Gheist

by Richard Mosses

  Clint didn’t even go back to the shack. He saddled Achilles and headed west, following so many from the state with nothing left to lose.

  16

  The church was open but completely empty. Another night had passed and still no word from Clint, Fingers or Jack. It might seem over-familiar or presumptuous to just walk through, so Kat walked round to the manse’s front door. Not having a phone was starting to feel damned inconvenient as it also made contacting Evelyn impossible without a long journey and a prayer that she’d be in. Knocking and ringing didn’t raise her - so it seemed Evelyn was out and yet the church was open.

  Kat went back inside to wait. She wasn’t going to sleep this time. It helped that she no longer felt as tired as she once did. Perhaps the determination to escape this mess was giving her new energy.

  It felt like the altar was missing something. Pristine white tablecloths on a table, no chalices, heavy bibles, or even candelabra. No lectern to create a barrier between the priest and the congregation. Having only witnessed one service there was very little to go on, but this religion’s need to keep the ghosts here seemed selfish and futile. Then again without the ghosts there’d be no one to preach to.

  It seemed like an hour or two passed without incident. Kat put away the worn paperback she’d bought second hand. She had wanted something to get her teeth into. It would have been easy to borrow a celebrity news mag from one of the girls at work, but she didn’t know who half these people were. She probably could have picked something less spooky than The Shining, but she quickly realised how much she felt like Danny, trapped with these spirits from an old place and time.

  She tried the door through to the manse. It was unlocked. Evelyn’s approach to security was shocking. There was nothing to steal in the church save wooden benches and comfy kneelers, but her home was another matter. On the other side of the courtyard the door was open too. Something was wrong, Kat felt her neck tingling.

  “Hello?” No one answered as she entered the changing area and went through to the kitchen. “Hello?” When she walked in to the living room it sounded like something moved through the back. Kat hadn’t been past the bathroom before. She moved carefully along the hall trying to hear and be ready for what she found. At the end was a door, slightly ajar. There was some movement and what sounded like a sob. She pushed the door open with her foot. Inside it was like a scene from Hell or something Giger would think up.

  The room was a complete mess. Given how Evelyn lived in the rest of her house it was unlikely she’d ripped up her clothes and thrown them around the room, gouged the walls deep into the plaster, shredded her curtains and splintered her dressing table and chest of drawers. Worse than this was the crowd of drones surrounding the bed. They were packed in so tight that Kat could only get glimpses of it. They formed a wall of bodies around and over the bed. It was as though they had fused together into one shell with a few gaps where heads and limbs didn’t quite lock perfectly together. And yet it seemed to shift as the warped bodies stretched beyond any normal human form. It was like the drones were slowly flowing together, around and through one another. From within came the faint sobbing. On the far side of the room a cupboard door was open.

  “Evelyn? Are you here?” said Kat.

  “Help.” It sounded faint, far away like a poor phone connection.

  “What can I do?”

  “Key.”

  In the ruined room, with ragged yellow curtains the key could be anywhere. Kat shifted some clothes and pieces of wood on the floor, she even tried to see under the bed, but there was no sign of it.

  Kat edged round the drone shell trying not to touch them. She went over to the cupboard and opened it further. The door was heavy, and no wonder – it was ribbed with metal, as was the space inside. A chest was open with hundreds of objects on little trays around it. On the floor was a padlock and beside it the key.

  Kat picked it up and turned back into the bedroom. The key tried to jump out of her hand and nearly scalded her at the same time. The dome began to shake and fall apart. The drones collapsed like a house of cards. The cast off, stiff and malformed bodies, resembled a warped and brittle insect husk before each in turn vibrated and disappeared.

  In the middle of the bed huddled into a tight ball, protecting her head with her hands was Evelyn.

  “It’s alright,” Kat said. “They’re gone.” Evelyn was a mess. How long had she been like this?

  Slowly Evelyn lifted her head, her greasy hair stuck to her face, blinking in the afternoon light like she’d emerged from a deep mine.

