Hungry Ghosts

by Stephen Blackmoore

  No, she didn’t. She saw it as letting our parents die. For the next couple of weeks as we picked up the pieces, prepared for the funeral, paid lawyers, greased palms and cast spells to move things along, she either wouldn’t talk to me, or outright accused me of murdering them.

  And the hell of it is, I felt the same way. If I’d been a few minutes sooner I could have saved them.

  Lucy didn’t ask, but I knew she wanted me to look for their ghosts. I didn’t want to, and I tried to avoid it as long as I could. And when I finally did there was nothing. No Haunts, no Wanderers. Not even Echoes. I know that was the best possible outcome, but not finding them just added to my failure.

  “So what am I supposed to do with this?” I say. “Tap into my inner child and cry about it? You know you’re a shit therapist, right? It’s been more than fifteen years. I got over it. I made a choice.”

  “Was it the right one?” says the voice.

  Like I haven’t asked myself that question. Look what it led to. Exiled from home, leaving what was left of my family in the care of Alex and Vivian, who I selfishly assumed would take care of her. Running away with my tail between my legs. No contact with anyone for fifteen years.

  I still don’t know the answer. And then the world snaps around me like a rubber band.

  I’m standing outside a San Pedro warehouse at night, a smoking hole of twisted metal in its side from a burning car that’s been run straight through. One man is on the ground, the other is slumped over the hood.

  I’d loaded the car with a bunch of propane tanks and opened the taps, wrapped the whole mess in detcord. And then, when the man who killed my parents came outside, I stuck a brick on the accelerator. A small fire spell, once the car hit the warehouse, took care of the rest.

  This time I’m not reliving the memory, I’m watching it. I can see myself walking across the parking lot from behind a shipping container, full of piss and vinegar and unending rage. Younger me grabs the man on the hood, Jean Boudreau. Punches and kicks him.

  This is different from Canter’s or at the house fire. This is watching myself instead of being in the middle of it. The actions might feel distant, but the rage is white hot and present. Even now I’m getting a sick sort of glee out of watching myself beat the living fuck out of Boudreau.

  I remember every one of those blows. How my hand kept creeping toward the Browning in my waistband. I wanted to drag it out, make him hurt. How I eventually decided that I could do something so much worse than shoot him.

  I remember being glad I hadn’t killed him, that he was conscious. I wanted him to be awake. I wanted him to know what was happening to him. I watch myself slap him hard and his eyes jerk open. He tries to go for a gun, but it’s kicked out of his hand to go skittering across the pavement.

  Boudreau’s weak, disoriented. Broken bones for sure. If he’d been any more aware of his surroundings he’d have killed me. I gave him the mother of all sucker punches, and it didn’t even occur to me that I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I knew a handful of spells. He could have wiped the floor with me.

  Younger me drags Boudreau away from the wreckage, bunches his fists in the man’s shirt collar. I remember that moment. The spell I’d only tried a few times before. I knew it was possible the way I knew I could tie my shoes when I was a toddler, but I still had trouble doing it.

  But that’s how most magic works. We don’t write much shit down. There’s no point. We learn from experimentation, picking up tips from other mages, doing what feels natural.

  And much as it strained me and took forever to cast as I tried to get it right, I remember it feeling like the most natural thing in the world.

  Then they’re gone. No flash of light or weird noises. Just there one second and gone the next. I took him over to the ghost’s side. Took him there and called to any ghost who cared to listen.

  And then I fed him to them like I was chumming sharks.

  “I’d do it again,” I say. And I would. Hell, I did. When I came back to L.A. a shred of Boudreau’s soul had somehow reconstituted itself, sucking ghosts in to rebuild. I put him down pretty much the same way. Only I’m the one who ate his soul.

  “No regrets?” says the voice. It’s changing. Becoming more feminine. Out to the side of the warehouse, standing among the shipping containers I can see someone. Blurry, like the woman who got out of the car.

  “Not a one,” I say. “Why do you care, anyway? If you’re trying to make me feel remorse about this, that’s not happening.”

  “Not even for the consequences?”

