The Midnight Ground

by Eric Dontigney

  Helena and I turned our heads in unison and eyed the girl.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “It was crazy. For a second there, it looked like Helena was glowing.”

  Well, son of a bitch, I thought.

  Chapter 23

  Abby looked back and forth, from me to Helena. Her cheeks went very pink.

  “What?” Abby demanded.

  I glanced over at Helena. She looked dumbfounded. I realized that I must have had the same look on my face. Dammit. Way to cover, Hartworth. For people schooled in secrecy, Helena and I were doing a pretty piss poor job of covering what was, all things considered, a fairly minor revelation in a series of sobering, frightening revelations. I shot Abby a bemused smile.

  “Yeah,” I said, forcing a chuckle, “I had some of those drugs once. Saw some crazy shit.”

  Abby cast me a rightfully suspicious look and turned her gaze back to Helena. Helena had taken the opportunity to compose her face into gentle amusement. Score one for fast recovery. Abby wasn’t dumb, and she knew we were covering something. Lucky for Helena and me, Abby wasn’t an adult yet. She was probably used to challenging her grandfather about things. After all, what teenagers don’t challenge the parental figures in their lives?

  Other adults were something else entirely. She wasn’t used to challenging them, let alone demanding answers from people who seemed intent on secrecy. I saw the mental tug-of-war on her face. She wanted to understand what had made Helena and I look at her that way. Hell, who wouldn’t want to know what caused that? She also didn’t want to start stepping on our toes. Some of her hesitation might have been out of fear that we’d withdraw our attention. That was probably a lot of it. There was an unpleasant dearth of people around who seemed to give a crap about her. Alienating the few people who were being kind must have sounded like a losing bet to her. Her curiosity lost out to either deference or self-interest. I resisted the urge to sag in relief.

  I looked at Helena. “It’s getting late. We should let Abby get her rest.”

  “Yes, we probably should,” Helena agreed.

  Abby still cast suspicious expressions at us. The certainty that we were lying our asses off was painted in her furrowed brow and on lips pressed into a line. Helena did what I hadn’t. She went over and gave Abby a hug. The gesture seemed to soften Abby’s suspicion, or at least her belief that we were deceiving her with malicious intent. The girl hugged Helena with a nigh-hideous expression of need on her face. Paul probably wasn’t big on hugging.

  In fact, I’d have bet money he stopped hugging her almost entirely right around the time she hit puberty. He wasn’t a bad guy, just made from a mold that aspired to different ideals. I couldn’t fault him for that. Truth be told, I was probably cast from a relatively similar mold. It might have been years since a maternal figure of any kind had given Abby a meaningful hug. It was difficult to watch the girl hug Helena. Abby was emotionally exposed in a way that would have horrified her, if she knew someone saw it. God, it was enough to break even my callous heart.

  I couldn’t help but wonder whether Abby represented some kind of a throwback to an earlier generation. She had, after all, been raised by a man who grew up in the wake of World War II. My own lack of experience with kids notwithstanding, I did occasionally stumble onto the Internet. I saw articles bemoaning something called Millennials and their sense of entitlement, their laziness, and their lack of work ethic. Like most generalizations, I assumed it grossly overstated things, but those kinds of generalizations don’t come from nowhere, either.

  If Abby belonged to the Millennials, it seemed as though it must have been a mere chronological happenstance, rather than evidence of a shared worldview. She struck me as someone who just wasn’t jaded enough to have grown up in a post-Watergate, post-9-11, post-economic meltdown world. She was too innocent and too willing to let it go when adults clammed up. That didn’t really jibe with the entitled thing. She also didn’t strike me as lazy. The TV in her room was never on. If she was looking for a mental anesthetic or a way to avoid doing anything, TV would serve that function.

