"Haunting My Hometown" Part Two, Supermoon-New Moon 04/29/25

Parts 5-1

5.

The front door shook and then creaked open. Then strutted in a poor player in the wake of the motor bike’s sound and fury signifying nothing. It was a short teen dressed like a 1950’s drifter: a black leather jacket with various patches--military insignias, a capital A in a circle, a white feather, an upside peace sign, a red star, a naked man pushing against a white star, astrological symbols for Mars and Venus and one that combined both, a triangle refracting a rainbow, and various car and engine companies—over a white t-shirt torn at the neckline. On his feet were Addidas running shoes with royal blue laces. Fresh road tar stained his old blue jeans.

The teen looked like the motorcycle had run him over.

Everyone: Kelley, the Norman sisters, Scott and Marlena, and Cecilia, shivered as if this teen had stepped over their graves or had tried to jump all the parked cars on a motorcycle to get here.

The Watcher hissed (Kelley heard it). He couldn’t believe it. It was like he was looking at a mirror image of the Drifter. After decades and decades, it was payback time.

The teen wasn’t much to look at. All scuffed up. Like a cat that had lost eight out of nine lives. There were fresh scratches around his neck and bleeding scrapes over the back of his hands and knuckles. As if he had been tossed off the back of the motorcycle and bounced on the sidewalk before crashing into the front door. His black hair was greased back and parted down the middle with a cowlick at the front.

He staggered over to the bar proud to be worse for the wear. Grabbing some napkins out of a cozy on the corner of the bar, he dabbed at his oozing wounds.

The Watcher gathered his spiteful darkness like a cold snowball in his ether hand. He meant to smash it in this teen-drifter’s face. That would be just a taste of what the Watcher wanted to do.

The Watcher tried with all his ether-might and swiped at the teen-drifter. His handful of cold spite went through the teen’s flesh-suit and struck something physical. Glad that he snagged something, the Watcher threw the object sailing away from the teen-drifter. The Watcher was pretty proud of himself: never in his whole afterlife had he moved anything.

Everyone saw it happen. No else had been at the bar and the teen hadn’t touched the glass. Nervous thumbs scrolling through pictures or videos to see if anyone had caught the flying glass on video.

Kelley felt things held in abeyance start to shake loose. Pictures on the wall wiggled. The floorboards wobbled.

A wall of air moved across the bar where the teen stood checking over his wounds and passed over the atrium. Kelley felt the air goose her flesh and pass over her like some kind of barometric pressure front. The Norman sisters cooed, convinced that an unwelcome guest had indeed come. Even Cecilia shuddered, horrified as she read the Norman sisters’ thrill at something having happened.

The teen-drifter looked from everyone’s surprised faces to the shards of broken glass rocking on the wooden floor boards. He grinned stepped forward with shaky legs. Enjoying the effect that he had on people, places, and possessions.

“Mercury!” Cecilia cooed as she offered her hand with pink lacquered diamond glued nail for him to kiss. He straightened as obdurate and steadfast as ever while she wrapped him in a she-bear hug. “My peoples!”

Kelley looked askance as Mercury brushed the dark brown knuckles with his pearly white teeth crouched behind red ruby lips. Mercury liked to feign romantic charms and archaic manners when he wasn’t being caustic and when he wasn’t being caustic he was being gnomic.

“You two know each other?” Kelley asked as if she was the last to know anything.

“Sure, sis,” Mercury said as he hugged the only part of Cecilia he could encircle: a hug around her shoulder. “We go to Piasa High School together.”

Through with her hug, Cecilia took a turn at looking from Mercury to Kelley. “Wait, did you say, ‘sis’?”

Kelley pointed to her light-brown-curly-headed-blue-eye self, “Kelley Morgan Branscombe,” and then to her black-haired-brown-eyed fraternal twin, “Morgan Kelley Branscombe. We’re twins. I’m the older.”

“By five minutes,” Mercury said and put his fist out for his twin.

“Viva la five,” Kelley said and fist bumped him back.

“Oh, wasn’t that a glorious day,” Winter snubbed them.

“You know what should have happened when you were born, Winter?” Mercury asked. Not that she wanted to know, but Mercury went on to explain anyway. “On the day you were born, when your mom asked, ‘What should we call it?’ Your dad should’ve looked at you and said, ‘Let’s call it quits.’”

“Well, don’t you look like something the cat dragged in,” Autumn said.

Mercury took it all in stride. “I’ve got cat’s eyes and nine lives.”

“Mercury, you look like you’re using them up pretty fast,” Scott laughed.

“Why they call you Mercury?” Cecilia asked.

“Cuz I’m so cold I make the temperatures drop,” Mercury said.

