Ghost Hand

by Ripley Patton

Pain jumped up and down my ribs. I couldn’t breathe. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to curl my body in against the next blow. I’d seen what Jason had done to Palmer. Stupid! I was stupid! Jason probably wouldn’t shoot me, but he would certainly enjoy beating the shit out of me.

  “Stop it!” I heard Yale say, his voice like I’d never heard it before.

  I opened my eyes to see him standing between me and Jason.

  “He thaid to keep her safe,” Nose said, joining Yale. “Thath the only reason I thied her up. But we’re naw gonna hur her.”

  “She’s one of them,” Jason insisted, but he lowered his gun. He was at least smart enough to recognize when he was outnumbered.

  “I highly doubt that,” Yale said. “But either way, she can’t do anything tied up and locked in a garage.”

  “You saw what that hand can do,” Jason pointed out. “You don’t think she can use it to untie those ropes, and break outta here? Maybe she’ll even stick it into one of us on her way out. So, we take shifts watching her until Marcus comes back.”

  * * *

  I had hoped Yale would pull first shift guarding me, but he didn’t.

  Jason knew better, so he left Nose in the garage, armed, with instructions to duct tape my mouth if I tried to talk to him. I could hear Yale and Jason arguing in the living room. Yale was working on it, trying to make Jason see reason. I wasn’t going to hold my breath for that.

  I tried to use my hand on Nose as soon as Jason and Yale left. I willed it to reach out and skewer him, but it refused to cooperate. Maybe it was the cool cement, sucking the warmth out of my body. Maybe it was exhaustion. Or maybe it was just my ghost hand’s stubborn determination to only do things that screwed up my life. Whatever the reason, no matter how hard I tried, it wouldn’t take any form but a useless tied-up hand. I had the bullet in my pocket, but that was a joke. Sure, I could disappear my ropes, or maybe even myself, right out of the garage and straight into the paranoid lap of Jason The Wonder Thug. The universe had a sick sense of humor.

  I craned my neck, looking at Nose, who was now sitting in an old lawn chair he’d pulled off one of the shelves, his gun in his lap. I couldn’t hear Yale and Jason arguing any more. They were probably securing the CAMFers. Would Nose really gag me if I talked to him? I had thought he was my friend. I had liked him. Trusted him. And he had tied me up. I had trusted all of them, Marcus most of all. And he had lied to me and used me. Had the kissing and flirting all been a part of that too? No. He felt something for me. That was why he’d gone off to save Emma. I’d talked him into it. I’d begged him to save my friend and tapped into his guilt over his sister without even knowing it.

  I lay my head down, my hair splaying over the oil spot on the floor. I had to find a way out of this. The CAMFers weren’t just going to let Emma go once they had Marcus. She knew who they were, and they had no qualms about killing people. I had to get help. I had to get Marcus and Emma back. But how?

  How had Marcus known where Emma was? He must have been in contact with the Dark Man, probably through my e-mail account. Dear Dark Man, meet me at the blah blah blah. I’ll give myself up in exchange for the girl. He knew the CAMFers would intercept the message. It would have been that simple. But then the Dark Man had called Emma’s phone. He’d decided he wanted us all, and Marcus’s web of lies had begun to unravel. But he’d still gone ahead with the plan to give himself up.

  It was possible I was wrong about the whole thing. Maybe Marcus really was going to come back in a few hours with the Dark Man trussed up like a pig and Emma safe and sound. I wanted to believe that pretty badly. And even then, I couldn’t.

  Something began to niggle at me, something at the edge of my awareness, like a feeling of déjà vu or familiarity. A tremble. A subtle vibration. A sound that, at first, I thought must be coming from outside. A passing car maybe. Or a helicopter flying overhead. No, not a helicopter because it was coming from the floor. Then suddenly I knew what it was. It was the blades. I could feel the buzzing of Passion’s blades.

  I lifted my head, glancing around the garage frantically, straining my neck.

  The blades were nearby. Somewhere in the garage. And they were reacting to the use of a minus meter.

  “Whas the madder?” Nose asked, leaning forward in his lawn chair.

