Speed Dating With the Dead (3 page)

It was probably the goddamned Mexicans’ fault. They’d punch the buttons on every washer and dryer at the same time, speeding things up with nary a thought to the power drain. Most people, all they wanted was to flip a switch and have the light come on. Not many cared about the complex science of electrons. J.C. didn’t blame them. All he wanted was a fast paycheck, so maybe he wasn’t that different from the Mexicans after all.

But the job wasn’t as simple as the work order made it sound. For one thing, the breaker box was in the darkest part of the basement, behind a row of support beams and a couple hundred feet from the rickety wooden stairs. For another, the basement always gave him the willies.

He’d heard the stories, and once in a while a shadow shifted out of the corner of his eye, but nobody in his right mind paid attention to the corners of his eyes. Pegleg had sworn to an encounter with The Jilted Bride, a woman supposedly abandoned at the altar a hundred years back and killing herself as a result. Of course, in Pegleg’s version, he’d done her seven ways to Sunday on the rotted mattress, adding a few more stains to the canvas and leaving her with a smile on her face as she vanished. The vision of Pegleg in the buff, flashing all his nubs, was more frightening than any ghost. But alone in the basement, with the pipes groaning, the wood creaking, and the raw sewage
plop plop plopping
, the blood ran a little faster and the short hairs tingled a little.

He flipped the switch to trigger the set of bare bulbs that dangled from the floor joists. Dead.

Shit fire, Miss Mays. Somebody better call maintenance
.

He tried to laugh but the dusty air clogged his throat.

Despite the flashlight, he was reluctant to leave the foot of the stairs, where light leaked from the doorway above. The darkness had a border, and stepping over it would mean hostile territory. The laws over there were unknown, and you could break them without even knowing you had trespassed. But the laws on this side, with that bitch Janey Mays holding the purse strings and his parole officer marking time, were just as cruel.

Life was full of choices. Walk through shit and black hell and check the goddamned breaker box or stand in the unemployment line with the rest of the garbage Janey had tossed over the past year.

He put one toe to the edge of the darkness. He could have sworn the line of blackness oozed forward a couple of inches, and his leg shivered as if a frosty mouth had exhaled over his Wolverine work boot. The basement was always 10 degrees colder than the building’s interior, but the place was so drafty the temperature fluctuated anyway, no matter the season. That’s why guests were always bitching about the ventilation, which caused Janey Mays to chew J.C. a new asshole, and he’d run around with duct tape, weather stripping, and nails, but all the patchwork did was send the drafts to new locations and start the merry-go-round all over again.

The air in the basement, though, was still and dead. J.C. had failed science in the seventh grade, but he remembered the teacher droning on about the moon and how you couldn’t breathe there, and in the pictures of astronauts they all had on those bozo helmets with the black masks and lots of tubes running into different parts of the white suit. J.C. had never wondered about their breathing. He’d been more curious about where all the piss and shit went, and the teacher said they ran their piss through a filter and drank it again. And people called them “heroes.” J.C. called them “dumbasses.”

“A small step for man and a big step for mankind,” he whispered, mangling the astronautic catchphrase.

He thrust the flashlight in front of him and entered the darkness. The dirt floor was as slick as a plastic sheet covered with Crisco, but he didn’t look down at it. His focus was on the breaker box, which seemed to have moved farther away from him. Something rustled to his left, and he flicked the light over to the boiler.

The damned thing grinned at him with those rusty metal teeth, the old valves glittering like eyes that had been snapped open from a long sleep. The blacker darkness inside it quivered, a tongue of coal ash and cinders. Decades ago, men like J.C. stood down here half-naked, shoveling coal into that beast’s belly as it spit glowing embers onto their sweaty flesh. Compared to that kind of work, J.C.’s little mission was a tiptoe through the tulips.

And if he didn’t get the hot water going soon, Janey Mays would blow her smoke in his face and flash that wrinkled, mummified grin.

As he crossed the room, stubbing his boot on a busted cinder block, he fished in his tool belt for a screwdriver. He would need it for the breaker box, he told himself, though he held it like a weapon and the job would more likely require pliers than a sharp blade.

