I rolled onto my side, facing the window. I could see the top of the maple in the side yard, bright even in the moonlight with October color (is it October?). I considered the moon itself, and decided it was a waning crescent. And then I started to cry. Or rather, my eyes did. The rest of me didn’t make any sound, or move. Except for those tears, I was numb, aware only of the maple leaves and the slice of sky above them. I couldn’t feel myself breathing, but I guess I must have been.
The thing was, it wasn’t because I didn’t know the answer that I didn’t tell Charlie how I got there. It was because I did know it. And I was ashamed.
“I got here by leaving Tom behind,” a cracked, ruined voice told the moon. “That’s how.”
I found out later that after Jeffrey banished me into the canteen, a hysterical call-me-Sherrie brought it back to Charlie. I’d been inside for twelve days. (Was that all? How could that be all?) Warren was told I was out of town for work, which when you think about it, was not a lie. So when I went to wake him up for school the morning after I got back, he wasn’t especially surprised to see me.
“Did you bring anything back from wherever you went?” was all he wanted to know. It was generally understood in our house that anything was a synonym for food. Whenever Charlie or I traveled for business we tried to bring some fun treat back: peanut brittle from Virginia, maple candy from Vermont, that kind of thing.
“No, they didn’t have anything good where I was.”
“That stinks. Can we have oatmeal?”
The oatmeal was harder than it should have been. My finger still hurt like a bitch, and I had trouble gripping things with that hand. I wrapped it in a bandage when Warren wasn’t looking, more to avoid questions about it than for healing purposes; it was an awfully ugly purple-black. Warren helped make his lunch while I slowly made the oatmeal happen, and between the two of us, we got him off to school.
When I came back from the bus stop, Charlie was in the kitchen.
“Don’t you have to go to work?” I asked.
“I’m working from home. I’ve been doing that a lot, when Amy can’t take Warren after school. They’re starting to get pretty pissed at me, actually.”
Like I’d just run off to Fiji, maybe, and laughed over margaritas while he was forced to parent his own child. “Gosh Charlie, I’m sorry my banishment and imprisonment and several near death experiences were all so inconvenient for you.”
He neither smiled nor looked pissed off at this. He just looked tired. “We have to talk.”
It really doesn’t matter if he’s gay and you’re not romantically involved; hearing we have to talk from the man you live with is just never a good thing. First I washed the dishes while he made coffee (too early for switchel, needed caffeine), which was good because it avoided any serious conversation. Then we sat down with our mugs and a plate of cookies (never too early for cookies, especially when you have to talk) and I told him everything that happened with Jeffrey, the canteen, and the apparitions inside it.
After that, things got ugly. I tried wisecracks. I tried deflection. None of it worked. Charlie wanted me to stop banishing ghosts, and that was that.
Finally he set down his coffee decisively, as a sign that he was about to pronounce the executive summary of the conversation as he saw it. “It’s just not fair to Warren, Lyd. Or me for that matter. We’ve already lost Nat to this job. If you want to be part of our family, you can’t run that same risk.”
“You can’t make me not part of your family.” Great, so I was being both pedantic and petulant. A clear indication that I was not winning.
“Immediate family, then.” He got up and turned his back on me, rinsing his mug in the sink.
“Listen Charlie, I don’t know how I feel about banishing ghosts after everything that’s happened. I may very well stop. But I’m in the middle of something I have to finish first.”
“And does the something involve banishing a ghost?”
“Technically, no. As it turns out, Jeffrey is a fiend.” Funny, during my time inside the canteen, I’d pretty much forgotten about the undead serial killer who put me there. But I’d tossed and turned most of the night, waking up at the edge of panic, and not just because of Helen and Roderick and Tom. Now that I was back in my own world, its problems began to pile on top of me like stones, and I felt a growing dread that Jeffrey would not have forgotten about me. He probably hadn’t been very active since I left—banishing me would have taken a whole lot of energy—but I was willing to bet that once he gathered his strength again, he’d show me he remembered. Show me with a dead girl’s body, maybe.
“But you want to banish him?” Charlie asked. “This fiend?”
“I need to banish him. It’s what I signed on for, remember?”
“People quit jobs all the time.”
“Not usually if quitting is going to kill people!” I took a cookie and a deep breath. “But that’s not even all. I have to find a way to get Tom out of there. After I do that, we can talk about me giving it up.” I stood up and handed him my own mug, since he was still in front of the sink. “But to be honest, Charlie, I can’t talk about it until then. I don’t have time for this. I have things to do.”
“Things to do.”
“Yes.”
“Banishing-type things.”
“Yep.”
Charlie sighed, dried his hands, and then threw them in the air. “Well then Lydia, maybe you need to do these things someplace else.”
I gaped at him, then when he didn’t say anything else, turned to throw my half-eaten cookie in the trash so he wouldn’t see me tearing up. “Are you actually threatening to kick me out?” I asked while my back was turned.
“I’m not threatening you at all. This is your choice.”
Some choice. I couldn’t believe he’d just said that to me. I turned around again and crossed my arms, as if that would somehow ward off his ultimatums and his red angry face. Even his bald spot was red. “How can you be this blockheaded, Charlie?”
