Pennies for the Ferryman - 01 (8 page)

Darren was a lanky white man in his mid-thirties. Ian described him as soft spoken and somewhat bookish. I’d seen prisoner of war pictures as part of training for the Iraq war. He looked like he’d gotten the crap kicked out of him on a routine basis. I helped him finish off the two that I’d beaten and grabbed his hand.

“Darren, let’s get out of here.” I started dragging him, pain and a sudden weakness coursed up and down my arm. Struggling with his weight, I realized that if a ghost could have an adrenaline rush, Darren just crashed.

“Too weak…I can’t… do it. Ross, I’ve been waiting for you… This is huge… You have to be careful. Get some protections! They’ll come after you like they did me. Find Karla, she has all my notes.”

“Come on! You can tell me all about it later.” Darren shouted something and pushed me to the side. Looking up, I saw the point of the sword coming out of his back as he sagged to the ground.

Darren moaned before releasing my arm,
“Find Karla!”

I scrambled back up to see the wild, angry eyes of Colonel Vincent. He tried to pull his sword back, but Darren rolled away from him. I didn’t need to be touching him to see that he was mouthing “run.”

Screw that! I was angry. Darren was trying to warn me about something. I came at Vincent swinging. The first blow caught him on the shoulder and sent him to the ground where I kicked him. He rolled away from my kick, pulling my leg with him.

We struggled to our feet and grappled. I did some of that kickboxing crap that Hodges and Porkchop used to do in my prior life and drove my knee into his gut.

“Intruder! Send reinforcements!”
he roared after he got his breath back. In a way, it was ironic that a ghost still needed to breathe.

I could hear him screaming for help. I wound up, planning to finish him, but he caught my wrist on the downswing.

“Do you think me beaten? Never!”
He punched me in the gut, forcing air out of my lungs and sending me tottering backwards. I lost my grip on the wrench which he easily held in the air.

I knew he wasn’t a run of the mill ghost. He was just as dangerous as Jenny’s mom. I could see shapes moving in the distance. I bumped into Darren’s body and could see it completely fading. There was a look of profound sorrow on his face. A second later only Vincent’s saber remained.

He held my wrench, so I figured that turnabout was fair play. I scooped up the saber in my hands. It felt real enough, and even in the dim light, his eyes widened. I slashed at him and he blocked with the wrench, causing actual sparks where sword met tool. Vincent quickly tried to get close enough to grapple, but I smashed the pommel guard into his face. With a downward slash, I sliced his leg. He fell backwards and turned, diving into the ground like a swimmer.

Snatching the wrench from the ground, I saw others running towards me. Army doctrine says that in these situations, the soldier is to calmly evaluate the situation and determine the best course of action. Yeah, I ran like hell. One came close enough to me to make me worry. I ran him through with the blade and then cracked him in the skull with the wrench.

Vincent came back out of the ground ahead of me, blocking my path. He was glowing brighter than the rest. Almost like the special effects in those Star Wars movies, he hurled a heavy flowerpot at me. It was about at this moment that the stray thought intruded that maybe he was more dangerous than Jenny’s mom. I could admit when I was wrong.

Fortunately, I was also the best in my gym class at dodgeball – good thing too. Vincent’s glow diminished, but his anger was still there. He dodged my sword slash. I ran right past him. He was just trying to slow me down.

My big problem was that I needed to run around objects and they could just run through them. On the bright side, I had a sword and no one else seemed to. It made me wonder if there were any soldiers who were buried with muskets; would the guns still fire?

One fast little bugger got close enough and I cut his hand off. By then I was running flat out. I could see Jenny’s car in the distance. She was leaning on side of the car looking bored.

“Jenny! Let’s go! Let’s go!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Graveyard full of ghosts chasing me! We need to leave!” I dived into the car as she started the engine. I didn’t calm down until we were ten miles down the road.

Jenny couldn’t see the saber, but she felt cool when I sat it on her leg. She thought the idea of wielding a ghost’s sword was “utterly cool.” The whole stabbing people thing didn’t seem to bother her.

“Well, they’re already dead, aren’t they? They can’t get any deader, right?”

“I think we need to stay away from Gettysburg for now. The less they know about me the better.”

Jenny got quiet – extremely quiet.

“Jenny? What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You know that dramatic writing assignment for English? I wrote the story of our adventure like a news article. Professor Weathers told me to send it off to the Weekly World News. I got their acceptance letter and a check yesterday.”

“What!”

“How was I supposed to know that you were going to run into some ghost conspiracy? I was planning on splitting the money with you. It’s going in the next issue. Ghosts probably don’t read that thing anyway.”

Somehow her reassurances weren’t all that comforting.

It was a long, cold drive back to Maryland.

Episode 3: Looking for Death in all the Wrong Places

“Mrs. Rosemont,” I said, trying not to sound annoyed, “I really can’t find anything. Are you certain that your furniture is moving around at night?”

“Young man, I may be quite old, but I do know what I see: that paper with the article about you saving that girl keeps turning up near my telephone.”

Megan Rosemont was an eighty-three year old widow, whom I had already visited twice before. I almost didn’t come back this time, but she was adamant that things were happening in her home in Rockville, Maryland. Thus, I found myself standing in the doorway of her meticulously clean house once more.

