“Oops,” she wiped her mouth, glad for the interruption. They neither had the time nor Rev the energy for extracurricular activities at the moment. “Sorry, Brutus.”
She opened the zipper that ran the bag’s circumference, and a soupy, steamy mixture of fog and musty dust cascaded from the opening like a murky waterfall. Hitting the floor, rolling and curling, then twisting up and inward, up and inward. A tumult of black clouds becoming the same fluffy, menacing swirls of soot and burnt dust over and over until the form of a tall, stocky, robust man stood in the middle of the room. Brutus was over seven feet tall, his imposing size matched only by his dark and ominous comportment. He had a way of staring with his two red glowing eyes, like burning embers within a storm of smoke, which could make even those who knew and loved him shake in their shoes.
“Brutus,” Rev chastised. “You couldn’t have picked a worse time. Couldn’t you have waited an hour?”
“An hour?” Abby laughed out loud. “Try five minutes.”
“Hey!”
Abby wanted to rejoice in Rev’s embarrassment, but she saw Brutus go for the exit. Right away she was concerned.
“Brutus, where are you going?”
He didn’t answer, departing without a sound, straight through the large wooden door like heavy smoke permeating a screen. Brutus told them both he’d be back, but he didn’t tell them where he was going.
Abby didn’t like it.
“What do you make of that?” she tunneled into her bag. All the gear she needed for encounters and incursions with enemies both living and nonliving was in there. Her statmag emitter, close-range spirit weapons like the ghost prod, conventional combat gear like a Sig Sauer P229 and even a collapsible baton. Folded among it all was hair product and makeup and thong underwear. She threw aside the sundry items, tossing garments and knives and spirit stunners left and right, searching for her statmag emitter. When she looked up, expecting to hear some kind of answer from Rev, she caught him staring. He flinched and shot his head the other direction and began unpacking his own bag.
“What?” she stopped everything.
“Huh?”
“Why were you staring?”
Rev knew he was busted. “You’re just so damned beautiful.”
“No I’m not.”
“Abby. There’s not a man alive…or dead…who wouldn’t think so.”
“You just want to get into my pants.”
“True,” he said to her immense sigh of reluctance. “But that’s not why I’m saying it. I just get lost sometimes when I look at you. It’s like there’s something in you I’m trying to figure out, like a puzzle so difficult to solve it’s become my one true obsession, the one thing that absorbs and captivates me.”
She looked at him with new eyes, pondering where that came from…and why. All she could do was stare at him, no matter how profoundly she yearned to ask.
“I don’t know why, Abby,” he blinked slowly, hypnotically, drawing her even nearer with his preternatural animal magnetism. “I really don’t. Something about you, something luminous and intoxicating and indefinable lies below the surface of our relationship, of my feelings for you. I’ve never felt like this before.”
In a rare moment, Abby sensed something other than immature hubris from Rev. She sensed a deeper, more complex side, and it ingratiated her to him ever more. How could she stay angry at this ghost?
“You really feel that way?”
“Yeah. That’s why I believe so strongly in this case. It’s not just that the Petrovics are innocent spirits. That’s bad enough. What gets me is how much they love each other, and how that love transcends even Hatman’s evil. I mean, just look how long Hatman has been holding the Petrovics. That tells you something about their love. It’s a bond, spiritually and emotionally, when two souls are intertwined it results in such intimacy…”
Rev finally stopped and took notice that he was rambling.
“So where the hell did Brutus go, anyway?”
“He’s around,” Abby brought the conversation back to the matter at hand. “Tell me more about love.”
Rev’s normally eternally tanned face took on a ruddy glow of embarrassment.
“I believe there’s a soul that’s matched perfectly for every other soul out there. I also believe that if they were meant to be together, then they’ll find each other.”
Before Abby had the chance to ponder that one over, Brutus invaded the room with his foreboding presence. His stormy, smoldering energy commanded much more urgency than both Rev and Abby were accustomed to seeing from the large and imposing ghost.