  When we’d played games, she played well. She played to win. She focused on the game with all her attention. She wasn’t a poor winner or a sore loser, which said a lot about her character to me. She was happy when she won, but didn’t respond with the in-your-face ridicule that pervaded all modern competition. When she lost, she was far too busy analyzing the loss to engage in sulking or whining. She engaged with the world around her. People who engaged with the world rarely lacked a work ethic.

  Of course, all that was overshadowed by her unintentional revelation. She had seen the power around Helena. In my experience, maybe thirty percent of people sensed it when someone was actively engaged in using magic or gathering the power to do so. Most of those people didn’t know what they were sensing. They thought it was a draft, or an errant noise, or just their imaginations. In other words, they needed it to be explicable. Therefore, thought following need, and working from a host of false assumptions, it became explicable.

  A slim fraction of one percent of those who sensed it saw gathered power. I’d been at the magic game for years and I didn’t see it most of the time. Then again, I’d made exactly zero effort to learn how. Seeing was an advantage in some respects. It gave you an early alert. It was also a disadvantage. When you see gathered power, it’s hard to ignore and harder not to react. In a subculture devoted to secrecy, noticing the wrong person with gathered power can reap unpleasant consequences, like your untimely death. That was especially true when you didn’t have any magic to defend yourself, and I was certain, down to my damned DNA certain, that Abby didn’t.

  What that meant was that she was psychic, maybe very psychic. There were a lot of people who considered psychic ability to be magic. Maybe it was on some grand scale, cosmic meta-level, but not for practical purposes. I’d go so far as to say I believed they were inextricably entwined: like two species that evolved from the same parent species, which had manifested different traits over countless generations. Even so, it wouldn’t do Abby any good to go running around willy-nilly noticing things that people didn’t want noticed.

  The timing also bothered me. If she was psychic, why had she chalked up her insight to drugs? It was as though she had no earthly idea of what she could do. Had Helena and I witnessed the first manifestations of that psychic ability? It seemed so improbable as to be insane. To have seen Helena’s power the way she did suggested Abby was a first-order psychic. That kind of power didn’t show up during adolescence. It showed up around conception and began torturing its possessor from the get-go. In my opinion, that was one of the universe’s more malicious decisions. A benevolent universe, or a benevolent God, wouldn’t saddle the most helpless members of humanity with direct access to the unvarnished truths of existence. A benevolent universe wouldn’t ever do that to anyone.

  The lucky psychics received guidance early on from knowledgeable family members and mentors. The unlucky ones got institutionalized and drugged to the gills. Apparently, psychiatrists found the exposure of their deepest, darkest, innermost secrets worthy of the moral equivalent of murder. After all, when you pharmaceutically lobotomize a person and then lock them away for life, you have murdered that person in all meaningful ways. Oh, they don’t call it that. Murder is wrong, after all. They call it treatment, or protecting society, or some other euphemistic bullshit that lets them sleep at night. Make no mistake, though, it is medically-sanctioned murder. They just waited for time to kill the body. It was cleaner that way, and western medicine loved to keep things clean.

  I only wished it was a paranoid fantasy. I’d thought it was for a long time, until I saw it happen to someone I knew. Only the exertion of old money, political connections, and I was fairly certain, the kind of threats only underworld types knew how to deliver, freed Peter from the situation. He learned his lesson. Secrecy. It all came down to secrecy. If you enjoyed freedom; if you enjoyed the ability to continue u
sing your mind unfettered by chemical inhibitors; if you wanted to continue participating in the world, you kept your damn mouth shut.

  Abby was innocent of that kind of knowledge. It was a dangerous innocence. I wouldn’t see her locked away because of a quirk of birth. She had to be told. She had to be instructed. She had to be warned, but, my mind reminded me, she had to survive first. More to the point, none of us were prepared to have that conversation. It couldn’t be broached lightly. Groundwork needed to put in place. Ideas needed to planted and watered. Once they’d had time to grow and mature, the conversation could take place.

