Both of them. She’d lost both her brothers now.
She wasn’t going to catch this ghost. She wasn’t going to send it to a better place.
She was going to destroy it.
With both feet planted firmly apart, she connected with the ground, felt the shiver of grass and microbe, the running of water, the firm line of warm iron and the speeding of the engine, hot, appearing to her internal vision as red. Red for heat, for all that was purposeful mechanics, designed and manufactured. The rest was humming green or white, made according to no plan known to her or any other human. Faith was required here, and it happened to be the one thing that Lutie possessed.
It was real, all of it, the red metal, the ghosts, God’s unfathomable will.
Ghosts were tied to place of death, and this madwoman’s ghost had wandered away, called by Baz’s song, lured by it. It was vulnerable, an easy thread to cut. She didn’t know how to open a road for the dead, didn’t think she probably could. But she could sever things, of that she was sure. She was good at cutting things off, had learned from her mother. This ghost, far from its remains, from the memory of where it had been, would wither and disappear. Would be lost. Surely this is what it deserved? Surely this was what it had wanted when it had been a woman and taken its own life?
It’s what M’man had wanted.
She was concentrating so closely on finding the ghost’s tenuous string that held it to this earth that she didn’t smell the ash, didn’t notice how the day darkened. The train crept closer, and the noise of it, the diesel wafting along the breeze, blocked out any threat she might have otherwise perceived.
Of all things, it was the madwoman’s ghost that warned her. Maybe the ghost really wanted oblivion; maybe it saw a kindred spirit in Lutie; maybe it was just crazed from God-alone knew how many years spent between existences, but it pointed behind Lutie, and Lutie turned just in time to avoid the club.
She didn’t have time to think. No natural athlete, no talent for fighting, she simply got out of Lewis’s way, was able to move quickly, if not purposefully. The madwoman’s ghost scattered like blown leaves, or Lutie might have gone right through it as she fell. Lewis loomed over her, covered in ash, char flaking off it, shedding skin and clothing, bare bones curved with heat, cracking with the sound of gunshots. The train was loud in her ears, and it passed by as she lay on the ground, rolling steel rattling her bones in unison.
The bull’s ghost stilled, sunken red eyes fixed on the train, something of longing in its steady distracted gaze. The long line of cars bound for elsewhere, out of this place, not stuck. Able to leave, able to find rest at the end of the trip, everything a ghost was not permitted to do.
It passed, the train, but Lewis was still there. The moment held.
“You can’t go home,” Lutie said, pointedly. She talked to ghosts. She’d always talked to ghosts. She didn’t give a rat’s ass what her father had said, what Sol had said. There was a note of triumph in her voice.
Lewis’s ghost stood for a heartbeat longer, not looking at her, looking at the tracks. It had come, eventually, or had been sent, perhaps to kill her. It was in thrall to the devil that had been plaguing them, and that would make a difference in what happened next.
Ma petite, it’s like calling over a cat, she had said. You want to offer them something, and then you wrap them around your finger comme ça.
Finally, Lewis’s ghost turned to her, red eyes glowing, burning like embers, hot on her. She remembered what she’d heard about Lewis, how he’d taken pleasure in beating hobos to death, had despised their impermanence, envied their freedom. Maybe he knows where Sol is. Maybe he can show me.
“You need someplace to stay, Lewis?”
The club held slackly at its side, the ghost hovered a moment. Don’t go, don’t go, Lutie pleaded, still on the ground, but daring to come up on her elbows, and then her arms, all the way to a sit. The thing was huge, deadly, ugly. Bound to a devil, but Lutie knew about cutting things off, and she wasn’t going to stop now.
Whatever village the engine had slowed for—a huddle of graying houses, the empty granary—it had disappeared with the train. Sol was left on the high prairie, grassland rolling away from the lines of rail, waves of bronze and gold soft as fur, as though one stroke would make it purr. It shouldn’t surprise me, he thought, looking for the missing village, one hand pressed to his bandaged side, fingers spread as though he could contain the hurt. Nothing about this should surprise me.