Flup flup flup.

The sound came from the boiler, which was now 20 feet behind him. J.C. had been called on to exterminate bats before, but they hung out in the attic and were easy to catch in the daytime. The White Horse had enough mice, rats, and possums living within its walls to pick up the place and carry it away, but those rodents made sharper, scurrying sounds.
Flup
meant wings.

J.C. moved faster, and he was almost to the breaker box when the boiler clanged. To hear Pegleg tell it, the thing hadn’t been fired since 1962, but Pegleg had only worked the White Horse for two years and he could create facts on the spot, anything to keep his jowls flapping and his hands idle. Of course, Pegleg’s war wound made a trip down the stairs too risky, and his arthritis hated the damp, and his eyesight was gone to hell since Saddam’s boys had let loose all them chemicals, but at least the important equipment still worked and you could just ask the Jilted Bride, because he’d done her seven ways to Sunday and–

The bed creaked.

J.C. knew that sound as well as any man, because he’d gone through two wives and had screwed his way down a whole trailer-park row during his teenage years, and a fuck squeak was a fuck squeak.

Most likely it was a couple of them ghost hunters. They were a weird enough crowd, probably liked to bang in graveyards and haunted houses and coffins. He cleared his throat, but they didn’t stop like normal folks would. Maybe they wanted an audience.

A couple of the check-ins had been hotties, and he wouldn’t mind getting a late-night plumbing repair call from them, because he’d sure fix their leak.

But no way was he going to swivel the light over to the bed. He might see the Jilted Bride laying there getting drilled by something black and oily and monstrous, maybe something with giant, raggedy wings that went
flup flup flup
as its hips rose and fell.

The creaking fell into a rhythm, along with the
flupping
, but J.C. zeroed in on the breaker box and he could see the problem–somebody had unscrewed the fuses and left the holes empty.

One of the ghost hunters might have snuck down here and tried to kill the lights. Maybe even the people on the soggy mattress. Just the kind of thing to add a little shock to the system. But not knowing how the place was wired, or that the main breaker box had been moved to the ground floor during the last overhaul, the dumb shits had just gone for the only fuses they could find. Except a couple of the fuses were still intact, buttoned up across the top row.

Creak flup creak flup creak flup.

If it was fucking–and J.C. would bet a case of Busch Lite on that–then the ride was going slow and steady, the kind women always said they liked until you actually did it and then they got all impatient.

He didn’t want to play the light on the ground and look for fuses because he was afraid of what he might see. He fumbled in his belt pouch for new ones, but when he started screwing the first one in, the one above it gave a half turn counterclockwise.

All by itself.

Creak flup creak flup creak flup.

J.C. gulped and twisted the fuse home, then plugged the five other holes. Lastly, he secured the top one again, screwing a lot more frantically than the things–
people, it’s people
–on the bed.

Finished, he back-pedaled, the rectangular light from the basement door spilling down like the stairway to heaven. Not so far, not so dark, though the basement air smelled like sulfur and smoke, as if the boiler was fired up and gasping. And the air that had been cool was now stifling and thick, the darkness like a cloud of ash.

All he had to do was breathe and walk, though, and he’d have a story that would top anything Pegleg had to offer. All he had to do was put one Wolverine in front of the other, eyes straight ahead, and–

CREAKFLUP CREAKFLUP CREAKFLUP.

The bed rattled with urgency, and the creatures–
ghost hunters, it’s just freaky ghost hunters
–appeared to be speeding up for liftoff.

Despite himself, J.C. turned toward the noise, though he kept the flashlight beam ahead of him. The sounds had been joined by wet sloshing, like somebody had dropped six bags of pea soup on the party. Porn flicks were ten bucks a pop down in Fantasy Land Books, a corrugated, windowless warehouse on the backside of Black Rock that had no books but plenty of magazines, plus some video booths in the back corner that J.C. wouldn’t have entered on a dare. But J.C. wasn’t much of a peeper, and his last three-way had ended in a divorce and a confrontation with a .38 revolver, so the group scene wasn’t his thing, either.

