by T. A. Pratt
Instead she said, “Kill.”
I blinked. “Kill... whom?”
“Whom he says!” She rolled her eyes and grimaced dramatically. “Whomsoever made you want to die yourself, that’s probably a good start. Turn off the engine, will you? The fumes are making my eyes water.”
That was demonstrably untrue—her eyes were bright and clear and untouched by tears—but I turned the key to the off position anyway. She struck me as more interesting than death, which hadn’t been true of anything else in my life for months.
The woman tapped the thing that wasn’t a broom handle against the side of the car. “With this, you can punish everyone who ever wronged you.”
“With a stick?” I coughed, waving the fumes away from my face.
“With a spear.” She slid the stick—it was the color of old ivory, carved all over with delicate abstract patterns of swirls and whorls and curlicues—down through her hands, until I could see what capped the end: a pale, glossy spearhead as long as my forearm, lashed to the shaft with leather thongs gone black with age.
“What’s that supposed to be? The spear the Roman soldier used to stab Christ on the cross? Are you selling relics?” The flicker of interest I’d felt a moment ago faded as suddenly as it had come. I was so inexpressibly weary, of everything.
She snorted. “Ha. I see I’ve got an erudite suicide on my hands. You think it’s the Spear of Longinus, that old thing? No. I’m not selling relics. I’m giving away... call it an artifact. An object with a point of view. I hold in my hands one of the most perfect instruments of vengeance ever wrought by human hands—strike that, I’m pretty sure it predates humanity, and I don’t know for sure that any hands at all were involved in its wrought-ing. Wrighting? You wouldn’t say ‘forging,’ it’s made of bones and teeth and skin, not metal... Making, then. Anyway, come on. Who are we reaping first?”
“Reaping? It’s not a scythe.”
“You’re awfully pedantic for a guy who was about to be dead in a few minutes. But reaping’s what I mean. This spear has a name, or at least, some people have a name for it—they call it ‘Ghostreaper.’ Not as classic as ‘Heartseeker’ or ‘Stormbringer’ but it’s got a certain ring. So. Let’s go make some ghosts?”
“I wish you’d leave me alone.” I slumped even further in my seat. “I don’t know you. I don’t want you here. I don’t want what you’re selling. The problems I have can’t be solved with a spear.”
“I’m not here to advocate problem solving. I prefer causing problems anyway. I’m here to advocate revenge. Who’s to blame for your suicidal tendencies? You’re, what, early fifties, only moderately pear-shaped, all your own hair, good teeth, nice house, fancy car—it’ll lose a lot of resale value once you die in it though—so what’s the problem? Heartbreak? Gambling habit catch up with you? I don’t sense anything terminal on you, certainly not cancer—that kind of my specialty—and your serotonin levels smell fine, which makes me think it’s situational depression. So what’s the situation?”
“It’s... lots of things.” The litany of misfortune unspooled in my head. “My boyfriend was killed, a few months ago. In a hit-and-run, just a few blocks from our house. This house. We were going to get married. After that, I just... had trouble focusing. I lost my job—I am, I was, an accountant, corporate taxes mainly. I cashed in my retirement fund and thought I’d drink myself to death.” I laughed, but not happily. “I just fall asleep before I get very far, though, and throw everything up.”
“The key is to sleep on your back, so you aspirate on the vomit,” the woman said seriously.
I wrinkled my nose in distaste. I never liked a mess. “I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this.”
“I have one of those faces that makes people want to confess. It’s one of my many fine qualities. Here, give me your hand.” Before I could reply, she reached into the car through the open window, grabbed my wrist, and pressed my palm against the shaft of the spear.
I jolted upright. The sensation was like being plunged into ice water, but also like touching a Van de Graaf generator, but also—
“Feels like getting a blowjob from a guy with a peppermint in his mouth, doesn’t it?” she said. “The tingle! That’s the alcohol leaving your body, and the need for the alcohol, too, and any other addictions you’ve got. Maybe the loss of an inhibition or two as well. Ghostreaper likes a clean vessel. So why didn’t you ever hunt down the asshole who ran over your boyfriend?”
