by A. J. Aalto
“I don't?” I blinked. “When don't I?” I heard myself and shook my head. “I'd be wearing pants. What I mean is…” I lowered my voice. “Mrs. Valli, have you seen my future?”
“My shop burns down, dear,” she told me simply, as though she were discussing the weather, or the war in the Mid-East. “I learned a long time ago not to interfere with the visions I might be blessed with. I'm going to stay with my nephew in San Bernardino next week while I look for the new house. I find a nice little place on the West coast. Green vinyl siding.”
I didn't know what to say. Speaking to precognitives was always eerily confusing. Seers creep-out the rest of us: the Gropers, the Feelers, no one really likes to hear about what was coming. Before I could open my mouth again, Ruby Valli motioned to Hood and Dunnachie by the doorway with Batten. “There's one you need to watch more carefully, dear.”
“What do you mean?” I turned so my hips covered her view and they wouldn't see her talking about them. “Which one? Why?”
“The hunter, of course. I see fire from him. Fire and alcohol, the instruments of the devil. Not to mention dishonesty. He deceives you.” She looked up at me and blinked through her glasses. “Please keep clear of the shop. The bones are cast, but the future is fluid. I'd hate for anyone to get hurt on my account.” Ruby Valli struggled out of the chair to her feet and took two experimental, shuffling steps aside with the help of her cane, leaving me looking at the back of her curly-haired head.
Avoiding the grieving parents and keeping my jacket yanked over the warm, damp coffee stain, I strutted over to where Hood and Dunnachie had been left standing post. I found if I walked quickly and confidently enough, my ankles didn't have time to buckle and I wasn't in as much danger of doing a face-plant. Hood watched me approach with a mix of uncertainty and poorly concealed amusement, his one hand leaving his side in case he had to catch me. Dunnachie's long, morose hawk face was barren of expression.
Hood nodded a hello. “Those shoes are murder on your arches. Better hope you don't have to dash off.”
“I am painfully aware of their limitations,” I assured him, accidentally getting caught in the swampy gaze that was still, I discovered happily, a blend of sympathetic and skeptical. Skeptathetic. Handsome; not in a cocky badass way like Batten, more of a corn-fed, clear-eyed cowboy way. “No Danika Sherlock yet.”
To his partner, Hood said, “Sweeping back entrance again.”
Deputy Dunnachie nodded, ignoring me completely. I followed the path of his gaze, tracing Harry's every elegant move across the room.
I asked Dunnachie, “The beetle bites didn't cause any lasting damage, I hope?”
“If the vampire hadn't been there, there wouldn't have been necrophile beetles in the first place.”
I'd never heard his voice before. He sounded like he'd had a hedgehog squatting in his voice box for the last decade that periodically tried to claw its way out. If he wasn't a whiskey-drinking chain-smoker, I'd eat my frog-print underpants.
“Well, that's debatable. There still would have been a severed head,” I said cautiously. “If that revenant hadn't squished the necrophile beetles, they'd have burrowed into your brain.”
I thought he was going to argue, but he surprised me with, “You have a very quick-thinking monster roommate.”
“Thanks,” I said, before I realized he was being glib. “I should tell you, in case you're wasting effort pursuing this: Harry didn't kill Kristin Davis.”
“Says you.” He didn't turn that long face of his down to look at me.
“Well, yeah.” Clearly, my word wasn't going to carry much water with this particular cop. “If it makes you happy to watch him, go for it. He is fascinating to look at. If you're trying to figure out why, it's the otherworldliness.”
His Adam's apple bobbed; his eyes were flat and unafraid like a well-fed alligator in a Florida gator farm. “Predators often revisit their victims.”
“The hell you say,” I gasped, feigning shock.
Irritation buckled his eyebrows. “This viewing is the perfect place for him to relive his crime.”
“I know all that junk. I work with Supervisory Special Agent Know-it-all,” I said. “But you're wrong about Harry. He had no intention of coming. He's only here to guard me.”
“And why are you here?”
“I'm a suspect?” I laughed, but it quickly died. “The only thing I've ever been accused of killing is a good time and a plate of cookies. The PCU wanted me here. Normally, I'd do the opposite of what everyone wants me to do, but since I have PMS and needed to come out for chocolate anyway, here I am.”
