by Неизвестный
“Sounds perfect.” Eli turned off the van’s engine, jumped out, and jogged to catch up with Khan.
Chapter Ten
The diner had classic red vinyl booths and heavy tables that were bolted to the floors. Even the artwork was bolted down, with four visible screw heads dotting the corners of every painting. The paintings were of bullfighters, sketched in bright flourishes on a black velvet background. Eli had never seen a restaurant decor so… boldly original.
He had checked the time on the van’s dash, so he knew it was the beginning of the dinner rush. Most restaurants in the neighborhood would be at least half full by now, and the good ones would have a lineup and waiting list. This diner was two-thirds empty.
Nobody greeted them at the door, but a standing sign invited them to sit anywhere they wanted.
Khan led the way to a corner booth, where a brunette with a ponytail hunched over a table full of papers.
“I get it,” Eli said. “You eat here because your sister likes it.”
“We both eat here because there’s never a wait, and by the time we realize we’re hungry, it’s almost too late.”
Khan slid into the booth across from his sister, then patted the seat next to him. He pushed his sunglasses up to nestle in his spiky white hair and gave Eli a look. Don’t even think about parking your butt next to my sister’s, his look said.
Valentine glanced up and stared right through both of them, as if they weren’t even there, then returned to poring over her papers.
A waitress walked by and dumped three menus on the table without ceremony. Eli turned to ask her about the daily specials, but she was already gone.
Valentine smoothed out what looked like a map of the city, then covered it with a layer of tracing paper and began marking the paper with circles and dashes.
“Thanks for asking about today’s service call,” Khan said to his sister wryly. “As it happens, the disturbance was a no-show.” He turned to Eli and explained, “In the business, we refer to para-electrical elements as disturbances.”
“You mean the ghosts.”
Khan winced. “Not all ghosts are para-electrical elements.”
Valentine chuckled without looking up. “We should have an orientation booklet for the new hires.”
“I’m not a new hire,” Eli said. “I have a job already, delivering packages. It’s not much of a career, but my options are limited by…”
Valentine looked up again, her pretty, pale green eyes silencing Eli with their beauty.
“Limited by what?” she asked.
He didn’t want to say. Not in front of Valentine, or Khan, for that matter.
Eli couldn’t lie, except for sarcasm, but he could change the topic. He picked up a menu. “What’s good here?”
The other two answered in unison: “Nothing.”
Valentine took his menu away and waved to get the waitress’s attention. “Three cheeseburgers and three Cokes,” she called across the two-thirds-empty diner.
The woman acknowledged with a wave, shouted the order into the kitchen, and wearily began getting the sodas. Eli looked away for a second, and suddenly the waitress was at their table, slamming down the drinks on the margin of table not covered by Valentine’s papers. He rubbed his eyes and wrote off the time glitch as a byproduct of the previous night’s oxygen deprivation.
Once they were alone again, Eli casually asked, “So, besides the para-electrical elements, what other kinds of ghosts are there?”
Khan shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We only deal with the wires.” Something thumped under the table and he jolted in his seat. “Valentine! What the hell?”
“Don’t lie to our new friend,” she admonished.
Eli smiled, filling with sunshine and sparkly butterflies. He was their new friend.
Valentine’s lovely hands flew over the paperwork and tidied the table by rolling everything into a tube, fastened expertly by the red elastic band she pulled from her ponytail. She shook out her medium-brown hair, and Eli had to look away guiltily.
“What’s your experience level?” she asked him. “Have you been haunted?”
Eli held his tongue and prepared his words carefully. “I know someone who reported something like a black cat, sitting on her chest. She was terrified. Do you know what something like that might be? Assuming it’s not a hallucination?”
“Interesting.” Valentine shook her head, her brown hair framing and reframing her face in ever more breathtaking compositions. The waves of hair also seemed to accentuate her curves below the neck—not that they needed any help. Eli clutched his jaw with one hand, pretending to be itching his chin, and manually averted his gaze.
“Sounds like a kitty wraith,” she said.
“Feline wraith,” Khan corrected. “Or cat wraith.”
“Kitty wraith.” She giggled. “They’re bad kitties, Eli. I don’t have much experience with them, but I know they fall halfway between helpful and malevolent.”
“Do they—” Eli’s voice cracked “—suffocate people to death?”
Valentine sipped her Coke through a straw, then licked away the bead on her lower lip. Eli was staring, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“Not to death,” she answered. “They usually follow lonely people home, where they do stuff to liven things up in the household.”
Suddenly, the waitress was at the table again, dropping huge platters of burgers and fries in front of them.
“What kind of stuff?” Eli asked. “And why?”
She rolled her pretty green eyes. “I told you why. To liven things up for lonely people. The kitties think they’re helping.”
Khan cleared his throat. Around a mouthful of cheeseburger, he said, “We can’t attribute human motivations to the unhuman. What we can do is re-home them, into a steel cage.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, which only smeared the oil around. “Does your friend want us to make a service call? I’ll give him a cut rate, for friends of friends.”
