The ghosts are cackling up a storm. An easy crowd. And I wasn’t even using my A material.
“You invaded our home and now you’ll die here.”
“Yeah, you keep saying that.”
“You can starve slowly over weeks or you can end things quickly. Use one of the stones or pieces of metal to cut your wrists.”
“I’m going to go with door number three. The year’s supply of car wax and a weekend in Hawai’i away from Spooky Town.”
A rock hits the side of my head. Someone shoves me so hard I almost fall. Pieces of drywall and metal slam into the wall around me. Some of these dead pricks are tougher than others. Not just specters but full-on poltergeists. Some scratch my face, going for my eyes. I duck and get my arms up to block them, but their spectral bodies flow around them like fog with talons. Dropping an arm to my side, I manifest my Gladius, an angelic sword of fire. I swing it in front of me, turn and raise it overhead, bringing it down again right through the thickest part of the ghostly crowd.
They burst out laughing. Big, nasty belly laughs.
“Look, everyone. The mighty wizard is using magic against us.”
“I hope he doesn’t kill us, don’t you?”
The ghosts drift away like they’ve lost all interest in me. They move around the room, full-body specters now, chatting and telling jokes about what an idiot I am. I drop down onto one of the beanbag chairs.
The dead creeps are right, of course. Practically all my hoodoo is about hunting and killing. Not much use against someone who’s already dead. I take out a cigarette, but when I try to light it, they again blow out the flame.
“You are the worst dead people I’ve ever met.”
They go on with their little coffee klatch, hoping I’ll go nuts and off myself.
I put the cigarette away.
“Hey, do any of you spooks know about a crazy ghost? I mean crazier than you. He’s in some kind of Roman bath or something.”
A couple of them nod. One says, “No one talks to him. He’s mad.”
“Yeah, I think I already said that. Thanks for nothing.”
So far, Kill City is living up to its name. I have no intention of letting Casper and company kill me, but I’m seriously stuck here. And I don’t like cemeteries. Not one little bit.
I was around fourteen when it happened. Balthazar Roszak, the spoiled little prince of a powerful Sub Rosa family, decided he didn’t like me. It had nothing to do with family rivalries or magician envy. It was just one of those dog-pack bully-and-victim games that young boys play. Balthazar played harder than just about anyone. His clan was rumored to practice heavy Baleful magic on the sly. Maybe he was out to make his bones in the family or maybe he was just a stone bastard, but when he came after me one night, I knew he was going to kill me.
I had a lot of power even when I was fourteen, but it was mostly show-off stuff. Unfocused tricks to amuse friends or impress girls. It was nothing at all like Balthazar’s hoodoo. He’d been training since he was a goddamn fetus. If he wanted me dead, I knew there wasn’t much I could do to stop him.
I hid in the Golden Hills Cemetery not far from my house. Golden Hills had been a big deal in the fifties, but that was a long time ago and now it was barely hanging on. The grounds were kind of weedy and the place was generally starting to fall apart.
I went inside through a place in the wrought-iron fence where I knew a post was missing. Headed straight for the trees and the big tombs where the families with money had planted Grandma and Grandpa years before. I was hoping if I stayed in the shadows, Balthazar wouldn’t be able to follow me through the wet December grass. But the fucker came right along where I’d run. He wasn’t even moving fast. He knew some kind of tracking hoodoo that I’d never heard of. All I could do was keep moving and hoping that he’d get bored and go home.
After an hour, I was running out of steam. It wasn’t that I was tired. It was that Balthazar was relentless. No matter what I did—running straight, doubling back, climbing trees—he’d always find me. And he’d let me go to run some more. He wanted me to give up and offer myself to him. I wasn’t that far from doing it.