I kept my fingers curled around the cool haft of the spear. The tingling had subsided, leaving in its place a sort of cold, distancing clarity, as if I were viewing the world through a pool of perfectly still icy water. “The police didn’t have any leads. My boyfriend, Richard, was home sick from work that day, I don’t even know why he was out walking—he should have been here in bed. No one saw the car that ran him down. A neighbor found him, bleeding in the street.” His blood had run down into a storm drain; I saw faded brown splotches staining the iron later.
The woman slid across the hood of my car like the heroine of an action movie and pulled open the passenger door—even though I’d locked it—dislodging the hose in the process. She sat down next to me and patted my hand. “I can find the killer for you. And you can introduce them to Ghostreaper. Would you like that?”
“What—how—”
“It’s pretty much always a waste of time to ask me questions. I prefer assertions, even if they’re mistaken ones. Shall we?”
We rearranged things, first. I climbed out of the car awkwardly, keeping my hand on Ghostreaper through the window, unwilling to lose the numbing clarity that touching the weapon seemed to afford. I grasped it with my other hand before untangling myself from the window. The spear was six feet long from its base to the tip of its point, two inches taller than me.
The woman slid out of the passenger seat and took a moment to yank the garden hose loose from the exhaust pipe. Then she looked around my garage, humming, and picked up one of my smaller telescopes from the workbench, a refractor with a 2.76 inch aperture, about 15 inches long. Not as obvious a blunt object as a lead pipe, but of roughly the same dimensions. “Heads up,” she said, and swung scope at my head like a baseball bat.
I flinched away, turning to catch the blow on my shoulder—but when the scope struck me I felt no pain, and barely any sensation, just the barest flutter of pressure, as if I’d been brushed by a butterfly’s wing.
She tossed the telescope on the ground with a clatter, and even as my mind raced and my adrenaline pumped, I winced at the tinkle of the lens breaking.
“The wielder of Ghostreaper is invulnerable to physical assault,” the woman said. “As long as you’re touching the spear, anyway. Let it leave your grasp and you’re as breakable as ever. So what I’m saying is: while you wield Ghostreaper, act with impunity. Of course that’s what I always say anyway.”
“You could have just told me. You didn’t have to break my telescope—”
“I believe in instructive demonstrations. Besides, telescopes are for the long view, and I want you focused on the immediate situation.”
I maneuvered the spear into the car with difficulty, shoving the spear’s butt deep into the passenger footwell, reclining the seat and leaning the shaft back against it, the head nearly touching the back window. I got into the driver’s seat, resting my fingers the shaft, glad the car was an automatic and not a stick shift, so I had a hand free. The woman sat in the back seat, right behind me.
“Who are you?” I reached for the key awkwardly with my left hand, but I didn’t turn it yet. Last time I’d started the car, I’d intended to kill myself. Next time I started it, I would do so with the intent of killing someone else.
“My name’s Elsie. You’re Dave, right?”
“Carson,” I said. “My name is Carson.”
“Oh. Well, that’s okay. You’ll do.”
“When you say you can find the killer—”
“Open up the garage door, and turn left. Your
vehicular manslaughter-er doesn’t live too far away. Keeping it local, I like that, shows real community spirit.”
I activated the garage door opener and did as she asked. I followed her directions, and soon parked in front of a neat, narrow, two-story house just a few blocks away. I saw someone moving through the windows inside.
“She’s home!” Elsie said. “Let’s go visit.”
I stared at the silver Prius was parked in the driveway. “They found flakes of silver paint on Richard’s body. The police said it was too common to trace.”
“Luckily I have other ways of finding things that interest me.” Elsie took a great gulping inhalation of air. “I can smell chaos in the air. I’m like a bloodhound for strife. Also for actual blood.”
I climbed out of the car, bringing Ghostreaper with me. The day was cool but clear, perfect San Francisco summer. It should have been awkward to get out of a car dragging a six-foot spear after me, but I didn’t have any trouble at all. Still, even with the cold clarity of the weapon in my hand, I hesitated. “I don’t—what do I say to her—”
Elsie was somehow out of the car and beside me in an instant. “What, you mean, like, ‘Prepare yourself, Dana Martin, for I am your death, destroyer of worlds?’ Eh. Pithy one-liners are overrated. I mean, the main audience is going to be dead in a minute, yeah? When you tell the story later you can make up any dialogue you want, because who can contradict you? You can say anything you want, or nothing. Though if you do have questions, I find that menacing someone with a huge weapon is a good way to get them to answer. The answers might not be true, but truth is overrated too.”
