As he took a breath to continue to the chorus, all about loss and grief, Lutie gave a little cry of surprise. He kept singing, smiling, wondering if the light seemed as bright to her, as warm. He almost couldn’t see her in the orange dappled sunspots.
For a moment, the air cleared, wind kicking up loose snow, which sparkled in the sun like a scatter of sequins. Lutie looked to him, eyes following fast movement, and Baz felt a brush against him, a rush of cold in the warmth, and he was buffeted, like in a stiff breeze. Startled, he stopped singing, then heard, “Don’t! Keep going!” and Baz couldn’t tell if she was excited, or scared.
The winds stirred more vigorously and he was immediately cold, his breath huffing out as he started again this time “You Are My Sunshine”, which wasn’t a happy song at all, not when you really listened to the words, but he knew he was scared. They were not alone. Another shove, and he was forced back a step, had felt a hand caress his cheek, another curl around his throat, seeking warmth or sound or life. “Lutie?” he called, uncertain.
“Don’t stop!” she shouted back, still on her knees, but he heard it this time, heard the fear.
He opened his mouth again, but nothing came out for a moment, he was too frozen. A push from behind and he staggered a few feet, then felt a slicing, horrific cold go right through him, right to his heart and he thought for a moment he might pass out.
Then Lutie screamed, and Baz whirled around, reaching for her, but she was much too far away.
Oh, God, this had been a bad idea, he knew that now. Then the light that had been everywhere simply left, and in its place was cold gray, gravel and snow shards sharp as smashed glass. Once again, the cold swept though him, held onto his heart with winter’s hand; Baz crashed to hands and knees, the stones unforgiving. He shook his head, and heard the rapturous gasping chuckle that he recognized from the night, recognized as something he should have known better about but that had known his needs too keenly.
“You came back,” it said, and it might have been at his shoulder, or across the tracks, or in his head, Baz couldn’t tell. The pain in his chest was excruciating. “And you brought such company. You’re a surprising one, Basile Sarrazin. I’m sure glad we’re friends.”
Lutie screamed again, but the rattling voice was closer, fetid, cloying like rotting meat. “You can keep singing. They like it. I don’t much care, but everyone else likes it. Pity to disappoint.”
Baz gagged, spat on the ground, barely able to breathe, and instead of the ghostcold, he felt like he was on fire. “Lutie,” he managed to croak, then drew a painful razor breath, and shouted, “Lutie!”
He heard her crying. He lifted his head, and she was staggering towards him, one hand held out for balance like she was on a boat at sea. “Baz!” she shouted back, then got one arm under him. “Come with me,” she whispered in his ear, and his head was ringing, and the cold was back, worse than ever. Lutie kept shouting, telling things to leave Baz alone, and Baz kept feeling hands on him, stroking his face, snatching his hair, unseen fingers hooked in his belt and he whispered into Lutie’s close ear: “You gotta tell them to go, chouette. I can’t stand it. Tell them to go.”
Lutie dropped him and he fell, no strength in him, though he knew he had to stand. Lutie stood above him, one foot on either side of his body, one hand on his chest, eyes bright in the over-bright day. “Dégagez!” she shouted, then screamed, “Dégagez!”
After a moment, the cold faded and the brightness died away, and Baz saw blue sky above, his breath coming in wispy, rasping sighs, loud to his own ears.
“Can you get up?” Lutie asked, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her coat, which was now far from pristine. “Here, let me help you up.” She put one arm under his shoulders, but Baz just hugged her tight, not letting her go. After a moment, she returned the embrace.
It isn’t real, he told himself. I’m real, not this damn ghost.
It was difficult to believe, of course, because the pain was so bloody real and the coffee table through which he’d just crashed was plenty real as well. The ghost though. The ghost was not, and Sol knew it. He knew it. An apparition, a slip of soul or feeling or memory, he scarcely knew which, but it was visible to him, it was merely visible, and it could only do what you believed it could.
