“Didn’t you tell your boss what would happen? Didn’t you warn him?”
“I tried. He doesn’t get the paranormal stuff, thinks it’s all a bunch of hooey.”
Peter turned to Liza. “Lesson number one: No one ever listens to the psychic until it’s too late.”
“What’s going to happen?” she asked.
“Fire and brimstone with the earth tilting on its axis. Real wrath of God stuff.”
“Be serious, Peter.”
“I am being serious. You don’t mess with the spirits in any capacity.” He addressed Garrison. “Where is the shadow person right now?”
“Follow me.”
Garrison hurried up the marble stairs with Peter and Liza on his heels. Reaching the top, the FBI agent went down a hallway only to abruptly halt. Peter and Liza nearly crashed into him.
“What the hell,” he said.
Twenty feet away, his team stood with the frozen shadow person. The team also appeared frozen, with mouths agape and arms locked at their sides, and looked like empty shells.
“Nan, Fred, Johnny,” Garrison called to them.
The team did not respond.
Garrison shoved his hand into his jacket. He was going for his sidearm. Why did cops think that shooting something you didn’t understand was the best alternative?
“Put your gun away,” Peter said. “You’ll only make it angry.”
“Is that so?” Garrison said.
“Let me deal with this. I’ve had experience with these things.”
“Peter beat one up at the theater yesterday,” Liza said. “He can hurt them.”
“Yeah? Well, you have my permission to hurt this one, too.”
Peter started down the hall. Garrison hadn’t heard a word Peter had said, and started to follow him. “Stay back,” Peter said.
“I don’t take orders from you. My people are in danger.”
“You’re in a foreign land. Act like a tourist. Okay?”
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“I don’t want to call your wife later, and tell her you’re dead. Stay put.”
“You’ve got a lot of nerve.”
“You asked me here, didn’t you?”
Garrison didn’t have a good answer for that.
Peter turned to Liza. “Lesson number two: The FBI is never wrong.”
“Very funny,” Garrison snorted.
Liza smiled with her eyes. Peter realized how much he liked having her with him. It gave him a sense of confidence that he had not experienced before. He went down the hall toward the shadow person and cluster of FBI agents. This time, Garrison did not follow him.
He drew close to the gathering. The shadow person was smaller than its predecessors, and stood about five feet tall. Small in stature, it could not have weighed much when it was alive. The bright overhead lights had captured it in an awkward pose, and it hovered in fear against the wall. There was nothing threatening about its presence at all.
He studied Garrison’s team. To his relief, their spirits were still inside Grand Central. Their frozen expressions and rigid bodies were the product of something else.
Shock.
Shock was not uncommon when dealing with the supernatural. Seeing things that did not compute could cause a mental meltdown. Even Peter dealt with it sometimes. Garrison’s team needed to be brought back to earth. He started with Nan Perry, whom he knew the best.
“Did anyone ever tell you that you’d make a really good mime?” Peter asked.
Perry continued to stare straight ahead. “It’s alive,” she whispered.
“Excuse me?”
“This thing’s alive.”
“No, it’s not. It’s deader than dead.”
“Take a look.”
He followed her gaze. There was a spot on the shadow person’s neck no larger than a coin. Its color was dark blue. It looked like the corner of a lapel to a shirt.
“What is that?”
“It’s a piece of a blouse,” Perry said. “There’s more. Look at its face.”
Peter got closer to the dark spirit and stared at where its face should have been. His heart leapt into his throat. A woman’s eye stared back at him. It was a murky brown and filled with everlasting dread. Was this the last facial expression the shadow person had experienced before passing into the great beyond? Something told him that it was. He was looking death in the face, and it shook him to the core.
“That’s creepy,” he said under his breath.
There was more. The tip of an ear was also showing. And a finger. The middle finger, to be exact. A black substance was oozing out of it. He bent over to get a better look. The fingernail was torn, the flesh bleeding. Evil spirits were bad people who went to hell when they died. The Devil was a cruel host, and relegated his subjects to suffering and indignation. This shadow person was clearly being punished for past sins.
Then Peter noticed something else. The shadow person’s wristwatch was bleeding through the darkness. An art deco Cartier. Whoever she was, she’d had good taste.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Perry asked.
“Well, for starters, it isn’t alive,” Peter said. “What you’re seeing are remnant memories and emotions that stayed behind. Think of them as leftovers.”
“Of a person.”
“That’s right. We shed a lot when we die.”
“It’s not a zombie, then.”
“Nope. It won’t eat you.”
Perry breathed a sigh of relief, and visibly relaxed. So did the other agents. The threat had passed. Or so everyone thought.
“Let’s move this thing,” Perry said.
“Don’t touch it,” Peter warned.
Perry stuck out her hand and made contact with the shadow person. Humans and spirits were not meant to physically interact, and many bad things could have happened at that moment. Perry’s hand could have caught fire and been burned to a crisp, or it could have melted, with the fingers falling off like icicles. Her hand could have also disappeared, never to be seen again. This was what happened to people who touched things they weren’t supposed to.
But Perry got lucky. Nothing happened to her hand. Instead, she was given an invisible shove, and sent flying down the hall. Now unfrozen, the shadow person raced up the wall, and disappeared inside an ornate light fixture. Moments later, the hallway was thrown into darkness.
“It’s going to get away,” Peter called out. “Call someone, and tell them to turn the light back on.”
“Are you all right, Peter?” Liza called out.
“I’m fine. We’re all fine.”
Garrison got on his cell phone and began barking out orders. Peter could feel the shadow person’s unearthly presence lurking overhead. At any moment, it could leap down, and kidnap Perry or the other FBI agents in the hall. He whispered to Perry and the others, and they formed a tight circle around him. “It won’t attack you if you’re standing close to me,” he said.
“Attack us how?” one of the agents asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
The hallway light flickered to life. The shadow person had done something to the bulb, and it burned only half as brightly as before. Peter looked straight up. So did the others. Like a bunch of tourists visiting the city for the first time, he thought. It was almost funny.
What they saw was not meant for any tourist’s eyes. The shadow person was stuck to the ceiling like a giant spider, and appeared to be gazing down at them, as if sizing up its next meal. Peter stuck his hand down into his shirt and pulled out the five-pointed star. He held the star so it was pointing directly at the evil spirit that seemed intent on harming them.
“Leave us alone,” he said.
The shadow person pulled back. Peter held the star up higher and raised his voice. “Go back to where you came from. Leave us alone.”
“I think it’s leaving,” Perry said under her breath. “Way to go.”
It was a little-known fact that human beings were capable of chasing away ghosts and evil spirits. Bathing them in bright light was one way to do it. Another was to hold up a mirror and expose them to their own reflection. But the best way was with a talisman. All of these methods had been used by ghost hunters to rid dwellings of evil spirits for hundreds of years.