Page 9 of Rattling Bone (OutFoxing the Paranormal #2)

CHAPTER NINE

“Oscar!” Nigel shouted, his heart seizing as Oscar slumped on the treacherous catwalk high above. He started for the stairs, but Tina grabbed his arm.

“Wait!” she ordered. “Chris is on it!”

Chris put down their camera, then dashed up the stairs, the steel ringing and groaning beneath their boots. They dropped down by Oscar, grabbing his chin and tilting his head back to look in his face.

Oscar seemed to come out of his daze. He pulled away, then clasped Chris’s hand. “I’m okay.”

Relief battled with concern. “You should come down,” Nigel called.

“In a minute.” Oscar’s voice sounded stronger. “Chris, get the tripod and thermal camera set up.”

“What happened?” Chris asked worriedly.

“Just a moment of dizziness,” Oscar replied. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you later.”

“He sensed something,” Tina murmured to Nigel.

It seemed likely. He watched anxiously while Chris set up the camera, and Oscar drank from a water bottle. Once the camera was in place, Chris pulled a canister of salt from his backpack and poured a circle around it. It was a preventative measure to keep any spirits from draining the battery, but Nigel wasn’t sure if it would work this time, given how much salt fell through the open grating.

Once they were both back down to ground level, Nigel resisted the urge to hurl himself at Oscar. “You gave us a turn,” he said instead, putting a hand to Oscar’s shoulder.

Oscar’s mouth quirked slightly. “I gave myself a turn, if that’s any consolation.”

“Not particularly.”

“Where to next?” Tina asked.

“I’d suggest we make for the powerhouse, stopping at any other buildings on the way to look for places to set up the extra cameras.” Nigel glanced at Oscar for confirmation.

Oscar grabbed up the equipment he’d put down for the climb to the catwalk. “Sounds good.”

* * *

As they stepped out of the distillery building into the pale winter daylight, the fine hairs on the back of Oscar’s neck prickled.

They were being watched; he was more certain of that than ever.

He cast about at the ruined buildings, the winter-gray overgrowth, the steep slope of the mountain dominated by the ancient oak. Nothing.

At least, nothing visible.

The original buildings were clustered tightly together, so it was only a short distance to the powerhouse. Its brick smokestack towered above every other structure on the lot, still standing solid against the overcast sky. If it had been spring or summer, likely chimney swifts would have been swooping in and out. But in the dead of winter, the stack was as abandoned as everything around it.

The door opened onto a long, large hall. To one side, grimy windows let in thin light; one of them had broken, and vines reached inside like grasping hands. From above, large metal chutes, constructed in pairs, fed into what looked like some sort of enclosed bin with large grinding teeth at the bottom. The air had a chill in it that seemed deeper than outside.

“I wonder what all of this did?” Nigel said, the beam of his headlamp sweeping over the corroding machinery.

“Coal feeders,” Tina said, pointing at the chutes. “They’re feeding into the pulverizers, to reduce the chunks before going into the boiler, which is probably on the other side of that wall. Judging by the layout of the building, the turbine hall is probably above us.” She grinned at his startled expression. “What? Oscar is into old houses; I’m into power plants.”

“Nerd,” Chris said as they stopped to snap some still pictures of the manufacturer’s nameplates on various pieces of equipment. Tina stuck her tongue out at them.

A loud clanging sound echoed from above.

Everyone froze and fell silent. “What was that?” Tina whispered after a long moment when nothing else happened.

Chris shook their head. “It almost sounded like someone dropping a tool on the floor above.”

“Could someone be in here?” Nigel asked. “Someone living, I mean.”

“Only if they hiked in instead of drove,” Oscar said. He looked around carefully, then made for the steel stairs leading up to the next level. “I’m going up.”

Nigel grabbed his sleeve. “Be careful.”

“I will.”

Oscar swallowed and put his foot on the metal grating of the stairs. It felt solid, so he went up another two steps.

A set of quiet footsteps, barely audible, crossed the floor above, just out of sight of where he stood.

Gooseflesh rose on his arms, and he swallowed hard. “Hello?” he called. “Is there someone else here? We’re not here to hurt you.”

Only silence answered. But every sense screamed at him that someone was present, was right there just out of sight.

Oscar took a deep breath—and charged up the rest of the stairs.

Weak sunlight fought through the grime coating the overhead skylights, and the windows puncturing the walls—dim, but enough for him to see most of the room clearly.

No one was there.

* * *

“No one up here,” Oscar called down. “No one living, anyway.”

