by C. E. Murphy
Phoebe looked at me a long time, like if she scowled hard enough or long enough, she might worm her way inside my mind and get a better understanding of what’d gone wrong. Finally, though, she shook her head and said, “Yeah, okay, whatever,” and picked up her gear bag. “Are we going to fence, or what?”
I met Billy back at the precinct building, damp with sweat but in a better humor. He said, “I guess it went okay with Pheeb,” and tossed me the keys to an unmarked police cruiser. I wanted to take Petite, but with the cost of gas what it was, driving a police vehicle on police business just made the receipts easier. At least I got to drive. Not that I could remember Billy ever doing the driving since we’d been partnered.
In police academy, they’d impressed on us that there were two kinds of good drivers. One was the kind who followed all the rules, drove the speed limit, never double-parked and always wore their seat belts. I was usually that kind of driver.
But I’d also cut my driver’s teeth on hairpin Appalachian roads with plunging cliffs on one side and sheer rock face on the other. I could jackass Petite around a forty-five-degree turn at speeds way above the limit without losing momentum, and I’d spent my share of time feeling like Wile E. Coyote, dangling in the air over a dark green valley when me and another driver’d met coming opposite directions on a road barely wide enough for one. Dancing a police car through road cones and driving with blown-out tires was nothing.
Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I missed North Carolina and Qualla Boundary. I said, “Huh,” out loud, and Billy looked askance at me. “Nothing. Just an alarming display of internal emotional stability.”
He said, “Good,” dryly. “Sonata gets upset around unstable people, and I’d like her to be able to get these ghosts off me.”
“Sonata? Like the musical piece? Did she name herself? Oh, God. She’s a new-age hippie freak, isn’t she?”
“I swear to God, Joanne, if you can’t behave yourself I’m leaving you in the car.”
Me and Doherty in the driveway, together but separate, leaped to mind. I shut my mouth and drove us to Sonata’s house, up on Capitol Hill. It was one of those gorgeous old Victorians that requires either inheritance or obscene wealth to buy. Being a medium seemed ideal for “just happening” to come into such an inheritance.
The woman who opened the ornately windowed front door was, in fact, a long-haired hippie freak, one in her mid-sixties who’d probably never left the Woodstock era. She wore moccasins, gypsy skirts with beaded belts, and an inordinate number of rings on her thin fingers.
She also wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a smiley face that had a splash of blood marring its cheerful yellow circle. It wasn’t exactly a hippie vibe. I tried to rearrange my prejudices as she put her fists on her hips and inspected us.
Inspected me, more accurately. Billy obviously already had the all-clear, and I was just as obviously lacking. After a good long examination, she said, “Are you sure this is the one you were talking about, William? She’s got skepticism written all over her.”
I glanced at my hands to check, but they were, thankfully, unmarred by ink. Stranger things had happened. Billy, ruefully, said, “I’m sure. It’s good to see you, Sonny.” He kissed her cheek and she smiled, then offered me a hand.
“All right, come on in, unbeliever. I’m Sonata.”
“I’m Joanne.” I thought “Joanne” had a nicer ring than “unbeliever,” but I wasn’t sure Sonata would call me by it. She nodded and ushered us in.
Victorians were the ultimate houses for séances. Sonny’s was brighter and more airily decorated than I expected, but it still had a sense of somber grandiosity. I hoped she’d bring us to a dark room with the requisite enormous wooden table, and was looking forward to searching it for knockers and strings, but we went into a well-lit, comfortable living room where a young man was drinking a glass of wine.
Disappointment must’ve shown on my face, because Sonata looked amused. “Dark corners and spooky rooms are for charlatans, Joanne. This is Patrick. He’d be my partner in crime, the one dripping cold water down gullible séance attendees’ spines while I asked if they felt the icy touch of the grave, if you’re trying to keep track of how I’d run my scam. Pat, this is Joanne Walker, and you know William.”
