Chapter Fourteen
“I thought you were going home?” Derek had his back to me. He stood by the elevator where I’d left him not five minutes earlier. His fists were planted on his hips as he looked into the open shaft ahead.
“I thought so too,” I replied, “but my keys are in the basement. Do you think you’ll be able to get that thing working?”
He turned at the waist to look at me and raised one eyebrow as if to say, “What kind of miracle worker do you take me for?” Without a word he turned back and assessed the situation. His first possible solution was the simplest. He removed the ID badge from his front pocket, reached forward, swiped the badge across the scanner and pushed the call button for the elevator. The door ahead of him slid closed and the hum of machinery emanated from behind it. It was working.
Not half a minute later the door slid open again and revealed the interior of the elevator I had abandoned at the bottom of the shaft. The garbage cart, dust mop head and upturned five-gallon bucket were all present and accounted for. The old man looked back at me but all I could do was shrug my shoulders and look dumbfounded into the elevator. I felt like someone was toying with me.
“That doesn’t mean everything’s back to normal,” Derek cautioned. “The fact that it worked could be a fluke.” He moved forward and was about to step into the elevator when I dashed forward and caught him by the sleeve.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked with complete disbelief.
He replied, “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m going in.” He pulled his shirt free of my grasp and continued on into the elevator. He turned when fully inside and said, “Better wait up here incase it gets stuck again.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” I replied, still uneasy about him riding it. He pressed one of the buttons and the door slid closed. I heard the machinery inside hum to life as it began to move. The next ten minutes were characterized by every imaginable kind of silence. There were no physical noises discernable to my ears and there was psychic silence also. There were no whispers, no smell of smoke and no laughter from little girls. The problem is that it is when these complete silences are present that nightmares are born in the imaginations of people bearing the weight of many sources of stress.
“What’s taking him so long?” I wondered impatiently. If he was just testing the elevator the prolonged absence might mean he had gotten stuck. But how would I know? I wondered if I should expect him to come climbing through the elevator shaft like I had or if I should listen for him pounding a message in Morse code.
Then I imagined the specter of the dark man springing from the shadows and sending Derek to the floor with a heart attack. I didn’t know if that could happen but my ignorance on the subject was little comfort. The wait had become too much for me. I reached my hand forward to press the call button. My finger never made it to its destination.
All of my senses were on high alert and so when the mechanism of the elevator hummed to life again I almost jumped out of my skin. My hand recoiled from the button as if from a poisonous snake. Soon the doors opened and Derek stepped out. He had the yellow plastic shopping bag which had once held my uniform but which now carried my regular clothes. He handed the bag to me and I received it with enthusiasm.
“Thanks,” I said. I let the bag fall open and I fished inside and into the pockets of my folded pants and found my keys. I held them up and inspected them as if they were some precious artifact. After I felt reassured by their presence I placed them in the pocket of the uniform pants I wore so I would be sure not to lose them again anytime soon. Derek cleared his throat and I returned my attention to him.
“If you’re not quite so shaken up anymore I could use your help figuring out the elevator.” He stood there with his arms crossed waiting for my reply. Behind him the doors of the elevator closed again. My mind raced the options to see which one would win. It was a close match.
“Okay,” I finally said. “I think I can stay. I’d just prefer not to have to be in the elevator by myself if I don’t have to.” He seemed to weigh this and then nodded.
“Fair enough, but I can’t make any promises. I may need you to step in alone at some point because I may be tangled in the control panel and need to see what happens there when the elevator is operating. You’ll have to be inside it if you’re going to operate it from all the floors.” He seemed to consider something else then added, “I have a set of walkie-talkies we can use to keep in touch.” That bit of news gave me a little extra comfort.
At least if I was attacked by restless spirits someone could hear my screams even though they couldn’t get to me. I then thought that maybe the presence of the ability to communicate with another person might be enough to hold at bay whatever had trapped me in the elevator. The dark man seemed to want less attention, not more. But then I thought that if he could stop an elevator from working he could probably do the same thing with a walkie-talkie.
“Yeah, okay,” I said not wanting my fear to show through. The last thing I needed was my new supervisor to think I was some kind of sissy. He waved his ID badge in front of the sensor and pushed the button on the wall again and the elevator opened. We both stepped inside. I pushed the garbage cart to one side and Derek pushed the button for the main basement. The doors closed and we were on our way.
