I smiled then. Daisy’s tips are sketchy at best, constructed on flimsy and mostly nonspecific evidence. When I first met him, I told him to get more of the facts. He looked at me like a dog does after you take the last bite of your cheeseburger. For Daisy, there’s magic in not knowing. He gets excited over the possibilities in the spaces in between. New Orleans’ love affair with the undead is in his blood. I guess I wouldn’t have it any other way.
My eyes roam across the abandoned Dutch Ironworks, where something has been killing the homeless for at least a decade. It’s a sprawling set of brick buildings, with two enormously tall smokestacks. The windows are small and covered in dust and grime. Most of them have been boarded up. I might have to break something to get in. The athame flips lightly between my fingers, and I get out of the car.
As I walk around the building, long-dead grass whispers against my legs. Looking ahead, there’s a glimpse of the black, seething mass of Superior. Four hours of driving and that lake is still with me.
When I round the corner and see the door, hanging ajar with the lock broken, my chest tightens and my whole body starts to hum. I never wanted to be here. It didn’t hold any interest. But now that I am here, I can hardly catch my breath. I haven’t felt this tuned, this pulled-by-a-string, since I faced down the Obeahman. My fingers tingle around the knife handle and there’s the odd, familiar sensation that it is part of me, welded into my skin, down to the bone. I couldn’t let it drop if I wanted to.
The air inside the factory is sour but not stagnant. The place is home to countless rodents, and they move the air around. But it’s still sour. There’s death underneath the dust, death in every corner. Even in the rat shit. They’ve been feeding on things that are dead. But I don’t detect anything fresh; there won’t be a stinking bag of meat waiting for me around a corner, nodding a greeting with a falling-off face. What is it that Daisy said? When the cops find another set of bodies, they’re practically mummified. Bones and ash. They mostly just sweep them out the door and straight under the rug. Nobody makes a big fuss over it.
Of course they don’t. They never do.
I’ve come through the back and there’s no telling what part of the factory this used to be. Everything worth taking has been looted, and all that’s left is bare scraps of machinery I can’t identify. I walk down the hall, the athame out and at my side. There’s light enough coming through the windows and reflecting off things so I can see just fine. I pause at every doorway, using my whole body to listen, to smell strong rot, to feel out cold spots. The room on my left must’ve been an office, or maybe a small employee lounge. There’s a table pushed back toward the corner. My eyes zero in on what looks at first like the edge of an old blanket—until I see the foot sticking out of it. I wait, but it doesn’t move. It’s just a body, used up, nothing much left but raggedy skin. I walk past and let the rest stay hidden behind the table. I don’t need to see it.
The hallway opens up on a broad, high-ceilinged space. Ladders and catwalks link through the air, accompanying what look like rusted-out conveyor belts. At one end, a hulking black furnace sits dormant. Most of it has been torn apart, broken down for scrap, but I can still see what it was. So much must’ve been produced here. The sweat of a thousand laborers’ bodies has soaked into the floor. The memory of heat still lingers in the air, god knows how many years later.
The farther I get into the room, the more crowded it feels. Something is here, and its presence is heavy. My grip tightens around the athame. Any minute I expect the decades-dead machinery to jerk back to life. The scent of burning human skin hits my nostrils a fraction of a second before I’m knocked facedown against the dusty floor.
I flip myself over and get to my feet, swinging the athame in a wide arc. I expect the ghost to be right behind me, and for a second I think it fled and I’m in for another game of whack-a-mole or ghost-darts. But I still smell it. And I feel anger moving through the room in dizzying waves.
He’s standing at the far end of the room, blocking my way back to the hallway, as if I would try to run. His skin is black as a struck match, cracked and oozing liquid metal heat, like he’s covered by a cooling layer of lava. The eyes stand out bright white. I can’t make out from this distance whether they’re just white or if they have corneas. God I hope they have corneas. I hate that creepy weird-eye shit. But corneas or no corneas, there won’t be any sanity in them. All these years spent dead and burning have taken care of that.
