Chasing Shadows Read online

  They all stared at me for a few seconds. Then one of the canine creatures hopped up onto the other end of my bed and began shouting at me in a language I could not understand. I stared back in confusion. When it became apparent that I was not comprehending whatever it was trying to tell me, it started to snarl.

  That I understood loud and clear. I scrambled backwards with my hands and feet until I tumbled off the other edge and smacked my ass against the carpet. I ignored the pain and kept backing away.

  The canine spat what I’m pretty sure was a profanity before leaping into the air toward me.

  I closed my eyes and instinctively raised my left arm to shield my face. Then I heard the rollup bed crash onto its side and the canine yelp like any other dog in distress. This was followed by lots of angry shouting in that strange language that sounded like a mix between Klingon and Swahili.

  I cracked open an eye to find one of the humanoids looming over me with the talking canine hanging limply in its right claw. It was in the midst of an animated argument with the other canines and two of its red comrades.

  I took advantage of the distraction to crawl into a corner. I whispered into the air, “Whoever is nearby, I could use a little help here.”

  The humanoid who had saved me was larger and more heavily muscled than the others. It was easily eight feet tall. The fabric kilt it wore around its waist was a brighter shade of blue and more decorative than the ones its companions wore. They all seemed to be the same gender, which I guessed was male as I saw no obvious signs of reproductive physiology. Despite fearing for my life, the scientist in me found these beings fascinating.

  After a lot of talking, Fancy Kilt appeared to win the argument. He pointed one sharp claw at me and said, “Chu’lok.”

  “Chu’lok!” the others shouted back in unison.

  They might as well have shouted, “Dark Meat!”

  I started yelling at the top of my lungs. “Help! I need help!”

  Fancy Kilt reached down, clamped a claw around my neck and lifted me clean into the air. It brought our faces close enough for me to see the maggot-like larvae crawling around inside its mouth. I did my best to stifle my gag reflex as he cursed at me with the same phrase the canine had used. It then produced a startingly long serrated knife that it held aloft for the others to see.

  “Chu’lok! Chu’lok!” they shouted.

  Fancy Kilt raised its arm high for the killing blow.

  I smiled, which, as I had hoped, momentarily befuddled the creature.

  A battle axe with Latin calligraphy on its polished hilt sailed end over end through the air before pinning Fancy Kilt’s knife claw into the wallpapered drywall next to my head.

  It roared, orange liquid spurting from its hand.

  Over Fancy Kilt’s shoulder, I saw the ghost of Felipe Benalcázar rise from a throwing crouch and grin. I immediately noticed two things about the sixteenth century Spanish conquistador and adventurer. The first was that he was dressed for battle in full body armor and a scuffed morion atop his head. While I was aware that ghosts could change their attire, I had never seen Felipe wear anything but the velvety Courtesan robes that marked him as a noble and landowner. The second thing I noticed, with equal parts confusion and relief, was that he had somehow manifested as real flesh instead of a wispy, translucent ghost.

  The warrior pounded his breastplate and issued a challenge to the room in ancient Spanish that needed no translation.

  Every monster who wasn’t stuck to a wall set upon him.

  Felipe danced and slashed about himself with a broadsword, expertly sending flesh and orange blood spraying in every direction. The tide seemed to briefly turn when one of the canines sank its claws into a gap between the Spaniard’s rib guard, bringing him to a knee with a grunt. But the attacker paid for this with its life when Felipe slammed one of the sharpened points protruding from his elbow guards deep into the creature’s ear while simultaneously using the baseboard molding as a brace to spear the humanoid falling on him from above.

  Ninety seconds later, Felipe vanquished his last free moving opponent by stomping an armored boot down on the head of the humanoid at his feet, sending bits of gore sprouting from its ears.

  Fancy Kilt roared and yanked its trapped claw away from the wall, leaving a sizeable chunk of flesh behind. It snatched up the folding bed to use as a shield as it charged across the room at full speed.

  Felipe sneered and ran forward. Just before the two collided, the Spaniard used the coffee table and the center bar of the bed to launch his body into a flip above Fancy Kilt’s reach. He slashed backward with his sword as he fell, beheading the creature. He landed in a graceful crouch like a gymnast.

  My jaw fell open in amazement.

  My savior, face splattered with orange blood, walked over to me and extended an armored gauntlet.

  I grabbed it and was lifted to my feet like I weighed nothing.

  “Impressive, eh, Moor?”

  Felipe insisted on calling everyone with dark skin a Moor, even though he knew it was a misnomer.

  “I can’t believe what I just saw,” I admitted. “How can you move and jump like that with your armor on?”

  Ignoring my question, he said, “You saw the repayment of a debt between us.”

  For most supernatural beings, the spiritual world is a temporary rest stop. They cannot move on to their faith’s version of the afterlife until they resolve a matter they left behind in the physical world. The only way for most of them to interact with the physical world is through someone like me. Talkers are rare, so when we call for help, just about every ghost in the vicinity will come to our aid.

