by Tracy Lane
“I could never,” insisted the ghost.
“It’s just that”—she let out a short breath—“whenever he asks me to share a cup of coffee after work, I can’t bring myself to accept. I know I should, it would be the polite thing to do, but…a man like Atticus, he’s easy to say no to.”
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want,” Frank said tightly. “Ever, with anyone.”
She nodded halfheartedly, but gratitude was visible in her moist eyes. “I know that, and yet something tells me it would be smarter if I just gave in.”
“Never give in to a bully,” Frank warned. “They’re never satisfied. They’ll always want more.”
“He is a bully,” she said. Her voice sounded stronger now, but when she looked up at Frank, Jake was startled to see that her face was filled with childlike fear. “He scares me, and I think, when he’s not admiring me, he enjoys scaring me.”
“That’s what bullies do best,” Frank said. “Trust me, I know. I’ve been one before…”
“Never,” Clara said, slapping his leg lightly. Jake noticed the way their skin seemed so fleshy, not retreating into mist as usual. Didn’t Frank say the stronger the emotion, the stronger the ghost?
“You could never scare someone,” she insisted.
Frank almost laughed. “Used to do it for a living, doll, but not anymore.”
He winked at Jake when Clara shook her head. “I don’t believe it,” she said.
“Believe it,” he said. “But enough about me. I want you to promise me something, okay?”
“Anything,” she said a little too quickly.
“You tell me if Atticus Granger ever starts to—”
“Did I hear my name?” asked a voice from the other end of the hall, drifting in from – literally – out of thin air.
Even Frank jumped, to say nothing of Jake, who nearly tossed his mother’s camcorder out the broken window.
“Mr. Granger!” Clara said. She was suddenly solicitous, standing and bowing as Frank stood beside her, a nasty glower wiping all traces of gentle strength off his face.
“Gossiping about your boss to your new beau?” Atticus pressed as he approached them with his beak nose raised and trademark sneer brandished. “And on company time, no less?”
“N-n-no,” said Clara, her flitting stare begging Frank for intervention.
“Clara here was just telling me how much she respected you,” Frank stated.
“Is that so?” Atticus asked.
“Of course it is,” said Frank, making sure he stood nearly a head taller than the slight clerk. “Are you calling one of your guests a liar?”
“Of course not, sir.” Atticus halted and bowed deferentially. “It’s just that, well, Clara is needed in one of the chamber rooms and I couldn’t seem to find her.”
“Right away, sir,” Clara said, hardly showing Jake or Frank a backward glance as she strode hastily back down the hall. “Right away.”
Atticus turned and followed her closely – too closely, from the looks of it, murmuring in her ear the whole way down the stairs.
“You know,” Jake said, his shoulders slumping in relief now that Granger was gone, “for a smart guy, you’re pretty dumb.”
Frank started. “How’s that?”
“You can’t keep bullying Atticus,” Jake said.
Frank scoffed a little too dramatically. “Why not? He should know what it’s like to pick on someone his own size. Plus, I like to see him quake in his boots.”
“That’s just it,” Jake hounded. As someone who had been the new kid in every new school in every new town his parents ever dragged him to, he knew a thing or two about bullies. “He might cower in front of you, but the minute you’re gone, he’ll take it out on Clara, and twice as bad, just to get back at you.”
Frank shook his head, his fedora catching a glint of the golden afternoon sun, but his face made it clear he was considering Jake’s words. “Fine,” he conceded, hands up in surrender. “No more. But tell me, how do you know so much about ghosts?”
Jake snorted and lifted up his camcorder, ready to get back to work. “I don’t,” he said, “but a bully is a bully, alive or dead.”
Chapter 16
“I think it’s a bad idea,” Mrs. Weir said, her voice tight in Jake’s ear as he paced the corner of his room. Marley panted and shifted restlessly on the bed nearest the window, angling for Frank’s attention. “You’ve never stayed overnight before, Jakey. Why now?”
