“No, you ain’t.” Elsie hooted. “You weren’t sorry when Death crossed your path, Jack. Not once.”
“Things change,” he said shortly, and turned his worst glare on Simon. “You need something, my son, or are you just holding up that bit of wall?”
“He’s harmless,” Elsie assured Jack. “Got a snip of talent and not much of a brain. Simon, go feed the cats and take in the wash. There’s a fog brewing up.”
Simon shuffled away like an enormous carrion bird, and Jack turned his eyes back to Elsie.
“I need you to read for me.”
Elsie’s tea stopped halfway to her lips. “Thought you didn’t believe in the future, Jack. You said there was no point.”
“And I told you, things change.” Jack reached out and put his hand on the bone box. “Afraid of my future, Elsie?”
“You had any sense, wanker, you’d be afraid, too.” Elsie set down her teacup with a bone-on-bone clink. “Give it here. Of course I’ll read for you. One old conjurer to another.”
She opened the bone box and drew out her tarot cards. Elsie hadn’t had much beyond a filthy shirt, ripped tights, and a skirt that barely kept her decent when Jack had met her, but she’d had the cards, rolled in purple velvet in her knapsack. She’d had the magic to make them dance under her stubby fingers, to unfurl the future with the ink and paper and quicksilver dance of the seventy- two images that she turned into windows on the mind and soul.
Elsie shuffled once, twice, thrice. No ceremony—she was fast and hard as a dealer in Monte Carlo. She slapped the cards in front of Jack. “Cut.”
Jack did as she said, making sure to touch the cards only with his fingertips. They weren’t a new-age scam that you could buy in any Waterstone’s. Elsie’s deck was at least a hundred and fifty years old, stiff paper inked by hand. A Death’s deck, every card a representation of the Bleak Gates, the Land of the Dead, or Death itself, in all its guises from Thanatos to the pale Horseman.
In her band days, Elsie claimed the deck was inked in sorcerer’s ink and colored in human blood. Feeling the pinprick shock of foreign magic, old magic that did not brook disturbance, Jack was only half sure she’d been jerking him off.
Elsie held the cards between her palms and then with a snap, laid the first one face up on the velvet.
“Death,” Jack said. “Shocking, I tell you.”
“Death right side up is a change,” Elsie said. “Transition. Evolution. The painful birth of the new.”
“And the Fool card is a stubborn sod and the Lovers mean everybody hug,” Jack muttered. Crystals and tarot and candles only served to allow the weak talents to think they had more than their share, and the non-talents to fuck about where they had no business. Objects of magic threw Jack off balance, made his stomach lurch and his skin crawl. They were never good omens, and frequently the harbinger of a royal cocking-up on the part of the owner.
Elsie flipped the next card. The Devil leered up at Jack as he copulated with a pale-skinned virgin on a funeral pyre.
“Well,” she said. “You’re off to a strong fucking start, my darling. Death and destruction.”
“Just another day, luv.” Jack shrugged, although a faint prickle of unease crawled through him. The Black woven through Elsie’s smothering house grew restless, like ghostly wings against his cheeks, and the dead birds swayed in their cages as a wind blew in.
“Storm’s coming!” Simon shouted from the kitchen, slamming a door and a basket. “Laundry’s all gone to shit.”
Elsie didn’t stir. Her eyes were distant, gray mist drifting across the surface of her pupils while her fingers, nubby with arthritis, communed with her cards. Jack’s eyes did something similar when he was in the throes of a spell. Pete said it made him look “like one of those bloody kids from that spooky village movie.”
The next card flipped, and Jack’s breath stopped.
Death, his skeletal form standing atop the highest tower in the Land of the Dead.
Death stared him down with hollow eyes. “No,” Elsie rasped.
“No, no . . .” Her eyes snapped back in her head, and the fog of energy stole her gaze until something fathomless and old, something Not-Elsie stared out.
Her fingers moved of their own accord, laying down card after card. Death, and the Devil. Across the velvet they marched, death and destruction cutting a swath like an execution squad.
Jack reached out and grabbed Elsie’s wrist. “That’s enough.”
Elsie’s lip curled back and she snarled, hands continuing to twitch spasmodically, card after card after card glaring up at Jack from the velvet. Skull and horn. Death and the Devil.
“Oi.” Jack grabbed her by the shoulder, shook her. “Elsie!”
She slammed the last card down with a bang and stared into his eyes. Her face was a skull with skin stretched over bone like a death masque. Her eyes were storm clouds hiding lightning.
“No escape,” Elsie croaked. “Not for you.”
Her voice was the demon’s voice. Jack jerked, his knee slamming the underside of the table, sending it tumbling. Seventy-two Deaths and Devil fluttered to the floor like autumn leaves.
“Run, Jack.” The demon grinned at him as Elsie shuddered, head thrown back and legs twitching in convulsion as the demon rode her body. “Run while you still can.”
Chapter Fourteen
Pete was at the car when he returned, leaning on the bonnet, arms and ankles crossed. Jack slowed his feet, slowed his breathing, composed his face into a mask. “Waiting long?”
Pete sliced him with her gaze. “Where the bloody hell were you?”
Jack waved a pack of Parliaments. “I was out. Went over to the pub.”
His heart hammered loudly enough that he was sure they could hear him in the next county, and cold sweat clung to his skin under his clothes. The demon’s message was clear as a churchbell:
“You look pale as the dead,” Pete said. “Are you sure you just went for fags?”
