by J. S. Bailey
Meryl’s eyes widened with realization. “You can’t be Nate. He’s—”
“Do you mind if I come in? I had a rather longish drive getting here.”
A funny sound issued from Meryl’s mouth. What her eyes told her and what logic told her were currently at war with each other, and her face showed it. “How can you be here?” she croaked. “I thought you were…”
This is all perfectly normal. Thane fed the thought into her mind like a tasty morsel. You shouldn’t be alarmed.
Confusion remained evident in Meryl’s eyes for a moment, then it cleared. “It’s so nice to finally meet you, Nate,” she said brightly. “Come on in.”
They entered the front hall together. Evergreen garlands had been wound around the banisters of the twin staircases sweeping up to the second floor, and a twenty-foot-tall Christmas tree sat on the hall floor between them. Thane supposed that the display had been intended to make the place more festive, but for some reason it looked staged and impersonal. Even the packages sitting beneath it wrapped in solid reds and golds came across as artificial. True Christmas gifts came in lumpy, oddly-shaped packages, not perfect cubes.
“Let me take your coat and suitcases,” Meryl said. “I can put you up in one of the spare rooms.”
“I’d be delighted. Thank you.” Thane relinquished his things to the woman, who took them up the left staircase and vanished into an upstairs corridor. His grandparents had certainly been the pretentious type, building a home this large for a family of three. The place had eight enormous bedrooms and six bathrooms that were so large his room in Arbor Villa Nursing Home could have easily fit into the smallest of them.
Now that Meryl was gone, Thane sent out his thoughts and located his parents sitting in lounge chairs around their glassed-in heated swimming pool, sipping on margaritas. A further sweep of the house revealed that they, Meryl, and Vance were the only four people present aside from himself.
Thane brushed a fleck of dirt off of his otherwise flawless button-down shirt and walked down the corridor leading to the back of the house. Memories of running down these hallways as a boy with Leon and Pamela flooded his mind. He tightened his jaw. This was no time to be sentimental. He was, after all, about to confront the people who had essentially gotten rid of him after he’d sustained a grievous injury. Kinder souls would have considered it abuse.
He paused outside the door leading out to the swimming pool. Normally he wasn’t the type to be at a loss for things to say, only now the words just wouldn’t come to him. He hadn’t seen his mother or father for ages now, since they’d only visited him on the rarest of occasions. His family simply wasn’t the nurturing type. When someone they cared about became broken, they would throw him or her away like so much garbage.
Thane steeled himself and pulled the door open.
Both of his parents were sixty years old but in fairly good shape, so he didn’t feel the need to shield his eyes when he saw they were both in swimwear. His mother, Shirley, wore a lime green two-piece that contrasted with her graying auburn hair, and John Bagdasarian wore a pair of black swimming trunks.
“Hello,” Thane said to them as he shut the door behind him. “I hope you’ve both been well.”
His mother froze with her margarita glass halfway to her mouth. Thane half-expected her to drop it and let it shatter on the concrete in order to add to the melodrama, but, ever graceful, she lowered it to the small table sitting between her chair and John’s.
“What?” Thane asked. “Don’t either of you have anything to say to your long-lost son? Oh, wait. I was never lost. You got rid of me on purpose.”
They blinked at him, faces ashen. Thane was almost enjoying this.
“You two are pathetic,” he said. “I thought you’d at least say something.”
John seemed to be working the muscles in his mouth to conjure an intelligent word, though Shirley spoke first. “How…how did you…?”
“I got better. Bet you weren’t expecting that.”
Her eyes nearly bugged out of her head. “People like you don’t just ‘get better’!”
Thane pretended to examine his fingernails. “That’s funny, because it looks like that’s exactly what I did.” He reminded himself that he wouldn’t technically be better until Bobby Roland was eliminated. If Thane failed to kill him by December 31, Thane would die instead.
Thane accepted that. It was all part of the deal he’d made with the one who’d healed him.
“But Arbor Villa!” Shirley went on. “They’d have called us about this.”
