Aspen

by Skye Knizley

  Jynx’s next question was interrupted by Creek, who appeared carrying two carryout containers. He held them out sheepishly and muttered, “I kno’ yer goin’ out to Debbil Lake. Take these wi’ ye.”

  Aspen took the containers gratefully. “Thank you, Creek. We’ll be back as soon as we can and put an end to whatever Martel got into before the Mistress comes back around.”

  “Jes’ be careful.”

  Aspen hugged him, not caring that he smelled of unwashed yeti and bacon grease. He was a good friend. Jynx started the big car’s engine and Aspen climbed inside. “Don’t worry, Creek, we’ll be back in a few days. Save my room for me.”

  He closed the door and leaned down to look through the window. “Be careful.”

  Jynx put the car in gear and accelerated away. Aspen could see Creek watching them from within the cloud of dust, like a scarecrow on an empty field.

  The sun was just a faint glow on the horizon when Jynx got out to move the barriers at the end of the lonely dirt road that led to Devil’s Lake. A warning sign indicated that the area had been condemned and trespassers would be prosecuted. Jynx stuck her gum to the sign, moved the barriers and drove through. Once they were on the other side, Aspen put the barriers back and cast a minor spell to erase their tire tracks, which she hoped would keep curious eyes from following them to the village.

  The town of Devil’s Lake started as a mining camp at the edge of a small spring-fed lake. When silver was found, the camp boomed into a village with more than five hundred souls, primarily miners and prospectors in search of the precious metal. Once the silver veins had been excavated out, the majority of workers moved on to richer mines. Those left behind made a go of mining the thin veins of coal that seamed the area. The town made a modest recovery until an accident ignited the sulfurous coal and destroyed the mine. The town was condemned and the mine abandoned as too dangerous to work any further.

  In the 1980s the area became known as haunted when a group of tourists were found at the edge of the access road, frightened and half-starved. Though four of their number survived, three were never seen again. After that incident, the area was marked off-limits and fenced off, with only the one access road left to monitor the fires.

  Being marked as off-limits hadn’t kept ghost hunters and adventure seekers out, though. More than seventeen explorers had vanished in the last twenty years, alone, with numbers closer to fifty if rumors and legends were to be believed.

  Jynx parked the Charger on a stretch of hard-packed clay and looked out at the cluster of buildings around them. “This is a Midnight Road.”

  Aspen’s brows knit. “A what?”

  Jynx didn’t look at her. “A Midnight Road. It’s what my grandfather always called places of evil, where the veil is thin. Something really bad happened here.”

  “If you listen to the stories, it is still happening. We should set up camp before it gets any darker,” Aspen said.

  It took some time to gather the gear and set up a camp not too far from the car, which Jynx parked in such a way it was facing back the way they’d come. As she worked, Aspen felt herself drawn to the buildings behind her. They were old and looked like every ghost town in every horror movie ever made, with weather-worn wooden walls and roofs made of tarpaper. The windows of the nearest building, an old gas station with rotting pumps, were broken, but the glass in the older buildings near the heart of the village looked intact. Trespassers, it seemed, were only brave enough to explore the outskirts of town and not the heart, where the safety of the tree line was less certain.

  It was full dark and the bugs were out by the time she’d finished putting together the old tent Jynx had provided and stowed her sleeping bag and other gear inside. When she was through, she started setting up some of Martel’s “ghost hunting” equipment while Jynx got a fire going and set about warming the burgers and fries that Creek had sent along. She placed two infrared cameras, one facing each direction down the main street, along with an electromagnetic field reader. When she was done, she joined Jynx by the fire. Jynx handed her a somewhat soggy burger and sat back on an old stump to eat.

  “What do you think?” Jynx asked.

  Aspen looked at her burger suspiciously. It smelled like Creek had added mustard. “About what?”

  Jynx bit into her burger. “This town, this whole place. Why do you think Martel came all the way out here?”

