Restless

By J.M. Sudar

Prologue

Sid lost count of how many silent, early departures they’d made around the dozenth time.

Ahead of him the headlights telegraphed hours more of winding river road to endure. Next to him, Katrina stared into the darkness. Based on her expression, she was contemplating the end of civilization.

Irreconcilable differences. It was Kat’s favorite buzzword, or at least her favorite description of every problem they’d had over the last year. They no longer had arguments, disagreements, or even differing opinions. They had irreconcilable differences.

“I’m sorry,” he offered, “all I said was that I didn’t like seafood.”

Silence greeted him with a deafening roar.

“You can’t seriously be this mad at me for that. Did you have plans for date night that could only happen over lobster and salmon?” That was a stupid question. Of course she did. Kat had every Valentine’s Day, anniversary, and Friday Night from now until her choreographed #perfect funeral plans scoped and ready.

Leaving after midnight was unfortunate, fight or no fight. Dark didn’t do justice to the southern road leading to Riverport. The stretch of highway was abandoned by both citizens and transportation department alike. Between the interstate bypassing Riverport to the west, and all the state highways favoring the larger metropolises in the north, the southern route hadn’t even been updated since the sixties. Truth be told, he wasn’t even sure where they would enter the city. All he knew was that it would bring them closer to the historic district and the city’s roots as a logging community, which he’d always wanted to see.

Sid wanting to see it, spoiler alert, was never enough a priority to make it onto the date night calendar. He loved old brick buildings and early settler architecture, but that made for lousy hashtags. The thought of a drive through those old buildings was the only thing keeping him from driving the car through the wood and metal barrier and into the water to escape another hour of this angry, pouting silence.

On either side, past the barriers, murk and bog sprouted thin, leafless trees. Every now and then a spire of rock left behind by the ice-age cataclysms that millennia ago shaped the river gorge lumbered into the headlights like a troll. His map app swore this was the quickest route home from the farm to table ceviche hut to which he’d sacrificed his Saturday. If he’d been calm enough to notice that his phone was at less than 10% battery after they’d finished fighting, he probably would have accepted an extra five minutes for the better-known path.

He needed to fix the broken clock in the car. It felt like they’d been driving for more than an hour, but that would have meant they were home. The dead trees were so thick and the night so overcast that he couldn’t even use the hills surrounding Riverport as a north star. Finally, after another silent hour that was probably only ten minutes, the water to their left picked up and the road climbed, with a rock wall along the right indicating they’d entered the valley.

He breathed a sigh of relief, then moments later slammed on the breaks just in time to not run through a chain-link cyclone fence.

“What the—” Kat gasped, her phone spinning out of her hands and clunking into the windshield. “What are you doing?”

“Trying not to drive us through that gate.” Sid sputtered. “Or would you rather I totaled the car and stranded us?”

“Hold on,” Sid pointed at the glowing face of the phone on the dashboard. “You’ve had battery this whole time?”

“Yes.”

“So why haven’t you been doing maps?”

“I’ve been saving the battery for in case we needed to make an emergency call. Like if my genius boyfriend smashed us through a fence.”

“No,” he held up his hand, “no I specifically remember you saying our phone was about to die.”

“But I hooked it up to my battery pack. I needed to repost something.”

Luckily the car was old enough to rattle even when it idled, so Katrina couldn’t hear the sound of creaking rubber as Sid silently throttled the steering wheel. “Whatever. I’m turning around. I have no idea where we are.”

On the other side of the fence a flat stone path stretched out past the headlights’ reach. Waist high walls lined both sides like a castle battlement. Past the wall to the left was a void of utter black. To the right, the general direction they wanted to go, was slightly lesser void speckled with occasional bursts of light, like twinkling stars. As his eyes adjusted, Sid made out the shadow of a building with towers reaching into the sky on the far side of the path.

“Wait a second,” Sid said, “I know where we are. This is the decommissioned dam at the bottom of the old highway. We’re back in Riverport.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

He held back a snarl that she could have seen it instead of the banjo and pickled vegetable festival last Labor Day if their relationship was anywhere near equal, and instead put the car into reverse. Their headlights swept the scene as the car turned and he saw that the cyclone fence was in two parts. One, green and brown with years of slime and rust, blocked the entrance to the dam. The other blocked a tucked away turn to the right, which he figured would follow the river’s bed and lead to the city proper. The fence blocking the road they needed was brand new.

“What’s going on,” he said mostly to himself. “That’s where we want to go. Why is it blocked off?”

“Because the city probably got sick of drivers like you missing the turn and dunking into the river?”

“You know for someone who accused me once of booby trapping the cupboard for her because I put some dishes away in a tippy stack, you can be a real jerk.”

Her gasp described her expression in the dark. Her voice turned into a quaver, “I don’t want to be a mean person.”

He kept throttling the steering wheel. He had every right to feel frustrated, and not just because he hadn’t actually called her a mean person. She had an uncanny ability to take statements with even a whiff of criticism and turn them, making him the monster. Without giving her another word to judo back onto him he slammed out of the car to see if he could open the new fence. If not, there might at least be a sign indicating why they had to reset the clock on this agonizing drive.

