The Downside Ghosts Series Books 1-3: Unholy Ghosts, Unholy Magic, City of Ghosts

“Tonight.” She drew a hard breath through her nose and let it out slow. Fuck the airport. She’d either find out if there were other ghosts there or she wouldn’t, but there was no fucking way she was letting an entity attach itself to her like a fucking metaphysical tapeworm. “We do the ritual tonight.”

Terrible slid his Chevelle into a spot on Thirty-fifth as neatly as a puzzle piece. Chess got out before he’d made it around to open her door for her. It didn’t feel right to let him do it, not anymore. If it bothered him he didn’t say anything.

She’d never visited the pipes here, but the man guarding the door looked familiar. He barely looked at her as he nodded at Terrible and stepped out of the way.

“Hey, Bone,” Terrible said. “Old-timer Earl in there?”

“Aye. Five minutes ago, maybe. Sent him down, but I ain’t tell him you coming.”

“Good. C’mon, Chess.”

She followed him through the heavy wooden door into the hall covered with faded green paper and carpeted with thick brown shag. The faint odor of Dream filled it, Dream and bodies and whiskey from the saloon at the end. She would have known she was in one of Bump’s rooms even if she hadn’t known, just from the color on the walls and the jazzy lounge music piped in. He thought it helped keep fights from breaking out while people waited. Probably not true, as it drove everyone she knew nuts, but Bump insisted.

On busy nights and first thing in the morning the line to use the pipe room would stretch all the way down the hall, even into the street on a weekend, but afternoon traffic was light. They headed into the saloon, where another guard waited to open the door for them.

“Want a drink first?” Terrible asked, but she shook her head. Who could think of drinking anything, of doing anything, when they were so close? And it had been so long. She needed her pills, but Dream … Dream was like a dozen pills all at once, Dream was like falling asleep on a cloud. Dream was forgetting the world even existed, much less her own self.

And she couldn’t have any. Not now. But she could smell it, she could watch. She could live vicariously through the lucky few lounging with their pipes. When this was all over …

The room she usually visited, the one off the Market, was blue. This one was red, a rich crimson that glowed in the light from the candles and the dim oil lamps under the pipes. Red glass chandeliers floated in the space between the high, arched ceiling, once white but now dirty ivory from smoke, and the vast room below. Red couches, curved like seashells, rested in groups around the gleaming hookahs in the back and trays of single pipes near the front.

Most of the couches were empty, but some held people, their bodies stretched on the wide seats as they smoked or stared at the ceiling or dozed off.

And even in the middle of the day the attendants wandered ceaselessly between the couches like characters in a well-choreographed ballet, spearing small lumps of sticky Dream on long, silver needles and shaping them expertly over silver dishes, ready to pop into the pipes to be dissolved into smoke. They handed out fresh pipes and took the used ones back to be cleaned, wiped out Dream bowls with tools like tiny hockey sticks and collected the ashes. They trimmed the lamp wicks and refilled the pots of oil. All of these tasks they performed silently, with only the scraping of metal against metal and the snick of their trimming scissors announcing their presence.

With no windows it could easily have been nighttime down here in the cellar, but the feeling of daylight still clung to Chess’s skin and clothing. The cavernous room was less like an escape than it was a cafeteria before the lunch rush, a stage set for a party no one was attending. Even the smell of smoke, so heavily ingrained into the furniture and walls she doubted it would ever come out, didn’t manage to change that impression.

“That’s he, there.” Terrible nodded to one of the occupied couches and headed down the stairs. Chess followed, trying to pick out which one he’d indicated while at the same time watching her step.

They reached the bottom and turned, weaving their way between the couches and the attendants, until they reached a low, straight, padded platform against the wall. On it lounged a man who could only be Old-timer Earl.

Old-timer wasn’t quite right. Ancient worked better. No other word fit the wizened creature on the cushions, his bony legs drawn up almost to his chest, the knobs of his wrists huge against his scrawny forearms and arthritic hands. An attendant rolled his bowl for him, manipulating the Dream ball with her needle, moving off to the side when Terrible jerked his head at her.

“Lady gotta word with you, Earl,” he said. “Bump wants you tell her some things.”

Earl pulled his mouth away from the pipe and glared at Terrible with dozy eyes. “Ayegahnotrubblooump,” he rasped. It took Chess a minute to translate that in her head to I got no trouble with Bump. Great.

