Buried Truth

by Frank Hurt

  “Oh no,” Nancy said. “You look far worse.”

  “I couldn’t care less about what I look like if I’m going to be dead, anyway.”

  “Hmmm,” Nancy wagged a finger at Ember. “See, that’s where you’re wrong. How you look when you die is how you’ll look for eternity—or at least close enough to what eternity is, by my understanding. You want to be dressed to the nines—like that chauvinist friend of yours, Barnaby. That’s how you want to look when a future Inquisitor summons you. Trust me. This is coming from someone who’s permanently wearing curlers and a bathrobe.”

  Ember’s face creased into a smile.

  “There, that’s the spirit—pardon the pun.” Nancy clapped her hands together. “Now that you told me your deep, dark secret, it’s only fair that I share a little bit about me. This sort of thing is what bonds a team together.”

  “As much as I enjoy bonding with you, I’m not sure now is the time.”

  “Sure it is! Now’s exactly the time,” Nancy said. “I’m distracting you from the anxiety attack you were having. You can’t come up with a brilliant plan to escape this harrowing plight unless your mind is clear.”

  Ember changed hands and shrugged. “Right. So, what’s your story?”

  “My curlers,” Nancy said, pointing at her head. “I have naturally straight hair. Marcus loved straight hair. He liked my hair long and straight.”

  Ember squinted at the ghost, not fully appreciating what she was hearing.

  “Marcus loved straight, long hair. So, I kept mine short and in curls. It was one of the few ways I could stand up to him. One of the only things I could control, that he couldn’t. He…found me less attractive with short, curly hair. So he touched me less. Which was just peachy by me.”

  “I can’t imagine living with such a monster,” Ember said softly. “What he did to your daughter. To your grandson. To you.”

  Nancy nodded. “He was a monster. A terrible monster. That’s no doubt. And you ended his terror. You did that.”

  Ember hung her head. “I have nightmares from that, still. He’s gotten the last laugh I suppose.”

  Nancy hovered nearer to Ember. She gently reached a bony, transparent azure hand to Ember’s face. “He only has as much power as you let him have. That’s one lesson I learned too late.”

  If she would have had any hydration left in her, Ember might have lost a few drops then from her eyes.

  “Your hand’s shaking,” Nancy said. “Are you frightened?”

  Ember held up her trembling hand. “No. Not really. I don’t know why it’s shaking.”

  “I had an uncle who had Parkinson’s Disease,” Nancy said. “It looked like that.”

  “I don’t have Parkinson’s,” Ember said. She tried to will her hand to stop trembling. When it refused, she stuffed it into her jacket pocket until the quivering stopped. “Maybe it’s a byproduct of traversing the Snot Sea. Or from sending Doug away to…wherever he is now. The first time I performed a temporary lift on a Deference Spell, it made me pass out. I bled from my eyes and nose and was in something of a coma for the next day or so.”

  “Jeez. These spells…they take their toll on you,” Nancy said. “But you recover?”

  “I have so far.” The mage raised a leg and clumsily began untying her lone shoe. She removed the shoe and tied its laces to the door’s lever handle, letting the shoe dangle. She tentatively began to release the lever, but quickly reapplied pressure when the handle began to rise.

  She exhaled sharply. “I need more weight.”

  Ember crouched awkwardly, always keeping one hand on the handle. She scraped up pebbles, sand, a couple rusty bolts—whatever she could reach at her feet. Her excavation site was a 30-inch diameter circle beneath and around her position. Pinch by tedious pinch, she filled her shoe with aggregate.

  When the shoe was filled, Ember carefully began to remove her hand. The weight held—for a moment.

  The lever handle was made of smooth, round chrome. There were no corners to it, no edges with which a shoelace could find adequate purchase to suspend its sand-filled mate.

  The shoelace and shoe slid off the lever. Ember emitted a surprised shriek, clasping the lever handle with both hands. The shoe tumbled to the ground and rolled away, spilling its contents until it came to rest, just out of reach.

  “Bloody hell!” Ember tried in vain to reach the shoe with her foot. She allowed herself a single scream of frustration.

