The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  So if I were Cribbs, holed-up in the Hunt Public House, and if I were worried enough to bribe the two sons of bitches who worked here so that they’d keep anybody from getting into my room, and if I were stupid enough—the rush of blood, mixed with shock at the stupidity, made me pant, a doggy grin on my face—if I were so goddamn stupid that I still parked my semi-tractor out back where anybody who took an extra two minutes could find it, and if I’d been here for days, the worry and fear ramping up, getting stronger, putting me on the edge of my seat because I was here with the kids, nowhere to go, nothing to do but wait, what would I do?

  I’d go out of my damn mind. I paused as my sneaker passed room 4. After a few days of that, hiding out, stupid as shit, I’d be getting paranoid. I’d start wondering if the Lady was going to deliver on whatever she’d promised. I’d start wondering if the cops were already looking for the kids. I’d start wondering if Axton and his dumbass brother might not be willing to sell me out to anybody who had an extra twenty.

  The hiss of blood in my ears made me brace myself against the wall. If I were feeling like that, I’d be ready for somebody to show up at any minute. And I’d be ready to do something stupid. Maybe really stupid.

  I backtracked to the supply closet. I snatched the mop, wrung out as much of the stagnant water as I could, and scuffed my way up the nickel’s worth of carpet until I was just past the door to room 4. I didn’t want to get much closer. Any closer and I might get caught up in the wrong kind of stupid.

  Flipping the mop around, I grabbed the wet nylon strands, grimacing as the water ran down my wrist and soaked the sweater. Then, the long wooden end of the mop wobbling, I swung and rapped it against the door to 5. Once. It was a sharp, clicking sound. I brought the mop back again, ready to crack it against the door again. It wasn’t a perfect replica of a knock, but to a guy who’s been holed up for days, worrying out of his mind, it might sound like—

  The shotgun’s boom crashed through the hallway. Pellets chewed through the door, gnawed away a good chunk of the mop handle, and dug deep into the drywall on the other side of the hall. I staggered back, my ears ringing. A second shotgun blast followed, the sound even louder this time, as a grinning chunk of the door peeled away and fell into the hallway.

  “I’m gonna kill you, motherfucker,” came a shout from inside the room.

  Cribbs, I guessed. What an introduction.

  On my next breath, I tasted gunpowder and the dry gypsum of wallboard. Dust swirled in the air. My ears were still ringing from the two successive gunshots, and when another flap of wood fell from the door, I heard nothing as it hit the ground. I edged a step closer to the door. I needed to see him; I needed that much, or I doubted I’d be able to make the connection that I needed to reach his mind and disable him.

  “Mr. Cribbs.” Christ, that sounded stupid. I opened my second sight, and the ultra-textured reality of the other side washed over me. “Mr. Cribbs, my name’s Vie. Vie Eliot. I’m a friend of your kids—”

  “Vie?” Hannah’s voice was small, barely audible over the lingering thunder that the gunshot had left in my ears. It hammered right into my heart like a silver spike. “Vie, he’s got a gun. He’s not my dad—”

  He’s not my dad. I didn’t know what that meant, but I could sense Hannah’s fear like a poison cloud. I didn’t care about Axton or his brother coming back. I didn’t care about my body lying helpless on the floor. I pushed, the feeling like I was trying to sit up, and projected myself into the other side. Whoever was in there, I was going to walk right through that wall and rip his mind into so many pieces they could use it for confetti.

  Before I could do more than project myself into the other side, though, I felt a surge. It was like what I had felt in the power Ms. Meehan had used at Emmett’s house, like my own power, but another variation on it. The door to room 5 buckled. The hinges bent and squealed. One of the screws ripped free from the jamb, and then another, and all I could do was stare as an invisible force yanked the door out of its frame. Wood and metal shrieked, and the door flew inward, as though a giant had pitched it. Stranger still was the way the other side reacted: the threads making up this part of reality stretched, the weave drawing tight, snapping in places, subjected to forces that went beyond the physical. It grabbed me, my psychic projection, and slammed me against the wall. Whatever was happening, it was ripping the whole universe.

