Peter forced more words up through his ravaged throat. They barreled over whatever rough patches the accident gave him, catching on sharp corners, losing volume and weight. “Why are you naked?”
“It’s a nice night,” the stranger said. Then a wicked humor drew his smile up even tighter. “No, wait. Wash day. Nothing clean.” At this, he snapped his fingers four quick times.
Wasn’t that from a movie, too? Like the crackhead line? Different movie, though.
“I’m trapped,” Peter said. “Can you…?”
“Help a brother out?” the stranger asked. He hunkered there, knees wide and dangling bits swaying, grinning and making no move to help.
“Yes. Help.”
The stranger stood up, tugged the door until it squealed open. The Yaris’ dome light flickered on. A soft pinging alerted Peter the key was in the ignition. In the light, he saw the stranger’s ankles and feet. Knicks and cuts and even a keloid.
The wind brought in a fresh stink of exposed car juices and blood. Fresh blood had no smell human could detect. How long have I been hanging here? Not long at all. This came from something else.
“Step one, done,” the stranger said. “You got a phone?”
“Huh?”
“Call for help, man.” He patted his hip. “Mine must’ve fell out my pocket.” His laugh was louder and more hyena like. Animal.
Phone? Phone! Peter’s mobile was connected to the radio by cable providing background noise while driving. Tonight, he listened to the Sawbones podcast, weird medical history factoids recounted by a doctor wife and doofus husband. Funny, funny shit. Find the phone. Several inches of severed cable hung from the plug and still jammed into the USB jack. The other end? “Where?” He looked, and there it was among the stones on the roof. Not far. He grabbed it, remembering too late his thumb’s shape and whined as fresh pain burst in the digit.
“Let me get that for you, man,” the stranger said. He reached in, plucked last year’s model iPhone off the roof and studied it. “You got a code?”
“Nah.”
The stranger shook his head, tsk-tsk-tsking. “Not very safe to be unsecure these days.” He fiddled with the screen, said “Hello, hello?” a couple of times and then shrugged. “Your shit’s whack.” He twisted at the waist and threw the phone at a headstone. It came apart with a loud crackle. “And the crowd goes wild!” He danced a bit, humming that annoying baseball music.
“The hell you doing?” Peter’s hands pawed at the buckle. The belt sagged and he slammed onto the roof. The aches eased. Imagination? No way. Adrenaline flood, maybe. He could not right himself. Peter was stuck in a new contortion.
The stranger stood tall and proud at the edge of the dome light’s range. No longer dancing, he stared deeper into the cemetery, head cocked and listening. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he muttered, “Bitch, bitch, bitch.” Then, he glanced back toward the car, his expression confused like he did not recall the mess.
“I was helping you, wasn’t I?” the stranger asked. His voice then took on an ugly edge. “Well, let me help you.”
The stranger closed the distance between them at a trot, heedless of the broken safety glass and debris he crunched beneath his soles. With one hand, he caught hold of Peter’s shoulder and then plucked him free with no more difficulty than pulling a bagged suit out of a closet. When he was clear of the mess, the stranger let go and Peter dropped onto his seat in the cold grass and wrecked car debris. No one was that strong.
“How?” Peter asked. His throat felt better. Still rough, words needed to be pushed, but better.
The stranger waggled a finger toward the car.
Peter glanced inside and saw a bundle of clothes in the dome light in a jumble on the roof. Not just clothes, though. These were bulky, filled out. Peter realized he was looking at himself, a pulped body wrapped in bloody clothes.
“Guess your wreck finished you off,” the stranger said. “Broke a neck or something.”
I’m. That’s. No. Peter’s mouth may have tried to utter the syllables, but they stuck inside.
“It’s all for the best,” the nude stranger said. “Because we need a body, and I hate killing innocents. Way easier to pluck the soul out the corpse.”
“What?”
“You heard just fine. You having a problem parsing because you don’t quite get that you’re dead. It’s fine. No worries about Heaven or Hell, yet. It being Halloween and all. Go haunt someone. You got almost twenty-four hours without consequence.”
