Fraser comes into the kitchen and she gives him a look too; a different but no less familiar one. You shouldn’t have done this.
“I know,” he says. “Believe me, I know.”
“You’re alive,” Allie says again. “Fuck logistics and practicalities and whatever else. You’re alive. We did a good thing here. Am I the only one who thinks that?”
The other two look at each other, but not at her. Apparently, yes, she is.
***
In the end, Rae worries for nothing; nobody asks any awkward questions at all, not even the hospital. God bless the inefficiency of the NHS.
Allie fields the few calls from friends and colleagues, who’d never been told the full story anyway, with platitudes and vague references to a long bout of glandular fever. They’re all pleased to hear that Rae’s on the mend and go away satisfied with Allie’s assurances that she’ll be in touch when she’s back on her feet.
“There you go,” she says. “It’s fine.”
And it is. It’s all fine. Okay, so she has nightmares and a near-constant headache, and sometimes sees things that aren’t there, but she can handle it. And her eyes have turned a pale, icy blue, which is a bit freaky, admittedly, but it suits her. It’s fine.
Rae starts fretting about epilepsy, about brain damage, but Allie dismisses her concerns. There’s nothing going on she hasn’t lived through after a hundred drug and booze binges in the past. The fluttering in her chest, the heat in her skin, the pressure behind her eyes. It’s nothing new, nothing strange. Nothing to worry about.
Her little flick knife is a comfort. She runs her thumb over the edge, enjoying the feel of it. The potential of it. Fire helps, too. External heat seems to draw out the heat inside her, calm it down. One day she lights the cooktop, turns the gas up high and puts her hand into the flame, remembering a vision of stripped, scorched bone. Her palm blisters and weeps, but there’s no pain. She’s vaguely disappointed.
By the time Rae has finished yelling at her and fetched the first aid kit, the burns have already healed.
“It’s fine,” Allie tells her, one last time.
Rae doesn’t argue, but the look in her eyes isn’t relief. It’s horror.
“What have you done?” she whispers. “Allie, what have you done?”
Allie doesn’t answer. She doesn’t know how.
***
Fraser answers the door in a stained shirt, an unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
“Wow,” he says. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks,” Allie says, and shoulders past him. “Kind of you to say so.”
The flat is littered with bottles of booze. Most are empty, but not all. Allie grabs a liter of supermarket gin and uncaps it. “Ground rules for this conversation, number one: you do not say I told you so at any point. Understood?”
Fraser’s face turns grave. “What happened?”
Allie takes a long, burning swallow of the gin. “It’s still in me.”
“What?”
“Whatever you called down that night. To perform the resurrection. It didn’t leave.”
“Shit,” he says. “That’s—shit.”
“Yeah, thanks. I got that far on my own. Any other thoughts?”
He rubs his chin, his hand rasping over gray stubble. “Has it made contact?”
Allie laughs. The sound comes out high and strange, and she’s glad when it stops. “Yeah, you could say that. It’s in my head, Fraser.”
“What does it want?”
“Oh, the usual. Pain, suffering, torment.”
He steps towards her. “Oh, Allie—”
“Don’t.” She backs away, her hand held up, then clenches it into a fist. The nails bite into her palm, leaving little crescents of blood. “It’s getting bored with my pain, that’s the trouble.” She looks away. “I’m frightened, Fraser. I’m frightened about what it might make me do. I can feel it, looking out through my eyes. And it keeps looking at Rae.”
“Shit,” he says again.
“I’m not going to take the chance that it might do something to her. Not after we’ve come this far.” She empties the bottle and coughs. Her throat feels like it’s been sandpapered. “So, how do we get rid of it?”
“I have no idea.”
She stares at him. “What?”
He starts pacing the room. Since it’s so tiny he has to turn around after every six steps, and it makes Allie dizzy to watch him.
“I don’t know, Allie. I did some shit when I was younger because I was a fucking idiot who didn’t know any better, but that doesn’t make me a goddamn expert. I put together that ritual out of spit and sellotape, and, quite frankly, I was fucking shocked it worked. I don’t know how to fix this.”
