Velveteen

by Daniel Marks

  Horror.

  The unseen owner of the shadow tentacles didn’t eat the souls. It didn’t take them away or bring them to some secret lair.

  All of the tortures were quiet ones.

  To project. To play out its victim’s greatest fears on the screen in the back of their brain. Full-color 3-D horror, HD with Digital Surround. Or so Velvet had heard from the gossips in the square.

  She had a strong stomach for lots of things. Violence. Gore. Sex. Even cruelty. But the look on Bethany’s face was pure, undiluted terror. Velvet wondered what the thing was showing the girl. What it would show Velvet if it had the chance. The wave of emotion struck her like a fist to the throat. Her mind was back in Bonesaw’s shed.

  Her skin, shredded.

  Grated.

  Tendrils of gristle shook in the killer’s teeth as he barked with laughter.

  Velvet shook it off and glared into the darkness. A hollow roar echoed through the courtyard, interrupted briefly by the clatter of tiles sloughing from the rooftop like dandruff. The unseen kraken on the move. She didn’t need Miss Antonia to tell her twice. Her team was the best for a reason, and while they were usually tasked with routine reconnaissance, they lived for a chance to take down a bad guy. And every time they’d had a shadowquake—every single time—there’d always been a bad guy doing something awful in the daylight as well.

  Witches, banshees, whatever—Velvet and her team were on it. Like black ops but ghosts. Ghosts with very specific abilities.

  Velvet, besides being the team leader, was a body thief, which, when asked about it, she usually described like so:

  “Remember that movie The Exorcist? Well, think of me as a demon … only hotter, obviously, and not evil. I can squeeze right into a body without them even noticing and work my mission without leaving a scratch on them.”

  Quentin pulled off a similar deal with dead bodies, but it’s too soon to talk about the specifics, as it’s completely disgusting. “The muscle” was really too simplistic a description for Luisa and Logan’s duties as poltergeists. They were experts at causing trouble, getting into fights, and generally messing things—and people—up. Plus, their ability to create distractions always came in handy.

  “Come on!” Velvet yelled for Quentin, Logan, and Luisa to follow her as she darted for the front door, cutting between toppled tables and hurdling chairs along the way. A tentacle crept toward the entry alcove from above, forcing Velvet and the rest into a low scrabble as they barreled beneath and past its beseeching undulations.

  Outside, the glass-shaded streetlights shattered and showered the cobblestone with shards as tiny as sleet, leaving the gaslights transformed into flaming torches whipping in the miasma of molten tar descending on them like an eternal night. There weren’t many tentacles outside, but the few that Velvet’s team witnessed had already found an audience for the horror show. Slack citizens hung in the air around the square like sad gray ornaments on a dying tree.

  “Velvet!” a froggy voice called out from the darkness.

  She didn’t need to look up to know Quentin was making his shaky way toward her. Velvet pushed herself up into a crouch and reached out for his hands just as the boy stumbled and crashed onto his knees with a painful groan.

  “Oh, crap!” she cried out. “Are you okay?”

  The scrawny kid rubbed at his knees while bracing against Velvet’s shoulder just to stay upright in the constant rumbling. Everything about the boy was thin, from his gangly limbs to his awkwardly narrow head and barely visible lips. He’d have looked like a pencil if it weren’t for his chillingly lovely eyes, alive at that moment with terror. “This is the worst it’s ever been,” he said. “Somethin’ real bad is happening!”

  “No shit!” Velvet shouted.

  He craned his head to glare in the opposite direction. “The twins were right behind me!”

  Velvet glanced over his shoulder, and sure enough, Logan and Luisa emerged from the smoky haze of the shadowquake, grimaces of frustration plastered on their normally calm faces. They clung to the building’s mortar lines spotlit by one of the few remaining streetlamps, like the twins had been mistakenly forced into a jailhouse lineup.

