C.H.A.R.O.N., page 14
Medved gulped his coffee and then poured himself another. “Yes to both. I did the autopsy. The cause of death was traumatic injuries from his fall. No evidence of drugs or intoxication, and the sheriff found no reason for suspicion of foul play. Also no suicide note; so it was ruled accidental. That’s always bothered me because while I couldn’t prove otherwise, it never seemed right.”
“Why?” Brent leaned back against the counter.
“Because of the height of the windowsill. I couldn’t see how someone could fall out of that window ‘by accident.’ But there were no witnesses, no reason to think someone had been with him when it happened, so I kept my thoughts to myself,” Medved said.
“And the body?”
“Some guys in dark suits came and packed up everything in his office and lab, including the equipment. They arranged for his casket to be shipped to wherever they took the rest of the stuff. Somewhere near Washington, D.C., I think.”
“Langley?”
Medved nodded. “Yeah, that sounds right.”
“Shit. That’s Spook territory—the other kind, CIA. Seems a bit ‘convenient’ for Wyrick to have family in that area.” He swore under his breath. “Do you know what happened to Wyrick’s patients?”
“Only from hearsay—nothing official. I wasn’t keeping track, but I’d catch the gossip. Small town, everyone knows everyone. And of course, a lot of people don’t like to talk about seeing a psychologist, so I didn’t know who all might have been a patient. But—” Medved drained his cup.
“Two committed suicide. Three had mental breakdowns. It gets murky on some of the others. They died younger than the average lifespan, but so do a lot of people in Central Pennsylvania. So was it something Wyrick did, or the general pollution exposure, crappy health insurance, and slate of chronic conditions that are way too common in these parts?”
“The feds took all of Wyrick’s hospital records. Wouldn’t there have been some other groups keeping track? The V.A.? Insurance? Medicare?”
“Maybe—but getting to that information won’t be fast or easy. Lots of layers to go through. And I thought I heard something about the hospital offering Wyrick’s program free to veterans. That would have been quite an incentive if Wyrick wanted to recruit patients. Folks around here don’t have much cash,” Medved replied.
Brent mentally added tracking down Wyrick’s patients to his to-do list. Travis came back from his shower and raised an eyebrow, questioning the conversation he missed.
“Ready to go? We might need to swim. It’s really coming down out there,” Brent said, figuring he’d fill Travis in while they drove.
“I forgot our water wings,” Travis joked. “We’ll have to doggy paddle.”
They thanked Medved again and headed out.
“Which one first?” Brent asked.
“Let’s start with the least likely, and end up at Wyrick’s floor and the sheriff’s office.” Travis pulled out onto the street, wipers barely keeping up with the rain.
“Sounds like a plan. Have you figured out what we’re supposed to find?”
“Hoping we’ll know it when we see it.”
It didn’t take long to get anywhere in South Fork, and minutes later, Travis pulled up in front of the Miner’s Memorial. The rain eased off a bit, but they still needed their slickers when they got out of the car, and Brent knew that they’d be soaked by the end of the night.
The large gray granite rectangle looked like an oversized tombstone. Some of the miners who died on the job were probably buried in the two cemeteries, but for others whose bodies were never recovered, the monument was their only remembrance.
“There are a lot of names,” Travis observed, taking in the carefully inscribed rows. “I knew mining was dangerous but…”
“Owners who cut corners on safety made it more so,” Brent finished for him. “I’ve read about superintendents cutting into the support pillars to eke out a bit more coal or skimping on maintenance for the fans that pulled the bad air out of the mines. Some of the disasters could have been prevented if it weren’t for greed.”
Travis closed his eyes and rested a hand against the rougher granite of the monument’s corner. Brent guessed his partner was checking for ghosts or trying to get a psychic read on the marker’s energies.
A few minutes later, Travis opened his eyes. “The ghosts who cling to this place aren’t our problem. They’re victims, not perpetrators.” Travis raised his hands, palms out, and said a blessing to ease the passage of those ghosts who wanted to move on.
