The Midnight Ground

by Eric Dontigney

  Helena continued staring at me with that same unidentifiable expression she’d been wearing almost continuously. “Without all that psychic power, she’d be dead already.”

  I glared at Helena. I just wanted to be angry. I didn’t want to reason my way through it. I wanted to hit something, hard, in the face, over and over again. I tried to push those thoughts down, but my emotions were up. Abby bringing up Jack Reed had thrown me way off balance. I rubbed my face with my hands and made another attempt to put my emotions in check. I didn’t get them locked down, but I penned them up in a corner.

  “Maybe so,” I conceded. “Doesn’t make it right. Damn sure doesn’t make it any less ugly.”

  Helena nodded and went back to staring at me. I looked away.

  “Ask,” I muttered.

  “Reed,” she said, very soft and gentle. “He killed Marcy?”

  I didn’t speak. I didn’t dare open my mouth for fear that it would turn into a scream of pain or hysteria. I nodded my head.

  “Was it mur—” she cut herself off. “Was it intentional?”

  I shook my head and took a chance on speaking. My voice was rough. “Accident. Stupid, stupid, careless, unnecessary accident.”

  She frowned and studied me some more. “What did you do?”

  I felt my expression go blank. “You know better than to ask a question like that, no matter what the answer might be. I did something. That’s all that matters.”

  She seemed taken aback by the answer for a moment, but then she nodded. She couldn’t answer a question she didn’t know the answer to, if it came down to it. She closed the distance, slid her hand into mine, and squeezed. There was nothing romantic in the gesture. She was being kind to me. She was being Helena. I squeezed back, calmed by the warmth of human touch and empathy.

  “I’m sorry, Adrian. I knew it was tragic. I just assumed it was some kind of illness. Something swift and painful enough to scar you the way it did. I never imagined that it was…” she trailed off. “I’m sorry.”

  I gave her an empty smile. “Yeah, me too.”

  Helena glanced up at the ceiling, though I had the impression she was really trying to look up several floors at Abby. She frowned and sighed. I couldn’t blame her.

  “This will complicate things with her.”

  “You think? I’d be surprised if she let me back into the room.”

  “Maybe, but I doubt it. What she saw in you frightened her. I don’t think it frightened her as much as you think.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “I mean that she saw things in both of us, things she wasn’t ready to know about our world. Imagine it. If you had been exposed to everything you know now, right at the very beginning, what would you have done?”

  “Run for the hills probably, but,” I saw her point, “but Abby can’t, even if she wanted to.”

  Helena nodded.

  I shrugged. “Nothing to be done about it. Damage done.”

  “True,” she said.

  I gave her an oblique look. It was my turn to ask a personal question.

  “Helena, what was that business about attachments and saving me?”

  Helena stood there in silence, but she didn’t let go of my hand. I let it ride. She’d answer, if I gave her long enough. It took about two minutes.

  “She was mistaken,” said Helena. “For the most part.”

  “She read me pretty well,” I countered.

  “You were,” she sighed, “are, important to me.”

  That admission didn’t come cheap for Helena. I saw the pain of acknowledging the truth on her face.

  “When we were together, I thought, I believed it was so I could save you from yourself. Or maybe it was just from your pain. I don’t know that I really knew which, at the time. I thought if I could save you from that, then we’d be happy, genuinely happy. When you left, I felt like a failure at saving you, at building a life, at relationships. It felt like that for a long time. I know I can’t save you. You can never really save anyone.”

  “But?”

  “But, knowing it doesn’t automatically free you from the feelings that went with it. Believing I could save you was hubris and self-serving hubris at that. Feeling like a failure after was a bruised ego. You were damaged and still in love with Marcy. Expecting you to change, believing I could heal you, it was expecting too much from both of us. I still struggle with that hubris and frail ego. My attachment isn’t you, but it’s locked up with my memories of you. It isn’t always easy to separate them.”

  “Especially for a frightened kid with limited life experience,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  I gave her hand another gentle squeeze and then let it go. “I never really said it, but I am sorry. You weren’t the only one expecting too much from both of us.”

  She let out a surprised little laugh. “Oh? What were you expecting?”

  I’d asked myself that more than once. “A miracle.”

  Chapter 32

  “I spoke to The Twins,” I said, before she could ask the inevitable follow-up question.

  I never figured out more than that I’d expected some kind of miracle. The exact nature and timing of the miracle was anyone’s guess. Helena spotted the dodge, but let it go. Drilling into one another’s psyches was questionably wise. She knew that as well as I did.

  “What did they say?”

  “Nothing good. I need to go back out to that graveyard and take another look.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to make sure I saw what I thought I saw and to, um, confirm a theory.”

  “What theory?”

  I waved the question off. “Let me check it out first. I don’t want to scare anyone without a reason. If I’m right, though, we need to get Paul and Abby out of here immediately.”

  “They may not want to go,” said Helena.

  “That’s a perfectly reasonable assumption and it doesn’t matter at all. They’ll still need to go.”

  “Okay, now you’re scaring me. What did The Twins tell you?”