The fence looked official enough, but he couldn’t find a gate. If pranksters set it up he would expect it to be obvious and easy to knock down. Instead, it was anchored in concrete blocks and joined with thick gauge wire. There were no signs indicating why the route was blocked or how to detour. That seemed illegal enough that he wondered if they had grounds to sue for lost time or some similarly stupid, yet student-loan eradicating reason.

Something deep in his chest unsettled and shifted. It felt like an instinct his genes remembered from all the way back on the life in the caves. He followed it before he knew what was happening, turning to face the older fence.

It was solid, despite years of splashing river water and neglect. He peered through the links at the mossy concrete walkway beyond. His shadow stretched through the chain links, leading towards the abandoned plant on the far side.

There was something else there too. He peered, straining for details, and noticed the hole in the ground. Once he noticed it he wondered how he could have ever missed it. It drew his attention like a siren, inescapable. The chasm yawned, hungry like a mouth demanding to be fed.

They were going to feed him to it.

A hand stronger than any manacle gripped him by the arm, dragging him forward as the chains at his wrists and ankles clinked against the scaffolding. There had to be at least a hundred people watching this happen, why wouldn’t any of them help him?

How could any crime be worth this? It was inhumane, did nobody care?

Could all these people condemn him like this in the name of justice?

Was irony itself dead at the bottom of that pit?

He reached the top of the scaffold. A long plank extended out and over the pit, offering him up to it.

Soon he would discover everything that was dead in the bottom of that pit. He’d join the dead things down there.

Someone tapped his shoulder. “Hey kid,” Sid turned, to see not the gaoler he expected, but a man dressed in a white button up shirt with slacks, a sideways smile plastered on his face. “Need your opinion.” as he spoke, black frost crept out from the neck of his shirt, ruining the skin as it went, turning it black as the depths of a frozen lake. It bit deep purple furrows into his flesh. The eyes crystallized and cracked, but the frostbitten corpse kept smiling. “Is it cold out here, or is it just me?”

“Sid!” Kat’s anger smashed through the icy vision and into his head. “Sid!”

Stop them. The voice hissed right behind him. No, right in his ear. No, somewhere else, he couldn’t tell where, but close, too close, almost inside his head.

“Sid what are you doing?”

He turned to see Kat standing just outside her car door, ordering him back via gesture. She froze, a statue of his girlfriend with freely falling tears serving as the only evidence she wasn’t made of stone. The stone shattered when she screamed.

“Sid, run!”

Something slammed into the fence behind him. Moss and mildew sprang free and showered down on him, blinding his eyes and peppering his lungs at the same time. He stumbled, coughing and blinking, looking quickly for the frostbitten man and instead coming face to face with a snarling animal trapped in the body of a giant, a head and a half taller than Sid. He looked back to the frozen man, but there was no one there. Instead, through the headlights he saw gnashing teeth and wild, white eyes. Any chance to wonder if he was dreaming, asleep at the wheel vanished as the giant leapt halfway over the cyclone fence and scrambled to clear the rest.

Sid made it back inside the locked car just in time for the giant to smash into the driver window. He saw a face covered in dirt, contorted by fury, stark white eyes glaring. An instinct Sid didn’t know he had took over, and he quickly reversed the car and executed a J-turn he didn’t know he could do. It faced them the right way down the old road, leaving the giant in their taillights.

“Drive, drive, drive, drive, drive,” Kat muttered like a mantra.

Somewhere near the junction with the main road their hands found each other and squeezed harder than Sid had throttled the steering wheel thirty minutes prior. With her free hand and full battery, Kat texted, tweeted, and generally screamed to the world what they’d seen, while narrating her messages in duplicate to Sid.

He barely noticed. He wasn’t thinking about the giant, nor about the frostbitten man. Instead, he thought about the pit, the feeling of being dragged there by his wrist, and the bottomless darkness waiting to devour him. 

Chapter One

Heck heard the ghosts aboard the Mary Ann's Morning long before the ship’s outline materialized in the mist.

“...kill you...” echoed a patch of words over the water, between chokes of anger and pain.

“There,” said Captain Russ, “did you hear it? Clear as cussing.”

“Yeah,” Heck replied, “Someone's unhappy.”

“Two days ago the weather was so clear you could see and hear the Morning from the shore. I walked the sheriff out onto the pier and held his mouth shut until he heard it. He still called me crazy. But you heard it, didn't you?”

“I definitely did.” If Russ Rolland was crazy it wasn't because of the ghosts he heard out on the water. About thirty different people over three months had reported something offshore at Silt Step Bay. First it was a few fishermen radioing the local police band, saying they'd heard but couldn’t find someone lost in the fog. Then it was a vacationing family renting a pontoon boat. That one made it to social media in a blurb of teenage angst and slang. A trend emerged when second and third posts from separate sources confirmed people experienced a haunting in the local waters. When a local teenager posted plans to find the “screaming man” of the beach, it was time to intervene.

Silt Step was the kind of resort town unknown to anyone who didn’t live in or know someone from the region. Instead of sandy beaches and warm water, you could ride go karts over a hillside covered in replicas of famous monuments. Wind-surfers flocked to the reliable offshore winds every summer. The forty-foot lighthouse that once protected sailors from the rocky shore was converted in the nineties into a library, bar, and B&B, complete with a local history wing curated by captain Russ Rolland.

