Ghouls Just Haunt to Have Fun

  “He’s in the office right behind the front desk,” I said, still moving carefully down the corridor, my free hand resting on the cap of my grenade. “Heath?” I called. “Gopher?”

  The pounding and muffled shouts got louder the farther down the hallway I moved. I picked up my pace and made it to the end, which left me the choice of turning right or left. I chose left and walked with care as my eyes, ears, and sixth sense opened up wide.

  On the edge of my energy I could feel something vile, like a snake or a serpent slithering in the ether. My heart was thumping loudly in my chest when suddenly, from behind me, there was a loud bang. I froze in my tracks and stepped to the side with my back to the wall, pointing my flashlight behind me.

  I could hear thumping, and the ground seemed to tremble slightly under my feet. It was then that I caught Tony, panting hard and sweating up a storm, around the corner as he came directly into my flashlight beam. “I . . . told . . . you . . . to wait,” he said in a gasp, completely out of breath.

  “Right,” I said to him with little sympathy. “Do you have your grenades?”

  Tony held up one of the metal tubes while he aimed his camera in my direction, and I noticed that both of his arms were trembling with either fatigue or fear, but probably a little of both. “Where are they?” he asked me.

  “I think they’re down this way,” I said, noticing for the first time that the pounding and muffled shouting had stopped, and that worried me greatly. “Come on,” I said, moving farther down the passageway.

  We walked for about ten yards, my beam bouncing back and forth along the corridor and that slithery negative energy becoming more and more acute. “Heath!” I yelled again, but nothing came back to me. “Gopher!”

  “Where are they?” Tony asked, his voice quivering with fear.

  “I don’t know!” I admitted worriedly. “I heard them before, but now they’re both quiet. Gil!” I shouted into the mike. “What’s the status on those lights?”

  “I can’t find the manager!” Gilley squealed. “But I’m looking for the master control switch. It’s got to be around here somewhere.”

  I motioned to Tony, and we’d continued for a few paces when I felt something under my feet. I pointed the beam down to the ground and saw that it was a headset. Picking it up I held it out for Tony to see and asked, “Whose is it?”

  “Not sure. But it means at least one of them was here.”

  I folded the headset and was tucking it into my utility belt when I heard Tony shriek in fear. My head snapped up, and I saw him pointing over my shoulder, his mouth open in horror. I turned and took a step back. In front of us and in the dim light being cast from my flashlight was a shadow that was at least eight feet high. It loomed in front of a doorway and swayed back and forth like a cobra. “Holy shit!” I swore. It was just like the thing that had attacked Heath and me down in the lobby.

  Tony and I pressed our backs against the opposite wall, and for a brief moment I found it hard to breathe. Then two things happened simultaneously: The first was a terrific pounding from right behind me; the second was that the lights came on.

  Both Tony and I jumped and dashed down the hallway, away from the serpent thingy, when I realized I hadn’t used my grenade. Pulling it out of my utility belt, I popped the cap, dropping the magnetic spike into my hand.

  I looked over my shoulder and, in what felt like slow motion, I saw the shadow serpent crouch low and chase after us. I tossed the spike over my shoulder and pulled out my second grenade.

  Tony was slightly ahead of me, and he was screaming bloody murder. He dropped the camera and his grenade without pulling off the cap; then he tossed his other one over his shoulder without looking back or pulling off the cap. I had to duck to avoid getting hit in the face with it, and barely managed to hold on to my one remaining grenade. I glanced back one last time and saw the shadowy serpent rear up as it came to my magnetic spike, twisting and turning, and a sound echoed down the hallway that was very much like a hiss.

  I gripped my last grenade tightly, and, gathering every last bit of courage I had, I whirled around, changed direction, and started running at the serpent. I’d gotten only a few feet when something hot seared my shin. “Ah!” I yelled, but kept going. The serpent swayed as I approached, and it got taller.

