by Tanya Huff
I should have told her flat out that it was none of her damn…darned business. Her mind on other things, Claire moved toward a soft gray light. I am not an ageist.
“Hey, Dean, sorry to bother you, but I wanted to go poke around in the attic ’cept the door’s locked and Claire’s gone off with her keys.”
“Claire’s gone? Where’s she at?”
“Oh, she stomped off into the wardrobe.” Rocking backward and forward, heel to toe, Diana grinned up at him. “We had a fight, and she took off to think about what I said. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Keepers have this tendency to think they’re always right.”
Dean’s brows rose. “Aren’t you a Keeper, then?”
“Well, sure, but that doesn’t make Claire any less of a pedagogue.”
“A what?”
“A know-it-all.” Her eyes gleamed. “Although I’m leaving off a few choice adjectives. The attic?”
“Okay, sure.” He pulled his key ring from his pocket dropped it in Diana’s outstretched palm. “It’s the big black one. You, uh, know about Jacques, then? The ghost? He might be in the attic.”
“Yeah, Claire told me all about him.” Closing her hand around the keys, she reached out and punched Dean lightly on the arm. “Don’t worry, you’re better off without her. She snores.”
Don’t worry? If Claire told her sister all about Jacques, Dean thought, watching Diana bound back up the basement stairs, what did she tell her about you, boy?
“Don’t stand around with your thumb up your butt. What do you want?”
Claire’s wandering attention snapped home. She was standing in a long room, lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Directly in front of her, sitting at a library table stacked with shoe boxes, was an older woman with soft white curls, wearing an ink-stained flowered smock. “Historian!”
“I know who I am,” the Historian snapped. “Who the hell are you?”
“Claire, Claire Hansen. I’m a Keeper.”
“You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. Wait a minute.” The Historian’s eyes narrowed, collapsing the pale skin around them into a network of grandmotherly wrinkles. “I remember now, you were here three years, twelve days, eleven hours and forty-two minutes ago looking up some political thing. Did you finish with it?”
“The site?”
“No, democracy.”
“Uh, not yet.”
“Crap. You wouldn’t believe the amount of paperwork it generates.” She sighed and pushed away from the desk, giving Claire her first good look at the computer system nearly buried in shoe boxes.
“Is that one of the new 200MHz processors?”
“New? It was obsolete months ago. History. That’s why it’s here. So, since I tend to discourage social visits, what can I do for you?”
It took Claire a moment to get past her anger at Diana and remember. “Kingston, Ontario, 1945; two Keepers stopped another Keeper from gaining control of Hell.”
“How nice for us all.”
“I need to know how they did it.”
“Damned if I know.” When Claire frowned, the Historian sighed. “Keepers, no sense of humor.” She pointed an ink-stained finger along the bookshelves. “The forties are about a hundred yards that way. The year you’re looking for was bound in green.” Then, muttering, “Hansen,” over and over to herself, she opened up a shoe box that had once held a size nine-and-a-half cross trainer, and pulled out a digital tape. The plastic case appeared to be slightly charred. “When you get home, tell your sister I’d like to have a word.”
The padlock slid into her hand with a satisfactory plop. Diana slipped it into her pocket and returned her attention to the key ring. Dean had the master neatly labeled with a piece of adhesive tape.
All she had to do now was push.
Heart pounding, she gripped the doorknob.
I’ll just bring Aunt Sara up to partial consciousness, ask her a few questions, and take her back down again. Piece of cake.
What good was power if she never got to use it? Claire was going to be so pissed when she got home and found her younger sister had all the answers.
Sara, herself, turned out to be a bit of a disappointment.
While the old adage, the more human evil looks the more dangerous it is, was undeniably true, Diana had been expecting at least some outward indication of the heinous crime Sara had attempted—small horns, visible scars, overdue library books—but from the look of things, she hadn’t even been having a bad hair day. The only incongruous point about her whole body was that her very red lips glistened, dust free.