“The old girl's been out there for longer than me,” Russ mused. “It used to be a fishing boat back in the day, but it missed the tide one afternoon and came back to port when the water was too low. It got sucked down in a silt bar and the mud gripped it like epoxy. It was heavy from all the fish, see? When the tide came back in, it just stayed down. There was suction holding it at that point. The hold filled with water and the crew bailed out. Every tide just seemed to pull it deeper and deeper, and before you know it the town had itself a landmark. That’s about all anyone knows to be honest, mister,” he faltered, “I’m sorry I forget your name.”

“Hector Reeves. Call me Heck. Did anyone die aboard the ship?”

“No sir, not one soul. But you've got to understand this was back in the depression. Before Silt Step was a nice place to live, if you didn't work the boats, you worked the limestone quarry. Maybe no one died on the ship, but someone lost a lot of investment aboard it, both in money and hope.”

Heck struck the first possible cause of haunting: a death. Cause number two was still possible per Russ’s expansion: strong ties to a place or goal. The Mary Ann's Morning could be both, a place and a motivation. Add a dash of hope, plus the hard daily work of a fishing boat and you had a lifestyle. From the lifestyle came habit, cut short by a lingering sense of what if, and that might be enough to keep someone going after the end.

Another howl rippled across the water.

Russ let the boat idle, eyes searching the fog. “They're getting louder, you know. A young couple heard them from the cafe the other day. That’s Main Street, not the pier. They wanted the coast guard so bad they almost threatened the owner with some negligence charge or other. And that was right in the middle of the daytime, doesn't that seem strange?”

“You might be able to make another couple bucks if you advertised it: bed and breakfast gives way to goulash and ghosts.”

“That doesn't seem right. I don’t think I’d like it if I were lingering with unfinished business and someone charged admission to listen to me.”

Heck liked that answer. Russ was right though. The sounds were getting worse based on the reported data. In a few months they’d gone from a few people hearing screams on the water to a handful hearing them on land. Heck’s people had been monitoring it since the trend began, and when it looked like at least one easily-influenced kid was willing to give amateur ghost-hunting a try, they sent Heck to see if the ghosts tied to the Mary Ann’s Morning were growing in influence. He was to address it if so.

Silt Step sat at the end of a wide river delta that mingled with the sea. The air was thick with brine and kelp. Morning mist curled off the still water alongside the creep of dawn. Ahead of Russ’s whaler, the Mary Ann's Morning peeked through the fog at last.

The rusted booms emerged first, as though the semi-sunken ship were raising its hand in attendance. The bow sat high out of the mud, sweeping back in smooth curves to the low-slung stern. Most of it was out of sight, hunkered beneath murky water and gripped tight by muck.

Something growled behind Heck. “There there, Skipper,” Russ whispered, scratching the curly dog’s head as it popped out of his satchel. “They're not going to hurt you.”

“No one's going to hurt anyone,” Heck agreed. Despite pop-culture’s insistence, dogs weren’t any better of an indicator for a haunting than people were, but that didn’t help the sense of foreboding brought by the growl. Heck set his book down as he got up from his seat: book four in the Sunbeam Express series, a young adult collection of stories about magical ponies who solved every problem with friendship.

“You have kids?” Russ asked, gesturing at the book.

“No, why?”

“I’m pretty sure my niece reads those so I figured. Are they any good?”

Heck suppressed a sigh, having read too many of the books to remember he wasn’t the target demographic. “Last one was better. There’s only so many times you can read about the healing power of a hug before things start feeling one note.”

“I hear that. I think.”

Heck felt less sure that no one would get hurt when he touched down on the rusty metal of the Mary Anne’s Morning and the thing onboard roared. Its scream rebounded off the metal walls of the sunken ship. Skipper yipped and burrowed back into his hiding place.

“Good luck,” Russ said, his voice gone from a mutter to a whisper. “We'll circle 'til you’re done. Don't worry,” he picked up the dropped book, “I’ll keep your ponies dry too.”

“Good call, never put them away wet.” Heck watched as Russ steered his boat away from the wreck faster than he’d approached it.

Time to pay attention. The water covering the top deck came to Heck’s knees, cold enough to make him hiss. His flashlight found a black pit towards the stern. The hold, built to carry thousands of fish, was full of water as promised. After its eighty years of neglect, he could see that mud and sea grass that had taken hold, plus possibly the shells discarded from the meals of a giant octopus. He chose to search the upper decks first.

The outer doors all led to cabins with bunks so narrow and hard they looked like a chiropractor’s payday. The sodden fused mass on a rotten desk had probably been a diary or ledger at one time. Brass fixtures long-turned green held a few corroded pieces of lightbulb. There was no sign of whoever was doing the howling.

The engine compartment sat at the front of the hold. The bulkhead had so far prevented the water from leaking in, and the darkness past it yawned with breath of rust and stale oil. Inside, Heck knocked on the wall and heard the reverberation of metal against the water. He kept knocking, going lower and lower until finally hitting a dull thud. The compartment was underwater but mostly not underground.

The Morning's heart looked as strong as a race horse's. The rust-covered drive shaft sat suspended in the air, nearly half a foot in diameter. Huge pistons waited, ready to stretch their legs after a decades-long rest. Covering the walls, about a hundred dials and gauges lay as dead and silent as the air filling the hold.