Everyone could believe that, even the Watcher.

“I bet I’m the only one who knows why,” Marlena said. “It’s because when Mercury was young and very sick, one time he bit into a glass thermometer that his mother was using.”

Kelley was amazed. She had never heard that story before.

“His mother freaked out because mercury is very poisonous. And when it hits air the mercury congeals into tiny balls. She had a devil of time picking them all up,” Marlena said.

Kelley could believe it. Mercury had ingested so many kinds of different drugs that tale might not be apocryphal. But that didn’t explain Mercury’s sudden appearance. He had a knack for turning up like a bad penny or unbidden like an annoying genie who would take away three wishes instead of granting them.

“How did you get here?” she asked her twin. Neither had a driver’s license. And Mercury didn’t have a car and couldn’t afford one.

He shrugged. “Spider.” Spider’s real name was David Thornton Hutson. The spider web tattoo on his elbow gave David his nickname. The tattoo signified all the time he had spent in juvie lock-up until David had felt like a solitary spider exiled in his web. Spider was twenty and had just graduated, late, last year from Piasa High School. Mercury had met Spider in detention hall and it was a match-made in hell. Spider had a bike and a line on every drug for anybody’s flavor. Mercury was his mule. In between the delivering and drugging, the two fought like cats and dogs. Spider must have gotten mad at Mercury and dumped him off the back of his bike.

Kelley was punctual and precise while Mercury just showed up like a whirlwind to turn all the apple carts upside down. He lived his life one step ahead of chaos. Sometimes when Kelley would call him just to talk to him because he hadn’t reached out in weeks, it would be like to talking to a whirlwind.

Mercury liked to live his life close to the knuckle. And now his knuckles were skinned.

“You’re just in time. Scott and Marlena were thinking of taking us on a ghost tour of their business,” Winter proclaimed when neither Scott nor Marlena had said any such thing.

“You three couldn’t get a light switch to turn on if you held a séance,” Mercury said.

“My sisters and I are a triple threat. Kelley, now that your twin is here, would you care to double some trouble?” Winter asked. “

Cecilia sniggered. “That a dare?”

Every kid sucked in their breath, but Kelley was prescient enough to know that none of them were cool: they hid their hurts, their habits, and their hang-ups in the fear that someone would find out their secret and spread it all over town. Instead, the players strutted and fretted behind a mask scared of death and hiding the truth: if their secrets were exposed to the world they would die of embarrassment. Instead, they talked big by cursing with every third word. Bragging about a sexual surety acquired by screen time. Sharing stories about someone else’s recreational drug escapades third-hand. Tagging each other with mean-spirited prank videos while summing up everything with “I know, right?”

It was the unspoken rule to laugh at someone else so that no one would pick on you, no one wanted their deeds to be known by the Light. It was like the lyrics to one of Uncle Brendan’s favorite songs that mentioned the unspoken rule of being cool or be cast out.

“Winter, you and your sisters might be the only people who could drive spirits away,” Mercury said.

“I could lay a curse on you, but your family already took care of it for me,” Winter.
Mercury shrugged, “I like curses. Keeps things interesting. Like Cecilia asked, ‘You like dares?’”

“Morgan,” Kelley warned. She hated dares. Rocking the boat made her seasick. But Mercury’s master plan was to run headlong at anything and everything.

“A bet!” Autumn sang out.

“Loser is banished from the Meridian for a month,” Summer proclaimed.

“Let’s make it more interesting. Winner take all. Meaning, the winner decides what the loser has to do,” Mercury suggested much to Kelley’s chagrin.

Cecilia sweetened the deal, “You and your sisters’ powers against our gifts.”

The Norman sisters’ eyes grinned like Cheshire cats. “What should we beat you at?”

“Let’s not mess around with finding out what ghosts are here or what they might want. Anyone could claim it was anybody’s ghost for whatever reason,” Kelley suggested.

The Norman sisters hesitated. They had already proven one use by conjuring a name out of the spirit. What more would be required?

Now it was Mercury who grinned like the Cheshire cat. “The first team to find Dr. Wise’s safe wins and decides what happens to the loser team.”

The Watcher wanted to laugh. The teen-drifter was crazy like a fox. He would make an interesting ghost.

Winter assented for her sisters. The terms having been laid out and both parties in agreement, the six teens turned to Scott and Marlena. They showed consent with a shrug: maybe they did or didn’t want to start a ghost tour, but they couldn’t deny there was interest. Besides, who wasn’t interested in finding a rumored hidden treasure?

The audience was stoked. They got busy texting their friends who had decided to stay home and binge on-line video games or their favorite show stream, promising live feeds of the competing ghost chasers to see who found Dr. Wise’s safe first.

