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

by Rasmussen, Jen

  I tasted blood. I tried to spit it out, but I couldn’t break the grip on my finger. Roderick was laughing somewhere.

  “A voice we loved is silent.” Helen shook her head in a boys-will-be-boys kind of way, still smiling. “Hurry with that finger now, or the cake will be late.”

  Gradually, I stopped struggling against it. The blood wasn’t so bad. It was just a shock, that was all. But once you got past that, it was actually kind of tasty.

  I bit down. Blood was weeping from the living room walls. I could smell something burning. Roderick was laughing, finger-painting with the blood. Helen sang from the kitchen. Jeffrey sat on the floor with Roderick and told him to open wide. He had a handful of bloody teeth, and he was pressing them into Roderick’s gums like tacks. “Too much is never enough,” he told me with a conspiratorial wink. I could smell the cake.

  I bit and bit and bit.

  And then I woke up. My finger was in my mouth.

  It was no longer attached to my hand.

  SIXTEEN

  * * *

  Nineteen: the number of times I screamed “FUCK!” before I was able to do anything else.

  Brian came rushing into the room on the fourth shout. He stood stupidly staring at me, the bloody sheets, and the top half of my finger lying on the pillow for seven more. He screamed with me for the next three. Running from the room and coming back with his cell phone took up the bulk of the rest. I was on the nineteenth when I realized he was about to call 911, which is what finally freed me from the loop.

  I grabbed his arm. He recoiled in a very unflattering way. “No,” I said through lips that were sticky with blood. “Do not call anybody.”

  “But you need a—”

  “I need to end this, and so do you. What do you think will happen, exactly, if I’m admitted to the hospital for biting off my own finger? Do you think they’re just going to let me go? I’ll be in a loony bin by noon.” I had no idea whether this was true, and surely we could have come up with a story anyway. Blamed one of the poor departed dogs, maybe. But it was enough to get Brian to stop before he hit Call, which was all I was going for.

  I wasn’t conscious of much pain—shock I guess—but what was left of my finger was bleeding freely. I kept it elevated while I pushed Brian out of the room with my other hand. “Go downstairs and get a fire going in your fireplace.”

  “Why?”

  “DO IT BRIAN!”

  I guess he didn’t much want to mess with the kind of houseguest who bit off appendages, so off he went. I got dressed as best I could and bled all over everything. It took me several tries to buckle my belt with a finger missing, but I needed that belt, and the sheath that was attached to it. Then I stared at the mess on the pillow for quite a while before I was able to summon the courage to take the finger. Come on Lydia, it’s your own finger, it can’t hurt you. It won’t bite you, har har. I nodded and picked it up. Trying not to think about it, or anything else, I went downstairs to find Brian.

  Aristotle gave me a tentative wag, but when he stretched out his nose and gingerly sniffed, the scent of blood made him tuck his tail and slink off to the powder room. Brian had followed instructions: a healthy fire was burning in the living room. I looked around until my eyes fell on a cast iron pan with a long handle propped against the mantle. I picked it up.

  “My niece gave that to me. It’s for popping popcorn,” Brian said, as if I gave a shit.

  I put it into the fire. “As soon as it heats up, you’re going to cauterize my finger with it.”

  All color left his face. He shook his head. “What I’m going to do is take you to the hospital, then never ever come back here.”

  “No. You aren’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I said so!” I brandished my bleeding stump. “And I’m obviously a lunatic!” He already knew the story about Helen and my finger; I’d told it to him while we were digging the day before. So it wasn’t like he didn’t know why I’d bitten it off. But his face still communicated his agreement with my assessment. He didn’t argue any more, but he didn’t want to do the cauterizing.

  Neither did I, when it came to it, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I found out later we probably could have done it less painfully with liquid wart remover, but I was shocked and frantic and not in my right mind, and it didn’t occur to me to call a time-out while I consulted the internet.

  I’ve mentioned a time or two how I feel about fire. There was too much damn burning involved in this stupid Litauer case, which all this stuff with Helen and Tom was just an offshoot of, after all. I’d never have been banished into the canteen if it weren’t for Jeffrey. All that burning, and all those teeth. And now my gnawed-off finger was about to connect the two.