  It was easier with small children. They weren’t as paralyzed by “knowledge” as someone Abby’s age. They grew up accepting the actual facts about existence as facts. The world was complex on orders of magnitude that science just wasn’t sophisticated enough to cope with yet. Some of the bleeding-edge physicists seemed to be nosing around the edges of it, getting the scent, and figuring it out through sheer brainpower and diligence, but it would be a long time before science caught up enough to join the conversation at the grown-up table. Abby didn’t have that kind of time. I wanted to scream in frustration. As though things weren’t complicated enough before her abrupt entrance into mine and Helena’s world.

  I found myself profoundly grateful that Helena was there. She was a velvet touch compared to me. It wasn’t that I couldn’t start the process or even see it through. I’d been through it myself. Subtleties weren’t my strong suit, though. I knew enough to know that reordering the conceptual groundwork that held a teenage girl’s mind together wasn’t a smart move for a ham-fisted, journeyman practitioner like me. I could mess her up in all kinds of ways with the best of intentions. Priorities, I reminded myself. Focus on the priorities. Keep her alive, now. The rest can happen after.

  I realized that I’d been lost in thought and refocused on the room. Helena and Abby were watching me with nearly identical expressions of blazing curiosity. I nearly took an involuntary step back under the weight of their combined gazes.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” said Helena.

  Her voice sounded sweet and innocent, but I figured she’d guessed the line of my thinking. I could have strangled her. I waved a dismissive hand while I thought up a fast lie.

  “Trying to remember if I left food out for Lil,” I said.

  “Who’s Lil?” Abby asked.

  “She’s a cat,” I said. “She kind of adopted me.”

  Abby’s eyes lit up and she squealed in a way that made her seem very, painfully young. “I love cats! Can I meet your cat?”

  I looked to Helena.

  She mouthed, “How should I know?”

  I shrugged at Abby, “Okay. I’m sure that’ll be fine.”

  She gave a wordless cheer and I was blessed with another of her million-watt smiles. If I wasn’t careful, I’d go snowblind in the glow. She surprised me then. She held out her arms in the universal sign of hug time. I flicked another glance at Helena. That time, she offered guidance. She jerked her head toward Abby hard enough that I got sympathetic whiplash. I walked over to the bed and leaned down. Abby threw her arms around my neck and squeezed me hard enough that it almost cut off my air flow. I didn’t mind. I wrapped my arms around her. I was horrified and saddened by how frail she felt. Fucking cancer, I fumed. Fucking demon, I seethed. I wanted to lay a world of hurt on someone or something right then, preferably with my bare hands and teeth.

  On another level, one that was tied to my memory and all my unlived dreams, I wondered if that was how it might have felt to hug my own daughter. A wrenching, awful pain that would have doubled me over if I wasn’t already bent down tore through me. That pain had nothing to do with my burned back or even my body. It was all in the intangible spaces of my heart and my head. It also hurt a hell of a lot more than getting burned. If I could have done it without being seen, I’d have wept.

  Chapter 24

  We stood next to my car. The sky was clear overhead and the number of visible stars shocked me. I spent most of my time in places with awful light pollution. The town’s light footprint was so small that the stars glittered overhead like a wash of diamonds spread across black velvet. I leaned against the Neon and did my best to exorcise thoughts of non-existent daughters and a life that never was.

  Helena watched me obliquely. “Are you alright?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, just some ghosts I thought I’d laid to rest a while back. Took me by surprise.”

  “They do that,” said Helena. “Abby will need instruction. I assume you’d prefer I handle it.”

  “Probably for the best, all things considered. It’s not like I’m really teacher material.”

  Helena sniffed. It sounded derisive.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You and your self-loathing. I forget how bad it gets. You would be a perfectly adequate teacher, if you ever managed to stay somewhere long enough to see it through.”

  She meant what she said, but old pain laced the words. She wasn’t the first person I hadn’t stuck around for, but I thought it had hurt her more than anyone else. She had loved me, actual, legitimate love, and I had left. I’d told myself that I wasn’t made to stay. I’d lived most of my adult life by that credo, never settling down anywhere, not even bothering to establish anything like a home. My world consisted of hotel rooms and motel rooms and, from time to time, staying for a few days or weeks with the handful of people who still opened the door when I knocked.

