Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories

by Joseph Nassise

  Patience sat on a dark wooden chair, one leg up over one of its arms, her bare foot kicking back and forth. Her eyes were closed.

  She was a seer. Not some kind of phony medium speaking with the spirits of the dead and handing out empty platitudes. Not a fake psychic claiming to know where the bodies were buried. Patience knew things she couldn’t possibly know. She saw them as clearly as Laura saw the nose on her own face. She would talk about things that wouldn’t happen for years as casually as people talked about yesterday’s news, because for her, there wasn’t any difference.

  “He’s in a motel near Gainesboro,” Patience said. As if she’d read it somewhere on the internet. “He’s already lost.”

  There was no computer in the farmhouse. There was a telephone about a half mile away, in a trailer at the edge of the valley. When it got dark in the farmhouse you lit a kerosene lamp, or you just went to bed.

  Laura had worried about the Polders, once. What would happen if there was a fire, or someone broke into the farmhouse? They couldn’t call 911. Now she knew the witchbillies were perfectly capable of taking care of their own problems.

  Just not in a way anyone outside the valley would ever call normal.

  “You’ll need to hurry,” Patience told Laura. “By the time the sun sets, it’ll be too late for him.” The girl studied her short-cut fingernails.

  Laura nodded and rose from her chair. She’d come to Patience because she’d been asked to find some kind of Special Ops guy who’d gone rogue. She’d been given very few details. A name, Jack Walker, and the fact that this US Navy SEAL was somewhere in southern Pennsylvania. This from an anonymous voice calling her cell phone on an untraceable number. A voice that knew another name, the name of her probation officer. A voice that could make very believable threats. The voice hadn’t identified itself, hadn’t even responded when she demanded to know more. The voice had not specified why she had been chosen. Certainly there were better people for the job. All it said was that if she didn’t find this guy, didn’t “exfiltrate” him, she was going back to jail.

  “Why me?” Laura asked, now, because she might actually get an answer from Patience.

  “It has to be you. You need to go, now. Every minute you waste is going to make this harder. And Laura?” Patience asked.

  “What?”

  “Get him out of there. By sunset. Or it’ll be too late for you, as well.” Patience turned and looked her right in the eye, then lifted a hand and waved it in a shooing motion.

  With an exasperated sigh, Laura headed out of the room, back into the daylight outside. After the dusty gloom of the farmhouse, the world dazzled her, half-blinded her. She put on a pair of sunglasses and jumped in her car.

  She sped all the way to Gainesboro. It wasn’t far. She opened up the maps app on her phone and set it to search for local motels.

  The app zoomed way out, to show her a motel on the edge of Lancaster. Twenty miles away.

  Laura cursed and pulled over to the side of the road. She zoomed in on the map again and scrolled around, looking for any sign of the place Patience had mentioned. Nothing turned up. She zoomed out a little more and saw a big patch of green. White Deer Forest, one of those patches of land reserved for hunters. There were a lot of hunters in Pennsylvania. People would come from miles around to hunt in that forest, and they needed a place to stay. There had to be some kind of motel nearby, but where?

  Laura Caxton had grown up in this part of Pennsylvania. She’d spent years on these roads as a state trooper, doing highway patrol back when she was a solid citizen, not an ex-con. She knew how this land worked, could read volumes in the way the ridges ran, how the shadows folded into the hollows between those long, high hills. In a place like this, you would build near running water, where the local creek met the highway.

  Laura had no psychic talents, at least none that were actually helpful. She was a hell of a detective, though, when she set her mind to it. She drove another two miles, deeper into the woods. The light danced as it filtered down through the rolling waves of leaves over her car. Up ahead she saw a general store and a pizza place. She pulled into the lot they shared and waited until somebody came out, a middle-aged guy in a stained T-shirt holding a large pie, shifting it from hand to hand as it burned his fingers. She rolled down her window. “Hey!” she called.

  This was rural Pennsylvania. The people were friendly. He smiled and walked over to her car. Set his pizza on her hood.

  “You know of a motel around here?” she asked. “Some place hunters go?”

  “T’ain’t season yet, not for months,” he said, with a shake of his head.

  “That’s all right, I’m not hunting.” Not for deer, anyway. “Listen. I’ll level with you,” she said, “I’m looking for somebody. Somebody who probably doesn’t want to be found. I heard he was holing up around here.” Maybe the guy with the pizza would mistake her for a cop. Even years after she’d lost her badge, it happened all the time. She still had the cop look. You couldn’t shake that once you learned it.

  The guy smiled, one of those nasty grins that meant he thought he knew more than he was letting on. “What happened, your husband run out on you? Give him a couple days, I’m sure he’ll come home on his own.”

  Okay, so much for the cop look. Whatever, she could work with this. “He took my ATM card and I need to buy groceries,” she said.

  The man shrugged. That stupid grin was lingering on his face like it was painted there. “There is a place, but if he’s there . . . well, maybe he ain’t comin’ back after all.” He nodded as if he’d just decided something, worked through some moral quandary. “Ayep, you head down this road another two miles. Look for the hex sign on the side of the place, you’ll know it. I’m sorry, honey.”