  Fear was a temporary thing for the twins, who were the best poltergeists to come along in decades, or at least that’s what the station agent said, and Velvet was totally in agreement. Logan and Luisa could scare the crap out of the worst kinds of villains and, as their months together had shown, took great pleasure in crushing skulls, when they had to … and even when they didn’t.

  “We gotta get to the station!” Luisa cried, her tone battened with dread.

  “Now!” shouted Logan from over her shoulder, his eyes wild with excitement. It was looking like that brawl was definitely going to happen.

  They were right, of course, and were voicing the obvious. The station housed the primary cracks between the world of the living and the dead. That Velvet had found another and hadn’t reported it was, well, beside the point at the moment, but nonetheless bad. Even now, the station agent would be gathering intelligence about the source of the shadowquake. Her visions might not nail down what horrible event was occurring in the daylight, but she’d get a clear enough picture so that Velvet’s team could focus on the journey.

  Velvet watched the sky. The shadows struck and recoiled off each other, battling to be first to the mountain. She felt a surge of adrenaline roil through her, and the light within her glowed brightly through tiny cracks in the ash she wore, like magma peeking through fractured rocks.

  She bolted for the funicular ramp.

  The wooden carriage itself might turn out to be useless, with the ground rolling as it was, but they could always climb onto the tracks and use them to get up the hill to the massive station at its peak. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that; it would take forever to hike the several miles to the top, especially with the ground convulsing like an epileptic. Velvet could barely see six feet in front of her now; the clouds of inky crap had descended into her line of sight. She vaulted over the rail and onto the raised funicular platform, the others moving like a wolf pack behind her, fluidly, in unison.

  Despite the situation, she knew she was grinning. Maybe not in the same way that Logan was, in gleeful anticipation, but her excitement was there on her face.

  It always was when there was a mission.

  Nothing could keep her mind off her troubles with Bonesaw like a big giant commando operation–inducing catastrophe.

  Dropping into the pit where the railcar traveled, Velvet closed her eyes and crouched to feel the bronze rails. The rocking and rolling was stronger there, and she had a difficult time distinguishing the feel of the ground’s shaking from the vibration of metal against metal. It was subtle at first. An infinitesimal shudder ran through her grayed skin, just a hint of what was rolling toward them, cutting through the shadows like a knife.

  “There it is,” she said.

  Quentin nodded hopefully.

  There was a consistent tremor driving through the bronze. The railcar was still functioning. She turned and looked down the track. Realizing it could be several feet away, barreling toward her, and she wouldn’t even know it through the curtain of darkness, Velvet jumped up and scrambled back onto the platform.

  “Is it comin’?” Logan searched her face for the answer. Sometimes he was so dense.

  “Well, duh!” Velvet snapped. “I just jumped out of the way, didn’t I?”

  He planted his hands on his hips and looked from her to the thick gray mist and back to her, then back to where the railcar should be, a sneer spreading. “Yeah. Like you were about to get splattered, then … uh. Nothing.”

  Velvet waited a moment, wishing for the wooden train to appear, and then acquiesced. “Sorry! I meant to say, ‘Yeah, it’s coming.’ ”

  A squeal pierced the night as the heavy bronze plow of the railcar cut through the shadows and into the station. The contraption was packed with souls. Gray powdered arms thrust from glassless
windows set in the doors—each row of seats had its own—and behind those, faces twisted into masks of terror floated in the dark depths of the carriage. The shouts began almost instantly.

  “We got no room!”

  “Don’t even try to get on!”

  Velvet stepped forward and yanked the nearest door open. A small woman in a pillbox hat, nose pinched and upturned, held the soul of a plump baby in her lap. She hadn’t bothered to make it gray with ash, and it glowed eye-achingly bright. Velvet raised her hand to shield against the glare of its firing synapses. Clearly she couldn’t ask this woman to vacate her spot—that would be terrible. Not to mention rude. She leaned inside the cab and assessed the other passengers; most couldn’t look away fast enough. Velvet spotted a pair of young men in ratty baseball caps pulled down over their eyes, one fidgeting with his bill.