  Aspen bit her own burger and chewed while she thought. There was an odd feeling to the small town, but that was to be expected. It was abandoned, after all. But there was something else, something more sinister that she couldn’t put a name to.

  She swallowed and looked at Jynx. “It feels odd. There is more to this than just the place being abandoned. From Martel’s notes and what I found so far, he was here trying to debunk that the place was haunted. His story was that the missing people were just accidents blown out of proportion by the media.”

  Jynx took another big bite and talked while she chewed. “I don’t think they were accidents. Something bad happened here, something real bad. I can feel it.”

  “That’s why we are here. To find out what happened and what killed Martel,” Aspen said.

  Jynx finished her burger and started smothering her fries in ketchup from a pile of ill-gotten packets. “I still don’t get why you’re so interested in his case.”

  Aspen shrugged. “Why are you?”

  “Because I have the attention span of a chipmunk and need something to keep me from going nuts while Piper is in the hospital,” Jynx said.

  “How’s she doing?”

  Jynx stopped chewing. “She’s all right. Doc has her in something called an induced coma while she heals. Nothing I could do there right now.”

  Aspen nibbled on a fried potato and stared at the fire.

  “What about you?” Jynx prompted.

  Aspen didn’t look from the flames. “I told you. If I don’t, nobody will.”

  Jynx spat into the fire. “Yeah, I heard you. But there’s more to it than that.”

  Aspen raised her eyes. “You know me that well after two days?”

  Jynx smiled and rubbed an insect bite on her wrist. “I do. So, spill it, girlfriend.”

  Aspen paused and nibbled on another fry. “When I was in college, I was studying to be a composer. My roommate was a forensic science major named Tanika. She was a real pretty girl and a good friend. Our third semester, she was walking back from a Bulldogs game when two boys caught up with her.”

  Jynx looked away. “Shit.”

  Aspen slapped at a mosquito feasting on her neck and wiped the blood on her jeans. “Yeah. They cut her up real bad, too. When the cops showed up, they did almost nothing. They said there were small crimes and big crimes and, in the scheme of things, one girl was a small crime.”

  Jynx kicked her seat hard enough that wood chips flew away into the darkness and stared at the fire.

  “I came back from class one morning to find her swinging from the ceiling fan. No note, no nothing, just my dead friend,” Aspen continued.

  She wiped tears away from her eyes. “There are no such things as small crimes to the victims. Martel is dead and somebody somewhere deserves to know why.”

  She stopped talking and examined her burger. Somehow, the meat and cheese didn’t look so appetizing. She set it aside and stood. “Feel like taking a look around this dump?”

  Jynx tossed her takeout container onto the fire. “Why not? I ain’t going to sleep until we know it’s safe.”

  The old main street was scarred and pitted blacktop with a center line so faded that it was nothing but a smear of yellow against grey pavement. It vanished to the north and was flanked by a variety of buildings that looked almost untouched by time and vandals. As they neared the old station, Aspen raised her hand and sent a wisp of light through the broken window. She could see it flickering through the
holes in the station’s walls and the shattered doorway, which showed the small building was empty save for an old desk and a bedroll covered in dust and debris.

  “That’s a neat trick,” Jynx said as the ball flew back to Aspen’s hand.

  Aspen held the ball and stroked it lovingly. “It’s a will of the wisp, the first spell my momma ever taught me.”

  “Is there any chance you can teach me?” Jynx asked.

  Aspen sent the ball winging away toward the next building. “Maybe, you are part fae.”

  The next building was in better repair than the gas station, but still bore the signs of neglect and abuse. The crazily leaning sign had once read ‘General Store’, but time and vandalism had changed it to ‘Gen tor’ and left it swaying in the breeze like an old kite. The wisp fluttered through the window and circled around the first floor. Aspen crept up to the entrance and peered inside. More old sleeping bags sat on the floor. The way they were arranged, partially unzipped and wrinkled, they gave the impression their occupants had just been roused from a fitful sleep. Only the dust, weeds, and debris gave away that they had been that way for years. Aspen briefly wondered what had happened to them. Campers weren’t known for leaving their gear behind.