  “Sorry?” she asked.

  “If he’s there, maybe you don’t want him back.”

  She thanked the man and got back on the road.

  She found the motel soon enough. It was the only building on that stretch of road that hadn’t collapsed under its own weight or rotted down to nothing where it stood. It looked like there had been a decent-sized town here once, but the motel was all that remained. Not that it was in great shape, except by comparison. The white paint was all peeling and the hex sign had faded in the sun. A bunch of cars sat out front, several of them rusted out so they would never run again.

  The hex sign on its side wall was a work of art. You saw a lot of hex signs in this part of the state—round panels of wood, colorfully painted with designs of birds and stars and hearts. They were an old folk tradition, brought to Pennsylvania by German settlers. Most of them were just for tourists now, souvenirs to take home from your visit to Amish country.

  Typically they were the size of a dinner plate. This one was ten feet across, and so packed with symbols it must have taken days just to design, much less paint.

  The witchbillies—Patience Polder’s people—could make hex signs that had real power. They could protect a house from intruders, or help crops grow. This looked like one of those. She wondered if it functioned to keep people away, those who weren’t invited, at least. She wondered if that hex sign was why the motel didn’t show up on maps.

  There was a little office to one side of the motel, with an attached restaurant that looked out on the road. The main bulk of the place was two floors of rooms, all of them facing the same direction, each one fronted by a plate glass window. Every single room had its curtains drawn, but she saw a flicker of blue light through a crack in the drapes of one of the first-floor rooms. She walked across the parking lot, her shoes crunching on the gravel. She wanted a better look.

  Not that she didn’t know already. She knew that particular shade of blue all too well. As she got closer, she started to hear her father’s voice calling out from behind her. Still faint enough that she could pretend it was a trick her mind was playing on her.

  As she got closer to that blue light, it was like her father was standing right behind her.

&nb
sp; “Laura,” he called.

  She heard it with her ears. It was as real as the crunch of the gravel, the chirping of the crickets out in the woods.

  “Laura,” he said. “We need to talk about Mom.”

  She clamped her eyes shut, terrified she would see him if she looked. He’d been dead for twenty years. It wasn’t fair.

  Laura Caxton might not have any psychic talents but she did have one nasty psychic liability. She was sensitive to ghosts. “Susceptible” might be a better word. Vulnerable. She couldn’t resist them.

  Whoever that voice on the phone had been, the person who sent her on this manhunt was a real bastard. A jerk of the first order.

  “Laura, she’s suffering. She’s just hurting every day now,” her father said. “The doctors say the cancer’s in remission, but I think they’re wrong.”

  She started hammering on doors at random, shouting for the people inside to come out.

  But no one came out. Twice she saw haunted faces peer at her through a gap in water-stained curtains, but that was all. Then she saw the rental car. A pristine Detroit pearl in a lot full of rusty crap. It was parked in front of room 19. She ran and banged on the door.

  No answer, but she could hear someone inside. A deep voice, babbling. Drunk, by the sound of it.

  She glanced both ways. Seeing no one, she raised her leg and kicked open the door. It slammed into the wall. She caught it on the rebound as she strode into the room. She saw the thing on the wall for a brief second before she averted her eyes. Even that little time created a longing, a yearning she was barely able to control. She was desperate to be out of the place. But first she had to get her guy away from the ghostskin.

  She couldn’t see him at first. She took in the ruin of the motel room, the carpet strewn with garbage, wet towels mildewing on the side of a bed that had probably never been slept in. The blue flicker of the skin on the wall kept pulling at her, demanding her attention.

  “She’s hurting, Laura. Not just her body. Laura? Young lady, this is serious. We need to talk about your mother.”

  Already the skin was changing. Taking shape. A wedding ring glinted on a hand that only had three fingers. As she shoved her way through the garbage-strewn floor, the skin grew a fourth finger, and then a thumb. It would start growing her father’s face next. It would look like he was walking out of the wall. Coming back.

  She had to get out of this room before that happened. She forced herself to look down and saw what she’d come for. The guy she’d been sent to save must have been something once—he was built like an athlete. His face was covered in greasy stubble, though, maybe a week’s worth, and his hair was a rat’s nest.

  There was no way she could carry him. “Get up,” she said. “Come on. You need to help me.”

  “Fuck off,” he moaned. He wasn’t even looking at her.

  No, of course not. He was looking at the skin on the wall. The skin that had started to form her father’s arm, his shoulder. The thick cords of his neck, that special place she remembered hiding her face on the Fourth of July, when the fireworks were too loud and scary. That same place she’d buried her tears when Mom died.

  Laura punched herself in the thigh, hard enough to leave a bruise. The pain helped clear her head. She looked down at the man on the floor and wondered if maybe he could use a little of that spur, himself.

  So she kicked him.

  Tried to, anyway.

  He might be a drunken shadow of himself here in this dead-end place, but his reflexes were hardwired. His hand shot out and grabbed her ankle, hard enough she worried he might break it. “I said fuck off!” he shouted.

  At least there was still some fire in him. “Get the hell up, sailor,” she said. She tried to make herself sound like a drill sergeant. “Get up right now or I’m leaving you behind. Orders or no orders.”

