It takes trauma: physical, emotional. The more violent the death the more likely you’ll leave something behind. Gunshot wounds, car accidents, burn victims. Suicides, broken hearts.
I have no idea why, and haven’t met anyone who’s ever had an answer. But the kind of ghost you get is a different matter. That comes down to will. Haunts don’t have enough will to leave the place they died. Wanderers have it to spare.
Drag the dying out and all that willpower drains away. The soul goes on, but there’s nothing left behind but a big old ball of trauma. All you’re getting is an Echo.
That’s why he tortured her. Lucy’s killer knew what he was doing. He wanted to make sure that’s what he left behind, not only so I’d see the message, but so I wouldn’t be able to ask her any questions.
But there are a lot of dead people I can ask.
—
I pull the Caddy into the motel’s parking lot, next to a beat up Volkswagen bus and a mid-80’s Volvo covered in gang tags. I dig around in the Caddy’s trunk for a minute and grab all the things I’ll need, then check that the wards I put on it haven’t faded.
When I get in the room I lock the door, push all of the furniture in the room as close to the edges as I can. I pour a circle of salt about five feet wide in the center of the room, place red glass grave candles at the cardinal points. Another circle of the last of the powder I used in Texas goes inside. I strip to the waist and touch up some of my tattoos with a black Sharpie. I lay out my straight razor, an antique silver soap dish to catch the blood. I do some stretches. I’ll be sitting cross-legged inside the circle. I’m going to be there for a while and I don’t need a cramp.
Some of this shit’s just pomp and circumstance. Some of it’s a focus for me. Some of it’s running on ancient laws that were laid down before men knew how to talk. I have no idea which is which, so it pays to follow the rules. Finally everything’s ready.
With a single wave and a whispered spell I light the candles, blow away the sunflower seeds and strips of palindrome-inscribed Post-it notes from the room’s threshold. The wards I set up on the room blow away like sand.
I can feel the ghosts taking notice. They can smell me. The ones who haven’t figured out I’m here yet are going to in a minute.
I hate this part. When Odysseus called forth the shade of Tiresias he bled a ram and fed the dead prophet its blood. You ever try to get hold of a goat after midnight in L.A.? Sure, maybe in Hollywood, but I’m not up for trawling through Craigslist ads.
I flip open the straight razor, press the tip of the blade against the scar-marked patch on my forearm, slice fast and deep, send out a mental invitation. Deep red blood hits the silver cup and the room lights up like Christmas. Standing room only in two seconds flat. Sound like a jet engine that only I can hear.
Wanderers from miles around burst into the room, eyeing the cup, licking their lips. A seething mass of stab wounds, suicides, bullet holes. Forty or fifty of them, it seems like. Hard to tell with them all crammed into the room, flowing in and out of each other in a blur of limbs and faces.
They yammer for a taste of the blood, for a lick of life. Please, please, please. Some tiny reminder of what it’s like to be breathing. Pathetic faces stare at me like the orphans in Oliver Twist.
It’s easy to forget how dangerous they are. Seeing them is one thing, but this is different. I’ve thinned out the barrier between worlds. Given half the chance, they’d eat me.
It’s not the blood they want, it’s the life in it. They’ll suck it dry if I let them. The silver dish is a focus to keep their attention. If they noticed it was my blood they’d be on me like a Sunday pack of church folk at a HomeTown Buffet.
The tattoos help divert their attention, and they can’t cross the circle of salt and graveyard dirt I’ve poured onto the carpet unless I let them, but it doesn’t mean some of them won’t try.
“Here’s the deal,” I say. “You want a taste, I want answers.”
The noise increases. Too many voices, too many sounds. They’re all shouting random shit like the audience of a game show, hoping they’ve got what I’m looking for, answering questions that haven’t been asked.
I start by culling the herd. I put my hands together in front of my like I’m praying, focus my will to weed out the dead. First, let’s see who’s been in Venice in the last month. The crowd parts in front of me like flesh under a scalpel as I separate my hands. Still too many. I split and shuffle, rearranging the dead like packs of cards.
