Home Improvement: Undead Edition

by Harris, Charlaine

  So much for jumping. If the fall didn’t break their legs they’d impale themselves, and he had a feeling it would be both rather than either/or.

  Chess’s gaze darted between them and the ghost. “Can you guys get down?”

  “Naw. All broken metal down there.”

  “Shit! I—what the hell?”

  Ghostly feet had appeared just below the ceiling. As they all watched, the feet sank to the floor, another ghost revealing itself inch by inch from the bottom up.

  And another.

  Holy shit. Rick’s heart pounded so hard in his chest he thought it might literally explode. He almost wished it would, because at least that would be a quicker death. In that other room lay a pile of broken boards, some studded with nails. Probably enough debris filled the other rooms to turn himself, Terrible, and Chess into nothing more than bloodstains and piles of goo, even if the ghosts couldn’t cross the salt line. Ghosts could throw things, after all.

  Chess spun around, tugging that black crayon or whatever out of her pocket. “Boost me up. I need to mark the ceiling.”

  Rick started to bend down to cup his hands, but Terrible got there first. In one smooth movement he had Chess lifted high enough that she could scrawl another of those little symbols on the ceiling.

  “That should hold,” she said, as she slid back down. “But I need to get up there.”

  On what planet was that a good idea?

  He must have said that out loud, or made some kind of sound, because she looked at him. “The portal is up there. They’re not coming up out of the floorboards, they’re coming down through the ceiling. I need to close it.”

  Terrible frowned. “Lemme come along, aye?”

  “How are you going to get up there? Rick can’t lift you.”

  “Ain’t want you on your alones up there, Chess. Ain’t just one or two, aye, an’ we ain’t got any knowledge what weapons might be up there.”

  A pause, while Rick’s heart sank into his shoes. Then, as if in slow motion, they both turned to look at him.

  “Sure.” Was that a squeak in his voice? He cleared his throat and tried again. “Sure, I’ll go with you. Just tell me what to do.”

  She smiled at him. Terrible made some kind of growling noise.

  “I’m going to salt off a section up there,” she said. “Just like this one, as soon as I get up. I don’t know if there’s any debris or anything in that attic, but I assume there is, so you’re going to need to grab whatever you can—if you can—and put it in that area, where they can’t get it. Okay?”

  She slid past them and marked off another section of the floor behind her line, forming a square with the line already existing. “Try to get through here.”

  He didn’t look happy about it, but Terrible nodded and stepped into the square, ramming the iron rod at the ceiling. Plaster fell around him. For a moment it looked bizarrely like snow, until the plaster stopped and chunks of wood began.

  In less than a minute, or so he thought—time seemed to be going by awfully fast, and every passing second moved Rick that much closer to what he was certain was his date with death by ghost—the hole in the ceiling was big enough for them to get through.

  “Okay.” Chess looked at Terrible. “As soon as you get us up there, step back, okay? Don’t stay under here, at least not until I get it marked off on the floor.”

  If Terrible nodded or said anything, Rick didn’t hear it, not over the rasping of his own breath in his throat. He closed his eyes for a second or two; when he opened them, Chess’s feet were disappearing into the ceiling.

  His turn. His turn. Terror numbed him so effectively that he barely felt his feet hit the dusty floor.

  But Terrible didn’t bend down to cup his hands, not immediately. Instead he grabbed Rick’s arm and squeezed, hard. Hard enough that Rick wondered if biceps could liquefy. Terrible’s eyes were black holes in his brutish face, and he said, “Aught happens to her, I kill you, dig?”

  It didn’t seem like the kind of question that was really a question, and Rick was glad, because he didn’t think he could have replied if he wanted to. So he just nodded mutely, and Terrible bent down for his foot.

  Something hit the wall above them, and the noise reverberated through the room. Rick barely had time to register it before Terrible practically threw him through the hole in the ceiling.