  And then it stopped. I fled back to my body, dragged myself to my feet, and stumbled toward the door. Sure, whoever was in there had a shotgun, but I was willing to bet that guy didn’t matter anymore. Something bigger and nastier had gotten him. Something had come for these kids, and I wasn’t going to let him—or it—have them.

  When I got to the broken door frame, I stopped and peeked around the jamb. Like a million other shitty roadside motels, the Hunt Public House had two queen beds with cheap polyester coverlets, a utilitarian chest of drawers, and a bulky CRT television on top. All of that, my mind took in without registering it. My attention was drawn to the man who was dying in front of me.

  He was shorter than I had expected, with a compact muscularity that had gone to seed. He had a pot belly, likely from too many hours on the road and too few hours on his feet. A jagged end of the wood had punched through his torso and protruded from his chest, surrounded by gore. Pieces the ruined door lay around him, shrouding him like some bizarre postmodern burial custom. Suburban Death: A Visiting Installation. Like something Gage would have dragged me to see at the OKCMOA, and part of my mind flicked on at the thought, warning me how bad this must really be, how bad this was fucking me up because it had to be bad if my brain was skipping all the way back to Gage.

  It wasn’t the fact that this guy was dead that had my brain scratching and skipping like a shit record. I’d seen death before. What froze me was the kids.

  Tyler crouched under a three-legged card table behind the dead man, his face set in a vicious snarl, his throat working noiselessly. Blood made a thin line under his nose. Tyler had done this, I realized. He was in a straight line behind the man, and somehow he had ripped the door out of its frame and pulled it toward himself—spearing the dead man in the process. He’d managed to drag my psychic form toward himself too; he’d managed to twist the threads that made up the other side. An extraordinary combination of powers.

  “Hey, it’s me. Tyler. It’s me, Vie. Ty, come on. Ty. Can you hear me? Where’s Hannah?”

  At the sound of his sister’s name, Tyler jerked his head viciously, and his snarl became audible.

  My second sight unfolded. The saturated colors of the other side bloomed: the coverlets suddenly looked ultramarine, the carpet textured brown and gray and black, even the cheap nightstands glowed like the best walnut. Except Tyler. Only Tyler looked the same as he had with only my physical sight, and that didn’t make any sense. I didn’t have time to think about it, though. Everything slowed down. The vicious jerks of Tyler’s head became comically exaggerated pantomimes. I stretched across that distance and touched the mind of the boy I had tried to keep safe. Tried and failed.

  Instead of stepping into darkness, I met a barrier of sharp edges. Like broken glass. I forced my way past it, ignoring the pain, and stepped into a hellscape of fire and pain. A sickly orange fire. The glow of a candle inside a plastic Halloween pumpkin. I had seen this color before. I had felt the hectic, fever heat of it. This was the Lady’s touch, warm like infected flesh.

  Inside myself, I found a soothing memory: dusk on the bank of the Bighorn River, late autumn, the rangegrass spiked with catkins at the water’s edge, the cottonwoods spinning flame-colored leaves out against the sky. A purple sky. A quiet sky: no sun, no stars.

  In the flickering sickness of Tyler’s mind, a memory answered. That was how it worked: an echo to whatever I could find in myself. For Tyler, though, the memory wasn’t of the river. It wasn’t the cottonwood leaves tipped with fire against the void of the Wyoming sky. It wasn’t the sound of the river, the s
mell of mud turned up by my sneakers, the brush of a catkin tickling my neck.

  For Tyler, the memory was one that I recognized: the vinyl sofa sticking to his cheek, the scratch of an unfamiliar blanket, the leftover taste of chicken strips in his mouth, chicken strips that Vie—me, I thought, me—had brought home from work, and the smell of Hannah’s hair kind of like his mom’s hair as they shared the sofa. His eyes fluttered, a kind of watchfulness as he scrambled to keep from falling into sleep, and he saw me, my hair tied up in a bun, as I slouched against the wall, my chemistry book in my lap, a pencil between my teeth.

  The memory poured over the fire like glacial water; Tyler’s mind went dark and still. I shook myself free and found myself back in my body, staring out at the warp and weft of the other side. I didn’t remember that night. I mean, sure, I remembered having them over, night after night, as they slept on the sofa until Shay got home from work. But I didn’t remember any one night in particular, anything special, any night that might have left that kind of impact on Tyler. I was shaking. Part of it was from exhaustion, and part of it was—I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know.

