by Chuck Wendig
He’s got a bag of stuff between his legs. More of the same shit they found in his apartment, and at the run-down gas station in Halloran Springs: saint candles, votives, bird skeletons, chalk, crystals.
(Thankfully, no piss-jars or cat mummies.)
“That stuff,” Miriam says. “We found it at your apartment.”
“Sorry about shooting you in the chest,” he mumbles.
“It’s fine. I’m alive.” She glances down at the bag. “What’s the deal with all that shit, anyway? What do they do?”
“They don’t do squat.”
“What?”
“I said, they don’t do squat.”
“No, I heard you; I was doing a reflexive what, more like a what the fuck do you mean, they don’t do squat, so why do you have them, then?”
“Because they make me feel better.”
“They’re just a crutch?”
“Everything is just a crutch. We all have little rituals. Knocking on wood, salt over the shoulder, rub the rabbit’s foot. We like things a certain way even when it doesn’t matter. We pretend the crisper drawer in our refrigerator does what it says. We make believe that the knob on the toaster actually makes the toast darker. We take herbal supplements and vitamins even though they don’t do anything for us, and we just”—he mimes a stream of motion coming from his crotch—“whoosh, pee them out. We like what we like and we do what we do and it helps us get through the day. It is these idiosyncrasies”—that word, he pronounces each syllable distinct and separate from the next, overenunciating it—“that make us human.”
“Does it help you with your power, though?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. Doesn’t hurt.”
“Must be weird.”
“All things are weird. What weird thing do you speak of?”
“Being you. Having a power talking to . . . invisible dead people.”
“I was always weird.”
“Were you born with it? The curse.”
He strokes his long black-and-white beard. “No. I died. And when I died, it opened this conduit inside me, and it has been open ever since.”
Miriam wrinkles up her brow. “You died?”
“Yes. I stole a man’s dog. He beat the dog and I did not want him to beat the dog anymore. So, as a boy, I went to his house at night, in winter, every night, to tame the dog he kept chained up under the porch. I fed it bread and warm water. I earned its trust, and when I did, I freed it. Me and the dog, a red hound, ran away, but the man heard the clatter of chains. He pursued us with a rifle. I took a shortcut to my house, across a frozen lake. The dog ran beside me, slipping on the lake. A shot rang out. The dog tumbled forward. Blood bounced on the ice. I collapsed atop the dog to try to save it. And then the ice broke and the two of us fell through.”
Steve leans around the headrest in the front seat. “The dog saved you, right? Pulled you out of the ice? Hero Dog?”
“Yes.”
He exhales sweet relief. “Thank God.”
“Then the dog died.”
“Oh, goddamnit.”
“It was the man who shot the dog who dragged me off the lake, called the ambulance. I was dead but then came back to life. The dog was dead too, but I could see it still. It was with me then. I see him still, some days.”
Miriam arches a brow. “The dog was a ghost?”
“Correct.”
“Dogs have ghosts.”
“Correct.”
“Do all animals have ghosts?”
“No. Only smart animals. Dogs, cats, octopuses, ravens.”
“Is that it? Is that the list of animals who get ghosts?”
“I cannot say. Maybe parrots.”
“Maybe parrots?”
“Maybe parrots.”
It’s fucked-up, but it’s helping. Talking to him. It’s absurd, this conversation, but it calms her a little. She’s a bustling cluster of nerves, like a sack of sea urchins stabbing each other, a bag of bees, a satchel of starving snakes. But this really, weirdly helps. Crutches, indeed.
“I’m sorry you died,” she says.
“I’ve grown used to it.”
“Used to dying?”
He nods. “I have died six times.”
It’s Gabby’s turn to lean back. “Who are you, Rasputin?”
“I am,” he says plainly, as if, duh, yes, obviously.
“Who the fuck is Rasputin?” Miriam asks.
Steve jumps in: “Grigori Rasputin. An old Russian dude—”
“Mystic,” Gabby says. “Mystic, and advisor to the tsar.” She beholds the looks that angle her way and she hastily explains: “I took a lot of weird classes in community college.”