…but had there not been problems with the sacrificial virgin, the Keepers would never have arrived in time. Not until Aunt Sara had Margaret Anne Groseter suspended over the pit and had made the first cut did she realize that the girl, although only fifteen was not suitable.
Feeling as though the big green binder of 1945, Kin to Kip, had just smacked her on the back of the head, Claire read that paragraph again.
Margaret Anne Groseter.
“Mr. Smythe told me that she lived in the house next door her whole life. He said it used to be Groseter’s Rooming House and Mr. Abrams was a roomer who didn’t move fast enough and got broadsided.”
“It’s not possible.”
For Mrs. Abrams to have been fifteen in 1945, she had to have been born in 1930. Which would put her in her late sixties. With a virtual thumb blocking the bouffant orange hair of a mind’s eye view, Claire supposed it was possible.
“I used to be quite progressive in my younger days.”
It was, Claire reflected, occasionally terrifying knowing the exact measure of the fulcrum that Fate used to lever the world.
Stepping through the shield, Diana had a momentary qualm. The emanations rising from the sleeper were stronger than she’d expected. It wouldn’t be easy accessing power surrounded by such potent malevolence.
“On the other hand,” she cracked her fingers and moved up to the head of the bed, “if it were easy, everybody’d be doing it.”
…however, it took the combined strength of both Keepers to achieve the necessary balance of power between Sara and the pit, and even then she nearly broke free of their restraints.
Given the urgency of the situation, the Keepers on the scene felt it best to use a slam, bam, thank you, ma’am approach.
The Historian clearly believed in making history accessible to the masses.
Reaching carefully through the middle possibilities for power, Diana trickled a tiny amount into the matrix that held Sara asleep.
As the patterns in the dark emanations changed, a howling Austin raced into the room, trailing a cloud of shed fur. “Diana, stop! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
I TOLD YOU NOT TO WORRY ABOUT THE SECOND KEEPER. SHE’S HELPING US!
DO WHAT?
SHUT UP AND BE READY.
The cat gathered himself to leap just as Sara’s lips parted and drew a long breath in past the edges of yellowed teeth.
NOW!
At the top of an infinite number of voices, Hell shouted Sara’s name up the conduit.
With the seepage added to Diana’s power, the balance tipped.
Sara opened her eyes.
Her own eyes wide, Diana tried to block the power surge. One second. Two. A force too complicated for her shields to stop slammed into her, dropping her to her knees.
Yowling, Austin landed on the end of the bed.
Sara smiled and raised a finger.
The energy flare caught him full in the face, lifted him into the air, and smashed him against the wall between the two windows. The first bounce dropped him into the remains of the fern. The second dropped him unresisting to the floor.
“NO!” Unable to stand, Diana crawled toward the body. A warm hand clamped down on one shoulder stopped her cold.
“I don’t think so.”
As Sara’s grip dragged her around to face the bed, Diana put up no resistance. When Sara’s eyes met hers, she grabbed for al
l the power she could handle and smashed it down on the other Keeper like a club.
Sara didn’t even bother swatting it aside. She absorbed it, twisted it, and wrapped it around Diana like a shroud. “My mouth tastes like the inside of a sewer,” she muttered, running her tongue over her teeth. “Christ on churches, but I could use a cigarette.”
…unfortunately, as both Keepers were drawn from troops about to leave for the European theater, this temporary solution…
“Claire Hansen?”
“In a minute. I’ve almost got it”
“Suit yourself, Keeper, but I just got an e-mail telling me to reactivate that bit of history you’re reading.”
Claire looked up from the binder. “What do you mean reactivate?”
“Probably got a couple of loose ends tying themselves up.”
“Probably?” Claire scrambled to her feet. Any loose ends had come untied since she’d left. “What’s happening?”
“How should I know? I don’t mess with the present I do history. Put the book back on the shelf before you…” The Historian sighed and moved a black three onto a red four as Claire raced away through the ages. “And they wonder why I don’t like company.”
