Paint It Black

by Val Crowe

  Wade went to the door after her, but he didn’t open it. He just put his palm against it and then rested his forehead there. “Damn it,” he muttered.

  I licked my lips.

  He raised his head. “You probably came here to give me hell. You want to hit me? You should probably hit me.”

  I sucked in a deep breath.

  He turned around, now resting the back of his head against the door. “This is insane. This morning, I didn’t even believe in ghosts. Now, there’s one attached to Charlotte, and it’s going to kill her.”

  I folded my arms over my chest. “You really haven’t put up a lot of resistance to the idea of the supernatural.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Weird, right? You’d think it wouldn’t be so easy to accept. It’s only that I’d been thinking about it. Why Olivia died the same way Heather Olsen did. And I felt that barnacle thing. When it was on me, it was like a heaviness everywhere. And then when it lifted, I could tell. So, yeah, I believe.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

  “Just like that,” I sneered.

  “You know, what’s harder to wrap my head around is the fact that you never told me this. You’ve been seeing ghosts since before we met, and you never said a word. What’s up with that? We tell each other everything.”

  “Except when you break the most important pact we ever made,” I said.

  “I did tell you,” he said. “And I was going to tell you earlier, but you weren’t listening.”

  “Yeah, but you took your time telling me.”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly easy to say,” he said. “You going to hit me or what?”

  I balled my hand up into a fist and turned it around in front of my face. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “You should.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I want to.”

  “Okay.” He nodded too. He sucked in a breath and shook himself. “Let’s do this.” He crossed the room and opened his arms, an invitation.

  I released my fist. “You know, if you’re just going to let me hit you—”

  “What? You want me to fight back? I killed her, damn it. I want you to hit me. Hell, I want to hit myself. Maybe I will. It’ll be like that scene in Fight Club or whatever, and—”

  “Stop,” I said. “That’s not why I’m angry with you. It’s not because she’s dead. You didn’t mean that. That’s just… I mean, shit happens.”

  “Yeah, but I shouldn’t have slept with her.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have.” And now I balled my hands back up into fists.

  “Because I killed her.”

  “No, because of the pact, damn it.” I advanced on him.

  He stood his ground.

  I stalked over to him and stopped, inches between us.

  We stared at each other for several long moments, and then he broke the gaze.

  I spoke, my voice low. “Our friendship comes first. Before any chick, even Olivia. And you screwed that up.”

  His jaw twitched. He wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  “God damn it, Wade.”

  “I think she wanted you, anyway.”

  “What?” What the hell was he talking about?

  He raised his face, looked me in the eye. “Olivia. I think it was always you. She only ever said yes to anything with me because I was connected to you, you know. And I think she stuck around here, thinking that you would come back, and then when you never did, she settled, but I don’t think—”

  I punched him.

  He staggered away from me, hand to his face.

  I shook out my fist, my knuckles stinging.

  He looked up at me, and the surprise in his eyes was real. He hadn’t meant it, not really. He hadn’t wanted me to hit him.

  I felt my insides twist. I turned and walked out, letting the door bang behind me.

  Damn it.

  * * *

  “You’re in a great mood,” said Mads.

  I was sitting outside the Airstream under the awning on a camp chair with a glass of whiskey on the rocks sweating in my hand. It was hot out here, and that meant that it would be even hotter in the camper. I had air conditioning, and I was hooked up to the campground’s electricity, but it always seemed a little out of the spirit of camping to fire it up.

  “You not speaking to me again?” she said.

  I took a drink of the whiskey. “Wade slept with Olivia.”

  “Oh,” she said. “So, there was something with you and that girl that died.”

  “No,” I said. “And now there never will be.”

  “You really liked her.” Mads hunched her shoulders, like she was trying to make herself small.

  “Look, it’s all very complicated,” I said. “You ever hear of a specter that could be passed from person to person like a disease?”

  She furrowed her brow. “Like… it’s airborne?”

  “Like an STD,” I said.

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh,” she said in a quiet voice. “So that’s what happened to Olivia.”

  I took a big slug of my whiskey.

  “That’s awful,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Deacon.”

  I sat forward in my chair, turning my slippery glass in both hands. “Everything is crazy.” I began to explain it all to Mads, starting with Ridinger Hall and ending with saving Rylan from falling out of that window. “It looked at me, and it knew my name. Why did it know me?”

  Mads looked troubled. “That’s not good, Deacon.”

  “There’s something about me,” I said. “What is it? They want something from me.”

  “You’re… special,” she said, stepping closer.

  I looked her over. “Do you want something from me too?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No, I’m not like them. I don’t need anything from you.”

  “Yeah, so why do you hang around?”

  She laughed, and there was a hint of helplessness to it. “I shouldn’t. Does no good to either of us.” Then she cocked her head to one side. “What happened to your hand?”

  Ruefully, I made a fist and brought it up in front of my face. It still hurt, but I forced myself not to wince. “I should put some ice on this,” I muttered.