  Helena crossed her arms and lifted an eyebrow at me. We’d had—or rather, I’d lost—a number of arguments where that posture played a prominent role.

  “In short, they told me that we’d be fighting a losing battle if we went head-to-head with whatever is causing all of this.”

  “How sure are they?”

  “It’s The Twins,” I said, in my best that-should-say-it-all voice.

  “I’ve never dealt with them directly,” she reminded me.

  “Oh, right. In my experience, you ignore their information and advice at your own peril.”

  She tapped her foot a few times. It wasn’t impatience, just a nervous habit. She’d had it for as long as I’d known her.

  “Let’s say it comes to that. How do you propose we convince them?”

  “I doubt Abby will need much convincing. She’s seen into our heads. She knows this is all real now. Big, scary real.”

  “Granted, but she isn’t the one calling the shots about where they are, is she?”

  “I don’t think Paul could handle the truth about all of this,” I said. “Do you?’

  Helena frowned and then shook her head. “No, probably not. I know it’s happening and I can barely believe it. This is bizarre even by our standards.”

  “Then, all other things being equal, we’ll probably have to resort to emotional blackmail.”

  Helena didn’t look convinced. “He doesn’t strike me as the sort to bend that easily.”

  “Maybe not for himself, but for Abby?”

  “God, Adrian, that’s cold.”

  “It’s better than letting her die.”

  Helena closed her eyes and then nodded. “Alright, if we have to. So what now?”

  “I go to the graveyard and try very hard to prove myself wrong.”

  I took my sweet time driving to the graveyard. I was looking forward to what I expected to see there about as much as I looked forward to being beaten
with a baseball bat. I realized I was checking the rearview a lot more often than necessary. I snorted. I was looking for the sheriff, but I’d been staying comparatively low profile since our chat. I didn’t think he had a reason to come looking for me. Even driving slowly, the entrance to the cemetery appeared all too quickly. I parked and reminded myself how important it was to do what I went there to do. Only, I didn’t immediately open the door and step out.

  I just sat in my car and looked at the wrought iron gate for several minutes. I usually liked wrought iron. It was decorative without being ostentatious. Staring at the gate, though, it didn’t look decorative to me at all. It looked like prison bars. The living might be able to come and go easily enough, but not the dead. The dead were locked in there, in cells of smoke, and I doubted their jailor ever let anyone go.

  “Damn it,” I said. “Stop creeping yourself out.”

  I struggled to banish those kinds of thoughts. I hadn’t known what I was in for the first time, but blissful ignorance was just a fond memory. I thought I knew what I was going to see, would have bet money on it, but I wasn’t eager to confirm my beliefs. Like I said, the veil between the living and the dead exists for a reason. You look across it at your own risk. I told myself to quit stalling and got out of the car. I made the short walk to the gate and stepped into the graveyard. I glanced across the weathered faces of the closest graves. They all bore identical dates of death.

  I wasn’t much for prayer, but I looked up at the sky. “You know, Big Guy, I generally like being right about things. It’s gratifying and all. Honestly, though, I’d much rather be wrong here. If there’s anything You could do to help make sure I’m wrong, I’d appreciate it.”

  The sky remained blue and still. I was not encouraged by that. With nothing left but to do what I went there to do, I closed my eyes and tried to raise some kind of mental shield to protect myself. The effort was pointless. It would be terrible, because I was human and alive. No mental shield could blunt those facts. I hunched my shoulders a little and raised the Eye of Horus. I looked through it at the nearest grave. The milky crystal cleared and my stomach flip-flopped at the sight of the roiling, hellish smoke that poured from the grave. I lowered the Eye and tried to let the sudden nausea pass.

  “So it isn’t just Abby’s mother,” I said, trying to reassure myself with my own voice.

  My hopes crumbled under the weight of what I’d seen. I was right. I knew I was. Still, there was no benefit in being sloppy. I raised the Eye again and turned to the next grave, and the next, and the next. Every single one was consumed by that unnatural, pitch-black smoke. I braced myself and lifted the Eye of Horus so I could take in the graveyard as a whole. Hundreds of graves were desecrated by the unholy smoke. The sight nauseated me, so it took a while to realize that the smoke was thickest at the front of the cemetery. The deeper into the cemetery I looked, the fewer graves I saw with the smoke bindings.

  I understood why I hadn’t been able to connect Abby’s parents and the demonic presence. There hadn’t been one, not a direct one. The connection was right in front of me. Thirteen lives sacrificed, but not entire families. The families had stayed, lived, and died in the town, for the most part. Decade after decade, generation after generation, the demon had taken its vengeance, thinning the bloodlines. Each death would have freed the demon’s power a little more. Of course, not everyone stayed. Abby’s mother, Mary, was raised in California. One of Mary’s parents, or grandparents, must have left the town.

  A random thought wandered through and I wondered if Abby was the last. If she wasn’t, she had to be close to the last. If the bloodlines died out, the binding would fail utterly. I lowered the Eye of Horus. I’d seen enough. I’d seen more than I wanted to ever see of those smoke bindings. I turned to leave the graveyard and stopped as another thought occurred to me. I lifted the Eye one last time and pointed it at the tomb of E.J. Cavanaugh. The smoke was there as well. Where it billowed out of the other graves, though, the smoke lashed and battered the tomb, unable to find a point of entry into the small Byzantine structure. I frowned and shook my head.