  “Just . . . just give me a second. Gotta talk to somebody first,” he said, struggling to get to his feet, his hands unable to grip the bed enough to help him up.

  On the wall the skin started growing hair. Her father’s thinning hair. He’d never tried to comb it over. Never worried too much about how he looked, though Mom always talked about how handsome he’d been, back when they were courting. Mom always said—

  “No time,” she told the sailor. She looked around and found an ice bucket that was half-full of what she thought was stagnant water.

  It wasn’t water. He’d been so locked into the skin’s trance that he hadn’t been able to make it to the toilet.

  He came up at her, howling like an animal, ready to kill.

  She could work with that.

  “Come on!” she said. “You want a piece of me? Then come and get it, tough guy!”

  He chased her out of the room and halfway across the parking lot. Then suddenly his face changed and he looked at her like he had no idea where he was or what he was doing there.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey, I’m sorry about that. I thought you were . . . I thought . . .”

  “I know,” she told him. “I know what you’ve been up to for the last week.”

  Big tough sailor guy he might be. Still he turned his face away in shame.

  “I know. And I can help,” she said.

  THREE

  He needed to clean himself up, but she couldn’t let him out of her sight. They headed over to the little restaurant attached to the motel, all grimy tables and mismatched chairs. “Restroom?” Laura asked, when she spotted the lone waitress leaning on the counter.

  The woman pointed behind her, barely looking up. Until she realized Laura was taking the sailor into the bathroom with her. “No, no, no,” she said then, chasing after them. “This is a family place, you can’t—”

  Laura slammed the door in the waitress’ face. That seemed to do the trick.

  She sat down on the lid of the toilet while he leaned hard on the cheap porcelain sink; hard enough the bolts holding it to the wall creaked.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, though she already knew.

  He took a while answering. Like he wasn’t sure she had security clearance. “Jack,” he said.

  She nodded. “You’ve got some powerful friends, Jack. People who want you back. That’s not enough, is it? Just knowing that somebody worries about you, it’s not as good as what you had in that room.”

  “Listen, ma’am,” he said. “I’m going to apologize for this in advance. But you know shit-all about me.”

  Laura let it sit like that while he washed his face, ran fingers through his hair. She could see the discipline in this man, the iron in him, like she was looking at the bones under his skin. She could feel his shame radiating off his back. He pulled his shirt off over his head. Reached for his belt buckle, then stopped and glanced her way.

  “Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’m not going to get any ideas. For one thing, you look like something that got snaked out of a drain right now. For another, you aren’t my type.”

  “Right,” he said, drawing out the word.

  “Let me put it this way: you have any sisters?”

  He laughed. It wasn’t much, just a quick chuckle, but at least it was something. If he’d chosen to be a hard case, he could have made this impossible.

  He scrubbed himself down with paper towels and pink liquid hand soap. Only when he started dressing again did she say what she needed to say.

  “Jack, I do know one thing about you,” she told him. “There’s somebody—somebody who means more to you than your friends do. Somebody you can’t live without. And they’re dead.”

  She saw every muscle in his body tense up. His hands balled into fists and she wondered if she would have to fight him, right there in the bathroom.

  Instead he punched the mirror.

  In prison, the mirrors were just polished steel. You could punch them all you wanted and they would just dent. Sometimes she had trouble remembering she was outside now, a place where things shattered. She cried out a little as fragments of silvered glass, long
triangular shards, cascaded down into the sink and onto the floor.

  He turned and stared at her. His hand was bloody, bits of mirror sticking out of his skin.

  “I’m done,” he said, his voice empty, as he slid to the ground, his back to the door. “I’m done. Just leave me here. I’m done and done.”

  She had no idea what to tell him.

  They sat together in the bathroom, staring at each other, staring at nothing.

  FOUR

  Eventually, Jack pulled himself to his feet, cleaned his wounds as well as he could, then exited the bathroom.

  The waitress didn’t seem particularly surprised when Jack came out of the restroom with blood streaming down his arm. She grabbed a towel and wrapped his hand for him, tying it in a knot. “Happens more often than you’d think,” she said.

  No demand that he pay for the damage. No insistence that he leave right now and not come back. She took one look at an injured man and she tried to help.

  He’d forgotten there were people in the world who weren’t trying to kill each other.

  “Let’s get you some food. You too, Miss, you look like you could use a good meal. Burgers and fries okay? They’re frozen, just take me a second to defrost them and heat ’em up.”

  The woman, this strange, short-haired woman who had dragged him away from Jen, nodded and then she led him over to a booth and sat him down. She never stopped staring at him.

  “We call them ghosts but they’re not the spirits of the dead. Don’t think of dead people haunting the living because they have unfinished business, they’re not like that. I don’t know if that kind of ghost even exists, really.”

  “They do,” he said, though he shouldn’t have. Maybe all these people trying to help him were making him soft. “They exist. And they’re bad enough.”

  She didn’t seem surprised to hear it. “This is different. Don’t think lost souls. Think ectoplasm, maybe,” she said. Laura. Her name was Laura. That one fact had actually penetrated the swamp that his brain had become.