  “Do you hear that?”

  “Hear wha?” he asked, cocking his head.

  “That buzzing.”

  “I don hear nuddin,” he said, looking at me suspiciously.

  “No, listen. It’s the blades. They’re here somewhere. In the garage.”

  “The blaves?”

  “Yes, the blades. Follow the sound. Look for them. Maybe they’re on one of these shelves.”

  “Maybe they are,” Nose said, getting up and looking on the shelf behind him. “Maybe they are wight here next to the tape,” he said, picking it up and walking toward me.

  “No!” I begged, tears swimming at the corners of my eyes. “I’m telling you they’re here. And someone is using a minus meter nearby. That’s what makes them buzz.”

  “Come on now. I’m nah falling for tha,” Nose said, crouching down and setting his gun right in front of my face. “You wan me to look around on these shelves so you can Houdini your way out of here behind my back. I don’t thing so.” He found the end of the tape and began pulling a piece loose.

  “Nose, listen to me.”

  He tore at the tape, ripping a long strip off.

  “Don’t do this.”

  He stretched the strip over my mouth, patting it down tightly.

  A tear of frustration rolled down my cheek, catching and welling at the sticky edge of the tape.

  Nose started to move away, to go back to his chair, but before he could a new sound rose from below us, from the very earth under the garage. It was muffled and faint through the thick slab of cement, but there was no mistaking it.

  It was the sound of someone screaming.

  31

  FREEZERS DON’T SCREAM

  “Wha—is—tha?” Nose said, his eyes filling the holes of his ski mask.

  The screaming went on, faint but rising and falling. Then it suddenly cut out.

  The garage filled up with silence. The buzzing was gone. The blades had stopped just when the screaming had.

  “Hmm. Mm Mmmfph,” I said, lips straining against the duct tape.

  Nose looked at me. He glanced at the garage door. He looked down at me again, reached over, and ripped off the tape.

  “Untie me,” I said, even though my lips and cheeks were burning with pain. “They’re under us. It came from right under us.”

  Nose looked toward the garage door again.

  “Nose,” I said, calling his eyes back to me. “We don’t have time to argue with Jason. You know I’m not a CAMFer. Untie me!” I rolled over and shoved my bound hands at him.

  “We only hab one gun,” he said as he untied me. He was scared. So was I. But we couldn’t risk bringing Jason or Yale into this. Obviously, they hadn’t heard the buzzing or the screaming—and probably wouldn’t believe Nose and I had.

  “There must be a basement,” I said, pulling my hands free, and then my arms, “Or a cellar under the garage.” I sat up and began helping him untie my legs.

  “Yeah, bu how do we geh down there?” Nose said, glancing around.

  “There has to be an entrance in here,” I scanned the garage like I never had before. “If Marcus didn’t go out the back of the house, or the front, then the only place he could have come was in here.” I got up and started moving around the garage, desperate, looking, shifting things aside as quietly as I could.

  Nose joined me. We didn’t have much time. His turn guarding me would be over soon.

  We searched systematically, silently, moving things off the shelves, feeling along the walls, inspecting the floor for any signs of a trap door.

  After about five minutes Nose said, “There’s nudding here.”

  “There has to be. Keep looking.” I pul
led the mower aside and looked at the chest freezer. Maybe it was covering a trap door. I shoved my hip against it, but it didn’t budge. It was damn heavy and wedged in the corner. I put my hand on it, feeling the hum of its motor. Maybe that’s what I’d felt before—not the blades—just the vibration of the freezer on the cement floor. But freezers don’t scream. Maybe if I unplugged it, Nose and I could move it together and look underneath.

  I went around to the freezer’s end and found the power cord trailing away behind the nearest shelf. I moved some stuff and found the plug sitting on the shelf. It wasn’t plugged in. If the freezer wasn’t plugged in, how could the motor be humming?

  I threw myself down on the floor next to the freezer, pressing my face to the cement, spreading my hands.

  “What are you doing?” Nose asked, standing over me.

  “It’s happening again,” I said, feeling the buzz of the blades rising up from the floor. I hadn’t been able to feel them when I was standing up.