Scott and Marlena nipped all that in the bud. They closed up early. It wasn’t even eight thirty-nine on a Friday night, the pre-teens complained.

Then Scott told a fib. “We are out of soda. All we have is straight coffee or water.”

That did it. There was a mass exodus over the next twenty-one minutes. While Scott closed down the bar and counted down the drawer, both teams helped Marlena clean the first and second floors: bussing the tables and wiping them down and sweeping the floors—all the while Kelley felt someone watching them as Cecilia picked up on the Norman sisters’ thoughts and told Kelley they “was nasty people” while Mercury kept his Cheshire grin.

After Marlena checked the second floor for any trash or stragglers, Scott flipped the sign on the front door to “CLOSED.” Then he had everyone meet in the office just behind the bar. It became standing room only.

4

The double trios gathered with Scott and Marlena around the simple work desk. The office was windowless and the walls papered with boring grey. There was no chance of stimulation or color in here. It was like a tomb. A niche carved out of the business so one could concentrate on the simple pressed cardboard desk holding a laptop and a monitor screen and a large binder and many, many business envelopes opened at the top.

There was no telling if Dr. Wise had ever used this room for anything. The building was larger than the space set aside for business. There were anterooms. Siderooms. Closets and walled off inner spaces which drew the eye by plastered sheet rock over archways. And the ceiling had been lowered in places to hide with conduits and pipes stuck to the underside of the next storey-floor.

Scott and Marlena had done well with their rehab of the building. Walls could be repainted. Floors could be removed. But the bones of a building held true.

A building might get gutted, but never reborn. Even if it was torn down to the foundation and resurrected in a modern incompetent version of twenty-first mediocrity, the spirit of the old place would inhabit the footprint of the inferior intruder.

The Watcher remembered what the Wise Dentistry office used to look like; he walked its dimensions now as he had back then as the space existed side by side this one. And as of now, the safe was still safe. The steel plate had been ignored and unmolested in their precious rehab. It was better off that way: the secrets inside shouldn’t see the light of day.

Kelley often wondered if a place could be haunted or cursed. A physical location couldn’t generate manifestation and weird phenomena on its own. Hundreds-year-old places or brand new spaces were just manufactured shells that held the happenings of life and soaked up the energy from the weird things that weird people did in them. They often needed a powder keg or a catalyst.

She was not that kind of person who could make things come undone. She was the kind of person who could find Aunt Gwen’s misplaced car keys in a flash because she could see her aunt mislaying them and take her to the exact place. Kelley had never wanted to be the kind of psychic who drew ghosts to her like some kind of aural nightlight.

Ghosts were no better than castaways. Caught in a moment of time and space. Held in a dark hole to live with the memory of their deeds while waiting for a hearing before the judge to receive sentencing—an eternal injustice, a kind of purgatorial sentence in and of itself.

She had been around weird things all her life—Mercury, too. But that didn’t mean Kelley went looking for trouble. She had a healthy respect for the paranormal and tried to keep a healthier distance from it.

Not like Mercury who went head over heels from one psychic screw-up to another. Sometimes, Kelley thought Mercury was playing a kind of Russian Roulette with the spirit word. He liked to call the bluff and push it past the pale.

Scott sat at the desk and pulled a flash drive out of a skinny drawer above his knees. He popped the flash drive into the laptop and mirrored a video player screen to the flat screen monitor. The double trio gathered behind him to crowd the small office.

“So, a TV production team came and investigated the Meridian,” Scott said and looked straight at Winter. “They did it on spec. If they can sell it to a show they will come back for a follow-up.”

Winter shrugged. “Just good business sense.”

“Did they find anything, Scott?” Mercury said.

“They caught something on an infra-red cam up on the second floor,” Scott said. He scrolled through a menu to a folder and then a subfolder and then thumbnails of picture files. “Now I’ve got some things on video, which I’ll show you all in a minute. So, I also showed them to the production team. They had a psychic and a paranormal investigator and a parapsychology student. After I show this evidence, you tell me what you think and I’ll tell you what these investigators say it is.”

“It’s really fascinating,” Marlena said.

Scott opened a file that showed a black and white filter washed free of depth and discernment. Kelley wasn’t sure what she looking at. It looked like a big smudge stretched across the camera’s eye.

The Norman sisters corrected each other in trying to identify it. “That’s smoke.” “No, it’s vapor.” “Bruh, it’s mist from a ghost.”

Mercury smirked and rolled his eyes. “That’s your Watcher, Kelley.”

Kelley turned to look at her twin. “You don’t see the mist. You see something else.”

Mercury shrugged. “It’s a young man. Or I think it is. His shape is all twisted. Probably because his heart was twisted, too.”

