“Nah,” said the girl. “We don’t get many white boys in here. I’d remember that.” She shoved the pot at him. “Six bucks for the candles and the chalk. Consider the rest a gift.”
Jack narrowed his eyes. The one thing he wanted even less than to owe a demon was to owe one of the Morrigan’s sisters in death and blood debts. “I’ll pay.”
“Oh, you will,” she agreed. “Just not today.”
Jack handed her a ten dollar bill—American money all looked like scraps of dishrag to him—and she made change. “Have fun,” the dead girl told him, before picking her magazine back up.
CHAPTER 11
Pete thought he was insane, and told him so, and he didn’t disagree with her. Jack told her she didn’t have to go back to the Case house, and didn’t have to be a part of it at all.
“Don’t be a fucking idiot,” Pete snapped. “You swallow your tongue, who’s there to roll you on your side?”
The street was the same when they returned the next evening—quiet shadows broken up with barking dogs and hissing sprinklers. Jack set himself up in the kitchen, in the center of the bloodstain where Mrs. Case had kicked it. If he was going to be mad, he might as well go straight over the top.
“Need me for anything?” Pete said.
“Not unless I start choking on my own fluids,” Jack said. Pete peered out the windows.
“I see a private security car,” Pete said, as headlamps swept the room. “Haven’t seen any cops.”
Jack wasn’t worried about the police—all they could do was arrest you, whack you a few times in the skull with a stick, and send you on your way. He wasn’t at all worried about anything human that might happen.
He touched his lighter to the candles and drew a chalk sigil on the tiles—a sort of all-purpose
A trance reading wasn’t dangerous to a run-of-the-mill ghost-peeper. A psychic went under, they witnessed the murder via the psychic echoes, saw the dead’s sonar picture recorded for posterity on the site of their passing. They were just an observer, and when they came up they were able to tell the family that Aunt Mabel loved them and had skipped merrily into the light. Except his sight didn’t let him be only a observer. The dead were a tide, determined to suck him under and make him one of them, sooner or later. His gift from the Morrigan showed him death in vivid, screaming reality, and this would be no different.
He’d done a few trance readings when he was much younger and stupider, one of which had cumulated in the dead girl he’d called up sitting in the corner of a cheap hotel room in Dublin, watching him slice his wrists to finally, once and for all, make the visions and the whispers stop.
Permanently trapped in the replay of the Case murders, or Pete, and by extension the kid, on the wrong end of a deal with Belial? It wasn’t a hard fucking choice. Jack figured he was already half-crazy anyway.
“Find some matches.” he told Pete. He dumped the herbs into the iron pot and sat in front of them, rolling his jacket for his head in case he keeled over.
Pete handed him a blue box, and Jack lit a pair of matches, dropping them into the dry herbs. They lit with a crackle, curling into blackened ash, and smoke curled up, fragrant and overpowering. The back of Jack’s throat went sticky, but he forced himself to breathe the cloying stuff and let it fill his lungs.
Trances felt like a shitty high at first—none of the warm pool of smack, not even the pleasant fuzziness of pot. You floated, dizzy and sick to your stomach, and then out of the corner of your eyes, you noticed that you were no longer part of the world.
Jack’s head throbbed once as the smoke filtered into his brain, his sight opening wide and straining to all corners of the Cases’ kitchen.
It was night, but not the same kind of soft night he’d come from. This was dark, lights glittering through the darkened door higher on the hill. One by one, the faraway lights blinked out, until only the glow of the pool and the digital clock on the Cases’ oven gave light.
Jack stood up, although the small, remote part of his mind that wasn’t fucked up beyond recognition knew that he was likely sprawled on the tile floor.
The darkness became absolute, rolling through the crystal water of the pool like a cloud of blood.
Jack kept his eyes on the back wall, where the trail had been, the erasure of something ripping through the Black that floated over the Case house like a bleak fog. Even before the murders, this hadn’t been a happy home.
After a time, a figure appeared at the back wall. It was human, Jack supposed, if you were loose about the definition. The limbs were long, ragged with extra skin, sores popping out all over wrinkled skin. A pair of tattered suit pants were barely holding on to starved hip bones. The thing had a beard, long and hiding a hollow-cheeked face, and burning eyes fixed on the pet door.
The thing wriggled through like a worm, bones rippling under the sagging skin. It turned and stared directly at him, but Jack held his ground. It wasn’t real, just an echo, replaying for his sight like a tattoo needle going over and over a piece of skin.
He watched as the man—it had been a man, once, before whatever was inside the skin had hollowed it out —went to the knife block sitting on the kitchen island. It pulled out the largest blade, silver-handled and gleaming in the low light, and then reached out and grabbed a bowl of oranges and lemons with a hand ragged and bleeding, nails cracked and brown. It flung the bowl at the tiles, and then it stood, ragged chest rising and falling, until a light flared from the hallway and Mrs. Case appeared.
In the trance, she flickered, almost transparent. Her echo was much fainter, and with a few decades or a good cleansing of the house by a practitioner, it’d be gone entirely.
She didn’t see the thing waiting for her. Never saw Death spread its wings and dive. She waddled into the kitchen and saw the bowl. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Underwater whispers, barely a voice. “Badger, did you get on the counter again?”
Badger must be the mutt. Jack hoped for the furry rat’s own sake he’d clocked the thing waiting for his mistress as something not to be fucked with, and stayed away.
“Badger?” Mrs. Case bent her knees with difficulty, pregnant belly swelling under her robe, and started picking up the glass shards. “Goddamn dog,” she muttered.
The thing moved then, behind her, pressing the knife against her neck and wrapping its free arm across her breasts. It whispered something to her that Jack didn’t catch, but Mrs. Case went limp, and the thing laid her out in the spot that Jack’s body occupied in real time.
It pointed the knife at Mrs. Case. “Tape.”
She was shaking, eyes filling with tears. “Drawer by the sink. Please don’t…”
“Shut up, bitch.” The thing had an ancient smoker’s rasp for a voice, gravel and phlegm rattling in its chest. It hacked and spat a gob of something on the tiles.
Mrs. Case’s eyes roved around the dark kitchen, lighting on the glass shards. While the thing turned its back, she reached for one, but it lay out of her grasp. She clasped her hands over her stomach again, shaking uncontrollably. “What do you want?”
The thing turned back with a roll of packing tape. It bound her wrists and slapped a piece over her mouth. “I told you to shut up.”
It finished taping up Mrs. Case and then turned, nostrils flaring and burning eyes widening.
“Honey?” It’d be Mr. Case, coming to save the day.
Jack watched, following in the wake of the thing, as it met Mr. Case just over the threshold. Quick, brutal jabs, knife angled up, piercing vital things like lungs and heart and stomach. Mr. Case gurgled, and the thing stepped back and drew the knife across his throat in a slash. Blood hit the walls and floor, and pooled with startling speed.
The thing’s bare, knobby feet slicked in Mr. Case’s blood as it turned and focused its attention back on Mrs. Case. Her wide, marble-like eyes watched its every move. Jack did too. This was a predator wearing human skin. Belial’s vague scary story aside, Jack could see when something was not of the daylight world, when it crawled from the shadows to hunt and feed.
