by Devin Hanson
Chapter Three
Sunlight streaming in through partially opened blinds woke me. Ethan’s spare bedroom had a window on the eastern wall and the direct sunlight caught on drifting dust motes in the air. I stretched languidly, feeling more refreshed than I could remember.
Ethan had provided a backup charger for my cell phone and I fished over the side of the bed until my hand caught in the cord. Ethan might think he was a man of the world, but he didn’t have side tables in his guest room. I dragged my phone up by the cord and checked the time. It was just after six, far earlier than I normally woke up, but I felt like I had slept for ten hours.
I rolled out of bed and padded to the bathroom on bare feet. One of Ethan’s shirts had served as a nightgown, and it dropped to mid-thigh on me. Humming cheerfully to myself, I made it all the way to the sink before I remembered my apartment. A wave of anger came and went, and I scowled at my reflection. Somebody was going to pay for that, as soon as I figured out who was responsible.
Or maybe what was responsible would be a better question. Ethan’s comment the night before about it taking a lot of energy to wreck my apartment had hit closer to home than he might have guessed. I hadn’t been gone from my apartment for more than two hours. It would have taken a crew of very efficient men to have so thoroughly destroyed everything in such a short amount of time.
A crew of men, or one very angry poltergeist.
I hadn’t sensed anything the night before, but that wasn’t hugely surprising. I had been too rattled to see much beyond the destruction. And despite my inclinations to see the supernatural, a medium I was not. Still, there were things even a layman like myself could do to check for the presence of spirits. I wish I had thought of it the night before; sunrise would have destroyed most of the evidence, but there might be traces still lingering.
After brushing my teeth with my new toothbrush and changing back into yesterday’s clothes, I made my way downstairs to the kitchen. To my surprise, Ethan was awake. He looked haggard, with circles under his eyes and his usual healthy tan seemed pale.
“You’re up,” he greeted me with a wan smile. “Did you sleep well?”
Ethan’s kitchen matched his personality. White marble counters, walnut cabinets, stainless steel appliances and everything perfectly spotless. The living room beyond had a black leather couch. In front of the massive TV, a white wool throw rug was pinned in place by a glass-topped coffee table. It looked like he had flipped through an interior design magazine and selected a living room at random. It made me miss my own destroyed furniture.
“I did, thanks.” I opened his fridge and rummaged through the door shelves. A carton of orange juice caught my eye and I pulled it out. “Glasses?”
Ethan pointed and I opened cabinets until I found his collection of coffee mugs. Predictably, his were all identical, with the logo stamp of his business blazoned on the side. There wasn’t a single theme park mug in sight. I settled for a tall glass and poured myself some juice.
“I hate to say it, but you look like shit. Did you even sleep last night?” I settled at the table across from him and sipped my juice.
He hugged his coffee mug closer and frowned at it absently. “I did, but it was pretty restless. Lots of weird dreams.”
I nodded sympathetically. I was no stranger to those myself. “I want to go back to my apartment,” I said. “Whoever trashed it must have left signs behind.”
“Why don’t you just let it go? You can stay here for a few weeks until you find another apartment.”
I drained off the last of the juice and stood. “You’re a sweetheart, Ethan, but what would you do if someone broke into your place and robbed you?”
Ethan’s mouth twitched up in a wry grin. “Touché. I’d offer to drive you, but I have a client meeting in an hour.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said quickly. “I’ll catch a cab. Who’s the client? Anyone interesting?”
“It’s sensitive, and you don’t work for me,” he shot back. “Unless…”
“I’m not that desperate yet. Um. I know last night I said I would only be here for one night…”
“Sure. Nobody else is using the room. I’ll call my girlfriend and let her know you’re staying. That would be an awkward conversation I’d rather head off before it started.”
Girlfriend? I looked about at Ethan’s precise, sterile kitchen. She must be new. “Why, is she the jealous type?”
“Alex, when you’re involved, every girl is the jealous type.”
