by D V Wolfe
“Well, I hope you’ve bought a new suture needle since the last time I saw you,” Rosetta huffed, closing the big book on her lap and shifting to put her short legs on the ground. “You look like hell.”
“What else is new,” I said, taking the sawed-off in my left hand and tightening my grip on my machete before heading back up the stairs.
“Going in for round two?” Rosetta asked. “Bane, you always jump before you look. When are you going to learn?”
“Noah is still inside,” I said.
“Christ,” Rosetta said. I glanced at her, surprised. Rosetta was ‘Moses on the mountain carrying the stone tablets’ serious when it came to the sin of cursing. “It’s a poltergeist,” Rosetta said, bending down and picking up her twelve-gauge shotgun from the ground beside her lawn chair. She cocked it with one hand and took off her pink sunglasses with the other.
“You stay here,” I said to Rosetta. “I’ll get him out of there.”
“You’re so cute, Bane, bless your heart,” Rosetta croaked. “Now get out of my way.” She shoved me sideways and the railing cut into my wound.
“Fuck,” I wheezed.
“Language,” Rosetta said as she lifted a patent leather shoe and kicked in her back door. Her floral-patterned dress billowed around her legs as she stood framed in the doorway, gun squared to her shoulder, sighting down the barrel.
“Alright, you narcissistic pestilence, bring your non-corporeal hiney down here!” She shouted into the house. This statement was met with the rattling scrapes of her furniture and possessions as they were dragged around inside. A scream echoed down to us from upstairs.
“Noah!” I shouted. I charged up the porch stairs and tried to push Rosetta aside. She was already moving forward into the house but we both hit the same invisible wall preventing us from going further than the doorway. I leaned into it, tried to punch through it with a hand, and suddenly Rosetta and I were knocked backward. I fell down the stairs and Rosetta landed on top of me.
After a minute, Rosetta sucked in a breath and sat up. “I’m too old for this shit.” She stood and smoothed her dress and then reached down to lend me a hand.
“You gotta stop watching those old cop movies at night, Rosetta.” I stumbled back towards the stairs again.
“Bane, give it up.”
“I can’t, Noah is still in there.”
“Hey!” A voice called over the back fence. I saw a flash of curly orange hair bounce above the wooden fence slats.
“Noah!” I called, feeling relief or maybe just weakness in my legs, wash over me. I slumped down and sat on the back steps while Rosetta went to let him in the side gate.
“Come join us, sonny,” Rosetta said with her best southern manners. “I’ve made some fresh lemonade.” Noah gave her a weak smile and then looked around her to where I sat. I waved the sawed-off at him in greeting and put my head down. My vision was getting spotty which wasn’t helped any by the burning townsfolk who were still crowding me, punching at the air around my face in flaming vengeance.
“Is she hurt?” Noah asked Rosetta.
Rosetta turned to look at me. “Nothing a suture needle and some Stitch’s bourbon won’t fix, I expect.”
“Let me see,” Noah said, dropping the ten-gauge on the pink lounge chair and crossing to me.
“It’s nothing. Just some glass caught me,” I said. Noah offered me his hand, and helped me stand up.
“Put the gun and the knife down,” Noah said. I looked at him. “If I’m going to fix you, I really don’t want you armed while I do it.”
I set the machete and the sawed-off down. I gritted my teeth and put both hands on the railing. “Make it quick.”
Noah moved my slashed shirt out of the way and looked at the wound. “I don’t know if cauterizing this will really be that helpful. I could stop the bleeding but that’s pretty much it. You need stitches.”
Rosetta came to join us. “He’s right, Bane. Where’s your suture needle and thread at?”
“Tennessee.”
Rosetta rolled her eyes. “I think I’ve got something that will work in the shed.” Rosetta turned and headed to the little potting shed along the back fence.
“How’d you get out of there?” I asked Noah, sliding back down to sit on the stairs.
Noah looked down. “I ran back out the front door when it grabbed you.”
I looked up at him. “Smartest thing you could have done.”
Noah met my gaze. “Really? Because it felt pretty wimpy.”
“Fools rush in, remember?” I said with a smile as Rosetta approached us carrying a tackle box. “Ewww,” I said as she flipped the lid open and the smell of dead fish reached us.
Rosetta glared at me. “I believe there’s a saying about beggars.”
“Right,” I conceded.
“Noah, is it?” Rosetta asked him. He nodded. “Go grab the bottle she keeps under the seat of her truck, will you?”
