Midnight Blue-Light Special

by Seanan McGuire

  One of the best things about Nathan was that she could just sit, in silence, without being alone. Sometimes she’d read, and sometimes he’d read; sometimes he’d play video games, and sometimes he’d build things; sometimes they’d just walk aimlessly all over the city, as if footsteps were a kind of writing. It wasn’t that she wasn’t supposed to talk; when she wanted to talk, she did. But if she didn’t, it wasn’t awkward. He was like a quiet, private place.

  And that’s the only thing that’s left of him, really.

  A quiet, private place.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  AT 9:30 P.M., CELL TIME, the phone rang. Emma slid it out of her pocket, rearranging Petal’s head in the process, flipped it open, saw that it was Allison. Had it been anyone else, she wouldn’t have answered.

  “Hey.”

  “Emma?”

  No, it’s Amy, she almost snapped. Honestly, if you rang her number, who did you expect to pick it up? But she didn’t, because it was Allison, and she’d only feel guilty about one second after the words left her mouth. “Yeah, it’s me,” she said instead.

  Petal rolled his head back onto her lap and then whined while she tried to pull a Milk-Bone out of her very crumpled jacket pocket. Nine years hadn’t made him more patient.

  “Where are you?”

  “Just walking Petal. Mom’s prepping a headache, so I thought I’d get us both out of the house before she killed us.” Time to go. She shifted her head slightly, caught the cell phone between her chin and collarbone, and shoved Petal gently off her lap. Then she stood, shaking the wrinkles out of her jacket.

  “Did you get the e-mail Amy sent?”

  “What e-mail?”

  “That would be no. How long have you been walking?”

  Emma shrugged. Which Allison couldn’t see. “Not long. What time is it?”

  “9:30,” Allison replied, in a tone of voice that clearly said she didn’t believe Emma didn’t know. That was the problem with perceptive friends.

  “I’ll look at it the minute I get home—is there anything you want to warn me about before I do?”

  “No.”

  “Should I just delete it and blame it on the spam filter? No, no, that’s a joke. I’ll look at it when I get home and call you—Petal, come back!” Emma whistled. As whistles went, it was high and piercing, and she could practically hear Allison cringe on the other end of the phone. “Damn it—I have to go, Ally.” She flipped the lid down, shoved the phone into her pocket, and squinted into the darkness. She could just make out the red plastic handle of the retracting leash as it fishtailed along in the grass.

  So much for quiet. “Petal!”

  Running in the graveyard at night was never smart. Oh, there were strategic lamps here and there, where people had the money and the desire to spend it, but mostly there was moonlight, and a lot of flat stones; not all the headstones were standing. There were also trees that were so old Emma wondered whether the roots had eaten through coffins, if they even used coffins in those days. The roots often came to the surface, and if you were unlucky, you could trip on them and land face first in tree bark—in broad daylight. At night, you didn’t need to be unlucky.

  No, you just needed to try to catch your half-deaf rottweiler before he scared the crap out of some stranger in the cemetery. The cemetery that should have bloody well been deserted. She got back on her feet.

  “Petal, goddammit!” She stopped to listen. She couldn’t see Petal, but he was a black rottweiler and it was dark. She could, on the other hand, hear the leash as it struck stone and standing wreaths, and she headed in that direction, walking as quickly as she could. She stubbed her toes half a dozen times because there was no clear path through the headstones and the markers, and even when she could see them—and the moon was bright enough—she couldn’t see enough of them in time. She never brought a flashlight with her because she didn’t need one normally; she could walk to Nathan’s grave and back blindfolded. Walking to a black dog who was constantly in motion between totally unfamiliar markers, on the other hand, not so much.

  She wondered what had caught his attention. The only person he ran toward like this was Emma, and usually only when she was coming up the walk from school or coming into the house. He would bark when Allison or Michael approached the door, and he would growl like a pit bull when salesmen, meter men, or the occasional Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness showed up—but he wasn’t much of a runner. Not these days.

  The sounds of the leash hitting things stopped.

  Up ahead, which had none of the usual compass directions, Emma could see light. Not streetlight, but a dim, orange glow that flickered too much. She could also, however, see the stubby, wagging tail of what was sometimes the world’s stupidest dog. Relief was momentary. Petal was standing in front of two people, one of whom seemed to be holding the light. And Emma didn’t come to the graveyard to meet people.

  She pursed her lips to whistle, but her mouth was too dry, and anyway, Petal probably wouldn’t hear her. Defeated, she shoved her hands into her jacket pockets and made her way over to Petal. The first thing she did was pick up his leash; the plastic was cool and slightly damp to the touch, and what had, moments before, been smooth was now scratched and rough. Hopefully, her mother wouldn’t notice.

  “Emma?”

  When you don’t expect to meet anyone, meeting someone you know is always a bit of a shock. She saw his face, the height of his cheekbones, and his eyes, which in the dim light looked entirely black. His hair, cut back over his ears and shorn close to forehead, was the same inky color. He was familiar, but it took her a moment to remember why and to find a name.

  “Eric?” Even saying the name, her voice was tentative. She looked as the shape in the darkness resolved itself into an Eric she vaguely knew, standing beside someone who appeared a lot older and a lot less distinct.

  “Mrs. Bruehl’s my mentor,” he said, helpfully. “Eleventh grade?”

