At last I go numb, pinprick specks of light making my sagging skin glow from the inside, and when finally I trust my legs to lift me, I stand, and let myself lean against the drugstore window.
This is what I wanted, I have to remind myself from the depths of this alien skin. This is what had to happen. It was the only way. Every time I blink, I’m somewhere else. Flying, soaring, spying at lovers who have plans to kill each other, gazing into the eyes of elderly folk who have all but given up but would jump at the chance to escape, detecting the scent of long buried bodies in long forgotten plots, reading the minds of the lovelorn, the desperate, the lost. Every house in Milestone is a vault of secrets, but it didn’t take for this change for me to know that.
Now behind my closed eyes I’m standing atop a rotten post by a deserted parking lot, peering at the reflection of a raven, and beyond that, at the willowy woman in the gray dress who’s praying for my death as she scrubs another man’s blood from the floor.
* * *
He awakes in a bathtub, raises his head, and winces in pain. He has been sleeping. This much he knows, but it is all that he knows. His neck hurts from the awkward way he’s been lying. Cold water from the showerhead drip-drip-drips down the back of his neck, making him shiver. His joints ache; there’s a taste in his mouth that repulses him, makes him want to gag. It’s as if he’s been sucking on road kill. With no little effort, he manages to sit up, tries to look around and yelps as a bolt of pain shoots from the back of his head down to the base of his spine. “Jesus…” he moans, and reaches a hand back to try and negotiate his comfort with whatever muscle is holding it hostage. As he does so, he jerks his neck a little, the hand bracing the tendons and muscles there should they decide to unravel, and notices the faded flowers on the wall. Tulips, he thinks, and remembers the crude joke about them that he composed but never remembered to share with Iris. It doesn’t seem funny now, only cruel. He starts to shake his head and flinches as once again pain reminds him he has not yet been cleared for such a move. He moves his hand to his throat, gingerly probes the flesh there. It’s raw, tender. It hurts, and the feel of it combined with his discomfort starts to lead him ever so slowly back to the memory of what happened to him.
“I was—” He’s not sure where the rest of the thought goes, or what it’s supposed to make him see, but now his nostrils are filled with the scent of oil. The creaking of a strained rope resonates in his head and his eyes widen. “I was—”
“Dead.”
He turns too quickly and cries out as the muscles contract protectively around a not yet healed break.
“You were dead,” Iris says, from the doorway. “And now you ain’t.”
Her voice is cold, which seems to suit the situation, though he has never heard it from her before.
“What happened?”
“You daddy saved you. Now get up and get yourself together.”
“I can’t…I’m—”
“The only law we have around here now.” She tosses something at him. It glances off the side of the tub and tumbles into his lap. He recognizes the chipped and grimy gold star as his father’s. “And you got work to do.”
* * *
The sun is down.
On a post in the parking lot at Eddie’s, opposite one of the formerly broken windows, stands a raven. He caws and bobs his head at my approach, but I don’t know whether the greeting or warning is meant for me, its own reflection in the smoked glass, or if the bird is a familiar of the woman inside. It makes little difference, I suppose.
I open the door and step inside.
The smell of soot and smoke rushes to greet me like the extension of a ghost that can’t wait for me to join it. The room looks smaller than it ever has before.
Gracie is on her knees, both hands clamped around a sponge soaked rusty brown by the blood that has gathered in a wide ragged circle beneath a toppled stool.
“Vess,” I say, and she looks up. Her face is wan, and sweaty, her eyes narrowed as she tries to focus on my shadowy form. Cadaver, and people like him, like me, I have found, are not friends of the light.
“Come to gloat?” she asks, returning to her labors.
I let the door swing shut behind me. “There’d be little sense in that.” I suppress a shudder. It horrifies me every time I speak to hear that grated hollow whisper, though I am not dependant on that ugly little microphone for volume. Eventually, perhaps, but not yet. “It would be as pointless as cleaning up the blood of a man to hide it from me when I’m standing right in front of you.” The voice is my own, of that I am sure, but the throat through which it has to pass certainly is not.
