Modern Pantheon: Ghost Page 7

  Chapter 6

  From the case files of Special Agent L. Garrison

  Supernatural Investigations Department:

  Five confirmed deaths occurred in what has been dubbed the "warehouse incident."

  An expert analysis of the captured video clearly shows the warehouse imploding from all places simultaneously and a study of the wreckage confirms it. Steel beams were twisted and wrenched, but all debris was contained within the building's lot. It is my personal belief that explosives were not the cause of the implosion, nor were any other understood forces.

  Due to the location of the warehouse, no eyewitnesses came forward, but I know one exists. Six seconds prior to the implosion, an unidentified male was thrown through the wall of a warehouse and into the nearby street before fleeing north.

  Let me make one thing clear; prior to the event the warehouse was in perfect condition. It passed all OSHA safety inspections, and had no history of any kind of damage. Those walls were made of concrete. Throwing a man against would break the man. Nonetheless, he crashed through it without so much as a broken bone from the looks of it.

  As for the identity of survivor - other than his brief appearance on the video, we can't even confirm anyone was in there. Aside from the lone, closed-circuit hidden camera that depicted the incident, all other video evidence within a three block radius went missing.

  The next morning I woke up with a hiss of pain as I rolled onto a bruise the size of my fist. My entire underarm was three shades darker than the rest of my skin. I hadn’t gotten around to taking that shower last night. Nor undressing. The smell of burnt wood emanated in every direction.

  I figured that the first step in preparing for tonight’s dinner party was a nice, extra long, extra hot shower. As chance would have it, I’d have a visitor in five minutes, so it was only natural that was in the shower within two.

  My plumbing and I have a long-standing tradition, in which I spend several minutes messing with the dials because, of course, if you go a millimeter too far to the left, magma spews forth, while a millimeter to the right will send out a glacier. A tapping echoed through my house upon that final tap, right when I’d finally made the water tolerable. The source: my front door.

  The bathroom was connected to the living room, so I reached past the curtain to open the door and shout, “Who is it?”

  “Me. Lara. Can I come in?”

  “Ah. Damn, it,” I said quietly to myself. “Lost my sheep,” I said to the front door, throwing my will into the words.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Come on in – I’ll be out in a second,” I yelled throughout the bathroom door.

  As quickly as I could, I scrubbed the soot and dirt from my hair and skin.

  I heard Lara come in. Through the door, she called, “I looked into the stuff you wanted. Found a few things, too.”

  “Yeah? Tell me about it in a minute.”

  I quickly finished, and stepped out. There on the ground was the yesterday’s clothes; my chimneysweepers’ garb. The leather jacket was gray with the mess, and since putting it on would require me to take another shower, I was in a tight spot. I looked at the towel on the rack and wrapped it around my torso.

  I moved into the Mercers’ basement when I was only sixteen, and she moved out within a few months. Our step-sibling status allowed us to awkwardly bypass certain boundaries. Still, the plan was to just shoot into the bedroom.

  Pushing open the door, I avoided eye contact as I crossed quickly to the other side of the room, and squeezed into my room. “I have a few things you should know, too. Cameron met me here yesterday. He rehired me.”

  “Rehired?” she said as I slid into my bedroom.

  “Yeah.”

  Some of the myths about Magic are true, to an extent. Mages vary from using lots of gibberish words, to none at all. A spell can be programmed into an object and activated by a trigger, such as a word. While triggers are useful in some instances, they are limited. For one, all magic will eventually be overcome by the Equilibrium, meaning I have to continually reprogram anything I enchant. Also, a programmed spell doesn’t have the luxury of customization on the fly. If you program your spell to affect a five by five foot area, that’s all it’ll ever be able to do, ever, whereas a spell made on the fly will be as customizable and complex as your mind allows. However when those issues aren’t a deal-breaker, it’s the easiest kind of magic you could ever hope to perform.

  It also means there is the need for mumbling in archaic terms. Latin is a dead language, which makes it a frequent flier in the magical realm, but a trigger can be anything. Sure, you could set the spell’s code word to be “fire,” or even ‘blazing inferno,” but if you’re talking to someone and the topic comes up, you might accidentally blow up your house. That’s usually a bitch to explain to cops and insurance companies. That is, assuming the Imperium doesn’t kill you for breaking their secrecy laws.

  As for my protection ward’s trigger words I set around the apartment. I couldn’t figure out a good phrase to use when, when Presto – Little Bo Peep came to mind.

  “You free this evening?” I asked Lara from the cracked open bedroom door. “He gave me and ‘plus one’ an invitation to some fancy get together atop of the Cane Industries Skyscraper. We both figure the bad guy’s going to be there. Want to come?”