“What’s wrong, Brutus?” Abby sensed his agitation. She also gathered from him a sentiment she rarely got from Brutus even in their most challenging of missions—fear.
“This place,” Brutus was more solemn than ever. “It’s bad.”
“I know what you mean,” Abby couldn’t deny it any longer. “There definitely is a nasty vibe going on here within the fake veneer of bucolic utopia. What are they hiding?”
Rev pondered over the team’s possibly ill-conceived infiltration plan. “We’ll soon find out.”
Chapter 12
The staircase was a nightmare for Abby, who relished her competence as a stealth professional. The hand built lodge, with its wooden nails, trusses, and peg fasteners, had way of settling. A pile of sticks affixed together by more sticks is going to flex and bend and…settle. So that’s what it did, and every step, without exception, even if she tiptoed, even if she pawed the ground like a church mouse on those old and uneven and hand-hewn floorboards, creaked and squeaked and moaned incessantly.
“Oh hell!” she whispered loudly. “Brutus, you might as well carry me!”
He swung his massive bulk behind her, ready to scoop her up.
“I was just joking,” she smiled cynically. “But thanks anyway.”
Brutus had discovered the hidden staircase with his otherworldly vision, and Abby decided to see where it led. They followed it down to an area below the first floor. Below the dining room and lounge. Below the front desk where that nosey doorman held constant vigil. But it wasn’t only old Ed and Stewart the pimply faced bellhop Abby had to contend with. It was a feeling she was receiving from deep within the bowels of the lodge. Loathing. Fury. Melancholy. Terror. Loss. So many different emotions, all of them bad.
“Oh my god!” she halted in her tracks, having found a massive wooden door, a passage to the hellhole of suffering which lie beyond.
Brutus couldn’t refute Abby’s sense of foreboding. However, he had a difficult time sensing anything past the doorway. No definitive vision. His spiritual senses were failing.
“Brutus, are you seeing anything?” Abby dug into her pack and produced a heatspec goggle set. She tried it, but had no luck. “Brutus?”
He was gone. Brutus had decided to find another way around. He didn’t know why, but the more they moved toward that door, the more nauseated he felt, like it was stripping him of energy, but worse than that, changing it. So he kept his distance from the great door, behind which seemed the darkest of forbidden nightmares.
“Brutus? Why are you…?”
Abby’s utterance were the magic words that unlocked the heavy wooden door. Silent and smooth, the great plane of mountain hemlock swung free from its bolt mechanism and a cave of abysmal blackness stretched from some cryptic world within. Abby felt instant terror and weariness all at once. Unrelenting loathing and despairing languor. A spiritual wasteland dwelt somewhere in the darkness beyond where her eyesight dared not travel.
She saw quite plainly, mounted in a sconce, an oil lamp burning softly, casting a somber glow on the rough stone underground walls. At closer inspection, she noted that the rustic wood staircase was now at an end. Solid granite now encompassed her as she followed the downward slope.
The passageway curved to the left on a gradual decline. The walls had carved sconces at regular intervals with lamps like the first one she’d seen. A flickering flame of im
pending doom. No frescos adorned the walls. No cartouches or arabesque designs of intricate detail. The corridor, as she saw it, was remarkably unremarkable, and that only added to the gloom of her portentous insight.
A howl in the darkness. Her heart skipped a beat, then made up for it by pounding steadily. This was the first time since they’d arrived she actually heard the voices of the dead, the dead she knew were there, in nothing less than a subterranean torture chamber. She did not yet know exactly why this evil cult of the rich and powerful wanted to imprison souls. Maybe they got a sick kick out of it. She didn’t care to waste her time with conjecture. All she knew was her initial impressions were correct. This was a hellish prison for many innocent spirits. Emile Petrovic and his wife Alexandra were not alone.
With these alarming indictments, she strode slowly, deliberately, to the end of the long sloping hall, expecting to see some sort of chamber at the end. And exactly that she saw. Expectations ended there, though, when she witnessed something other than a ritualistic altar, a sacrificial table or stone monolith so naturally associated with cults of these kinds. Instead of a place of sacrifice, it was a room full of rods here, there, and everywhere. Tall wood poles not much thicker than a broom handle speared into the loamy ground.