  She frowned for a moment, and then the frown cleared. “You’re the new guy.”

  “New,” he said with a shrug. “Same old, same old, really. Don’t take this the wrong way,” he added, “but what are you doing here at this time of night?”

  “I could ask you the same question.”

  “You could.”

  “Great. What are you doing here at this time of night?”

  He shrugged again, sliding his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Just walking. It’s a good night for it. You?”

  “I’m mostly chasing my very annoying dog.”

  Eric looked down at Petal, whose stub of a tail had shown no signs whatsoever of slowing down. “Doesn’t seem all that annoying.”

  “Yeah? Bend over and let him breathe in your face.”

  Eric laughed, bent over, and lowered his palms toward Petal’s big, wet nose. Petal sniffed said hands and then barked. And whined. Sometimes, Emma thought, pulling the last Milk-Bone out of her jacket pocket, that dog was so embarrassing.

  “Petal, come here.” Petal looked over his shoulder, saw the Milk-Bone, and whined. Just . . . whined. Then he looked up again, and this time, Emma squared her shoulders and fixed a firm smile on lips that wanted to shift in entirely the opposite direction. “And who’s your friend?”

  And Eric, one hand just above Petal’s head, seemed to freeze, half-bent. “What friend, Emma?”

  But his friend turned slowly to face Emma. As she did, Emma could finally see the source of the flickering, almost orange, light. A lantern. A paper lantern, like the ones you saw in the windows of variety stores in Chinatown. It was an odd lamp, and the paper, over both wire and flame, was a pale blue. Which made no sense, because the light it cast wasn’t blue at all. There were words on the shell of the lamp that Emma couldn’t read, although she could see them clearly enough. They were composed of black brushstrokes that trailed into squiggles, and th
e squiggles, in the leap of lamp fire, seemed to grow and move with a life of their own.

  She blinked and looked up, past the lamp and the hand that held it.

  An old woman was watching her. An old woman. Emma was accustomed to thinking of half of her teachers as “old,” and probably a handful as “ancient” or “mummified.” Not a single one of them wore age the way this woman did. In fact, given the wreath of sagging wrinkles that was her skin, Emma wasn’t certain that she was a woman. Her cheeks were sunken, and her eyes were set so deep they might as well have just been sockets; her hair, what there was of it, was white tufts, too stringy to suggest down. She had no teeth, or seemed to have no teeth; hell, she didn’t have lips, either.

  Emma couldn’t stop herself from taking a step back.

  The old woman took a step forward.

  She wore rags. Emma had heard that description before. She had even seen it in a movie or two. Neither experience prepared her for this. There wasn’t a single piece of cloth that was bigger than a napkin, although the assembly hung together in the vague shape of a dress. Or a bag. The orange light that the blue lantern emitted caught the edges of different colors, but they were muted, dead things. Like fallen leaves. Like corpses.

  “Emma?”

  Emma took another step back. “Eric, tell her to stop.” She tried to keep her voice even. She tried to keep it polite. It was hard. If the stranger’s slightly open, sunken mouth had uttered words, she would have been less terrifying. But, in silence, the old woman teetered across graves as if she’d just risen from one and counted it as nothing.

  Emma backed up. The old woman kept coming. Everything moved slowly, everything—except for Emma’s breathing—was quiet. The quiet of a graveyard. Emma tried to speak, tried to ask the old woman what she wanted, but her throat was too dry, and all that came out was an alto squeak. She took another step and ran into a headstone; she felt the back of it, cold, against her thighs. Standing against a short, narrow wall, Emma threw her hands out in front of her.

  The old woman pressed the lantern into those hands. Emma felt the sides of it collapse slightly as her hands gripped them, changing the shape of the brushstrokes and squiggles. It was cold against her palms. Cold like ice, cold like winter days when you inhaled and the air froze your nostrils.

  She cried out in shock and opened her hands, but the lantern clung to her palms, and no amount of shaking would free them. She tried hard, but she couldn’t watch what she was doing because old, wrinkled claws shot out like cobras, sudden, skeletal, and gripped Emma’s cheeks and jaw, the way Emma’s hands now gripped the lantern.

  Emma felt her face being pulled down, down toward the old woman’s, and she tried to pull back, tried to straighten her neck. But she couldn’t. All the old stories she’d heard in camp, or in her father’s lap, came to her then, and even though this woman clearly had no teeth, Emma thought of vampires.

  But it wasn’t Emma’s neck that the old woman wanted. She pulled Emma’s whole face toward her, and then Emma felt—and smelled—unpleasant, endless breath, dry as dust but somehow rank as dead and rotting flesh, as the old woman opened her mouth. Emma shut her eyes as the face, its nested lines of wrinkles so like a fractal, drew closer and closer.

  She felt lips, what might have been lips, press themselves against the thin membranes of her eyelids, and she whimpered. It wasn’t the sound she wanted to make; it was just the only sound she could. And then even that was gone as those same lips, with that same breath, pressed firmly and completely against Emma’s mouth.

  Like a night kiss.

  She tried to open her eyes, but the night was all black, and there was no moon, and it was so damn cold. And as she felt that cold overwhelm her, she thought it unfair that this would be her last kiss, this unwanted horror; that the memory of Nathan’s hands and Nathan’s lips were not the ones she would carry to the grave.