“All right. How did it happen?” the investigator asked.
“He wanted more money. That’s all. He showed up in her office the day before we opened. We met in her office. He said the play was a big joke—” Faulkner the director bristled, but Kellyn didn’t pause “—and that he was sole reason tickets were moving. Of course, she called him a prima donna. They got into an argument, and she told him to get out. But he wouldn’t leave. And she had these masks on the wall.”
“So, she hit him with the ogrun tragedy mask,” Abigail said. “Hard enough to break it, even.”
Kellyn groaned again. “She was just angry. She had no idea how hard she had hit him. I said we should go to the city watch, but she said it would ruin the Majestic and both of our careers. She said we could go after the play’s run was finished but not yet.”
“Oh, sure. That was gonna happen,” Grimes grunted. Abigail cast him a stern glare, and he fell silent again. She turned back to Kellyn.
“What did you do with the body?” she asked.
“We hid it,” he said, but Kincaid could already see the self-defensive veil falling across his face. If he knew where the body was and could lead the city watch to it, his involvement was confirmed. As it stood now, there was no evidence to link him to the murder, which is what Kincaid knew the watch would call it. All they had was his supposed confession, which he could deny in a heartbeat. His word against theirs.
“Where?” Abigail pressed.
“What difference does it make?” Kellyn seemed in control of himself once more. “She hid it so even I wouldn’t find it. She didn’t want me to be involved any deeper.”
“We need to know where it is,” Abigail said, “because that’s what the spirit wants. It wants to be reunited with its body. Then it can move on or we can—”
As if summoned, it came again.
“I didn’t call it!” Elliot cried.
Just the same, this time, the Strangelight team was ready. As the ghost fell on them from the stage above and behind them, Elliot pulled his hood back on, and whirled to face the angry spirit. Mel backpedaled and grabbed the Strangelight projector attached to its stand. The scarred mask wove past her toward Abigail.
Grimes moved to interpose himself between the investigator and the spirit as it descended. After flicking a switch on his chest, his armor rapidly expanded, ballooning outward. When the jammer suddenly pulled his goggles down, Kincaid reacted with a jolt. Goggles, he thought. He shielded his eyes with one hand as the first blast of purple Strangelight from one of the projectors lit up the auditorium. He’d been told the goggles had two uses—first to make things revealed by the Strangelight easier to see, and secondly to protect against lingering damage to the eyes. It was this that frightened Kincaid the most—thinking of Grimes’ silver eyes. Likely one mission wouldn’t cause him any great harm, but he wasn’t eager to see a different pair of orbs looking back at him in the mirror when he got home.
The team was ready to defend itself, but it was not as ready when the ghost of Berek Ofstad attacked Kellyn instead.
For the first time, Kincaid saw a second mask—a bizarrely grinning ogrun face, almost amusing in a paradoxical way—as the spirit hefted it. When he could see the two masks side by side, he understood that, despite the apparent corporeal presence of the snarling mask, it was really as ethereal as the ghost itself. It was part of the spirit realm, not the world of the living.
But the grinning mask was real. It made a sickening thudding sound when it smashed into Kellyn’s skull.
The theater assistant didn’t make a sound as he fell, the side of his head a bloody mess of hair and bone. He lurched forward into Elliot and Mel, who tried to catch him before he struck the floor. The spirit raised the grinning ogrun mask, now cracked down the middle of its forehead and between its eyes, and brought it down at the mechanik as she held the dying Kellyn in her arms.
Kincaid caught it with the very edge of his baton, less than three inches from Mel’s forehead. The reverberation made his arm throb with sudden agony. Flinging the grinning mask back with his baton, he watched the ghost retreat, the snarling ogrun mask cocking like a dog that’s heard a high pitch. It seemed to be looking at Kellyn—and Kincaid could not help but wonder if it could see the theater assistant’s own spirit leaving his mortal self.
Without a sound, the ghost of Berek Ofstad curled into a fetal position and disappeared. The grinning mask clattered to the floor.
