Wait, there is something else now. I am seeing light from somewhere now. I can make out a slight glow.
A blood-curdling shriek erupts out of the darkness nearby, and a bright figure bursts out of the wall opposite me about eight feet away. The thing flies straight at me, yelling so loudly I think my eardrums will burst. My heart skips several beats.
The ghost stops directly in front of me, staring me in the face from inches away. I can’t tell if it’s a woman or a man. Its long hair radiates out from a mask of rage and venom. It looms over me for ages, screaming in my face while I huddle in terror and try and keep away from it.
Overhead, more ghosts float through the walls. Their chatter adds to the confusion and pandemonium in the room. Whether they’re attracted to the first ghost’s noise, I don’t know. But they mill around to watch the show—some merely gazing without expression, others swirling around cackling in laughter. There’s too many, too much confusion for me to get a good look at any individual.
This goes on for hours. After the initial terror subsides, clarity returns to my mind. I don’t know what these ghosts are trying to accomplish, but they are apparently not trying to hurt me. They’re trying to terrify me, which is working, but they aren’t causing me any physical pain. I’m still too scared to provoke them, but my mind is racing. I make a vow.
Whatever else happens to me, if I have any power over it, I’m going to survive. I’ll do whatever I have to in order to get through this. I’ll do whatever it is they want me to do. I will not give up.
The ghosts continue their screaming.
Chapter 14
So.”
I don’t really know what to say next; I’m just getting uncomfortable with the silence. Marsh hasn’t muttered anything since the captain spoke to us about ten minutes ago. The body is covered up and stashed into a closed coach, to be delivered back to the office to some undisclosed room in the bowels of the building.
It’s not like there’s a morgue.
I’m leaning against the pier’s railing, my back to the dark churning water below. The sounds of the water drown out the hushed whispering of the other officers at the scene. It may have been possible to keep the last few bodies quiet, but this one, Captain Radu is right, I don’t know how he’s going to stop the news of this one from spreading.
I look over the railing at the water. The current is strong, steady, trying its best to yank out the supports of the pier, but this pier has likely been here a hundred years. It’s not going anywhere. The railing is worn smooth by hands over countless decades of use. The smell here is refreshing, the salt air blowing away the stench of corpses that constantly clogs my nose. I’m going to have to remember to come back.
“Marsh,” I say, finally getting his attention. He turns to me, his face unreadable.
“I’m going to guess you’ve never investigated anything like this before.”
“Got that right,” he mumbles.
“I have to ask. Why is this freaking everyone out so much? You’ve already shown me a dead body before today. You didn’t seem bothered then.”
Marsh stares at me for a second. A series of emotions flicker across his face, each easily read. First, he wonders how anyone can be as stupid as I am. Then he realizes I am used to things dying. It’s what defines being alive in many ways. Being NOT dead. That’s not something they have had to think about for decades or centuries. Then I see him reach a decision of some kind. Determination settles over him, and a new fire comes alive in his eyes.
“One body, it’s weird, but I can get past it. It’s easy to ignore, I guess. But multiple bodies. And it’s showing no signs of stopping. After living here as long as I have, kid, nothing was supposed to surprise me anymore. Then you showed up. I still haven’t figured out what’s going on with you. But this . . . Never seen nothing like this before.”
If anything, his scowl gets fiercer. “I told you how someone’s will is what keeps them around. Once you make that decision to hang around past death, you can’t take it back. It’s not a switch you can flip.”
I look at him quizzically, and he waves away any question I’m about to ask. He starts walking back to the coach, so if I want to hear an answer, I have to keep up with him.
“The stronger your will, the stronger your body, right? If you’re not careful, you can lose your body, but then your spirit sticks around. You can wander around indefinitely as a ghost. You might lose all memory, forget who you are, who you were. You might eventually fade away. But you are still here. You never die.”
“Yeah, you covered most of that.”
