Shutter

by Courtney Alameda

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  I linked my pinkie finger around his. “I know.” He kissed his fist and I kissed mine—I’d never realized how close the gesture brought us, emotionally and physically.

  The gate groaned, the lock releasing, metal shaking off dust and leaves and cobwebs as it shifted back. Oliver turned and gave us a thumbs-up.

  “Should’ve bribed him to screw up,” Ryder muttered. With a wave, Oliver climbed into Jude’s truck. They headed out. We headed in.

  The empty Presidio compound stood on a thousand acres. Historic Spanish-style buildings aged gracefully beside modern training facilities. Dad decommissioned the Presidio once construction finished on the headquarters at Angel Island. The Bay Area Corps had been preparing for the move before Mom’s death, and afterward, I think everyone was grateful to make this place a memory, including me.

  The motorcycle’s headlight made a tunnel through the darkness. We drove past silent, tomb-like outer buildings. Dead vines dug skeletal fingers into the brickwork, and the streetlights rose like rib bones against the dark sky. I’d driven this road countless times, but I’d not seen this place vacant before. Desolate, with windows dull as dead men’s eyes and grass the color of rot. For a moment, I imagined Ryder and I were alone in a vast, empty world, and the feeling echoed in my soul.

  Ryder turned off the main road and onto a narrower lane, which took us through a copse of trees. I gripped him tighter.

  “Take a deep breath.” His voice was barely audible over the bike’s engine. We passed the place where we built forts in the summertime as kids. I swear I saw the foggy forms of my little brothers running through the trees, chasing each other. I shut my eyes and turned my face forward.

  Real ghosts don’t look like that, I told myself.

  “You’re holding your breath,” Ryder said. “Breathe in.”

  I took a breath. The boys are just in my head.

  “Now out.”

  I exhaled. Opened my eyes.

  The bike slowed and rocked to a stop. Ryder put a hand over mine and squeezed. This place held almost as many memories for him as it did for me.

  The house sat apart from the rest of the compound, surrounded by aged, towering eucalyptus and evergreen trees. She was the grandest house I’d ever seen, a Victorian painted lady dressed in mahogany and white. On the outside, she had soaring gables and scrolling woodwork, a giant wraparound porch, and huge picture window. I imagined my brothers’ faces there, sticking out their tongues at us. They used to sing that stupid “Sittin’ in a Tree” song about Ryder and me. I’d insisted to them and everyone else Ryder and I were and always would be just friends. I’d even believed it back then.

  “You ready for this?” Ryder asked.

  “Stop asking me that,” I whispered, wishing the answer wasn’t hell no. He threaded his fingers through mine and squeezed my hand again. I hugged him tighter, then pulled away. I had to focus on the house and all her memories.

  I swung off the bike. Fog hushed the property. The familiar earthen scent of the trees and the ocean’s crash should’ve calmed my nerves; instead, it took me back to my last night here, the night Ryder came and carried me out of hell or home or whatever this place was now. He’d cradled me on those front steps while we waited for the EMTs, telling me to hold on while I watched red ghostlight seep down the veins in my arm. Blood had soaked my shirt, pumping from the torn flesh in my trapezius, my world nothing but pain, shock, and worse.

  “Micheline?” Ryder turned my name into a question—Are you okay?

  An owl croaked from the trees. The sound echoed in the empty chambers of my heart.

  “I need to go in alone,” I said.

  He started to protest, but I put my hand up. “Give me five minutes.” I pulled my old house keys from my camera bag. Without looking at him, I started toward the house and took the stairs one by one. I didn’t look back when the steps creaked after me. I’d let Ryder follow me to the threshold, no farther.

  Inside, the house was shrouded, shuttered, and dark. It smelled lonely, like settled dust and dry, rotted roses. The floor squeaked in all the same places, boards my mother had stepped on with a grin, ones my father had sworn to fix. It means this place has history, she’d cajoled. Dad smiled when she wasn’t looking and left the floorboards loose.

  The littlest memories bled like sores: Dad coming home and kissing Mom, ruffling Ethan’s hair, and lifting Fletcher on his shoulders. I swear I heard Mom’s voice, calling me. I almost answered her. I could see my parents slow-dancing in the kitchen, or feel the whoosh of air as my brothers raced past, chasing each other with Nerf guns.

