Mike is laughing, and Chase tosses him another beer. Even in the growing dark I can see that his cheeks are flushed with booze. He’s starting to waver on his feet.
I glance between them and the house. As much as I’d like to investigate further, I’m going to stop. This isn’t right. Now that they’re here and afraid, they’re laughing at her, trying to turn her into a joke. Crushing their full beer cans against their heads feels like a great idea, and yes, I feel the hypocrisy in my wanting to defend something that I’m trying to kill.
I look past them at Carmel fidgeting from foot to foot, hugging herself against the chill lake breeze. Her blond hair is wispy in the silver light, strands of spider web around her face.
“Come on guys, let’s get out of here. Carmel’s getting nervous, and there’s nothing in there anyway besides spiders and mice.” I push my way past, but Mike and Chase grab me by each arm. I notice that Will has gone back to stand with Carmel and is talking to her quietly, leaning down and gesturing toward the waiting car. She shakes her head and takes a step toward us, but he holds her back.
“No way we’re leaving without looking inside,” Mike says. He and Chase turn me around and walk me up the driveway like prison guards escorting an inmate, one at each shoulder.
“Fine.” I don’t argue as much as I maybe should. Because I would like to get a closer view. I’d just rather they not be here when I did it. I wave to Carmel to tell her everything’s fine and shrug the guys off.
When my foot hits the first moldy board of the porch steps I can almost feel the house constrict, like it’s breathing in, awakening after being so long untouched. I walk up the last two stairs and stand, alone, before the dark gray of the door. I wish I had a flashlight or a candle. I can’t tell what color the house used to be. From a distance it seemed like it was once gray, that the paint peelings were slivers of gray falling to the ground, but now that I’m closer they seem rotted and black. Which is impossible. Nobody paints a house black.
The tall windows on either side of the door are caked over with dirt and dust. I walk to the left and rub my palm across the glass in a quick circle. Inside, the house is mostly empty, except for a few pieces of furniture scattered about. There is a sofa in the center of what must’ve been a living room, covered in a white sheet. The remains of a chandelier hang from the ceiling.
Despite the dark, I can see the interior easily. It’s lit with grays and blues that seem to come from nowhere. There is something strange about the light that I can’t process initially, until I realize that nothing is casting a shadow.
A whisper makes me remember that Mike and Chase are here. I start to turn to tell them it’s nothing I haven’t seen before, and could we please get back to the party, but in the reflection in the window I see that Mike is holding a piece of broken board, aiming at my skull with his arms raised above his head … and I get the feeling that I’m not going to be saying anything for quite some time.
* * *
I wake up to the smell of dust and the sensation that most of my head is lying in shards somewhere behind me. Then I blink. Each breath I take sends up a small puff of gray across aging and uneven floorboards. Rolling onto my back, I realize that my head is still intact, but my brain hurts so badly that I have to close my eyes again. I don’t know where I am. I don’t remember what I was doing before I got here. All I can think of is the fact that my brain feels like it’s sloshing around in there unattached. An image pops into my head: some Neanderthal oaf swinging a board. The pieces of the puzzle start falling into place. I blink again in the strange gray light.
The strange gray light. My eyes flash wide. I’m inside the house.
My brain shakes itself off like a dog ditching water and a million questions fly from its fur. How long have I been unconscious? What room am I in? How do I get out? And of course, the all important: Did those assholes leave me here?
My last question is answered quickly by Mike’s voice.
“See, I told you I didn’t kill him.” He taps his finger against the glass and I twist toward the window to stare up at his grinning idiot face. He says something stupid about how I’m a dead man and that this is what happens to guys who mess with his property. That’s when I hear Carmel shouting that she’s going to call the cops, asking in a panicked voice if I’ve at least woken up yet.
“Carmel!” I shout, struggling up onto my knee. “I’m okay.”
“Cas,” she shouts back. “These jerks— I didn’t know, I swear.”
