Stones Unturned (30 page)

Danny froze, watching as the black-skinned animal bore down upon him, and he braced for the inevitable impact. Eve was on the move as well, and when he glanced into her eyes and saw the cold judgment there, he felt certain he was about to die.

As he tasted the blood of the old lady still on his tongue, he realized that might be for the best.

"Get down," roared a voice from behind him, and Danny did as he was told.

Baalphegor hurled the woman's body like a child's broken toy, right into the path of the raving beast. The animal went wild, attacking the corpse in its fury, while Squire screamed for it to stop.

Danny turned to face his father. The demon was muttering something, a sound very much like the angry drone of insects, and his hands moved around in the air, trailing darkness as they seemed to weave the fabric of night into a hole hanging in the air.

"Quickly," the demon croaked, directing Danny toward the pulsing circle of darkness.

He started toward the conjured escape, but then found himself turning to look at his friends. Squire was beating the slavering beast with a piece of blackened wood, but Eve was looking directly at him — her eyes beckoning to him. She shook her head no, and reached toward him as though she could pull him back. Danny looked away. The taste of the old woman's coppery blood was still on his tongue.

It was too late.

He dove into the icy embrace of the dark portal, and left hope behind.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ghosts haunted the present, but were forever haunted by the past. Only when they at last abandoned the flesh and blood world and allowed their spirits to move on were the spirits of the dead, the lost souls, free of this shadow. Dr. Graves had learned the truth of this over the years since his death, every time he visited a familiar place or saw a familiar face. Each fond memory existed as an unsettling ghost to him and troubled him far more than his lingering spirit had ever troubled the vibrant world of the living. His history was his personal ghost.

The Empire State Building was a part of that history.

It still towered above New York City, a monument to another age, a time when men had dreamed big and had had faith in Progress. Now it was taken for granted, just another office building, despite its landmark status. People streamed in and out of its doors on their way to and from meetings, without any inkling of the awe its construction had inspired among those who had watched it rise steadily toward the heavens in those precious days of 1930, when America had desperately needed the hope it symbolized.

Clay strode through the three-story lobby, glancing around in wonder, putting on the air of a fascinated tourist. A camera would have completed the illusion but wasn't necessary. To security guards he would look like any ordinary man, neat and well groomed, his blue jeans new and his leather jacket fashionably weathered. He joined a dozen other tourists in front of the elevators that would carry them up to the observation deck on the eighty-sixth floor.

The ghost stayed with him. With so many people it was impossible to avoid sharing the same physical space with someone, and those tourists whom Graves passed through shivered at the touch of his spectral substance. One elderly woman he touched rubbed at the back of her neck and glanced around nervously, her eyes alight with confusion and fear. He wondered if she sensed his presence as the nearness of death and worried that her time had come.

At half past eleven o'clock on the evening of the tenth of May 1944, the mayor of New York City had ridden one of these very same elevators up to the observation deck. The time was well after the hour when the public was allowed to visit the observation deck, but Roger Alton Bennett had become mayor because he was a persuasive and powerful man, used to getting his way. The doorman and elevator operator who gave Bennett his way that night, and the two employees of a radio station on the eighty-fifth floor who happened to ride up with the mayor, reported that he was alone. No other unauthorized visitors entered the building that night. Access to the observation deck after hours was restricted. The elevators still in operation that late at night did not stop on the eighty-sixth floor without the override key the elevator operators had, and the doors from the stairwell were locked to prevent employees of the building's tenants from entering.

Roger Alton Bennett did not ride the elevator back down. He took a faster route to the street, off of the observation deck. City officials called it an accident. Rumors emerged from the police department and in the papers, claiming Bennett had taken his own life. The rumors became so rampant that at last the commissioner had held a press conference during which he had revealed that there were signs of a struggle on the observation deck, including traces of blood, indications that the mayor had not taken his own life but had instead been murdered. The inability of the New York Police Department to uncover any further details or to provide any suspects or theories about who might have been responsible for Bennett's murder had raised a furor in the city that lingered for more than a year.

All of this had taken place months after Graves's own murder. A wandering spirit, lost and searching for answers to the mystery of his death, it had been years since he had learned of the controversy surrounding Bennett's murder. The mayor had not precisely been his friend, but they had been allies. Still, he had been a ghost, obsessed with his own death, and had never been drawn to inquire further into Bennett's terrible, violent end.

Until now. Kovalik and Zarin had both implied a connection between his murder and Bennett's. It would be impossible to do an effective physical investigation of a murder well over sixty years in the past. Blood traces, broken glass, signs of struggle . . . such things did not last forever.

But a building this old and historic had a great many ghosts, and they lingered, echoes of the past.

The elevator doors opened and Clay stepped out onto the eighty-sixth floor. There were fewer people on the observation deck than Graves would have expected. The ghost moved among them, glancing at Clay from time to time. His friend watched him, but kept silent. New York had more than its share of lunatics and seers, but it wouldn't do for him to appear to be talking to himself up here, where security guards were on edge, expecting attempted suicides or terrorist attacks.

The ghost slipped between two little girls, beautiful twins with caramel skin who might have been the daughters he and Gabriella would have had if fate had been kind. He tore his gaze away from the smiling, excited girls and looked out through the protective glass that had been erected many years ago to prevent people from throwing things off of the observation deck — and from jumping.

The view of New York City that spread out before him was sheer magic. Had he still been a creature of flesh and blood he would have caught his breath, and gooseflesh would have risen on his arms. As focused as he had been in his life, he had never been immune to such wonders. New York had remained a truly remarkable city.

