Teddy gave a mock tip of his hat and stepped through the automatic doors to the parking lot. Boyd watched as he touched his fingers to the passenger-side window of Boyd’s truck where Lady had her paw up. The shepherd barked in response, then turned her head to look back at Boyd, and barked again.
Boyd’s hand slid subconsciously to his hip where he had carried a gun for so many years. So long it almost felt like there was a symbiotic attachment to it, and he’d developed a nervous habit for running his fingers over the butt of the weapon like he needed to feel the reassurance of it by his side. It wasn’t there now, he’d left it at home, but he was starting to wonder if that had been a good idea.
-4-
It took just two hours before Boyd started to feel bored and lonely. He was a man who didn’t like to be left to his thoughts. His mind often traveled terrain that was better left in the past where it belonged.
Out of boredom, he decided to poke and peck at the keyboard to the computer at the desk. He typed Westinghouse Hotel into the search bar on the screen and most of the links the computer returned had to do with the ongoing renovation. A few pages later he found some old news articles detailing the life of the building back when it used to be a high school in the late eighties to early nineties. There had been a fire then, too, a bad one; the entire west end had burned down and taken the north with it. Six faculty members and fourteen students had died in the blaze. Perhaps the most alarming was that two days before the fire, a teacher, Mr. Dubois, had walked into his classroom and taken a pistol to his temple in front of his students.
Boyd scratched at the stubble on his chin as he found himself falling further down the rabbit hole as each article led to another with some horrifying event taking place within the walls of the building. One in particular caught his attention. It came from a local press and detailed a recent string of missing children in the area. The journalist had researched and documented that each missing child had been within a ten-mile radius of the then-abandoned school (a new high school had been built across town after the fire). He was urging the local community to vote to demolish the building which had served as nothing more than a haven for the homeless and a “breeding ground for strange, and possibly satanic rituals.”
The latter Boyd had scoffed at. It was a buzz term often used by the media to garner a certain reaction to an article. He’d come across it often enough in the years he worked homicide and knew that sometimes people needed to assign something supernatural or inhuman to try to explain and rationalize why people did the bad things they did to each other.
Boyd kept reading, and as he neared the end, a cool, prickling rush ran up his forearms. One of the missing children had returned home. A young boy named Joseph Ellis. A few days after he was found, he told police that he was cutting through the woods near the school when he saw a man standing in the front entrance of the building. The man had waved him over and Joseph said that he didn’t remember anything after that, except that the man had kissed him on the head.
Boyd sat back from the keyboard, the gears in his brain already shifting forward, and he opened a new tab in his browser. He did a search for Joseph Ellis, but the name was so common that he didn’t find what he was looking for right away.
It turned up, several pages later, in the form of a short blurb from a press in Denver. A local man had hung himself in his apartment after barricading himself in. Hours earlier, his girlfriend had called the police in near hysterics that he had been trying to set her on fire. The only thing linking the two articles was the journalist from the Denver press had mentioned briefly that Joseph had been a missing child in his youth, back in the town of Lansing, New York, and had dealt with mental issues most of his life.
Boyd brought his face closer to the computer screen. The photo for the article was small and showed a picture in a picture. The smaller of the two looked like it had been taken from a graduation album and the larger showed Joseph’s apartment with two EMTs ready to wheel his body out. In the background, on the wall just above a toppled bookcase, the words “Badge plays —” were written, but the rest had been cropped out due to the size of the photo.
He got to his feet and stretched. The familiar cracking of his joints soon followed. He walked around the oak desk and caught himself mid-step as it dawned on him that he was a few feet from the front entrance where a young Joseph Ellis had claimed some unknown man had waved him over.
Boyd shook his head, hard, trying to shake the thoughts free. He knew firsthand what an overactive mind could do when it was left to wander untamed.
He stepped through the automatic doors and into the night. The temperature had dropped even more and he was thankful for his jacket. Lady had her snout up against the glass, leaving wet rub marks in its place. Her eyes had that almost unnatural, glowing green tint to them, and when Boyd opened the door she put her paws up on his chest. Boyd let out the breath that had felt trapped in his lungs and let himself indulge in the calming routine of petting the rough, black fur on Lady’s spine.
“Doing okay out here, girl?” he asked, his voice low.
The shepherd seemed to sense the tension in him and licked at his free hand. Boyd reached into the rear of the cab and pulled out two plastic bowls. The first he filled with water from the plastic gallon he carried and the second with dog chow from a crinkled paper bag. He set both down on the cement as Lady enjoyed her dinner with sloppy, wet enthusiasm.
Boyd looked out over the hood of his truck. Tall sodium-vapor lamps cast arcs of light over the lot, but the surrounding trees swallowed most of it. The air felt oddly stagnant and still. It made Boyd feel like he’d fallen out of touch with the earth: This is Boyd Dwyer to Mission Control, anyone out there…?
When Lady finished her meal, he put the bowls away and attached a leash to her collar. “What do you say we stretch our legs a bit?” She gave him a look that said otherwise, but Boyd tugged her along as he unclipped the metal utility flashlight from his belt.