I believe her. I rub the back of my head. My fingers come away with a little bit of blood. Actually, it’s a lot of blood, but I’m not worried, because head wounds leak like water from a faucet even when the injury is barely more than a paper cut. I put my hand back on the floor to push myself up and the blood mixes the dust into a gritty reddish paste.
It’s too soon to get up. My head is swimmy. I need to lie back down. The room is starting to move on its own.
“Jesus, look at him. He’s down again. We should probably get him out of there, man. He could have a concussion or something.”
“I hit him with a board; of course he’s got a concussion. Don’t be an idiot.”
Look who’s talking, I would like to say. All of this feels very surreal, very disconnected. It’s almost like a dream.
“Let’s just leave him. He’ll find his own way back.”
“Dude, we can’t. Look at his head; it’s bleeding all over the place.”
As Mike and Chase argue back and forth over whether to babysit me or let me die, I feel myself slipping back down into darkness. I think this might actually be it. I’ve actually been murdered by the living—pretty unthinkable.
But then I hear Chase’s voice go up about five or so octaves. “Jesus! Jesus!”
“What?” Mike shouts, his voice irritated and panicky at the same time.
“The stairs! Look at the fucking stairs!”
I force my eyes open and will my head to lift up an inch or two. At first I don’t see anything extraordinary about the stairs. They’re a bit narrow, and the banister has been broken in no less than three places. But then I look up farther.
It’s her. She’s flickering in and out like an image on a computer screen, some dark specter trying to fight her way out of the video and into reality. When her hand grips the rail she becomes corporeal, and it whines and creaks beneath the pressure.
I shake my head softly, still disoriented. I know who she is, I know her name, but I can’t think of why I’m here. It occurs to me suddenly that I’m trapped. I don’t know what to do. I can hear the repeated panicked prayers of Chase and Mike as they argue about whether or not to run or try to get me out of the house somehow.
Anna is descending upon me, coming down the stairs without taking any strides. Her feet drag horribly along like she can’t use them at all. Dark, purplish veins cut through her pale white skin. Her hair is shadow-less black, and it moves through the air as though suspended in water, snaking out behind and drifting like reeds. It’s the only thing about her that looks alive.
She doesn’t wear her death wounds like other ghosts do. They say her throat was cut, and this girl’s throat is long and white. But there is the dress. It’s wet, and red, and constantly moving. It drips onto the ground.
I don’t realize that I’ve scooted back against the wall until I feel the cold pressure against my back and shoulder. I can’t take my eyes off her eyes. They’re like oil drops. It’s impossible to tell where she’s looking, but I’m not foolish enough to hope that she can’t or hasn’t seen me. She is terrible. Not grotesque, but otherworldly.
My heart is pounding in my chest, and the ache in my head is unbearable. It tells me to lie down. It tells me that I can’t get out. I don’t have the strength to fight. Anna is going to kill me, and I’m surprised to find that I would rather it be one like her, in her dress made of blood. I would rather succumb to whatever hell she has in mind for me than give up quietly in a hospital somewhere because someone hit
me in the head with a piece of plank board.
She’s coming closer. My eyes are drifting shut, but I can hear her movements whisper through the air. I can hear each fat drop of blood strike the floor.
I open my eyes. She’s standing above me, the goddess of death, black lips and cold hands.
“Anna.” My mouth curls into a weak smile.
She looks down at me, a pathetic thing shoved up against her wall. Her brow creases as she floats. And then she jerks her gaze away toward the window above my head. Before I can move, her arms shoot forward and break through the glass. I hear Mike or Chase or both of them screaming almost in my ear. Farther away, I hear Carmel.
Anna has pulled Mike through the window and into the house. He’s screaming and bawling like a caught animal, twisting in her grip and trying to keep from looking at her face. His struggles don’t seem to bother her. Her arms are as immobile as marble.
“Let me go,” he stammers. “Let me go, man, it was just a joke! It was just a joke!”