Last time, when he’d abandoned this journey, he’d hitchhiked back. He’d gone this far on the rails, stopped at a nameless hamlet, begged a cup of coffee and bummed a ride from a trucker on his way to Denver. Turning around was easier than catching out.
Sol scanned the tracks, not seeing even a road, much less signs of human habitation. A spray of birds chattered to flight, and he sighed. It was a long walk back. Either start walking, or stay here, and he wasn’t willing to be a target, wasn’t going to wait for something else to make the next move. He took a few steps, able to read east and west easily enough, the sun helping him. A point in the afternoon, land flat as far as the eye could see, no mountains to hem, to cradle, to assert the land’s permanence, to state that it wasn’t going anywhere. A mother’s steady hand. But not like Louisiana either, where the land was tentative, unwilling to give any support, indifferent to notions of safety and duration.
He swallowed hard, not wanting to think about sinking land, about drowned houses, bodies piled on overpasses, confused ghosts unable to find their way out, their terrain turned toxic, unknown and unknowable. Instead, he remembered Baz on Robbie’s couch, that stupid haircut, and her careful laughter, not knowing what Sol’s reaction would be, thinking him some kind of fragile glass, breakable. Or maybe I pave her way with eggshells, make her guess what my breaking point will be, when I won’t come back through that door.
It was ridiculous, thinking that here, but he knew Robbie as well as he knew anyone, better than he knew himself, and then he thought, I am such an asshole. The rails to Denver were littered with shards of glass, things that he’d smashed along the way. Break them myself and at least it’s predictable. He stopped walking after a few steps, hip aching, and he put a hand to it, eyes to the rail ties, binding slender filaments of iron to the land, gathering together a nation, allowing for people to leave at will.
Allowing them to go back home, he realized.
Looking up, Sol experienced yet another revelation in this day, already full: it was indeed still possible to take him by surprise. The ash cloud blocked the sky to the west immediately in front of him. Sol smelled it at the same time he saw it, rolling like a dust storm toward him right on the rails and he knew that trains also could come along here, and he wasn’t falling for that again. He stepped to the side of the tracks, unprotected between the iron lines, but also out of the way of any train. The cloud rolled over him, choking him, ash in his eyes, down his throat, everything constricting, a cough coming immediately, fire along his slashed side as he gasped for air.
The day became instantly gray, swirling with flakes like snow in nuclear winter, everything soft haze, diffusing whatever light tried to penetrate, a pall, a gloom.
Only a moment, he knew, before Lewis would appear and he was bent over, exposed, not ready. Despite the effort it took, he dropped to his knees, hand out, needed to send this thing on its way not because it belonged elsewhere—though it certainly did—but because he wasn’t going to be able to fight it. The first landed blow would finish him.
The trouble was, Lewis’s ghost was so damn quick. It appeared out of the ash just as Sol’s coughing subsided, just as he felt the vague tendril of connection tremble along his hand, ready for him to pluck it out of the earth like a spreading root system of an invasive plant. Blackened rags hung from Lewis’s spare frame, tattered like plastic bags caught on a tangle of wire fence, and the ghost swung his murderous bat, eyes burning from beneath the brim of his charred ball cap. Sol scrambled backwards, the c
onnection lost, and he knew if he didn’t find it again, he was dead.
Aren’t I already dead? Maybe this is Hell, missing Robbie and all the things I’ve screwed up, and having to fight this trou d’cul over and over. He rolled away over gravel, into grass, the day turning to night, swirl of gray becoming blacker, and he smelled not just ash, but burning. Flesh burning.
He knew this smell, had worked enough car accidents and house fires to recognize it, and his stomach curled up on itself. Roll and roll, on his feet, trying to ignore his side and hip, but his leg gave under him as he tried to stand, gave out entirely as though tendons had been severed. The pain coincided with a flash of light, which Sol thought meant that he’d been hit by the bat, and just hadn’t seen it coming.
