Apparently Velvet didn’t care for the treatment.
This close, I could see her aura change in response to my actions, could see the anger sparking off her now in thick black streaks, and beneath that the red splatter that was her pain and the faint, luminescent sheen of blue I’d come to learn was fear. Three emotions that didn’t play well together in the living, never mind the dead.
The fingers of my left hand absently rubbed the lodestone hanging around my neck as I felt myself shiver at all that raw emotion.
Velvet stood her ground, ignoring the banishing and refusing to leave.
She wasn’t happy with recent events though, and she let me know it. The temperature in the room dropped like a stone; even as I watched, frost blossomed on the window and spread out across the glass. Along with the cold came the first true poltergeist activity I’d seen so far tonight, the bed beginning to rock up and down on its four legs, banging out a staccato rhythm against the floor.
It was time to bring out the heavy guns.
From the depths of my outer pocket I withdrew a can of red spray paint. Velvet’s eyes were following my every move by this point, but she still hadn’t given any sign that she intended to try to physically stop me, so I continued with my preparations. Turning to the door, I uncapped the paint and sprayed a big red X right across it from one corner to the other.
An old wives’ tale says that ghosts don’t like the color red and, oddly enough, it happens to be true. In fact, ghosts will go out of their way to avoid it, the same way you and I might cross the street to avoid a nasty-looking dog. Some say it’s because of the vibrations the color gives off, others that red reminds them too much of blood, and therefore of life. I didn’t really care one way or the other. All that mattered to me was the knowledge that with the door marked in red, Velvet wouldn’t cross that barrier if she had any other option open to her. The window was already sealed off thanks to the iron grille, and with the door now secured, her options were dwindling fast.
I was hoping that at this point she’d decide to go peacefully.
I was done with being polite, though. She’d resisted the simpler methods at my disposal. Now I had no choice but to get a little rough.
Velvet’s watchful demeanor changed the second I pulled the clump of sage out of my other pocket. Gone was the casual disregard; now she stared directly at me and the black taint of her aura intensified until it drowned out the other colors.
I’d come too far to stop now though. I was being paid to get rid of her. She didn’t belong here, not anymore, and I’d gotten pretty good at enforcing my will in situations like this.
I repeated my request for her to leave, this time with a bit more force, and then touched the sage to the candle flame. As the dried herb began to smolder, it gave off a thick, unpleasant-smelling smoke, which I began to wave around the room and at Velvet herself. Smudging, it was called, and, like the note and the candle routine, it was supposed to drive off the ghost.
The bed was bouncing up and down harder now and the drawers of the dresser in the corner began slamming open and shut as Velvet fought back against my efforts. She was stubborn, holding her ground against the noxious fumes, refusing to move on. I kept my head down but my gaze fixed firmly on her as I hunted in my pocket for the last item I needed to finish the banishing.
Something flew through the air and just missed smashing into my head. It took me a moment to realize that it was a dresser drawer. I glanced up, only to jerk my head to the side as another swept past not an inch in front of my eyes. A third slammed into my stomach, momentarily driving the breath from my lungs.
Better hurry up, Hunt …
My hand finally found the cloth pouch I’d been rooting around for and I pulled it free, slipping the drawstrings open as I did. Velvet’s figure was swelling as she drew power from the air around her, and I wasted no time in pouring what was inside the pouch into the palm of my hand and flinging it in her direction.
The finely ground iron dust struck her full in the face.
I had a brief, fleeting moment to think I’d bested her at last and then everything spun out of control.
Velvet screamed, a long unearthly cry that made all the hair on my body stand at attention. Streams of black poured from her eyes in a rush and then, with her fingers hooked into ragged claws, she charged forward, throwing herself across the room at me with the kind of rage and despair that only the dead can muster.
I’d been wrong.
This was no harmless poltergeist but actually a full-blown spectre masquerading as a lesser ghost. And clearly, she intended to tear me limb from limb.
Instinct took over then, every fiber of my being shouting at me to run, and run I did. My body was already in motion before my brain had finished telling it which way to go, and as I pushed through the door, I gave it a hearty swing back in the other direction, slamming it shut at my back.
Something massive struck it a resounding blow on the other side, and I heard the wood crack quite clearly, even over Velvet’s horrible cries.
I spun around to face it, only to have the room around me go strangely silent at that exact moment.
The sudden quiet was as alarming as the torturous shrieking cut off in my wake.
Just what the hell was she …
I began backing my way across the living room, unable and unwilling to take my eyes off the door. As I went, I dug in my pocket for my last line of defense, a small hand mirror.
I’d barely made it halfway across the room when something struck the door with incredible force, blasting it right off its hinges and directly at me.
I threw myself to the ground, feeling the weight and heat of the door’s passage as it whistled by me.
The impact with the ground jarred the mirror loose from my hand. It bounced across the floor, out of sight.
“Noooo …!” I cried involuntarily, fear filling my throat. Without that mirror, I was done for. I had to find it!
