Unholy Ghosts (11 page)

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Five hours later, after a restless nap that felt more like swimming through sleep than actually sleeping, she arrived at the Mortons’ house. The street was soulless and blank, dark houses lined up like empty tombs while cars slept on their driveways. Only the trees spoke, whispering back to the breeze.
Chess set her bag on the stone walkway leading to the Morton’s front door and unzipped it. The Hand’s fingers tried to grip hers as she pulled it out and placed it next to the bag.
Lockpicks came out next, in their leather case, followed by a short, fat candle. The Hand twitched, then shriveled slightly as its muscles tightened around the candle’s base. Her camera had fallen to the bottom, but she found it after a minute of searching and slipped the strap around her neck. Last was the steel syringe full of thick, oily lubricant for the lock.
This she squirted in, sliding the needle as far into the mechanism as she could get it. Some Debunkers used a spray can with a tube, but Chess found that too messy, especially after one of her books had managed to wedge against the nozzle of her old one and soak everything inside her bag. The syringe worked better, was quieter and more accurate.
After that sat for a minute she went to work with the picks as silently and quickly as she could, listening for the minute click that would tell her the catch had given.
It came. She grabbed her things, swung the door open, and stepped inside the house.
The Mortons did not believe in leaving a light on, it seemed, and they did believe in running the heater even on a night like this one, when autumn’s chill barely touched the air. The heat didn’t bother her but the lack of light did. People who were genuinely frightened of ghosts in their home tended to leave them on, often even sleeping under their glare.
“Algha canador metruan,”
she whispered, striking a match. Light flared from the tip, casting shadows on the tasteful ivory walls of the living room. Once again the Hand twitched as she lit the candle and shook out the match, placing it in her pocket.
She relaxed. The Mortons would sleep now under the Hand’s magic, more heavily and sweetly than they had in a while, and she didn’t have to worry so much about noise.
The living room held no secrets. In the faint glow from the flame Chess crawled along the perimeter, sliding her fingertips along the baseboards and joints, using her penlight to see behind the furniture. Not that it was too necessary. With the exception of Albert, the Mortons didn’t appear to be readers. No bookcases gave hints as to the interests of the own ers.
Instead the room was filled with what she thought of as spindly furniture: occasional tables with one single knickknack on top, or couches with tiny legs and space beneath. She slid the beam of the penlight beneath them and found only a thick coating of beggar’s velvet. Mrs. Morton apparently didn’t bother to clean under there.
Good thing, that. The dust made it clear nothing had been moved. No wire trails marked it, no scrapes indicated sound or film equipment had been hidden here. She hadn’t expected there to be, but still good to know.
The kitchen was next. She set the Hand on the counter while she opened the fridge and peered inside, finding it stuffed with condiments and neatly labeled and stacked plastic containers, complete with dates. The freezer held numerous blocks of white paper, also labeled, that would become roasts and chickens when they were unwrapped. She made a note. If she found nothing else before she left, she’d have to come open them all, to see if they contained anything other than dead animals—or rather, the wrong kind of dead animals.
Probably not; the windowsill was lined with cookbooks, their spines ridged and unreadable from heavy use. Chess picked them up one by one, flipped through them, glancing idly at the elaborate photos.
The Meat Lover’s Cookbook
…
Cooking with Taste
…
Mrs. Increase’s Family Recipes…Cuisine of the Bankhead Spa
…Wait. What?
The Bankhead Spa was the kind of resort where movie stars and extremely high Church officials went on vacation; incredibly expensive, incredibly dull, with a private ferry and hordes of asskissy staff. Not the sort of place she’d expect an optometrist—or was he an optician? She could never remember the difference—to visit. Not the sort of place she’d expect one to be able to afford, more important. But just the sort of place she could see Mrs. Morton insisting on being taken to. For people who gave a shit about such things, she supposed it would be quite a coup.
The spine on that book was not fuzzed with age. It cracked when she opened it, in fact. Brand-new. Definitely brand-new; the receipt was still inside. September. Only two months before.
