by Stacia Kane
“Algha canador metruan,” she whispered, striking a match. Light flared from the tip, casting shadows on the tasteful ivory walls of the living room. Once again the Hand twitched as she lit the candle and shook out the match, placing it in her pocket.
She relaxed. The Mortons would sleep now under the Hand’s magic, more heavily and sweetly than they had in a while, and she didn’t have to worry so much about noise.
The living room held no secrets. In the faint glow from the flame Chess crawled along the perimeter, sliding her fingertips along the baseboards and joints, using her penlight to see behind the furniture. Not that it was too necessary. With the exception of Albert, the Mortons didn’t appear to be readers. No bookcases gave hints as to the interests of the owners.
Instead the room was filled with what she thought of as spindly furniture: occasional tables with one single knickknack on top, or couches with tiny legs and space beneath. She slid the beam of the penlight beneath them and found only a thick coating of beggar’s velvet. Mrs. Morton apparently didn’t bother to clean under there.
Good thing, that. The dust made it clear nothing had been moved. No wire trails marked it, no scrapes indicated sound or film equipment had been hidden here. She hadn’t expected there to be, but still good to know.
The kitchen was next. She set the Hand on the counter while she opened the fridge and peered inside, finding it stuffed with condiments and neatly labeled and stacked plastic containers, complete with dates. The freezer held numerous blocks of white paper, also labeled, that would become roasts and chickens when they were unwrapped. She made a note. If she found nothing else before she left, she’d have to come open them all, to see if they contained anything other than dead animals—or rather, the wrong kind of dead animals.
Probably not; the windowsill was lined with cookbooks, their spines ridged and unreadable from heavy use. Chess picked them up one by one, flipped through them, glancing idly at the elaborate photos. The Meat Lover’s Cookbook … Cooking with Taste … Mrs. Increase’s Family Recipes … Cuisine of the Bankhead Spa … Wait. What?
The Bankhead Spa was the kind of resort where movie stars and extremely high Church officials went on vacation; incredibly expensive, incredibly dull, with a private ferry and hordes of asskissy staff. Not the sort of place she’d expect an optometrist—or was he an optician? She could never remember the difference—to visit. Not the sort of place she’d expect one to be able to afford, more important. But just the sort of place she could see Mrs. Morton insisting on being taken to. For people who gave a shit about such things, she supposed it would be quite a coup.
The spine on that book was not fuzzed with age. It cracked when she opened it, in fact. Brand-new. Definitely brand-new; the receipt was still inside. September. Only two months before.
No wonder they were still in this neighborhood. No wonder they needed money. With a faint smile, Chess snapped a quick picture of the receipt and the book, and replaced both. It might not be important, that was true. But it might be, and every little bit of evidence would help.
The only place she couldn’t search was behind the fridge, so she pulled her electric meter from her bag and fed the wire around. A flip of the switch showed her nothing else back there used electricity. Next she tried the mirror on its long metal antenna. Clean—well, as clean as it could be behind a refrigerator.
This was a waste of time, but still she searched, following the Church-set routine so that if she needed to testify she could say she had. Cabinets stuffed with packaged food and sugary snacks—no wonder Albert looked like a small, squashy torpedo instead of a boy—and still more plastic tubs. Had Mrs. Morton once sold the stuff, or what? Chess couldn’t imagine any reason why one small family of three needed the ability to store enough food to feed the entire Downside for a year.
Pots and pans clanked as she shifted them to look behind. The oven was clean and empty, the drawers practically overflowing with lids for all those tubs.
One last stop, the laundry room—actually a small alcove off the garage—where Mrs. Morton had been the day Albert supposedly first saw the apparition. Clean, as was the garage itself.
She climbed the stairs, listening to the heavy, regular breathing of the Mortons. Somebody snored so loudly that if it weren’t for the Hand, Chess imagined it would have woken everyone up. The sound grated up her spine like a broken saw.