Against his instincts—every one begging him to flee, to get the hell out of this madhouse—Sol closed his eyes. Felt the cold but ignored it, completely blocked out the sensation of being lifted by his hair, throat stretched back, exposed to whatever bit of broken glass or sharp edge that could be procured. He could die here, of course, that had always been a possibility, just not a very real one.
It felt real enough now.
Into this, Sol melded the ghost’s awesome fear, which was under the anger, always. Fear of the unknown, perhaps, fear of what came next. Sol imagined what fear would drive a fortuneteller, someone gifted or cursed with seeing ghosts, to capturing one like this. Fear of being alone, fear of being useless and crazy. Sol felt all these fears tighten, and then—mind out to the room, trying to connect with ground, already intimately connected with blood and iron and salt, he could imagine the line that bound the ghost and the host, or maybe the ghost showed him, who knew which? He didn’t need to undo this knot, tied years ago, fretted and gnawed and tightened. He needed to sever it, and he remembered his Greek mythology and imagined his mind a knife and he cut right through the knot.
With an extended, interminable roar, the ghost dropped Sol and he bounced against the remains of the table before hitting the floor, gravity as real as anything else in that room. Self-preservation kicking in, paying close attention to instinct now, Sol shinnied back to the wall, hands sliding through a minefield of glass shards, watching the ghost circle the room at speed, looking to get out.
Free, free, free, it screamed, but it was not. It was trapped by thin salt lines and Sol’s blood and by the iron in the windows. And now, it was up to Sol to send it to where it was supposed to go. Leaning forward from his spot on the floor, back against the wall, Sol placed his hand into the opening of his button-up shirt, onto his chest, felt his own heart beating madly, blood coursing through every bit of him. Life. I will do no harm, he thought, sent it out, not knowing if it would matter to the ghost, if it would care, but it mattered to Sol, that he was doing this with true aim.
The ghost turned, as though noticing Sol once more, and it blinked static, stalled. Sol held his breath, brought his hand out, brushed fingertips to his lips: intent, blood, heart, breath. And into his breath, this evidence of life, into the ghostcold, he blew a pathway, shining, though Sol himself could not see the end of it, did not know where it might go.
The ghost looked at the path, then back at Sol. It shivered, it wasn’t evil or angry or scared. It was tired.
Sol watched as the ghost came into focus: a tall man, a young man, dressed in the clothes of a field hand, hands powdered with dusky soil, clothes blood-stained down one side, skin tanned a deep V at the open neck of a faded cotton shirt, a tooled leather belt circling a waist whittled by work and drought. Its exhausted eyes rested on the road that Sol had made for it, an expression of wonder and recognition on its face. It turned to Sol, and didn’t acknowledge him, but the expression slowly changed to one of certitude and the ghost moved off, shimmered and disappeared.
On the floor, covered in glass, little knowing if he’d broken something within during this frantic, bizarre battle, Sol swallowed back triumph and instead settled on relief. He’d done it, and he hadn’t killed anyone in the process, himself included. Delicately, gray light persistently trying to define the room, Sol tapped the ground three times, then pushed himself up with his legs, not setting his hands on the floor again for fear of cutting them on the glass. His legs, he found, held.
His head, on the other hand, rang ominously, and his browbone burned and itched. He put up a hand to feel it, and winced, fingers coming away bloody. With his other hand, he probed his side where he’d landed hard on the table. No broken
ribs, he didn’t think. Good.
And that’s when he heard the distinctive click of a gun’s hammer being pulled back, directly behind him from beyond the velvet curtain leading up to the stairs.
“You,” the dark inflected voice spat. “You,” like it was the dirtiest word in her language.
Slowly, he brought up both hands, circled so he could face her. The fortuneteller stood in a white nightgown, an older revolver in her hand, heavy enough to be used as a paperweight, a door stop. It was pointed right at him, and he couldn’t have been more than five feet from her, close enough that there was no way she would miss, too far to make a grab for the gun.
They’d made a ton of noise and what, did he think she would be far behind? The ghost she’d bound hadn’t killed her, he reminded himself. This was still a success by any measure. Unless he wasn’t around to enjoy it. He wondered what Wayne would call a perk in this particular rescue.