“Ain’t say you got trouble with him. Only might be, you don’t answer the lady. Aye?”

Earl frowned. Terrible nodded at the attendant, who pulled her needle away, leaving Earl with an empty pipe.

“Ey!”

Terrible shrugged. “Answer the questions, she bring it back.”

“Fy, fy. Brinback, aye? Esswastin.”

Once she got used to his slurred speech, it wasn’t so bad. A good thing, because when she asked him about Chester the floodgates opened.

“Always bad, there. Bad luck. Don’t know why they built that damn thing there. Back in forty-one, y’know, things was booming. Then the war started, got booming even more. And so many people! This city sure something to see back then. Even here. Never a rich part of town, get it, but we had style then. Not like today.”

Chess and Terrible exchanged glances. He was describing a time over eighty years before, how did he know what the city was like then? He looked old, sure, but …

“I see what you’re thinking.” He gave a short, sharp cackle that made Chess jump. “You don’t know how old I am, neither do I. But I was there, oh yes, maybe a little older than Mr. Terrible here, and I remember it all. Lots of us grumbled when they built that airport. Wasn’t right, using that land again, no ma’am it wasn’t.”

Wan’tight, usinatlanagin, nomamiwan’t. The cadences of his speech drew her in, made her lean forward. “What do you mean, using it again?”

He took another long drag from his pipe and blew out a thick steam of dirty tan smoke. “I’m getting there, missy, don’t you rush me.”

“Ain’t got all day, Earl.”

“Don’t you start with me either, boy. I tell it my own time, my own way. You wanted me to talk, you’re getting talk. Just you relax.”

Terrible raised an eyebrow, but did not reply. Earl nodded.

“Some of us tried to tell them no, when they talked about it. Building there, I means. Those days there was more land than you could shake a stick at. Guess it was kind of like it is now, only half the population hadn’t died. Or hadn’t died yet. Those damn Nazis and their Jap and Dago buddies sure killed enough in the years to come, oh yes. Near enough killed me, at least, one of them traitorous slimebag Vichy did. Wanna see my scar?”

His leer should have disgusted her, but the smoke was going to her head and she was finding his offensive patter oddly amusing. She’d never heard such words actually used in conversation before. It fascinated her.

At least, it did until she thought about Lex, about what those bygone words actually meant. Earl probably wouldn’t have been so eager to show her a scar on what she thought must be someplace normally hidden by layers of cloth if he knew who’d been seeing her bare skin—and exploring it fairly thoroughly—only a few hours before. Twice. Lex wasn’t Japanese, but she doubted Earl would care about the distinction.

“No, thanks.”

“Got some scars of your own, I see. And bruises. Did Terrible here do that to your face?”

“What?” She’d actually almost forgotten. “Oh, no! No. I fell.”

Earl made a face. “Sure you did. My momma used to say that, too.” He sucked in another chestful of smoke, his eyelids fluttering.

“But like I said, there was plenty of places for them to build their airport, instead of on those grounds. Wouldn’t have been so bad if they built homes or stores, but to bring planes there again just seemed wrong.”

“What do you mean, planes? Nothing was on that land before—what was there before?” The documents at the Church hadn’t said anything about the way the land was used before Chester was built.

Earl shook his head. “Such a terrible tragedy. I was just a boy then but even I remember when it happened, the night bright like I’d never seen before and didn’t see again until I got shipped overseas. Them flames rose so high looked like they were trying to burn down heaven—that was when we thought such a thing existed, you know, I ain’t saying it now.”

“Of course. Go on, please. What burned?”

“The base. The air base. Thought the Hun had crossed the ocean to get us.”

“The Hun? Wasn’t Germany the Nazis then?”

He glared at her. “What you think, missy, you think I don’t know the difference betwixt Hitler and Wilhelm? I say the Huns I mean the Huns. That fire happened when the air base stood, the base, not that damned Chester Airport. Not World War Two. The Great War. That base—Greenwood, they called it—burned down in 1917.”

Chapter Twenty-eight (#ulink_8264210a-7d1d-5709-aefe-5aef20051d19)

“We must forgive the Old Government their failings. They understood not the consequences of their actions; they denied the Truth of the spirit world.”

—A History of the Old Government, Volume II: 1620–1800, from the introduction by the Grand Elder