  Fatigue dragged at me, and I felt my third eye sliding shut. Then I saw something else. Something I hadn’t noticed before.

  I saw Hannah.

  Tyler’s sister perched on the edge of the bed, wearing a short yellow dress that might have been perfect on a warm spring day, a day spent at the playground, but that was far too light for the recent bouts of Wyoming cold. She was kicking her legs. And what made me freeze, what made me struggle to keep my inner sight open, was that she appeared to me in the hypersaturated colors of the other side. And then, next to her, I saw her body. Her physical body. Stretched out along the coverlet.

  “Hi, Vie,” she said, her face drawn with fear, her kicks a little faster now. “Do you know why I can’t wake up?”

  SOMEHOW, I KEPT MY third eye open long enough to drag myself to the bed. Tyler had curled up under the card table, his breathing even, his eyes half-shut and liquid beneath his lashes. I could deal with him in a moment.

  “I keep trying to wake up. I keep opening my eyes, but nothing happens. I even pinched myself. That’s what Grandma said you should do when you have a nightmare: pinch yourself. But I can’t wake up.”

  “I don’t know.” I had to clear my throat as I dropped onto my knees next to the bed. Next to the tiny body. Was she in first grade? Christ, how shitty was that? I didn’t even know. I raised my hand to take her pulse, and I froze again. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t.

  “Vie?”

  I had to clear my throat again, and my voice still sounded like I’d swallowed an egg beater. “Just a second, Hannah.”

  “My dad can’t wake up either. He’s in the other room.”

  Too late, I thought. I was always too late. Too late to keep River alive. Too late to keep Emmett from having to kill Makayla. Too late to keep Austin from almost dying at Krystal’s hands. Too late. Over and over again, too late. Too late for these kids, who hadn’t done anything to anyone. If I’d gone looking for them right away, right when Shay asked, I might have been able to do something. Instead I had dicked around, moping about Emmett and trying to convince myself that he still cared about me, that in spite of all signs to the contrary, I meant something to him. If I’d just done what Shay asked and come looking—

  “Do you think I’ll wake up soon, Vie?”

  I still couldn’t move my goddamn hand.

  “I’m not scared,” Hannah said.

  My eyes flicked toward her, the spirit version of her. Her eyes were wide and earnest. Her legs kicked easily. Here she was trapped on the other side of reality, just happy as a jaybird, and I couldn’t so much as move my hand.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why aren’t you scared?”

  Hannah thought about this for a moment. Her waifish face twisted in indecision. “I don’t know. That old lady came and did something, and it hurt, Vie. It really hurt.” Her hand caressed a spot below her ribs. “And then I was like this. I couldn’t go back. Dad didn’t like it. He didn’t like what the old lady did, and when she went outside, he made Tyler climb out the bathroom window, and then he carried me out, and we came here. I was scared for a few days. At the beginning. And then it just seemed silly to be scared for days and days, and I thought about how Tyler would have loved something like this, and I was worried about him because—because then the other man came, and he hurt Dad, and the other man wasn’t nice to Tyler at all, and then I—I just got unscared.” Pausing, she seemed to consider it. “I guess I was a little scared. Right now. Because of the door. But I don’t feel the same way I used to feel. Things are different when I’m like this, aren’t they, Vie?”

  I didn’t know, but I remembered how I had felt when I was fully on the other side. I didn’t answer. I flexed my fingers. One knuckle popped, and it startled me so bad I pulled my hand back like I’d touched the stove. And then I reached for her inanimate form, settling my fingers on her neck, holding my breath. For one agonizing moment, I remembered seeing Hannah for the very first time: small and hungry and helpless. Like a kid on the back of a milk carton, if they even still put missing kids on milk cartons.

  Her pulse bumped against my touch. Maybe just my imagination. Maybe just a dream. And then it bumped again, a tiny knot of pressure passing under my fingers.

  I blinked. I dragged the sleeve of Dad’s nasty, scratchy sweater across my eyes. I smelled the burnt plastic stink—the crystal meth stink—that had been baked into the wool. I smelled mop water. My chest hiccupped, and I had to scrub again with that wool, scrub hard enough to start a fire in my eyes.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Stay here for a minute.”