Brent watched, on alert for an attack. He trusted Travis to deal with the spirits, but an uneasiness remained that Brent felt sure wasn’t linked to the revenants. He had learned years ago to trust his gut, so he turned slowly, scanning for danger.
Dark clouds made it feel much later than the actual time. Brent eyed the shadowed places beneath trees and near buildings, unable to shake his certainty that something was watching them.
He pulled out his shotgun from beneath his raincoat and chambered a salt round. Travis was still deep in his connection to the departing spirits. So when Brent saw the slow lengthening of darkness behind the monument, he pivoted and drew down on it.
In a single heartbeat, the shadow changed, legs emerging from a muscled, furred body, head and neck coming into focus as the hellhound took shape.
Brent fired as Travis spoke the last words of his litany.
“Run!” Brent pushed Travis ahead of him while trying not to turn his back on the all-too-solid-looking creature behind them.
Brent heard the shadow monster growl and could smell the sulfur on its breath. He got off another shot, and the hellhound slowed but did not stop, and although the salt hit it square in the face, the sharp crystals raised no blood or ichor.
Great. I can’t hurt it—but I bet it can hurt me.
As if it guessed his thoughts, the monster swiped at him with a wide paw. Brent bit back a cry of pain as sharp claws ripped through his jeans below the knee and dug into his flesh.
Travis grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved Brent behind him, dousing the demon dog with salted holy water from a flask in his pocket. That bought them a few precious seconds, enough for Travis to half-shove/half-carry Brent into a garden bed surrounded by an ornamental iron fence.
“By all that is holy, I abjure thee,” Travis shouted. “And I refuse to believe you have power here. Be gone!”
The hellhound vanished, and Brent slumped against the lone tree in the center of the plantings. The creature that pursued them might not have been “real,” but the gashes and blood on Brent’s leg and his torn jeans certainly were.
“Do you think it’ll come back?” He panted, still gripping his shotgun.
Travis eyed the area around them for another minute, then shook his head. “Not quickly.” He turned to Brent and saw the blood. “Fuck. He got you.”
“I’m okay,” Brent said through gritted teeth. “It’s not deep.”
“Bullshit. You’re bleeding. Let’s get back to the car. I can patch you up and decide what to do after that.”
Brent resigned himself to leaning on Travis as he limped back to the Crown Vic. Neither ghosts nor devil dogs harried them, and the heavy rain meant no one else was in the park to question his injury.
Travis drove them to a defunct gas station with a protective overhang above the useless vintage pumps. It sheltered them from the worst of the storm, although gusts still drove the rain sideways now and again.
Travis got the medical bag from the trunk, a far more specialized and comprehensive kit than its civilian counterpart. Brent swiveled in the passenger seat so that he could put his legs outside the car, and Travis squatted to have a look.
“You were lucky. They’re not deep enough for stitches and not long enough to hobble you, but damn—it could have been a lot worse.” Travis worked as he talked, dousing the gashes with holy water and then antiseptic, following up with an ointment made from ingredients known to repel both infection and magical taint. It hurt, and Brent bit his lip to keep from crying out.
“If you hadn’t slowed it down with the rock salt…if we didn’t know to get inside the iron fence…that thing could have had you for puppy chow,” Travis fretted as he closed the worst of the cuts with a butterfly bandage and then bound up the leg with gauze.
“You think it was a tulpa?”
“Don’t you?”
Brent nodded. “Which means they’re clearly solid—and capable of killing. So regardless of what the others might look like to their victims, I think we know what took the people who disappeared and what happened to them.”
Travis stood and packed supplies back in the med bag, then offered Brent an antibiotic and something for pain, along with a bottle of water to swallow them down. “You want to go back to Horvath’s and rest?”
Brent shook his head. “I don’t think we can afford the time. Let’s head for the mansion. By the time we get there, the pills will kick in.”
