Queen of the Dead (11 page)

So maybe they, the mysterious Leadership Mina kept talking about, really were around here somewhere.

I reached the end of the block and pulled a U-turn to double back. This time, I noticed the open lot at the back of the theater, where a building had obviously just been torn down. Amid the still-standing piles of rubble, a half dozen cars were parked haphazardly. But they were all pointed toward the chain-link fence between the empty lot and the back of the theater. And one of them, though it was hard to be certain in the reduced light, I thought might be Mina’s beat-up Malibu.

I backed up and pulled into the open lot, gritting my teeth as my poor Dodge rattled and thumped over the uneven ground. I parked next to a pile of bricks, tucked the card Mina had given me into my pocket, grabbed my phone from the passenger seat, and got out.

The sound of my door closing echoed in the surrounding silence. Even the crunch of my shoes on the uneven gravel sounded absurdly loud.

What are you doing, Will? You should not be here.
My common sense decided to make an appearance, late as usual.

Just shut up for a second. Let me see if I’m even in the right place.

I made my way through the cars, half-expecting someone to jump out at me, until I reached the one that I thought was Mina’s.

I peered in through the window, finding fast-food wrappers and trash on the passenger-side floor, and zombie office-worker dolls glued to her dash, just as I remembered.

It was definitely her car. I was in the right place.

But now what?

“Hello?” I called quietly, and immediately kicked myself for it. Everybody knows that’s one sure way to make yourself an easy target. Also, if this were a horror movie and I’d said “Is anyone there?” I’d be dead by now, dragged kicking and screaming under one of the cars by a multiclawed creature of some type.

I supposed I could, in theory, wait right out here. They couldn’t leave without their cars, right? But that felt almost disrespectful, like one step short of turning down the invitation to meet them. Not a great tactic to use with people you were hoping to pump for information.

I headed to the fence and found a place where the links had been cut, the freshly exposed metal gleaming in the blindingly bright security light positioned on the roof of the theater.

Holding the fencing aside, I slipped through and onto the theater property. This had probably once been part of the hotel. I’d need to start paying more attention, and not just for signs of people from this world.

The back of the theater didn’t look like much, just a short, nondescript building made of crumbling brick with a couple of construction Dumpsters neatly in a row. It certainly did not scream, “Most Haunted Place in the City!”

The security light overhead focused its beam on a door, the only one that wasn’t bricked or boarded up. It was a rusty metal with green flaking paint and looked like it would give you tetanus if you just glanced at it, let alone actually touched it. The handle was missing; an open and sharp-looking hole in the metal remained where it had once been.

The door was also open about a foot, and kept that way by a cinder block at the base.

And still, no sign of anyone else around.

Damn. This whole thing smelled of a trap. Or a test. Or something equally unpleasant as either of those two alternatives. Mina had said they’d wanted to meet me, to see what I could do. I was beginning to suspect that this was going to be far less small talk and far more survival of the fittest than I’d anticipated.

Then again, all the people those cars belonged to had to be around here somewhere, right? Maybe they were already inside. They didn’t seem much like the coddling sort, again based on Mina’s information, so I had a hard time imagining them leaving someone out here just to greet me.

Just turn around, and go home
, common sense suggested.
Whatever you find out cannot be worth the living nightmare inside that building.

And then what? Lose track of them forever? Miss my chance to meet other people like me? Never know if Mina had been talking about my dad?

I wasn’t sure I was ready to give up on those potential answers just because I was afraid. I mean, I was right to be afraid. The ghosts inside this building could kill me. They’d killed people who weren’t ghost-talkers.

So, it was a risk. A big one.

But maybe that was the point. It was a test. To see if I was worthy. They’d allowed, no, encouraged Mina to take a chance on containing Mrs. Ruiz alone. So, if that were true, then this would not be so out of character for them at all.

I stood there, fifteen feet from the door, trying to weigh my options.