Looking at the engine, Heck felt a pull like there was a magnet in the center of his chest. It changed his personal gravity to feel like the room slanted away from him, threatening a tumble down to the far wall. He closed his eyes and leaned into the ghost’s fugue.

A familiar weight on his back told him the transition was complete. He opened his eyes to not see anything at first. He heard the alarm bell though. Within a couple blinks he adjusted to the dim glow of emergency lights, blood red and outlining the shape of a metal bulkhead. It was a different shape than the ones on the Morning, however. Those were relatively large and just took a crouch and a step to get through. The hatch in front of him had a narrow, efficiency-first, comfort last flair of military design.

Past the bulkhead was a narrow enough hallway to convince him he was on a submarine and not just a battleship. He arbitrarily picked a wire conduit to follow, and it led him through a winding path that seemed like an awful waste of space for such a narrow boat, which spat him out into an abandoned helm. The instrument panels made little sense to him, but he didn’t think they should be shooting from the bottom to the top of their range over and over the way they were, so something on the sub had gone wrong. Glancing down a nearby set of metal stairs and seeing knee-high water, he had a hunch what that something was and where the alarm bell originated.

“Come on you stupid piece of—” came a scream from down the stairs, telling him where to find his ghost. He clanked his way down the stairs, wishing he wasn’t about to take the cold of that water straight to his bones, and having his wish not-granted.

The same winding hallways as above awaited him at the bottom of the stairs, though here the metal conduits were broken every few feet, shooting sparks as the roiling water splashed up to hit bare wire. Every bulkhead he passed brought the water higher, until it was over his hips as he waded through. He wasn’t willing to rule out that this ghost had a fixation on drowning after all, but he really hoped that wasn’t the case since he didn’t feel like coming along for that fugue. Drowning was never a fun way to go.

His concerns abated, replaced by fresh new concerns, when something erupted out of the water in front of him. He ducked before a wrench brained him, taking his head underwater. It was surprisingly clear and well-lit down here, which more than anything was a clue from the fugue: the fixation had something to do with the underwater of it all. Heck looked around, and sure enough there was a hole in the wall of the submarine, half-repaired with water still gushing in.

The flailing figure was his ghost, who dove back under the water with his wrench and set to repairing the hole. Heck couldn’t see the repairs actually being made, but that wasn’t unusual, with plenty of fugues occupying a dream-logic space on little details like that. Either way, Heck had a good look at his subject: late fifties, well into balding, grease and sweat on blue coveralls attesting to his hard work, and the furious trembling of his mustache indicating how stressful the process had been up to that point.

With a last twist of the ghost’s wrench, the hole disappeared. The submarine shuddered, and with a slurping sound like draining an unclogged sink, the water level lowered, some unseen pump apparently gaining traction against the flooding now that the hole was closed. The mechanic gave a little pump with his fist and broke the water’s surface, with Heck following.

He glanced momentarily at Heck, but didn’t so much as nod. With a Class One ghost like him, Heck may as well have been furniture. Instead, the mechanic leaned against the wall, lungs pumping to recover from his stint underwater. The instant he took a final heaving sigh, there was a bang like a bullet as a rivet popped down the hall. Water rushed in at head height, and the ghost gave a scream that had more whimper in it than the previous ones before racing down the corridor and working away at the new hole. Behind him, a second hole appeared with a bang, dousing him from behind with a jet of water. The ghost tried and failed to keep at his work, brushing water out of his eyes, coughing as it repeatedly found his lungs. On that point at least, Heck could help.

The weight that appeared on his back on entering the fugue was the tool of his trade. A consistent tool for shaping fugue which identified Heck as a trained medium, ready to influence the ghosts he encountered. Heck’s totem defaulted to a sword slung in a scabbard on his back. What he drew however was an umbrella stretching from the hilt instead of a blade.

He stuck the umbrella in the path of the streaming water that battered assailed the mechanic, who blinked in surprise, really noticing Heck for the first time. He gave a quick smile and a nod before returning to his work. He had the hole patched in a couple of minutes, spun, and had the second one resolved in half that time.

Like clockwork, the water drained again, followed by another bang, this time from a room farther away. The ghost screamed and set off, with Heck following at a middle distance. They emerged into a torpedo room, stacks of ominous red tubes flanking the walkway with a chain lift ready to bring them one room closer to danger. Rushing water flowed through one final bulkhead that led to the launch tubes. The mechanic set to work once again, swearing and growling as the water filled up at an even faster rate than before.

Heck noticed the Sisyphean work less than he noticed a bright orange emergency suit nearby. There were emergency rations too, and an inflatable raft, along with instructions on how to use the tubes to launch yourself to safety in an emergency. Tellingly, there was a single suit left.

“Have you thought about this?” Heck asked the mechanic, who was back to thinking of Heck as furniture and looked suitably shocked when the couch talked to him and tried to offer advice. “You could escape, I think everyone else already has. You don’t have to go down with the ship.”

Desire glistened in the mechanic’s eyes as he looked at the emergency suits, but not enough to break through his fugue. After a pause, he shook his head and dove back into the water. Heck noted that as an avenue to work on during his stay in Silt Step, and leaned out of the fugue, returning to the engine room of the Morning.

