by Eli Constant
The face that is revealed is blood-soaked and alien. The eyes are black pits surrounded by sallow flesh. But the lower part of the demon is missing, as if the end of the spell cut him in half as the portal closed.
I stand there, knife in hand, overcome by nausea and fear.
And the monster reaches for me… and whispers Master.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“It’s over,” I assure Kyle and Terrance. They’re both leaned against the decrepit shelving, staring around the room. The dead witches, the carnage of the exploded stomach, the dead demon with half a body.
“I feel like the worst kind of hangover,” Terrance rubs his head.
“Hammers and fashion sense,” Kyle says weakly.
I nod, smiling. “Hammers and fashion sense.” A knife, and a seed of broken magic.
Clean-up isn’t something we can delegate. I don’t think the Bonneau police department is ready to face the truth about magic and hell. The first thing I want to do, and I’m not sure why, is to dig through the soil and find the seed. I search and I search, but I’m only sifting dirt. There’s nothing. The seed is tiny, but it’s here. It should be here. I wonder what it means that it’s not…
It wasn’t the apple that made the sin. It was the seed.
That grew without sunlight. That grew without water.
The end in a single spark of life.
We bury the bodies right there in the hidden wine cellar. I’m the only one who can manage scooping the woman’s flesh and organs into a small pile to push into the shallow grave. Both men gag as they try, but I’m used to the death. I’m used to cleaning out a person’s insides and preparing them for what comes after. When we’re done there are two small mounds in the ancient cellar.
Terrance secures the kitchen floor tiling in place. The room below was untouched for so long; we can only hope it falls back into obscurity, that no one finds it again.
I don’t tell either of them about the demon, about what it said before dying.
A problem for another day.
It seemed like I was saving them up lately.
Leaving the restaurant feels strange, anticlimactic almost. Like the end of the world, or at least our little piece of it had almost ended, but we were the only ones who knew about it. So did it really happen?
As everyone woke up today to go about their business, blissfully unaware… a tree falling in the forest, and no one to hear its death cry.
We’re standing around the cruiser, all of us silent and reflective. When the sun begins to rise, flooding the sky with striking colors and the promise of a new day, Terrance phones his wife to tell her he’s safe and he’ll be home soon. Part of me wants to reach out to Liam, but he would have known how in danger I was. And he didn’t contact me. He didn’t come to help.
You’re the one who banished him, idiot. Shut up, brain. I don’t want to listen to reason right now.
“We can go to my place, Tori. I’ll take you to your house in the morning. You need to rest.” Kyle opens the door to the cruiser. “Terrance, you mind taking us out that way? My vehicle’s still at Tori’s.”
“Sure,” Terrance said, his voice hollow and tired. “Off Blackdog Lane, right?”
“I can’t rest right now, Kyle. I need to go home—to my home. I need to see what I’m dealing with. It’ll be easier anyways, to go ahead and get your car so we have transportation tomorrow.” I reason with him.
“We’ve got Dad’s bike,” he responds halfheartedly, knowing that it’s not the vehicle convenience. The Victorian is my family; it’s part of my body, deep to my bones.
I shake my head, but my mouth is dry and my heart is tired. And when the squad car moves towards my part of town, instead of Kyle’s, I can’t tell if the weight in my chest is lighter or vastly heavier.
***
I close my eyes as we turn the corner onto my street. I don’t know how to prepare myself. I should have gone to Jim’s house instead. Denial was easier, every single time.
“We’re here,” Kyle says softly once the vehicle has come to a stop. My eyes are still closed, my heart beating out of my chest. I finally face the truth. I face what’s happened. Evil followed me home again, and this time it destroyed everything.
I peer out the window and my heart beat halts. It is not so bad as I have imagined, but it still feels like I have lost a giant chunk of self. Terrance and Kyle get out of the car. I must wait a moment longer, to make sure my legs will support me when I get out.
