Ghosts of Gotham by Craig Schaefer

Author:Craig Schaefer [Schaefer, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

Thirty-Two

“I found something,” Maddie said. From the look on her face, it might have been one of Chandra’s ghosts. She had met Lionel on the sidewalk as he emerged from the gallery, coming at him as fast as she could without breaking into a sprint.

“So did I.” He showed her the pale-violet business card. “There’s a chance Chandra talked to this Wen Xiulang a little before she died. It might be worth checking out.”

Her hand clamped on his wrist, harder than it needed to, and she tugged him across the street toward the coffeehouse.

“Oh, fuck no,” she said with a humorless laugh. “We are not going to see Wen Xiulang.”

“Wait, you know her?”

“And she knows me. No, that’s not happening.”

He waited for an explanation. She didn’t offer him one. Maddie led him past the espresso-brown awning of Spence’s, around a crumbling brick corner. Lionel jarred to a dead stop at the mouth of the alley.

“Whoa. What was that?”

Maddie’s eyes widened. “You saw it?”

He wasn’t sure. He’d seen the alley, a gaping mouth of oil-stained concrete and bare red brick. An overstuffed dumpster stood shoved to one side, rusting away with a couple of trash bags tossed at its feet like offerings to a second-rate god. Across the concrete span, graffiti tags festooned the opposite wall. Tribal tags, jagged and shouting out over one another to be heard, anything intelligible lost in the pile-on of painted noise.

Then he saw the dart of blue-silver smoke. It lanced past his shoulder, silent, carrying the momentum of a speeding train but not even ruffling his hair, and zipped around the corner up ahead.

“Up there,” he said, pointing.

He jogged up the alley, following in the apparition’s wake, and Maddie ran alongside him.

“I saw two more of them when I was checking out Spence’s,” she said. “Coming in from two different directions. Same destination.”

Behind the coffee shop, the alley opened onto a small intersection: an uneven courtyard carved out between storefronts, with a three-space parking lot and another couple of dumpsters. Any other day, Lionel wouldn’t have even noticed the steel box on the wall at eye level, anchored to metal conduits that snaked up into the coffeehouse rafters and down into the pavement below. Just a junction box, some kind of electrical nest, the sort of urban infrastructure designed to be bland and invisible.

Any other day, it wouldn’t be seething with a violet-black glow. The misty glow clung to the corroded metal like someone had doused it in psychedelic paint and flipped on a black light.

“What am I looking at?” Lionel asked. “You’re seeing that, too, right?”

“You’re looking at what I hoped to show you back at the ballroom. And at Calvary.” Maddie edged closer to the box, keeping her distance, drawing an invisible perimeter as she studied it from every angle. “That’s residual death energy.”

“What, like, a ghost?”

She shook her head. “No, it’s like . . . a by-product. It’s the leftover energy when a soul transitions. Sort of like the grease that’s left

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