She sets him on his feet. He’s bleeding from cuts on his face and hands. He takes one step backward. Anna bares her teeth. I hear my voice coming from somewhere else, telling her to stop or just screaming, and Mike doesn’t have any time to scream before she thrusts her hands into his chest, tearing through skin and muscle. She pushes her arms out to the sides, like she’s forcing her way through a closing door, and Mike Andover is torn in half. Both halves fall to their knees, jerking and skittering like insect parts.
Chase’s screams are coming from farther away. A car starts up. I’m scrambling away from the mess that used to be Mike, trying not to look at the half of his body that is still connected to his head. I don’t want to know if he’s still alive. I don’t want to know that he’s watching the other half of him twitch.
Anna is looking down at the corpse calmly. She looks at me for a long moment before turning her attention back to Mike. When the door bursts open she doesn’t seem to notice, and then I’m being dragged by my shoulders from behind, pulled out of the house and away from the blood, my legs thumping down the front porch steps. When whoever it is lets go of me, they drop me too suddenly on my head, and I don’t see anything anymore.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Hey. Hey, man, are you waking up?”
I know that voice. I don’t like that voice. I crack my eyes open, and there’s his face, hovering over me.
“You had us worried there for a while. We probably shouldn’t have let you sleep so long. We probably should have taken you to a hospital, but we couldn’t really think of anything to say.”
“I’m fine, Thomas.” I reach up and rub my eyes, then gather my will and sit up, knowing that my world is about to swim and slosh hard enough that I might throw up. Somehow, I manage to swing my legs down to rest on the floor. “What happened?”
“You tell me.” He lights a cigarette. I wish he’d put it out. Beneath his scraggly hair and glasses he looks like a twelve-year-old who swiped a pack from his mother’s purse. “What were you doing in the Korlov house?”
“What were you doing following me?” I return, accepting the glass of water he holds out.
“What I said I was going to do,” he replies. “Only I never figured you’d need so much help. Nobody fucking goes into her house.” His blue eyes peer at me like I’m some kind of novelty idiot.
“Well, I didn’t just walk in and fall down.”
“I didn’t think so. But I can’t believe they did that, dumped you in the house and tried to kill you.”
I look around. I have no idea what time it is, but the sun is out and I’m in some kind of antique store. It’s cluttered, but full of nice things, not piles of old junk that you sometimes see in the seedier places. Still, it smells like old people.
I’m sitting on a dusty old couch near the back, with a pillow that is mostly saturated with my dried blood. At least I hope it’s my dried blood. I hope I wasn’t sleeping on some hepatitis-riddled rag.
I look at Thomas. He seems mad. He hates the Trojan Army; no doubt they’ve been picking on him since kindergarten. A skinny awkward kid like him, someone who claims to be psychic and hangs out in dusty curio shops, was probably their favorite target for swirlies and atomic wedgies. But they’re harmless pranksters. I don’t think they were really trying to kill me. They just didn’t take her seriously. They didn’t believe the stories. And now one of them is dead.
“Shit,” I say out loud. There’s no telling what’s going to happen to Anna now. Mike Andover wasn’t one of her usual transients or runaways. He was one of the school jocks, one of the party boys, and Chase saw everything. I can only hope that he was too scared to go to the cops.
Not that cops can stop Anna anyway. If they went into that house, there would only be more dead. Maybe she wouldn’t show herself to them at all. And besides, Anna is mine. The image of her conjures itself in my mind for a second, looming and pale and dripping red. But my injured brain can’t hold her.
I look over at Thomas, still nervously smoking.
“Thanks for pulling me out,” I say, and he nods.
“I didn’t want to,” he says. “I mean, I did want to, but seeing Mike laying in a sloppy pile didn’t exactly make me excited about it.” He sucks on his cigarette. “Jesus. I can’t believe he’s dead. I can’t believe she killed him.”
“Why not? You believed in her.”
“I know, but I’d never actually seen her. Nobody sees Anna. Because if you see Anna—”
“You don’t live to tell anyone about it,” I finish dismally.
