“Weren’t bad.”
She laughed, for reasons Rick could not fathom, and nodded at the ghost. “Where did she come from, do you know?”
“Barreltop find her, lookin like. Pulling up floorboards.”
“I thought you were going to let me check over these places before you start tearing them up.”
He shrugged. “You was workin. Bump only choose the place couple hours past.”
She looked like she wanted to say something, but stopped herself before starting again. “Okay, this should only take a couple of minutes, no big deal.” She glanced at Rick. “You guys want to wait downstairs?”
“Actually, I’d—”
“Aye.” Terrible’s fist closed around Rick’s arm, lifting him from the floor. Damn, could the guy be any more insulting?
But to say anything would only make things worse, so he followed Terrible across the room and down the stairs, taking one last glance back to see Chess unfolding a long black stick and setting it into some sort of base on the floor.
☠
TEN MINUTES LATER SHE CAME stomping down the stairs. “It’s not working.”
“What?” They both spoke at once.
“I can’t get a portal to open, and the only reason I wouldn’t be able to do that is if there’s already one here.”
Terrible rubbed his chin. “Like where?”
“I don’t know. Show me where she came from, we’ll see if maybe it’s there. The ghost is masking anything else I might feel, so I’d have to get closer to whatever it is to find it.”
“What do you mean, feel?”
Chess started to answer him—at least he thought she would, she opened her mouth—but Terrible spoke first. His thick brows drew together. “Why you askin?”
“Just curious.”
“Aye? Don’t be.”
Chess’s voice cut into the silence. “Show me where the ghost came from, okay? I’d like to get out of here.”
“But—” Rick snapped his mouth shut. “Never mind.”
“No, what is it?”
“I just—you have the ghost locked in that circle up there, right? So why can’t we just leave? And maybe call the Church and have them come take care of it.”
Terrible folded his arms over his massive chest and glared, but Chess shook her head. “The wind could blow the salt away any second. And if there’s an open portal in here, that means more ghosts, and they’ll find their way into the streets. We can’t let that happen, right?”
That still didn’t really explain why he had to stick around, but neither was he going to try to leave. His toolkit was still upstairs, and he had the distinct feeling that if he tried to grab it and run he’d end up face-down on the floor.
So the three of them headed back up the stairs and into the other section of the house.
No windows at all back there, at least not ones people could see through. Boards crisscrossed the empty eyes in the wall. For some reason Rick felt almost as if they’d suddenly stepped underwater, or into some kind of jail cell. Probably the jail cell was more accurate.
But as much as he hated this—and he did hate it—he had to admit he was kind of having fun, too, now that the situation seemed under control. It wasn’t every night that he got to fend off a ghost with a curtain-rod and hang out with a girl who might not be a Church witch but was definitely a witch of some kind. How many of his friends were having this kind of night? They were probably all sitting around Alex’s living room watching bootlegged porn.
Barreltop hadn’t gotten very far with his crowbar. One board splintered at the end and split down the center, but that was all. Probably fortunate, really. The thought had no sooner entered his mind than Chess gave it voice.
“Good thing he was lazy. If the ghost came out of here with loose boards and shit lying around you guys could have had a serious problem. A more serious problem, I mean.”
Terrible didn’t reply.
Chess sighed. “Can one of you pull this board up all the way so I can look underneath?”
She said “one of you.” But she looked at Rick, and he, sensing an opportunity to actually not look like a total wimp in front of her, seized it and headed back to the other room.
The ghost still stood in the circle, her fists clenched at her sides and her long gown moving as if in a faint breeze. She bared her teeth. Her furious gaze followed him as he grabbed the crowbar from where he’d dropped it.
He ignored her. Or at least tried to. It wasn’t very easy, ignoring the presence a few feet away of something that had—maybe not personally, but still—killed three of his grandparents and several aunts and uncles. Not to mention millions and millions of other people during Haunted Week, leading to the rise of the Church and the fall of all other governments and religions. The urge to spit at the thing, to hurt her somehow, rose in his chest, but he fought it down. He couldn’t hurt her. She was a ghost; they didn’t feel pain. And she wouldn’t care if he spit at her.
Better to pry up that board and let Chess destroy the portal or whatever, and send the ghost to the City of Eternity where it belonged.
Assuming Chess could. If she was Church, she could, but she couldn’t be Church, not if she was hanging around Downside in the middle of the night. But if she wasn’t Church—whatever. No point in wondering, he guessed. They wouldn’t tell him.
They were both kind of smiling when he walked back into the room, watching him. Maybe she’d told Terrible to get off his back? That would be nice.
Terrible reached for the crowbar, but Rick pretended he didn’t see. He’d just fitted the flat end under the edge of the board when Chess spoke.
“Hold on. If that came out when he’d only lifted the edge of the board, I have no idea what lifting the rest of it might do. So…be careful, okay?”
He forced a grin. It felt more like a grimace, but he had to at least try. Chess didn’t look scared. Terrible certainly didn’t look scared. Rick was damned if he was going to be the only one who did. “I held off a ghost with an iron bar for like fifteen minutes before you got here. I think I’ll be fine.”