“Would it have hurt them to have dusted me on occasion? I don’t think so.” Lifting a thrashing Diana about three feet off the floor, Sara tied the laces of the young Keeper’s black high-tops together and used them as a handle to drag her through the air toward the door.
Chewing on the power gag that held her silent, Diana dug her fingers into the doorjamb.
“Let go or lose them, your choice.” It was clearly a literal offer. “I, personally, don’t care. I know what you’re thinking,” she continued as Diana reluctantly released the wood. “You’re thinking that all you have to do is delay me and sooner or later more Keepers will arrive. Well, they won’t. And do you know why? Of course not, you’re a child….”
Tiny wisps of steam rose up from Diana’s ears.
Sara smiled and ignored them. “…you couldn’t possibly comprehend how I work. Over fifty years ago, two interfering busybodies put a shield around me. Specifically, around me. It’s still there. No one will know I’m awake until it’s much too late.”
As the sound of Sara’s gloating receded down the hall, several small, multicolored figures came out from behind various pieces of furniture and moved purposefully toward the limp body of the cat.
Running full out, Claire still hadn’t reached the end of the bookshelves.
“Stop thinking about the past!”
Distorted by echoes, it could have been anyone’s voice. Claire didn’t waste time turning to check. She needed a door. She couldn’t get home without going through a door.
“Hello, handsome. Are there any more at home like you?”
Pressed up against the wall in the lobby. Dean had a sudden memory of a fish flopping about the gaff that pinned it to the bottom of the boat. It didn’t stop him from struggling, but it did give him a pretty good idea of how successful that struggle would be.
When he finally sagged, exhausted, he felt the sharp points of fingernails lift his chin off his chest.
“Very nice,” Sara cooed. “I’ve always been a big fan of flexing and sweating.” Slipping her fingers into the front pocket of his jeans, she pulled the denim away from his body and dropped the keys into the pouch. “Thanks so very much for your help. I don’t suppose you have a cigarette on you?”
Dean shook his head and dragged himself out of the pale depths of her eyes. They were same gray/blue as the heart of an iceberg only less compassionate. He nodded toward Diana’s thrashing body. “She said she was going into the attic. I thought Keepers couldn’t lie.”
“Bystanders can’t lie to a Keeper, but we’re actually very good at lying to…” Sara ducked and the old leather-bound registration book whipped over her head and slammed corner first into the wall. As the ancient binding gave way and yellowed pages fluttered to the ground, she measured the dent between thumb and forefinger. “Nice try, Jacques. I’m amazed you managed that much ectoplasmic energy.” Leaning toward Dean, she whispered, “He must’ve gotten lucky in the last couple of days.”
Eyes watering, Dean turned his head away. Her breath would’ve peeled the paint off the gut cans at the processing plant.
“Hey!” A fingernail opened a small cut in his cheek. “You sleep for that long and see what kind of a morning mouth you wake up with.”
The brass bell rose off the counter and smacked into her shoulder.
“This is getting tiresome, Jacques.” She turned to face the office. “Technically, I should have dust and ash for this, but we’ll just have to make do with an abundance of dust.” A gentle push sent Diana down the hall toward the basement stairs. With both hands free, Sara scraped a bit of fuzz off the front of her skirt and drew two symbols in the air.
Dean braced for bad poetry, but he needn’t have bothered.
Both symbols glowed red.
Jacques snapped into focus between the symbols. Eyes wide with terror, he twisted and fought, and when Sara smacked her palms together, he exploded into a thousand tiny lights that scattered in all directions.
Praying silently, Dean worked his left hand free and snagged two of the lights as they went by. They burned as they touched his skin, but he closed his fingers around them and faced Sara with both hands curled into fists.
“Well,” she said, “that takes care of him. You, however, I can use.”
SHE’S GOING TO TRY IT AGAIN!
WOULD YOU STOP WORRYING! A FEW DECADES AT HER BECK AND CALL AND THEN WE’RE FREE.
