Paranormal After Dark

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “He’s dying,” he whispered.

  Two sharp reports answered him, two flashes of light, two burning holes in his chest.

  Leland disappeared into the cellar, and Lenny took the opportunity to disappear into the night.

  He wanted that to be the end of it. He wanted an end. He deserved an end. But he was intercepted. Sebastian caught him up and stanched the bleeding, holding him tight. It was Sebastian, but it was also the priest, and so Lenny submitted without resentment. At least one of the two cared for him, and if that was the best he could get, he would take it.

  “Who shot you?” Sebastian demanded. “Who was it? Was it Leland?”

  Lenny nodded, because there was nothing else he could do, and Sebastian took off, back toward the farmhouse. There were three cars out front, which could easily mean enough people present to be a threat. Lenny hung back, watching Leland bring the boy out. Not dead, though. No one had died, and the boy seemed almost to be moving under his own power.

  The boy ended up in Leland’s car while Leland spoke with a woman Lenny did not remember having seen before. They reached some kind of agreement, and Leland moved away.

  Sebastian had disappeared, but Lenny knew he was still nearby, and sure enough, something small and hard, a river rock, whistled out of the darkness and struck Leland’s temple. The man’s glasses shattered, shards tracking red lines down his cheeks as he fell, unconscious.

  Lenny winced and turned away, scrutinizing the boy instead. He had been badly hurt. Lenny had heard the bones breaking and felt death moving in, but the bones had healed, and he seemed well enough to scramble out of the car with a hammer in his hand, ready to do damage. He could not understand it, unless Leland had peculiar gifts of his own.

  The boy moved fast for someone who should have been moments from death, but Sebastian was faster. He hoisted the nerveless body over his shoulder and ran, and Lenny followed a moment after.

  They did not go back to the car, as Lenny had expected. Sebastian ran straight past it, toward town, and dumped Leland in a heap on his own back porch.

  “He won’t let us in,” Lenny whispered. There was fluid in his punctured lungs, and his voice was weak.

  “Doesn’t have to,” Sebastian replied, rummaging through the unconscious man’s pockets until he came up with a key ring. “He lives here, but it’s not home to him. He probably thinks it is, but it’s not. Too temporary. He knew he wouldn’t be able to stay.”

  He let them in and threw Leland onto the floor in the kitchen while he hunted for a suitable cell. Most of the rooms had windows and would be easily escapable, but there was a cellar, as well. He shoved Leland down the stairs, closed the door, and had begun to lock it when Lenny interrupted.

  “He’ll b-break out.”

  Sebastian nodded thoughtfully. “You’re right. I’ll go take care of that, shall I?”

  Lenny shuddered and waited upstairs, ignoring as best he could the sounds that rose from below.

  The house was beautifully furnished, he realized. Leland must have been very well connected to move everything across the country so many times, and he must have been terribly optimistic to even bother. There were bookcases lining every wall, an upright piano, a massive roll-top desk, steamer trunks covered in interesting artifacts. The place may never have truly been Leland’s home, but he had clearly wanted it to be. Lenny touched the cracked wood of an antique violin case propped in the corner. The place was full of the shades Daniel Leland carried with him, memories of hundreds of friends and companions embedded in the brass and paper and polished wood. The man had loved people. Somehow, that struck Lenny as strange. It was difficult to reconcile the man who had beaten him, the man who, for some unknown reason, had felt it necessary to murder Kate, with a person who hoarded mementos and trinkets. But then, among those trinkets was a wall covered in gleaming steel, a mounted collection of deadly bladed weapons, and the echoes those carried had not been friends.

  Lenny shied away from all of it, gravitating instead toward the books. He touched the weathered spine of a volume of poetry.

  I could stay here, he thought. This is the kind of place I could stay.

  He couldn’t, of course, not surrounded by a mob of what would soon become angry villagers, not among another man’s cherished memories, but he could want to.

  Sebastian trudged up out of the cellar, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Taken care of,” he said.

  “H-how?”