“I thought it might be neat to film some night vision stuff for the episode,” Jake said, and he was only half lying. “Think of how cool the footage will look to the guys at the Scream Channel.”
On the other end of the line, his mother paused. He could practically hear the wheels turning in her head. “Jake,” she warned, but in her tone was the slightest hint of acceptance.
“I’ll have my cell phone on the whole time,” he promised, plunging ahead before she could protest. “And Marley is here with me, and I can patch you in a live feed of everything I film.”
“Jake,” she said, voice tighter this time. “I am doing this against my better judgment. I want you home by seven in the morning, and you know I will not be sleeping until then…”
“Thanks, Mom!” he said.
“Don’t thank me,” she sighed, whispering now. “Thank your father. If he hadn’t just gotten home from rehab and needed me to wait on him hand and foot, I wouldn’t even be thinking about it.”
Jake hung up the phone, heart pounding. Marley pounced back and forth up the bed. Part of Jake had wanted his mother to say no. He had fully expected her to say no. Now that she hadn’t, he felt a sudden spike of nervousness; he looked around the room as darkness crept across the city to cloak the Balthazar, which hadn’t had any sort of electric lighting in over sixty years.
“Way to go, sport,” Frank chuckled, appearing in a trail of glowing mist at the door. “Now you’re stuck with me and the rest of the night dwellers.”
Marley sat up as his master appeared and yipped pleasantly, while both Jake and Frank shushed him.
“Very funny,” Jake said once Marley had quieted down. He fiddled with a mini-camcorder that fit inside his palm, adjusting the settings for night vision. “Help me see if this works or not.”
“How?” Frank started adjusting his suit and his hat, as if Jake would actually be able to see him through the lens.
“Just stand there,” Jake said. He drew the camera up to his eye and peered at the decrepit hotel room through the night vision lens. Frank was invisible, of course, but the saggy old beds and dusty dressers and nightstands glowed a brilliant, almost neon green.
“Perfect,” Jake said, and he lugged his larger camera with him toward the door.
“Wait,” said Frank. “What if Atticus sees that?”
Jake frowned and bit his lip. “Good question.” He sighed, wishing he didn’t have to go to such elaborate lengths just to fool a stupid ghost. “I can tell him it’s a flashlight,” he said, inspired.
Frank looked unconvinced. “Kind of big for a flashlight.”
“But too small for a 1921 movie camera,” Jake reasoned.
“What if you hid it in your bag?” Frank suggested, nodding toward Jake’s canvas sack that hung off the back of the desk chair. “You could point it out the open flap, kind of hug it against your side?”
Jake reached for the bag and, after a few adjustments, had the bulky camera resting surprisingly well just so inside the flap. It wriggled around, but as he slung the bag over his shoulder and secured it between his arm and his side, it stayed fairly stable.
He imagined any footage it would take might look a little jumpy to viewers, but then again…they kind of liked that.
He looked to Frank, who gave him a thumbs-up, and then he wrenched the old door to their room open.
Marley followed at Frank’s heels. “No, Marley,” Jake had to say; he bent down and leveled with the pup’s watery brown stare. “I’ll only be gon
e for a little while, okay?”
He offered Marley a treat from his pocket and, while the dog was munching contentedly, slid the door shut. Moments later, Frank materialized on the other side. Jake paused and heard soft, quiet whimpers on the other side of the door.
His heart hurt for the little dog, but he couldn’t risk ticking off Atticus. Eventually, Marley sneezed and snuffled and sighed, then went quiet, hopefully settling in to wait for their return.
“Okay,” Jake said, clutching the bag by his side. “Let’s do this.”
The night had blackened the inside of their skeleton of a hotel, and as he picked his way down the stairs, Jake was grateful for the moonlight shining in through broken windows whose curtains had long since fallen or been burned away.
Downstairs, the lobby looked as it usually did: dark, dank, and decrepit. “Where is everybody?” Jake asked as he pulled a LED light keychain from his pocket and shined it around the room.
“Listen,” Frank said.