  Then there are the beings like Felipe, who thrive in the spiritual world and show no interest in moving on. The ghost hunting crowd calls them Lifers. Not only will most Lifers ignore pleas for help, many are openly hostile. They view Talkers as a threat. The leading theory about Lifers is that they remain in the spiritual world because they do not realize it’s not Heaven. I’ve met enough of them to know that’s total nonsense. Lifers stick around because they’re having more fun in death than they ever had in real life. Like, for example, the Spanish adventurer who died of smallpox in his thirties before he could complete his plundering of the New World.

  “You owed me no debt,” I said.

  Felipe showed me his blood-stained teeth. “In my time we had a saying: ‘A monarch without subjects is still yet a monarch.’”

  I wrinkled my brow. “We have a saying in my time too. It goes, ‘What you talkin’ bout, Willis?’”

  He laughed. “Always the jester, even when Death is close enough to kiss.”

  I poked a finger at his steel gauntlet. “I suppose somebody could kiss you right now. How can you be here in the flesh like this?”

  “When the laws of two realms meet, neither rules.”

  “Come again?”

  He used my pants to clean the blood off his sword and then stood. “That is all I may say, Moor.”

  “Can you at least tell me who sent you?”

  I had been expecting my aid to come in the usual form of twenty or thirty elderly ghosts who couldn’t move on until they cleared things up with the guy or girl they kissed under the bleacher fifty years ago.

  “Your French mistress,” he said. “She assured me that I would find many great battles here.” He gazed at the broken alien bodies splayed about the room. “I am not yet certain if I have been played for a fool.”

  I’ve never had a French mistress, but I knew who he was referring to.

  “Thank you for saving me,” I said.

  “Ba! As I said, my debt is now paid.”

  “But—”

  He raised his gauntlet. “I never said my debt was to you, Moor.”

  Then, to my utter surprise, he walked over and gently turned the spider turtle right side up.

  The creature backpedaled and then rapidly waved its antennae.

  Felipe bowed and then vanished.

  This was the oddest
night I’d had since Halloween.

  I took a step toward my equipment bag.

  The creature scurried underneath the sofa for protection.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, scanning the area for my camera. “I just want to get a picture of you.”

  Inside my head, a deep and soothing male voice said, “You are not like the other Huuuumannnns.”

  I turned toward the sofa. “Is that you?”

  Before I could get an answer, the living room lights came on and everything that wasn’t part of the physical world snapped out of existence.

  “Oh my Gosh!” Pat said from across the room. “What happened?”

  She was wearing a plush robe, one hand on a light switch and the other holding a .22 caliber pistol.

  “I met your other houseguests,” I said.

  “Guests like plural?”

  “Afraid so,” I said.

  She came further into the room but kept a healthy distance between us. “I heard a lot of noise. It sounded like World War Three.”

  I rubbed my aching back. “Felt like it too.”

  She took a good look at me. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ve been worse. What did you see on the camera feed?”

  “Pardon me?”

  I pointed up at the ceiling. “That light cover is way too dark and doesn’t match the rest of the decor. And a red light blinks when it’s recording.”

  She hesitated. “I saw you spring up from the bed like you were having a nightmare. Then the furniture started flying around.”

  “I don’t hear any sirens coming to your rescue.”

  She looked down. “I’ve called the Police so many times they’ve started fining me a hundred dollars for every call. The last time they warned me that if they come here again and don’t find anything, they’re going to charge me with filing false reports.”

  I had figured as much. “I’ll do my best to put your living room back together. Anything I can’t fix I’ll pay for.”

  “Who were you talking to just now?”

  I started picking up my gear from the floor. “No one. I was just talking to myself.”

  “Do you always talk to yourself in weird Spanish?”

  “Only when I’m watching Latina porn.”

  “What?”

  “Forget it.”

  “I can’t forget it. This is my life.”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  She turned red. “In the last month, I’ve seen my car stuck to the ceiling and my dead grandmother waving to me at the golf course. There is a black man spending the night in my house and an axe sticking out of my living room wall. Don’t effing tell me what I won’t believe.”

  I looked up at the axe, which should’ve vanished when Felipe did.

  Then I turned to Pat. “You should probably sit down for this.”

  Chapter 9

  A day later I was back in Philadelphia recounting the events to Eve.

  “You did not say that to her,” she said incredulously.

  “If I’m lying, I’m dying.”

  Eve shook her head. “That was undignified. I swear, if I hadn’t met your mother, I would think you had no home training. If Pat ever calls here, I’m going to tell her that Latina porn is not the kind you like.”

  “Wait, you know what kind of porn I like?”

  “Petite ebonies,” she said without missing a beat.

  “How?”

  “You never clear your browser cache, Einstein. Personally, I think it’s a reflection of unresolved angst toward your ex-wife and a minor Oedipal complex, but if it floats your boat, I’ll stick to the shore.”

