Summon the Keeper

by Tanya Huff

  “Dean?”

  He took a step away from the furnace room. He wanted to ask her if she really thought she could close up Hell, but the sound of a hundred grains of rice being ground to powder drew his gaze to the floor. “What’s with all the rice?”

  “Conservation of mass,” Claire explained wearily. “It used to be the chains.”

  “You changed the chains into rice?”

  “It had to be something I could get through even though it weighed the same as the chains.”

  The area immediately in front of the furnace room door looked as though a small blizzard had wandered through on its way to Rochester. Crouching, Dean scooped up a handful of the tiny white grains and frowned as they spilled through his fingers. “Instant rice?”

  “What’s wrong with instant?”

  “Nothing. I mean, it’s not like you’re cooking with it.” He straightened, dusting his hand against his thigh. “Are you after changing it back?”

  Claire shook her head and regretted the motion. “I can’t. I couldn’t change my mind right now.”

  “Then should I replace the chains? Mr. Smythe kept a box of extras,” he added in response to her expression.

  Claire glanced at the door. The chains, like the locks on room six, were wishful thinking. If Hell got loose, chains wouldn’t stop it. “Why not.”

  Picking rice off her socks, she watched him walk to a storage cupboard at the far end of the basement return, and efficiently secure the door. When he turned to face her, she realized there was a reserve in his expression, a new wariness in his gaze, that made her feel as though, somehow, she’d failed him. She didn’t like the feeling.

  Keepers weren’t in the habit of apologizing to bystanders. But then, Keepers didn’t usually have to look Dean McIssac in the eye, knowing they were wrong. “All right.” She tried to keep her nostrils from flaring and didn’t quite manage it. “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you.”

  “I told you so.” Enjoying the startled reaction his unexpected declaration had evoked, Austin picked his way across the laundry room. “What’s with the rice?”

  “It used to be the chains and locks,” Claire told him.

  “I see. Well, the mice will certainly be pleased.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you, I don’t think they’re mice!” The need to vent at something pushed the volume up until she was almost shouting.

  Austin snorted. “Oh, that’s right; you’re the Keeper and I’m just a cat. What do I know about mice?”

  She smiled tightly down at him. “You should know they don’t come in primary colors. Were you looking for us?”

  “No. But I was wondering why Jacques is having hysterics in the dining room while you two are hiding out down here.” Fastidiously finding a clean bit of floor, he sat down, wrapping his tail around his toes. “After what I overheard, I’m not wondering any more, but I was.

  “This is only a guess,” he continued as Claire raced for the stairs, “based on the really pissed-off ravings of a dead man, but did someone use the h-word out of context and almost condemn his soul to everlasting torment?”

  Dean blanched as he realized that was exactly what had happened. “If you’d told me,” he called, hurrying to catch up, “I wouldn’t have done it!”

  “Her mother wanted her to tell you.”

  “Shut up, Austin.”

  When they reached the dining room, a plastic salt shaker, a box of toothpicks, and six grapes flew out of the kitchen. Claire ducked and Dean took the full impact.

  “J’ai presque ete a l’Enfer!”

  Wiping crushed grape off his chin, Dean stepped forward. His French wasn’t up to an exact translation, but the infuriated shriek suggested a limited number of possibilities. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. It was…”

  “It was an accident!” With a well-placed hip, Claire moved Dean out of her way. “Granted, he said the words, but he didn’t mean them as an instruction. He should be able to say what he wants with no effect.”

  Austin snorted and whacked the salt shaker under the dining room table. “That thing’s been down there for over a century and the power seepage has permeated this whole building. I’m only surprised that he never told old Augustus where to go.”

  “I couldn’t say that to my boss,” Dean protested.

  “Not without a union,” the cat agreed.

  Jacques surged through the table to stand face-to-face with Claire. “I don’t care what he should have been able to do! All I know is that he tried to throw me into Hell!”

