by Tim Pratt
“I don’t want awesome powers. They come with awesome responsibilities, and those suck. Sure, let’s go meet my neighbor, and find out if I’ve ever actually met her before. Walking sounds like a better idea than driving, though. I’m going to get twitchy every time I sit behind the wheel of anything for a while, I think.”
“Understood.”
We set off together around the house and into the woods. I thought back fondly to how freaked out I’d been by weird noises in the forest—being scared of mystery animals just seemed like an amusing affectation, now that I’d dealt with a supernatural home invasion.
I still jumped like someone had pinched my ass when that fluting-trumpeting-screaming sound emerged from the woods off to the west, though, and Trey stepped closer to me, looking around wildly. “What was that?”
“According to you, it’s a loon or a woodpecker.”
“That’s the noise you heard? Wow. I am such a dick. I’m sorry I brushed you off before.”
“I forgive you. Just don’t dismiss me next time I tell you I heard some eldritch shit. I’m not a country girl, but it’s not like I’ve never been in the woods. Seriously, though, you haven’t heard anything like that before?”
“I have not, and I wouldn’t want to investigate without some kind of firearm handy. Maybe after you find that magical flamethrower.”
“I had to suggest a restful walk in the woods.” We listened for another moment, but didn’t hear anything else. “I wonder if it’s a monster.”
He frowned. “What do you mean a monster?”
I bared my teeth and made the hand that wasn’t holding the sword cane into a claw and raked at the air. “Roar. Monster. Scary thing. Eats people, et cetera.”
“Ah. We’ll call that ‘the monster hypothesis.’ But there’s an old saying—if you hear hoofbeats, you should think horses, not zebras. It means—”
“The simplest explanation is the most likely, yes, I know. Most people just say ‘Occam’s razor’ and leave the poor horses out of it, you know. Your morsel of folksy wisdom makes a lot of sense—unless you happen to be standing in a zebra habitat. But we saw a woman’s face melt off and reveal a different face underneath.” I brandished the cane. “I slashed you with this blade and it fixed your broken neck and leg. You really think monsters are the least likely explanation around here? For all we know, we just heard the dragon the Eldest Daughter flies around on.”
“I withdraw my argument, your honor.” Trey lifted his hands up in surrender. “I know when I’ve been out-argued. Your monster sounds far away, at least. And we’re headed in the opposite direction, so I say let’s just keep going.”
We kept walking, this time in silence, and I assumed he was keeping his ears open for further strange sounds, just like I was—which was kind of silly, since the monster noise was loud enough that we’d hear it again even if we were singing sea shanties at top volume. But our quiet did allow us both to hear a rustling sound to the right.
I grabbed Trey’s arm, and we froze, looking toward the sound. The trees in that direction were especially thick, trunks close together and clogged with vines, but I saw something (or more likely someone) dressed in red hurrying away, deeper into the forest.
“Do you think that’s the Firstborn?” Trey whispered.
“I’m not sure she’d run away from us. She seemed less the spying type and more the jumping-from-a-bush-and-eating-us type.”
“Touché.” Trey looked around. “Could just be a kid from the college taking a walk. There’s parkland not far from your property—someone could have started hiking and wandered onto your land, maybe without even noticing. The fence is down in a few places.”
“The way you talk, you’d think I don’t have good reasons to be paranoid and jump at shadows.”
“Just because there are monsters doesn’t mean every noise you hear belongs to one.”
“Yes, your honor. Let’s keep going.”
We continued on, and I even managed to relax a little when there were no more bizarre screams or mysterious interlopers for fifteen whole minutes in a row. We reached Melinda’s cottage, which looked just as it had last time we visited—homey, cozy, and uninhabited. This time, though, the cats didn’t run from our presence, but came up to us, yowling pitifully, rubbing against our calves, obviously in distress, or at least hungry for attention. Or food. Trey knocked on the door and peered in the windows, calling, “Melinda!”
