Paranormal After Dark

by Rebecca Hamilton

  Chapter 4

  HE LAY PERFECTLY still in the dark, aware that he was still himself, but unable to admit it.

  There were ghosts around him and whispers in his head, but what held his attention was thirst. What was the point of murder if it didn’t quench the thirst? He could have sworn the whole reason for killing was to make the parched pain go away.

  Between the ghosts was a memory, and he knew from the moment he saw her that she was not real. He would have known if that particular spirit had been trapped. He would have known, and he would have sought her out, and he would have given his unlife to free her. But she had crossed over, and no one ever came back from beyond the Veil, and so she was not real.

  “You’re not real,” he thought he said, and she nodded.

  “Neither are you,” she said, and it had the ring of truth, though he didn’t understand.

  She sat beside him and folded his hand in hers, and he chose to forget that she was long gone, just like he had chosen to forget that he wasn’t himself.

  Dimly, he wondered what part of him still had the resources to think, if any. What would it feel like to pretend to think? Was it possible to work around the thirst? It must take a very, very long time to get used to something like that, to start to remember.

  On the other hand, even a sleeping brain can misfire. It wasn’t really thinking, only the illusion of thought, created by randomly accessed memories. She nodded and gave his hand a squeeze.

  “Remember when I found you,” she instructed, and the cellar became a woods.

  He is running, even though he knows he shouldn’t. He will trip and fall, weighed down by bad balance. He shouldn’t run, but boys who see the dead don’t easily make friends with the living, and the others laughed. How can you lose someone who died before you were born? They didn’t understand that she had only been waiting for her husband, so he would have a hand to hold as they went across together. Grandmother. She taught him to speak when he couldn’t hear living voices, but her waiting was over, and she and Grandfather went across. He got to see them as the shadows closed in and the years sloughed away, and they stepped into the darkness together, confident that there was light on the other side.

  He ran because he knew that when the other boys laughed, they were laughing at him, even though he didn’t always catch them in time to read their lips. They didn’t want to understand, and he didn’t want to try to explain. He is only four. Surely a child so young can’t understand death.

  The trees are silent. He cannot remember what birdsong sounds like, or wind in the leaves. If anyone had come after him, he wouldn’t hear them, but no one comes. The boys aren’t cruel; they just don’t know how to deal with a witch, a medium.

  He stops anyway and turns around to check. The stretch behind him is still and empty. Father will come to find him if he is gone too long, but no one is following just yet. He is not sure whether he ran because he wanted to be alone, or because he wanted to get out of the house where Grandfather’s shell still lies, or because he wanted to show them how upset he is. He is not sure he didn’t want to be followed.

  There are ghosts among the trees, though, and they know him and will understand. They knew Grandmother and what she was waiting for. They will know why she is gone now, and they will know why heneeded her. There is a place further in where the ghosts are old and quiet, the victims of some battle a thousand years past. They have amassed the wisdom of those who watch the world but cannot touch it. The blood on their clothes has faded, and their rage has burned down to embers.

  He never makes it to those ghosts.

  Two trees have fallen across the path he usually takes. One was huge and dead, and when it fell, it brought the other down with it. To the right of the obstacle is the stream, and he cannot swim; to the left is a short, rocky cliff, barely taller than him, where time amputated a small hill long ago. He could go back and over the hill, but he doesn’t want to go back. He goes over.

  The bark scrapes his shin as he climbs atop the larger of the two felled trunks, clinging tight to keep his bad balance from getting the better of him. A hare watches his progress from between the jagged roots. The gap between the trunks is small enough that he can climb across easily, but instead, he does something stupid. He stands, intending to step over. Immediately, he knows that he has done wrong. The curvature of the wood upsets his footing, confusing his inner ear. He pitches forward, takes a step to steady himself, and his foot slides down into the small space between the trees, lodging his leg up to the thigh. He has enough time to worry that he’ll get stuck, but his momentum continues to carry him forward, and the crack resonates through his entire skeleton. It takes another second before he feels it, the ice and then the fire.