“Sure. Nice to meet you, Joanne.” Patrick was a little older than me and had the unaffected good looks of a California surfer boy. My opinion of what constituted a medium shifted rapidly. Not only did Sonata wear inappropriate T-shirts, but she apparently had a hot young thing to keep her company. Maybe growing up to be a hippie freak wouldn’t be so bad.
The hippie freak gave me another amused smile. “I’ll be turning the lights down. Spirits are more comfortable in dim lighting. But if what William says is true, you won’t need light to see if what I do is real or not.”
My ears got hot. “I don’t know. Billy’s aura doesn’t change when he talks to ghosts, and I can’t normally see them myself.” I didn’t like that I could see these ones. It suggested the cauldron—if that was the root cause—had some kind of back door into my own magic, and I had no idea how to face or even find it. “For all I know, the Sight won’t show me anything with you.”
Sonny tilted her head, interest piqued. “I have to go into a trance to speak with the spirits. That may be different enough to trigger your ability to detect magic.” She turned a knob on the wall as she spoke, and the lights dimmed.
I yawned. Unless absolute catastrophe struck, I was going home and going to bed after this. Billy looked as if he was having similar thoughts. Sonata sat down cross-legged on a cushion, hands palms upward on her thighs, thumb and middle fingertips curved in loose circles to touch. Patrick knelt just behind her, close enough to touch, and bowed his head like a guardian angel.
The Sight winked on, lending a surreal depth to the room and making Sonata flare with yellow and red as bright as the face on her T-shirt. I wondered if she knew her aura tended toward those colors, or if it was a sort of cheery coincidence. Patrick, in comparison, glowed serene white, a bastion of calm. Sonata closed her eyes, slowing her breathing.
I turned the Sight on Billy, checking his aura and his general sense of well-being. His gray ghost cloak moved away as I watched, gathering itself in the middle of the room and quivering. For incorporeal spirits, it sure looked like they were jittery with excitement. A few tendrils still led back to Billy, as if the ghosts were anchored there, but it was clearly Sonata they were interested in now. All except one: it hung back, staying with him, and when I turned my gaze away, it teased me with the faintest shape of a child, pigtailed and open faced. She disappeared again when I looked back, and I rubbed my eyes, wondering if I was losing my mind.
Sonata said, “Restless spirits,” in a vibrating deep tone completely unlike the voice she’d spoken in earlier. The ghosts snapped to attention, and so did the hairs on my arms. Even Billy jumped a bit, but Patrick remained calm and utterly steady. Presumably he’d heard the voice before, and had been expecting it. “You are welcome in my home from this moment until I bid you leave. If you would speak with us, you will agree that my voice and the words restless spirits, begone will send you from this place. Strike a hard surface thrice, if we’re agreed.”
I thought only poltergeists had the corner on making noise and pushing things over. The cyclone of ghosts spun around, then darted to the room’s hearth. I heard nothing, and shot a glance at Billy, who shrugged one shoulder. Sonata, though, opened her eyes and focused on the gathering of ghosts with a satisfied nod. “We’re agreed.” Then dismay contorted her face and she breathed, “Oh.”
Billy and I both tensed, trying to anticipate disaster. Sonata sat silent, looking at the blur of ghosts with sorrow deepening the lines in her face. I wished, briefly, that I could see what she did, and was equally glad I couldn’t.
“They’re children,” she finally said. “So many of them are children. A girl in a pinafore, two boys in diapers, an older boy who threatens me with a slings
hot, and one who’s just on the childhood side of being a woman. She has the most rage in her, and anchors the others.” Sonata put out a hand, an inviting gesture, and the cloud of ghosts swirled around it. She rocked back, letting go a soft sigh, and spoke again in a voice much lighter than her own: “My name is Matilda Whitehead. I will not go back into the dark.”
I nearly bit my tongue in half as Sonata’s colors bleached, then tinged an off-shade of green. Another face faded into existence over Sonata’s, outlined in lime and making her hard to look at. I cut off a combination of a yell and a question with a strangled noise, and Billy gave me a quick look that both appreciated and approved of my rare silence. He slid to the floor so he could kneel in front of Matilda/Sonata. “There’s light waiting for you, Matilda. Are you called Matilda?”