I grimaced at the sight of the clipping from
The Weekly World News.
It featured Jenny Goodman’s hard-to-believe story of how I sort of broke a ghostly curse in her life as an assignment in her English class. She then had the brass to send the story to one of those supermarket tabloid papers, and they bought it!

Despite her offer of a cut of the money, I’d been giving her the silent treatment for about a week now.
She
didn’t have to answer the phones at the Ross household from the numerous nut jobs.
She
didn’t have to explain my new-found ability to see, hear and touch spirits to my skeptical mother.
She
didn’t get a wonderful lecture from that same mother about how I was following in the footsteps of my deadbeat, insurance-selling father, David Michael Ross
Senior
, who’d made his living by conning people out of their hard-earned money and giving them precious little in return.

At least I knew why our English teacher kept looking at me funny.

Most importantly, Jenny Goodman didn’t have to worry about the cryptic warning I’d received from Darren Porter, the psychic whose donated cornea dragged me kicking and screaming into a world that I never wanted to believe in. Whoever the “they” were that frightened Darren, I sincerely hoped that “they” don’t read the magazines while standing in line for their groceries!

Instead, Jenny kept saying how I needed to set up a website and go into the “paranormal investigation” business!

Needless to say, I was annoyed at her for the moment. She was cute, curvy and exuberant, but at times she displayed an annoying habit of leaping long before looking. Although, to be honest, while I was peeved at all the whack-job phone calls I’d received since publication of the article, a few of the phone calls brought some much-needed cash into my wallet.

Money was always tight around the Ross household, ever since I could remember and more things were breaking around the house than were getting fixed. The furnace barely made it through last winter and until there was enough money to get a transmission fixed, Mom’s car was a four door paperweight in our driveway. The only reason I hadn’t taken Jenny’s offer of splitting the money was because I was just as stubborn as I’m poor – not a spectacular combination if you ask me.

Closing my ‘normal’ left eye, I scanned the room for any signs of a ghost and found none. At least, I didn’t need to wear the eye patch as much and my vision was improving. Either someone was messing with Mrs. Rosemont or she was clinging to the hope that a spirit was trying to contact her. Taking her money made me feel guilty.

I didn’t have anything to do that afternoon, so I tried to make myself useful to the pleasant, but possibly batty woman offering me too sweet tea. “No, nothing in here, either – who do you believe is trying to contact you?”

“My granddaughter, Elsbeth passed away in a dreadful car accident a year ago. Her husband, Charles, will be by shortly. Would you like to stay and meet him?”

The image of being berated by the beefy looking monster in his early thirties I’d seen in the pictures on the mantle played across my mind. I didn’t like how it turned out, so I shook my head. The mousy looking brunette woman in the wedding picture dwarfed by the large man must be the late Elsbeth Snowden.

“Well I suppose I should get my pocketbook…”

“How about we just call it a free check up this time instead?” The fifty bucks would’ve been nice, but this wasn’t actually helping with her loneliness.

We were still haggling; Megan wanted to at least cover my bus fare, when there was a knock at the door. Damn, I hadn’t gotten out in time. I hoped that Charles was smaller than he was in the pictures. From the number on his college football jersey, he played offensive line for James Madison University a decade ago.

Those hopes were dashed, as I watched the man literally squeeze his way through the door frame, “Hello, Grandma Meg. I stopped and picked your replacement prescription up as well as some lunch. Oh I’m sorry; I didn’t know you were entertaining.”

“Charles, this is Michael Ross.”

He held out a meaty paw that enveloped my hand, “Charlie Snowden. I’m pleased to meet you. Is there anything I can help you with?”

I put on my best casual smile, “No, we were just finishing up here.”

“What exactly do you do, Mr. Ross?”

I was about to reply ‘Radon Gas Inspections’ when Megan offered, “He investigates the paranormal. Michael has been looking into all those strange happenings.”

Charlie let my hand go rather quickly and gave me a hard stare. Maybe I was being a bit self-conscious about my new vocation combined with the fact that he was almost a foot taller than me, but I’d be damned before I was going to let him intimidate me.
 
I wasn’t an ex-combat vet for nothing. His big act falls a bit flat in comparison to the uncertainty of living with the prospect of sudden death for months at a time, not to mention my subsequent encounters with the supernatural.

“And what exactly have you found,
Mr. Ross
?”

“I haven’t found anything at all, Mr. Snowden,” I replied politely. “If there was something here, it’s not here now and it hasn’t left any trace. That’s why I’m not charging a fee for this visit.”

He set the Walgreen’s bag on the counter next to the bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. “That’s…very
nice
of you Mr. Ross. Well in that case, I’ll walk you out; be right back Grandma.”

He was decent enough to hold the door open for me and allowed me to get about ten steps down the driveway before he put his hand on my shoulder. “Mr. Ross, if I might offer some friendly advice, don’t let me catch you around here again. If I do, well, I might call the police after I beat the living shit out of you. She may not be
my
Grandmother, but I don’t like seeing some piece of shit like you taking advantage of her when she’s getting older and her mind isn’t what it used to be. Now why don’t you just go and find some other stupid mark to steal money from.”