  “You know my methods.” Sebastian smiled. “He came around a little, enough that I could push him around some. You know he’s a shapechanger. I’ll be interested to see whether I pushed him hard enough to keep him from shifting.”

  “Into wh-what?”

  “Eh, not sure. But I did ask if it was something small enough to get out under a door, and he said it was. Anyway, I drained him out, too. Too weak to pull any tricks, hopefully.”

  Lenny nodded. He could feel sorry for the man who owned those books and fought so hard to survive, but not for the man who had killed his wife.

  “I want to look at him.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “D-death imprints whatever’s around when it happens. I want to see how Kate d-died.”

  Sebastian blinked once, then stood aside. For a moment, something in his face was reminiscent of the priest. “Finding out hurt you enough. Are you sure you want to see?”

  “Yes. Why do you c-c-care, anyway? I’m not your friend, remember?”

  Sebastian grimaced, and Lenny descended into the cellar.

  It was dark. A single lightbulb dangled from the ceiling, but the switch was outside in the hall, and his vision was better in the dark, anyway. It smelled of cement down there, that dry, slightly sour smell that reminded Lenny of somewhere else. He paused on the stairs and nearly turned back, but he could not avoid cellars for the rest of his life, however long or short that might be.

  Leland slumped, unbreathing, in a corner. His forehead was dented where the rock had struck him, and his throat was a mangled mass of flesh. His pupils were unevenly dilated, and his gray eyes looked at nothing. He was almost pathetic.

  Lenny reached the bottom of the stairs and moved closer. He could already feel the mountains of memory in the man, vibrating between the atoms in his body. Close to two hundred years of them, though for some reason, Lenny had expected more. There was too much of it for him to sift through a second at a time, but he already knew what he was looking for, and approximately where to look. He knelt and touched Leland’s spidery white hand.

  An empty room, the men’s lavatory of an abandoned building, dust on the floor and cobwebs on the ceiling, water damage on the walls. No reflection in the mirror. Waiting.

  He was not looking to help anyone but himself, and so his ghost sense gave him nothing extra. None of the reasoning, none of the insight, no clue as to why Leland was there, what he was waiting for.

  Finger on the grip of a gun, nervous stance, tight grip on a briefcase. Something is wrong, here. Checking a watch. Whatever he is waiting for is late. Shifting slightly, as though he needs to fidget but does not dare make noise.

  A sound from outside. Body tensing, tight grip on the gun. Door opening. Beat. Tiny body, a grown woman no taller than a child. Kate, trousers and cropped hair, carrying a canvas folio that seems huge beside her body. Brown eyes widen. Hand raised, not quite a greeting.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Eight shots, tight grouping, heart obliterated. She stands as though confused. Skin sloughs away, laying bare flesh. Flesh crumbles, laying bare bone. Eyes are the last to go, full of fear.

  He could see them even when the rest of her was gone, a pile of fine gray ash on a tile floor amid urinals, a humiliating death.

  The world went red. Hands gripped him tight and dragged him back, and he dragged something with him, but could not see what it was. He could see her eyes and nothing else. She had been so afraid. The hands pried his fingers away from whatever he had been holding, and he tried to gr
ab it back. His arms twitched with the need to lash out.

  “Hugo!”

  Something loomed up dimly in front of him, and he struck at it blindly, but it caught his hand.

  “Hugo.”

  His hand was slick, though, and slid out of that grip. He struggled and threw out an elbow, feeling it contact flesh.

  “Leonard. Listen to me. Relax.”

  He couldn’t. He didn’t want to relax, but the fight went out of him anyway, and he collapsed, sobbing.

  “Listen. Calm down. Listen to me. Breathe deep and relax. You don’t have to feel this right now. Focus on my voice.”

  Lenny focused. He wanted to listen, and for once, that want had nothing to do with Sebastian. But the voice was breathless, slightly shaken, and falling into it was harder than it should have been. Lenny sucked in a breath and grasped at the artificial stillness he had been offered.