  As it turned out, I didn’t really need Brian to do anything but hold the pan while I pressed my finger to it. I didn’t shout fuck or anything else that time. I just cried, straight-up wept like a toddler, and I am not the least bit ashamed. You can’t imagine what that pain was like.

  But it stopped the bleeding. The antibiotic ointment Brian spread over it afterward stung, and I cried some more. He wrapped some gauze around it and taped it tight.

  “Where are the bones?” I asked when it was done.

  Brian pointed at the bag we’d put them in, still on his coffee table, joined now by my finger in a plastic sandwich bag. Brian had wanted to put the finger on ice, but I told him not to bother. I was sure that by the time I got back, it would be too late to do anything with it. I’d brought it down because I had another use for it.

  I nodded and took my phone out of my own bag. “One more thing I have to do before we get going.” I was thinking of Warren, and how Helen had dragged him away from me. It was just a dream, sure, but tell that to the stub of my freaking finger. She shouldn’t have been able to get to him, not so far from the place she was anchored to, but I wasn’t putting anything past the bitch.

  It wasn’t until Charlie sleepily answered the phone that I realized it was only five in the morning. The sun wasn’t even up yet. I told him he didn’t have to wake Warren, but insisted he double check he was breathing. He was. Warren was fine.

  While I set up on the coffee table—it took longer than usual because my finger, or lack thereof, hurt like a bitch—one phrase ran through my mind, over and over: Prepare for death and follow me.

  You got it, Helen. After you.

  I had Brian get me a bowl full of water, then I took my finger out and shook some of my blood into it. It was gross, but I didn’t know whether using my blood to get out of the canteen was a reverse-direction thing, or a live-person thing. I wasn’t taking any more chances with this plan than I had to. When I was done, I looked everything over one last time. I laid my hand over Tom’s knife and took a deep breath. Then I began the ritual.

  Helen and Roderick showed up right on time, about halfway through the first verse, and it need not be said that they had no intention of going quietly. But I wasn’t about to let Helen into my head this time, and after banishing a fiend the week before, her hideous son was a walk in the park. Okay, maybe that’s going too far, but at least he didn’t make me breathe fire.

  What he did do was launch himself at my back. He looked the same as he had in the netherworld, and had the same sharp claws. I kept on reciting the incantation while I batted at him with my one good hand, and wished I could do that rope-from-the-fingertip trick Gemma had done at Tom’s house. It seemed unfair that Helen had somehow retained enough of her netherworld powers to make me bite my damn finger off, but I couldn’t conjure one little thing.

  That reminder of Tom’s house gave me enough strength to knock Roderick off me, though. Then while he was off-balance I pushed him down and gave him a good kick in the ass. I couldn’t help but smile as I watched him skid across the floor, but I kept speaking. Brian, to his credit, was doing a fine job of tending the fire even though he was paler than the ghosts were.

  I started the final verse and threw in Helen and R
oderick’s bones. Helen’s shriek at that nearly stopped my heart. I let her think it did. I let my voice falter, just for a second, just enough for her to think I was stopping for real. The fire flickered.

  Helen’s laugh filled the room. She thought I was overcome. She thought she was winning. She thought they could kill me like they killed Nat.

  Roderick was on my back again, clawing and biting. My locket was slick with blood from what he’d done to my neck. My fingers slid over the clasp; I couldn’t undo it. I yanked until it came free, then flung the locket into the fire as I shouted the last few lines of the incantation. Helen’s laugh died, and her shriek rose up again, but I kept going. Roderick’s teeth were in my shoulder, but I kept going.

  Then they were both shrinking, fading, slipping toward the canteen.

  When I finished, I shouted Jeffrey’s favorite word for good measure: “Kahrosh.”

  I was falling. The world was spinning. Everything hurt. I was tangled up with the other two, smashed together in what must have been the opening of the canteen. Roderick was still snapping at my shoulder, but he was falling away. The pain in my head was nearly unbearable. I shot an arm out half blindly and grabbed Roderick’s tiny wrist. I heard him snarl, then scream. I held on tight while the bright white pain took everything away.