  I pulled out my spike, holding it firmly, and ran full-tilt right at the ugly thing in the center of the hallway. “You’re going back to hell!” I shouted, and threw my spike at the center of the serpent.

  The spike sailed through the air, slicing into the shadowy serpent before it seemed to shiver, and then, in an instant, it disappeared. I stopped just short of where it had vanished, my chest heaving and my shin feeling as if it were on fire. I pulled up my pant leg and inspected my wound. There was one long, curved cut that was bleeding freely. “Bastard!” I yelled at the empty hallway.

  “M.J.!” I heard Gilley’s faint voice coming from somewhere in the distance, and I realized my headgear had come off and was on the ground just down the hall. I went to retrieve it and put it on.

  “I’m okay,” I said, still panting for air.

  “Did you find Heath and Gopher?”

  As if in answer the pounding and muffled cries picked up again, and I headed back down the hallway. Near the room where Tony and I had seen the serpent I found a narrow door. Using the master key card that Knollenberg had given to Heath and me, I swiped the lock and it opened. Gopher and Heath tumbled out.

  “Oh, thank God!” said Heath. Getting to his feet, he tugged on Gopher’s arm. “He’s unconscious,” he said.

  I realized that Heath and Gopher had been trapped inside a small utility closet and wondered how the hell that’d happened. “You okay?” I asked, bending down to help him with Gopher.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Heath said. “I’m fine. Just a little woozy. Hey, you’re bleeding!” he added, looking at my hand, which had the blood from my shin on it.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Come on. Let’s see if we can get Gopher down to the elevators and the hell out of here.”

  * * *

  With a whole lot of effort we managed to get the producer down to the first floor, where Gilley and a still terrified Tony were waiting for us. By this time Gopher had come to, and was blinking at us rather stupidly. “Wha . . . wha happen?” he asked as the elevator doors opened and Gilley rushed in to help.

  “You fainted,” said Heath.

  Gopher shook his head vigorously as if to clear it. “I did?”

  “Yep. But you’re all right now. Come on, guy, help us out here; can you get to your feet?”

  Gopher looked from Heath to me to Gilley as if he were seeing us for the first time, but then it must have dawned on him that we were trying to lift him up, because he did manage to get his legs to work, and with only a little wobbling he was back on his feet.

  We eased him out of the elevator and over to the couch in the lobby area. “How’re you feeling?” I asked when we got him to sit down.

  “Okay,” he muttered, taking the bottled water that Gilley was trying to hand him. “God, what the hell happened up there?”

  I glanced at Heath and noticed that his face was really pale and his eyebrows were pushed together as if he were in pain. “Are you all right?” I asked him, and motioned to Gilley to get another bottle of water.

  “I think so,” Heath said, rubbing his temples. “I’ve just never been attacked like that before.”

  “What happened?”

  Heath edged away from Gopher and sat on the other side of the couch. “It was creepy,” he said.

  “Granted,” I allowed. “If you two saw anything like what Tony and I did, I’ll give you that, right, Tony?” I looked over my shoulder to see my cameraman behind the bar unscrewing the top of a whiskey bottle and proceeding to pour much of its contents into a large highball glass.

  Realizing that I had asked him a question, he ignored me and directed his gaze to Gopher. “I quit, man,” he said.

  He then
gulped down the whiskey and poured himself a second glass without saying another word.

  I turned my attention back to Heath and said, “Tell us what went down up there.”

  Heath took a sip of water and began. “We couldn’t get the guy in room five-eighteen to accept his death. Turns out he’s another suicide. The best I could get out of him was that his name is Gus and he’d lost his entire life savings in a poker game. He shot himself in that bed later on.”

  “Did he give you a time period?” I asked, hoping to research these facts in the city’s newspaper records and maybe find a personal detail about Gus that we could use to get him to cross over.

  “Early nineteen hundreds.”

  “Cool,” I said, then waved my hand for him to continue with his story.

