“Tim? That dweebie boy who died of cancer in seventh grade?”
“He’s not a dweeb, he’s just kind of…not hot. Gives off this ‘little brother’ vibe.”
“Well, Royce here has got him all beat on the Fahrenheit scale. What does he measure, 55 degrees or something? He’s so cool, he’s frigid.”
“I don’t meddle in your love life, so please stay out of mine.”
“Except for two things. You do meddle in my love life, and your coffin cutie is in my kitchen, probably trying to figure out how to work a microwave.”
As if on cue–and Crystal wasn’t sure how keen a ghost’s sense of hearing was–a pot clanged in the kitchen and Royce called out, “Hey, Dollface, come cook me up some eggs.”
Crystal folded her arms. “It’s your date, you take care of him. And you’re not borrowing my bed.”
Bone’s lips tried to curl in disappointment but it was a lost cause. Crystal wondered if her best friend was a permanent lost cause. But friends were friends, until the end and back again.
Bone rolled off the bed and slouched toward the door. “All right.”
“He is kind of cute,” Crystal offered in encouragement.
Bone sighed and adjusted the hideous floral-print blouse. “Isn’t this a Cindy Summerhill hand-me-down?”
“Go get ‘em, Tiger.”
Bone went out, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear.
As the door swept closed, Crystal called out something Momma might have said. “And have him back in the grave before midnight.”
Chapter 9
Minerva had suspected something was up as soon as Crystal had assured her nothing was wrong. When nothing was wrong, that meant everything was wrong.
But she hadn’t suspected things were so far gone. The Lurken had been growing bolder by the day, apparently annoyed that the Year 2000 hadn’t resulted in the End Times after all. They’d have to destroy the world in a steady, measured, and fairly exhausting fashion.
The Aldridge bloodline had warded off evil for at least a millennium, despite the culling of the herd by the Catholic Church and the Salem Witch Trials. Now it was down to her and Crystal, and she wasn’t sure her daughter was up to snuff.
The way Crystal avoided talking about Dempsey led Minerva to suspect a crush. And she didn’t doubt for a second that Darkmeet would play dirty. All was fair in love and war and interdimensional conquest.
Minerva had intended to circle the trailer park and then cut the engine, because her Chevelle had a couple of holes in its rusted muffler and a stealth approach was out of the question. But the dang-blasted Spindale tomcat, which was black as night and twice as slick, darted in front of the car.
A little voice implored her to mash the gas and grind the little puff-puss to Purina, but she’d learned to ignore those little voices. Instead, she swerved, running her passenger-side wheels into a drainage ditch and getting stuck tighter than a cork in a guinea hen’s noonie.
The cat was perched on the fence, its tail whisking joyfully under the orange streetlight. Minerva was hunting for a chunk of gravel to hurl when headlights swept over her.
The truck rumbled beside her and the driver’s window descended. Pettigrew’s strong chin thrust out.
He’s not up there in looks but if you ever needed to hammer a tent peg, his chin would come in mighty handy. Plus he’s tall.
“Hey, Miss Aldridge, you need a hand?”
“I got two already, but if you got a chain, I’d sure be obliged.”
“Happy Hooker Towing Service & Auto Service at your service.”
As he backed up and lowered the winch cable, she said, “Crystal talked like ya’ll weren’t going out tonight.”
“Yeah, but her voice sounded kind of funny. I decided to drive by and check on her.”
“She don’t take kindly to that.”
“It ain’t that I don’t trust her.”
You got a good heart, son, but your head is packed full of axle grease. You’ll learn soon enough that “trust” and “woman” seldom go together.
Pettigrew tugged the Chevelle out of the ditch, then they both stood looking down the row of mobiles homes to the Aldridge residence. The oversize sardine can looked a little frayed and dented, and the light leaking from between its curtains didn’t radiate a sense of security and comfort. Minerva sometimes wished she’d used her powers to pile up a fat bank account, but the Rule of Three worked against greed. The harder you wished, the faster the money went.
