She flipped through the bookings chart. “I suppose Sheela can cover for you,” she said, with enough weight on each word to let me know this was a favor she intended to call in later.
“Thanks, Jinnie. I owe you. Sorry again.”
I went down to the waterlevel to see if I could flag a gondola at this hour. There happened to be one moored right in front of the building, with a boatman who looked about fourteen. “How much to Hogskar?” I asked. He returned a number that was extortionate, but I wanted some time to think, so I paid it and climbed in.
The water smelled clean. Our gondola slid between the long shadows of buildings, snake-smooth and steady. Here I could see almost all the way to groundlevel: the old shop fronts and their big glass windows rippling in the boat-wake; caressing fingers of kelp; the small dark shoals of fish. The water’s surface was too disturbed to show me Mirror Boy, but it was calming nonetheless.
As I straightened up I happened to catch a glimpse over my shoulder, and my heart dropped, a sudden lurch. I thought I’d seen the man in the gray jacket behind us in a second boat.
I didn’t dare turn around. “Are we being followed?” I asked the boatman.
He looked puzzled. “No, ma’am.”
Maybe I had just imagined it. Too nervous to check again, I settled for watching the white faces of buildings glide past. Windows polished as silver posted distortions of the gondola over their glass-warp. There I was, hands clasped over my lap, with Mirror Boy by my side.
I startled and turned on instinct. Of course Mirror Boy wasn’t there. Of course I was alone on the ramshackle passenger bench of the gondola. I pulled my coat tighter around myself. We were too far away to talk, in any case.
I remembered now. This was how I lost him. First I started seeing both our images together: intermittently, then all the time. Later it started being just me sometimes, with a yawning emptiness where he was supposed to be. There then came a point where he stopped appearing for good, but by that time I was aggressively hunting for a lease and a fifty-six-hour workweek, and didn’t have the space to find out where he went.
I thought of the late afternoons spent laid out on my bed—an old gym mat taped to the floor—with him curled naked by my side, a weightless, ephemeral comma. There, but not there. I’d touch myself while he hovered over me in the reflection, imagining it was his fingers I felt sliding over my flesh. Later I filched a dildo from an acrobat’s room and watched him in the gloss of my stolen window as he matched the thrust of his hips with my movements. With my head turned to one side, I could imagine that the translucent figures I saw, rapturous in their copulation, reflected the reality I was in.
The gondola slowed at a cross-junction and stopped for the lights. I leaned over the boat’s edge as the water calmed and Mirror Boy came into focus. “I wanted you to be real,” I told him.
“I know.”
I brushed my fingers against his cheek, and his face wavered and broke apart in the ripples. When I sat back I realized the boatman was staring at me. “You sure you alright?”
“Yeah,” I said, not looking him in the eye. I stared at the chipped corner of a building instead, spotty with water damage. My cheeks burned with a mixture of embarrassment and anxiety.
• • • •
Hogskar was home to one of the pockets of weird I’d curated. I directed the boatman to a flat-roofed apartment block, where a couple of floors above the water lived a witch who ran a manabonanza out of her home. As the gondola bumped against the barnacle crust along the walls, I thanked him and climbed the stairs through something that used to be a window and was now a front door.
This building, like mine, used to have a functional elevator nestled in the winding central stairwell, and it lay drowned at ground level. As I peered into its bronze cage and its flooded depths, a warning prickle ghosted over the back of my neck.
“Be careful,” Mirror Boy said.
I ran up a flight of steps on instinct. Crouched in the cover between windows, I leaned until I could just see outside.
The man in the gray jacket sat in a slim boat with an outboard motor, parked against the border of masonry across the canal. I watched as he fished something out of his pocket, lit it, and put it in his mouth. From this distance he looked startlingly like Mirror Boy, all grown up, with a ragged beard and hair that had last seen scissors years ago.
Fuck. I went back to the rusted bars of the elevator cage. The dark surface of the water was now a floor away. “Who is he?” I demanded of the distant, floating spirit.
Mirror Boy just looked sadly at me.
