by Ellen Datlow
I couldn’t hear what my mother said when she answered the door but she sounded friendly. So did Gideon O’Dell, friendly and a little subservient, before he got a ladder and climbed up onto the roof with a toolbox.
My mother came up to tell me not to use the front door for a while. “If you want to go out, use the patio door. I’ve got a guy fixing loose tiles on the roof.”
“One of the G&S guys,” I said accusingly. “The one that cut down the redbud.”
She nodded. “He saw them while he was here. He said he’d done that kind of work and he’d charge less than a roofer, so I told him to come back today.”
“What if he does a lousy job?” I asked.
“He guaranteed his work, and if he couldn’t fix something, he’d tell me.”
“What if he’s lying? For all we know, he’s a burglar casing the joint.”
“Then he’ll know there’s lot better pickings next door. Assuming he can fence a collection of ugly silver and tacky Nelson Rockwell plates.” She chuckled.
“What if he’s worse than a burglar?” I said as she turned to leave. “Like, a murderer?”
She turned back to me, eyebrows raised. “Like what—an IRS agent?”
“What do you know about him?” I persisted. “What’s his name? Where does he live?”
“You know, when most parents have this conversation, it’s the other way around.” She came over and sat down next to me on the bed. “He’s just fixing some roof tiles, Gale. We’re not going out on a date. And he’s not a total stranger, he works for our tree service. I’m paying cash so I only know his nickname, which is—”
“Go,” I said. “Do you know his real name?”
All at once, she went serious. “Did this guy ever try anything inappropriate with you?” she asked. “Or one of the neighbor kids?”
That lie was too evil to tell, even about him. “No, definitely not,” I said. “But who knows what kind of person he really is?”
“Who knows what kind of person anybody really is?” My mother gave me a hug. “You don’t like the guy, stay away from him. No fault, no foul, everybody wins. Okay?”
He’s not just a guy, he’s a murderer; he’s Gideon O’Dell, I tried to say. But when I opened my mouth, all that came out was, “Okay.”
She kissed me on the forehead and went back downstairs, leaving me to wonder what the hell was wrong with me. It wasn’t okay. Gideon O’Dell was up on our roof, exuding poison from his wife-murdering soul and somehow I was the only one who could feel it.
Because Lily O’Dell had touched me, I realized. I couldn’t remember but I didn’t have to. I had her memory—it was in her blood.
• • •
“Pizza for supper?” my mother asked. She’d just made another gallon of iced tea to replace what Gideon O’Dell had drunk. I had ice water instead.
When I put away the ice cube trays and closed the freezer door, I saw a fridge magnet holding a slip of paper with a phone number on it and underneath, Go’s cell, call anytime, leave message.
“That’s just in case he has to repair his repair job,” my mother said.
“You think he’ll have to?” I asked.
“We’ll see. They’re predicting heavy thunderstorms tonight.” My mother chuckled. “Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s nothing that’ll keep you awake.”
“We’ll see,” I said, mimicking her. She didn’t notice.
• • •
We ate pizza from Valentino’s in front of the TV. Talking her into having a glass of wine wasn’t hard and she didn’t protest when I suggested a second, but then, it was an Australian Shiraz. I told myself that was why she’d poured such a full glass and drunk it more quickly than usual. But so what? She wasn’t drunk, just very relaxed. She’d get a good night’s sleep and no hangover.
Or maybe just a little one, I thought as she had a third glass, which killed the bottle. There was no more wine in the house but she wouldn’t have opened another bottle anyway—she was too relaxed to use a corkscrew. She’d also get part of her good night’s sleep in front of the TV but that suited me just fine.
My mother was snoring softly even before the first warning rumble of thunder. I threw Grandma’s hand-crocheted afghan over her and waited to see if she’d stir. More thunder, louder this time; she didn’t even twitch. I went into the kitchen to get Gideon O’Dell’s phone number, started to go up to my room, then stopped. Not because I was having second thoughts, but because I wanted to make sure my mother wasn’t about to wake up. I tiptoed into the living room to check on her.