Scott shook his head, “Mercury, I’ve stared at this a hundred times now. I can barely see a shadow, let alone any shape.”

“That must be him,” Winter said. “The one we talked to,” Autumn confirmed. “Through a reading of the cards,” Summer said.

“So, that’s one ghost,” Scott said as the mouse clicked back to a different folder that held dates: feed from the security cam placed on the wall outside of the office door giving them a vantage of the stools in front of the bar, the atrium, the front door, and the stair case leading to the second floor. There was a cool blue filter over the scene. Perhaps more ultra-violet which reversed the color contrast. “But wait, there’s more.”

“We keep LED lights on over the bar. Kinda like a soft night light,” Marlena said. “The research team said it breaks down things in a more ultra-voilet spectrum and that’s why we can see them.”

“See what?” Cecilia asked.

“Orbs,” Scott said. “They start showing up after everything gets quiet.”

Playing the skeptic, Kelley asked, “Are you sure they’re not just dust?”

Marlena shook her head, “I don’t think so. There’s a definite difference between dust motes and these orbs in how they move. Dust motes tend to go straight in one direction. Usually down.”

“I wanna see ‘em,” Cecilia said with child-like expectancy as if someone had caught an elf on camera helping Santa deliver Christmas gifts. “I ain’t never seen one.”

Soon, they all got to see one. The room was empty and motionless. Except for what seemed a kind of ball or butterfly.

A floating bubble containing a mass.

A moving nucleus holding a static electrical charge.

Or semi-transparent dandelion fluff.

Skipping through the light spectrum.

Gliding.

Flitting.

Whipping about like the tail of a dragonfly.

Or a vapor escaped from a dying man being gathered up to his fathers.

The orb skipped along the atrium and crossed over the top of the bar under the LED lights to disappear into the return vent next to the basement door.

But there came another down the stairs to follow the same path. And then another with a fourth in tandem. The orbs were playing follow the leader.

“Can we see what happened to that glass after Mercury came in tonight?” Cecilia asked.

“I didn’t touch anything,” Mercury claimed.

“You didn’t have to,” Kelley smirked.

Scott went back to his file folder and scrolled up to the top. He opened the file for tonight and fast forwarded it through the throngs of pre-teens and teens milling about the bar, back and forth, like their choices had some bearing or meaning.

Then Kelley saw her small figure in a plaid skirt with the pattern reversed come in.

“Stop!” Winter commanded for some reason.

Scott did.

“Go back a little, Scott,” Autumn urged.

Scott reversed the feed. There was a young boy with shaggy hair walking away from the bar with his drink as Kelley stood some feet away. “Stood” wasn’t quite right. She tottered. A slack look on her face as the body was on auto-pilot because the captain had gone ashore.

“Look at her, she seems spaced out,” Summer said.

Something whisked around Kelley. A kind of swiping mist. Being pulled along in the wake, an orb shot through the middle of the kid and over Kelley’s head.

Then they watched the replay of Kelley fainting dead away into Cecilia’s waiting arms. Kelley watched herself being taken into Cecilia’s bosom as the real Cecilia in the here and now put her beefy hand on Kelley’s shoulder. As much as Kelley tried to walk the Catholic straight and narrow, she couldn’t deny that she could be effected by the devil’s darts—she was all too human: weak and fragile.

“Now, let’s see this glass fly off the bar,” Winter said.

Scott fast forwarded the video feed until Mercury came staggering in. Under the ultra-violet feed camera filer he had glowing eyes and a silver head. He looked like a gnome with hunched shoulders and wind milling arms.

As Mercury took some black shaped napkins from the bar, something streaked towards him. Next, glass tinted with silver flew from the corner of the bar into the screen of the return vent and shattered into slivers.

“You made something mad, Mercury,” Scott said.

Mercury gave one of his favorite gnomics: “Love me or hate me, but you’ll never forget me.”

“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Marlena said.

“Nothing has ever messed with anyone or anything at the Meridian House until you came tonight Mercury. I’ll just tell you something right now, seeing that orb pass through the kid and the mug being thrown against the wall is a little disturbing,” Scott said. “Kelley, what do you think it is?”

Winter answered instead, “It’s Schwann.”

“Being territorial like a poltergeist,” Autumn said.

“Poltergeists aren’t territorial. Elementals are,” Summer amended. “But whatever it is, it doesn’t like Mercury, that’s for sure. He made it mad.”

Mercury shrugged off the acknowledgement or any thought of threat to himself.

“It’s the Watcher,” Kelley said. “That’s what he calls himself.”

“Kelley thinks she can see things happening even though she’s not there,” Winter said.