No wonder they were still in this neighborhood. No wonder they needed money. With a faint smile, Chess snapped a quick picture of the receipt and the book, and replaced both. It might not be important, that was true. But it might be, and every little bit of evidence would help.
The only place she couldn’t search was behind the fridge, so she pulled her electric meter from her bag and fed the wire around. A flip of the switch showed her nothing else back there used electricity. Next she tried the mirror on its long metal antenna. Clean—well, as clean as it could be behind a refrigerator.
This was a waste of time, but still she searched, following the Church-set routine so that if she needed to testify she could say she had. Cabinets stuffed with packaged food and sugary snacks—no wonder Albert looked like a small, squashy torpedo instead of a boy—and still more plastic tubs. Had Mrs. Morton once sold the stuff, or what? Chess couldn’t imagine any reason why one small family of three needed the ability to store enough food to feed the entire Downside for a year.
Pots and pans clanked as she shifted them to look behind. The oven was clean and empty, the drawers practically overflowing with lids for all those tubs.
One last stop, the laundry room—actually a small alcove off the garage—where Mrs. Morton had been the day Albert supposedly first saw the apparition. Clean, as was the garage itself.
She climbed the stairs, listening to the heavy, regular breathing of the Mortons. Somebody snored so loudly that if it weren’t for the Hand, Chess imagined it would have woken everyone up. The sound grated up her spine like a broken saw.
Ah. Pay dirt. Albert had replaced his books. Everything from electrical wiring for dummies to complicated texts on animation and film editing. She took several pictures of the shelf as a whole, then started removing books, shaking them by the spine in the hopes that something would fall out before photographing them.
His drawers were next. Chess grinned. Looked like Albert had been studying blueprints of the house itself. Interesting. She took more photos, and just out of spite decided to take pictures of his rather extensive collection of porn as well. Ha, she knew he’d have one.
Albert sighed and rolled under the covers as she bent down to search under the bed. The bag of wires she’d noted Saturday night was still there, along with an ancient DVD player and a few more books on film and wiring, suggesting Albert may indeed have been hiding his activities from his parents.
Wedged between the headboard and the wall was a small black velvet bag. Chess reached for it, then pulled her hand back, certain nothing electrical was inside it. It was a magic bag, a gris-gris, even, and she did not want to open it.
Most homes were full of such items, and none of them ever bothered her the way this one did. Perhaps it was simply tiredness, or the way her nerves still jangled when she thought of the dead man at the airport. But something told her this was not legal magic, not a basic protection bag or charm for safe dreams. This didn’t even feel like magic Church employees were authorized to do.
She nudged the bag with the toe of her boot, trying to pull the thread holding it closed. No luck. It was knotted at the top and sealed with wax.
She slipped on a pair of surgical gloves—after the amulet, she wasn’t taking any chances—and lit another match, slipping a small white china cup onto the carpet to catch the melting wax. Albert mumbled something in his sleep.
“What’s that, Albert?” she said under her breath.
“Didn’t mean to,” he said.
Chess glanced up sharply. No, he was still asleep.
“I’m sure you didn’t,” she replied gently, shaking out the match. Most of the black wax had melted into the cup. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
He sighed. “I was hungry and I didn’t have any money, and I like chocolate…”
Whatever. So he stole a candy bar from a convenience store or something. Big deal.
He kept droning on while she untied the bag and held it upside down over another dish, then snapped a few hasty pictures of the contents. Black salt, a crow’s talon, some pink thread tied in knots…nothing particularly unusual here. It might be unorthodox for a dream safe, but within legal limits certainly—it was personal, and it didn’t affect anyone else. So why did her skin crawl, why did she feel as if something large and black and sharp were about to swoop down on her?
Her hands shook as she snapped a quick photo then poured everything into the bag, resealed it, and stuffed it back behind the headboard. She wanted to leave. Wanted to get out of this house that was suddenly suffocatingly warm and filled with eyes.