  “You know Thomas, usually the clothes come off after the date,” she said, bemused.

  “Yeah, yeah, you want to come or not?” I said, opening my dresser and grabbing the first set of clothes I could find. From the living room came the sound of fluttering paper as she examined the invitation. “It says here you’ll need a tuxedo.”

  Pulling a gray buttoned-up shirt over my head, I pushed the door open and re-entered the living room, this time decently attired in Jeans and a black Polo. “Cameron’s note says he’ll reimburse me for any rental. By the way, a lot happened since I talked to you last night. I saw the ghost again last night.”

  I took a minute or two to tell her everything I could remember at James’ cabin. I tucked in my shirt at least. Half of it, anyway. Standing at the counter, she appeared nothing like the way I looked and felt. Whereas my eyes were still red with morning grogginess, hers were alert and aware. She had her hair styled, her makeup perfectly applied, her hands manicured, and women-only-know what else done. All she lacked was a dress, and she’d be ready to go. She was always like that, even back on the Mercer Farm – ready for the day before I’d gotten up. I ended my story by telling her, “So, what did you find?”

  “Several things. For one, Emmitt Cane wasn’t the ghost’s first victim.”

  “Oh?” I plopped heavily onto the faded blue lay-z-boy in front of the coffee table.

  “He’s the third. Kind of. His name is Gregory Scythe. According to the newspaper, and he died in twenty years ago from a stab wound.” She picked up a manila envelope from the counter and handed it over. As I pulled out a few pictures, she continued. “It took me awhile to get this, but it all makes sense. It was on some guy’s forum posting, but there were some old police records on it and a snippet in the local newspaper.”

  “A forum? As in some random guy on the internet?”

  “Is that the ghost you saw?” she asked, ignoring my own question.

  I looked down at the first picture, which was a police mug shot. “Umm, not really. Similar. The ghost I saw had a similar, all over the place hairstyle, but the face was a lot... I don’t know, a lot meaner.”

  “Makes sense.”

  I flipped to the next piece of paper, a newspaper clipping headlined, ‘Man Dead: Mysterious Circumstances.’ Underneath it was a separate story from a different paper entitled, ‘ghost seen at Square Lake.”

  “We both know that a ghost doesn't exist,” she said.

  “Well, yeah,” I agreed. My training in magic was pretty solid, but ghosts were one thing I’d never recalled.

  “Which means that the spirit of Gregory Scythe isn’t to blame. A
ghost could, however, exist if enough people share a strong enough belief. True, it probably wouldn’t do anything other than exist, but the power is there.”

  I saw what she was getting at, but skepticism prevented me from taking it all to heart.

  “So you’re saying that a lot of people just believed in him, and that just magiced him up?”

  “It’s a bit of a stretch, but it’s happened before throughout history. Look. There’s a double murder at the Scythe residence. It’s a classic, real life tragedy. Betty Scythe and John Allworth fall in love and sneak away for a few days to some cabin in the woods. Gregory, the girl’s evil father, finds out about it and instantly hates the guy. He drives up, bursts into the cabin and the two fight it out. The Internet and the newspapers say the two wrestled for a while, until Gregory pulled a knife out and stabbed the kid. Then, they both fell over the balcony and died.”

  “Okay...”

  “A year later, the same cabin was bought by a young couple. Unmarried. The guy’s doing a bit of housework and slips. Fell off a balcony and broke his neck. At least, that’s what the newspaper said. The forum, however, disagrees and said he was stabbed first, presumably by the ghost of Gregory Scythe.”

  “Right.” I said. “So what exactly do you think brought up the ghost?”

  “Suppose it became a local legend. Locals tell the story around campfires. No one admits it, but they all believe the place is haunted. Suddenly you’ve got a dozen or more people pumping it full of their beliefs, and therefore their willpower, into this ghost.”

  A lot of people assume you have to be of some special bloodline to cast magic. To be touched by the gods or some nonsense like that. Truth is, anyone can become a mage. Anyone. Thus, the reason for all the secrecy. It’s the Imperium’s first commandment; Thou shall not tell others they can cast magic. That’s not the way they word the law, but by my reckoning, the Imperium and the wordage used in the King James Version are a perfect match for one another.

  “I’m not saying the ghost of Gregory Scythe pushed anyone off the ledge, but everyone else is. Chances are that the second guy that moved in just lost his footing and broke his neck, but people in town would start to talk. If enough people believe it, the ghost will exist. You get a dozen or more people powering this thing, and the Equilibrium isn’t strong enough to stand up to all of their beliefs.