Now all fluttery with adrenaline, I loped upstairs and pressed the buzzer under bunting that read, in faded red, CHRISSAS MANABONANZA. Bundles of shells and fishbone and cartilage festooned the doorway with great cheer, and the protective beak of a colossal squid hung over the premises. A pair of heartbeats passed before Chrissa’s voice crackled over the intercom. “We’re closed, come back at three!”
“It’s Lynette.”
“Circus Girl! Hey! What are you doing? Don’t you have work? Just a mo.”
I imagined Chrissa tumbling off whatever surface she had perched on and clattering through the layers of her house and shop. The door flew open to her wide-eyed smile and stream of chatter. “You’re just in time. I’m working on something new, it’s so great, you’re going to love it.” She clicked off the multiple locks across the folding aluminum gate. “It’s like, a clockwork heart, and I think I’ve almost got the formulation right this time.”
“Chrissa,” I said. “Chrissa, I need your help.”
“Oh. That sounds serious. Come on in.”
The moment I crossed the threshold an alarm sounded: a single, shrill, vibrating note. I froze. That sound meant fire, it meant death, it meant run, for all is lost.
“Shit,” Chrissa said. “What the hell?” She grabbed me by the arm and stiffly pushed me into an alcove by the door, cluttered with shoeboxes and the mummified carcasses of old umbrellas. “Did you get infected?”
The alarm continued its devouring scream. Chrissa tiptoed and thumbed off its controls, fixed under the fuse box. “Sorry. It’s a recycled school bell—it’s pretty fucking loud.” She turned back to me. “What’s going on? Did you get haunted?”
I leaned against the cold ledge of the alcove’s hatch, lined with red brick. “I don’t know. It’s worse than that, I think.”
Chrissa clicked her tongue. “Okay. Hang tight. Let me get my stuff.”
I stood in the dark of the alcove, inhaling layers of dust into a chest already tight with emotion. Chrissa hummed as she rifled through overflowing cabinets, her straw-bright hair drawn into a high, messy bun. She came back with a lacquered box and an armful of clear plastic drinking glasses. “Here,” she said, leaning across the hatch, “give me some fluid. Spit, blood, whatever.” She handed me a dusty shot glass.
I spit several times while she set up, decanting squid-ink tinctures into the glasses, a rainbow of eldritch chemistry. “Thank you,” she said, taking the shot glass from me. She dipped a clutch of cocktail sticks into the spit, then dropped one into each glass.
“Hmm,” she said, as the tinctures turned color, effervesced, or remained inert. “Okay. It looks like you’ve got a wraith. That’s . . . not great. When did you pick it up?”
So that’s how I learned Mirror Boy had a classification, a precedence, an observed set of characteristics. “Ten years ago. I was sixteen. But he left. He’s just only come back now.”
“Ten years? No, that means the wraith didn’t leave, it just went dormant. I’ve heard that it happens. That’s probably why the wards didn’t pick it up before.” She pushed off the alcove hatch. “Anyway, you’re not at end stage yet, and wraiths aren’t super-infectious. I might be able to contain it. We’ll see. The important part is, you’re still you. Come on.”
“Chrissa,” I said, “the wraith’s not the problem.”
She paused. “Oh?”
“There’s a murderer
after me. I think he’s downstairs, waiting across the canal.”
“A murderer?”
“He’s killed all of Mirror Boy’s— my wraith’s other refuges. I don’t know what that means, but there’s been a string of murders in Darlingfort—”
“Hang on a minute. Describe this guy. You said he’s downstairs?”
“I think it’s him. He’s about my height, skinny, stringy brown hair down to here. This gross, patchy beard . . .”
Chrissa’s eyes were slits. “Gray leather jacket?”
“That’s him. You know him?”
“Shit.” She blew air between her lips and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, he came to get his scry adjusted. Fucksquid, I didn’t know he was after you.”
“He’s killed seven people,” I exclaimed. “Why did you help him?”
“Honey. Do you know what wraiths do? You— wait.” She blew out a breath as a modicum of understanding hit. “You don’t want to get rid of this wraith, do you?”