He finally looked down at me. Everything about Neil Dunnachie was sharp and craggy, from his aquiline nose to his high Spock-like eyebrows, to the worn, over-suntanned skin, making him look a lot older than he was. There were faint acne scars pitting his chin. I think that's why he grew a scruff of a goatee over it. A full beard would have worked better. Still, despite the odd angles and worn appearance, or maybe because of them, he was interesting to look at. He had not only a cop's competence and natural resilience, but something deeper, more personal, a bullshit-resistance inside hard eyes that had seen unspeakable things. Not a guy who got rattled easily. I had a feeling that no amount of feminine wiles would sway this man once he set his mind on something, and right now his mind was set on monster equals murder.
He asked me, “You got some place you'd rather be?”
“Chernobyl? A super-max prison yard? Up Shit Creek? Anywhere but here. Being here reminds me of my grandmother's funeral. My father giving me the silent treatment. My mother collapsed in a folding chair. My siblings bickering and being generally stupid. And in the middle of it all, oblivious to his new family, Harry… pale, cold and utterly devastated.” I didn't know why I was bothering to share, but the words came anyway. “Harry hung at my mother's side. I think she was the only one who felt the same degree of pain as he did about Vi's passing. The grandchildren rarely saw her. My father was too self-interested to care. Harry… he seemed lost.”
I remembered my brand new Mary-Janes blistering and rubbing my heel. I remembered watching this stylish creature I'd inherited, wondering what exactly that meant, what he truly was—down to the science, although at the time, science wasn't my strong suit—how this was going to work. I remembered Vi's urn, and trying not to imagine her body being burnt into ashes on a slab…an urn, Harry had explained quietly, because she'd spent enough time in caskets. Her companion's casket, where she spent her days, sleeping curled at his side so they could be awake all night together. I remember thinking I might have to quit school, or take night classes, and would I ever have a job? Get married? Have children? Vi had a child: my mother. Harry was not the father; revenants have dead sperm. So was Harry ok with her sleeping with other men? With my grandfather, Matts? There had been so many questions I hadn't felt comfortable asking, competing for attention with my broken heart.
Dunnachie interrupted my thoughts. “He doesn't seem lost tonight.”
“Well, it's less personal, but he feels their sorrow, their devastation. Harry's an empathic revenant, that's one of his Talents. He's not even attempting to block it the way I am.” I needed another cookie, but the platter had been cleared away. I couldn't even get crumbs. “He's trying to alter the distress he's exposed to, by making the Davis’ feel better. In that way, he's more charitable than I am. I just want to go home and be done with this. I haven't even been able to go meet them yet, to shake their hands and say how sorry I am for their loss.” I rubbed my ungloved hands on my skirt to dry the sweat and left a smudge on the silk. I looked around for Harry. He was standing directly behind me and I jerked guiltily.
“Pardon us, officer.” He pulled me aside. “You are perspiring. Shall I take your coat?” He slid it off my shoulders and I made sure my silk shirt was covering my gun. It didn't cover it well, but no one would notice unless they looked right at my bum. “Agent Batten would like a word, and then I do believe we're taking our leave.�
�
“Thank the Lady,” I whispered. “I feel like we've been here all night. You know, Ruby Valli didn't want to talk to me. She didn't want me coming to her store, either.”
“Chances are, at her age, she does not have the energy for the pandemonium your company guarantees.” He looked like he completely understood; I elbowed him.
“She also said her store was going to burn down.”
Harry breathed a soft laugh out of his nose. “Seers make announcements. ‘Tis their only charge in life. Were she always right, she would be holding grand seminars like Ville Aaman, not turning tarot cards and selling tumbled stones in a magic shop.”
Batten's voice was a harsh hiss at the back of my head. “Are you wearing a fucking gun?”
I jumped guiltily again, set my lips in a line and craned over my shoulder. “Why are you looking at my butt?”
“You'll pass it to me, nice and slow,” he told me. “Then go make your condolences and go home.”
I took exception to the word “home”, like it was our place, not mine. I also took exception to relinquishing the only thing that was giving me a measure of confidence.
