The lights in the living room hadn’t gone on, and—oh, shit—little sounds started making their way into the closet, sounds that were unmistakable indications that Mrs. Solomon and her companion were doing some “celebrating.”
Terrible pulled back Chess’s hair so he could kiss her neck. “Be in here a while, aye?”
“Maybe he won’t last long.”
His short laugh made his chest move against her back. “Aye, maybe so.”
Mrs. Solomon yelled something, something that had something to do with cowboys, if Chess heard right, and— Wait. Wait a minute.
Mr. Solomon was Hosting. He shared his body with a ghost, but Chess would only feel that when the ghost was “out,” so to speak—when it had control of his body. The underwear on the floor in the bedroom came back to her. Of course. One man preferred boxers, the other briefs. No, Mr. Solomon didn’t wear khakis, he wore jeans and t-shirts, but there had been tidier clothing on the floor, right? So the ghost wore button-downs, the ghost wore trousers. She honestly didn’t think she’d ever seen anything like it, heard of anything like it in six years of Church training and almost four more of Debunking. People didn’t Host spirits and just…let those spirits exist as another person using their body. They Hosted for power. They worked with a ghost but didn’t allow the ghost independence. How fucking dangerous was that? What was the matter with these people, did they not realize what a ghost would do if given control of a body?
Mrs. Solomon had been laughing and talking to the ghost. Laughing, talking, and calling it Joe. The man inside her husband’s body.
What had Mrs. Solomon said? “We believe in exploring the pleasures of the body,” or some shit like that? Yeah.
Some exploring.
Well, she hoped they’d enjoyed it. They wouldn’t be exploring too many bodily pleasures in their prison cells.
☠
MR. SOLOMON HAD COME HOME at about five the day before, so Chess gave it until almost seven before she arrived at their front door and gave it a happy little knock. She’d been stuck in that damn closet for almost an hour the previous night while Mrs. Solomon and the ghost in Mr. Solomon’s body had themselves all sorts of fun in the living room. At first it had been funny. Then it was boring. Then annoying.
But now she had the forms and herbs she needed and she was going to bust them for their rather creepy sex game, and now she had three Cepts and a couple of lines of speed working their warm and delightful way through her bloodstream, so she had reason to be cheerful.
Mrs. Solomon obviously didn’t feel the same. Her face darkened when she saw Chess on that pitiful porch.
“Hi, Mrs. Solomon. I’d like to talk to you and your husband.”
“We really don’t have time right now, Miss Putnam, I’m afraid—”
“It’ll only take a few minutes.” Chess pushed past her into the living room, where she plunked herself down on one of the two armchairs and started messing about with the papers in the file she’d brought. Not that she needed to. She knew where they were, which papers she needed. But it made her look official, and distracted her from the sandalwood smell.
“This isn’t—”
“Come sit down.” Chess’s smile was starting to hurt her cheeks.
Mrs. Solomon looked toward the kitchen, from which Mr. Solomon was emerging with a half-eaten sandwich in his hand. “We were just— Doug, can you tell her we’re busy?”
“Maybe Joe can tell me,” Chess suggested.
The Solomons froze. For some reason, the sight of Mr. Solomon, sandwich still in hand, mouth full of food, body stiff as a board, made Chess want to giggle. Or, well, it was probably a combination of Mr. Solomon looking rather silly and how fucking good she felt. Good physically—great physically—and she and Terrible had slept late and spent the afternoon hanging out in his big gray bed, and he loved her and she loved him and that was the most amazing thing. Which made her feel good, well, non-physically, too.
“Come, sit down,” she said again, indicating the couch. “Let’s talk, and there are some forms I’d like you to sign. I have a list of attorneys for you—you’ll probably want one, of course, but—”
“Please don’t.” Mrs. Solomon’s voice broke. “Please. It’s not what you think.”
“Oh? It’s not Mr. Solomon here Hosting a spirit so you can have sex with it?”
