Empty Vessels

by Meredith Katz

  "Still are, though. Still are," Lucas said. He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. "I'm just going to rest, so go ahead and listen to music."

  A bunch of retorts rose on Keith's lips, ranging from mundane (you don't sleep) to bitter (you can't rest, obviously, that's what a ghost is, it's a dead person who can't goddamn rest, why do we never talk about this) but he swallowed them down and looked away, fumbling the end of his headphones into his phone. "Yeah," he said, and put them in, a little glad to get away.

  ***

  It was over an hour later that they got off the last bus in the suburbs of Stonybridge. The neighborhood felt very different from those Keith was used to. Downtown was always busy, full of short square buildings no more than four stories tall due to bylaws, with pollution-tinged windows and wide sidewalks. The university area was right on the edge of the industrial part of town, with a lot of warehouses and apartment buildings around.

  But the suburbs were full of proper houses, and the area they were walking through seemed to remember it had once been farmland. Streets were named after trees that used to be there—and trees that were still there. Large sections of land that they walked down had gravel paths wandering off into woodsy areas, trees and raspberry bushes in tall grass.

  They stuck to the road, and two side roads away they found Oak Copse crescent, as the note had said. 112b was around the corner from the main 112, and they walked up the driveway a bit uncertainly.

  Keith was starting to get anxious again. If knocking on a stranger's door wasn't enough to do that by itself, the area felt isolated, the house itself backing onto woods, and he couldn't shake the memory of the news reports he'd been seeing lately. It was one thing to worry about Others being killed by Terrors, but there were perfectly normal threats out there too. And a lot of humans had been murdered lately.

  Be kind of ironic, he thought, to come out all this way and end up buried in the woods out back without even meeting the girl.

  It wasn't as if he was going to just turn around and go back, though. Double checking the address, he swallowed and knocked rapidly on the door.

  Nobody answered, but he had the sense someone was listening—impulse, or one of his sixth senses he didn't have good mastery over, or maybe he'd caught movement inside without consciously realizing he'd done so. Or maybe, he added silently, he was fooling himself. He knocked again, as if to remind the listener that Terrors wouldn't knock.

  Then again, Terrors didn't work in groups or use tools either.

  "Uh, hello?" he called, a little more softly than he felt that he should, but he didn't want to be overheard by the inhabitant of 112a Oak Copse either. "Are you there? I, uh, was sent here by a friend of yours?"

  Silence again, and he was about to consider following Lucas's suggestion and sticking a paper under the door—or asking Lucas to swallow his distaste and walk through the door to check the place out—when a girl's voice finally called back from the other side, muffled a little and likewise pitched low.

  "Who sent you? What do you want?"

  He wished he had a good answer for either of those questions. "Uh, we met one of your friends today. A guy who works in… maybe owns, I guess… an antique shop down on Antique Row. I was looking into a… a thing… and he mentioned that I might want to talk to you?"

  Another long pause. Then, "Do you have any proof you talked to him?"

  Keith stalled out, meeting Lucas's eyes a little desperately. Lucas stared back, equally at a loss, then brightened and held his pinky and thumb up to his cheek like a telephone.

  "Oh! Right. Uh. I have his phone number. I can call him and see if he'll tell you through the door that he really did send me?"

  "What's the number?"

  He still had the paper clutched sweatily in one hand so he could check the address. Clearing his throat, he read it back. Somehow, he managed to make the series of numbers sound like a question.

  "Give me a minute." All this in the same toneless voice.

  What could they do? They waited, Keith shoving the crumpled paper back into his pocket and leaving his hand there with it, Lucas tilting his head back to watch the sky as if calculating how long it would be until night fell.

  It should be a good hour. Keith certainly hoped they wouldn't be waiting that long.

  A few minutes passed, and then the door lock rattled. The sound of the chain being pulled back seemed almost loud. The door cracked open, then pulled inward fully. "Come in," the girl said, her voice high and a bit faint.