  Just as Nose knelt down next to me, the screaming started again.

  I knew what it was. Could see it in my mind’s eye; Marcus on a cold metal slab, his mouth open making that sound. The Dark Man standing over him, extracting his PSS again and again.

  The freezer wasn’t on, so it was probably empty. And yet I hadn’t been able to move it at all.

  I jumped up and went back to it, grabbing the door handle, ready to yank it open. There was no doubt the screaming was coming from inside of it. Then, like before, the sound suddenly stopped. The garage was silent. My hand on the freezer felt nothing. No buzzing.

  “This is it,” I said, feeling Nose come up behind me.

  I lifted the freezer door.

  The freezer had no bottom. Instead, metal stairs descended into its deep insides, leading down into unknown darkness.

  Cool air wafted up at us, fluttering my bangs against my forehead.

  “Get your gun,” I said to Nose.

  For a second, I was afraid he’d chicken out. He stared at the steps leading down into the dark hole under the freezer. If he made the wrong move, I was going to have to reach my ghost hand into him. I was pretty sure I could do it, now that my hand and arm weren’t pinned on the cold cement. Just like Jason, I told myself. In and out with no prep or weirdness. Except this time I wouldn’t let go until Nose was out cold like Passion had been. I didn’t want to do that. Yes, I was still pissed at him for listening to Jason and tying me up, but despite all that, I couldn’t help liking Nose. But it didn’t matter. I could not risk anyone trying to stop me.

  “I’ll go first,” I said, taking the lead, hoping Nose would follow.

  He nodded and went over to the shelf were he’d left his gun. He picked it up and came back to me.

  I hiked my leg over the freezer’s edge, and slid down onto the top step. I descended to the next, and the next, bending my head a little when I came even with the freezer’s lower edge. I heard Nose climb in behind me, his shadow falling across the stairs and blocking out most of the light from above. And there was no light coming from below.

  “What’s down there?” Nose asked. It sounded like his tongue was doing a lot better.

  “I don’t know. I can’t see. Don’t close the lid yet,” I whispered, pulling my glove off and jamming it in my pocket. Marcus had warned us not to reveal our PSS, not to use it, but there was no way I was going to walk blindly into a dark room under Mike Palmer’s garage.

  I took the last step down and held out my ghost hand.

  Light sparkled back at me, hundreds of spots of light, my PSS ricocheting around the big empty room I was standing in. The light danced, strobing off the tiny metallic rectangles hanging from the ceiling, looking like some long abandoned rave. The effect was almost enchanting, if you could ignore the fact that the things hanging from the ceiling doing all the twinkling were the razor blades I’d pulled out of Passion Wainwright. But there hadn’t been that many, had there?

  “It’s an empty room,” I told Nose, which wasn’t totally a lie. He was still at the top of the steps holding the freezer door open a crack.

  I couldn’t tell what the razor blades were hanging from, maybe just dark-colored wire. They were strung at various heights and distances across the entire room, and it looked like they got closer together in the middle of it. The Dark Man had been doing some nasty little arts and crafts project, it seemed. Palmer had said he was experimenting.

  On the far side of the room there was a door, a thin line of yellow light seeping under its threshold.

  “Come down,” I called up to Nose.

  “Okay,” he said, pulling the freezer closed, the rubber seal making an odd sucking noise like some strange monster smacking its lips. Nose’s descent wasn’t exactly quiet. His boots scraped loudly on the stairs. At one point his gun clanged against the metal railing. Even his breathing was loud. Then, when he finally made it to the bottom, he reached out and groped at my chest.

  “Hey, watch it,” I said, redirecting his hand into mine.

  “Sorry,” he whispered, looking up. “Oh, whoa, what is this place?” he said like a little kid.

  “Those are the blades, the ones that jam minus meters. At least, some of them are. There weren’t this many.”

  “What the hell are they doing up there?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. But I could guess. “Come on,” I said, pulling Nose forward before he had time to guess too. “Just don’t touch them, and hurry, and we should be okay.” Nose didn’t know about the zapping, and I was hoping to keep it that way.

