I turned to take in the strange netherworld around me. With the exception of the lovely old library, the original Fulton Falls was a corpse, slowly rotting in its coffin. I swallowed. “I can’t say I like the rest of this much.”
Dan squeezed my hand. “Being in the dark like this feels depressing, but you can go above ground anytime you like.”
A small beam of light two buildings down caught my attention, and I let go of Dan to carefully pick my way down the debris-rubbled street to look. A grate covering a storm drain let sunlight in overhead, and I listened to the sounds of life I still took for granted; car motors, the thrum of conversation, and birdsong.
Dan followed me and I looked at him, grateful to see him in the golden light instead of the strange wash of gray that permeated the ruined city. “Are we under a street here?”
“Altamaha Drive is right above us.”
I shuffled through the debris below the grate, trash washed down by the frequent spring rains, no doubt. A gleam of metal caught my attention, and I stooped to see a woman’s gold class ring with a dainty sapphire stone. “Look at that,” I said to Dan. “Someone’s going to be upset she lost it.”
I reached and closed my hand over it. I felt the cool metal against my fingertips and then a strange numb sensation as the ring passed right through my grasp. I looked up at Dan with wide eyes.
“Okay, I don’t like this at all.”
He crouched next to me, his expression soothing. “You can manipulate physical objects from the living world, but you have to draw energy.”
“How do I do that?” For some reason not being able to pick up the ring really bothered me.
“Most of us pull from the natural magnetic field around us.” At my impatient huff, he coached, “Close your eyes.”
I did so, though shutting out his handsomely craggy face seemed like a crime.
“Do you feel a pulsing around you, like a soft heartbeat?”
I went very still, trying to sense the atmosphere around me. A horn honked in the world above. Someone laughed, the sound an eternity away. Beneath it all I sensed a low thrum that ebbed and flowed, something deep enough to pull at me. “Yes, I feel that.”
“Now relax and think about drawing it into you. Think of yourself as a magnet attracting it or a sponge soaking it in. There you go.”
The approval in his voice strengthened me, and I felt a prickly hum run through my body. “It kind of tickles,” I told Dan.
“Okay, now try to pick up the ring.”
I opened my eyes and noticed how my hands seemed to exude the same glow as the old library. Fascinating. I closed my finger and thumb over the ring again, and this time I was able to lift it.
“Wow, it works. Hey, am I brighter to you?”
He grinned at me. “Yes, brighter and more solid. If a living person was here, he might see you as an indistinct shadow or mist right now.”
My grip suddenly felt numb, and my finger and thumb met. The ring clattered to the ground. “Fudge,” I griped.
Dan patted my shoulder. “Pulling energy will become second nature as you get used to it.” He straightened and pulled me to my feet. Tugging me along, we ventured further down the street. “It just takes practice, and you have eternity to get it right.”
I skipped over a large rock in my path. “Are there stronger sources than the magnet field?”
“Magnetic field,” he gently corrected. “Batteries are excellent sources to pull from. We can also pull from each other, but it’s bad form to do so. It’s incredibly painful and stealing energy from another spirit will turn them into wraiths. Do it long enough, and the wraith will wink completely out of existence.”
I skirted a rusted spike of rebar despite realizing I could probably walk right through it. “I thought wraiths were spirits of the dead. What’s the difference between me and a wraith?”
He grimaced. “What we call wraiths down here are ghosts of ghosts. It’s a terrible way to be, and an even worse way to die.”
I shuddered. “Sounds like it.”
Dan toured me around the remains of old Fulton Falls’ downtown where most businesses and government buildings had been buried. One building in particular was completely missing: the Armory, where the Fire of ’36 had started. A drunken private had accidentally set off some rounds of ammo, hitting several hydrogen tanks. The nearby naval airbase, which had a small fleet of zeppelins, stored their surplus there. In a conflagration that seemed an ominous foreshadowing of the following year’s Hindenburg disaster, a sizeable portion of Fulton Falls went up. It was said the explosion at the Armory could be felt clear out to Jesup, a town that sat an hour away by car.