Ghost in the Canteen (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 1)

by Rasmussen, Jen

  We came to a wide river on a cool night. A big cartoony full moon spilled silvery-blue light across the water. There was a steamboat floating in the center, full of golden light and jazz and raucous laughter.

  As we passed the music stopped. I heard low voices, then saw a couple of silhouettes in the boat’s lights, leaning over to look around. I shrank back, but there wasn’t much cover where we were. I had a nearly uncontrollable urge to run.

  As if he read my mind, Tom clamped his hand over my wrist. I looked at him and he shook his head, just slightly, once. We stood still. There was no sound but the lapping of the water and the whispers in the dark. I could feel my pulse against Tom’s warm fingers.

  Eventually the music started up again.

  But I was nervous after that. “How much farther?” I asked as we came into the next plot, a pleasant forest with autumn color and soft, springy ground. There was a fresh-smelling breeze.

  “Only a few more plots,” Tom said. “But this one is dangerous.”

  “Worse than the last one? It seems nice enough.”

  “So did Megan McGibbons, I’m sure, when she was alive.”

  Oh lovely. I’d banished a lot of creepy ghosts in my day, but Megan McGibbons was in the top ten. At sixteen she killed her parents with a flail they’d bought her at a Renaissance Festival two days before, then slit her wrists and painted the walls with her own blood until her strength gave out. After that she stuck around to haunt the next owners of her home, leaving little bloody spike-prints all over the place: their pillows, their soap, even, on one occasion, a loaf of bread. But they were willing to put up with that; it was a good school system, and the house had been a steal. It wasn’t until she started cutting people that they hired Nat and me to get rid of her.

  “Yes, she did seem nice,” I said. “One of those situations where none of the neighbors could believe it. Cheerleader. Blond pigtails.”

  “She still has the pigtails. But she’s not so cheerful. And she’s very powerful. If you’re the one who sent her here, we need to be extra careful, ward or no ward.”

  We came out of the woods to an abrupt, improbable change in landscape. In front of us was a steep climb along a narrow path with ocean on one side and sheer rock on the other. A castle loomed at the top of the cliff, a disjointed hodgepodge of Gothic towers and dark gables. I remembered Gemma’s warning about the ward not being an invisibility spell, and I did not want to walk past that castle. I imagined Megan had several Inquisition-style torture chambers in there. But there didn’t seem to be any other way past it. “Are you sure you can’t fly us?”

  But Tom had already started climbing the path. It was too narrow to walk side by side, so I fell in behind him. The wind picked up until I shrank against the rock for fear of falling into the sea below. I was breathing heavily by the time we reached the top.

  Megan McGibbons was there, standing under a fir tree from which hung, like Christmas ornaments, an assortment of daggers, maces, and spikes. She was wearing a fairy-tale-princess-meets-biker-babe sort of dress, black leather with lilac taffeta petticoats peeking out from beneath the full skirt, and studded with tiny silver skulls in an intricate, lace-like pattern. And there were the pigtails, tied up with big, floppy lilac bows.

  “Warded yourself, huh? I always know who comes through my plot.” She twirled a lock of honey-colored hair around one finger and tilted her head in what I guessed was meant to be a flirtatious way. “Did you come to see me, Tommy?”

  Tommy? I almost laughed.

  “Just passing through, Megan.” He gave her a stiff smile that was going for charming but missed. Tom wasn’t so good at hiding his bad opinions of people. “Do you mind?”

  “In your case, I’d rather you stayed a while.” Megan’s finger was still twisting and twisting inside that lock of hair. It was starting to get tangled. “And in her case, I’d rather she didn’t come at all.” Her cold eyes fixed on me. They were golden, almost the same shade as her hair.

  I’d spent most of the climb up thinking about what I’d say if we met Megan, or anybody else I’d banished, so you would think I’d have been prepared. Except I hadn’t come up with a single suitable thing. Apologizing wasn’t right. I was sorry I’d banished Tom, and I was sorry the canteen turned out to be what it was. I wished people like Megan McGibbons had gone to the afterlife instead. But I couldn’t be sorry I’d sent her packing from our world.