I scrambled forward on elbows and knees, searching, as Velvet came after me.
Come on! Where the hell is it?
A wave of freezing cold washed over me and I knew she was almost upon me. If I didn’t find it fast …
There!
As those claw-tipped fingers reached for my tender flesh, my fingers finally found the mirror’s edge. I grabbed it and I swung my hand up and around, thrusting the mirror out in front of me, directly into her path.
Velvet’s gaze went to the mirror’s surface, and in the split second before the reflection snagged her I thought I saw her eyes widen in surprise.
For the living, a mirror is simply a convenience, a way for us to see that we don’t look like complete idiots when we leave the house in the morning, but to the dead, it is oh, so much more.
Ghosts can use mirrors as portals, passageways from one place to another, in much the same way that hobgoblins can travel from shadow to shadow. Most people recognize this, even if only on a subconscious level. That’s how the custom of covering the mirrors in the home of the deceased during a wake originated; no one wanted the dead man’s ghost showing up and scaring off those who’d come to pay their respects. The same reasoning explains why the best funeral homes in any city expressly forbid hanging mirrors inside their halls.
But mirrors also have other uses, and I’d specially prepared this one for just such an emergency as this. Held to the place by the violent circumstances of her death and all the iron covering the entrances to the building, Velvet would have probably gone on haunting the place indefinitely. Unable to reach the individual who had stolen her life away from her, she was using those who’d failed to help her as his surrogate, taking out all her hatred and rage on them instead. She likely could have left at any time had she wanted to. After all, what woman’s apartment didn’t have a mirror in it somewhere? But she’d become focused on vengeance and was ignoring the means at her disposal to let go and move on to whatever was next.
I was simply forcing her to do so.
This close she couldn’t resist the pull of the way between worlds, something that seems to be true of every ghost I’d encountered so far, and as a result her headlong rush changed just enough to bring her into contact with the mirror’s reflective surface.
A flash of searing cold passed through the mirror, frosting its face, and then the glass cracked with a loud snap that echoed in the sudden silence that fell over the apartment in the wake of Velvet’s disappearance.
Working quickly, I pulled a piece of black silk out of my pocket and wrapped the mirror in it. With its surface broken, the ghost was now trapped inside the glass, at least temporarily. In time it would either move on to whatever stage of the afterlife was next or discover a passage back to the real world through a connecting portal. Either would take some effort, which left me some time to dispose of the mirror as I saw fit without worrying about Velvet coming after me.
I slumped back against the ground, exhausted.
It was over.
Nearby, something clattered to the floor.
I sat up hurriedly, afraid that there had been more than one entity holed up inside the apartment, but the room behind me was empty. Nothing looked out of place, either.
I knew I hadn’t imagined it, though. The sound had been quite distinct. Something had skittered across the bedroom floor, as if pushed by errant hands, and I had the sudden overwhelming urge to find what it was. My gut told me that I couldn’t just turn my back on this. I had no idea why, but I knew it was important.
I’ve learned to trust hunches like that.
Back in the bedroom I got down on my hands and knees and went over the floor with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. It took a while, but eventually I found it, tucked away under the baseboard against the wall by the window where Velvet had been standing. It was a small locket, maybe silver, maybe gold; it was hard to tell in the gray haze that was my vision. The kind of locket a girl might wear on a chain around her neck, and from the amount of dried blood on it I could tell that Velvet had probably been holding it when she’d died. If the cops had searched hard enough they would certainly have found it, as it wasn’t that far out of sight, but obviously they hadn’t cared as much about some dead hooker as the captain led the press to believe.
I couldn’t see the image in the photograph that lined the inside of the locket: another side effect of my Faustian bargain from years before. And not just photographs, but paintings, too. They all looked to my strange new vision like deep gray Rorschach blotches, and I knew them for what they were simply because they were the only things that appeared that way. This one was no different.
The picture didn’t really matter though. It was the locket itself that was important.
To those in the trade they were known as fetters, physical objects that tied a ghost to a certain location. Fetters could be anything, from a childhood toy to a prized personal possession to a loved one the ghost refused to leave behind. In the short time I’d been doing this kind of thing, I’d seen my fair share of them and could recognize them by the way they pressed against my senses in much the same way as the ghost to which they were tied.
The locket had been Velvet’s fetter, her link to this place and time.
I scooped it up and put it in my pocket. If you were going to haunt somewhere, there were a thousand better places in this city to do so than a run-down tenement building in the heart of the Rox.
Taking one last look around the apartment, I turned and headed for the door.
My job here was done.
4
THEN
I can’t remember my first kiss or the first time I said “I love you” to the woman I would one day marry, two events most people would consider to be quintessential moments in a man’s life, but I remember each and every detail, no matter how trivial, of the horrible afternoon when Elizabeth disappeared. They are etched indelibly on the surface of my mind, a grotesque and terrifying mosaic that I can recall at will, anytime, anywhere. It is as if the universe wants to be certain that I don’t forget even the slightest detail, wants me to be able to relive it all in a heartbeat, complete with high-def and Dolby surround sound.