“So make it up,” Allie says. She’s been grinding her teeth in her sleep lately, and her jaw is aching. “If you made it up last time and it worked, do it again. Come on, for fuck’s sake. We’ve all seen the films.”
He lets out a sharp burst of laughter. “Yeah. I’ve seen plenty. And you know what? They don’t end well. Oh, and in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not a priest. I haven’t got a stash of holy water and incense in the cupboard. I haven’t even got a fucking Bible.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Wander down to St. Dominic’s and ask if they can fit in a quick exorcism between the christenings and the Women’s Institute jumble sale?”
He slumps into a filthy armchair. “I don’t even think the Catholics do it anymore. Or maybe I’m just taking that from the films, as well. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
She kneels down in front of the chair. “Try. Please, Fraser. Just try.”
He blows out a long, whistling breath, closes his eyes, and puts his hands on her head. “In the name—” he starts, but that’s all Allie hears before she blacks out.
There’s no comforting drift when she comes back this time, no brief moment of floaty, undemanding peace. She’s slammed straight back into full awareness of the blood in her mouth, the pain in every part of her body and the demon laughing in her head.
Yeah, it says. The voice sounds like her own. That’s not going to work.
The flick knife is in her hand. She’s not sure when that happened.
Kill him, the voice says. Kill him and I’ll leave you alone.
Fraser’s eyes widen, and she wonders if he heard it too.
“Liar,” she says, and it laughs again. The sound is like snakes hissing directly into her brain.
Kill him. Kill him now, Allie. You’ll enjoy it, I promise.
“I’m sorry,” Fraser says. His face is drawn and gray. “I don’t know what to do.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “I do.”
The hand still clutching the knife twitches. It wants to rise, so she lets it.
“Tell Rae I’m sorry,” she adds, although she’s not entirely sure what for. Then she sticks the knife into the soft flesh under her jaw and drags it across her throat.
***
She understands why Rae looked so exhausted, now. Coming back from the dead is a fuck of a thing.
Rae takes her home, gives her a measured dose of prescription painkillers and a judgmental attitude, as if she herself hadn’t been the first suicide. Hers might have been less messy, true, but as far as Allie’s concerned, the moral high ground is actually pretty low.
And through it all, the demon laughs itself stupid. Noble self-sacrifice isn’t that fulfilling, it says. I’m still hungry.
Fuck you, she says, and it sets her insides on fire.
She used to think she knew what pain was, but she didn’t have a fucking clue.
She makes Rae and Fraser tie her to the bed, although she’s fairly sure the demon could get her out of the restraints if it wanted to. But the gesture makes her feel a bit better, at least.
“It’s fine,” she says. “I’ll just be the madwoman in the attic. Or the guest room, whatever. Every good family should have one, right?”
They don’t seem to find this funny, but Allie
thinks you’ve got to keep a sense of humor about these things. She keeps thinking that right up until the bed rots away from underneath her.
“It’s too powerful,” Fraser says. “The evil. Your body can’t contain it. If it isn’t—” He swallows. “Vented, it’s going to keep building up. And then it’ll—well, it’ll leak.”
The smell in the room is bad. Allie lived in a squat once, a place that had flooded and been declared uninhabitable until it dried. This reminds her of that house: a pervasive wet mold, filling the nostrils and catching at the back of the throat.
The wallpaper peels away, revealing a layer of spotty black fungus on the plaster. The carpet squelches underfoot. Food goes bad within ten minutes of being brought into the room. Allie learns to eat fast.
“I’ll go back to Fraser’s,” she says. “That whole block is such a dump already, nobody will notice.”
They don’t seem to think that’s funny, either. In fairness, nor does Allie.
The demon, however, thinks it’s all hilarious. Typhoid Allie, it says, and giggles.
She catches on about thirty seconds before Fraser starts coughing.