Or, as Roy Reed used to say, “Want in one hand and poop in the other and see which hand fills up the fastest.”
“What do I owe you?” Minerva said.
“Shucks, Miss Aldridge, we’re practically family. But a root beer would sure be nice about now.”
Minerva knew he was angling for an invitation, and his fondness for root beer had made it easy to dose him with her most powerful love potion. But she wasn’t sure what she would find when she entered the trailer.
For all she knew, The Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or at least the Lennon and Harrison portion of it, would be smoking marijuana through a tuba. Or Julius Caesar and John Belushi would be throwing a toga party. Or Vincent van Gogh would show up looking for his ear.
“It’s a school night,” she said.
“It’s Friday, and her GED class is on Wednesday.”
“She was feeling poorly and said she was turning in early.” Minerva coughed, hacked up a dry clod of mucus, and spat as if the Aldridge home were a quarantine zone.
“I was kissing her just this morning, so I probably got it anyway,” he said.
Minerva had not yet perfected the love spell. The trick was to get him head over heels without him jamming his tongue against her tonsils. She didn’t want to think about the other things they might be jamming.
Crystal would eventually be called upon to manufacture a female descendant, but there was no big rush. Plus it would be that much harder for Minerva to tutor her daughter in the arcane arts if Pettigrew lived under the same roof.
Plus, Crystal might actually fall in love for real. Talk about your complications.
“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll go in and see if the coast is clear, then signal you.”
Pettigrew nodded as she pulled away in the Chevelle. She parked beside the porch and goosed the accelerator, hoping the noise would alert Crystal and give her time to stop any funny business.
Pettigrew parked at the foot of the trailer, engine idling, awaiting her signal. She entered to grunts and sloppy, sloshing sounds, and braced for the sight of Crystal making out on the couch with that Dempsey fellow. Instead, she got a good-news/bad-news deal.
Bad: A strange man in your trailer.
Good: He’s fully dressed.
Bad again: He’s attached to a Lurken.
An oily tentacle protruded from beneath the couch and was wrapped around the young man, towing him toward the dusty darkness. The man, dressed in black leather boots, tight blue jeans, and white T-shirt, had a frantic grip on the oven-door handle. He was pleading for help, apparently not used to creatures from beyond. Crystal stood on the couch, whapping at the tentacle with a broom. Wet farting noises spilled from beneath the couch.
“I can’t leave you alone for a minute without all hell breaking loose,” Minerva said, but her heart wasn’t in it. After all, hell would probably have broken loose even if Crystal had been away.
That’s just what hell does: it breaks loose. It doesn’t have a whole lot else going on.
“Give me a hard time later,” Crystal said, straws flying from the broom as she flailed it up and down. “First, we got some housecleaning to do.”
The male intruder kicked at the tentacle that held him captive, but the Lurken only applied more pressure. Anyone with a lick of sense would have played possum, let his body go limp so the Lurken would go off in search of fresher prey. Despite his lack of wits, he was quite a specimen, and his jeans were snug. As Lurken bait went, you could do a l
ot worse.
“Hold on,” she said to him, stepping over the tentacle and heading down the hall.
“Where are you going?” he yelled, with an embarrassing, near-pubescent crack in his voice.
“To call in the cavalry,” she said.
“Momma!” Crystal said.
“A fat lot of good you’re doing,” Minerva called back. A breeze skirled down the hall from Crystal’s bedroom, carrying the aroma of roses and rot, but Minerva didn’t have time to make sense of it.
She wheeled into the bathroom and noted with dismay that Crystal had been playing in the potions again. Perhaps the Lurken’s visit wasn’t accidental after all. Crystal could have knocked together an accidental concoction that would draw Lurken like flies to horse dooky.
Problem.
The bottle of wog essence had somehow fallen behind the toilet and leaked a good half of its contents. The swampy aroma of frogbirth filled the tiny lavatory. Every decent summoning spell required a foundation of wog, and barely a spoonful remained in the bottle. At the most, Minerva would be able to conjure a were-bunny, and then it would only be effective once a month under the full moon.