Anne was gone for the weekend to the spa in Westport with her girlfriends—their annual pilgrimage, I liked to call it—and I was alone in the house with our daughter. It had been raining all day, one of those cold October rains that seeps into the very marrow of your bones and chills you from the inside out. I’d spent much of the morning locked away in my study, working on the translation of a manuscript that had just come in from Iraq. I could hear the television playing in the room down the hall and knew Elizabeth had settled in for her afternoon ritual of watching Scooby and the gang chase down the latest villain. She’d be there for at least an hour and that gave me the time I needed to get the translation under way.
I was working from computer scans of an ancient scroll found in the desert by an American army patrol, and it required all my attention to correctly decipher and translate the Chaldean script that covered the pages. What I had intended to be an hour session quickly turned into two, then three. At last I was done. I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes, and smiled in achievement.
That’s when I noticed the quiet of the house around me.
That’s weird, I remember thinking.
Elizabeth was a boisterous child, with five times the energy any one person deserved. If she was quiet, that usually meant she was up to something.
My thoughts still on the work I’d completed, I left the study and went in search of my daughter.
The living room where she had been watching cartoons earlier was empty, as was the bathroom adjacent to it. The television had been turned off, so I assumed she’d had enough of Scooby and had gone off to her room to play. A glance at my watch let me know how long things had gone on; it was almost time for dinner.
“Elizabeth?” I called.
No answer.
“Elizabeth? Where are you, honey?”
Only silence.
The quiet was getting to me and I felt the first faint stirring of unease in the pit of my stomach.
I tried to ignore it, telling myself that nothing was wrong.
Assuming she must be up in her room listening to her radio with her headphones on, I climbed the stairs and moved down the hall. Her bedroom was halfway down the hall on the left, just before my own.
I knocked once, waited a minute, and then opened the door when I didn’t receive a reply.
The room was empty.
I didn’t react at that point. Who knows, maybe I should have. Maybe if I had run outside right then and there I might have been able to save her. Or, at the very least, gotten a good look at whoever had taken her. But hindsight is always twenty-twenty and nothing in that moment suggested that five years would pass without a clue to her whereabouts or fate. Elizabeth was an active child; I was sure I’d find her somewhere else in the house.
I wandered from room to room, calling her name as I went. I checked the living room, in case she had gone back to watching television. She wasn’t there. I checked the kitchen, thinking she might have gotten hungry and gone looking for a snack, but that room was empty as well. I even went back upstairs and stuck my head in the spare bedroom, for she sometimes liked to curl up in there and watch the cars drive by on the street outside. No dice.
It was only when I wandered back past her room that I noticed the draft. The curtains had been drawn, covering the window, but even from the hallway I could see them billowing away from the wall as they caught the breeze from outside.
A sense of dread swept over me in that second and somehow I knew.
Elizabeth was gone.
Parents experience a unique kind of fear. It is at once more visceral and more paralyzing than any other fear, a cold, clammy hand that squeezes your heart until your very blood starts to drip from between its fingers. It invades your mind like an alien presence, disrupts your thought processes and ratchets your emotions right off the scale, until you can’t po
ssibly think straight and every second is an eternity, an eternity where all you can do is think about all of the terrible things that could have happened to your precious child.
Fear overwhelmed me, freezing me where I stood, my pulse pounding in my ears. All I could do was stare at those billowing curtains and imagine my daughter’s body lying on the frozen ground two stories below.
Getting my legs to move took a Herculean effort.
I yanked the curtain back, exposing the open window. The lower half had been pushed upward as far as it would go. With these old windows that was a good foot and a half, at least half again as much as Elizabeth would have needed to slip out.
Bracing myself, I stuck my head out into the rain and looked down.
The ground below me was clear.
I gasped in relief, not realizing until that moment that I had been holding my breath, but that relief was short-lived, for she was still missing.
“Elizabeth?” I shouted, from the top of the stairs, hearing my voice echo through the rest of the house. “This isn’t funny now Elizabeth, come out here right now!”
The house mocked me with its silence.
Panic took over then, a panic fueled by years of news reports about missing and abducted children, of small bodies found broken and twisted in the dark and lonely places of the world. I raced frantically through the house, shouting her name, demanding that she come out right this instant or there was going to be hell to pay.
Of course she didn’t answer me.
Now, years later, I’m convinced she was long gone by then. I have this memory, real or imagined, I’m not sure, of a thump I heard from the room above me while in the midst of my translation efforts. Nothing drastic, nothing that caused me any sort of alarm at the time, just a brief thump, like when a heavy book falls to the floor.
A heavy book.
Or maybe a young child.
When she still didn’t respond to my calls, I dashed outside, running around the yard, hoping against hope that she had simply decided to put on her raincoat and go play in the puddles. But there was no sign of her anywhere.
Eyes to See Page 3