Graveyard Child

by M. L. N. Hanover

  Ex was right. I had changed. I thought of the things that had uneased and unsettled me, not just when I got to Denver. When, in Arizona, my boyfriend’s circle decided to eject me from their clique, it had been devastating. I’d dropped out of college because I’d been distracted by something that didn’t matter to me now at all. When I’d found out, after falling into bed with Aubrey, that he was technically still married, I’d thrown a fit. When I’d met Karen Black, just standing next to her had left me feeling inadequate.

  I could remember all those events, all those feelings. But I couldn’t imagine having them now. Even coming home, seeing my parents again, seeing Jay. It hadn’t been easy, but four years ago it wouldn’t have been possible. The thought was comforting. I liked the younger Jayné who’d made her decision and stuck by it. I liked the one who’d decided to let herself be seduced by a man she basically didn’t care about as a rite of passage into the new life she’d chosen. I’d made some stupid decisions, but they were mine, and there was as much to love about where they had brought me. Except for the hiding behind wards in a hotel room. That part wasn’t an emblem of success.

  I heard Ozzie jump off the other bed and pad stolidly across to the bathroom. She drank out of the toilet. Voices came in the corridor and went. I drifted by degrees down toward sleep.

  And then I sat up, my heart pounding and my blood electric. Ex turned to me, alarmed.

  “What’s the matter, Jayné?” Chogyi Jake asked from the other bed.

  “I never told Jay where we were staying,” I said, “and he found us here anyway.”

  chapter twenty

  We drove to Jay’s house in the rising light of dawn. The streets were filled with the traffic of the city. The snowstorm was only getting worse, wind whipping the traffic signals until they swayed. Ozzie, in the backseat with Ex, whined softly under her breath, and I didn’t know if she was worried by the weather or if she was just picking up on my fear. I hadn’t told anyone where we were staying. And then the evil little bastard had used Chogyi Jake’s blood to find us. And then Jay had appeared. I’d been so focused on the Invisible College and Carla that I hadn’t questioned it.

  “We aren’t certain yet,” Chogyi Jake said. “There may be another explanation.”

  “He’s my older brother,” I said. “He was born before Eric broke off his whole angels-in-America thing with Mom. It had plenty of chances to put a rider in Jay and pull it out again. And it didn’t crawl through my family through the whole twentieth century with a few extra decades on either side by not having a backup plan. I should have seen this.”

  “The opportunity was there,” Chogyi Jake agreed. “I’m only saying we should be certain before we do anything drastic.”

  Drastic. He meant we shouldn’t kill Jay out of hand. Well, fair enough. We shouldn’t. I needed to get Rhodes and his pals together to bind the thing. The only comfort I had was that someone knew a way to beat this thing, even if that someone wasn’t me.

  A particularly vicious blast of wind caught the SUV broadside and rocked us a little as I swung around in a wide left turn. Another two miles and we’d be there. I wished now that I hadn’t called Jay, that I hadn’t told him about meeting with Rhodes or that I knew about the Graveyard Child or any of it. But if I was right, it still wouldn’t know I’d figured out who it was. I had to hope that tiny advantage was something I could use.

  “I’m a little surprised, though,” Ex said. “I made the mother for it.”

  “She is certainly qliphotic,” Chogyi Jake agreed. “On the other hand, if it had been in her, she wouldn’t have seemed so desperate to take in Jayné’s rider.”

  “Fair point,” Ex said.

  “Guys,” I said.

  The little house loomed up from the blowing snow like a ghost. A single light was on. His car wasn’t there. Ozzie’s whimpering grew louder, and she pawed Ex nervously. I got out of the car, my senses straining for anything. A smell, a movement, any sense that something was there. The malaise I’d felt the last time I was here seemed less like a reflection on Jay and his impending loveless marriage. It seemed more sinister, like the nature of the building itself had been changed by being too near something evil. I walked up the unshoveled walk. The ghosts of footprints still showed, slight indentations in the gray snow. Chogyi Jake trudged up behind me.

