Phantoms

by Terence West

  "Where did he run off to?" Cane asked.

  Chloe shook her head. "I don't know. He was pretty pissed off when he stomped out of here earlier. My first guess would be to check all the bars in the area. He has a propensity to drown his feelings in alcohol." She looked over her team. "Jackson, why don't you go look for Rivers? Trent and I will try and salvage our equipment. Cane, you and Chris can tell Carrie what happened, and then I think you should round up the rest of your team."

  Chapter 21

  Bishop leaned over and nudged Dawn. Her eyes shot wide open as she sat up in the seat. They had arrived at the Stone Brook Police Department only moments ago, but were stopped by several officers. The area was littered with police cars and ambulances, their red and blue lights glancing menacingly off the sides of the surrounding buildings. Several men and women were being carried out of the station on stretchers, while others were limping clear under their own power. Something about this scene seemed horribly familiar to both.

  "What the hell happened here?" Dawn asked.

  Bishop shrugged, "It looks like a damn war zone."

  The two slowly stepped out of the car and began to walk toward the station. They easily avoided the officers on the perimeter, as they were too busy holding out members of the local media. Weaving through the maze of police cruisers, the two stopped in front of a large white ambulance. They watched as one of the officers was wheeled out of the building and into the back of the vehicle. His head looked like a sack of doorknobs, and his arm was clearly broken. He was mumbling something almost incoherently to the technicians. Bishop pressed close to the ambulance and cupped his ear. The officer mumbled again. Bishop drew back from the emergency vehicle and shot a strange glance at Dawn.

  "What did he say?" Dawn asked.

  Bishop shook his head. "I probably didn't hear him correctly and from his condition, I would say he's probably in shock and incoherent, but–"

  "What did he say?" Dawn pressed.

  "He said she floated," Bishop said with a worried look on his face.

  "Who floated?" Dawn wondered.

  "I don't know, but I plan to find out." He started to push his way through a crowd of officers toward the entrance. Reaching back, he grabbed Dawn by the hand and led her through. Before anyone knew it, the two were up the stairs and through the front doors.

  Bishop and Dawn skidded to a halt just inside the door. "Christ," Bishop said in awe.

  "Maybe you were right," Dawn said as she looked at the devastation in front of her. "It looks like there was a war in here."

  Bishop suddenly spotted a familiar black coat among the EMTs and work crews. "Detective Montoya!"

  Montoya spun around and began to scan the lobby for the source of her page. Her eyes finally settled on Bishop and Dawn standing just inside the entrance. She returned her attention to the officer in front of her. "Get that done, okay?"

  The younger officer nodded, then went about completing Montoya's orders.

  Montoya worked her way across to Dawn and Bishop. "What can I do for you two?"

  "What happened here?" Dawn immediately asked.

  "One of our prisoners escaped and tore up the place," Montoya said with shame in her voice.

  "One prisoner?" Dawn echoed in awe. "One person did all this?"

  "Who was it?" Bishop probed.

  "I'm really not at liberty to say," Montoya said loudly as she glanced around. Bishop instantly realized she was trying to cover her tracks. "Come with me," she instructed them quietly.

  The three moved through the destruction toward a connecting hallway in the rear of the room. Montoya took a quick left at the end of the hall and stopped in front of the first door on the right. Reaching down, she twisted the handle and pushed the door open. "This is Detective Enbaugh's office," she said as she moved inside. "I don't think he would mind if we used it."

  "How is the detective?" Bishop wondered.

  "He's going to be okay," Montoya assured them. "He suffered some pretty bad injuries from the accident, but the doctors are sure he'll make a full recovery." Her expression darkened. "He saw them again."

  "The phantoms?" Bishop asked.

  Montoya nodded. "He thinks they tortured him and," she took a deep breath, "that we can't stop them."

  "Did he say if he found out anything else about them?" Dawn wondered.

  "Only that they are pure evil," Montoya said gravely. She walked around Enbaugh's desk and slipped into his chair. She let out a long sigh, then propped her elbows on his desk. She motioned for Bishop and Dawn to sit down.