Travis looked skeptical but nodded. “All right. But if you start to get a reaction—”
“You’ll be the first to know.”
They drove to the Sanders mansion and stayed in the car for an extra moment, viewing the grand house. “Knowing what we do, it almost feels like Mob money, looking at how wealthy Sanders got when his mines were death traps for the workers.”
“That could certainly create a well of negative energy,” Travis agreed. “It’s a museum now—no one’s lived there for a while. Let’s see if we find anything important.”
Sanders’s home was an ornate, sprawling Victorian that took up the entire block. Given the modest homes Brent had seen around town, the opulence of Sanders’s house was even more ostentatious.
“You know that the coal companies built housing for the miners, but it trapped them into owing their rent to the mine landlord. They bought supplies at the company store and basically paid their salary back—and more,” Brent said.
“Plenty of reason for angry ghosts—especially the miners who died,” Travis remarked. “Let’s go see what we can pick up on.”
Thanks to the weather, the normally scheduled estate tours were canceled. Travis and Brent picked the lock on the back door and moved cautiously through the space. They looked closely at the furnishings, decorations, artwork, and personal possessions preserved in the house, trying to sense any supernatural energies.
Brent felt a pang, wishing Danny’s ghost was with them. Danny had been good at running interference with other spirits and sometimes cajoling a fellow revenant into sharing information or discovering information hidden from mortal eyes. The silence when he reached out for his twin’s presence hurt.
The focused look on Travis’s face told Brent that his partner was probably trying to sense whether demons had left behind any tell-tale evidence or if he could pick up traces of dark magic.
“There’s an old shadow here, but it’s not one of the usual culprits,” Travis remarked. “Like a stain that won’t come out. There’s no malicious haunting. A few ghosts who don’t want to move on, but nothing dangerous. They’re more forlorn than anything.”
While the old house was an interesting piece of history, nothing appeared to be related to the Shubin or the energies attacking the town.
“Well, that was a bust.” Brent limped back to the car and dropped into the passenger seat of the Crown Vic.
Travis called Liz to let her know they were on their way to St. Benedict’s so her contact would know to expect them.
Beth, a tall thin nurse with short gray hair, was waiting for them in the lobby and held out two visitor’s passes.
“I can take you up to the fourth floor, even though it’s not being used for patients now,” Beth told them as they followed her. “We’ll have to get off the elevator on three and take the stairs.” She shivered, even though the hospital was a comfortable temperature.
“I get the feeling the fourth floor isn’t a popular place,” Brent remarked.
He could almost see the emotions war in Beth’s expression, struggling between fear and professionalism.
“No, it’s not. Hospitals are perfect haunting grounds because even at our best, people die. St. Benedict’s has a checkered history. Some bad things happened here, and there were some bad people. Four has an…energy…that gives folks the heebie-jeebies.”
“Energy?” Travis asked as they exited the elevator and wound around to a stairwell.
“You’ll feel it. Everyone does. When the floor was in use, staff fought not to get assigned to it. Lots of turnover. And it wasn’t just our imaginations—outcomes on four were worse than elsewhere. We were all glad to see it close.”
Brent felt a frisson of unease when Beth unlocked the door, and they stepped into the fourth-floor corridor. She wasn’t kidding about energies. This place has bad juju.
“Liz said you were interested in Dr. Wyrick’s area. It’s over here. Just—be quick. I have to stay with you because no one’s allowed here unchaperoned, but I’d really rather be anywhere else,” Beth confessed.
“Thank you,” Travis told her. “I promise we won’t take long.”
Travis’s pinched expression made Brent wonder what his partner experienced from four’s psychic hangover. The maintenance-level lighting accentuated the floor’s abandoned state, adding a feeling of melancholy.
“I don’t imagine there’s anything to find,” Travis said. “Feds probably picked it clean.”