A shadow shape eased up past some of the headstones on the other side of the stranger. Its yellow eyes glistened in the glow of the car’s headlights. Not animatronics. Not a costume worn by a crazy person with a death wish. The animal was real, and it was all its own thing. Kind of like a werewolf, humanoid and bestial, powerful shoulders and limbs, covered in a ragged fur, but the head was all wrong, too long and sleek, the snout came to a point like a beak. Suggested a picture he once saw of that beast from the Egyptian Myths, the one that hungered for the hearts of men unworthy of entry into the afterlife.
“That’s the spirit,” the stranger said, ignorant of the rising shape. “Pardon the pun. You know your eyes are bugging out? Makes you look kind of creepy. Real freaky-deaky, you know what I’m saying?” He eased around Peter. “Manifesting for the non-sensitive types ain’t easy, so don’t worry too much about that. You can still move shit, though. All about heavy emotions. So, get real angry or horny or something. Let it all flow out through your fingers and pitch some quarters or maybe throw a dart at some dude’s eyeball. Have some fun before midnight calls it quits for another year.”
Even though Peter had not yet broken his gaze from the animal, he could still see what the stranger was doing. His senses were more acute, less reliant on direction. Awareness extended in a bubble around him, three-hundred-sixty-degrees. The stranger levered and yanked his corpse out of the car. The shape clambered up onto the stone it stood behind, rear leg claws hooking over the rounded top and securing its position. The stranger finally cajoled Peter’s body free and assessed it: “Damn, you’re a mess. But the blood is all that really matters—”
The animal growled, a low, yet ferocious, sound, stopping the stranger cold. He released the corpse and whipped around in time for the shape to leap from its position behind the stone. It bowled into Peter, first, passed right through him with a disturbing tickle and then slammed into the stranger behind him. That man howled curses and he tried to hold the spread wide jaws apart, but there was no stopping that toothy maw. It snapped shut first on the hands themselves, biting cleanly through meat and bone. Then, they wrenched open and caught the stranger in his midsection, carving out a morsel from his groin to his gullet. The chewing sounds following this were moist and terrible.
Peter stumbled forward. The ground felt spongy, insubstantial beneath his feet.
A deep voice grumbled a handful of unintelligible syllables behind him amidst the wet smacks, crunching bones, and greedy swallows.
Peter’s moving legs froze. Had that terrible voice said, “Apologies?”
“It did,” the voice said. It stopped chewing and the words became clearer. “Me manners is bad, yeah. I take you across. You want go early?”
The animal was staring into his back. Its jaws moved as though continuing to chew, but it made words instead. “Can use help, though.”
“Help?” Peter snapped and wheeled on the thing. It was big and terrifying but, damn it, he was dead! What could it hope to do to him, now?
“Help, yeah.” The appearance was animal. The eyes, however, twinkled with wicked intelligence. One paw patted the eviscerated stranger on the cheek. “Blackest witchcraft tonight.”
“You caused the wreck.”
The animal nodded. “Wish didn’t.” Its shoulders shifted in an approximation of a shrug. “Blood and meat is reliable lure.” Again, the paw tapped the stranger on his cheek. There was nothing affectionate there. “Three more to tend to.”
“A lure?”
Peter took no solace from the animal’s nod. “Why me?”
“They chose,” the animal said. “First spells arranged for sacrifice. Me put you where needed for me.”
Crazy talk. Crazy enough a talking animal. Crazy enough to be outside his own body. “Bring me back?”
“I guide to Other Place,” the animal said. “Can’t restore here.” Now that terrible paw caressed his own corpse. “Too broke up.”
The chorus from the Elvis tune, ‘All Shook Up,’ popped into his head. Wrong words, wrong attitude, but the brain is a mystery in how it leaps from one item to the next. Peter said, “It’s not fair.”
The animal nodded. Agreeable cannibal. “You help?”
“No!” The word was out before he had the chance to consider what all this meant. His backpack was laying upside down against one of the shattered headstones, ripped along the outermost pocket and spilling mechanical pencils and blue Bic pens into the dirt, but otherwise unharmed by the vehicle’s passage off the highway, through the iron fence and into White Chapel cemetery.
“Wait,” he pleaded with his bag. The animal did not stir, either.
