by Cal Matthews
Not all of them remembered me; some, like Marcus, had very few memories of the events immediately before and after their deaths, but others recalled everything. And of course, the dead people don't haul themselves to my doorstep. They always brought at least one other person with them, people who had heard whispers about me, desperate enough to set aside their fear and doubt. They were the ones that get me business, by word of mouth, hush-hush conversations at bars.
I was grateful for the business, but I fucking hated running into these people afterward, in the toilet paper aisle or when I picked up Johnny’s heartworm medication. I knew they were scared of me. Fuck, I scared myself.
But I never - ever - questioned someone about how they died, about the circumstances of their death. I didn't want to know, didn't want to get mixed up in anyone else's business. Keeping a low profile was hard enough, and I barely succeeded at that.
Not to mention my worst nightmare--that some religious fanatics or, God-forbid, the US government heard about me. No, I didn't talk, and I strongly encouraged my, uh, clients, to keep quiet, too. Yeah, it was paranoid, especially for a little Podunk town like Heckerson, but after seeing the damage people did to each other, I didn't want to take any chances.
I knocked before I could talk myself out of it. I didn't feel well, and when I glanced back at my truck and saw Marcus's blurry face behind the windshield, I felt even worse. Maybe she wasn't home. Maybe Leo would show up tonight and announce he had discovered a bear killed Aubrey, and we could stick Marcus on a bus and life would go back to normal.
Nothing happened behind the door. I stepped back, bracing the expensive glass storm door against my back and looked over the rail to peer into the front window.
And saw Aubrey holding the curtain aside, staring back at me.
A weird yelpy grunt got stuck in my throat and I jerked backwards, hitting both my elbows and my head on the glass door behind me. It made a rattling crash. For a second I worried I had broken the damn thing, but it held. When I looked back to the window, Aubrey was gone, the curtain rippling into place.
There was a scrambling noise behind the door as the locks were clicked and then the door cracked open. Aubrey's pale face appeared in the space between the door and the door jam, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. She looked just as deranged.
“Aubrey?” I said cautiously, really not liking the crazy-eyed stare she had going on. Her hair hung in limp clumps around her incredibly pale face.
“Yes.” Her voice sounded strong, though, and she opened the door a little wider, looking up at me. I hadn't realized when she was lying dead on my table how tiny she was. She couldn't have been over five feet.
“I'm Ebron?” I said, completely winging it. “I, uh, helped you out the other night?”
“Yes,” she said again. “I remember.”
“You do.” I swallowed, shoving my hands in my pockets and then taking them out again. “Can I ask what exactly you remember?”
She considered me, giving me a long hard look that made me uncomfortable. I really hadn't expected her to be so self-contained. I had limited experience with teenage girls, but I assumed she would be flighty and pepper her speech with incomprehensible text talk. This girl was sizing me up like she was about to go for my throat.
“It's cold,” she said finally, opening the door the rest of the way. “Come in. Take your shoes off, please. My mom's rules.”
“Sure,” I said. I cast a look over my shoulder towards the truck, which looked pitifully lonely in the gray light. I couldn't see Marcus now - he was just a blurred shape behind the windshield.
I followed Aubrey into the front hall. She continued on, her bare feet padding quietly over the thick, white carpet, but I stopped short and looked down at my crusty work boots. Why hadn’t I worn sneakers? It would take me forever to lace those back up. I knelt, tugging at the laces until I could wrench each boot off and I lined them up neatly beneath the white wooden hall bench that dominated the entryway. My nose twitched at the heavy scent of glass cleaner. A clock ticked loudly above my head.
I grabbed the zipper on my coat and then stopped again, uncertain if I should leave it or take it off. The coat tree was already laden with sports hoodies and pea coats and my Carhartt looked about as out of place as a porn star at church. Walking across her bright living room, past all the expensive leather furniture and framed impressionist artwork in socked feet and a winter coat felt too ridiculous though, and I hung the coat next to a Montana State University sweatshirt. I felt like my dirty socks were going to leave footprints across the room, like a slug trailing slime.
Aubrey stood in the doorway to the kitchen and when I joined her, she indicated a stool at the counter. Clearly she’d vacated it when I’d knocked on the door; a mug of coffee on the table still steamed and the laptop beside it open to Tumblr. Late morning light spilled across the table from where the big sliding glass doors opened up to the big backyard. The quiet house hummed with the forced air heater. I wanted to ask her about her family, how she was doing, but it really didn't seem like the time for small talk.
I sat at the stool opposite hers, and we regarded each other. She seemed more curious than angry now, and indeed when she spoke, she just said, “So what are you doing here?”
“I want to know what you remember.”
“Why?”
“Someone else got killed the same way you did.”
She went white. Her pale face lost even more color and she blanched, turning her head so that her limp hair fell over her face like a curtain. I leaned forward and almost touched her hand, but kept my fingers splayed on the granite counter instead.
“Aubrey, what? What do you remember?”
“I was dead,” she said, looking up into my eyes. I saw the question there.