  “Seriously, Universe!” The mage yelled up at the sky, which had turned hues of lavender as the sun dropped into the horizon. “What the hell do you want from me?”

  Ember closed her eyes and screamed again at the evening sky. She was sure the dehydration and stress was making her hallucinate; she imagined a person circling in the air.

  She opened her eyes, searching the dim sky. A large raptor flew into view. The golden eagle answered Ember’s scream with one of its own, piercing and resolute.

  The eagle dropped, flapping its wings to control its descent. It landed near the Ranger, flapped its wings one more time, and then began to shapeshift. Wings began appearing more as arms, tucked in against a woman’s breasts and broad shoulders, clad in a dark canvas coat. Claws and legs stretched and widened into boots and jeans. The eagle’s head transformed into a feminine human’s, with hair sprouting long and dark blonde. Her eyes became human-shaped, but they retained their dusky, predatorial confidence.

  She may have been dehydrated, but Ember found the material to produce tears, all the same. “Anna,” she whispered hoarsely. “I didn’t know if you’d come. I didn’t know if you got my directions.”

  Anna closed the distance to Ember with a jog that started awkwardly, as though she needed to remember how to move as a human again after living as a bird for the past few hours. “I heard enough, at least. And I looked for the Ranger. Good thing your bright red pickup stands out against the dry prairie.”

  “Good thing you’ve got crazy powerful eyesight, too,” Ember said. Her words merged with a sob of gratitude. “Thank you, my friend. I owe you so much.”

  “Sure you do,” Anna said. She placed her fists on her full-figured hips as her raptor-eyes flitted around the scene. She looked all the part of a superhero, swooping in to save the day. “What happened to you, anyway? You look like you’ve been rolling around in a cow’s afterbirth. You smell like it too. Are those rotten eggs I’m smelling? And you said you were glued to something?”

  “Metaphorically,” Ember said. “Sort of literally too, I guess.”

  She explained her situation to Anna, glossing over the details such as her side journey to the Snot Sea.

  “How do you know that you’ve tripped a bomb? Are you sure there’s a bomb in there? I smell the propane leak and hear the hissing, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bomb.” Anna looked skeptical.

  Ember thought of a lie she could tell. She thought of several lies. Instead, she took a deep breath of propane-laced air and exhaled the truth. “You’re going to have a tough time believing me. I’ll have to explain more later, but the short version is that I can see ghosts. I can talk to them, too. I’ve been talking to Doug and Josh and Matt—the three spies you and Rik helped me…deal with.”

  Anna’s eyes slid over Ember, her head following a moment later. “You talked to ghosts, and they told you to come here. Then they told you that you triggered a bomb, right before it goes off?”

  “Right. Sort of,” Ember said. “It was another ghost who told me about the bomb. Her name’s Nancy. She’s become my sidekick, you might say. She’s standing right there, by the junked-out fridge.”

  Nancy waved cheerfully and said hello.

  Anna said only, “you’re right. You’re going to have to explain more later. For now, I’ll just have to take you at your word. How do you propose we get you out of this predicament?”

  Ember pointed at a nearby truck tire. “I was thinking maybe you could roll the tire over here, against the door. Then we could tie a rope or a cord
or something between the tire and the handle to keep it from flipping—”

  “No,” Anna shook her head as she peered more closely at the door handle. “That won’t work. This handle is too smooth. Any rope’ll just slip right off.”

  “Yeah,” Ember chewed her lip. “I did try something like that already, with my shoe. It ended up falling off, like you said. I barely caught the latch in time.”

  “How did those guys get in and out of this trailer without triggering the bomb themselves?” Anna’s gaze moved along the wall of trash a moment before her head followed. “They’re just idiot meth-heads, I realize, but they had enough foresight to hide their lab. To set up an elaborate tripwire. They must have some way of turning it off so they can come and go safely.”

  “That’s…that’s a good question,” Ember said. She looked at Nancy. “We hadn’t thought of that.”

  “We?” Anna glanced at the mage. “Oh. Sure. Your…you and your…sidekick.”