Overhead, a sign announced this place’s intent: where memory lies in beauty. Peter was almost done with school. He was looking forward to the chance to get a little life and workplace experience under his belt before returning for a graduate program. Now, he was a ghost. Now, he was dead and gone and what the hell had he been working for? Coming here? He supposed he was on his way here all along, but… but you didn’t think about it that way. You took one day at a time, made plans and followed them through until the unthinkable, yet inevitable, conclusion happened, and you left this life for whatever waited in the next.
That bag might not be the culmination of twelve years of public school and four years of university education, but it was the bag he used since freshman year at OU. It was the bag he carried three or five days a week, depending on how the class roster came together. It was the innocuous container that saw him through years of frustrating courses and cake walks, making friends, flirting with pretty people, maybe slipping into the library study room for a hand job from a boyfriend or girlfriend if he was lucky. It traveled from Ferndale to Rochester and back again. It had as many miles as its commuting owner. And yet, it was still functional in the world of cars and cemeteries and midterms and finals and spring breaks. “I can’t handle this.”
“Then wait. I come back when done.” The animal lumbered off into the dark, leaving him with two corpses and his wrecked Yaris. Too many questions, not enough time to consider them. He sat down where he was, the spongy terrain felt even less substantial under his spectral rump.
“So, I’m dead,” he said. At that moment his eyes shifted toward his own corpse, stretched out on the ground beside the savaged stranger. A witch, according to the animal. “I was killed by witchcraft.”
Witchcraft? Such a goofy, dated thing. Who got killed by witchcraft, anymore? Peter dated a couple of Wiccans over the years, and they were just normal enough people who still believed trees and soil had mystic energy and nature was worth revering. It was like that old joke: What’s the best thing about dating a Wiccan? They worship the ground you walk on.
That was, maybe, the hardest thing to wrap his head around. Not only was he dead, he was dead from a witchcraft-induced automobile accident. He realized there was one silver lining: “At least I’m not as dead as you,” he said to the stranger’s butchered carcass.
The laugh never manifested. The stranger’s cocked head, and wide and terrified eyes were too much. Overwhelming Peter with shock. Worst of all, he decided, was not the chewed remnants spilled across the soil, but the way the man’s lips had relaxed into a faint smile, a subtle promise of worse things to come for Peter.
Where was that man’s ghost? Shouldn’t he be sitting here, too? Waiting for the animal to come back. “Where are you, man? I didn’t even get your name.”
Maybe witches didn’t make ghosts when they died. Went off to whatever reward or damnation awaited. Of course, the stranger got eaten by the animal, and maybe that meant it really was like that devouring beast from Egyptian lore—according to the myths he half-recalled, if that ancient eater got hold of a spirit, it was consumed whole, digested and, theoretically, shat on some spirit home’s front lawn or sidewalk.
Elsewhere in the cemetery, Peter heard a commotion. A woman’s scream. A man’s shout. Pistol reports. Peter cocked his head to attention, and he turned a worried stare in the direction those sounds came from. Worry as habit, of course. What did he have to worry about now? He was dead.
It was just the remaining witch coven getting their comeuppance. It was just the animal tearing into them the way it ravaged the nude stranger. When it was done with them, it would come back here and… and guide him to the afterlife. Or, maybe, devour his soul, too.
Should I trust a thing that used me as a lure?
Well, what the hell else was he supposed to do? Somewhere farther in the massive bone yard, lights flickered to life. A fire, maybe. Small and controlled, not some wild blaze. Well, that was new, and it was not likely due to the animal. The thing had not struck Peter as a tool user. Did it even have opposable thumbs?
Crunching sounds, approaching footsteps. The animal on return vector? No, these were far too slow, cautious. Also, there were two sets moving just out of sync.
A man’s deep voice broke the silence, asking, “What the hell is the car doing over there, Cerulean? You off your game?”
Not the animal.
“Magic’s not a science, you bone head,” a woman replied. Cerulean was a color, but apparently it was also a name. She spoke with the strained annoyance of a teen valley girl. “It doesn’t work with precision. We needed a car; we got a car. We needed a body, we get—”
Cerulean’s voice cut off suddenly. Then, she said, “Milo? Shit. It’s Milo, Dee.”