I inhaled and exhaled deeply, steeling myself against the prospect of traveling alone in that thing. Derek looked at me skeptically.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” The concern in his voice was noticeable beyond the obvious nature of the question.
“Yeah,” I replied as casually as I could manage. “Why do you ask?”
“You just seem nervous, that’s all.” He was right of course. I was nervous and I did a terrible job at covering it up. I decided to come clean partially but without revealing the extremity of what had been happening to me.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that when I was stuck down there I think my mind started to play tricks on me. You know, every little noise turns into something big and ominous.” I hoped the explanation would serve to answer his concerns. It wasn’t the full story, but if I let him in on that I suspected he would think I was a nutcase.
The elevator came to a stop and the doors opened into the basement. We stepped out and headed for the office.
“Sure,” he said to my relief. “Sometimes it takes a while to get used to working down here. And anyone who gets trapped in an elevator alone is going to get a little stir crazy. I just wanted to make sure you’re going to be fine. I don’t need you freaking out on me when I’m trying to keep this place in one piece.”
“Don’t worry,” I replied. “I’m cool.” Cool in the loosest possible sense of the word, anyway. Over the last two weeks I’d had enough strange experiences to last most people a lifetime or more. I also was in possession of the knowledge that there were more of those experiences to come and that they would likely only grow in intensity. Something big was coming and I could only guess what it all would look like when the day was done. I would discover nobody really knows what kind of person they are until all Hell breaks loose and they are left to stand before its onslaught.
We retrieved the large metal toolbox from earlier and the walkie-talkies then left the office again to return to the same place where we had tried to figure out the elevator issue. Our footfalls echoed as we marched down the hall, the eerie space amplified the sound of the two of us to make it sound as though we were many. Derek was right, it was hard to get used to working in that kind of place, especially at that time of night. Yet even more so when you know intimately not all of the strange things you might see out of the corner of your eye or hear echoing in the distance are tricks your mind plays on itself.
We arrived at the box on the wall again and Derek opened it while I set the heavy toolbox on the floor, this time careful not to drop it. He worked silently in the wall box without asking for anything from the toolbox. My thoughts began to drift away from the b
asement to a hospital bed and the unconscious form of Katie recovering, trying to wake up.
I discovered she provided my mind a safe place to go. I could take myself out of the gloom and shadows of the basement and fly on morning’s wings and land by her side. I could send my thoughts her way and turn my back on the dark at least for a little while. It was a sort of rescue, maybe for us both. We didn’t have to be alone. I resolved that I would go and be by her side again when the next set of visiting hours came around.
Derek cleared his throat. I came out of the dense but wonderful fog of my daydream to find him looking at me and realized I’d been off somewhere else and had stopped paying attention to what was happening around me. I had missed something, I knew.
“You awake chief?”
“Sorry?” I asked, buying time to cover up my embarrassment.
“I asked you for something from the toolbox. Can you get it for me?”
“Yes,” I said trying to refocus. “Sorry about that. What was it you asked for again?” I stooped and opened the toolbox and removed the trays.
“Hand me the multi-meter,” he said casually. I began pawing through the trays before I realized I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“I don’t know what that is,” I confessed.
He walked over and pulled a small electronic tool out of one of the trays and returned to the wall box. Holding the thing up he said, “This is a multi-meter. It’s like a circuit tester…” He broke off and considered something. “You know what a circuit tester is?” I did.
“Yeah, basically,” I nodded. “It’s a gadget which measures electrical current through the wire of another electronic device, right?”
“More or less,” he said. “A multi-meter is like that only it does a few more things, too. It can detect other stuff like voltage and amps in a way that a simple circuit tester can’t.” He turned back to the wall box and began testing the rainbow of wires inside. I almost wrote off the impromptu equipment lesson as secondary trivia until an interesting parallel occurred to me.
In explaining the difference between circuit testers and multi-meters Derek had unwittingly given me a useful analogy to help me understand why I had experienced some of the recent phenomena of the last few weeks and why many other people generally do not. Perhaps, I reasoned, I—like the multi-meter—came equipped with some tools which allowed me to detect the presence of things which are always present but for which most other people simply have no apparatus to enhance their perception. But then I wondered why, if I possessed such a tool, had I only recently begun detecting the other energies? Not only that, but why also had my newly discovered ability of detection, or whatever you want to call it, been so locally centralized? The ghosts I’d encountered all had one shared story, or so it seemed to me. It was in the storm center of those questions that I came to an uncomfortable realization.
