by Amy Lane
Tucker looked around. “There’s a putty knife in the kitchen,” he said. “Two of them, actually. And it’s coming off plaster, right? I mean, a lot of it’s been hanging from the ceiling since you did the thing with the humidifier.”
“Yeah.” But Josh didn’t sound sure. He was, in fact, eyeing the paper with cool assessment. “But it’s dried out since then. This old stuff, it gets really attached to the surface. You’re lucky this place is plaster—it’s one of the reasons it keeps so cool, which is nice. If it was drywall, you’d have to buy sealant and sandpaper and a thousand other things, but this…. You still might need sandpaper and probably some base paint, because if it sticks you’re going to want to paint over the plaster to keep it smooth.”
Angel’s attention started to wander with the word “plaster.” He was, in fact, fixating on the paperweight.
“Tucker, it’s getting lighter.”
Tucker wasn’t looking at the paperweight, and he wasn’t looking at Josh either. He was looking at the open door.
“Josh,” he said seriously, “we need to leave.”
Josh looked around, frowning. “No, I just said we should see if it comes off easy first. There’s no guarantee we’re gonna need the paint and the sealant.”
“No,” Tucker said, fumbling in his pocket. “That’s not what I meant.” He pulled out the three pendants Rae had thrust into his hand as they’d left and held them in front of him as he approached Josh. “Man, put one on. I’m so stupid, I should have had you put one on before you even walked in the house.”
“Tucker, calm down! I thought we both talked about how psychically blind I am!”
“Oh shit!”
Angel saw it too.
The dark mass that was Thomas Conklin’s soul was rushing toward the one unprotected being in the room. Tucker reached Josh just in time, wrapping his arms around the man and clasping him, the three silver charms dangling down his back right as the mass hit.
Tucker grunted with the impact, and Angel tried to dematerialize so he could appear over the two of them, hovering, to protect them both.
That curious weight on Angel’s shoulders became a brick wall, and he fell to his knees.
“Tucker!” Angel cried, confused, frightened, “Hold on! Hold on to him, Tucker!”
Tucker cried out this time as Conklin’s psychic weight pushed at the two of them and his feet shifted.
“Tucker, what’s happening?” Josh’s voice was pitched with genuine fear.
“Hold on!” Tucker called. “Hold on, Josh. As soon as we get one of these things around your neck, you’ll be safe!”
“Leave him be!”
Angel saw James Beaufort run through the door, and he forgot about materializing and gathered the strength to run to protect Tucker and Josh from one more new force. “Get Conklin out of here!”
“Who is that?” Josh asked, desperately confused.
Tucker was buffeted back by the enraged raw energy of Thomas Conklin, and Angel jumped in front of them before Beaufort could throw himself into the fray.
“Don’t separate them!” Angel cried. “James, they need to stay together or—”
James crashed into him, and he fell backward into Josh and Tucker. Tucker fell against the corner of the desk, howling as he hit it with his back, and slid all the way down, smacking his head last.
He hit the floor, obviously dazed, and his arms loosened, the hand with the charms falling limply to the wood. Josh rolled out of his arms and struggled to his feet even as Angel jumped in front of the two of them again, facing James Beaufort and the coalescing energy that was Thomas Conklin Senior.
“You stay out of this!” Conklin snarled at Beaufort, ectoplasmic spittle dancing from his wet lips. “You have done enough, trapping us here in this tiny, twisted hell!”
“Stay away from them! They’re innocent!” James Beaufort was desperate—a protector to the core of his soul, and Angel admired him for it. But Conklin’s sneer chilled Angel to the marrow of his incorporeal bones.
“The more innocent, the better, don’t you think?” He laughed, the sound ringing off the walls of the empty room like the bells of bedlam, and Tucker let out a grunt.
“Angel. Dammit, Angel, the paperweight—”
Angel whirled and stuck out his hands to catch it as it wobbled, and Tucker scrambled up, putting his hands out, disregarding the cost.
It didn’t matter.