Peter made out the two shapes, moving up on the scene from between some of the stones. He was not looking in their direction, per se, but he sensed and then saw them, nevertheless. More of that three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sight stuff.
The man was a few inches taller than six feet, and the woman just a few inches shorter. The man was black and maybe the dead stranger’s younger brother. Similar noses, similar eyebrows. The woman was a pasty, pale thing, plain face framed by crooked white scars on either side, which ran from temple to jawline. They were both rangy sorts and, unlike the dead stranger, they were wearing dark ceremonial robes tied at the waist with gold cords. Witchcraft vestments, Peter supposed. Neither wore shoes.
The two made their way to the dead stranger. They walked right past Peter’s ghost without acknowledging it. Did they see him? The dead stranger saw him.
“It’s Milo, Dee,” the woman repeated, aghast.
“Well, that’s a thing, bra,” the man called Dee said, low voice not quite drenched in mournful tones. The phrase was meaningless to Peter, but he sensed it carried no small weight for Dee. Something he and Milo said to one another with regularity. He looked around, his gaze sweeping past Peter without a pause. “You still here, bra? Watching over us?” He waited, and Peter remained silent. Dee muttered, “That spirit shit was always his turf.”
Cerulean still stared at the corpse. “It ate him.”
“Was going to eat us, too,” Dee replied, sounding as aloof as a philosopher. “Would have, if Ginny didn’t pop a cap in its ass and you…“ He raised a hand and twiddled fingers in the universal sign of spellcasting.
The animal was dead, then. Or captured. Or otherwise removed from play. Peter wondered: Now what am I supposed to do?
“Want him for the ritual?” Dee asked.
“No way! He’s our brother.” The valley girl’s inflections added a ‘Duh!’ to this without one needing to be voiced.
“He’s my brother, Cerulean,” Dee corrected. “You a sista of the night, but you weren’t blood to us. We need blood, yeah?”
“No way,” she said. “We got the De
vouring One. Better than any mortal blood sacrifice.”
“Maybe some sweetbreads?” he teased. “Taste just like chitlins.”
“Gah-ross.”
“How about mister innocent bystander?”
“Don’t need him anymore. Like I said.”
Peter wanted to jump up. Scream at them to take his damned body. They killed him; they might as well use him instead of… instead of wasting… He sat on the spongy ground and gaped. His death was truly meaningless. These witches brought him here to use his blood. Now, they didn’t even need him? “Motherfuckers.”
“Did you hear something?” Cerulean asked. She cocked her head at just the right moment, as though catching the curse.
Peter went suddenly silent. Could she hear him? If they did, what would they do? What could witches do with a ghost?
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Maybe it was the wind.”
“Sure. You head back, make sure Ginny got the fire how you need. I won’t be long.” He did not say he wanted a moment alone with his dead brother. She did not ask, just trudged back the way she came.
“You’re a mess, bra.”
Dee closed the driver’s side door, but the damage prevented it from latching. The dome light inside extinguished until it yawed open far enough. When the light went, Peter realized he could still see as though it were dusk. When the light flickered back on, his vision cut down to just the light’s radius. Weird.
He glared at the man’s back, feeling a surge of hatred and anger and, most surprising of all, pity. Stones flicked up from the ground and pelted the man’s back, butt and neck. He wheeled around, saw no one, and frowned. Then, he bared his teeth in a grin. “That you, Milo? Seems like something you’d do, wait for me to get all broke up and then mess with me.”
Milo had said Peter could move things. Emotional overload resulted in kinetic force. “You killed me for nothing? I’m sorry your brother’s dead,” Peter growled, “but I’m really glad he’s gone. You sickos all deserve the same thing!”
This rage was even more surprising in its power. Behind him, he saw something better than stones. Something more poetic. Dee did not see the backpack loaded with books until it slammed into his chest and propelled him back against the car, halfway into the upside-down driver’s compartment. Rage gave way to a manic glee, intense enough to manifest as still more motion. Peter unleashed it and the door slammed against Dee once, twice, three times, first breaking the fingers that clutched the frame to stop from falling in, and then battering the man himself into unconsciousness. The man in robes slumped to the ground just in time for the door to close its fourth time, rebounding off Dee’s head with a sick crunch.
The Other Side Page 8