He fell, pain exploding like a rocket, the light gone, everything so dark he couldn’t see a damn thing. Except. Except the red glow of the ghost’s eyes, silent, never saying anything. Some ghosts talked to you, and Sol knew better than to answer, but this one, this one wanted no connection to the living. This one wasn’t making conversation; it wanted Sol dead, had been told to kill him. It was reaping the harvest and Sol’s hip wouldn’t allow him to stand, so he looked up at the dark form, black against black, beyond any kind of usual pain. Looked up, in the end waiting for the damn thing to make the next move, because Sol Sarrazin was out of moves.
Wind, screaming, that was the only sound, and it swept through Lewis as though he wasn’t there, took him apart like a thumb smudging wet ink, a smear, indistinguishable from the sudden unnatural night. Sol stared, trying to make sense of it, but Lewis suddenly wasn’t there, just the night, and the wind. The song of the wind, which became a different song, keening, a melody of loss.
Baz. Not his road-voice, the one permitted in the car, singing along like a happy kid at Scout Camp, but his true voice, the one that their father had feared so much he’d forbidden it. Feared this voice not because it called ghosts, Sol realized, as his father must have realized at some point, but because it called something else, something bigger and unknowable and untouchable. You don’t want them to notice you. Not because they’d hurt you, or because they’d snatch you away, or anything else imagined or awful. But because an angel noticing you meant that a devil would too, and that put you in middle of whatever went on between them, neither caring who got caught, who got killed. Angels and devils weren’t made for humans to understand. That devil, the one that killed Papa, it’s using Baz, Sol thought, heart sinking. Oh, Jesus, merde, Baz, cher. Stop your singing.
He struggled to his feet, looking for the source. This time, his hip held, but only if he put all his weight on the other leg. He wished, briefly, for a cane or a crutch. Even as his eyes adjusted, he could make out nothing in the gloom. Just the voice, singing in French, mispronouncing badly, and then that came to an end, soft as a Bible being shut on a pulpit. He looked down, and between his worn leather boots, a broken line of cracked yellow paint snaked past him, running along shattered asphalt. A road. Something, better than nothing.
A form moved in the dark ahead of him, another black huddle of mass, near his feet, moved and dodged and Sol knew what it was. Again, surprise. He couldn’t reach down without going all the way to his knees, and he didn’t want to try to get back up again now that he was upright, so Sol whistled under his breath, short and sharp.
The dog came.
Last time he’d seen this thing in life, he had been stacking rocks onto its frozen body. The dog had also been on the train with a devil wearing DJ’s form, and Sol wondered if that meant that the devil was nearby. But no. He didn’t think the dog was in league, it had just been swept along. Kinda like me. In its short life, the dog had been loved by a drifter and Sol had taken care of its last journey. By tending to that, had he some kind of favor owed to him?
It’s my job. I don’t do it for the thanks.
The little dog sat by his leg, gave a short ruff of acknowledgment. Said ‘hi’. Sol didn’t feel too ridiculous saying hi back. In response, the dog put one paw on Sol’s foot, then trotted off a few yards, just on the edge of the blackness. It looked back.
They don’t let you down, Sol thought, but he was thinking of his own dog, how Renard never came when called. How happy the damn thing was to see him when he’d paid the fifty bucks and was allowed to take him home from the pound. Good to see you, too.
Ignoring the fact that it was like a lost Halloween episode of Lassie, Sol followed the drifter’s dead dog along the road. Seeing that he was falling in behind him, the dog led on, stopping to let Sol catch up, not letting him lose track. Sol went slowly, not able to see the road, hopeful that a semi wasn’t going to come barreling out of the gloom to run him over.
Without the sun, time was difficult to gauge, but eventually the black became a bad bruise, and then a rain cloud and then soft as an old dog’s muzzle. The sun came through, and Sol was on an indeterminate road, surrounded by nothing but rolling prairie and sun-burned grass, yellow passing lines faded but present. Encouraging, in a way, indications that there might be things to pass, or things that might pass you, or things coming in the opposite direction. Like that. In the distance, very far away, a figure walked toward him, and Sol recognized the bounce, the way Baz’s center of balance was somewhere high in his chest, like he’d topple in a stiff breeze. Like he’d take off in flight.