Eyes like the ones of the hooded figure watching her from the doorway.
Chess jumped up so fast she stumbled against the rickety bedside table, banging her knee hard on the edge. The lamp fell over and crashed to the floor while she tried to stuff herself into the corner, to get a better look at the shape.
He was made of darkness, it seemed, the complete absence of light behind him making the outlines of his robe—or whatever it was—squirm and ripple. Her gaze couldn’t seem to catch on anything, to find the definition of his form outside that narrow, pale face and the terrible black depths of his eyes.
He smiled, revealing sharp, dingy teeth, too many teeth. His nose hooked down, thin and crooked like a stalactite in the center of his face.
He should have been another flat image, a film projected from a hole somewhere in the wall, as she’d thought the first time she saw him. But he wasn’t, and she knew it. She felt him, felt the absence of humanity and conscience crawl over her skin and try to invade her body.
His hand materialized in front of him, stretching toward her. Not a gesture of supplication, but of threat. He was coming for her, and she could not escape.
It felt like hours Chess stood there, with his eyes burning into her and his presence staining her soul, but it could not have been more than a few seconds before he moved, so fast she couldn’t track it. He seemed to disappear only to reappear again a foot closer to her, inside the doorway, as though a strobe light was flashing in the room.
Her legs refused to move. She tried and tried, but they would not budge, as if her feet had sprouted roots and dug themselves into the thinly carpeted floor.
Closer again, standing at the edge of Albert’s bed while the boy muttered in his sleep and shifted under the blanket. Now the creature’s other hand was visible, also held out to her, fingers curled in preparation to close around her throat. Her skin there burned already. Her lungs fought to inflate. He was going to kill her, this was it, there was no way she could escape him. Especially if she couldn’t get her fucking feet to obey.
Another movement. He stood in Albert’s bed, mired to the thigh by it as though sinking into quicksand. Another. He stood in the corner. Another. He hung in the air by the ceiling, playing with her, disorienting her, forcing her to look wildly around the room to find him.
The knife in her back pocket dug into her. She reached around to grab it, closing her fingers over it, and her palm shrieked in pain. Only then did she realize it had been throbbing for several minutes.
As a weapon the knife would be useless, but it made her feel better, stronger, to hold something as she crept out of the corner holding it in front of her.
He appeared again, right at her side, so close she could see a droplet of red fall from the sharp edge of one canine tooth. Chess screamed and waved the knife at him, but he disappeared again in a breath of icy cold.
Her chest ached as she spun toward the door and started running, banging her shoulder hard on the doorframe and hurtling herself down the stairs. He could have been on those stairs, he could have been anywhere. The darkness was so complete, she couldn’t see where she was going, couldn’t see anything at all, and she could feel his hands on her neck as she fell the last few steps and landed in a heap on the polished wood floor at the bottom.
He was across the room. He was in the doorway to the kitchen. He was everywhere in the house, in her head. Her palm hurt so bad, she thought it was going to explode. Her shoulder ached, and both her knees where she’d landed on them. No matter. She had to get out, out into the cool fresh air, back into the world she knew existed outside this house of horror.
It wasn’t until she was there, crumpled on the street, brushing tears off her face, that she realized she’d left the Hand inside, along with her bag and everything else.

Chapter Fourteen

“Now the lack of gods is fact, which is Truth and need not be believed or doubted. The Church offers protection, and so the Church makes law.”

—
The Book of Truth
, Origins, Article 1641

Lex shoved his hands into his pockets and stared up at the Morton house. “I gotta touch what?”
“A hand. A dead hand. It’s on the floor of the bedroom on the right, at the top of the stairs. Just grab it, and my bag, and bring them down here, okay?”
“Don’t know I want to touch some dead witch hand, tulip. No offense.”
“It’s not a witch’s hand, it’s a convicted murderer’s, and it’s harmle—never mind. Are you going to do it for me, or should I call someone else? There’s not a lot of time left until sunrise.”
