Bump (A Witchlight Novel)

by Jaime Munn

  “I can’t say,” I said.

  Cleo didn’t say anything but she didn’t really appear to be listening to me either. I figured she’d already heard what I’d had to say before I’d said it. It was a damned annoying ability. I wondered if other supernaturals thought the same about witchy psychometry.

  We got out of the vehicle and headed into the building. F.C. insisted on using his own legs. This time, as pedestrian traffic was pretty sparse, I let him. There was an elevator but Cleo led us to the stairs and we went up two levels before we entered a dirty corridor. We headed to apartment 34. Cleo used a set of keys to open the door.

  The interior was a surprise. It was clean and expensively decorated. I figured that Daudie had used his ability to shop for what he needed using borrowed credit cards and bodies. Cleo stood to one side and waved me forward. I had the run of Daudie’s apartment.

  Electronic goods aren’t the best conductors of psychic impressions. Some thought it was because of the connection to an electric circuit and others that they were such impersonal items that nothing really clung to them. I ignored them as I surveyed the apartment for something that might offer a glimpse into the dead incubus’ life. The apartment almost seemed newly furnished. I wondered how much time Daudie had actually spent in it. He’d seemed very committed to living other people’s lives for them when we’d met. I doubted that he had spent much time living his own.

  I dismissed almost everything I saw and turned to Cleo and Boytjie.

  “His bedroom? That’s where you…found him?”

  “That’s where we dealt with him, Ms Hayes,” Cleo corrected coolly and pointed towards the corridor leading off to the right. “Last door,” her eyes locked with mine. “We haven’t really had the place cleaned yet.”

  I hesitated.

  “We’ve dealt with that,” she answered my unvoiced question about Daudie’s body.

  Slowly I made my way towards the bedroom. Cleo and Boytjie didn’t come with, but F.C. shadowed me every step of the way. I was pathetically grateful to have him with me. The bedroom door was closed. I opened it, took a deep breath and went inside.

  The bedroom had been white. There was a huge sleigh bed that dominated the room, an elegant and expensive looking wardrobe, and a massive portrait on the wall. It was instantly recognisable, although I couldn’t put a name to it or the artist. A squat and ugly looking incubus sat atop a sleeping woman garbed in a white nightgown. The incubus looked out of the painting at me. It was a powerful image, more so now that it had a spatter of blood across it.

  The bed linen was missing. I assumed that Cleo and her muscle had wrapped Daudie’s body in it when they’d removed it from the flat. The blood had soaked through the mattress though. It was a jagged and ugly flower that I could mentally picture blooming from Daudie’s torn throat. Boytjie had done that. I shuddered.

  On the bedside table was an old watch. It looked almost cheap by comparison to everything else I’d encountered in the incubus’ apartment. Watches are the reason there’s speculation about why electronic goods aren’t steeped in psychic impressions. Watches are sometimes different. It’s probably why I chose to believe in the second theory about electronic goods. You might love watching your TV or boiling water for that cup of coffee, but if it broke you’d dump it quicker than corporations dropped people to over inflate their bottom line.

  Sometimes people hung onto things and the more they clung to them, the more rich they were in psychic residues. Watches, cars, cameras were some of the things that tended to accrue sentimental value. I firmly believe that sentiment was at the heart of psychometry. I wasn’t much of a believer in token-object readings, because when it came down to it what you felt through the object was the person. Reading an object was just one step removed from reading the person.

  I hesitated a moment, thinking about the awful monster who’d worn my friends like they were pieces of clothing, then reached for the watch and let the impressions that swam up overwhelm me.

  You might think that witchy psychometry answers all questions, but it’s not really all that good at finding a needle in a haystack. I always think of it as a little bit like modern television. There are too many channels and nothing on.

  Trying to find one specific element to Daudie’s life wasn’t possible. I was hit by a flood of sordid images. Daudie had lived a life of sex, drugs, blood, and madness in the bodies of strangers. No experience had been too perverse for him. He’d left a trail of bodies in his wake, both living and dead. I’ll spare you the gory details I wish I could delete from my mind.