Air hits me, thick and choking. It is like the entire world is smoke-coated. My legs are unsure things beneath me, so I lean back against the now-closed passenger door.
The structure is still standing, broken and brown. It is damp from a thousand gallons of water—maybe more. It will never be same, no matter how much money is poured into its walls in an attempt to bring it to life again. It will be a reanimated thing. Its spirit gone. I cannot change that, despite my continually-growing powers.
Nearly all the front-facing windows are broken. The firemen are still here, watching the house and making sure the flames are well and truly out.
I step away from the squad car and being to walk forward, caught in a daze. This can’t be real. This house… it means so much to me. The memories made inside its walls are constant embraces. Knowing my dad and my grandmother slept in these rooms and walked these halls, gives me a connection I can’t get anywhere else.
I’m untethered. Floating in the wind. Unrooted.
“Miss, you can’t go in there yet.” A voice calls to me, and I realize I’ve walked nearly to the front porch. My feet are ready to mount the steps, to enter and return to normalcy. But that part of me has been amputated.
Strong arms go around my shoulders and pull me into a steady embrace. “I don’t even have more underwear. I didn’t even do wash this week,” I mumble out. I speak quietly, because what I really want to do is shout and scream at the sky and rail against the devices of life that have robbed me of this house and its wonderfully-complicated innards.
It’s dumb, to be focused on piles of dirty laundry. Yet… in the wake of losing all of your material things, you begin to think of how precious the tiniest object is—like clean, non-granny panties. Or a wayward single cufflink of your father’s and a note from your grandmother that might have survived, sitting in a little sterling box in your room. Or an ironic throw pillow with disgruntled blind mice.
“We’ll get you some things tomorrow. Come on. You need some rest.” Kyle pulls me gently. I don’t want to leave, but I move anyways, feet feeling like they’re trapped in concrete.
“I need to call Dean and tell him what’s happened.” I need to cling to something—business and responsibility.
But it’s not really possible to cling to a business that’s burned to the ground, is it?
“We’ll call him, just… not right now.” Kyle squeezes my body gently. It should feel good, comforting. Instead I feel a bit trapped.
We finish the walk to Kyle’s car. I’m still a zombie, trapped by the death behind me. Kyle has to open my door, help me slide against the seat, and he even leans over to buckle me up. Leaving the house is worse than arriving. I can’t pull my eyes away from the corpse of my home. The personality is gone, though the ‘x’ of yellow caution tape looks like a gag around the screaming half-open door.
Where will I live? It’s too soon to move in with Kyle officially. I’m not ready. And I don’t want to be in Jim’s house. Liam’s hideaway… but he’s gone. And I couldn’t move in with Liam either, even if he was here.
The road passes by too slowly; it gives me too much time to wallow. Kyle takes the turns gently, as if that deliberate kindness can make things better. If he knew me, and what I needed right now, he’d be going at breakneck speed. He’d take turns like the devil himself was after us. He might lose control. Spin off the road.
Erase everything.
We pass a road sign then that leaves me feeling sick to my stomach, not for the first time tod
ay.
I know exactly where I have to go. The only other place where my family once lived. The only other place with memories—though many of them weren’t good.
I’d go to my grandmother’s house. To that little cottage adjacent to that bog of eternal spirits.
Hellhole Bay.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I don’t think you can save that,” Kyle speaks gently.
Nodding sadly, I drop the photo album into the bin. Even if the pictures were not blackened beyond recognition, they would still be soaking wet from the firemen’s efforts. “So much is just… gone.” All my life when I’ve thought about fire, I’ve also thought of the end. Dying. Being discovered and tortured and burned.
Not once did I foresee this outcome of flame.
Kyle’s arms go around me. I know he means it as a comfort, yet every time he’s touched me this past week since the night my home had died, I’ve felt trapped. Rationally, I know it’s not Kyle himself, but the emotions I’m pushing down. I’ve tried my hardest not to take it out on him, and even when I have he’s taking it in stride. Like when I basically kicked him out of the hotel two nights ago so I could be alone.