“It’s called remote viewing,” Cecilia scowled at the sisters.

“Why is he called ‘the Watcher?” Marlena asked.

“Because whatever it is, it stays in the upstairs apartment,” Kelley said. “It used to live there.”

Marlena turned to Scott whose face drained. “That’s where I stay.”

“Looks like you got a roommate, Scott,” Mercury quipped as Marlena left the office to finish cleaning upstairs.

Scott closed the video file. The monitor glitched and showed, once again, a quiet bar. Free of pre-teens. Empty of teens. Crypt quiet. Lacuna silenced.

Someone came down the stairs. A silvery figure with holes for eyes. It was Marlena carrying down a bus tray from upstairs.

Cecilia looked at the monitor.

Orbs, again.

About three.

Coming one after another.

Bouncing down the stairs.

Skipping through the atrium.

Following after Marlena.

Passing over her to float over the bar

And into the return vent on the wall under the stairwell.

“Isn’t this now? Ain’t this a live feed?” Cecilia asked.

Everyone stopped to look.

Scott smacked his head. “Holy molie. I’ve never seen that many.” He called for Marlena to come have a look.

By the time she came into the office to check the live feed, there were three more orbs bouncing in the air in tandem.

“I’ve never seen them this active,” Marlina said.

“What do you think will happen if we go out and sit at the table in front of the bar?” Mercury posited.

Everyone turned to look at him as if the thought had never occurred to them.

3.

“We’ll go out first,” Winter said.

The Norman sisters went out of the office and sat around the table by the railing where Kelley had met Cecilia with Summer having to draw up an extra bar stool.

The others watched on the monitor. The darkness seemed green. The sisters became dark silver with shining eyes. The sisters sat as still as three competitive sisters could be.

The orbs came dancing. Three in a line. One by one.

At first, they followed their usual route. Down the stairs. Across the atrium. Over the bar. And through the return air vent.

On a second run, the orbs circled in a little closer and went around the table of sisters before leaping over the bar.

The others sat in the office amazed. Marlena had stood at the doorway in order to see both the sisters and the monitor feed. She told the sisters that the orbs were coming closer, but neither the sisters now her could see them with the naked eyes. They only registered as digital whisps on the monitor.

Scott made them change out: the sisters came into the office and the twins and Cecilia went out to sit at the table.

Again, the orbs made their circuit. Chasing one another down the stairs. But were they playing or looking for something?

This time, they broke rank. They slowed. Floating among the tables’ occupants. As if looking them over. Brushing their shoulder.

“Mercury!” Scott called out. “There’s an orb on your knee!”

Mercury brushed at his knee. Kelley could see nothing there. And when Scott wasn’t talking, the loudest thing in the room was the return vent.

Scott called everyone back into the office and played them the video feed from both parties’ interaction with the orbs. The most interesting evidence was when an orb floated down and rested on Mercury’s knee. Then when he brushed his knee, the orb lifted off again and went towards the bar.

“What are they?” Winter asked.

“They seem harmless,” Autumn said.

“I think they’re little kids. Scared and lost,” Summer said.

“They seemed to like you, Mercury,” Scott said.

“Where do those orbs go?” Cecilia asked.

“Into the return vent,” Marlena said.

“What’s behind the vent?” Kelley asked.

“The heating and air and all the ducts,” Scott answered.

You’re getting warmer, the Watcher thought.

“Where does that other door lead to?” Winter asked.
“The basement,” Scott said.

“It’s deep and wide. There’s just one closet. We use it for supplies,” Scott said.
“Let’s look there next,” Autumn suggested.

Now you’re getting cold, the Watcher thought. He was enjoying this.

“If there’s something down there Mercury will pick up on it, won’t you?” Cecilia asked.

Mercury shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. I can’t turn on or turn off my gift like a switch, you know. It just happens.”

Scott led them out of the office and past the bar to an alcove under the main stairway. The large return vent screen stood like a small door to the space holding the heating and air beyond. Instead, Scott opened the door built into the underside of the stairway and turned on a light.

Now, you’re getting cold, the Watcher teased.

He was right about the basement. It was deep and wide. Scott and Marlena had installed a few plastic shelving units to keep dry goods and paper supplies down here. But most of the basement was a wide open space kept dry and stale.

“What was here before?” Kelley wanted to know as the two teams spread out across the basement space.

“This was our uncle Robert Wise’s dentist office,” Winter said.

“He used to get all the rich kids up the hill,” Autumn said.

Summer pointed to the open closet area. “That was supposed to have been his dark room.”

“All that was back in the 1950’s,” Marlena said.

Kelley did some quick math in her head. Over seventy years ago.

“Mercury,” Scott offered. “Care to take a look?”