  “Then, some day a bold kid goes up to the abandoned Scythe house and peeks inside, expecting to see something. Think about it; that’s the exact same thing a mage does to cast. He’s believes he’ll see the ghost, which puts a precise focus to the community’s shared beliefs. Once the kid sees it, he believes without doubt that the place is haunted. He spreads the belief around– tells all his buds. Of course, the kid only tells people that’ll believe him, in fear of sounding crazy. You know, people he trusts, or people who’ve already expressed their beliefs in ghosts. Pretty soon you’ve got twenty people, all believing a ghost is there. Half of them may have seen or heard it themselves. Remember, I’m not saying Gregory Scythe came back as a ghost. I’m saying that everyone’s belief that Gregory Scythe came back as a ghost created an image of him.”

  “Hmm... When I mentioned ghosts at the gas station the other day, the teenager behind the counter mentioned he’d seen one. It must be the Scythe guy.”

  “Yeah, and there’s another thing. This Gregory Scythe has a history of violence. And with a name like Scythe? Who wouldn’t think he’d want to come back from the beyond and get vengeance? You said he had a similar hairstyle, right? But a different, angrier face?”

  “Yeah.”

  “People remember the guy’s hair and his anger. Therefore, those are the two features that come across most prominently in the ghost’s face. A small army of believers powers him. All a–”

  “Hold on. I see where you’re going with this,” I interrupted quickly. “The ghost has power, but no direction. It exists. Period. But there’s no reason or place for it to exist unless someone is actively thinking about it. All a mage would have to do is take all that pent up magic and give it focus. Hell, there are millions of people that believe in ghosts. That alone is too general to work with, but it could possibly be more fuel for the ghost.”

  “Right.”

  “But...” I continued to think on how this specific spell could be pulled off. “But why would James program a spell to burn down his apartment.”

  “Yeah. That is kind of stupid,” she said, narrowing her brows. Then, her face brightened. “What if he didn’t mean for it to happen. Technically, he doesn’t really control the ghost. The collection of beliefs would be the driving force for the spell. I think the ghost’s motives were simply to kill you, by any means necessary.”

  “But the ghost is just a spell,” I said skeptically. “A spell isn’t alive. It can’t make decisions.”

  “It’s a Sentient Spell,” she explained. “These things have been known to exist. It can’t make choices on its own, true, but it can do actions that clearly would accomplish their reason for existing. Last night, the ghost simply wanted to kill you, right? It figured the best way to carry out that action was to burn the place down. It didn’t choose to burn the place down. It simply acted within the reason for its existence – to kill. The spell realized that fire was the best way to do that.”

  “Okay...” I said, unsure. Coming from just about anyone else I wouldn’t have believed them, but Lara knew more about the nature of magic than most others in the Imperium. “That means that the spell has a lot of restrictions.”

  “Right. I looked more into ghosts and I found–”

  “Looked into? As in researched? We’re talking about people – I doubt those thirty or more people researched ghosts. They thought ‘scary spirit thing’ and left it at that.”

  She glared at me for the interruption as she explained, “I read movie summaries. Blare Witch Project. The Shining. Ghostbusters. These are typical places people learn about ghosts. If you had a TV, you’d know what I’m talking about.”

  “Ahh. Good point. You were saying?”

  “Well, there are a bunch of things we have to consider. One, I’ve never heard of a ghost that came out during the day.”

  “True, I guess.”

  “Let’s see. Poltergeists are almost as popular as ghosts. They’re invisible spirits that throw things around. I think the mage would want to bring some of those beliefs into the mix because, obviously, the ghost itself can’t hurt anybody. However, there would be other ways to empower the ghost.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, if I were to summon the ghost, I’d program a few things around the room to react to its presence. Add onto the spell without increasing its difficulty or the willpower required.”

  I thought about the house last night. There were dozens of potential weapons the ghost could have employed, but it only moved a few things. The door, which slammed shut; the levitating antlers, and the poker. Also, there was the self-igniting fireplace, but I doubted James programmed that one beforehand. Someone in the mix of beliefs must be a pyromaniac.

  “There’s another thing about the ghost,” she continued. “It probably didn’t target Emmitt Cane directly.”

  “Right,” I understood. “Magic can’t affect anyone without his or her permission, so it could have attacked say, a guy over there. Or, since this is Gregory Scythe, that guy over there who, by the way, is sleeping with your daughter. It’d be easy for the summoner to program that into the ghost’s head.”

  “Err, not necessarily,” Lara said. “They could have gotten Emmitt’s permission to target him, which is doubtful. Or, they could have led him to the false assumption that magic can affect him.”