“Where is it?” Abigail demanded, turning.
“It’s nearby,” Elliot said. “It’s watching, possibly waiting for us to give up. I could call it, but it will come with more fury.”
“We’re not giving up.” Abigail crossed to Mel, kneeling to check Kellyn for any signs of life. Her features were hard. “Why would we give up?”
“Because if we don’t,” Grimes said, leaning back with a sigh against the edge of the stage, “it’s going to try to kill the rest of us. Might succeed, might not. But we can’t do a damned thing with it if we don’t find its body. We do that, we have a chance to catch it.”
“Are you saying we can’t catch it any other way?”
“Its rage is exceptional,” Elliot said as Grimes nodded in support. The thin man shrugged. “It likely sees no way out. No way to go on living but no way to finish dying. Catching it without having its former vessel nearby would only antagonize it to further acts of aggression.”
“What? You still want to catch this thing?” the director Faulkner suddenly shouted. “It’s not a stray dog that’s wandered onto the property! It’s a murderous entity from beyond the grave!”
“Take it easy,” Abigail said. “We won’t let it hurt you. We’re trained to—”
“Hurt me?” Faulkner snorted incredulously and crossed his arms. “It’s a goldmine! Two victims—and that’s just so far! We’ll be in all the sheets tomorrow as the theater experience of the season. Who wouldn’t want to come see what might happen?”
Kellyn sat up in Mel’s arms.
One eye ran with blood while the other seemed to drift in his skull, as if knocked loose to float in its socket. He turned his head, his lips pulled back tight to reveal his teeth, and another small dribble of blood ran down from his ear. His face was already a horrifying white in death.
“Get out,” he rasped in a voice both Kellyn’s and someone—or something—else. “You need not be dead for me to take you from within.”
And then he crumbled like a bag of bones once more. His head made a thunking sound when it struck the floor next to Mel. She winced.
“Sorry,” she whispered to the dead man. “I hope that didn’t hurt.”
Elliot knelt next to the body.
“You have a place waiting for you,” he whispered. “The door is open and your place is just beyond it. There is glory there, and it’s yours. I can show you the way.”
Abigail lifted her lumitype and held it pointed steadily at the body so the purple Strangelight washed across it. Bathed in that odd illumination, Kincaid watched an otherworldly glowing light drift from Kellyn’s corpse, twisting like a small storm as it rose.
It all lasted only a moment, and then the ghostly glow was gone. Elliot stopped speaking; Abigail lowered her device.
For a long minute, no one moved. Kincaid imagined the ghost hiding in the balconies above them, crouched in the shadows, daring them to stay, contemplating them as they stood in a rough semi-circle and considered their fate if they chose not to flee now.
Faulkner finally swallowed and cleared his throat. “Well, I suppose refunds would seem to be in order.”
• • •
KINCAID WAS ABOUT TO AGREE WITH the director when Abigail climbed up onto the stage above them. They all turned to look at her when she called for their attention. Slowly, she knelt and pet Artis, scratching its ears as she took them all in. She looked weary; Kincaid suspected she was about to tell them to pack it up. And he was okay with that.
“I was told we should try to bring this one in,” she said, re
moving her glasses to clean them. Kincaid suspected this made the rest of the team look blurry to her and made it easier for her to say what she needed to say. “This isn’t an option. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but we’re not helping this one move on to Urcaen. Not yet, anyway. We’re taking it back to Blackwell Hall. We’ll need to set up the containment devices. Mel, you’ll want to help Grimes get them in place.”
On the far side of the stage, one of the Strangelight projectors began to turn on and off repeatedly. Over and over. Artis hissed.
“We’re not leaving,” Abigail said firmly.
Kincaid winced and looked away. The flashes from the projector were coming faster. It made a hissing sound as a gas escaped it, perhaps from overheating.
“Enough,” Abigail commanded.
The projector shut off and then cracked open and apart like a metallic egg. Smoke rose from it, and a grey-green liquid spilled out one side. The investigator glared at it for a moment, then looked around the auditorium, up at the rafters, as if searching for the ghost.
