The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold Read online

  When I walked up the wooden steps, though, the old boards creaking loudly, my feeling about the house changed. At first, I felt only a mild unease, but with each step the unease grew. My mouth went dry. My stomach churned, queasy, as if I'd just swallowed something rotten.

  The inside of the house was dark. There was a lockbox on the door. I knocked, just in case, but nobody answered. I tried the knob and, as expected, it was locked. My heart picking up its pace, I stepped to the window and cupped my hands on the glass. When my eyes adjusted, I saw a big empty living room, a faded and warped hardwood floor, and lots of cobwebs. No little girl.

  Based on the condition of the hinges and the frame, it would not have been hard to break down the door, but that would draw a lot of attention. I scanned the neighborhood to see if anyone was watching, then followed the cracked and uneven single-car driveway along the side to a waist-high chain link fence that separated the backyard. The kitchen window of the house next door was so close I could have rapped on the glass. While I stood there, a woman in a pink bathrobe, her hair up in a net, appeared at the window with a dish, but it was dark enough that she didn't seem to see me.

  After she left, I hopped the fence and rounded the corner to the back, nearly tripping over a metal garbage can. Next door, a dog barked a few times, startling me, but he stopped after a moment. I found a back door up a couple of disintegrating wooden steps, but it was even more solid than the front door. There was, however, a basement door down a concrete stairwell, and it looked a lot flimsier: thin wood, no deadbolt, a loose knob with a simple lock.

  I took out an old Starbucks gift card I'd been carrying around my wallet for a while, and, with just a little bit of sliding and jiggling, managed to pop open the door.

  It wasn't a trick that worked on modern doors much, but it still came in handy now and then.

  The door creaked open into a basement with a concrete floor and a low ceiling with exposed pipes, impenetrably dark. I saw a stack of empty fruit crates, a wooden support beam, and not much else. A puddle of water had pooled by the door. As I stood there, the house expelled a draft of stale, dank air, like a corpse letting out its last breath.

  I felt my heart pounding all the way up into my eyelids. It had occurred to me that the girl I'd seen might not be alone, that she may not, in fact, be a ghost at all. If she were a real person, John probably would have seen her at some point, but maybe not. Or maybe she was some kind of accomplice. Child abductions by strangers were actually quite rare—most were by family, friends, or at least someone the child knew—but when they did happen by strangers, they were often done by people who lived nearby. Perhaps even next door.

  I took out the Glock, checked to make sure the magazine was loaded, and felt reassured holding the cold grip in my hand. The proper way to hold a Glock, or really just about any handgun, was with two hands, with the non-dominant bracing the dominant, but the problem was I couldn't see well enough without some kind of flashlight. I used my phone, turning on an app for just this purpose, and ventured into the basement with the phone in my left and my Glock in my right. If only Dick Tracy could see me now, the twenty-first-century detective.

  The phone gave off a weak bubble of bluish light, but with the basement so empty, I got a good view of the entire room. More empty crates. A broom. A rusty child's bicycle without wheels. No people, or anywhere for them to hide. I swung the door closed behind me with my foot.

  "Anybody here?" I said.

  My voice tightened up on me, choking the words. So much for being a modern equivalent of Dick Tracy.

  "Hello?" I tried again.

  Much louder this time, bolder. Surely, a hello spoken like that would intimidate just about anyone.

  Still no answer. My breath fogged in front of me. I saw a wooden staircase on the far side leading up to a closed door. There were lots of scratches on the lower part of the door, deep groves. A dog had spent a lot of time down here, a dog that hadn't been too happy about his imprisonment. I crept up the stairs, cringing at each creak and crackle of the old wood, and tried the knob. Unlocked. Gently, I swung open the door.

  Warped vinyl flooring. White cabinets with even whiter knobs. A couple of empty paper sacks sitting on a countertop the color of granite but made of something thinner, something that bubbled up around the edges. I called out again, got no answer. I stepped into the room and swept my phone through the kitchen, illuminating cobwebs hanging from the ceiling and peeling flower print wallpaper. Cobwebs? Obviously even the real estate agent didn't like to be in this place.

