Eviction Notice

something like that happens, you really cannot think of anything else to say. Sometimes a nice 'Gah' is the most you're able to get out on short notice.

  “How did you- when did you- I had to jump off a giant pig, and you just walked, or-” I said. I was finding it kind of hard to finish a sentence through the confusion and also a tiny bit of rage that apparently I'd secretly been hanging out with an Olympic sprinter and she hadn't mentioned it until now.

  She replied very softly. “We're going to die.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Has anyone ever told you that you are a total Negative Nancy? I'll have you know that this is not the worst situation I've ever been in. Not even the worst ghost! I mean, sure he's got a lot of raw muscle, but he's not creative. Remind me to tell you about this one haunted house that had the bathroom full of spiders that screamed at you, that was crazy. Harry? He's strictly an amateur.”

  Lydia raised a shaking hand and pointed behind me.

  I winced, and slowly turned around.

  I hadn't gotten a really good look at this thing before. It hadn't come into the room. But I recognized the hook, a nasty, jagged butcher's tool that had scraped along the doorway. And aside from the fact that it was huge, that was the main defining quality. It was human shaped, but no flesh was visible... thick leather gloves, a butcher's apron over loose-hanging leather wraps, a mask that looked more like a burlap sack than anything intended to be worn over the head. The damn thing was at least eight feet tall, and stocky to match it; hard to tell if it was supposed to be fat or muscle through the outfit covering it. The whole thing, every inch, dripped blood; the scent of it was somehow stronger than the whole roomful from the main hall had been, despite the fact it wasn't one-thousandth the amount of liquid.

  “On the other hand,” I said, “he's a dedicated amateur.”

  “Trespassers,” hissed that voice from the main hall. It wasn't centered on the figure in the center of the room; it wasn't centered on anything. It bounced up and down the halls, reverberated from every surface. “Thieves. Defilers. In my home, my place! I'll take a gallon of your blood for every step you've taken into my house, cut a pound of flesh from you for every scratch on my possessions! You'll die, you'll die screaming and-”

  “Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, you're evilly evil, we get it,” I said. There was only one door out of this room, other than the one we'd come in through. Hook Harry was between it and us. This was gonna suck.

  I reached behind myself, under my shirt, and slipped my remaining knife into my hand. “Lyd, when I say, make a break for the closet. Try to get inside, work out what he doesn't want us doing in there. I got this.”

  Lydia just made a whimpering sound and sank to her knees.

  Oh you horrible woman do not give up on me now! I thought. I smacked her again, just a little tap to make her notice me. “Did you hear me?”

  She wrapped her arms around herself, and began to rock back and forth. And Hooks McLeather was moving very meaningfully in my direction.

  Well.

  I wish I could put this in a way that makes me sound brave and awesome. But the fact of the matter was that in my mind, one of us getting out of this alive was better than nothing. And if she wasn't gonna run, it wasn't gonna be her.

  There's a reason I charge money for doing this sort of thing normally. I'm not a hero by nature.

  I let go of Lydia and ran for it. Maybe if I got the ghost focused on me again she would make a break for it... I doubted it, but it was a nice thought.

  Not that I felt guilty or anything.

  Anyway! This was Harry's go-to apparition, the one he took on himself when he was done playing around. I needed to be careful; it was big, so it was safe to assume it was also strong as an ox. Hopefully it didn't have speed to match with all that bulk; it wasn't walking terribly quickly, so I felt pretty safe dodging around the side of i-

  The hook came slicing up from a prone position so fast I could barely see it. Only the fact that I had my knife already in-hand and between myself and the manifestation let me get a guard up in time. The rusted metal of the meathook screeched, striking up oddly bright sparks against the silver-lined steel of my knife.

  Okay, data acquired! He didn't walk fast because he was apparently in no big hurry, but that didn't mean he couldn't move quickly in a pinch! Useful to know.

  Also, he really was strong, yikes. Blocking his strike felt a little bit like being punched in the arms by God. Luckily, I've been in enough knife fights with things bigger than myself to know how to handle it.

  First rule: Do not be stabbed to death! That rule actually applies to every sort of fight.