Chess waited for him to call her bluff. There was no one else she could call. Her only options had been Doyle or Lex, since she didn’t have Terrible’s number. Lex had won easily. At least he wouldn’t spread news of her ridiculous flight all over the Church in the morning. Maybe that wasn’t fair to Doyle, but she didn’t care, not when the thought of going back into that house made her feel like she was going to wet her pants.
“Aye, I’ll do it.” His dark eyes scanned her up and down, in her black jeans and snug black top. “But I get something in return.”
“Fine. Just go get my stuff, okay?”
She watched him slouch his way up the walk and disappear into the house, half-convinced he wouldn’t come out. And now he wanted something in return, and if she were honest with herself, she’d known he would when she called him.
And maybe that, more than anything else, had been why she called him. The thought didn’t make her comfortable, but then most of her thoughts these days didn’t. Her mind seemed to be endlessly turning over pieces of a broken vase she couldn’t put back together. Airports and ghost planes and runes and bodies and
eyes
, those black eyes that seemed to sear right into her flesh when they focused on her…Why hadn’t he killed her?
Cold seeped through her jeans as she leaned back against the side panel of her car and crossed her arms. A window brightened in a house down the street, some early riser starting their day. She’d gotten here around three. It couldn’t possibly be later than five now, but blue light streaked the horizon and turned the chimneys into blackened teeth against it.
What the hell was taking him so long in there? It wasn’t a mansion, for fuck’s sake, it was a damned two-story Colonial.
Maybe the ghost…no. Lex hadn’t been frightened in the tunnel, not even a little bit, and although the thing in the house was worse, much worse, she still somehow doubted it would bother him.
Come to think of it, it didn’t seem to have bothered any of the Mortons either. What she’d seen in Albert’s bedroom didn’t resemble the description Mrs. Morton had given in the slightest. No gray rags decorated his shapeless form, and he had definitely been male. Did more than one ghost haunt the place? But then why was she the only one who’d seen the figure in black?
And why hadn’t he killed her?
He couldn’t be real. That was the only possible answer, the only thing that made sense. He wasn’t real, and she was on so many drugs, her body didn’t even know what it felt anymore. She rubbed her forehead, the bridge of her nose. She was losing it, oh shit she needed sleep, needed to give the speed a rest and let herself kick back down to normal.
Lex appeared, holding her bag in one fist and the Hand in the other. The look of disgust on his face would have been comical anywhere else.
“Don’t fancy carrying this thing for work,” he said, handing everything back to her. “Don’t know how you do it.”
“You get used to it.” She tossed the bag into her car and set the Hand on the passenger seat. Normally she would blow out the candle as soon as she left a house, but given how late it was, she thought it would be better to get away first. People tended to wake up immediately from enchanted sleep, and she didn’t want to take a chance that she’d be still visible when they did.
Lex stood for a minute, watching her. “So you head home now?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Ain’t you gonna ask what your owes is?”
“I assume you’ll tell me.” She didn’t particularly want to unzip her jeans and show him her tattoo here on this empty morning street, but she would. She did owe him. And all things considered, it was a pretty harmless request.
“Aye.” He nodded his head, but his gaze didn’t leave her face. “Thinking I got an idea.”
She swallowed. “What?”
“Touching that Hand, you know, weren’t pleasant. Kind of a big favor, aye?” He’d stepped closer to her, close enough for her to see each individual eyelash and to smell cigarettes on his breath. Her heart rate sped up.
One hand caught her neck, gently, with his thumb under her chin. The other slipped around to the small of her back. His body trapped her against her car, but there was no threat—or rather, no malice.
“Think I kiss you, tulip,” he murmured. “How’s that for an owes?”
Chess opened her mouth, unable to think of a reply but feeling certain she should make one. She didn’t have a chance. His lips took hers with the utter confidence of a man who knows his kiss is welcome, and fear blossomed in her chest as she realized he was right.