“Come on,” I say, and flick my wrist; the athame is ready to stab or slice. There’s a faint pain on my back and shoulders, where he hit me, but I shrug it off. He’s coming closer, walking up slow. Maybe because he wonders why I’m not running. Or maybe because every time he moves, more of his skin cracks open and bleeds … whatever that red-orange stuff is that he’s bleeding.
This is the moment before the strike. It’s the intake of breath and the stretching out of a second. I don’t blink. He’s close enough that I can see he does have corneas now, bright blue, the pupils constricted in constant pain. His mouth hangs open, the lips mostly gone, cracked and peeled away.
I want to hear her say just one word.
He swings his right fist; it slices the air inches from my right ear, hot enough to sting, and I catch the distinct smell of burnt hair. My burnt hair. There’s something Daisy said about the corpses … leathery bones and ash. Fuck. The corpses were fresh. The ghost just burns them up, dries them out, and leaves them. His face is a ruin of rage; the nose is gone and the nasal cavity scabbed over. His cheeks are as dry as used charcoal in places and wet with infection in others. I backpedal to stay clear of his blows. With his lips burned away, his teeth seem too big and his expression is a sick, constant grin. How many homeless people woke up to this face, right before they were cooked from the inside out?
I drop to the ground and kick, managing to drop him, but also singeing the shit out of my shins in the process. My jeans are fused to my skin in one spot. But there’s no time to be dainty about it; his fingers reach for me and I roll. The fabric rips loose, taking who knows how much skin with it.
The hell with this. He hasn’t made a peep. Who knows if he even has a tongue left, let alone whether Anna feels like speaking through it. I don’t know what I was thinking anyway. I was going to wait. I was going to be good.
My elbow cocks back, ready to slam the athame down into his ribs, but I hesitate. The knife could end up bonded to my skin literally if I don’t do it right. The hesitation lasts barely a second. Just long enough for the flutter of white to drift through the corner of my eye.
This can’t be. It must be someone else, some other spook who died in this godawful factory. But if it is, it didn’t die by burning. The girl walking silently across the dust-covered floor is pale as moonlight. Brown hair hangs down her back, falling over the stark white of her dress. I’d know that dress anywhere, whether it was too white to be real or made entirely of blood. It’s her. It’s Anna. Her bare feet make a soft, scraping sound as they pad across the concrete.
“Anna,” I say, and scramble up. “Are you all right?”
She can’t hear me. Or if she can, she doesn’t turn.
From the floor, the burning man grasps on to my shoe. I kick free and ignore both him and the smell of scorched rubber. Am I going insane? Hallucinating? She can’t really be here. It isn’t possible.
“Anna, it’s me. Can you hear me?” I walk toward her, but not too fast. If I go too fast she might disappear. If I go too fast I might see too much; I could pull her around and see that she has no face, that she’s a jerking corpse. She could turn to ash in my hands.
There is a gristly sound of meat twisting as the burning man crawls to his feet. I don’t care. What is she doing here? Why won’t she speak? She just keeps walking away, ignoring everything around her. Only … not everything. The dormant furnace is in the back of the room. A sudden sense of foreboding clamps down in my chest.
“Anna—” I scream; the burning man has me by
the shoulder and it’s like someone just shoved an ember down my shirt. I twist away, and in the corner of my eye I think I see Anna pause, but I’m too busy ducking and slicing with the knife and kicking this ghost’s feet out from under him again to really tell.
The athame is hot. I have to toss it back and forth between my hands a second, just from that small, nonlethal slice that is now a narrow fissure of red-orange across his ribcage. I should just put him down now, jab the knife in and pull it out fast, maybe wrap the handle in my shirt first. Only I don’t. I just incapacitate him temporarily, and turn back.
Anna stands before the furnace, her fingers slipping lightly across the rough, black metal. I say her name again but she doesn’t turn. Instead she curls her fist around the handle and draws the broad door open.