Beth nodded. “I remember when that happened—his accident and all. Terrible thing. But it was almost like in those movies where the black SUVs show up, and guys in suits with earpieces and sunglasses walked in like they owned the place, bossed everyone around, packed up everything, and left. All they were missing were the helicopters,” she added, sounding a bit unnerved.
Wyrick’s program had been given a suite of rooms with a waiting area, consultation space, and what had probably been an office or storage area. Nothing about the furnishings looked unusual, and the same drab white paint made the area unremarkable.
“Not much to see,” Travis mused, opening and closing empty filing drawers.
Brent eyed the window where Wyrick had taken his fatal fall, staying well back. He felt a headache coming on, and the desire to leave felt like a persistent itch, more urgent by the moment. “Are you picking up on anything?” he asked Travis.
“There’s bad energy here, but the ghosts are keeping their distance. I don’t think they like this place any better than we do.” Travis sounded distracted as he made a thorough search.
“You can see ghosts?” Beth’s voice rose to an almost squeak.
Travis nodded. “Yeah. Don’t worry—they aren’t dangerous. They just don’t want to move on.” Travis covered his face with his hands, muffling a cry of pain as he sank to one knee. Brent moved to help and realized that it wasn’t a migraine—it was a vision.
“Travis!” Brent gripped Travis by the shoulders, gently shaking him loose from the horrors only he could see.
“Should I call someone?” Beth sounded frightened.
“No! He’ll be okay. It’s just a vision.” Brent told her without taking his worried gaze off Travis.
“I’m all right,” Travis forced out. “Just…give me a minute.”
“You got this?” Brent’s voice dropped so only Travis could hear.
“Just like always.”
“Then we are so screwed.” Brent managed an encouraging half-smile.
Travis got to his feet. Beth walked a lot faster leaving than she had on their way in, locking the door behind them when they made it back to the stairwell without complications.
Travis stayed quiet as Beth led them to the main lobby. Brent made small talk, trying to keep from freaking out. They thanked Beth and headed back to the car.
When they got to the Crown Vic, Brent insisted on driving. He handed Travis an energy bar and a bottle of water from a bag in the back. “Want to talk about it?”
Travis gobbled the bar and gulped the water before answering. “I got a glimpse of how things were when Wyrick was still alive. Bland, institutional office. Wyrick looked like he was in his forties, with cold eyes.”
He rubbed his temples. Brent reached for the ibuprofen and offered a couple of tablets along with another bottle of water, which Travis accepted gratefully.
“There was a guy sitting on the couch—a patient,” Travis went on. “He looked like he was under a spell or in a trance—and terrified. Black shadows slithered all around him, circling the couch. Maybe that’s what a tulpa looks like before it’s been shaped by someone’s fear. So much dark energy. Malice. And raw hunger.”
Travis shivered, despite the car pumping out heat full blast.
He called the shadow creatures, Brent thought. And now they won’t leave.
Brent put the car in gear. “Next stop—the sheriff’s office and the box.”
“Okay,” Travis replied. He was silent for a few moments. “Wyrick was using his patients to conjure the shadow creatures. I think our tulpa theory is right, and he found a way to soup them up just like he did the Shubin.”
“That might explain why the ghosts kept clear,” Brent replied as he pulled out of the lot. “Maybe we’ll find what we need in the box. We’re missing pieces of the puzzle—and running out of time to find them.”
Melinda at the sheriff’s office just nodded when they identified themselves. She had a pleasant face, with lively blue eyes and a tired smile. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and Brent figured she might be in her early forties.
“I’ve been expecting you. Right this way.” She led them to a locked interrogation room and opened the door.
“Don’t add or take anything, and don’t alter anything. The sheriff approved photos. If you think something really needs to leave the room, he has to okay it.”
None of the rules surprised them. “Can do,” Travis assured her. “Thank you very much.”
The banker’s box bore an identification sticker and a bar code. The seal had been broken when Melinda opened it the previous evening. Since Wyrick’s case had been ruled accidental, it wasn’t likely civil authorities would care much about what happened to this leftover collection of items.