Heat snaked through her body, into her arms and legs, into the fingers she gripped his shoulders with and slid along the back of his neck. His tongue insinuated itself into her mouth, finding hers, greeting it and leaving again as he pulled away from her.
“Guess like we all even now,” he said. His car door opened with a faint snick, and he got in. “You call me, keep me on the update, aye?”
She hadn’t quite gotten her mouth to form words again when he sped away up the brightening street.
Smoke curled into the sky as she turned the car off the highway onto her exit. Nothing surprising in that. Once a month or so someone’s firecan turned over, or a junkie passed out with a lit cigarette in whatever squat they inhabited at the time, and a deserted building became a destroyed one. The craggy, black-stained walls interspersed with whole buildings mutely testified to the poverty of Downside. No one would pay to have the wreckage removed. No one would pay to build new. And no one really mourned the dead.
Of course, they weren’t supposed to, not in the way mourning had been done Before Truth. Bodies were incinerated, souls transported to the City and kept there. For a prohibitively large fee those left behind could still, with the aid of a Church Liaiser, communicate with them. All neat and tidy, all controlled in the same careful and precise way the Church had controlled everything since Haunted Week twenty-three years before. Almost exactly twenty-three years, in fact. The anniversary was just a few weeks past.
But Chess didn’t have time to think of how busy she had been during the Festival, or of anything else. Her bones ached with tiredness. Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls. Her hand—among other parts—still throbbed faintly, and she craved sleep almost as much as another Cept.
Her ramshackle little car—on its last legs, but how was she supposed to afford a new one?—crawled through the deserted streets, past boarded windows and graffiti, finally sliding into a parking space half a block from her building. Chess grabbed her bag and her knife and headed for home.
She crossed the entry hall that had once been the nave and headed up the stairs, only to stop halfway up the first flight. It wasn’t unusual to find people in here trying to escape either rain or cold or people with weapons, but the boy sprawled across the landing was neither.
“Chess,” he said, and that slightly high, nervous voice placed him in a way his narrow face had not. “I talk to you?”
“What are you doing here, Brain?”
“I talk to you?” he asked again, glancing around the stairwell as if he expected someone to leap out of the solid wall and attack him. His nervousness bothered her. If someone was after him she didn’t want to be involved.
But neither could she tell him no and send him back out on the street. He was just a kid. Damn it.
“All right,” she said, pushing past him up the steps. “Come on.”
It felt like she hadn’t been home in weeks. She half expected to see a shroud of dust covering all the furniture. Or rather, more dust than there was already.
Brain closed the door behind him and stood, shifting his weight from foot to foot. In his small face his eyes looked huge, shiny as marbles.
“So what’s up, Brain? What’s the tale?”
“Hunchback. He…He heared about t’other night. Guessing Terrible gave him the speech. He mad at me, Chess. Say he don’t want me around no more…” He blinked rapidly, his thin mouth twisting.
Shit. “What did Terrible say to him?”
“Angry, methinks. Of cause Hunchback saying the tales about Chester being haunted and all. Hunchback blame me now. Say I not so brainy after all.” His too-big black coat bunched up around his shoulders as he crossed his thin arms over his chest.
“Ain’t got no other place, not now. Maybe I sleep here? Just a few hours, aye? Then I find a new place. I knows other people out there, somebody help me. Only none of them awake now.”
Something about the way his eyes shifted as he spoke made Chess suspect this wasn’t the entire truth. He’d had no reason to believe she’d be awake either, but he’d come here, and if what he’d said about Hunchback on Friday night was true, his squat was a good twenty blocks away. A long walk in the chilly, dangerous Downside predawn.
“You can stay for now,” she said, setting her bag on the kitchen counter. “But just for now. You’re not moving in, got it?”
“Aye, oh my thanks, Chess, my thanks, you ain’t gonna even know I’s—”
“No, I won’t, because you’re not going to be here long enough for me to notice. You can sleep on the couch. Don’t touch anything, got it? Nothing.”
He nodded.
“And don’t tell anyone either. How did you get into the building?”