Minerva hurried back into the kitchen, where the struggle continued. “You were meddling,” she called to Crystal.
“Just peeked,” she answered, still wielding the broom against the aggressive tentacle.
“This is what happens,” Minerva said, retrieving a butcher knife from a drawer. “You mess around and meddle, and before you know it, you’re dealing with forces beyond your understanding.”
“You chicks are crazy,” the man yelled, his face red from exertion as he kicked and twitched. The Lurken held tight.
Crystal jumped forward and smacked him with the broom. “We’re not chicks,” she said. “We didn’t hatch and we don’t go ‘cheep cheep.’”
Minerva chopped the butcher knife against the tentacle, and a purple, viscous fluid welled from the wound. It had the consistency of maple syrup, but smelled of rat rumps and fermented yak milk, both of which she’d had occasion to sample. The drops of purple goo spattered on the floor, collected themselves into tiny balls, and rolled down in the grids of the heating duct that connected to the oil furnace.
Great. Now we’ll enjoy that lovely Lurken smell all through winter, assuming we survive the night.
“Make it let go!” With his free hand, the man batted at the tentacle, which had slithered another six inches up his thigh and was threatening to crush some soft bits.
Minerva was sawing the blade back and forth across the tentacle, wishing she’d taken Ronco up on its offer of a Ginsu knife set for only $19.95 plus shipping and handling.
A second tentacle roped from beneath the couch, its tip quivering in the air.
Make that two knife sets.
“There’s another one, Momma,” Crystal shouted.
“It’s the same one twice,” Minerva said, lamenting Crystal’s ignorance. Maybe she should have sped up the apprenticeship, but Crystal had never been strong on book-learning, plus she’d seemed a little more absentminded than usual since her best friend Bonnie had died.
“Don’t let it get me,” the man whined.
“Shut up,” Minerva and Crystal said in unison.
A geyser of goo shot from the knife blade. Minerva dreaded the clean-up job ahead.
The price of playing hostess.
“Maybe we should give it what it came for,” Minerva said.
“Noooo,” wailed the man.
While Crystal slapped at the second tentacle, which dodged the blows like a mosquito eluding a baseball bat, Minerva tossed the knife toward the sink and yanked open the fridge. The second tentacle froze in mid-air, and Crystal nailed it a good one with the broom.
Minerva rummaged among the breakfast meats and emerged with a half pound of hickory-smoked sugar bacon. She ripped the package open and held it up, letting the odor of preservatives, salt, and pig fat seep across the room.
The second tentacle undulated toward the bacon while the first loosened its grip on the man’s leg. Soon both tentacles stood erect like begging puppies. The glistening nubs on the ends of both tentacles throbbed with unwholesome appetite.
“Works better if it’s cooked, but this will do,” Minerva said.
She delivered an ancient chant that had been handed down through a thousand Sabbats and Walpurgis Nights, and even a few family recipes:
Out of fat and into fire,
Let go of this dork,
Back to Darkmeet with a gift,
A sacrifice of pork.
She tossed the bacon toward the crevice under the couch and the two tentacles writhed and whipped after it, briefly tangling in a tussle before sweeping the bacon into the darkness beyond.
A slithery thumping followed, as if the Lurken’s tentacles were working in opposition, then came a slobbery smacking of what could only be grotesquely oversize lips and bare gums.
Then came a belch that sent a rancid, porcine breeze across the kitchen, and peace once again reigned.
“Behold the power of bacon,” Minerva said by way of explanation.
While the Lurken was otherwise occupied, she hurried into another chant, knowing the spell wouldn’t hold because of a lack of wog:
Ashes to ashes, bone to bone,
Let the Orifice be gone.
Something schlumped and thudded under the couch like the slamming of a rotted garage door.
“Out of sight,” the man said, standing and unbuckling his belt so he could jimmy his T-shirt back into his jeans. “So, where’s my eggs?”