“Yes.” Firmly, so there was no doubt. She nodded and her body loosened, her stiff arms going soft, her jaw relaxing. The memory of her wide, staring eyes came to me in a flash and I looked back down at my hands. The sleeve of my thermal shirt had a stain on it, and I self-consciously bunched it with my thumb until I had twisted it out of sight.
Aubrey didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes were fixed on me. “And you . . .”
“Brought you back to life.”
“How?”
“I don't know,” I said. “I just can.”
“Anybody?”
“No, not if it is real bad.” She gave me a hard look and I swallowed heavily, feeling defensive.
“But I was real bad, wasn't I, Ebron? I remember . . .”
This time I did take her hand, giving her palm a squeeze. My hands dwarfed her small, slim ones, her bones fragile between my fingers. She seemed surprised by the contact, and gave my fingers a squeeze in response, turning my hand over in hers and tracing one of the veins up to my wrist. It was weirdly sensual, but I didn't pull back.
“Tell me,” I said quietly.
“Cameron won't touch me now,” she said, still staring at my hand, her eyes zoning like she was a million miles away. “He said that all he can think about is my guts hanging out. He said he could see my intestines. Did you see my intestines, Ebron? That's a strange name.”
“I know it is. Yes. I had your intestines in my hands. They were . . . slippery.” Fuck, man, when in Rome. “But I put them back in your body and fixed it all.”
She nodded, as though that confirmed something. “We were at the reservoir. We were fooling around. It wasn't the first time,” she added, looking at me sternly, like I might question her level of experience or her choice of bed partners or whatever. Her unflinching eyes wouldn’t look away from me. Her fingers traced up and down my wrist.
“Okay,” I said tightly, making an expression that I hoped conveyed how little I cared about her sexcapades.
“It's been so cold, you know?” she continued, still stroking my hand like it was a cat. A ripple of goose bumps went up my arm and along my back and she noticed, glancing up into my eyes and then dropping my hand abruptly. I tried to draw
my hand back slowly, as though I didn't want to dose it in hand sanitizer or bleach or anything. It felt faintly filmy, like there was residue left behind.
“We had the truck running,” she said. “All the windows were fogged up, and we couldn't see anything. Not that we were looking. But then there was, like, this slushing noise, real loud. You know how sometimes noises carry when it's really cold and you can't tell how close it is?”
I nodded, leaning forward a little to catch every word.
“So we heard this noise, and Cameron is always real paranoid, so we started putting our clothes back on as fast as we could. We kept hearing this slushing noise, and it was getting louder. Or closer maybe, I don't know. So Cameron wanted to just go, but I couldn't find my leggings, and I didn't want to try to put them on bouncing down the mountain. And I thought that he was being stupid, because who comes out there anyway? Besides stupid kids like us. But I really could hear something, and at first I thought that it kinda sounded like an animal? Because I could hear breathing. But then I heard...”
“Yeah?” I said, leaning forward on my elbows. She paused, her lips slack, her eyes unfocused. I waited and my heart started to pound.
“So then I could hear laughing and I knew it was people.” Aubrey took in a deep, shuddering breath, her chest rising, and I thought of the deep purple color her liver had been, how sticky her blood had felt on my hands.
“Cameron started hearing it, too, and he was like, fuck it, we're leaving. So he gets his pants on and swings the truck around, but we started sliding a little, and just for a second I saw . . .” she trailed off, blinking a few times, her face becoming still.
“What?” I said, and against my better judgment I reached across the table again and touched her hand. It was cold and I didn't want to, but I curled my fingers around hers, trying to bring her back.
“There was a man. He was tall and all in black, but mostly I saw his eyes. They were looking right at me. And then Cameron was shouting because there was someone by his door, and he tried to just gun the engine, but the truck died, and then they dragged us out.”
“Out of the truck,” I clarified, into the silence that followed. She seemed to have phased out again.
She nodded. “Yeah, and they were struggling with Cameron, sort of pushing him around and I remember that they were laughing, like, high school, you know? Like pushing around the freshmen in the locker room. But there were just two of them, and no one was holding me, so I just turned and ran.” She was looking past me, her eyes unfocused, her mouth hanging open. “They caught me though,” she added in a tiny voice. Her chin bobbed down, and I stared at the twin lines of tears falling down her cheeks. When she spoke again, it was so soft that it was nearly not said.
“I think he may have been the Devil,” she whispered, and a chill went over my whole body, my skin rippling with goose bumps.
Silence again, silence that stretched and stretched. I tried to picture it, my mind racing, trying to figure out who the hell would be slicing up kids in the forest, and of course, the only thing I could think of was the fucking witches again, because who else?
“What did they look like, Aubrey?”
She shook her head, her limp hair coming loose from where it was tucked behind her ears and hanging back in her face. I had an absurd impulse to tuck it back for her, feeling all protective and terrified and completely creeped out, all at once.
“I don't know,” she said. “I really don't. It all happened so fast. I didn't understand at first, there was just this pain, and then Cameron was grabbing me and hauling me back into the truck, and I went with him, and then - oh, God, my stomach just opened. It just opened, like a purse, like it just split and there was blood fucking everywhere, and Cameron started screaming at me, and I was just holding my guts in my hand, trying to pull my coat closed around it, you know, to hold them in, and then . . . I don't know. I was gone. Somewhere else. And then I saw you.”