I didn’t wait for an answer. Instead I went through the garden, which was equal parts ornamental and practical, with vegetables and flowers intermingled in a haphazard but beautiful fashion. A mess of empty flower pots, half-empty bags of fertilizer, and assorted yard tools were piled at the end of the garden, and the cats raced ahead of me and began meowing at an overturned wheelbarrow next to a couple of big black garbage bags stuffed with leaves—
And an outstretched human hand. It was wearing a chunky fake ruby ring on one finger and half a dozen bracelets on the wrist. I walked around the wheelbarrow, the air seeming to thicken around me, everything stretching out and slowing down in an endless moment of anticipatory horror.
The woman in the garden looked exactly like the disguise the Firstborn had worn, except for her glassy, staring eyes…and the leaves stuck in her hair…and the fact that she was dead. I didn’t touch her to feel for a pulse, but there was no doubt in my mind she wasn’t among the living anymore. It wasn’t just the absence of breath, the bits of dirt that flecked her open eyes, or the awkwardness of her sprawl. I actually felt her absence of life like an ache in the back of my head. She’d ceased to be a someone and had become a something.
I’d never seen a dead person outside the context of a coffin, and I was struck by how wrong it seemed, her body just twisted there in the dirt in her garden, all messy, with no dignity, as simply and pointlessly lifeless as the corpse of a deer by the side of the road. There were no obvious signs of violence—she might have just fallen over, stricken by a heart attack or an errant blood clot or a lightning storm of rogue electrical activity in the brain—but I didn’t believe it. It seemed much more likely the Firstborn had killed her, as easily as she’d tried to kill Trey, and for even less reason. Just to make sure Melinda didn’t wander onto my property while the Firstborn herself was there in disguise. To leave Melinda unburied, unhidden, added an insult to the crime, I thought—as if Melinda were so insignificant she could be dropped in the dirt and left for nature to deal with as it saw fit, her mortal remains no more important than an apple core dropped in the grass after a picnic.
I opened my mouth to call out for Trey, then closed it. I still had the sword cane in my hand, after all, so maybe this was a problem I could solve. Trey had been on the edge of death, down to his last breaths, and the merest brush of the blade had healed him entirely, new wounds and old. I understood there was a chasm between almost dead and all the way dead, but I needed to see if I could bridge it.
Yes, I thought about “The Monkey’s Paw” and Pet Sematary and even Night of the Living Dead, but this woman had been killed because of me—indirectly, at least, since the Firstborn was only in Meat Camp to take things away from me. If it was even theoretically in my power to save her, I had to try.
At least I wasn’t stupid about it. I didn’t stab her through the heart. I unsheathed the cane, and knelt, and decided to press the point of the blade against the bottom of her bare left foot—because if I failed, and the police came to take her body away, a scratch there probably wouldn’t excite much comment.
I pushed the point of the sword, gently, into the dirty sole of her foot.
I don’t have the vocabulary to describe what I felt when the sword touched her corpse. Every comparison I come up with is a pochade sketch at best, just a quick attempt to capture a sense of the color and atmosphere without anything approaching clarity of line. But: It was like my entire self became a tidal wave, rushing toward some distant land. As if my soul became a geyser, bursting up through the top of my head. Like I’
d closed some immensely powerful circuit, allowing unimaginable energies to pass through me and on out into the sword. Or, more prosaically, like I was a gas tank, and someone was siphoning me out.
Then I vomited and blacked out.
#
I woke to Trey’s insistent and panicked voice in my ear and his arms around my body, and when I opened my eyes and mumbled some complaint or question, he squeezed me hard, saying, “I thought you were dead, I was afraid you were both dead, I thought the Firstborn found you, that she got you—”
Once I got my muscles under control, I cut off his babbling and said, “I’m okay,” at the same time pushing him away. My mouth was sour and my head pounded like a heavy metal drummer had set up his kit inside my skull. There was a puddle of my puke way too close to my body, and when I looked around for the sword cane, I discovered it a good five feet away, half stuck in a compost heap, as if I’d hurled it away from myself with great force. Which, maybe I had. Sometimes when you black out your body goes right on doing stuff without the involvement of your conscious mind, right?
