Calypso Slaves - Ghost Story

"We've been all over this town for weeks, we'd have noticed if you were taking photographs around here," Amber said.

"Well I can guarantee Majestic Thirteen doesn't care about you, because they have also been all over this town for weeks," Cassie said, sliding off her pack and digging through her files, scanning over them briefly to double check if any names were named. "Here," she said, handing them to Amber once she was satisfied there was nothing there that would bring Majestic Thirteen to an informant's doorstep, "this is all the intel I got, look at it yourself.

"Neil, Lionel? Echoshire's been around since about the turn of the 24th century, I'll take the first 25 years after the founding, Neil, you take the next, Lionel, you bring us up to modern day. We're going over every obituary, there'll only be a few dozen per year in a town this size, and we're looking for deaths that all occurred in the same place. Sort the deaths by location and cause, see if any pattern emerges. For location, get building-for-building accuracy if you can. The recent disappearances are all in the admin district so we know the haunt is somewhere around here, we need to know which area exactly. Particularly if we're inside the haunt right now, we want to be outside it before nightfall.

"Amber, once you've satisfied your paranoia, I'm sure we'd all appreciate some help. People are dying and will keep dying until we shut this down, because Majestic Thirteen are more than happy to wait until it winds down on its own no matter how many people die along the way," Cassie finished, and then turned to get started before Amber could complain. Neil followed, and Lionel made a show of dragging his feet a little, but Amber wasn't protesting, so he was coming along, too. These kids had always been easily impressed by having a plan at all, and on their own they usually just ambled about ineffectually, following the first idea that popped into their heads. Someone, usually Amber, would form a pet theory and then drag the others into trying to find evidence into supporting it, mostly ignoring any leads that didn't seem like they'd confirm the pet. Any sense of thoroughness had always impressed them into compliance.

Amongst the unusual dead was, firstly, Annette Alvarez, who was killed in a school prank in 2356 when her friends, teasing her over her fear of heights, attempted to shove her off the edge of the roof and onto one of those giant landing cushions used for skydiving, but Michelle Hoffman, the person in charge of the pushing, forgot to check which side of the roof she was on before giving Annette a shove. The school wasn't that tall and Annette might've survived if she'd landed on her legs instead of her neck. Michelle committed suicide by running live wires into her bathtub later that year, but that was out in the residential areas far outside the potential haunt and one murder does not a poltergeist make. Annette's ghost might've haunted the school for a while, and Michelle's her home, but she had probably become a wisp by now.

There were a total of three different fatal car accidents that all happened at the same intersection just down the block from the archive. Echoshire was a small town, but even so, one accident every 25 years wasn't that surprising. Software glitches sometimes, and carbots were no exception. Plus, one of them in 2341 happened because a dude named Evan Price had hacked his car to drive manually and then tried to show off his skills while drunk. That ended poorly for him, but mostly it ended poorly for Krystal Owens and Max Davis, the people he ran over.

Starting in 2359, there had been a number of unexplained disappearances, however, about one per year. No bodies were ever recovered, and it seemed like all of them were last seen at the local school. They tended to be spaced about 9-18 months apart, most of the missing persons were teachers or janitors, although students occasionally went missing as well, especially in recent years. A few gaps of two years or more were filled in by missing persons reports that never resulted in a funeral and thus didn't show up in obituaries. Early on, they happened exclusively at night, but later began happening during the day, which corresponded to the increase in student disappearances. This had the numbers to be the catalyst for a poltergeist if they were related.

It was technically within the realm of possibility that this was a spectacular coincidence. Within the galaxy there were enough high schools that by sheer weight of numbers, one of them would have lots of mysterious disappearances spaced regularly apart from one another that were completely unrelated to one another. But it probably wasn't Echoshire High.

The group had gathered around a table in the center of the library to compare notes, the table's display lit up with all the windows they'd imported from the terminals, mostly spreadsheets where they stored their findings, occasionally obscured by the bags of chips and empty pastry wrappers from the snack runs Cassie had occasionally sent Neil or Lionel on. Amber was still suspicious and apparently thought being in the same room as Cassie would allow her to magically detect any nefarious business Cassie got up to even if she was facing away from Cassie, focused on a terminal, and didn't even have Cassie in her line of sight due to an intervening terminal stack. But hey, whatever, Amber was the last person who'd call the cops on someone, so Cassie wasn't especially worried about her being paranoid.

