Chapter Twenty One
Trent rented a room at a hotel. He said he needed the space and quiet to do some thinking and I was perfectly fine with that. I wanted some time to myself as well so I went back to my apartment after I dropped Trent off and saw Katie back to her place.
We stood outside the door of her apartment and I asked if she wanted me to stay for a while and she smiled. She stepped up close to me, put her hand over my heart and kissed me on the cheek very close to my lips. I wanted to turn my head slightly and kiss her back but I didn’t think she wanted that, not yet anyway. “Soon,” she said.
“Call me if you need anything,” I said.
“I will.” She smiled again, winked at me and turned to enter her apartment. When the door closed behind her I lingered a few seconds. In part I guess I was afraid for her. The thought occurred to me that if James Price could find her at her place of work he might be able to find her home. But she made her choice to stay home alone and I couldn’t hang out in the car in her driveway all day and night waiting for something bad that might not happen.
So I left.
As I drove home my mind returned to the key I had found in the basement of Spectra. It was yet another cog in the machine that was the mystery of my life at the moment. I knew it was a very important element which would help us solve the mystery, yet what was it for and where? The Spectra building was the clear candidate for the location. It was the place the trouble started and it was likely the place where it would all end. I just hoped my friends and I wouldn’t end with it.
No clear answer as to how the key could be used at Spectra presented itself. My thoughts refused to steer away from the key, however, and kept turning its image over and over in my mind. I tried to replace the topic by concentrating on things I drove past. On one street corner there stood a group of people waiting for the crosswalk to change so they could move to the other side and be on their merry way. As I moved beyond them my attention turned to them instinctively and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
Time seemed to slow as my eye was drawn to the group. The whole collection of people stood facing the adjacent street corner, save one. The dark bowler hat gave him away and soon I noticed the glowing orange eyes. As I reflected on this brief encounter later it seemed to me that everything about the manifestation of this spirit was a contrast to the people who stood unaware of him. It was almost like seeing a picture in vibrant living color with a single, central element which had faded.
He watched me the whole way past and sneered, revealing blackened teeth. I noticed a trickle of smoke rise from the corner of his mouth. He wanted to remind me he was always near. As if I could ever forget such a thing.
When my attention returned back to the road ahead of me and time resumed its regular quality I found myself approaching a red light and a busy intersection. I jammed my foot down on the brakes and the car screeched to halt just over the stop line. Horns blared from a few of the vehicles passing in front of me. Had I been two seconds later I would have t-boned a pickup truck. When my heart vacated my throat and returned to my chest I whipped my head around to look at the group now crossing the intersection a ways behind me. There was no visible trace of the malevolent spirit.
“You’ve got to be smarter than him,” I chided myself. I sat back and exhaled a long breath. Sweat had appeared on my brow and my pulse struggled to drop to a normal rate. I wiped the sweat away and tried to lower my pulse by forcing my breathing to a steady, calming rate. It helped a little but now I would wonder if the thing would be waiting around every corner or if he was always present just a step behind, breathing fire down my neck.
By the time I came back to my place I was only moderately on edge. I tossed the keys on the counter right inside the door and they slid a little. The message light on the machine blinked a single time. Another calming breath came in and left and I pressed the button. I was rewarded with the cocky voice of my lawyer.
Stuart said something about an organized manhunt for Price and a mounting pile of evidence against him. All of this was iterated with the glee of a kid on his way to Disneyland for the first time. It was a little unnerving to be in cooperation with someone who was so cheerful about publicly dismantling people, whether said people were irresponsibly self-destructive or not.
He made a few other comments, including a slightly irritated one about me not owning a cell phone, and then rattled off contact information which I didn’t need. I would return the call soon but not quite yet. There was something else in the place which demanded my attention. I moved into the apartment and found the old key I had liberated from the basement at work. The artifact was a dull bronze color, tarnished with age and disuse. I hefted the little thing in my hand and then slipped it onto the kitchen counter next to my other set of keys.