“I just read Hellboy,” Steve says.
“He died a bunch of times,” Gabby says. “Well, sort of. They tried to kill him a bunch of times, and he just kept not dying.”
“I am the reincarnation of Rasputin,” Lukauskis says. “Yes.”
And nobody really knows what to say to that.
“This is probably the strangest car ride I have ever been on,” Miriam says. “And I’ve been in an SUV when a guy got his foot cut off.”
SEVENTY-THREE
DEAD ENERGY
The quiet lunacy of the car ride goes sour as they get closer to the Black Star Canyon. Miriam can feel it—she wants to chalk it up to just the anxiety of ants breeding in her gut, but she also can’t deny it feels more palpable than that. Her skin tingles. She can feel her pulsebeat in strange places: her fingertips, her eyeballs, the backs of her calves. The baby, too, seems to shift again and again, like the little girl can’t get comfortable, like she knows something is up, something is wrong. For Miriam, it’s like hearing a dead frequency, or being in a place that’s eerily, improperly quiet.
And it only gets worse as Steve pulls off to the side of the road at Lukauskis’s command. “This is where we go,” the medium says.
He points to a berm over the side of the road, thick with scrub and shrub—it rises up and then past that, sinks down once more into the darkness. Miriam can’t see much beyond that, though the light of the moon draws the line over the top of what looks to be an old metal fence.
“Are you sure about this?” she asks Lukauskis.
“I am sure of nothing. But this is where we go.”
He leads. They follow. Steve starts to come too, but Miriam says, “No. You wait here. Stay by the car. We might need you.”
“Are you sure?”
“No. I’m not sure of anything. But this is like something out of a horror movie, and the fewer of us we have to keep track of out here in the dark, the better.” And she thinks to herself, Honestly, dude, you’re too good for whatever’s about to happen out there.
He nods. He remains.
She and Gabby follow the mad mystic.
Brush crackles as they climb the berm and meet the fence. But Lukauskis is right: this is where they go. The chain link is pulled up, away from the ground, with enough room that they can crawl under.
One by one, they do. Miriam is last. She shimmies on her back, because of the roundness of her pregnant belly. But as she scooches forward, inch by inch, she feels the teeth of the metal fence dig into her shirt, then her skin, drawing three slow claw-marks across the pale expanse of her flesh.
She winces as she pulls through.
Blood drizzles from the rake marks. It soaks her shirt.
“Shit,” Gabby says, suddenly worried. She tends to Miriam quickly, saying that they might need to turn around, go back, get a bandage.
“I’ll heal, remember?” she says. “It’s fine.”
“Miriam, I don’t know—”
Lukauskis interrupts: “The blood is good. Like chum in the water, it summons the shark. Let’s keep moving. Midnight is coming.”
He shambles off through the scrub, toward a small dusty trail. They follow after, and Miriam wonders: can they really trust him? Certainly, Guerrero seems to have. And though Lukauskis seems like a straight-up moonbat, Miriam t
ends to like moonbats. They’re nuts. But they’re honest. They’re authentic. And in her experience, they’re better people than most.
Still, something about this place . . .
It’s sour. Her guts curdle like she just drank a glass of vinegar. The air is like air gone bad from disease. It doesn’t smell that way. It just feels like it. Like it’s turned, somehow. Gone rancid, gone rotten.
They wind their way over one hill, down another.
Miriam pulls the mini-Maglite that Gabby usually keeps in her purse, and flicks it on. Lukauskis turns to her, gives her an irritated look—his black eyes flashing above the thorny expanse of his tangled beard. But he keeps going on, and she leaves the light shining.
They pass a sign framed by thick vegetation:
THIS TRAIL IS NOT MAINTAINED.
ORANGE COUNTY IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY LOSS OR INJURY SUFFERED BY REASON OF ITS USE.
The sign is pocked with bullet holes.