  “Me leaving L.A.? Small price to pay to protect Lucy and my friends.”

  “But it didn’t. What do you have left, Eric? You got a short-term gain for a long-term loss. You won the battle, but you lost the war.”

  I can’t take my eyes off the figure in the distance. It’s becoming more distinct, more solid, but I still can’t make out enough detail to know who it is.

  “Is that you over there?” I start walking toward the figure. She, he, it’s hard to tell, is standing in the shadows, watching me, not moving. I pull the obsidian blade from its sheath in my pocket. This whole thing is bullshit and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of gods and afterlives and getting dicked around. I’m tired of cryptic non-clues.

  “Actions have consequences, Eric,” says the voice. It’s all around me. Louder now. Definitely a woman, but there’s a distortion to it.

  “Yeah, like my boot up your ass.” The figure still hasn’t moved. If I shank this observer, or concierge, or whatever the hell it is, maybe it’ll pop me out of this place.

  The scene shifts again, shimmering around me like water rippling after a stone thrown in. The warehouse, the parking lot, the figure in the distance, they all fade away to be replaced with a brightly lit house. White walls, white carpet, modern lines. The art on the wall a series of black and white photos, the decor modern and minimalist. I can smell sea air wafting in through an open window and the slight sewer scent of the canals off Venice Beach.

  I know this house and everything inside me starts screaming.

  The last time I was here it had been a crime scene. Furniture shattered, blood on the walls. The white carpet was so soaked through with blood it crunched under my feet as I walked across it.

  I saw Lucy’s Echo here. Forced myself to watch her murder replay itself so I could find some clue to who killed her. She lasted a long time before finally dying and I sat there and witnessed the whole thing with no way to do a goddamn thing about it.

  When she finally died after being beaten and tortured and brutalized, the murderer wrote a note in her blood using her body as a paintbrush. Then they wiped it out so the only way anyone could read it would be if they could see her Echo. If they could watch her die.

  In other words, it was tailor-made for me. I spent the next half-hour being violently ill in the sink.

  I walk down the short hall and come to a den that fits the same motif as the rest of the house and stop dead.

  Lucy sits curled up on the couch wearing yoga pants, her brown hair dyed black. She walks a familiar looking silver dollar back and forth across the back of her knuckles with a practiced air. I’ve only ever seen her dressed like this in a handful of photos and when I watched her Echo. I left L.A. too early to see her grow up into this woman.

  “Hi, Eric,” she says. “Come to murder me again?”

  When Lucy was a kid I tried to help her find her magic. Pretty much a pointless endeavor. She didn’t have enough to register, but we did it anyway. I bought her an old silver dollar and we worked day and night trying to see if she could manipulate a coin toss.

  For most mages that’s dirt simple. Pretty much the first thing we learn. It’s also one of the reasons we don’t usually lack for things like money. But she couldn’t get it. She’d get frustrated, have a tantrum for a bit, cry about it. But then get back to it. She’d gnaw at it like a dog with a bone. Never giving up. I found out after she died that she finally got that co
in toss. Took her years to do it, but she got there.

  I wasn’t around to see it.

  “You’re just pulling out all the stops, aren’t you?” I say.

  “What, this?” she says, tossing the coin in the air with a flick of her thumb and catching it in the palm of her hand. She smiles and it’s a smile I remember from when we were kids. Seeing her with the coin hurts. Seeing that smile hurts more.

  I know she’s not really here. It’s not her soul. She’s not in Mictlan. Why would she be? Santa Muerte might have killed her, but unless she was a follower she should have gone somewhere else, though where I have no idea.

  That’s one of the biggest problems with necromancy. I know how ghosts are made, I can talk to them, influence them, control them, even. I know there are afterlives, but before I met Santa Muerte I’d never actually seen one up close or figured out how to get to one. I mean, besides the obvious way, of course.

  Mages are surprisingly agnostic. Yes, we know there are gods, we deal with them all the time. We just think they’re largely irrelevant and mostly assholes. In case you hadn’t figured it out, yet, we’re pretty fucking arrogant.