"Alright, looks like we've only got one real poltergeist candidate," Cassie said, "now we need to find out enough about them to try and put as much of the haunt to rest as we can. That means we're looking for unfinished business. We've got a list of names, here. Split it up between yourselves and track them down on social media, find their friends, and see if you can get in touch with them. Find out everything you can. Say it's for some kind of school project."

"Friends lists are locked and hidden for dead people, though," Lionel said.

"Just scroll through their timeline until you reach when they were alive and see who they talk with like friends," Cassie said.

"There'll be like two decades of posts to get through first, though," Lionel said.

"Two decades of posts on a dead person's account. There's probably less than a page of new material between now and the week of the funeral," Cassie said, "then maybe a couple of pages of funeral stuff, which might also be helpful so read that, and then you'll have the conversations they were having right before they died."

"What're you doing?" Amber asked.

"It's getting late, ghosts get out and about in the dark. I'm gonna head to the school and see if I get haunted," Cassie said.

"I'm coming with you," Amber said.

"No way in Hell," Cassie said, "Amber, I am going to a poltergeist's haunt with the specific intention of getting it angry to see what it looks like. If you come with me, you will die."

"So what's your big secret to surviving the encounter?" Amber asked.

The problem here was that Cassie was kind of bluffing, in that the average poltergeist had 'only' like a 40% chance of murdering any given trespasser, so no one's death warrant was signed just by setting foot in the haunt. But still, Cassie had one very important survival trait that Amber didn't: She had nothing to prove and would run like a little girl at the first sign of danger.

"Amber, listen," Cassie lowered her voice so that Neil and Lionel would hopefully not hear or, if they did, at least understand that this was supposed to be private, "you're the one who actually has any kind of actual commitment to this. If you aren't driving the others on, it might not get done."

"Yeah, and no one will be around while you report to your mystery boss. All your 'intel' came from somewhere," Amber said.

"My 'mystery boss' is on your side, Amber. I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly why he wants this town protected but I can promise you that he has sunk way too many resources into doing it for him to be bluffing. I promise you that we are working towards the same goal and we only have so much time, so please, for the love of God, just help me instead of second-guessing everything I do," Cassie said.

"So I gotta help you because we're all in it together against some mysterious threat? Sounds like every fascist ever. You're not reporting to anyone!" Amber said, and grabbed the biggest tablet on the table to swing at Cassie's head.

It was a light plastic tablet and Amber had only half-risen from her seat to take the swing. It thwapped against Cassie's head and left a sting. "Ow," she said, rubbing the point of impact. Amber got up out of her chair completely and took another swing, and Cassie caught the tablet and pulled it out of her hands. "Amber, stop!" she said, "what the Hell?"

"I-I..." Amber said and trailed off.

"What, were you expecting to be the plucky heroine sucker punching the mustache-twirling traitor unconscious?" Cassie asked. "This isn't a movie, Amber, Jesus Christ." Amber did not respond. Cassie turned to Lionel and Neil. "Can you guys look up the victims' friends?"

"Sure thing," Neil said, as Lionel looked to Amber and back to Cassie, but he muttered out an affirmative in the end.

"Thank you," Cassie said, and then turned back to Amber. "You can be a paranoiac little brat as much as you like, but don't try to fucking hit someone because you've got a hunch," she said, and left the archive.

Cassie had been less than an angel in high school, and while she hadn't gone to Echoshire High, breaking into schools after dark wasn't new ground for her. It took a brief visit to the hardware store to get a multitool and some duct tape, but there was still enough light left that Cassie wasn't especially suspicious prying open the panel's door lock, sawing through the wires, and taping them into reversed position. Well, okay, close up she was extremely suspicious, but from a distance she mostly just looked like she was fiddling with a keycard. No one was watching the entrance to a school like a hawk anyway. She'd already checked to make sure neither of the Majestic agents were lurking about.

