by H. P. Bayne
Breanna kissed each of her loved ones and gave Sully a final, lingering smile that replaced the need for words he’d never hear.
A glow formed around her, so bright and warm and full it was impossible to tell if it came from inside her or somewhere beyond, somewhere Sully didn’t have the eyes to see. Into that warmth Breanna faded, an expression of the most serene peace settling over her once-anguished face.
Then she was gone.
Sully placed the last couple of bottles into the beer fridge and closed the door while, a few feet away, Betty scrubbed at the stain on the bar.
“Betty?” he said. “You know Dez was kidding about putting that stain there, right? I think that’s part of the wood grain.”
Betty’s head shifted up toward him, her gaze taking a moment to follow. “Hmm?”
“You all right?”
“Fine, Sully. Just fine. Just trying to clean this goddam stain your brother put here.”
He was about to repeat his statement when Betty changed the subject. “How was court today? That bastard get what he had coming to him?”
“He pled out and got a life sentence, no parole for twenty years.”
“Good. Good. And you’re doing okay?”
Sully frowned. He’d known Betty a while now and although he knew she liked him well enough, she’d never before expressed much concern about him. It wasn’t her style. “Yeah, I’m fine. How about you?”
She’d gone back to the stain—albeit with an expression and movements that signified her mind was elsewhere—and her eyes snapped back up at his question. “Of course I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“No reason. Just asking.”
The two worked in silence as they prepared the bar for opening, and so Sully was surprised when she spoke up again.
“Something I wanted to ask you. Not sure how exactly.”
Sully feigned indifference. Betty tended to get uncomfortable when someone focused on her too much. “What’s up?”
He was met with another long silence, enough that he wondered whether she’d thought better of asking, until she broke it with a quietly asked question. “What do you think of your uncle?”
“Lowell?”
She looked up from her scrubbing, head tilted and eyes studying him in a way that spoke to the stupidity of Sully’s query.
“He’s … I don’t know. He’s all right, I guess.”
“You don’t really think that, though, do you.” It was more an observation than a question, one that required a reply nonetheless.
Sully shrugged. “I’ve never really gotten along with him all that well, I guess. I mean, he gave me this job, so there’s that. He didn’t have to.”
“Did you want this job?”
“I didn’t really know what else I wanted to do. The only skill I really have is playing guitar, and there’s not exactly a lot of call for that.” He watched Betty as he considered how much he could get away with asking. Curiosity won out. “Why do you want to know about Lowell?”
“No reason,” she said. “Just wondering. That’s all.”
It wasn’t all. Far from it, if Sully was any judge of people. But whatever Betty had been wanting to ask, possibly to reveal, had slipped irretrievably back into her mind, far out of his immediate reach.
For now, the two of them worked in his uncle’s bar within a silence that had become more uncomfortable than companionable.
And then, as his eyes caught slight movement at his left side, he realized two had become three.
The spirit formed slowly, like a soft morning mist caught in a gentle breeze as it drifted across a dewy lawn. The first thing he saw was a wet tuft of red hair not far above the level of his waist, followed by a shining set of green eyes. Although the ghost was still materializing, Sully didn’t need to see the additional features to recognize the child. He’d seen him before, long ago, standing next to the creek that ran behind the house where Sully had been lucky enough to do most of his growing up. He recognized the boy from photographs, and from the colouring he shared with his father and now-grown big brother.
Sully stared down into the child’s eyes, wide with unspoken meaning, with the message he’d never been able to impart.
“Aiden?”
So fixed was he on the small face that Sully temporarily forgot where he was. A question from Betty brought him back, had his gaze snapping from Aiden to his boss. “Did you say something, Sully?”
Sully looked back down to his side. Aiden, whose little body had been pulled from the water sixteen years ago, was gone.
There was no sign of him, nothing to tell Sully why he’d come here, what he needed.
No proof he’d ever been here at all.
“Sorry,” Sully said. “I thought I saw something.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Sully said.
“That happen to you a lot?”
Sully ran a hand along the bar’s smooth surface, wishing he had a stain of his own to focus on. Anything to distract him from her question, that sudden vision of Aiden, of the unseen world that constantly encroached on the life he’d struggled so hard to build for himself.
He offered her as much truth as he could.
“Yeah,” he said. “All the time.”
Copyright © 2018 by H.P. Bayne
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover art by Fiona Jayde Media with image from innervision/depositphotos.com.
1
The wind rattled the thinly paned windows of the small apartment. The creak of glass turned the unnerving howl into a viable threat.
Sullivan “Sully” Gray had been asking his uncle Lowell Braddock to replace the windows for the past year, but the man—despite the exorbitant size of his net wealth—always found a convenient way to forget. While he had poured enough money into his pub downstairs, the same didn’t hold true for the three suites above the Black Fox.
It might have helped were the other two rented out, but Lowell couldn’t be bothered with the inconvenience of acting as landlord. Sully wasn’t viewed by his uncle as a tenant so much as a live-in employee, not family so much as the foster kid he was.
