Queen of the Dead

7 Will

“Are you okay?” Sam, my boss and my mom’s semi-boyfriend, stopped by the booth I was cleaning on his way back to the kitchen. “You haven’t said much today.” He sounded concerned.

“I’m fine.” Nothing that about ten hours of sleep and way less frustration in my life wouldn’t solve.

I’d chased after Alona when she’d fled this morning, but she was too quick for me, what with me actually having to open doors to get outside. Then I’d driven over to her mother’s house, thinking I might catch up with her before she got there, but no such luck. Either she’d gone somewhere else, or she’d gotten there faster than I would have thought possible and was already safely ensconced inside by the time I got there. It wasn’t as if I could ring the doorbell and ask for her.

While I was there, I couldn’t help but notice the small mountain of black trash bags at the foot of her mother’s driveway, lending credence to Alona’s story. Ignoring the strange looks from the few neighbors who were out and about, I’d snagged a few bags at random for Alona and tossed them in my trunk. Here was hoping I’d managed to grab something other than a week’s worth of her mom’s takeout containers or whatever. I hadn’t been trying to hurt her this morning. It was just…everything was so confusing now.

Then I’d come back home and spent three fruitless, grainy-eyed hours searching on the Internet only to find virtually nothing about any Order of the Guardians — other than a few vague allusions on a conspiracy theory message board — and way too many Blackwells in the St. Louis area.

Now what? I had no idea.

And Alona was furious with me. That couldn’t possibly end well. It wasn’t like her to be gone for this long, even if she was angry. Especially if she was angry. Her theory when it came to conflict was that it was only effective if the other person was made painfully aware of your perspective — emphasis on “pain”—until he or she had no choice but to surrender. And Alona was all about winning.

But right now, at a little after nine at night, it had been more than twelve hours since I’d seen her last.

“Do you maybe want to move on to a different table then?” Sam asked, drawing my attention back to the conversation at hand.

I looked down to find the once crumb-covered and syrup-sticky table gleaming and shiny wet. The booths on either side of me, which I swore had been full of people just a second ago, were now empty except for the piles of dirty dishes and balled up napkins for me to take away. How long had I been zoned out? I needed caffeine. Immediately. “Right,” I said. “Sorry. I just need some more sleep, I guess.”

Assuming Alona would let me. I envisioned a mob of angry ghosts gathering at my house — knowing Alona, in my freaking bedroom — right now.

“Well, go home, then.” Sam grinned. “You were due to clock out fifteen minutes ago anyway.”

“Oh.” Wake up, Will.

“I’m all for the extra help, but I think your mom’ll start getting nervous if you’re not home soon,” he said.

I nodded. He was right, as usual.

“Also”—he leaned a little closer—“just so you know, table sixteen has been staring holes through you for the last ten minutes.” His mouth quirked. “Whatever you did, I hope it was worth it.” He patted me on the shoulder and walked away.

For a second, my mind supplied the image of Alona glaring at me from the corner of booth, but I knew that wasn’t possible. Well, it was, but Sam wouldn’t have been able to see her.

I turned and counted tables until I reached the general vicinity of the teens. I still didn’t have the layout memorized, so I wasn’t entirely sure which one was sixteen.

Then again, it turned out not to matter because once I was close, I saw exactly who Sam was talking about. Mina. And “staring holes at me” was a polite way of phrasing it. It was more like if she could have set me on fire with a look, she would have done it and gleefully watched me burn.

What the hell? Like she had reason to be angry with me? That took nerve.

I dropped my washrag on the table and stalked across the restaurant to her booth.

“Thank God,” she said with an irritated sigh as I approached. “I was beginning to think I was going to need to rent a neon sign to get your attention.” She was still wearingthe clothes I’d seen her in last night, but she looked considerably more rumpled, and the faint stain of a bruise now darkened her left cheek. A half-empty cup of coffee sat on the table in front of her, surrounded by a half dozen empty sweetener packets.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded. “I thought you’d be home, celebrating your success and laughing at the dumbass you left behind to get caught.” Me, angry? No, of course not.

“Funny thing about that.” She smiled bitterly. “They were watching.”