  “And then he pulled you out again.”

  “You think that makes up for him putting me there?”

  “Would you listen to me, Jacques!” Had she been able to get hold of him, she’d have shaken him until his teeth rattled. “He didn’t know it would happen. He didn’t even know what was in the furnace room.”

  “He did not know!” Jacques stepped back in disbelief, half in and half out of the table. “You did not tell him?” All at once, he frowned. “Come to think on it, you did not tell me!”

  “You’ve been in the same building with it for seventy-two years!” Claire met indignation with equal indignation. “Knowing it’s there won’t change anything.”

  His eyes darkened. “You are wrong, Claire. It changes what I know.”

  She couldn’t argue with that, even if she’d wanted to. “Okay. Fine. I should’ve told you. I should’ve told you both. But I didn’t. I’m sorry.” And that, she decided was the last time she was apologizing for it. “You both know now. I’m going to have another shower even though it won’t do any good because the touch I can feel is inside my head, and then I’m going to get some breakfast because I’m starving. All right?” Her chin rose. “Is there anything else you’d like me to tell you?”

  The two men, now side by side, exchanged interrogative glances.

  “Non,” Jacques said after a moment. “I cannot think of anything.”

  “No more secrets,” Dean added.

  “God forbid I should have secrets.” Her ears were burning and she didn’t want to think about a probable cause. “My cat can’t keep his mouth shut, and suddenly my life is an open book.”

  “Hey!” Austin stuck his head out from under the table. “You let the ghost out of the attic all on your own, and I said you should tell them about the furnace room.”

  “You did not.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “Well, I never told you not to.”

  Claire swept a scathing glance over the three of them, suggested they watch their language, and stomped out of the dining room. It would’ve been a more effective exit had she not been in socks and had her heels hitting the floor not set up a painful reverberation in her head, but she made the most of it.

  “There will be secrets,” Jacques observed, as the door to her suite slammed shut. “Women must have secrets.”

  “Why?” Dean asked, going into the kitchen.

  “Why? Because, espece d’idiot, between a man and a woman, there must be mystery. The worst of Hell is that there is no mystery.”

  ROSEBUD IS HIS SLED. When silence was the only response, Hell sighed. GET IT? NO MYSTERY. ROSEBUD IS HIS SLED…. DOESN’T ANYONE CARE ABOUT THE CLASSICS ANYMORE?

  Dean turned to face the ghost, feeling slightly sick when he thought of what he’d nearly done. “I can only keep saying I’m sorry.”

  “That is right, Anglais,” Jacques agreed. “You can keep saying you are sorry.”

  “The way I see it,” Austin said, leaping from chair to counter-top, “you’re even. You unjustly accused each other of wanting to wake her. You, Dean, accidentally almost sent Jacques to Hell, but then you purposefully went in and rescued him.”

  “Non. Not even.” Jacques glared over the cat’s head at Dean. “He also accuses me of hiding behind Claire.”

  “Yeah, and you called him something pithy and insulting.”

  “You speak French?”

  “I’m a cat.”

&n
bsp; “Look, I overreacted,” Dean admitted. He paused while the hot water pipes banged out the rhythm of Claire’s shower. “It’s just you’ve been pretty obvious about how much you want a body.”

  “I would take a body from the cat before I took a body from her.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Austin recommended.

  Pulling the toaster from the appliance garage, Dean shook his head. He couldn’t help feeling he should be more upset about the reality of a hole to Hell in the furnace room except that reality and hole to Hell in the same sentence just didn’t compute. “Why does she bother me more than Hell?”

  “I could go into the deep psychological problems men experience when they come face-to-face with powerful women…”

  “We do not!” both men exclaimed. Standing with their arms crossed, they regarded each other warily.

  The cat snickered. “…but it’s simpler than that. Hell is too nasty for mortal minds to comprehend, so they trivialize it, knock it down to size. It’s a built-in defense mechanism.”