“It’s over,” he said. “There’s nothing for you to do now.”
He was staring straight into her mad dark eyes when she pulled the trigger and proved him wrong.
NINE
COMES WITH THE TERRITORY
Baz weighed a ton, mostly height rather than any excess flesh, and he was faking nothing. Lutie staggered under his arm, but she’d always been strong for her size. The sun was fully up, day clear as a glass of cold water, and she couldn’t see any ghosts. Not that black thing, no white light. Just Baz, panting, green, unable to keep his feet under him. They weren’t home free yet, not by a long way, so she tried not to think about what she’d just seen, about what she’d just caused to happen—he offered, he went in eyes wide open. Getting Baz through the hole in fence was the worst, because he was all elbows and knees and when he fell, she didn’t know if she’d be able to get him back up again.
As she whispered fiercely to him, “Get up, get up, or I’ll leave your ass right here,” she also knew she had to stop crying otherwise he’d know she didn’t mean it.
To her surprise, she heard Baz laugh, “Bon Dieu, T-Lu, don’t you do that. I still have your car keys.”
Lutie used the moment to scan the landscape behind them through the chain link, but nothing seemed remotely alarming or dangerous. She was shaking, she who thought she’d seen every damn thing there was to be scared of. But she’d never seen a black thing like that; the mere sound of it, like a match being struck, made her think of bonfires, of things that got thrown on bonfires: the sacred books of heathen religions, effigies of evil, witches.
But that was definitely thinking about what had just happened, so she once again helped Baz to his feet where he stood, barely, waving her away before putting his gloved hands into his coat’s pockets. “What the fuck, Lutie? What just happened there?” He was dropping his THs, making them into Ds. Stressed.
“Not here,” she said, because if things could disappear, they could probably re-appear. “Give me the keys. Let’s get out of here.”
As she watched, he raised his head, eyes glowing in the slanting light. “What do you see? Right now. What’s here?”
“Nothing,” she said truthfully. “They’re gone, all of them.”
“Not for long,” Baz said, but quietly, mouth turned from her, fetching her car keys from his pocket.
They had parked behind a warehouse, a dirt lot, and the dry soil made a plume of dust behind her as she spun her wheels.
Beside her, Baz shifted in his seat, hunched into his coat. “Vas-y mollo, chère.” And Lutie didn’t know if that was a curse, or what. She’d forgotten almost all her past and it seemed unfair that he’d retained so much when she’d been kept in the dark, lost. If only Maman hadn’t left, this would have been easy. If only that hadn’t been taken from her, along with all the rest.
“English,” she said, finding the gear and realizing that they’d been driving all night, that she was stupid with exhaustion as much as terror.
A succession of machine-shops and auto parts distributors passed by the window; Lutie didn’t really know where they were going, just away from the yards. Baz wiped his nose on his sleeve, tucked his hands under his armpits. “You okay?”
She nodded and turned up the heat so that the entire car vibrated with the noisy fan. “You?”
He laughed, shrugged and shook his head at the same time. She concentrated on the road, couldn’t look at him. “You didn’t catch one, eh?” he asked, after a minute.
A sign directing them to the I-80 came up on the left, looked tattered and rough from the freezes and thaws, and Lutie took the turn-off, wanting nothing more than to be moving fast in an opposite direction. She headed west, not knowing if that was right, but she owed him that, to get him home at least.
“I didn’t catch a ghost, no.” She hadn’t even come close. The railyard ghosts had been roiling with anger—maybe they’d been murdered, or lost, or abandoned. Something that made them crazed. After the gentle ghosts in her father’s church, she hadn’t expected anger, she now realized. “They didn’t want anything to do with me.” Say it, he deserves to know. “They only wanted to get to you.” She cleared her throat, glanced at him, then back at the road. “The white light, it held them off. After it went, the ghosts, they were…” She flipped her hand up and off the wheel, like a bird startled to flight. “They were pissed off.”