  “You two!” she shouted, and when neither glanced her way, Velvet motioned for an elderly woman sitting in the row beside them to get their attention.

  One peered up from his spot, his shoulders wilted, shamed, and rightly so.

  “Salvage business!” Velvet yelled menacingly. “Make room or suffer the consequences, dingleberry!”

  She ducked out of the cab and slammed the door. Then she stomped to their section, tore open their door, and jerked them out by their worn hoodies. They fell into the benches on the platform and scowled.

  “No worries, gentleman,” Luisa said as she strutted past. “I’m sure there’ll be another car along in no time.”

  As if to punctuate the joke, a wooden roof tile from a nearby building shook loose and slapped one of the guys in the back of the head.

  “Yeah!” Logan chuckled. “You’ll be perfectly safe here. What are you worried about? Dyin’?”

  “Dying!” Quentin howled with laughter as he slunk past the pair. “That’s a good one, Logan. ’Cause they’re already—”

  “Yep.” Logan stopped him with a hand on his chest. “That’s why it’s funny.”

  Quentin clammed up and slid in after an old woman. Logan followed. Velvet followed Luisa into the row vacated by the two boys and slammed the door behind them.

  She thought about the faces in the crowd—so many her age, some younger and some a bit older. It seemed that purgatory was built for the young, those who died far before their time and with so much left to learn. They’d be there forever. But youth is resilient, as the station agent was so fond of saying. That’s why Velvet had been enlisted—and Logan, Luisa, and Quentin—to track down souls that should have made it here but didn’t for whatever reason. She just wished there were more accidental causes and fewer nefarious ones.

  She reached for the cord that ran down the center of the ceiling in limp droopy scallops and yanked it. A series of bells started to chime, and moments later the railcar jerked into motion. Swift movement caught Velvet’s eye. Outside, the extricated slacker boys were already hanging limply at the ends of a pair of plump shadowy tentacles that were pulsating and tightening around the boys’ waists. Another, larger appendage slapped against the side of the car with a wet thwap. It coiled around the frame of a nearby door before striking, snakelike, at a frail-looking gentleman with a bag on his lap. At the slightest touch, the man went soft in his seat, slipping away from danger and onto the floorboard, loose enough that he could have been deboned. The tentacle reared back, ready to attack again.

  Screams rolled through the cabin like a wave.

  At that moment, the railcar jerked forward and the tentacle was torn free, and it disappeared into the charcoal night. The screaming calmed into hushed discussion, though the passengers were noticeably compressed into the center of the bench seats and as far from the glassless window frames as possible.

  Velvet leaned over the back of her seat and helped the older soul, now conscious, into his proper place.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, patting his shoulder.

  He shook his head, glancing back and forth, confused, and then his eyes went wide with memory. “Oh, God.”

  “What?”

  “It showed me …” His voice trailed away and his face, crinkled with ash, dropped into his palms. “It showed me horrible things.”

  She patted his shoulder again. She knew she should say something. Something comforting—but the words wouldn’t come. Velvet turned and faced forward as they traveled the hundred or so remaining yards to a track interchange.

  A pair of gruff-looking souls in coveralls chained the funicular cars to a massive wedge and then backed away as the car shook violently and began its long trudge farther up the steepening hill. The wedge acted like a stair and kept the train as level as could be expected during a shadowquake. Normally it ran quite smoothly, but now it rocked and the train rattled and squeaked as the entire wedge began to roll underneath them.

  Velvet scanned the faces in their car, half expecting their fear to be dissuaded simply by the presence of the Salvage team, but the tendrils of mist were dark, and the shadows still crept in through the arched openings in the doors, reminders of the black tentacles and their dark work. It dawned on her then, it wasn’t enough that her team would eventually do something about the shadowquake. The fact was, they weren’t doing anything about it currently.

  She decided to remedy that and climbed atop the wooden seat, bracing her hands against the ceiling for support.