  “I’ll wait here,” Ryder said, framed in the front door. He shoved his hands in his pockets, scanning the depths of the house behind me. “Call me if you need me.”

  “I will.” I drove my fingernails into my palms, holding on to my courage. I turned into the house, not bothering with the lights or even a flashlight—I knew every inch by heart.

  The last family photograph we’d taken hung in the family room, right over the mantel. Mom looked like the center of our universe, our golden North Star. No wonder Dad and I lost our way after her death. I stepped closer to the picture. My hair was platinum blond then, like Mom’s, and fell past my waist. I started dyeing it black after her funeral—it was hard to look in the mirror every day and remember her.

  With trembling fingers, I reached up and traced the planes of her face. For the briefest instant, her features darkened and snarled. I drew back as though burned, almost tripping on the coffee table. It’d been a long time since I’d had a PTSD flare, but here, in this house … the memories came back. The good, the bad.

  The nightmarish.

  I hovered on the kitchen’s edge. Mom died in here, the paranecrosis invading her frontal lobe so fast she’d screamed in agony. Ethan and I had run downstairs, yelling at six-year-old Fletcher to stay in his room. But he’d been right on our heels as Mom collapsed, her body oozing red light.

  I didn’t have to close my eyes to see the scene: Fletcher sobbed and tried to run to Mom, I’d grabbed him back. Ethan was twelve and in the academy, old enough to know what was happening, old enough to know we had fifteen seconds before she got back up again, and smart enough not to lunge for her. Scared enough to follow me when I lifted Fletcher in my arms and ran upstairs.

  Mom howled from the kitchen, and the sound hit like a chainsaw to the chest. Ethan shook and leaned on me, silent tears streaming down his face. He hadn’t started hunting with a crew yet and only dealt with the dead in textbooks.

  We’d run to the end of the hall. Panic room, panic room, panic room. I punched my thumb into the gel reader and when the door snapped open, I pushed my brothers inside. Glancing back, I’d seen slushy-red ghostlight creeping up the stairwell.

  “Call Dad!” I’d shouted at Ethan as I slammed the door, tripping the locks and alarms. The monitors on the walls flared to life, showing every room in the house.

  Mom climbed the stairs, her movements slow but powerful. She’s dead. She’s not my mother anymore. She’s dead, dead, dead—

  Hands shaking, I’d logged into the security system’s administration to reset the cached prints. New paranecrotics maintained some of their long-term memory function for the first six postmortem hours and, during that time, usually possessed abnormal strength if not much dexterity. Mom might remember to press her thumb into the gel reader by the door. If she got in, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop her, unarmed.

  Fletcher sobbed and shrieked for our mother. Ethan grabbed him and clapped a hand over his mouth. He dialed a number on the landline with his other hand, lower lip trembling.

  Mom’s next roar rocked my bones. I fought to keep from crying. I was the eldest, the hunter; I had to be the brave one. I scrolled through the administration panel’s windows, trying to keep my hand steady on the track pad. When I clicked on Security Controls, the system beeped and asked for a password.

  On the monitors, M
om stalked into my parents’ bedroom, searching for us. A few doors down, now.

  “Dad?” Ethan asked.

  I entered Dad’s usual password into the system—Alexa&Len—and raced through the options. The system catalogued Reset Print Cache near the end of the list. I clicked it, heaving a sob.

  “Something’s wrong with Mom. No…”

  Ethan started to cry.

  I took the phone from him. “Mom’s dead and mobile.”

  Two beats of silence axed my heart.

  Dad said, “You’re in the panic room? With the boys?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you armed?”

  “No.” My voice broke on the word.

  “Don’t move. I’m coming.” He hung up.

  I sank to the floor, wrapping one arm around Fletcher, and the other around Ethan. We clung to one another as Mom stumbled out of her bedroom and turned toward the panic room. I prayed that it wouldn’t take Dad long to get home from the main office buildings. We’d timed it before—six minutes, max.