  I stepped into the kitchen and closed the door behind me. It was warmer than in the basement, but still cool, the thermostat obviously set low. I heard a truck rumble past on the street. I heard a few whines and groans from the old house around me, sounds old houses often made but were still unsettling.

  "I'm not here to hurt you," I called out. "I just want to talk, I promise. I can see you. I can see you where other people can't, so don't try to hide."

  There was no response. Had I really seen what I thought I'd seen? Even with my unique ability, I still sometimes questioned what I saw, especially when it was so fleeting. A dark face flitting in and out of shadows? It could have all been in my mind.

  Then, just as I started to take a step, I did hear something—a flutter of footsteps above me.

  Upstairs. My heart, already beating hard, felt like an engine that had broken free from its restraints, rattling around in my rib cage. This was not a sound an old house produced by itself; it was too rhythmic and steady. Too loud for a mouse, too soft for a fully grown man. She was up there. Oh, yes, she was.

  I started to creep through the kitchen, not wanting to make a sound, but then realized this was probably the wrong approach. Why frighten her? I deliberately let my footsteps be loud. I walked around the corner, to the living room and the front door, still going, passing an empty bedroom, and there, found another staircase. It was narrow one that led to a narrow landing, doubling back on itself.

  I held my phone on that landing for a long time, concentrating on slowing my breathing, getting calm.

  "Are you up there?" I asked.

  Nothing. She definitely wasn't going to make this easy for me.

  Glock ready, phone lighting the way, I took my first step. The floor yelped as if I'd stepped on its toes, a creak so loud I flinched. My heart hammered away so furiously I felt dizzy. What was going on here? It was normal to be nervous in situations like this, maybe even scared, but my coolness under pressure had always been one of my strengths. This felt different. It was all I could do to keep my legs from turning on their own and bolting me out of the house. Something had changed for the worse inside me and I didn't know why.

  Easy, Myron. Easy now. There would be plenty of time for psychoanalysis later.

  I thought of the girl. Olivia. I thought of her, somewhere out there, afraid, and it helped propel me up another step. Then another. The wooden steps felt uneven, one sloping one way, the next the opposite. Soon I was on the first landing, the phone light sweeping around the corner then up into the gaping darkness that was the hall at the top of the stairs.

  "Hello?" I said.

  The way my voice rolled through the hall, echoing back to me, I knew there was a cavernous empty space up there.

  When I was sure there was no answer, I continued up the steps. The air felt cooler, almost as cold as the basement, and the wooden steps chilled my feet as if I walked on blocks of ice. In the movies, people often felt suddenly cold around ghosts, but I knew from experience that was mostly a myth. But only mostly. A rare few ghosts, usually the really bad ones, often did transform the environment in a way that normal ghosts didn't.

  That could be the case here. Maybe I was facing a truly terrible ghost.

  Or maybe it was just cold.

  It was probably just cold.

  When I reached the top of the stairs, the ceiling was low enough that I felt the urge to duck my head. An open door to my left led into a tiny room
with no closets. Nobody there. The hall opened into a big, attic-like room with a pitched roof ceiling and cobwebs hanging from the exposed beams. The door to the right, a narrow one with a rusty brass knob, was closed.

  My dilemma with the closed door was that I had my phone in one hand and my Glock in the other. Put down the phone and I had no light. Put down the Glock and I had no protection. I bet Dick Tracy would know what to do.

  Knowing I was most likely facing a ghost, and a little girl at that, I cradled the Glock under my arm and quickly opened the door, so fast I barely felt the coldness of the knob. I had the Glock back in my hand by the time the door swung open and revealed a tiny closet, empty except for a couple of hangers on the wooden rod and what looked like mouse droppings in the corner.

