by Amy Lane
The forest on the left, Daisy Place, sat dark and dank. Friendly, independent trees like willow and oak had no business in this area, but they grew anyway, overgrown with mistletoe, ivy, and thick weeds. Tucker, who knew nothing about topography or botany, thought the grounds of Daisy Place would be more in keeping with a Southern mansion or the forests of the Northeast before the pilgrims landed.
A veil on that portion of the land quite simply darkened the sun, leaving the vegetation primeval and the shadows threatening.
“That is not good,” Tucker mumbled, remembering Angel’s duties. Apparently, the ghost hadn’t been talking out of his ass about the massing of souls over the property.
“Yeah, well, it’s always looked like that over the cemetery. Like I said, it just now got bad over the whole stretch of property.”
Tucker was busy negotiating the mostly washed-out dirt road. “I’m not breaking this thing, am I? Because I really fucking like it.”
“Nossir, it does this about every day. I really need to put gravel on our driveway. It’s not county property, and it stretches about a half mile.”
“Good. And ceme… ter… y…?”
Because that must have been it.
“Yessir,” Josh breathed, his voice hushed and respectful. “That’s the one.”
Tucker risked a glance at Josh, wondering if he saw what Tucker did. Because what Tucker was seeing was not an ordinary cemetery.
Most cemeteries are laid out very orderly—little rectangular earthen repositories for horizontal storage while the human bodies fought embalming fluid to decompose.
The graves Tucker was passing were randomly set out and randomly marked: angel headstones, giant sheets of granite, tiny sunken plaques—all of them vied for space in a haphazard arrangement over uneven, unkempt ground…
That stretched into infinity.
Real infinity, mile upon mile of erratically spaced graves stretching into the blackness of a dimensional horizon.
Tucker kept his foot steady on the gas and said, “That’s a little bigger than I expected.”
“Naw, bout an acre at the most. It’s full of the folks who passed away at the house. Daisy Place was founded around the Gold Rush. You knew that, right?”
“I assumed.” Which he had, even before Angel had told him, because much of California had been. Coming up the I-80 corridor, the giant statue of the prospector in Auburn was one of the most prominent reminders of the state’s history of exploration, entrepreneurship, and raw tragedy and greed. Daisy Place, with all of its Gothic sprawl, had probably been built to accommodate the newly rich and the young men out to find their fortunes, expecting it to take a week or two at the most. Much of the town was like that—including the place where Tucker had been eating his first night in Foresthill, the Ore Cart.
In fact, Tucker could see more than a few miners and pioneer women among the masses of spirits wandering the road to dimensional hell that apparently existed in his backyard even as he drove by. A bearded prospector with no teeth and maggots in his beard waved at Tucker from the side of the road, his appearance made no less grotesque by the fact that most of his body was poisonous green vapor.
Tucker thought that the poisonous green actually highlighted the maggots.
He swallowed back his nausea and kept his eye on the bend in the road, praying that the dimensional pathway to wherever the fuck it went disappeared when he turned left. It had to, right? Because that thing was big enough to suck up a semi, and this town was too damned small for semis to just disappear.
“It is a little creepy, isn’t it?” Josh pondered, and Tucker managed a weak grin.
“You should try living next to it,” he said.
And finally they came to the bend in the road. Tucker slowed the truck down so that he didn’t rip the transmission out of it, and the road became paved and leveled out considerably.
The dimensional porthole visible from the east side of the road had vanished.
Even though the psychic darkness remained, casting a patina of despair over the entire property, the graveyard appeared much as Josh had probably seen it—disorganized, haphazard, but entirely human and earthbound.
Tucker fought an audible swallow and resisted the temptation to wipe his clammy hands on his jeans.
“Okay, so about a mile down this road, then?” he asked, hoping his voice didn’t crack with the excess brightness.
“Yeah, then we’ll see the southbound road and we can get back on the highway. How’d she drive on the dirt road, though? Like a dream, right?”
“She was an angel,” Tucker said fervently. Because if this truck could deal with that amount of supernatural interference and not self-destruct, it was a keeper.
“Yeah, anything newer, with all of that electronic shit that goes into it, usually sort of shorts and dies on that road. I didn’t want to tell you about it, because I figured you’d think I was just a crazy yokel, but you gotta know, folks think your place is haunted.”
Tucker didn’t consider himself a brave man, nor one particularly invested in self-control, but he managed to keep himself from laughing hysterically for the rest of the trip, and he would always be proud of that.
THEY WENT to Auburn for a bigger selection, and by the end of the trip to the hardware store, Tucker had managed to relegate the dimensional porthole to where-the-fuck-ever into the mental column of “home improvement.” He was renting a sander, buying floor stain, gloves, chemicals to strip the walls, some paint so he could make the trim in the Chrysanthemum Room gold and orange, to keep the room’s original tone, and all of the tools he thought he’d need. By the time he’d finished, he was looking forward to fixing the house up, one room—and one set of ghosts—at a time.
He also threw in a spade and a post-hole digger from sheer instinct, because the graveyard had to be a part of that, right?