The board came up with a satisfying crack. He reached down and tossed it aside.
Chess produced a flashlight from somewhere—had she had that before?—and handed it to Terrible, who shone it into the space beneath the boards while she knelt beside it and peered in.
“See anything?”
“No.”
“Feel anything?”
“Not really. I mean, yes, the whole house feels off, but it doesn’t seem particularly strong here.” She straightened up. “There’s no portal or anything under—shit. Get back. Both of you.”
“Huh?” Rick looked toward the doorway, where her gaze was pinned as she stood up. From her hand dangled one of those cloth bags Rick saw earlier.
Terrible grabbed him and shoved him against the wall. He thought he heard his bones creak; he certainly felt it. “Hey, what—”
Oh.
Another ghost wavered in the doorway. It held a crowbar in its spectral hand.
Pure terror shot up Rick’s spine, the kind of terror he hadn’t felt since he was seven and his older brother dangled him off a bridge for touching his stuff. That was his life, that crowbar, swinging like a metronome in front of the ghost’s wicked smile.
Terrible picked up the iron bar, while Chess stepped forward, her right hand hidden by the cloth bag. An odd collection of syllables poured from her mouth and she flung something at the ghost, something that made dark speckles against its pale glow.
The ghost froze. Almost before Rick had time to register that, to wonder at it, she’d upended her salt canister and started pouring another line, stretching it across the length of the room.
Okay. That made sense, he guessed. But it also blocked their escape. What were they supposed to do, sit there all night? All day? Ghosts hated the sun, but not much sun would come in with the windows boarded up like they were.
As if in reply Terrible turned and smashed h
is heavy foot into the boards. Rick joined him, feeling the boards give under his boot, until finally they split and fell into the yard below.
It was a cloudy night, a dark one, but Rick’s eyes adjusted well enough to see a patch of overgrown weeds and some rusted lawn furniture. A rotted awning hung in tatters off a frame protruding from the side of the house.
So much for jumping. If the fall didn’t break their legs they’d impale themselves, and he had a feeling it would be both rather than either/or.
Chess’s gaze darted between them and the ghost. “Can you guys get down?”
“Naw. All broken metal down there.”
“Shit! I—what the hell?”
Ghostly feet had appeared just below the ceiling. As they all watched they sank to the floor, another ghost revealing itself inch-by-inch from the bottom up.
And another.
Holt shit. Rick’s heart pounded so hard in his chest he thought it might literally explode. He almost wished it would, because at least that would be a quicker death. In that other room lay a pile of broken boards, some studded with nails. Probably enough debris filled the other rooms to turn himself, Terrible, and Chess into nothing more than bloodstains and piles of goo, even if the ghosts couldn’t cross the salt line. Ghosts could throw things, after all.
Chess spun around, tugging that black crayon or whatever out of her pocket. “Boost me up. I need to mark the ceiling.”
Rick started to bend down to cup his hands, but Terrible got there first. In one smooth movement he had Chess lifted high enough that she could scrawl another of those little symbols on the ceiling.
“That should hold,” she said, as she slid back down. “But I need to get up there.”
On what planet was that a good idea?
He must have said that out loud, or made some kind of sound, because she looked at him. “The portal is up there. They’re not coming up out of the floorboards, they’re coming down through the ceiling. I need to close it.”
Terrible frowned. “Lemme come along, aye?”
“How are you going to get up there? Rick can’t lift you.”
“Ain’t want you on your alones up there, Chess. Ain’t just one or two, aye, an we ain’t got any knowledge what weapons might be up there.”
A pause, while Rick’s heart sank into his shoes. Then, as if in slow motion, they both turned to look at him.
“Sure.” Was that a squeak in his voice? He cleared his throat and tried again. “Sure, I’ll go with you. Just tell me what to do.”
She smiled at him. Terrible made some kind of growling noise.
“I’m going to salt off a section up there,” she said. “Just like this one, as soon as I get up. I don’t know if there’s any debris or anything in that attic, but I assume there is, so you’re going to need to grab whatever you can—if you can—and put it in that area, where they can’t get it. Okay?”
She slid past them and marked off another section of the floor behind her line, forming a square with the line already existing. “Try to get through here.”
He didn’t look happy about it, but Terrible nodded and stepped into the square, ramming the iron rod at the ceiling. Plaster fell around him. For a moment it looked bizarrely like snow, until the plaster stopped and chunks of wood began.
In less than a minute, or so he thought—time seemed to be going by awfully fast, and every passing second moved Rick that much closer to what he was certain was his date with death by ghost—the hole in the ceiling was big enough for them to get through.
“Okay.” Chess looked at Terrible. “As soon as you get us up there, step back, okay? Don’t stay under here, at least not until I get it marked off on the floor.”
If he nodded or said anything, Rick didn’t hear it, not over the rasping of his own breath in his throat. He closed his eyes for a second or two; when he opened them Chess’s feet were disappearing into the ceiling.
His turn. His turn. Terror numbed him so effectively he barely felt his feet hit the dusty floor.