  She reached out and covered my hand with her own. The iciness of her touch cooled the pain in my knuckles.

  CHAPTER NINE

  When I was nine years old, my mother accidentally made it so that I could see ghosts.

  I know she didn’t do it on purpose. Back then, she did everything in her power to seem like a good mother. I remember the way she used to read me stories before I went to sleep and the way she used to make my favorite meal (macaroni and cheese from a box) whenever I asked for it. She used to tell me that she loved me at least ten times a day and plant kisses on the top of my forehead until I pushed her away and rolled my eyes, telling her to knock it off.

  Of course, even with all that work she was doing to seem amazing, she wasn’t perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination.

  She made a living conning people, going from one town to the next and offering to contact the dead for money. So, I didn’t exactly have a stable home life or anything. We didn’t even have a permanent address. Maybe that was why I’d taken to living in the Airstream so easily. It was what I knew. I had grown up in a motorhome, moving from place to place.

  My mother homeschooled me, and when I was younger, she kept up with it pretty well. After everything got bad, not so much, but I still managed to keep up well enough myself. I did graduate high school, anyway. I’m not an idiot. I can do whatever I need to take care of myself, to get by. Back then, though, that was our life. Driving from town to town, doing my school work while we drove, staying out of sight while she worked with the clients.

  And then one day, my mother brought home a necklace. It was a big thing with a heavy chain and an ugly pendant—elaborately twisted serpents with chips of gemstones for eyes. She liked to pick up junk like that to make her seance room look more authentic. The more weird and occult-y st
uff she had the more people took her seriously.

  I was playing with the thing while my mother was practicing her spiel for clients. She liked to go through everything, partly to practice her performance and partly to make sure that all the technical effects were working. Like I said, she had a smoke machine and a thing under the table that allowed her to make spirits knock. Then she could say things like, “Knock twice if it’s dearly departed Uncle Marvin,” and then produce the correct number of knocks, stupefying and amazing the people who were forking over their cash.

  So, she was standing in her seance room, which was a tent she sent up in front of the motorhome. Inside, there were tapestries and wall hangings, candles and incense, a table in the center with an honest-to-goodness crystal ball… you get the picture.

  I was outside the tent, and I had this necklace thing around my neck. I was pretending to be the master of snakes who could call them forth from under the earth (back then I didn’t know that snakes did not live underground like worms) and send them to vanquish the enemies of the land. I was highly in demand by the authorities and by damsels in distress and stuff like that. Being the master of snakes was a big deal in my imaginary world.

  My mother was inside, intoning in a great and powerful voice words about calling the dead and piercing the veil. “Come to me, spirits!” she called out loudly. “Reveal to me your secrets. Show to me the other side!” And then she started talking in another language, which wasn’t something that she usually did. But apparently, the woman who had sold her this weird snake necklace had given her some odd slip of paper with an incantation on it, and my mother liked the idea of the incantation. She didn’t believe ghosts were real, so she just thought that it made her seem more authentic.

  Except, whatever, this incantation was the real deal.

  So, the necklace started to feel red hot around my neck. And heavy. Outside the tent, I began to scrabble at the thing, trying to pull it over my head.

  But I couldn’t.

  It was sizzling against my skin, burning into me.

  I screamed. It hurt worse than anything I’d ever felt.

  My mother ran out of the tent, yelling for me, “Deacon, Deacon, what’s wrong?”

  I had fallen to my knees, trying to yank the necklace off of me. “Help, Mommy, it hurts!” I remember I called her Mommy, even though I was too old for that, because the pain was terrifying and awful, and pain tends to do that, to make you revert to being a frightened small child.

  She was on her knees next to me, trying to pull the necklace off.

  But the necklace was burning its way into my flesh, into my bone. It was sinking down into my skin.

  I screamed and screamed, and my mother screamed too, and she tried to get it off and I tried and…

  I guess it’s still in there somewhere. Sometimes, I finger my collarbone, trying to find it inside. I can’t feel it. But whatever that necklace was, it did something to me. It changed me, and from that moment on, I could see things that no one else could.

  I know that my mother couldn’t have known that what she was doing would have such drastic results. No one would think to distrust a necklace. It’s insane to think that something like that could actually hurt a person. She was beside herself. I remember that she took me to the hospital, but the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me. I didn’t even have any burn marks from the necklace, even though the whole area was tender for days afterward.

  I still remember her sitting on my hospital bed, gripping one of my hands and brushing my hair away from my forehead and crooning to me that she was going to fix it. “Don’t worry. Mommy will fix it, baby,” she said over and over again.

  The hell of it is that I believed her.

  Back then, she seemed to love me.

  Now, I know it was all an act. She was never capable of real love.

  * * *

  “Wake up!” screamed a voice at my ear.

  I sat up straight, struggling to catch my breath.

  “You thought you got rid of me, didn’t you?” said Mrs. Michaelson the ghost, who was standing next to my bed. “Well, I got back to you. It wasn’t easy. I ended up back at the bar, where I always am, where no one can see me, and I thought it was all ruined. Because I never used to be able to leave there. But you… you made me stronger.”