His physical body hadn’t moved far outside of the fugue, but his head was upsettingly close to a low-hanging pipe that would have hurt to hit. That was an important note in motivating his work while he was here, as even a trained medium had almost earned a head wound. If the teenager who’d planned a visit online arrived here before Heck did, he might be a body on the grated floor right now. Since the edge of the mechanic’s fugue consistently reached the shore at this point, something like that was only a matter of time unless Heck intervened.

Having heard the screams up close, Heck knew the mechanic was the screaming ghost. Seeing the clear focus to the ghost’s fugue suggested he had work to do to remediate the obsession. After that he needed to see to see if the ghost returned, but for now, Heck could summon Russ and Skipper and head back ashore.

Then he felt another magnet pull from the upper cabin.

A ladder led up to the helm. At its top he didn’t find a captain’s cabin or wheel. Instead, he emerged through the hatch into walls made of shining copper, carefully riveted and polished smooth like the bow of an ocean liner. Each rivet was filed down into the seamless burnt orange surface. There were paths ahead of and behind him, but only the path ahead had scraps of paper leading around the far corner.

The papers all had different directions printed on them; literal maps like the maze you’d expect on the puzzle page of a newspaper, all marked with different routes. Heck had seen variations on this sort of fugue before. In his experience, navigating a labyrinth meant negotiating some puzzle with an unclear solution: messy inheritance, debt, even a fraught political decision in one case. Ghosts weren’t known for their subtlety.

In some ways, a fugue like this was more dangerous than the mechanic’s. Even Heck, experienced as he was, didn’t feel the pull of this fugue before it absorbed him. That meant an unsuspecting urban explorer could fall head first into it, followed by head first back down the ladder onto an unforgiving metal floor.

Around the corner, hunched over disintegrating maps, he found a wiry man adjusting coke-bottle glasses. He was taller than Heck, with short, curly brown hair and the gaunt, craggy face of someone who knew the difference between hungry and hunger. He stood at a crossroads in the hallway looking at a piece of paper freshly pulled from a file folder, turning it every which way and muttering notes to himself.

Unlike the ghost of the mechanic, the ghost of the captain turned and saw Heck, taking him in through his thick lenses. “Morning,” he said with a trace of Scandinavian accent. “Did we have an appointment today?”

“No, I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

The man looked around the polished metal corridor. “Why?”

“No reason in particular.”

“I know,” the captain replied with a nod, continuing to shuffle the papers. “It doesn’t take much, does it. I can’t even remember where I started. I don’t suppose you remember, do you?”

“I might, though I might be just as lost as you.”

“Well, at least we’ll have company. Shall we?”

Heck gestured affirmatively and the pair of them strolled around the corner. Their footsteps echoed and squeaked against the polished floor. More than once the ghost slipped, barely catching himself, and sending papers tumbling. “Oh no,” he said, frantically checking the order. “I can never get these quite right again.”

“You didn’t organize them the first time?”

“No it was all laid out for me. Look at this,” he said, gesturing to a strange symbol on the corner of the page on the top of the stack, “I can’t even tell if this is a number. How am I supposed to put the pages in order?”

“I can’t tell either, I’m sorry. How long have you been here?”

The ghost shook his head distractedly. “Who knows? I feel like I’ve only been ever been here these days.”

“Where were you before?”

“I was working. But it was bad. My eyes burned from the dust and I developed a cough. Some nights it hurt so bad to breathe that I couldn’t sleep.”

“What about before that?”

The ghost paused, the question stumbling him. His eyes went distant as he thought. “I was on a ship, coming to find work. I wanted to stay on the coast but I had to come inland. It was a miracle that I found another boat to crew so I could stay on the water.”

“I understand.”

The captain’s gaze sharpened. “No, I don’t think you do. I would have done anything had she asked. But that, to trade my health like that. She didn’t want it either, she was thrilled when I found the boat. But the cost. It was too much even when we found it. I could barely make the payments during a good month, and then when it ran aground,” his voice trailed off.

“Hey,” Heck said, handing him one of the papers. “Leave these for a moment, let me see if I can help. Fresh eyes might find some new corners to pick.”

After they rounded a few corners, something started scratching and scuttling on the other side of the copper wall. The captain grabbed Heck by the shoulder and the tiny footsteps faltered with their stop. After a moment Heck looked at the captain and nodded, cautiously taking an experimental step. A few scuffles on the other side followed, matching his pace. He stepped again and there was another batch of scuttling. He looked quizzically to the captain, and whatever crawled on the other side of the wall took off at a scraping sprint.

“Quickly,” the captain said, “we can’t let them get ahead of us or we’ll have nowhere to go.” Heck took off running after him, pausing just long enough to recognize the feeling of a ladder in his hand. He wasn’t running outside of the fugue, which was good. He threaded his arm through the rung and grabbed his wrist, locking in so he could safely engage with the captain’s presence.

The scuttling sound outpaced them. From the sound there was more than just one thing racing them. The captain kept pulling papers out of his portfolio and letting them fall, taking their path in stride and keeping roughly with the direction of the things outside.

Heck stayed a few paces behind, and was glad for it when the captain skidded to a halt. Instead of the copper tunnel continuing, there was a clean edge where every rivet had been drilled out and the tunnel paneling removed. Blackness loomed outside the tunnel. That, and gravity, telling them that if they’d continued out past where the tunnel was removed they would have fallen.