There was not simply a central story which all of the spectral visions shared but there was also a central location. The first place I had any of the experiences was in the lobby and shortly after in Jan Fenstra’s office one floor above my head. After that I had seen the little girl crossing the street just outside. I had seen the blackened bones in a cupboard in the basement and heard the whispers and seen the reflection of a boy outside the elevator. And of course there was the unfortunate incident inside the elevator just hours earlier.
I had experiences in other locations too; my apartment, the hotel room and the hospital stood out vividly in my mind but there was something about those encounters which were in some fundamental way different than the ones I’d had in the Spectra building. The difference was like standing in an art gallery and becoming enrapt in a vibrant painting of a beach sunset compared to actually standing barefoot on the beach, feeling the warm sand between your toes and a gentle cool breeze ripple through your shirt as your eyes drank in the living colors of sky as the flaming Sun sank beneath the horizon.
The Spectra building was somehow the lynchpin holding all of the disparate threads of everything together. And I had been drawn to it, hadn’t I? I knew that I had.
I had combed newspaper and internet want ads searching for the perfect job and then for an acceptable job and then for any job at all that would take me. After months of silence and rejection I had stumbled across the posting for Spectra on a job hunting website. It had almost jumped out at me. Then I saw it again, this time in the newspaper want ads and had the same sort of feeling. At the time I had chalked it all up to nerves or desperation. Thinking about circuit testers and multi-meters began to change my perspective on that. Maybe, I thought, it’s not so much that I had wanted the job as much as the job had wanted me and searched for me. On one level the thought was preposterous but on another it struck such a deep chord within me that I knew I would be a fool to turn my back on the idea.
Derek turned to me and handed the multi-meter to me. “Here, put this away,” he grunted. But I could only stand there and stare at the little device. Holding the thing and staring at it was like looking into a mirror of sorts. Another layer to the mystery had been peeled back. I came back to myself and followed the man’s instruction.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s try a little experiment. You go to the elevator…” He must have seen the worried expression I had tried in vain to keep off my face because he hastily added, “and send it upstairs to the first floor. You don’t have to get inside it. In fact, I don’t want you to incase it gets stuck again.”
“Alright,” I agreed without allowing the reluctance to seep through in my voice. I started to walk in that direction but stopped when I heard Derek whistle to gain my attention.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” He held one of the walkie-talkies gingerly between two fingers of an upraised hand. Cursing myself silently I trotted back and retrieved it from him and then resumed my journey back to the elevator. As I drew closer to it my nerves grew weaker. I hadn’t even arrived in sight of it yet and the hairs on the back of my neck began to react to the memory of the prior episode. I made a conscious effort to calm my nerves and to breathe slowly. These efforts worked with at least marginal success until I rounded the final corner and then all thought of my given task vanished from my agenda. I saw the figure standing in front of the elevator doors and my heart jumped onto a maniac freight train.
His back was to me and I noted that he was short in stature. I slowed my pace and tried to make my approach quieter. I didn’t want to startle him. I didn’t know if such a thing could even happen but I didn’t want to risk it.
The closer I came to the figure the more detail I was able to discern. His shortness was due to his apparent age. He was a boy of no more than twelve. He wore a tan cotton shirt with a light brown plaid pattern. Blue jean overalls went all the way down to just below his calf muscles but terminated there in ragged tears. In fact all of his clothes had a second hand feel to them. His feet were bare. His skin was dark, clearly African in descent. His hair short, cut close to his scalp.
He looked as if he were waiting for the elevator to come, like it was something he did every day. Maybe it was, I thought. I approached until there was only about three yards between us and then I stopped. Something in my bones told me I should speak, that he was waiting for me to speak.
“Hello,” I said feebly. “I’m Steve.”
“Good evening sir,” he replied respectfully, but there was something else in his voice too. Was it resignation? He said nothing else and did not turn to look at me.
“Why don’t you turn around and we can talk?” The boy hesitated and seemed like he was going to turn around at first, but then must have decided against it.
“Please, no sir. I don’t want to.” I weighed the desire to urge him to turn around again versus letting it be. I decided not to press the issue and followed another and more indirect route.