But he was feeling braver now that he was closer to the stairs and could chalk it all up to his imagination. Here was a chance to make the story even better. A ringside seat at a ghosthunter orgy. Pegleg could gnaw his fucking shin to splinters in jealousy

The boiler clanged again, and J.C. shifted the light toward the bed, getting a glimpse of something slick and red tangled in a foggy spiderweb.

Creakflupcreakflupcreakflupcreakflup

The red thing was pulsing like a raw heart, and J.C. squinted, backing toward the stairs, wondering if a pack of possums had given birth all at the same time, or if–

His flashlight blinked dead.

He banged it once against his hip, but it was still dead, and the
creak flup creak flup
grew louder like–

The BED is walking
.

He flung the flashlight toward the noise and fled for the stairs, boots slipping in the mud as he threw himself on its rough wooden planks, dust flying in his face. His knees throbbed where they’d banged and one fingernail had been ripped to the quick, but that was okay, the light was waiting above, and the ground floor, and cool air and sunshine and ghosthunters in clothes and the three cans of lukewarm Busch Lite in the maintenance shed.

He wriggled halfway up, his hips rising and falling like he was
creakflupping
the steps, unable to get traction. He could taste the sweet hotel air with its rug cleaner and cigarette smoke and—

creakflupcreakflupcreakflup
.

The basement door slammed shut and darkness draped him like a thunderstorm.

Pegleg playing a gag, pulling my leg, that’s all...I’ll yank HIS fucking leg off and beat him over the head with it.

A molten band of iron girded his ankle, yanking him back down into the basement.

The
creakflup
had given way to raspy boiler breath, the hungry panting of a pulsing red thing.

Chapter 4

Kendra wouldn’t look there.

No, not a glance, he doesn’t exist, he’s Ghost Boy to me.

He’d jumped out of the van with its stylized “SSI” logo on the panels and cut across the lawn, grinning above that Brad Pitt soul patch that hadn’t quite filled out. The Future of Horror had his own Web site, Internet radio show, and fan club, and it didn’t hurt that he looked drop-dead hot in his black jump suit. At 17, he was in the range as a lust object without it being sicko, though Dad had already given her the lecture about “boys like Cody McKenzie.”

He was headed for the door and the adulation of the ghost hunters, who were all certain he’d have his own television show in a season or two. Kendra would ignore him. That was the best strategy, and if nothing else, she’d sleep better tonight. Fewer bits of Cody roiling in her fevered brain.

But he wasn’t headed for the door.

Kendra glanced into Cody McKenzie’s eyes. Mistake.

They were the green of oceans and Lime Jell-O and other things that could drown you, salty or sweet.

She kept her sketch pad by her side, not hiding it exactly, but not shoving it in his face, either. She was simply offering him the opportunity to express curiosity if he wished. She didn’t have much in the boob department, not yet, but her art was weird enough to be awesome.

“How ya doing, K-Babe?” he said. “I haven’t seen you since the Carolina Inn.”

“The inn was lame,” she said. “That was urban-legend crap. The armchair ghost of an eccentric professor who smoked a pipe and occasionally ruffled the pages of the
New York Times
. Hardly what you’d call ‘bone-chilling terror.’“

Cody grinned, like she knew he would, like she was afraid he would. Those big, brilliant Chiclet teeth were the stuff of Hollywood. He probably had groupies all over the country mailing their panties for autographs. Even the boys.

But she could out-cool him any day. She just needed to keep her head, which was hard to do when he leaned close and his breath moved across her cheek like a warm sea breeze. When–

Enough. Emily Dee died a virgin.

“Yeah, it’s a high-priced gig, all right,” Cody said. “What was your dad charging for that one, $400 for an overnight?”

“Basic package. And an extra hundred to go in with the team and hold an EMF meter.”

“My thermograph got nothing,” he said. “I think that place is deader than Bob Dole’s dick.”

Kendra teenybop-giggled despite herself. “You’re the only person alive who thinks a place is dead if there are no dead people banging around.”

“Besides your dad.”

Kendra rolled her eyes and immediately regretted it.
That’s sooo Hannah Montana. I need to bring my Megan Fox moves or he’ll ignore me.