  Brow furrowed, Dean stared down at the cat. “So she bothers me more than Hell because I don’t have any natural defenses against her?”

  “And because the original Keepers put a dampening field around the furnace room. Without it, business would be worse than it is, as difficult as that may be to imagine, and any sane person would run screaming once they found out what was in the basement.”

  “And with it?”

  “Unnerving but endurable. Kind of like opera.”

  “A dampening field to dull the reactions.” Rubbing at the perpetual stubble along his jaw, Jacques nodded. “That does explain why I take this so well.”

  “That,” Austin agreed, assaulting the lid on the butter dish, “and because you’re dead. The dead don’t get worked up about much.”

  “Except getting their rocks off,” Dean muttered.

  “You desire I should tell Claire why we were really fighting?” the ghost demanded.

  “If you know, why didn’t you tell her upstairs?”

  “Two reasons. If you do not know, me, I am not the one to tell you. And two…” He shrugged. “I remember in the neck of time…”

  “Nick of time.”

  “What?”

  “Not neck,” Dean told him. “Nick.”

  “D’accord. In the nick of time, I remember that women do not always appreciate being fought over the way those who fight might assume.”

  “Oh.” Opening the fridge, Dean stared at the contents, ignored the little voice suggesting that, under the circumstances, it was all right to have a beer before noon, and closed the door again, saying, “That’s pretty smart for a dead guy.”

  “I was, as you say, pretty smart for a live guy.”

  “You’re bonding,” Austin observed sardonically. “I’m touched. Well, what would you call it?” he asked when both the living and the dead fixed him with an identical expression of horror.

  “We’re not bonding,” Dean declared.

  “Not even a little bit,” Jacques added. “We are…” He looked to the living for help.

  “Not bonding,” Dean repeated.

  “Oui.” Settling himself cross-legged an inch above the table, the ghost leaned back on nothing and studied the other man. “Me, I have no choice, but you, now you know, do you stay?”

  “Claire asked me that, too.” He folded his arms. “I don’t run away from things.”

  “Perhaps it is wiser to know when to run.”

  “And leave you alone here?”

  Jacques spread his hands, the pictures of wronged innocence, the gesture far more eloquent than words.

  “Fat chance.” Shoving his glasses up on his nose, Dean headed for the basement stairs.

  “Where are you going?”

  He made the face of a man who once a month scrubbed the concrete floor with a stiff broom and an industrial cleanser. “I’m after sweeping up the rice.”

  “You’ve had a busy twenty-four hours, Claire. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I have a vicious headache.” Cradling the old-fashioned receiver in the damp hollow between ear and shoulder, she fought with the childproof cap on a bottle of painkillers. Teeth clenched, she sat the pill bottle on the table and pulled power. The bottle exploded.

  “Claire, what are you doing?”

  There were two pills caught in the cuff of her bathrobe. “Just taking something for my headache.” She swallowed them dry.

  On the other end of the phone, Martha Hansen sighed. “You aren’t the first Keeper who’s had to apologize to a bystander, you know.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve ever had to do it.”

  “It’s the first time a bystander’s ever been involved in what you do.”

  Claire opened her mouth to disagree, then realized that her previous involvements with bystanders were not something she wanted to discuss with her mother. Nor, she acknowledged with a small smile, were they something she had to apologize for.

  “Claire?”

  Pleasant memories fled as the current situation shoved its way back to the forefront of her thoughts. “At least I needn’t worry about it happening again. Dean’s too nice a guy to even think of doing it on purpose.”

  “And Jacques?”

  Her lip curled. “Jacques is dead, Mom. He can’t affect anything.”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  Claire decided she didn’t want to know what that meant. Had the phones been Touch-Tone, she’d have suspected Austin had been talking to her mother behind her back. Since there was no way the cat could use a rotary phone…All at once, this conversation was not making her feel any better. “I’d better get dressed and get back to work.”