The lighting was different now. Her heart began to pound again when she took note of something else. Silence. At the very moment her eyes beheld the staffs, cluttering the flat, open space like a bamboo forest, the sounds of the tormented souls ceased. The deafening silence spoke of a solitude and desolation the likes of which she cared not fathom. It was everywhere. Loneliness so profound, it hung like a haze of forced seclusion and darkness at every turn. However, she saw no spirits. No souls. No poor and destitute wretches in desperate need of her help. And she certainly didn’t encounter the Petrovics.
“Shit,” she said instinctively. “Dead end.”
Her profound sixth sense wouldn’t be denied. Though the voices had fallen silent, the residue of ghostly energy was all around her. Somehow, someway, she knew the spirits were there. She was on the right track. This was some kind of diversion, an obstacle set in her path to dissuade her from discovering and setting free the two spirit lovers who had been wronged so terribly.
It wasn’t until she studied the staffs that she had begun to formulate an intriguing hypothesis. At the ends of each pole, fastened with a snakeskin rope, were tightly bundled spheres made of wire and wood. A hollow maze of intricately connected fiber optic cables and roots, intertwining and interconnecting like arteries reducing to veins, then branching off to capillaries. The strangest kind of device she’d ever seen, and it almost invited her touch.
She reached out and received the shock of her life. So strong. So magnetic. She couldn’t let go. Instantly she received a flood of emotion, permeating her sensitive mind with an unfortunate story of demise, of loss, of being trapped and tormented and tricked by Hatman, a loathsome and powerful entity that wanted only pain and suffering for the world.
“Who are you?” Abby asked the lost and terrified spirit trapped in its thorny prison of darkness. Abby saw the luminance of the spirit’s energy shining through like a lantern in the gloomy night. The spirit proceeded to tell Abby about herself. She was once a leader of a woman’s suffrage movement. A strong-willed and passionate fighter for the rights of females. But not anymore. Now she was an inmate in this, creation’s most cruel prison, for it was a prison of souls awaiting their final sentence. A death row for the dead.
“Don’t worry,” Abby thought she was being reassuring. Soon she’d find out differently. “I’m here to help you.”
At that she received a bombardment of willful energy, and not the kind she was expecting. Instead of an outpouring of gratitude, the sentiment was the complete opposite. The overall din was too much for her to discern individual voices, but the main theme wasn’t lost. The souls trapped in that dingy dungeon, shackled in their strange electric/wicker spirit holders, overwhelmingly and categorically asserted that Abby must go.
“What are you saying?” Abby asked. The ghosts of that lonely and desolate place, unwitting pawns in some strange and brutally ancient sacrificial rite, didn’t want Abby’s help. They wanted her to leave.
“Go!” they said unanimously. “Go and never come back.”
It was unnerving to hear so many spirits, usually kind and compassionate, behaving with such ribald contention. It got so bad she almost felt threatened, and considered a retreat. But then a voice from a nearby staff captured her attention, a familiar and pleasant tone she’d come to know well.
“Abby? Abby, is that you?”
It was Alexandra Petrovic.
“Alexandra!” Abby was amazed she’d found her. “Yeah, I’m here…we’re here,” she reached for the staff and felt it was secure in the ground. “To…get…you…out!” She heaved on the staff with all her strength, yet only moved it slightly. Then she felt the earth give way and pulled the staff straight up.
“Wait!” Alexandra warned her zealous rescuer. The throng of frightened ghosts added to the command with calls for prudence of their own. “Wait, Abby. You don’t understand. You can’t do this! You and your friends have to leave…now!”
“No, you don’t understand,” Abby sometimes had to be assertive. And this, it seemed, was one of those times. Sometimes ghosts just didn’t know what was good for them. “It’s our mission to get you out of here, and that’s what we’re doing,” she looked left to right to left, scanning the staffs. “Now, which one of these is your husband?”
