A Ghost of a Chance Page 11

  “Isabella is meaningless.”

  “Not to me, asshole!”

  “If you want to save one, you have to save the other. Don’t you understand?”

  “Hell, no! This is crazy, Reg.”

  “More than you could know. It’s all up to you, old boot.”

  “Me?” That got everything inside to stop at once. Keenan was having a hard time breathing. “What the fuck can I do?”

  Reggie chuckled and the front door banged open. “You’d be surprised. Coming?”

  Without waiting for a reply, Reggie floated towards the door. For some reason, Keenan followed.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, double-checking for his keys.

  Reggie put his hands in his pockets and headed out the door. “To church.” Then disappeared into the night.

  Chapter Twelve

  A Grave Miscalculation

  When Keenan was thirteen, the only girl who would even talk to him was Sally Rae Wikowski, his best friend. Partnered a couple years before for a science project that involved a dead cat, a set of scalpels, and balls of steel, the two of them had bonded over thirty-five feet of intestines and bad dead cat jokes.

  Keenan’s thirteenth summer was spent with Sally’s family at Diamond Lake where the two of them chatted for hours about God, the universe, and everything, paddled for countless hours over the silky water, and road bikes around the forested shore. Monday of the third week, on one such ride, they decided to get miles off the trundled path. In retrospect, it was probably not one of Keenan’s better choices. Five things happened on that day that changed his life forever.

  The first was when they found an old dilapidated cabin and decided to explore it. Rotting timbers barely held up a sloping roof, the fragile walls crisscrossed in ruins, and what they could see through the gaping door was inky. Sally was reluctant to go in, but Keenan bullied her into it, calling her a girl. That did it. She marched into the cabin with determination.

  When they got inside, Keenan remembered the waterproof matches he always kept in his pocket and struck one. In the flare of the fire, they could make out decaying rough built furniture: a table, a single chair, and a cot lying close to the ground. On the cot was a bundle stretched the length of the small bed. Keenan’s baser instincts kicked in when he saw it and he moaned at Sally, “Oooooo, ooooo.” Apparently, Sally didn’t appreciate it since she hauled off and landed a good right hook to his shoulder. He behaved after that.

  After exploring the small cabin and the third match (a matter of only a few minutes), Sally wanted to leave, but Keenan’s curiosity twisted his arm and the second of the four things happened. When he pulled the cover off the bed, a crumbling skeleton stared back at them. Both froze and took a step back in unison.

  Then the third thing happened. A faded man rose from the covers to hover above the dead body. In the sparse light, his ghostly grin sent panic racing through Keenan’s every nerve. He dropped the match and flames roared up as if someone had doused the place in gasoline. Grabbing Sally’s frozen arm, Keenan pulled her toward the door and ran as fast as he could. They didn’t even stop to get their bikes.

  Several thousand feet away from the cabin, when his breath gave out, Keenan threw himself to the ground. Sally was right beside him. When he looked back, black clouds were filling the forest behind them. The woods were on fire.

  That’s when the fourth thing happened. Without warning, Keenan suddenly found his arms full of Sally, crying and trembling. He was never sure why he did it; it may have been the adrenalin from the scare, a deep-seated desire sparked by panic, or just an instinctive comfort reflex. Grabbing her face, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her deeply. It was at that instant their friendship died.

  Sally, apparently caught up in the moment, returned the kiss with passion, giving Keenan his very first taste of a girl. The kiss set off adolescent crescendos through every hormone in his body. It was the first time he had a hard on outside his bed.

  When they broke the kiss, Sally looked up at him in complete surprise. He blinked at her, uncertain what else to do, and held her out at arm’s length. Guttural words escaped his moist lips, but that was all.

  That’s when the fifth thing dawned on him; the forest was on fire and he had absolutely no idea where he was. They were completely lost. His stomach sank into his hips when he screamed at Sally to run.