  "Tell us what happened here," Dawn asked after a moment.

  "I'm not really sure," Montoya confessed. "From what fragments I can piece together, this was all done by one woman."

  "I knew it," Bishop said with a crooked smile. "Women are evil!"

  Dawn reached over and smacked him on the back of his head. "Now is not the time," she warned him. "I'm sorry, Detective, please continue."

  "The girl we picked up this morning at the hotel, Morgan LeFay, she escaped and did this. I'm getting a lot of conflicting reports from eyewitnesses, but they all say she did this by herself."

  "And that she floated," Bishop added.

  Montoya nodded. "I've heard that myself."

  "How did she get out of her cell?" Dawn queried.

  Montoya paused. "She blew the door off."

  "What?" Bishop exclaimed. "She literally blew off the cell door?"

  "Plus most of the wall around it," Montoya admitted. "We don't know how. Forensics has been in there ever since it happened, and they can't find any trace of any kind of explosives used."

  "Jesus," Bishop said after a moment, "who is this lady? Wonder Woman?"

  "I put out an APB on her. I consider her extremely dangerous." Montoya shifted uneasily in her chair. "We have to find her. Several of our best officers are fighting for their lives right now because of her."

  "But no one's dead?" Dawn asked.

  "No," Montoya said, "but I don't see what that has to do with anything. She probably just didn't have the opportunity to kill anyone."

  "With that kind of power?" Bishop said, understanding where Dawn was heading with her line of questions. "How could she not have killed anyone?"

  "It looks like a bomb went off out there," Dawn continued; "yet all the officers are alive. She blew off her cell door, for God's sake. I don't think it would've been a problem to kill all the officers out there."

  "She didn't though," Bishop added. "She just roughed a few of them up to escape. I don't think she really wanted to hurt anyone."

  Montoya slammed her fist on Enbaugh's desk. "We can sit here and speculate on her motives all day, but the fact of the matter is that she escaped from police custody, resisted arrest and almost killed several of my men. That means she's a fugitive, and a dangerous one at that."

  Bishop held up his hands in a surrendering gesture. "Whoa, hold up, Detective. We were just advancing a theory. We didn't mean to imply she was any less guilty of her crimes."

  Montoya slowly unclenched her fist and relaxed. "I'm sorry, with all that's happened in the past few days, I guess I'm burning on a short fuse."

  Dawn nodded. "That's completely understandable."

  Slipping back into Enbaugh's high-backed chair, Montoya looked over the two figures in front of her. "What do we do now?"

  "I think we only have one course of action," Bishop conceded.

  Dawn waited for a moment, "And that is?"

  "We need to stop these shadows." Bishop stood and walked around the desk toward Montoya. "It's obvious now that these things, whatever they happen to be, are at the root of all this. It seems, at least to me, that Morgan was a nice, normal girl before she arrived here in Stone Brook. Something's changed her."

  "You're speculating," Montoya pointed out. "You have no idea who Morgan LeFay was, or is," she quickly corrected him. "She may have been a nut from the get go."

  "I can't subscribe to that theory," Bishop argued. "From what I've
learned from the Ghost Chasers, Inc. crew, she was a nice, normal girl when they first met her."

  "They all say that, Bishop. Have you ever seen a reporter interview the neighbor of a serial killer?" Dawn's expression went blank. "He was the nicest guy," she started in a stilted, monotone voice, "always very quiet. Even helped me build my doghouse. They don't say ‘I was in fear for my life every minute'!" Her tone quickly changed. "I was just waiting for the day that whacko would come blazing through my door with a chainsaw!" She smiled. "See where I'm going with this?"

  "Yeah, that's all fine and great," Bishop said, dismissing her poor attempt at humor, "but that's just a stereotypical view of a killer. That doesn't help us at all."

  "So what are we talking about here?" Montoya asked, hoping this conversation would come to a conclusion.

  "Spirit possession," Bishop said firmly.

  Dawn laughed out loud, "You aren't serious?"

  "Haven't you guys ever seen ‘Exorcist'?"

