“Oh, good, you did find them. The gun he got off a Nazi necromancer and said only another necromancer could make the magic work. The pocket watch . . . well, it wasn’t always a pocket watch. When I met your grandfather it was an elaborate nineteenth-century clock weighing almost twenty pounds. Had to carry it in a suitcase. Over time it changes, or decides to change. Who knows, maybe in another twenty years it’ll look like a cell phone.”

“This is fascinating, and kind of disturbing, history, but—”

“The safe,” she says.

“Yeah. Kind of on a timetable. Why was your phone number in there?”

“I don’t know what the thing is, but it frightened him. He called it a spirit bottle, and got it when he was doing security for some local archaeologists. I’m afraid I don’t have the details. He paid for the phone line and when he died I kept it up. I don’t really know why. He told me to only talk about it if someone from his family called the number. I think he was hoping no one ever would and then it would simply be lost. But, in a weird way, I think he had you in mind.”

“Presumably you know where it is,” I say.

“Oh yes,” she says. “I’m the only one.” She hands me a key with a plastic, teal-colored tag that says AMBASSADOR HOTEL on it. There’s a number on the key, 427. “Now it’s your problem. You’ll find it in that room in the Ambassador Hotel.”

The Ambassador Hotel. Of course. Why not? It’s not like anything else about this is easy. “You do know that the Ambassador was torn down a few years ago, right? It’s not there anymore.” She looks at me like I’m the stupidest kid in school and she’s trying to teach me that two and two is four.

“Of course it isn’t there,” she says. “Not on the living side.”

Chapter 25

It takes me a second to parse what she’s just said.

Items leave a psychic imprint on the landscape. Have something around long enough and it will have an equivalent on the side the ghosts inhabit. It doesn’t even have to be particularly old, it just needs to be imbued with enough people’s attention for enough time.

Things that don’t stay fixed in one location don’t stick around. Cars, for example, or any other vehicles, unless they’re directly related to a haunting, like a ghost train.

But buildings, particularly old buildings where some shit’s gone down, they’re solid as rock. Walls are walls, floors are floors. You want to open a door, you better have the key. There are ways around it, but they’re usually more dangerous than they’re worth.