  Rangers got the fire out in time and rescued the kids, but Keenan had never been in more trouble in his life; he spent the next four summers working to make up some of the loss. The trip back to Portland with Sally’s family was completely silent. That fall, they moved away and Keenan never saw her again.

  Keenan rolled that incident over in his mind as he drove. Those emotions were playing a repeat performance behind his eyes now: passion, happiness, stark terror. He was thirteen again; gangly, out of control, knowing that each decision was worse than the last. Confidence slipped away, replaced by a doubt that was so tangible Keenan could feel it as a knot in his stomach. Who was he to rescue Isabella? He should call the police. But, with the exception of maybe Thompson, no one would believe him. That one truth was something he had to live with; whatever needed done he would have to do himself. There wasn’t anyone else.

  At Reggie’s instruction, Keenan aimed his car at downtown Portland.

  He knew the old church Reggie told him to drive to. Condemned several years before, the historians wouldn’t allow the city, or the new owners, to demolish it. The court battle went on for years and the church fell into ruin.

  He was afraid to ask Reggie too many questions. There was something decidedly edgy about his friend. It was completely out of character for the ghost and Keenan didn’t like it. Reggie was uncharacteristically quiet. He lounged in the backseat, his eyes closed. Keenan knew he hated riding in the jeep. He wasn’t sure why Reggie didn’t just meet him there.

  Keenan concentrated instead on his own motivations. He had no intention of helping Dabria. He would grab Isabella and get her the hell away from ghosts, entities, succubi, or any other creature that got in his way. They’d live on an acre of forest so far away from civilization you’d need a compass and helicopter to find them, have fat laughing babies, and live happily ever after.

  He didn’t owe that creature anything. She had attacked him, taken advantage of him, had actually raped him. His macho pride was having a hard time getting that particular piece of information to register properly. He eventually labeled it seduction and left it at that.

  Keenan wasn’t sure why he had to rescue the succubus. Couldn’t someone else do it? Hell, there were hundreds of ghosts and who knew how many other ethereal creatures out there? Weren’t there? Why couldn’t they do it?

  The Wrangler swerved to the right when he took a corner a little too quickly and he compensated by steering to the left. The answer that followed the adrenalin rush startled him.

  He couldn’t help it; he did want to help her. Wanted it more than almost anything. Keenan wondered if that was self-motivated. Maybe somewhere in the back of his mind he was thinking about that night in his bedroom. No, it wasn’t that and that’s what surprised him. He wanted to do it because of what she did the next night.

  The memory of that warm touch on the school’s brick walls had done something to him, something profound. Dabria had changed him that night, made him somehow stronger, happier. Keenan had no idea what exactly that meant, but it was true. The music from that embrace still lingered in his heart. It was there when he was in jail, during the precious time with Isabella, and even when he stepped into his home to find all his belongings gone. In everything that had happened over the last two days, it was the one thing that made it almost worth it. He focused on the road when the streets turned dark.

  The city was Sunday-evening deserted when he hit the Morrison Bridge and rushed over it to downtown. The only people he saw were the night creatures, living and dead, walking hand in hand with disillusionment, the wash of despair paling their already drained face
s.

  Keenan hated downtown; it was where the really old ones hung out, the spirits who had lost their spirituality. No respectable ghost would be caught dead downtown…like living like dead, he guessed.

  The church loomed at the end of the street, a shadowed sentinel in the midnight sky.

  When he got to it, Keenan pulled into the driveway, only to confront a chain link fence with a heavy padlock intertwined through a set of impressive gates.

  It hadn’t even dawned on him they would lock up the place.

  Dummy, he said to his head. “Great,” he said to the gate.

  He put the car in reverse and began to back out.

  “Ram it,” Reggie piped up from the back seat. Keenan thought the ghost had lost his mind.

  “Screw you! I’m not ramming a locked gate with my jeep.”

  Reggie’s voice was strangely compelling when he said, “Go through the gate!”

