Graves snorted, tossed his hair back as he took another drag. The smoke hung in a feathered shape for a moment as he exhaled, but I blinked to clear my eyes. “Hey, we’ve got to suffer for beauty. Chicks don’t go for guys with gloves.”
I’ll bet chicks don’t go for you at all, out here in Stepford Podunk. “How would you know?” I stepped over a tree root, my bag bumping my hip.
“I know.” He shot me a look over his shoulder, his hair almost swallowing his grin, too. “You never said if you liked shooting pool.”
“I don’t.” I felt a little guilty again. He was trying to be nice.
There was one in every school—some guy who thought his chances were better with new girls. “But I’ll beat your ass at it, okay?”
I decided I could wait to find the local paranormal hangout. Dad would probably give me another version of The Lecture if I went looking for it alone. There was that one time in Dallas when he found me trading shots of Coke with a pointy-eared goggle-eyed gremlin and about had a cow—
“Fine.” He didn’t even sound insulted. “If you can, Dru.”
I thought about telling him Dad had taught me to shoot pool when we were low on cash, and decided not to. Maybe if I embarrassed the kid he’d leave me alone.
CHAPTER 2
I got home a little after five, riding the jolting, bumping bus all the way from downtown. Graves had wanted me to hang around and shoot a few more games, but the place—an all-ages pool club with a jukebox and indoor basketball and tennis courts—was loud and full of funky smells, as well as being jammed with kids who should have been in school themselves. So I bailed and had to figure out the bus. I’m used to figuring out the public transportation in just about any part of America, and this place actually had a good system.
Dad’s truck was gone, but he’d left the light on in the kitchen and a fifty-dollar bill next to a note. Don’t wait up. Order pizza. Homework before TV, kiddo, and do your katas. Love you. Dad.
Other dads actually sat at the dinner table. Mine left me a fifty and a reminder to do my goddamn katas.
I was cold anyway, so I dropped my bag in the kitchen and bashed my way out into the garage, the big broken-spring door rattling as the wind teased at it. The heavy bag creaked, swaying a little, but I shucked my coat and shivered in the middle of the concrete floor instead.
Dad liked karate, and he was big enough that it was a good choice for him. But I’m built rangy, like my mom, except she had nice chestworks and a pretty curve to her hips. I’m just angles except for the breasticles, which are more trouble than they’re worth, especially when it comes to boys. I don’t have the kind of muscle mass you need to meet a punch with direct force.
So for me, it’s tai chi and what Dad called “The Basic Dirty-Fightin’” when he was sober and “Six Great Ways to Bounce an Asshole” when he’d had a few Beams. I like tai chi—I like the slow way each movement flows into the next and the breathing smooths everything out. It’s still hard work, because your knees always have to be a little unlocked, and after a while it really murders your quads and hamstrings, but it’s nice.
Push-pull. Part the horse’s mane. Catch the swallow’s tail. Warmed up and loosened, and feeling a little better, I finally inhaled and exhaled, as close to at peace as I guess you can ever get. The outside world rushed in as soon as I opened my eyes, and I began worrying about Dad again before I even opened the door to the kitchen and stamped through, making a lot of noise I really didn’t have to.
It’s the only way to fill up an empty house.
I dug through the fridge and eventually settled on a bowl of Cheerios. I’d scarfed a greasy slice of pizza at the pool hall, and the thought of more half-cardboard cheese didn’t appeal to me, even with pepperoni. So I wolfed the cereal, spiked a glass of Coke with some of Dad’s Jim Beam, and wandered up to my room to lie on the bed and look at the light on the ceiling. Every room is different, and the way outside light reflects up onto the spackle stuff smeared on most ceilings is unique. I could probably describe pretty much every place we’ve ever lived in terms of ceiling light.
The worst part about Dad being out on hunting runs was the way whatever house we were in got really creepy around dusk. Night is when most of the stuff in the Real World comes out to play—and by play you can mean “have a little fun,” “go grocery shopping because sunlight burns like acid,” or “make unwary people disappear, yum yum.” Take your pick.