  Montoya shook her head. "I can't believe I'm listening to this." She looked Bishop in the eyes. "I don't think I saw Morgan's head spinning around, or her vomiting pea soup on everyone."

  "That's not exactly what I'm talking about," Bishop argued. He was digging a hole. "I–"

  "Let it go, kid," Dawn finally said. "There are supernatural answers here, but that isn't one of them." She leaned back in her chair and briefly collected her thoughts. "What I think we need to do here is let Detective Montoya do her job. She needs to get a dangerous element off the street before it hurts someone." She bit her lip for a moment, then stopped, realizing what she was doing. "Bishop and I will head down to the country clerk's office and see if we can dig up anything on the Grant House. Maybe it has some kind of paranormal history."

  Montoya nodded. "If you need anything from me, you have my number."

  Dawn nodded.

  "I'll check back with you in about an hour to see what you've got," Montoya said as she stood up. She pushed past Bishop and headed for the door.

  Once she was gone, Bishop slid into her vacant chair. "You didn't really think I was talking about her head spinning around, did you?"

  Dawn shook her head. "Shut up, Bishop."

  ****

  Morgan stopped. I can't let them find me. I have to stop them.

  She ducked into an alley just as a black and white cruised by. Getting as far back as she could, she finally allowed herself to rest. She pressed her body against the cool brick wall in front of her. The cold felt good against her hot flesh. She had been ducking in and out of alleys and buildings ever since she'd escaped the police station. She wouldn't stop, but now, she needed to. Her body cried out for rest as her heart thumped wildly in her chest. She slowed her breathing. She was now taking long, deep breaths instead of the short, shallow ones that were hyperventilating her. She looked up to see a small stream of water running off a drainage pipe. Stepping under it, she let the cool rainwater run over her face and down onto her body. She needed to focus. There was a task at hand.

  What the hell am I doing? She asked herself out of the blue. Why am I running from the police? I'm only making my situation worse–because you have to.

  Her mind wandered back to earlier when she was incarcerated. Where did that power come from? She had never displayed that kind of power before, nor had she ever wanted to. She considered herself a good person. Her heart was true and just, but what she did today bordered on…

  She didn't want to admit it.

  Evil.

  She had conducted a spell or two in her life. A Glamour, or a cleansing spell, but nothing like this. She didn't even know she was capable of those kinds of feats. Her world was spinning around her now. Her life had changed in ways that even she had yet to comprehend, and it was still evolving. She wondered if she would recognize herself in a mirror now. How had she gone from working with her hero on a television show one minute, to being accused of his murder the next? How did these two points connect? Where was the strand of logic that bound them?

  It was almost too much. That fact alone was strange. It should be too much. She knew herself very well, as self-exploration was a favorite pastime of hers, but this wasn't right. She didn't have the constitution for this. She hated to say it, but the Morgan she knew would have crumbled by now. How was she holding on? What force was driving her on, and why?

  Letting the water run over her head and through her black hair, Morgan leaned forward and let it spill onto the back of her neck. She gasped once as a shiver ran down her spine. Stepping away from the stream, she ran her hands over her hair to wring out some of the wetness, then back over her face. She didn't know why or how, but she had a moment of clarity. A single instant where it seemed like everything in the universe made sense.

  I am not Morgan LeFay.

  She shook her head. The clarity had unfortunately, past. What did that mean? I am Morgan LeFay and have been all my life. She was too confused, and her head was throbbing.

  She raised her face to the sky and looked at the dark gray clouds gathering. The storm would return soon, and with it, the shadows would be free to roam. How she knew that, she wasn't sure, but she didn't doubt it. She and the storm were the keys to this, but why?

  ****

  The neighborhood was quiet. Most of the windows and doors had been boarded up because of the storm. Jackson wondered if the people of this town kept a supply of plywood and nails at the ready at all times. A person would make a killing in the lumber industry here. Of course, that would be benefiting from someone else's loss, but that idea really didn't seem to bother him. Looking up, he could see the dark clouds overhead, and then he felt the first raindrop. He buttoned up his jacket and began to walk a little more briskly toward his destination. He didn't want to be caught in the storm, but then again, was that as bad as the other option he was facing?