The mass of the thing tipped, tilted, and finally landed on the round side, then rolled ponderously to the edge of the desk. Angel would have caught it if it hadn’t plummeted right through what should have been his flesh. Tucker would have cushioned it with his bare, vulnerable hands, but it landed on his fingertips, bending his wrist back with a sickening crack.
Tucker screamed, and the glass orb hit the floor, shattering, the blackness inside flowing out of the orb and into the air around them.
“What in the hell?” Josh muttered, and Tucker sucked in a gasp of air that sounded like it tortured his very soul.
“Josh!” Tucker scrambled with his good hand for the charms scattered on the floor. “Take one. Take one and put it on. Please, Josh. Please!”
Conklin started laughing, a window-shattering cackle that punctured Angel’s ears and eyes like an icepick, right through to his brain.
The oily black smoke released from the paperweight rose to the ceiling, and Conklin’s shape disappeared, leaving only the echoes of his laughter as the darkness descended in a rush into Josh Greenaway’s open mouth.
Dark Moon
A DEAFENING silence killed the echoes of Conklin’s laughter, and Tucker stared at Josh Greenaway.
His friend stared back at him through an oily film, sparks of madness zinging through the windows of his possessed soul.
Josh leaped toward Tucker, hands going for his throat, and Tucker fell back, the bruises along his body and the back of his head catching fire again. He raised his hands to push Josh off, and his wrist gave a vicious throb.
Josh’s hard hands were cutting off his air supply, and Tucker’s vision darkened, his windpipe crushed under madness and muscles honed with hard work. He lowered his hands to try to break through the grip around his throat, and Josh/Conklin’s scream of pain echoed through the room.
The pendant burned hot against Tucker’s throat, and the acrid smell of burning flesh sizzled up from Josh’s hands. Conklin let go and jumped up, holding his hands in front of him and shrieking.
“You think you’ve won? You think I can’t get you? Who’s going to keep you safe when I release the prisoners! You think a little bit of silver is going to protect you from hundreds of captive souls?”
Josh went thundering out of the room, and Tucker struggled to stand. He put weight on his wrist and yelped, falling back to the floor.
“I’m sorry,” James Beaufort sobbed, as Angel knelt by Tucker’s side. “I’m sorry. I wanted to keep him far from any of you—”
“Thomas Conklin is not your fault,” Tucker rasped. He struggled up on his elbow, and then used his other hand to sit. Angel was mostly solid, kissing his temple, touching his bruised throat with fluttery fingers, keeping his emotions together by a fragile thread. “James—we need you to go stop him.”
Below them, they heard the sound of Josh’s truck starting up and revving to life. It peeled out of the driveway, followed by knocking sounds that indicated it hadn’t backed up and turned into the street, but had instead gone over the brick border that marked the edge of the parking area.
“Fuck!” Tucker gasped. His bad wrist gave again, but Angel caught him this time, grabbing his elbow and helping him stand. “James, you can move fast enough. He’s going to the graveyard.”
“How do you know?” Angel asked.
“Those have to be the lost souls he was talking about—and that’s exactly where he’s heading. One meatsuit—that’s all he needs to build a bridge between Daisy Place and the adjoining property line. Some spilled human blood to break the spell of th
e metallurgy and the ghosts are free to get out of Daisy Place and perpetrate havoc. James, you can get to him—get him to drive off course or wreck the truck or something. Angel and I will meet you—he’s going to try to take that fucking vehicle cross-country. He may have used Josh’s brain to figure out how to start it, but if I know Josh Greenaway, he’s going to crash it into a tree when he can. I need you to meet him, harass him, drop shit in his way. Don’t hurt Josh any more than you can help it, but stop Conklin. Do you hear me?”
James nodded, pain evident on his face, and Tucker took a moment to ease his mind.
“James, do this for us. Help us get rid of that spirit once and for all, and I can give you peace. I swear it. You can join your wife and your sons and your sisters. They miss you.”