I pulled Mom’s red-and-white quilt around me, snug as a bug in a rug, and sipped at the Coke until my taste buds burned off a little—I’d made it about half and half, and began to get a warm glow after a while. My clock blinked its little red eyes, and darkness gathered deeper and deeper in the corners. The wind made the glassed-in screen door on the enclosed back porch rattle.
When we lived in apartments, I would play the game of listening to the sounds in the building as everyone came home, and imagining stories for all of them. Most apartment buildings aren’t quiet if you’re really listening. After a while the noises begin to seem like family, and you catch the rhythm of each separate life in your building working together to make the melody called home. One place we lived, the guy next door played the cello after dinner every night. That was nice to listen to, even if the other guy down the hall beat his wife once a month when rent came due.
Houses are different. They creak to themselves, muttering, when night comes around. An empty house around dusk starts to talk, no matter how newly built it is. I used to play music to cover it up, but after a while the thought that I wouldn’t be able to hear if anything was sneaking around the hallways got to me.
When you can see apparitions and poltergeists in living, solid color, that sort of thinking usually does start getting to you.
So I mostly listened and waited on nights when Dad was “out.” Night gets kind of strange when you’re waiting for someone to come home. I’ve seen shit on TV you wouldn’t believe, stuff that only happens when you’re alone and nobody can verify the sighting. Once Dad found me curled up on the floor of the mobile home we were renting in Byronville, clutching a baseball bat and sound asleep while a Twilight Zone rerun blared out of the television. I’d eaten a TV dinner and my hair had gotten into the empty tray. After that he made me promise to go to bed and not wait up, but that just meant that I fell asleep sitting up in bed and thinking about all the ways things could go wrong.
Things can go very, very wrong. They go wrong all the time in the normal world, and the Real World just means they go wrong with teeth and claws, quicker than your average bear. August called it “the Situation.” Dad called it “gone south.” Juan-Raoul de la Hoya-Smith called it “mala goddamn suerte, chingada.”
I didn’t know what Dad was after this time. He hadn’t said anything on the way from Florida. That was a little unusual—normally he had me looking through the boxes of old leather-bound books he picked up here and there, searching for odd bits of information. Or helping him make bullets and sharpen the knives, bouncing ideas off me or quizzing me on tactics. I’m probably the only sixteen-year-old girl in a three-hundred-mile radius who knows how to distinguish a poltergeist from an actual ghost (hint: If you can disrupt it with nitric acid, or if it throws new crap at you every time, it’s a poltergeist), or how to tell if a medium’s real or faking it (poke ’em with a true-iron needle). I know the six signs of a good occult store (Number One is the proprietor bolts the door before talking about Real Business) and the four things you never do when you’re in a bar with other people who know about the darker side of the world (don’t look weak). I know how to access public information and talk my way around clerks in courthouses (a smile and the right clothing work wonders). I also know how to hack into newspaper files, police reports, and some kinds of government databases (primary rule: Don’t get caught. Duh).
Hey, even if you’ve got great intuition you can’t just walk up to people and ask them about the resident exorcist or the last unsolved murder that was committed during the n
ew moon. You also can’t ask them about the haunted houses that serve as nodes or the local werwulfen hangout—where the burgers aren’t just rare, they’re raw. And served in big bloody piles.
Sometimes you have to go digging to find the pattern behind events that to other people just look like random bad luck.
Get information and you’ll find a pattern, Gran said. Find the pattern and you have your prey, Dad said.
He also said, Don’t let the backwoods woo-woo take the place of logic. He said that a lot.
I wondered where he was and took another gulp of Coke and Beam. My CD player was across the room, the concrete-block-and-plywood bookcase empty except for my clothes. There was another pile of clothes and my CD case in front of the closet, and other than my mattresses and the nightstand, that was about it. The lap of luxury at Casa Anderson. I’d stopped putting up posters or hauling my books upstairs. It wasn’t worth it and Dad didn’t care as long as the laundry got done. To my everlasting relief, he’d also stopped with the starch a few years back. The military made him big on spray starch, but I point-blank refused to touch the stuff after a while. He finally gave up doing it himself, and I manfully restrained myself from pointing out that the world didn’t explode when he did.