“What’s your name,” I heard myself ask the boy as from a distance, as if I were a mere bystander to the event. I chose the question because I felt it was
casual, non-threatening. I did not expect the response I received. The boy’s head dropped in shame and he began to weep, his shoulders shook visibly.
“I…I can’t say, sir. It’s not allowed.” He wanted to tell me, I could sense it. I believed he feared some consequence from beyond himself. It was probably the dark man, I concluded.
I fought the instinct to rush forward and put an arm around the boy in effort to comfort him. I didn’t know how he would react to such a gesture or if I even could touch him. I remembered the little girl had picked up my laptop in the apartment and handed it to me, so I knew they had the ability to interact with and manipulate objects but that did not answer the question of whether or not a physical person could willfully make similar kinds of contact with them. Instead I stayed where I was and kept my efforts at consolation verbal.
“Hey, it’s okay,” I said softly. “Forget about it. I just thought you wanted to talk with somebody. Or do you come here every night?” The boy steadied himself a bit and wiped the left side of his face.
“No,” he said gravely. “We’re not supposed to get out but I knew you were coming back this way and I had to get to you before he comes back.” The boy’s fear was a palpable fog which left a coppery taste in my mouth, almost the taste of blood. My own level of concern raised a notch. This all but confirmed my suspicion about the dark man as the source of the boy’s dread.
“Who,” I pressed. “You had to get to me before who comes back?” I was desperate for more information about what was happening to me. I saw the truth then that just because I came equipped with a few extra tools that it didn’t mean I was better than people without those tools. I could be just as lost as anybody else when it came to matters of life beyond death. Just like there were aspects and properties to the physical world beyond my grasp there were likely to be facets of this other dimension of reality as complex, difficult and outside the reach of my understanding. But because I recognized my possession of those other tools I also saw that I could move forward. I could in some way move from ignorance to understanding.
“I can’t tell you,” the boy said, this time with real frustration in his voice. I had almost crossed a line. The boy had come to tell me something and I had fumbled about with trivialities. I might as well have commented on the weather.
“Okay,” I conceded. “What can you tell me? What is it you want to say?” I waited for the boy to respond but there was only silence. I sensed he didn’t want to say what he had come to say. I could also feel that he was reconsidering the whole thing and thinking about running back to wherever he had come from. If I was going to make it anywhere I was going to have to do something fast. Finally I stepped forward. My hand raised and reached forward. I hesitated for only a moment but knew I had to follow through. My hand gently came down and rested on the boy’s shoulder. He was there and not there at the same moment and there was something else too. Beneath my hand there was a swirling sensation of ice and fire. I almost ripped my hand away from the paradox but forced myself to keep it there. “It’s okay,” I said. “You can tell me.”
He relented. “If you can help us mister, you better do it quick.”
Unsure if I really wanted to know the answer to my next question I held back for a moment. But I was already beyond the point of commitment. Denying myself information at that point would only be a disservice to everyone involved. So I asked, “Why does it have to be quick?”
Again there was a pause from the boy as he steeled himself for what he had to say. “You have to act soon because he’s getting stronger now. It’s not like he was before; not when he was alive or after he died. He was a very bad man in life and has been a terror to us in death. But he’s been different lately, more terrible and stronger. He’s been doing things he couldn’t before.”
“What has he done,” I heard myself ask in hushed fear.
“What he did to your book in the hotel room, how he tore it all apart. He couldn’t do that before. He brought some of us with him and made us watch so we’d know he was getting stronger. Some of us are scared and want you to go away because they think you started it. None of this started happening until you showed up. Some of us think if you go away he might go back to how he was before.” The tremor in his voice told me that he might be one of those who thought that way. Yet here he was, telling me what he didn’t want to tell me. Something had convinced him it was important to try, to work against the dark man. I knew exactly what it was that had persuaded them on their present course. It was the little girl. She was an important key to solving the mystery. I knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
“And how he was before,” I interjected gently, “that’s how you want it to be again? It sounded bad before. Do you really want it to be that way again?”
“It was better than it is now. At least we’ll have that much.” The cold reality of a person who has given up and accepted a subpar way of life floated on his words. I’d heard it a hundred times from students who weren’t making the grade and could see no hope. I didn’t accept it from them and I wouldn’t accept it from him. A fire awoke in my gut, anger at the acceptance of defeat.