  “Let me run you a bath,” said Kat. “You’ll feel better.”

  “Water,” said Evelyn though cracked lips.

  When Kat returned with a glass Evelyn had sat up in the middle of her wrecked room. “Thank you,” Evelyn said, and drank greedily.

  “Careful,” said Kat. “You should do that slowly. At least that’s what they always say on TV.”

  Evelyn smoothed her hair back out of her face and stared off into infinity. Kat ran her a bath and made her some scrambled eggs on toast. Sitting on the sofa in the scrappy remains of her pink dressing gown, matching towel on her head, Evelyn looked more like she’d spent the night drinking. It seemed best not to hassle her with questions about what had happened.

  “The drones went crazy,” Evelyn said, when she finally broke the silence. “They must have followed me into my bedroom when I was putting away the anchors. They ripped the place up, crowded me in, and I couldn’t get past them. It’s like they knew what I’d done.”

  “What did you do? What anchors? The stuff in the trays?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Evelyn. “It’s all my fault. I screwed up your plan.”

  Kat frowned. “At the casino? You made that happen? With the anchors?”

  “The Church has been studying the spirits of the dead for a few thousand years. We know a thing or two about them. We collect anchors, mostly so we can protect them. But they can also be used to control the person they’re bound to.”

  “Did you send them in or take them away?” Kat should be furious, but in a way she wasn’t even surprised. All she could muster was disappointment.

  “I pulled them out of there,” said Evelyn. “I’m so so sorry.”

  “The others had nothing to do with you then.” There might have been some security after all. “Why?” She knew but just wanted to hear it from Evelyn.

  “It was wrong. You shouldn’t have been doing it. Using them for your own ends. Playing again. None of it was right. I was so angry. I had to do something.”

  “I don’t know when you stopped being a pastor and became my judge, jury and executioner. I may have been making a mistake, but I’m a big girl. I make them all the time and I live with the consequences. In this case I don’t think what’s happened to me is very just. I’m surprised you think it is.”

  Kat stood up.

  “What’s happened to you is horrible, but this was just…”

  “Wrong?” said Kat. “Gaming, gambling, is just wrong. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Maybe I should work for decades to get back what was fucking stolen from me. No one was going to get hurt. The guys worked with me because they wanted to. You treated them like uppity slaves. I don’t know what you’ve done with them, but you should set them free.”

  “I didn’t do anything with them.”

  “They’ve been missing since you did whatever you did. You must have done something with them.”

  “I swear, I just pulled them out of the casino.”

  “I know we don’t really know each other well, but I thought we could’ve been friends. It’s one thing to disapprove of my choices, it’s something else to interfere in my life.” Kat still had the key in her pocket. She took it out and put it on the coffee table, keeping her hand on top. “You can have this back, but I want their anchors.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Evelyn. “You don’t want to get noticed. The dead have rules like we do. Don’t interfere wi
th the living. They enforce it.

  “Yeah, the Communards. Just tell me what I’m looking for. I’ll get them myself.”

  Evelyn sighed. “The death’s head lighter is Clint’s.”

  “I’m not even going to ask how you have that if his body is in cement.”

  “Obviously the pearl handled flick knife is one of Jack’s. The glasses belong to Mickey Parker.”

  Kat left the key and went to Evelyn’s bedroom. She found the items and left.

  Slavery, Kat had said. She had treated the ghosts like slaves. Was she really a slaver?

  Evelyn wanted to curl back up on her bed and wait for it all to stop. What had happened to her? Why did Kat playing cards bother her so much?

  When he thought she was ready, or more likely when he knew he couldn’t go on for long on his own, Grandpa had shown her how to use the anchors. How to manipulate the ghosts, how to pull them and a few other tricks. He’s also shown her how to find the anchors. They weren’t always obvious. In rare cases he’d told her you could transfer the bonds to a new object. This was helpful if a living person was the anchor, but could come in handy if an anchor was in danger of being destroyed. Most of all he’d taught her subtlety. Always be gentle, always be considerate. You didn’t want to be noticed. Not just by the ghosts - there were other things out there.