The front of the building stretched the length of the lot and stopped at the tree line. The sidewalk, however, did not — it curved around the corner and disappeared into the night. Boyd shined the light of the flashlight there as Lady took some of the slack on her leash to go investigate a bush to pee on.
When she returned they started down the walk, the branches of the nearby trees almost reaching out like fingertips and leaving condensation on Boyd’s shoulder. The walk widened as it spread out to reveal a stone courtyard. An empty fire pit sat in the center as the building made a U Shape around them.
Boyd brought the light up near the left corner of the building and could still see the char marks the fire had left there. He moved the light over the damaged walls and windows and then back down to where a set of double doors would have been to lead back inside, except they were missing or had melted during the fire.
Lady began growling in the back of her throat, and Boyd glanced down to see the dog’s eyes looking up toward a third-story window on their left. Boyd went to bring the light there, but stopped. The night air blew the curtains inward.
A light was already on in the window.
-5-
The phone at the front desk was ringing when Boyd returned to the lobby. He looked at it, puzzled. It seemed to him that the air in the silent lobby was still vibrating from the electronic chirp of the phone. Boyd grabbed it on the third ring and placed it to his ear.
“Boyd?”
“Yeah?”
“Glad I caught you when I did.”
Donnie. Boyd felt his heart start to slow for some reason. “Just about to start my rounds,” he said.
“Fantastic. Look, I wanted to let you know that Teddy is gonna be a little late when he comes back in to relieve you in the morning. He has to take Gina for a checkup. I told him you wouldn’t mind the overtime.”
“No, sir,” Boyd said. A silence fell over the phone for a moment, and then he cleared his throat. “This a courtesy call, or are you checking up on me?”
“Just wanted to check in,” Donnie said. “See how you were doing.”
“Doing fine,” Boyd replied. “I got to start my rounds now. Appreciate the heads up.”
He slammed the phone down on the cradle before Donnie had a chance to respond. The force of the slam sent little tremors up his hand and into his wrist, and he tried to shake the feeling away.
It was completely unprofessional to feel so … what? Disrespected?
No. Donnie was doing his job and had every right to check in. Boyd had done this to himself, but it didn’t stop him from feeling annoyed by how Donnie had been treating him like a child since he got kicked off his last assignment. He tried to focus his thoughts on something else and decided to survey the building map on the desk.
He figured he’d start with the first floor as it would allow him to double back through the lobby and check on Lady if he had to. The shepherd was still refusing to leave the confines of Boyd’s truck and enter the building.
The walkthrough didn’t end up taking nearly as long as Boyd would have liked, but it did serve its purpose of letting him cool down. The first floor was mostly unfurnished conference rooms, management offices, and a small lounge area. The heavy chemical smell of new carpets and fresh paint did give him something of a headache, though. It was all much too sterile. Boyd wasn't sure if he was supposed to be in a hotel or a hospital.
On the way back to the desk, something seemed off and he couldn’t quite place it, until he realized that the automatic doors were open and seemed to be stuck. He set the clipboard and the flashlight down on the desk and went over to inspect the doors. He passed through a couple times to see if that would trigger the motion sensor, but it didn’t do any good. Finally he threw his hands up in defeat, and tugged the doors shut.
“Must be faulty wiring,” he muttered, and hated how his voice sounded.
Boyd didn’t talk out loud to himself. He didn’t have an explanation of why he did it just then, either, other than the fact that he wanted to add some type of normal sound to the apparent vacuum he was working in.
He returned to his chair behind the desk with the clipboard and made sure to note the issue with the doors. “Faulty wiring” sounded good and it possibly explained why there was a random light on over in the west end. He went through the checklist of the other floors and thought about checking them off, but then decided against it, only to change his mind a moment later. It was a bad habit he’d picked up from another freelancer on a former rotation he’d worked. The rule of thumb was if you were working a site by yourself, and the company staffing security was too cheap to pay for two overnight guards, you didn’t cover more than a twenty-minute walk from your post.
It was a flawed practice, Boyd knew, and it wasn’t something he took pride in doing, either. He tried to rationalize that for his own safety it wasn’t wise to be walking through a building by himself that could have other structural damage due to a fire, and it wasn’t like there was anyone else on site to double-check his work anyway.
There was something else there, too, but he felt foolish even giving life to the idea. Maybe, and this was a stretch, and he’d never admit it out loud, but maybe he wasn’t entirely comfortable going any deeper into the building by himself. Of course he knew that he was letting his imagination run away from him again, but he had to admit there was a feeling to the place that was undeniable.
When he worked homicide it was a feeling that would get into your bones now and again. It wasn’t something you could avoid and ‘came with the territory’ as the saying often went. A case came to mind. One of Boyd’s first. Young family. The Daltons? No. The Grays. Husband worked at a factory that processed something; what, Boyd couldn’t remember. There was a wife and three kids as well. The husband snapped one night; Boyd thought they had found some heavy narcotics in his system, but he had suffocated his son and two daughters with plastic grocery bags.