  So I just stood there like an idiot until Megan said, “You’re one of the ones that sent me here.”

  “We were afraid you were going to hurt somebody,” I said.

  She laughed at that. “Hello? I did hurt somebody. Did you think my parents liked what I did to them?” This question seemed to be rhetorical, because she only paused long enough for a tiny giggle. “Do you know what they were saying about my daddy after?”

  I did, and I saw no point in pretending otherwise. “There was a theory that you might have snapped because you were molested.”

  “Right? Because if a girl is pissed off it can only be because somebody screwed her, you know?” She shrugged. “I wasn’t even pissed off, actually.”

  “Why did you do it then?”

  Megan finally took her finger out of the nest she’d made in her hair. She reached up and stroked it gently across the blade of one of the knives in her torture-tree. “I just wanted to see the blood.” When she brought her hand back down, blood was flowing down her finger and over her palm. She rubbed it slowly over her cheeks, then her forehead. “They never guessed that,” she mused as she did this. “Because girls aren’t usually psycho killers, you know? It’s mostly boys.” She drew her hand down her neck, spreading the last of it. “But I like blood.” Then her eyes lost their glazed look and she looked at me sharply. “I don’t really mind it here.”

  “I’m glad,” I said. Well then. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all. Maybe watching this crazy young thing use blood for face paint will be the worst of it, and now she’ll just—

  Before I could complete that thought, Megan let out a shriek that made me jump. She started grabbing weapons from the tree and flinging them at us. I started to run. Tom grabbed me without breaking his stride and leapt up, but it wasn’t quite the rescue I’d have hoped for. We were barely in the air for a second before we hit the ground, rolling. I heard Megan laughing behind us as we struggled to untangle ourselves from one another.

  But the knives had stopped flying. I looked over my shoulder. She wasn’t chasing us, only watching, her red face glowing in the sun. “I know just what to do with you!” she called. “And I don’t need to get my dress dirty to do it!”

  Tom grabbed my arm and tugged, and we started moving again. “What does she mean by that?” I asked.

  “No idea.” We got to the edge of the cliff. There was no path down. Without hesitation Tom picked me up again, and jumped. It was a long way down, and yeah okay, I might have screamed a little. But it worked out better that time. We didn’t land gracefully, but at least we landed on our feet.

  “Does she know Helen? Is that what she meant?”

  “I have no idea,” Tom said again.

  There was a copse of trees ahead of us, but it turned out to be shallow. After only a few feet we came out of it directly onto a city street. To our right was a seedy-looking bar. Cigarette smoke and country music drifted out the half-open door. A man leaned against the wall outside. He saw me and spit on the sidewalk.

  “Well, look who the cat dragged in,” he said.

  Great. Another one. I didn’t recognize him at first. It still took some getting used to, these people I’d previously only seen in hazy shades of pearl and gray, suddenly in full living color. But when Tom gave him a curt “Harvey,” I knew. Harvey Phelps had been killed in a bar sometime in the seventies by one of the hookers who worked for him. The bar he was standing in front of wasn’t the same one, though. I wondered whether the ability to create your own reality extended to creating people, and if so, whether he had hookers in the
re.

  “Harvey,” I echoed.

  Harvey curled back his lips, showing me his rotten teeth. I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to smile or snarl. “Where’s that boyfriend of yours, the one who threw my lucky silver dollar in here ahead of me? Never did find it.”

  “He wasn’t my boyfriend.” I had no idea why I felt this was an important thing to clarify. “He was my brother.”

  Harvey shrugged. “Probably didn’t stop you fucking him.”

  Tom stepped forward at this. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes made it perfectly clear that he’d have no problem beating Harvey to a pulp. And in spite of all my very grown up problems at the moment, I felt a girlish little thrill that one boy was willing to beat up another one for me. (And mine was definitely bigger and stronger and better looking.)