“Fuck,” she says. “Come on, this is enough. Enough.”
Not for me.
Fraser’s panting for breath like he’s just run a marathon, and his skin is sallow and clammy. Allie tries to help Rae lift him but he screams when her hand touches his skin, and vomits blood over his shirt. Rae shoos her away and drags him out of the room herself.
Allie goes to the window. The front garden’s been neglected for a while now, the once-neat lawn choked with tall, vicious-looking weeds. As she watches, they begin to turn brown.
“All right,” she says. “You win. I’ll do it.”
Do what, Missy? I like specifics.
“I’ll kill for you. If that’ll make it stop, I’ll do it.”
“No,” Rae says from the doorway. From somewhere behind her, Fraser starts retching again.
Allie rests her aching forehead on the glass. “If I’m going to be the kiss of death anyway, then better some scumbag off the street than your neighbors, or somebody who just happens to wander past and get too close. I know plenty of people the world won’t miss, Rae. Better we lose a dealer or a pimp than Fraser. Or you.”
Rae’s voice is eerily calm. “No. It’s not. This is my fault, Allie, because I was supposed to die. So I have to be the one that dies now, to put it right.”
“No. No way. That’s not how this works.”
“It has to be.” Rae strides into the room and grabs her wrist. “Kill me. You have to. That’s how we make it stop.”
Allie yanks her arm out of Rae’s grip. “I said no. And for fuck’s sake, keep away from me.”
“Too late,” Rae says, and now her voice is gentle. “Kiss of death anyway, remember?”
She lifts up the bottom of her t-shirt and Allie looks away, but that’s too late as well; she can’t unsee the gray and flaking skin, the blisters spilling greenish, blood-speckled fluid.
You fucker, she tells the voice in her head. You lying, cheating fucker.
It giggles, and the sound swallows everything for a while. When Allie can hear properly again, the air is filled with the dissonant warble of an ambulance siren. She checks the window and sees it pull up at a house across the street, blue lights flashing.
“Allie” Rae’s voice says. “You need to do this quickly, or it’s just going to keep getting worse.”
In her hand is a long-bladed kitchen knife. She holds it out. “Take it,” she says. It’s a command.
Allie’s fingers feel numb, but she watches them close around the handle. The knuckles turn white.
Rae stretches out on the floor and pats her chest. “Here, into the heart. It’ll be quick. And then this will be over.”
Allie kneels beside her as more sirens join their discordant voices to the first. Rae smiles, and closes her eyes. “It’s all right.”
“No, it’s not,” Allie says, but she raises the knife anyway.
***
She stays kneeling on the floor for a long time. Eventually, she’ll have to get up. There are things she needs to do. Practicalities to take care of. Logistics. She laughs, and it comes out as a sob.
But the flames inside her body—her mind—have gone out. And there are no more sirens.
For a while, the demon says.
Allie freezes. Beside her, Rae’s body arches off the floor. Her mouth opens wide and her eyes fly open. She screams, high and loud.
The laughter in Allie’s head this time is more of a sated, indolent chuckle. You wanted me to bring her back, it says. That was the deal, wasn’t it? I’m just doing what you wanted.
Allie pushes herself to her feet and her foot kicks the knife, sending it skittering away across the room.
Good choice, the demon says. We can try a more hands-on approach, next time. Strangulation is always fun. Or guns. I like guns.
Rae sits up, gasping and choking. Her skin is smooth and unblemished.
There’s a sound like a yawn, and Allie can imagine something stretching sinuously behind her eyes. Don’t fret, it says, with that soft, amused laugh. We’ll have plenty of time to try them all.
TWELVE BY NOON
JOANNA PARYPINSKI
These lonely days, the old farmer rises with the awakening sun; methodically polishes off a pot of coffee watching the gathering of tenuous shadows cast by dawn; tends to the corn, thinning the crop around the nine scarecrows that lord over the field; walks the three miles up to the small lake where he fishes for bluegill; walks back to fix himself supper; methodically polishes off a bottle of whiskey; and sleeps.