He shrugged and sauntered into the open niche and came back out. He shook his head.

Nothing there, darn the luck, the Watcher thought.

“What about the second floor?” Marlena asked. “That’s where the researchers caught that mist.”

Now, you’re getting colder, the Watcher thought.

“That was the dentist’s main office. The first floor was the waiting room,” Winter said. “Or so my dad says. He’s been in here when it was still set up as a dentist office.”

“Did he ever let Dr. Wise work on his teeth?” Cecilia asked.

“No, our uncle died while our dad was young,” Autumn said.

“How?” Kelley asked.

“He committed suicide,” Summer said.

“Where?” Marlena asked.

“Down in the basement in that space he used for the dark room,” Mercury announced.

Winter’s jaw dropped. “Yes, but how did you--”

You little creep. How did you? The Watcher thought. He tried to gather his thoughts and feelings into some more raw power.

“And the upper apartment where that night watchman lived? Did the researchers find anything out about him?” Kelley asked.

“The dentist let it out to someone to watch the building at night. They found his name from local police blotter reports in the paper,” Marlena said.

The Norman sisters waited for confirmation.

“His name was Robert Schwan,” Scott said. The girls cooed and goosed themselves.

Score one for them. Everybody’s got a name, the Watcher thought.

“He was arrested a few times for public intoxication down at a local bar and grill. Fast Eddie’s. It’s still open,” Scott said.

“The burgers are good and cheap,” Mercury said. When he wasn’t causing trouble with spirits, he was chowing down on food.

“Dude sounds sketchy. Like some kind of pedo,” Cecilia said.

“He was murdered just outside the front door,” Marlena said.

“The police report shows that the dude was nasty and he died a nasty death,” Scott said.

I am what I am. Are you any better? The Watcher wanted to ask him.

“If there anybody’s ghost hanging around, it’s his,” Winter declared.

Mercury and Cecilia looked at Kelley who gave them a slight nod.

“Scott, can we go back upstairs now? My sisters and I want to check out where the researchers took that picture of the mist,” Winter suggested.

2.

Scott led the troop back up to the first floor and then up the main stair case.

On the way to the second floor landing, Scott gave them a rundown of the researcher’s report. “So, the investigators classify the mist as being a three on a scale of five. The orbs would be a two. Now if we heard voices or saw a shadow, that would be four. Moving objects or a full-bodied manifestation or voices that interacted with us would be a five.”

“The researchers said a poltergeist can move objects and make noises which makes them a four. But a level five can be intelligent and malignant spirit. So, up to now, we thought we just had a level two with the orbs and a maybe a three with that mist. But after tonight, I’m not so sure. And I’m not so sure we should be meddling with it or that doing a ghost tour is a good idea,”Marlena opined.

“What about finding Dr. Wise’s safe?” Mercury asked.

You’re never gonna find the safe, the Watcher predicted to no one but himself or what was left of him.

The second floor proved to be quiet and dark.

“Mercury, what do you think about our orbs?” Marlena asked.

He shrugged. “Skeptics say they are just static electrical charges. Or dust motes.”

“Schawn is no orb,” Winter said.

“We can talk with him,” Autumn declared.

“Do you just want to stir up trouble for Scott and Marlina?” Kelley barked.

The groups entered the second floor through an archway off the landing. It was a den of rooms built in an L around a huge brick support pillar of very old masonry. There were various tables and chairs of different decades and styles gone in and out of fashion and decadence.

The group cast long forms like an eight headed-octopus across the wooden floors. The tops of their shadow heads poked into crannies. Their spindly arms hooked into nooks. The only creak came when Kelley ran into Cecilia’s back.

Nothing met them but their shadows and their footsteps’ echoes.

Things were quiet like mice in church.

The silence had plugged up their ears except for the free beating of their accelerated hearts.

Covetous and expectant, the Norman sisters led the charge into the antechamber which they used to write their runes and do their tarot readings. Their chairs had been stacked on top of the table and the tarot card deck had shuffled and piled up in the middle.

The girls gasped. “This is not how we left it!” “ We had the cards laid out!” “We didn’t put our chairs up!”

Scott shook his head. “So, maybe Marlena cleaned up.”

They all watched Marlena shake her head. “I didn’t clean up. When I came back downstairs, the chairs and cards were like the girls said they left it. I saw it.”

“Doesn’t seem like anything else is going on here. So, upstairs to my apartment we go,” Scott said.

“Probably gonna be skibidi,” Summer was stupid enough to say.

Scott wasn’t sure what that meant, but he was right to take it as an insult. “Hey, I live up there.”

“So does the Watcher,” Mercury pointed out.