  He can’t hear himself scream, but someone else hears. Not Father, not the boys, not the ghosts.

  When he has exhausted all his breath, she is there. She hangs back among the trees as though reluctant to be seen, but she is dead, and he can sense her there. He begs and reaches out, and she steps forward when she realizes that he has spotted her. A ray of sun pierces the canopy and strikes her hair. It is tangled and dirty as the rest of her, but the light makes it glow in a golden nimbus. He has no idea what she is, but she looks about like he assumes an angel would.

  She regards him warily, as though ready to run, but the dead are his friends, and he can’t believe that a friend would leave him in this pain. He falls silent and waits for her help.

  She takes hold of the larger trunk, the corpse of a two-hundred year old behemoth, and lifts it away from his leg. He can’t hear it, but the grating vibrations shake the ground beneath him. He slides down into the dirt, and the impact jars his shattered femur, and he cries again. That’s what small children do, isn’t it? When they’re hurt, they cry.

  Cool hands come to rest on his cheeks, bringing his face up so that he can see her eyes. They’re brown, as cool as her hands.

  “Hush,” she whispers, and the tiny amount of power in that one word is enough to send him down so quickly and willingly that she pauses, surprised. Perhaps it’s because his ghost sense bypasses his useless ears, because her voice goes straight to the core of him, but from that first encounter, he has always been ridiculously easy to trance.

  She works quickly. The tears stop, and a moment later, the pain has all but disappeared. His leg is completely numb. She sets him upright, leaning against the smaller fallen tree, and then steps back to look at him. There is blood from his scraped shin on her hands. That’s when he notices her mouth and the teeth inside, but her power is still too heavy on him, and he can’t be afraid.

  “What are you?” she asks quietly, clearly trying to be gentle in case he really is only a hurt child.

  He doesn’t have a good answer for her. With a child’s logic, he tells her that he is a little boy, and she seems to believe it.

  “I think you may be something else as well,” she tells him. That thought seems to both worry and intrigue her. She bites her lip, a dangerous gesture with teeth like those. Then she picks him up. He can feel the echo of pain as his leg shifts, but she hums a few soft notes, her chilly lips pressed into his hair, and it recedes again.

  “Do you live near here,” she asks, “or are you lost?”

  He points in the direction of home, trusting that she will get him there safely. They are friends, after all. But she sings as she walks, her voice as golden as her hair. The light filtering through the leaves is suddenly too bright, and his mind is too still, and when he wakes at home with his leg still numb, she is gone.

  She is gone.

  She is gone.

  He reached out to touch the memory, but there was only empty air. The dream faded. There was pain then, but a broken leg was nothing. Thirst struck him like a blow to the head, and he sank back down into silence, unable to remember and too tired to try.

  He saw her again, and she brought him more memories, and each time, the memories seemed a little more real, more real than the cold cement un
derneath him.

  He knows she does not mean him harm. He knows that, but sometimes she looks at him like she is trying hard to form a plan, and when he asks what she’s thinking, she will only tell him that he is special. Some days, she doesn’t come, and when he sees her again, there’s a bitter, hard feel to her spirit. It makes him feel ill. Once, she tells him that she used to have children. She misses them. She asks if he minds her staying close to-

  The boat is a giant, completely full of people. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like the way the water feels beneath him, or the sense that it is alive. Most of all, he hates what it does to her. She lies in a trunk in the cargo hold, paralyzed and helpless except for brief moments when the tide changes. He stays with her almost all the time, now. He tells his parents that he is exploring the ship, but as soon as he is out of their sight, he runs down and stays near her, so he’ll be there for the moments she can rise. She has always been there for him; he owes her. One day, she rises and looks at him with hunger and fear, and before she can speak, he offers her his wrist. They argue, but he knows what he’s doing, and she finally accepts. He worries that it will hurt, but it-