“Who is this person, Alexandra?” the staff directly adjacent to Alexandra’s lit up with just a fraction more luminance than before. Not enough for the average human eye to detect. Abby noticed it when she heard the voice, and knew the owner immediately.
“My name is Abby Rhodes, Doctor Petrovic,” she said. “I’m with Ghost Guard, and we’re here to help you. You, your wife, and every other spirit in here.”
“You?” the doctor was afraid. Very afraid. This was his worst nightmare come true, if this woman was who she said she was. “Did you say you were here to help us?”
“Yes. Yes, I did.”
“Then you certainly must leave!” There was no equivocation in the Doctor’s demand. Abby was as confused as ever, as she defied the order, plucking the doctor’s staff from the soil like Arthur with Excalibur.
“No!” came the sudden and conjoined cry. Both husband and wife sent their emotional energy at Abby with tremendous force. “You’ll just make things worse!”
“Make things worse? How can it be worse for you than this?”
“You don’t understand!”
“Make me!”
“There’s no time,” and when those words entered Abby’s sensitive third ear, she also received the oddest, most abysmally terrifying blast of emotions. It was unmistakable in its source. Behind her back something wicked loomed. Every inch of her skin prickled with fear. Every hair on her body stood on end. Every instinct in her innate, reptilian brain screamed out danger was near, stalking, watching, biding time before something sinister, something unthinkable was unleashed and she would meet an ugly, terrifying end.
She faced the menacing coldness and the thing she saw stole the breath right out of her lungs. A sight of unsurpassed evil, yet at the same time of unrivaled elegance. A man, forged from the gloom, with soft outlines and indistinct shades of gray and black. His style was vintage, a hundred years old at least, and impeccable in every detail. A tasteful three-piece suit with a mid-length split tail and rose boutonniere. A rounded bowler hat with a wide rim casting just enough shadow to mask his eyes. She felt those eyes penetrating her, ravaging her, violating her.
With a start, she dropped the staffs and plunged her hands to her chest, gasping deeply and crying aloud. This thing called Hatman was entering her mind, occupying her will, rendering her defenses completely useless. Normally, under such a psychic attack, she would have summoned a wall of sound, a battlement of music that could keep
out even the strongest of supernatural creatures. Hatman, though, was cunning and quick, almost as if he knew about Abby’s inner defenses, stinging her before she had the chance to raise the psychological wall.
Like a snap of thunder, Hatman dissipated to fine mist. Then, in a fraction of a second, he rematerialized inches from her, seizing her so firmly she thought she’d be crushed whole.
“Hello, Abby,” Hatman’s eyes were shrouded by impenetrable shadow. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
He flung her hard, with the strength of ten men, and with the cruelty of no other. She sailed into the air and landed twenty feet away, or her side, feeling it in her ribs. Wheezing, she lay there as Hatman, this time moving at the speed of a regular mortal, walked to her and lifted her off the ground with one hand.
“I’ve been waiting far too LONG!” he thrust her in the air again, hurling her as if she had been shot from a cannon. She felt her body go limp as she crashed against the wall and slid motionlessly to the floor, feeling now the hard surface of the walkway leading into, and out of, that terrible pit of sadness and regret. Her entire circulatory system ignited with the keen yearning to live, to save herself. Regrettably, the Petrovics would have to wait.
On hands and knees, she scurried as fast as her bruised physical state would allow. She heard steady footfalls. One casual and lethal step at a time. She hated his arrogance, how he thought he could toy with her like a doll. Never, in dozens of missions, had she experienced this combination of supernatural cunning mixed with pure malice. Even their last foe, Elyxa the ancient immortal from the stars, had a smidgen of compassion, although it was all directed at Rev. This thing, this desolate and soulless monster possessed nothing of the sort. No compassion. No mercy. Only hatred and the seething, ever present desire for power.
Ghost Guard 2: Agents of Injustice Page 9