Further down, they find an old tent—months, maybe years, past. It’s been slashed to hell. All around are cinder blocks, campfire ash, empty and rusted cans. There’s a half-wall nearby, in the scrub, and several someones have spray-painted various symbols on it. The anarchy symbol, a pentagram, that fucked-up heavy metal S that Miriam used to write on her high school notebook for reasons that remain to this day unknown.
Ahead, another wall—the rocks in it bulging and uneven. Written on that is a message: WE ALL FALL. Past that, an overturned VW Bus, and on its roof someone has tagged a message in big, puffy letters: FUCK YOU.
Succinct, she thinks.
They keep walking. Miriam’s circle of vision is just what the little light affords her: a halo of illumination, beyond which everything else is just creeping shadow. Trees like hands reaching for the stars. Boulders like the heads of skulking, sleeping giants.
Ahead, they cross under what looks like a fallen telephone pole—it lies angled over the path, and they have to duck beneath it.
Spray-painted upon it is the direst warning yet:
GO BACK
NOT WORTH IT
She likes to think it’s just a fucked-up hiker version of a Yelp review: Meh, shitty trail, turn back, one star, would give it zero stars if I could. But her gut tells her it’s more a warning about what you pay by going forward, and how nothing that happens from this point will be worth that price.
She clears her throat, catching up to Lukauskis with Gabby.
“What’s the plan?” she asks. “How deep do we have to go?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what? I asked you two questions.”
He grunts. “And with one stone I slay two birds. I do not know is a sufficient answer for both of your queries, Miriam Black.”
“You have no plan? I kinda think—” She grits her teeth, biting back anger. “I kinda think we need a plan.”
“This sort of thing is not a typical thing. What we do here is not math or science. It is art. Art has no plan. But if I had to guess—”
“Yeah, fucking guess, please.”
“We do as I have done before. We summon your ghost. We bind it to this place by trapping it in an animal. A coyote, most likely. Then we seek answers from it. And if we must, we kill the beast.”
It’s Gabby’s turn to ask: “And that’ll do what, exactly? Miriam already said this thing is happy to kill its . . . hosts, or whatever. Didn’t seem to affect it at all.”
“That was elsewhere. This is Black Star Canyon. The dead energy here will create a kinship with the entity. It will trap it here.”
“That sounds like a temporary solution,” she growls.
“The existence of ghosts should tell you that all solutions are temporary solutions. Even death is not a permanent condition.”
Fuck.
“And you’re sure you can trap it in a coyote?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve always been able to bind spirits to animals?”
He shakes his head and holds up a dissenting finger. “No. My power has evolved. As yours has, has it not? First, I could only see the dead. Then I could speak to them. Then I could . . . move them around, bind them to things, to beasts. Which makes them vulnerable, likelier to tell me the truth when they are in this plane, trapped here, with me.”
Gabby interjects: “Last time, you said trapping it into a coyote didn’t work out so well. That thing nearly killed you. This spirit, Miriam’s Trespasser—it’s more powerful. Too powerful just to be bound.”
Shame casts a sudden and unexpected shadow across his face. That cuts him. He has not until this point seemed vulnerable to anything; he’s mostly been a shambling mound of uncaring ambiguity. Maybe this will work, maybe it won’t, I died six times. But now he looks disappointed. Worried. Injured. A little part of him seems to crumple inward. “You may be right. I failed the last time. I could fail now, too.” He draws a deep breath through flaring nostrils. “Perhaps we should go. This was a mistake.”
He turns to head back the other way. Miriam catches him by—well, she’s not sure what piece of clothing she’s holding on to, and she half-expects him to slip out of it like a lizard dropping its tail, but he’s hooked.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she says. “You told me you could do this. You were all full steam ahead and now you’re not sure?”
“I . . . I can be overconfident. Foolish. I’ve made mistakes before. When I do, I put myself on the line, and that is an acceptable loss. But now it could hurt you, and her, and your unborn child. I cannot accept that loss.”