  I rang the doorbell and waited. The cold felt like a slap. Chogyi leaned to look in past the closed blinds. The freezing wind whistled and shook, driving snowflakes sharp as powdered glass against us. I dug my phone out of my pocket and called Jay’s number again, listening for the ring coming from the house. I hung up without leaving a message.

  “Not here,” Chogyi Jake said.

  “Nope. So where?”

  We stood, looking at the closed door for a few more seconds, then he turned and headed back to the car. I started to do the same, but then my body stopped. Without my willing it, my feet took two steps in toward the door. The Black Sun pressed my ear against the wood. I heard Chogyi Jake’s footsteps creaking in the snow behind me. I heard the shifting, restless wind. And then I heard what the Black Sun had wanted me to hear.

  I heard a woman sobbing.

  “Carla!” I shouted over the storm. “Are you in there? Please, Carla, open the door! I know what’s wrong. I can help!”

  The sobbing grew more violent—louder but not closer. I looked at the dead bolt, the frame of the doorway. I put my hand against the freezing metal. There. It was small but unmistakable. The house was warded.

  “Carla,” I shouted. “I can’t break the door in. You need to come open it.”

  Nothing.

  “Carla, it’s Jayné. I can help you, but you have to come talk to me. There’s going to be something in there. A line of ash or salt in front of the windows and doors. You have to help me get across that. I can help you.”

  I pressed my ear to the door again. It was quiet. I imagined her on the other side, maybe inches from me.

  “I can help Jay,” I said. Nothing. “I can save the baby, Carla. Open the door, and I swear in the name of Jesus Christ, Lord of Lords, that I will help you save your baby. I swear it in His name.”

  The trick is to know your audience. The lock clicked. The knob turned and Carla pulled the door open. She looked like hell. She wore a dirty nightgown that showed how big her belly had grown. The dark, exhausted circles under her eyes were as dark as the blood pooled under mine, and the whites of her eyes were pink. Her skin looked gray and her wrists were red and angry. Ligature marks. Sometime recently she’d been tied against her will, and I was pretty sure it hadn’t been when she was with Rhodes.

  “What did you do?” she asked. “What did you do to him?”

  “Made him nervous, I think,” I said. And then, simply, “There’s a demon in him. It’s not Jay. It’s the thing inside him.”

  Tears tracked down her cheeks. The cold was making gooseflesh on her arms and legs, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “I want to go home now,” she said.

  “All right,” I said. “I can help you do that.”

  She shook her head slowly and opened her arms. I walked across the threshold and embraced her. Her body felt hot as a fire, and she folded against me. “He’s the devil,” she murmured. “He’s the devil, he’s the devil, he’s the devil.”

  I turned to look back. Chogyi Jake stood in the snow. He wasn’t smiling.

  “I think we’ve got confirmation,” I said.

  “I believe we do,” he said.

  We didn’t pack her anything, just put a coat over her nightgown and took the car. When I looked for her purse, she told me it was gone. Her ID, her money, her cell phone. Everything was gone. After Jay got her from the Invisible College’s safe house, he’d taken everything away.

  The Best Western, despite having the most forgiving cleaning staff in Christendom, wasn’t safe anymore. I didn’t know where to take her, so instead I drove, as if movement by itself was a kind of defense. As if the Graveyard Chi
ld couldn’t find us.

  “He told me that he’d kill me if I left again,” she said. “He said that I was his. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I thought I had to go. The tattooed man said that . . . my baby . . . and that you were . . .”

  “The tattooed man and I kind got our wires crossed,” I said. “We’re cool now, though. Nothing bad is going to happen to you now. We’re going to make sure you’re all right.”

  She licked her lips and looked up at me.

  “How?” she asked. I didn’t have an answer. I needed shelter. Safety. I needed a base of operations I could count on being secure.

  I needed a home.

  “Gentlemen?” I said. “I am open to suggestions.”

  “Are we thinking short term or long?” Ex asked.

  “Either. Both.”

  “A sacred place,” Chogyi Jake said. “In the short term. After that, it will depend on the situation with Jay.”