Something in the air shifts. There’s a current, a ripple, and the dimensions skew in my vision. The opening of the furnace yawns wider and Anna crawls in. Soot stains her white dress, streaking across the fabric and across her pale skin like bruises. And there’s something wrong with her; something about the way she moves. It’s like she’s a marionette. When she squeezes through the opening, her arm and leg bend back unnaturally like a spider being sucked into a straw.
My mouth is dry. Behind me, the burning man drags himself onto his feet again. The sear in my shoulder makes me move away; I barely notice the limp brought on by the burns on my shins. Anna, get out of there. Look at me.
It’s like watching a dream unfold, some nightmare where I’m powerless to do anything, where my legs are made of lead and I can’t scream a warning no matter how hard I try. When the decades-dead furnace surges to life, sending flame spewing into its belly, I scream, loud and without words. But it doesn’t matter. Anna burns up behind the iron door. One of her pale hands, blistering and turning black, presses against the slats, like she’s changed her mind too late.
Heat and smoke drifts up from my shoulder as the burning man grasps my shirt and twists me around. His eyes bulge out of the dark mess of his face and his teeth gnash open and shut. My eyes flicker back to the furnace. There’s no feeling in my arms or legs. I can’t tell whether my heart is beating. Despite the burns that have to be forming on my shoulders, I’m frozen in place.
“End me,” the burning man hisses. I don’t think. I just shove the athame into his guts, letting go immediately but still scorching my palm. I back away as he falls jerking to the floor, and run up against an old conveyor belt, hanging on to it to keep from going down on my knees. For a long second, the room is filled with mingled screams as Anna burns and the ghost at my feet shrivels. He curls in on himself until what’s left looks barely human, charred and twisted.
When he stops moving, the air grows immediately cold. I take a deep breath and open my eyes; I don’t remember closing them. The room is silent. When I look at the furnace, it’s dormant and empty, and if I touched it, it would be cool, like Anna was never there at all.
CHAPTER SIX
They’ve given me something for the pain. A shot of something or other, and pills to take home for later. It would be nice if it would knock me right on my ass, if it made me sleep through the next week. But I think it’s going to be just enough to keep the throbbing down.
My mom is talking to the doctor while the nurse finishes applying ointment to my freshly and insanely painfully cleaned burns. I didn’t want to come to the hospital. I tried to convince my mom that a little calendula and a lavender potion would be enough, but she insisted. And now, truthfully, I’m pretty happy about having the shot. It was fun too, listening to her try to come up with the best explanation. Was it a kitchen accident? Maybe a campfire accident. She decided on the campfire, turning me into a klutz and saying I fell into the embers and basically rolled around in a panic. They’ll buy it. They always do.
There are second-degree burns on my shin and shoulders. The one on my hand, from the final blow of the athame, is pretty minor, first degree, nothing more serious than a bad sunburn. Still, a bad sunburn on the palm of your hand sucks a whole lot. I expect to be carrying around unopened cans of ice-cold soda for the next few days.
My mom comes back in with the doctor so they can start gauzing me up. She wavers between tears and consternation. I reach out and take her hand. She’ll never get used to this. It eats her up, worse than it did when it was my dad. But in none of her lectures, none of her rants about taking precautions and being more careful, has she ever asked me to stop. I thought she’d demand it after what happened with the Obeahman last fall. But she understands. It isn’t fair that she has to, but it’s better that she does.
* * *
Thomas and Carmel show up the next day, right after school, practically peeling into our driveway in their separate cars. They burst in without knocking and find me semi-comfortably drugged on the couch, watching TV and eating microwave popcorn, clutching an ice pack in my right hand.
“See? I told you he was alive,” says Thomas. Carmel looks nonplussed.
“You shut your phone off,” she says.
“I was sick at home. Didn’t feel like talking to anybody. And I figured you were at school, where policy says you are not to be frivolously texting and making phone calls.”