  The first time he kisses her, she screams at him. He is still only a child, to her. He’s a friend, but a child. It took months to work up the courage to do that, and he won’t try again for more than a year, but he has loved her since the first time he saw her, and now he is in love with her too. He can’t help it. He is not a child any more, but she is ancient, and he is very afraid that she’ll never see him as a man. The next time he tries, she smiles and shakes her head, but instead of pulling away, she pulls him down into a second-

  It has been years since he felt that bitter, hard edge on her. He asks, but she only-

  The gown is snug in the bodice, pagoda sleeves tapering to points that nearly reach the floor. The overskirt is bustled in back, the underskirt shimmering with silver embroidery. She laughed when he nervously brought up the idea of marriage, but neither of them is laughing, now that this dress is made, ensconcing her body in his handiwork. His father the tailor never made anything like this, not even for their lord. She is radiant in the sun – blinding, even – and his heart hammers in his ears as-

  The evening closes in, and she closes her eyes while he applies her makeup. A little rouge, a little kohl. He doesn’t like the makeup, but he likes to touch her, and he likes to sit behind the stage and watch the audience while she sings. Some men can’t stand when others look at their women, but it feels good to watch them admire her, knowing that he is the one who gets to feel her lips. Odd as it sometimes seems, he is the one she-

  There was a brief flurry of motion. He thought he remembered Sebastian coming back, sitting on the steps and watching, talking quietly to himself. The whispering started again. He opened his eyes, felt death, and retched into the cement. There was a broken body staring back at him from the ground.

  “That’s the spirit,” Sebastian said with a double thumbs-up. “So close.”

  He whimpered and crawled toward the corpse, toward that overwhelming scent of spent life, but it was too dead for a medium, and no matter how hard he tried, he could not force his body any closer.

  “Oh,” Sebastian said. Then, after a moment, “I think I can fix that. Maybe if you’re a little drier…”

  The whispering became deafening, worming its way deeper and deeper inside him, and the world dissolved.

  There was a girl, either drugged or tranced, lying across the stairs. He could hear her heart beating slowly. It was calling him, so he came. Gingerly, reverently, he touched his cracked lips to her throat. Under her skin was everything he needed. He could almost taste it.

  And his ears filled with whispering, and something in his mind twanged, wires crossed, and his own body dumped him unceremoniously on the floor in a violent convulsion. It passed as quickly as it had come, leaving him shivering in a heap, colder even than before, quivering and confused. A minute corner of his brain noted that nothing had died, that heart still beat, and there was nothing there to hurt him. The door was gone. Sebastian was gone. The girl was not so weak that a sip would hurt her. The obstacle was unreal. He crawled forward again. Just a tiny sip…

  Whispering. Twang. He seized.

  Twang.

  Twang, twang.

  His eyes were too dry for tears, but he huddled by the girl’s feet, weeping in frustration. She was so close. Relief flowed inches away. He could hear it, smell it… even touch it. But every time he tried to take it-

  Twang.

  He hovered there for days, listening to her heart slow and slow and finally stop. The death tore into him, and she joined the ghosts in the dark.

  * * *

  SOME SMALL SOUND broke through the silence, hushed and furtive like someone trying hard to avoid notice. Footsteps. The noise brought with it the smell of relief, damp and soothing and all too far away. But it was getting closer.

  He both longed for it and dreaded it. He had long since learned that touch meant torture, but the promise of relief was more than his empty veins could take, even if he knew it was a false promise, and his muscles tensed in reflex. What was left of his brain was torn between the instinct and the learned response, between approach and recoil. Neither could win, so he stayed motionless in the dark, sprawled in his pile of filth and bones.

  A door appeared, punctuated by a blaze of light. His pupils tried to contract, but could not, so he lay there silent and blind. It wasn’t Sebastian. He knew that much, at least, and beat down the half-eager terror that fluttered in the pit of his hollow stomach.