“Bottle?” Noah asked.
“The rotgut whiskey she uses instead of, well, most everything.” Noah nodded and crossed to the side gate.
“Stitch’s isn’t rotgut,” I said. “Mattie May would call for a duel with you if she heard you call it that.”
Rosetta snorted. “Not likely with all the other hoopla that goes on at Pitch’s. Rotgut is probably a badge of honor.”
“Hoopla notwithstanding,” I said, looking up at the house. “How do you want to handle the carnies running around in your funhouse?”
“Well,” she said, pulling a dirty needle off an old ‘Gone Fishin’ magnet from inside the tackle box. “If this was a normal poltergeist, I’d say ash the remains, but considering where it came from, that’s probably not a plan that will prove to be a good use of our time.”
“I told you when you bought the place.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Rosetta said. “Here.” She handed me a stick from the lawn to bite down on.
“Thanks.” I looked down at the fishing line she was unwinding. “How old is that stuff?”
“Not as old as you,” Rosetta said, threading the suture needle.
“Good enough for me.” I looked at the rusty needle. “That can’t be sanitary.”
Noah closed the gate behind him and gave the edge of the house a wide berth as he approached us and handed Rosetta the whiskey bottle.
“What’s up with you?” I asked, noticing how pale Noah’s face was. “I mean besides the stuff that’s been happening over the last twelve hours.”
“I saw…” Noah looked back up at the windows of the house. “I saw a girl.”
“Huh,” Rosetta said. “I’ve never had a girl one in my house before. It’s usually a boy throwing a tantrum.”
“How many times has this happened?” Noah asked, gazing up at the second-story windows.
She shrugged. “Every now and then.” She filled the bottle cap with whiskey and scrubbed at the needle.
“Why didn’t you say anything on the phone?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “Besides not being able to get many words in before we were cut off, I’m not completely useless, young lady. Don’t you forget who taught you everything you know about the business.”
She poured more whiskey on my side and I stuck the stick in my mouth and bit down. She finished the stitch job much sooner than I would have, doing it myself. Her stitches were clean and neat, like the embroidery she did when her hands weren’t busy holding her twelve-gauge.
She put a bandage over it and stood. “There.”
“Thanks, Rosetta,” I said looking down at it. I stood. “Ok, so if we can’t destroy the remains, that leaves what? Another cleansing ritual?”
Rosetta nodded. “Hex bags and Holyroods.”
“Holy what?” Noah asked.
“Holyroods. Relics,” I said.
“Well, not actual relics,” Rosetta said, repacking the tackle box. “Just rosewood ash and reddened bones.”
Noah shook his head as if this was too much to absorb
. “What’s in there?” Noah asked, his glance sliding to the broken kitchen window.
“A poltergeist,” Rosetta said, heading back to the shed. I followed her and Noah trailed after us.
“Like the movie?”
Rosetta and I paused and shared a smile before we looked at him. “That was just a movie,” I said, “This is real. It’s the murderous spirit of a person who was killed in a violent, gruesome way, coming back to punish the living. A spirit on steroids.”
“What’s it doing here?” Noah asked.
“Well, that’s what happens when you go bargain shopping for a homestead,” I said, cutting my eyes to Rosetta.
“They were going to build a school on top of it. What would you have done? And it wasn’t bargain shopping, I paid them double what the city was offering.”
“What? Why?” Noah asked.
“Well, Rosetta’s lovely house, on this beautiful corner lot, is built on top of a Hellgate.” Noah just stared. “That about sums up my reaction,” I said, moving inside the door of the potting shed. I started searching the nearest shelf for hex bag materials. I picked up a bottle of graveyard dirt and glanced over my shoulder when I heard something heavy hit the ground.
Noah had slumped to the ground, splay-legged with his back against the open shed door.
“It’s really not that bad,” Rosetta said. She had opened a box of dried herbs and was carefully removing them one at a time with a pair of tweezers, setting them in squares of sackcloth. “They usually just mind their own business. I mean I did have to give up the walk-in closet and the root cellar, but I just use the guest room on the first floor to store my canning.”
“Don’t forget the downstairs bathroom,” I grunted as I tossed her the graveyard dirt and pulled down the bag of reddened bird bones from the top shelf.
Rosetta began measuring out the dirt and rolled her eyes. “Do you always have to bring that up? I’ve apologized to him over and over about that.”
“I’ll bet it’s hard to tell if he’s forgiven you, what with half his tongue missing now. If I was him, I’d relieve myself outside for the rest of my life.”