  She, like the horned boy, was passing for human, and whether the delay had been her reapplying her disguise or calling him to confirm, Keith wasn't sure. But if it was the former, it was a wasted effort. He could see the disguise—a plain and unremarkable woman in her thirties, with tightly curled black hair, an unnoticeable shape neither thick nor thin, wearing a long skirt and a heavy sweater.

  Focusing through it, though, he could see her actual self too. Bone spurs rose from her body from elbows, knees, hips, shoulders, along the length of her back. Her face was heavy with them, spikes curling out from cheekbones, chin, brow.

  He swallowed heavily.

  "Hi," he managed after a pause. "I'm Keith."

  "I'm… Jane," she said.

  She definitely wasn't. "Should I be calling you that? The horned boy mentioned that Others don't generally give out their names."

  She blinked. "… You're human. One of the ones who can see?"

  "Yeah. More or less," he said. And then, remembering that she could probably see Lucas too, he gestured to him. "This is Lucas. A friend of mine."

  "Oh…" She finally looked at Lucas, as if she hadn't been permitting herself to before, perhaps unsure that Keith knew he was there. "Charmed."

  "Pleasure's mine," Lucas said, with a little awkward smile. He launched right in. "Keith sometimes has true dreams, and he had one about Terrors that somehow brought him to your friend."

  "A dream?" The bone girl transferred her black, vague eyes onto Keith again. "Tell me about it."

  He explained again, standing awkwardly just inside the shut door with his hands in his pocket, but she hadn't invited them any further in and was just standing there herself. He was worried, at first, about giving her too many details and spooking her—the horned boy had said she was afraid for her life—but she kept nodding, watching him with wide, dark eyes shadowed under heavy spurs of bone, and so he just kept talking until eventually he ran out of words and the nodding stopped.

  "Oh," she said.

  At first, he didn't think she was going to say anything else and was calculating if he should even try to continue a conversation, or maybe just turn around and leave, and then she took a few quick steps backward, clearing the way she'd been blocking.

  "You should sit down," she said. "Do you drink tea?"

  "Yeah," he said.

  "Not for me," Lucas said, as nicely as if it were even an option.

  She nodded a couple of times, jerkily, and pointed to a small sofa before she rounded a half-wall into a kitchenette.

  That was as much an invitation as could be expected, clearly, and seeing her own shoes in the doorway, Keith took his off and went over, sitting awkwardly. The couch was old and sort of torn up, probably from a thrift store, if not left by previous tenants. Instead of a coffee table, there was a pair of mismatched end tables in front of it.

  Lucas took a seat next to him, twisted to watch her as she moved haltingly around the kitchenette. "I wonder," he murmured softly to Keith, "if she's always like this, or if she's not been sleeping well?"

  "If I was getting premonitions of my own death, I'd probably be jumpy," Keith muttered back.

  "Me too," Lucas said, and grinned a little, rubbing the back of his hand against his nose.

  She didn't come out while the water was boiling or while the tea was steeping, but waited until it was fully ready before carrying two cups out silently, plunking one on the taller end table in front of Keith. That done, she sat on the floor. The bon
e spurs scraped against the hardwood floor, and suddenly much of the condition of the couch made sense.

  Keith cleared his throat. "So," he said.

  "I don't have visions," she said. "Or true dreams."

  "Your friend said—"

  "I have impulses," she said. She blinked, almost too slow, then sighed, hunching around her tea cup. "They aren't helpful? I can't pick the right lottery ticket. But I get intrusive thoughts. They go around my head over and over. And when that happens, it's usually right. If I think, he's going to break up with me, he's going to break up with me, he breaks up with me in a few days. If I think, I'll get sick, I'll get sick, I get sick soon."

  Keith and Lucas shared a dubious look. Keith was trying to keep the sheer degree of his incredulity off his face, since she was sitting across from him. But there was no way to avoid the fact that it just sounded like paranoia, or even something she'd cause just by having decided it had to happen. Having someone always thinking you were going to break up with them would make you not want to maintain a relationship. And worrying about sickness too much might not make you get sick, but would make every little tickle of your throat into a big deal.