He stops walking and turns to me. I jerk to a halt to keep from crashing into him. I’m pretty sure I would bounce off him.
“OK, genius. But you don’t know it all yet.”
“Right. Sure.” I take a step back to try and get out of arm’s reach.
He glares at me for a second, then starts walking again, leaving me scrambling like an idiot after him. “Lots of the ghosts you’ve seen floating around, they used to have bodies after their death. Many lose their will to hold everything together, you know? They gradually dissipate, like they can’t be bothered to hold on to their bodies no more.
“Once you stick around after death, and you find your way here, you’re stuck. We don’t let you go to the living world, the world outside our walls, because we don’t want anyone finding their way back here. And since you already turned away from the bright light or the eternal dark, your path that way is shut.
“You can lose your body, but never your soul. Your soul is rooted here ’til Judgment Day, or whenever things eventually end.” He looks back at where the body was laying at the end of the pier. “Except now that’s not the case anymore, looks like. We got bodies here with no spirits, no souls. It goes against everything we know.”
“Wait, there are a few things I don’t understand.”
“Just a few?” he mutters.
“Look, I’m going to ask some dumb questions.”
“Go ahead,” Marsh says like he doesn’t expect any other kind. We’ve reached the coach and climb up into the bench up front. He clacks the reins, and the horses set into motion. We’re going slower than on the way here; Marsh is in no hurry to pick a destination.
“OK, here’s one. Zombies, spirits, undead things. There is folklore, stories about destroying them. Chopping off the head, exorcisms, silver bullets. Are you saying there’s no way to kill you guys?”
Marsh chews over his response for a moment, looking at me with suspicion.
And then he says, “Yes, some of those things work. Exorcisms, ways to force the spirit beyond. The thing is, none of us here can do those things. Even if I wanted to send a spirit on to their great reward—and believe me, there’s been plenty—an exorcism would banish everything in earshot, me included. No one here could do it because it would drop them in the attempt. Which means most of us could start an exorcism, but none of us could finish it.”
He turns to me with a cruel grin. “One of the reasons we didn’t kill you right away is we were sure you didn’t have the know-how to do that. If we think for a second you know how to banish or exorcize someone, you won’t last two seconds.”
“Got it,” I say, my mouth dry. I’ll make it a point to avoid that topic of conversation in the future.
“Silver bullets will hurt some of us—the more supernatural of us, I guess you’d say. But you aren’t going to find any silver here; it’s banned. You try chopping off someone’s head here, and they’re going to get really pissed.” He chuckles at the thought. I’m never going to understand this guy.
“So, no death penalty here, then. What do you do with your criminals? You just throw ’em in a cell?”
“Most of them, yeah. The ones that have bodies, anyway. We toss them in a box and let them sweat it out for a few years. When you have all of eternity staring you in the face,
you don’t want to spend it in a cell.”
“What do you do with the ones who don’t have bodies?”
Marsh makes up his mind about where he’s going, evidently. He sits up straighter, snaps the reins, and the horses pick up speed. He smiles. “I’ll show you.”
“It’s called the Pit,” Marsh explains, squinting against the glare of the energy pouring up from a fissure in the ground.
We’re back at the police headquarters. We walked through the massive gate on the main floor, past the guards, the latches and deadbolts locking behind us. We’re at the top of some steel stairs, wide enough for about four people to walk side-by-side, winding down around the inside of the walls, around a huge pit in the floor. The room is cavernous, maybe about a football field in length and just as wide. It’s kind of like a giant elevator shaft, massive stone blocks fit snugly together to form walls that tower up and disappear into the gloom overhead. It looks like the whole building was built to surround and contain this. The only light comes from the floor, way down below.
I lean out over the rusting railing and look down. The stairs only reach about halfway down, and that is several stories down into the earth. The floor is a good hundred feet farther down from where they end. The stairs stop at a platform, and that is where Marsh is heading. We don’t talk much as we make our way down. I don’t know that I could walk, talk and take it all in at the same time.