  Just for spite, Keenan slammed the jeep into first and hit the gas pedal as hard as he could. The heavy wrangler went through without a hitch, but the noise probably woke everyone in a twenty-block radius. The gates bounced off the fence and banged back to smack the Jeep’s rear end. Keenan grimaced at the thought of how much damage they had done to his precious baby.

  At any moment, he expected to hear sirens, but when he rolled down his window to listen, the night was silent except for the roar of the freeway a few blocks away.

  He drove the jeep through the lot and stopped just outside massive church doors. When the jeep rattled to a halt, he lifted his eyes to the structure filling his windshield.

  Despite the decrepit condition of the old stone building, it was still outstanding. A wall made from rough square cut blocks rose three stories above Keenan’s head. On each corner was a tower with a conical spire at the top. At the front of the building, one rose twice as high as the others. The intricate stonework that climbed up those spirals reminded Keenan of cathedrals he had seen in Venice and Florence. The memory provoked a familiar guilt that he swallowed. Not the time to play hardball with regret. The church was impressive.

  Of course, now the stone was almost black with city soot and crumbling everywhere. Steel plates or bars sealed the windows, and a padlock barred the massive wooden doors against intruders. Graffiti and gang signs dotted the walls wherever a hand could reach and even above that line in places. It made Keenan heartsick; this was such a waste of architectural perfection. A craving to fix the building leaked out of his desires.

  Looking behind him to make sure the cops weren’t coming, he got out of the car and circled around the side of the building. Halfway down the sidewall, well away from the street and prying eyes, was an open door. When Keenan turned to speak to Reggie, the ghost was gone.

  Cursing, Keenan approached the small entrance. He was furious he hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight but then remembered he had one of those little safety lights on his keychain. Digging into his pocket, he pulled it out and tested it by blinding himself for a second. When his eyes cleared, he turned to the door and took a deep breath.

  The smell coming from the building caught in the back of his throat. It was an odd blend of cheap motel, rat droppings, and stale incense.

  The light was a step above useless, but at least he could see a few inches in front of him. Not that there was a lot to see; the door led to what he thought was an old church kitchen. They had removed all of the cabinets, appliances, and a lot of the floor, so it was mostly a huge room with a giant stone grill at one end.

  Broken tiles, rusting nails, and old rotting wood covered the floor. Keenan took his time, knowing that a fall would shred him. He could only imagine what was happening to his sneakers. He stopped in the middle of the kitchen.

  “Isabella?” he called as loud as he could and then listened as a series of echoes returned. After several seconds, there was no other sound.

  Once on the other side of the littered floor, Keenan found a broken door that barely hung from its hinges. When he pushed, it crashed to the floor sending echoing thunder through the building that answered itself a few moments later. It was only then he realized he was alone. Completely alone.

  In this wreck of a church, it caved in on him in one frightening realization. There wasn’t a ghost, specter, mist, shadow, or anyone else, physical or otherworldly anywhere near him and hadn’t been all evening. A hot rush of fear froze his heart. It was like someone had taken the blood out of him. The solitude hollowed him out. He couldn’t move for a moment.

  “Reggie?”

  He hoped his friend would swoop in and scare the hell out of him; that it was all a joke. But the reverberating name came back to him unaccompanied.

  Keenan forced his feet to move with a veiled threat and made his way through the door and into a huge open space. He tried to shine the little light into the vast chamber, but the dark sucked it away. Sending another uneventful Isabella into the void, he strained to hear her voice, but it was hopeless.

  The small flashlight was giving up the ghost. It flickered and Keenan gave it a good shake. Using its feeble last rays, he found two tables, one on either side of the entrance. A thick woven blanket of dust covered one, but the other looked like someone had cleaned it recently. At the center of the table sat a camping lantern and a box of wooden kitchen matches. He figured the renovators used it, but Keenan doubted the matches worked. He tried one. Miraculously, the match struck on the first go and the lamp flared to life. Nothing better in the world than kitchen matches!