Across the gap they could see the other half of the tunnel. They also saw dark figures, child-sized but moving with an adult’s sense of coordination and purpose. They worried at the seam of another tunnel section, using sharp talons on each thumb to punch out rivets. The copper groaned as its supports failed, and the section fell away, tumbling into the endless darkness. The creatures watched it fall, then snapped their heads up, staring back across the gap at Heck and the captain. Their features were obscured by the darkness, but their eyes glowed yellow as they backed into the shadows, clinging insect-like to the outside of the copper tunnel.

The captain let out a string of Scandinavian-sounding swear words whose meaning Heck could guess at. “I take it that’s not the first time this has happened?”

“They’re always undoing the path when I make real progress. Every time I need to double back and find another route. It’s maddening.”

Heck leaned out into the darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he saw a tube crossing the gap a short ways away from them and figured he could lead them back towards it. “I think I see where we need to go. Let me take a crack at this. And if those things come back we’ll give them some trouble, okay?”

Heck smiled at the captain’s thrilled face. Taking the lead, he followed his instincts as his mind and influence shaped the path they were taking. He used his participation in the fugue to steer them towards the path he’d seen, which stretched straight ahead into the distance towards the captain’s goal.

It wasn’t long after they started the new path that the scuttling footsteps found them again. Heck raised his hand to stop as the pattering stopped alongside them, just like before. The little gremlins or whatever they were supposed to be weren’t smart, even if they had the advantage of seeing the whole maze. If that was the best they had going for them, Heck could work to take it away.

He reached for the sword on his back and drew it as a sledgehammer, winding up to strike the copper wall of the tunnel. “Cover your ears,” he warned the captain, before twisting at the hips like a baseball player and smashing the hammer into the copper wall. It rang like a cathedral bell. The things on the outside of the tunnel squawked in surprise at the vibration. The pair heard scrambling claws outside, followed by mournful howls as the things fell into the darkness below.

“Well done,” the captain said, yelling some over the ringing in his ears. “Oh well done. Thank you so much. We can continue!” He charged straight ahead down the long, straight path ahead of them, and Heck was once again left to catch up.

The captain’s excitement made sense, as the path ahead stretched farther than any other route they’d seen so far. Heck jogged after the captain, sword in hand. The feeling of doing so reminded him of something, and he remembered too late what it was. A memory surged up beyond his control and invaded the fugue, his presence changing the scene.

The tunnel stretched and the walls became ribbed. The ribs deepened, stretching and losing their uniformity as the surface of the walls changed, cracking and turning into tree bark. They stood on a forest path, leaves swirling in the wind, empty branches stretching overhead like skeletal fingers. Panic surged in Heck like heartburn, and as he begged internally for the path to go away, it moved under their feet like a treadmill, leading them forward. The captain turned to Heck, as confused as the medium was panicked, but said nothing, the fugue out of his control now.

He still held the ladder. Hurting yourself to escape fugue was as taboo as anything for a medium, but he didn’t care. Anything was better than continuing down this forest road. He let go, and the sickening feeling of free fall woke him from the fugue just as the feeling of falling served to wake one up from a dream. Crashing into the grate on the floor sent a twinge of pain through his knee and stole the breath out of his lungs, but at least he had escaped the woods and where they led.

*

Over the next week Heck became an expert in Silt Step's sea air. In the morning it was sharp enough to wake him before his alarm. By noon the sun baked ocean greens exposed by the low tide stank so bad his vision swam. When evening fell, things calmed down and left the town smelling of salt carried on a cool breeze.

Larry Wilmore, the mechanic, continued to roar, even after three days of Heck solving his fugue multiple times. He took careful notes of what changed every time he visited, continuing to keep himself pulled back so that his influence was minimal. Changes were no good if they came from him.

In his notes he recorded what he found out about the captain, whose name was Keller, and who did indeed work the quarry, make a run at fishing, and eventually return to the limestone after his creditors took his house for the wrecked boat. Somewhere during his time at the mines, his daughter was born, though she only survived a week. Her name was Mary Ann, and with that, Heck understood the grim pun behind the name, and that it should have been written Mourning.

There were plenty of questions he could ask and things he could probe to find out more about Keller, his family, and Mary Ann. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to bring himself back to the captain’s deck. Every time his hand touched the ladder, he saw the tunnel of trees, and he knew it was dangerous for him to go any farther. Everything except for that, his limitation keeping him from going back into the risky fugue, made it into his report.

If the fugue could not be solved, the place had to be changed. The boat was the anchor, giving both ghosts unsolvable problems that drove their fugue’s development. Unfortunately, the ship could not be saved, so that meant there was only one thing to do. Heck included that doctored cause in his official report before going forward with his next steps.

*

When Heck finally found a diver who could handle underwater demolition, it didn’t help that the reason for the demolition was ghosts. Insisting that a local landmark housed dangerous spectral activity that would soon become a danger to Silt Step’s citizens and visitors landed about as well as common sense said it would. The threat that the ghost of Larry Wilmore represented to young people and tourists didn’t seem to motivate the demolition expert very much either. In the end, as was often the case, Heck leaned on the federal statutes that gave him the ability to threaten a subpoena and legal action requiring the work.