It’s crazy loud here, like the roar of a waterfall. I can feel the air being pulled into the floor below. Intense colors flare out from a massive split in the ground. It’s like the light is trying to escape, but the pull of force keeps dragging it back in. I can feel the pull from even up here, like something grabbing on to my shirt and tugging.
I pause on the stair I’m on and close my eyes. It reminds me of the beach, standing in the water about knee deep, feeling the pull of the tide trying to tug my feet out and drag me under. It feels like I’m moving, though my brain keeps telling me I’m standing still. I can feel the sand piling up around my feet.
It’s like that here, the weight pulling me down to the hole in the ground. I open my eyes and look anxiously at the platform where we’re heading. There is an opening in the railing on the end that hangs out over the hole. Seems really easy to get swept off to whatever is down there.
I catch up to Marsh just as he reaches the platform. He walks halfway out and stops, about twenty feet from the edge. I nervously inch out to join him. I try not to think about how easy it would be for Marsh to bump me off and never have to deal with me again.
“What is it?” I yell over the rush of energy pouring past us, visibly getting sucked down into the earth. It’s like a tornado of barely-visible colors and lines swirling down.
“Not sure, really,” Marsh yells back. “Massive gravity well. Bottomless pit. Scientists and magicians call it different things. It pulls in light, sound, energy. Anything that gets sucked in never comes out.”
He slaps one hand on top of his head to hold his hat into place before it gets yanked away. “We bring the ones here who refuse to obey the rules, those that pose a danger to all of us. That won’t toe the line. And whether they have a body or not, we toss them in. Bodies get sucked down. Spirits too. Ghosts can’t get near this thing, even if a ghost goes in there, it can’t come back.”
“It kills them?”
Marsh shakes his head. “No. They’re still alive down there. Trapped for all time. If we toss a body in there, the force will tear the body apart. But it just pulls the spirit down.”
I shiver, trying to imagine being stuck in the bottom of a well for all eternity—too loud to speak, not able to do anything but exist. Whoever is down there, they must be insane. How many souls are pinned down there at the bottom? Do they even know?
“Don’t you get too close,” he cautions. “If your body gets torn apart, we don’t know yet if your spirit will come back.”
We both stand there on the platform for a short while, resisting the pull of force trying to lure us down. The roar in my ears discourages talk, but it doesn’t stop Marsh.
“I like coming down here to think. The noise, it drowns everything else out.”
“This Pit, is it natural? Or did you guys make it?” I ask.
He shrugs and doesn’t answer.
I watch streamers of energy swirl past. Closing my eyes, I lose myself in the sensation. I feel a tap on my shoulder, and I open my eyes to see Marsh waving me back.
“Let’s go, kid.”
Chapter 15
I don’t know the first thing about how a detective solves a case. Kind of a major drawback in being a detective as it turns out. But if this is what they want of me, damn it, I’m going to figure out how to do it.
All I can do for now is approach it in the same way I approach projects at school. When I’m building models on my computer, it’s all about starting with the basics and slowly working outward. If I want to model a character of any kind, I start out with a simple cube and start extruding one face after another. Squish, stretch, bevel, copy, paste, smooth, pull, and move vertices and faces until everything lines up just right. I’d like to think I can apply that same method here, even though I know this grossly simplifies what I’m in for.
So where do I start? I requested some instruction manuals, training manuals, history books, even doodles on napkins, anything to try and help me get ready for what’s ahead of me. They don’t have any. Plenty of rules and laws and codes though, rooms full of them. But no step-by-step on how to solve a case.
I’m supposed to provide some special kind of perspective. They expect this knack I have for sensing lies, or my ability to breathe, is going to be the means of giving them the breakthrough they want. I’m determined to do a good job here, prove I’m worth keeping alive, but frankly, I don’t see how I can pull it off.