I ran into the hills that gave the cemetery its name. The oldest part of the place. All the families that could afford the view had long since moved to better neighborhoods with better places for their dead. No one ever went up to the hills anymore. The grass was long and slippery. Some of the gravestones were beginning to tilt in the soggy ground. A lot of the mausoleums had cracked foundations and walls. The far end of the hill was a straight hundred-foot drop to the freeway. The other end faced down the slope to where Balthazar was coming. I’d cleverly run myself right into a dead end.
I crept across the top of the hill trying to spot where Balthazar was coming up, but he was nowhere in sight. There weren’t any trees up there, so I climbed on top of one of the tombs.
From somewhere below me, someone said, “Boo.”
It was Balthazar. I was so startled that I started to slide off the slanted roof and only stopped myself by jamming my heels into the raised edge. There was a crack and a crash and the whole tomb seemed to drop a few feet. I thought the roof was going to collapse and take me with it. But it held together. I couldn’t hear Balthazar anymore. It was a perfect moment to finish me off, but nothing happened.
I climbed down and there he was, lying under a marble pillar from the tomb. It had come down across his chest. His head and arms flailed and pushed at the pillar, but his legs were at a funny angle and didn’t move. When he saw me he tried to yell, but it came out rough and wet.
“You. You did this. You’re dead.”
Even hurt, Balthazar was strong. He threw a couple of fireballs at my head. They missed, but only by inches. I was stuck. Terrified of helping him. Terrified of leaving. He tried a spell to raise the pillar. He managed to get it up a couple of feet before it fell back down on his chest with a soft frightening sound.
“Help me,” he said. “Or I’ll kill your whole family.”
I knew he meant it. I couldn’t move. I was so scared of him that I wanted to help him. But I was too afraid to move. Then he started to cry. Big, wet-eyed wails. That was when I understood. I walked away and left him up there on the hill.
There was a Laundromat not too far away that still had a working pay phone. I dialed 911, didn’t give them a name, but I told them that a boy was hurt inside Golden Hills. I didn’t tell them exactly where. I didn’t want them to find him right away. Then I went home.
The next day it was all over the local TV news. The boy who’d died in a tragic accident in a poorly maintained graveyard. When the medics had found Balthazar, they’d taken him to an emergency room at a good hospital. But it was full of civilian doctors. If they’d known to take him to a Sub Rosa clinic like Allegra’s, they might have been able to save him. But I didn’t want that.
I knew the moment Balthazar started crying that I was dead. No matter what he said after that, no matter what he promised or how much he pleaded, he’d never forgive me for seeing him so weak. He’d kill me the first chance he got. So I did the only thing I could do. I left him lying in the wet grass.
Balthazar was the first person I ever killed. I don’t like to think about it, so I work hard at not doing it. Sometimes I see his face on an opponent when I dream about the arena. I looked him up in Hell when I was Lucifer. Found him in Butcher Valley with the other killers. Turns out I wasn’t the first kid he’d come after. Still, remembering him on the ground bothers me, though not so much that I would have changed what I did.
I wonder sometimes if leaving Balthazar in a graveyard is why I’m tied so closely to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. A cemetery was Balthazar’s exit and my entrance into this world. Two fucked-up kids connected forever by a land of bones.
That’s why I hate cemeteries.
The Kill City Cemetery is in even worse shape than Golden Hills. Tombs are slapped together from collapsed concrete and drywall. A few graves were hacked into the
floor, but most are just covered with debris. Mini burial mounds. Someone made crosses from old water pipes. Angels are tacked on some of the graves, torn from Valentine candy displays. A Star of David is crudely hacked out of an acoustic ceiling tile.
I pick up a Big Blue World snow globe from the floor and toss it at the nearest cross. It bounces off with a satisfying ping. I get up and tear the cross out of the grave, find another, and tear it out too.
“Stop that,” says a ghost.
“Fuck you, Jacob Marley.”
I bang the metal crosses together, shouting, “Hello. Hello. Hello.”
When I don’t hear anything I toss one of the crosses up and out of the ghost wall into the corridor above.
“Stop that,” screams one of the ghosts.
They swarm around me, pushing and shoving, trying to knock the second cross from my hand.