  He’d thought maybe he’d need a minute for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but he didn’t. Not just because the small, round windows in the attic room weren’t boarded, but because it was so full of ghosts it glowed.

  For a second he just knelt there, his mouth open. He’d never seen anything like it before. Yes, before this night he’d never seen a real ghost, so by definition any ghost was something he’d never seen before, but this . . . this was amazing, and frightening, and beautiful in a terrifying and awful way.

  Through the mass of their bodies, the tigerish pattern of light and darkness, he saw other shapes, the thick outlines of furniture. Not too much, thankfully, but enough to make his heart sink further. Across the attic space were more porthole-like windows; through one of them a streetlight shined like a single star in a clouded sky.

  Chess crouched not far from the hole. She’d already marked off a large square around it with salt, and apparently the ghosts realized it, because Rick had barely seen the line when glass shattered above his head, raining chips on him that stung his shoulder and arm.

  “Chess! You right up there?” Terrible shouted from below.

  “I’m fine,” she called back, digging around in her bag.

  She glanced at Rick. “It’s definitely here, the portal. I have no idea how it got here or what the deal is or why, but it’s here.”

  “Is that going to be hard to fix?” A chunk of wood came flying at them. They jumped back and it clattered against the wall.

  “Don’t know.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  Bluish light moved across her face like a reflection of water, making her features seem to shift and change shape a little as he looked at her. “I mean I don’t know. Until I know how it happened, I won’t know how to close it. Or even if I can close it.”

  Great. Just great. He’d come up to help “clear debris” or whatever, and now he was on the front line of some sort of portal that this girl who may or may not be a witch may or may not know how to fix. Oh, and don’t forget the huge, very scary guy below them who looked like he ate babies and had just promised to kill Rick if anything happened to the aforesaid maybe-witch.

  This night just kept getting better and better. And he had no—“Ow! Fuck!”

  A shard of glass had embedded itself in his arm, thrown by an angry ghost.

  Chess’s eyes narrowed. “Did you just get cut?”

  He lifted his arm to show her.

  “Damn it! They’re going to sense that, it’s going to make them mad.”

  Witch or no witch, she was starting to piss him off. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to let myself get injured after risking my life to come up here and help you. How careless of me.”

  To his surprise, she smiled. “You would have risked your life more if you hadn’t come up to help, and I kind of think you know that. But yeah, I guess you’re right. Sorry.” She lifted her hand, the black crayon in it. “Come here. I want to mark you.”

  He wanted to ask what the hell that meant, but he was tired of saying “What?” over and over like some sort of idiotic parrot.

  So he scooted over, closing the few feet between them. “Would Terrible actually have killed me if I hadn’t agreed to come up?”

  “It’s entirely possible, yeah.” She said it like it was no big deal. Like it was normal or something, rather than psychotic. Who the hell were these people?

  Her fingers touched his jaw, cool and light. “Close your eyes.”

  She smelled faintly of shampoo and a sort of herbal scent, with a little cigarette smoke mixed in. The crayon wasn’t a crayon at all, he realized, but some sort o
f woodless grease pencil, and it moved across his forehead in a tingly line. Circles, maybe, some kind of swirl with an angle? He wasn’t sure. It made his head buzz, though, enough that he opened his eyes a crack to try to shake the dizziness.

  The pencil moved down to his cheek; another little symbol there, and then she lifted his hand and drew on the back of it. It looked almost like a crab, but he couldn’t seem to really trace the pattern.

  Instead he looked up at her. He’d thought before that her eyes were dark, but they weren’t. Inside the thick black eyeliner and mascara they were lighter than that: hazel, almost blue but not quite. Pretty.

  He opened his mouth to tell her so, driven by some sort of imminentdeath impulse, but she dropped his hand and pulled back before he could speak.

  “Those should help keep you safe.” She tucked the pencil back into her pocket. “They won’t be able to drain power from you, and you won’t feel the cold as much when they touch you. Okay?”

