Sherrie exhaled in a little offended puff and said, “Too bad.”
She was right, of course. Ready or not, Jeffrey needed to be banished now. Even Charlie didn’t deny that, although he continued to come down on the side of not risking my life, for Warren’s sake. He didn’t shout this time, or even argue much.
“This does mean it’s more urgent, Lyd, but it also means it’s even more dangerous than we thought. There’s a very real chance he could kill you.”
“I know,” I said softly, and left it at that, because he was right. There were no drinks this time, just the two of us, dry-eyed, in the living room with the television on so Warren wouldn’t hear us talking if he woke up.
“I know it’s an almost impossible choice, and I even understand why you’d pick going through with it, blaming yourself the way you do. But I can’t...” Charlie threw up his hands. “I just can’t.”
I nodded.
“If you do this, and you live through it, then you look for a new living situation as soon as it’s over.”
I nodded again, because there was nothing to say.
I would lose my home over this. I would lose Warren, in a way. I’d still be his aunt, but what the hell did that mean? I didn’t even know.
And I might lose a lot more than that. I had no idea what I was doing, and as I saw it, a very low chance of winning. I had the incantation, or so I thought, so I hoped. But I didn’t know where the true name fit in, and I didn’t have it even if I did. Not to mention I still had absolutely no clue how to help Tom, but that would have to wait now.
The anniversary of Nat’s death had come and gone, but I’d been so distracted that I forgot another death-date was coming: Jeffrey’s was only a little over a week away. If he’d already gathered the power to kill somebody, so soon after what he’d done to me, I couldn’t imagine how bad it was about to get. Maybe so bad that he’d be beyond banishing at all. Maybe so bad that I’d have no hope of surviving if I tried. I had little enough hope as it was.
I was supposed to meet Sherrie at the house the very next day. I had no choice. I had no time. I’d told her the truth: I was not ready. And she’d told me the truth back: that was just too damn bad.
FOURTEEN
* * *
That oppressive feeling didn’t wait until I got upstairs this time; it greeted me at the door of Sherrie’s (Jeffrey’s) house. But before I’d walked even three steps inside, I knew I was going to have a lot more than feelings to worry about this time.
The walls were weeping blood. Not a lot. I thought it would be easier if it was a lot. That might have given it a fake, horror-movie kind of quality that I would have welcomed. This was subtle, tiny droplets seeping through Sherrie’s tasteful earth tones like condensation, like the house was just humid.
I spoke in a whisper, though I have no idea why. I was sure Jeffrey was perfectly aware of my presence. “When did this start?”
“About twenty minutes before I packed everyone’s things and left,” Sherrie said.
I’d told Sherrie I wanted to do the ritual in Avery Ann’s (Jeffrey’s) room, to bring the fight to him. It felt like a long walk upstairs. I waited for something to jump out at me, for hands to come crashing through the floor boards, or coat themselves in blood as they reached for me from the walls. But nothing happened, not until we got inside.
Avery Ann’s things were all gone. All that was in the room was an old card table. The carpet was wet. I could hear it squishing under my shoes, although there was no obvious sign of what the liquid was.
“I couldn’t bear to have her things in here, with him,” Sherrie said. “Where he could touch them. But I put a table in for you.”
I nodded and approached the table. There was something on it. I knew I didn’t want to know what it was, knew without a doubt that Sherrie hadn’t put it there. But there didn’t seem to be any way around looking.
There, in a neat little coil, was a bracelet made of teeth. A charm dangled from it, a little heart engraved with the name Lucy.
The papers never said anything about True Colors taking teeth. But it would certainly fit what I knew of Jeffrey. Maybe it was one of those things they withheld from the public, to filter out crazies trying to confess. Or maybe these weren’t really Lucy Winchowski’s teeth, and he was just taunting me with her name, trying to throw me off, upset me. But it didn’t much matter where they came from, because they certainly threw me off, and they definitely upset me.