Pausing, Jake suddenly heard it. Music. That leg-shaking, hip-wriggling music of the late 40s was wandering out from the ballroom.
However, when Jake approached and gently shoved open the doors, the music stopped. Shining his light, he saw the room not as it had been then, but as it currently was. Inside, all was moldy and empty and dark and quiet. Overturned tables with broken legs, walls chopped apart by the firemen’s axes, carpet torn up or burned to a crisp. Walls were charred or stained by soot and glass fixtures were shattered, destroyed in the pressure of intense heat.
He crept deeper in, the LED glow roving over the carnage left behind; a chill started creeping up his arms and legs.
“Frank?” he asked, quietly, so the camera wouldn’t catch it.
“I’m here,” said Frank. “I don’t—I’m not sure what’s happening.”
And then, from the doorway a beckoning whisper. “Frank?” It was Clara.
Jake turned, caught sight of the maid, and gasped. In the space she took up, he saw a glimpse of the Balthazar as it had been: beautiful, bold and alive with rich colors and flickering gas lamps and the warmth of Clara’s sweet, inviting face.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Frank murmured, before turning and hurrying to her side.
“Sure,” Jake answered, his voice faltering. He watched them laugh and whisper to each other before drifting away from the open ballroom doors and out of sight. Once again, the wide room around Jake had returned to ruin, wallpaper sagging and carpet torn and hallway dark.
He sighed and continued his exploration, clutching the messenger bag tight by his side to focus the night vision camera on his every footstep. He knew that even without the excitement of a bustling ballroom – which the camera’s eye couldn’t see anyway, just creeping around the deserted hotel in the dark would likely excite any member of the Paranormal Properties viewing audience.
“It better,” he grumbled to himself. “’Cuz this is some creepy—”
One of the ballroom doors slammed shut, sending dust and charred wood rustling to the floor, and Jake nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Hey!” he shouted, suddenly finding himself deeper into the ballroom than he’d expected. He raced for the one open door and watched, in horror, as it swung shut as well.
“Hey, not funny!” he shouted, ignoring the messenger bag’s fragile contents as he banged on the closed doors. For as flimsy as they looked, they might as well have been reinforced steel. He pounded and kicked and pounded and kicked some more, and…nothing. The doors didn’t budge.
He heard a sudden cackling on the other side, familiar and cold. Atticus Granger!
There were other noises too. Something flashed, then there came a kind of soft crackling, then a whoosh – suddenly, the smell of smoke. It drifted through the cracks in the floor and the walls, thick and gray like fog. Flames soon followed, little flickers that burst to life in licks and spurts and crept along the bottom of the doorway and up the sides.
“Atticus?” Jake called as he backed away from the doors. “Frank?”
His voice was a whimper, and then a choke. Smoke billowed into the room and, like kindling, the wallpaper and cracked frames around moldy paintings burst into flames.
“No,” Jake gasped. The smoke was curling thick and making it hard to see. “How—how is this happening?”
He searched in vain for an exit; by now, the smoke was so black, the room so dark, he kept stumbling against tables and tripping over broken chairs. The walls danced with fire and seemed to close in on him.
Jake bent low and edged toward the middle of the room, watching wallpaper drip onto the carpet, setting it aflame, and trying hard to slow his breathing. He could see the future coming, the time when the walls wouldn’t be the only things on fire inside the Balthazar ballroom.
Once the curtains and chairs and carpet caught fire, he would have nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. He paced in tight little circles, unaware that he was whimpering, panting.
He was sweating too, the salt stinging his eyes and dampening his clothes. Suddenly, he thought of his cell phone and reached for it, speed-dialing his mother – but there was no service, not when he called his dad, or Tank, or the police.
He shoved the phone back in his pocket and dropped to his knees. He felt faint and rested his arm on a chair for support. It was cool to the touch, but Jake knew it wouldn’t be for longer. All around him, his vision blurred by thick smoke and stinging sweat, he could see the room burning. The flames were dancing and swirling, and he was scared, more scared than he’d ever been.