  He held the lantern up and the size of the chamber startled him. It was huge. The area in front of him was obviously the nave, but it was bigger than any he had ever seen. There were raised galleries on both sides and hundreds of broken pews running the length of the chancel. Many of them were missing, the rest askew or overturned. A fine blue mist of dust illuminated by the lantern lay suspended in the air. The full effect was like looking into a sunken ship. Rustic brown boards obscured high windows from the outside, but Keenan could make out dull stained glass in each. Dust had turned the colors gray; it was like seeing them in a black and white photo. They must have been phenomenal when they were at their full glory.

  Keenan made his way to the center aisle where the debris was less tangled and chewed over his next move. He had no idea why Reggie had disappeared and without ghosts to talk to, he was left alone with his own resources, which were sparse. His macho instincts wanted him to run through the building screaming Isabella’s name until the dust sloughed off the rafters. The other, more sensible instincts wanted him to run out of the building like an idiot. Middle ground, somewhere between desperation and almost heroic tendencies, was quiet destitution. When he screamed her name into the gaping open, the words echoing back to him were pathetic. He wanted to throw up.

  A soft moan echoed through the chamber and Keenan froze.

  “Isabella?”

  The moan was indistinct. It could have been coming from anywhere. Keenan closed his eyes and listened until his ears rang, but the sound eluded him. Flipping a mental coin, he decided to head toward what he assumed would be the altar.

  As he moved, his stomach was doing the mambo and he had to force it to stay still by squeezing hard. That fixed it. The thought of going deeper into this eerie ass church did not appeal to him, but he was committed, even with the primeval part of his brain screaming run, you idiot, run for your life! Try telling that to shut the fuck up.

  When he got to the front of the nave, darkness and more rubble greeted him. Piles of broken stone covered the floor. He looked up and saw why; directly above the rubble the roof had caved in and rained debris onto the church floor. Water splashed from the hole and caught Keenan full on the face when he looked up. He stepped back sputtering.

  Two ornately carved doors stood at attention on either side of the back wall. He moved to one and heard the moan again. It was definitely coming from behind one of them. He pulled on the first and tried to turn the handle. Locked tight.

  Moving to the se
cond door, he couldn’t stop the lady or the tiger feeling sneaking up his spine. That mixed with the cold water on his face added a macabre tinge to the scene. It was like walking through a Vincent Price movie. He expected wax monsters, pendulums, or psychopaths to jump out of every shadow. All he wanted to do was find Isabella and get the hell out.

  The second door opened with a loud scrape against the floor.

  Keenan put the lantern in first, just so the light could take care of any unforeseen adversaries. He needn’t have bothered.

  The sanctuary was about half the size of the nave, but much more ornate. It was obvious no one had been in there since the closure. Everything was intact, from the dozen or so crooked oil paintings on the walls to the richly worn oriental carpet that filled the floor. Except for a thick coating of dust and long stringy cobwebs on everything, the room looked as fresh as yesterday.

  Hundreds of lit candles cascaded down both sidewalls, filling the chamber with flickering lights that bounced against the expensive chandelier high above Keenan’s head and the saint crowded stained glass windows surrounding the arced ceiling. The chandelier was the most amazing thing Keenan had ever seen; the intricate web of wrought iron, braided wires, and hundreds of glistening crystals were outstanding. It belonged in a palace, not a church.

  At the other end were three things Keenan had a hard time getting his senses wrapped around.

  In the exact middle of the back wall was a big table with something dark on it. To the right of the table was a giant glass bubble. Swirling kaleidoscope colors filled every inch.

  On the left, a looming black and gray cloud hung a few feet off the ground. It was very odd: a still photo of violence, caught in suspended animation. The only movement came from a yellowish glow that radiated along its edges. Keenan recognized it instantly as the thing that had attacked him at the restaurant.

  He stopped cold.

  The moaning was louder now and coming from the table. Keenan could just make out a dark figure lying there.