I heard a little cry beside me, quickly and wetly cut off. I’d almost forgotten Sherrie. She looked as stricken as I felt. She also looked like she was about to faint. I grabbed her elbow to steady her.
“Sherrie,” I said. “I need you to stay calm.” I wondered how she could possibly take advice on cool-headedness from someone whose voice was shaking as badly as mine was, but I had to do my best, no matter how much I wanted to vomit and run. “This is just one more reason we have to get rid of him for good. Right now.”
Sherrie’s eyes fluttered a little, like they might roll backwards. But then she gave another wet gasp and started to cry. I considered that an improvement. While she tried to get control of herself I ran to the bathroom for a hand towel. I scooped up the teeth in it, the way you pick up dog poop, and went back to the bathroom to throw it away. When I came out Sherrie was standing in the hall, but she looked calmer. She followed me back.
I couldn’t believe how much energy was in that room, how much palpable malice, even without factoring in Jeffrey’s little gift. Casting me into the netherworld had worn him out for weeks, yet killing a person just three days ago didn’t seem to have weakened him at all. In fact, he seemed stronger than ever.
“It’s too close. He’s gathered too much power.” I realized I was talking out loud, and stopped short of I can’t win.
“What did you say?” Sherrie was still very close to hysterics. I hoped she really hadn’t heard me.
“It’s his death-date in ten days,” I said as matter-of-factly as possible. “He’s growing more powerful. This little display is just him showing off.”
“Can you do it?” It was clear from her hopeless tone that she didn’t think so. I couldn’t say I blamed her, after last time.
“I can if you help me,” I said. “If you love your daughter, and you still say you can’t afford to sell this house and move, then you cannot let that fire go out. Do you understand?”
To her credit, she didn’t get either whiny or indignant, didn’t argue at all. Her jaw hardened in a way I wouldn’t have expected of a vanity-plate-sporting, designer-purse-carrying housewife. She nodded, and I believed her.
I started unpacking my bag. I’d brought only what I needed for the ritual into the house. My purse and phone were in my car. I was wearing new clothes that meant nothing to me, and no jewelry at all. Nothing that could be used as a remnant.
As soon as I set the switchel ring down, the whole table flipped toward me as if someone on the other side was throwing a fit over a poker game. It banged into my hip and shin. The canteen skipped across the carpet. The cork fell free.
“Thank you Jeffrey,” I said as I righted the table. “I needed that uncorked.”
Jeffrey’s nerdy laugh rang through the room, that nasal, annoying twitter that didn’t fill me with terror so much as a desire to kick the person making it.
I put the switchel ring back on the table, the cork beside it, and my bowl beside that. I was about to ask Sherrie to go get some water when the table flew halfway across the room. The bowl shattered against the floor despite it being carpeted.
My beautiful redware bowl. It had been a wedding gift from some aunt of cheating-lying-no-good Kevin’s, and I never saw her again, so its source wasn’t a sentimental one. But it matched the color of the switchel ring so well, and I’d been using it for so long now, I’d come to regard it as a charm of sorts. So much for good luck. But what the hell, it’s not like the odds were on my side to begin with, right?
I righted the table a se
cond time, then crouched to pick up the shards of pottery. I have no idea why I felt this couldn’t wait until later. But I guess we’re just conditioned to not leave broken things lying around. Because, what? Someone might cut their foot? As if that even made the top twenty list of risks to consider, under the circumstances. I wasn’t even wearing sandals.
But pick them up I did. Or at least, I picked up three. The others slid of their own accord, away from my fingers, across the carpet. They began forming themselves into a pattern. I stared at them, dreading something horrible, a pentagram, a satanic symbol.
But it was a heart.
I swiped my hand across it, scattering the shards, and one of them lodged itself in my finger, right at the knuckle where it was still scarred from Helen’s little game. Why were these people always messing with my hands? Sherrie yelped as I started bleeding.
I pulled the shard out and said, “It’s fine, it’s just a little cut.”