  She’d been heavy handed, that’s for sure. She’d just been trying to keep the status quo, keep them all safe. She’d lashed out and not only lost the ghosts themselves, but also the closest thing to a friend she’d had since school.

  She could’ve been a doctor, an engineer, walked on the moon. Instead she was left running a church for the dead. Even the thought of it brought a sneer to her face. What a waste of a life. It didn’t matter to the dead what she said in a sermon from week to week. They were here anyway. When was the last time an actual living person besides Kat had sat in her church? Even her brothers didn’t show up now that they’d moved out of the city.

  And Kat had shown her another side to her faith. Something she’d not seen until now. What was she really doing for these ghosts? The anchors weren't securing them from drifting off; they were shackles keeping them here. Her faith had taught her she was caring for them, keeping them safe, maintaining memory of the Word. What if instead her church kept them from their eternal rest and was manipulating them? But to what end? She didn’t even have someone she could ask. The other pastors were few and far between. Great Uncle Peter in Louisiana maybe?

  Evelyn went back to her room. The drones had done what she’d wanted to do herself many times. Rip it all up.

  17

  Clint’s war-time trophy was all kinds of wrong. Having grown up in a world where all Nazi symbols were vilified, used in TV shows and films as a lazy short-hand for evil, Kat knew she was supposed to feel repulsed. She took the brass lighter in her hand and concentrated on it, exploring how it felt, the engraving and the embossed skull, the rough wheel. She tried sparking it up a few times. The flint was good, but there was no fuel. It was possible there was something more there, like a string on a kite, sometimes it felt loose and others it seemed almost like the lighter would be pulled out of her hand.

  Kat thought about Clint, tried to picture him in her mind’s eye, wearing the jeans and the cowboy shirt, a kerchief tied round his neck. She imagined sending him a message down the string to wherever he was. It was more like she was calling to him, giving him something to home in on. She didn’t want to reel him in; he wasn’t a marlin or a salmon with a hook in his mouth. For all Kat knew he could be staying away for a reason. He could be injured.

  She knew he’d heard her, felt him stir. An image came of him trapped in crystalline prison. He reached out towards her and the crystal broke into shards around him. Then Clint was in Kat’s room.

  “Howdy, princess,” Clint said, hamming it up. He looked dazed, uncertain about where he was.

  “Howdy, prince,” Kat said, mimicking him without mockery. “How’ve you been? Riding the high chaparral?”

  “More like I’ve been in solitary.”

  “The crystal you were inside? Evelyn didn’t say anything about putting you in a prison.”

  “What has Evelyn to do with this?”

  “She’s the one who yanked you and the boys out of the casino.”

  Clint took that well. Kat would have been raging if it had happened to her. “So that’s where you got my lighter from.”

  “I persuaded her to give up your anchors so I could get you and the guys back. If it helps she appears to be genuinely remorseful.”

  “I never had any proof before, but when I tried to find you it seemed strange that my search area was centred on the church. I know she was only tryin’ to help, in her own way.”

  “Seems like she was a tyrant with velvet gloves. A slave master without the wit to realise the damage she was doing.”

  “She’s a good soul trapped in a terrible position. Don’t be so hard on her. She’s been alone with only us dead folks for company, until you came along. I don’t think she left the church except for groceries.”

  This really wasn’t the reaction Kat had expected from Clint. She’d thought there’d be more unholy vengeance than sympathy for the devil. “How did you end up in a cell?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes, when I exert myself too much, I end up in this crystal space with nothin’ but my memories. It seems each time there’s less of them, you know? Sometimes it’s like a cell and sometimes it feels more like a cocoon where I can rest in safety. Eventually I kind of wake up and I’m back.”

  “Sort of like spirit A and E.”

  “I guess so,” said Clint.

  “I’ll see if I can call Fingers and Jack before my luck runs out.”