  “I hope it helped you to talk about it, Claire. You know you can call any time. Speaking of calling, you haven’t heard from your sister, have you?”

  She could feel her jaw muscles tightening up. “No. Why?”

  “We had a bit of a disagreement, and she stormed out of here last night. I’m not worried, I know where she is, I was just wondering if she’d spoken to you.”

  “No.”

  “If she does call, would you please explain to her that turning the sofa into a pygmy hippo for the afternoon might be very good transfiguration, but it’s rather hard on the carpets and it confuses the hippo.”

  A dry, tearing sound, the sound of something large and ancient clearing its throat, pulled Dean up from the basement. Fighting against the natural inclination of his legs to get the rest of his body the hell out of there, so to speak, he made his way to the dining room where he found Claire on her hands and knees, surrounded by pieces of broken quarter-round, ripping up the linoleum.

  “She’s venting frustrations on inanimate objects,” Austin explained from the safety of the countertop. “You should consider yourself lucky.”

  “Boss?”

  She shuffled backward and tore free another two feet of floor covering before the section detached from the main. “There’s hardwood under here. We’re going to refinish it.”

  “But I thought…”

  “Congratulations.”

  “…that you were after working on closing the site.”

  “To close the site, I need to study it. To study it, I need to get close. To get close, I need to be calm.” Claire ripped up another ragged section. “Do I look calm?”

  “I guess not.” Amazed by the extent of the mess, Dean wasn’t entirely certain he wouldn’t rather have faced the demon he’d expected. “But what about the front counter, out in the lobby.”

  “I know where the front counter is, Dean.” She tossed aside a crumbling piece of linoleum. “I’m not asking you if you want to refinish the floor, I’m telling you we’re going to.”

  Dean glanced over at the cat who looked significantly unhelpful. “Where’s Jacques?”

  “Staying out of my way.”

  “Ah.” He cleaned his glasses on his shirttail and squinted unenthusiastically at the exposed wood. “Should I go re
nt an industrial sander?”

  “Yes, you should.” Claire rolled up onto her feet and headed down the hall toward the office.

  “Why should we be the ones who suffer?” Dean muttered at the cat as he turned to follow. “She was in the wrong.”

  “And you’re just going to keep that thought to yourself, aren’t you,” Austin told him.

  Dean knew the envelope Claire pulled the money from—Augustus Smythe had paid him out of it every Friday. He could’ve sworn it had been empty on Saturday when he’d unlocked the safe. “Where did you get the cash?”

  “Lineage operating funds.” Claire tossed the envelope back in the safe and closed the door. “When people, or institutions, or pop machines lose money, it becomes ours, available to draw on when we need it.”

  “This is where lost money goes?” Fanning the bills he counted four twenties, three tens, and a five with Mr. Spock’s haircut penciled onto the head of Sir Wilfred Laurier. It was a remarkable likeness. “What about socks?”

  “Socks?”

  “Where do lost socks go?”

  Claire stared at him as though he’d suddenly sprouted a third head. “How the he…heck should I know?”

  When Dean returned just before noon, all the furniture in the dining room had been rearranged on the ceiling and the linoleum had been completely removed. It was still lying around in messy heaps, but it was no longer attached to the floor.

  Tired and filthy, Claire watched appreciatively as he wrestled the heavy machine in through the back door. Having actually been able to accomplish something had put her in a significantly better mood.

  They ate soup and sandwiches sitting on the counter, discussing renovations in perfect harmony. Two hours later, the debris bagged, Claire left to finish sorting through Augustus Smythe’s room while Dean used the sander.

  As the layers of glue and old varnish began to disappear, he grew more confident. Finished with the edging, he began making long, smooth passes up and down the twenty-three-foot length of the room. After the third pass, he began to pick up speed. All at once, a body appeared too close to the drum to avoid.

  Jacques screamed in mock agony as the sander split him in two.