They backtracked through the second floor landing and went halfway up the stairs to a locked door that separated business from living quarters. The door was old and had been repainted many times. Kelley’s back muscles tightened as something poked her between the shoulder blades.

Someone had been watching them all along. Trailing behind the group. But now this entity was stalking them.

The door opened to a part of the building that hadn’t changed in the last seventy years. No new paint. No scrubbed walls. Worn steps. Cobwebbed corners.

This section of the stairs was lit by a naked bulb. At the top of the stairs was another stoop with another unpainted, dingy door.

Scott opened it and bade them enter his domain.

Only someone else still claimed it as their turf. There was someone else gathering in the shadows who didn’t want them there. Not that there would have been room for a ghost had it materialized with eight people stuffed inside Scott’s three room apartment.

It was a tight fit with all three rooms laid out with connecting doors like walk-in closets. The front door had led to an old kitchen with mildewed black and white square tile the old sink and stove both dirty. From the kitchen, they walked straight into the bedroom with a king sized bed with unmade blankets squeezed into the tiny space.

The third room held an old square dining table and a reclining chair in one corner sitting sideways against the table facing an open window that looked out onto Broadway three storeys below.

Kelley noted that the wall between this room and the kitchen had an old door frame that had been plastered over. That meant that the original door and egress and regress from room to room had been choked off.

She had no idea how Scott could relax enough to fall asleep up here. It felt like shadows were brooding in the upper corners of the room like giant hungry spiders. And when Scott did drowse enough to close his eyes, the four walls must push in as a cold recess to become a stone sepulcher. And as Scott was snug as a bug in a rug, the Watcher came creeping with finger reaching to pinch Scott’s big toe that stuck under the downy blanket. Or slip his cold ethereal fingertips down Scott’s arm that hung over the bed.

Scott would feel the weight of a leering gargoyle face, sneering from being half blown away, straddling his chest before the shadow figure began throttling him.

Like a dead ringer, Scott would gasp and rise up in bed.

Kelley felt pent up. She had to get away. Clenching onto Mercury’s arm she startled and looked around in a daze.

But it was Cecilia again who gave her a comforting hand on Kelley’s shoulder to anchor her and reassure her.

“What’s the matter, Kels?” Mercury asked his twin as he had never seen that look on her face before.

“You her twin and don’t know? She can see what the Watcher do in this room when Scott tries to sleep,” Cecilia said.

“I’d rather not think about that right now either,” Scott said.

“Hey!” came a man’s voice. A younger man’s voice harsh and mad. Through the open window.

Everyone froze stiff. Scott’s eyes bulged.

“Just someone from the street, Scott,” this time it was Cecilia who lied. “Probably telling their girlfriend who just got mad at them not to go off and leave them.”

Was Kelley the only one who noticed it gotten cold in here? And it wasn’t coming from the open window. Cecilia took her hand away, so Kelley grabbed onto Mercury’s wrsit.

She heard Cecilia muttering something. “Surely…shall deliver…from the snare… and from the perilous pestilence…” But she could only make out every other word through her breathy phrasing. “You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor…by day, nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness…”

Mercury made Kelley let go of her and shook his wrist. Then he showed her where her nails had left pale white marks among the healing cuts which looked like score marks with a line through them.

“Well, that’s everything to show you. Let’s head on back downstairs,” Marlena said. She was just as anxious to be out of the apartment as anyone.

Cecilia had been quoting from the ninety-first Psalm verse three.

For protection.

Not that it did Mercury much good.

On the top at the stoop, he became rigid as stone. His eyes rolled back white and he began to squeal air out through his nose and blow bubbles through his clenched lips.

Mercury slipped off the top step and stumbled into the past.

“Oh, God. Not again,” the Watcher said through Mercury.

Coming up the steps was an overweight man in his early thirties in new jeans that were too big so they were rolled up at the cuff. He enjoyed making the stair treads creak with his Georgia work boots which he wore all year long. The man tried to hide his paunch with a red and black hunter’s zipper sweater. His red hair was greasy. His blue eyes icy. And all around his fingernails dirty.

Behind him was a younger man with dark hair greased back and a cowlick spilling over his brows. He wore a dark leather jacket with some Army patches. His unwashed jeans were loose. His Converse canvas hi-tops had once been white, but were now a dirty grey.

This was the Watcher with his latest catch: the Drifter. He brought his guest into the kitchen played at making Swanson Salisbury Steak dinners in the oven. And as they burned, the Watcher made unwanted advances to the young man he had promised a place to flop for the night explaining what the price for room and board was.

They struggled with the Watcher confident he would win with his weight behind some good leverage. The Drifter putting up a fight would make the seduction all the more fun. But the advantage became lost to the Watcher as the Drifter produced a gun in his face.