“We came here to do our job,” she said; Kincaid could not tell if she was speaking to the Strangelight team or to the ghost they’d come to find. “We knew what the risks were when we signed up.”
Mel leaned in closer to Kincaid and whispered to him. “I bet you didn’t know what to expect, did you?”
Kincaid shook his head. Even with all their talk about bouncers dying and risk, he hadn’t taken most of it seriously. Mechaniks told similar stories about the risks of crawling inside factory machines—dramatics without drama.
“We’re going to have to capture it without access to the body,” Abigail went on. “That’s not as easy.”
“It’s mad because it’s without its body,” Grimes said. “Thanks to that, we’re going to end up fighting it and sending it on to Urcaen if it gets out of hand. I don’t put good odds on our catching it without that. This ghost is going to do us some serious harm while we’re trying to bring it home.”
“It doesn’t see any other recourse,” Elliot agreed.
“The body could be anywhere,” Grimes grunted. “For all we know, those two people he killed dragged his corpse out and threw it in the river. I’m going to bet he didn’t get laid out for a proper burial.”
Kincaid blinked. He thought about the ghost curling into a fetal position before disappearing, both in the office and in the auditorium. Not laid out for burial at all, he thought.
“Mel,” he whispered, “do you think it matters that I did prison time?”
“To who—the ghost?”
Kincaid scowled. “No. To the team. To Abigail.”
“I doubt it,” the mechanik said. “I’d bet Grimes has been on the wrong side of the law before, for one. The rest of us as well, I suppose, from time to time, even if we haven’t all been caught. Why do you ask?”
Instead of answering her, Kincaid patted her gratefully on the shoulder before climbing up onto the stage next to Abigail. She raised her eyebrows at him, and while he thought again how much he liked her, he also hoped he wasn’t about to doom any future he might have with the team. He was starting to like all of them.
“I think I know where the body is,” he said.
• • •
LUGGING THEIR EQUIPMENT, they followed him down to the dressing rooms, all of them so silent Kincaid could have easily imagined he was going alone to an uncertain fate. The corridor below was cool, but he could feel himself sweating. It reminded him of how he’d felt standing in court, listening to the magistrate hand down his prison sentence for…
“…burglary,” he had explained. “They called me the Locksmith back then. I was a safecracker. And for what it’s worth, it wasn’t called the Majestic Playhouse then—it was Ceryl-in-the-Round.”
“Why would your gang break into a theater?” Mel had asked.
“Because it was easier than breaking into the vault next door, below a moneychanger.” He had tried grinning but saw that no one else was going to return it. “No guards in the theater. So, we were going to go in through the moneychanger’s underground vault. Through the wall between the theater’s basement and the vault. But we got caught—the mercenary hired to protect the place was lazy and smoked like a dragon, so instead of guarding the place, he spent half the night outside in the back. He saw where we broke into the theater, and he called the city watch. They got here before we made it into the vault. I was in the closet, taking my turn digging, when they arrived. The rest of the gang took off—I was the only one they arrested.”
He had waited, and when no one asked, he’d filled in what he assumed they were wondering. “Three years. In the Rockthrow Prison Colony, where they only send the best and the brightest. Oh, and the sneaky shits who force you to learn to sleep with your eyes open. I learned. When I got out, I planned to put my life back together. I learned mechanikal skills during those three years, so I went looking for work. And here I am—working with all of you.”
“A new gang,” Abigail had said dryly.
Kincaid had sighed. “Come on. Let me show you.”
Now as they moved down the narrow corridor that led to the dressing rooms, he wished he’d lied. He berated himself for thinking Mel was in tune with the Strangelight team—how could she be? After all, it was clear the team hadn’t been together all that long. Both Abigail and Elliot were young and inexperienced. He glanced back at the investigator, but the dim lights of the corridor reflected off her glasses and hid her eyes. She looked like a ghost herself. She held her lumitype like a pistol.