A long silence. Mr. Solomon sat down, placing the sandwich on the side table and resting his hand on Mrs. Solomon’s knee. She covered it with her own. Kind of a sweet little gesture, a sad one.
But ghosts were dangerous. Not to mention that what the Solomons were doing could conceivably be ghost abuse, which wasn’t any less serious than Summoning ghosts in order to kill people.
They’d broken the law for their kinky thrills, and they had to go down for it. So to speak. In the legal, being-imprisoned-and-executed way.
Mr. Solomon cleared his throat. “It’s not like that. It’s— Joe is…”
“He’s our third,” Mrs. Solomon said. “He’s our lover. It’s not just sex. We love him.”
Right. Sure they did. “Mrs. Solomon, regardless of why you’re breaking the law and endangering your neighbors—”
“I would never hurt anyone,” Mr. Solomon interrupted, and at the same moment Chess’s skin started trying to leave her body. Silver covered his eyes, a thin sheen Chess could still see through. Like a shiny film. “I know what you think but I wouldn’t.”
“You’re Joe, I assume.”
He nodded. “Joseph Bayer. And I am not a killer. I’m not like that. I— Doug and Moxie…I love them. I love them, and they love me.”
A trickle of…something…started crawling up Chess’s spine. Discomfort, maybe? Sadness? What?
Mrs. Solomon glanced at her husband, or rather, at the ghost in her husband’s body, then turned back to Chess. “We used to have parties, as you know. One week we decided to try summoning a ghost. I know, Miss Putnam. I can’t imagine now why we took such a risk, but we did.”
“They summoned me,” Joe said. “I saw the hole and I leapt for it. Miss Putnam, you can’t imagine what it’s like in the City, how cold, how—”
“I’ve been there.” Definitely discomfort now. Yes, Chess had been to the City of Eternity, the enormous underground cavern where the dead were imprisoned. The enormous underground cavern everyone seemed to think was a beautiful, peaceful place, the enormous underground cavern in which everyone was thrilled to know they’d live forever. Not Chess. To her it was a hell she never wanted to visit, a place so horrible it made even living worthwhile.
Joe’s shoulder relaxed. “Then you know. They’re…they’re more normal, when no living people are around. They’re just like regular people, most of them. But some of them…they never get over being dead, and they’re so angry. It’s awful. It’s awful to be around them. Doug and Moxie saved me.”
“We started summoning him every week,” Mrs. Solomon continued. “And eventually he started hanging around after everyone left, and…we fell in love.”
Again her voice went hoarse. She cleared her throat and went on, her eyes damp. “We did some research. We found out how Doug could Host Joe and how we could make the house a spirit home to keep him safe. Our friends all helped us do the rituals. And we’ve been together ever since, the three of us.”
Joe smiled; he leaned over and kissed her forehead. “The three of us.”
The silver sheen left Doug Solomon’s eyes. “We love each other. Joe and I can talk, you see, we experience things together. I’m never alone, because he’s there. Moxie is never alone, because we’re both here. We share my body, and I’m happy to share it with him because…because I love him.” He coughed, wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand like a little boy embarrassed at being caught crying.
“I don’t expect you to understand.” Mrs. Solomon sniffled. “But we’re just, we’re in love. Joe is our third. He’s part of us. He’s…he’s just part of us. He’s like the missing part we never knew was mis
sing, and we can’t— To lose him… Please, please don’t…”
Chess shifted in her seat, looked up at the ceiling, over at the far wall, Mrs. Solomon’s sobs cutting into her flesh. Her own eyes stung.
Yeah, she did understand. She did know. Six months before she wouldn’t have, and she probably would have been calling the Squad at that very moment.
Which was what she should be doing. No matter what the motive, Hosting a spirit was illegal. Consorting with a spirit was illegal. The Solomons were committing a serious crime.
But she’d done it too, hadn’t she? That sigil on Terrible’s chest, the one saving his life—that was a serious crime. A forbidden sigil. The psychopomp—a hawk—which had been coming to collect his soul the night he’d almost been killed, the psychopomp she’d shot dead because she couldn’t bear to lose him…that was a serious crime.