Not normal so much as an attention-seeking liar or a certifiable freak.
Sully urged away the dark thoughts as he rolled onto his side, facing away from the orange glow of the streetlights. He closed his eyes to the places in the room the light didn’t touch. He’d shut the bar down half an hour ago, but he’d never been as good at doing the same with his brain. Too much went on around him all day.
And far too much at night.
This night would prove no different.
He jumped to the sound of smashing glass, his eyes snapping open and straining against shadow, ears tuned to the anticipated sounds of another break-in. They happened at the Fox sometimes, local addicts looking for ways to get at the liquor or anything that might be left in the till.
Tonight’s noise was unaccompanied by the usual thudding of feet or clattering of bottles. What that meant, he didn’t know.
He reached for his phone beside him and slid from under the covers, battling the chill in the room. After pulling on the jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt he’d left rumpled on the floor, he stepped into a pair of untied runners. He grumbled out a curse when his toe rammed into the dresser.
Unsure where the sound had come from, he decided to check the pub and the adjoining staff-only areas first. He considered phoning the police—his older brother, Dez, was on duty, and would get here in about ten seconds if Sully called in—but decided against it. If the only intruder—given the protests the windows continued to make—was the wind, he didn’t want to come across as panicked. Not until he knew for sure he had something to panic over.
And there was the other a
lways-unsettling possibility—the one now making itself known in the form of a wide-eyed older man standing in the bedroom doorway.
He appeared solid. They always did.
But Sully had learned to tell the difference long ago between the living and the dead.
This was a new ghost, so he brought with him a large degree of unknown—and an equally large degree of uncommon terror. Sully had been seeing the dead for as long as he could recall and, over time, bone-shaking fear had dwindled to a far-more-manageable anxiety. They still startled him, but rarely was he afraid.
This time, a creeping dread rapidly boiled over into outright panic, threatening to send him from the room, the apartment and even the building at a dead run.
Unlike many of the ghosts Sully encountered, this one presented no immediate sign of fatal injury, although the way his body appeared to be seizing likely provided some clue. His eyes were unnaturally wide, his mouth gaping in a silent scream that had Sully working hard to keep his own at bay.
Like the others Sully had seen, the ghost hovering in the doorway had a luminescence in the dark. The man, somewhere in his sixties, had thin, grey hair and an unkempt layer of stubble over both cheeks and chin. He swam within baggy, pale yellow drawstring pyjama pants and a matching top. His hands, balled into tight fists at his side, spoke more to tension than aggression.
His sudden presence provided another possibility: the glass-breaker was not the kind of person the police would be able to slap a pair of cuffs on.
Even so, there remained a solid chance the noise was, in fact, a living, breathing intruder, one Sully would need to report. To make sure, he needed to slip past the ghost blocking his path.
Sully closed his eyes and took a measured breath as he tried to rationalize that the terror wasn’t his own. In dealing with the ghosts of murder victims—the only ones he ever saw—he’d learned the hard way their emotions could affect him. He’d taught himself how to block out feeling, but this one wasn’t so easy.
It took longer than he’d cared to admit to reach a place where his mind wasn’t reeling in fear, and his heart not threatening to explode inside his ribcage. It could have been a few seconds or a full minute, but Sully at last felt his nerves settle into something he could almost call comfortable. He opened his eyes.
The ghost stood directly in front of him.
Sully fell back, his shock finding voice in a short, sharp yelp. The man was way too close. But as Sully stared at him with what felt like it must be a mirroring expression, the spirit disappeared.
The terror dissipated like smoke after an extinguished blaze, until Sully felt the return of a semblance of normal. The whole episode had likely lasted thirty seconds. It felt like thirty minutes.
Remembering the noise downstairs, he grabbed the baseball bat he kept by the door and crept from his suite. The ambient glow of the streetlights filtered through the landing window, and Sully sought the shelter of the shadow in the corner, listening.
Silence. He was relieved the ghost wasn’t following him. Remaining alert to the possibility of a living, breathing intruder was difficult enough without a dead, terror-inducing man at his shoulder. Sully steeled his nerves, and lifted the bat so the business end was close to his right ear, ready to swing.
He started down the steps.
It was darker where he emerged into a back room that accessed the rear exit, the offices and employees-only area. To the right was the door to the bar. That door—stronger, with a better lock than its predecessor—was supposed to be locked after hours, but it had been damaged during a fight a few nights ago. Lowell hadn’t yet managed to get the locksmith to look at it, nor had he ever bothered installing an alarm.
After giving his eyes a moment to adjust, Sully headed there first.
The door was shut, but that didn’t make the next step easy from a psychological perspective, Sully having to summon courage before grasping the handle and pulling.
The last time he’d done this, an intruder had rushed him from the other side, hitting him with the steel door in the process and leaving a nasty goose egg on the edge of his forehead. This time, he was ready, standing just to the side of the door as he anticipated a possible repeat.
