Empty Vessels

by Meredith Katz

  Even spending the time to assess them felt, though, as if he was delaying, trying to avoid what he knew he had to do.

  Slowly, carefully, he approached the dust cloth hanging over the chair. It looked, to all the world, as though there was someone sitting in it.

  It's probably just a doll, he told himself. The room was full of dolls. If there was a human shape under the cloth, it would have to be one too.

  But why would only this one be protected right now? If the others had been recently handled, dust free, why only a cloth over one?

  He swallowed, reached out a hand, and touched whatever it was through the cloth. He felt a head underneath, and features, but the form didn't move.

  Just a toy, he reminded himself through his internal screaming, and, carefully, trying not to knock the thing underneath to the floor, lifted the cloth off the chair and let it slide down.

  It was, exactly as he'd expected, a large doll. She was child-sized, around four feet if standing, and had curly black hair. She wasn't dressed, no frock put on her, and her body was as featureless as was expected: slight curve at the bust and waist but no visible sex, only shaped so that once in a dress, it would look as expected, with a body underneath rather than a lump of clay.

  She was ball-jointed as well, designed so she could be posed any way the owner desired. As it was, she had her head bowed under what had been the weight of the cloth, her ankles crossed under the chair, and her hands in her lap. In those hands was a hand-mirror, turned up to reflect her face.

  It, he reminded himself. Not she. Just an object, even if it was human-shaped. A little creeped-out, he leaned over, glanced in the mirror to see if anything was on its surface, caught his own eyes and the reflection of hers—

  Her eyes rolled up slightly, meeting his in the mirror.

  Keith strangled on a scream, backing away, preparing to flee to the hall with his heart suddenly pounding. She didn't otherwise move, not trying to rise or chase him, but it didn't matter. He'd seen enough.

  But his attention was torn away by a wail from the next room, the voice heart-stoppingly familiar—

  His own fear, his own flight, was forgotten. He did run, but not away, and not because of her.

  Feet pounding, he tore out of the doll room and yanked open the final room at the end of the hallway, voice already raising in a shout. "Lucas—!"

  Icy air poured outward.

  The room was a master bedroom. He saw a four-poster bed, a long dresser covered in empty sharpened glass bottles, Lucas hovering between the two. A bottle was sticking out of him, strangely—something solid shouldn't be able to be supported by his massless form, but it stayed there regardless.

  Keith blinked rapidly, drew a hitching breath, and realized another person was there too.

  His second sight was used to making out Lucas's details, especially since Lucas was haunting him—the other one took a moment for him to recognize as a result. The shadow in front of Lucas, holding the bulbous end of the bottle, looked like a man, twisted and featureless. Not a Terror, still certainly a ghost, but with a gaping hole for a face. He seemed somewhat old, though how old Keith couldn't guess. He could barely focus on the realization he was having, staring at the bottle in Lucas.

  It couldn't hurt him, he told himself into that silent pause. Lucas was a ghost. This was meant to hurt Others. It couldn't hurt him.

  He didn't realize he'd spoken aloud until the faceless ghost's head turned. "A ghost…" the faceless ghost said, his voice cracked and dreamy all at once. "Yes, a ghost. A ghost will be perfect for the tests. Others are only a pale imitation, but this I can use… you brought me a ghost."

  "Lucas, come here," Keith said, mouth dry.

  Lucas met his gaze with eyes turned into black holes and shook his head. His shadowed lips parted, turned down. "I can't," he said, and all intensity had gone out of his voice. "Go."

  "If I kill you," the faceless ghost said to Keith, conversational, "I wonder if I'll be lucky enough to have two ghosts? It hasn't worked on the humans I've killed so far, but you're so attached, I see, that perhaps—"

  "Go," Lucas wailed again, voice rising in an ungodly groan, and flung a wall of pressure out. Keith fell backward into the hallway, smacking into something behind him, solid and clattering as he hit it. His necklace tore free from his neck, broken off by Lucas's ghostly pressure. It clattered across the hallway's landing, then fell off the edge between the railing posts to the living room below.

