Paint It Black

by Val Crowe

  “Mmm,” I said, smiling. “Good plan.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “I can tell you about it, Deacon,” someone was saying.

  I was trying to help Rylan with Joey’s clothes, which were strangely complicated for some reason. Joey could have helped us, but he was just standing there, laughing, his eyes rolled back in his head. Sometimes, he touched me or touched Rylan—traced her lips, fingered my shoulder—but mostly he was still.

  “Least the fucker could do is help us kill him,” I muttered.

  “I know, right?” said Rylan.

  “I was there,” said the voice. “I saw her. I know what happened to your mother. She changed. One minute she was sweet and good and she held you and kissed you, and the next she was brutal. I saw the bruises. I saw the blood. I know what happened, because I stopped it.”

  That was Mads’s voice.

  I looked around.

  Where was she?

  There.

  Behind my head.

  Standing there.

  “Shut up,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “You were only a little boy,” she said. “You didn’t understand why she was doing it. Why she hurt you.”

  “Shut up!” I growled.

  Wait, why was I undressing this Joey guy again? I stepped back.

  “You were all alone,” said Mads. “Except for me. Because when I saw what she was doing, I knew that I couldn’t let it go on.”

  “Rylan.” I grabbed her by the arm.

  She turned to look at me, giving me a faint smile. “You’re not helping, Deacon.”

  I shook her. “Snap out of it.”

  She furrowed her brow.

  “Uh…” a deep voice from the window.

  I turned to Joey.

  His eyes weren’t rolled back in his head anymore. He was trying to fix his clothes. Rylan had gotten his shirt off. Joey was trying really hard to find the bottom, so that he could put his shirt back on, but all he could find were sleeves.

  “What the fuck?” said Joey. “What the hell were you doing?”

  Rylan’s eyes widened. And then she put her hand to her mouth, and she started to shake.

  “Get the hell away from me,” said Joey, pointing at me and then pointing at Rylan. He tore between us, out of the room and down the stairs.

  He went right through Mads, who disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  I reached for Rylan, and I felt the weight of the barnacle, still so heavy.

  Rylan’s lower lip was trembling. “Oh, God, oh, God.”

  “Thank you, Mads,” I said, taking Rylan by the arm. “Come on.”

  She shook me off. “Don’t touch me. No one touches me right now.”

  “Right,” I said. “Okay, got it. Sure. But let’s leave, okay?”

  We went out of the house, and there was no resistance. The house seemed… switched off somehow. The shimmering vibration was gone. Had it given up on us?

  And why was the barnacle so heavy?

  Rylan collapsed on the front lawn, on her hands and knees. She started to cry, but it wasn’t like a normal crying, it was these heaving sort of desperate sobs.

  I tried to pat her back and she threw me off, fierce, baring her teeth. “Don’t touch me.”

  She let out a few more heaving sobs, and then she was done. She stopped. She turned over and sat on the ground.

  I ran my hands through my hair.

  “I want a hot shower,” said Rylan.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. “I’ll drive you home.” I pointed. “My truck’s this way.”

  She shook. “A scalding shower. I want it so hot it peels off my skin.”

  * * *

  Rylan handed me the mouthwash. “You’re taking it pretty well, the fact that you kissed a dude.”

  I tipped the bottle into my mouth and swished. I gargled. I swished some more.

  She took another swallow of mouthwash and did likewise.

  For several long moments, that was all we did. I could hear my blood thrumming inside my skull. The barnacle was pressing on my shoulders. My neck ached.

  I spit out the mouthwash. “Let’s, um, let’s never say that out loud again. Let’s pretend that didn’t happen.”

  She spit. “Right,” she said. “Ditto.” She offered me the bottle. “More mouthwash?”

  “Yeah,” I said, seizing it.

  “I was out of control of myself,” she said. “It was going to make me… I feel violated.”

  Yeah, that was about the word for it. Better not to think about that. Better to shove that aside and forget about it.

  I spit the mouthwash out. “Okay, well, thanks.” I started out of her bathroom.

  “Where are you going?”

  “You said you wanted to take a hot shower. I’m going to go back to my camper and, uh, yeah. Do that too.”

  She nodded. “Good plan. Meet up for breakfast?”

  “Okay,” I said. “What time?”

  “Early,” she said. “I want to figure out how to get rid of this thing as soon as possible. No more talk of trying to pass it on?”

  “None,” I agreed. “Eight o’clock, then?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Celeste’s.”

  “I’ll bring Wade,” I said.

  * * *

  I took a really hot shower too. It was like Rylan said, a violation. Not just of my body, which was bad enough, but of something worse. My mind or my soul or something. It had made me do it to myself, and it had made me enjoy the idea of hurting someone.

  I felt like I couldn’t get the water hot enough. I took a really long shower, longer than I normally would have. Completely depleted the hot water in the Airstream, which usually didn’t happen. For one person, the hot water tank was adequate.

  When I was done, swaddled in towels, my skin red, I sat on the bed and felt exhausted. The barnacle was resting on my chest. It was so heavy. I felt as though I had to struggle to breathe.