  Harvey shrank back, as bullies tend to do when actually threatened.

  “She ain’t worth the trouble,” Harvey said, and spit again. But as we walked away he called after me, “Don’t let me catch you without your bodyguard though, missy! I know just how to take care of girls like you!”

  Tom started to turn, but I grabbed his elbow. “Ignore him,” I said. “Helen’s probably looking for us right now, so the less time we waste, the better.” He nodded and we kept walking, but I couldn’t get Harvey’s gross teeth out of my head. “Suppose we figure out how to get out,” I said finally. “Then what? I can’t let all these people go.”

  Tom looked surprised at this. “Of course you can’t.”

  “But I didn’t know I was trapping them,” I said. “It might be wrong to let them back into our world, but...” I looked up at him, wondering why this question hadn’t occurred to me before. “They are trapped, right? Completely trapped? It’s not just that they can’t get back. They can’t move on from here either, right?”

  “I asked Gemma that same question,” Tom said. “She said some people have tried, but only a few were able to. You can’t just choose to do it like you can back home. This place is meant to keep people.”

  “There you go, see what I’m saying? Don’t I have some responsibility to these people? I imprisoned them here. Their souls will never get to move on to—”

  “—to Hell?” Tom interrupted. “Because I doubt most of them would be going to Heaven. It’s an act of mercy, keeping them here instead of up to their chins in blood, or fire, or whatever it was that Dante said was in Hell, don’t you think?”

  “I guess.” But I was thinking that Dante had no clue what was on the other side of earthly existence, and neither did the rest of us. And I could only feel wonder, mixed with disgust, that I’d ever thought I had a handle on life and death and the things in between.

  “We’re almost there,” Tom said.

  We walked down a country lane, past a farm, and through a cavernous one-room building in which was raging what could only be described as an orgy. I tried not to make eye contact with anybody, but looking down as I was, it was impossible to avoid the gaze of a skinny young girl sprawled on the dirty carpet, leaning against the back of a man who was otherwise engaged with someone behind her. She was wearing panties and nothing else, holding a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. Her smile was slow and lazy and damned.

  Okay, maybe I was projecting the damned part. She didn’t look unhappy. She just didn’t look... anything at all. Here was someone who would never do anything, become anything. Never move in any way past where she was in that moment.

  When we were safely outside again I asked, “Did whoever’s plot that was conjure up all those people, too?”

  “You can’t conjure people or animals,” Tom said. “They’ve all been banished here. Didn’t you recognize any of them?”

  “I didn’t look very closely.”

  “Well, I guess they had similar views on the definition of happily ever after.” Tom shrugged. “Not everybody wants to spend eternity alone like Bob Taskin.”

  “But you do? You live alone, right?”

  Tom glanced back at the warehouse with a little chuckle. “Haven’t found a better alternative.”

  “No? Megan McGibbons seems to have a crush on you. You could probably get a nice room in the castle.”

  He gave me a bored sort of look that said that was such a stupid joke it wasn’t even worth getting annoyed with me over.

  “Okay, sorry, but you do seem to know a lot of people for someone who hasn’t been here all that long. Everyone we’ve come across has recognized you.”

  “I did a lot of exploring when I first got here. Asked a lot of questions. But Gemma is the only real friend I’ve made.” I felt another stab of guilt. Good lord, I’d sent him here. To be with these people.

  It was dusk in the place we walked into next: a dusty field with some scrubby grass and a ramshackle house of graying, weathered wood. In front of these were several statues of Roman gods and goddesses, the kind you see in bad Italian restaurants. I couldn’t imagine who would choose this, when presented with the opportunity to create anything they wanted. But as we got closer to the door I caught the scent of a familiar place, vinegar and body odor and liverwurst, and then I could.

  “Cyrus lives here,” I said.

  Tom nodded, and knocked on the door.