  Second rule: Standing toe-to-toe and trading shots evenly with a guy who is bigger than you is a stupid way to fight.

  I slid my knife down his weapon and slashed it across his wrist, where the tendons would have been in a human being; I wasn't expecting to cripple him, but it would at least annoy him and that was about the best I could manage at short notice. I then jumped backwards and to the left. He swung again and, rather than try to block it, I used his speed against him; dodging to the side and swatting at his weapon as it passed me, I overbalanced him and sent him stumbling. I also, though I wasn't obvious about it, took another small step left.

  I wanted him swinging wildly, in frustration, and not noticing the tiny little fact that I wasn't exactly fighting him.

  I smiled. Two advantages. First, I haven't brought any of my stuff in here yet. The house is a derelict, and you don't have any handy knives or broken glass to throw around. You have to make all your weapons yourself, and your imagination isn't all that dynamic. You tend to stick to one approach at a time, even if it isn't working.

  Second, you may be strong and fast, but I've seen enough amateurs to know you've never been in a real fight, jackass. You swing wildly, you haven't got the footwork down, you aim where I am and not where I will be.

  You haven't noticed I'm maneuvering you.

  The door I needed to get to was now to directly on my left side, and the thing trying to stop me from getting there was in front of me swinging like a doofus. In other words... not between me and the door anymore.

  I swear I don't normally solve my problems by running away this often. You're seeing me on an off-day. But yes, I waited for him to take another of his fast but big and stupidly overblown swings... and made a break for it.

  The hook whirred past my head, so close I felt the breeze on my ear, but he was too late. It was only a few feet now, and he was too bulky to correct himself before I got where I needed to be. I slammed open the door, ran in and...

  It was just a closet! There was nothing but empty shelves! I was gonna die!

  “Oh, come on! He wouldn't have been trying to keep us out of nothing, right?” I snapped to an uncaring universe. I was just about to go back into the kitchen and play another round of dodge-the-hook just for the right to smack Lydia in the face for telling me to go to the wrong room, when I saw something... kinda weird.

  There was a lot of dust in the house. It was old, it was unused, it wasn't weird. But dust doesn't just move on its own, right? There needs to be an air current, a person disturbing it, something. So... how come the rear wall of the small pantry, the dust wasn't as thick as it was along the side walls?

  As if there was some kind of air current there?

  I didn't halt my run and slammed into the wall, flattening my palms against it and frantically sliding sliding it as hard as I could to the right. There were no handles to pull out, it didn't give when pushed on, it had to be a sliding door, and it had to slide to the right, mostly because if it slid to the left or was stuck on something, I was gonna die...

  The wall, a hidden door after all, started to move. Too slow.

  Harry took his step into the closet; it was too small for him to raise his weapon over his head, but I strongly suspected he wouldn't be terribly inconvenienced by th
is, given that there was also nowhere to run from him. The door was sliding slowly. It wouldn't give quickly enough.

  Dammit, we were so close... I thought. As last thoughts go, it wasn't terribly original, I'm sure. I kept working at the door, despite realizing how futile it was. Given how big Harry was, I was not gonna get past him in this enclosed space, and if I tried to fight him head-on, it would end with me a smear on the floor. Better to give it a shot and die trying, right? Even though there was a ghostly killer thing a foot away from me reaching out with its bloody hand to disembowel me that didn't mean there was no hope. Okay, yes, that's exactly what it meant, but still.

  A few seconds passed, the door slipped open another few inches. I was notably still emboweled, and didn't really know why.

  The door slid another inch. Okay, why had he not killed me yet? I was very killable, the jerk. Was I not good enough for him all of a sudden? After all the trouble I'd caused him, all the things I'd survived! I had put a lot of effort into this, said some very disparaging things about the quality of his ghostliness, and he was giving up at the last second? That dick.

  I hazarded a look behind me, curiosity overpowering common sense. The scene I saw was so absolutely surreal that I almost lost my grip on the hidden door.

  Lydia. Little cowardly, too-scared-to-run-away Lydia, was standing between me and Harry, arms outstretched as if her