James Beaufort’s face was plain and square, but the desperate hope that lit it from within gave him a plaintive beauty. “My family?” he begged. “Tell me I might rejoin them.”
“I promise,” Tucker whispered, his throat aching along with most of the rest of his body. He reached down to the floor with his good hand, grabbed the charms, and shoved them back into the pocket of his cargo shorts, where he could grab them when he needed them. He felt the bronze button with the sailing ship in there and took heart from that. “Once we take care of Conklin, any debt you had is completely discharged. Your spirit can rest easy, James, I promise.”
James disappeared then, and so did some of Tucker’s resolve. He sagged against the now-stable desk and tried to think past the pain.
“I need a bandage,” he said. “For my wrist. A sheet—Angel, do you know where the sheets are?”
“Tucker, you’re injured,” Angel protested. He put his hand behind Tucker’s head and pulled it back, wet with blood.
Tucker groaned, trying to see through the spots in his eyes. “Angel, if we don’t get a move on, Conklin’s going to do some really shitty things to Josh’s body. And worse, he’s going to let all the ghosts out of the cemetery, and then we’ll really be fucked. Let’s worry about me later, okay?”
Angel nodded, his face crumpling. “I am so worried now,” he whispered.
Tucker nodded, raised his good hand to Angel’s cheek, and wiped off the tears that gathered there. “I know. I don’t think you’re built for this, for the violence, for the fear. But you can do it, Angel—I have faith. We can’t fall apart now. Just hang in there. We need to see this through.”
With that he took a deep breath and wrapped his arm around himself, rooting through his other pocket for his cell phone.
The Greenaways were one of his few contacts.
“Rae, I need you. Man, some serious shit went down, and Josh needs your help.”
“Josh?” her voice cracked, and Tucker forced his aching body out of the room, past the fucking sander and down the stairs. “What did he do?”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Tucker told her. “Man, the thing came gunning for us—and then it rammed itself down his throat.”
“It what?”
“Rae—I need you to grab as much silver wire as you can, and more than that, and take it to the side road, the one facing the cemetery. He’s heading there, and I have an idea.”
He explained his idea as he got to the kitchen and found a dish towel to rip into pieces and tie around his wrist. He kept explaining as he and Angel got into the truck and backed down the driveway, then pulled around to head away from town and toward the cemetery road.
That was about the point when Rae hung up, presumably because she’d already grabbed the wire, the nails he’d told her to bring, and her kids to come help, then loaded up the minivan, determined to go get her husband out of the fire.
“Do you think that will work?” Angel asked, looking at him nervously.
“Sure,” Tucker told him, setting the phone down and letting his wrist rest limply in his lap. “It’s got to.”
“But how are you going to get him in the trap?”
Tucker kept his eyes on the road.
“I’m going to bait it myself,” he said grimly, and then prepared himself for the argument to come.
They were still arguing when they pulled off to the side road and rattled down the dirt track at top speed. The back end of the truck fishtailed, sending the post-hole digger Tucker had tucked there clattering from side to side, but Tucker kept going.
He skidded to a halt, the truck spinning half a donut, just as they drew even with the cemetery.
“The cemetery does not actually look worse,” Angel assessed coolly—then he lost his composure and went back to bitching at Tucker. “But that doesn’t mean this plan of yours is any safer. Dammit, Tucker, what happens if he jumps ship? Do you think you’ll have any more protection than Josh did? Do you? Because I’m thinking no! I’m thinking your empathic ability is going to make it worse—that you’ll become this horrible, horrible man, and that the Tucker I know and love is going to be lost and stomped flat by all of that… that crazy meanness!”
“I won’t become this horrible man,” Tucker said solemnly. But he had to tell the truth. “I probably won’t become this horrible man. Remember—I’ve felt ghosts inside me. I felt you inside me. You even took over a couple of times. But I was still me. I still knew right from wrong. Josh was caught unawares, that’s all. If he’d known what was coming—”
“But he did.”
“He didn’t believe it!” Tucker insisted. “Now look. Unless you’ve got a better plan, I’ve got some fucking cable to lay, and not the good kind!”