He squeezes me again, and that human touch threatens to break my strength, tear down the walls I’m building up to help me face what’s about to happen.
And what has happened, I think trying to call my power once again, and finding it still a feeble thing. At least the voice is gone, that thing that wanted to take me over at Mordecai’s and spoke to me in my home.
“It should have been in my room,” I say, pulling away from him and picking up a soaked pillow to toss it onto the growing pile of things to be trashed. “Let’s keep looking. Or… maybe I’ll just stay in the hotel forever.”
Kyle chuckles. “Yeah, not very sustainable. You know my offer stands. You’re more than welcome to—”
“I’m not ready to live with you, Kyle.”
“Can’t blame a man for trying.” He pats the pocket of his jacket, and I know it’s subconscious. That’s where the ring still is. A promise represented by a never-ending circle. I keep thinking about what I’ll say if he… when he pulls it out.
“Here, is this it?” Kyle is holding a little silver jewelry box in his hands. “Wonder how it got out here.” I didn’t like that something dear to me had been buried beneath the contents of an overturned bookshelf in the hallway. I mean, I understood why police and fireman had needed to trudge through my home—to check for lingering damage, to find the source of the fire.
Of course, they’ll never find the source, because he’s dead. The Adam buried in a hidden cellar room, no longer able to revel in the ashes of his handiwork.
“Yes, thank you.” I close the distance between us and take the sterling box. It is coated in a thin layer of smoke residue and I lift the edge of my tank top to polish it away. On the lid are my initials. And below those the words—Beloved Daughter. I open the precious thing gently to see a singular cufflink, a grouping of worn keys, and a folded piece of paper. This I unfold, though I know what is written on the paper by heart.
I know you hate the house, Piccola morte. My lovely little death. A day may come when you need the shadows there. I am always with you.
I refold the paper, put it back in the box, and then lift the keys. They jangle quietly. “There’s no avoiding this, I guess.” I think back to Dean talking about money, and being smarter with the business. Maybe if I had been, I would be able to live in a hotel indefinitely… or at least for longer than a week’s time. Though, how many families wouldn’t have been able to afford coffins and flowers had I only thought about the payout?
“Is it really that bad?” Kyle is standing by the broken living room window, the one that I couldn’t get open the night of the fire because it had been nailed shut from the outside. It’s covered in transparent plastic that makes the world outside blurry. I will miss looking out of it, when the seasons change and snow falls and the lake is a glassy mirror in the distance.
“Imagine you’re eating in a restaurant. You’re sitting in a small table right in the middle of everything. All around you are large parties—screaming children, loud conversations, and music is blaring from overhead. Imagine someone tells you that you have to sleep there, work there, function twenty-four seven there.” I pause, letting my words sink in. His face is blank as he listens. “Then imagine that most of those people around you are in pain. Radiating abject sadness because each one of them is deaf and no one can hear and they just keep talking and screaming and calling out to the universe to be heard. You’re the only person in that place that has working ears. The only person they can actually talk to.”
“You’re the person who can hear,” he says slowly.
“In Hellhole Bay, I’m the only person who can hear. And that restaurant is… God, it’s full. Lost ghosts. Still-trapped spirits on their way to ghosthood. Wraiths caught by a spell my grandmother planted years ago. But I can hear them.”
Kyle pulls me back into a hug, so tight I lose myself. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just live with me, Tori?” His body is shaking, and I don’t know if it is his bear reacting to my words or his human empathy. This time, I let him hold me longer than I’d like, because I think he needs it more than I do. And that’s a relationship isn’t it? Giving of yourself even when you want to run away and hide.
“It would be easier, Kyle.” I pull away, yet again, and I smile. “But inside the house is fine. It’s spelled to keep out the noise. Or at least it was.” With grandmother dead, would the magic still be alive?