Routine can only save you on a day unlike this day, for today a disturbance is coming. You can feel it, can’t you old man?
The car stalled on the distant road unsettles the old farmer. It foretells an aberration in his routine. He decides to ignore the car and return to his work, but eventually he retreats to the house, inside the dim and dusty confines of its wood-paneled walls bedecked with rusty nails meant to hold up rifles from World War I and other esoteric weaponry he had collected over the years but never deigned to properly display. And so all has gone to rust, and the nails protrude from the walls like angry totems meant to capture spirits.
But he feels their coming, and he thinks to himself, this will change things. Yes, this one will change everything.
As the afternoon dwindles there comes a hesitant rapping on the door. On the stoop stand three young people, college-bound by their looks: a girl and two boys. Everything here is old, but they are young. He can feel their youth, and he is afraid.
He and the girl size each other up. He knows what he looks like: a man whose filth is evidence of a careless existence, his beard tangled about the buttons of his ancient shirt. She must be more afraid of him than he is of her, a strange thought to imagine, when he has not seen another human in so very long, and certainly not one so frightfully smooth and new and real.
“Can we use your phone?”
He stares blankly at her, then looks at the boy holding his cell phone up like a talisman. “There’s no signal anywhere,” the boy says, sounding mystified, as if he has never heard of a place without reception. Without connection. This place is not his world. He is tall and lean, a runner’s body with sunburns ringing his collar. The other boy, who looks stiff and scholarly, puts his hands in his pockets. They are far from the comforts of civilization.
The old farmer sniffs. “Don’t have a phone.”
“Really?”
He shrugs. “Ain’t anybody want to call me.”
The three of them look at each other. “Well, is there anyone else who lives around here?”
“Sure,” says the old farmer. “Bout twenty miles that-a-way,” and he nods vaguely to the darkening east. “Best start walking.”
He is being rude, but this does not concern him. He is meant to be rude. It is part of his role. He thinks maybe they will leave. Maybe these ones will c
hange everything—they will leave, and this exchange will remain meaningless for eternity, just a simple conversation between strangers. Part of him wishes this were so, the quiet part of him that desperately needs to maintain his routine.
“You know anything about cars?”
The old farmer can see their broken-down vehicle on the road beyond the field where the scarecrows loom darkly like hooded sentinels.
Will you look beneath the hood, old man? Will you gaze into the machinery that lies beneath?
“I can take a look,” says the old farmer. “But not ‘til after supper.”
The girl introduces herself as Yvette and the others as Mo and Dylan. The old farmer stares at each one in turn, memorizing their faces and wishing she hadn’t told him their names, because it makes them more real. Then he turns back inside and starts fixing supper. Without direct instructions, the three hover about the doorway before carefully letting themselves inside and shutting the door.
After a brief consideration whether to make enough to feed all three of them, for they do look tired and hungry, he decides he’d better not. This is no place for kindness. Instead, he lets his lone plate of fish clatter to the table in front of him and picks up his fork and knife. He tucks a napkin under his chin and counts the forkfuls until he is finished eating, making sure it is the same number as yesterday. Numbers change sometimes, and he doesn’t like it when they do. It confuses things.
When the old farmer finishes eating, dusk is creeping through the windows. He brings a small bag of tools and they trek out to the road. The others politely do not comment on the constant hum of congregated flies and the smell of something foul and sick and rotten, as they make their way through the overgrown field. While he tinkers blindly with the car, he is aware of the growing dark, the crackling fibers of the air, and the back of his neck prickles with the sensation of moonlight and of things awakening behind him.
Do not turn around, old man. You know what watches you in the night.
He was hoping this wouldn’t happen. All he wants is his routine. Why did they have to come and waken the sleeping guardians?
When it is dark, Dylan turns on a flashlight to shine into the engine and cries out. Now the old farmer can see what he is doing, and so can the others, who gasp when they spy the straw that has been stuffed into the metal parts.
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