  Mom approached the panic room door. She swayed on unsteady feet. Her heart wasn’t beating. Her cells had stopped splitting. She wasn’t breathing, but she was moving.

  Fletcher whimpered, watching the screens. “Daddy’s going to make Mommy better, right?”

  “Yeah, baby,” I whispered back, clutching him tighter, feeling sick in my head and heart and numb everywhere else. “He’s going to help her.”

  We watched Mom press her thumb into the door’s gel reader.

  Once.

  Twice.

  The door stayed shut. I exhaled.

  Nothing happened until she did something I hadn’t bargained for:

  Reaching up with a trembling index finger, she started typing a code into the panel.

  A-l-e-x-a-& …

  Dad’s password. The manual override code.

  L-e-n …

  The door slid open.

  * * *

  THE PANIC ROOM DOOR hung ajar, a black maw, still choking on the echoes of my brothers’ screams. I had failed to protect them from a monster, and would live with the scars from their deaths my whole life long. Worst of all, we never found the people responsible for infecting my mother. Dr. Stoker found a pinprick at the nape of her neck and an unknown, fast-acting strain of the paranecrosis bacteria, nothing more. No trace hairs or fibers, no evidence of a struggle.

  My tears turned into a sob. Why hadn’t I grabbed my handgun off my desk? Why hadn’t I thrown the boys into the panic room and gone after Mom myself? At fifteen, I’d killed reanimates. I’d studied them, dissected them, hunted them down with knives and guns, and put their ghostlight out. Necros relied on their spinal cords and brainstems—a shot or slice to either would’ve been enough to stop her. But how could I put a bullet in my mother? Could Dad have done it, if Ryder hadn’t gotten here first? Or would his trigger finger stick even as her fingers tore into my throat?

  Ryder’s trigger hadn’t stuck. Mom bit into my neck and he …

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, shivering. The room swallowed my words whole. “I’m so sorry.”

  Before long, Ryder came for me. He put his jacket around my shoulders, and it smelled of motorcycle exhaust and gun smoke and something entirely him.

  “They don’t blame you,” he said softly.

  I pulled his jacket close. “They don’t have to.”

  FRIDAY, 10:49 P.M.

  RYDER AND I REVIVED the house—removing slipcovers from furniture, opening windows, dusting, and igniting the gas-powered generators. The work diverted my thoughts, but I tried not to make eye contact with the people in the family photos. I wouldn’t let Ryder take them down, either. I wanted this place kept untouched, this museum of my past life. The dryer still had clothes in its belly, little-boy-size shirts with baseball bats and cartoon characters on them. The bathrooms were stocked with half-used toiletries. The boys’ room had jumped-on bedspreads. Stuart Little waited on Fletcher’s nightstand, ready for me to read another chapter aloud.

  Those were the painful, sucker-punching things. We found disgusting things, too. The fridge, for instance, hadn’t been emptied. Eighteen months with no power hadn’t been kind to Mom’s famous egg salad—I thought my insides would grow mold just from breathing in the stuff. We scrubbed the fridge clean and threw away everything in the pantry.

  While Ryder stoked the furnace in the attic, I headed to the darkroom to develop my shots from St. Mary’s. Film might be an old-school medium, but it was the only one capable of containing spiritual energy. Digital cameras were honest-to-God useless against ghosts—not only did entities have a nasty habit of sucking lithium ion batteries dry, but their ghostlight had to be pressed into something more substantial than a memory card. Be it analog film or a silver mirror, a ghost’s energy needed a physical container of some sort, and digital cameras provided none. But fine-grain film, with its light-sensitive silver-halide salts, had a perfect retention rate, making a camera an optimal exorcism tool. Oliver even developed a film that was hypersensitive to violet light for me.

  Beyond the basement door, a spiral staircase plunged down into darkness. Reaching up, I tugged on the pull chain for the lone, naked bulb. Dust chalked my palm as I gripped the handrail and took the stairs one by one. The whole place smelled like unwashed hair and dank earth, not like home.

  Antimirrors crowded the basement walls—thirty or so regulation-size panes, edges gilded with light from the bulb upstairs. They reflected nothing else, darker even than the basement walls, dark as dead space. A pair of worktables held the other oddments of exorcism: antistatic mirror cases, power inverters and clamps to charge the panes, rubber gloves, and cans of rubber mirror sealant. Mom hadn’t stored her “virgin,” unused panes here—those were in a vault in one of the compound’s warehouses.