“Who?” I reached for the knot at the back of my apron totake the thing off, so Rosalee, the lead server and technically my supervisor, wouldn’t interrupt us to bitch at me for “chatting” during work time. I hadn’t clocked out yet, but Rosalee would probably assume I had if I weren’t wearing the apron.

“Leadership.” Mina nodded tightly. “They said it was for my protection, but now…now I’m not so sure about that, considering they’re far more interested in you than theyare in the fact that I cheated.” She touched her cheek gingerly with an unhappy sounding laugh.

“I don’t understand,” I said slowly, and sat down on the opposite side of the table.

“It was a risk, one they couldn’t be sure would pay off, but it was only my life, my future at stake.” Mina shook her head.

“What are you talking about?”

She leaned forward across the table, her hair skimming the top of her coffee cup. “You should have told me who you were,” she hissed.

“I wasn’t the one who refused to give a name,” I argued back.

She laughed again. “Right. I should have just known. Sorry, but memorizing your family history has never been a top priority.”

I stared at her, baffled. Why would my family history be any priority at all? At some point between last night and now, one of us had stopped making sense. I was pretty sure it wasn’t me.

She cocked her head to one side. “You really don’t know, do you? You didn’t have to listen to endless tales of the infamous ‘book club’?”

He called it book club, though what kind of book club involves coming back exhausted and all banged up, I have no idea. My mom’s words echoed in my head, and I felt a chill.

“What book club?” I asked cautiously.

Mina made a disgusted noise and slapped a business card down on the table. “Be at this address in an hour. They want to meet you, see what you can do. Let them answer your questions.”

“Leadership?” I hazarded a guess.

She stood up. “You don’t deserve this.”

I didn’t even know what “this” was, but I sensed arguing with her about it now probably wasn’t a good idea.

“You know the thing that would scare the crap out of me, if I were you? If they’re willing to go this far to get you, what do you think they’ll do to keep you?”

I might have been more worried if I’d understood half of what she was talking about.

“Here.” She pulled the disruptor from her pants pocket. “Just remember, this”—she tapped her finger on the open end with the exposed wires jutting out slightly—“is the dangerous end.”

She tossed it at me, and I caught it with fumbling fingers.

“And then I guess we’ll see if you’re worth everything they think you are.” She gave me a mocking smile and then walked away.

Well. That didn’t sound good.

“Yep, should be fun. Don’t wait up.” I juggled the phone between my ear and my shoulder and tried to check building numbers as I drove by. This area of town — one of the oldest sections of Decatur — was not the greatest, and the lighting was sketchy at best. This had once been a bustling downtown area and now consisted mainly of empty and papered-over storefronts like blind eyes staring out at me.

“Have fun, sweetie,” my mom said. “I’m so glad you’re out having a good time. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

My mother, unused to me having much of a social life, had been astonishingly easy to lie to, something I already felt guilty about. She was so eager for me to have friends that my story of bumping into some buddies from school who wanted to see a late movie didn’t raise a single red flag, when it should have hoisted several.

“Okay. Good night.” I waited for her response, then closed my phone and chucked it onto the passenger seat.

I could have gone home. I probably should have gone home instead of coming out here on what was probably at best a wild goose chase and at worst some other scheme Mina had cooked up that would get me into trouble.

But there were two things that bothered me about that conversation with Mina that I couldn’t quite dismiss: First, how much she really, really did not want me to come down here for whatever meeting this was. Given Mina’s previous lack of interest in my health and well-being, I was intrigued by what would cause such concern. In fact, I suspected she was more worried for herself than for me.

Second, could it really just be chance that both my mom and Mina had referenced a book club, one that clearly had nothing to do with reading, in the last twenty-four hours? I doubted it. And what was all that about my “family history”?

I had no idea what that meant, other than something to do with my dad. It was all too much to pin on coincidence. If all of this had something to do with him, I wanted…no, needed to know about it.

I squinted at the scrawled address—2600 Lincoln Avenue — on the back of the business card Mina had left for me. The front of the card was simply an 800 number. I hadn’t yet attempted to call it, but I might have to if I didn’t find the address soon.