Ah. Pay dirt. Albert had replaced his books. Everything from electrical wiring for dummies to complicated texts on animation and film editing. She took several pictures of the shelf as a whole, then started removing books, shaking them by the spine in the hopes that something would fall out before photographing them.
His drawers were next. Chess grinned. Looked like Albert had been studying blueprints of the house itself. Interesting. She took more photos, and just out of spite decided to take pictures of his rather extensive collection of porn as well. Ha, she knew he’d have one.
Albert sighed and rolled under the covers as she bent down to search under the bed. The bag of wires she’d noted Saturday night was still there, along with an ancient DVD player and a few more books on film and wiring, suggesting Albert may indeed have been hiding his activities from his parents.
Wedged between the headboard and the wall was a small black velvet bag. Chess reached for it, then pulled her hand back, certain nothing electrical was inside it. It was a magic bag, a gris-gris, even, and she did not want to open it.
Most homes were full of such items, and none of them ever bothered her the way this one did. Perhaps it was simply tiredness, or the way her nerves still jangled when she thought of the dead man at the airport. But something told her this was not legal magic, not a basic protection bag or charm for safe dreams. This didn’t even feel like magic Church employees were authorized to do.
She nudged the bag with the toe of her boot, trying to pull the thread holding it closed. No luck. It was knotted at the top and sealed with wax.
She slipped on a pair of surgical gloves—after the amulet, she wasn’t taking any chances—and lit another match, slipping a small white china cup onto the carpet to catch the melting wax. Albert mumbled something in his sleep.
“What’s that, Albert?” she said under her breath.
“Didn’t mean to,” he said.
Chess glanced up sharply. No, he was still asleep.
“I’m sure you didn’t,” she replied gently, shaking out the match. Most of the black wax had melted into the cup. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
He sighed. “I was hungry and I didn’t have any money, and I like chocolate …”
Whatever. So he stole a candy bar from a convenience store or something. Big deal.
He kept droning on while she untied the bag and held it upside down over another dish, then snapped a few hasty pictures of the contents. Black salt, a crow’s talon, some pink thread tied in knots … nothing particularly unusual here. It might be unorthodox for a dream safe, but within legal limits certainly—it was personal, and it didn’t affect anyone else. So why did her skin crawl, why did she feel as if something large and black and sharp were about to swoop down on her?
Her hands shook as she snapped a quick photo then poured everything into the bag, resealed it, and stuffed it back behind the headboard. She wanted to leave. Wanted to get out of this house that was suddenly suffocatingly warm and filled with eyes.
Eyes like the ones of the hooded figure watching her from the doorway.
Chess jumped up so fast she stumbled against the rickety bedside table, banging her knee hard on the edge. The lamp fell over and crashed to the floor while she tried to stuff herself into the corner, to get a better look at the shape.
He was made of darkness, it seemed, the complete absence of light behind him making the outlines of his robe—or whatever it was—squirm and ripple. Her gaze couldn’t seem to catch on anything, to find the definition of his form outside that narrow, pale face and the terrible black depths of his eyes.
He smiled, revealing sharp, dingy teeth, too many teeth. His nose hooked down, thin and crooked like a stalactite in the center of his face.
He should have been another flat image, a film projected from a hole somewhere in the wall, as she’d thought the first time she saw him. But he wasn’t, and she knew it. She felt him, felt the absence of humanity and conscience crawl over her skin and try to invade her body.
His hand materialized in front of him, stretching toward her. Not a gesture of supplication, but of threat. He was coming for her, and she could not escape.
It felt like hours Chess stood there, with his eyes burning into her and his presence staining her soul, but it could not have been more than a few seconds before he moved, so fast she couldn’t track it. He seemed to disappear only to reappear again a foot closer to her, inside the doorway, as though a strobe light was flashing in the room.