  Gods have limits, boundaries, rules. We exploit those, twist them to our own ends. Or don’t and end up a smear on the floor if we’re lucky.

  So where did Lucy end up? The most popular guess, and that’s all we’ve got, guesses, is that we go to what we’re most drawn to. Gods don’t choose it. We do.

  Christian? Go to Heaven. Norse Pagan? Valhalla. Hate yourself and everything you’ve ever done and have a vague idea that there’s probably a God, but you’re really not sure and if there is boy howdy are you ever fucked? One of a thousand random Hells, probably.

  Point is, when you die you’ll go somewhere. Even if it’s only to be recycled into the universe.

  So Lucy’s out there, somewhere. But she’s not here.

  I sit down in an easy chair opposite her. I wonder what would happen if I stabbed her with Mictlantecuhtli’s blade. Would it kill the thing that’s impersonating her? Or is she just an illusion being fed to me the way Vivian was and it wouldn’t do anything?

  I’ll do it if this thing starts to piss me off, but otherwise I might as well see how things play out. I slide the knife back into the sheath in my coat pocket.

  “So what’s the point of this exercise?” I say. “I mean in a cosmological sense? There’s got to be a reason for putting people through this crap. Did all the Aztec gods get together and say, ‘Hey, let’s fuck with our believers and make them relive their individual horrors’? Or did they just do that whole carving out human hearts thing?”

  “It’s a challenge, Eric. That’s the point. This is Izmictlan Apochcalolca, the mists that blind, the place of nine rivers. The final stop before reaching your destination. By the time they get here, most have had their devotion tested by the crushing mountains of Tepectli Monamictlan, their sins carved away by the obsidian mountains of Iztepetl, their fears flayed from their souls by the scouring blade winds of Izteecayan. There’s only one thing left.”

  “I figured with the river metaphor it had something to do with swimming.”

  “Why’d you kill me, Eric?”

  “I didn’t—”

  The room flickers, blood blooms on the carpet, streaks across the walls. Lucy’s head lies on her shoulder, cocked at an insane angle, bones poking out her arms. Her fingers are ground down stubs of blood and meat, her face purple and swollen.

  “Yes, you did. You murdered me as much as the man who burst through the window to beat me to death,” she says, her voice thick around a slurry of blood and ground up teeth. “As much as Santa Muerte used his hands to break my bones. Everything you did brought this down on me. Letting our parents die, killing Boudreau, running away like a whipped dog and staying away like a coward. And even if you hadn’t done those things, I’d still be dead because of you. Because of what you are. You’d have brought Santa Muerte or some other freak to my doorstep just to get at you.”

  I can’t speak. I want to. I want to argue with her, but I know she’s right. It’s all true. Every word.

  “You always thought you were the freak of the family because of all the death that surrounds you. You were wrong. It was me. It was always me. I was the family embarrassment. I was the shame you all needed to hide.”

  She shifts her weight and her head lolls over to the other shoulder on a neck so broken it’s just a bag of shattered bones.

  “I was that thing you all hated, Eric. I was normal.” She spits the word out, blood dripping from her devastated jaw.

  “I never felt that way,” I say. “I loved you.” Only I did feel that way. I’m ashamed of it and horrified by it, but I did. She was a thing that shouldn’t have happened. A normal in a family full of mages. She was a target for anything that wanted to get to us.

  One time as a kid I even thought it would have been better if she’d never been born.

  “You say you loved me. And that’s why you killed me, Eric. You were always going to kill me. Just like you killed Alex. Just like you’ve killed all the other good things in your life. That’s what you do. You kill the things you love.”

  “I did not kill you,” I say, trying to put a conviction into my voice that I don’t feel. “I tried to save you.”

  “Hell of a way to save someone,” she says. She peels herself slowly off the couch, congealed blood sticking her to the seat. Her body jerks around like a badly controlled marionette and steps toward me.

  “You’re guilty. We both know it. If you weren’t, why won’t you go back into my house? Why won’t you exorcize my ghost? You’re just letting me replay my death over and over and over again. Because you’re too cruel and too cowardly to make it stop.”