  I eased the door closed with my foot and turned my light to the big room, only a few steps away. Reaching the opening, I swept my light across the room and saw a dormered window alcove on each side and nothing else. Hadn't I heard footsteps? I'd seen mouse droppings. Was that all it was, a scared little mouse? Disappointed and somewhat relieved, too, I headed for the window on the right, the one I'd seen from John's apartment.

  Frost ringed the glass. Cool air jetted through the cracks. Many of the windows in John's apartment complex were lit, and a high number of them had the shades open or blinds up: I saw people inside, some at desks, some sitting on their beds, and quite a few with no one in them at all. John's bedroom was one of the empty ones, until I saw him step into the room and look at the floor. If I hadn't just been in there, I wouldn't have known what he was looking at, but I had and I did. He was looking at Olivia's area. He stood like that a long time, not moving, his face an impassive mask, until finally he dropped to his knees and out of view.

  Based on where he'd knelt, I could imagine the rest. I saw him, in my mind's eye, lying on Olivia's sleeping bag.

  I felt something there, something deep inside, give way, a tearing or a crumbling, something letting go. I had never been a father. I didn't know how that felt. But I knew loss. I knew what it was like to lose those you love, how wrenching it was, how all that life could ever give you in the end was lots of questions that had no answers. I spent so much time trying not to feel things that when I did feel something, something beyond the basic human needs that none of us could avoid, it often felt strangely foreign. As if the emotions weren't my own. As if I'd put on someone else's jacket at a party by mistake and though it was the right size and style it didn't fit quite right.

  I was standing there mulling this over when I heard crying behind me.

  Something cold slid into the pit of my stomach. The sound was muffled, as if the person was crying into their hands, but it was unmistakably coming from a child. I eased my way around.

  Even with the light aimed directly at her, it took me a moment to see her. Crouched in the corner with her back to me, hair and skin as dark as the night, the gray afghan draped over her shoulders like a moth's wings, she blended in with the background. Her shoulders shook, her pigtails bobbing. She was a tiny thing, so small and fragile that it was hard to believe anyone could be afraid of her.

  I swallowed away the lump in my throat and approached cautiously, stopping a few feet away.

  "It's okay," I said. "I just want to talk."

  The crying stopped, though she didn't turn around. I heard sniffling. I saw now that her afghan was only gray because it was coated in so much dirt and soot; the original color, yellow, showed through in a few spots like daisies on cracked concrete. She had welts on her neck, lots of them, and it took me a second to realize that the pattern of welts perfectly matched a person's fingers. Big fingers.

  "Did someone hurt you?" I asked.

  She sniffled a bit more, then looked over her shoulder at me, eyes big and brown and ringed with tears. Such small tears. So small compared to the size of those welts. Her face still possessed some of the roundness of a toddler, though the cheeks were sallower and more sunken than a child of any age should have been. She blinked a few times at me, squinting, and I pointed the flashlight slightly away, keeping it trained close enough that I could still see her face.

  "I'm Myron," I said. "What's your name?"

  She didn't answer. It occurred to me that pointing a handgun at a child wasn't exactly a gesture of trust, so I holstered the Glock. It was still possible that she wasn't a ghost, but even so, I was pretty sure I could handle her without fifteen rounds of 9mm bullets.

  "Can I help you?" I asked.

  She swallowed. Thinking my height was intimidating her, I dropped slowly to my knees. She reacted by whirling around and crouching in the corner again, tucking herself into a tight, quivering ball. I scooted forward, playing it by ear, not sure what my next move was going to be. I used soothing words, telling her it was all right, that no one was going to hurt her, scooting a bit more, a little closer. I thought if she could just see my face, see that I didn't mean her any harm, she would relax enough that we could have a conversation.

  Not sure why I was doing it, or what good I thought it would do, I started to reach for her.

  My fingers were not far from her back when she spun around and screamed.