Carmel sighs and drops her schoolbag onto the floor before plopping down in the wingback chair. Thomas perches on the arm of the couch and reaches for the popcorn.
“You weren’t ‘sick at home,’ Cas. I called your mom. She told us everything.”
“I was too ‘sick at home.’ Just like I’m going to be tomorrow. And the next day. And probably the day after that.” I shake more cheddar into the bowl and offer it to Thomas. My attitude is wearing on Carmel’s nerves. To be honest, it’s wearing on mine. But the pills dull the pain, and they dull my mind enough so that I don’t have to be thinking about what happened at the Dutch Ironworks. I don’t have to wonder if what I saw was real.
Carmel would like to lecture me. I can see the admonishment dancing around her lips. But she’s tired. And she’s worried. So instead she reaches for the popcorn and says she’ll pick up my homework for the next few days.
“Thanks,” I say. “I might be out part of next week too.”
“But that’s the last week of classes,” says Thomas.
“Exactly. What are they going to do? Flunk me? It’d be too big of a pain. They just want to make it to summer like we do.”
They exchange this look, like they’ve decided I’m hopeless, and Carmel stands up.
“Are you going to tell us what happened? Why didn’t you wait, like we decided to?”
There isn’t an answer for that. It was an impulse. More than an impulse, but to them it must seem like a selfish, stupid move. Like I couldn’t be patient. Whatever it was, it’s done. When I confronted that ghost, it was just like before, in the hayloft. Anna came through, and I saw her suffer. I watched her burn.
“I’ll tell you everything,” I tell them. “But later. When I’m on fewer painkillers.” I smile and rattle the orange bottle. “Want to stick around and watch a movie?”
Thomas shrugs and plops down, digging his hand into the cheddar corn without a second thought. It takes Carmel an extra minute and a couple of sighs, but she eventually drops her book bag and sits in the rocking chair.
* * *
For all their horror at the prospect of missing one of the last days of school, curiosity gets the better of them and they show up the next day around eleven thirty, just before lunch period. I thought I was ready for it but it still takes me a few times to get it right, to tell them everything. I’d already said it once, to my mom, before she left to go shopping and drop spells around town. When I’d finished, she looked like she wanted an apology. An I’m sorry, Mom, for almost getting myself killed. Again. But I couldn’t quite manage it. It didn’t seem like the important thing. So she just told me I should have waited for Gideon, and left without looking me in the eye. Now Carmel’s got the same look.
I manage to croak out, “I’m sorry that I di
dn’t wait for you guys. I didn’t know I was going to do it. I didn’t plan it.”
“It took you four hours to drive there. Were you in a trance the whole time?”
“Can we just focus?” Thomas interjects. He asks it carefully, with a disarming smile. “What’s done is done. Cas is alive. A little crispier than before, but he’s breathing.”
Breathing and craving a Percocet. The pain in my shoulders is like a living thing, all throbbing and heat.
“Thomas is right,” I say. “We need to figure out what to do now. We need to figure out how to help her.”
“How to help her?” Carmel repeats. “We need to figure out what’s going on first. For all we know, the whole thing might be in your head. Or an illusion.”
“You think I’m making it up? Concocting some kind of fantasy? If that were true, why would it be like this? Why would I imagine her catatonic, throwing herself into a furnace? If I’m making this up, then I need several hours of intense therapy.”
“I’m not suggesting you’re doing it on purpose,” Carmel says apologetically. “I just wonder if it’s real. And remember what Morfran said.”
Thomas and I look at each other. All we remember is Morfran spewing a bunch of crazy. I sigh.
“So what do you want from me? You want me to sit here and wait, when what I saw might be real? What if she’s really in trouble?” The image of her hand, flung up against the furnace door, floats behind my eyes. “I don’t know if I can do that. Not after yesterday.”
Carmel’s eyes are wide. I wish we hadn’t gone to Morfran, because the things he said only scared her worse. All of his posturing, his forces spinning around the athame, something wicked this way comes B.S. My shoulders tighten and I wince.
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