  Whatever Lucas had done seemed to use up whatever energy he'd had, whatever he was doing to resist the bottle. The faceless ghost's attention turned back to Lucas, head swiveling, and Lucas popped.

  There was no other way to think of it.

  His image vanished, pulled toward the bottle and then was just gone, and along with it, the sense of his presence vanished as well. That sense of being watched, the sense of oppression, of having a spirit attached to him, the sense of knowing that Lucas was always there—gone.

  It felt like there'd been a bubble around him that was no longer there. The world felt wrong, shapes looked too solid, noises seemed too loud.

  (Hey! Look out!

  It had been the same then, ignorance and then pressure, a body hitting him hard enough that he was bruised and scraped from the impact to the road, a horrible sound that he'd never forget, not until he died, and then suddenly the world was changing in a smear of body parts that he shouldn't have ever seen, an empty gaze, a face tilted back toward him from a body that wasn't anybody any more—)

  In the room, the bottle clattered to the carpet, and the faceless ghost turned toward him again.

  "Run," a voice said.

  The words should have been Lucas's, and the unfamiliarity of the voice, a crisp, feminine tone, just confused him. He didn't know what was happening, couldn't know. His heart was pounding and he was on the road and someone he didn't know had just died to save him.

  Cold fingers grabbed him around the shoulders, and he was pulled vaguely upright. "Run," she said again, and the faceless ghost was coming toward him and he couldn't find Lucas anywhere.

  Her icy hand closed around his wrist and pulled and he turned and ran, clenching the girl's wrist equally tight, clattering down the stairs with her without caring if they broke under him, hitting the door and fleeing, gasping, legs pumping, into the sunny forest outside.

  chapter nine

  Keith ran, only half-aware of what was happening, legs pumping, feet catching on fallen branches, stumbling, fingers scraping raw on tree trunks sticky with sap, recovering, continuing on.

  Somewhere along the way, he'd let go of the girl's hand, and knew he should probably be concerned about that—whoever she was, she was running too—but he could hear her behind him still.

  Or at least, he hoped it was her, and not somebody else.

  He hardly had the attention to spare. His mind felt injured, thoughts in tatters. He'd begin to think something, and it would be whisked away again into the empty void of presence where Lucas should have been and wasn't.

  Gone, gone, gone.

  His foot caught a root and he went down, sprawling in wet leaves, shoulder hitting the ground so hard that it sent a jolt through his entire body. He struggled, limbs pressing against the dirt, scrabbling, head-spinning, every breath in making the vertigo worse. A clatter again as she caught up to him.

  "You need to keep running," she said in that light, crisp voice, but even if her voice had no sympathy in it, she had crouched over him and was pulling at his shoulder instead of running on alone. A sob wracked him, and she gave him a shake. "I don't know if we're safe."

  We.

  He knew what she meant, but shuddered anyway. He felt stretched thin, overlaid between the past and the present. It had hurt like this when he'd hit the pavement. He remembered that ache, the pain, the shattering in his skull…

  His hands were on the ground, but he pushed her away without using them.

  She went flying, her hands torn from him, and clattere
d back against the path. A noise of shock was torn from her throat and that sound drove a knife through his gut, a sharp stab of guilt that drew him up short.

  What am I doing? Keith thought, staring at his bloodied, dirty hands on the ground. He'd never been able to use telekinesis before, though he'd tried. He'd experimented all through his teenage years to try to lift things, move things—he'd focused so hard on items in his room that if he'd really had the ability, they'd probably have exploded.

  But that was neither here nor there.

  He shouldn't have been able to shove her, but had. That was the fact, and she hadn't done anything except try to help him, to get him out of there. It was clear she was as much as victim in this as he was or as…

  As Lucas was.

  He drew a deep breath and tried not to panic at the thought, tried to keep himself held together, as tenuous as it felt. "I'm sorry," he said, and pushed himself up fully on trembling arms, turning to face her finally. "Are you alright?"