I look up at the sound of footsteps on the brittle floorboards. Some old guy has come in, the kind of old guy with a twisting gray beard that ends in a braid. He’s wearing a very well-worn Grateful Dead t-shirt and a leather vest. There are strange tattoos up and down his forearms—nothing that I recognize.
“You’re a damn lucky kid. I have to say that I expected more from a professional ghost killer.”
I catch the bag of ice he tosses to me for my head. He’s smiling through a face like leather and peering through wire specs.
“You’re the one who tipped off Daisy.” I know it instantly. “I thought it was little old Thomas, here.”
A smile is my only reply. But it’s enough.
Thomas clears his throat. “This is my grandfather, Morfran Starling Sabin.”
I have to laugh. “Why do you goth types always give yourselves weird names?”
“Strong words coming from somebody walking around calling himself Theseus Cassio.”
He’s a salty old dude, and immediately likable, with a voice that belongs in a black-and-white spaghetti western. I’m not put off by the fact that he knows who I am. In fact, I’m almost relieved by it. I’m happy to come across another member of this peculiar underground, where people know my job, know my reputation, know my father’s reputation. I don’t live my life like a superhero. I need people to point me in the right direction. I need people who know who I really am. Just not too many. I don’t know why Thomas didn’t say as much when he found me by the cemetery. He had to be so damned cryptic.
“How’s your head?” Thomas asks.
“Can’t you tell, psychic boy?”
He shrugs. “I told you; I’m not that psychic. My grandpa told me you were coming and that I should look out for you. I can read minds sometimes. Not yours today. Maybe it’s the concussion. Maybe I just don’t need to anymore. It comes and goes.”
“Good. That mind-reader shit gives me the willies.” I look over at Morfran. “So, why did you send for me? And why didn’t you have Daisy set up a meeting for when I got here, rather than sending Mentok the Mind Taker?” I jerk my head toward Thomas and immediately curse myself for trying to be a smartass. My head is not healthy enough for smartassery.
“I wanted you here quickly,” he explains with a shrug. “I knew Daisy, and Daisy knew you, personal. He said you didn’t like to be bothered. But I still wanted to keep tabs. Ghost killer or not, you’re just a ki
d.”
“Okay,” I say. “But what’s the rush? Hasn’t Anna been here for decades?”
Morfran leans against the glass counter and shakes his head. “Something’s changing with Anna. She’s angrier these days. I’m linked to the dead—more so than you are in many ways. I see them, and I feel them, thinking, thinking about what they want. It’s been that way since—”
He shrugs. There’s a story there. But it’s probably his best story, and he doesn’t want to give it away so early on.
He rubs his temples. “I can feel it when she kills. Every time some unfortunate stumbles into her house. It used to be nothing more than an itch between my shoulder blades. These days it’s a full-on twist of my insides. Way things used to be, she wouldn’t have even come out for you. She’s long dead and no fool, knows the difference between easy prey and trust fund babies. But she’s getting sloppy. She’s going to get herself on the front-page news. And you and I both know that some things are better kept a secret.”
He sits down in a wingback chair and claps his hand against his knee. I hear the clicking of dog toenails on the floor and pretty soon a fat black Lab with a graying nose waddles in to put its head on his lap.
I think back to the events of the night before. She was nothing like I expected, though now that I’ve seen her I have a hard time remembering what I did expect. Maybe I thought she’d be a sad, frightened girl who killed out of fear and misery. I thought she’d trundle down the stairs in a white dress with a dark stain at the collar. I thought she would have two smiles, one on her face and one on her neck, wet and red. I thought she would ask me why I was in her house, and then come at me with razored little teeth.
Instead I find a ghost with the strength of a storm, black eyes, and pale hands, not a dead person at all but a dead goddess. Persephone back from Hades, or Hecate half-decayed.
The thought makes me shiver a little, but I choose to blame the blood loss.
“What are you going to do now?” Morfran asks.
I look down at the melting bag of ice, tinged pink with my rehydrated blood. Item number one is to go home and shower, and try to keep my mom from freaking out and slathering me with more rosemary oil.