  That would have been bad enough, because it was one of those high-decibel screams that hits you with all the force of a jet breaking the sound barrier. The sound wrapped around me like invisible chains and tightened every muscle in my body. But the worst was not the sound, which went on and on, much longer than any living girl could have expelled her breath. The worst was that she changed.

  It started with the bruises on her neck, which began to glow green and sizzle like a phosphorescent acid. Her teeth sprouted into knives, tightly packed together like the prongs of a fork. I saw the embers of a fire glowing at the back of her throat, pulsing from orange to red and back again. Oily black worms sprang from her eyes and her nose, dozens of them, dropping to the floor, crawling on her face, twisting and curling, leaving a sizzling ooze in their wake. Her hair burst from her head and transformed into a swarm of thousands of swirling gnats, circling her bald head in a furious black cyclone. Bruises covered her scalp, and while I watched, they changed into some kind of maggot or leech, scabby and pus-covered, pulsing in time to the glow at the back of her mouth.

  It took all of my will power to keep my body firmly rooted where I was. It would have been easy to run, but that was what she wanted me to do, and I'd seen enough terrible things already in my years walking among the dead to know I was capable of facing horrors that would have put me in a psychiatric ward in the old days—and did, briefly, when I first emerged from my coma. I could face them all and come out the other side still standing. A bit shaken, maybe. But standing.

  She didn't give up easily. When it became obvious to her that the screaming wasn't doing the trick, moth wings burst from her back and she hurled herself at me, wings buzzing. Her mouth opened wider, impossibly wide, the knife teeth longer, the fire at the back of her throat glowing brighter.

  It was like getting struck by lightning, only the electric buzz wasn't hot or even painful but cold, deeply cold. I felt it in my eyes. I felt it in my toes. It may have lasted a second or an hour or a lifetime, they were all the same. Then she passed through me, landing near the window that looked out on John's apartment. In a blink, the fearsome creature was gone and the little girl with pigtails returned, the quivering ball wrapped in the afghan.

  "Well," I said. My throat was so constricted that I had to cough and start again. "Well, that was something."

  She didn't reply. Staying on the floor, I scooted around and faced her. I placed my phone, pointed upward, on the floor in front of me.

  "It was pretty impressive," I said. "Do you—Does that usually work? Does that scare people away?"

  She still didn't say anything, but the crying stopped and I heard her sniffle.

  "I'm not going anywhere," I said. "You can do it again if you want, but I'm going to stay right here."

  She said something, so softly I couldn't make
out the words.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "I says I can do it a lot scarier."

  It made me smile. I had her talking, which was a start. She had a voice deeper than I expected for someone so little, hoarse and gravelly like a longtime smoker. I wondered if it was because she hadn't used it in so long.

  "I bet you can," I said.

  "I'll do it a lot scarier if you don't leave."

  "I'm not leaving."

  "I'm gonna do it."

  "Okay."

  She glared at me over her shoulder. I braced myself, expecting the worst, but eventually the glare gave way to tears. She shook her head and turned away from me again.

  "Don't matter none," she said defiantly. "You can't make me do nothin' now."

  "I'm not going to make you do anything."

  "You can't hurt me."

  "I won't hurt you. I hope you don't want to hurt me."

  "Go away."

  "Who hurt you?"

  From behind, I saw her shake her head.

  "Is he still around?" I asked.

  No answer. The streetlamps cast a yellow square of light on the floor next to her, bright enough that it appeared like an opening to the floor below. The snow fogged the air outside, the flakes so tiny they were indistinguishable from one another. I heard tiny feet skittering along the floor in the other room, mice or rats, one or the other. Rather than keep pressing her about herself, I decided to try something else.

  "Do you know Olivia?" I asked.

  "Who?"

  "She lives across the way there. In that apartment complex."

  The girl didn't reply, but it seemed as if she had grown more still.

  "She's missing," I said. "I'm trying to find her, and I could really use your help."

  This got the girl to turn around. The fear, at least for a moment, had been replaced by genuine concern. "She not there no more?"

  "So you do know her?"