“No,” I shushed. “I've learned my lesson. My life sucks so bad that I need to be constantly armed. That's just a fact. I'm over it. I suggest you get over it, too. My gun doesn't leave my hip.”
“That's the dumbest thing I've heard you say,” Batten said low. “Give me the damn thing before you shoot yourself in the ass.”
“If you had allowed MJ a gun in Buffalo, she may not have been placed in such peril, may not in fact have been wounded at all,” Harry spoke up. The icy shadow of his body close to mine was familiar and comforting, but as Batten stepped closer on the other side of me, I could feel the impatient huff of steamy air as Mark took a deep breath and exhaled angrily. I was a hot-and-cold sandwich.
“You could have come to Buffalo,” Batten reminded Harry. “You chose to stay in Portland. It may have helped to have you there.”
Harry stiffened. Batten had finally found the thorn in his side.
“Buffalo. The Armpit of America. Too right, I could have prevented much had I been there. A pity.” After a meaningful glare, he stalked away. Batten watched him go with new interest.
“I hit a nerve with Tall, Limp and Pasty?”
“Don't call him that.” I floundered. “He's not tall.” And he's not always limp.
“All right,” Batten agreed, sliding his hand to my hip, taking the gun. His lake-bottom blue eyes dared me to argue as he tucked my gun somewhere behind him. “Does Lord Fancy Pants have a problem with Buffalo?”
“Specifically with Cheektowaga,” I said pointedly.
Batten's voice was a low growl. “I'm fond of Cheektowaga. Had the best twenty minutes of my life there.”
“Twenty minutes?” To avoid blushing hard, I performed a text-book emotional door slam. “More like five.”
“Harsh.”
“Honest.” I straightened my shirt, watching Mr. Davis walking out with some relatives, leaving his wife alone, forlorn in her chair. “You'd be wise to never mention Buffalo again. Harry knows damn well that he could have sheltered us from the mindfuck in the alley. He shoulders half the blame for the shooting.”
“And the other half of the blame?”
“You, jaggoff.”
Batten accepted this silently, as if he agreed. “You're not to blame for any of it?”
“Not in his books.”
“Why not?”
I watched as Harry noticed Mrs. Davis sitting alone, and move to fill the void. He bent slightly at the waist, made soft and comforting small talk with Mrs. Davis beside the casket, holding my leather jacket draped over one of his arm like a sommelier with wine and a napkin. She gazed up at him from her wheelchair with naked appreciation, tears glistening, one hand hovering protectively near her heart.
“Harry expects me to make bad choices,” I said finally.
Batten was opening his mouth, maybe to agree, when the closed lid of the casket blew open. In a sawdust cyclone of reaching, rotted arms, metal hinges cartwheeled through the air, screws clattered into the walls, wood shattered, shards spinning. A patchwork creature wrenched up out of her satin bedding and keened, her agonized tongue lolling in the air.
Harry sidestepped across the floor in a whirl of coat, putting himself in the line of sight between the casket and the grieving mother. He was too late. Mrs. Davis had seen, in violent Technicolor, the thing that used to be Kristin with her butter-yellow funeral dress clinging wetly to putrid skin.
Mrs. Davis rocketed backward, her wheelchair hitting the wall with a thud as the crowd's screaming chorus drowned out her shocked objection. Her dead daughter threw her stitched-up chin back and wailed. Mrs. Davis' horrific shrill rose to an octave only me and dogs could hear.
Dead Kristin's head whipped around.
OK: me, dogs and ghouls.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Nothing I had ever seen in textbooks or online could have prepared me for the grotesquely rotted horror of Kristin Davis’ ghoul scuttling on the Berber carpet. Her skinless fingers coated in the slime of rapid decay. Too rapid, my brain noted, just before she looked up at Harry with eyelids sewn shut and my mental processes screamed to a halt, leaving all notion of sane thought behind in its wake.
Harry stared unblinking at her lids, achieving a sphinx-like stillness. The ghoul scrambled to snatch at my jacket in Harry's arms. Harry never flinched. He relinquished to the ghoul my leather jacket, melting slightly from solid statue to liquid motion, backing away with cat-like fluidity.
I vaguely heard Chapel ordering, “Get these people out, get the family out!”.