  “You son of a bitch. You knew what was happening and built yourself a post-mortem safe house. You’ve got a lot to answer for, Cavanaugh.”

  I turned my back on Cavanaugh’s tomb and went back to my car, more certain than ever that I knew what was happening, and hoping against hope that I was wrong. I checked my phone. Patty had texted me at some point and told me to meet her at the school at four. I decided that, if I drove slowly, I’d get there right about on time. I fired up the car and headed for the school.

  Events had raced well ahead of my ability to process them all. It was only during the comparative downtime of the drive to the school that my mind finally turned its attention to the question of who could have launched the psychic attack on me at the cabin. I couldn’t even venture a guess. Someone local, obviously, but I hadn’t met anyone aside from Abby who showed even telltale signs of supernatural ability. Even if they weren’t using magic, the one place my intuition did serve me well was in spotting my ilk. I suspected it was years of exposure that let me do that, rather than any kind of natural talent at spotting a practitioner.

  Even so, someone in town had some kind of mojo going on and was good enough to slip in under my radar. The attack had been smooth, subtle, and aimed at my weaknesses. Helena knew me well enough to come after me like that, but I couldn’t see her taking that kind of action. It went against everything she believed. She held that we had a responsibility to use whatever power and skills we had to try to leave the world a better place than we found it. It was why she chose to be a healer and a teacher, even though she could have used her strength differently. There weren’t a lot of people who could have done anything about it, either, if she’d taken the shadowed road.

  I tested the idea that it was her, found it to be possible, but wholly improbable, and dismissed her from my suspect pool. That left me with several thousand people in the immediate vicinity who could have done it and no information to narrow the list down. That realization left me feeling all kinds of worried. There was no guarantee whoever it was wouldn’t do the same thing when Lil wasn’t around to bail my ass out. I felt a surge of something that was not quite panic. My heart started to beat a little faster.

  There hadn’t been time to be afraid or to process how close a call it was for me. Now that my mind was on the subject, fear reared up to collect its due with interest. Whoever it was could have killed me or, bare minimum, taken me out of play long enough to kill Abby. An image of Abby’s pale, lifeless body sprawled across a floor rose unbidden in my head. I saw her locked into a smoke binding of her own. That image was all too easy to conjure, thanks to Abby’s resemblance to her mother. The possibility that I could have found myself locked in a dream state nearly sent me into a panic attack.

  My whole body started to shake at that idea. I saw myself trapped and motionless on a bed in some coma ward, unaware of my condition and living out a false life conjured by my imagination. A more chilling idea was that I would be completely aware of my condition, aware of the false life and its cause. That would be a prison as terrible and effective as the dead found those smoke bindings. I’d have been alive, but only in the most technical sense of the word. I’d be little more than a corpse, just waiting to happen.

  My rational mind, the only real defense against unreasoning fear, reasserted itself. True, it conceded, someone could try the same thing again. However, now that I knew the threat existed, I could take steps. In hindsight, I should have put such protective measure in place from the start. I’d taken it for granted, just assumed, that Helena and I were the only real magical power players in town. My assumption was ludicrous, but also a forgivable mistake. I formed that assumption when I was in a lot of pain and on fairly potent painkillers. Statistically speaking, there would almost need to be at least one or two other people in town with some magical talent.

  If someone came after me that way again, they’
d find it a much trickier business. If all went well, it would also be a horrifyingly painful experience for them. Helena’s idealism about how we should use magic to leave the world a better place was all well and good. It did not, however, leave much wiggle room to deal with assholes. That usually called for playing dirty, playing mean and not showing much squeamishness. Being that way was hard work for someone like Helena. It was about hard as starting a car for me. You know what they say, play to your strengths. That thought actually did more to dispel the low growling of fear than any of my cold reason.

  I managed to get disoriented in town for a few minutes and drove up and down maddeningly familiar streets. It was sort of predictable. I’d only driven by the school twice and hadn’t made much note of its position. My brief encounter with being geographically challenged meant I arrived about ten minutes late. Patty leaned against the side of her cruiser and tapped her watch as I pulled up. I got out of the car and gave her an apologetic look.

  “Hartworth,” she said.

  “Patty.”

  “Do I want to know why you want a tour of the school?”

  I gave it a moment of weighty consideration, or what I hoped looked like weighty consideration. “You absolutely don’t want to know.”

  Chapter 33

  She rolled her eyes. “More of your conspiracy nonsense?”

  I shrugged. She wasn’t ever going to be a believer until she saw something a lot more impressive than my holy water light show at Paul and Abby’s house. That caught her off guard, but the inextinguishable need for things to make sense had done its work. I’d tricked her with clever sleight of hand, or maybe she was misremembering, or maybe she’d seen light from Venus reflected through swamp gas. Whatever explanation she settled on didn’t include black magic, holy water, or a conspiracy. At least, it didn’t on the surface.