There was an angle underwater where a century of tides had washed the silt away. It left a ledge, deep and wide enough for the Mary Ann's weight to betray it. Russ, Skipper, and Heck watched from Russ’s whaler as the underwater torch lit up like a firefly. With every hole cut, the engine compartment flooded. At the same time, a portable pump drained the hold, and the metal creaked and groaned at the first change in its leverage in a hundred years. After the final hole was cut and the leaking was unstoppable, the diver retreated. The water spilled in and shifted the weight of the Mary Ann.

The bow leaned and the stern swung out. A bottom half that hadn't seen air in a century swung a seaweed-covered flank out, then back down. The disturbance splashed their little boat with its wake. When the bubbles stopped, it lay flat on its side just under the water.

Heck spent the rest of the week paddling his way up and down the coast, listening for the sound of Keller or Larry and feeling for the pull into their realities. With the boat no longer looming half in and half out of the water, a state of perpetually almost being seaworthy again, their ties were gone along with their painful, hopeless hope. The Mary Ann's Morning lay on its side, its crew finally asleep.

Every night before he left he thought of Keller and struggled to convince himself that there was nothing that could be done. At the end of the day he might have been right, he might have been wrong, but he knew that taking anyone else down forest road was a danger he couldn’t risk, even if that meant lying on every report from here until he was fired.

*

The pit seemed not to have a bottom. Either that or Sid was falling in slow motion. Either way, since the iron grip on his shoulder pushed him forward along the plank and let go, all he knew was falling. Falling, and darkness.

At this point, Sid was too tired to sit bolt upright in bed when the nightmare reached this point. Instead, he just lay there with his eyes closed hoping he hadn’t made enough noise to wake Kat again. The second time he woke her, she’d hit him with a pillow to the face, her reasoning being it was unfair for both of them to lose sleep, so as the non-nightmare haver she got priority.

He didn’t feel like pacing the block again. For all he knew, the brisk air was half the reason he was kept up. But he didn’t really believe that. He knew exactly why he was sleepless. It’s because sleep the past few nights existed in one place, and that place was a deep, black pit.

As for why he kept being thrown into the pit, he didn’t know. What had he done? This was worse than an execution. It was closer to immurement, except that immurement didn’t tease you with the hope of escape. There were tunnels at the bottom of the pit, but he had no idea where they led. It wasn’t like they gave him a flashlight before throwing him down there. What was he meant to do, wander around the tunnels, blind?

Maybe. It was better than staying there in the pile of bones that didn’t even receive enough sunlight to be bleached. Some had clearly died where they fell, but others had died trying to drag themselves deeper underground. Was that his fate? To die down there in the blackness, his legs working but at least trying to make a run for it, somehow? All for a crime he didn’t commit.

Either way, he couldn’t stay down here. It was time. He had to make an attempt down there in the dark. He had to take whatever agency was left to him before it vanished entirely.

He’d barely made it twenty steps into the tunnel before he paused at the gentle hushing sound ahead of him. Something… slithering? He barely had a moment to imagine what horrible new thing this was before a soft, orange glow lit the corner ahead of him. Any relief he felt faded the moment the circular, orange-hot metal brand poked around the corner.

Sid screamed himself awake, not even realizing he’d fallen back asleep. Moments later he crashed into the ground, taking most of the blankets with him. Kat woke up exactly enough for her motor control to slam another pillow where he’d just been. 

Chapter Two

Colloquially, Heck was a medium. In practice, he was more of a ghost psychiatrist, since he held his PhD in haunting remediation from the Riverport Academy of Post-Death Phenomena, and operated under the Academy’s civil authority. Situations like Silt Step made up the bulk of his work: investigate credible hauntings, mitigate any impact to the living, and assess how best to stem any progression to a more dangerous class of ghost if necessary.

By now, ghosts were an accepted part of life, so to speak. Research in the 1970s began the trail to legitimacy with peer reviewed, longitudinal studies establishing the basics of how and why someone might come back from the dead. The idea faced scrutiny until the early 1990s, however. Reality TV in the early 2000s meanwhile nearly sent the field back to the dark ages and was why Heck bent over backwards to avoid being called a “ghost hunter.” Anyone who knew him even a little knew better then to mention Ghostbusters around him. When he was a few drinks deep, he could easily rant about its damage to the prestige of his field for hours. It extended to the point where he couldn’t watch Bill Murray in any of his other films, which was a pity, because he wished he could love Caddyshack.

When the research finally outpaced the skepticism, a few nasty realities cut public interest in ghosts by half: not everyone would become a ghost, not everyone could see or interact with ghosts, and no ghosts chose how they came back or what moments of their life caused their persistence after death. Like quantum physics, boring reality killed the romance and took public interest in the crossfire, relegating ghost study to science fiction writers and the few people with the head for research.

Studying ghosts was perpetually the bleeding edge for these few. Funded, robust study was in its infancy with just a few decades of empiricism fighting against centuries of folklore, horror, and urban legends. Scholars formed entire careers around analyzing observable ghost behavior and tying it back to legends of poltergeists or local myths. Papers published every year looked at origin theories behind why Japanese ghosts were believed not to go around corners, or for relationships between hauntings and the prevalence of vampire myths in the Balkans.

As hard science, ghosts were as contradictory as photons. A ghost caused physiological, measured reactions in people. You could predict when and how someone would be impacted by contact with a ghost. There were classifications for how much detail and interaction one medium could experience versus another. Yet the underlying mechanic behind how a ghost influenced the living remained a mystery.