Nigel shivered. They’d all heard the clang and the footsteps; there had definitely been a presence above them just now.

“Is it safe to come up?” Chris called.

“Yeah, it’s solid.”

This flight was shorter than the ones in the distilling room and let out onto a concrete floor at the top. Pipes ran up—or down?—through the large opening in the floor that accommodated the stairs, and there was a matching opening on the other side of the room, though with less pipes. In the center was the turbine itself, its inner workings hidden behind thick steel.

Chris half-circled the turbine to get some footage, before swapping out the camera to get some still shots. “Is it just me, or is this place oddly clean?” they asked.

Nigel ran his boot over the smooth concrete. There was some grit, but less than they’d seen in the distilling room. “The windows up here are intact and there aren’t any open doors—perhaps not as much dust blows in?”

“That’s a good possibility,” Oscar agreed. “Unless Edwin Corbett is spending his afterlife sweeping up.”

Nigel looked around. Within the turbine hall, there was an enclosed brick room with windows looking out into the hall itself. “Tina, do you know what that room is?”

“The control room,” she said confidently. “Hey, Chris, there might be some cool shots in there for you.”

“On my way there next.”

Nigel approached Oscar. “Do you want to set up the laser grid or night vision camera in here?”

“Hold up a minute.” Oscar put a hand on Nigel’s shoulder, squeezing gently. “I know we have a job to do, but take a second to appreciate how cool this place is.”

Nigel blinked, then looked around. “I suppose?”

“Well, maybe it’s not for everyone.” Oscar took a step forward, gesturing at the turbine. “But this is one of the reasons we decided to ghost hunt in abandoned buildings. People built these places, sometimes a long time ago, and worked in them, and improved on them…and then left, for one reason or another. But the buildings are still here, slowly crumbling back into dust. Still holding onto the memories of those people, maybe long after they’ve passed on.”

Nigel was silent for a moment, absorbing Oscar’s words. This was one of the things he loved about Oscar—the way he looked at things, his appreciation for the weight of history. “I hadn’t thought about it that way,” he said at last.

“Yeah, well.” Oscar shrugged. “Maybe I’m weird…”

“No, I like the way you look at things.” Nigel said, smiling up at him. “Thank you for sharing it.”

Oscar gave him a quick kiss, more like a brush of the lips. “I’m thinking the night vision camera.” He frowned. “It would help to know where Edwin Corbett was electrocuted.”

“Tina might have an idea. I’ll ask her.”

Nigel crossed the hall and stuck his head into the control room. A bewildering number of metal control panels greeted him; the instrumentation looked as though it dated from the 1940s at the latest. Chris was eagerly photographing the peeling paint, old dials, and toggle switches.

Tina stood at one of a series of desks—stations?—in the center of the room, ruffling through an old logbook of some kind. She looked up when he cleared his throat.

“Where was the most likely place for Edwin Corbett to have been electrocuted?” he asked. “Can you guess?”

She thought for a long moment. “The switching room, I suppose,” she said slowly. “Where the manual breakers are.”

“And that would be…?”

“Adjacent to the turbine hall.” She stepped out of the room, Nigel following, and pointed to a door in the opposite corner. “Probably there. Let’s take a look.”

Through the door lay a long corridor that ran alongside the wall of the turbine hall as she’d predicted. Unlike every other room they’d been in, this one had only a single window at each end, whose grimy panes barely permitted any light to enter.

Nigel switched his headlamp on to reveal a dreary sight. One side was completely lined with metal panels set with dials, knobs, and heavy breakers. Their yellowish paint peeled, tiny flakes forming piles on the floor.

The air of the long room carried a deep chill, and he wished he’d thought to bring a scarf. “We should tell Chris to put the night vision camera at one end,” he suggested.

“He’ll want to get some shots of this,” Tina said, reaching to touch one of the panels.

There was an unexpectedly loud crackle of static electricity, and she yanked her hand back with a startled shout. “Fuck!”

“Are you all right?” Nigel asked, at the same time Oscar called from the main hall: “Tina?”

“I’m fine!” she shouted back, wringing her hand.

A moment later, Oscar stepped inside the hallway. His eyes widened—was he sensing something they couldn’t? “What happened?”

“Just static electricity,” Tina replied. “Dry winter air, metal…” she trailed off, staring at her hand.

A feeling of dread settled in Nigel’s gut. “Tina?”

Silently, she held out her hand. On the tip of the finger that had touched the panel was a bright, red burn.