I was on Lincoln Avenue already, and the numbers were descending the farther east I headed, so I should have been in the right area.…

There. At the corner ahead of me, a huge billboard announced new loft-style condos at 2601 Lincoln Avenue, and directly across the street…the boarded up remains of the Archway Theater.

Crap. I braked hard. Fortunately, no one was behind me.

The Archway Theater topped my list of places (along with Ground Zero in New York) to never, ever visit. It was legend.

It had been built in the twenties, before the Great Depression. In theory, it had cultural significance for Decatur as one of the few former stage theaters converted to a movie theater still in existence, though it had been closed for decades. The historical society kept trying to bring it back to life, butpeople kept getting hurt or dying during the various renovation attempts over the years. Workers fell to their deaths from the old stage, had unforeseen heart attacks, or were electrocuted when the power was supposed to be off.

It was always written off as superstition and coincidence, but in truth, there was something fundamentally wrong with the Archway that any idiot could recognize and no architect or contractor could repair. Back in the twenties, when the plans for the theater were approved, some genius got the idea to build it on some prime abandoned real estate in the center of town…right on top of an old hotel that had burned down in the middle of the night a decade before.

Sixty-some people had died in that hotel fire, and some of the bodies had never been recovered. Then, less than ten years later, construction crews started tearing at the ground to build the theater. Not to go all Poltergeist on you, but you have to be a special kind of stupid to do something like that.

That kind of mass event, so many violent deaths all atone time in one place, created a unique energy of its own. Myguess was that the theater was caught in a reenactment loopof the hotel fire, the same events cycling over and over againand playing out just as they had that night. From what I’d read online, Gettysburg had a couple of big loops like that. Battalions of soldiers still fought for their lives there, evenafter they’d been dead for more than a century and a half.

Every year, some group of stupid kids dared each other to break in and spend the night on Halloween, and almost all of them came out scared, sometimes hurt pretty badly, and refusing to talk about their experiences.

And yet, here I was.

I shook my head. Why would a bunch of ghost-talkers want to meet at the most haunted location in town, possibly even the whole state?

Someone honked behind me, and I jumped. I let my foot off the brake and turned down Springfield to get a closer look at the building. The theater sat on the corner with entrances on both sides, though everything looked dark and boarded up tightly. Thankfully. I really had no interest in going inside.

Then as I was driving past, a flash of red caught my attention. A banner, hanging where the old marquee had been, read: NOW UNDER RENOVATION. OPENING SOON!

Great. Well, that explained it. Assuming Mina had been telling the truth at least some of the time last night, this Order organization was involved with the Decatur Governance and Development Committee. I didn’t know anything about what that committee did — something about permits or permission or something? — but if someone on it was concerned about “cleaning” the Gibley property before the parking garage was built, then it would make sense that same person might be interested in making sure the theater was equally untainted before opening day.

So maybe they, the mysterious Leadership Mina kept talking about, really were around here somewhere.

I reached the end of the block and pulled a U-turn to double back. This time, I noticed the open lot at the back of the theater, where a building had obviously just been torn down. Amid the still-standing piles of rubble, a half dozen cars were parked haphazardly. But they were all pointed toward the chain-link fence between the empty lot and the back of the theater. And one of them, though it was hard to be certain in the reduced light, I thought might be Mina’s beat-up Malibu.

I backed up and pulled into the open lot, gritting my teeth as my poor Dodge rattled and thumped over the uneven ground. I parked next to a pile of bricks, tucked the card Mina had given me into my pocket, grabbed my phone from the passenger seat, and got out.

The sound of my door closing echoed in the surrounding silence. Even the crunch of my shoes on the uneven gravel sounded absurdly loud.

What are you doing, Will? You should not be here. My common sense decided to make an appearance, late as usual.

Just shut up for a second. Let me see if I’m even in the right place.

I made my way through the cars, half-expecting someone to jump out at me, until I reached the one that I thought was Mina’s.

I peered in through the window, finding fast-food wrappers and trash on the passenger-side floor, and zombie office-worker dolls glued to her dash, just as I remembered.