I had Mina’s disruptor in my jeans pocket, if I could figure out how to use it. There were several buttons on top, and I hadn’t yet figured out the right combination to make the blue beam appear, even though I’d tried a couple of times in the diner parking lot.

I had my cell phone, too. And if things got really bad, I could summon Alona. She would be furious, even more than before, but she’d have no choice but to come when I called. That was the way the system worked.

However, she was not required to help me, and I was guessing, based on her earlier mood, she would not. Plus, who knew how well Mina or any of the others watching might take her arrival?

Still debating, I shifted my weight uneasily, my heart beating too, too fast.

That’s when I felt it, this sudden sense of being watched. I looked around, but still saw no one. Not that that necessarily meant anything. There were dozens of places to hide in the shadows, not to mention the fact that every building surrounding the theater was several stories taller, allowing for a variety of easy-viewing positions.

If they’d watched Mina and me at the Gibley Mansion, what was to say that they weren’t watching me now?

And even though I couldn’t hear a clock ticking, I could almost feel the seconds slipping away. At some point, if I just stood here, my chance would be over before it even began. The door might, literally, close on this opportunity.

This was most definitely a test. And the first step was just seeing if I’d enter the building.

I started for the door, my knees feeling shaky and some part of me asking over and over again, “Are we really doing this?”

I climbed the two wooden and creaking stairs to the door, and then with just a second of hesitation, stepped around the cinder block and over the threshold.

Immediately, the smell of dust, mold, and rotting wood engulfed me. I grimaced.

It was dim in here, but I could still see pretty well, thanks to the security light outside and the still-open door.

Clearly, this had once been a backstage area for the theater, but it was now covered in piles of discarded plaster chunks, old chairs with the velvet covering rotting away, and splintery and cracked support beams destined for the Dumpster outside. A narrow path cut through the debris, and I could see recent footprints—more than one set—leading the way through the dust.

Ghosts don’t leave footprints, not unless they’re around someone like me. So, either way, whether these were tracks left by members of the Order or ghosts who’d been given physicality by their presence, this was probably the right way.

I pulled the disruptor from my pocket, hoping I wouldn’t have to use it, because I didn’t really know how, and started to follow those footprints.

I wish I could say I was surprised when the door slammed shut behind me, leaving me in complete and utter darkness.

I froze for a long second.
Don’t panic. Don’t panic.

Easier said than done, though. If I let myself, I could almost feel breath on the back of my neck. I wasn’t alone in here, not by a long shot.

I switched the disruptor to my other hand and dug intomy pocket for my cell phone. I yanked it out, my fingers fumbling in my hurry. Because it was craptastically old, I had tohold a button down for light. The beep sounded enormously loud in the thick, ear-ringing silence around me, but it didits job, lighting up a tiny area around me and revealing the flashing lack of signal in the upper left corner of its screen. Not surprising, given the age of the building and the thickness of the walls and the general shittiness of my phone.

Now what? Keep going…in the dark.

Great.

I started forward again, following footprints that stood out even more in the blue-white light of my cell phone. After just a few steps, the leg of my jeans caught on something in the tight and crowded corridor, and something sharp bit into my shin.

I swallowed back the pain noise. The less attention I drew to myself, the better. If the Archway was caught in a reenactment loop, like all those ghost battalions in Gettysburg (another place on my never-visit list), then the most powerful energies wouldn’t stir until the time of night when the hotel had burned. So, if I could stay quiet and get through to where the others were before the worst of it started up again, I might be okay.

My first clue that that might not be possible was the four guys in the suits. In the dim light from my cell phone, it was hard to catch a lot of detail, but I could see ties that were too short and fat to be modern and big heavy-looking leather suitcases at their feet. Definitely ghosts. They were leaning against the left-hand wall, smoking. Actually, only two of them were leaning against the wall; the other two were half
in
the wall—one was only a pair of legs, crossed at the ankle, sticking out of the wall at his knees. He was clearly sitting on a chair, probably one from the long-destroyed lobby. The other one stood facing the others at an angle, almost split in half by the wall running down the center of his body. He didn’t seem bothered by it, though. He grinned—his teeth flashing in the darkness—as he nodded at the others in agreement with something one of them had said. Probably the dude in the wall, since I hadn’t heard anything.