I matched his grin. “Are you flirting with me?” I wasn’t wearing makeup, my clothes were stale, and my hair was tied up in a messy bun. I hadn’t felt this unattractive in years.
“Not this time. I’ll call you later with the door code so you can let yourself in.” He stood up and snagged his sports jacket from the back of his chair. “I gotta run. Be careful out there.”
I watched him leave, unwilling to get up from the table at the same time and make it awkward. I needed a way to get to my apartment. There wouldn’t be any difficulty getting a cab or an Uber, but the fee driving all the way out to my neighborhood would hurt. My bank account had precious little left in it.
At least I didn’t have to worry about paying for rent at the end of the month. With a sigh, I requested an Uber on my phone. As much as I didn’t want to spend the money, there wasn’t any other way to get to my apartment, and I’d be damned if I was going to ride public transportation.
I had a few minutes to wait, so I wandered back to Ethan’s fridge and picked something at random to snack on. I wasn’t hungry, but it seemed wrong to pass up the chance to eat when it was free. Then I went outside and waited at the curb for my ride to come.
Ethan’s house was at the end of a private drive in the Hollywood Hills. Conservatively, the land itself was worth well over a million dollars, let alone the house built on it. It really put some perspective on how different our financial situations were. I had been struggling to pay rent on a four hundred square foot single-bedroom apartment in Eagle Rock; Ethan had to be paying at least five grand a month on mortgage.
My ride showed, a hybrid car with an acne-faced college kid in the driver’s seat. I got in the back and then forgot about him. Strangely, the thought of returning to my apartment made my hands sweaty and my chest tighten up. It took me a moment to recognize the sensations for what they were.
I was afraid.
Analytically, I knew whoever, or whatever, had trashed my apartment wasn’t going to come back. There wasn’t anything left in there that even Goodwill would accept. And why would they come back? If they had wanted to do physical harm to me, they could have simply waited for me to come home.
Still, there was something about how completely destroyed all my belongings were that put me on edge. There had to be a personal, driving motivation behind it. I tried to think of someone I had made an enemy of, but couldn’t come up with anything. Sure, I haven’t always been the easiest person to be around, but I didn’t go out of my way to make life hard for others.
I looked up and caught the driver staring at me through the rearview mirror. He flushed and dropped his eyes to the road, but his eyes kept coming back to me before flinching away again.
“Can I help you?” I asked, feeling a little irritated.
“Sorry. Um. No, there’s nothing—”
I glared at him until he shut up and stared forward.
After a minute, he spoke again. “Are you an actress, or, or a performer or something?”
I suppressed a sigh and rolled my eyes. “No. Nothing like that.”
“Oh. Well,” he said, growing bolder, “you totally could be. I don’t know if you’ve tried auditioning, but it could be an easy route to money. My, uh, my sister wants to be an actress.”
Her, and ten thousand other unemployed bimbos, all come to Hollywood with star-studded dreams. “I have a job.”
It wasn’t that I hadn’t considered it. I’ve been turning male heads since I was old enough to notice, but there w
as too much about my life that wouldn’t bear close scrutiny. Being hounded by paparazzi would make things uncomfortable, and for more than just myself.
“Oh, what do you do?”
“Odd jobs,” I said, regretting getting into the conversation. “I do contract work and some freelance stuff.”
He gave me a funny look, which was fair given the vagueness of my answer, but dropped the inquiry. We got off the freeway, and he had to start concentrating on the streets. As we drew closer to my apartment, he shot a glance back at me.
“You want to go here?” he asked dubiously.
“Yes, that apartment building there at the end of the street.”
The driver pulled up to the curb and I popped the door. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Be careful!” he called after me.
I only slammed his door a little and hurried inside my apartment building. Now that I was here, I just wanted to get it over with, like yanking off a band aid.