Crystal swung the broom at him, but he stepped aside and her foot hit a grease slick on the floor. She fell against him and he caught her, letting go of his jeans, which wormed several inches below his navel as they wrestled.
“We gave away the wrong pig,” Crystal said, as Minerva tried to pull her free of the man’s grip, which was every bit as persistent as the Lurken’s tentacle had been.
The trailer door creaked open.
Pettigrew stood there, staring at his sweating girlfriend, the teddy-bear hoodlum with the unbelted jeans, and Minerva with her greasy fingers, the kitchen in disarray.
“I can explain,” Crystal said.
“No, you can’t,” Minerva said.
“You don’t have to,” Pettigrew said, stepping back out into the cool night air.
Crystal headed after him, but Minerva stopped her. “He can’t know.”
Crystal pulled free. “Why can’t I be like everybody else?”
“Because you’re an Aldridge, that’s why.”
“Where’s Dollface?” the hoodlum asked.
Crystal ran to the still-open fridge, felt along the racks, and grabbed two fistfuls of eggs. She began flinging them at Royce, wishing she had a spell to get her out of this dump and into a real life.
Chapter 10
“I better call him,” Crystal said, annoyed that Momma was pulling her patented “Momma knows best” act.
“First, tell me where this came from,” Momma said, grabbing Royce by the ear and giving it a twist. He yowled in pain but the fight was gone, so he sagged against the stove and brooded. He had perfect eyebrows for brooding, though the mucus of the eggs was beginning to harden on his hair and skin.
“I thought you knew everything,” Crystal said to Momma.
“I know you better let Pettigrew stew for a while,” Momma said. “Give us time to cook up a good story.”
“What’s wrong with the truth? You said all good relationships are built on honesty.”
“I lied.”
“What does that say about our relationship?”
“What is it with you guys?” Royce said.
“Shut up,” they answered in unison.
Minerva opened the closet, returned the broom, and brought out the vacuum cleaner. “I better suck up the residue. No telling what that Lurken glop will mutate into if you leave it laying around.”
“I’m not going to lose my boyfriend ove
r a simple misunderstanding.” Crystal folded her arms and pouted.
“One, it’s not simple, and, two, you’re not going to lose him.”
“Oh, so there you go, knowing everything again.”
Minerva scowled and tilted her head toward Royce. “Take this back where you found it, and then we’ll talk.”
Minerva switched on the vacuum cleaner, drowning out Crystal’s snappy comeback. Which was fortunate, because she didn’t have one.
“Come on,” Crystal shouted over the roar, tugging Royce’s arm. He followed her toward the bedroom.
“And no funny business,” came Minerva’s last decree, as Crystal shut the door.
“Hey, Dollface,” Royce said.
Bone was sitting on the bed, Roscoe in her lap. She’d changed clothes, having slipped into Crystal’s favorite red sweater. Other clothes were scattered across the floor, as if Bone had engaged in her own private fashion show. “You really know how to ruin a date,” she said to Crystal.
“You know how to ruin a life,”’ Crystal answered. “What happened to you?”
“I dunno. I was walking down the hall when—boom—something knocked the wind out of me. I fell and got dragged into the bathroom, where I could smell all those funny chemicals. I thought I saw a shadowy figure rummaging among the bottles, but everything’s fuzzy. When I finally came around, I was lying here on your bed.”
“And you look real gorgeous there,” Royce said, putting one knee on the bed as if he were going to crawl toward her.
Crystal rammed a hand in his back pocket and pulled out his ugly toy switchblade, wondering why he hadn’t used it on the Lurken. She felt along the edge until she found the switch, then she sprung the blade and pressed it against his back.
The tip rested near his heart, if he even had a heart. After all, he was a guy, and a dead one at that. The odds were slim.
“Don’t even think about it,” Crystal said.
“Hey, sweetie, forget what happened in the kitchen. We’re all friends here.”
“You heard my momma. No funny business.”
“You got a point,” Royce said, and she pressed the knife tip a little deeper to punish him for the pun. The blade bent to the side as she applied pressure.
October Girls: Crystal & Bone Page 7