Creepy as it was, that made sense. The theater to them wasn’t real. The lobby of the hotel was, and obviously that wall hadn’t been there when they were alive. And unlike Alona, Mrs. Ruiz, and some of the more sentient ghosts, they were trapped in their own time, unaware of anything else. Until, of course, I tried to slip past them, my head down.

“Hey, buddy, you have the time?” one of them called after me.

I paused, hesitating for just a second. If I didn’t answer, they might forget they ever saw me. Then again, at least one of them had seen me in the first place, indicating they might not be entirely blind to events and people outside their own ghostly existence.

“Uh, no?” I offered without turning around. It wasn’t true, of course, but if I looked at my cell phone to check the time, who the hell knew what kind of conversation that would provoke?

I heard the sharp tap of his shoes on the old hardwood floor. “You from around here?” He exhaled with the words and smoke swirled past me in a cloud.

I turned slowly. He, the ghost, didn’t seem suspicious ofme, though he was watching me closely. It struck me as possible that after so many years of reliving their death by fire, some of these ghosts might have started up a hunt for the cause of their death, even if they didn’t realize quite what they were doing. If so, good luck to them. Bernard Shaw, a teenage porter, who’d fallen asleep in the baggage room while smoking, had started the fire.
He
had survived, waking up in time to escape with his life. He hadn’t bothered to tell anyone about the fire, fearing for his job.

“No, I’m just visiting,” I said to the ghost.

“Didn’t think so. Not in that getup.” He chuckled, nodding at my clothes.

Uh-huh. Right. Okay. “I have to get going. My…” What would make most sense to him? A girlfriend might raise eyebrows if he thought this was a hotel. So might the equally ambiguous “friend” if I seemed too young to him to be wandering around at night. “My dad,” I said finally, “is waiting for me.”

“He part of the convention?”

His words triggered a vague memory. The reason the hotel had been so full that night was because of a traveling salesmen convention being held in town. Duroluxe Vacuum Cleaners.

“We’re just passing through,” I said.

He nodded and flicked his cigarette to the ground between us, and I held my breath. This place with all of its dried up wood, rotting velvet chairs, and dust and junk was a fire waiting to happen.

I stepped on the cigarette butt quickly. Fire was one ofthe most treacherous parts of being a ghost-talker. Being near a ghostly match, cigarette, or, hell, a firework—whatever aspirit had died with—was enough to spark a fire that would cause real-enough damage or death.

“Thanks, kid.” He cuffed my shoulder, and I flinched, waiting for him to make the connection that he’d actually touched me, a living person, but he didn’t. Then again, to him, for however much longer, until the fire started again, he was a living person, too. After that, everything would be up for grabs.

Once my new friend had walked back toward his buddies, I got going again. Ahead, the corridor opened into a widerarea, or so it seemed. All I could really tell was that the light from my cell phone wouldn’t reach beyond the edges of the darkness, and I wasn’t seeing the piles of junk stacked along the sides that had accompanied my journey so far.

I hurried past the last piles of junk in sight, and out into the open. I could sense the ceiling above me lift in that way you can just feel it when the air shifts around you. I’d moved from a tight and cramped corridor to a larger, more open space. Noise carried differently out here. And the floor beneath me had changed too. Every step I took now thumped hollowly.

Lifting the phone up higher, I caught a glimpse of tattered strands of ghostly white fabric hanging from the ceiling, moving in the draft I’d felt earlier. The top of it, what I could see anyway, was far more intact, still holding a bit of the original rectangular shape.

The screen.
I’d made it into the theater. Probably on the old stage. That would explain the hollow sound beneath my feet.

But still no sign of anyone else.

Where were they?

In the distance, at what would probably be the top of the aisle in the seating area, a quick flash of light, like a flashlight quickly doused, caught my eye.