Then he took a rifle to his wife. Later, after he was arrested half nude on his front lawn, he said that he was only trying to “get them to see.”
Whatever the hell that meant.
There had been a feeling in the air, almost palpable, when Boyd had walked into that house. He knew something awful had happened, and when it did it left its black mark, like a stain, on everything. It became a part of it. Its very fabric. The Westinghouse was no different. Bad things had happened here and perhaps the building wasn’t quite willing to let them go yet.
-6-
He didn’t remember nodding off, but the automatic doors sliding open with a whoosh pulled him from sleep. He stirred, and then squinted an eye open to check his surroundings before rubbing his knees and shins, as they had fallen asleep propped up on the desk. He stared over at the doors, almost waiting for someone to walk through and announce their arrival, but no one came.
Boyd checked his watch. It was almost 3:30 a.m.
He ran a hand over the back of his neck and sighed. The light doze he’d planned to take had turned into a three-hour nap. He smacked his lips to rid the stale taste from his mouth, and slowly got to his feet as his joints popped and snapped with age and overuse. One of the things he missed most about drinking, and there were a few, was that first beer upon waking up. It wasn’t the taste, most beer was too skunky on a dry mouth, but it was the way the first one sliced the edge off cleanly for the rest of the day.
Boyd thought a nice cold one would be perfect right now, but then he had to remind himself that the desire for one was just the compulsive need he’d developed. If he put it out of his mind the desire would eventually subside and then it’d be nothing more than a dull ache.
He hovered beneath the automatic doors and studied them for a second. This was just for show, of course; not that anyone was watching, not even Lady, who for once wasn’t staring in at him from the passenger seat of his truck. It just seemed to make the most sense to go inspect the broken thing. He knew damn well he wasn’t an engineer or an electrician, but there was always the outside chance that if he stared long enough, then maybe the problem would present itself. Crazier things had happened.
As he was contemplating fussing with the door as a way to fight off boredom, he heard a low, electronic chirping. It was like a bird had flown in through a window from miles away. Boyd’s first instinct was to flick his head toward the desk, but the only sound there was the voice of some hyperactive infomercial host droning on from the small TV.
Something chirped again.
Boyd turned his attention toward the small hallway that was off the lobby. There was a bathroom and two mid-size conference rooms that way. He started in that direction and quickly identified what he was hearing.
Would Donnie be calling him at this hour?
Maybe it was Teddy, and he needed Boyd to stay on shift a little longer for him. But why wouldn’t he call the phone at the front desk?
When he reached the door of the first conference room, he turned the handle down and poked his head inside. The overhead lights flicked on one row at a time. The cold took him by surprise; the entire first floor was well heated, but the room had a tight chill in the air. On the far wall was a black phone with a digital LED screen. Its ring echoed loudly in the deep-set room. Boyd walked over to it and squinted to read the caller ID, but the only thing flashing there was “unknown.”
Boyd picked the phone up.
Before he could say hello, he heard someone on the other end clear their throat and let loose a heavy exhalation.
“…Hello?” Boyd asked.
There was no answer, just sniffling and wet, raspy breathing.
“Teddy? That you?”
The sniffling stopped and the line seemed to go dead for a moment. Boyd turned to face the door he had come through. He didn’t like having his back to it. On the other end of the line he heard what he thought was the sound of the phone being passed around and then there was a voice in his ear so small he almost missed it.
“…Here it comes.”
The tinny sound of the
dial-tone played over Boyd’s breathing and he pulled the phone away to look at the receiver as if the explanation was written there.
He pressed down on the redial button, but in return got the automated voice telling him his call could not be completed as dialed.
Boyd hung the phone up.
-7-
By the time Teddy had showed up around 10 a.m., Boyd had mostly forgotten about the strange phone call. When he thought back on it, it seemed to be some extension of a dream, like maybe he had been sleepwalking. The overnight shift could do that to a person; hours got muddy, and would sometimes blur. Although, it was nowhere near as bad as when he would get a little sauced and suddenly there were hours and moments and things he did, like driving into his own mailbox, that just weren’t accounted for.
Teddy paused on his way into the vestibule and raised an eyebrow at Boyd when he noticed the stuck automatic doors. Boyd gave Teddy a shrug, and got one in return. As Teddy set a coffee down for him on the desk, Boyd said, “I think there must be an electrical short with the door. Thing kept popping open all night. Maybe someone goofed up on wiring this place. Might even explain our issue with the heat on the third floor.”
“Well done, detective,” Teddy said with a smirk, and took a sip of his coffee from the white styrofoam cup. “It doesn’t surprise me, though. They’re in such a rush to get this place open by their deadline that no one is doing any quality control. That fire I told you about really set them back.”
“I saw,” Boyd said, and started to gather his things. “I took a walk with Lady out to the west end to check out the damage. Fire did a number. I’m not an arson expert, but if there is faulty wiring here, could’ve been an electrical thing.”
“Could be,” Teddy replied. “Speaking of Lady, I saw her in your truck. She stay there all night?”
Ghost Box Page 2