AND YOU THINK SHE’LL WANT HELL WAITING FOR HER WHEN SHE DIES?
After a long silence, Hell muttered, YOU MIGHT HAVE BROUGHT THAT UP BEFORE.
SHE’S SEALING THE PIT! WE CAN’T STOP HER!
NO. NOT FROM IN HERE….
First there were no doors, and then there was nothing but doors. Claire’d charged into three saunas, two walk-in freezers, something animated she couldn’t identify, and more hotel rooms than she wanted to count.
“Yoo hoo! Cornelia! Diana! I was taking Baby out for his walkies and I just popped by to see if you…” Mrs. Abrams froze on the threshold, her mouth opening and closing but no sound emerging. Finally she managed a strangled, “I remember you!”
“That was an oversight on somebody’s part,” Sara observed as she tied the laces of Dean’s work boots together. “Please, come in and close the door.”
One hand pressed against the polyester swell of her bosom, Mrs. Abrams shuffled forward.
“And the door,” Sara prodded. “Don’t forget to close it.”
Although her movements were pretty much limited to impotent thrashing, Diana managed to bring herself closer to the wall. Twisting left, she slammed her heels into the plaster.
Mrs. Abrams jerked at the sound and took a step backward, toward escape.
Sara raised a hand, and Diana found herself wrapped even more tightly in power. All her strength, all her attention, focused on drawing air through constricted passageways.
“Margaret Anne. Close the door.”
Margaret Anne Abrams, née Groseter, had been fifteen the last time Sara had commanded her. A lot of water had passed under the bridge since then, and little old ladies were not without power of their own. Taking a breath so deep it stood each orange hair on end, she rallied. “Don’t you talk to me in that tone of voice, young woman! I’ll have you know that I’m the head of the Women’s Auxiliary at our church and I’ve five times been volunteer of the year at the hospital. Look at you, you’re all covered in dust. If I were you I’d be ashamed to go out in that…” Her voice trailed off as Sara’s pale eyes narrowed and she expelled the last of the breath in a squeaky cry for help. “Baby!”
Secured by a leather leash to his own front porch. Baby lifted his wedge-shaped head off his paws.
He heard his master calling.
Lips pulled back off his teeth, the big Doberman surged up onto his f
eet and out to the end of his leash. The leather held.
The porch, on the other hand, surrendered to the inevitable.
Claire knew she was close. She could feel the hotel, but a dozen doors remained between her and the end of the hall, and she couldn’t shake the fear that time, usually so fluid outside reality, had decided to march to a linear drummer. In other words, it was passing. Quickly.
Behind the first door to her right, sat a tiger. Fortunately, judging from the debris around its cell, it had just eaten.
“You’re only delaying the inevitable,” Sara muttered, as with a crooked finger she drew Mrs. Abrams farther into the lobby. “There’s nothing you can summon, old woman, that can hurt…” Her eyes widened.
Baby had lived his whole life for this moment. Years of frustration propelled him over the threshold in one mighty leap.
The remains of the porch swept Mrs. Abrams off her feet, tangling her in the twisted wreckage.
Baby’s front paws slammed into Sara’s chest.
She hit the floor, bounced once in a cloud of dust and lost the collar of her jacket as the extra weight on the end of Baby’s leash stopped him a mere fraction of an inch short.
Breathing heavily, the Keeper scrambled to her feet careful to stay clear of the snapping mouthful of too-long, too-pointed, and too-many teeth.
Fixated on her throat Baby missed his chance at a number of other body parts as they passed.
A wave of Sara’s hand closed the door. The sound it made, the sort of sound that put a final period on both rescue and escape, was almost a cliché.
“Margaret Anne, as much as I’d love to finish what we started so long ago, I’ve got all the sacrificial bodies I need.” She raised her voice to be heard over Baby’s frantic snarling. “This time, there’s no mistake about the qualifications.”
Dean hung limp in the air, but Diana took a moment out from breathing to glare.