Her legs refused to move. She tried and tried, but they would not budge, as if her feet had sprouted roots and dug themselves into the thinly carpeted floor.
Closer again, standing at the edge of Albert’s bed while the boy muttered in his sleep and shifted under the blanket. Now the creature’s other hand was visible, also held out to her, fingers curled in preparation to close around her throat. Her skin there burned already. Her lungs fought to inflate. He was going to kill her, this was it, there was no way she could escape him. Especially if she couldn’t get her fucking feet to obey.
Another movement. He stood in Albert’s bed, mired to the thigh by it as though sinking into quicksand. Another. He stood in the corner. Another. He hung in the air by the ceiling, playing with her, disorienting her, forcing her to look wildly around the room to find him.
The knife in her back pocket dug into her. She reached around to grab it, closing her fingers over it, and her palm shrieked in pain. Only then did she realize it had been throbbing for several minutes.
As a weapon the knife would be useless, but it made her feel better, stronger, to hold something as she crept out of the corner holding it in front of her.
He appeared again, right at her side, so close she could see a droplet of red fall from the sharp edge of one canine tooth. Chess screamed and waved the knife at him, but he disappeared again in a breath of icy cold.
Her chest ached as she spun toward the door and started running, banging her shoulder hard on the doorframe and hurtling herself down the stairs. He could have been on those stairs, he could have been anywhere. The darkness was so complete, she couldn’t see where she was going, couldn’t see anything at all, and she could feel his hands on her neck as she fell the last few steps and landed in a heap on the polished wood floor at the bottom.
He was across the room. He was in the doorway to the kitchen. He was everywhere in the house, in her head. Her palm hurt so bad, she thought it was going to explode. Her shoulder ached, and both her knees where she’d landed on them. No matter. She had to get out, out into the cool fresh air, back into the world she knew existed outside this house of horror.
It wasn’t until she was there, crumpled on the street, brushing tears off her face, that she realized she’d left the Hand inside, along with her bag and everything else.
Chapter Fourteen
“Now the lack of gods is fact, which is Truth and need not be believed or doubted. The Church offers protection, and so the Church makes law.”
—The Book of Truth, Origins, Article 1641
Lex shoved his hands into his pockets and stared up at the Morton house. “I gotta touch what?”
“A hand. A dead hand. It’s on the floor of the bedroom on the right, at the top of the stairs. Just grab it, and my bag, and bring them down here, okay?”
“Don’t know I want to touch some dead witch hand, tulip. No offense.”
“It’s not a witch’s hand, it’s a convicted murderer’s, and it’s harmle—never mind. Are you going to do it for me, or should I call someone else? There’s not a lot of time left until sunrise.”
Chess waited for him to call her bluff. There was no one else she could call. Her only options had been Doyle or Lex, since she didn’t have Terrible’s number. Lex had won easily. At least he wouldn’t spread news of her ridiculous flight all over the Church in the morning. Maybe that wasn’t fair to Doyle, but she didn’t care, not when the thought of going back into that house made her feel like she was going to wet her pants.
“Aye, I’ll do it.” His dark eyes scanned her up and down, in her black jeans and snug black top. “But I get something in return.”
“Fine. Just go get my stuff, okay?”
She watched him slouch his way up the walk and disappear into the house, half-convinced he wouldn’t come out. And now he wanted something in return, and if she were honest with herself, she’d known he would when she called him.
And maybe that, more than anything else, had been why she called him. The thought didn’t make her comfortable, but then most of her thoughts these days didn’t. Her mind seemed to be endlessly turning over pieces of a broken vase she couldn’t put back together. Airports and ghost planes and runes and bodies and eyes, those black eyes that seemed to sear right into her flesh when they focused on her … Why hadn’t he killed her?
Cold seeped through her jeans as she leaned back against the side panel of her car and crossed her arms. A window brightened in a house down the street, some early riser starting their day. She’d gotten here around three. It couldn’t possibly be later than five now, but blue light streaked the horizon and turned the chimneys into blackened teeth against it.
