Dead Things

by Stephen Blackmoore

  “That’s the preferred method,” he says. “Though I know one guy who likes it in an enema.”

  I decide not to tell him that he’s basically bottling demon piss. Probably already knows. I start to hand the vial back.

  “No, keep it. I got lots.”

  I don’t know if I want it, but I don’t want to be an asshole and turn him down, either. I slip it into my coat pocket.

  “Thanks. I think.”

  “Anyway, that’s me,” he says. “What about you?”

  “Hanging out with dead folk,” I say. I take a drink of my whisky. The silence drags between us.

  “That’s it?” he says. “Come on, Eric. Fifteen years. There’s got to be more than that. What are you doing for a living? Where are you living? At least give me some highlights.”

  “Highlights. Right. Traveling a lot. Studying. Spent some time in Europe, South America.”

  “I heard some things,” he says.

  “Were they good?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then they’re probably true. I’m an exterminator. Ghosts, demons, gremlins. I kill shit for a living. That about sums it up.”

  I down the rest of my whisky. There’s that silence again. I’m not asking what needs asking and I don’t get the idea that Alex much wants to talk about it either.

  “Hey, I wanted to say something,” he says after a moment. “Vivian—”

  “What happened to Lucy?” I say, cutting him off before he can say anything more. I don’t want to talk about my dead sister, but I really don’t want to talk about my ex-girlfriend.

  He looks past me like he’s thinking hard about something, taps his fingers on the desk. He leans heavily back into his chair, puffs out his cheeks and lets out a long breath. Punches a button on the intercom. A minute later Tabitha pokes her head in.

  “Could you grab us a bottle of the Balvenie ’78 and a couple glasses?” He looks at me. “This might take a while.”

  —

  I’m getting drunk on someone else’s booze, reminiscing about things I wasn’t around for. I feel like I’m at the wake for a woman I’ve never met.

  Three hours in and I’ve learned a lot. Lucy never married. Lucy never had kids. Turned out she was gay, but didn’t figure it out until a few years ago. Never found that special someone.

  Instead she had an inheritance that, as far as anyone was concerned, came from a dead uncle in Denmark, a house on the Venice canals, and an eye for design that the hipsters would shell out wads of cash for.

  When I skipped town she already had a bulletproof identity of Lucy Van Pelt. She picked the last name when she was five. She loved Peanuts.

  Alex kept an eye on her when he could. Tried to keep her from getting into too much trouble. Bailed her out when she needed it, talked over boys, then girls, then what to do with either one. Watched her graduate, nagged her until she picked a college, helped her move. He was big brother, mom and dad rolled into one.

  It’s hard to hear as he rattles off the last fifteen years of her life, but I make myself listen. I’ve missed so much. The scotch helps. I’m on my third glass.

  “And she stayed away from the magic?”

  He shrugs. “Mostly. I had to get on her case a couple of times. The whole ‘scared straight’ thing. I mean, I don’t have a lot of power, but her, Jesus.”

  He takes a slug from his glass. His words have been slurring the past half hour. “But she still fucked around with it,” he says. “I don’t know what it was with her and fixing a coin toss. But the day she got that down, man, I’d never seen her so happy.”

  “Coin toss.”

  “Yeah. Every time I saw her she’d make me flip this silver half dollar a couple hundred times. She ever do that with you?”

  “Yeah,” I say, thinking about the months we spent trying to get that down. Remember the half dollar, a silver Franklin from the forties I bought her at a pawn shop. “Couple of times.”

  “I think it got to her,” he says. “You know how it is. Once you get that one spell down? How you keep trying for more? She tried to hide it, but I know she was doing it. I mean, we all do, right?”

  “You think she fucked something up?” I say. “Maybe a botched summoning?” I’ve seen it happen before. Hell, I’ve done it before. You think you’re pulling down an imp to help you pick Lotto numbers and instead you get some pissed off thing that’s all teeth and shadow and appetite.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It would explain how she was … you know.” He closes his eyes. Is he—? He is. He’s crying.