“Aw. You don’t like that? How about this?”
I push through them and pick up a piece of concrete with some rebar sticking from it. Using it like a sledgehammer, I bash one of the makeshift tombs to pieces.
“Stop him, someone.”
“Please.”
“He’s insane.”
A mummified body lies among the ruins of the tomb. I pick it up by the neck.
“Any of you ever see The Muppets? I loved that show. Let me see if I can do Kermit’s voice and work the mouth at the same time.”
“Stop. Please.”
“Why should I stop? You can only kill me so dead.”
I kick a plywood support from the side of another tomb. It leans to one side and slowly slides to the ground.
“Please. No more.”
“I’m going to pull every single body out of these graves. I figure I can make half of you into lawn gnomes and the other half into ventriloquist dummies. The tourists will love ’em, don’t you think?”
A spook screams in my face, “Do not desecrate our resting place.”
Before any of them can stop me, I pull Mason’s lighter and touch it to the corpse. It goes up like a torch in a Frankenstein movie.
“According to you assholes, this is my resting place too. If it is, I’m going to redecorate it any way I like.”
“Stop. You can go.”
I drop the burning body.
“What was that?”
“Please put out my corpse and we’ll let you go.”
I get one of the beanbag chairs and drop it on the body, smothering the flames.
“Okay. I put it out. How do I get out of here?”
“There’s one more thing you must do. Take our bodies with you so they can be buried in the earth.”
“Are you crazy? What are there, twenty or thirty of you? I can’t carry that many bodies.”
A poltergeist swoops down from the wall and flicks a knucklebone from one of the unearthed corpses at me.
“A single bone will do. One from each of us. Bury them in the ground somewhere. If you promise to do that, you can go.”
“I’m going to have to mess up your little garden even more to do it, you know.”
“Do what you have to, but please don’t be cruel when digging us up.”
“How am I supposed to carry all these bones with me?”
The poltergeist tosses something in my direction.
“Look down. There are shopping bags everywhere.”
It’s a thick plastic bag advertising a 50 percent opening weekend sale at Victoria’s Secret. Pictures of attractive women in panties and bras. I fill the bag with bones, the smallest ones I can find from each body. Yes. This is exactly how I wanted to spend tonight.
“So, what were you? Workers getting shops ready for the mall?”
“And some construction workers.”
“I was an OSHA inspector.”
The others laugh.
“That’s not funny,” says the inspector.
I shake the bag a few times to settle the bones.
“I think that’s it. Did I miss anyone?”
“No one who wants to go.”
“Good. Now point me to an exit.”
“No.” It’s a new voice. “He doesn’t go.”
“He’s alive. He’s an invader.”
“He has to die.”
“We had a deal,” I say.
“Not with us.”
Skeletal arms and bodies shoot up from the trash-covered floor. Grab on to my legs and the waistband of my pants. It’s jabbers. A whole pack of them. The meanest I’ve ever seen. Jabbers are just animated skeletons with a little connective tissue holding them together. They’re not very strong or solid, but I suddenly have dozens of hands trying to pull me down. A few more crawl completely out of the floor and pile onto my back. I’m covered in the stinking mummified remains of pissed-off clock punchers looking for some payback from the living.
I’m still weak from the Shoggots. The jabbers pull and push me down onto my hands and knees. I drop the bag of bones. They get my right hand under the floor debris. They want to pull me under and drown me in garbage. I relax and let them pull. Concentrate everything I have into my hand. The jabbers keep puling me down. I’m almost on my belly when I’m able to manifest the Gladius. I drag it from the ground, hacking through jabber bodies and sending a shower of burning trash all over the room. The jabbers back off fast. I swing the sword, ripping through their bones as the other ghosts and poltergeists dive-bomb them, driving them back underground. Another minute and it’s over. I let the Gladius go out and fall against the wet wall, panting and holding on to my gut. I think I’m bleeding again, but when am I not bleeding?
