It Waits on the Top Floor

Thursday night, it was a dirt lot.

Friday morning, it was a 60-story skyscraper.

A tech billionaire wants the building’s secrets for herself. She hires a team to reverse-engineer the overnight construction. But she knows more than she’s letting on.

A curious 9-year-old decides there’s treasure inside, and goes exploring. His terrified dad chases close behind. Inside, the facade of an empty office building is quickly shattered. Ghostly figures stalk the explorers. The walls themselves are hungry. And something is waiting on the top floor.

Chapter 1

A crooked skyscraper sprung up overnight.
Chris stood in his driveway. November chill seeped through his bathrobe. It was colder than last night, as if the new tower had brought a cold front with it.
Chris loved the simple Richmond skyline, and he knew every angle and window. He'd hoped to design a building for it one day.
This new tower didn’t belong. It was off by itself, in Northside somewhere, where it was all neighborhoods. Residential zoning issues weren't quite as eerie as the fact that last night, the building hadn't been there.
Almost as weird: Chris recognized the building. He thought he might have once sketched its twisting tiers, its off-center penthouse.
The tower felt like it belonged to him.
But he'd finished his architecture degrees five years ago, and he'd worked on a grand total of four projects since then. He couldn't place the tugging familiarity of this new building.
"Well?" His wife, Sherri, tapped on the steering wheel in her rumbling Ford. "You chase me out here, beg me to wait, and now what? Your head's right back in the clouds."
Chris looked down at her. He snapped back to his immediate situation. After a night of insomnia, Chris had gone upstairs to find Sherri stuffing clothes into the cherry red Samsonite luggage he'd bought her for Christmas.
It didn't surprise him she was leaving.
But the timing was a kick in the groin—and not just to Chris.
He pulled his bathrobe tight against the cold. He had one chance to sketch out a reason Sherri should stay. Only one angle to take, really. "Did you wake up Eddie to tell him, or am I supposed to break the news?"
Sherri swallowed. She teared up.
Hope flickered inside Chris. Would she change her mind?
"How could you ask me that? This isn't easy for me, either."
"Then don't leave." Chris bit his tongue. He'd let too much exasperation into his voice. Now she'd be mad.
"Tell Eddie I'm sorry. You'll be a good dad. I'm not cut out for this."
Chris resisted the urge to reach for Sherri's hand. The car's heat drifted up to his cheeks. No reason he drew for her would change her mind. He shouldn't have tried at all. Now, he looked like a manipulative loser. He'd never win her back now that she was seeing him like this.
He hated himself for that last thought. "Was your signature on the adoption paperwork even dry before you started the divorce papers?"
Sherri's expression turned sharp. "You should be thanking me. If I'd left when I wanted to, the State wouldn't have finalized the adoption."
Chris leaned back to breathe in the cold, damp air. The new skyscraper grabbed his attention again. It wasn't his design. He was confident in that. But he remembered the scrape of the pencil on drafting paper as he filled in the shadows where the tiers twisted at odd angles. Maybe it'd been an assignment to copy an existing drawing? But even that didn't quite explain why he felt like the tower was his.
"This is why we can't work." Sherri shook her head. "Anything bad happens, you withdraw. What was all that therapy for if you never learned to talk to me?"
Her hypocrisy yanked him back. "Remind me how many times you talked about separation? Help me remember. Was it zero? Zero times?"
"You pushed me into an adoption I wasn't sure about."
"Eddie's been part of our family for three years!"
"On and off. I agreed to be a foster parent, not a permanent mother.”
"The paperwork you signed last week says otherwise!"
"You can do this on your own."
"I can't even pay for this house on my own."
"Stop yelling at me."
"Oh, the volume of my voice is the real offense here? Not the fact that now I have to tell Eddie, hey, you know how your bio mom got really into meth after your bio dad died? Well guess what? It's time for another abandonment! So forget the bedroom we painted that garish red color that you love, and the family portrait we took by the river! Forget anything else we did to drill into your little impressionable skull that you're now in a stable home. Because—surprise!—the whole world's shaking again, and the Haberman household is not rated for seismic shocks."
His chest heaved. He watched for Sherri's reaction. He knew later he'd think he'd gone too far, but right now, it was cathartic.
Sherri stared through the windshield. Mascara smudged in the corner of her eyes. "Just mom."
"What?"
"Don't call her Eddie's 'bio mom.' She's just his mom."
A stupid thing to say. Legally, Sherri was now mom. But apparently, she'd never embraced it.
Everything shifted. He'd wanted to woo her back, to persuade her back, to guilt her back. Now, she needed to leave.
Sherri couldn't be here when Eddie woke up. She couldn't have second thoughts and turn around, come back tomorrow and throw Eddie's world back into unstable chaos. She wasn't staying, so she needed to leave forever.
"Get out of my driveway."
He might as well have slapped her. She sobbed and cursed and told him this was his fault.
But she did leave.
His heart pumped like a rattling AC unit. Sweat leaked out of his palms to quickly turn frigid.
His therapist—who Sherri had been paying for, so that was over—suggested he avoid catastrophizing by losing himself in something he loved. Normally, he'd admire the Richmond skyline.
The new building could be his distraction. He should get over there and check it out. Maybe being up close would jog his memory on why he felt possessive of it.
But he was getting ahead of himself.
How the hell had it gone up overnight?