  I stepped past the curtain separating the basement from my makeshift darkroom, tugging the chain for the safety bulb. Amber light oozed down the walls, coating the photographs of the hundred-odd exorcisms I’d completed before Mom’s death. They wallpapered every vertical surface—cinder block and cabinet alike—and hung like uneven teeth from drying lines. Some ghosts looked like many-limbed Hindu gods, shot several times on one piece of film. Others were violet slashes on a canvas of black. All beautiful, in a creepy kind of way, all of them mine.

  Unlike antimirrors—which served as portals to the Obscura if left unsealed—photographs were a one-way trip, freezing and sealing away a ghost’s energy, no glass or rubber dip necessary. The process of capturing a ghost on film destroyed a ghost’s ties to the physical world, whittling down its energy bit by bit. In most cases, the more ghostlight I sealed away on film, the dimmer an entity became. I rarely needed more than three or four shots to exorcise a ghost. The better the shot, the more energy I captured, the faster my target deteriorated.

  Catching the ghost on film wasn’t easy as point and click, though. Some entities moved like hummingbirds, more blur than body. Before Mom died, she’d been considering giving me a group of first-year academy tetros to train on cameras instead of mirrors. Most tetros used their mirrors like shields, so it took guts to exorcise with lens.

  Working quickly, I prepped the developer chemical in the sink, praying it hadn’t expired, and turned off the safety light to spool the St. Mary’s film onto a reel. Strange, the film barely glowed with ghostlight. Pins needled the bottoms of my feet.

  I slid the reel into the light-tight developer tank, turned on the safety light, and checked the chemical temperature. One hundred degrees, good, film was picky about temperature. I timed each move, dumping the chemical into the tank and agitating the film. Despite the routine, the pinprick sensation worked its way up my spine and nestled at the base of my skull, spurring me to move faster.

  The final rinse took ten minutes. I paced, annoyed by the egg timer’s gradual tick. When it finally dinged, I removed the negative roll, stood on tiptoe, and clipped the film to a drying line. It uncurled like a serpent’s tongue, reac
hing down to taste the floor. Not bothering to set the weight clip, I grabbed a small flashlight from a desk drawer.

  Maybe the entity’s shadowy miasma prevented its ghostlight from glowing on film? I flicked on the flashlight to backlight the negatives. The inverted frames never made sense at first, and several images crowded one piece of film. A bit of the corpse with her slashed leg emerged, transposed under my point-blank, blurred Hail Mary shot of the entity’s cheek and jaw. A rind of violet glowed off the curve of the entity’s chin. A third image was taken in the hallway—the ghost’s form overlaying the darkness beyond, the boys’ flashlight beams shooting off at odd angles.

  I’d barely caught any ghostlight at all.

  My grip on my flashlight loosened, and it clattered to the floor and went out. The photographs didn’t make sense. My hands shook. I must have made a mistake, developed the film wrong, or perhaps my chemicals were expired? I checked the labels on the bottles, scattering supplies as I yanked jugs off the shelves and fumbled for dates. All good.

  What if I couldn’t exorcise this thing? Oliver warned me, long ago, that if a ghost ever gained enough power to make the jump from violet to ultraviolet light, that my camera and film might not be sensitive enough to contain the energy. Could the white-violet light I’d seen be ultraviolet ghostlight? What if I failed to capture this monster and got more people killed?

  The tremors from my hands spread until my body shook so hard, I sank back against the cabinets and to the floor. The pins in my spine pushed up and pricked my eyes. It’d been a long time since I felt so low, not since we buried Mom and the boys.

  That night, I’d wandered the safe house in my black dress, lost. Dad stared at pictures of Mom for hours, chasing memories with whiskey. Cigarette butts slouched like tombstones in his ashtray. He never looked at me, never spoke to me. So I cracked open a couple of big Sharpies, bled the wells dry, and used the ink like hair dye. Everyone said I took after my mother, so I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without seeing her, dead and alive.