Dunnachie and Hood became heavily armed sheep dogs, their barking full of authority, their big arms ushering toward safety as the Big Bad Wolf keened, a ragingly terrible sound, as she stood knocked-kneed, rolling her head, tongue ululating.
Two things happened abruptly at once. Batten holstered his gun and took off from where he'd fallen to one knee, bolting like an Olympic sprinter for the rear exit. I hoped to get his kit. At the same time, a shoving, sobbing stampede crushed out the front doors, leaving only the group of us squaring off against the fetid monster, and Mrs. Davis mindlessly moaning in her chair, waving her pointer finger, lost without sensible words. No one had thought to wheel the grieving mother out.
Impossible. This wasn't happening. Kristin was dead, yes, but she had been embalmed and tidy, her body stitched up carefully, intact and pristine in her brand new, first time off the lot casket.
With difficulty, the ghoul forced open her sutured eyelids to reveal yawning holes full of brown-stained cotton between thick threads. She roared with frustration as the threads pulled at her flesh then ripped. She eagerly tore my jacket apart, seams flaying. Small polished gemstones thudded with my lip gloss, my pink Moleskine mini and emergency condom in a rain of personality on the carpet. A little plastic Ziploc bag with the ruined newt eye fell with a plop to the floor.
The ghoul dug frantically at the bag like a puppy at a burrow until the plastic split. She snatched up the eye, really just a stringy, pinkish filament of sclera now, and, pulling out the cotton in her sockets, pressed it there into her useless, gaping hole.
Okay, not a newt eye. I had a brief image of the ghoul digging at my entrails the way she'd dug open the Ziploc. Saw stars in the swirling black of my head, felt like I was pitching backward. Nope, blacking out now would be bad.
Mrs. Davis was chanting, “She had Krissie's eye, she had Krissie's eye!!” over and over in revulsion from behind her hands.
“I didn't know,” I said, mostly to myself.
I drew fierce focus on the perfectly smooth oblong stone by the ghoul's foot, red jasper. My head cleared. Dead Kristin was wearing patent leather flats, now dotted with gobs of meat. I dragged my gaze away from them and back to the red jasper. If only I could get to it, without getting close to it… her? I didn't know what to call her anymore. This was not Kristin Davis, and y
et it was. I had no doubt that the young girl's spirit was trapped inside it.
I heard wheezing sounds coming out of my mouth, heard words forming. Incredibly, I was making sense.
“She shouldn't be rotting, why is she rotting?” No one needed to hear that now, but I couldn't stop myself saying it. “Why is she rotting so fast?” I had a light bulb moment, a rare 100 watt one. “Exothermic reaction. Heat. Flesh magic.” And then, as all the hair on my scalp pricked straight up. “Demon.”
“What is that thing?” Batten demanded behind me, throwing his kit open in a clatter on the floor. Green bottles of Brut cologne and holy water jostled with silver chains that caught the overhead lights. “Marnie, what is it? A zombie?”
The ghoul withdrew its soiled fingers from the muck of her face and bayed in seeming pain. Paralyzed now, I could only stare, pulling with my lungs but getting no air. Something else was stirring, just beneath the surface of reality. An awful perfume worse than death, black magic encountering and bruising the underside of my own grey power. The ghoul felt it too, and knew its source.
Dead Kristin's head wobbled atop a ruined spine as it creaked in my direction, held upright only by infernal magic, vertebrae grinding audibly.
Batten barked, “Marnie, get out!” but Harry was already moving toward me, pointing at the front door commandingly.
“Harry, get Mrs. Davis!” I ordered. As Harry came away from her, Mrs. Davis lost it. She wailed hysterically,
“My baby. My baby! Get away from my baby you monsters!” reaching, grabbing Kristin's elbow.
The skin sloughed off in her hand in a long wet sheet. Mrs. Davis’ gurgling scream raised my hackles. The ghoul took two more loping strides toward me and I shouted:
“…Carna come unlock the door/Remove the boundaries I implore!”
When it happened, I felt it: blinking disappearance, sudden incorporeal lift, flinging bodily through the sludge of limbo-space, appearing in a windless shock in the opposite corner. I didn't look to see how my little jump had affected anyone but the ghoul. She stopped, trained in on me again, lifted those melting lips off her teeth and snarled frustration.