  She was a doll, the doll that he'd found under the dust sheet in the guest room, with her curly hair and long, strangely jointed limbs.

  Keith's heart fell into the pit of his stomach, even though he should have realized it sooner. She'd started to move right before Lucas had yelled. There was really nothing—nobody—else it could be.

  She was helping him, though, and there was no reason to be afraid.

  For a moment, he felt fear regardless. She was something of that house, that terrifying doll-filled room that seemed to exist for a purpose he didn't yet understand. And she had come with him, come after him.

  But that thought fled immediately as her actions clamored for his attention. It was obvious she was on the run too, but she'd taken the time to help him and check on him. She might have come from that place, but that didn't mean she was of it. She'd seemed imprisoned in some way under that blanket, unable to move until he'd looked into the mirror.

  None of this was her fault.

  She'd looked up at his question, though she hadn't answered him yet, having examined her body for injuries or, more likely, cracks. "I'm all right," she said finally. "… Are you?"

  Hysterical laughter tried to bubble up inside him. He swallowed it with effort.

  "I don't know," he said. "Does anything seem to be after us?"

  "Not yet, but—"

  Whatever was making her hesitate had to wait as a car pulled up with a squeal of tires and the scent of leaking gas. He almost didn’t recognize the horrible red monstrosity, but when he did, his hand flew to his chest, feeling for the locket Hiraeth had given him and not finding it.

  "That's a friend," Keith managed, scrambling to his feet even as Hiraeth's driver-side door swung open and he hopped out, head ducked to let his antlers pass. "Get in."

  "Who's this?" Hiraeth asked, looking around with quick, prey-like movements, eyes rolling as his head tilted this way and that. "Where's Lucas?"

  A lump formed in Keith's throat and he swallowed that too. "She was in there; she helped me get out. Lucas—Lucas can't come. We need to get out of here, just in case."

  "I don't know if we're being chased," the doll said. "I don't want to risk it.

  Hiraeth's attention jerked to her and froze on her for a long, unsteady moment, his eyes wide. The expression on his face was hard to detangle, especially in Keith's current ragged mental state, and he didn't dare try to empathically sense anything.

  "All right," Hiraeth said finally. "Get in."

  He helped Keith into the passenger seat and held the door for the doll, then clambered back into his own seat, barely waiting until the door was closed and not bothering to buckle up before he slammed his car into reverse. It stank awfully and bounced terribly, and Keith thought that something must have damaged it on the trip in, the cluttered dirt road tearing at the suspension or something.

  "I… I hope your car won't be too expensive to repair…"

  "Love, I should probably get a new used car instead of fixing this one," Hiraeth said dismissively, which didn't make Keith feel much better. "It's just a thing."

  "I guess."

  They drove otherwise in silence, until Hiraeth had successfully, if unpleasantly, reversed off the dirt road back into the abandoned development site, then swung the car around to get back onto the main road.

  "—Will they be able to track the gasoline?" Keith asked, the thought abruptly occurring.

  "Shouldn't be able to," Hiraeth said. "Gas smells are everywhere in the city. I could park it some blocks away from where we're going just in case, but…" He glanced back at the doll.

  The doll, in the back seat, pressed artificial fingers against the window, watching out. "You could get that new car now."

  "That's a bit of a rush," Hiraeth said. "And doesn't really solve the immediate problem: I imagine they'll be a bit alarmed if two young men and a naked young girl show up together."

  Keith blinked, then went red. "She's not—it's a doll body—"

  "How do you think she looks to a human with their normal sight?" Hiraeth asked mildly. "Speaking of, sweetheart, please slide down a little. Don't want the cops on me when anyone looks in the window."

  "Hang on," Keith stammered. He dug in his backpack, pulling the perfume bottle out first. He felt a rush of gratitude that it hadn't had broken in any of his falls. The bottle itself was thick-walled and the hoodie had protected it, but if it had been damaged and the perfume had leaked, he was sure they would have been very easy to track. "Here."