  He’s crying and I can’t wrap my mind around it. I can’t begin to imagine what he’s feeling, what I would be feeling if I’d stuck around.

  The room suddenly feels claustrophobic. I lurch out of my chair, unsteady from the alcohol. I have to get out of here.

  Everything spins around in my head like a greased roulette wheel. Guilt, grief, too much alcohol, not enough sleep. Finally settles on something I can understand: rage.

  “What’s her address?”

  “I know that look,” Alex says. “You’re about to do something stupid. Don’t do that, man. I can barely handle this stoic routine you’re pulling, but I can’t handle The Angry Young Man thing. It didn’t work for you when you were one.”

  “What’s her fucking address?”

  “Jesus, Eric. What do you expect to accomplish? I’ve had ten guys cast divinations and not a one of them can see a goddamn thing in there. It’s like there’s a fuzz over what happened.”

  “Who’d you get?”

  “Nobody you know.”

  “What about the Nazi? He still in town?”

  “Neumann? Dude, he’s dead. Something ate him like six months ago. And why would I? Guy was an asshole.”

  “Anybody else do dead?” He was the only other necromancer I knew in town when I was here. Alex is right, though. Guy was an asshole. If something ate him, the fucker deserved it.

  “There’s a guy up in Fresno, but he never called me back.”

  Of course there isn’t anyone else in town who does dead. Sure, you’ve got a bunch of hack spiritualists that can channel your passed on grandmother, but real necromancy isn’t something people want to fuck around with unless you’re born to it. Folks buy into that whole “black magic” bullshit or faint at the sight of blood, or have a problem with the whole death thing. Some of us don’t get a goddamn choice.

  “Everything you’ve done so far is as good as a fucking Ouija board,” I say. I head to the door, anger and purpose clearing my head.

  “Fuck you,” Alex says. “I did what I could. Where the fuck were you? I—” He stops, closes his eyes. “I’m sorry. I just—I know she was your sister, but it feels like she was mine, too.”

  I feel hollowed out, numb. Maybe the alcohol’s blunting my feelings. Maybe I just don’t have them, anymore. He’s got more right to call her his sister than I do. He was here; I wasn’t.

  “No, you’re right,” I say. “But I have to do something. And I can do something you can’t. If I want to find out what happened to Lucy, I need to ask Lucy.”

  Chapter 5

  The Venice canals crisscross through land that used to be a swamp. Guy named Abbot Kinney built them at the end of the 19th century as part of a beach resort, hoping to get tourists to come out and spend their money. The area’s changed but the canals are still there. Thin islands connected by bridges, hidden from the traffic just on the other side of Washington Boulevard. If you don’t know they’re there, you might not find them.

  Lucy’s house is a narrow two-story built in the eighties with a palm tree out front. Faces the Howland Canal. Curved façade, wide, high windows tinted almost black. The only sound is the wind whipping the water against the canal walls, the nearby traffic on Washington Boulevard.

  There’s a handful of Wanderers in the area; their flickering images flit along the canals, glowing in the light from the streetlamps, the low hanging moon. Gangbangers, mostly. In the nineties the Shorelin
e Crips and Venice 13 were going at it like cats in a bag. The bodies stacked up. The ghosts never left.

  The front door is still covered in police tape. I take a deep breath, steel myself for whatever it is I’m going to find. I touch the doorknob, trace a charm with my thumb, and the lock snaps open. I try a light switch next to the door. The power’s been cut off. Simple enough. I call up a torchlight, an indistinct glow that hovers behind me and slightly to my right. It’s plenty of light to see by, but not so bright that it should get any of the neighbors’ attention.

  Inside is a designer’s dream. Modern art on the walls, vaulted ceilings, colors that should clash but miraculously don’t. Alex was right. She had a good eye for this kind of thing.

  The foyer gives way to a hall, which goes to a living room. I can feel her here, faint, but she’s here. In what condition I don’t know. If I’m lucky she left a Haunt or a Wanderer and I’ll get my answers.