And they say maturity is just for adults.
The house was empty. It started talking, groans and squeaks as the wind outside rose. Everywhere you go, the air changes around dusk. Sometimes it’s soft and sweet, or whistling just enough to make you feel happy to be inside and snuggled up.
When something bad is coming, it’s different. Like a moan, only with big glass teeth.
Tonight the wind had that sound. I hoped Dad would be home soon. Once I finished my drink I fished in my bag for a pencil and paper and started to draw. The long curved lines turned into a frilly iris, one of Gran’s favorite flowers. I got into it, shading the different textures of the petals, imagining the colors—vibrant purple, snowy white, the green of the stem. I’d drawn a lot of irises, especially after Mom died and Gran got me paper and a pencil to keep me busy while she worked in her cabin.
When I think of right after Mom died and Dad disappeared for the first time, the smell of paper and the sound of Gran scrubbing something—she was always cleaning—mixes together with the feeling of a pencil in my hand. She was always washing the floors with hawthorn water or wiping down the windows, in between the other tons of work that had to happen to keep the cabin running right. Like collecting eggs or feeding the pigs or splitting wood. I still can’t pass a house without looking for the best place to put a woodpile, and I always spin the eggs once clockwise on the counter before breaking them.
Somehow she found time to keep the place clean as a whistle and rinsed down with all sorts of floor and window washes—hawthorn, mountain ash, true rowan, sometimes yarrow or lavender. Bundles of wild garlic and onions strung up everywhere, and Gran working on her spinning wheel late at night, the thump and whirr getting into my chest as I cried myself to sleep, missing Dad, wanting my mommy, terrified and lonely and not understanding.
What does a five-year-old understand about “dead”? Or “forever”? Or even about “be back in a while”?
Full night fell. The clock blinked on and on. I got up to go to the bathroom a couple times, taking the quilt with me. Once I went downstairs for another Coke and Beam. Dad would give me another Lecture—probably the one about Responsible Choices and Adulthood, and how I wasn’t close to either yet—if he ever guessed I drank while he was out. But since he put the stuff away at a pretty steady rate himself, I don’t think he ever twigged.
I went on to drawing simple shapes—the lamp on my nightstand, the bookshelves, the closet doors. Then I sketched the pile of laundry in front of the closet, taking care to shade everything just so. The clock kept blinking. I finished the second glass of Jimmy Beam lightly misted with Coke and fell asleep with the pencil still in my fingers, a jagged line sliding down the pad of paper in my lap, opened to a fresh page.
When I woke up in the morning, Dad still wasn’t there.
INTERMEZZO
He walked down a long corridor, picking his way carefully in booted feet. The concrete was crazed with broken lines and slick with fat rivulets and lakes of something best not to name; he stepped over them like a kid stepping over sidewalk cracks, break your mother’s back.
A buzzing had started in my head. I wanted to open my mouth, tell him not to go down that hall, that Something Invisible was looking at him. But the hall was so long, and it was so hard to think through the hornets in my head. They were having a fine old time building condos inside my skull, and the buzzing spread through my bones as if I’d stepped on a live wire.
I didn’t use to have these buzzing dreams often. Lately they’ve been once a month or so, usually just before I start my period, cramps and weird sleeping going hand in hand. But this one wasn’t the usual buzzing dream, where I am flying over rooftops, or even the worst dream of all that ends with me in close darkness, surrounded by stuffed animals.
No. This dream was hyper-colored. I could see every hair on his head, the fine lines of lavender in his blue irises, the nap of his favorite green Army jacket, every line and crease on his polished combat boots. The gun gleamed dully in his hand, held loosely, professionally.