Tucker slid out of the truck then and grabbed the post-hole digger and the two brooms he’d remembered to get from the gardening shed. Wrapping his good arm around them, he made for the clear psychic line that marked the edge of the property, and the gate in the middle of it. The gate was the focus point, the center, because the ghosts still respected the rules of the physical world. But add some of Josh’s spilled blood, and that gate would become a portal to the outside world.
It was a good thing he had some Teflon gloves in his pocket as well—and that the graveyard part of the property line was soft and marshy, with the consistency of rotting flesh. He had to dig one-handed, but the hole was still two feet deep by the time Rae’s minivan jounced down the road at the same speed Tucker had been driving.
But Rae had kids in the back, and before the engine completely died, the doors opened and the kids scrambled out, Murphy and Coral falling to their knees without ceremony and petting the ground disconsolately.
Rae and Tilda didn’t even stop to reprimand them.
“We’re here, Tucker. Where do you want me to start?”
Tucker called her over to where he was digging the hole. “Look, as far as I can figure, the foundation for this place can’t be much deeper than fifteen feet.”
“What makes you say that?”
Tucker pointed to the skyline. “Notice there are no pine trees?”
Rae contained her impatience and scanned the area around Daisy Place. “Oak and willow,” she said, surprised. “They don’t go down that far.”
“Exactly. I need the hole dug and the wire wrapped around the broom handle and thrust into the ground as far as it will go—”
“My job,” Tilda said, taking the digger from him and moving a hell of a lot faster than he’d been.
“Both broomsticks,” Tucker told her seriously. “And the post-hole digger. If I had a spear, I’d give it to you. Wrap them in wire and shove them in on top of each other. I need metal of some sort down as close to the foundation as I can get it. All of those metals—and the water seeping here—should connect, and the metal down there should ground a lot of the energy that gets released up here.”
“What energy?” Rae asked, looking at the eternal graveyard with big eyes. “You’re going to drain this huge psychic waste dump with a little bit of jewelry wire?”
Tucker grimaced at the muttering mass of toxic soul discharge. “I wish,” he told her grimly. “No. You have those nails?”
Rae nodded, and Co
ral came trotting up, pale-faced but composed, holding a third of a bucket of tenpenny nails with all her strength. Tucker nodded in approval. “Coral? Murphy?” Murphy followed his sister, hauling several spools of jewelry wire that probably weighed as much as he did, lined up on an old broom handle. Tucker reached out with his good hand, but Rae stopped him.
“Put it down,” she ordered. “Tucker—” She reached for his aching wrist.
“Let’s get them started,” he told her, shaking his head and then wobbling. Christ, he was not doing well. “Okay, kids? You know what a pentagon is?”
“A five-sided figure with equilateral sides?” Coral said promptly.
“Oh my God, fifth grade has gotten harder since I was in school! Yes—that’s exactly it. Do you guys see this line of property, the part in front of the gate? Where it goes from normal and dry to—”
“Creepy and haunted?” Murphy supplied. “We don’t have to go over there, do we? The ghosts are looking at us like fresh meat!”
“Angel will protect you,” Tucker said, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out the three pendants he’d tried to give Josh. “And these will too. Take one—each of you. Give one to Tilda as soon as I’m done. We’re making a giant pentagon, about six feet wide in the center. That’s as tall as I am, got it?”
They nodded soberly, putting the charms over their heads.
“After we make the pentagon, we’re going to put nails in the corners of it, and make it a pentagram.” He held up one of the necklaces. He figured that if the pentagrams worked on a small scale for protection, then they’d work on a big scale as a trap—and not just because he’d seen it done in a TV show either. “The hole Tilda is digging is going to connect with the pentagram—it’s like any line of electricity. We’re going to trap the electricity in the center of the pentagram and then funnel it to the metal foundation under the property.”
Rae stared at him for a moment, blinking. “But Tucker, how are we going to get my husband—and the thing inside him—into the center of the pentagram? Teleportation?”