Angel had said the property was a portal to the afterlife. His job with Ruth had been to clear the ghosts, and after seeing that graveyard, Tucker could appreciate his urgency in the matter. The graveyard was clogged, like a highway or an artery—or a toilet. Obviously, it was so clogged that even ghosts like Angel, who were self-aware, couldn’t find the way home.
Tucker’s brain didn’t even trip over the concept of a self-aware ghost—but it should have. Because that was what Angel had to be, right? A ghost who knew he was a ghost?
Or was he something else?
It didn’t matter. Angel was his helper now, and one of the things he had to help Tucker do was to get the entire back forty of Daisy Place’s occupants able to find their goddamned way home. He figured that each ghost he cleared would make that portal a little easier to tackle, right?
And if not, well, he was here for the duration. He’d figure something out.
Catharsis was his gift—and maybe in his old life, it had meant getting close to people and helping them find a new way through their life. Apparently here, where there were more ghosts than live people, catharsis was still his gift. But his karmic mission had changed to helping the spirits on their way.
Whatever. As long as he didn’t have to sleep with the ghosts of old prospectors, he was going to call it a win.
JOSH WAS good company through the store, telling him what he’d need for the projects and how much of something to buy. He even offered to lend Tucker a floor sander, which Tucker took him up on just so he’d have a reason to reconnect. By the time they were done, it was twelve o’clock, and Tucker stopped by a sandwich place so Josh could bring food home for his wife.
“She’s a local artist,” Josh said proudly. “Three stores on the boardwalk sell her jewelry, and four in Auburn—she’s real popular. And it sounds like she could create her own hours, right? But she really can’t. She’s got orders to fill, so she needs to get shit done.” Josh worked at a car dealership in Auburn, fixing up the old ones that the new guys with their electronics couldn’t handle, and he was just as happy to find someone to chat with on his day off.
“Wel
l, it’s nice of you to help her with lunch,” Tucker said, because that was the sort of thing you were supposed to say to married people.
Josh shrugged. “Well, she promised me that if I could get out of her hair and feed her, we could have afternoon sex, since the kids are all off with their friends. Not only that, but if you’re writing me a check for the truck, we can go out tomorrow night. You know, the things you do to keep the marriage happy!”
Tucker had to laugh because, as far as he knew, nobody had ever been that frank about it. “I really didn’t know,” he said honestly. “But I’m always open for tips and information.”
Josh cocked his head as they were standing in line, the big dolly behind them loaded up with everything from a stepladder to paint rollers. “Why is it that you haven’t found someone?” he asked curiously. “I mean, I know not everybody gets married when they’re twenty, but you’re not a bad-looking guy. You’re bound to get lucky sometime, right?”
Tucker grunted, appreciating his equal-opportunity approach to matching Tucker up with a companion and then wondered how much of a chance to take with him.
“Josh, you know how you didn’t want to tell me about how car electronics short out and die on the east road to my property?”
Josh looked around the hardware store casually, as though wondering who was going to hear. When it appeared nobody was listening, because the clerk was bored shitless ringing up lightbulbs for the person in front of them and everybody else was just too damned hot to give a shit about anything but getting home and doing home improvement—or leaving it until sunset—to actually listen, he nodded.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Well, the reason I don’t have a boyfriend or a girlfriend is something like that.”
Josh laughed. “Does this have anything to do with living in a haunted house?”
“You actually think it is?” Apparently he hadn’t been kidding before—Tucker was a little surprised.
“My oldest boy, Andy, he used to deliver groceries there and take care of the lawns. He kept going on about Ruth’s friend Angel that he never got to see. Gave me the creeps, I’m telling you.”
Tucker blew out a breath. Okay, so you couldn’t really hide a giant haunted mansion in a town with less than two thousand people. That was somewhat reassuring. But he had to answer Josh’s question. “It’s hard to explain. But it’s like that graveyard—whatever’s going on, it doesn’t happen often in nature.”
Josh looked perplexed for a moment; then he grinned. “So you got the magic clap, right? You have sex and your wang shoots green lightning, and the person you’re with turns into a frog.”
Tucker could barely stop laughing to have the clerk ring up his purchases. By the time they emerged from the hardware store, he had a peculiar sense of lightness in his chest.
It wasn’t until after he’d followed Josh’s instructions down past Todd Valley to a decently sized, sprawling, nonsuburban house that he started to get a clue as to why he could breathe.
Josh’s wife stepped out to meet them.
Between the ride through the graveyard and getting the sandwiches, Tucker had heard enough about the Greenaways to feel like he’d known them all his life, and Rae was almost exactly what Tucker expected. She had a broad face and curly hair that escaped rubber band and scrunchy. Her brown eyes looked out at the world with a sort of wry and gentle skepticism that was possibly what happened when you were raising four children.
Josh had told Tucker that their oldest, Andy, was twenty-two, trying to find a way to go to college in Sac, where the rent was appalling and he could only work part-time, and his younger three—Tilda, Murphy, and Coral—seemed to be growing in complementary and completely different directions. To Tucker, it sounded like the couple put a lot of effort into being good parents for a diverse group of kids, and this woman, with her wide hips and her capable hands and a face without makeup, looked like she was strong and whimsical enough to do that.