We walked toward the front door, and I paused by the Prius. I slashed the spear at the car viciously, expecting to smash the rear window.
Instead the spearhead passed through the glass, as if I’d slashed at a fog bank. I gaped. “What—”
“Oh, sorry, Ghostreaper isn’t much good for general vandalism. The shaft is ordinary matter, at least most of the time, so you could maybe smash a taillight with it. But the spearhead just passes harmlessly through anything that’s not alive. It’s one of those quirks. Magical weapons, what are you gonna do?” She skipped up the front steps, turned the knob, and threw the door open. I was surprised the door was unlocked—but maybe it wasn’t. Locks hadn’t kept Elsie out of my garage, or my car either.
I went up the steps, the spearhead passing through the doorframe as if it wasn’t there at all. I stood awkwardly in a stranger’s living room, full of old comfortable furniture, abstract prints on the walls, and enough potted plants to give the whole place a jungle feeling.
The woman, Dana, hurried in from another room, frizzy-haired and sharp-featured, dressed in Bohemian swirls of skirts and scarves. She froze when she saw me, I assumed because I was holding an enormous spear, but then she whimpered and said, “You.” Her body language shifted, as if she planned to run away, but then she steeled herself, lifted her chin, and said, “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I parked my car first, I just wanted to talk to him, but he walked away from me, called me a crazy bitch and then just walked away, and I lost control, I put the car in gear—”
I’d half-believed Elsie was trying to deceive me into committing some grudge-murder on her behalf, but this was an open confession, not even of an accident, but of something akin to premeditated murder.
Which seemed to me, in the cool comfort of Ghostreaper’s company, to be grounds for a premeditated murder of my own.
“We used to climb up on the roof together.” I twisted the spear in my hands, the delicate filigree patterns cutting into my palms. “Richard and I. We’d lay there and look up at the stars, what few we could see with all the city lights. Sometimes we’d go out to the desert to see the stars, or go camping during meteor showers. We made up our own names for the constellations. Now I can’t even look at the sky without feeling a black hole open up in my chest. You took the stars away from me.”
Dana’s face crumpled in on itself, tears springing into her eyes. “I’m so—”
I stepped forward and swung the spear, the point aimed for her soft belly. The spearhead passed through her, still with no resistance at all, and I thought it was a different cruel trick, a spear that couldn’t stab anything, the murderous equivalent of those birthday candles you can’t blow out no matter how you huff and puff. But Dana’s eyes went blank, and she slowly crumpled to the floor, sprawling on her side. There was no blood on the spear when I lifted it away, no visible wound, but her body was still and unbreathing.
“So how did that feel?” Elsie stepped inside and shutting the door behind her.
I looked down at the corpse of the woman who’d killed my boyfriend. “It felt... good. Like closing a difficult account forever.”
“Revenge gets a bad rap.” Elsie prodded the corpse with her foot. “People say it’s ultimately unsatisfying, that it only ends in tears—but of course, people would say that, wouldn’t they? To discourage people like you from going out and getting revenge on them. I’ve always found vengeance to be pretty satisfying, making people pay for what they’ve done to me. Hell, sometimes I even make them pay in advance.” She looked at the ceiling, and her tone took a turn for the philosophical. “Of course, it is true that an act of revenge can begin an endless cycle of retribution, with this woman’s loved ones coming to kill you, and so on... but fuck ‘em. You’ve got the spear. As you can see, Ghostreaper makes it look pretty much like death from natural causes, so it’s super fun at parties—”
“You killed me!” a voice shrieked, and Dana walked into the room again—but this time she looked like a faded watercolor of herself, almost transparent in places, and her feet didn’t quite touch the ground.
“Oh, right,” Elsie said. “I forgot to tell you about that part.”
I stumbled away from the shimmering doppelganger, lifting up the spear defensively.