  “Right,” I said. “And third – this is kind of obvious, but there is a mage needed to focus the beliefs. Likely he’s someone who has a lot of experience in magic. Also, it’s probably someone local to the area. After all, they had to have found out about the ghost, and learned how to perfect the spell to the point of
turning it into a deadly weapon.”

  I frowned as I thought of the possibilities. “There aren’t many people like that in the area. No wonder everyone’s pointing at me.”

  “There are only three groups that could pull this off.”

  “The Imperium,” I said. “But they’re not around.” Because she hadn’t lost faith in them as I had, I didn’t add that I felt this was exactly the sort of sneaky weapon the council would employ. “The Guardians. And James Freidman.”

  “We can eliminate us, obviously,” Lara said crossing to the couch and sitting on the side nearest to my chair. “Bree’s a master illusionist. That’d mean she’d be able to make it appear better than anyone–“

  “It’s not her,” I interrupted with certainty. “She’s a guardian, but I trust her. She’s too... I don’t know. Good. She works with a guy I don’t know, but he’s fairly new to town. Doesn’t fit our profile, and he does he have a motive.”

  “Bree’s always seemed like she’s had a few loose wires to me. I mean, she tried to get you arrested for that warehouse thing.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But she never lied. I’ve never seen her do anything illegal. Hell, she’s a good Christian girl.”

  “Who also once joined a cult,” Lara said.

  “It wasn’t Bree,” I said. “Drop it.”

  “Fine. I still think it’s James Freidman, anyway,” she said, but then closed her eyes and shook her head. “But what about the Venir? How’s Lance involved?”

  “Hmm... I think James Freidman has some kind of relationship with the Venir. I’m not sure what that is, though,” I said.

  Lara scanned my face as she said, “If the rumors about the Venir coming from a foreign dimension are true, they could have offered Emmitt the kind of knowledge that would help Cane Industries.”

  She didn’t take her eyes off me, and I knew why. She was right, but I’d had a long-standing agreement with the Imperium that I wouldn’t tell anyone what I knew about the Venir. Having been a former Guardian stationed in this area, I was one of the few Guardians they told outright that the Venir had access to advanced technology. I tried, and probably failed to keep my face stoic.

  “Because if it were true,” she continued, “I’d suggest there was some kind of tradeoff. Lance gets money, and Cane Industries gets new technology. That would at least explain Lance’s interest in all this.”

  “And someone’s tailing me, by the way.” I said. “There’s some guy with an A S H license plate I saw awhile back. I figure it’s probably one of Lance’s men. The Guardians don’t have the resources, and Cam, who also had me tailed, was the one that confirmed it. Haven’t seen anyone since last night, but I’ve no reason to suspect anything changed.”

  “Two tails? You’re a popular guy lately?”

  “I should start an act. Thomas’ comical adventures as a PI.”

  “So far you’re not doing too badly. You’ve already found one homicidal maniac.

  “Yeah, but he wasn’t real. So what’s our next move?” I asked.

  “Cameron and I both suspect James Freidman. Basically, I plan to find him, beat a confession out of him, turn him into the Guardians, and collect my winnings, or at least this year’s get out of jail free card. He’s perfect for the murder – motive is clear. With Daddy Cane on his deathbed, he probably wants a bigger share of the fortune Dad will leave behind. One less brother means a bigger share of the inheritance goes to him. Cam told me James was arguing with Emmitt the night before. Plus, my break-in last night proved that James knows how to summon the ghost. I’m not even planning on going to that Dinner if I can solve this before then.”

  “Probability is on your side,” she said, a look of exaggerated desperation on her face. “But what if it’s not him?”

  “It is,” I got up and started for the coat rack by the door.

  “Probability is on your side, but it’s not a hundred percent,” she said with a sense of urgency.

  I studied her for a second and said, “You just want to put on a dress and schmooze with the rich folk.”

  “Open bar,” she beamed. “I take my bonuses where I can get them. Besides, we deserve to go and have some fun.”

  I grinned at her, and shook my head, amused. “I probably won’t have time to get the Tuxedo.”

  “I’ll just guess the size and pick it up,” she smiled deviously. To Lara, the word guess meant ‘use my magic to get you the best darn tuxedo in the place.’

  “You have my permission,” I said, knowing that in order to guess my size, I’d have to allow her magic to affect me. “But that’ll take you an hour.”

  Her smile faded. “I’ve gotten better in the last ten years. It’ll take five minutes.”

  I shrugged apologetically as I stepped toward the door.

  “Try to make back by five,” she said.