Rae welcomed them into a house that looked like a hurricane had hit it and sat them down at a cluttered kitchen table without shame. To the left of the table, up against a big bay window that faced the front yard, a work desk dominated most of the kitchen. Tucker studied it for a second, seeing three-dimensional sketches of curious shapes, embellished by the occasional jewel, twining sinuously into what could easily be a pendant or an earring.
“Pretty,” he said, captured by the lines of the drawings, the glittering display of finished products lining the back wall.
“Yeah, pagan, Viking, Enochian—you name the symbol, I’ve researched it and put a jewel on it.” Rae gave him a grand gesture. “Take a look while I clear the table.”
Tucker moved closer to the desk, and unbidden, his hand raised to about six inches from the pendants suspended from a corkboard on the wall next to the window.
He could feel the energy radiating from them—fertile energy, energy for strength, energy for…. “Oh….”
The pendant was a simple silver pentagram, locked inside a circle, with a blood-red garnet cut for the center.
He held his hand out a little closer, and the pendant gravitated toward him, tugging against the chain until it was about six inches from the wall.
“You can have that one,” Rae said, not sounding put out at all.
Tucker glanced over his shoulder. From where she stood, Rae could see very well that her jewelry was arching off the pegboard toward him. “How much?” he asked, respectful of her livelihood. The thing hummed as it reached for his flesh, and he felt the pull in his chest. Oh… oh, something inside him needed this. Needed it so much.
“Take it,” she ordered.
Tucker jumped, and the pendant did too, right off the corkboard and into his hand… where it burned. Tucker shoved it in his pocket and scowled at the red scorch mark across his palm.
“Took you long enough,” Rae said mildly, putting milk and glasses on the table.
“Thank you?” Tucker offered.
She shrugged. “You don’t work with symbols and not have some odd things happen from time to time. It’s a symbol of protection, and it’s yours, that’s all. Josh, could you have taken any longer with these sandwiches?”
“Well, we went to the hardware store,” Josh replied, having apparently missed out on all the floating jewelry. “Tucker here needed to be introduced to the town.”
“The town is so small, you sneeze and you miss it.” Rae laughed. “You had to take him to Auburn, didn’t you?”
Josh shrugged. “Well, yeah. He’s trying to clean the old place up and restore some of it. He needs more than a couple of screws and a wrench.”
Rae eyed her husband with exasperation. “Well, so do I, but sometimes that’s all a girl gets when she’s gotten rid of her kids for the day.”
Tucker laughed. “I really can go—”
Rae shook her head. “Sit down. We need to eat and digest. My jewelry likes you, and I have to admit, I’m really curious. But since you know what we’re going to do afterward, you know….” She looked at him meaningfully, and Tucker fell a little in love.
“Don’t linger,” he said.
“Don’t linger,” she agreed. “So, are you gay?”
Tucker almost choked on his sandwich. “Bi.” He looked at Josh, with his openly friendly shirt. “Do you know someone who is gay that you’re trying to set up?” he speculated—although he was pretty sure he knew who it was.
“Andy,” Rae confirmed through a mouthful of sandwich. “Our oldest. He keeps thinking he’s going to find someone in this one-horse burgh, and we keep telling him he really needs to go to school in Sac, because it’s just not happening here. But you seem okay with Josh and his shirt of loud politics—”
“I’m being supportive,” Josh said with dignity.
“You’re being an asshole. You hope people will get in your face so you can argue with them,” Rae replied.
Josh shrugged and nodded. “That’s fair. But still—”
“Still, the poin
t is, I was just asking him so we could see if Andy had a chance.”
Tucker had to laugh. “Uhm, no. I’m thirty-four. Twenty-two is officially too young for me.” It wasn’t really, but it made a convenient excuse. The idea of being set up with these nice people’s kid made Tucker feel decidedly odd. And of course, Tucker wasn’t into dating.
“Damn,” Josh muttered. “That kid is going to be a virgin forever.”
“Well, my virginity is going to grow back,” Rae muttered sourly. “Me and my boy can be spinsters together.”
“You guys are, uh, really involved with your children,” Tucker said, not even trying not to laugh.
“We thought I couldn’t have any,” Rae said after a moment. “It took us… three years? Something. Before I got pregnant with Andy. But we don’t take them for granted.”
Oh. Emotional honesty. Tucker needed to reciprocate.
“My folks died when I was seventeen,” he said baldly, keeping the part about how confused he’d been, since it had been then that truly glitchy part of his gift had manifested. God, he wished his mother could have guided him. She’d been so supportive of everything he’d ever done. “You just keep interfering with their lives. They need to appreciate you.”
“Aw, hon.” Rae put her hand on Tucker’s. “You’re a sweetheart. Josh didn’t tell me—what do you do for a living?”
And here was the part where he lost them. Damn.
“Well, my degree is in history, literature, old languages, folklore, and comparative religions,” Tucker said brightly. “So mostly I live on my inheritance and read.”
Josh chortled, but Rae tilted her head, chewing the last of her lunch as she did so. “That’s not the whole truth,” she muttered. “You have an angel on your shoulder, telling you what to do.”