As if on cue, thunder boomed, seemingly right overhead. It wasn’t loud enough to rattle the windows but I thought if anything would wake her, that would. She didn’t even twitch. I turned out all the lights, started to go up to my room again and then paused, looking at the front door. The TV threw just enough light so I could see it was locked.
Unlock it.
The words were so distinct, it was like someone had actually whispered in my ear. But I could hear my mother still snoring under the babble of the latest hot cop show. If I was hearing voices, they weren’t too bright; opening the door would wake my mother for sure.
Not open it—not yet. Just unlock it.
It crossed my mind even as I did so that this alone would be enough to wake my mother, because you never, ever left anything unlocked after dark. But any disturbance in the force this might have caused was no match for three glasses of Shiraz. Or for Lily O’Dell, who I realized was in charge of this party.
Good. Now you can go upstairs.
I felt like I should say thank you, but at the same time I understood Lily O’Dell didn’t care how well-mannered I was.
Lightning flickered like a strobe; a few seconds later, thunder cracked like the sky was breaking apart. Maybe it was. My room was dark except for the nightlight in the wall outlet beside my bed, an owl and a pussycat sitting in the curve of a crescent moon. I unplugged it and opened the window. There was a streetlight about halfway between our driveway and the one next door but it seemed dimmer than usual and I couldn’t see the street very well. As I raised the screen and leaned out, it started to rain.
• • •
It was the kind of rain that comes straight down and very hard, like it’s real pissed-off at everything it’s falling on. Tonight, I could actually believe it was. It slapped leaves off trees, smashed down the geraniums lining either side of our driveway, pounded the pavement hard enough to bounce.
Had it rained the night Lily O’Dell got killed? I was pretty sure it hadn’t—
Yes, it did. It rained blood. You got caught in the storm.
I reached out as far as I could, palm up, just to make sure, but it was plain old rainwater. Still coming down hard, enough to make my hand sting.
The lights in the Graftons’ old house went out. Was it that late already? Maybe I should check to see if my mother was still asleep—
Time to make that call. That’s what you came up here for.
Yes, but now that it was time to do it, I was starting to feel shaky.
You think you’re shaky? Try sprinting around the block and hopping fences in backyards. Your knees’ll knock like castanets.
I could see a form in the straight-down sheets of rain, someone in the street, waiting while tiles slid off the roof and smacked wetly on the front steps.
Call him and tell him to come over immediately. Give him hell or sob your heart out but get him here now. Now.
I picked up the phone and dialed.
I started by sobbing my heart out but Gideon O’Dell didn’t want to come over. There was nothing he could do while it was still raining and even if it stopped, he certainly couldn’t work in the dark. I kept sobbing and he kept being reasonable, so I tried getting mad. The way he answered made me think he’d had a lot of anger management classes in prison.
“You just get your ass over here right now and give me back all the money I paid you,” I said, “or I tell everyone on the block who you
really are, Gideon.”
He practically choked. “You—you what?”
“If you think people here want a murderer taking care of their trees—”
“Okay, please, stop. I’m coming now, all right? I’ll be there in ten minutes. Not even that. Just don’t—please, I’ve got all your money—”
I slammed the receiver down, shaking all over. Thunder rumbled but without much power as the rain began to lessen. Lily O’Dell was walking slowly up the incline of our lawn, toward the front door. I knew she’d want me to open it now.
My mother was still fast asleep, hugging a throw pillow. The cop show had been replaced by old reruns of a different cop show, one that only came on very late. How long had I been upstairs? And had it been raining hard and angry the whole time?
Open the door.
That would wake my mother for sure, I thought. Just in time for Gideon O’Dell to show up apologizing and begging her not to tell anyone. She’ll have no idea what he’s talking about but maybe she’ll be too distracted by the tiles that fell off the roof to care—
Open the door now. Before the doorbell wakes her.
