here!'
Michael didn't bother to reply. The ghost was scared of him. That had to be a good thing.
The ghost came closer, sparks playing between its fingers. The eyes changed, becoming dark, bottomless pits. 'You're going to die, Outsider! This is not your place! You can't stay here!'
Michael poured more power into the crowbar, trying to draw the creature into the bar and ground it. Whatever else the creature might be, it consisted of electrical fields.
A huge static energy charge exploded in front of Michael's face, blinding him for an instant and covering his face in a sudden wash of heat. Then he watched as the ghost stretched and became disproportional, like a strip of taffy being pulled. In the next instant, the ghost was sucked into the crowbar, yanked along the lines of electromagnetic force Michael had channeled the creature into.
The ghost disappeared, and the wind disturbance died away. An eerie silence descended over the basement area.
Valenti pushed himself to his feet cautiously. 'Is it gone?'
Michael held the crowbar fast in both hands. The power he contained still throbbed within the length of metal. 'I don't know. I've got it contained for now.'
'What is it?'
Michael shook his head, trying to keep concentrating on holding the force within the crowbar. He imagined the energy striking the stone floor and burning itself out of existence.
A silver surface glinted to Michael's right, drawing his attention to a pile of rags and bones lying against the wall to the right. The thing, whatever it was, moved arthritically, rocking back and forth. It was about the size of a quarter, barely seen in the beam of the flashlight Valenti held.
An explosion of light filled the basement again. Through slitted lids, Michael saw lightning shoot from the crowbar and strike the bobbing silver object trundling through the pile of rags and bones. The crowbar was suddenly dead weight in his hands.
Sparks smoldered in the pile of old clothing, like coals in a campfire.
Valenti joined Michael, walking a little unsteadily. He aimed the beam at the pile of clothes. 'You saw it, didn't you?' Valenti asked.
'Yeah,' Michael croaked.
The pile of rags turned out to be the remnants of clothing that had rotted away. Inside the rags was a skeleton. The eye patch had fallen as the flesh had melted away over the years, but still hung around the dead man's neck. A leather pouch on a rawhide thong around his neck had a hole torn through the side. The whole left side of the skull was crushed; bone fragments barely clung to the damaged area and the empty cavity where the brain had been.
'Terrell Swanson?' Michael asked, struggling a little to keep from backing away from the skeleton. Standing up to a ghost that he didn't believe was a ghost was one thing, but this was definitely a dead guy.
'Probably take the forensics people a little while to agree to that,' Valenti said in a tired voice, 'but I'm betting they do.'
'Wilkins killed him,' Michael said.
'That would be my guess too. When that old man gets out of the hospital, he's going to be up on murder charges.' Valenti shifted the light to the gaping hole in the back wall of the basement.
The edges of the hole were jagged concrete. A pick and a sledgehammer lay on the floor nearby.
'Wilkins killed Swanson and buried him in here,' Michael said. 'Then he dug him up. Why?'
'We don't know Wilkins dug up the body,' Valenti pointed out. 'That's just guesswork.'
'Want to bet against me?'
'No.' Valenti probed the cavity in the wall with the flashlight. Spiderwebs filled the space, but they were old and covered with dust. 'Spiders lived in here for a while.' He played the beam over the dead spider bodies cluttering the floor space at the bottom of the cavity.
'Something killed them?' Michael asked. 'Maybe the ghost-thing that was trapped in here with the dead guy?'
Valenti knelt. 'No. This wasn't sudden, like through an electrical surge. They starved to death.'
Michael stared at the hundreds of bodies inside the makeshift crypt. 'Why would Wilkins wall up so many spiders with the corpse?'
'There probably weren't many spiders at first,' Valenti said. 'The few that got locked up inside the wall had babies.' He shone the light on the desiccated corpse at their feet. 'They had food. At first.'
'Okay,' Michael said, edging toward a gross-out meltdown. 'That's plenty of bug food chain stuff for me. If somebody like you were teaching biology at the high school, more people would stay awake and lunch wouldn't be such a big draw.'
A piece of silver glinted on the dead man's clothes. The material still sustained glowing embers from the lightning strike.
Valenti knelt and took a folding pocketknife from his jeans. Carefully, he speared a delicate network of wires that looked like a bit of shredded aluminum foil. Black stains showed on it, offering mute testimony to the fact that the lightning had hit it.
Michael looked at the metal piece. 'What's that?'
'That,' Valenti said, 'is what I'd call a clue.' Then he directed the flashlight beam over stacks of plates containing half-eaten food, beer bottles with cigarette butts floating in them, and a thick book. 'So are those.'
Michael took in all the dishes and abandoned food, the beer bottles holding cigarette butts. 'Somebody put in a lot of time down here.'
Valenti studied the food. 'None of the food looks more than four or five days old.'
'So what?' Michael asked. 'Wilkins sat down here spending time with his old, murdered buddy?'
Valenti reached in among the plates and took out the book. He showed the thick tome to Michael.
'The Bible?' Michael asked.
Valenti opened the book at the marked sections. 'Yeah. And judging from the areas Wilkins was reading, he was studying how to perform an exorcism.'
Staring at the pile of bones lying in the basement floor and remembering the ghost he saw at the Crashdown, Michael said, 'Yeah, well, I guess he didn't learn enough.'
'It's okay,' someone shouted in Kyle's ear. 'We've got him. Back off.'
Feeling the throbbing pain in his injured arm, Kyle remembered how the room on the remodel job crackled with static electricity before the dead man showed up. He gratefully moved back from the old man lying in the bed.
'He's coming for me!' the old man yelled, fighting against the team of nurses and two doctors that piled on him in an effort to keep him in the bed. 'He's dead! Do you hear me? He's standing there with half his head missing! God, it was an accident! It was an accident!'
Kyle walked backward, bumping into Quinlann, who took charge of his injured arm and applied one of the antiseptic compresses the nurses had given him to slow the bleeding.
'What's going on?' Quinlann asked.
Kyle watched the old man struggling against the doctors and nurses. The old guy had surprising strength.
'He thinks he sees a ghost,' Kyle said.
'Where?' Quinlann asked.
'In here,' Kyle whispered, gazing around the darkened room, looking for the dead man he'd seen earlier. 'Somewhere in here with us.'
The explosive lightning bolt had taken out the primary power inside the emergency room, but the battery- operated auxiliary lights came on. Some of the darkness went away. There was no sign of the ghost.
'Trank him,' one of the doctors told the other. 'Get him sedated before we have a riot on our hands.'
The doctor rushed past Kyle, heading for the medicinal supplies.
The old man continued to yell fearfully and fight against the hospital staff in an effort to get out of the bed. A moment later, the doctor returned with the hypodermic and injected the sedative into the IV shunt in the back of the patient's hand. Another moment of hoarse yelling ensued, then the old man went limp.
Quinlann guided Kyle back to the bed. 'You moved really fast when that old guy started screaming,' the construction foreman said.