“What happened?” Trey said.
“Good question,” I muttered, sitting up. I looked over at the body. “I found Melinda. Like this. I tried to heal her with the sword, and…” I shook my head. “It didn’t work. Pretty emphatically. I’ve got a hangover without the fun of getting drunk first.”
Trey looked at the sword, poking out of the compost heap like a low-rent Excalibur, and whistled. “You tried to raise the dead?”
“When you put it that way, it sounds like a bad idea. Help me up.” He got to his feet and offered me a hand, pulling me upright without apparent effort. He was stronger than I’d realized. I might have found that kind of sexy, if not for the corpse, vomit, headache, and existential terror.
My mother always did say I was picky about men.
“I can’t believe you tried to bring someone back from the dead,” Trey said.
“I don’t know. If you thought there was even a chance you could save her…”
“Oh, I get it.” Trey retrieved the sword, wiping off the blade with a handful of leaves, then picked up the sheath and turned it back into a cane before handing it over. “Looks like there are some things you can’t do, though.”
“Definitely a failed experiment.” I spotted a water hose coiled in the garden and traced it back to the faucet, then rinsed my mouth out and spat, making sure to do so well away from the body. The puddle of puke was enough contamination of a possible crime scene already. “I think I tried to make the sword do something it wasn’t meant to do. Like using a spoon to dig a swimming pool. Or maybe more like sticking a key into a power outlet.”
“Don’t try that, either, please. Even if you think it’s a magic key.” He was trying to keep his tone light, but he kept staring at Melinda’s body, and I could tell he was shaken. “She…Melinda was a nice woman. She didn’t deserve this.”
“She didn’t. Nobody does. And if the Firstborn did it…I don’t know what I can do about that, but I’ll try to do something.” I sighed. “You should probably be the one to call this in, since you’re a pillar of the community.”
“You’re thinking of my granddad. I’m barely a fence post of the community.”
“Close enough. I don’t want to lie to the authorities, but it’s not like I can tell the cops about the sword, so I think I have to play the ‘I’m-a-helpless-girl-who-can’t-handle-reality’ card to explain the barf. God, I hate that kind of bullshit.”
“It’s better than being institutionalized for delusions of grandeur,” Trey said.
“True. I’m not feeling all that grand at the moment anyway.”
#
The sheriff’s deputy who interviewed me was clearly suspicious—a dead body turns up, and I guess it’s only natural to wonder about the new girl in town, so maybe it wasn’t even necessarily racist, though I’m sure my being on the brown side didn’t help. But Trey was in full lawyer mode, without ever quite needing to deliver the “I’m her attorney” line, so I didn’t get hauled in for questioning. The cops knew Trey, anyway, and believed him when he explained he’d been showing me around the grounds and bringing me to meet Melinda when we stumbled on the corpse.
The part of the story about me seeing the body, then puking and passing out from shock, also helped ease their suspicions, especially since the puddle of vomit provided corroborating physical evidence. I guess murderers don’t usually throw up all over the scenes of their crimes.
While we’d been waiting for the police to arrive, Trey and I had agreed it would be irresponsible to leave out the Firstborn entirely—Melinda was dead, and my father’s eldest daughter might be responsible, and we needed a way to convey that useful information without sounding like lunatics. We got our story straight, basically, and so when the police asked if we’d seen anything suspicious lately, we told them a white-blonde, sharp-featured woman had been skulking around the property. Trey said, “Mr. Grace was pretty well off, and he had a lot of antiques in his house, so we thought maybe she was sneaking around with an eye toward breaking into the house and stealing something. I don’t know her name or anything, though—I’ve never seen her around before.”
All true. Just incomplete.
The cops took our statements, and lots of photos, and finally Melinda was lifted away from the garden and loaded onto a gurney, into an ambulance, and taken away. Seeing her lifeless form disappear into the back of the ambulance knocked something loose inside me, and I started shivering hard enough that Trey noticed and got a blanket to drape around my shoulders.