  “We can go to church,” I said, but Chogyi Jake grunted softly and shook his head.

  “Someplace we thought the rider unlikely to have been already,” he said. “Better if it was someplace he wasn’t familiar with. A Buddhist temple would be best for what I have in mind.”

  “We’re in Kansas,” Ex said. “Where are we going to find a Buddhist temple here?”

  “Fairmount,” I said. “That’s where the Zen center is anyway. I think there’s one out on South Hydraulic by the exit from 35 too, but I’m not sure about that.”

  The silence in the car was broken only by the wind, the engine, and Ozzie’s steady breath.

  “That was my prejudices showing, wasn’t it?” Ex said.

  “We love you anyway,” I said, making a careful U-turn.

  At the temple, Chogyi Jake spoke quietly with a kind-faced woman who listened to him intensely. Ex and Carla and I sat in a waiting room, drinking tea from Dixie cups while the wind howled at the windows. Now that Carla was out of that oppressive, grim house, she seemed to be rallying a little. There was more color in her cheeks, and the fever-heat that had radiated from her before was lessening. Despite all that, she looked empty and lost and alone. I wondered if I’d looked like that once myself. Seemed likely.

  “He woke up this morning and listened to his voice mail,” she said. “That was the last time I saw him. He just left. He didn’t tell me where he was going. He said that I had to stay in the house. He took my shoes. He took all my shoes away so I wouldn’t leave.”

  “I’ll get you new shoes,” I said. “Did he say where he was going?”

  “I asked. He said he didn’t answer to me,” she said.

  “Has he been like this before?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “But then he’s so sorry. He’s so sweet. He’s my little Jay-bird.”

  Ex stood up. I could see the anger in his expression, even if Carla couldn’t.

  “I’m going to take the dog for a walk around the block,” he said.

  “She’s not going to thank you for that,” I said.

  “I know,” Ex said, limping manfully back toward the door.

  I watched him go.

  “Did I piss him off?” Carla asked. Her voice sounded tired.

  “You didn’t,” I said. “He blames himself because he didn’t keep this from happening to you. He does it with everyone.”

  “That’s dumb.”

  “He’s dumb sometimes.”

  Chogyi Jake came in and nodded to me. As I walked out into the hall, the kind-faced woman went in behind me.

  “The good news is that they have had some experience with riders here, and have connections with a women’s shelter. I believe they will be able to keep her safe until we can arrange a way to get her safely back to Florida and her family.”

  “The Graveyard Child can buy plane tickets too,” I said. “I’m not sure there will be any place safer than here. Hell, for that matter, I’m not sure where we can go. This thing is a bad one.”

  Chogyi Jake paused, leaning against the yellow-brown wall. The inked calligraphy behind him reminded me of Jonathan Rhodes. The air had the faintest ghost of incense.

  “It is,” he said. “I believe the time will come when we have to confront it. But now isn’t that time. It has the advantage of its own environment. It has places of physical and spiritual power to draw from. And by the nature of its host, it has certain protections we don’t.”

  “You mean that, since it’s in Jay, I won’t kill it,” I said.

  “And it won’t hesitate to kill us. Yes. I think the time is right for a strategic retreat. We go to Denver and research its habits, learn about its goals and its strengths and weaknesses. Consult with the Invisible College and Sabine Glapion. Aubrey and Kim. Tamblen and Carsey and the rest of Father Chapin’s exorcists. We have a network of support that we can bring to bear on this problem. If you and Ex and I can’t solve it, the others will find a way.”

  I felt myself frowning. Everything he said made sense, and I hated it. I wanted to make Carla and her baby safe in some long-term, permanent way. The truth was that no one gets that, ever. The bad guys might come after her, or she might get cancer, or escape from Jay and the Graveyard Child and fall in love with some other, more mundane abusive asshole. The best I could do was the best I could do.

  “I don’t have to like it, though, right?”

  “No. You don’t,” he said.

  “So wait for the storm to break, then gas up and get out of here?”

  “And we will need to make a call to your lawyer,” Chogyi Jake said. “Roshi Annabel is an uncompromising negotiator, and I’m afraid we’ve promised her a great deal of money for taking care of Carla.”