  He would have nodded, but ducked instead when a large chair flew at them.

  She grabbed his arm with her left hand, grabbed his eyes with her own. “But listen. They like fear. They can sense it, it excites them. You need to try to sublimate that. You cannot show them you’re scared. You cannot let them see when they hurt you. Now take off your shirt.”

  “What?”

  “Take off your shirt. Give it to me. We need to bind that wound of yours to try to mask”—a crash broke through her voice, as what looked like a table leg hit the wall—“the smell of your blood.”

  He tried to smile. “You know, if you wanted to see my bare chest, all you had to do was ask.”

  Terrible’s voice cut into her reply. “Chess! What’s on up there?”

  Damn it! He’d finally managed to say something funny, too.

  “We’re fine,” she called.

  Rick peeled off his shirt and handed it to her. The attic was so damn hot it barely made a difference.

  She wiped his cut with it, ducked as glass smashed behind her, and wound the fabric into a bandage, which she tied around his arm with the air of someone used to dealing with such things. “I need to get out there and look around. So you need to start grabbing stuff, okay?”

  He glanced out again at the sea of ghosts, at the way the light they cast reflected off the naked ceiling boards and patchy walls and somehow thickened the air.

  “They can’t hurt you unless they have a weapon,” she said, in a softer tone. “Without magic powering them they can’t solidify themselves without an object to solidify around, remember? And those sigils will help protect you. So just keep your eyes open, and get everything you can behind that line. And for Truth’s sake, do not break the line, okay?”

  The sound of wood scraping wood drew his attention; a team of ghosts, four or five of them, were pushing what looked like an enormous wardrobe.

  Chess saw it, too. “We’ll worry about that when we have to. Just go, and go as fast as you can.”

  She stepped over the salt line and into the mass of ghosts, who whirled around her, grabbing for her with impossible white hands that failed to take hold.

  Rick’s breath rattled in his chest. Ghosts out there. Terrible downstairs, probably with all sorts of weapons and eager to kill someone. He could move, or he could die, and while neither of them really appealed, he figured moving seemed like a better idea.

  They were so cold. So damn cold. He’d never really thought about it. He’d been brought up to think of death as something peaceful, something that meant you got to go live in the City below the earth forever, that it was simply another stage of existence.

  And he did believe it. Hell, he didn’t have to believe it, because it was Fact and that was Truth, and he’d spent hundreds of Saturday Holy Days at Church and didn’t even have to think to know that Fact and Truth were what really mattered, and it was comforting and right.

  But apparently it was Fact and Truth that ghosts were cold, too, and that made him wonder if the City was cold, and if the dead spent their time there milling around in angry silence the way they were in that attic.

  A lamp flew past his head and hit the wall beside him with a heavy thud. He scooped it up and ran with it, dropping it on the “safe” side of the line. Same with a large book bound in moldy leather, and a rusty frying pan. There wasn’t as much small stuff in the attic as he’d originally feared, but he kept circling the floor, scanning it, almost getting used to the sensation of being dipped in ice over and over again.

  Something heavy slammed into his shoulder. He spun around to see a ghost raising another chair leg high over its head, preparing to bring it down again.

  He reacted without thinking, grabbing hold of the leg and pulling, turning so he could put his back into it. Damn, that ghost was strong. The edges of the wood dug into his fingers, into his ribs when he tucked it under his arm to get a better grip and leaned forward.

  The ghost still didn’t let go. This was fucking ridiculous. What was he supposed to do, spend the entire time up here playing tug-of-war with a dead guy for a chair leg? While more of them wandered around, faster and faster, probably grabbing more weapons to beat him into a bloody pulp?

  The thought energized him a bit. He pulled harder, pushing his entire body forward, and ended up taking five or six steps before he realized what was happening.

  Maybe he could . . . ? Yeah, that would work, right? The ghost couldn’t cross that salt line, but he could, and the chair leg could.