  Not too much time has gone by. She should still have most of her memories. Ghosts fade at different rates. Some might last a week, some might last a thousand years. With luck she’ll be able to tell me what killed her. And then I can go kill it.

  I walk around the living room, looking at the photos on the wall. The kind of vacation snapshots professional photographers take. Were these her friends? Models? There’s so much I don’t know. So much I never will.

  I move on through the house, feeling for her. So faint. Through another hallway that opens to a den in the back. I stop at a spray of dried blood soaked into the edge of the carpet.

  I crank up my torchlight and bring the whole room in view. The carpet is a brilliant white and the crusted blood soaked into it is so dark it’s almost black. The shag has dried into spikes that crunch under my feet as I step on it. The walls are a Pollock painting of blood spatter. Thick streaks run across the floor, slide along the walls.

  Shattered glass coffee table, an overturned couch, both scrawled with bloody handprints, thin lines running from fingers as she was dragged across them. The fireplace is spattered with thick drops of spray. One window is broken, and is covered with a board.

  Every surface is covered in blood. Except for one wall. Wide arcs have been wiped off of it, as if the killer tried to clean up before finally realizing there was no point.

  Just because she’s here doesn’t mean she wants to come out. Or can come out. I could force the issue, but it feels somehow wrong. Sometimes it’s better to be patient.

  I find a relatively clean spot on the floor and sit down cross-legged. Take off my coat, roll up my sleeves. Soon there’s no sound but my breathing and the ticking of my pocket watch. Half an hour goes by. An hour.

  And then I hear it. Sound flitting in and out. Phantom noises. Keys on a table, a purse being set next to it. My heart sinks. I know what those little sounds mean, those tiny audio snapshots of her last day on earth. I stand up and get ready for it.

  It’s showtime, folks.

  Lucy appears at the door to the den, her long, flowing hair dyed black from the mousy brown it was when I saw her last. Workout clothes. Just got home from the gym.

  She stutters across the room, like a badly remembered dream. No idea I’m here.

  Because she’s just an Echo. A recording of her last moments. There’s no consciousness there, no construct of memory I can talk to. All I can do is watch.

  She’s in full color because she’s still new. She’ll probably fade in a couple more weeks to a muddy gray and then disappear entirely in a few months. Echoes rarely last very long.

  I stand and follow as she paces the room. She picks up a shadowy item that I think is a TV remote. It fades into view as she gets near it, incorporating it into her image. She puts it down and it fades away. She’s not expecting trouble. Especially not in her own home. She has no idea what’s about to hit her.

  It’s sad and disgusting and I wish I wasn’t who I was, couldn’t see what I can see, didn’t know that this shit was real. Because the last minutes of my sister’s life are about to play out tonight. She’ll do it tomorrow night, and the next night. And the next, and the next, and the next. One long memento mori.

  And all I can do is sit here and watch.

  She spins toward the boarded up windows, shielding her face with an arm as something crashes through the window. I see hints of glass as they come near. Sound is the first thing to go with an Echo, and I can barely hear her scream.

  Her killer fades in as shadowy as the TV remote had a minute before. It’s a man, definitely. Or man-shaped, with a man’s build. Lot of things look like that and not all of them are human.

  From the entrance through the window the summoning gone bad theory is losing ground. For a second I hope I can catch his face, but I know I won’t. This is all her show and all I’m going to see clearly is her and whatever she leaves behind. Like all that blood.

  She turns to run, but the killer grabs her from behind. The sounds of her struggle, of her being slammed into the wall, thrown into the glass coffee table are getting louder, more intense. She tries to stand, the wind knocked out of her, her hands badly sliced and dripping blood. Before she can get her feet under her she’s being strangled again. The killer slams her hard against the wall. Two, three, four times.

  Her attacker’s not unusually tall. Can’t be more than six feet. But he’s incredibly strong. His hands go round her throat, choking her as he beats her to death with her own house. He throws her like a rag doll onto the couch, knocking it over. I know no one else can hear the commotion, but I check the door anyway. To me it sounds like a cage match between rabid wolves.