  His vision began to clear slowly, and he turned to glare at Leland. Something horrible had happened to the man. His face was ruined, and the back of his head was a bloody mess, as though it had been smashed repeatedly into the concrete wall.

  “Kill him,” he heard a grating voice say. His throat was raw. “I don’t care. I want to see. I want to feel the bastard die.”

  * * *

  SEBASTIAN DID NOT kill Leland. Instead he worked hard to reestablish his foothold in Lenny’s mind, talking constantly in that low, soothing way of his, until he was able to send him to sleep.

  When Lenny woke in the murderer’s bed, he felt nothing. That had to be Sebastian’s doing. In a way, it was better than agony, but he had felt power for a moment, strength drawn from rage, and he wanted that back. He had felt free.

  He looked over to where Sebastian sat by the window. The priest flickered in and out of his field of vision. Both of them looked exhausted, fatigued by stress.

  “If you won’t do it,” he told them, “I will.”

  Sebastian opened his mouth and shut it again, unable to find words. He shook his head.

  “I will.” Lenny rolled over and rose shakily, throwing off the hand he felt at his arm.

  Sebastian pulled back as though burned. The priest was closer to him, deeper inside him. They were almost the same person. Lenny could hardly tell the difference, anymore.

  “I… Leonard. Lenny? I don’t want you to.”

  “Give me one g-good reason I should give a crap what you want.”

  There was a disconcerting sort of helplessness in the way Sebastian wrung his hands. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, okay? I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “There’s a damn lot of things you shouldn’t have done, but telling me about Kate wasn’t one of them.”

  “It broke you.”

  “That was the p-point all along, wasn’t it? That’s what you were g-going for since the first time you saw me. Don’t pretend it wasn’t.”

  “But then you stayed. I didn’t mean it, what I said. You’re my friend. I wasn’t yours, but I should have been. You stayed.”

  Lenny’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Bye,” he spat, and he turned on his heel and stalked from the room, twisting his hands into claws.

  “You won’t,” Sebastian protested, trailing after him. “You can’t. It’s not who you are.”

  “I can sure as hell try.”

  “And if you succeed? What will you be, then?”

  “The k-kind of husband she deserved.”

  Sebastian stopped for a moment, then caught up. “No. You’d be me, and I won’t let you be me. I said stop.”

  The command blazed through Lenny, in his mind and in his blood, and he fought it with everything he had. He struggled to keep his legs moving despite the foreign desire to obey.

  “Stop, Lenny.” The name seemed to stick in Sebastian’s mouth, just as the alien compassion stuck in his spirit. “Stop. Lenny, stop.”

  Lenny’s body weighed him down like lead, but he toiled onward with the last of his strength until Sebastian’s touch froze him. He was too tired to brush it away.

  “Calm down, Lenny. Listen to me. Stop feeling, stop thinking. Let yourself heal now.”

  The anger drained away and left emptiness behind. Lenny sagged. Perceptions drifted in and back out again, but did not register. He could not catch hold of them.

  Sebastian, wetting his lips with the tip of a nervous tongue. Sebastian, grasping at straws. The priest was in his eyes, in the gentleness of his hands, and for a moment, Lenny understood. He remembered what Rhona had said. There are always people who want to kill him. He makes sure of that. It validates his paranoia. He had already done what was needed. In refusing to leave, in letting himself be demolished and never striking back, he had invalidated Sebastian’s entire world. The walls were breaking down and the soul was slipping back where it belonged, not beyond the Veil, but inside the man.

  Lenny hated it. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t worth it. He was not a savior, not a Christ. He had never volunteered to buy back Sebastian’s soul with his own life.

  But he could not remain bitter long, because the understanding drifted away again and left him empty once more.

  “You’re full of holes,” Sebastian mused. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? That’s where it started. You need someone else in your head, holding you up.”

  That was where the problem had started, but it had grown far beyond that. Yet Lenny could not object; he could not recall how that was wrong.

  “That girl. What about her? You like her well enough, don’t you?”