  It made him feel a bit like a sled dog, for some bizarre reason, but he did it, towing the ghost toward the line, pushing through the mass of them. The cold almost started to feel good, it was so hot up there.

  He stepped over the salt line. Crossed the few feet between it and the wall, and gave the leg one last tug. The second the ghost’s hands touched the air over the salt line it let go.

  Yes!

  He ducked out of the way of a flying picture frame and headed back out. Through the translucent forms filling the attic he saw Chess, bending over slightly with her hand out. Trying to find the portal, he guessed. Or hoped.

  Not for the first time the idea that he had only her word that she actually knew what she was doing crossed his mind, but he shoved it away just as quickly. If she didn’t, it really didn’t matter. He was in that attic and he wasn’t getting out until either she managed to fix the problem or they both died, so no point in worrying about it.

  Terrible shouted from below, and Chess shouted back again that they were fine.

  A few simpering china babies sat on the floor by the wall. A ghost picked one up, started advancing toward him. Rick ducked away, realizing as he did so that he had an advantage Chess hadn’t explained. He could walk through them. They couldn’t walk through each other.

  He twisted his body, sliding through a ghost raising a shard of glass—that could not be a good thing, was there more broken glass around?—and around a heavy desk. More stuff, that was what he needed, stuff to get on the other side of that—

  The china baby smashing into the side of his head stunned him, knocked him on his ass. Literally. For a second his vision blurred and shook; when the world snapped back into focus he saw light hit the shard of glass as it started to descend.

  Without thinking he grabbed at the spectral hand that held it. It was solid. Solid and cold and damp, with a sort of horrible give to it, the kind of give all living flesh possessed but just felt wrong when the flesh in question glowed bluish-white and froze his own.

  The ghost’s face leered above him, its lips stretching into a hideous grimace. His arms shook from trying to hold it off. The point of the glass came closer, a little closer, aiming straight for his heart.

  “Chess! Chess!”

  She didn’t reply, but he heard her footsteps, heard her voice as she yelled more of those makeshift syllables and flung something at the ghost.

  Dirt. It landed on him and he realized it was dirt, dirt with a particular pungent smell. He also realized the ghost had fro
zen in place and he took advantage of it, snatching the glass from its hand and tossing it at the wall.

  That was a mistake. Another ghost caught it. Fuck.

  Chess glanced over. “I’ve found it. Get that glass to the other side of the line and come over to the corner. I might need your help.”

  Okay, this he could do. He thought. The ghost grinned, holding the glass up, but it was still close to the salt line and wasn’t moving quickly.

  And his mother had told him playing basketball after school wouldn’t actually teach him any real skills.

  He looked at the glass, at the hand holding it. Focused on it. And ran, his hands outstretched. Another china baby smashed against the floor where he’d been; an old book glanced off his back. He ignored them.

  His hands closed around the ghost’s, shoving it forward. The ghost immediately went transparent. The glass fell to the floor, and unfortunately Rick fell with it, and it drove itself into his thigh.

  It took every bit of strength he could muster not to cry out in pain, but he managed it, remembering Chess’s warning about showing emotions. Instead he forced himself to get back up. They’d smell his blood, yes, and that was a bad thing, but he couldn’t really do anything about that. Instead he limped over to where Chess stood, shouting back down to Terrible that they were okay and had found whatever it was.

  She turned to him when he drew up beside her. “Look.”

  It was a wreath. What?

  As he watched, another ghost slid out of it. It was horrible to see, like witnessing the birth of a grotesque baby. It swung at him, at Chess, several times, its expression growing angrier and angrier, until finally it passed through them, no doubt to hunt for a weapon of some kind.

  When it had gone he realized that the center of the wreath wasn’t there, or rather, that he couldn’t see the floor through it. Instead the air appeared wavery, shiny almost, and tiny lights glowed in that space, lights and more shapes that could have been people.