you let me have this last thing I ask of you!”
“Don’t touch me! Your very touch makes me ill! I cannot wait until you’re gone—you have destroyed my life!”
But the panther man only jerked her closer, eliciting a yelp of pain, the hem of her white skirt flaring above the white stockings of her long slender legs.
“You’re hurting me! I’m warning you!”
“And I’m warning you!” And as if to confirm his contempt, one black claw reached up and tore away the front of her face in a single pink swatch. The woman hissed but did not scream, only gnashed her teeth and glared up at him, at her pink mesh mask dangling in his hand.
She tried to wrench free and slap him but he caught her hand easily in his and ripped free the hideous panther mask with the other, crushed his dark mouth to hers, his face still in shadow.
I pulled myself to a sitting position behind the big chair, glanced down at the carpet ball still in my hand, and felt something give inside me. The dark sphere was growing steadily pale, steadily transparent in my hand, so quickly I could already see the outline of my fingers through it.
“I said, let me go!”
The struggling figures were fully formed now, properly dense and three-dimensional as any living human as they spun and gamboled before the flickering fireplace. The truly terrifying thing, though, was occurring just above their rocking heads on mantle. Like a dark sun, the onyx sphere of the carpet ball was materializing there even as it evaporated from my hand. In another moment it would be as solid and real as the couple themselves.
The woman slapped at him again, this time connect
ing, turning—for an instant—the darkened features into a twisted visage as loathsome as the panther mask itself. Then he struck back with an open palm, sending her crashing against the mantle as he grabbed her pale throat, throttling her.
My heart knew what was going to happen next even before my brain did.
The now-solid carpet ball rolled to the edge of vibrating mantle with a heavy sound—it caught the man’s fiery attention and was snatched up before it fell. Then the ball rose trembling above his head…
The woman, eyes bulging in terror, saw it coming and let out a strangled whimper of a scream before the ball descended into her face, spoiling the pretty features with a patchwork of red.
I tried to cry out for her, but managed only a dry rasp.
The dark ball rose and fell, rose and fell in a quick series of slashes that began as strident whip cracks and ended in muffled squishes.
Then the white bloody face and whiter uniform dropped to the carpet like so much loosed laundry and the Ballroom was still, but for the outside pop and crackle of the brightly colored lightning…not lightning at all, of course, but a sparkling chorus of luminous 4 of July fireworks.
The tall man straightened, red face glistening droplets of sweat, of blood, free hand jerking about absently behind him and replacing the monstrous mask quickly. We both looked up at the same time.
But not at each other; at the small form standing rigidly just inside the firelight’s penumbra. The small form in summer white shorts, vintage sailor shirt, black patent leather shoes, staring disbelievingly at the crumpled white doll before the flickering andirons, eyes wide, mouth agape. “Mamma!”
The tall man and the small boy locked eyes then.
An instant’s silence.
And then the man, cat-like, leapt across the twisted corpse and grabbed the paralyzed child, driving him to his thin back on the carpet, one clawed rubber hand about the constricted throat, the other raising the carpet ball for the death stroke.
Again I tried to make my voice work, tried to make my legs, my body work, but it was as if I weren’t quite yet a part of this grim new world. I managed only a feeble stretching, a garbled moan, as the cruel ball poised trembling before the descent.
“Stop!”
It wasn’t me.
And it wasn’t the little blonde-haired, terrified child Theodore, who still struggled beneath the gnarled claw.
It was Nathaniel.
Apparently he’d just come round the fireplace mantle and stopped frozen in his tracks at the sight before him: the homicide atop the fireplace bricks and the homicide-about-to-happen with the dead girl’s only son.
The heretofore omnipotent panther man went rigid with shock. The carpet ball slipped from black rubber claws and bumped across the floor. He looked in stupefaction from one little tow-head boy to the next repeatedly, and in that instant I think the already-deranged mind of the Gas Lamp killer became even more mangled with incomprehension.
By then enough of my blood had returned to my legs that I managed to stand awkwardly. It caught the attention of my brave little Nathaniel and his eyes flew to me, brightened with recognition. “Pugh!”
The panther man turned hate-filled eyes on me.
I stared back at him, his face once more hidden behind the hideous mask.
The errant carpet ball—the only weapon within sight—lay exactly halfway between us.
We both saw it at the same time.
It would be a race.
Which I lost by milliseconds.
The tall man dove and grabbed the heavy ball in one sweeping hand, but I grabbed the tall man in both of mine, crushed down on his throat between them and rolled him to his back.
He was muscular, my junior by maybe ten years, but I was astride his chest, lashing out with a shoe every time he tried to swing the ball, driving back his aim. Together, under firelight, we twisted and grunted, heaved and lurched while the night sky outside burst bright with continual proof of our Independence, and the thick crowd on the beach ooed and awed obliviously.
I leaned down on the interloper with all my strength, fingers digging into his gullet, hard rump driving the air from his lungs, sweat flying from my brow, each moment I felt my arms and back screaming fatigue, then in another moment I grew more solidified throughout, felt another ounce of strength course through me. I think I was on the brink of winning—the panther man’s eyes behind the mask holes rolled back, his lunges beginning to flag—when I saw little Nathaniel charging from the stone fireplace with the black length of poker aimed at the tall man’s black head.