“Me?” he asked. “You’re the one who won’t even discuss it, because you’ve got things to do that are so much more important than Warren and me.”
“Stop being an idiot! I have to finish what I started here, Charlie! You want me to leave Tom trapped there? You want me to just let Jeffrey keep hurting people? How selfish can you be?”
Here’s a tip: if you want to fix things so someone isn’t mad at you, and won’t kick you out of his house, calling him a selfish idiot blockhead isn’t really the way to go. Charlie’s voice was closer to shouting than talking when he answered.
“I can be plenty selfish, on Warren’s behalf! And you’re not going to make me feel guilty for that. I have to put him first.”
“But—”
“But but but Charlie,” he whined in what I hoped to heaven was a poor imitation of me. “There will always be a but, Lydia. Because there will always be an apparition hurting people. That’s the simple truth.”
I had no answer to that, because he was right.
“You’re going to have to choose between being Warren’s Aunt Mom, and saving those people,” he went on. “That’s a hard thing and I know it, but there it is.”
There it was, indeed. “Okay then,” I said. “Maybe I should leave. For a few days. Maybe we should just take a little break to think things over, and see how we both feel, not living together.”
I expected him to call my bluff. Instead he said, “I think that’s a good idea.”
So that was it then. A trial separation. I knew how those went. In my experience, it was just a way of pretending you weren’t breaking up for good, so you could swallow it all in smaller, easier-to-stomach bites. But this was not easy to stomach. When I thought of what I’d just been through to come home to Warren and to Charlie and to this house, I almost laughed.
I tried to look calm and adult and not at all like an unwanted, unloved freeloader while we discussed a few practicalities, like which car I would take. Both of them wer
e his, legally speaking. Discussing what to say to Warren took longer. Finally we settled on avoidance and small lies, under the guise of “not troubling him until we know what we’re dealing with.” We decided to tell him I had another work emergency and would be working long hours, even overnight sometimes, until we came up with a more permanent resolution.
Once I got in my (Charlie’s) car I was finally free to cry hysterically, which I did, all the way to the Homeaway Hotel.
But when I got there, I didn’t have much choice but to get a hold of myself. I couldn’t afford to just curl up and break down, not with so much to do. It would all be fine. This wasn’t like Kevin. It wasn’t a divorce. It was completely different from a marriage. I would fix things with Charlie one way or another. Preferably soon, given the price of the hotel room.
But leaving Tom behind was not an option, and neither was just letting Jeffrey go on as he had been. Maybe this really would be my last job. But I had to finish it first. Which meant, I had to start finishing it. I sat down at the decidedly not level table and took out my phone, blessedly returned by Sherrie along with my purse, and opened my handy-dandy checklist app to a new list. Then stared at it for a few minutes, possibly having a contest to see who was more blank.
I knew I was right about Jeffrey being a fiend, but Greta Litauer had a lifetime’s worth of memories of him. So he must have been using a human form for an awfully long time. Until his fun was ruined when that girl came along and killed his human body, so you could see how that would have made him angry.
And when he got angry, he did not count to ten or punch a pillow or go for a run. He cut people up. Plus he’d tossed me into the canteen, which was kind of humiliating. I was going to banish that fucker for sure.
Cyrus said there was a different ritual for banishing fiends. I finally had something to put in my checklist:
1. Find ritual for banishing fiends
2. Banish fiend
And then, of course, there was Tom. He had his own ritual to perform, but he needed a remnant, and his watch was lost.
3. Get another remnant for Tom
4. Find way to deliver remnant to Tom - perhaps pin to Jeffrey’s jacket when you banish?
But of course just bringing Tom back to this world wasn’t enough. All he wanted now was to be at his daughter’s side when she died. I knew it was probably impossible for him to get to her, that many miles from his house, but I at least had to get him back home so he could try. If he never saw Maisie again, it wouldn’t be because of me. But she was old, and infirm or weak enough that she couldn’t live alone anymore. Who knew how long she had?
5. Hurry the fuck up
“Okay, well, that’s only five things,” I said to nobody. “Five things isn’t so bad.”
The representative of self-doubt in my head answered me anyway, even though I clearly had not been talking to her. Even if they’re five nearly impossible things?
“It’s still better than ten,” I muttered. Then I called Katie.
She wasn’t much more pleasant than Charlie had been, and for a much stupider reason: apparently I’d dropped the ball on some important Bakestravaganza duty. Social media update something, I don’t know. I apologized profusely, and told her I’d been called out of town on an emergency. I was on the fence as to how much to tell her about Tom. Should I tell her everything about the canteen? Mention the fact that he was Grandma Maisie’s real father, which made him her great-grandfather? That his voice was beautiful and I felt sorry for her that she only had pictures and would never hear him speak? There was so much to tell her, and I had no idea how to say any of it. Or which secrets I even had the right to spill.
Luckily, she spared me such decisions. “Okay, well, did you need something? Because I’m on my way out and...”
“Oh, okay. Well I can fill you in on the details later, but I’m actually calling about Thomas Dodd.”
“What about him?”