If it was ever discovered, if anyone ever learned that she’d killed that hawk to prevent it from carrying his soul to the City, that she’d illegally locked Terrible’s soul to his body to keep him alive, she’d be executed. They wouldn’t give a shit that she was Church, that she had a great Debunking record, or that she’d done it because the thought of a world without Terrible in it made her literally want to die. Even the City wasn’t as bad as a life without him would be. She’d committed a capital crime, and if that was discovered she would die for it.
But it would be worth it, because that crime had meant she wasn’t alone anymore, that she would never be alone again. It meant some of the emptiness inside her was gone and would never come back as long as he was there to fill it. It meant that she actually had someone she could trust, someone she could depend on, someone who made her feel special and beautiful and good, like a whole person, like someone who wasn’t dirty and wrong and worthless.
He did all of that for her, because he loved her, and because she loved him, and every day she thought about that with the kind of gratitude she’d previously only felt for the Church and various pharmaceutical companies.
Terrible was… He was a miracle in a world without miracles, and she couldn’t believe her luck. And there was nothing, absolutely fucking nothing, that she wouldn’t do to keep him in her life, because without him it wouldn’t be a life at all. So, yeah. She knew how it felt to find part of herself in someone else.
Mrs. Solomon was still sobbing. Mr. Solomon had his arms around her, whispering to her. As Chess watched, his eyes changed; now he was Joe telling Mrs. Solomon how much he loved her, how much he loved Doug, that he always would. His tears fell onto her hair.
They were breaking the law. Chess’s job was to bust them for it. Her job was to keep the world safe and to uphold the Truth.
She swallowed. “Joe…you understand my concerns here. You are a ghost.”
He glanced at her over Mrs. Solomon’s head. “I do. But I swear to you, I’m not like that. I’m human. I’m as human as I was the day before I died ten years ago. I would never harm any living person. I was a doctor, I spent my life healing the sick.”
This was so wrong. This was so, so wrong.
But it was all she could do, because she couldn’t look at them huddled together on the couch crying, couldn’t listen to them murmuring to each other, and do something she knew in her heart was cruel. She couldn’t do it because she couldn’t forget how it had felt when she saw Terrible lying so still on the broken sidewalk and knew he was gone forever unless she did something fast.
She tore off a piece of paper from her notebook and closed the file. “Joe, Mr. and Mrs. Solomon, this is my cell number. I expect you to use it if anything changes. I mean it. Even if it’s simply that Joe starts to feel angrier than normal. I can take care of it, and you won’t be arrested. But you have to tell me, because if you don’t…if you don’t, we all get busted.”
“What?”
“You need to keep me informed of what’s happening. I need you to swear. I need that to be a magic-bound oath, one you’ll be physically compelled to keep. That means I’ll be putting a magical imperative on that one action, do you understand? And it’s connected to me.”
Mrs. Solomon’s eyes, wide and disbelieving, fixed on Chess, like watching her would keep her in place. “You… I don’t understand. You, you’re not…”
“I’m not turning you in, no.” Chess put the papers back into the file. Good thing she hadn’t told her supervisor, Elder Griffin, what she was on her way to do. She could pass this off easily as the Solomons liking to watch movies in the dark and Mrs. Brent being paranoid. “Provided you agree to my terms. The oath, the phone calls if anything goes amiss. And please, be more careful about what you let your neighbors see, okay?”
She expected gratitude. She didn’t expect Mrs. Solomon to burst into tears again, or to throw herself pretty much into Chess’s lap. She didn’t expect Mr. Solomon to fall to the floor and curl up into a fetal position, practically wailing with joy.
Fucking hippies.
☠
TWO HOURS AND THREE MORE Cepts later she unlocked the front door of Terrible’s apartment and slipped through the magical wards she’d put up as another layer of protection from things both alive and dead.