I stared at the innocuous little thing pondering about the part it would soon play in the grander scheme of everything else which had come to dominate my existence. I couldn’t resist picking it back up for further examination. It was almost as if the thing wanted me to notice something very specific about it. So I picked it up and held it between my thumb and forefinger.
“What is it?” I asked no one. “What do you want me to see here?” It was very plain and un-magical feeling. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about it and no visions came to me this time as I held it. There was just…nothing.
That’s when it occurred to me that it was precisely this quality, the lack of unique value, which I was supposed to notice. But it wasn’t quite that, even. It wasn’t that the key was like every other key in that it was only a piece of material, but that it innately lacked something. The key was empty somehow. It needed something else to be complete, to be useful. Which was all well and good of course but I had no clue as to how to change that. All I knew was that I was going to need help.
When I felt I wasn’t going to get anything more out of the key I picked up my phone and dialed Vox’s number. The administrative assistant who answered connected me to him and soon his voice came over the line. “Mr. Nicholas, good to hear from you,” he said with a hint of mischief.
“Yeah,” I replied ignoring his tone, “I’m just returning your call.”
“And I’m ever-so-glad you did. You and I need to get together and talk about what we’re going to do to Mr. Price. I have a few ideas I’d like to run by you. Are you available for dinner tomorrow?”
I told him I could meet for lunch because I had to be to work by six and asked when and where he’d like to meet. He told me he’d take care of the details and get back to me.
“Hey,” I said, “I need to talk to you a bit about what happened at the bookstore with Price.”
“Can it wait until tomorrow?”
“No,” I said, though noncommittally, “I don’t think so.”
“Okay,” he said with some seriousness finally, “go ahead. What’s so important?”
“The reason we were at the bookstore was…”
“Who’s ‘we’ exactly?” he cut me off. I could hear him scribbling notes on the other end.
“Myself and a friend, Trent.”
“Okay,” he paused as he wrote. “‘Trent.’ Got it. Now, why were you there?” Now he was all business and I got the impression the cocky persona was a façade, a mask he wore firstly to intimidate others and secondly to protect himself. I thought: What complex little things we are sometimes.
I told him about the call we had gotten from Katie. When he asked me who Katie was I took the easy route and just said she was my girlfriend even though I wasn’t fully sure of the reality of that. Hopeful but not sure. There was a completely different mystery, one I would probably never solve: Women.
“She said there was someone at the store and she thought he might try to hurt her,” I added.
“I’m guessing that ‘someone’ was one James Price?” When I affirmed his suspicion he said, “This guy just keeps digging himself a deeper hole. I’m not going to have any trouble squeezing tears out of him on the
stand.” I cleared my throat at this and then felt more than heard the note-taking on the other end of the line cease. In an irritated tone poorly masked with playfulness Vox asked, “You think otherwise, Mr. Nicholas?”
I silently cursed myself for painting myself into a corner like that and with a lawyer, no less. Now I was going to have to find my way out and I didn’t think playing the “I’m being tormented by ghosts” card would help me with Vox’s kind of personality. But I soon found what felt like a legitimate reason.
“I don’t think he’s sane.”
There was a pause and then, “Okay. How do you mean?”
“I mean I think the guy’s crazy. He attacked people in public and by the time we got there the dude was growling and hissing like an animal.” Vox contemplated this for a moment before responding. This was clearly a new development for him and one he hadn’t even considered.
Finally he said, “That’s an interesting piece of information. Do you think it was real or was he faking it?”
The possibility that it was all an act hadn’t occurred to me but I dismissed the idea quickly. “No,” I said, “I think it was real. I mean the whole display had the ring of truth to it. Price doesn’t seem like the creative type if you know what I mean.”
Vox laughed. “That’s the spirit, Steve. Call’em as you see’em! When they catch this little punk we’re gonna put’em on his knees even if it means I personally have to wrap a shock collar around his idiot neck.”