But Terrible didn’t bend down to cup his hands, not immediately. Instead he grabbed Rick’s arm and squeezed, hard. Hard enough that Rick wondered if biceps could liquefy. Terrible’s eyes were black holes in his brutish face, and he said, “Aught happens to her, I kill you, dig?”
It didn’t seem like the kind of question that was really a question, and Rick was glad, because he didn’t think he could have replied if he wanted to. So he just nodded mutely, and Terrible bent down for his foot.
Something hit the wall above them, and the noise reverberated through the room. Rick barely had time to register it before Terrible practically threw him through the hole in the ceiling.
He’d thought maybe he’d need a minute for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but he didn’t. Not just because the small, round windows in the attic room weren’t boarded, but because it was so full of ghosts it glowed.
For a second he just knelt there, his mouth open. He’d never seen anything like it before. Yes, before this night he’d never seen a real ghost, so by definition any ghost was something he’d never seen before, but this…this was amazing, and frightening, and beautiful in a terrifying and awful way.
Through the mass of their bodies, the tigerish pattern of light and darkness, he saw other shapes, the thick outlines of furniture. Not too much, thankfully, but enough to make his heart sink further. Across the attic space were more porthole-like windows; through one of them a streetlight shone like a single star in a clouded sky.
Chess crouched not far from the hole. She’d already marked off a large square around it with salt, and apparently the ghosts realized it, because Rick had barely seen the line when glass shattered above his head, raining chips on him that stung his shoulder and arm.
“Chess! You right up there?” Terrible shouted from below.
“I’m fine,” she called back, digging around in her bag.
She glanced at Rick. “It’s definitely here, the portal. I have no idea how it got here or what the deal is or why, but it’s here.”
“Is that going to be hard to fix?” A chunk of wood came flying at them. They jumped back and it clattered against the wall.
“Don’t know.”
“What? What do you mean?”
Bluish light moved across her face like a reflection of water, making her features seem to shift and change shape a little as he looked at her. “I mean I don’t know. Until I know how it happened I won’t know how to close it. Or even if I can close it.”
Great. Just great. He’d come up to help “clear debris” or whatever, and now he was on the front line of some sort of portal that this girl who may or may not be a witch may or may not know how to fix. Oh, and don’t forget the huge, very scary guy below them who looked like he ate babies and had just promised to kill Rick if anything happened to the aforesaid maybe-witch.
This night just kept getting better and better. And he had no—“Ow! Fuck!”
A shard of glass had imbedded itself in his arm, thrown by an angry ghost.
Chess’s eyes narrowed. “Did you just get cut?”
He lifted his arm to show her.
“Damn it! They’re going to sense that, it’s going to make them mad.”
Witch or no witch, she was starting to piss him off. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to let myself get injured after risking my life to come up here and help you. How careless of me.”
To his surprise, she smiled. “You would have risked your life more if you hadn’t come up to help, and I kind of think you know that. But yeah, I guess you’re right. Sorry.” She lifted her hand, the black crayon in it. “Come here. I want to mark you.”
He wanted to ask what the hell that meant, but he was tired of saying “What?” over and over like some sort of idiotic parrot.
So he scooted over, closing the few feet between them. “Would Terrible actually have killed me if I hadn’t agreed to come up?”
“It’s entirely possible, yeah.” She said it like it was no big deal.
Like it was normal or something, rather than psychotic. Who the hell were these people?
Her fingers touched his jaw, cool and light. “Close your eyes.”
She smelled faintly of shampoo and a sort of herbal scent, with a little cigarette smoke mixed in. The crayon wasn’t a crayon at all, he realized, but some sort of woodless grease pencil, and it moved across his forehead in a tingly line. Circles, maybe, some kind of swirl with an angle? He wasn’t sure. It made his head buzz, though, enough that he opened his eyes a crack to try to shake the dizziness.
The pencil moved down to his cheek; another little symbol there, and then she lifted his hand and drew on the back of it. It looked almost like a crab, but he couldn’t seem to really trace the pattern.
Instead he looked up at her. He’d thought before that her eyes were dark, but they weren’t. Inside the thick black eyeliner and mascara they were lighter than that: hazel, almost blue but not quite. Pretty.
He opened his mouth to tell her so, driven by some sort of imminent-death impulse, but she dropped his hand and pulled back before he could speak.
“Those should help keep you safe.” She tucked the pencil back into her pocket. “They won’t be able to drain power from you, and you won’t feel the cold as much when they touch you. Okay?”
He would have nodded, but ducked instead when a large chair flew at them.
She grabbed his arm with her left hand, grabbed his eyes with her own. “But listen. They like fear. They can sense it, it excites them. You need to try to sublimate that. You cannot show them you’re scared. You cannot let them see when they hurt you. Now take off your shirt.”
“What?”
“Take off your shirt. Give it to me. We need to bind that wound of yours to try to mask—” a crash broke through her voice, what looked like a table leg hit the wall— “the smell of your blood.”
He tried to smile. “You know, if you wanted to see my bare chest, all you had to do was ask.”
Terrible’s voice cut into her reply. “Chess! What’s on up there?”
Damn it! He’d finally managed to say something funny, too.