There were fluorescent lights overhead, their buzz echoing the idiot noise in my head. That’s why I couldn’t speak, you know—that sound just destroys anything you might say, like static on the television screen will eat whatever you’re thinking for hours at a time. You can just sit and stare. Like some brain-sucking thing has, well, sucked your brain.
Time slowed down, getting all stretchy and elastic. Each step took a century, and by the time the door came into view—just a plain steel door, with those fluorescents noising overhead—the hornets weren’t just crawling through my bones and brain but touching my skin with fleshy little prickling feet.
There was something behind that door, something that smelled of iron and cold darkness, a freezing shiver up the spine. It was like the feeling I got in that broken-down house on the outskirts of Chattanooga, my first job with Dad, right before a poltergeist started throwing little shards of glass hard enough to bury them in rotten drywall with little sounds like puckering lips.
Or like that small podunk in South Carolina where the local voodoo king sent the zombies around because Dad was cutting into his business by breaking the hexes the king had been throwing at people who got in his way—or who wouldn’t give him what he wanted. I’d had to use every scrap of anti-hexing Gran taught me and a few things from our books to break through some of those old, nasty curses, and Dad had lost some serious blood fighting off the zombies. That had been bad.
This feeling was worse. Much, much worse.
Don’t go in there, I wanted to say. There’s something in there. Don’t do it.
He walked down the hall, and the buzzing got so bad it shook everything out of me, the dream running like colored ink on wet paper, and as it receded I struggled to say something, anything, to warn him.
He didn’t even look up. He just kept walking toward that door, and the dream closed down like a camera lens, darkness eating through its edges.
I was still trying to scream when Dad reached out his free hand slowly, like a sleepwalker, and turned the knob. And the darkness behind it laughed and laughed and laughed. . . .
CHAPTER 3
I came awake all at once, with a jolt like five shots of espresso hitting my bloodstream at full speed. The pencil had snapped in my fist, and I was clutching the two broken pieces. My head felt like a bowling ball being cracked by a giant’s fingers, and I moaned and blinked. Gray light coming in through the window was empty, sterile, and infinite.
The house was a still, cold cave.
I pushed myself up, head throbbing and ribs aching. I’d fallen asleep and slid over to the side, my back against the wall and my artist’s pad digging into my stomach. I rubbed what felt like a half-ton of sand out of my
eyes and listened for the heater, for the sound of breathing, for the creaks of Dad moving around.
Nothing. And my alarm clock was turned off. I vaguely remembered something noisy happening earlier and me fumbling for it, almost spearing my palm with the broken pencil.
I rolled up out of my mattresses and shuffled barefoot into the hall. The quilt wrapped around my shoulders wouldn’t keep me warm enough. I made my way down to the other bedroom at the end of the hall, the one next to the stairs.
The door was open but the blinds were down. I peered in. Dad’s cot was there, and his metal footlocker. A wooden box sat by the door, Dad’s private box; I didn’t lift the lid. The cot was neatly made, and I thought it hadn’t been slept in. You could always bounce a quarter off Dad’s cot, though, even five minutes after he got up.
No problem. He’s downstairs; he fell asleep over the table again. Or he’s in the living room with the TV on mute, bandaging himself up. Go down and look. You’ll see. He’s there.
My heart knew otherwise. It pounded inside my ribcage, each pulse accompanied by a sick squeeze of pain inside my skull and a flip-flop of my stomach. I made it down the stairs like an old woman, holding on to the icy banister.
Silence like the heavy quilt wrapped around my shoulders.
There were boxes in the living room, and my orange beanbag chair. Dad’s camping chair sat at its usual precise angle to the television. The red eye of the cable box blinked, and I could almost hear it flicking on and off, it was so quiet.
Dad wasn’t in the kitchen. Dirty dishes still piled in the sink, and the house was cold. I shuffled out into the hall and punched the buttons to turn the heater on.
The heat pump soughed into life with a wump. It was so loud in the stillness I jumped, pulling Mom’s sunrise quilt closer around my shoulders. Then I walked slow dream-like down the hall and to the front door, unlocking both deadbolts and yanking it open.