None came. Nor was there any sound from inside the bar to indicate an intruder of the human persuasion.
Not that it meant anything. While any trespasser Sully had encountered to date had been easily startled, it was possible someone had heard him coming and was hiding.
He slipped through the door and flicked on the lights. Searching the room and the customer bathrooms at the back, he found nothing. No human burglar, no ghostly visitor. Nor, he observed, were there any broken windows or bottles.
Leaving the bar lights on, Sully flicked on the one in the employees’ area. Nothing. The last place he could think of was the manager’s office down the hall.
Hugging the wall, Sully made his way there. The door was shut; from behind it came the sound of someone rifling through papers and supplies.
Betty Schuster, the Fox’s manager, would come in after hours on occasion, but never at two-thirty in the morning. When she did turn up during non-business hours, she always put on the lights and left her office door open.
This wasn’t Betty.
Sully guessed the door would be locked, so he went back down the hall, intending to conceal himself in the side alley to keep watch while he talked to police.
With the bat tucked under his arm, he dialled 9-1-1 and eased the back door open, slipping outside. There, he reported the break and enter.
“I’m heading down the side alley,” Sully told the operator, a woman he’d talked to several times in the past.
“Don’t get too close,” she warned. “It’s not safe. Just sit tight where you are. Police are on their way.”
Sully was fine with the idea of not getting too close, but he wanted to be near enough he could provide a description, given the guy would probably bail once he heard sirens. He didn’t tell the operator he was taking a few more steps in, knowing he’d be setting himself up for a balls-busting.
In the distance, and getting closer, was the sound of a siren; Sully didn’t need to be psychic to know Dez was pedal to the metal as he made good on the big brother role he’d perfected since Sully had been placed with the Braddocks at age seven. Three years older, and significantly taller and more broadly muscled than his foster brother, Dez came by the role of protector naturally, and he’d never outgrown it in the fifteen years they’d known each other.
It wasn’t until the sirens—he could make out at least two—were close enough to make it clear they were coming this way that the intruder decided enough was enough. A solidly-built man dressed in jeans, a dark hoodie, gloves and a balaclava crawled out the broken window and started down the alley.
Toward Sully.
“He’s coming this way,” Sully told the operator, before slipping his phone into the pocket of his jeans. Despite the material, he could hear the operator trying futilely to continue the conversation.
With the intruder now running in his direction, Sully figured he had his hands full.
The man had been looking over his shoulder toward the street, probably expecting the police to come from that direction. He pulled up short at the sound of Sully’s shouted, “Hey!”
In the glow from the lights of the small parking area, the two men locked eyes.
The moment passed quickly, wide-eyed surprise giving way to a determined glare that had the man rushing at his would-be opponent. Sully readied the bat and swung, a move that would have laid out most of the intruders he’d encountered. He was fast, always had been. But this guy was faster, spinning away from the swing so it only caught his side a glancing blow. As he moved, the man grasped the bat, and it was only the fact Sully kept himself in shape that prevented the weapon from being yanked away from him.
As the sirens approached, the man released the bat, throwing Sully off-balance and leaving him open to a leg sweep. He hit the pa
vement hard, retention of the bat proving pointless as the man drove a booted foot into his side and gut.
A combination of the assault and the impact on pavement drove the air out of Sully’s lungs, had him struggling for breath until it came back in a round of hacking coughs. Around that, he could make out the sound of the man sprinting off.
Still coughing, he managed to roll to his hands and knees. A car braked hard, followed by the slam of a door. Then more rushed footfalls, these ones coming toward him with a shout of his name.
“Sully! Sully, you okay?”
He nodded between racking coughs, which didn’t prove good enough for Dez.
“Are you hurt?”
A head shake, no, this time.
“Which way did he go?”
Sully managed to extend an arm and point to the right. Dez picked him up and half-dragged him to the passenger side of the car. Having been deposited inside, Sully sat, getting his wind back while Dez drove the area in search of the guy.
In the end, despite a half-hour hunt that came to include five separate police cars, they found nothing.
They returned to the Black Fox where forensic identification members had been called in to look for clues.
“There have been a few business break-ins around Riverview lately,” Dez explained as Sully sat on the back stairs, filling out a written statement. “Could be it’s our suspect. You’re lucky. He stabbed the last guy who caught him at it. What the hell were you thinking, going out there?”
Sully gave up on the statement for the moment. He’d known the scolding would be coming, and Dez would expect his full attention.
“You’re right. It was stupid.”
“Damn right it was stupid. You had no idea if the guy was armed. We’re seizing guns left, right and centre off the streets these days. You could have gotten yourself shot.”
“I know. Okay?”
“So, why do it?”
“I thought maybe I could get close enough to get a description.”
“If you’re close enough to get a description, you’re close enough to get shot. Not worth it. Let Ident do their job.”