“Back door lock’s loose.”
“What do you mean, loose?”
“I only had to play with it a minute afore it gave. Loose.”
“You broke in?”
“Was I ain’t supposed to?”
She sighed. As if her money situation wasn’t bad enough, now she’d have to pay to get the lock fixed and new keys made for everyone in the building. Leaving the back door unprotected was out of the question.
In fact…she always carried spare nails, good strong iron ones so they had the additional benefit of warding spirits. That would at least put a temporary stick on it. It wasn’t a fire-safe stick, but the chances of someone breaking into the building were a lot better than those of it catching fire. She didn’t particularly rate the odds against either.
“No. You weren’t supposed to, but it’s done now. You can fix it before you go to sleep. I’ll get you some nails and a hammer, you can close the door and jam the lock.”
“Ain’t suppose you got some eats? Only my belly getting tight. Can’t remember last food I put in.”
Chess ignored him and set a couple of nails on the counter. Their pointed tips reminded her she’d need to refill her lube syringe, so she grabbed the bottle of oil from under the sink, too.
“Chess? Got me a few dollars, I could help for some food…”
“Take a look in the fridge. I don’t think there’s much.”
There wasn’t. Brain stared into the empty depths as though a four-course meal would magically appear. When one didn’t his shoulders sagged. “I have a beer?”
She shrugged. “If you want one. Get me one, too.” Hey, he wasn’t her kid, and chances were he’d already done a lot more than have a beer or two. Kids younger than him OD’d every day.
He handed her one. “I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
She filled the syringe and a spare and set them on the counter. Her bag was a jumble of magic items and mundane; she really ought to clean it out. No time like the present. For some reason she didn’t feel like going into the living room and sitting down. Perhaps it was the unexpected presence of a child in her apartment, or maybe she was just afraid that if she did she’d fall asleep.
“You gonna try to clear them ghosts at Chester?”
“Why?”
Brain leaned against the opposite wall and studied the floor. “I just curious. About what you do. Good thing, right? Good magic clears the ghosts.”
“In general, yes. The Church doesn’t do black magic.”
“But do you?”
“What is that supposed…Brain? Do you know something about that airport?”
His eyes widened. “Don’t know what you’re meaning. I just curious, is all.”
No. He’d started to say he’d been there before, hadn’t he? Friday night with Terrible. He’d almost said he went there all the time.
“Did you see something out there, Brain? Did you see something happen?”
“No! No, I never been there cepting when you met me. I see nothing there.” His fingers wrapped around his beer bottle were white.
“You can tell me, you know. If you saw something, it might be important. Really important, okay?” She paused. “I bet Bump would be grateful if you saw something that helped him open that airport. Might even give you a job.”
“Terrible hate me.”
“Terrible doesn’t hate you. And even if he did…he’d like you if you helped. Wouldn’t you like that? Working for Bump? Having Terrible as a friend? You could tell Hunchback to fuck off right to his face and he wouldn’t be able to touch you.”
Some of the fear drained from Brain’s face. “Thinking so?”
“I do. If you know something, Brain, you should tell me. It might be important. And I’ll…I’ll keep you safe. You can stay here, as long as you need to.”
“With you?” The hopeful expression on his face was like an arrow straight into her heart. How many times in her childhood had she dreamed of safety, of being somewhere no one would hurt her or of being so powerful no one could?
Now she was. Practically untouchable, thanks to her position with the Church and her new alliance with Bump. No wonder he’d come to her.
“Yes, with me.”
“True thing?”
“True thing, Brain.”
He sighed, a long, shaky sigh that seemed to come from his toes and work its way up, and nodded.
Chess picked her beer up off the counter. “Okay, great. So let’s go in the living room and sit down, and you can tell me all about it, okay? Everything you saw.”
The knock at the door startled them both. Months went by and not a single person came to visit her. Now she had two, at the crack of freaking dawn. Great.
Doyle held up a white paper bag. “Thought you might like some breakfast.”