Eli eyed Khan warily. Because he didn’t yet believe ghosts were scientifically proven, he was almost certain this was part of a con. The Hart siblings were planting ideas into his subconscious. That was all. And even if the so-called cat wraith was real, it supposedly wasn’t fatal.
The edge of Khan’s mouth curled up, as though he couldn’t keep a straight face any longer and was on the verge of admitting he gave Eli a business card laced with hallucinogenic powder.
“Well?” Khan prompted. “Does your friend want a service call?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Eli said.
Khan shrugged and continued cramming greasy burger into his mouth.
“Your friend could put out some catnip,” Valentine offered. “And a saucer of milk.”
Eli’s stomach growled. He looked down at the food in front of him. It glistened with oil-based calories.
He began to eat, thinking over Valentine’s suggestion.
Catnip.
A saucer of milk.
Well, he had been thinking about getting a pet.
Chapter Eleven
After leaving the diner, Eli drove to the department store where he and Brenda shopped regularly for containers. Their apartment was too small, and full of too much stuff, but Brenda truly believed they were just a few more plastic boxes away from achieving balance.
Eli skirted the container department, treating it like a miniature Crashdown Zone. The metaphor was apt, because every time Brenda dragged him to the container department, he did seem to lose a nugget of sanity. Just looking up at the sign marking the aisle made him feel like grabbing onto passing shopping carts, to feel the sweet tug at his limbs.
He shook his head to clear the weirdly suicidal daydreams, and proceeded to the small appliances department.
The store had two dozen models of microwaves, but fourteen of them were designed for mounting over a stove. That left ten options. Eli closed his eyes and began fondling the control panels.
A youthful voice of ind
eterminate gender asked flatly, “Can I help you with anything, sir?”
Eli’s eyes flew open. The staff member in the blue bib was male, and in his teens. He had dyed black hair, wore black eyeliner, and a studded dog collar around his neck. Eli’s eyes traveled down and stopped on the boy’s name tag—a name tag which led Eli to believe this young man might be sympathetic to Eli’s plight.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Eli asked.
The young man glanced around, his dark-rimmed eyes flitting nervously. “Why? What do you know? If you’re from head office, you have to tell me. Those are the rules, or else it’s that bad thing. Entrapment.”
“I’m not from head office, I swear. I’m just a civilian customer, trying to buy a microwave, and wondering if other people believe in ghosts.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Eli.”
The boy shook his hand. “I’m Nateas.” He pronounced it Nate-az. He nodded to his name tag, which really did list his name at NATEAS, though the final two letters had been drawn in with felt pen. “Read it backwards,” he said, smirking.
“Two steps ahead of you, Nateas. That’s why I asked if you believe in ghosts. So, do you?”
“All warlocks believe in ghosts.”
“You’re a warlock?”
Nateas took a step back and looked around again. “Are you sure you’re not from head office?”
“Would someone from head office wear polyester short pants?”
Nateas looked down at Eli’s knees and chuckled. He checked around furtively for the third time, then pulled a card from his blue smock.
Eli hesitated before accepting the card, doing a visual check for powder and noting that Nateas was touching the sides with bare fingers. Finally, he took the card, which contained nothing more than an email address that began with necromancer69 and finished with a free email provider.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Eli said.
“Their numbers are growing,” Nateas said, his voice quivering. “The ghosts are converging on the city from all over the world. Soon we’ll be outnumbered.”
“What do they want?”
“A front row seat for the big show.” The kid paused dramatically, his eyebrows raising to their limit. In a hoarse near-whisper, he finished, “The end of the world.”
“Oh.” Eli turned away and twisted the dial on a microwave. “Sounds legit.”
The kid snorted. “Don’t tell me you’re a Mothershipper.”
“Pardon me?” Eli didn’t know the term, but it sounded disturbingly similar to another epithet.
“One of those alien abduction weirdos,” Nateas explained. “Mothershippers.”
“I think I’d know if I was.” He turned back to the microwaves, deeply regretting his choice to strike up a conversation with a stranger. He knew there was a reason he didn’t usually do such a thing.
The kid slipped back into work mode. “If you buy one of these microwaves, tell them Nate helped you, so I get the commission.”
“Are you going to help me pick one out?”
The boy pointed one black-lacquered fingernail at the most basic model. “That one’s on sale.”
“Is it a good microwave? I hate to be cheap, but I’m buying it for an old guy who’s blind, so this model with the two dials might be better than the digital ones.”
“He’s blind?” Nateas blinked rapidly, his eyes becoming dewy. Eli got the terrible feeling he’d just ruined someone’s day by mentioning the existence of disabilities.
“Just in the eyes,” Eli said. He’d meant to say something reassuring—something else entirely, but sometimes the chip diverted him like this. “Just in the eyes,” he repeated in a gentle tone, hoping his voice was soothing.
“Phew,” Nateas said. He grabbed a cardboard box from the shelf below the display models. “I’ll take this to the checkout for you, unless you need anything else.”
“What if I did? Would you follow me around like my personal shopping sherpa?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Okay, Nateas. I need catnip. I don’t have a cat, but I’d like to buy a lot of catnip, for personal reasons.”