  SEVEN

  * * *

  I felt a swell of nerves that brought me instantly, sharply back to childhood. I moved back and a little to the left, so Cyrus would only see Tom when he opened the door. From that angle I didn’t get a good look at him, but I did hear his unmistakably nasal voice saying, “Tom. Well, I suppose you’ll have to come in.”

  “Thank you Cyrus.” Tom stepped inside. I followed closely on his heels. Cyrus was looking down, ready to swing the door shut, when he found my leg in his way. He looked up and scowled, then his mouth went slack.

  “Cyrus,” I said.

  “You ain’t dead,” he replied.

  As greetings went, it was about as polite as Cyrus got.

  “No,” I agreed. I walked in without waiting for an invitation, moving past his smell of B.O. and dirty socks as quickly as I could. Although the outside had been completely different, the living room was an almost exact replica of the house I’d once known, complete with dusty books and stained couch.

  “Wow,” I said. “So, this is your paradise, huh?” I always hide behind sarcasm when I don’t know what else to do. That familiar half-panic, half-excitement at the door had thrown me off balance. All the way there, I’d been prepared to be firm and demanding with Cyrus. But now I was just a kid again, in a house full of things I didn’t know how to work. In the old days being the ignorant visitor to Cyrus’s territory had been disorienting, and a little frightening. In the new days, it was pretty much the same thing.

  I sat down on the couch and felt the old sensation of sinking into it. Apart from his initial open mouth, Cyrus showed no sign of surprise. He sighed, a man resigned to something unpleasant, and sat in his usual chair.

  “No such thing as paradise,” he said. “This is as good as anything, I guess.”

  “How did you get here, Cyrus?” I asked.

  “Which time?” Cyrus laughed his raven’s croak of a laugh, and the sound was yet another time-travel dart shot into my head. I could practically feel the weight of my girlhood braids on my shoulders, the tightness in my toes from shoes that seemed to always be a little too small.

  “What do you mean, which time?” Tom asked. He took off his hat and, after a brief hesitation, sat down next to me. I noted the look of distaste on his face and remembered what kind of family he came from. He’d probably never been in a house this dirty.

  “Came here once as a live person,” Cyrus said. “Fiend sent me through. Pulled him with me though, the bastard, so I gave as good as I got.” By the time he finished saying this, Tom had already gotten up and wandered over to a bookcase in the corner. Cyrus watched him. “Don’t be touching my things.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “How could you have fought a fie
nd? How could you have brought it here?”

  Tom looked over his shoulder at me. “Am I supposed to know what a fiend is?”

  “It’s different from an apparition,” I said. “A fiend has never been human.” I looked back at Cyrus. “Which is why it should be impossible to banish one.”

  Cyrus shrugged. “There’s a different incantation for fiends, but it works pretty much the same.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose. So there was snot in Cyrus’s paradise. That seemed about right. When he finished he balled the handkerchief up and put it back in his pocket.

  Sure there was a different ritual for fiends. There were probably a dozen rituals Cyrus had failed to tell us about. I bit back both my anger and half a dozen wiseass comments. Much as I might like to tell Cyrus off, or beg him to teach me, which was what he really wanted, there was a higher priority matter to be dealt with first. “Okay, you got pulled in here by a fiend, and that was the first time,” I said. “So when was the second time, and how did you get back to the regular world in between?”

  “Lot of questions,” Cyrus said. “You want some switchel?”

  “Nope. Just answers.”

  He looked at Tom, who shook his head and moved from the bookcase to the window.

  “Well, answers are precious things,” Cyrus said. “I don’t give them away for free the way I do my switchel.” He laughed at his own joke, but I just stared at him with as stony a face as I could manage.

  “You never did have much of a sense of humor,” Cyrus said. “The second time I came I wasn’t pulled. I was banished the ordinary way.”

  “But how can that be? When you died, we—” I stopped as my stomach flipped over. We had the canteen. What he was saying, it couldn’t be. Cyrus might have loved keeping secrets, but not my brother. Not from me.