I couldn’t say yes. I couldn’t say no. I said, instead: “I want to know what’s going on. And I want this creep to stop following me.”
Chrissa narrowed her eyes again. “How would you describe your relationship with this wraith?”
This time, I really hesitated. “Intimate.” As Chrissa’s eyebrows shot upwards I said, “I was sixteen! He was a boy, I was a girl, I—”
“Did you love him?”
“No! I don’t know. Look, it’s been ten years. I just don’t want to die like the others. Please, there’s got to be something we can do.”
“Honey . . .” She rubbed my arm apologetically. “Come on. Let’s see what we’ve got on our hands.”
With a bucket of squid ink, wet and pungent, Chrissa inscribed a charm circle on the floor, a standing mirror at its heart. As she worked, she explained: “Wraiths are a bit weird. They’re in between, not fully spirits, but more than raw energy. They’re sort of, leftover life-force that goes hunting for hosts. Parasites, basically.” She straightened up and went to put the ink bucket away. “The problem with wraiths is that A, they take over their hosts and do crazy shit, and B, they can also jump hosts. So they spread. There are hunters who specialize in taking them out before they become a real problem. The more hosts, the harder to kill.”
“You said they’re not infectious.”
“I said they’re not super-infectious. There are conditions for becoming a host.” She beckoned at me to step into the circle. “Come on. I want to see this mirror boy of yours.”
I looked at the lines and glyphs spread across the floor. “Is it going to hurt him? I don’t want to hurt him.”
“Oh, honey.” Chrissa shook her head. “It won’t hurt him. It’s for me to see him and talk to him. If he wants to talk.”
I gingerly tiptoed into the circle, careful not to disturb the still-wet lines. Mirror Boy stood in front of me, fully clad in a shabby red t-shirt and jeans. I’d never seen him like this, and it sent a trill of sadness and betrayal through me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He was just a child, scuffing the toe of one beat-up shoe against the heel of the other.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
Chrissa knelt and chanted softly over the charm circle, invoking Kraken, invoking Leviathan. “Neither spine nor ribcage, neither collarbones nor hips, the eyes that see in the watery dark, the mouths that open in the deep.” Her handiwork slid from glistening black to iridescent silver, and the lines sang as they came to life, each circular glyph ringing a different note. The chorus of bell tones raised my flesh in tingling waves.
“Alright,” Chrissa said, matter-of-factly. She stood and struck gray dust from her hands as the charm circle hummed. “Let’s see what we got.”
She stepped in, looked into the mirror, and melted. “Oh, honey. Look at him. He’s just a baby.”
“Yeah,” I said, mouth dry. He was a baby. I’d been a baby back then, too. Neither of us knew what we were doing, flailing through this world.
Chrissa and her marshmallow heart were already gone. I should have known this would happen. Her voice was bright and airy like she was talking to a small, soft animal. “Hello. What’s your name?”
“I don’t have one.” He looked to me for reassurance. “She calls me Mirror Boy.”
“I want to know about you. Tell me about yourself.”
Mirror Boy stared blankly. Undaunted, Chrissa asked in the singsong manner she reserved for young children, “How would you describe yourself?”
“I am what I am,” he said. “I live through others. I’ve had eight different hosts. Lynette was my first, a long time ago. And then she asked me to leave, so I found others. I don’t think she remembers this.”
“I remember,” I said, stung by his accusation. “And I never asked you to leave.”
Chrissa quietly patted my hand, as if to say, not now. “Tell me about your other hosts. How come you have so many?”
“I found pathways to other people. But they didn’t always want me around. So I left them too.”
“Seven other hosts over ten years?”
He nodded. “The shortest time I spent with one was three days. But—” he hitched his shoulders up and drew in a shaky breath like he needed air— “the hunter killed her too. Why? She didn’t know who I was. She thought I was a bad dream.”
“Hunters have to be thorough,” Chrissa said. I choked audibly at that, and she explained, “It’s like an illness. You have to get rid of everything that’s infected.”