“’Course I’m sure,” Jack said. The words didn’t slide off his tongue easily this time, and Pete’s pretense of believing it cracked as she jerked the car door open and jammed her keys into the Mini’s ignition. Jack climbed in, shut the door, and nearly had his head whipped off as Pete kicked the little car into motion.
“The locals didn’t have much to add,” she said once they’d left the square. The moors rose on either side of the ribbon of road, a petrified sea that could fold over your head and swallow you down.
“He topped himself?” Jack said. Pete nodded.
“No medical examiner here, of course, and no proper morgue, but he most definitely suffocated. Naughton called the locals immediately and the sergeant I spoke to—Hogan—said Danny was in the attic on the crossbeam. ‘Swingin’ like a Christmas ornament’ is how he put it, I believe.”
Jack watched the tops of the moors slowly fade away as fog crept over the crest and down the hillside, the sky turning from the peculiar empty blue-white of open spaces to the hard gray iron of rain and storm. “Could explain the poltergeist. Suicide doesn’t usually leave Casper the Friendly Fucking Ghost behind.”
“So?” Pete slowed at a junction and squinted at the signs. Fingers of fog obscured the miles to the next town.
“So, what?” Jack cast a glance at her. They were alone now, just the road and the fog and a bit of stone wall separating them from the windswept nothingness of the Dartmoor.
“What do we do now?” Pete asked, going left. “If it’s only a poltergeist and not a real haunting?” The Mini jolted as the road turned abruptly from paved to gravel.
“Cleanse the house,” Jack said. “If it doesn’t take care of Danny Boy it will at least tell me what I’m dealing with.” Jack wasn’t convinced the great, grasping void of the Naughton estate was simple resonance from a suicide. The power that had taken a crowbar to his sight wasn’t natural, as much as anything in the Black was ever natural.
“What we’re dealing with,” Pete said.
Jack rubbed the center of his forehead. “Yeah. ’Course.”
Pete gritted her teeth as the Mini’s undercarriage scraped the track. “It is
Jack debated with himself, and then nodded agreement. He was crap at looking contrite, so he patted himself down for a light but found nothing useful. “You’re right, luv. ‘We’ it is. Forgive me?”
Pete hissed through her teeth. “I’d be a deal more inclined to forgive the sins of the world at large if I knew where the bloody hell we were.”
The road was nearly invisible beyond the Mini’s bonnet, and Jack shivered as the fog formed vines and tangles outside the windscreen. They were alone, closed off, and the road narrowed and turned back on itself.
Pete stopped and set the emergency brake, turning off the car. “I’m lost.”
Jack looked behind them, but there was only fathomless gray, like the mists outside the walls of the Land of the Dead. Endless, cold, and full of lost souls.
“Must have taken a wrong turn in the muck,” he suggested. “It’s all right. All of us get lost at one time or another. The trick is getting found again.”
Pete drummed her fingers on the wheel. “I guess there’s nowhere to go but forward. Have to come out somewhere.”
Jack joined in her drumming, the bass line to “Shut Up and Fuck Off” springing up under his fingers. He’d written the song with Dix McGowan, the Poor Dead Bastards’ drummer, after a night sitting up with more bottles of whiskey than comfortably fit in the bin of Dix’s minuscule flat. Dix was newly dumped, Jack was pissed, and he felt good enough about being too drunk to see the dead that he wrote a song. It hadn’t gone on the Bastards’ single LP, and only hit a few set lists in their club gigs, but it was Jack’s favorite. Simple, uncomplicated.
“Jack.” Pete tapped him on the back of his hand. “You with us?” She turned the ignition key, and the Mini coughed and shuddered.
He folded up the memory and put it with all the others that lived in a rat-eaten cardboard box marked Before the Fix. In the Mini, there was no warmth and no biting scent of whiskey, no guitar neck under his hands. Jack felt as if a finger of fog and damp had slipped in and placed a hand on the back of his neck. “Try it again,” he said to Pete, trying to keep the low urgency from his voice even as his chest felt as if a giant had closed its fist about him.
The Black boiled, in the wake of something passing through, large and ancient, that set all of Jack’s mental alarms to screaming.
Pete jiggled the key and then hit the dash. “Bollocks! I
Jack put his fingertips against the Mini’s window. His prints turned the mist to droplets and they slid down the glass, turning his handprint into nothing but streaks on a pane.
Outside, on a lone telephone wire, a crow landed, and stared at him. It darted a gaze left and right, and then took wing, cawing madly.
Magic prickled up and down Jack’s body, and he shivered as the crow’s call faded into nothingness along with all else.
The Black of the Dartmoor was not the Black of London. There were layers in the city, ley lines of abandoned tunnel and underground river, the cool sting of iron railway tracks and bridges binding the wild power of the Thames. London breathed, it fluttered and shouted, wriggled and screamed. A million energies spread across the Black, slithering through smoke and stone, caressing his sight like a lover’s insistent hand.
Here, the moor was simply alive, an open wound. Raw power from the Black trickled through Jack’s consciousness, undiluted and primal. The tors and pagan sites scattered across the landscape were like torches in a vast darkness, floating on a sea of raw power.
It was an ancient place, a place of wild magic, and Jack watched his breath make a cloud when he exhaled. Even though it was freezing in the Mini, sweat broke all over Jack’s skin, under his leather. His pulse jittered, and his nerves crept up and down his flesh. The Black of the Dartmoor felt like nothing so much as ghost sickness. Jack shut his eyes, tried to push against the tide of the
