Free Ghost College by Scott Nicholson, J.R. Rain

already passed through. You don’t have to do this.
    Sigmund snapped the cravat with both hands. “Slow and painful,” he said, although his lips never really moved.
    Maybe I didn’t have to do this, but this had gotten personal. This man, this thing, standing before me wanted to kill me, and, apparently, to torture me for all eternity.
    And if it wasn’t me, it might be someone else.
    Yeah, this son-of-a-bitch had to go.
    My wife, of course, had followed my train of thought in ways that I would never fully understand.
    Be careful, love.
    I wouldn’t have it any other way.
    I looked at the entity standing before me. “How do we do this? I’m guessing you’re going to need a neck if you must choke me.”
    “That won’t be necessary,” he said, grinning, and in a flash of brilliant white light the cravat turned into a long, gleaming dagger.
    “ Nice trick, asshole.”
    He grinned. “It’sss no trick,” he said. His sibilants were getting mushy. I think he was getting off on this a little. I filed that information away for later use. Every weakness meant a possible advantage.
    We circled each other in the basement, one astrally projected paranormal investigator and one ugly-as-hell Dark Master. I kept thinking I might trip or stumble over that damn silver cord, but it somehow always managed to orient directly back to my physical body.
    Too weird. Everything is too weird.
    Be calm, love. It might be weird, but it’s also damn real.
    During my private investigator days, the boxing skills came in handy more than once, especially when some clown decided he wanted me off a case.
    Maybe they’d work when some demonic clown wanted to sever my silver cord thingy.
    Perhaps my nearly overwhelming desire to lay one on his kisser contributed to what happened next. Or perhaps I was just losing my mind. But either way, I had somehow managed to will myself to flesh. Or whatever passed for flesh in this non-place. Maybe ectoplasm. I don’t know how to describe it, because I am sure my body was still lying back in the abandoned office where Ellen was, but I felt my body harden like an empty mold being filled with warm wax.
    I rolled my shoulders and tried to get comfortable in my own skin. I noticed I’d put on a little paunch in my middle age. Too many chocolate pancakes. But if I didn’t do this thing right, I’d be spending a lot of time weightless in the near future.
    And in the far future as well.
    “All right, Dark Master,” I said. “Bring it on.”
     
     
    Chapter Seventeen
     
     
    Sigmund lunged at me with his knife.
    I don’t know much about black magic, but I know how to bob and weave. I sidestepped him easily and heaved an arching, over-the-top punch that would have leveled just about anyone.
    I expected my fist to go straight through him. I mean, I really didn’t expect to connect with anything. But, son-of-a-bitch, my punch landed and landed hard.
    Sigmund reeled backward, arms flailing, his silly top hat tumbling to the dirt floor.
    “Holy shit,” I said, shaking my hand that actually hurt. “How the hell did I just do that?”
    Illusion meets physical laws meets the spirit world , came my wife’s words.
    “ So, basically, anything goes.”
    Most anything. There are still laws.
    And when those words appeared in my thoughts, something nagged at me, and hard. And it wasn’t something pulling on that damn silver cord, either. It was something else.
    Laws. There was something there.
    I may not have been a big believer in the afterlife, or ghosts, or the supernatural, but I paid attention. And what I knew about demons—and if Sigmund wasn’t a demon, he was certainly bucking for a promotion—was that they needed to be bound to something. Often something physical. And often something of great importance to them.
    An anchor of some sort. I had my silver cord. He probably had some black cord, or an invisible cord, something tethering him to this world.
    Sigmund regained his balance and turned to me,