  Nancy beamed. She pointed triumphantly at Anna. “See? It’s catching on! Ghost sidekick. She gets it. This one gets it. I like her.”

  “They’re all three birds as their changeling subform,” Anna said, as much to herself as to Ember. “I wonder.”

  Without further explanation, Anna shapeshifted into her golden eagle subform. She stretched her wings and with a hop and a few flaps, she lifted off.

  Some irrational corner of Ember’s fatigued mind thought she was about to be abandoned by her friend. She watched Anna land atop the trailer house. She lost sight of her friend.

  Something heavy was being moved out of view on the trailer house roof. That something dropped with a tinny thud. Anna’s voice announced, “I found something. It’s a hatch. A door on the roof, they’d hidden beneath a wooden pallet and some tin. Clever junkies. They made it so you can’t see it from the sky, but the only way to access it is to fly onto it. Gimme a second.”

  Ember would have made a quip about her inability to go anywhere. Instead she just chewed her lip and listened.

  Anna dropped through the hatch onto the trailer house floor. The oxygen to propane ratio was dangerously unhealthy, so she held her breath and moved purposefully. Her superior night vision aided her in the windowless, darkened lab. She studied the mechanism attached to the door and the wires attached to the car battery’s posts with terminal clamps. With both hands, she grasped either clamp and squeezed, disconnecting both simultaneously.

  Ember was surprised to find the door pushing against her as it swung out. Anna’s face poked out from the doorway and she released the air from her lungs. “It’s good. It’s done. Let’s get away from this before we pass out.”

  Anna hadn’t traveled two paces from the trailer house before Ember sprinted, shoeless, away from the trash heap. She hopped over the uneven, thistle-laden sod to the Ranger, some hundred feet away. As she ran, she was unfastening her pants, scooting them and her panties down past her knees immediately before squatting against one of her pickup’s tires.

  She gripped the tire for support, sighed heavily, and relaxed. Ember was not joking when she said she needed to pee.

  27

  I’ll Add it to Your Tab

  The Ranger’s headlights painted a view of asphalt before them. A white line ran hypnotically along the highway’s shoulder, conspiring with the steady hum of the pickup’s engine to tempt the mage into sleep. Every so often, a piece of dried mud broke free from underneath the pickup, resulting in a brief percussive clang to counter any chance of the hypnosis taking root.

  When she was assured of Ember’s safety, Nancy departed the abandoned farmstead and made for Minot. She explained that she wanted to say goodnight to her daughter and grandson. Though neither of them would be able to see or hear Nancy, it brought the ghost some semblance of comfort.

  After today’s terrifying events, the concept of family time sounded especially appealing. Even if, in this case, one of the family members would be present in spirit only.

  “Thank you for taking me away from that place,” Ember muttered. “I was starting to think he would be right. That I’d die there.”

  “Are you gonna tell me what happened to your shoes? Or why your clothes are shredded and you stink like dead fish?” Anna chose to drive them home, as the most alert of the two. She glanced at her passenger, her head following a moment later. “Hell’s bells, are you gonna tell me that a ghost did this to you?”

  “No,” Ember shook her head. Her encrusted ponytail clung to her back, but pieces broke free when she moved. The cloth passenger seat would be covered with flakes of dried ectoplasm. “Not a ghost. But where ghosts come from.”

  The driver’s dusky raptor eyes dared another moment’s stare at Ember before returning to the road. “We’ve got a long drive ahead. You can tell me about it after we stop at the Kum & Go in Tioga. Get some gas, some water. Flying that far made me thirsty. I’m guessing you could use a drink, too.”

  “Scotch on the rocks,” Ember sighed. “But I’ll settle for water.”

  When they arrived in Tioga that evening, the convenience store was nearly as busy as it had been when Ember fueled up earlier that day. Anna instructed her to stay in the pickup, lest she be mistaken for a shoeless crazy person or a panhandler.