  I pulled away from the visions, dropping the watch to the bed and ran through to the adjourning bathroom to wretch into the toilet. I knelt there sobbing after throwing my breakfast up into the bowl. Froot Loops didn’t look so cheery coming back up as they did going down.

  “Feel better about him not being in the world?” Cleo asked softly from the door way. I turned my head to catch a tear blurred vision of her standing there.

  I didn’t nod though I definitely wanted to.

  “You didn’t find anything did you?”

  I shook my head and rose slowly to my feet. I flushed the toilet and washed my face in the basin. Water dripping down my face I stood in front of the clean hand towel and hesitated. It had belonged to Daudie. It probably had been washed clean of his taint, but still it had belonged to the monster.

  Cleo stepped forward, took the towel from its rail and gently patted down my face.

  “It’s just a towel,” she said soothingly. “Daudie Schalko is dead and gone. He can’t hurt anyone else.”

  “Why didn’t you stop him before?” I asked as Cleo returned the hand towel to the rail.

  She fussed with it, aligning it neatly and sighed.

  “There’s an awful lot of monsters in the world. We can’t fight them all.” She turned to me, her brown eyes deep and dark, striking me as rich with stark layers of emotion. “We took care of one of them and now we’re embroiled in a battle between two witches. We had a little incident last night when some of the pack who need to be locked up over full moon nights got free. I can’t say we have any proof…but it did taste like witchcraft to my wolf.”

  I sighed. Maybe I hadn’t been a target for Grace yesterday because she’d been busy with my allies.

  “I’m sorry I dragged you into this mess.”

  “Don’t be,” Cleo said. I heard a lilt of her familiar steel and cool composure seeping through. “We’ll get our monies worth out of you yet, Ms Hayes.”

  I almost laughed at that and not a hysterical giggle either. It was a little bit funny if you looked at it strictly from an outsider’s point of view. My life was seriously turning into a punch line in the making. I just hoped that I came out on the other side of it still breathing.

  “Besides a warlock has to be one big bitch to make a werewolf quiver.” Cleo stepped away from me and headed back into the bedroom. I followed. “Are you going to try another…” she waved her hands in circles, “…or maybe you want to take a break and look at Daudie’s stash?”

  “His stash?” I asked blankly.

  “Trophies,” Cleo clarified. “Sick bastards always keep trophies.”

  “I don’t know if I have the stomach for it,” I replied, “but it’s empty now anyway. Besides, I can’t take another trip down Daudie’s memory lane just yet.”

  I tried to resign myself to the notion that eventually I would have to pick up that watch again, but it left me cold with fear. There were ice butterflies in my stomach, sending chills and panic through me. Still, I knew that I’d have to face it down and bite that bullet again. I didn’t have to like it. I didn’t have to squarely face the challenge. I didn’t have to be action hero strong. Sobbing my way through another psychometric reading of Daudie’s watch wouldn’t make me any less a badass witch.

  I followed Cleo back into the main room. I didn’t see Boytjie and I wondered if Cleo had posted him outside the apartment. F.C. hopped up onto the windowsill t
o peer down at the street below.

  There was a large safe hidden within a concealed cupboard that almost looked like a random square pillar in the corner of the living room. The safe had been torched open. I wondered what Cleo and her pack had thought to find inside. Gold? Diamonds? Incubus ointments, lotions, and creams? Sometimes even the good guys are a little in the grey area of the purist ethical debate.

  Inside the safe on several shelves was a neatly arranged pile of junk. I wondered how disappointed the pack had been. I frankly was relieved. There were no body parts preserved in jars, which made it perfect in my opinion. Still, it did make me feel a little queasy looking at the volume of it and equating each and every little piece with one of Daudie’s victims.

  I didn’t want to touch any of the pieces in the safe, but Cleo stepped aside to give me a clearer view of them. There was a pair of gloves in a plastic folder taped to the safe door. Intuitively I realised that Daudie hadn’t wanted to touch them either, but more in the vein of a museum curator handling a priceless artefact than in sheer horror at the thought of getting a backlash of pain and anguish from victims scarred or murdered by the incubus.