A poltergeist drags the bag of bones to me. I pick it up.
“Okay. Now. How the hell do I get out of here?”
“That, I’m afraid, is your problem. The ceiling collapsed over the door and there are no windows and no ladders down here.”
“Great. Can I get a small fire going?”
“Why?”
“So I can make a shadow. I can get out that way.”
“All right.”
I wrap some of the old clothes and paper around a pipe and pack it together tight. Using a cinder block as a stand, I stick my MacGyver torch on top and wait for it to catch. When it does, it puts out more smoke than light. But it’s enough. I know the corridor above me, so this should be easy. Right. Because everything’s been so easy down here. I step into the shadow and I’m out of the cemetery. Go through the Room and I’m back in the passage upstairs. I sit and pour the bones from the bag into my coat pockets. I slit the lining of my coat and drop in the handful that don’t fit. I stop and fill my lungs with air that doesn’t smell like an abandoned butcher shop.
Now that I’m out, I have no idea where the others might be. For all I know, the group following us is right around the next corner, but I can’t sit here in the dark forever.
“Hello,” I yell. I wait. Nothing comes back. I call a couple of more times. Not a peep. I’m pretty worn out. Maybe I’m not shouting as loud as I think. I take out the Colt, cock the hammer, and fire two shots into the ceiling.
A few seconds later I hear shouts and see pinpoints of lights in the distance. If it’s the other team, I’m not going to be happy. If it’s another pack of ghosts, I’m fucked. I slide behind a big concrete boulder that blocks half the hallway and cock the Colt again.
I hear her before I can see her clearly. I know the sound of her sneakers slapping on the floor as she runs. I stand and she hits me like a little leather freight train. Candy throws her arms around me. I’d do the same to her, but she has my arms pinned.
“This is because I like you,” she says. She lets go and punches me in the arm.
“Ow.”
“And that’s for disappearing again.”
“It’s good to see you too, baby.”
I kiss her and feel the others crowd in around me, hands helping me stand up straight.
Brigitte reaches into one of my coat pockets and pulls out some bones.
“Look. You’ve brought pre
sents for everyone.”
“Don’t lose any of those. I promised some dead people I’d get them out of this dump.”
“We have to find our own way out first,” says Traven.
I look around for Delon.
“How’s that coming, Paul?”
He nods somewhere down the corridor.
“We found the door the Grays pointed us to.”
“Show me.”
Delon walks on and the rest of us follow. Candy keeps looking at me like I might keel over at any second. After my soirée with the dead, I must look pretty bad.
“Where were you? We’ve been looking for you for over an hour.”
“And dodging the other group,” says Vidocq.
“You saw them?” I say.
“Their lights,” says Candy.
“Sorry to slow you. I’ll tell you what happened when we’re out of here.”
Delon is putting his shoulder to the door when we get there. Traven helps him. They both pound on it, but the door won’t budge.
“Let me try,” says Vidocq. He gets to work with his lock-picking tools but stops after a few seconds.
“The door is already unlocked. Perhaps there’s debris on the other side.”
“Let me try,” I say.
The others get behind me. I bark some Hellion and concentrate on blowing the door off its hinges. A few sparks dance around the doorframe like a bunch of drunk Tinker Bells giving me the finger. My head goes funny. I fall back against the wall. Traven and Candy grab me.
“Sorry. I think I missed.”
Candy runs a hand through my hair.
“Don’t feel bad. All guys have performance issues now and then.”
“Unless you have some Viagra for magic in your pocket, I think I’m done for tonight.”
Delon probes the door’s hinges with a knife.
“At least you cleared off some of the dust. I think we might be able to pop these.”
“You do that. I’m going to sit here and be useless for a while.”
“Of course,” says Delon. He’s trying to sound neutral, but I can hear the microtremors in his voice. He’s as giddy as a little French girl to see me bloody and weak.
Kill City Blues: A Sandman Slim Novel Page 22