  Heath took another sip of water. “We left Gus’s room, and the next spirit on the list was Carol Mustgrove. I know you said we should tackle her together, but when I checked in with Gilley, he said that you had just finished up with Duke and were on your way to the dining hall, so I thought I could at least give Carol a shot and see if maybe we’d get lucky.”

  “How were you going to get into her room?” I asked, thinking about how it had been sealed off by the police.

  “I wasn’t,” said Heath. “I planned on trying to pull her out of the room and talk to her in the hallway. And for a minute or two, M.J., it worked.”

  “It did?”

  “Yes,” Heath affirmed. “I was standing in front of her door, and she actually came out into the hallway. She thought I was her ex-fiancé, and, man, was she ready to tear me a new one.”

  I smiled. Carol struck me as the uppity type too. “I think that was the right way to play it to get her to come out and talk,” I said, thinking Heath was a natural at this ghostbusting thing.

  “Yeah, well, it didn’t last long.” Heath sighed. “Anyway, Carol comes out into the hallway and she’s calling me Brian—I’m assuming that was her ex’s name—and then she starts yelling at me that I’m having an affair with another woman, and she even knows the other woman’s name.”

  “She’s got a good memory, for a spirit,” I mused. Usually grounded spirits become so foggy and confused that some of the finer details and names of people they only had an acquaintance with become lost.

  “I don’t think the name came from memory,” said Heath with a bit of excitement. “She said she knew the other woman’s name was Sophie.”

  I gasped. “No way!”

  Heath nodded. “I don’t think she was talking about the actual woman Brian had an affair with,” he said.

  “Me either,” I agreed. “Sophie was murdered in Carol’s room,” I said. “Do you think Carol could have witnessed it and was confused about who Sophie was?”

  “I really do,” said Heath.

  “What else did she say?”

  Heath’s face fell. “Not a lot,” he admitted. “It was right after Carol said the name Sophie that . . .” Heath’s voice trailed off, and I noticed that he was looking at Gopher oddly.

  “And then what?” I asked, switching my gaze from Heath to Gopher and back again.

  “Well,” Heath said, fiddling with the bottle cap from his water, “I heard Gopher say something.”

  I noticed that Gopher’s expression had turned troubled and his gaze dropped to the floor. Heath didn’t appear to be comfortable continuing, so I asked Gopher, “What did you say?”

  Gopher didn’t answer me right away; he just continued to stare down at the floor with a faraway look. Finally, however, he muttered softly, “I don’t remember.”

  “You weren’t speaking English,” said Heath. “And I don’t know what the hell you were saying, but it was supercreepy.”

  Something clicked in my head at that. “Did it sound like Spanish or Portuguese?”

  Heath looked up at me in surprise. “Yeah,” he said. “It did sound like that.”

  “Gopher, what do you remember about the moments leading up to then?”

  Gopher shrugged but managed to make eye contact. “I don’t speak Spanish,” he insisted. “Or Portuguese.”

  “I believe you,” I coaxed. “But I really need to know what you remember.”

  Gopher ’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “I remember filming Heath,” he said. “I remember getting a tight shot of room three-twenty-one. I remember feeling this really intense blast of cold air hit the back of my neck, and then . . . and then . . .” Gopher didn’t seem to be able to finish the thought.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You don’t remember anything else after that?”

  “No,” he said with a shake of his head. “I kinda do. I mean, I remember feeling like I’d been drugged or something. I guess it was that I felt really disconnected and far away, and I remember words coming out of my mouth, and in the back of my mind I couldn’t figure out what I was saying, and then I remember running a little and opening a door, but it was so weird because I didn’t want to open the door, and then I remember Heath being right behind me, and I shoved him into this small room or something, and he was fighting with me, but I pushed him in, and in my mind I knew I shouted at him that I was going to kill him. . . .”

  “You wouldn’t let me out of that closet,” said Heath. “I tried to get you to move so that I could get out of there, but you wouldn’t budge, and then you just fainted right on top of me, and all I could do was kick at the door with my feet and hope someone heard me. I’m really claustrophobic, and I get sick to my stomach and find it hard to breathe when I’m confined.”