  The interior of the safe was lit up with LEDs, presumably so that Daudie wouldn’t need to shine a flashlight into the corners of his safe to see every piece of his macabre collection. Mostly Daudie seemed to have been into collecting photographs, although he’d gathered a few other trinkets along the way. Without touching them I could only tell that most of the images were of smiling, happy people. They were obviously from before Daudie got under their skin. There were layers of photographs though, several to a stack, and there might have been an after in each collection. I didn’t want to look.

  Wondering if the pictures were chronological I knelt down to look at the images on the bottom shelf of the safe. There was only one stack of photographs here, like Daudie had isolated them from the rest of his collection. Despite my reluctance to touch anything in the safe, it seemed that there might be something more to the first piece of his collection that I couldn’t afford to miss.

  Hesitantly I pulled the photographs out of the safe. They didn’t hit me straight away with a series of images, but rather left me with a sense of melancholy. The images were faded. I couldn’t say why but it struck me that I was looking at Daudie’s family photographs.

  I glanced up at Cleo. “You said that Daudie’s parents were dead. How long ago did they die?”

  Cleo narrowed her eyes as she peered over my shoulder at the photographs in my hand.

  “Twenty three years ago,” she said quietly. “The house burned down. They were still inside.”

  I flipped slowly through the images. They were steeped in regret and smelled of smoke, although that might simply have been psychosomatic. The couple seemed too nice to have raised a monster, but then everyone posed for the camera. However candid the images seemed they were ultimately staged. People who lived on the cusp were hiding something from the very first day they were born into the world. While I wouldn’t say that made them consummate actors, it did mean that they learned quickly to live with a secret. There were no proud exclamations of ‘we’ve got a witch in the family’ for us.

  At least one of Daudie’s parents had probably been an incubus or carried the potential. It wasn’t genetic, at least not the way witches thought of it. Since we could see the supernatural manifest in auras and sense it in the very physical presence of a person, it was something we’d long associated with the nature of the spark. Even people without any supernatural heritage could be changed by the firing of that spark into a flame. But then although the human genome project hadn’t turned up any latent supernatural genes I hadn’t exactly gotten beyond rhizomes in biology. I doubted many witches followed through on the subject into university.

  Who knows…maybe we all carry a supernatural heritage in the soup of our genes. Every being on the cusp knows that anyone, however plain vanilla their heritage, could end up something different. Just ask any werewolf.

  The photographs were odd sizes though they looked like they had all been processed by the same film developer. There was a stamp on the back of each from a particular photographic store. My sense that the photographs had been edited was only confirmed when one of the smaller photographs showed only a partial stamp on the back.

  “What about siblings?” I asked Cleo.

  “A twin. Jannie Schalko. He died in the fire too. The detail is sketchy at best, the records are pretty old. The fire started in the twins’ bedroom . Jannie didn’t make it out alive.”

  “Are there any photographs of the twins?” I asked.

  I wondered if a psychological profiler could tell me why Daudie had given the photographs their own shelf, isolating them and setting them apart from the rest of his trophy collection. The sense of regret and sadness that seeped from the photographs made me think that maybe this had been an accident, but the doctored photographs seemed to say something else.

  “There might be one in an old newspaper report. I’ve got copies of all the articles from the time. You can look through them.”

  I nodded. I glanced down at the smiling boy in the last photograph. There was a hand at the edge that had probably belonged to his twin. Was this Daudie or Jannie Schalko? If the trophies showed victims then it had to be Jannie, but something held me back from jumping to that conclusion. It might have been a witchy vibe, but I had the distinct feeling it was way more crass and commercial than that. It was probably all down to television and The Parent Trap.

  I pocketed the photographs. Then steeled myself and headed back to the bedroom. Daudie’s watch was waiting for me. Cleo and F.C. let me go it alone. Chicken, I thought at my familiar, but I didn’t blame him.