  Years of experience provided me with a bit of clarity. The truth proved more complicated than the catchphrase I fed myself, as the truth always does. I was a natural wanderer. That much was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. I also wandered because I was broken. I’d never gotten clear of Marcy and the things we had planned. Settling down somewhere, let alone with someone, would have been too much like burying Marcy a second time. I couldn’t face that prospect. I couldn’t make that choice without engaging in mental self-mutilation that would have crippled me even more than my inability to move on.

  “Maybe,” I hedged. “It’ll probably be easier coming from you.”

  She sniffed again, somehow managing to cram even more derision into it. I was impressed. It took hard work to communicate that much with one, brief noise.

  “Spare me. That girl has so much hero worship going on toward you right now that she’d crawl through a cobra pit filled with razor wire and burning tires to please you.”

  “All the more reason for me not to do it, don’t you think?”

  Helena stood there in silent thought for a moment. “Maybe so. Still, it might smooth things over if you participated from time to time.”

  “She’ll be more pliable when I’m around, you mean?”

  “Yes. You know how difficult the transition is coming at it as an adult,” she paused, “or nearly an adult. It’s painful enough when you’re a willing participant. She won’t be willing, but she has to learn.”

  “She does. Assuming she doesn’t die in the next couple days.”

  “I have an intuition that a broody, wandering father-figure won’t let that happen.”

  My head snapped back. Christ, had I been so obvious? Helena laughed, but not unkindly. If someone was going to be able to read me so easily, Helena would be that person. I just wasn’t used to it happening.

  “I forget how perceptive you are,” I said.

  “I have my moments, but it wasn’t hard to figure out.”

  “No?”

  “You are many things, Adrian Hartwell, but gentle is rarely one of them. You’ve been handling that girl like she’s made of crystal. It’s actually rather endearing, in a cognitive dissonance and migraine yielding sort of way.”

  I gave her a little bow. “I’ll be here all week, providing the cure to your mental well-being.”

  “Speaking of curing mental well-being, do you have any thoughts about dealing with the current problem?”

  I waggled my hand in a maybe-maybe-not gesture. “I know where to
look now, even if it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “The school?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why doesn’t that make sense?”

  I frowned at Helena. How could she find it anything but bizarre and perplexing? The damn place was a church not that long ago. A demon squatting there should have been impossible, or the next best thing to it. Was she testing me? Being intentionally obtuse to force me to work through my own reasoning? Then, I remembered. She didn’t know. She hadn’t seen the school, and I hadn’t had a reason to mention it to her.

  “It used to be a church,” I said.

  It was her head that rocked back that time. I took more than a little smug satisfaction in that. Pettiness wasn’t becoming, but it could be satisfying. She sputtered for a few seconds before words finally took shape and shot out into the night air.

  “A church!”

  “You see my quandary. If anything, she should be safer there than anywhere else in the entire town. Instead, she gets sicker whenever she sets foot in the place. It’s as incomprehensible as everything else in this shitty situation. It’s like I slipped into some alternate universe where they scrap-heaped the rules of magic and basic reasoning.”

  Helena offered a sympathetic look. “So what’s the move? Visit the school?”

  “Are you out of your mind? I don’t want to get near that place until I know more about it. What’s happening here shouldn’t be happening. That it is happening scares the shit out of me. If that place is evil central, just walking in might be a death sentence for me and anyone near me.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “I do things the old fashioned way.”

  “Which is?”

  “Dollars to donuts, some industrious local wrote about that church. I just have to run the information down. So, I go to the library and see what they have on local history.”

  Helena threw her head back as peals of laughter flew from her lips. The laughter went on for so long that she was holding her stomach before she wheezed to a stop. I gave her a hard-eyed stare.