It was definitely her car. I was in the right place.

But now what?

“Hello?” I called quietly, and immediately kicked myself for it. Everybody knows that’s one sure way to make yourself an easy target. Also, if this were a horror movie and I’d said “Is anyone there?” I’d be dead by now, dragged kicking and screaming under one of the cars by a multiclawed creature of some type.

I supposed I could, in theory, wait right out here. They couldn’t leave without their cars, right? But that felt almost disrespectful, like one step short of turning down the invitation to meet them. Not a great tactic to use with people you were hoping to pump for information.

I headed to the fence and found a place where the links had been cut, the freshly exposed metal gleaming in the blindingly bright security light positioned on the roof of the theater.

Holding the fencing aside, I slipped through and onto the theater property. This had probably once been part of the hotel. I’d need to start paying more attention, and not just for signs of people from this world.

The back of the theater didn’t look like much, just a short, nondescript building made of crumbling brick with a couple of construction Dumpsters neatly in a row. It certainly did not scream, “Most Haunted Place in the City!”

The security light overhead focused its beam on a door, the only one that wasn’t bricked or boarded up. It was a rusty metal with green flaking paint and looked like it would give you tetanus if you just glanced at it, let alone actually touched it. The handle was missing; an open and sharp-looking hole in the metal remained where it had once been.

The door was also open about a foot, and kept that way by a cinder block at the base.

And still, no sign of anyone else around.

Damn. This whole thing smelled of a trap. Or a test. Or something equally unpleasant as either of those two alternatives. Mina had said they’d wanted to meet me, to see what I could do. I was beginning to suspect that this was going to be far less small talk and far more survival of the fittest than I’d anticipated.

Then again, all the people those cars belonged to had to be around here somewhere, right? Maybe they were already inside. They didn’t seem much like the coddling sort, again based on Mina’s information, so I had a hard time imagining them leaving someone out here just to greet me.

Just turn around, and go home, common sense suggested.Whatever you find out cannot be worth the living nightmare inside that building.

And then what? Lose track of them forever? Miss my chance to meet other people like me? Never know if Mina had been talking about my dad?

I wasn’t sure I was ready to give up on those potential answers just because I was afraid. I mean, I was right to be afraid. The ghosts inside this building could kill me. They’d killed people who weren’t ghost-talkers.

So, it was a risk. A big one.

But maybe that was the point. It was a test. To see if I was worthy. They’d allowed, no, encouraged Mina to take a chance on containing Mrs. Ruiz alone. So, if that were true, then this would not be so out of character for them at all.

I stood there, fifteen feet from the door, trying to weigh my options.

I had Mina’s disruptor in my jeans pocket, if I could figure out how to use it. There were several buttons on top, and I hadn’t yet figured out the right combination to make the blue beam appear, even though I’d tried a couple of times in the diner parking lot.

I had my cell phone, too. And if things got really bad, I could summon Alona. She would be furious, even more than before, but she’d have no choice but to come when I called. That was the way the system worked.

However, she was not required to help me, and I was guessing, based on her earlier mood, she would not. Plus, who knew how well Mina or any of the others watching might take her arrival?

Still debating, I shifted my weight uneasily, my heart beating too, too fast.

That’s when I felt it, this sudden sense of being watched. I looked around, but still saw no one. Not that that necessarily meant anything. There were dozens of places to hide in the shadows, not to mention the fact that every building surrounding the theater was several stories taller, allowing for a variety of easy-viewing positions.

If they’d watched Mina and me at the Gibley Mansion, what was to say that they weren’t watching me now?

And even though I couldn’t hear a clock ticking, I could almost feel the seconds slipping away. At some point, if I just stood here, my chance would be over before it even began. The door might, literally, close on this opportunity.

This was most definitely a test. And the first step was just seeing if I’d enter the building.

I started for the door, my knees feeling shaky and some part of me asking over and over again, “Are we really doing this?”

I climbed the two wooden and creaking stairs to the door, and then with just a second of hesitation, stepped around the cinder block and over the threshold.

Immediately, the smell of dust, mold, and rotting wood engulfed me. I grimaced.