  “Well, there’s that, anyway. If we can’t beat the bastard, at least we can spend its money in ways it wouldn’t approve of.”

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket, ready to make the call. A tiny numeral 1 was next to my texting icon. Somewhere in the drive, I’d missed the alert chime. It was a response from Curtis:

  Help me. Its here.

  THE SUN was gone, the day as dark as the night had been. Every third thing on the radio was a severe weather warning or someone advising anyone that didn’t need to be on the roads to get off them. I drove home for the last time. The curbs were starting to vanish under the depth of snow, and only the bigger streets were clear enough to drive on. I’d gotten the SUV to drive through the snow and ice of northern New Mexico. If we’d been in one of the little sports cars Ex liked, we’d have been walking.

  I felt calm but not peaceful. I wasn’t ready, and I knew I wasn’t ready, and I was going in anyway. To their credit, Ex and Chogyi Jake hadn’t asked me to reconsider or wait. We were rushing in where angels feared to tread because there was no option. When it came to possession and riders and evil things from outside the world, we were the pros from Dover. I knew where the panic was in me, and I could chose not to feel it. Later, if there was a later, I could break down. Not now, though. That wasn’t the person I’d become.

  At the house, the windows were all bright. The Christmas lights blinked and glowed blue and red and yellow and green under the thickening snow. Icicles as long as butcher’s blades hung from the eaves. The family home at holiday time. It should have been beautiful, but it seemed obscene.

  In the backseat, Ozzie growled. When I stopped the car, she looked from me to the house and back, her eyebrows raised. It was the perfect pantomime of you’re-not-going-in-there-are-you? I reached back and scratched behind her ears.

  “Okay,” I said. “Here’s the plan. I’m heading in. I’ll distract it. You guys go around the outside and come in the back. When you hear the signal, we’ll try to beat the sonofabitch down enough that Ex can run an exorcism.”

  “And what will the signal be?” Chogyi Jake asked, hefting our one remaining shotgun.

  “I was thinking something like ‘Get him,’ ” I said. “Simple, direct.”

  “Works for me,” Ex said. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait,” I said. “If there’s a ques
tion . . . if it looks like we can’t stop this thing without hurting Jay . . .”

  I couldn’t say the words. They were there at the top of my throat, too thick and hard to speak. For more than a century, this thing had been eating my family. The math on the sacrifice was obvious. Lose one person to stop the death and degradation of dozens more. But it was my big brother.

  “It’s not going to come to that,” Ex said. Chogyi Jake didn’t say anything, but I knew what was in his mind. Whatever happens, happens. We may die. We may kill. Terrible things or wonderful or both together, inextricable as milk poured into tea.

  “I just needed to say it,” I said. “You know.”

  “All right,” Chogyi Jake said.

  I got out of the car, and before I could stop her, Ozzie clambered out with me. She pressed her body close against my knee and looked up expectantly.

  “Okay,” I said. “But you’re not going to like it in there.”

  We went up the walk, me and my dog. I didn’t bother knocking or ringing the bell. The door wasn’t locked.

  As soon as we stepped in, Ozzie started growling low in the back of her throat. I felt it too. Everything was as it had been, but it was wrong. A parody of my childhood home. A grotesque version of it. The smell of gingerbread filled the air so thickly, it nauseated. The dead Christmas tree was decaying in its stand. I gathered my will and pressed out, making a warm place at my heart and expanding it like a bubble all around me. The sense of transcendent madness and evil lessened a degree, even if it didn’t evaporate.

  From the kitchen, something laughed. It was a sick sound, wet and phlegmy. I walked in. They were at the table. Mom, Dad, Curtis, and the small, twisted tumor of a thing that had once been my brother Jay. Thick nylon rope bound all of them except it. Bright red Christmas stockings were stuffed in their mouths as gags.

  The Graveyard Child’s grin split its face, and it cackled obscenely.

  “Hey there, sister,” it said, and smacked its massive frog-like lips. “I was hopin’ you could come.”