  Like last time, the wind was knocked out of me, my head was ringing and vibrating like a bell tower, and my thoughts, if you could even call them that, came slow and thick. I had a vague feeling of bodies around and on top of me. I needed something, to find something, get something. But I had no idea what.

  The first sense that really returned was smell. Dank, rancid, like rotten plants. Had I left flowers in a vase without changing the water for too long? I ran my hands along cold ground.

  And then I was being lifted. “Wait,” I muttered, groping around more urgently. My hand closed around a small wrist, then a scrap of cloth, then a chain. I gripped the chain in my fist, knowing it was important, but it didn’t put my mind at ease. “I have to find it first.”

  “Find what?” A familiar voice, deep and rich.

  “I can’t remember.” I was turning, twisting, rising. The wind on my face brought me around at last.

  In the movies when superheroes fly away with damsels in distress, they always carry them in their arms, and everyone is graceful and it’s all very picturesque. I was slung over Tom’s back like a little kid being given a piggy back ride, my arms around his neck, my wrists in his hands. Where my chest met his back, I could feel the rise and fall of his breathing.

  We were soaring above the patchwork landscape of the netherworld. I leaned forward to talk in Tom’s ear. “You’ve gotten better at this.” I felt rather than heard his chuckle.

  The wind was whipping over us, whistling in my ears and taking my breath away when I opened my mouth. I didn’t say any more until we got to his plot. Then he landed softly, and I slid off his back.

  “Thank you,” I said as we turned to face each other. My heart beat a little harder than I’d have liked, looking into that gray stare again. “It’s lucky for me you were there. Still searching the swamp for your remnant?”

  Tom put his hands in his pockets. “Among other things.”

  “What other things?”

  He shrugged. “What happened to your finger?”

  I glanced down at the bandaged stump. For the first time, I noticed that the finger Helen had chosen was the third on my left hand. She didn’t like wedding fingers. I could hardly blame her there.

  “Helen and Roderick happened. Did you see where they went?”

  “I got you away while they were still dazed. We’ll have to strengthen the wards. Thanks for bringing them back, by the way.”

  “Sorry. But I have a plan.”

  “Good.” He nodded in the direction the house. “Come and fill me in, why don’t you?”

  It was my own locket I’d picked up in the swamp; I was still clutching it in my fist. I tried to put it back on as we walked, but part of the clasp was bent from when I’d pulled it off, and I couldn’t fasten it with the nine-and-a-half shaking fingers I had left. Tom stopped and gestured for me to turn around. His hands were warm on my neck, and then the locket fell into place. “Thank you,” I said. “I’m lucky I got it before it disappeared.” We started walking again. “But I was trying to get their remnants, too. If they find them themselves, there’s nothing stopping them from leaving again.”

  “And wouldn’t that be a shame?”

  “But I need them here. This is where I can get rid of them for good—” I stopped both talking and walking when we came through the front door. That familiar smell of vanilla and pipe tobacco. The gilded mirror that hung in the entryway. A glimpse of the dining room, the sideboard, the blue-and-white dishes. It all felt like coming home.

  Tom put an arm around my shoulders and pulled me to his side. “Welcome back.”

  “Thank you. I didn’t come empty-handed this time.”

  “No?”

  I stepped away from him and unclipped the leather sheath that had been hidden from view beneath my long t-shirt. “I believe this is yours?”

  Tom didn’t say anything as he took it, but I could see his throat bob in a big swallow. He ran his hand over the leather, then took out the knife.

  “Maybe not the remnant I’d have chosen myself,” he said finally. “My feelings about the war are a little complicated.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I needed a weapon. You don’t mind if I borrow it before we take you home, do you?”

  “Sure.” He put the knife back in its sheath and handed it back to me. “Helen and Roderick?”

  “And the fiend I sent here last week.”

  “You have been busy.” He seemed about to say something else, but instead he pulled me hard into a hug. “Thank you,” he whispered in my ear.