My building had been styled after the luxury apartments of Manhattan and built during a housing boom in the seventies. Poor location combined with the gradual decline of the neighborhood to reduce the market value of the rooms down to bottom dollar. Sometime in the nineties, the building had been sold and the new owner had gutted the spacious suites and rebuilt them as cramped one- and two-bedroom apartments.
That had been over twenty years ago, and the penny-pinching construction work was beginning to show through. The marble façade on the floors in the lobby was cracked and stained, the reception desk had been stripped out and replaced with ranks of mail boxes, the chandelier had been left unlit for so long it would probably be a fire hazard to turn it on now due to the number of cobwebs on it.
I skipped the elevator and made my way to the stairs in the back. Anyone who risked the elevator had pretty much even chances of getting to their destination or being stuck halfway between floors. The acrid scent of urine hit me as I pushed open the stairway door and I held my breath until I made it past the obvious stains.
The ammonia smell lingered with me until I left the stairwell on the third floor. Cigarette smoke and stale sweat drowned out the last of the urine smell and I started breathing easier. The aromas of home.
My door looked the same as I had left it the night before. I stopped outside it anyway and listened. By the time my heartbeat normalized again after running up the stairs while holding my breath, I was fairly certain nobody was in my apartment.
Gingerly, I pushed open the door and winced at the squeal of bent hinges. I stuck my head through the doorway and took in the ruin of my apartment. Some part of me had been hoping that the destruction hadn’t been as thorough as I had initially thought, but no, I had remembered quite accurately.
I stepped inside and propped the door closed with the piece of credenza. Now to figure out who, or what, had done this dastardly deed.
Spirits are everywhere. That was just a fact of modern life. Two centuries ago, people knew what precautions to take to keep the dead from disturbing the living. These days, people are so enthralled by their electronics and their science that even when they walked into a haunted location, they rarely noticed. The old ways have fallen out of use, and as a result, spirits clog the ether.
Most spirits don’t stick around. They grow bored or depressed and just fade away. It takes a really strong purpose for a ghost to persist. But even then, without interaction, purpose wanes and the constant failure to communicate to the living makes them give up.
A few spirits are unlucky enough to figure out how to communicate, even if only slightly. Hope makes them persist, and they grow strong enough over time to attract the attention of someone like me. I didn’t take many ghost jobs; the pay was usually miserable and it never turned out the way the customer wanted.
There’s a common layman’s belief that ghosts only haunt because they need closure about something. That is true, in a sense, but it’s only half of the picture. Ghosts are a snapshot of life. When someone dies while feeling intense emotion, the spirit that lingers hangs onto that emotion. Or perhaps I should say, the spirit believes it is that emotion. They haunt because they need closure and giving them that closure only leaves them without purpose, but with the emotion still firmly in place.
That’s when ghosts get nasty. Without a way to channel that emotion toward something at least superficially constructive, ghosts get more and more worked up, and their power grows. Then you end up with poltergeists and other spiritual nasties.
Places that have ghosts haunting them have a certain vibe. They feel abandoned, the air itself feels forlorn. My apartment felt a little like that now, but it certainly hadn’t when I had left to go to dinner last night. Then, it had felt normal. Safe. It was a home.
My apartment had had a threshold. I’m not talking about the piece of wood that goes under a door, I’m talking about the palpable energy that a place develops when someone lives there for a long time. You never find thresholds where the occupants are transient. Hotel rooms, apartments with month-long leases, rental cabins, and the like, never develop a threshold.
I’d been living in my apartment for nearly two years, and it was my home. If I was a hippy, petting my crystals and spaced on peyote, I would say my aura had infused the space. It had become a part of me, and I of it. But I’m not, and hallucinogens aren’t my thing, so I just call it a threshold.
The thing is, spirits can’t find traction in a place protected by a threshold. That’s why you always hear about hauntings when someone newly moves into a house. In my apartment, a poltergeist might have been able to knock over a cup or made the radio fill with static, but it couldn’t have flattened my spoons and shredded my clothes.