“Whatever,” I said trying to steer us back on track. Over the rest of the conversation I relayed the remainder of the story checking myself every step of the way to make sure I didn’t drop in anything which didn’t need to be said to this guy. He stopped me at a few points so he could keep up with his notes and so I could expand on a few details. We wrapped the call in less than twenty minutes and Vox closed by saying he’d call and leave a message about where he wanted to meet me for lunch the next day.
“That’s cool. I’ll see you tomorrow.” I ended the call and looked around the apartment. This was a habit from which I expected I would never recover. Nobody was there besides me but my mind was no more at ease because of this.
I made my way over to the futon and dropped onto it. I had converted it to its couch position and so I sat. I leaned my head back as far as it could go and closed my eyes. I thought about the Spectra building to which I would return in a few hours for my next shift. Now that I knew it sat on the same space that the old St. Francis Orphanage had burned to the ground nearly a century earlier I grew more uncomfortable going back.
I must have worked through a hundred scenarios and excuses I might use to get out of ever going back to work there. None were viable, of course. I was certain I would need to get back in there to bring an end to the madness I had gotten myself into when I interviewed for my job there not long before. Aside from that I really needed the job to keep my head above water.
I opened my eyes and stood at the same time intending to head into the kitchen for something to drink but found I was no longer in my apartment. Instead I stood in a dimly lit hallway. When it registered that I wasn’t at home I quickly looked about to get my bearings. The place was familiar and sterile. I was back in the hospital. I looked behind me and saw myself sitting on my futon conveniently relocated to a friendly neighborhood hospital. Then it clicked. I realized I wasn’t really in the hospital but neither did I imagine it. I knew I had not fallen asleep in the short amount of time between when I sat down and stood back up. Instead my fully awake mind had been carried there because I was meant to see something.
The hall was deserted and the dim fluorescent lights above flickered in and out of life. Hospital smell filled my nose and the dull colors of the paint assaulted the ramparts of creativity in my mind. Hospitals were second only to airports in the places I avoided whenever I possibly could because they were, in a great twist of irony, places devoid of life.
A wave of recognition washed over me as I came to see where precisely I was in the hospital; I was on the same floor where Katie had rested in a coma for all that time. I thought I had, as in my other dreams, been brought back to another time, this one more recent than the others. Perhaps, I wondered, I had missed something those other times I had come to visit Katie and now I was meant to finally see it.
With my bearings in order I began to move through the corridors in dream slowness in the direction of Katie’s room. Moving past the nurse’s station I kept my eyes forward, not noticing who was on duty, nor caring to know. It would only register later that the station had been empty as I walked past it.
A movement up ahead caught my attention and then was gone. I quickened my pace to catch up to it, cursing the slow-motion dream effect for hindering my progress. I reached the corner and turned to follow the moving thing or person ahead of me. I was able to catch a better glimpse this time before it disappeared around the next corner…before she disappeared around it. It was the spirit of the little girl. She had stood looking in my direction before she ran off again. She wanted me to see her. She wanted me to follow her.
The lights above dimmed again but this time they went all the way out and I stood in complete darkness for a short moment. I skidded to a halt out of instinct, not wanting to crash blindly into anything. When the lights came back on I saw a shadowy thing pass down the hall ahead of me and felt fear rise up strangely in me. It manifested itself first in my face where heaviness took root. My breath quickened and then a sort of emotion climbed its way from deep in my gut, up my throat to the place behind my eyes and tried to force out tears but I would not let them come.
I started moving again but quickened my pace further, sprinting after the girl expecting to see her standing and waiting around the next corner by Katie’s room. As I rounded that corner I saw her farther down the hall than expected. I stopped by Katie’s room and looked in the open door. Someone else lay there. I didn’t recognize him at all. I looked back to the girl waiting for me to follow. A question began to form on my lips but she beat me to the punch.