  But on the other hand, it wasn't his place to judge another person's experiences.

  His own experiences were ones that if he told anyone, they'd definitely assume he was lying, or needed help, or something like that. When his abilities had woken up—when Lucas had died in front of him—he'd seen Lucas there with him. Had panicked, been afraid, horrified. Talked to him, talked about him.

  His family would have probably sent him to a therapist regardless, to deal with the survivor's guilt, but when their only son was talking about how he'd been haunted by the guy who saved him, of course they did. It had mostly got him put under medications that made him want to sleep most of the day away and, at best, blurred what he saw and felt into images he couldn't really understand instead of ones he could.

  There were a lot of situations a therapist could help him with, he was sure. They’d even given him a few tools to understand his feelings and reactions. But seeing real ghosts sure gave them a lot of false flags to act on, too.

  Ironically, Lucas had ended up being more help than the therapist where that was concerned. Lucas being there, talking with him, spending each day helping him through his fear and guilt and crises, had convinced him that this was reality, or at least, his reality.

  He still had those thoughts sometimes, though, that he might be making this all up. That Lucas, his abilities, might be delusions. The only thing that made him always come to the same conclusion—that this was real—was how consistent Lucas was. The rest of it, the shifting shadows, the flashes of memories off objects, even just seeing the often-twisted shapes of Others in passing, he could write off as hallucinations. But there was no ebb and flow in Lucas's presence. And now, he was meeting Others too. Could he really be imagining them? To be fair, he hadn't seen them interacting with any other humans, but here he was in one's apartment.

  She was watching him carefully, almost braced for his reaction.

  Keith had no right to assume that her abilities weren't real.

  "All right," he said, and closed his hands around the tea, raised it to his mouth for a sip. It was bitter, and he couldn't place the flavor at all, acidity and a licorice aftertaste. He desperately wished that he had milk or sugar or maybe a different drink entirely, but managed to swallow. "And what impulses have you been having? That the Terrors will get you?"

  "Yes," she said. Then, "No."

  "No…?"

  She bit her lower lip, worrying at it with elongated, sharp teeth. They didn't pierce her skin, and he figured she knew what she was about and tried not to stare. "Yes, but those aren't the exact thoughts. Not the wording. There are a few. They overlap."

  "What are they?"

  "The Terrors will hunt me," she said. "They're going to hunt me. I feel it. They'll hunt me down."

  "Ah—"

  "And. Also. I'm going to get captured," she said, almost breathing it. "I keep thinking that. I'm going to get caught. What can I do to not get caught? Maybe if I hide here I won't get caught. Maybe if I move with groups I won't get caught. But I'm going to get caught. I'm sure of it."

  He was starting to see what she meant by calling them intrusive thoughts. The way she said it, the not-exact repetitions, short and abrupt, were exactly the sort of thing that popped up for him when he let his mind wander.

  "Impulses," he agreed. "You don't have proof, but you have that sense of pushing, like you just know. That's what true dreaming feels like when it happens to me, like the only difference between a nightmare and a vision is a sense of urgency pushing into it, a sense of reality."

  The bone girl's eyes widened a little and she nodded quickly. "Yes," she said. "It's not like the thoughts that just happen, such as 'nobody likes you' or 'you're too much trouble' or anything. It's a sense of happening that won't let go."

  She seemed agitated, and Keith wondered abruptly if it were an uncommon ability for Others. If it was something people doubted in her, the way he doubted it in himself.

  He nodded again, smiling awkwardly. "I believe you," he said. "Your friend did too. That's why he directed me to you."

  "We go a ways back," she muttered. "It was nice of him to think of me."

  "He did seem like a nice sort," Lucas said, finally speaking up. Keith got the distinct impression he'd stayed silent for a reason, and glanced at him, but Lucas was only watching the girl, leaning forward and resting an arm on, or over, the table, his hand open and palm relaxed. Inviting. "Do your impulses have any hints of what you can do to avoid it?"