Gracie’s scrubbing slows, her hair obscuring her face. I am struck by the desire to brush it out of her face, a lingering impulse from not-so-better times, but that brief surge of need is enough to confirm what I already know. I am still here. I am still me. Somewhere.
At length, she ceases her cleaning altogether and raises her face, tilts her head a little. Sniffs the air. “How did this happen? What did you do?”
“Fate is a fickle thing,” I tell her. “Which is why we are told to never put our faith in it, never to rely or depend on the chips falling where we want them to. It doesn’t work that way, and only a very desperate woman would try it.”
She smiles, sits back on her haunches, brushes the damp hair from her brow. Her eyes are like beetles nestling in bleached wood. “So you know then?”
“I didn’t, until the change. Until I was allowed to know.”
“That old bastard,” she sneers suddenly, rising to her feet. “He cheated me.”
“You’re hardly in a position to cry foul.” I step further into the room. The light from the hurricane lamp on the bar flutters. Shadows writhe.
“Fuck you.”
“Was a time,” I start to say and grin.
She stares at me for a long moment, her breasts rising and falling rapidly beneath her sweat and bloodstained dress, and slowly, slowly, a smile begins to crawl across her face. “But you’re him now, aren’t you?” she says. “You’re not just a pig-fucking Sheriff stuck in a rotten vessel. You’re him, which means you can do for me what he wouldn’t. What he was supposed to do.”
“Tell me why I should do anything for you.”
“Why else are you here? You know who I am and you want rid of me. I understand that, and I even promise not to hold it against you. We can consider the old contract null and void and start anew, what do you say? You give me what I want, and I’ll give you what you want.” She lets the fingers on one hand trail over her breast. An unconvincing look of lasciviousness crosses her face. “What do you say? I remember how you used to look at me, how you studied me.”
“Does life mean that little to you?” I ask her, ignoring the proposition. “That you’d sell so much of it for your own gain?”
“Spare me.” Contempt overwhelms her face. “Why should I be condemned to stay here because of a mistake, because of one small error I made tryin’ to escape that rapin’ bastard? Should I have shut my mouth and done nothin’?”
“You killed Gracie. You killed an innocent woman. Sacrificed her to get out.”
“I did her a favor.” The mention of her crime is apparently sufficient motive for her to drop the act, and so she does, even as the words continue to come. Her hair ripples, shortens, darkens. “She was miserable, just as much Eddie’s prisoner as I was. She hated me, and I her. She’d never have trusted me if I told her I’d take her from here, and she’d have been right.” Her skin turns stark white, cheekbones pressing against the skin as it tightens to suit the rounder shape of her face. “I would have taken her home to Toyko and sold her to the men who crave such bargains. But it never came to that. There was never much chance to plan anything.” Her accent has changed, become clipped, sharper, the lips forming them leaner. “Eddie made his own mistakes, and often. One of them was to accompany me home to meet my family.” She smiles proudly. “My family did not take to him. They put on quite a show f
or my American husband, and when he came home, he was quite mad.” Though she’s still wearing that drab gray dress, the body inside it has changed. It’s thinner, smaller, the breasts mere nubs beneath the material, the arms stick-like.
“Gracie—you—said you didn’t come home with him.”
“Not at first, but neither my family nor I were content to take his mind. They wanted to see him die through my eyes. So a week later, I came back, only something had changed in him, something we hadn’t foreseen. Whatever magic we’d done to his mind, it negated my magic. I couldn’t hurt him, couldn’t influence him. I was powerless. He was a raging beast, and he beat and raped me before I could think of a way to stop him. And then he tried to kill me.” Lian Su’s smile fades. She slowly turns her head to face the window, but her eyes are still on me. “In the moment of death, I left my body, and took the daughter’s, trapping her in mine. Too late I realized what I had done. The mark I had carved was still on the little bitch’s chest, and it was a hex I could not undo from the inside.”