  “Where are we going?” Nose protested as I dragged him along, weaving between dangling blades.

  “The door across the room.”

  As we worked our way forward, the blades grew thicker and it was harder to dodge them. Some hung at eye level, some at chest level, some as low as our knees, and now I could see they were hanging from hair-thin transparent cord, its ends glowing wherever it was laced through the razors. In a few places we had to get down and crawl. It was like running a maze or a hanging labyrinth. When we got to the middle of the room there was a thick wall of razors, like one of those beaded door curtains. I was trying to see a way through, thinking maybe we were going to have to backtrack and find a different route when a sound came from behind the door we were heading toward. A voice calling out “No!” A voice I knew, begging for mercy. Marcus’s voice.

  I didn’t even have time to warn Nose.

  The air exploded with sound, with a buzzing so loud it rattled my teeth in their sockets and made me clutch at my ears.

  The blades rose up, coming alive, whipping this way and that, slicing at my clothes, my skin, my hair, my face. One bit into my cheek and I yanked it out, raising my arms to defend my head and eyes, but I could still feel them battering at my forearms, tearing into my shirt sleeves like mad hummingbirds.

  And then the screaming started. And the Pain. The pain in my ghost hand was so excruciating that I suddenly found myself on the floor, curling my body around it. I didn’t know where Nose was, and I didn’t care. Didn’t care where I was, or what I was, or who I was. Barely noticed that someone was kicking me in the head because it was nothing compared to the piercing, cutting, fiery, agony of my hand. Even the screaming. I was screaming. Someone else was screaming. Everyone was screaming. If I could have cut my own hand off, I would have. If it would make it go away. I’d do anything. Just stop. Just make it stop. Please, make it stop.

  And then it stopped.

  The sound.

  The pain.

  The screaming.

  I was lying on the floor curled in a fetal position.

  Someone was moaning near me, up by my head.

  Someone was whimpering.

  No, that was me. I was making those sounds.

  I rolled onto my back and looked up at the twinkling blades against their black ceiling, blinking like so many happy stars in the universe.

  I raised my ghost hand and looked at it, surprised that it was still ther
e and intact. I’d expected to find it mangled. Severed. Black. Dead.

  From my new angle, the soft blue glow of my PSS illuminated the hanging wires, and I could see that each wire ran from its blade up to the ceiling, those wires connected to more wires imbedded in the ceiling and spiraled across it like some giant glowing spider web.

  The blade swaying just above me dripped something wet onto my face.

  I reached up and wiped the drop away with my flesh hand, looking at my fingers.

  They were covered in gashing cuts and slick with blood.

  My forearm was drenched in blood too, ribbons of my shirt and flesh falling away together.

  The pain hadn’t kicked in yet, but it would.

  How much blood had I lost?

  Quite a few of the blades I could see were slick and dark with it.

  Of course, some of it was probably Nose’s.

  “Nose,” I said, scrambling up to my hands and knees. “We have to get out of here.”

  He was lying on his back a few feet away from me. His mask was shredded and soaked with blood, and the PSS from his nose was shining through the slits making him look like some radiant, fissured monster.

  “Nose,” I said, crawling to him, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him. “Do you hear me? We have to get out of this room.”

  “Yeah,” he said, vacant eyes looking past me. He was conscious. Barely. The pain in my hand had been almost unbearable. Nose had felt that same torture in his head, and he wasn’t recovering as fast as I had.

  “Can you crawl? I think we should crawl.” I helped him up on his hands and knees.

  We crawled toward the door, hands slipping in our own blood, avoiding blades when we could, plowing through them with our heads down when we couldn’t. It wasn’t like a few more cuts were going to make a difference. The door was no longer just a slit of light. It was the way out of a living nightmare.

  When we got to it, I helped Nose stand up. The blades were more spaced out at the periphery of the room, and there were none right near the door.

  I looked back across the room, to the shadowy stairs leading back up to the garage, trying to catch my breath. My eyes flicked to something on the floor near the middle of the room where the blades were thickest.