“Come see,” she said. Her voice was half echo and distortion and it came to me as if from across a great distance. I looked back at the unfamiliar form in the bed and then followed after the girl. From behind I heard a low growl and stopped again and turned. The hall behind me was completely dark. A face briefly appeared in the shadows and was gone again. I thought at first it was the dark ghost who had been stalking me but knew almost instantly that was wrong. I knew the face but my awake-yet-dreaming mind refused to place it correctly. I took a step away from the shadow and the shadow advanced about the same distance. I took a few more steps and the shadow came a few more. I turned to find the little girl. She was gone again and I began to run, to follow after her, turning yet another corner.
This time she stood very close to me, so much so that I was startled by her appearance. Her little frame held ground with confidence and gave no indication of moving away. Her eyes were deep set in dark circles in her fire-scarred face. She looked more exhausted than I had ever seen her before.
I turned to look behind me again and the shadow still came. It tried to advance after me but I noted it receded a bit. When it did so I saw a bit more clearly the person concealed within. He threw his arm around his face and stepped back into the darkness. But in that short amount of time I saw and apprehended knowledge of the man I knew. James Price vanished into the black.
“He serves the bad one now,” I heard the little girl say. I turned to look at her. She was resolute. “He can’t follow us anymore right now. I stopped him.” I turned back to see the blackness move a few feet back into the hall, but then stop. A few growls and angry moans escaped the dark and then settled down. I turned back to the young girl.
“What am I doing here? What do you want me to see?”
She held my gaze for a brief instant and then at last she stepped away from me and turned away and walked down the hall. She stopped next to a door and looked inside then back at me. “Come see.
Come.”
A flash of psychic understanding came upon me. I was not moving within a time already gone by at the hospital but in a time soon to come. I was looking at the future…a possible future anyway. I knew a number of things might happen en route to cancel it out if I were not careful. I moved forward in this vision to the door and the small girl.
Before I had the chance to reach the door, however, something farther down the hall caught my attention. Three figures stood where they had not been the moment before. Trent, Katie and a man I did not recognize, but whom I knew to be Stuart Vox, stood down the corridor with faces filled with fear. I advanced past the door and the girl and gave no notice to who lay in the room I was meant to see.
While I was still a few yards away from the group a fourth figure stepped into view from between Katie and Trent. It was the dark man in his dirty white shirt, a black vest and his old bowler hat. He locked gazes with me and all the hatred in the world seemed to well up inside me and direct itself down the hall at the evil thing. It must have hit him in some way because he took a step back.
The brief surprise that had been on his face was soon replaced by humor. He began to laugh, soft at first and then it bloomed into a full belly laugh. “You got to watch that temper, sonny,” he said and his voice seemed to come at me from all directions. “That anger can burn. We know all about burning.” The he craned his neck and addressed the girl behind me. “Don’t we darlin’? We know very well how to burn.” He raised his hands and the three people behind him spontaneously erupted into bright flames and piercing screams.
I reached out and screamed for them at the top of my lungs and discovered I was back in my apartment, standing in front of my futon with my arm stretched out in front of me and a loud noise issuing out of my mouth. I stopped screaming when I realized I was back. I noticed my legs ached and then saw the time. Hours had passed while I stood in my apartment dreaming and awake and discovering and failing to see. I would have just enough time to get dressed for work and grab something quick to eat from a fast food joint.
I did not want to go back there because I knew what used to stand in its place and the things which once happened there. I also knew I had no choice and that many people, alive and dead, depended on me to get through this. I was committed to my course, like it or not. I got dressed and made sure I had everything I needed for work.
As I walked out the door and headed to the car I got the sense that I had just begun the home stretch but the path ahead was fiery and dangerous. “No time for casting about,” I said to myself. “Now it’s personal. Now there will be hell to pay.”
A Ghost of Fire Page 32