“Like an extermination,” I said tonelessly. I wanted to vomit.
Chrissa’s lips pursed. She looked more upset than I ever remembered, and that helped with nothing. She turned back to Mirror Boy as I blinked back burning in my eyes. “How about the host you were with the longest.”
“My last host,” he said. I noticed how much more tired he looked. “Her name was Nur Elisha. She lived alone in Darlingfort. I was with her for seven years. She thought I was her long-lost grandson.”
I swallowed. Words could not describe the ugly feelings welling up in me now. “Did the hunter kill her too?”
“He killed her first. And found the others, one by one. Every one I fled to, he killed.”
Nur Elisha, Nur Elisha. I replayed the name in my head, trying to tease out if and when I saw her in the news. But an elderly woman dying alone in the sewer slums wasn’t important. And wouldn’t be until the third or fourth person killed the same way.
“I’m going to ask you a question. Please answer it honestly.” Chrissa’s manner towards Mirror Boy was still gentle as a shepherd’s, but I’d never seen her this somber, and that frightened me more than anything else. I was standing chest-high in a sea of uncertainty. It was a sick old feeling. It was a familiar old feeling. “Why didn’t you take any of your hosts over?”
“Because I didn’t want to,” he said. “I know I’m supposed to. I can feel that call. But I—” He stopped, struggling for words. He had never been the most talkative, my Mirror Boy. “I just wanted to watch. What would I do with their lives?”
“What, indeed,” Chrissa muttered to herself. To Mirror Boy she asked: “Do you know who your hunter is?”
“No.”
“Hmm.” Chrissa had gone uncharacteristically quiet. She told me, “You stay right here,” and vanished into the upper loft.
With Chrissa gone, Mirror Boy leaned as far as the glass would allow him and hissed: “She can’t help us. Nobody can break what links us. Either you run, or—” He exhaled, and the glass went misty on the inside.
“Or what?”
“Or she finds a way to kill me without touching you.”
“No.”
“It’s the only way—”
“No.” I slapped my hand against the glass and he flinched back from it. “Stop saying these things. I don’t want you dead. And I never asked you to leave. Why would you say that?”
He moved away from the glass. “You did
n’t have to say it. I could tell. You were trying to build a life that had no space for me in it. You wanted a normal life. So I let you be normal.”
“That’s not true,” I insisted. I had been maybe a bit relieved to get my reflection back—to know that it would be my face I saw when I looked in a mirror—but I wasn’t glad. It was just—it was more convenient. Because then I didn’t have to worry about explaining him to other people. Or the fact that I couldn’t see to put on lip gloss. It was just slightly easier.
But I’d rather have had him. I believed that.
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be normal,” Mirror Boy said.
Chrissa came back downstairs, waving a small velvet box that probably safekept someone’s wedding ring in its previous life. “Luckily for us,” she said, “our hunter-murderer is a bit of a dumbass. I’m guessing an amateur. I asked him for a bunch of things as payment for fixing his scry, including a lock of hair.” She tapped the ring box. “Pro tip: Never give a witch anything that used to be part of you. No matter what the reason.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked. I imagined the curses she could lay upon him on my behalf. She could solve all our problems instantly.
But of course Chrissa wasn’t that kind of witch. “I’m going to find out who he is.”
Her desk yielded a sliver of workspace and she got busy, tuning us out of her consciousness. I folded myself to the floor and leaned my head against the cool glass. I wasn’t sure what time it was anymore. I thought: I need to tell Shane I’m not coming back tonight. It’s my turn to cook dinner.
I closed my eyes. Mirror Boy began to talk. “At the start, I was going to take you over,” he said. “It’s true that is the nature of wraiths. But you, you wanted to live so badly. You burned with so much desire that it frightened me. I didn’t think I could put out that flame. So I stayed and I watched you. And over time I realized I didn’t have to do what my nature demanded of me. So I didn’t.”
“You’re not like the other wraiths,” I whispered.
“I suppose I’m not.”
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 18