  My heart sank. Because of course what he meant was, thank you for bringing me a remnant so I can go home to my daughter. He wouldn’t be so grateful when he found out I’d only brought it to him so he could go home to nobody.

  “No, don’t thank me.” For the second time, I stepped out of his embrace. I looked at the floor, wishing I could sink into it, wishing I could somehow never move again, not into the next minute, not on to the next thing I had to say.

  But when I looked up, Tom was looking at me expectantly. There was nothing else to do but tell him. My breath shuddered as I drew it in. “Tom, it’s Maisie. She... she passed away.” His eyes darkened. Like a coward, I started talking before he could. “She didn’t die at the house. The home they had her in was miles away. You wouldn’t have been able to be there with her.” He turned away. I could see the back of his neck turning red. “I understand if you’re angry.”

  “If I’m angry?” His back was still to me, but his voice was hard. “If I’m angry that you stuck me here where I couldn’t get to her?”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “You can take your sorry straight to Hell!” Now he turned around, and I wished he hadn’t. I couldn’t stand his face. “How dare you stand here and say you’re sorry! My daughter died alone, with nobody to mourn her but her awful granddaughter. And it’s your fault! You ruined my—”

  “Your what?” I broke in. “Your life? Because you’re dead, Tom.”

  “I know that, you bitch!”

  Bitch? Okay, I could give him some leeway for being mad at me, but bitch? It was time for Thomas Dodd to hear some hard truths.

  “My point is, you didn’t belong there,” I said.

  “I stayed because of her. I was there for her. Except when it counted most, thanks to you.”

  “Are you honestly kidding yourself that you were there for her?” I took a step forward. “How could you have helped her, Tom? You tell me. How have you ever helped her? None of it was for her. You were there for yourself.” He was grinding his teeth now, but I didn’t stop. “You were pissed off that you weren’t going to get a relationship with your daughter, so you hung around
and made one up. Like a spoiled brat who didn’t get his way. You didn’t care about her, you were just throwing a tantrum.” Okay, maybe a tad too far. Saying he didn’t care about her was at least as mean as calling me a bitch.

  For once, Tom was perfectly still. He didn’t pace or play with his hat or put his hands in his pockets. He just said, without raising his voice at all, “You can’t possibly imagine I’m going to listen to this, from you. Get out.” Without waiting to see whether I’d obey this command, he turned and walked up the stairs that had killed him. I heard a door slam, punctuated by Garm’s angry growl.

  I almost went after him. But (speaking of hard truths) if I had it wouldn’t have been for his sake. I didn’t want to be cut loose with Helen and Roderick and Jeffrey out there. And I couldn’t believe, had he been thinking straight, that Tom would have tossed me out into such danger.

  But I didn’t want to beg. I was sorry, but I was also pissed off. The things I said were (mostly) true, and he was using his anger at me to avoid facing any of it. How many times did he want me to apologize for banishing him? And I’d risked life and limb to come back for him, where was my credit for that?

  So call it pride or call it stupidity, but either way I did as Tom asked, and got out. I walked across his lawn in a kind of daze. I couldn’t believe how fast that had all happened. Hadn’t he just been hugging me? Hadn’t I just felt his breath on my neck? And now I was out here alone, still shaking with anger, and yeah, okay, regret. By the looks of the sky, Tom’s own anger was brewing up a good storm.

  I stopped at the edge of his plot. What did I do now?

  There was only one answer to that. If Tom and I were on different sides now, Gemma would be on his. And I only knew one other person in the netherworld who didn’t want to kill me.

  Lord help me, I’d been reduced to depending on Cyrus.

  Finding my way back to Cyrus’s plot in that ever-changing, sometimes awful place was no easy task. I dusted off everything I’d learned last time, willed myself out of exhaustion and hunger and thirst, and walked. And walked. And walked some more. If I thought of the netherworld as a big circle (or more accurately, I supposed, a ring), I knew Cyrus lived near the center. Compass directions didn’t make any sense here, but somehow I could feel it when I was getting in deeper, farther away from the edges, and from the swamp at the top.