The rain had stopped.
Lily O’Dell wasn’t covered with so much blood that I couldn’t see what Gideon O’Dell had done to her face. One eye was swollen shut and the other was getting there; her nose wasn’t just broken but so smashed that it didn’t look anything like something to breathe through. One side of her face was caved in, her lower lip was badly split and she’d lost some teeth. I could see distinct finger marks in the bruising around her neck.
Only I shouldn’t have been able to. All the lights were out and the TV wasn’t bright enough. And yet, I could see her, could see her struggling to breathe, seemingly unable to gulp in enough air. But I didn’t hear it until she punched both hands through the screen door.
Suddenly I was small, looking up at her in horror and confusion, tasting blood as she smeared her hands over my face. Her voice was barely audible as she begged for help, and when Gideon O’Dell yanked her away, she couldn’t make a sound.
Gideon O’Dell, however, was yelling and cursing as she dragged him down the lawn by his hair, past his truck parked at the curb. I don’t think he knew it was her until they got to that very specific spot on the street, but when he did, he went completely hysterical. I thought for sure his screaming and begging would wake up the entire neighborhood.
But he didn’t. No lights went on in any of the neighbors’ houses or across the street; my mother slept on, undisturbed and unaware. And all the while, I was trying to get the screen door open but the stupid lock wouldn’t budge.
I don’t know where the knife came from—maybe it was a ghost, like Lily. But also like Lily, it hurt him for real. I didn’t want to watch but I couldn’t look away, couldn’t yell for my mother, couldn’t even move. All I could do was stand there and watch Lily pay Gideon back stroke for stroke, slash for slash, stab for stab.
It took a very long time. When she was finally done, she turned to look at me and bowed her head a little, like she was saying thanks.
Then it began to rain again, pounding straight down like before. I closed the door and went to bed.
In the morning, the truck was still parked in front of our house but there was no trace of Gideon O’Dell, nothing to show why he had come here or where he had gone, not even a stain on the asphalt. It had rained that hard.
A Hinterlands Haunting
Richard Kadrey
Nick crossed the bridge on foot, moving from one world to another. Really, he was just leaving a bright and crowded district for one that was neither. But the one he was crossing to was older and, being across the river, it felt like another country, with its own language and obscure customs. He made the crossing every year at the same time. Always ten p.m. Always Columbus Day. He had to be careful because the date of the holiday changed from year to year and dates were something easy for a ghost to lose track of.
He thought it was unfair that every year on the pilgrimage he shivered at the frigid wind whipping up from the water. What good was it to sense heat and cold when you were dead? Still, Nick could do other things that most people didn’t think ghosts could do, so he supposed it was part of the bargain. But still, the crossing was horrible and he ran the last few yards, leaving the living city behind and heading into what amounted to a vast necropolis.
This older part of the city had been condemned and was just waiting to be demolished—every apartment building, school, church, and bowling alley. Very few people lived here anymore so there were few lights on in the buildings. It was so quiet you could hear the wind through dead trees lining the main street. Tinny music echoed off the buildings. Someone’s radio, maybe around the corner or maybe a mile away.
In school, Nick had read about pandemics. Spanish influenza. The Black Plague. They emptied whole towns. He imagined that it must have been like this. Still, the living had to keep their eyes open for groups of feral children and desperate old codgers with kitchen knives up their sleeves. Even a few gangs roamed the streets. Too small or too unlucky to cut it in the bright city, they’d retreated to the hinterlands. Then there were wild dog packs. What was terribly unfair was that some of these things were even dangerous to him. “What’s the use of being dead if you’re afraid all the time?” he would say to other ghosts, but few spoke to him and none had any answers.