  He passed the hoodie back. The doll stared at it briefly, and then pulled it on. It covered her to mid-thigh, but regardless, she sank low in her seat.

  "Better," Hiraeth said. He considered the situation, lips tight, watching traffic. "It shouldn't be possible to track us through the city—Terrors aren't good with mechanical scents—but I understand the risk you're suggesting. I'm going to drop you two off at the antique shop and you can sneak her inside. Then I'm going to take this car somewhere a good distance away, and I'll deal with repairing or getting rid of it later."

  "Right," Keith said. He was losing focus again and knew it, rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Sure."

  "I assume I can't take her to your dorm."

  "No, it—no."

  "Okay," Hiraeth said. "Rest for a moment. You can catch me up when we're all inside."

  "Yes," Keith said. He cupped the perfume bottle with both hands and gratefully let himself just stop thinking for a while, just letting his eyes go blurry and watching the splashing fluid inside the bottle as the car bounced along.

  There wasn't much conversation on the way anyway, the doll keeping quiet—perhaps, he thought, scared—and Hiraeth mostly watching traffic, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror.

  Keith had to start paying attention again when Hiraeth pulled into the driveway to go behind the antique shop, idling once in. "This is my place," Hiraeth said to the doll. "We'll take care of you, darling, just hold tight. I imagine we'll all have questions for each other."

  "Yes," she said, sitting up straight again. "I imagine."

  Hiraeth took a key off his key ring and handed it to Keith. "Take this and both of you go upstairs," he said. "I'll have to knock to be let in, so keep an ear out for that."

  Keith closed his hand around the key. "Right. Okay."

  "Raid my closet for clothes for her."

  "Ah—yeah."

  He got out stiffly, starting to feel his aches and bruises from the flight, and headed to unlock the back door. The doll came to stand behind him, and he tried not to feel strange about that, the familiar sense of someone nearby without any sense of Lucas at all.

  Hiraeth backed out of the driveway, the car making a horrendous noise, and was off.

  Keith got the back door unlocked and let her in. Hiraeth had implied he should lock up behind themselves, so he did, then gestured her up the stairs. "Um, he—the horned boy—he's a friend of mine. We were trying… We were trying to find another friend."

  "A friend…? In th
ere?" the doll asked.

  They headed into Hiraeth's tiny bachelor apartment over the shop, and obligingly, Keith went to the closet, starting to dig through it. Hiraeth wasn't particularly large, but even so, his clothes were likely to hang baggy on her small form. He picked out a pair of pants and a belt to go with them, along with a button-down shirt, then handed them to her. "Yes," he said, about to explain, then hesitated. "What were you doing in there?"

  "I was… always in there…?" she said, and looked at the clothes clutched in her hands thoughtfully. "That can't be right, can it?"

  Keith let out a breath. Although he'd already seen her as naked as she was able to get, he turned away to give her some privacy to change. "I'm going to clean up," he said, putting the perfume bottle down on Hiraeth's desk. "Get dressed."

  "All right," she said, sounding preoccupied.

  Keith headed into Hiraeth's bathroom, and stared at himself in the small mirror over the sink. He looked awful, he thought. Dirt and dust aside, the skin under his eyes—always dark and heavy-looking—had gone from bags to an entire luggage set, almost bruised-looking.

  It was how pale his face had gone, he decided. Some kind of shock. He splashed his face, then began to scrub dirt off his fingers, off the scrape on his elbow where his shirt had torn. It didn't exactly make him feel better or anything, but standing in the silence with just the water running, not having to deal with anything except the intense immediacy of his dirty cuts and how they stung, was calming.

  Even after he'd finished, he stood there, letting the hot water build up steam he could inhale, warming his ice-cold hands in the sink. Hiraeth probably had to pay hot water costs, he reminded himself, but couldn't quite bring himself to stop for a good long few moments.