“Han…nah?” the ant demon said. She tried out the name again, saying it backwards this time: “Han- nah.”
Lia sucked in a quick breath. She understood what was happening when she saw the Ant’s eyes tick back and forth across the alphabet beads that made up Hannah’s necklace. Little square plastic ones that spelled out her name. Hannah wore the old thing almost every day.
Ant’s exoskeleton pebbled and turned to individual bugs while she stood there ogling the beads, forgetting to concentrate on holding her body together. Hannah shuddered over this new development, gasped, and turned to flee.
The demon’s forelimb re-solidified in the flash it took to shoot out and snag Hannah’s wrist. The disproportionately-strong insect jerked her around like she was nothing but a ragdoll. Ant caught sight of the alphabet beads again and lapsed back into her trance before she could bite, although she didn’t let go of Hannah’s arm. Lia could tell the tall Tzitzimitl was fighting hard to shrug off the palindrome-induced cognitive dissonance the necklace beads caused her and retain her physical form.
Lia also understood that Hannah was stuck. Hopelessly stuck, because Ant would snap back to herself at the instant those beads were out of her sight. Hannah seemed to understand at least some of this when she looked over toward Lia with wide and horrified eyes. “Little help? Please?” she said in a tiny voice, as if afraid to disturb the distorted, shimmering Ant in even the slightest of ways.
Lia set her broken-off branch aside and approached her friend with a bomb-squad degree of caution, sizing up the situation. “It’s gonna be okay, Han,” she reassured, and thought she sounded at least mostly convincing. “It’s all right. Just don’t move until I say. But then be ready to do it
She edged in carefully, meaning to untie Hannah’s necklace at the nape of her neck and remove it without taking it out of the Ant’s eye-line.
“I’m sorry, L-”
“Stop, right there, just shut up,” Lia said harshly. Then she whispered, “The instant you say my name we both die, so be very,
“O- okay.”
Lia undid the necklace and lifted it off Hannah’s chest, leading Ant away with it as though the string of beads were a carrot on a stick. She hung the necklace on a nail just outside the gate. It was still holding Ant’s attention, but only barely. The creature almost seemed to understand that its quarry was within reach, and yet it couldn’t quite force itself to ignore the series of lettered beads that spelled out the same word in either direction.
“Get inside,” Lia said.
Hannah complied, springing over the property line like a schoolgirl skipping rope. Lia jumped back alongside her and threw the gate shut, shoving the wheeled length of fencing down its uneven track with all her might.
Ant shook off her paralysis and lunged, but she was a moment too late. The corrugated sheetmetal gate rattled shut, nearly cutting off two of her six limbs. She yanked them back with an ugly, high-pitched shriek.
A sequence of red spraypainted numbers rolled in front of her eyes along with the closing gate:
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937…
…and Ant jerked like she was having a seizure.
Her bugbody burst apart and the white light at her core rocketed down the line of numbers (which started at Hannah’s eye-level and went around and around and around the fence, all the way down to the sidewalks), scorching the digits onto the wood planks as it went. Ant’s inner light whizzed around the Yard’s perimeter multiple times in less than a second, chasing the Pi line like a firework flower, and then it winked out in a flash.
She was gone, just like that. Pursuing Pi into eternity.
Inside the fence, night’s stillness resumed. Crickets picked up their interrupted songs. Woodsmoke rose lazily from the outer side of the fenceboards, and Lia thought it smelled bizarrely nice.
She turned to Hannah. “You okay?” she asked. She figured her face was waxy pale, bloodless, and her wide, frightened eyes felt like they took up half of it.
Hannah nodded vigorously, assuring her that she was indeed unharmed, to the best of her knowledge.
“Okay, good,” Lia said. “That’s good. Yeah.”
Now that the crisis had passed and they were both provisionally safe, she turned away from Hannah and went over to the cherry branch she’d dropped in the parking lot gravel, where she sat down beside it and burst into a wrenching squall of post-traumatic sobs.
Being in danger herself was one thing, in Lia’s mind, and bad enough, but seeing that danger threaten someone she loved was
Hannah all but slid into home in her rush to throw her arms around her friend. Tom ran up too, offering his feline brand of comfort. Lia let Hannah squeeze her fiercely for a moment, soaking in the concern and affection, then pulled herself together and drew away, feeling self-conscious.
She swiped at her nose and looked up at Hannah from beneath the fringe of her thick, black bangs. “I really hope you and Skeletor didn’t finish off that bottle of wine,” she said.
Chapter Fourteen
Graves’ ghost tapped its way around the circumference of his invisible prison with vaporous knuckles that felt solid enough against the symbolized glass, looking for a weak spot in the force-field and growing increasingly frustrated with each rotation. He didn’t know how long he’d been down here, interred within Lia’s underground bunker. It seemed like hours had passed already. He could’ve used a cigarette or a drink, and he would’ve settled for something to read. No dice, though. He began to curse as he tapped, under his breath at first, but then with more volume.
As Graves grew angry, the bound-up lighter Lia’d stowed away on her bookshelf grew hot. The twine began to smoke, and the smoke swirled inside the inverted water glass.
Graves noticed this. He paused, getting an idea, and then strategically went nuts, bellowing at the top of his lungs and hammering on the psychic boundary Lia’d trapped him under, getting just as mad about his confinement as he possibly goddamn could.
The twine flamed and went up in a flash. Smoke filled the interior of the glass. The red-hot lighter pulsed deep within the gray miasma, glowing like a ruby beacon in a fog. Graves’ bones stood back up inside his stolen coat as his ghost evaporated. The transition from spirit to solid happened instantaneously, requiring no further effort on his part.
“Now that’s more like it,” his restored-to-animation skeleton said aloud.
Graves peeled off his tangled raincoat and tossed it aside. He stretched, groaning, and his spine crackled all the way up. The lighter’s glow faded away in the dense cloud of smog still lingering under the glass.
“All righty, then,” Graves said. “If nobody minds, I think I’ll just be on my-”
“Oh,” he finished. “Ow.”
He rubbed the exit crater above his eye as he looked over at the smoke-filled glass up on the shelf. The twine was long gone, burnt away, but the intention symbolized by the glass itself apparently remained in effect.
“Dammit,” Graves said, like he was picking up a refrain.
He sat his bones down on the floor in the same posture his ghost had assumed while ruminating and drummed his fingers on his kneecap. An air exchanger of some kind went on with a soft
A lone dust mote drifted down from an air vent, floating right past Graves’ nosehole. He followed its drift with