I don’t know why her death suddenly hit me so hard. The Firstborn had tried to murder Trey—she would have, if I hadn’t been on hand with a magic sword. I didn’t even know Melinda, had probably never actually exchanged a single word with her, but seeing her vanish into that van, bound ultimately for a coffin or crematorium, made me feel like my brain had been dipped in ice water. Everything went numb and far away, frozen, dead inside. It was just too much, in too short a time.
I vaguely recall getting a ride back to my house in a police car, with Trey sitting beside me in the back. When we got home, he came inside and made me tea in a big old kettle on the old-fashioned gas stove, murmuring things I didn’t really hear, until he asked me—probably for the second or third time—if I needed him to stay. “My grandfather wants to see me, he must have heard about Melinda from his friends in the sherrif's department, but if you need me—”
I shook my head. In my current condition it didn't matter to me if he was there or not. There wasn't room in my head for much besides Melinda, and the Firstborn. I must have said something that reassured him I was okay because not long after he went away, leaving me to hold my mug and stare at the wallpaper and not exactly think.
It took me a long time to realize what I was feeling, underneath all the shock.
What I was feeling was furious.
Furious at the Firstborn for showing up and screwing with my life when I just wanted to paint and figure my shit out. Furious with Archibald Grace for giving me this poisonous gift, with no preparation for the dangers that came along with it. Furious with myself, a little, for not just running away and moving in with Charlie and forgetting all this bullshit. Take the money and run—why not?
A few reasons, but mainly because that’s what the Firstborn had told me to do, and I wasn’t going to give that house-breaking murderous monster anything she wanted if I could possibly avoid it.
I don’t like feeling clueless and out of my depth. If there was initiative to be seized, I wanted to seize it. The house had reacted to me, maybe, or at least reacted to my peril, so I decided to give that unlikely avenue a try.
I cleared my throat. “So, house. Help me out, here. If there’s an instruction manual, or an address book, or letters, or something to tell me about the Grace family—”
I heard a thump from the living room. Naturally, my first thought was a home-invasion murder scenario, but it didn’t sound l
ike an assassin, unless she’d accidentally dropped her silenced handgun on the carpet. I rose, picking up the sword cane—yes, the most useless weapon in the universe, but hitting someone with a heavy cane does make an impression, and if someone tried to kill me maybe I could save my own life by giving myself a nick with the blade—and made my way toward the front of the house. I gripped the cane tight, thinking it would have to do until I found a fireplace poker that turned people into applesauce or an eggbeater that transported my enemies to the outer reaches of the solar system or something.
In the living room, I found the source of the thump: a book had fallen from one of the overstuffed shelves, and now rested in the center of a garish Turkish carpet on the floor. I let out a sigh of relief, not realizing I’d been holding my breath in the first place. A minor book-a-lanche wasn’t shocking, since Trey and I had shoved books back onto the shelves in a fairly haphazard fashion after the Firstborn’s whirlwind of destruction. I knelt and picked up the book…which wasn’t a book at all, really, but a small photo album.
I keep my photos on my laptop and a backup drive and in the cloud and on social media like a normal person, so I was intrigued to look at someone’s ancient analog memories, especially when there might be hints to my secret family history inside. I opened up the album to a page near the back…and the first thing I saw was a photo of myself as a child, trapped under the wrinkled cellophane page protectors.
The picture was a candid in the truest sense—at a guess, it was taken with a telephoto lens by someone so far away they wouldn’t have been visible to my naked eye. My father himself, maybe? In the picture I was standing on top of a slide at the playground where my dad—the one who raised me, the real one—used to take me when I was little. I was wearing a red cape with flowers embroidered around the edges, and I had a little-kid potbelly and wild hair, and my arms were raised above my head in triumph. I realized the photo was probably from an event that lived in family infamy as “the day Bekah thought she could fly.” I didn’t remember it myself, but family lore said when I was four years old, high on superhero fantasies, I decided to jump from the top of the eight-foot-tall big kid’s slide, apparently confident that my homemade fancy cape would keep me aloft. My dad looked over from the bench where he was sitting just in time to see me leap.