  A wound opens in her gut, though I can barely see the knife. It tears and drags through her flesh while she flails against him.

  I get up and cross the room to get a better look, fight my instincts to try to save her. I shut down every emotion I can. I have to pay attention. Now’s not the time to give in to grief and anger. I stand where he would be, examine the wounds as they open up. I somehow keep from vomiting. Phantom blood sprays through me leaving cold trails that linger in my chest.

  She gives a sudden jerk, bucks against the wall. By this time she’s got no air left and her screams fall silent. She’s gasping like a fish on land. Her attacker throws her against the other wall with more power than anyone normal would have. Leaving a dent in the drywall I hadn’t noticed before.

  Lucy jerks again as he grabs her and reams out one of her eyes with a finger. I force myself to watch. Been doing this my whole life and I’ve seen worse. But this is different. There’s nothing I can do but hope the scene drops some clue, gives me some opening to find this fucker and make him pay.

  He continues to brutalize her. Breaks her legs, her arms. She’s got no fight left in her, but at this point she was still alive. He tears into her flesh, ripping off chunks of her scalp. Her jaw’s got to be broken in at least three places. He’s making a point of torturing her. Why do that?

  He picks her up again, jerking through the air, a blood-soaked Raggedy Ann with the stuffing pulled out. Still alive, but barely. He shoves her against the wall he cleaned afterward. Grabs one of her broken hands, smears it in her blood, slams it against the wall, scrapes it along like a paintbrush. He starts writing.

  Was there writing there when the police came? There couldn’t have been. They would never have wiped it off. It would be evidence.

  I watch the words appear, watch him punctuate his message by slamming Lucy’s head against the wall, leaving a blotchy, red period. My rage at what he’s done turns into a spike of ice running through me. The room spins, my knees turn to water. This can’t be happening.

  It’s a message the killer never intended for the police to find. He wiped it out after writing it, leaving it behind in a way they couldn’t have possibly seen it.

  He left the message for the only person who would read it. The only one who could.

  WELCOME HOME, ERIC.

  He left it for me.

  Chapter 6

  I spend the next
half hour throwing up in the kitchen sink. While I was watching, yeah, I needed to stay focused, not let it get to me. But it’s over now and I break down.

  I sit on the floor in the dark, my stomach flipping cartwheels like a gymnast on meth. I tell myself that the tears are just some side effect of all the puking, but I know they’re not. Questions spinning through my head and I can’t focus enough to answer any of them.

  Why did he kill her in the first place? What the hell does this have to do with me? Why did he torture her? I wash my face, rinse out my mouth. Pull it together.

  The first question’s easy. She was bait. Bet that if he did this I’d come running. Whoever did this wanted me back in town. Wanted to get my attention.

  Well, he’s got it. Don’t know why he’s got a hard-on for me, but when I find out who it is I’ll feed him his nutsack and ask him.

  I can’t answer the second question. Not yet. But if I find out the why it might lead me to the who. File that one for later. And then there’s the torture question. What did the killer hope to gain out of that? Maybe he enjoyed doing it but I can’t imagine that was simple sadism. There was a reason for it. Had to be.

  It comes to me as I’m pulling the Caddy away from the curb outside her house. I drive through an Echo in the street. The hastily scribbled wards I drew on the Caddy in black Sharpie shunt it aside, but not before I see a boy in jeans and a black leather jacket get shot in the back of the head.

  Maybe he was in a gang. Maybe he was a bystander. Maybe he was a killer, or a saint, or his mother’s pride and joy. Whatever he was he was just like everyone else in one crucial way. He had a soul.

  When you die it’ll go off to, well, to wherever it’s going to go. Heaven, Hell, Elysium, Valhalla. Depends on what you believe, how strongly you believe it, whether you’ve pissed anything off big enough to take an interest.

  Sometimes souls stick around a while. You get Haunts and Wanderers. But ghosts don’t just happen. Your Uncle Billy’s not leaving a spook behind just because he stroked out during Thanksgiving dinner.