“My brothers call me Tilly, but it isn’t a proper grown-up lady’s name. I like Matilda.”
Billy cast a brief smile at the floor, then straightened his expression before meeting Sonata’s gaze again. “Matilda, then. When were you born, Matilda?”
“In the year 1887.” A shadow passed over Sonata’s face. “That was a very long time ago, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Billy said quietly. “Yes, it was. The others who are with you, do you know when they were born?”
Sonata turned her head to look toward the cloud of ghosts. “The twins are too little to say. Anne-Marie was born in the year 1846.” Consternation creased her forehead. “Ricky says he was born in 1943, but I remember nothing but the darkness after the year 1900. There are others.” Her gaze sharpened and she brought it back to Billy. “There are others with us here, but I care for the twins and Ricky and Anne-Marie. The others are not like us.”
The others. Billy’d collected ghost riders of his own before he’d taken on the ones trapped in my garden. I slid a glance at him, not wanting to speak, but he understood Matilda as well as I did. “How are they different?”
“They’re older.” I got the sense she meant they’d died older, rather than having died earlier in terms of calendar dates. “They died in the wrong way. In the wrong times. They are not like us.” Everything the girl said was delivered in a cool, precise tone, as though she disdained or mocked us. I hoped it was just a century of being dead, and that she hadn’t been quite so horrible when she’d lived.
“Died the wrong way?” Billy asked diffidently. I’d seen him use the approach with his own children when they didn’t want to confess to something they’d done wrong. Affected disinterest on Billy’s part made admission on theirs less scary.
“They were not sacrificed.” She said it with such disinterest I suddenly felt the rage behind her words. The little girl had been dead for decades. What Billy was really talking to was a fury so potent it had refused to cross over.
“Can you tell me what the sacrifice was?”
Sonata put her arms out, and a long thin line of red split each of her forearms. Then she stood, and another bloody line scoured her from throat to groin, and then again, splitting the muscles of her thighs. Magic roared to life inside me, sending me forward a few jerky inches before I realized the blood was tinged with ethereal green, and that beneath Matilda’s ectoplasmic presence, Sonata’s body was unharmed. She said, “Five cuts, such a pretty star,” and bent forward at the waist, arms spread out to the sides. Blood dripped from her arms and torso, pooling beneath her. Then she lifted one leg, then the other, so she hung in mid-air as though she’d been lifted there on a glass plate, and blood poured from all five wounds, splashing to the floor.
To my eternal gratitude, Billy, and Patrick, who’d stood when Sonata did, looked as astounded as I felt. We all three just stared at the woman hanging in the air, none of us able to get beyond the blatantly abused laws of physics.
The blood had actually started to slow before Billy finally cranked his jaw up and said, “Thank you for showing me, Matilda. You could sit down again, if that would be more comfortable.”
To everyone’s relief, she did. The injuries and the blood faded away, leaving the cool-faced child to meet Billy’s eyes again. He, cautiously, said, “A star has five points,” and I understood what he meant: the cuts she’d shown us made four starlike points, but the fifth obvious one would be the throat, not the torso.
Matilda shrugged. “The throat is too quick. The star bleeds slow to make the potion potent.” She sing-songed the words, as if they were a nursery rhyme long since committed to memory.
Billy nodded as though she hadn’t said something horrifying. “And the others died in the wrong times, too,” he reminded her. I couldn’t have maintained the casual calm tone he used, and was two parts impressed and one part shocked that he could.
“Fifty, one hundred, fifty, one hundred.” Matilda flicked her fingers dismissively, sounding suddenly bored. “There is something the woman who offered me her body should know.”
Magic thumped inside me like a heartbeat, warning. I hadn’t spoken in a while, and my throat was dry as I asked, “What?”
Matilda’s eyes came to me, and her mouth turned to a predator’s smile. “I said I would give it back. I lied.”