“I’ve got reason to believe we’re not quite done yet.” I scrambled to think of something that would sound like technical jargon. “Residual apparitional attachment. The house still has a part of his spirit infused into the actual building. It’ll have to be cleansed. No additional fee. I just think you’ll have an easier time selling if I follow up with this.”
“Funny you should say that, the house did have a weird feeling when I was there last week.” A true thing about a lot of people is that if you tell them a place is haunted, they will immediately feel it to be so. “What do you need?”
“Just another personal item of Tom’s. Can you get something for me?”
“Sure, I’ll look into it, I’m sorry Lydia, I have to go.”
She was still irritated with me. And also distracted. I gave it about a fifty-fifty chance she’d actually look for another remnant of Tom’s soon enough to suit me. I decided to do the stupid Bakestravaganza crap sooner rather than later. Then I’d call her again, soften her up with my excellent work, and remind her about Tom.
6. Stupid Bakestravaganza crap
My next order of business was another phone call, this time to Sherrie of the 2GR8KIDS, to let her know that a.) I was alive and b.) I still wanted to banish Jeffrey. She made a couple obnoxious jokes about me being tenacious about my fee, comparing me to bulldogs and such, but that was okay. There was an unmistakable tremor in her voice underneath them. I was right, Jeffrey had been quiet since he’d banished me. But the banishing had been scary enough to make Sherrie very eager to get him out of her house nonetheless. I told her I had some research to do to make sure that what happened last time didn’t happen again, and that I’d call her as soon as I was ready.
Well, I was organized, anyway. I had a list and everything. It was a start of sorts. But it wasn’t an easy list. Plus my finger was throbbing from holding the phone so long. My advice is, even if you’re stranded on an uncharted island and starving, or suffering from life-threatening frostbite, do not try to bite your own finger off, if you can help it.
My first breakthrough, such as it was, came as I was deciding between fast food and candy bars from the vending machine for dinner. Why I’d bothered to pay for a hotel room that had a full kitchen I’m not sure, since I was clearly going to be in the comforting-with-junk-food phase for some time. I went to see what was in the vending machine, so as to make the most informed choice possible, and pulled out my phone again on the way down the stairs, this time to open my email.
There was a message from Brian McLeary, who was the client at the Turner house, where Nat had died and I had sent Helen and Roderick into the world from which, a few years later, they would go on to bite me, or cause me to bite myself, in several places. The anniversary of Nat’s death was coming up, and he always wrote me a very nice note. Nice, but painful, and I’d had enough pain for one day, so I decided to open that later. Beneath it, sent the same day, was a message from someone named Edgar Vincent. It wasn’t until after I opened it that I placed the name: Cyrus’s cousin. Or as Cyrus would have said, his idiot asshole cousin.
Edgar apologized for the late reply; he didn’t check that old account very often, he mostly used other social media now. He even sent me links, as if I gave a shit about his status updates. He beat around the bush with regard to Cyrus’s old books—he might be able to dig them up, but it would take time and he was very busy—in a way that made it clear that he knew where they were, but was holding out for an offer of money. I extended such an offer, quoting what I’d be willing to pay for each book he found. I didn’t even bother low-balling him. I didn’t want this to take any longer than it needed to.
Well, that was encouraging. I looked at my checklist. Find ritual for banishing fiends, the first item said. Cyrus’s books might take me directly there.
Then again they might not. There had to be other clues to that ritual that I was missing. I had, after all, witnessed two fiends in action, heard them speaking their language. Surely such direct experience would help me in some way.
I considered this
while I fed dollars into the vending machine, then considered it some more while I walked back to my room with three candy bars (I couldn’t decide) and a bottle of water (because soda is really bad for you).
I kept right on considering it until about halfway through the second candy bar, when the sugar obviously made me smarter, and I called myself three nasty names out loud for not thinking of this before.
I was sitting on the rickety old hotel heater at the time, watching the crows outside the window pick at some roadkill in the parking lot. I told them, “Drayne got really mad when I asked if his name was short for something else. Remember?” Which, of course they didn’t remember, not having been there, but it didn’t matter, because they couldn’t hear me through the glass anyway. This didn’t stop me from explaining further. “Maybe he thought I was trying to get him to reveal his true name. You know, like how in Rumpelstiltskin she wins if she guesses his name? He was a fiend if ever there was one, right, stealing babies and all that?”
The crows didn’t so much as glance in the direction of my window, but that was okay. I was on a roll.
“Maybe none of them go by their real names. Jeffrey would be a pretty stupid name for a fiend, don’t you think? And even if I found the right ritual, it might not work if I used the wrong name. So there you go. I bet I need Jeffrey’s true name.”
I was not yet so insane as to expect the crows to help me think this through, so I was startled and not a little creeped out when one of them lifted his head and, I swear, looked me directly in the eye with his beady little stare. This may have been, was almost certainly, a coincidence. Or maybe sound carried better through the window than I thought, and he was merely responding to my voice. But crows are good for convincing you that supernatural things are going on even when they aren’t. I took his look as confirmation that I was right.
Ghost in the Canteen (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 1) Page 16