“They don’t even remember me being there.” Thane had made sure to erase all evidence of himself from the nursing home staff’s minds. “If you’d showed up asking to see me, they would have thought you were crazy, because to them I never existed.”
John’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and his eyes were wide. Apparently he thought he already was crazy.
Thane narrowed his eyes at him. “You weren’t planning on showing up at all, though, were you? I think sometimes you forgot you had an oldest child.”
“We never forgot you!”
“Oh, right. Don’t you remember the last time you came to see me? You sat around making awkward small talk for forty-five minutes and could barely look me in the eye. I knew you couldn’t wait to get out of there and back to your palace.”
“What do you want from us?” John finally demanded.
“It’s sad that as my father you even need to ask that,” Thane spat. “And before you get any funny ideas about wanting to make amends, I’m not interested, and I don’t think you are, either.”
They both stared at him. Thane wondered what they were thinking and decided he didn’t want to know.
“This is all perfectly normal,” he said to them. “Leon and Pamela don’t need to know I’m here, do they?”
Two heads shook. Some of the shock vanished from his parents’ faces. “Nate, it’s so nice for you to come by!” his mother said, rising from her lounge chair. She gave him a hug, which Thane didn’t know how to interpret. “What brings you out here tonight?”
“I’m looking for a way to catch a mouse,” Thane said, pulling away from her. “And I think you two might be able to help me kill it.”
BOBBY DROVE Bradley to St. Paul’s Church with hackles raised, expecting the man to become violent at any moment. His comment about Thane had been most peculiar, though Bobby knew that it hadn’t been Bradley speaking at all, but his oppressor.
Bradley seemed oddly calm once they’d gotten in the car, and watched out the window with indifference, likely to throw him off guard. Bobby refused to fall for it. Bradley’s inner ordeal would be far from over.
“Why are we here?” Bradley asked when Bobby parked in front of the church.
“I work here. We have a nice meeting room to hang out in. No one’s going to overhear us talking in there.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Bobby unlocked the double-doors and led Bradley through the entryway and into the left-hand hallway leading back to the church offices and meeting room. “What do you do here?” Bradley asked, looking around the place with curiosity.
“I keep it clean, usually. Here we are.” They stopped outside the meeting room door. Bobby opened it and gestured for Bradley to enter before him. “Make yourself comfortable. I just remembered I need to make a phone call.”
Shrugging, Bradley disappeared into the room, and Bobby quietly clicked the door into place. Backup. He needed backup. He wasn’t strong enough yet to do this on his own.
He turned so he could go make the call out of earshot from the meeting room and froze in place when he found himself staring at…himself.
Bobby blinked to make sure his tired mind wasn’t tricking him with waking dreams. Ten feet away stood a lanky man young enough to be mistaken for an overgrown adolescent with windblown dark brown hair and terrified eyes.
It’s me, he thought. It really is me. That, or the man was Bobby’s long-lost identical twin wh
o just happened to be wearing his favorite Led Zeppelin t-shirt and jeans. He seemed so skinny, so pathetic, that Bobby felt uncomfortable just looking at him.
Focus, the Spirit murmured.
Bobby shook his head. The inexplicable image of himself did not vanish. He hurried past it and punched a number into his phone. “Frankie?” he said when his backup said hello. “I need your help.”
BOBBY ENDED the first call and then made a second one to Father Preston while making it a point to forget the Bobby-doppelganger standing mutely nearby. Enough craziness had happened to him these last five months that he tried not to put much thought into it. There had to be a logical explanation for the apparition; he just had more pressing things to worry about than what its source might be.
Calls completed, he ducked back into the meeting room. Bradley had taken a seat on the meeting room couch. Bobby supposed that “meeting room” was a loose term since actual church-related meetings occurred in different rooms than this, but he could hardly start referring to it as the “exorcism room” now, could he?
Bobby sat down in the lopsided armchair across from him. Both couch and chair, upholstered in a garish floral print, had been brought in shortly after Bobby took on the mantle of Servitude. He was fairly certain they were castoffs from former Servant Roger Stilgoe’s house.