  As the changeling woman topped off the Ranger’s fuel tank and went inside the store, Ember leaned against the inside of the passenger door and watched. She considered how clean both she and her little pickup were when she was last here, and how filthy and tired they were as they passed through at the end of the day. Both the pickup and she would get washed. The Ranger would be restored to its previous state, but Ember suspected she would never be the same. There was no going back to how things were.

  Nor did she want to, really. Not if it meant forgetting what she had learned or unseeing what she had witnessed. The Snot Sea was the stuff of nightmares, but she felt oddly privileged to have glimpsed it. She had no desire to ever see it again—once was plenty—but having been there she gained new insights, new appreciation for her life and with it an evolved attitude. A soul-egg wasn’t the only thing she had acquired from that place.

  The cab’s courtesy light flicked on when the driver’s side door opened. Anna plunged two water bottles into the center console cup holders. “They didn’t have any whiskey. I got you a cereal bar and some jerky though.”

  Ember wet her parched throat and unwrapped her supper. “Once more, you’re a lifesaver. I owe you.”

  “I’ll add it to your tab,” Anna said with a wink. “I know you probably want to get home, but we need to stop by Rik’s place first. When you called me, I was heading into town. I pulled into Rik’s yard and left my car there so I could shift and get to you.”

  “I might have to borrow some of his hot water then,” Ember said. “I need to get this tosh washed off me soon. I need to feel like a human again.”

  “Are you gonna tell me about what that stuff is? And about your latest fashion choices?”

  “My shoes,” Ember said between bites of mesquite-flavored beef jerky. “I left one of them back at the meth lab. No point in bringing it back since its mate is gone for good.”

  Anna took a swig from her own bottle of water. “Was it sacrificed at the same place as the bottom quarter of your pant leg?”

  “Yes, actually.” Ember nodded. “I don’t know if you noticed the bruises on my leg—”

  “I had,” the changeling said. “It was hard to miss.”

  “Then you saw the round shapes. Those are from a squid. A giant squid.”

  Anna swallowed. “You tangled with a squid? In a field in the middle of nowhere? We’re literally as far from the ocean as you can get here, my friend.”

  “I’ll tell you everything,” Ember said. “You probably won’t believe me, but every word of it’s the truth.”

  She then told Anna everything. She talked more about her ability to interact with ghosts, the missing persons case and her plan to cover it up, and her tour of the spirit world. “I know
it sounds crazy. I’m not making any of it up.”

  The changeling woman considered her friend’s tale. She said, “I believe you.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure, why not?” Anna shrugged. “I shapeshift into an eagle. You cast spells and talk to ghosts. Sometimes you vacation in—what did you call it? Snot Sea?”

  Ember allowed herself a grin. “It was honestly every bit as repulsive as I described it.”

  “That is easy to believe. I’m the one smelling you here. Whatever that shit is you’re covered in, it ain’t from anything natural.”

  “Ectoplasm,” Ember pronounced. “The Sentry called it ectoplasm.”

  “I just have one question then for you.”

  “Sure,” Ember said. “Shoot.”

  “Why the hell did you try doing all this on your own?” Anna’s tone had a bite. “We’re in this mess together. You aren’t helping anyone by trying to clean it up by yourself. Okay, I get it, telling us you talk to ghosts might raise some eyebrows, but you know we’ve got your back.”

  “I know you do,” Ember sniffled involuntarily. “You and your family are good people. That’s why I wasn’t telling you about all this. I’m trying to protect you.”

  “Our hide is already in this. Uncle Boni and I were the ones who buried the bodies, after all. Rik and I were the ones who did those sons-a-bitches in when they attacked you.”

  “Not from that,” Ember said. “I wasn’t protecting you from anything legal. Or not just that.”

  “What else is there?”

  Ember stared at her reflection in the darkened passenger window. She watched her lips move as she revealed information known among the living only to herself and to Wallace Livingston. “I’m…different.”

  Anna snorted.

  “No I mean…I’ve got abilities that other mages don’t. No other mages, at least none that are living.”

  “Talking to ghosts,” Anna nodded.

  “Right. But not just that. I’m what they used to call an Inquisitor. A higher level above Investigators.”