  “Somebody bailed in a hurry,” Jynx said.

  Aspen stepped onto the sidewalk and leaned through the door. “Several somebodies. There are four bedrolls, four backpacks and enough military rations for a week in here.”

  The store had been gutted at some point in the past. Now, only the old metal shelves remained, pushed up against the walls to form a sort of barricade. Four sleeping bags lay in the middle amidst a pile of gear that included backpacks, military meals and an old camp toilet.

  Aspen stepped through and knelt to examine the nearest sleeping bag. She wiped away the layer of dirt, not surprised to find a spatter of blood beneath the grime. She showed it to Jynx, who was sorting through the stack of MRE’s.

  “The rations are still good, this couldn’t have happened more than a couple years ago,” Jynx said.

  “But what happened? Based on the amount of blood, I would say at least one person is dead, but there is no body. If the cops had come, all of this would have been taken as evidence,” Aspen said, “and if it was an animal of some kind, there would still be a carcass.”

  Jynx squatted beside her. “Maybe the survivors took it.”

  Aspen straightened and dusted off her hands. “You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

  She called the wisp back to her hand and held it high as she walked toward a splintered door at the back of the building. It opened easily at her touch to reveal a short hallway with a single door marked ‘storage’ and a wooden staircase leading to the second floor. She sent the wisp to the top and followed, the hair on the back of her neck tingling. She reached the top and pushed through another door into another corridor. This one had once looked out onto the main street through windows of leaded glass. Most of the glass now lay on the floor where it glittered in the glow of the wisp. Two doors spaced along the hallway led into an office that was now nothing more than an upturned desk and scattered papers covered in dust and a restroom that was so thoroughly abused as to have passed through disgusting and was now paddling around in the realm of hellish. Blood and offal floated in the commode and coated the wall above and hung from the ceiling in long strips. Aspen felt bile rising in her stomach and turned away, fighting to keep it down. She’d seen countless bodies and crime scenes yet somehow none were as bad as seeing human waste spattered all over the walls.

  She was still fighting for control when she heard the booming echo of a pistol.

  “Asp, you better get down here!” Jynx yelled.

  Aspen felt fear grip her heart and she ran for the stairs. She leapt down the last five and crashed through the door to find Jynx standing in the window, pistols in hand. Aspen joined her and looked out into the darkness.

  “What is it?”

  “Company,” Jynx replied. “Nosferatu bloodsuckers. I ashed one, but there are more circling the building. I can hear them.”

  Aspen shook her head. Most people thought nosferatu were a sort of vampire, and technically, they had been. In truth, however, they were a sort of blood-sucking parasite that animated their dead victims in order to spread the disease.

  “Nosferatu? But the purebloods wiped them out decades ago—”

  Jynx shook her head. “That’s the official story, but destroying them all would be a lot like killing off all the diseases in the world: Almost impossible. They started reappearing about ten years ago, pasty, smelly, and twice as mean as advertised.”

  “Marvelous,” Aspen muttered.

  She conjured her wisp and sent it into the darkness of the main street. At first, the approaching figures were merely shadows lurching in the darkness, but in the gentle white glow they became pale, bald creatures dressed in filthy rags. Their ears were misshapen and pointed like caricatures of elves and their teeth were black needle-like things that dripped with ichor. They approached in a sort of shambling run, their long arms extended in front of them.

  As soon as they became clear, Jynx started firing. Her pistols spat death that found its mark with supernatural accuracy and four of the creatures exploded into ash and flame that flickered in the night. The creatures nearest the damned squealed and spread out, hurrying forward on all fours. Aspen moved to the door and slammed it shut a beat before the nosferatu arrived. The old wood thundered against her back, but she held firm, using her legs to keep the door shut.