In his own center, where his balance sometimes secretly faltered, the weight, the need, tightened and he couldn’t stop a grin from splitting his face. His hip gave a sharp lancing pain, and the muscle there shivered in anticipation of folding. Sol couldn’t walk any further, and so he slowly sank to the road, the dog licking his face enthusiastically before Sol pushed it down. As his brother inched across the landscape toward him, Sol kept one hand on the dog, grateful.
The angel could have been a little more precise, could have saved him a walk, but Baz wasn’t going to complain. Not much, anyway, not when he could see his brother in the distance, sitting on the empty road, gray bowl of sky arcing above, nothing but grass and hill and hollow as far as the eye could see.
Baz walked faster, worried that Sol would disappear, maybe, or that he was badly hurt, because Sol didn’t usually just stop walking and sit down in the middle of a road. He hadn’t been moving quickly before that, had favored one side, nothing graceful about him. A small, dark shape darted around Sol, just in his shadow.
Twenty yards separated them before Baz figured out the shadow was a dog, and only then because the damn thing barked at him. He couldn’t help smiling, big and genuine, opened his arms as though he and Sol had run into each other on some exotic shore. Can you believe it? the gesture meant, and Baz didn’t really care where the angel had dropped him off, as long as it meant that Sol wasn’t dead.
The little dog wagged its tail, and Sol looked at it, one hand coming up as though to call it. Even as he did, the dog ran off into the grasslands, its bark fading as it went until the whole landscape was silent, not even birdsong or wind. Sol didn’t attempt to stand, looked up at Baz, and then away. Baz knelt down to his level, the indeterminate sun somewhere above. They didn’t say anything for a long time, Sol’s attention on the horizon, eyes squinting, stained parka open to the mild day.
“Where the hell are we, cher?” Baz asked him.
Sol didn’t answer for a moment, head tilted, listening for some sound that maybe Baz couldn’t hear. Baz stayed steady, waiting for his brother to return. Finally, Sol sighed and shook his head.
“A road has to cut through somewhere, even a deadroad.” Voice soft, tentative and therefore unfamiliar. “Did that damn ghost kill me?”
Baz raised his eyebrows, wishing that Sol would look at him. “I don’t think so. Lutie somehow…I don’t know what she did.”
Sol was nodding, a brief smile pulling aside his mouth, and he still wasn’t looking at him, was looking everywhere but at him. “Yeah. I don’t either. She send you?”
Something was strange about his voice. Baz shook his head. “No, I d
on’t think so. The angel did that.”
Baz watched as his brother bit the inside of his mouth, lips pulling in, chin down. Everything pulled in, held too tight. “L’ange, hé? Oh, God, Baz…” and his voice dropped, fell away. One hand came up, knuckles red and cut, and he covered his mouth. “You,” he began, words muffled against his hand, as though they were seeping out, bleeding from him. “You’re scaring the shit out of me, Baz.”
His face must have been something, because Sol laughed, finally stared at him, dark eyes full, reflecting the blue day.
“This, coming from the guy that sees ghosts, the guy that fights devils?” Baz wanted to touch Sol, wanted contact in this strange place, but he knew Sol wouldn’t allow it.
Sol nodded. “Ouais, cher. T’as raison. Mais,” and there was always a ‘mais’ with Sol, “mais, them angels, Basile, they don’t care about us. They don’t care about you. I don’t know what they want with you. Or what les diables want with you. It scares me, not knowing.”
It was a speech, for Sol. Baz nodded, swallowed, knowing that Sol wouldn’t like what he was going to say next. “I think the devil, the one I made the deal with, I think it has business with the angel. It wants me to sing, because that calls up the angel. I don’t think it can do it on its own.” He shrugged. “I think that it’s what it wanted from Dad, and when he wouldn’t do it, the thing killed him.”
Sol took that, hand coming up to cover his mouth again, eyes away. The dog hadn’t come back. The dog was gone. The sun hadn’t moved in all the time they’d been here. With a sigh, Sol dropped one shoulder, rolled it, wincing. He looks so damn tired, Baz thought.
“It’s been around longer than that. And it wants more than an angel, no matter what it says. Man, it hates us.”
Baz stared. “How do you know that?”
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