  Doubt engulfs me. I try to fight against it, but it’s too strong. It pulls me down and every argument I have is washed away by self-loathing. Guilt and shame fill me up. She’s right. It is all my fault.

  I can’t breathe, I can’t move. What the hell’s the point of even being here? I should just let everything play out and swap places with Mictlantecuhtli. Become a stone at the bottom of a hell I have no business being in. I deserve nothing better. I deserve so much worse.

  Wait. That’s it. I made a smartass joke about the nine rivers being something to swim in. I was closer than I thought. These rivers aren’t for swimming.

  They’re for drowning in.

  Self-doubt, guilt, shame, regret. That’s what this place is for, that’s the challenge. That’s the trap. The dead come in here, confronted with their own failings and it eats them up. Like they’re eating me. The more I fight it, the more it sucks me in. Maybe there’s another way. Maybe I do the opposite.

  “Yes,” I say, standing up from the blood soaked chair, my feet squelching in the gore soaked into the carpet. “I killed you. If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be alive. If it hadn’t been Santa Muerte it would have been something else. I chose not to run into a burning building to save our parents. I chose to kill Jean Boudreau and got this whole shitstorm started. I chose to leave and not come back. I pushed away Vivian. I shot Alex. I got suckered in by Tabitha. I’ve cut a swath of corpses through Mexico to get here. All of that’s true.”

  Lucy pauses. I step in close. She stinks of rot and blood. Her eyes are filmed over and gray, green pus running from the corner of her mouth. Her hair falls out in clumps to drift lazily to the floor. I have to remind myself that this isn’t her. This isn’t the girl I grew up with, the woman she became who I never had a chance to meet.

  “So fucking what?” I say, and for the first time ever I feel like I’m telling the truth about it. “I’ve been hanging onto this shit for years. I made choices in shitty situations. Do I regret what happened? Yes. Would I love to take it back? Absolutely. But I can’t. So if you’re trying to get me to wallow so you can feed off my guilt then you’re going home hungry. Because I am fucking done with that.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “Fuck you. I d
on’t have to justify a goddamn thing to you.”

  The room shudders around me, bends and distorts like it’s being run through a taffy machine. Lucy’s neck straightens, her bruises and cuts fading, her broken bones sliding back through the jagged tears in her limbs. Her skin fades from suppurating green to an ashen gray and finally back to normal.

  “You have a chance to fix some things, Eric,” Lucy says. “Don’t waste it.”

  She shatters like stained glass, the room going with her. Shards spray out in a shotgun blast of color and light blinding me. I cover my face with my hands as my vision goes white, my ears fill with a blast furnace roar. Pain wracks my body, a cold burn from the inside out that shoots through my limbs. It drives me to all fours and it takes everything I have just to stay conscious.

  When the light and the sound clear I’m lying on a flat plain, the pain fading from my body. I roll over onto my back, catch my breath. The sky is the same, cold gray as when I stepped into the mists, but the mountains rising in the distance tell me I’ve come out the other side.

  “That took less time than I expected.” Tabitha sits on a rock nearby, eating an apple. The landscape is less paved with bone here so much as scattered with it. Even the scrub brush and distant trees look more alive, less desiccated. Actual plants.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I say. And where the hell did she get an apple?

  I’m exhausted. And raw. Lucy’s image floats in my mind, neck snapped, bones shoved through skin. Her body a wreck of trauma and blood and rot. I want to throw up. I want to pass out.

  But that’s not the thing that’s gnawing at me. I am done with feeling guilty. I am done with feeling responsible for shit I have no control over. I’ll take my lumps, I’ll admit to my role.

  But I’m not responsible for everything, and giving up that belief feels like I’m giving up my memory of her.

  Why haven’t I been back to Lucy’s house? Why haven’t I exorcized her ghost? Do I really think this isn’t all my fault? Or did I just bluff my way through the mists?

  She said I had a chance to fix things. How the hell can I do that? How can I possibly fix anything? Goddamn, doubt’s a cold-hearted motherfucker.