  “And you never judged me?”

  “You haven’t seen the kind of porn I like.”

  “You watch porn?”

  “Everyone watches porn, Preston. Can we get back to the case now?”

  “Let me guess: You like the soft, romantic porn they show on cable?”

  “Preston! Focus!”

  “Okay. What do we have on the list so far?”

  Eve referred to her ghostly notepad. “You asked me to call an antiquities appraiser to get an estimate on the axe, setup an appointment for you to visit with Miss Faw, do a full background workup on Robert Hollenbeck and order a DNA test on the hair samples you brought back.”

  “That sounds like everything.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. No, wait. There’s one more thing.”

  “There always is.”

  “Would you look into the HOA laws of Mecklenburg County?”

  “Because of the nosy neighbor?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Great,” I said, rising and donning my jacket.

  “Is one of Darlene’s lawyers coming through the backdoor?”

  “Funny. No, I’m going to see The General.”

  * * *

  A short while later, I parked on a quiet street of renovated rowhouses in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that had recently been renamed to Northern Liberties so real estate agents could distinguish it from the poverty-stricken North Philadelphia neighborhood that it was slowly consuming.

  After retrieving three grocery bags full of overpriced organic foodstuffs from my trunk, I walked to the middle of the block where two brightly painted rowhouses were separated by an empty lot hidden behind a huge billowing tapestry of blooming tulips.

  Behind the tapestry I found a group of mostly young, mostly white hippies dividing their time between smoking marijuana and crafting various kinds of art.

  One of them, a young woman with Mediterranean features, came over to greet me.

  “Preston,” she said before kissing me on both cheeks. “What a surprise.”

  “Hello, Marianna.”

  “You come bearing gifts?”

  I handed her one of the grocery bags. “Not as much a gift as your art is to this city. I love the ceramic mosaic display you made for the school a few blocks over.”

  “You’re too kind.”

  I was being more diplomatic than kind. The group of artists in Marianna’s commune, goodhearted as they may be, were illegally squatting in these formerly abandoned properties. The neighbors tolerated them because they were quiet and the art they kept on constant display in the windows gave the block a hipster feel that actually made the property values go up.

  “Is the General around?” I asked.

  “I’ll go find him,” she said as she relieved me of a second grocery bag.

  The ghosts who were drawn to this place also showed artistic inclinations. One of them was currently floating fifty feet above the ground and putting the finishing brush strokes on a stunning impressionist piece it had painted on the exposed wall overlooking the lot.

  “Gorgeous isn’t it?” a feminine voice said to my right.

  I turned to find a sickly woman with medium cropped gray hair and a bright smile. She might have been in her mid fifties. She was leaning on crutches and wearing a canvas painter’s smock over a tangerine colored dress that perfectly matched the exterior paint on one of the buildings. I did not know what she was, but her skin and clothing were too vibrant for a human or a ghost. She was almost glowing.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s something to behold. It’s a pity no one can see it.”

  I’m not entirely sure how supernatural beings know they can communicate with me. For a long time, I thought I must have some kind of neon glow on the Astral plane, but Eve says it’s more like a feeling than a visual cue.

  “We can see it,” the luminescent being corrected me. “Besides, Devarra does not create her art so it can be seen. She does it for the joy of creating beauty.”

  “Did you own these properties when you were on this side?”

  “It’s more like they owned me.”

  “Hey Tree,” a male voice said a short distance away.

  Napoleon Crawford was a thin, twenty-five-year-old mulatto with crinkly brown hair and skin the color of almond milk. H
e was the sole child of a white French mother and a black American father, both of whom had died when he was a teen. His parents met when his mother came to the States to do post-graduate work in anthropology at the University where his father was leading raucous community protests against the school’s relentless expansion into the working class black neighborhoods surrounding it. One day, his mother, annoyed by the protesters constantly blocking her way to the Social Sciences building, informed his father that he was mispronouncing the Swahili word he was using to demonize her school. Napoleon was born nineteen months later. The story might have had a happy ending if his father hadn’t been a staunch Marxist who didn’t believe in property rights. The couple was killed in a gun battle with the law enforcement officers who came to evict them from the West Philadelphia home they had been illegally occupying for over a year.

  Napoleon inherited his mother’s intellect and his father’s political tendencies. The resulting adult was a neurotic computer whiz who lived in shady artist communes and offered his formidable technical skills in exchange for bartered services or food.

  After a bit of small talk, I handed him the flash drive containing a video recording of the happenings in Pat’s living room. Napoleon was the only techie I knew who could both encode the raw footage so the spiritual realm was visible on screen and psychologically handle what that footage often displayed.

  “Give me three days,” he said.

  “Sounds good,” I agreed. “This one is a little off the beaten path so you probably shouldn’t have any little kids or jumpy mosaic artists around when you process it.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  “Shoot me an email when it’s ready,” as I said on my way toward the tapestry.

  “Uh, Tree?”

  I paused. “Yeah?”