1 Chapter 1

“Enter that room at your own peril.”

The unexpected and dire pronouncement startled me. I jerked my hand from the greasy, fragile-looking doorknob and spun around. My alert eyes hunted the penthouse hallway, lit by only a single, dust-laden light bulb glowing directly above me. Apart from the ancient and tarnished cage elevator from which I’d just exited at the end of the long corridor, I could see no other doorways from which the voice might have originated.

My mind was playing tricks on me, I decided. Yeah, that had to be it, damn it to Hades. A lingering effect from last night’s binge of tequila shots and Corona beers, I told myself. A lethal combination for certain if wielded by an inexperienced boozehound…

But then again, a nagging inner voice reminded me, my vast training in that area had never before given me hallucinations. Or put phantom voices in my ears. No novice boozehound here, that’s for sure.

So what the hell was going on?

The longer I stood in the corridor, the more I recollected my morning, piecing it together like a jigsaw puzzle to make certain I hadn’t forgotten an element that could have caused me to hear disembodied voices…

I had barely felt a hangover after I awoke and showered—or rather, I had barely felt it after I’d gulped down the two icy-cold Coronas I’d discovered wedged into the back of the communal fridge. My roommate’s “secret stash.” I had decided that “hair of the dog” would become the perfect breakfast treat, and I hadn’t erred in my reasoning. Screw Jeff and his childish “buddies don’t have to share everything” dictum. All’s fair in love and war—andcollege roommates and hidden booze, especially when a hangover raged total war within one’s head. And never once since awakening with a head-banging sensation had I regretted the decision.

Until now, that is.

Nope, no way in hell had I imagined the voice, the words of warning, I’d just heard. Certainly, it probably wasn’t nasty remnants of the booze after all, I concluded, since by now I felt my normal self.

Perhaps it was the atmosphere that induced my fantasy. And why shouldn’t it? After all, here I stood on a Saturday morning in a seemingly abandoned office building in the center of the town’s historical district. The edifice, itself, had likely passed its one-hundredth birthday long ago, and it showed. The stained and peeling wallpaper, the cobwebbed rafters crossing the cracked ceiling, the eerie shadows and the squeaky floorboards beneath my booted feet…it appeared the building’s cleaning and maintenance crew had taken a century-long siesta. Spooky as anything out of a Stephen King novel, to tell the truth. The only thing missing was a thunderstorm to add Hitchcockian-like movie effects to the mix.

So why shouldn’t I imagine hearing voices, ghosts of the past to accompany the building’s many creaks and groans of old age?

An instant before I made the decision to turn back to the door, to ignore whatever it was that had just happened, I finally detected the silhouette of a man. He stood in a darkened alcove only a few feet away. I gulped. And to say a mere quiver ran through me would have been like describing the infamous 1905 San Francisco Earthquake as a mild shift at the fault lines.

Damn! No tremendous comfort in my discovery. I wasn’t losing my mind after all, just risking my life.

Renewed alarm rushed through me. Nevertheless, I puffed out my chest, the one I’d worked so hard to develop through the past few years, and held my voice as steadily as possible. “Peril? Excuse me, buddy? What do you mean by that?”

Surprisingly, a good-humored chuckle poured from the shadows, sounding anything but sinister. In accordance, my wise-ass nature and suspicion took over. Could this be Jeff, giving me just-revenge for that morning’s “Corona theft”? Or one of my other roommates playing a decidedly unfunny prank on me? Lord knows those crazy buffoons had all razzed me enough after learning about the appointment that had brought me here today. And I wouldn’t have put it past one of those jokesters to show up at this building just to razz me some more.

“I beg your forgiveness,” said the stranger. “I suppose ‘peril’ was not the most appropriate word. I do tend to have a flair toward the dramatic. Please know, I did not mean to startle you, or sound so ominous.”

Nope, no college buddy, I decided, as the voice didn’t sound familiar in the slightest. In fact, I couldn’t recall ever hearing a timbre so deeply rich and musically masculine. And I detected a slight accent, yet I couldn’t quite pinpoint its origin. European, perhaps. “Then what do you want? What did you mean?”

“I guess I just wanted to make certain you knew what you were getting yourself into by entering that room.”

“Should I be afraid? Is that what you’re implying?”

“Well, peculiar things—things a sane man would not typically expect to happen—sometimes do occur in there.”

“Is that so?” Peculiar things, similar to an unexpected encounter with a mystery man in a darkened corridor?I wanted to ask, but didn’t. “Well, what sort of things? It’s just an art studio, for heaven’s sake—”

“Justan art studio? Well, if you can say that, then you truly have no clue what to expect once you venture inside. Someone has not done his research, hmm?”

“Oh? Care to enlighten me about what I’ve neglected to discover?”

More chuckles, ones that tickled the hairs on my arms and chest and the back of my neck. Almost as if a variant breeze had cut through the rotten air and into my clothing to tease my flesh.