Elsie said, “When you kill someone with Ghostreaper, it, well... rips out their soul. Or essence. Or thought-pattern. It makes a ghost, more or less. A ghost that follows you around, uh. Forever, pretty much. But if it’s any consolation, no one else can see her, unless you want them to. And she’s bound to your service. Instead of getting an afterlife, she gets to do your bidding for eternity, or the local equivalent.”
This was too much. It occurred to me that I was probably still sitting in my car, breathing carbon monoxide, having a terrible final hallucination in my last moments of life. I found that idea very comforting.
“Will you tell her to shut up with that wailing?” Elsie said.
Dana—my victim—was indeed making quite a commotion, crouching by her corpse, keening. “Ah,” I said. “Could you... stop making that noise?”
The ghost went silent. Her hands went to her throat, her mouth, and she opened and closed her lips soundlessly, eyes wide.
“You can talk, I just don’t want you to—”
“He was cheating on you,” she said dully, still looking at her body, stroking the corpse’s frizzy hair. “Richard. He was cheating on you with my husband, Harvey. I did you a favor—”
“Richard and I had an open relationship,” I said. “We never wanted a little thing like temporary lust to ruin our connection.”
Dana sprang to her feet, floating just above the carpet. “They were going to run away together, you moron, you fat old man, your boyfriend was young, and so was my Harvey—”
“Stop talking,” I said, and she did, making those fish-mouth silent gapings, which should have been comical, but were horrible instead.
“So what next?” Elsie said brightly.
I frowned at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you’ve been transformed into an instrument of perfect revenge! Surely someone else has wronged you. Like the dead lady’s husband. He walked out on her—I can smell traces of their marital discord—but I can track him down. He was doing the dirty with your boyfriend, and even if you’ve got one of those brains that doesn’t get jealous over a little ugly-bumping,
dead Dickie was planning to abandon you for old hot-and-heavy Harvey, so surely that—”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know this Harvey, and if he made Richard happy, for a little while, that’s all I ever wanted, for him to be happy.”
Elsie sighed. “You disappoint me, Dave. I thought I saw real potential in—”
“I want to kill my boss.” I caressed Ghostreaper. “The one who fired me. The one who said it wasn’t as if my wife had died, just my boyfriend, except he said boy toy, he—”
“Even better.” Elsie beamed like a proud mother. “I love a man who shows initiative. The victims you choose yourself are always the sweetest.”
I looked down at the ghost. “Do you have any duct tape in the house?” I asked.
The car was crowded, with Ghostreaper in the passenger seat, Elsie behind me, and Dana in the back seat next to her, body contorted to avoid contact with the wedged-in spear. Dana seemed to be attached to me by an intangible tether: when I’d walked out the door, she’d bobbed along after me, floating just off the ground, like a helium balloon that had degraded into neutral buoyancy.
I drove slowly. I didn’t have any doubt about my chosen course—but that didn’t mean I wasn’t full of questions. “Why did you bring me this spear?” I looked at Elsie in the rearview mirror. “Why are you doing any of this? You don’t even know me.”
“Oh, people are the same all over, Dave.”
“I told you, my name’s Carson. And that’s not an answer.”
She looked out the window, twirling a lock of hair around her finger. “It’s not complicated. I eat chaos, and I get bored easily. There, that’s my motivations sorted.”
“Where are we going?” Dana spoke but didn’t look up, sullen as a teenage girl forced to go on a family road trip.
“To get you some company,” Elsie said, and patted her ghostly knee.
My former employer was an innumerate buffoon who’d inherited the firm from his father, a genuine gentleman who’d had an unfortunate blind spot when it came to recognizing the foulness of his imbecilic spawn. The old man was dead, and the idiot was ascendant, having stripped away all the small perqs and pleasantries of working in the firm until it was as soulless as any corporate cubicle farm. I’d come in late one too many times, probably with breakfast bourbon on my breath, and the idiot had called me in and told me with great relish that I was “out on my ass.” He then said, “Thanks for giving me a reason to get rid of you—now I can hire some young hotshot for half your salary.” I’d spent thirty years at the company, and I was escorted out by security, my possessions boxed up and mailed to me in a jumble.