Noah seemed to have recovered momentarily as he looked up at us. “What? Someone lost half their tongue in there?!”
Rosetta sighed. “Mayor Sheffield. He came over for my housewarming party. I used to teach him in Sunday school. He said he was offering an ‘olive branch’ since I’d outbid the city for the property.”
“And?” Noah asked.
“And...he had an accident.”
I snorted. “Yeah, he accidentally sat down on a haunted toilet that just happened to house a water wraith. When the thing came tearing up the U-bend and literally tore him a new one, he accidentally bit his own tongue off in shock.”
Rosetta glared at me. “No one likes a smart ass, Bane.”
I glanced down at Noah. He was nodding with a simple smile on his face as if this all made perfect sense.
“Did reality give you a roundhouse there?” I asked him.
He smiled up at me. “Oh I’m fine. Starting to get it. I’ve spent my whole life believing that the shit in scary movies and campfire stories didn’t exist. But then I meet you and suddenly all bets are off. Life just gives me a big wedgie and stuffs my head in a haunted toilet and then runs off, laughing.”
I shrugged. “I think most people’s first reaction to a brush with the business goes about like that.” I looked over at Rosetta, “You?”
Rosetta frowned, trying to remember. “Well, I’d just lost my husband so I think I was half-mad anyway and when I learned what had killed him, I think I was more angry than in shock. That first year, I stuck my twelve-gauge in all kinds of hornet nests.”
I nodded. “I remember Tags telling me stories about it. He said you used so much rock salt, Morton’s should have given you an endorsement.”
Rosetta grinned. “Well that was then. Now, I’m semi-retired. I live a quiet life here.”
“What do you do now?” Noah asked.
“I teach Sunday school,” Rosetta said proudly.
“And perform seances on Mondays,” I muttered, tying up the hex bags with lengths of bindweed.
“Well, you’ve got to use what the Lord gave you,” Rosetta said.
“In this case a Hellgate,” I said, dipping each bag in the jug of holy water and passing them to Rosetta.
“Noah,” Rosetta said sweetly. “How did you come to cross paths with Bane?”
“I was hitchhiking through eastern Pennsylvania and Bane stopped to pick me up.”
“And you thought it was a good idea to get in the truck with Bane?” Rosetta raised an eyebrow at me. I sighed.
“Uh,” Noah started.
“Beautiful country up there,” Rosetta said, not waiting for him to finish. She using a charred, red-marked bone dipped in Rosewood ash to mark each bag with the cleansing symbols. “You have family up there?”
“My mom,” Noah said quietly.
“Doing one of those ‘end-of-high-school-see the-world’ backpacking things?” She asked.
“Not exactly.”
“Noah sets people on fire with his hands,” I said. The awkward tension of both Rosetta and Noah trying to out-polite the other was getting old and I had shit to do. They both looked at me. “What?” I said, tossing four of the hex bags into Noah’s lap. “Come on, we’re wasting daylight.”
5
Noah didn’t move.
I tried to ignore the vision of Libby Stephens’ with her pigtails on fire standing next to him, holding a shovel and crying. I blinked a couple of times, hoping she’d disappear. No such luck. I looked down at him. “Get the lead out. That thing isn’t going to send itself back to Hell.”
“What do you mean, ‘he sets people on fire with his hands’?” Rosetta asked. She looked at Noah. “She’s joking right?”
Noah shook his head. “No.” He looked down at his feet.
“Well, it sounds like something she’d joke about,” Rosetta muttered, grinning at Noah. Noah caught her eye and he gave her a shy smile in return.
“I’m not sure that she’s ever joking,” Noah said. “All the insane things she’s ever said to me have come true. Well, except that this broken bottle of blood was cursed.”
Rosetta froze. “Did you break her bottle of dead man’s blood?”
I nodded. “All over the dash.”
Rosetta shook her head. “Rookie move. Well, you break it, you buy it.”
Noah swallowed hard.
“Only if you touched the broken glass,” I said, trying to smile at Noah with some semblance of reassurance.
Rosetta chuckled as she tied a carpenter’s apron around her waist and put four of the hex bags in the pocket. “You remember the first time you knocked over one of my vials of dead man’s blood?”
I rubbed my neck. “Yep, and I remember you being so pissed at me that you marched me right over to the undertaker’s on third street, showed me the loose basement window and told me that under no circumstances would I be getting any fried chicken and cornbread until I returned with a full bottle.”