Sherrie shook her head and pointed, not at my finger, but at my mouth. I reached up and felt wetness trickling from the corners. Was I drooling?
No. That was blood too. I could taste it then, coppery and repulsive.
What the fuck was that about? Did he somehow know what Helen had done to me? Was he recreating it in a way?
“It’s fine,” I said again, and I was pretty impressed with how calm I sounded. “It’s just a trick meant to scare me. Would you mind getting us another bowl? And filling it with water?”
While Sherrie went downstairs to do that, I gave myself a little talk about how all this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Let Jeffrey throw his tantrum. Maybe he’d wear himself out.
As if he was reading my thoughts, everything went quiet as soon as I put Sherrie’s bright blue plastic mixing bowl on the table.
Game on.
I used salt and water, same as always; I had no reason to believe that this part of the ritual was any different from the one I knew. The cardboard box of Cal’s teeth was clutched in my hand, and I wondered whether I should have saved the other teeth too, the ones we’d just found. But if Cal’s didn’t work, I doubted Lucy’s would either.
I lit the fire and started the incantation from Martha Corey’s book. I’d stayed up half the night memorizing it, and then when I couldn’t sleep, spent the other half memorizing it some more. After all those hours of saying it over and over, it had the same automatic, chanting quality as my usual incantation, and I slipped easily into the rhythm.
I hadn’t even finished the first verse before things in that room got ugly. The blood flow from the walls increased until it was a steady stream you could actually hear trickling, running everywhere. I was wrong about not finding this as scary as the gentle seeping. Especially when the squish-squish of Sherrie’s nervous feet on the carpet made me reflexively look down before my brain got a chance to tell my eyes what a bad idea that was. I was standing two inches deep in blood.
Then the blood lit on fire. I do not like fire. I moved into the second verse, but it took every bit of will I possessed to keep my voice even audible, let alone strong. It was like what happens when an oil tanker explodes, flames floating on top of the liquid. Sherrie was screaming. I couldn’t fend off the panic. My voice faltered.
Then I noticed. The fire and blood were all around us, flowing over my feet, coming off the walls. But there was no heat. No smell of burning rubber from my sneakers.
This was a parlor trick, nothing more.
I steadied my voice and began reciting more loudly. As I did, sparks and ashes came down from the ceiling. I grabbed Sherrie by the elbow to get her to look at me and raised my arm, where a cinder had landed on my sleeve. I pointed, then smoothed the fabric beneath it, hoping she’d get the message despite my not stopping the incantation to say it. Not burnt. Not real.
Something in her eyes seemed to click, and she looked around, then sniffed the air. “No smoke,” she said. I nodded and kept reciting. I was moving into the third verse now. I dropped that old box of teeth into the bowl, and Sherrie, bless her, actually smiled at me.
If Jeffrey was pissed off enough for these kinds of theatrics, he had to be running scared. Even with all the unknowns and gaps in my knowledge, even with all the things that could have gone wrong, I felt sure I was on the right track.
But then the burning started, not an illusion on the walls, not a magic trick, but inside of me. Had it really been so long since my other two encounters with Jeffrey, that I had forgotten? Or had so much just happened in between, all the scratches and bites from Helen and Roderick, all the setting my own self on fire, that it didn’t seem so bad anymore?
Because it was bad. Just like before, the searing heat spread all through me. I imagined my stomach and lungs curling and twisting, turning black and then flaking into nothing, like burning paper. My voice grew hoarse. The pain was nearly unbearable. I was more groaning the words than speaking them, but I was almost done, almost there.
I opened my mouth to say the next line, and I swear for real, smoke streamed from it along with the words, even a little fire. I always thought it would be kind of fun to be able to turn into a dragon. As it turns out, this is not the case.
Sherrie screamed. Then she fainted.
Jeffrey was laughing again. There he was, leaning over the bowl, one greasy strand of hair hanging over his forehead, his chapped lips curved in a big round O. I heard him inhale. Then he blew on the fire.
I started speaking faster, desperately trying to finish before it went out. It started to sputter. I had three lines left.