Cassie waited for night to fall inside, raided a janitor's closet for a flashlight in the meantime. Those were always the first to go when things started getting really spooky, but hopefully she could get a good look at the ghost and then run the Hell away while things were still in the flickering lights stage.

Cassie started making rounds through the school once night had fallen. Ghosts, even degenerate ones like wisps, could usually be provoked into making an appearance if you repeated the circumstances of their death, describing it aloud or better yet setting up the place so it looked like it just happened or was about to happen. But Cassie didn't have any idea how these people died and she didn't even know for sure they had died at all. So she wandered around randomly and hoped they would manifest on their own.

And hey, the way disembodied shadows were showing up in the beam of her flashlight was definitely pretty ghosty. Some of the desks in the classrooms were casting shadows of people who weren't sitting in them. Some of the lockers had shadows cast by people who weren't standing in front of them. The shadows never moved, and although they had no faces, somehow Cassie got the feeling they were watching her.

She might be able to get a reaction out of the ghosts if she was able to name them, and she had most of the names of those who'd disappeared here memorized. "Dominick Pena?" she asked, keeping her beam fixed on one of the shadows standing in front of a locker. "Janice Warren? Brian Cannon?" This one didn't seem to be responding. Cassie waved her beam around at some of the others, but she didn't have their positions memorized and she wasn't sure if they'd moved. But when she brought the beam back to the locker in front of her there were three shadows waiting. She swallowed. "Abraham Diaz?" she asked, swung the flashlight away, and then back in front of her. Now there was only one shadow. Well. She had the right ghosts.

But how did they die? Clearly whatever it was, it was unhappily enough to make them a poltergeist. Or maybe there wasn't a poltergeist at all, and something completely unrelated was killing people, leaving regular old wisps behind? That wouldn't explain the rise and fall of wisp numbers, though.

The flashlight began to flicker. Only a little, and maybe it was just a technical malfunction. Is what someone who had never read even a single ghost story, apocryphal or not, would say.

"I'm Cassandra Heart," she said, "I'm here to help you." The shadow did not respond. She slid the beam of her flashlight across the hall and across more of the shadows. She wasn't even sure if they were coherent enough to understand this, but if she kept talking they might repeat a mantra at her eventually. "I don't know exactly what happened to you or why you're still here. Can you please explain to me? What happened? Why are you here?"

She panned the flashlight around, looking for some kind of sign. Carving messages into walls was a fairly popular ghost trick. But nothing seemed to be happening, except that the shadows had changed position. Further from the walls, now, the shadows fell mostly on the floor, the non-people who were casting them were now not standing closer to Cassie. She turned around in a slow circle. The shadows had surrounded her.

At the end of the corridor she could see a figure. Turning the flashlight towards it, Cassie could see what looked like a student. She had the right uniform anyway. She shuffled towards Cassie, listless, her head dangling limp and rolling about with each lurching step. Cassie turned around to see if there were any more behind, but the girl with the unhinged neck seemed to be the only one who'd bothered manifesting as more than a shadow.

Cassie was barely even surprised when she turned back towards the ghost and she was suddenly only five feet away, inside the circle of shadows with Cassie, but even so she jumped a little when she saw the ghost so close. Cassie swallowed and tried to keep her thoughts straight. "Hello," she said, "do you need help? What's wrong?" Sandra Danning was the last disappearance to match anything close to this description, a student who vanished nearly five years ago. "My name is Cassandra Heart, I came because I heard someone might need some help. Is that right?" The most recent victim was John Lewis, and while this ghost's chest was a little underdeveloped she was definitely female. "Can you please tell me what happened here?" The last female to disappear was Ashley Miller, but she was a teacher, so why the student's uniform? If this was Sandra, where were Ashley and John? They were more recent victims, so they should be manifesting even more strongly than Sandra.

"Do you know who Sandra Danning, John Lewis, or Ashley Miller are?" Cassie asked. Her flashlight flickered again, then went out entirely. Cassie didn't even have time to swear before a shriek filled the air and she could hear the lockers slamming open all around her. She sprinted away from the ghost and could feel hands grasping at her, pulling her back, nearly tripping her up, but she pulled herself free from their grip.