  This time I tried linking the watch with the photograph of the smiling-happy Schalko family. And as the impressions and memories crashed over me I knew that none of them had been incubi, not until that night that the fire had burned down the house.

  Jannie Schalko liked playing with matches. It was a montage that flickered through my mind, a little boy first and then older. The night of the fire I thought he looked like he’d reached his teens. Everyone was asleep as Jannie stole out of his bed and got his secret stash of matches and lighters from his hiding place. I felt a chill at the sight of how he laid out his fire starting paraphernalia. It resembled exactly the trophy safe I had just examined. Perhaps it had been witchy intuition that held me back from pronouncing the twin in the photograph as Jannie Schalko. I didn’t need to see the events of the night of the fire to unfold to know that Daudie Schalko had died with his parents.

  Maybe he’d been the favourite twin. The good son. Maybe not. Maybe Jannie Schalko had just found it easier to think that Jannie who played with fire had died that night. I watched the fire start. Saw as Jannie struggled to put it out and only managed to spread it faster. Saw him panic. Saw him run from the house and leave his family to their fate. Daudie Schalko’s terrified screams had brought his parents to the burning room and none of them had escaped it.

  Jannie Schalko’s trauma had internalised that fire bug, had quickened his spark into flame. Had twisted his very nature until years later he’d emerged from that internal inferno as an incubus burning his way through other people’s lives.

  I dropped the watch before the visions started down the awful litany of victims again. I wasn’t prepared to experience any more of the incubus’ dark lusts and terrible cruelties. I knew enough now to know who was possessing Sofia. Ironically it had been Daudie Schalko all along.

  Shaking, I sat on the bed until my knees stopped trembling and felt able to carry my weight again. It only struck me when I was standing that I had sat in the very bed where Jannie Schalko had died his second death. Only this time it had been a real death. Boytjie had torn out his throat and his blood had seeped into the mattress.

  It had been a mercy killing, I thought, and wondered if that was how all monsters were born. It made me sick. If I hadn’t already thrown up my breakfas
t, I probably would have done now.

  I left the bedroom and found Cleo and F.C. staring at each other. F.C. never blinked, but Cleo broke eye contact to glance at me.

  “I can see why Boytjie likes your cat,” she said. “You don’t need any extra protection with him around.”

  “What do you see when you look at him?” I asked, curiosity helping to steady my nausea.

  “A shadow like a cat. It moves like a cat. It has colours like a cat. It doesn’t smell like a cat though. Like most things that stick to shadows it only resembles what you think it looks like as your mind fills in the gaps.” Cleo gave F.C. another searching look. “My mind tells me that it looks like a cat. My wolf tells me that it doesn’t…but even my wolf doesn’t know what it really looks like. It’s a puzzle.”

  “He’s a Frankenstein Cat,” I told her, feeling offended on F.C.’s behalf at the way Cleo was referring to him like he was an inanimate object.

  Cleo stared blankly at me.

  “Should that mean something?”

  I shrugged.

  “It means that he started out life specifically designed to eat me or to kill me or both. I changed his mind.”

  Cleo studied me a moment then nodded.

  “He’s still specifically designed to kill and to eat,” she said, “you’ve just changed the menu.”

  It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I glanced uneasily at F.C. He looked at me like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. But I’d seen his jaws and they were definitely sized up for chunkier meals. I wasn’t fooled for a minute. Still he was mine. I hadn’t put anyone on the menu for F.C. and I swore I never would. F.C. licked his lips. I wondered if that was his way of saying something witty. I deliberately avoided thinking about meal times. Not even a sadistic dentist, F.C., I thought.

  “Have you solved our little incubus problem?” Cleo asked, changing the subject.

  I nodded.

  “I think so. He started out almost normal you know.”

  “Most monsters do,” Cleo said shortly. She closed the trophy safe, secreting it once more behind the pillar façade. She headed towards the exit. F.C. and I followed. If it wasn’t a soft, furry animal brushing against my legs, I wondered, what was it?