“And here you are.”
“And here I am.”
“While Gracie rots in a freezer on the bank of the Milestone River.”
Her smile returns. “She liked the river. And her father took her life. Not me.”
“He thought he was killing you.”
“I’m hardly to blame for his short-sightedness.”
“And what about your family? Why not summon them?”
“Because of what he did to me. His violation was a lot more severe than even he—had he still possessed the faculties required to compose such a thought—even knew. He made me a victim, an unclean one, prone to vengeance of a basic kind: Human violence without magic, without influence. This is forbidden. I am either a majo, or a human, and whichever I choose is the way I must be.” Her face wrinkles in disgust. “And I have been forced to play as one of you for long enough.”
I approach her, taking my time. “And what if you get what you want. What then?”
“I will leave.”
“And go where? It doesn’t sound as if you’d be welcome at home.”
“Home is a small place. I am not tethered to it. I have survived on my own since I was fourteen. I can do so again.”
I walk past her and take a seat at the bar. She follows, a smile on her face that tells me she knows she’s going to get exactly what she wants. “One for the road?”
I nod silently.
“You shouldn’t look so glum, Sheriff. Is it all right to call you that now that you’re…in costume?”
Another nod, but I’m barely listening. What I’m doing as she pours me a tall glass of whiskey, is fingering through someone else’s memories, namely my predecessor’s seemingly limitless information about everyone in Milestone. It doesn’t take me long to summon up Lian Su’s callous visage, and in the time it takes her to put the cap back on the bottle after pouring her own drink, I know she’s been lying to me again.
“It’s a game,” I tell her, my fingers moving toward the glass. Old habits die hard, I guess.
I expect her to deny it, though at this stage of our little tête à tête, it would be silly. But she doesn’t. Instead she takes a long drink, sets her glass down on the bar and raises her hands. “Aren’t you the clever one?”
I shake my head. “You came here for the specific purpose of ruining this town. Why?”
“Like you said. It was, and still is, a game. When you’ve had the kind of life I’ve had, you get bored easily. Trust me. When Eddie came to my land, his talk of this place intrigued me. I had to see it. Had to smell and feel it, and ultimately…”
“Destroy it. And what was Cadaver?”
“A tool, but a powerful one, and I am stuck here, I didn’t lie about that. I needed him to set me free. Now I need you to do it.”
“And if I don’t?”
“If you don’t, I’ll break your son’s neck again.” She shrugs. “Simple as that.”
Of course I’m going to set her free, even without knowing what she’ll do once she’s no longer tied to this place. Walk outside and raze the town? Take off on her broomstick? It’s anyone’s guess.
“So tell me,” she says, casually, as if we’re discussing shoes. “What would you like for your part of the bargain?”
“I want you to leave Milestone.”
“I was planning to.”
“Well you’ll forgive me for not buying that. This way, you won’t get what you want unless I get what I want, and what I want is to be rid of you.”
She shrugs. “Plenty of other towns. Plenty of livelier places. You have nothing to worry about.”
“Good.”
“Funny though.”
I wait for her continue.
She sighs dramatically. “I would have thought as this town’s sworn protector you’d have asked to have your dead friends brought back and to have all the misfortune undone. Above all, I expected you to ask for escape yourself.”
I raise my glass in a toast and offer her a sardonic grin. “I have escaped.”
Chapter Twenty One
“Why aren’t you saying anything?”
Iris is looking out the passenger side window, at the silent houses hurrying past, the deserted streets whizzing by. There should be children playing here, their laughter echoing around the neighborhood. There should be adults standing in the doorways or sitting on the stoops, watching with dreamy eyes the vagaries of a youth they once knew and would kill to know again. There should be smoke from the chimneys, lights in the windows, but there are only houses, and the breeze, and a bruised horizon to suggest the sun has ever visited this town. “There’s nothin’ to say,” she tells Kyle.