I concentrate on the Canals, the day she died, the week before, the week after. Two weeks, two months. The long-gone, the newly dead. Every shuffle refines it down to the ones with enough awareness of the outside world that they can actually watch it.
I’m one of the few living pretty much all of the dead can see. For good or ill I’ve made myself known to them enough times that it’s stuck. Most of them have no clue there’s even another side. I split the group further to match my needs, pulling some back, pushing others away. They don’t like it, but fuck ’em.
Each time I ask my questions. What did they see? Who was there? Describe the place, the people. I scatter a few drops of blood into the crowd as payment whether or not I like the answers. I don’t.
Five hours into it, the parade of dead an incomprehensible blur, I get a hit. Barely more than a kid. Mid-1920’s, maybe. Slicked-back hair, smart suit with cravat, straw boater on his head. Half of one, at least. The rest looks like it went the way of most of his skull. He’s missing the left side of his face. Gunshot, sledgehammer, who knows. He probably doesn’t remember himself.
“A man,” he whispers. “Dressed in rags. He was there that night. I saw him crash through the window. I heard screams.”
I’ve heard a dozen stories so far, most of them vague hints at events that were either too late, too early or never happened. The dead don’t lie very often, but their memory’s for shit. So far none of them knew anything about the window.
“How tall was he?”
He looks me up and down. “Tall, but not overly so. Thinner than you.” He looks around the room. Points at a ghost near the bathroom. “His height.” From what I recall of the gray blur I watched kill Lucy, I’d say he’s two for two.
“Did you see it happen?”
He shakes his head. “Only the end. He wrote something on the wall. He used her body as a brush. Are you Eric?”
Bingo.
I drag a description out of him that narrows it down to about fifty thousand medium build, black haired, men. Maybe Latino, maybe Hawaiian. Dressing like a homeless guy might or might not help, but I’m not going to bet on it. He didn’t have anything with him. No backpack, shopping cart, suitcase. Nothing.
“There was something about him that frightened me,” the ghost says. “He glowed with a white fire. He felt dead, but he wasn’t. And he had black eyes. I’d never seen that before.”
“Black eyes? Like he’d been punched?”
“No. Like he had no eyes. Black pits. Nothing more.”
I can think of a dozen different things that look like men and don’t have eyes. But most of them aren’t urban. And what’s with that white fire?
“How long you been around?”
He shrugs. “Long enough.”
“You got a name?”
“Herbert, I think, but I’m not sure.”
“You’re a lot more put together than most,” I say.
He laughs with a sound like leaves on the wind, points at his head. “That’s one I’ve never heard before.”
The candles are almost burned out, the sun is peeking through the blinds. I could go on another five hours and not get anything else. Time to wrap it up. I’ve been steadily dripping blood into the cup all night. A drop here, a drop there. It adds up after a while. I’m feeling a little woozy. I’m going to need a steak after this.
I squeeze a few more drops from my forearm into the cup, push it out of the circle with the tip of my straight razor. It breaks the salt line,
but that’s just a marker for the border. The magic is what’s holding the circle together.
I don’t let any part of me cross it, though. Herbert looks like a decent sort, but I don’t doubt he, or the rest of them, would jump on me the second I crossed that line and drain me dry.
“Thanks for the information, Herbert,” I say. “Here you go.”
He doesn’t look at the blood. He’s got a lot of self-control. Damn few ghosts would wait. “What’s your surname if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Carter.”
“You’re welcome, Mister Carter. I hope you find what you’re looking for.” He reaches down to the cup, dips his fingers into it. The cup clatters as he pulls the life out of the fresh blood. He’s neater than most, too.
He seems to get more solid for a moment, then fades back to transparency. “Good night, Mister Carter,” he says.
“Good night, Herbert. See ya around.” I watch Herbert step through the wall and disappear. The rest of the assembled dead look on, envious.
“As for the rest of you freeloaders,” I say, “beat it.” A few hastily scramble away, but some of the others, more hopeful or more stupid, don’t get the message.