  I went back to the hallway and checked the door marked 4. Nothing.

  I checked the door marked 3. A dead man lay in the bathtub, wrapped in a shower curtain. His face, although bloated with death and age, reminded me of Tyler. Cribbs, I guessed. He had tried to save his kids, and someone had hunted him down. And they were holding on to the kids as a power play. Or, I guess I should say, they had been holding on to the kids.

  I went back to room 5.

  “We need to get you to a hospital,” I told Hannah. “Both of you.”

  “You don’t look very good.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Tyler looked like you once. Mom said he had cottage-cheese face. Then he threw up his whole bowl of Fruit Loops, and he got his throw up right into my bowl of Fruit Loops. And Mom made us both go to our room.” The last sentence carried a note of injustice, and Hannah looked at me expectantly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded, and then she slid off the bed and skipped over to Tyler. “Tyler’s got loopy-lips, Tyler’s got loopy-lips.”

  The fact that Tyler was dozing and, even if he’d been awake, couldn’t hear her didn’t slow Hannah in the slightest.

  Gathering Hannah’s limp body, I carried her out to the Impala. I came back to her teasing—

  —loopy-lips, Tyler’s got loopy-lips—

  —and carried Tyler to the car too. He grumbled a bit, twisting in my arms, trying to get comfortable. He managed to elbow me in the mouth, dig his knee into my solar plexus, and squirm halfway out of my grip before I caught him. He might have been dreaming about wrestling a tiger or kayaking through white waters or shooting lasers in outer space. Whatever he was dreaming about, he had a second round of it when we got to the car, and that time he got me good enough to bust the corner of my mouth, and I grunted in spite of myself.

  His eyes flitted open, blue and clear and empty, and he blinked, not seeming to see me. Then he huffed a breath, squirreled deeper into my arms, and mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “He says you’ve got cottage-cheese face,” Hannah said helpfully. She sat in the front seat, looping her hand around the seatbelt and then giggling as her fing
ers passed through it.

  After getting Tyler settled on the Impala’s rear bench, I belted Tyler and Hannah into place. There was something so odd about fastening the buckle around Hannah’s slim body while her spirit made faces—with no visible result—in the rearview mirror. But I figured that was just the tip of the iceberg with how weird things had gotten lately. I climbed into the driver’s seat and started the car. Behind me, two dumpsters overflowed with the Hunt Public House’s garbage. I eyed them in the mirror as I shifted into reverse, adjusting the turn so I wouldn’t clip them.

  “When Mom has cottage-cheese face, she usually needs to eat something. Or sometimes she definitely shouldn’t eat something. Sometimes she needs something to drink. Like medicine.” Hannah crossed her eyes at me and stuck out her tongue. “One time she needed her medicine, and instead Tyler cooked eggs, and the eggs burned, and Mom said he was trying to kill her, and he’s not allowed to make eggs anymore. But I never tried to make eggs.” Her eyes uncrossed. Her tongue shot back out at me.

  “I don’t need a drink,” I said, still gauging my turn in the mirror, but the truth was that a drink actually sounded really good. Really, really good.

  “But your cottage-cheese face—”

  “I don’t have cottage-cheese face.”

  Hannah’s whole face screwed up in concentration. I knew that face. Even glimpsing it out of the corner of one eye, with my attention fixed on making this turn, I knew that face. It was the face I made every single time Mr. Lynch put a new proof in front of us.

  “Why do Austin and Emmett want to kiss you on the mouth?”

  I hit the gas too hard. The Impala shot backward. The rear bumper clanged against the dumpster, and the dumpster answered with an enormous, hollow boom. I rocked forward, my head narrowly missing the steering wheel. Then I fumbled the car into neutral.

  Hannah was giggling, her hands pressed over her mouth.

  “What are you—I don’t—I wasn’t—They never—”

  “I saw you. I went to your house sometimes. When I was bored because Tyler couldn’t hear me and Dad didn’t want to hear me. And sometimes when I went, Austin kept kissing you on the mouth. And you kept trying to find something in his pockets. But one time, it was Emmett, only he didn’t kiss you on the mouth, but he looked like he wanted to, and then he got on his knees—”