  Jackson stopped dead in his tracks. Chloe had told him to go and find Rivers, then bring him back. He didn't want to go back to that house. He knew what lived there. He had seen them with his own eyes. He looked down at his watch and winced. It was less than seven hours from the live broadcast. Their host was missing, the crew was almost killed earlier and the psychic they had hired had been murdered. They were batting a thousand.

  He looked around. He didn't even know where he was. How was he supposed to find a man in a city he wasn't familiar with? Chloe had just told him to check all the bars, but that didn't do him a lot of good. He had no idea how many bars this town had, let alone where they were.

  He felt another raindrop hit his forehead. He held out his hand, palm up, waiting for the next drop to fall. He could see them all around him, small, dark spots on the sidewalk and road. It was spitting. Not quite raining, but almost. Jackson hated Florida. That much he was sure of. Why couldn't he be on some comfy sound stage back in California? Jackson slowly began to walk again. His only way out of here, he knew, was to find Rivers and get back to the Grant House. Then that was it. He was quitting right after that. There was no way anyone on that crew was dragging him back into that house. He would rather be struck by lightning than go back inside.

  He looked up at the sky with a wry smile on his face. "Just kidding about the lightning remark."

  He wasn't an overly religious man, but he knew better than to tempt fate so openly like that. All you were doing was sticking your neck down on the chopping block.

  Rounding a corner, he spotted a bar nestled between two squat buildings just past the residential section. The sign out front was lit, so he assumed they were open. The bar was built much like a sea shanty, but Jackson knew it was probably much studier. A fisherman's net and anchor were hanging on the front of the bar just next to the front door and one small window. He glanced up at the sign. "'The Wharf'," he said out loud.

  Pushing the door to the tiny bar open, his senses were immediately assaulted by the smoke and the smell. The instantly recognizable odors of vomit and urine burned his nose as he walked in. This was a high quality establishment all ri
ght. The door slammed shut behind him as he moved further inside. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the low light levels, but quickly, the dingy interior appeared out of the blackness. It was much as he expected. Two round tables sat in the middle of the floor and a short bar ran along the back wall. Two small lights hung from the ceiling above the tables, sending two conical shafts of brightness to the floor. Jackson could see one man passed out in the corner, his clothes tattered, and probably the source of some of the smells. Three more men were gathered around one of the tables drinking mugs of beer and exchanging old stories, while still two other man sat at the bar. Jackson slowly made his way through the smoke. He spotted the bartender sitting near the rear searching through the local want ads.

  "Excuse me, barkeep?" Jackson asked as he slid onto an empty stool.

  The scruffy man slowly lowered his newspaper and looked at Jackson. No doubt, his mind was assessing if it was worth it to get out of his seat or not. After a minute, he finally stood up and walked toward Jackson. "What?"

  Jackson was a little taken aback by the bartender's tone, but he quickly recomposed himself. "Just have a quick question for you."

  "Piss off, kid. If you ain't drinkin', then I don't give a shit." The man started to turn around and return to his seat.

  "Wait," Jackson said. He dug his hand into his pocket and produced a small wad of bills. Flipping off two fives, he laid them on the bar. "I'll have a draft."

  The bartender nodded. After selecting what was probably his cleanest mug, he filled it to the brim with the golden liquid. Setting it on the bar in front of Jackson, he snatched the money and turned toward the cash register. He eventually returned with what he considered was the correct change.

  Jackson didn't question. At this point, he really didn't care. "Can I ask you a question now?"

  The bartender shot Jackson an angry glance. "Can't you see I'm busy? Drink your beer and shut up."

  Jackson let out a quick sigh. "Seven bucks for a mug of beer," he muttered to himself. He lifted the glass to his lips and took a quick sip of the fluid inside but quickly stopped as it hit his taste buds. Dropping the mug back to the bar, Jackson leaned over and spit the nauseating liquid onto the floor. "Jesus!" He wiped his arm across his mouth. "It tastes like warm piss!"