Cassie could hardly see a thing, but she could still make out the motion of objects hurtling towards her from out of the lockers, and jumped and ducked underneath them. The light fixtures burst as she passed under them, showering her with sparks and broken glass, but she dove out of the way of the worst of it, and in the brief flashes of light she could see tablets, keys, backpacks loaded down with whatever, all being flung at her at top speed.

The streetlights outside dimly illuminated the mostly-glass doors of the exit. Cassie slammed into them, trying to push and then pull them open, but they were locked. A backpack rammed into her from behind, pushing her face into the glass, and she could hear something heavy, probably a desk, being dragged across the floor. She pulled her gun and fired a pair of bullets through the bottom pane of glass on the door, ducking underneath and sprinting away. A cloud of debris from the school followed after her, the poltergeist bringing its ammunition with it as it chased her halfway across the parking lot. Cassie didn't stop running until she was halfway across the admin district, not entirely sure if the attack stopped because she got out of the poltergeist's range or if it just got bored.

She found herself a hotel well outside the admin district to stay in, last thing she needed was a ghost attack in the night, and met up with Neil at the archives the next morning. He was alone. "What'd you find?" Cassie asked.

"Well, nothing on most of them," Neil said, "especially the recent ones, a lot of people didn't want to talk about it. But for a couple of different ones, they all mentioned a fixation with some kind of book before they died."

"A book?" Cassie asked.

"Yeah, like, a diary or something. Paper and ink. Not all of the people I talked to actually saw it, but those who did all saw it the same way, a little black diary like they sell at the craft shops. No one I talked to ever really bothered reading it. But at least one person was just reading it, never writing in it. The husband of Brittany McDaniel, a janitor who disappeared like fifteen years ago, said they didn't even have a pen," Neil said.

"Okay, so this book sounds ghosty as Hell. How many people reported seeing a victim with it before they disappeared?" Cassie asked.

"Five. Out of sixteen total disappearances," Neil said. "And that's not counting the fact that most of the people I got in touch with wouldn't give me any information at all."

"How long did the victims have the book in their possession before their disappearance?" Cassie asked.

"I, uh...I didn't ask," Neil said, "but at least one of them had it for months, Mr. McDaniel mentioned that Brittany had it for a while."

"Double check everyone who was willing to talk to you about it, see how long they were in possession of that book. And double check anyone who didn't want to talk about it or didn't respond, ask about the book and see if you can get a 'how did you know' out of them. Preferably ask them on the phone or in person where they have less time to filter a surprise," Cassie said. "Where's Lionel and Amber?"

"Amber won't talk to me," Neil said, "and Lionel says she's still mad."

Cassie rolled her eyes. "Are they doing anything stupid?"

"I don't think so," Neil said, "Lionel didn't sound like he was in the middle of anything when I called him. He didn't sound nervous or anything. I think Amber's just angry."

"So long as she isn't going to try and go ghost hunting alone. Thanks, Neil," Cassie said, "double check what we know about that book."

"Where are you going?" Neil asked.

"I'm going to check up on Majestic Thirteen," Cassie said, "if I can follow them back to their safehouse and wait 'till it's deserted, I can break in and see what they know."

The agents weren't especially close to the school, though it was visible from where they were posted. One read on his tablet while sitting on a park bench down the block. It looked natural enough if you looked at any given time of day, but it was a dead giveaway to anyone who was looking for suspicious activity, since he was there all the time. The other agent drove around the admin district constantly, which was again not all that suspicious if you saw him passing by, but if you were looking for it, it was incredibly obvious.

The one in the car was hard to keep track of, but the one on the park bench was really easy. Cassie staked him out from a cafe across the street, then from an electronics shop, then from a sandwich place, bouncing around from one store to another while keeping an eye on him and trying to look like a teenager on a window shopping spree. Cassie knew that whether or not the agent had spotted her, he'd act like he hadn't. The agent in the car stopped to pick him up, and the agent on the park bench got in completely nonchalantly, and now he would lead Cassie to either his safehouse or an ambush.