“No!” I cried, and loosened my grip only the slightest.
It was all the younger man needed. He got a knee up and under and slammed hard into my solar plexus. I flew backward like a ragdoll, all flailing arms and legs, the breath of life driven from me, my own personal fireworks flashing before my eyes.
I hit the carpet hard on the back of my head, saw the sky display brighten momentarily and the Ballroom list wildly, morphing out of focus. Don’t black out!
I sensed a spidery shadow leaping blackly at me from the mist…a spider wielding a thick, black poker, the rage of insanity burning in its eyes.
Time (although whose time I wasn’t sure) seemed to slow…every shadow and solid thing moved in sudden languid apathy like a slow-motion scene from an old movie.
My mind saw the tall figure leap high, saw the razor-sharp edge of the poker descend in a blurred arc, a darker black against billowing shadows, saw the iron cleave my forehead, split my brain down the middle like ripe fruit in a kettle of blood…
…saw all this clearly as the next moment, but felt none of it…
I felt instead my twitching fingers connect with something smooth and heavy beside me on the hotel rug: the carpet ball.
My palsied fingers closed around and started to lift--even as the lithe panther form descended with the promised weight of death until it blotted all else from my vision—
--then, like a blown match flame—it vanished...
* * *
I blinked.
Blinked again as thunder rocked the room and, a moment later, a splinter of white lightning illuminated its interior, casting long shadows past the workmen’s tools, the black baby grand.
I was still in the Ballroom…just not that Ballroom.
Not the Ballroom where the night sky danced with exploding stars and rockets above the cheering beach and the panther man had been struck the final bloody blow that ended his reign.
I sat there on my rump on the old hotel carpet, the new carpet still rolled up and bound beside me, the tall man, poor little Theodore and brave little Nathaniel all gone. I was back to a space/time continuum only God could understand.
I looked down at the dark sphere of carpet ball in my hand, hot again, but not the searing branding iron of before. Behind me I heard Byron’s mantle clock chime my survival. I was alive!
But a wave of failure washed over me.
I stood up shakily, the hand gripping the still-warm carpet ball the shakiest part of me.
I had accomplished nothing, only borne impotent witness.
The young nurse was dead. Or rather, it was the socialite we’d read about in the old newspapers, Lucy Hawkburn.
Young Theodore, who had somehow survived, according to the paper, was permanently traumatized.
And Nathaniel…
“Nathaniel!”
The wash of failure was swept away by a hot rinse of anger that went all the way to my toes.
I pushed up, regarding the cursed carpet ball with loathing. It had whisked me back to the present, no doubt, it had saved my life, but…
The inside of my brain was chiming like the antique clock.
…the ball had taken me back to the new-built del Coronado, to the scene and participants of a hundred-year-old crime, yet once there had faded from my hand only to reappear on the fireplace mantle as a murder weapon. Why?
The answer came almost instantly. Because that’s where it
belonged.
On the mantle beside the clock in the hotel…not in Nathan’s nursery!
Liz’s word echoed in my brain: “…inanimate objects can take on paranormal properties just like people, under the stress of a traumatic event…”
I found myself whipping around abruptly, eyes searching the hotel fireplace.
On the mantle.
A cloying tingle traced my spine as I strode quickly to the big stone fireplace, looked up at the antique clock perched above it. I looked down at the carpet ball in my hand.
A curtain of rain lashed the window panes, rattling them. I took a deep breath.
Where it belonged.
I lifted the heavy onyx ball and placed it atop the mantle…
* * *
The sound of sweeping rain ended as if whisked away by impossible winds.
The night outside bristled with the bursts and flares of exploding fireworks.
I whipped around from the mantle. The panther man was gone. Along with Nathaniel. A deep chill shook me. I squinted into Ballroom gloom…
But little, tousle-haired Theodore was still there in his white sailor shirt and patent leather shoes, squatting on his rump, arms wrapped around and hugging his skinny legs, shivering, rocking. I ran to him.
“Theodore!”
He wouldn’t look at me, even after I bent down and took his trembling chin in my hand gently. He was in shock, perhaps beyond it.
“Theodore! Listen to me! Where did they go?”
Theodore rocked.
“Theodore, please! I know you’ve been through a terrible…but you’re alive! And you can help me keep another little boy alive too!”
Theodore rocked.
“You’re safe now, Theodore, the bad man can’t hurt you! Won’t you please tell me where they went?”
Theodore rocked.
And finally, hesitantly, he pointed.
* * *
The beach was almost like daylight under the strings of lights put there by the hotel’s workmen for the party and from the brilliant explosions from above.
For the barest part of a second I thought I’d run into one of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: all the guests (hundreds of them, elbow to elbow) were in costume, some silly, some quite ornate. All masks—all eyes—were aimed at the sky.
NIGHT CHILLS: A Bracken and Bledsoe Paranormal Mystery Page 26