***
Several hours later, Kyle is helping me load salvageable clothes, a few sentimental things, and the books and journals from the safe in the storage room. The basement is in fair shape, most everything will be fine with some light restoration. I wish it were the other way around—my apartment saved, and the business part lost.
For some reason, I also take the painting that was hiding the safe. The graveyard and the crying woman. The angel tomb and the shining moon. I hate it, but I want it. Is that mixed signals again?
I walk towards Kyle’s vehicle. The day after the fire, I also found out that my car was a victim of the dick arsonist. My tires were slashed, the windows were busted, and the interior was soaked with gasoline. It was close enough to the house that maybe he had expected it to burn by proximity I guess.
“I really need to get a new car now,” I sigh out, looking back at my house and the sedan.
“About that,” Kyle takes what I’m carrying and shoves it into the back of his ride. My belongings seem so few now. “It was going to be a surprise when it was finished, but I figure you might need some good news.”
Curious, I turn to look at him. “There has been a shortage of good news lately.”
“I found a guy a few weeks ago that can rebuild the Bronco. You’ll need to pick out body color, new interior fixings if you want. It’s an option, at least. I know you were really broken up about—”
I fling myself into his arms and this time human contact doesn’t feel suffocating. “Kyle. Oh my God. This means so much to me.” I kiss his neck over and over and I realize I’m crying, but they’re happy tears and I don’t try to stop them, because it’s not just the Bronco that fills me with joy. It’s Kyle. It’s the ring, though I don’t want to wear it yet. It’s the future, though I’m still seeing only past the end of my nose. And it’s Liam, who I’ll forgive… eventually.
As we leave the Victorian, I don’t look back. Behind me is just a shell. The memories made there are mine forever.
Chapter Thirty
“Home, sweet, freaking, home.” I mumble, pulling a white sheet off of one of the sofas in the small front room of the tiny cottage. A cloud of dust puffs up. “She really didn’t change a thing. She just left me the house, died, and had someone preserve it like a damn museum.”
I sit on the newly-exposed floral couch with velvet trim and stare around the room.
The wooden frog wit
h the ribbed spine, accompanied by its little rod for music-making was still sat on the mantel. It was a gift from her shaman, and looked just like any of the million trinkets someone could buy in an exotic store and claim to have traveled to Africa. Yet, when the rod was stroked across the spine, it didn’t just make music—it warded off unwanted spirits. It was an invisible spell, almost disappointing when you’re used to movies with glowing prancing animals that ward off baddies.
A portrait of my grandfather is hung near the entrance to the kitchen. I’d asked her once why she didn’t hang him over the fireplace, where people typically put distinctive photos of their loved ones. She’d responded that he’d always loved her cooking, and every time she went into the kitchen he made her smile—and gave her a reason to eat and survive.
The journals and books filled with magical knowledge, plus the tome made of skin, are hidden well beneath a floorboard that is spelled so that only someone of her descent can access it. Someone could destroy the entire house, but that tiny area would survive. There was nowhere safer.
The power had been off for a long time. I’d had all the utilities hooked up in anticipation of moving in—the AC pushed out musty, barely-cool air and the fridge smelled like dead bodies. Guess that shouldn’t bother me, considering where I used to live, but the dead I handled were typically clean. Cleaner than most living people.
“I can’t believe I’m living here,” I speak to the empty room. Kyle had helped me unload, and then I’d asked for a few hours to… adjust myself. He’d agreed, but then had paused on the small covered porch—staring at the wrinkled, ragged trees reaching out from the shallow, murky water of Hellhole Bay, he’d asked me if I was absolutely sure this is what I wanted to do, where I wanted to live. It was probably his Berserker, wanting to stay and protect me from whatever the bear side could sense out there in the murder-stained swampy lake.
Of course I wasn’t sure. This might be the worst decision of my bad-choice-making life. It felt like what I had to do though. I wouldn’t move in with a man unless I was completely, completely sure of him. And the magical bond between Kyle and I still made sureness a complicated thing. And that wasn’t even factoring in everything else.