The strength of a ghost’s appearance was classified as its presence. Presence indicated how easy it was to perceive and how likely its fugue was to engage someone. But presence couldn’t yet be measured by anything other than a medium’s interpretation. Clickbait articles constantly promised new explanations on the origin or nature of ghost physiology “within five years.” Without fail, each of these predictions came and went as the one-sided nature of ghostly interaction reared its head again and again.

Mediums like Heck walked a path that straddled the line between clinical psychologist and field researcher. Less than one in a hundred people could experience the fugue from a Class One, like Larry the mechanic. With Class Ones, presence mostly flowed in one direction, from the ghost to the living. Even with talent it took training and experience to interact with a ghost as more than an observer. It took empathy and creativity to quickly recognize that whether or not the ever-sinking submarine was based on a real memory, it mattered because it represented the struggle of getting the Mary Ann working again and seeing every issue fixed followed by two new ones.

Work like Silt Step was the primary reason why mediums like Heck mattered. A ghost began as a nugget of personality; an idea that crystallized around a person, place, or thing. Depending on the idea, they might spread out and become robust and responsive, the way that Keller had. The captain was a Class Two, able to perceive and interact with Heck beyond simple acknowledgement, unconsciously merging parts of Heck’s influence with his fugue. This exchange allowed mediums to play a deeper role and shape a Class Two’s fugue, though it also opened the risk for too much reaching into Heck’s side of the exchange.

Class Two ghosts were uncommon, but nowhere near as rare as a Class Three. Class Threes held an easy distinction: they knew they were ghosts. They developed full personalities, breaking free from their point of persistence so that they could wander away, exploring their afterlife. Transient, Class Three ghosts, however, were as rare among ghosts as Heck’s ability was among the living.

If a ghost didn't grow and didn't fade, and its original idea continued to gnaw, its persistence might start to hurt. The mechanic hadn’t been far from that. In a few years he could have gone from incidentally almost hurting Heck to actively hurting him, defending the dark cave of his engine room like the Minotaur in its labyrinth. When a ghost became vengeful, trying to hurt others, it earned a new classification: Revenant.

Revenants were the origin of stories behind possession, hauntings, and demons. The mediums who could handle Revenants were few and far between. It meant controlling yourself and controlling a thing that existed purely to attack you, and betting your mind on that control. Heck had written his dissertation on the theory and practice of exorcising Revenants.

Working in ghost research typically meant finding a spot at one of the few institutions dedicated to the field. They had appeared and died like technology start-ups as ghosts became accepted research, and the handful that lasted long enough to make a mark typically grew due to their specialization.

One of the major schools was in Romania, surrounded by mountains that had claimed many lives over years of conflict and shifting rulers. Its facility was built into a castle, complete with dungeon, and the educational experience tended to be intense. Those who made it through were some of the best Revenant-facing mediums in the world.

In Japan, another school produced some of the most thought-provoking research on ancestor history in Eastern philosophy, as well as poetry-adjacent treatises on what it meant to be dead, yet still walk the earth. They frequently butted heads with a school in Vatican City, which took a predictable view on ghosts as figments of the soul needing absolution. As interesting as Heck (sometimes) found those debates, he didn't prescribe to either belief himself. In his opinion, the stress and frustration that people like the mechanic and the captain felt was real and caused them pain. Anything that prevented him from helping alleviate that pain as quickly as possible was a distraction.

Heck's alma mater was in the midsized Riverport Academy. Years before his school was formalized and accredited, it was a corner shop offering private eye services for people who believed they were being haunted. Though the shop seemed silly, the founder, Calvin Hunter, had a doctorate in philosophy and took the job very seriously.

Dr. Haunter, as he was known around the region, recognized that as a locale known for perennial boomtowns with historic fortunes in timber, a gold rush, and a trading hub, the region was as rich a spot to found formal ghost study as any other on the west coast.

Recognizing the roles that work, play, and fear filled in the formation of a ghost, Dr. Haunter developed the class model of ghostly activity. He also made the first set of replicable predictions on where and how ghosts were most likely to appear. When he published his theories and bullied them into the scientific community in 1971, everyone laughed, until the peer reviews started to come in. When other researchers used Haunter’s theory to assert where and when a haunting would occur, or how a Class One encounter explained a previously inexplicable local legend, people started to pay attention, the laughter stopped, and the funding rolled in.

The opportunity for a free education including room and board, endless prospects in an emerging field, and the chance to choose how you carve your path opened up to aspiring mediums. For students who joined at the pre-college level, classes were like any other high school, interspersed with field work observing Class One ghosts to strengthen the synapses that enabled them to experience presence. By the time they graduated, young mediums held conversations with Class Twos, or in extremely rare cases, learned to push back against Revenants. As graduates, they found their niche, either continuing with the work that held their interest or climbing to advanced degrees in research and academia, paving paths for others.

Those who couldn’t sharpen their ability to see and interact with ghosts still had opportunity. Recruiters were an evergreen need. Technology provided new research opportunities for how to spot worldwide ghost activity. The quest to quantify presence constantly drew young dreamers into the race to publish. All members of the field shared one benefit: an instant conversation starter or stopper whenever “what do you do for a living” came up at a party.