  She shook her head. "…I only get them when things are unavoidable. It's seemed that way so far," she said. She met Lucas's eyes and didn't seem able to look away, as though whatever she saw there was fascinating and familiar. She shivered. "Whenever it happens to me, that thing always ends up happening. So I think they're going to hunt me and catch me."

  Keith sipped his tea distractedly, only remembering a moment too late why he didn't want to do that, turning his reaction into a cough. He leaned forward without thinking. Then, realizing he was mimicking Lucas's body language, he wondered if it would be even weirder to sit back again immediately. "But you don't think they're going to kill you? Just catch you?"

  "I don't know," she said. "That's what Terrors do. Devour what they catch."

  Lucas said softly, "What exactly are Terrors? We've run into them before and we have a good idea of how they act. They're like dumb animals hunting. They just want to run things down and tear them apart. From what I've heard, they're drawn to negative energy, like, places where bad things happened or bad people live. And mostly they hunt Others or humans with Otherly abilities, but they'll pick on normal humans in a pinch. They don't have any particular abilities of their own. They're just fast and dangerous. Right so far?"

  The bone girl nodded her head, a brief jerky movement.

  "But are they just another type of Other? Or… what exactly?"

  "Oh." Her eyes were fixed on Lucas's face. "They're you."

  He seemed, somehow, to go pale. More faded. "What?"

  "Or what will happen to you if you forget who you were," she amended, her high voice scratchy with a sudden tone of sympathy. "I don't know if Others can become Terrors or not… We don't become ghosts, but we can be killed and we do have souls. It's just that our souls don't wait around to become disembodied spirits. But ghosts who have lost their tie to their human life, or lose whatever they're haunting, eventually they forget who they are. And then they turn into that."

  The awkward cadence of her voice felt like hammers falling on Keith's chest. He groped out a hand to try to find Lucas's, not caring how much he pushed through it as he pressed the edge of his own energy up against Lucas's until his hand went purely to ice.

  "Are you… sure?" Lucas asked finally, his voice unsteady. He hadn't even acknowledged Keith's hand halfway through his, just watching her as
if she held the answer to life and death itself.

  "Yes," she said. "We can see ghosts, so we see them slowly drift and twist and turn and fade. There are a lot of humans, and plenty of them leave their soul here instead of moving on. Why don't you all hear about more hauntings, then?"

  Keith's breath felt raw in his throat as he forced himself to speak, to interrupt whatever Lucas was going to reply instead. "Because… those ghosts become Terrors. That's what you're saying."

  "For strong ghosts with strong attachments, it might never happen," she said, in a tone she probably meant to be reassuring. "Or the ghost can move on before it happens. You won't necessarily become one."

  "But I could," Lucas said flatly. He blinked finally, looking down at his and Keith's hands.

  She nodded seriously. "Oh yes. You could."

  "It won't happen to you," Keith said. The words felt like they sounded weird, tearing through his too-tight throat. "Okay?"

  Lucas looked at him, and the fear on his face hurt to see, but his features were clear. Keith wondered if Lucas had ever noticed his own features blurring before, and if that wasn't just a normal part of ghostliness as he'd thought but was something else.

  "I promise," Keith added quickly. "I'll make sure of it."

  It wasn't a promise he had any means to keep, but Lucas forced a smile anyway, brows creased and expression strained. "Okay," he said. "I'll hold you to that."

  "Do you want more tea?" the bone girl asked abruptly. A change of subject.

  Keith closed his eyes, drew a deep breath, and tried to focus. "So. Back to the point. You think your impulses are unavoidable, but you're going to try to avoid it. Do you want someone to stay here? I could, but I have class tomorrow. I mean, though, I guess I could skip—it's less important than someone's life—"

  "No, thank you," she said. "I don't like sharing space with other people. It makes me anxious."

  Startled, Keith tried another tack. "But… okay, if not us, then maybe your friend…? You shouldn't be alone if they're most likely to get you alone, and he sounded like he'd be willing to help."