  “If you don’t mind me sayin’, you’re the luckiest gal I’ve ever met.”

  “Why thank you, sir. Now shush while I concentrate.”

  Kat picked up the flick knife, the mother of pearl smooth, the metal cool. She pushed the button and the blade appeared with a slight kick in her hand. Gently she tested the edge, still sharp after all these years. Kat closed her eyes and felt the thread whipping around. She called out to Jack along the wire like a crude string telephone. And there he was in the room.

  “What the fuck happened?” said Jack. He looked like he was still going to swing for one of the ghosts that had been hassling him, he lowered his fists.

  “Just a moment while I get Fingers,” said Kat.

  She picked up the glasses. It was hard to see how these had any connection to Fingers. Maybe they were a family heirloom. Kat held them in her hand, the round lenses reminded her of John Lennon. She opened each arm and instinctively put them on. The room was blurry through the glass. She closed her eyes and found the thread, holding it gently she called out to Fingers and moments later he joined the rest of the gang.

  “I’m going to kill someone,” Fingers said. “And make it last a long time.”

  Kat explained what had happened, and how Evelyn had interfered. They took it well, considering. “I also lost my winnings. I’m back to square one.”

  “Sorry to hear that, love,” said Fingers. “What you going to do?”

  “Think bigger,” said Kat, smiling.

  “Bigger?” said Clint.

  “We were just skimming, really. Cheating the odds. I’m not going to spend a few decades earning all I supposedly owe. I’m not going to spend another few months pulling together enough tips to go back to the tables. I’m going to take back what is mine. And that’s where you come in.”

  They guys looked at each other. Did they think they were still stuck in their crystal prisons and this was some kind of fantasy? Was the wee Scots lassie planning what they thought she was planning?

  “When I was in the casino, I felt my heart again. I’m convinced it was nearby, somewhere in the building. We’re going to steal it back.”

  “You want to turn over a casino?” said Jack. “I didn’t realise all this had addled your mind.
I said I’d help you get your heart back out of altruism, but this is too much.”

  “You’ll be joining us sooner than you planned,” said Fingers, with a grin.

  Clint smiled. “Remember when I came looking for you, sweetheart? In the diner? We never got to finish that conversation. Stealing it back is exactly what I was going to suggest to you.”

  “You’re both losing it,” said Jack. “It’s impossible.”

  “As impossible as having your heart taken out and seeing dead people?” said Kat.

  “Jack, think of the glory,” said Fingers. “Think of the fame. We’ll be the first to knock over a casino in Nevada. We’ll go down in history.”

  “We’d be famous if anyone knew who we were,” said Jack. “Two problems. One, we’re dead. Two, if we were alive they’d kill us. If we’re lucky they’ll just exorcise us. We don’t want anyone to know who we are. Are you all forgetting what just happened? Those ghosts that interfered. Who do you think sent them? Evelyn didn’t, they got her too. We’re not supposed to muck around with the living. That was just a warning.”

  “They’ll have to catch us first. And we know they’re out there now. We pull this off and we’ll still go down in legend. In and out without a trace. ‘We didn’t see no one. It was like they were ghosts.’” They all laughed, even Jack.

  “Where do we start?” said Kat.

  “Hold your horses there, sweetheart,” said Clint. Kat frowned at him. He raised his hands in supplication. “Just a turn of phrase, Ma’am. We need to know which casino we’re hitting before we do anything. Can you be sure your heart is still in the Monterey?”

  Kat shrugged. “Why would they have moved it?”

  “Jack’s right about something. Our actions the other night attracted some attention. Maybe not in the land of the living, but we were jumped by the dead. We don’t know if they were part of Danton’s setup or working for someone else. Either way someone may have been spooked into shifting anything particularly precious, or at least increasing security. Even if that wasn’t the case, it’s been a few days and we need to be sure it’s still there. You’ll need to do some reconnaissance and if it’s been moved we’ll need to find it again.”