He was sitting on the couch reading a car magazine, Johnny Cash’s “Flesh and Blood” playing in the background. Waiting for her.
“Hey, Chess. You right? All finished?”
She set down her bag and toed off her shoes, pushed them up against the wall. The way she always did, because that’s where they belonged. Because this apartment was where she belonged.
Because with him was where she belonged.
He set the magazine down when she reached him, opened his arms so she could sit in his lap. Her head fit perfectly into that spot just above his collarbone, where his neck met his body. Where she could bury her face in his warm skin and breathe him in.
His arms wrapped around her. “Chessie? You right?”
She nodded, closed her eyes for a second and let it wash over her. Happiness from the drugs sliding through her veins. Happiness—happiness so bright and strong it burned her heart—because of where she was, because of who she was with. Happiness because now the empty space inside her, the space where everyone else kept love and good memories and peace, had a little bit of those things inside it.
Happiness, too, because she’d done something to help other people feel that way, no matter how nervous it made her when she really thought about it. Hell, that couldn’t be avoided. Love and nervousness went hand in hand, she’d learned; love could be snatched away at any moment, love could end in destruction. Usually did, as far as she knew. But then, what didn’t?
But it wasn’t ending just now, and that was something she could feel good about. Something she could trust. And she did.
“Yeah, right up,” she said, and planted a kiss on his jaw. “Just glad to be home.”
THE END
Heroes and Heartbreakers again! This was probably the most difficult of these to write, since it’s a short written for a series with holiday/Christmas themes. Of course, since there is no Christmas in the Downside world, it wasn’t easy to think of a way to fit that theme.
I thought of Dickens and A CHRISTMAS CAROL first, of course; I mean, how can you not think of it when contemplating Christmas and ghosts? But since my ghosts aren’t the “I’ll give you a chance to change your life” type (and I’d already done the “But this is one of the rare ghosts that doesn’t want to kill everyone,” thing in HOME), that didn’t seem to work--and it did feel a little obvious to me. So I turned to GREAT EXPECTATIONS instead, because I’ve always found Miss Havisham in her wedding dress with her moldy spider-filled wedding cake to be such a striking and sad image, and then to another literary image that always stuck with me--the three gray hairs on Miss Emily Grierson’s pillow from Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily.”
“Eliza” was the first name of the real woman on whom Dickens apparently based his Miss Havisham, and “Hudson” came from that greatest of all cinema
tic obsessive shut-ins in inappropriate clothing and horrible make-up, Jane Hudson from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Plus, you know I’m always happy to write about love and death.
1.
CHESS HAD NEVER SEEN AN auto graveyard before. Human graveyards, sure, more than she wanted; her job required her to enter them on occasion—on bad occasions, since entering a graveyard meant she had a confirmed haunting in whatever house she was investigating as a Debunker, which meant no bonus for her—to collect dirt from the grave of whomever it was who’d returned as a ghost so she could banish it back to the City of Eternity under the earth.
The auto graveyard—junkyard, really—was very different. Aside from the obvious, there were no high stone walls and gates and locks, no signs warning people that by the authority of the Church of Real Truth unauthorized persons were not permitted to enter.
And she wasn’t alone in there, either.
Rusted-out hulks of cars made treacherous walls. Razor-sharp edges could slice skin and clothing; odd shapes made holes and nooks where anyone could hide. Where he could be hiding. Chess quickened her pace almost to a run. Where was he? Listening for footsteps didn’t help. He was too quiet, and it was too loud there, anyway. The cold wind whistled down the aisles and around the corners, whined through holes in the stacks of metal and made them creak and rattle.
Not to mention the music, the faint and very creepy tones of the Carpenters’ “Close to You.” Ugh. It was tinny-sounding, far away and half-lost in the wind, like maybe it was some weird auditory hallucination. Like a memory of the song rather than the actual sound of it playing.
She was pretty sure it was playing, though, because why the hell would she think about that song? And why would her head play it start to finish, over and over?