Years before, he’d lived in this now desolate part of the city. On the corner ahead, a light was on in a bodega he would frequent with his wife. The owner, whose name was Robert or Roberto—something like that—was an aggressive, foul-mouthed man who, Nick used to joke, had a PhD in ethnic slurs. When he reached the corner, he went into the shop.
It was mostly as he remembered it: dusty cans of soup and meat, snack food, liquor, and cigarettes. Now, however, most of the merchandise was behind a screen of thick plastic that extended from the front counter to the ceiling. There was a crudely cut slot by the cash register where people would pass their money and get their change. A couple of feet down the counter was a small revolving door where customers would receive their goods. It looked bulletproof, he thought, and tightly sealed. The bodega owner sat by the register in a dense gray fog of cigarette smoke. Nick went and stood in front of him, casting a vague reflection on the plastic screen. It took a couple of minutes for the owner to notice him and when he did, he turned white and stumbled off his stool.
A circle of small holes has been drilled into the plastic at mouth level so that people could communicate with the owner. Nick leaned close to it and said, “Have you seen her?”
The bodega owner shook his head in short, nervous bursts.
“That’s too bad,” Nick said. “I was hoping. It’s always so hard knowing where to begin looking.”
The owner nodded stiffly and when Nick didn’t move, he took a pint bottle of bourbon and passed it to him through the little revolving door. He took the bottle and put it in his coat pocket.
“Please,” said the owner. “Go.”
“Afraid of an old fashioned haunting? I don’t blame you. Take my word for it, the dead are mostly assholes.”
The owner didn’t laugh at the joke, which disappointed Nick. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not here for you. I have places to be.”
He walked a few aimless blocks trying to get his bearings. The city had taken down all the street signs to discourage people from living in the district. Nick used landmarks to navigate to the old apartment he’d shared with his wife.
Like the bodega, the neighborhood was mostly as it had been since last time he’d lived there. It was the little changes that caught his eye. A burnt-out bar. A clothing store full of headless mannequins.
Down a block that used to house bakeries and antique shops for tourists, was a sculpture of a snake that seemed to dip in and out of the pavement. Made of scrap metal and wood wired together, at its tallest, the snake was two stories high. He marveled at both the amount of work and madness necessary fo
r someone to build such an enormous piece of art that no one but the lost and the dead would ever see. He recognized the corner where the snake stood and knew that he was close to home. Nick decided that the sculpture was a good omen. He would find his wife soon and be able to finish what he’d come for.
He turned right just past the snake and started up a gentle hill before the small apartment building where his wife would be waiting. He looked up at their window, but didn’t see any lights on. Another good omen. Hauntings were always better when they began in darkness. He was almost at the front door of the building when he heard the dogs.
They came yipping and growling down the hill, at least a dozen of them. Living people could hurt him, but he had ways of dealing with them. Animals, on the other hand, weren’t afraid of his fragile, spectral form and could easily tear it apart.
The glass front doors of the building had been shattered long ago. He ran inside and raced up the stairs to the old apartment. Unfortunately, it was on the third floor and, despite what was in stories and movies, ghosts like Nick couldn’t fly. He had to go up a step at a time just like anybody else.
He was on the second floor, starting up the stairs to the third when heard the dog pack burst into the lobby and thunder after him. He ran up to the third floor as quickly as he could, but the dogs were much faster and by the time he sprinted down the final hallway, the dogs were just a few yards behind him. He tripped and fell against the door of the old apartment and, to his shock, it swung open. This made no sense since Eleanor had always been a fiend when it came to security, installing extra locks on all the doors and windows. But he didn’t have time to worry about it. Nick barely got inside and closed the door before the dog pack slammed into it. He threw all three locks and wedged a metal folding chair under the doorknob. Outside, the dogs snarled and scratched to get in, but Nick felt safe. While the building had never been elegant, it was sturdy, with thick, solid doors on each apartment. Still, he didn’t like being so close to the pack. He backed away from the door and went into the living room.