A few miles went by, Baz tracing his gloved finger on the glass, head resting in the hollow between seat and window. Through the metallic vibration of the heater, his voice sounded far away, disconnected, like it was being broadcast from another time, another place. “I don’t know about any light. I just felt the ghostcold.” He shivered. “I’m still feeling it.” He leaned forward suddenly, tried to crank the heat, but it was already as high as it could go.
Lutie wasn’t really made for dodging bullets, or trains, or anything, so she looked at her brother, about to ask him about the last thing, because there had been light, which he apparently couldn’t see, and there’d been ghosts, which he definitely couldn’t see. And then there’d been that black thing. He can’t see any of it, she thought.
She had seen it though, which meant that maybe it wasn’t real: a black crabbed figure, more like a crustacean than a human, spiny fingers splayed on Baz’s shoulder, its face, head, whatever you would call that, bent by Baz’s bowed and perfect profile. It had disappeared between one blink and the next, too far away for her to catch the words, but close enough to know that it had been talking. I can’t. I can’t tell him about this thing, he’s done enough today. He’s had enough done to him for one day. Drugs were better than this, surely.
Baz didn’t turn on the radio, didn’t sing. He stared out the window as exit signs for Sutherland and Paxton fled past the car, land the same in any direction, nothing on the horizon, buff dead grass, world asphalt gray, rimmed with leaden sky. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep, he was so quiet, face angled away from her, but all of a sudden he made a muffled choking sound and said, panicked, “Stop the car!” and she hesitated, but his hand was already on the door handle ready to go, and so she came to a sliding stop, wheels churning roadside dirt behind them.
Baz was out and on his hands and knees, retching into the dead grass before Lutie even registered the cold wind slicing through the open door. After what seemed like a long time, she heard him hawk, spit. She couldn’t see him through the open door, but then his hand grabbed the frame, and he appeared again, face flushed, eyes standing out like lasers.
Wordlessly, she handed him a half-empty bottle of water and he swished some in his mouth, spat it out on the roadside before getting back in. He was shivering and Lutie had no idea how to tell him it would be okay, because she had no idea if anything was going to be all right. “Is the heat turned all the way up?” His teeth clattering, face like classroom glue.
“Are we okay to go?” Lutie asked, tried to sound sympathetic, but it wasn’t something she was very good at.
Baz nodded a little more vigorously than was required. They hadn’t gone two miles before h
e made her stop again. This time, he had nothing to bring up, only the shivering, and with an apologetic grimace, Lutie felt his forehead with the back of her hand, a gesture learned from Karen. “You have a fever,” she said. “We have to stop. Ogallala’s coming up. We’ll find something there.”
Baz shook, didn’t nod at all, but whispered, “Sure thing, Lutie.”
There was something very young about his voice then, and it plucked a scrap of memory in Lutie, him agreeing to whatever she wanted. Instead of making her feel powerful, though, it pulled out something completely different, like she’d reached into a magician’s hat not to find a bouquet of fabric flowers, but a coiled snake.
There was no more conversation and Ogallala wasn’t that far away, so Lutie was able to keep from bawling until she’d found them a cheap motel room with two double beds and a bathroom door that locked. Only when Baz was asleep under the covers did she go into the bathroom and cry until there were no tears left.
Closing his eyes would stop nothing. Sol caught his breath in an involuntary gasp, and realized that the gun hadn’t discharged. For whatever reason—luck, gun fault, ammunition fail—she would have to pull the trigger again, and that meant that there was opportunity now where there wasn’t before.
Without thinking about it, he lunged forward, not caring if a bullet blasted through his hand, because that was better than his head, and grasped the gun in a violent twisting wrench. Madama Lopez came with it, screaming obscenities in Spanish, and with one arm, Sol curled her tight into his chest, and with the other, threw the gun as far away as he could. It landed loudly and invisibly down the kitchen corridor, and the Madama tried to dig her fingers into Sol’s eyes, kick his knees with her heels, scratch the arm holding her in a vise.
Sol was ready for all that, had some experience subduing people who were freaking out for one reason or another, and he held her as close and as tight as he could. Her hair was in his mouth as he said softly, into her ear, reasonable and calm, “Shh. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. It’s all done now. Shh.”
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