  Gopher stared at Heath in amazement. “I didn’t mean it, man!” he said. “You’ve got to believe me, Heath: I didn’t mean anything that I said or did!”

  “You’re right,” I said, trying to calm him down. “Gopher, you had no control over that period of time.”

  “M.J.,” interjected Gilley. “What do you know that the rest of us don’t?”

  “It happened to me too.”

  Gilley looked at me curiously. “What happened to you?”

  I ran a hand through my hair and gathered my thoughts. “The night we first arrived,” I began, “Steven and I were in our room, and I felt a foreign energy take hold of me, and Steven said that my features changed and that I started speaking Portuguese.”

  “Whoa,” said Gil. “A body snatcher!”

  “Yeah,” I said to him. “I’ve heard of this phenomenon before, and it can only be done by one hell of a powerful spirit, usually someone incredibly dark, and even then they can’t sustain it for long.”

  “I’m confused,” said Tony from behind us, and I realized that he was trying to follow our conversation, even though he looked about two sheets to the wind by now.

  “Gopher’s body was taken over by a very negative entity.”

  Tony blinked dumbly at me, and I heard Gopher say, “I was possessed?”

  I turned back to face him. “In the strictest sense of the term, yes.”

  Gopher’s face turned ashen. “Oh, my God,” he whispered. “Do you think it’s still in me?”

  “No,” I said with conviction. “I think that the spirit that took you over is gone. But there’s another thing that I’m even more worried about.” The faces all around me looked like they couldn’t take much more, so I decided to get right to the point. “If I was clawed again,” I said, pulling up the pant leg of my jeans to reveal the cut there, “then the knife that killed Tracy was somewhere close by.”

  “Shit,” said Gil. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  “We’ve got to call the police!” Heath insisted.

  “Great idea,” I agreed, then glanced at my watch. It was two a.m. “MacDonald sure isn’t going to like me waking him up at this hour.”

  “He’ll like it even less if we wait till morning,” argued Gilley. “And one more thing, M.J.,” he said, looking toward the front desk.

  “What’s that?”

  “You should know that the night manager is missing.”

  “Anton?” I said.

  G
illey nodded. “I saw him right before we started, but I haven’t been able to find him since I went looking to turn the lights on.”

  I felt a chill spread up my spine. Pulling out my cell phone from my back pocket, I hit 911.

  Chapter 11

  They found Anton in the men’s room. He’d been knocked unconscious, and there was a nice-size gash on the back of his head. MacDonald said the night manager had gone in there, heard the door open behind him, and was just turning his head to see who had entered when he got a good knock on the noggin.

  EMS took him away by ambulance to the hospital, and Knollenberg was notified. He showed up not long afterward looking like hell.

  “Hi, Murray,” I said, waving at him when he came running in the door just as the ambulance with Anton pulled away.

  “What happened?” he asked me, pivoting his head around like one of those bobble toys you see on dashboards.

  “Anton was konked on the head,” I told him. “We think by the same guy who’s been running around here letting demons out and causing general mischief.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “We think he’ll be fine,” I reassured him. “But . . . er . . . he wanted me to tell you that he’s quitting, effective immediately. He’ll be back later in the week to collect his things.”

  Knollenberg sat down heavily on a bar stool. “Damn,” he said. “And he had such great credentials. I was really hoping he would work out.”

  Tony, who was still standing behind the bar, got out a highball glass and shared some whiskey with him. “Here ya goes,” he slurred, pouring a generous portion. “To take the hedge hoff.”

  Knollenberg looked at the amber liquid in the glass, and I knew he really wanted to down it, but instead he turned back to me and asked, “What else happened?”

  I told him everything. How we’d managed to cross Duke over and were working on the other ghosts when Heath and Gopher were tackled by one powerful spook, and how, when I went to help, I got knocked around a little too.

  “And you called the police when you discovered Anton?” said Knollenberg.