“I said fuck off.” I clap my hands together and they make a sound that ripples through the room like thunder, breaking the ghosts into shards that fade away like smoke. I know more than I did earlier, but not enough to make a damn bit of difference.
Chapter 7
I manage to pull out a few hours of fitful sleep. My dreams are full of bloody writing and broken bones. Lucy asking me over and over why I left and didn’t come back. Blaming me for all of it. Her body shattering like glass.
Before I can say anything I wake up in a clammy sweat, shaking. It doesn’t matter. I didn’t have an answer, anyway.
I take a tepid shower in a scummy bathtub with no water pressure. It helps some, but not enough. I need to do something. I need to move. I doubt digging through the dead is going to get me any further that it did last night. I should talk to Alex, but I don’t want to. He’ll ask me what I found out, and for some reason I’m not entirely clear on I don’t want to talk to him about this just yet. I need to get my head straight. I’m running on too little sleep and too much punishment. My bruises are throbbing. My legs scream when I get up from bed. Sitting cross-legged for five hours takes a toll. My body’s getting tired of paying it.
I decide to take a drive, see if maybe that will jar something loose. I hop onto the 10, take the 110 through Downtown, cross over to the 5. Breakfast is a drive-thru burger joint on Los Feliz.
I take my grease bomb and fries over to Griffith Park and head over to Travel Town. Built in the fifties, Travel Town is an open-air train museum at the edge of Griffith Park. Locomotives and passenger cars from all across the nation ended up here. Heavy iron and history.
I eat my burger on the edge of an Oahu Railway passenger car from 1910, the wind whipping at the trees. The Santa Ana winds that were only beginning to gust the other day when I was in Koreatown have picked up speed.
I used to come out here a lot as a kid. Lucy and I would climb across the train engines, hang from the pipes and handholds. I can’t help but find trains soothing. After a night dealing with the dead I want to surround myself with solidity, sturdiness. Fifty tons of steel and iron fits the bill.
Besides a few Wanderers and a couple of faded Haunts tied to the boxcars I’ve got the park to myself. No one wants to be out here when the winds blow this hard. Rain threatens on the horizon in banks of crystal-white clouds shot through with streaks of dull gray. Waiting for that moment when the Santa Anas let up long enough that the clouds can swoop in and cause panic in the streets with nothing more than a light drizzle.
From the feel of the air that’s not going to happen soon. It’s too dry, too crisp. Red flag warnings will be up any day now in hopes that people will actually pay attention and not start a brush fire with a stray cigarette.
It takes me a long time to realize that I’m not really here for the trains, revisiting my childhood or anything like that. Comforting though it is, this is a rest stop. A place for me to pull up my big boy pants and go somewhere I’ve been dreading since I got Alex’s phone call.
Forest Lawn cemetery is right next door.
I know she’s dead. I watched it last night. That’s more real than any funeral or viewing or obituary listing can be. But I need to see her grave, anyway.
I don’t know why, exactly. It doesn’t make sense. She’s just ashes in an urn. Chunks of carbon ground down in a cremulator.
There’s really no point in putting this off any longer. I ball up the burger wrapper and toss it into a trash can, pass by the ghosts on my way to hang out with corpses.
The clerk at the cemetery office, a large black woman dressed in purple and black, horn-rimmed glasses perched on her nose, sells me a bouquet of chrysanthemums when I stop in to ask for directions.
I don’t know why I buy them. It’s not like the bodies care. Memories come flooding back as I drive past grave markers, the occasional mourner. I stop across from a funeral in progress, family and friends huddled under a large tent, copper casket waiting to be lowered into the ground.
The last time I was here was for my parents’ funeral. We had no casket. There hadn’t been enough of them left to bury. Cremation was almost redundant. We stood outside the Court of Remembrance, an open-air columbarium alongside movie stars and the not so famous but plenty loaded.
Nobody teaches kids how to mourn. Everything churns together and you don’t know which way is up. Sadness and anger and regret all ball up together in knots. That night I should have been there for Lucy. I should have taken care of her and protected her and sat with her while she cried for our parents. I should have been her older brother, the grown-up, the strong one.