I frowned and did a slow turn, examining the living room. There went my poltergeist theory. A chill crept up my spine and I shivered. I had hoped it had been a ghost. Ghosts I could deal with. Even poltergeists I could handle, though they’re more tenacious and dangerous.
Something that could walk over a threshold and still possess enough energy to do damage was in a different league. Hell, even vampires couldn’t enter a home without an invitation. And may God continue to keep vampires out of Los Angeles.
So I was dealing with something corporeal, something that didn’t rely on psychic energy for its strength and power.
Things were worse than I had thought. I was dealing with djinn.
I made it to Eagle Rock Plaza before I stopped running. The bustle of people shopping in the mall cooled some of my panic. I was winded, sweaty, and attracting the wrong sort of stares.
The sweat cooling on my skin raised goose bumps as I entered the Target. I needed crowds about me now. Witnesses. If there was one of the djinn gunning for me, they wouldn’t strike in public. The press of people moving through the foyer of the Target thinned as I moved deeper into the store, and I followed along with the greatest flow. I ended up walking slow circles around the clothing section, not daring to leave the thoroughfare.
Gradually, my panic evened out to a controllable tension. If a djinn wanted to kill me, it could have made the attempt at any number of places between my apartment and Target. Hell, it could have done the deed the moment I had entered my apartment.
I’m a scrappy girl when it comes down to it. I keep myself fit, even lift weights on occasion. I’m just shy of five feet and eight inches, and weigh… never mind. The point is, I’m a human female who still hasn’t turned twenty-one. The last marid I’d seen was seven feet tall and I swear his biceps weighed as much as I did.
In a fight against a marid, I’d be horribly out-classed.
The marid weren’t the only djinn of course. Besides the more elemental cousins like the jaan, and the bestial hinn, there were the houri. Houri might not have the same imposing physical stature of the marid, but they were just as nasty in their own way.
But it wasn’t a houri I needed to worry about. A houri wouldn’t destroy my apartment physically, that was something a marid would do. Marid are fast, hugely stron
g, with a sort of methodical, unimaginative approach to life. If one had been inclined to trash my apartment, it would have gone about it clinically, making sure that every spoon was flattened, every item of clothing shredded, and every piece of furniture broken.
The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that a marid had been responsible. In a way, it was a relief. If a marid was trying to kill me, at least I would see it coming.
I started taking more interest in the racks of clothing I was passing by. Besides the clothes on my back, I didn’t have a single thread to change into. I didn’t want to keep sleeping at Ethan’s place using his shirts as nightgowns; it would send the wrong message to his girlfriend. While I ordinarily wouldn’t be against playing that kind of game, I felt I owed it to Ethan to play nice.
There wasn’t going to be a better opportunity to do a little shopping. There was a simple catharsis to buying clothes that I desperately needed. I wandered around the clothing section, trying to put together an outfit or two that I could wear. It was nearing the end of September, which meant the nights were starting to get colder.
The shopping gave me time to think. As far as I knew, I hadn’t done anything recently that would anger a marid. As a people, djinn were quick to anger, so it was entirely possible I had done something that would attract their attention and not even realize it.
I needed help.
There weren’t a ton of djinn in the world. Humans, in their xenophobic paranoia, had seen to that. Most of the marid tended to hide in plain sight, posing as body builders or athletes. After a little cosmetic surgery to fix their nose wrinkles and oversized canines, they were indistinguishable from a steroid-abusing human, on the surface at least.
What I needed was an expert on the djinn, someone who knew more about them than a few anecdotes. I could spot one face-to-face, even had a few as clients over the years, but I had no idea where they hung out or how to get in contact with one if it was necessary.
I took my selections into the changing room and made sure Target’s wonky sizes fit. The new bra seemed tight but was manageable. I kind of doubted I’d find a better fit for twenty dollars, and I didn’t want to spend all morning in Target. Once I found a new place to live and had some time to myself, I’d go shopping for real and invest the time and money to get it right.