It was dim in here, but I could still see pretty well, thanks to the security light outside and the still-open door.

Clearly, this had once been a backstage area for the theater, but it was now covered in piles of discarded plaster chunks, old chairs with the velvet covering rotting away, and splintery and cracked support beams destined for the Dumpster outside. A narrow path cut through the debris, and I could see recent footprints — more than one set — leading the way through the dust.

Ghosts don’t leave footprints, not unless they’re around someone like me. So, either way, whether these were tracks left by members of the Order or ghosts who’d been given physicality by their presence, this was probably the right way.

I pulled the disruptor from my pocket, hoping I wouldn’t have to use it, because I didn’t really know how, and started to follow those footprints.

I wish I could say I was surprised when the door slammed shut behind me, leaving me in complete and utter darkness.

I froze for a long second. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.

Easier said than done, though. If I let myself, I could almost feel breath on the back of my neck. I wasn’t alone in here, not by a long shot.

I switched the disruptor to my other hand and dug intomy pocket for my cell phone. I yanked it out, my fingers fumbling in my hurry. Because it was craptastically old, I had tohold a button down for light. The beep sounded enormously loud in the thick, ear-ringing silence around me, but it didits job, lighting up a tiny area around me and revealing the flashing lack of signal in the upper left corner of its screen. Not surprising, given the age of the building and the thickness of the walls and the general shittiness of my phone.

Now what? Keep going…in the dark.

Great.

I started forward again, following footprints that stood out even more in the blue-white light of my cell phone. After just a few steps, the leg of my jeans caught on something in the tight and crowded corridor, and something sharp bit into my shin.

I swallowed back the pain noise. The less attention I drew to myself, the better. If the Archway was caught in a reenactment loop, like all those ghost battalions in Gettysburg (another place on my never-visit list), then the most powerful energies wouldn’t stir until the time of night when the hotel had burned. So, if I could stay quiet and get through to where the others were before the worst of it started up again, I might be okay.

My first clue that that might not be possible was the four guys in the suits. In the dim light from my cell phone, it was hard to catch a lot of detail, but I could see ties that were too short and fat to be modern and big heavy-looking leather suitcases at their feet. Definitely ghosts. They were leaning against the left-hand wall, smoking. Actually, only two of them were leaning against the wall; the other two were half in the wall — one was only a pair of legs, crossed at the ankle, sticking out of the wall at his knees. He was clearly sitting on a chair, probably one from the long-destroyed lobby. The other one stood facing the others at an angle, almost split in half by the wall running down the center of his body. He didn’t seem bothered by it, though. He grinned — his teeth flashing in the darkness — as he nodded at the others in agreement with something one of them had said. Probably the dude in the wall, since I hadn’t heard anything.

Creepy as it was, that made sense. The theater to them wasn’t real. The lobby of the hotel was, and obviously that wall hadn’t been there when they were alive. And unlike Alona, Mrs. Ruiz, and some of the more sentient ghosts, they were trapped in their own time, unaware of anything else. Until, of course, I tried to slip past them, my head down.

“Hey, buddy, you have the time?” one of them called after me.

I paused, hesitating for just a second. If I didn’t answer, they might forget they ever saw me. Then again, at least one of them had seen me in the first place, indicating they might not be entirely blind to events and people outside their own ghostly existence.

“Uh, no?” I offered without turning around. It wasn’t true, of course, but if I looked at my cell phone to check the time, who the hell knew what kind of conversation that would provoke?

I heard the sharp tap of his shoes on the old hardwood floor. “You from around here?” He exhaled with the words and smoke swirled past me in a cloud.

I turned slowly. He, the ghost, didn’t seem suspicious ofme, though he was watching me closely. It struck me as possible that after so many years of reliving their death by fire, some of these ghosts might have started up a hunt for the cause of their death, even if they didn’t realize quite what they were doing. If so, good luck to them. Bernard Shaw, a teenage porter, who’d fallen asleep in the baggage room while smoking, had started the fire. He had survived, waking up in time to escape with his life. He hadn’t bothered to tell anyone about the fire, fearing for his job.

“No, I’m just visiting,” I said to the ghost.