We’re back in the squad’s office. The door is closed, cutting out some of the noise from the main room. More importantly, though, it will prevent anyone from overhearing our discussion. Word of the murder has been buzzing around the precinct like a swarm of angry bees. It’s all anyone can whisper about right now, and they’re all looking at us for answers. We’re all here, all eight detectives on the squad, sitting at our desks in varying states of consternation, confusion and general pissed-offedness. Even Greystone is here. She’s a floating disapproving presence lurking at my shoulder. I can feel her anger in my mind, her irritation, if I didn’t already feel it radiating off her in waves. She’s spent the last half-hour scowling down her nose at the lot of us. I’m not sure what we’ve done to tick her off, but she’s in a snit.
Clark closes the blinds so no one can look in. Marsh erases a chalkboard. None of us are talking. Burchard is smoking something that looks like a cigar but smells like a swampy dead dog. Marsh turns to us, opens his mouth, closes it again, and scowls.
Clark shifts in his seat, loosens his green tie, and says, “Well, I’ll say it if no one else will. Holy shit! A murder, right?”
He’s the only one actually enjoying this. He leans back in his chair, looking around at morose and scowling expressions reflecting back at him. “I mean, not many firsts here, are there?”
Finnegan levels his unblinking stare my way. “Except for the breather, here.” I’m not sure how he does it, but while his expression doesn’t change, I can feel it loading with suspicion, with intent. “It occurs to me that it’s a damned coincidence that he shows up right when bodies start dropping. I mean, we never see a single death in this town in its entire history, and it happens the same time he shows up?”
This is bad, isn’t it? It feels bad. He’s jumping to an incredibly wrong conclusion. I want to debate mistaking correlation for causation, but I don’t think it would make much traction.
Armstrong starts tapping a finger on his desk while he growls, “I’m not buying his too-stupid-to-know-anything excuse. I’m with Finnegan. Let�
��s sweat him for some answers.”
“That’s enough of that,” Marsh says quietly, but it cuts through the room. “He’s been under surveillance the whole time he’s been here. Neither Greystone nor myself have let him out of our sights.”
Armstrong continues to tap, Finnegan continues to stare, but I breathe a sigh of relief. I didn’t like where the conversation was heading. It’s good to know my partner has my back.
“No, that too-stupid-to-know-anything expression of his is real,” Marsh continues, ignoring my choke of indignation. “We won’t rule out that he’s unknowingly connected somehow. But he’s definitely not behind it. According to the captain’s notes, the first body was found long before Green showed up. So what else have we got?”
Mumbles surround me, coming from everyone except Finnegan, who continues to measure me. I try and ignore him, but I can feel his eyes on me.
“OK, let’s start at the beginning. How many are we talking about?”
Burchard reads from a clipboard. “Four. That we can verify.”
“Wait,” I say. “When Radu found me in that room, right before he dragged me here, I fell onto a whole pile of bodies.”
Marsh waves my comment away. “That was back in, where was it? Nebraska. Those were just dead bodies, mortals. Miller had been killing a bunch for a while. He got a little overzealous in his feeding habits. That was one of the reasons he’s in the Pit right now.”
“Oh,” I say quietly, not knowing if I should feel relieved or concerned.
“These four victims: who are they and how are they connected?” Marsh asks.
Burchard looks at the clipboard again. “Otis Evans. Stephan Thunnel. Charles McRae. Tom Eldredge.”
Marsh writes the names up on the board as Detective Meints starts flipping through some files. Meints has a thin folder from a filing cabinet for each of the victims, and they lay open on top of the books strewn across his desk. He glances back and forth between the files and the notes he’s written on a pad in his hand, ignores the sighs of impatience around the room, then says, “Nothing stands out about any of them. Eldredge was a bit of a troublemaker, but nothing of great consequence. I can’t find anything on the surface that looks strange. No obvious connections between them either.”
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