  Lenny answered the question exactly as it was posed. “Yes.”

  “Good. Good, and that’ll fix it. You said you wanted her anyway, didn’t you?”

  He had, but the specifics of the situation were slippery, and all he could remember for sure was the fact that he had uttered the words. “Yes.”

  “Good, okay. This’ll work, then.”

  Sebastian laid out the plan, one Lenny would never have approved, had he been able to object. They would find Liz. It wouldn’t be difficult; Sebastian had her blood and could follow her anywhere. They should find her quickly, because humans were fragile and unpredictable, but securing her would likewise be easy. She would come when Sebastian called, just as Lenny did. Lenny would take the opportunity to build up his strength at least enough that he could sit with her throughout the transformation. When she was bound to him, part of him, shoring him up like new foundation for a leaning house, then and only then would they deal with Leland. The prisoner could languish until Lenny was no longer in danger of losing himself.

  It was all wrong, all completely wrong.

  Sebastian started to leave, then stopped and held a hand out to Lenny. “You should probably come with me. Unless you think you’d be okay alone?”

  Thinking, for the moment, was not among Lenny’s strengths, so he took Sebastian’s hand, and they ran.

  Liz’s hiding place was an old apartment building, whitewashed stucco and rusting stairs. Black plastic letters down the side of the building read “The Village.” The A had come loose and hung cockeyed several inches below the rest of the text. There was a pickup truck parked near one of the flights of stairs, and as they paused, a second car pulled up. An old lady climbed out with a bag of groceries. She had blued hair and a tiny frame, the perfect illustration of osteoporosis. Not a threat. But something about the two men unnerved her, and she sucked in a breath in obvious preparation for a scream.

  In the time it took to blink, Sebastian had appeared behind her and closed a hand over her mouth, and the bag of groceries dropped to the asphalt. His hand tightened, itching to snap her neck, but he glanced at Lenny and stopped. Instead, he bent and whispered in her ear, and she tottered inside with a glazed expression.

  “That one,” he said, pointing to a door. “We’ll call it getting even for her shooting me. Nothing too bad,” he amended quickly, glancing at Lenny. The priest was further away; the urge for revenge was Sebastian’s. “But I can’t just let her get away with that. I mean, arrows hurt like hel
l.”

  Lenny had been asked nothing, and so could not answer, but Sebastian’s problematic plan was burned into his brain, so he went to the door to get Liz. He knocked, three quiet taps, and turned back to look at Sebastian.

  “I’ll give it a tug,” Sebastian said.

  But nothing emerged. Lenny could hear the commotion inside, several people scrambling away from the door, panicked whispers. He tried the doorknob, just in case, but it did not budge.

  Sebastian frowned. “She’s fighting. Harder than I thought she could, actually. Maybe a shock, break her concentration…”

  He picked up the old woman’s groceries and flung them at the window with enough force to crack the glass. A strawberry upside-down cake burst free from its packaging and left an oozing red smear down the window.

  The loud noise was certainly a shock. Lenny heard the moment of silence that followed, and then the flurry of activity began again.

  “Got her,” Sebastian said. “Easy, now…”

  It happened quickly. The door opened, Elizabeth stepped out, and she closed it behind her. Inside, there was a confusion of sound, shouts and crashes, but it was all easy for Lenny to ignore.

  “Told you it wouldn’t be difficult,” Sebastian said. “Sympathetic magic, just like a voodoo doll. Control of the whole through possession of a part, you know? You should look into it, yeah?”

  “I don’t like this,” Lenny replied, surprising himself, and apparently Sebastian as well. He could not refuse, not really, but his brain was desperate to object, and it fixed on the thought of Sebastian’s revenge. Liz could not be blamed for defending herself. “The boy was the one who cut you.”

  “Relax. She’ll still be in one piece when I’m done, and you can have her back.”

  Sebastian glanced around and left suddenly, but Lenny hung back a moment. He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it across the girl’s shoulders. Part of him was glad that he could not be hurt by her vacant expression, which he knew had to match his own.