AllFreeNovel
Share Us
After a shower and a few more sweet kisses, Grant headed downstairs to meet up with the rest of the team while Huck left to go track down Janice and stalk her for the day.
Aurora was the only one in the command center, and she was in the middle of shuffling a stack of papers when Grant walked in.
“Morning!” she said.
“Good morning.” Grant waved, grabbing a seat at the desk next to her. “Where is everybody?”
“Bachata slept through his alarm so he’s running late, and Finn and Cary drove into town because Cary wanted those sausage biscuits from that fast food joint again.” Aurora held up the papers. “Which means you’re the first to hear the most stunning revelation ever, and I expect lots of cake pops in return for my hard work.”
“Oh?” Grant grinned. “Just how stunning?”
“I know why your ghosts are here and the rest aren’t.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.” Aurora held her head up high. “Are you ready?”
“Yes!” Grant exclaimed. “Wait, is it Aztec gods again?”
“No, but it does involve trees. Well, wood. Splinters, if we’re being technical.” Aurora laid out the papers across the desk. They were a combination of newspaper articles and medical reports. “Huck Sharpe fell down the stairs and broke his neck, right? The coroner’s report said he had wooden slivers in an abrasion on his leg. Rebecca Flynn, the famous actress, complained about having a splinter in her foot before she died. Witnesses said she was walking upstairs with one shoe on.”
“Okay.” Grant nodded. “With you so far.”
“The first report of Mrs. Charles’s death said she waspoisonedwith wood stain. It turned into a whole big thing of people claiming she was murdered, which led to the same paper later apologizing and making a correction because, oops, it was actually blood clots related to her fall that killed her. But! Why would they think it was wood stain unless she had some kinda wound where she got poked with a piece of the stairs? Maybe another splinter or something, huh?”
“Bit of a stretch, but all right. I’ll buy it.” Grant read over papers as Aurora handed them to him. “Okay, that just leaves Precipitation Per Chance.”
“Ah! Yes!” Aurora tapped her fingers across the desk. “I’m gonna have to ask you to do some real big stretching here, but he was beaten to death, right? And there’s that one lion statue on the stairs that’s damaged. I asked Myrna about it, and she said it’s been like that for decades. How much do you wanna bet that was the murder weapon?”
“I mean, I guess it’s possible.”
“Come on. Keep stretching. It’s the only thing that connects them all together. If he got hit hard enough with it, maybe some of the wood bits went into his dome.”
“Kinda creepy that there’s a potential murder weapon right there on the stairs, but all right.” Grant thought it over for a moment and then took a deep breath. “So. Everyone who is trapped here literally had some of the Eastern Stairs… inside them?”
“Ew, well it sounds weird when you put it that way, but yes.”
“That explains why that poor employee isn’t here,” Grant mused. “Even though they died on the staircase, I guess they didn’t have any wood chips or splinters or whatever.”
“Oh, but wait.” Aurora grabbed a beat up paperback and gave it a dramatic wave. “There’s more.”
“What’s that?”
“Alton’s book,My Escape From the Sun’s Fiery Grave,” Aurora replied. “It’s taken me a bit because it might just be the most awful thing I’ve ever read in the world, but there is some super fun stuff at the end about what they were trying to do with all the murdery bits. See, they believed the Thing in the Stairs was an alien spirit from another planet.”
“Right, who was gonna take them away in a comet or something.”
“Yes,” Aurora confirmed. “When that didn’t work, Alton and his cult buddies got the genius idea to let the Thing out. It couldn’t help them as long as it was trapped, so they had to help it break whatever bond it had to the stairs. This involves four souls with a final fifth to destroy the link.”
“Wait, souls?” Grant paled.
“Sacrifices.” Aurora grimaced. “They made it to five, but it didn’t work, yeah? That’s when the leader went crazy and started killing everyone. Alton thinks there was something special about that fifth soul that got messed up in translation. The Thing was communicating through their leader with spirit writing, which is how they got the instructions. You know, that whole schtick where the spirit tells the person what to write using psychic guidance or whatever. But, hey, surprise, the Thing only spoke in Latin.”
“Okay.” Grant paused on the latest bit of paper Aurora had passed over. “What the hell is anitorsoul?”
“I don’t know.”
“And this other part…” Grant kept reading, and his stomach dropped to the floor. “Oh no.”