  Jynx killed six more of the creatures then ducked away from claws that tore at the window and threatened to cut her into tiny pieces.

  “Any bright ideas?” she asked.

  Claws banged against the door and Aspen fought to keep it shut. “Shoot them!”

  “Brilliant! Sharp as a tac, you are!”

  Jynx reloaded her weapons and popped up firing. Aspen turned away and glared at the claws peeking around the gap in the door.

  “Spirits of light, bring me flame. Bring me flame and I will let you burn!” she yelled.

  The claws smoked and burst into flames so hot it scorched the wood around them. The nosferatu shattered into ashes and the door slammed shut. Aspen stepped away from it and raised a hand, keeping the door shut with her magik.

  “Jynx, get upstairs, we can fight them from there!”

  Jynx fired twice more and retreated away from the window. Aspen waited until she could hear her boots on the stairs then backed toward them herself. She passed through the door and kicked it shut behind her before turning and running as fast as her legs could carry her. She reached the top to find Jynx looking out one of the broken windows.

  “This is not good,” Jynx said. “They can climb walls. The fuckers can climb walls!”

  “What? Aspen asked.

  She moved to the next window where she had just enough time to see nosferatu crawling up the walls like pale, perverted spiders before ducking away from one whose claws threatened to disembowel her. She drew her own pistol and shot the creature in the face. It rained down on the ones below and she backed away.

  “Office! Get to the office!”

  Jynx fired into the approaching creatures and backed away with Aspen close on her heels. She slammed the door shut behind them and Jynx shoved the desk against the door.

  “Brilliant idea, Asp! What do we do now?”

  Aspen turned and looked at the bare walls around them. “Don’t panic, okay? Just don’t panic.”

  Jynx spun her pistols around her fingers. “Okay, I won’t. I figure we can just chew our way out of here!”

  “That’s not helpful!” Aspen yelled.

  Jynx shot at a clawed hand that was reaching around the door. “Sure, we’ll be out of here in thirty, forty years tops.”

  Aspen ignored her and started tapping at the far wall.
/>   “Now what are you doing?” Jynx asked.

  “I’m looking for a way out. There should be a window or…” She trailed off and looked at the roof, where an old board had been nailed over a vent or skylight. “…something.”

  Jynx fired at the door again and pushed against the desk with her foot. “Those things are coming through, whatever you’re going to do, do it fast!”

  Aspen climbed atop the desk and started pulling at the board. Splinters and nails cut into her fingers, but still she pulled. The nails shrieked and came loose in a sudden motion and Aspen tossed it aside. Behind it was an opening in the roof that had once held a wide pane of glass that looked out at the sky. Only a few desperate shards still clung to the frame and the sky beyond swirled with dull grey clouds that gave Aspen chills. But it was an exit and that was all they needed. She jumped and pulled herself through, then extended her arm back through.

  “Jynx! Come on!”

  Jynx jumped and caught her wrist as the door crashed inward under the weight of the creatures on the other side. Aspen pulled with all her strength and hauled Jynx onto the roof just as one of the nosferatu leapt for her. The creature was left gnashing its teeth in the gap as Jynx collapsed onto the roof.

  “Oh, I’ve had enough of these bastards,” she grated.

  She plucked something that looked like a film canister from her belt, pressed the stud in the top and dropped it back through the hole.

  “What was that?” Aspen asked.

  “Cover your ears,” Jynx replied with a wink.

  Aspen clamped her hands to her ears just as the roof below her shook. Flame and ash billowed through the hole and it felt as if the building shifted off its foundation beneath her. She rolled to her knees and glared at Jynx, who was wearing a Cheshire cat grin.

  “Did you?”

  Jynx climbed to her feet. “Yep.”

  “Was that?”

  Jynx helped Aspen to stand. “Yep. Homemade grenade just like Mom used to make. Useless against these guys in an open space, but in that room? Kablooie! Nothing left but blast-shadows and ash.”