Instead, I lost my mind.
I hunted down the man who’d killed them. Jean Boudreau. Hadn’t a hope in hell that I’d be able to do it, but I did it anyway. It was stupid. Would have been better if I’d failed. Even better if I hadn’t tried it in the first place.
I walk along the rows of interred ashes. A slot in the columbarium isn’t cheap. I’ll have to find out from Alex how much it cost so I can pay him back.
Carl and Diane Carter are in the north wing, third row from the bottom. Lucy is next to them. Even in death she kept the cartoon last name. I don’t know why it surprises me, but it does. It was hers, after all. She picked it.
I trace the letters on the plaque with my finger, feeling the weight of reality crashing down on me. Last night I could almost pretend that I was seeing someone else, or that it was distant, like watching it on television. But this is real, solid. A tangible reminder that she’s really gone.
I put the chrysanthemums in the holder hanging next to her plaque. They smell wrong. Like roses. And smoke.
“I grieve for you, Eric Carter.”
I spin around, call flames to my hand ready to let them fly. If my world were normal I’d think it was a tasteless if elaborate joke. Somebody stuck a skeleton in a wedding dress and plopped it behind me when I wasn’t looking.
The bones are bleached white, the eye sockets pitch black. The wedding dress is clean, if a bit tattered. She holds a scythe in one hand, a small globe in the other. Roses are braided in the veil pulled away from her face and along the sleeves and folds of her dress.
The last time I felt a presence like hers was in Carlsbad. She has the feel of one of the heavy hitters, like Baron Samedi, or Maman Brigitte. Not quite a goddess, but close enough as to not make a difference.
I’ve never met her in person, but I’ve heard of her. You don’t run in the circles I do and not hear about the Narco Queen herself.
I remember passing her shrines on my way through the desert. Remember thinking one of them had turned to follow me with its gaze as I drove past. Didn’t know she knew me. That can’t be a good thing.
“Thank you, Señora de las Sombras,” I say, bowing my head, lettin
g the flames die around my fist. I have a general rule about showing respect around avatars of death.
She has a lot of names. Señora Blanca, Señora Negra, La Flaca and, it’s rumored, Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec goddess who watches over the bones of the dead in Mictlan. Mostly, though, she goes by Santa Muerte, patron saint of drug runners, murderers and thieves. Her cult numbers a couple million at last count.
I’m not talking the typical Día De Los Muertos crowd. These aren’t your Hot Topic goths and mariachi bands in white makeup who come out once a year to put out ofrendas and calavera catrinas. They’re not even in the same ballpark.
The Mexican drug cartels routinely lop off the heads of their enemies and burn them as offerings to her. Saint Death. The only goddess who always keeps her promise. She’s very popular on the other side of the border, particularly in places like Juarez where the homicide count is astronomical. Not so much up here, but that’s changing fast.
She reaches out her hand and the scythe she’s holding turns to dust to blow away on the wind. “Walk with me,” she says. Her voice is smoky like Lauren Bacall after three packs of Camels, her accent generically South American. “Take my hand. We have much to discuss.”
That’s where I draw the line. “I’ll walk with you, Señora,” I say, “but we both know the power of a touch.”
She nods her head. “Agreed,” she says, a hint of amusement in her voice. I think. The thing I hate most about skeletons is you can never tell when they’re smiling.
I follow her as she glides along the pathway between the walls of interred ashes then out onto the manicured grass and rows of grave markers. Though the wind is whipping at my tie and jacket, it leaves her untouched.
“Do you know what my supplicants ask of me most often?” she says, breaking the silence.
“Can’t say as I do.”
She’s got some angle. All these fuckers do. Gods, goddesses, nature spirits. She wouldn’t have appeared to me if she didn’t want something. The question is, what?
“That their babies survive to adulthood,” she says. “Young mothers with husbands gunned down in the streets of Juarez or the Arizona desert. Rotting in prison cells, hanging in meat lockers.”
Dead Things Page 5