Miriam nearly bites her own lip off. “We need to do this. Now.”
“It’s too dangerous. Your friend is right. I have only heard of this Ghost of All-Dead in whispers, but what remains clear is that it’s powerful. And I am not up to the task. I may not be able to hold it in the beast for long, if at all, and if the beast attacks . . . Those teeth, those claws. Empowered by a vengeful, angry entity? Who knows what damage it could do?”
“So, we put it in something that won’t attack.”
“Miriam,” Gabby says.
“What is it?”
“I have an idea.”
“I don’t, so let’s hear it.”
“Forget the coyote.” To Lukauskis, Gabby asks, “Can you bind the spirit into a bird? A vulture, a raven, something.”
He hmms, and nods. “I could.”
Miriam understands.
“Oh. Oh, fuck. If it’s in a bird—I can get into its head. You trap the spirit in the bird, and I enter the bird’s mind. I control the bird, which means maybe I control the Trespasser. And that gives you time to kill it.”
She’s nearly dizzy with both the fear and the possibility of it: being trapped inside an animal’s mind with the Trespasser—the Ghost of All-Dead—is a horror for which she is not prepared. But it’s also how she gets answers to her questions. If she can at least find a place and exert her will over it, maybe they have a shot. Maybe it’s how she holds it accountable. Maybe it’s how they end the Trespasser.
“A bird is perfect,” he says. “A psychopomp is already a soul’s vessel. Filling it with the Trespasser has . . . a kind of cosmic parity.” But he shakes his head again. “It could still be dangerous. Are you sure about this?”
“No,” Miriam says. “But it’s the best we have. I want to do it.”
“All right,” Lukauskis says. “Then we need to move. Because midnight is nearly upon us, and we have a bit more walking to do.”
SEVENTY-FOUR
FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES
They come to a clearing in the scrub and the trees, a low place peppered with massive rust-red pipe pieces laying about—pieces big enough, you could walk through them if you ducked your head—some on their side, some facing toward the nighttime sky like one of Hell’s own chimneys. Boulders ring the area, and some of them have boreholes drilled through them: holes big enough for rebar or a stick of dynamite. And in the center of the clearing: a crater where nothing grows, where the dirt
is black and unforgiving, thrust through with a tangle of dead roots and runners.
Lukauskis tells them that the dead call this the place of portals.
“They gather here,” he says, “like water rushing to a sunken place.” But then he looks around, glaring past them with such a faraway stare that it appears he’s looking through the world rather than at it. “But none are here. This place is dead of the dead. Devoid of all but the void.”
Miriam wants to act like she doesn’t understand—but she does. She can feel it. It’s like being in a house when the electricity goes out. It goes beyond just a sudden silence: it’s like she can’t feel the frequency of life and energy all around. The air is still and momentarily cold.
And then—
A grave wind rushes in, hot and breathy, the Devil’s own exhalation—and with it, the faint stink of something burning, the underlayment of rot and sulfur. Then it’s gone again and the air goes dead.
Lukauskis hisses, “Something is coming. Your spirit has found us. It is attracted to your presence here in this place, a confluence it cannot ignore.” He hurries around, dropping candles around the portals and quickly hanging dangling bird bones from nearby branches like ornaments from a particularly fucked-up Christmas tree. Gabby hurries alongside him, helping him set up his ritual items. To Miriam he says with a bluster of impatient irritation, “You should find your bird now.”
She lets her senses radiate outward—though she’s never before thought of it this way, she realizes now it’s not unlike what Alejandro told her, throwing out a tether in the hopes of catching something—but she finds nothing, no birds, for this place is truly a dead zone. No, no, no. How is that possible? There are birds everywhere. But this place is a special hell, and birds, she realizes, have no interest in coming here—
Her breath is robbed from her.
Time seems to slow.
Lukauskis and Gabby continue to orbit the area, setting up the items he brought with him.
But someone else is here too.
Just as it was there in Emerson Caldecott’s dungeon—
The Trespasser has arrived.