Lia knew this place had once had a name, though Tom wasn’t able to tell it to her. They were here because she’d been asked to check the location out by a stranger, one whose brother had vanished almost a year ago, after coming here to perform what their so-called client had referred to only as ‘some weird ritual.’ Lia and her wordless familiar had a bit of experience with missing persons, and a lot more than that when it came to arcane rites. The real reason she’d agreed to this, though, was that Tom had known the place in question immediately. This place, this building, and the story of the missing brother had struck an obvious alarm bell for him.
He’d covered it up with his habitual wry composure right away, but Lia wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen him frightened before. Ghosts had little to fear, generally speaking, and yet even now Tom radiated a desire to believe that the story they’d been told was somehow inaccurate, that the location was dormant or otherwise closed down, and the neglected condition in which they’d found the building would seem to argue in favor of that possibility.
If something was lingering on here, however, Tom expected it to reach the height of its power during the next two days, a period of time roughly corresponding with the holiday the locals called el Dia de los Muertos. That made tonight, Halloween night, the best possible time to observe without putting themselves in unreasonable danger.
It sounded logical enough to Lia, in its way, but she was still unsettled by the fact that her friend had never tried to tell her before about the early twentieth-century skyscraper that now stood on a site once considered sacred to the Aztecs’ God of the Dead.
She glanced up, noting a camera mounted in a corner near the hallway’s ceiling. Its lens appeared to be occluded by a thick cataract of dust.
She looked over at Black Tom, who shrugged, although he could’ve sent her reassurance if he’d wanted to. Could’ve reached out with his mind and touched her nervous system, psychically blunting the sharpest edge of her fear and letting her know without words that everything would be all right. He’d done such things before, when she’d needed them in the past. That he wasn’t doing them now told her everything she needed to know about this situation. Tom thought it was more important, at the moment, that she be focused and on her guard than comfortably unafraid.
She did wish he could just talk to her about it, though. The wish was a well-worn one, reiterated nearly every day, but she felt her friend’s silence especially keenly right now, when even a single word of reassurance would’ve done something to ease her tension. But Tom was as silent as he’d ever been.
As silent as this empty tower.
Lia decided to push on, assuming the cobwebbed camera overhead had to be a dud. Nothing was working in here, she felt sure of it. Or at least she wanted to feel sure of it. All of the evidence before her confirmed the assumption that nobody else had set foot in here for a very long time. Even the graffiti looked pretty old.
Still, she had to force herself deeper into the building, and it did seem like that elderly camera was following her every move. She couldn’t tell if she felt watched because she was being watched, or merely because she was trespassing in a place she didn’t belong. In any case, she was nearly dizzy with it, that feeling was so powerful.
Encountering the otherworld always involved a series of moves and counter-moves, of selective advantages leveraged against specific weaknesses. Head-on confrontations with its denizens were generally ill-advised. But, much as a man in a flame-proof suit might stand beside a conflagration and not get burned, Lia was often able to edge in close to dangerous entities and learn their secrets-so long as she remained aware of their blind spots. This sort of divination was a spy-game akin to chess, and Tom had taught her to play it like a grandmaster (although he’d also trained her to know when it was time to knock over the board and make a run for it, too).
Intuition could be difficult to separate from paranoia, and Lia couldn’t tell which one of them was coloring her impressions now.
She clicked on her flashlight as she eased open the solid double doors at the end of the hall, and its beam sliced at the shadows that closed in around her like a silent pack of eager black beasts. The flashlight flickered and wavered as though it were frightened, but Lia shook it and it came back on strong. For the moment. She’d purchased new batteries before driving down here, so maybe it was a loose connection. Maybe. She hated to think the building might be draining her energizers at an accelerated rate.
The wide foyer she and Black Tom found themselves in was dark, abandoned, and liberally vandalized. Lia played her flashlight over the gaping elevator shafts, and then across the door marked ‘STAIRS.’ Its identifying sign hung askew.
Still, she opted for the stairs. Those elevators hadn’t been operated in a very long time.
Her flashlight flickered and stuttered out more warnings of its own imminent demise as she ascended flight after flight of echoing steps, headed up toward the tower’s very top floor. Black Tom tagged along after her, ascending easily despite his age. Lia’s calves had turned to wood by the time they reached the seventh landing, but she took a deep breath and continued climbing. Her heart thudded against her ribs, and not just from exertion. This place had an aura about it that unnerved her, despite Tom’s clear wish to find it empty.
The last stairwell door protested when she pushed it open, its disused hinges groaning over the indignity of being disturbed after so many years of rusty silence. Lia’s dimming flashlight beam preceded her as she emerged into a top-floor corridor, followed as always by her Tom.
She skipped her coin of fading, copper-colored light down the corridor’s frayed runner of once-red carpet, scanning along the baseboards for anything out of the ordinary. She paused and held the flashlight beam in place when it glinted off some tarnished bit of metal that might’ve been an old-fashioned cigarette lighter lying on the floor at the far end of the passage.
She and Black Tom went over to crouch down on either side of what did indeed turn out to be a Zippo-style lighter, one that sported a US Navy insignia on its side. An anchor inside a loop of rope. Tom and Lia examined it silently for a moment. Then they looked up at one another, as if on cue, and nodded in agreement. This felt significant to both of them. It was just the sort of sign they’d come looking for, although the lighter itself appeared far older than anything they’d expected to find.
Lia’s sepia-toned beam flickered fatally when she bent to pick up the Zippo. She shook the flashlight again, but it was a goner and she knew it. What she didn’t know was whether or not Black Tom could lead her out of here in total darkness. She guessed that he could-she was quite sure of it, really-but she still preferred not to put it to the test.
Lia rolled the Zippo’s wheel in desperation and, as old as it was, the flint inside of it still sparked. Her electric light would be dead within seconds, so she clicked the Zippo again, several more times, as her depleted batteries failed her once and for all.
In the moment of pure blackness that followed the flashlight’s demise, Tom seemed to notice something. Lia felt him frowning in the gloom.
Then the lighter’s wick ignited, and she was bathed in its faint, warm fire-glow.
Lia stood up on legs that felt liquid with relief, holding the lighter aloft. Black Tom hopped to his feet and tugged on the back of her coat.
She turned. “What?”
Tom pointed to a closed door at the end of the hall.