“Well…” Kyle, still stiff-necked, but no longer in agony, frowns, struggling to understand how he is here, and why Iris won’t talk to him.
“Just drive, ok? We can talk later.”
He doesn’t respond, knows she doesn’t want him to, and that confuses him. He has remembered his meeting with Cadaver, recalls how the confidence he brought with him, its weight similar to the gun in his pocket, fled once he was given the chance to express it before someone who could make it so. Hate persisted, but his determination evaporated as he finally realized the power he held in his hands, the magnitude of what he was planning to do, what he could do. In the end, uncertainty stopped him. As Cadaver stood patiently before him, a figure made of dust and shadow, he could not determine whether he was condemning his father to death just so he could get out of Milestone, or because he really believed the old man deserved to die. And that doubt was enough to drain his resolve. Assaulted by memories of life before the hate, he wept and fell to his knees. Cadaver hadn’t seem at all surprised, leading Kyle to wonder if he had anything to do with the sudden sequence of sentimental flashbacks. In the end, he hadn’t known, but was left alone in the room to mull over the possibilities. He could still sell his father out and get away from Milestone. It wasn’t too late, but even as he told himself that, he knew that it was. Once in a man’s life is enough to consider betraying his own blood. He could try leaving on his own, a thought that filled him with such inexplicable dread, he quickly dismissed it, and the rational explanation it demanded as to why this was so. The third option was to stay, and die here, and it was as he was imagining this, maybe five or six more decades in a town without life or color, that the fourth and final option began to make itself known.
He could stay and die here now, ending the torment and the confusion, ending a life that seemed frozen in an unhappy moment that might last forever. And it would let his father know that they had both failed each other.
“Faster,” Iris tells him, interrupting his thoughts at the perfect time. Any further and they might have claimed him, left him the same gibbering wreck he was when Cadaver impassively handed him the length of rope.
“I’m going as fast as I can. And what the hell is wrong with you anyway?”
“You’re what’s wrong with me.”
“Why?” Be
cause I’m a dead man walking, he almost answers for her, to fill the silence where her own response should be. But he swallows his words and concentrates on the road, the lights spearing through the dark. Eddie’s, she told him, and that was enough. Without knowing how, and too afraid to attribute it to some sense picked up during his brief walking tour of death, he knows they’re supposed to head to Eddie’s, and that he will find his father there.
That scares him.
Everyone gets to die. Few get to die and have to answer for it later, at least not to the living.
A twinge of dull pain across his throat makes him lift a hand from the steering wheel. He has already checked for marks and there are none, but the skin there feels stretched and smooth, like a healed burn. He should be dead; he isn’t, but something inside him hasn’t returned with him. There’s a cold empty space where his hate should be, and its absence has left him confused, without identity, as if in dying, he lost the only part of him that knew how to survive, the engine that kept him running.
They pass beneath the dark black rectangle of a set of broken traffic lights, swinging in the strengthening breeze. Beyond it, the street is deathly quiet, a deserted movie set. Vacant, lifeless.
Something dashes out in front of the car. With a hoarse cry of surprise, Kyle jams on the brakes and the car screeches to a halt, smoke from the tires rushing ahead of them, becoming fleeing ghosts in the headlights. But he isn’t looking at those ghosts, he’s looking at the deer that’s standing there, staring in at him, a glimmer in its oily eye.
“Fucking thing,” he says, and takes a breath that scratches at his throat. “I didn’t even…” He trails off with a shake of his head.
“Look,” Iris says, nodding pointedly.
The deer hasn’t moved, but beyond it, Kyle sees that it isn’t alone. “Jesus.” There must be a hundred of them, or more, all of them racing in from the road out of town, stumbling and leaping over each other in their haste. It’s an incongruous scene. Deer are not often seen in town unless they’re dead, their legs sticking out of the back of some hunter’s flatbed. “Looks like they’re running from something.”
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