  “Nothing to worry about!” she announced, arms outstretched in what she hoped was a show of strength. She’d seen Madonna do it in some movie about South America or something, also Nixon, though throwing up peace signs didn’t seem to fit the moment. “Your Salvage team is here to protect your afterlife.”

  She looked toward Luisa for approval and was met with a grimace and a finger slice across the little girl’s neck, the international symbol for shutting the hell up.

  There were some nods among the passengers, and some murmurs of dissent, or encouragement; it was hard to tell amid the grinding of the gears and the moaning of the ropes that pulled the railcar up the steep and treacherous incline. Her money was on the prior, though.

  “Smooth,” Luisa pointed out when Velvet sat down. “Really empowering.”

  “You think they bought it?” Velvet whispered.

  “Absolutely.”

  She brightened but noted a smirk at work on Luisa’s lips; they were even quivering. “Really?”

  “Not a chance.”

  Velvet sank back into the seat and groaned.

  Outside, the blurry shadows of rocks and precipices fell away to a solid wall of obsidian as the tram entered the shaft into the lower depths of the station. The sounds of souls screaming in the distance fell away, and the passengers grew eerily quiet.

  Velvet considered the cause of all this, steeling herself for the job at hand, whatever that might be.

  Witches, mediums, fortune-tellers.

  The blackest kind of magic.

  Sure, most of them were harmless, flipping cards, pointing out the obvious, telling people what they wanted to hear. It was almost noble. They actually kind of helped people, like counselors or something. Velvet never gave them much credit, but there were others, the ones that were a bit too accurate in their predictions, too powerful. In daylight, that magic was seen as a special gift, but the effect it had in purgatory was dangerous. A simple incantation could cause a quiver beneath the cobblestone streets, but shadowquakes rippled from an epicenter of dark intent, black magic stabbing like a sword from the daylight straight through to purgatory, the shredded fabric of the veil transmogrified into tentacles of pure horror.

  That was the trouble with the living. They didn’t recognize that actions had consequences. And that was the real issue. It pissed Velvet off, royally. Almost as much as Ron Simanski. He certainly acted without concern for the costs of his behavior.

  If only the asshole were dead, she thought. If only she could manage to do it.

  Make him cut his own throat.

  She’d never have to worry about another girl, or seeing his ass
again. He wasn’t likely to have an ambiguous afterlife. His path was certain.

  Straight to hell.

  Luisa’s hand nudging her thigh shook her from thoughts of homicide. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothin’.” Velvet shrugged.

  “I thought you were going to invite me the next time you took a walk?”

  She cringed.

  Luisa’s eyebrow raised, and Velvet saw a tinge of suspicion spreading over the girl’s normally placid face. This wasn’t the first time this confrontation had played out, and she suspected that her poltergeist friend might be on to her escapades, but Luisa never uttered the words in Velvet’s presence, never made any actual allegation. And she wouldn’t, of course, for the very reason that they were best friends.

  To say it aloud …

  Haunt.

  To speak that most horrible of syllables was to call the wrath of the station agent and the Council of Station Agents.

  No. Luisa would never say it. And that’s why they never discussed it. Velvet lied to protect her friend and herself, of course, no matter how difficult it was to keep the secret, and no matter how much she wanted to confide in Luisa. She wouldn’t place that kind of burden on Luisa’s shoulders. Ever.

  “It was just a walk,” she mumbled. “It’s not like I was out committing crimes or anything.”

  “What?” Luisa shook her head.

  “Nothing. Forget it. Just a walk.”

  In the sea of blackness, it was impossible to tell how far into the tunnel the railcar had carried them. The shadowquake’s black fog swirled around them and the rails still shook, but they hadn’t seen another tentacle since the old man had been attacked, so the train fell quiet. Her shoulders hunched with exhaustion, and she could swear she heard Logan’s grumbled snores over the clatter of metal on metal.

  The dark mist hung inside the car like oil floating atop a hot cup of coffee. It dotted the air like specks of ink. She held up her finger to poke one, and the droplet seemed to react, skittering away toward the opening in the door as though alive.