  Mads flickered in front of me. “Hey,” she said softly.

  I looked up at her. “I’m sorry I was a dick earlier.”

  “You’re under a lot of stress,” she said. “I’ll let it slide this once.”

  “You’re always there for me. If I didn’t have you, I don’t know what would happen. You keep saving me.”

  “I do what I can,” she said. “I may have gotten you out of there, but I didn’t save you. The barnacle, you can probably tell. It’s changed.”

  “It’s heavier,” I said.

  “Everything from the house is inside it,” she said. “All the energy that was connected to the place, everything that was generated by what happened to Heather. You’re carrying it around now.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “You inside us. Us inside you. That’s what it meant.”

  “Probably.”

  “Why? Why did it do that?”

  “Because of what you are, Deacon. You attract things. It wasn’t possible for them to get completely inside you, so they attached to the barnacle.” She spread her hands. “The good news is, I don’t think it’s trying to get you to kill yourself anymore. It wants to stay right where it is and feed on you. The longer it’s there, the stronger it gets, the more likely it’ll be able to control you whenever it wants.”

  I shot up. “That can’t happen.” My towel came untucked. I grabbed it as quick as I could, before it fell.

  Mads laughed.

  I glared at her.

  Her laughter faded right away. “Sorry,” she said. “I wish something could lighten the mood right now, but this is bad, Deacon.”

  “How do I get rid of it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve tried to help, but it’s too strong for me. The more it feeds on you, the stronger it gets.”

  I massaged the bridge of my nose. “So, basically, it stays on me, gets stronger, and then it makes me its bitch?”

  “Unless you get rid of it, yes.”

  “And we have no idea how to get rid of it.”

>   She made a face.

  I hung my head.

  “Look,” she whispered. “I won’t let that happen to you. I’ll find a way. I know I can do something. I won’t let you down.”

  “Mads…” I cocked my head at her. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you can see me?” she said with a little laugh.

  “You don’t owe me anything,” I said. “I’ve never done anything for you.”

  “It’s not about balancing some scale, Deacon.” And then she disappeared.

  I lay back on the bed, my mind churning. I was sure that I was never going to be able to go to sleep, not with everything I was already worrying about. But I fell asleep almost right away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I was attacking a pile of home fries at Celeste’s the next morning. I couldn’t help it. I was starved. Maybe having this supercharged barnacle was taking it out of me and that was why. Mads had said it was feeding on me, getting stronger. I didn’t think it was taking my literal energy, not like calories or whatever, but maybe I was wrong. I didn’t know how all this supernatural stuff worked.

  It was just me and Rylan. I had called Wade and told him to come along, and he had told me he was on his way, but he’d sounded sleepy as hell, and he hadn’t shown up.

  Considering he didn’t have a barnacle anymore and that there wasn’t any danger in the actual Ridinger Hall anymore, I wasn’t worried about his safety. I was pretty sure he’d just fallen back to sleep. But I was going to go and check on him as soon as we were done here.

  If Wade wanted out, he could be out at this point. He didn’t have the barnacle anymore, so he didn’t need to be involved. Maybe that would be better, anyway. I couldn’t handle it if anything happened to him.

  Rylan and I, though, we were still in the middle of this, and we didn’t have any choice. She said that she’d woken up trying to get out of her bedroom window, which she’d barricaded her path to before bed.

  “This can’t go on,” she said. “When I woke up, I had gotten through two-thirds of the barricade I’d made. I’d moved chairs and everything. It’s only a matter of time until I get through it and then it’s over for me.”

  “No, we’re not going to let that happen,” I said.

  “But we have no idea how to get rid of it. Should we get Wade and go back up into the room? Try it with me instead of Charlotte? Just to see if it works?”

  “There’s nothing left in that dorm,” I said. “It’s all in my barnacle. It leaped to me, because I have some kind of power that supernatural things can feed on.”

  “Oh, that sucks,” she said.

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “Have you always known that supernatural things can get energy from you?”

  “No, I haven’t. I guess maybe I’ve suspected, but it’s become more clear with this whole situation. Usually, I just steer clear of the ghosts as best I can. I don’t go looking for trouble.”

  “But this time, Wade was in trouble.”

  I nodded.

  “He talks about you a lot,” she said. “You guys are really close, huh?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “if you want to leave him out of this, I totally get it. We can do it without him.”

  “It’ll be up to him,” I said. “If he wants out, he’s out, no questions asked.”

  She cut off a bite of her pancake and nodded. “Okay. Well, what are we going to do?”

  “I think we should try your suggestion,” I said.

  “You just shot my suggestion down.”

  “Not the suggestion about going back into Ridinger Hall,” I said. “The suggestion about going to someplace with a really positive energy and seeing if it would absorb the barnacles off of us.”

  “You think it would work?”

  “Honestly, probably not, but we’ve got to try something,” I said.

  “Okay, where do we go, then?”

  “You didn’t have someplace in mind when you suggested this?”

  She shook her head. “I’m freaking clueless here.”