“Didn’t think so. Not in that getup.” He chuckled, nodding at my clothes.

Uh-huh. Right. Okay. “I have to get going. My…” What would make most sense to him? A girlfriend might raise eyebrows if he thought this was a hotel. So might the equally ambiguous “friend” if I seemed too young to him to be wandering around at night. “My dad,” I said finally, “is waiting for me.”

“He part of the convention?”

His words triggered a vague memory. The reason the hotel had been so full that night was because of a traveling salesmen convention being held in town. Duroluxe Vacuum Cleaners.

“We’re just passing through,” I said.

He nodded and flicked his cigarette to the ground between us, and I held my breath. This place with all of its dried up wood, rotting velvet chairs, and dust and junk was a fire waiting to happen.

I stepped on the cigarette butt quickly. Fire was one ofthe most treacherous parts of being a ghost-talker. Being near a ghostly match, cigarette, or, hell, a firework — whatever aspirit had died with — was enough to spark a fire that would cause real-enough damage or death.

“Thanks, kid.” He cuffed my shoulder, and I flinched, waiting for him to make the connection that he’d actually touched me, a living person, but he didn’t. Then again, to him, for however much longer, until the fire started again, he was a living person, too. After that, everything would be up for grabs.

Once my new friend had walked back toward his buddies, I got going again. Ahead, the corridor opened into a widerarea, or so it seemed. All I could really tell was that the light from my cell phone wouldn’t reach beyond the edges of the darkness, and I wasn’t seeing the piles of junk stacked along the sides that had accompanied my journey so far.

I hurried past the last piles of junk in sight, and out into the open. I could sense the ceiling above me lift in that way you can just feel it when the air shifts around you. I’d moved from a tight and cramped corridor to a larger, more open space. Noise carried differently out here. And the floor beneath me had changed too. Every step I took now thumped hollowly.

Lifting the phone up higher, I caught a glimpse of tattered strands of ghostly white fabric hanging from the ceiling, moving in the draft I’d felt earlier. The top of it, what I could see anyway, was far more intact, still holding a bit of the original rectangular shape.

The screen. I’d made it into the theater. Probably on the old stage. That would explain the hollow sound beneath my feet.

But still no sign of anyone else.

Where were they?

In the distance, at what would probably be the top of the aisle in the seating area, a quick flash of light, like a flashlight quickly doused, caught my eye.

“Hello?” I hurried forward, aiming my cell phone farther out, searching for the stage’s edge or maybe even the glint of metal of a not-yet-removed chair in the audience area for an indicator of where the stage might end. There’d be a drop to the floor, not too big, but it wouldn’t take much to snap an ankle or…a neck.

But taking my attention away from the floor was a mistake. Either they’d already begun renovation on the stage floor itself or they just hadn’t gotten around to fixing up the holes where the boards had already given way. One minute, I was moving along just fine, and the next, my left foot caught nothing but air.

My heart lurched into my throat, and I pitched forward, my hands and then head slamming into the wood still in place on the other side of the hole I’d found.

I clawed at the floor to stop my fall before the rest of me followed my feet and legs.

The disruptor flew forward, skittering out of sight, and my cell phone slipped from my hand, glowing all the way down to the ground beneath the hollowed stage, striking what sounded like metal crossbars.

Shit.

My heartbeat pounded in my ears, and my breath sounded as loud as a scream. The edge of the wood floor, splintery and sharp, dug into the underside of my forearms. My fingertips had caught on the side of a slightly raised board, and now my arms were pinned between the weight of my body and the floor as I hung there in a strained and awkward pull-up position.

The board was flaky and dry beneath my sweating fingertips and my arms were beginning to shake. I wasn’t sure which part was going to give first.

I slipped one hand free, feeling my skin tear as I dragged it across the ragged edge, and planted my palm flat on the stage.

With an effort, I forced my shaking and quavering muscles to pull together, and I landed, half on the stage and half in the hole still, panting and breathing in dust and dirt. I could do this. I could make it out.

And then from behind me, a burst of light, the smell of smoke, and dozens of shrieking voices. The Archway Hotel fire had begun.