It was Clay’s jammed fingers that found the cork. They wouldn’t flex, but Clay forced them, enough to lift the cork from the deck.
Then he leapt up and rammed it down into the opening—
Deidre stopped it halfway home. No! she yelled, shoving back as Clay shoved both hands down. Flashes of light strobed inside the glass, like the static sparks you saw when you opened a folded blanket in the dark. Lightning in a bottle. I’ll fucking tear you apart! Deidre shrieked, and for a moment Clay saw the glass shattering against her rage—all that spectral energy bursting out at him like a murderous swarm of bees.
In the end, though, the glass held and Clay used all his weight to drive the cork down.
The bottle had gone quiet and was cold to his touch, very cold, the glass covered in a fine layer of frost. “Here,” Clay said, lifting it.
She can’t stay here, Boyle told him.
“Why not?”
Would you want your girl’s coffin sittin’ around?
“Then what do you expect me to do with her?”
Boyle was quiet awhile. Two invisible fingers touched the bottle, their tracks running down the frost as Boyle drew parallel lines down the glass. I’m sorry, baby, but I caused you enough pain in this life. Better you rest.
Clay heard the tears in the ghost’s voice. He wondered if Deidre could hear Boyle inside the glass.
Gradually the frost rose against the finger tracks, until they were gone entirely.
Take her away from here, Boyle told him. Bury her. Tonight.
The idea made Clay cringe. But right now, he was just happy to be alive. When he opened his mouth, one word emerged: “Where?”
Stepping past the citrus trees, through the magnetized gate along the back wall of the property, Clay heard his father’s Benz pulling into the driveway out front. He heard two doors slam, heard Essie’s drunken giggle, and even if Clay’s biggest problem was literally bottled up and in hand, the master suite was another issue. Peter would be out-of-his-mind furious to find “Suck The Mans Dick” still scrawled on his wall.
Forever the disappointing son, Clay understood, and continued into the ecotone foothills behind the house.
By the soft glow of lantern light, he negotiated the dense chaparral valley and found a natural runoff that took him steeply uphill to the public trail above his neighborhood. The view from up top offered a sightline of Griffith Park and the Hollywood Hills to the south, all the way to the twinkling skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles.
From there, he moved north along the trail, following Boyle’s directions at the first fork, then the second.
Somewhere on the far side of the mountain, a coyote offered a lunatic howl. Beyond that, the night was profoundly quiet. Bats fluttered noiselessly in the canyon below. The gritty, moonlit trail wound along a narrow shelf of cliff—a steep incline of rock to the right, an equally steep drop-off to the left. And Clay marveled at the fact: Just over the ridge lay one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and yet here he was, by his lonesome in an isolated wilderness.
He wondered if mountain lions hunted nocturnally and was fairly confident they did. So, for no other reason than to exacerbate his already frayed nerves, Clay imagined a hundred-pound wild cat pouncing on him from the nearest pile of rocks. On the plus side, I’ll probably be the only guy in history attacked by a ghost and a lion in the same week.
The trail climbed, and in the distance Clay caught sight of a shape that didn’t belong. A chimney standing against the moonlight. A few dozen paces, and he broke out of the underbrush, and the vast valley lights appeared before him like a million sparkling jewels on a dark ocean floor. His journey ended in the clearing that presented itself a minute later. Though the chimney increased in height and proximity, no house ever materialized beneath it. All that remained of what Boyle had referred to as “the scout camp” was its foundation and brick hearth—as if some terrible wind had swept every wall, stick of furniture, worldly possession, and house-dweller clear off the mountain.
Rocco had told Clay that he and Deidre visited these ruins when they were getting sober. It was a vantage where a lot of the city could be seen, and up so high, the urban sprawl looked harmless, manageable—like it could be folded into a few neat squares and tucked away in your back pocket—and for one more night their demons would be conquered.
Approaching such a forlorn place in the dark, however, was not Clay’s cup of tea. In more rational circumstances, he wouldn’t have been caught dead here at such an hour. That he was gripping a bottle with an angry ghost inside didn’t help.
He listened to the silence of the canyon awhile—and in doing so, pulled up short.
There was a crackling on the trail behind him.
Human? Animal?
He switched the lantern off. And a moment later, a shadow rose over the brush.
It was human, Clay was mostly certain. Some lost soul seeking refuge from the bustle below. And wasn’t that the way life was? The whole fucking mountain range is deserted and the one place I need privacy—
Then the shadow drew closer, and Clay found something familiar in the way it moved.
He turned the lantern up and held it out to her. “Savy?”
“Hey, Clay. Thought that was you.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Told you, I come up on the trails sometimes.” She stepped fully into his light, her black hair tied in pigtails, wearing a vintage Megadeth shirt and a self-conscious grin. “I was sitting up on the bluff that overlooks your ’hood. You know the one—”
“—that you saw Boyle’s ghost from. I remember.”
“It’s so quiet up here. You can hear phones ringing in the houses below. So naturally I heard the Throne covers you were playing in your back yard. You were good.”
Clay lowered his lantern