  “Holy beans,” someone said. A woman’s voice. She waded into the pile, bones clattering all around her. The smell of her assaulted him.

  She turned slowly, and the glare of her flashlight swung away from him as she counted the skulls. He blinked once, clearing the droplets of color from his vision. She was so close, he could have reached out and grabbed her ankle, if he dared. He did want to, did think about it, but that dangerous tension in the back of his mind tightened and kept his hands still.

  “Holy beans,” she said again. “There’s got to be at least twenty. Bastard’s sure been busy.”

  A tingle of magic itched beneath his desiccated skin as she pulled a mirrored compact out of her pocket and popped it open. A wizard, then. That should have told him to stay away, stay still, but the ache inside him intensified. His hands trembled.

  “Hey,” she said into the mirror. “It’s me. I’m at the storage place, and it’s definitely his, but it looks like he’s pretty much just using it as a trash can. It’s full of bodies. Lots of bodies, but nothing more helpful.”

  A man’s voice answered through the tiny circle of glass. “Okay. Well, get out of there before he shows up. And you may as well torch it. He might have soil hidden in there somewhere.”

  “Roger wilco,” the woman said, and she pulled out a lighter.

  Chapter 5

  KIM DIDN’T MIND bodies as much as some people might. That cellar was horrible, and it stank, and it vibed her freaky in all the wrong ways, but it wasn’t horrible because there were dead people in it. It was horrible because something horrible had happened there, and it had stained the place in ways that bleach couldn’t fix. Fire would clean it out better than anything else.

  She slid her improvised telephone back into her pocket and zipped a flame out of her little plastic lighter. Bones wouldn’t catch, and cement wouldn’t catch, but she could give the flame a little boost, and the whole place would go up like her family’s last Thanksgiving. It was only a shame Sebastian Duran wouldn’t have the front-row seat he deserved. But if he had been anywhere nearby, this wouldn’t have gone nearly as smoothly.

  She blew carefully onto the flame, coaxing it brighter with a trickle of magic. Once the basement was going, she could go back up and light the building. All the buildings, just in case. She estimated ten minutes before the nearest fire station could get word, and another five for them to get there. Fifteen minutes
would be more than enough time to destroy the structure of the place, maybe wipe the walls clean of some of the bad juju they had collected. There had to be ghosts in a place like that.

  She blew on the flame again, and it fanned out yellow onto the heap of corpses. There wouldn’t be enough left to match dental records, but everyone down there looked like they had been gone long enough to have been pronounced dead, anyway. It twinged her conscience to take that closure from those families, but it was more important to keep that pile from getting any bigger. The flame caught, dancing along a broken femur with a cheerful crackle as it slowly grew brighter than her flashlight.

  And something hit her from behind, knocking her knees out from under her. She stumbled and hit her hip on the stairs. She could feel spindly, brittle fingers close on the fabric of her blue jeans, and she brought her flashlight down hard on them. They crunched like corn chips and pulled away with a papery hiss, and Kim scrambled up to try to get a look at her attacker.

  She had taken it for the freshest of the corpses, halfway to mummification, but now that she looked closer, there was a weird suppleness to the withered flesh. It wasn’t rotting, either, just drying up like a raisin. Pruny, wrinkled skin clung close to its bones and stretched tight over a highly visible skull. Its eyes were dull and stained dark red from pupil to lid, and its lips were drawn back from white, slightly crooked teeth. The canines, top and bottom, were long and sharp.

  The jaws parted as Kim watched, and the body tightened as though to lunge, but it toppled forward instead and lay still for a moment before gathering the strength to drag itself cross the remaining distance. It was fascinating to watch, and painful at the same time. Kim stepped back, up the steps and out of reach. The thing pulled itself to the foot of the stairs, put out its broken hand, and then stiffened. Its eyes rolled back, and it fell to its side with a scratchy exhalation.