“So you think you’re going crazy,” Bobby said, aware of the irony. At least shut inside the room, he couldn’t see his doppelganger.
Bradley nodded. “It’s hard to explain. I mean, tonight I thought my dead sister was with me. She tried to convince me I’d died, too.” He shuddered. “She told me to stand on the tracks to prove I’d died already. If you hadn’t come by, she’d have killed me. I’m glad you saw me when you were driving by.”
Deciding it wouldn’t be good to let Bradley in on Bobby’s little secret just yet, Bobby said, “Um, I’m sorry about your sister. When did she, you know…?”
“Ah. About a year and a half ago. She was only twenty-two. She went to a wild bachelorette party at a hotel, smoked too much pot, and fell off the balcony. Jess was my only sister. I have a brother, too, but we don’t talk.”
“I’m sorry.”
Bradley swallowed and blinked bloodshot eyes. “It isn’t fair. Life, I mean. Why are we born at all when we’re just going to die?”
Having often wondered the same thing himself during his bleaker moments, Bobby said, “Death isn’t the end. Sometimes I have to keep reminding myself of that.”
Bradley gave his head a weary shake. “I’m not sure I believe any of that.”
“You thought you were a ghost just a few minutes ago.”
Bradley’s hands clenched in his lap. “You’re…you’re right. See what I mean? I’m going crazy. Nothing makes sense to me anymore. It’s like my head is full of fog. I keep blanking out, whole days just gone, and I don’t drink that much. I don’t even know what I’ve been doing whenever I lose time like that. I could be sleeping, or I could be out doing lord knows what. Sometimes I find weird scratches and bruises on myself I don’t remember getting.”
His whole body lurched. Bobby sat up straighter, preparing to subdue the man if necessary, and then Bradley was on his feet moving toward the door.
Bobby leapt up and blocked Bradley’s path. Frankie, please get here soon, he prayed. “You can’t leave,” Bobby said.
Bradley threw him a look of anger. “So what, I’m a prisoner here? You said we could talk, and now I’ve talked.”
“Look, you need more help than just talking. You…you…do you believe in demons?”
“I’m not possessed, if that’s what you think. Move out of the way.”
The black aura blossomed darker in Bobby’s mind as Bradley reached for the doorknob. Bobby slapped his hand out of the way and maintained his position in front of the door, straining his ears for the sound of Frankie’s or even Father Preston’s car. He couldn’t fathom how Randy had managed to deal with the possessed singlehandedly in his own basement. Even though Bradley was of a similar height to Bobby, Bobby felt like a mouse borne down upon by a hungry cat.
Focus! the Spirit urged.
“Bradley, in the name of God the Father, and Jesus Christ his son, and the Holy Spirit, back away from the door and sit down.”
Bradley stared at him blankly, then a smile quirked the corner of his mouth. “Is this a joke?”
Bobby’s mentors, a group of five former Servants, had told him not to engage in banter during a cleansing because it would drive the focus away from his task, so he repeated what he’d already said: “In the name of God the Father, and Jesus Christ his son, and the Holy Spirit, sit down.”
“I’ll call the cops,” Bradley said. Bobby felt his stomach plummet when Bradley pulled a phone out of the pocket of his jeans, then reminded himself that he couldn’t lose heart again just because he was scared.
“Give me your phone,” Bobby said as sternly as he could, which to him didn’t sound that stern at all.
“Or you’ll what?”
“Just give it to me.”
Bradley’s eyes seemed to darken with wicked glee. “Thane is going to kill you, and no one will be able to recognize your remains, if they even find them. You’ll make a feast for the buzzards and worms, for sure.”
Bobby’s thoughts reverted back to the previous summer, when he’d met the quadriplegic man Thane at Arbor Villa Nursing Home. Thane had been appearing to him as an apparition, but as it turned out, Thane had the special ability to alter people’s thoughts so they saw and heard things that weren’t truly there.