My eyes flickered up and met hers, and something passed between us, an acknowledgement, shared grief. It was stupid to apologize, to say I was sorry, but I had helped her, for Christ's sake. Hadn't I? I had brought her back. But I wanted to say it any way, sorry it had all happened in the first place, and tell her I was working to make it right.
“So,” she said, before I could get my thoughts in order. I watched her wipe her tears away with the back of her hand. “You said that there was another one. Did they kill someone else?”
“Yes,” I said, glad to be back on more solid ground. “Yes, the same thing happened to him. I mean, I don't know exactly the details. But his stomach was cut open, the same as yours.”
“And you brought him back?”
“Yes.”
“Does it hurt you to do that?”
“No, not very much. It takes a lot of energy. But it doesn't hurt me,” I paused, not wanting to ask. “Did it hurt you?”
“Yes,” she said softly. “It hurt worse than the dying.”
I winced and looked away, letting my eyes fall on the ordinary kitchen knick-knacks of her family's life. A pile of mail. Some quarters left on the counter. A reusable shopping bag hooked over the arm of a chair.
“Where's your family?” I asked.
She sniffed, looking down at her hands. “They went to lunch after church. I didn't want to go. They don't know, of course. Cameron's dad and his sister came with me to your store. They helped him scrub out all the blood. Well, they tried.”
“He took you to his dad's house?”
“Yeah. He couldn't have brought me here.”
“How did he -” I stopped, shaking my head. I didn't need to know, but I wanted very badly to know. What did they say about me? What words did they use?
She regarded me steadily, her eyes not unkind. “I think you helped Scott - that's Cameron's dad - I think you helped a friend of his a few years ago. He got killed when a tree fell on him, remember?”
I did. You don't forget something like that.
“Scott knew about you from that. Or, he'd heard about it. No one really knows for sure if they believe it or not.” She sighed.
“Thanks for talking to me,” I said, patting her hand in sort of a fatherly gesture, trying to indicate my readiness to leave.
She nodded. “I hope you find who killed me.”
“Me, too.”
Aubrey stood up, and to my surprise she hugged me, her arms going around my waist and her head barely reaching my breastbone. I sort of brought my shoulders together in a facsimile of a hug, putting my arms around her but not really squeezing. She didn't seem to notice, though, and when she stepped back the smile she gave me seemed genuine. I wanted to ask her if she was glad that I had brought her back, but those words wouldn't come out. It was an answer I really didn't want to know. There was no coming back from that one.
“They want to go find them, you know,” she said, just as I laced my boots in the front wall way.
I looked up at her. “Who?”
“Cameron. Scott. They want to go find who killed me.”
My eyebrows drew together. “Where? Where are they looking?”
“They’ve been all up over the mountain by the reservoir. Over by the Brock ranch, too.”
Oh. I nodded. That explained the hunting party.
“But you don’t know who did it,” I said. “I mean, not for sure.”
She shrugged. “It was a man and a woman. He wore a long coat. That’s all I know.”
The breath left my body, and the loose, rattling notions in my head all came together, connecting and lighting up. “Did she have red hair?” I asked, hearing the stiffness to my own voice. I pulled the shoelace tight and stood up slowly. My limbs felt heavy.
Aubrey appeared to think about it, and then she shrugged again. “Could be. Why? Do you know who it was?”
“I might,” I said cautiously, but her face stayed blank. “They’re up there now?”
“Yeah,” she said. “They won't find him though.”
“How do
you know?”
She looked past me, her strange dead eyes fixed somewhere far away. “He's the Devil. And the Devil finds you.”
Chapter Sixteen
Marcus was shivering when I slid back into the truck, despite the heater running full blast. The short job across the street had left me splattered with muddy slush that oozed under my pants and rubbed cold against my ankles.. I put my ungloved hands up to the heater vent, flexing my stiff fingers.
“Well?” he said. His earlier snottiness seemed to have been frozen out of him. Now he just seemed subdued.
I thought about what I was going to say to him, how his expression would change when I said the words. I needed to keep it together, wait for Leo, get more information. But there was no doubt in my mind that Corvin and Morgan had killed Aubrey. The only questions that remained were why and why they had turned on Marcus.
“She remembers everything,” I said.
Marcus considered that, his eyebrows coming together to form a little V in the middle of his forehead. I had kind of forgotten I had just been making out with him, what, fifteen minutes ago? It seemed like a shock.
“She's really messed up,” I said, unable to forget how her hands had felt on mine, all slimy. And then without meaning to, I added, “I don't - I wondered if she came back wrong.”
“Came back?” he said, jumping on the word like a dog on a bone and I cursed my own stupidity again.
“Yeah. She was unconscious for a long time,” I tried lamely, but he wasn't buying it. He gave me a WTF face, and jutted his chin towards the steering column.
“Can we go now? I really have to pee.”
“Yeah,” I said, but I knew I wasn't going to get out of it. Why the fuck hadn't Leo and I come up with a plausible story? We were apparently terrible at subterfuge. I expected better of Leo.