The fire dwindled to almost nothing.
Somewhere behind me I heard Sherrie moan. But there were other sounds too. The crash of a door banging open against the wall. Footsteps.
A match.
Rasping the last few words, I turned my head and saw Charlie tending to the fire. There was no time even to smile at him. Jeffrey roared with rage. The walls pulsed inward; I was sure the house was about to explode. Something cracked and crashed off to my left. Charlie was thrown backward, then forward again. He’s going to fall right into the table.
I shouted, screeched really. Kahrosh. The incantation was done.
Jeffrey was above me, around me, a huge smoky monster as big as the room, but tapering down toward the canteen, like a genie being sucked back into his lamp. Charlie did indeed fall into the table. The bowl, with its water and fire, and the canteen and then the table itself all crashed to the floor. The carpet started to burn.
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t hear what Jeffrey was shouting as he disappeared, at last, into the canteen. I was falling too.
why am I falling he’s not banishing me again is he that’s not possible he can’t be banishing me I can’t go back to Tom empty-handed
Everything went dark.
And then Charlie was shaking me. There was smoke everywhere.
“Is the house on fire?”
“No.” Charlie inclined his head toward the burned patch of carpet. He’d used his sweater to smother it, by the looks of it. The blood was gone, but the floor was still wet. The acrid smell of burned plastic hung in the air. Below the overturned table I caught a glimpse of bright blue, no longer in the shape of a bowl.
I looked back at Charlie. There was a gash over his eye, from hitting the table I guessed, and he was holding his left wrist in his right hand. “Did you break something?” He’d never let me live it down if he did.
“No, just jammed it when I fell.” Charlie looked around the room, his eyes a little dazed. “So that was it? He’s gone?”
“I saw him go in,” I said, and despite feeling sick and in pain, a little thrill went through me as I realized it was true. “This world has seen the last of Jeffrey Litauer.” I pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingers, trying to lessen the pain behind my eyes. “What happened to me? I thought he might have been pulling me in behind him.”
“Not that I saw,” said Charlie. “But you passed out and fell. You’re lucky your hair didn�
�t start on fire.”
“How did you get here?”
“Through the door.”
“You’re funny.”
Charlie sighed. “I didn’t like how we left things, and with Jeffrey being so dangerous, and I knew the client had a hard time tending the fire last time...” He trailed off and waved a hand over the general destruction. “I thought you might need help, that’s all.”
“Well, thank you.”
“You’re welcome. You sound like shit, by the way.”
I nodded. I sounded like a lung cancer patient. One who had already died. “My throat’s been burned. My lungs too, I assume.” I sat up, then took a minute to wait out the dizziness. My breathing was labored, loud. I leaned over to pick up the switchel ring, then crawled halfway around the room to where the cork had rolled, and closed it up tight.
Then I realized what—or, more properly, who—was missing from the room. “Where’s Sherrie?”
Charlie just shrugged.
I stood up on shaky legs, trying to call Sherrie’s name, but I couldn’t project my wreck of a voice. Charlie did it for me. “Sherrie?” His yell filled the house and sent another wave of pain through my head.
“Here.” Her voice sounded wrecked in a different way. It was coming from downstairs.
Sherrie sat at her dining room table, coral lipstick smeared, ponytail askew. She was drinking single malt scotch directly out of the bottle. I kind of respected her for it.
“What happened to you?” I asked. “Are you hurt?”
“Not physically,” Sherrie said. “Never pleasant to run directly into what a coward you are though, is it?”
“Sherrie. The average person is not equipped to deal with fiends. I was barely equipped to deal with him, and I do this for a living.”
“I crawled away.” Sherrie took another long swig and stared straight ahead into space. Her throat, where it bobbed as she swallowed, was red. Her whole face was splotchy. “I guess I fainted or whatever, but I remember him shouting. Jeffrey. So I couldn’t have been out for too long. I could smell smoke.”
Ghost in the Canteen (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 1) Page 19