“Thane can’t hurt me,” Bobby said. “If he could, he’d have done it already.”
Half a second later he realized he’d engaged in precisely the banter he’d been forbidden, and Bradley launched himself at him with a feral cry.
Bobby’s evenings never did turn out how he’d planned, did they?
KAORI SAITO sat cross-legged on the sand on Fenwick Island, Delaware, doing her best to ignore the biting wind whipping her long, black hair out of its ponytail. She’d been trying to meditate for the past half hour but could hardly focus due to the sense of unease that had been eating at her for days.
Footsteps crunched on the sand behind her, making her jump. She turned and peered up into the eyes of her mentor, Matt King, who looked entirely displeased to find her out there.
“Are you trying to kill yourself out in this cold?” he asked. He’d jammed an orange knit cap over top of his thinning hair and wound a matching scarf around his neck.
“I’m wearing a coat,” Kaori said.
“Get up and come inside.”
Kaori sighed and rose, brushing sand off her rear. “I’m tired of being cooped up.” She glanced at the sun setting off to the west. “Besides, I thought I could catch a few rays out here.”
Matt rolled his eyes. “More like catching pneumonia. Sometimes I swear you’re looking for trouble when you think your life is getting too dull.”
Kaori followed him into the beach house, which belonged to Matt’s cousin Eli, a wealthy snowbird who’d gone off to Florida for the winter. They’d stayed there the past two weeks and were the only people along the whole strand save for a caretaker they’d seen walking her dog every morning. It had made for a peaceful break, but peace could grow dull after a while when it mostly involved playing chess with Matt, learning how to knit, and rewatching all the episodes of Doctor Who Kaori had already seen about seven hundred times each.
“I need some action before I find a hatchet and try to murder my family,” Kaori said once they were inside. She took off her coat and hung it over the back of one of the dining room chairs, then rubbed her hands together to warm them. “Did you have a nice nap?”
Matt ignored her question. “Three weeks ago you were complaining about needing a break.”
“And I’ve had one. Now I feel like I’m collecting dust.”
Matt yawned—maybe his nap hadn’t been so restful after all. At fifty, he was exactly twice Kaor
i’s age. Sometimes she forgot he wore out faster than she did. “Okay. How about we pray about where to go next? I vote someplace with palm trees.”
“I was thinking perhaps we could go to the UK,” Kaori said, adopting a proper English accent. “And then we could go to Glasgow or Edinburgh,” she added in a Scottish brogue. “My passport’s still good.”
Matt gave a thoughtful nod. “That sounds like a pleasant enough trip. I can start looking at airfare rates to see if it’s feasible.”
“You’re actually okay with that?” Kaori felt her eyes grow moist. She’d been an Anglophile ever since she’d started reading Roald Dahl’s books as a small child and had dreamed of visiting that rainy island for years.
“I wouldn’t mind a trip like that,” Matt said with a smile. “I’d rather go when it’s warmer, though.”
Kaori gave him a tight hug. “We’ll take that place by storm.”
Inside of her, she could feel the Spirit laughing, though whether it was with her or at her, she didn’t know.
BRADLEY’S BONY fist hit Bobby squarely in the jaw, and he staggered to the side, tasting blood. Okay. This is not cool. Not wanting to fight back, Bobby held up his arms to deflect another blow and nearly levitated off the floor in surprise when the meeting room door swung open to reveal Frankie Jovingo, a former Servant built like an Easter Island head with jet-black hair.
At first Bobby had had trouble liking the overbearing man, who had the penchant for insulting people in the hopes of bettering them.
Now he couldn’t be happier to see him.
Bradley froze when Frankie arrived, and he blinked up at the man in terror. “Who…who are you?”
“My name is Frankie Jovingo,” Frankie said with his chin held high. “I’m here to help.”
THOUGHTS RACED at a thousand miles an hour through Bradley’s mind when the giant man came through the door. Bradley knew he could have taken Bobby out easily, but there was no way he’d get past this guy. Punch him, and Bradley would break a fist.