CHAPTER 12
I bolted forward, hands outstretched to—to I didn’t know what, exactly, but I was by God going to try. Billy let out a yell and I dodged his grab, crashing to my knees at Sonata’s side. Outraged healing power lit me up like a Christmas tree, making my flesh translucent to my own eyes. I caught Sonata’s face in my hands, and beneath the quiet repose of her expression, Matilda flung her ghostly head back and shrieked with glee.
As a child, I’d gotten the idea that when I was in pain, if I could only stick a needle into the hurting part—whether it was a headache or a gassy tummy or a scraped knee—that I could draw the pain out with it and cast it away. I’d probably picked up the concept by reading about trepanation, but the point was that even as an adult, part of my brain thought it made sense.
Matilda, for all intents and purposes, became a needle pulling my pain out, except my pain in this case was actually my power, and I didn’t want to let it go. My fingertips turned to ice against her skull, stuck like a kid who’s licked a frozen pipe, and magic flowed out of me free as water. Her ichory color flushed to a healthier hue, green revitalized into a springtime shade. The other four ghosts suddenly came violently clear to me, brightening with yellow and orange and double spikes of blue for the twins. They surged forward, all eagerness to lay their hands on me. For a dizzying moment I felt myself fly apart, and doubted I’d ever come together again.
Patrick slapped his hand against my forehead, and against Sonata’s, and began to shout in a language I didn’t understand. Matilda laughed, a cold hard sound all wrong from a child’s throat. Under the shouting, under the flood of magic rushing out of me, I heard Billy’s voice, compassionate and stern: “Matilda, there’s a way out for you, but this isn’t it. Let us release you. We’ll take what you’ve told us and do our best to find your murderers, but you deserve to rest now.”
Her voice vaulted me out of my body, if I’d even been there anymore. I looked down at myself, feeling like I was a million miles away. A silver cord thrumming with power attached me to myself, though even as I watched, it contracted, losing cohesion as Matilda sucked magic out of me to strengthen her speech. “I don’t want to rest. I want to live.” For the first time she sounded like a child, full of desperation and fear. “I never had a chance to live.”
“And you still won’t,” Billy said calmly. “This body isn’t yours to take.”
“She gave it to me!”
“And you agreed to leave it.”
Her smile turned nasty again. “Only when she says the words, and I won’t let her. This one’s power will let me keep her voice locked inside.”
Gosh. Apparently there was a reason Billy’d told me not to let a vengeful spirit latch on to me. Patrick was still speaking, his voice gaining strength. I concentrated on that, trying to use it to get back to my body, but after a few seconds it occurred to me
that I didn’t even know the guy, and there was no reason he should be my guiding light. I wrapped my hands around the cord, which felt weak and watery even in my non-corporeal grip, and started pulling myself down.
Patrick stepped back to English and murmured, “This is your final chance, Matilda. Let us guide you through your pain and anger and into what waits beyond. It will be a better place, that much I promise you.”
Sonata shuddered, as though Matilda was entrenching herself more deeply, and my body-attaching cord turned to mist. I gave a panicked yell and dived downward, slamming into my body with a sick thud. I tried shouting, “Tally ho!” because I thought it was funny, but instead I said, “Trk!” and was astonished how much effort even that much sound took.
It didn’t matter. Patrick was making sound for me, a low steady murmur: “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti…”
Matilda arched under his hand and gave what, under normal circumstances, I would call an unholy shriek. Right now that was too accurate, and therefore seemed inappropriate. I Saw magic release from each of the child-size ghosts, and it snapped back to me with the sting of giant rubber-band guns misfiring.
Patrick’s voice rose, and then rose again, rolling over the little girl’s swearing and bellowing with infinite compassion and inexorable resolve. She bucked and twisted, and while my Latin wasn’t exactly fluent, even I could recognize that I was witnessing—hell, participating in—an exorcism in God’s name. Billy’d told me to get a priest if he was possessed. I hadn’t believed he’d really meant it until right now.
I guessed Patrick wasn’t a boytoy after all.
The children winked out, leaving cold spaces where their ghosts had been. Not the coolness of dead flesh, but the absolute nothingness I’d encountered in the Dead Zone, which was so remote from the rest of the astral planes I didn’t know if there was anything on its other side.