The boy hoisted the microwave box to the top of his head and led the way, sherpa-like, to the pet supplies aisle.
Chapter Twelve
Brenda was preparing to head out when Eli arrived home.
He didn’t have to ask where she was going, because it was Friday night, and she usually went dancing with her friends on Friday nights.
Eli stood at the door to the bathroom, holding a one-pound bag of catnip, and watched as Brenda applied a layer of glitter over top of her thick black mascara.
“Is that catnip?” she asked.
“It’s not oregano.”
Her lips twitched. She leaned in toward the mirror and used her fingertip to remove a black chunk of makeup that had fallen into her eye.
He waited for her to ask about his day. He wanted to tell her about the trip to the farmhouse, and trying to help the old, blind man, but he was too tired to simply volunteer the information.
Brenda often complained that she had to drag information out of him. By contrast, she never stopped sharing. They could be apart for ten minutes, and she’d come back with eleven minutes’ worth of anecdotes.
Eli enjoyed her chatter, the way he might enjoy a radio station that played his favorite music one third of the time. It was better than silence.
“I talked to Khan,” he said. “He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. The guy believes in ghosts, though, so I don’t know how much help he would be anyway.” He jiggled the bag of catnip in his hand. “Sometimes carbon monoxide makes people imagine things. There might have been one of those big trucks parked in the alley, idling its engine.”
“That could be it,” she said, flicking her gaze over to him via the mirror. “It seemed real last night, but anything can seem real in the middle of the night. Then the sun comes up and you feel pretty foolish.”
She didn’t walk him through her day, but Eli got the feeling Brenda had talked to some of her friends, and they didn’t believe in cat wraiths, so now Brenda didn’t, either.
“So, it was either a big truck in the alley, or the powder on the card.”
Brenda nodded in agreement. “We could send that business card out to a private lab to test for drugs. One of those places that parents send their kids’ hair samples to.”
“We don’t need to do that. We’ll find out tonight.”
She smeared strawberry-scented gloss on her lips. “What do you mean, we? I’m not sleeping here. I’ll crash at a friend’s house.”
“Which friend?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
Eli didn’t like the sound of any of this, but perhaps it was for the best he face this thing down alone, like a man.
He pulled open the catnip bag’s zippered plastic closure and took a sniff. The green flakes smelled exactly like the tea they served at Brenda’s favorite vegetarian restaurant.
Brenda finished applying her makeup, and shoved the apparatus back into the overstuffed drawer. She cursed the lack of storage in the bathroom. For a moment, Eli felt guilty about his secret storage, behind the mirror. He opened the bag and sniffed the catnip again. The feeling passed.
Brenda squeezed past him and put on her shoes and jacket by the door.
“What’s the catnip for?” she asked.
“On the off chance it’s something paranormal, this might appease the spirit.” He chuckled. “Stupid, I know, but catnip’s cheap enough.”
“Oh.” The whites around her eyes showed. Despite her big talk, Brenda was scared. “Do you sprinkle the herbs in a circle around the bed, so the ghost can’t get you?”
“That’s a good idea. I was just going to put it in a bowl.”
She put her hand on her hip and shook her head. “Oh, Eli.”
“Fine. I’ll sprinkle it around the bed. You can tell all your friends, and have a big laugh about it.”
She didn’t e
ven smile. “You’ll need to pull the bed away from the wall.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
She bent forward, strapping herself into her tallest shoes. When she righted again, her face was red. Brenda flushed easily, and burned easily, too. Sunscreen weather was coming soon. The seasonal change would add fifteen minutes of prep time to their excursions.
“Have fun dancing,” he said.
She closed the closet door slowly, like she hated to leave.
The hallway felt gloomy. Outside the sun was setting, and night was on its way. Eli flicked on the overhead light.
Brenda stood motionless at the apartment’s front door, gazing up at him. Even in her tallest shoes, she was still so small.
He wondered if she was waiting for him to say something specific—to admit to her that he was scared, and that whatever happened tonight, it would be less scary if he could face it with her.
Her gaze travelled down to the bag of catnip in his hand. Her lips twitched.
Let’s do this together, he wanted someone to say.
She blinked her spiky, sparkling lashes. Be a man, Eli. Be a man and make a catnip circle around the bed while I spend the night at an unspecified friend’s house.
And then she left.
The apartment beyond the hallway rapidly grew darker, as if someone was pushing a slider on a control panel. God, perhaps.
Eli shivered, like he always did when he thought about God.
He walked through the apartment, fastening the chain on the front door, then checking that all the windows were closed and secure. For good measure, he opened all the cupboards and checked for cats that might have climbed the fire escape and snuck in during the day. He found no cats.
He turned on the TV and watched some of his favorite shows. The comedies weren’t very good, but he laughed out loud at the punchlines, hoping they’d get better with some effort.
He wondered how Mr. Quentin was doing right now, and if he’d eaten well. It wasn’t much of a mystery to Eli why the old man insisted on staying in his house rather than move in with family. Humans were stubborn, and irrational. These traits only increased with age.