  I grimaced. I picked up a piece of bacon and shoved it all in my mouth. I chewed. Swallowed. “All right, well where’s a place that has positive energy?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe something that’s like… the opposite of death. Birth. We could go to a maternity ward.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Uh, babies are positive, yes, but I don’t think giving birth releases super positive energy.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Well, from what I hear, it’s painful.”

  “True,” she said. She turned back to her her pancakes. “Well, I guess that won’t work. Um… positive, positive, positive. Like… a bar?”

  “A bar?” I was incredulous.

  “Well, people go there, they get drunk, they have fun…”

  “Look, we’ve both been to bars,” I said. “We still have the barnacles. This reminds me, how did you even end up with that Joey guy last night? Did you decide you were going to sleep with a man after all?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head furiously. “Absolutely not. I don’t know how I ended up there. I was out at the convenience store by my place, buying some snacks, and that Joey person was working behind the counter, and the next thing I knew…” She shook her head. “It was worse than when it tries to throw me out of windows, because that I can’t remember that. I wake up someplace weird. This was like being in a dream, one where you can’t control anything that you’re doing, and everything is happening to you.” She set down her fork, looking ill.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bring it up.”

  “But you were going to go out and pass yours on,” Rylan said. “What happened? Couldn’t get anyone to go home with you?”

  “It didn’t go so smoothly,” I said. “I don’t think I can just… do that to someone.”

  “Because it’s like killing them,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And that’s what it tried to make us do last night. Kill Joey. But I’m not going to hurt anyone.”

  “Fine,” she said. “But we still have no idea where we can find positive energy.”

  “Maybe… maybe not a maternity ward, but a place where kids go,” I said. “Like a playground?

  “Mmm, playgrounds aren’t exciting enough,” she said. “We need somewhere that blows kids minds. Where they go and they have the time of their life and everything is amazing.”

  “Disney World,” I said.

  “Somewhere not fifteen hours away.”

  I scratched my jaw. “There’s a Bunny Buster’s coming into town.”

  “Oh!” Her eyes lit up. “I used to love that place when I was a kid.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

  “You get to play games, eat pizza. There’s a ball pit. It’s awesome. It’s a totally perfect positive place.”

  A shadow fell over the table. “What is?”

  I looked up to see that Wade was there. He looked bleary eyed.

  “Hey,” I said. “You’re here.”

  “Yeah, sorry I’m late,” he said. “I fell back asleep after you called me.”

  “Right, I figured,” I said.

  “What are you guys talking about?” He sat down in the chair between us.

  “Going to Bunny Buster’s to see if we can get the energy to absorb the barnacles,” I said.

  “Whoa,” said Wade. “Think that’ll work?”

  “It’d be awesome if it did,” I said, shrugging. “Hey, look, man, if you don’t want to be part of this, you can back out. You don’t have the barnacle anymore. You don’t have to put yourself in danger.”

  “Are you kidding? That’s my barnacle you have,” he said. “Of course I have to help out.”

  “It’s not yours,” I said. “It just hopped onto you because you were in the dorm. It could have been anyone.”

  “I’ve got your ba
ck, Deacon,” he said. “Always have, always will.”

  * * *

  I was working on picking the lock to Bunny Buster’s. It was after hours, and the three of us were trying to jimmy open the back door. I wasn’t great at lock picking, but it was one of those skills that I had learned from my mother. She was a treasure trove of unsavory pieces of information. She’d given me this set of lock-picking tools for Christmas one year, but since I didn’t do a lot of breaking and entering, I hadn’t used them very much.

  “How’s it coming?” said Wade.

  “It’s, you know, coming,” I grunted. I was wiggling several long strips of metal around in the lock. The idea was to get all the pins in the lock into the formation they’d be in when the key was put in. When that happened, you could feel it inside the lock. Everything sort of settled into place. Thus far, though, I wasn’t getting it.

  “Let him be,” said Rylan. “You hovering over him probably isn’t helping things.”

  “Sorry,” muttered Wade, taking a step back. He put his hands in his pockets and started whistling.

  “Can you not?” said Rylan.

  “What?” said Wade. “Not a fan of whistling?”

  “It’s screechy,” she said. “Anyway, when we get in there, you’ve got to keep your eye on us.”

  “How come?” said Wade.

  “Because both of us are going off the rails with these barnacle things. If you knew what we did in Ridinger Hall the other night, you’d understand.”

  “So, what did you do?” said Wade.

  “Got it,” I said, turning the knob and opening the door. “Ta-da!”

  “Nice work,” said Rylan.

  “Wait,” said Wade. “What did you do?”

  “We almost died,” I said. Geez, what part of never talking about it again didn’t make sense to Rylan? “Look, if either of us start acting strange, you pull us out of there, got it?” I pointed at Wade.

  He nodded. “Got it.”

  We entered the building. We were coming in through the back, and it seemed as though we must have entered into a staff break room or something. There was a sink and refrigerator and a round table flanked by metal folding chairs. Above the sink, it said, Employees must wash hands and Remember to smile.