“We went through a closet down the hall,” he said to her. “The closet’s back wall was lined up with the vault, if you could dig a tunnel straight across between the two buildings. Thirty feet at the most.”
He stopped at the rectangular silver plaque: CERYL-IN-THE-ROUND, Est. 590 and turned to face the group. They’d spread out almost single file, with Mel bringing up the rear to protect Elliot from behind while Grimes guarded him from the front. Abigail was directly behind Kincaid. The director Faulkner had decided he was entitled to tag along, so he came third, between Abigail and Grimes. Kincaid thought he should have stayed upstairs with the bodies, but given that the ghost could apparently possess the dead, he could understand the director’s trepidation at being left alone. Still, he could have come last. Except for Faulkner, the team had as much of their gear as they could shoulder.
“It was right here,” he said, indicating the wall where he’d scrapped his boot to mark the spot. “I recognized the plaque when we were down here earlier. This is where the closet was. But they built over its door—and recently. Take a look at the stonework and the paint.”
Abigail obliged, kneeling to inspect the wall, but Faulkner crossed his arms defiantly. She looked up at him. “What makes you think Berek Ofstad’s body is in there?”
Kincaid squatted, tightly tucking his arms close to his body and pulling his knees up to his chin to imitate the fetal position the ghost had assumed earlier. He then rose to his full height. “It’s a tight space in there.”
“This is just paint and planks of thin wood,” Abigail said. She tapped the wall, and the sound echoed around her in the narrow corridor. “We can knock this down.”
He was about to respond when she looked back at the others. “Grimes, can you do this?”
“Grimes!” Faulkner called. “Do this?”
“Wait,” Kincaid said before the jammer could answer. Abigail turned back to him. “I got this.”
He recognized in her eyes that reluctance he’d been seeing in the faces of any employer who asked about his background. If he told them the truth, this was the expression: doubt, mistrust, even fear. He’d been turned down more than a dozen times; he’d also walked away from those faces before, never waiting to hear the answer he knew was coming. But this time, there was more at stake than just a job. He held up a finger to silence her.
“Listen, Abigail,” he said in a low voice so even Faulkner couldn’t hear. “It was burgla
ry I was arrested for, not murder. I did time for it. I was coming to fix your furnace, not to chase ghosts—but I went along. I was right there in the thick of it at your side when Berek Ofstad decided to start killing everybody off.”
When she didn’t respond right away, he said, “I didn’t run when they came to arrest me. I didn’t run like your last bouncer. I’ve never run. You can count on me to be straight with you—even if I can’t count on you to be straight with me.”
She stared at him for so long that he’d begun to notice his own reflection in her glasses. Finally, she nodded and turned to the rest of the team.
“Mel,” she called back down the line, “pass a crowbar up here. Kincaid needs it to get this wall open.”
When she turned back again, she was smiling. He smiled, too.
“John,” he said. “My name is John.”
“If you were wondering,” Faulkner shouted back to the others, “his name is John!”
Abigail frowned at the director. “Stop doing that.”
She reached behind her, accepted the crowbar from Faulkner, and handed it to him. “You’re not very good at being mysterious, Kincaid.”
“Yeah, well, prison will do that to you,” he grunted as he attacked the wall where the closet door was hidden. The wood beneath the stonework façade splintered with his first blow. By the third blow, he could see the closet door beneath the thin paneling that had been used to disguise the closet’s entry.
From near the back of the group, Elliot suddenly called out. “It’s near. I can hear it. Do you want me to call it in closer?”
Abigail leaned in to look at the progress. “This is our best chance to bring it in. I hope you’re right about the body being back there, or we’re about to have another ugly fight on our hands.”
“I need him to wait for just a minute,” Kincaid said. He could feel the sweat running down his back. “We’re almost there.”
“For just a minute!” Faulkner called back to the others. “Almost there!”
“I told you to stop it,” Abigail said. “You’re an obnoxious echo. He can hear us.”
Wicked Ways: An Iron Kingdoms Chronicles Anthology Page 6