And yet beneath the reality of that teeming metropolis, he could still see the ghost of a simpler era, when the buildings were smaller and more elegant, and the view from the top of the Empire State Building was like looking down from Heaven.

Clay stepped up beside him and splayed his fingers on the glass. He peered out at the city.

"Anything?" he whispered.

"I haven't begun," Graves replied. "A bit lost in the past, I'm afraid."

"That's why we're here," Clay reminded him. He glanced at the two little girls who were watching him curiously, obviously wondering to whom he was speaking.

The ghost of Dr. Graves closed his eyes and slipped into the spirit realm.

A city of ghosts lays out before him. Each block and tower is a gray silhouette in a churning mist of phantoms. New York, seen from the other side.

Graves feels the familiar pull of the soulstream but only vaguely. He is far from the ivory gate, here, still only a whisper of a thought away from the flesh-and-blood world. He drifts outward, floating above the city, and turns to face the dark streak that is all he can see of the Empire State Building from this side.

The ghosts, as he suspected, are everywhere. They float in lazy circles around the antenna at the top of the building and flow across the observation deck. Dead, desperate, lonely eyes stare out of windows. Some are instantly recognizable, men and women in business suits that speak of many different decades. Others are little more than wisps, lingering spirits tied to the anchor of this building for some reason. He spies the lost souls of several men in the rough clothing of construction workers and understood immediately that these ghosts had lost their lives putting this building together, beam by beam.

Graves walks across the sky above the ghost city, stubborn in his insistence upon behaving as though he still has substance. He passes into the building — the spirit world's reflection of the building — and the ghosts on the observation deck slow, moving warily, like birds cocking their heads and waiting, worried that a predator is near. Even the nothings, the wisps, the vague unfocused spirits of the lost, seem to pause.

The specter whose form is most distinct belongs to a middle-aged woman with a sour, pinched mouth and grim eyes. She wears the sort of pantsuit favored by some professional women in the 1970s. She cannot help him directly — he needs an older ghost, a phantom who has haunted this place far longer — but perhaps she can provide information.

"Who are you?" he asks.

"Laura. I was Laura," she says.

The other ghosts have begun to move again, though still slowly. They give Graves and Laura a wide berth. He reaches out, and the ectoplasmic fabric of his spirit encounters hers, hands passing through one another.

"Can you tell me, what shade is the oldest, here? I must speak to the old ghosts of this place."

Laura tilts her head and regards him closely. Some of her solidity wavers and begins to drift apart.

"Why? We don't know you. This isn't your place. It's our place. We're tethered here, moored like ships. Like zeppelins. Do you know they used to moor zeppelins to the top?"

Graves smiles. The soulstream flows around them both, around them all, and the entirety of the ghost city. It blows through the spirit world like a wind, growing stronger nearer to the gate. Here, it is just a gentle breeze, but still it is tempting. He likes the image of zeppelins moored to the world of flesh and blood.

"I did know that," he says. "I saw them do it, in my life."

"You're not moored here," Laura says, suspiciously.

"No," Graves agrees. He glances around. It might be his imagination, but it seems to him that there are fewer ghosts here now. "And you won't be forever. Only until you figure out what's holding you back."

"I'm afraid," she says. "I watch children with balloons on parade day, and there are always some who can't hold on to the strings. They cry while the balloon rises up and up and disappears, and I wonder where they go. I'm afraid to go where the balloons go."

Graves stares at her. Again he tries to touch her hands, forgetting for a moment, despite so many years of death, that they are only phantoms.

"So am I," he says.

Laura smiles.

"Can you help me?" Graves asks. "I need to find the old ghosts in this place."

"Why?"

"A man was murdered here, a long time ago. Sometimes the ghosts are the only witnesses."

She blinks warily and draws back her hand.

"What man?"

"The mayor of New York."

"Who are you?" she says, and she wavers again, and her lower body seems to drift, becoming a wisp.

"In life I was called Leonard Graves. Doctor Graves."

"Oh, no," Laura says, her blue ghost-eyes widening, and then she is all wisp, slipping away through gray mist walls.

"Wait!" Graves calls, but even as he does he turns and sees the last few spirits there vanishing. They dart out into the air around the blur of a building, disappear into the city of ghosts or deeper into the building itself.

"What the devil is this?" he asks.

There are no ghosts to answer.

He slips out of the building again and sees the phantoms staring at him from a hundred windows. They withdraw, disappearing instantly, after only a fleeting glimpse.

Graves pursues, gliding now through the ether, to a ledge where the trio of high-steel workers stand in their gloves and boots and rolled up sleeves.

"Go away," one of the ghosts says, and there is danger in his gaze.

"My name is —"

"We know who you are. The dead travel fast, as do whispers."

Now Graves grows angry. His hands ball into fists. The workers stand shoulder to shoulder, their spirits resolving, solidifying. "Go away, Doctor Graves. You're not welcome."

"I only want to know who killed Mayor Bennett. You men would have been here. You must have seen what happened that night."

The worker on the left, his pug nose flaring in disdain, turns and spits a jet of soulstuff through the ether.

"You should know better than anyone."

One by one they drift, turn to wisps, and slip deeper into the spirit world.

Graves curses and follows. He focuses his spirit and lets the soulstream carry him. Phantoms blur around him. The city of ghosts is gone, the silhouettes of buildings disappear, and then he is standing in a place of nothing. Outlines of faces whisk by in the air, though here as well some of the specters are just coalescing clouds of mist.

The turbulent river of soulstuff that flows around his legs drags at him, and with each moment he is deeper and deeper within the spirit world — the otherworld. Soon he will see the twin spires, the ivory gate to the After, beyond which Gabriella awaits.