It went off and part of the Watcher’s cheek and teeth flew off.

There was a mad chase downstairs. Blood flying everywhere.

The Drifter opened the door and was out before the Watcher could stop him. The Watcher caught up with him and meant to strangle the Drifter right there on the sidewalk gun or no gun. The advantage fell to the Drifter again and his gun. This time he unloaded twice into the Watcher’s chest.

The Drifter broke free and ran down the street meaning to run all the way out of town.

The Watcher meant to run after him and catch up. But after his heartbeat began to fall, he turned his eyes to another destination: the police station up the block. His heart slowed and his legs weakened and the Watcher collapsed on the side walk hoping for another destination.

The whole thing should have started the replay. The Watcher should have been walking the other way on Broadway towards Fast Eddie’s. But there was only darkness.

That kid! That Drifter look-alike! He’s disrupting the whole chain of events.

Mercury floated in the past. Seeing and everything as it played out around him.

He waited because there was more to come.

After the cops came to the scene and called Doctor Robert Wise, they toured the building to see if any other areas had been involved in the murder scene. It seemed pretty cut and dry to the cops. A pick-up gone awry, too bad for Mr. Schwan.

Dr. Wise had to wait while they drew a chalk mark around Schwan’s body and kept the scene off limits until the coroner arrived. Meanwhile, Dr. Wise answered some questions daring to dart his eyes towards the hidden safe when the cops weren’t looking.

But Mercury was.

That kid’s gonna find out! And I can’t stop him!

When everyone left, Dr. Wise stayed behind. Confident that no one was looking, Dr. Wise walked to the large air return vent and popped it open. The safe was behind a false lead sheet next to the heating and air unit.

His dark secret was safe.

But now Mercury knew, too.

1.

Mercury came to with his body lying sideways across the old worn steps up against the door frame to the second floor landing. Kelley and Cecilia were checking over his face. He had a slight nosebleed as he often did after seeing the past.

“He’s retrocognitive,” the Norman sisters whispered to each other.

“He’s lucky he didn’t break his neck,” Marlena said.

Scott got him to sit up as they checked him for any broken bones. “You’re gonna be one sore kid tomorrow.”

“You’re gonna be famous tomorrow,” Mercury said.

“What in the world do you mean?” Marlena said. “Did you hit your head?”

“Take me back downstairs,” Mercury croaked.

Kelley shook her head. He was stubborn as, well, her. But one day he was going to kill himself trying to prove he was alright.

This spirit world was going to catch up…with them both. That was why she hewed to Catholicism. She needed protection. From the best.

But Mercury just liked to taunt the spirit world.

Cecilia got Mercury to his hobbling legs and put her large arm under his arm pits to steady him. Kelley went before them making sure he didn’t trip on the stairs.

When they came down to the first floor, Mercury had them gather around the bar. He directed Scott to open the return air vent which acted like a metal vented door. Behind it built into a large recess was the tall heating and air unit standing like a tree with its many branches of ducts.

“There. On the wall,” Mercury pointed. There was a portrait sized lead sheet. “The safe is behind that sheet of lead.”

“Do you know what’s in it?” Scott asked.

Mercury winced as he shook his head. “Not sure. But I’m afraid it’s something nasty.”

“Something he didn’t want known. That’s why he killed himself,” Marlena said.

Outside there was a honk.

Kelley’s phone vibrated.

It was Aunt Gwen and it was past eleven-thirty.

Everyone began to give their goodbyes.

“Scott, my dad may want to see the safe. If that’s ok,” Winter said.

“Sure, your family has been looking for it for years. He’ll know how to best handle it. Legally,” Scott said.

“Do you want me to ask Aunt Gwen to give you ride a home?” Kelley asked as the Norman sisters texted their dad the wonderful and strange news.

Mercury shook his head as he blotted his nose with a bar napkin. “I ain’t got one.”

“I’ll get my grannie to take you anywhere you wanna go,” Cecilia offered.

“Just somewhere I can sleep,” Mercury said.

Kelley prepared to leave.

The Watcher was glad to see them go. But that Drifter-Kid, he would take care of personally. He might follow him.

There was turbulence in the ether-air. Another spirit began to manifest, but only the Watcher could see him. It probably looked like a dark shadow to the others with the gift. It wasn’t fully formed, but it was a man. Twisted. Older. In a white button shirt splattered with blood. He was wearing glasses, with one lens cracked because one of his eyes had a bullet hole in it.

The Watcher knew who it was and at last he was looking at Dr. Robert Wise.

He counted the wounds. Between them, there were four bullet holes.

It was gonna get crowded in here.