Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (best color ebook reader .txt) 📗

“Okay, look. I get it. You want something. I can try to help you get it. But you’ve got to give me a sign. Something to go on. Let me know what I’m working with here. I can’t help you if you don’t give me a clue.”

I felt a pressure on my shoulders, like a pair of frigid hands pressing down with great force. I tried to stand against it, but the cold was too fierce. I dropped to my knees just as I picked up the faint click-click-click of a pair of dress shoes walking down the hall. I pressed my body all the way to the floor and scooted over to the wall as a beam of light shone through the window in the library doors.

I didn’t see a person, but I heard a faint voice saying, “I could have sworn I saw a light…” then the shoes clicked along down the hall, and the wayward guard was gone.

Huh. I guess Eddie upgraded security for this weekend’s show. Whatever else my cold-handed friend wanted, he didn’t want to see me go to jail, so that was definitely a mark in the “friendly” column. I wasn’t ready to call him a full-on Casper yet, but he was getting there.

I sat up, my back to the wall, and looked out into the library. “Okay, pal. I don’t know what’s going on, but you did me a solid, and I appreciate it. Now I just need to know why you’re hassling the library folks. They’re just doing their thing, trying to educate the kiddies. So why do you have to bug them?”

No answer. Of course not. I didn’t give him anything cool to echo. I don’t know why I was calling the ghost a “he,” it hadn’t done anything to indicate a gender, just…there was something about the energy of the thing that felt masculine somehow. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it certainly felt like whatever was in the room with me was male.

“Okay, let’s try this again. One more time, then I’m either going to figure out how to help you cross over, or I’m getting in my truck and driving back to Rock Hill. It’s been a shit night, and I’m not even going to Waffle House with the boys like I usually do after these shows, because I’m hanging out in here with a dead guy. So give me something to let me know why you’re moving shit around in the library. What is it that’s got you all knotted up about this place?”

No response. Well, no sound, anyway. But there was a reply. Kind of. I sat there for a few minutes, then got up and turned to go. As soon as I turned around, a blast of cold hit me in the face so hard it made my teeth chatter.

“D-d-dammit! What the hell was that for?” I turned around, and as soon as I did, the cold abated. Huh. That was weird. I turned to the door again. Same thing, cold air right in my face. I turned away, and I got warmer. Is this how he’s going to communicate? I turned to my left. Nothing. I turned to the right. Cold air, like somebody blowing a hair dryer through an ice block.

I turned back to the left and took a step. No cold. Another step, deeper into the library. Nothing. I walked about five yards into the room before I got another ghostly snowball in the face. I stopped dead in my tracks and backed up a step. I felt a slight cold breeze on my face, more like a draft than anything. I turned left, and it intensified. I turned right, and it went away altogether.

Yep, the ghost was definitely telling me when I was getting warmer or colder from whatever he wanted me to find. I walked toward a set of display cases along the wall, adjusting my course slightly whenever I felt a draft. The ghost steered me with icy air whenever I went off track, and after thirty seconds or so, I stood in front of a locked glass curio cabinet full of knickknacks. The big placard on the wall next to the cabinet proclaimed them “Artifacts of Education,” and described the process of saving these key pieces of Chester County educational history from the old high school before it was demolished.

The crap in the cabinet was mostly just that—crap. But there were some neat things. There was a pair of eyeglasses on a chain that were supposedly worn by the school’s first librarian. There was a diploma from the first African-American student to graduate after desegregation. I even saw a pair of cleats that claimed to be from Marion Campbell, who was an NFL player and coach, at least according to the card. I looked around and got no indication from my unseen guide as to which of these artifacts I was supposed to care about, so I took out my pocketknife and jimmied the cheap lock.

I reached inside the case and lightly touched the cleats. Cold air. I passed my hand over the glasses. Cold air. I brushed the spine of a stack of yearbooks. Cold air. I kept getting blasted with cold air on the back of my neck as I touched each object in the case one after another. It went on so long that I almost didn’t notice when the ghost didn’t freeze-blast me. Then I moved to another item, and got another shot of cold, this one much harder than before. That’s when it hit me—there was no cold air a moment ago.

I looked at the last thing I touched, a pipe leaning up against a well-worn wooden paddle with holes drilled in the surface. The pipe, according to the note, belonged to Colvin Stephenson, long-time principal of Chester High, who passed away in 1987 in his office at the old high school. I picked