  I groaned and flopped back on the bed. Great. Now, I was being awakened in the middle of the night by ghosts. Just perfect.

  “Don’t think you can ignore me. I know that you can see me,” she said. “And I won’t go away, not until you go and see my husband.”

  I put the pillow over my head.

  “Go to this address right now,” said Mrs. Michaelson. “Go to 202 Northwest Avenue and talk to my husband Roger. Please?”

  I ignored her.

  She kept talking.

  It went on like that for about forty-five minutes. Eventually, I put on some music to try to drown her out. Something mellow that would also hopefully lure me back to sleep.

  But she somehow managed to turn my music off.

  “What the hell?” I snapped at her.

  She grinned in triumph. “There! You spoke to me.”

  I groaned again. What the hell was this woman’s problem? I got up out of bed and went over to my refrigerator. I got out a bottle of water and drank it, leaning up against the sink.

  Mrs. Michaelson put her face right in front of mine. “You think I’m going to stop? I’m never going to stop. I’ll stay with you and keep you awake at all hours until you deliver my message.”

  I rubbed my face. “If I deliver this message, that’s it?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Oh, what the hell. It was worth a shot. The only other alternative was to drive out of here and try to use the oil to absorb her into a stronger power source, and I was still in the middle of stuff with Wade and Rylan.

  “Fine,” I said.

  She grinned like the Cheshire Cat. “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. You have no idea how much this means to me.”

  * * *

  It was 4:00 in the morning when I banged on the door of Roger Michaelson at 202 Northwest Avenue. The house was a nice one. Little fenced in back yard, nicely landscaped shrubbery, a porch swing. Mrs. Michaelson was trying to touch everything, but her hands were going right through it all.

  The door opened. A woman was standing there. She looked to be in her fifties. She was wearing pajamas and curlers on her head.

  Great, I thought. Mrs. Michaelson had old data. Her husband didn’t live in this house anymore, and this lady did now.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” demanded the woman at the door.

  “I’m looking for Roger Michaelson,” I said.

  “What do you want with my husband?” said the woman.

  “Your what?” demanded Mrs. Michaelson. “That can’t be right. That can’t be—”

  “Shh!” I said to her, glaring. “He obviously remarried. Pull it together.”

  “Who are you talking to?” said the new Mrs. Michaelson.

  “I have a message for your husband,” I said. “From his dead wife. She’s right here.” I pointed at Mrs. Michaelson.

  “You’re insane,” said the woman, starting to shut the door.

  I put my foot in the door. “Tell him that I know about the frog in the hot tub in Florida,” I said.

  “Wait, what?” said a male voice from the depths of the house. Suddenly, Roger Michaelson pushed his new wife out of the way and looked me over. He was a wiry son of a bitch for an old guy. He was also a good three inches taller than me. He folded his arms over his chest. The guy must lift weights.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking up at him. “She told me that so that you would know it was her. And she wants me to deliver a message.”

  “How dare you come here and say that you can speak to Evelyn,” said Roger. “How dare you?”

  “Tell him I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Michaelson.

  “She says she’s sorry,” I said.


  “I’m so sorry about Adam.”

  “She’s sorry about Adam,” I said, shrugging.

  Roger bared his teeth. “How do you know these things, huh? What have you been up to, digging into our private history? Let me assure you that I’m not going to pay you anything for this. You’re intruding on my house in the middle of the night.”

  “I don’t want money, sir,” I said, smiling grimly. “I just want the ghost of your dead wife to let me sleep.”

  “So, you come here and bring up her affair?” said Roger. “She died leaving that damned bar in town with him. She told me she was going out for a girls’ night, but she was fucking my best friend.”

  “Yeah, I know how that goes, actually,” I said, making a face.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Michaelson. “Really, Roger, if I could take it all back, I would. I only loved you. I was bored and selfish, and it would never have lasted. You were the love of my life.”

  “She’s really sorry,” I said. “She says you were the love of her life.”

  “You little bastard,” said Roger.

  Mrs. Michaelson was stretching and losing shape. “Oh,” she said. “I feel so… light. As if I can finally find peace now.” She stretched and stretched and stretched. And then she was gone.

  Wow. Apologizing had been her unfinished business. Now that it was done, she was gone. Great. I’d be able to sleep.

  Except before I could celebrate, Roger Michaelson drove his fist into my stomach.

  I staggered backward, grunting. “Whoa, whoa, she’s gone now. I’m leaving.”

  “Oh, how convenient,” said Roger. “You’re scum. Dirty scum, digging up my painful history like that. The worst kind of scum.”

  He tried to hit me again, but I managed to side step him.

  I took off running away from the house. Now, I remembered why I never bothered helping the ghosts out. It never went well for me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When I got back to the Airstream, Wade was there.

  He had a black eye. He gave me a half grin. “You should see the other guy.”

  “What are you doing here?” I strode past him and into my trailer. I didn’t invite him to follow me, but he did.