What the hell was taking him so long in there? It wasn’t a mansion, for fuck’s sake, it was a damned two-story Colonial.
Maybe the ghost … no. Lex hadn’t been frightened in the tunnel, not even a little bit, and although the thing in the house was worse, much worse, she still somehow doubted it would bother him.
Come to think of it, it didn’t seem to have bothered any of the Mortons either. What she’d seen in Albert’s bedroom didn’t resemble the description Mrs. Morton had given in the slightest. No gray rags decorated his shapeless form, and he had definitely been male. Did more than one ghost haunt the place? But then why was she the only one who’d seen the figure in black?
And why hadn’t he killed her? He couldn’t be real. That was the only possible answer, the only thing that made sense. He wasn’t real, and she was on so many drugs, her body didn’t even know what it felt anymore. She rubbed her forehead, the bridge of her nose. She was losing it, oh shit she needed sleep, needed to give the speed a rest and let herself kick back down to normal.
Lex appeared, holding her bag in one fist and the Hand in the other. The look of disgust on his face would have been comical anywhere else.
“Don’t fancy carrying this thing for work,” he said, handing everything back to her. “Don’t know how you do it.”
“You get used to it.” She tossed the bag into her car and set the Hand on the passenger seat. Normally she would blow out the candle as soon as she left a house, but given how late it was, she thought it would be better to get away first. People tended to wake up immediately from enchanted sleep, and she didn’t want to take a chance that she’d be still visible when they did.
Lex stood for a minute, watching her. “So you head home now?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Ain’t you gonna ask what your owes is?”
“I assume you’ll tell me.” She didn’t particularly want to unzip her jeans and show him her tattoo here on this empty morning street, but she would. She did owe him. And all things considered, it was a pretty harmless request.
“Aye.” He nodded his head, but his gaze didn’t leave her face. “Thinking I got an idea.”
She swallowed. “What?”
“Touching that Hand, you know, weren’t pleasant. Kind of a big favor, aye?” He’d stepped closer to her, close enough for her to see each individual eyelash and to smell cigarettes on his breath. Her heart rate sped up.
O
ne hand caught her neck, gently, with his thumb under her chin. The other slipped around to the small of her back. His body trapped her against her car, but there was no threat—or rather, no malice.
“Think I kiss you, tulip,” he murmured. “How’s that for an owes?”
Chess opened her mouth, unable to think of a reply but feeling certain she should make one. She didn’t have a chance. His lips took hers with the utter confidence of a man who knows his kiss is welcome, and fear blossomed in her chest as she realized he was right.
Heat snaked through her body, into her arms and legs, into the fingers she gripped his shoulders with and slid along the back of his neck. His tongue insinuated itself into her mouth, finding hers, greeting it and leaving again as he pulled away from her.
“Guess like we all even now,” he said. His car door opened with a faint snick, and he got in. “You call me, keep me on the update, aye?”
She hadn’t quite gotten her mouth to form words again when he sped away up the brightening street.
Smoke curled into the sky as she turned the car off the highway onto her exit. Nothing surprising in that. Once a month or so someone’s firecan turned over, or a junkie passed out with a lit cigarette in whatever squat they inhabited at the time, and a deserted building became a destroyed one. The craggy, black-stained walls interspersed with whole buildings mutely testified to the poverty of Downside. No one would pay to have the wreckage removed. No one would pay to build new. And no one really mourned the dead.
Of course, they weren’t supposed to, not in the way mourning had been done Before Truth. Bodies were incinerated, souls transported to the City and kept there. For a prohibitively large fee those left behind could still, with the aid of a Church Liaiser, communicate with them. All neat and tidy, all controlled in the same careful and precise way the Church had controlled everything since Haunted Week twenty-three years before. Almost exactly twenty-three years, in fact. The anniversary was just a few weeks past.