“Listen,” I said with some stone in my voice, “that is unacceptable. I am not just going to run away from this guy and neither are you.” I felt his tremble become still under my hand. He hadn’t expected that.
“Aren’t you scared of him, mister?”
“Hell yes I’m scared of him! But that doesn’t mean we just let him do whatever he wants to us, now does it?” By his reaction I could tell the thought had never occurred to him. He and the others, however many of them there were, had been oppressed and oppression is designed to throw a wet blanket over the fire of imagination. But oppression also eventually breeds revolution because starving imagination comes to life quickly when fed.
“But he’s stronger than we are, isn’t he?”
“Is he? I don’t know. He’s obviously made you think so and he may even believe so himself. But let me ask you this: how many of him is there?”
Confused by the question he slowly replied, “Just one, sir?”
“Yeah, that’s right, there’s just one. And how many of you are there?” Even standing behind him I watched him wrestle with the question…and gain the upper hand.
“There’s more of us, aren’t there, sir?” There was now a shard of confidence detectable in him. He began to see the hope of success and to latch onto it.
“There are at least three of us,” I replied. “There are you, me and the girl. But I’m willing to bet there’re a few more of you by the way you’ve been talking. But look, it’s not enough to be more than him in numbers; we’ve got to be smarter than him too.”
“Okay, sir. Can we do that? Can we be smarter than him?”
“Don’t doubt it for a second. His power over you is to make you doubt. If you trust that he can be beat then at least you have a chance.” My own confidence was building as I reassured the boy. It was truth I had needed to hear to propel me forward and now it did just that.
“But, sir…” He hesitated, still wrestling with doubt. He finally turned around so I could look at his face. His childish face was marred by terrible trauma. His right eye was gone. It looked like it had been taken out of his head by some careless surgery. The area around the eye was scarred with burned tissue. “You have to know what you’re up against. He hurts people. He’s good at it and likes to do it. He will try to hurt you.”
I confidently returned his stare and tried not to show repulsion at the sight of his damaged face. I stepped forward and held his gaze. “I know. That’s why we have to stop him if we can.”
The boy looked up as if he heard something. Then he looked back at me with a worried expression on his face. “He’s coming! I have to go.” I nodded my understanding.
“Get going. And tell the little girl I want to talk to her if she can.” This stopped the boy in his tracks as he started to turn away. “What is it?”
“We haven’t seen her or hea
rd from her in days. She’s the only one who comes and goes as she pleases. The dark man can’t stop her…at least he couldn’t before. But she’s been gone for longer than she’s ever been. If you see her tell her we’re waiting for her.” Then he turned and ran through the closed elevator doors. This was an unwelcome development and I had no idea what to do with it. Then my walkie-talkie crackled to life.
“Are you asleep over there, newbie?” Derek’s voice held no irritation but I thought he might be getting impatient. Still stunned by the news of the missing ghost of the little girl it took me a moment to be able to respond. For all the confidence I had been gaining in the discovery of my new psychic tools I found myself completely at a loss to understand what should come next. At last I raised the device to my lips and pressed the call button.
“No, sorry. I, uh, just got a little turned around getting back here.” On such short notice I was unable to concoct a better excuse. It was plausible enough, however, and so it would have to do.
“Fine, just push the button when you get there.”
I reached forward and pressed the call button for the elevator. The machine’s hum filled the corridor and the memory of being trapped returned to me. I shook the memory away and concentrated on the task before me. Even without any more encounters with the restless souls of children it was going to be a long night. “Okay,” I reported, “just did it.”
“Alright,” Derek replied. “Wait for it to come to you and then send it up to the top floor. But remember, don’t ride it. Just push the button and then get back out. I don’t want to have to rescue you.” Again, I was unable to tell if there was joking laced in what the man said or if it was pure deadpan seriousness. In the end it didn’t make any difference to me. I had bigger fish to fry.
I waited the short time for it to come down to me. When it finally did the doors opened and I bent in to press the button to send the thing all the way to the top floor. Before I touched the button for the top floor I paused. Inside the box I smelled smoke. I also thought I heard the whisper of sinister laughter. A shiver ran down my spine. I pushed the button and jumped back out of the box. The doors of the elevator closed and it began its ascent back up to worlds unknown.
A Ghost of Fire Page 23