“Frank!” he cried out, voice hoarse and choked with smoke. Panting, wheezing. Smoke filled Jake’s lungs as he sank down onto the carpet. He had to get below the smoke… He had to do something…
“Frank,” he croaked. His lungs were growing hot with each breath. He could no longer hear his own voice, such was the violence – and the thunder – of the crackling flames as they advanced on his tiny refuge in the growing inferno.
He gave up calling; he gave up trying. He curled in on himself as the fire approached, trembling hard. He was too hot to sweat anymore, too scared to cry out, and so, so tired. In moments, he would succumb to the smoke that choked his every swallow and made breathing feel like roasting in a broiling oven. In moments, he would pass out, he told himself. He wouldn’t feel a thing.
And then, from across the room, hardly a blur in his watery, fluttering vision: movement. A shift in the pattern of smoke and the direction of the fire.
The double doors of the ballroom burst open, and there stood Frank, a flare of bright, clean light that somehow cut through the clouds of ash. With his entrance the fire dampened, the smoke dissipated, and the room grew darker and colder in the midst of his luminous, ghastly glow.
“Jake?” he asked as he seemed to float across the room. “What are you…what are you doing there?”
Jake gasped, sucking in all the air he could; he struggled to his feet and glanced all around wildly. The fire was gone, all traces of it having vanished into thin air. The ballroom was as it had been, decrepit and bare.
“Where…” He sucked in another breath. “Did you see it? The fire?”
Frank frowned down at him as he frantically raced from table to chair, from wallpaper to moldy picture frame, feeling each and finding all of their surfaces as cold as the wisps of Frank’s body.
“Jake, there was no fire,” said the ghost. “Clara and I were standing not five feet away from the ballroom doors. They were open this whole time.”
“No, Frank.” Jake nearly tripped over his own feet on his way to the doors. “The minute you left, Atticus… Here, I’ll show you!”
Suddenly inspired, he opened his messenger bag and rewound the digital camcorder back for the last five minutes. Pressing play, he fast-forwarded until the moment just before the fire. “Watch,” he told Frank as they both stared at the glowing green screen.
It showed the ballroom, dark and dusty, the screen shimmering with slight flashes every time Ja
ke moved – but even as Jake’s voice appeared on the tape, high and panicked, and his movements grew quick and jerky, the doors remained open; the room stayed dark.
There were no flames, no smoke, no cackling laughter like the sounds he heard coming from Atticus Granger’s mouth as the man slammed the doors shut and lit the ballroom on fire. All Jake saw was his camera’s eye racing around the room, all he heard was his own voice growing shaky and hoarse as he paced and stumbled and crouched in the middle of the room.
He stood abruptly and shoved the camera deep in his bag without bothering to turn it off. “Let’s go,” he said quietly.
His panic, his fear of dying, it had all been for nothing. He couldn’t believe it.
“Where?” Frank asked, but he still followed Jake out of the ballroom, across the deserted lobby, and up to the fourth floor.
“Away from here,” Jake huffed. Once he reached their room, he snatched up Marley and slipped the sleepy pup into the messenger bag for the walk home. “I’m not spending another second in this place tonight.”
Chapter 17
“Jake, what’s wrong?”
Mr. Weir limped forward, leaning hard on the cane he had been given on his last day of rehab. Jake’s dad looked tired, older somehow, and he favored his right leg as he stood at the bottom of the hotel steps.
Jake struggled for words. The Balthazar was no place for his dad right now, not in his condition. “Nothing,” he replied. “It’s just—do you think you’re up for this?”
Mr. and Mrs. Weir exchanged befuddled glances. “Jake,” his dad said firmly, “I’ve been recovering for over a month. I’m more than ready for this now…” He looked his son over, and Jake hoped he couldn’t see how hard Jake was trying not to panic. “You’re starting to scare me.”
You should be scared, thought Jake, as he considered the burned out windows and charred walls of the hotel that loomed behind him. Out loud, though, he only said, “Sorry, Dad. I…I’m happy you’re finally out of rehab.”