The candle, the hair. The light, her life.
How had it come to this? part of her wailed. Her parents had been right, she should have stayed home, married the unremarkable suit they’d put in front of her. Too late, the scientific part of her mind reprimanded. She followed this path of her own free will and she must continue on. When the path seemed to end, you blazed a new trail through the wilderness.
“Amelia Parker, you have been tried and convicted for the murder of Lydia Harcourt and sentenced to death according to the laws of the state of Colorado.”
She cleared her throat and tried not to sound nervous. Her voice came out halting anyway. “Lady Amelia Parker. I’d prefer my title entered into the records, if you please.” Her throat closed, and she swallowed. Just a little longer. Stay focused on that room beside the iron door.
“Lady Amelia Parker, do you have any last words?”
“None whatsoever. Thank you.”
“Then may God have mercy on your soul.”
Closing her eyes, she left the scaffold. It was a strange feeling. She merely thought, Breathe out. Breathe it all out. Focus on the small symbols she had built, make them real, go there. Light, life, the room beside the door. Then she was watching a slim waif of a girl standing on the scaffold. It was her, pale and despairing. She’d hardly eaten for days and it showed. The prison dress hung limply on her. Hood over her head, rope around her neck. Still she could see. Was pleased the body did not tremble. But the executioners had to guide it into place, as if the person was no longer truly conscious.
The floor dropped with a creak and a snap, and everything went dark.
Cañon City, Colorado, The Present
Cormac took another step forward in line and tried not to think too hard. This place was built on routine, rhythm. If he let himself fall into it, the days flew by. He’d be out of here in no time, if he could keep up the rhythm and not let anything—anyone—knock him out of it. He made sure not to get too close to the guy in front of him—big guy, beefy shoulders, white, tattoo-covered—and tried not to think of the guy behind him—shorter, wiry, which probably meant he was quick—breathing down his neck. Cormac didn’t look at anyone, didn’t meet anyone’s gaze. Let himself be carried by the rhythm. He’d pick up his tray, his plastic utensils, find a place to sit where he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone, and eat to keep himself going for another day. Try not to think about the way the orange jumpsuit didn’t fit right across his shoulders, or the way this place smelled like fifty years of bad cooking.
He had his tray in hand when a shove hit his shoulder. Because he’d been expecting it, the tray didn’t go flying.
He didn’t have to look to know it was the guy behind him, the scrappy freak who’d tried to stare him down before at meals or out in the yard. It wasn’t an accident, though if Cormac confronted him the guy would say it was. More than that, he wouldn’t apologize; he’d turn it around, accuse Cormac of trying to start something, then he really would start something—a fight to knock him a few pegs down the pecking order. Cormac had seen this play out a dozen times. The black guys had their gangs, and they picked on the Latino gangs who picked on the white gangs who picked on everybody else, spouting some kind of superiority shtick, which was a riot because they were all locked up in the same cinder-block box wearing the same prison jumpsuits. Even their tattoos blurred together after a while. Cormac didn’t try to keep score.
He turned his head just enough to look at the guy, whose eyes were round, whose lips were snarly. The collar of his jumpsuit was crooked. He was bristling, teeth bared, like he was getting ready to jump him. But Cormac didn’t react. Just looked at the guy, frowning. Cold. The big mistake these jokers made was thinking Cormac cared about his rep, cared about the pecking order, wanted or even needed to join up for protection, for friendship, for some sense of belonging. Like they were all some pack of wolves, he thought with some amount of irony.
They stood like that for maybe a full minute until the next guy behind muttered, “Hey, move it.” Cormac only turned back around when the scrappy freak ducked his gaze. No need to get excited, no need to say a word. You just had to keep to yourself. He wasn’t here to make lifelong friends or be the boss of anyone.
No one else bothered him as he picked up his tray and went to an empty table at the far end of the cafeteria. Prison guards stood at the doorways, watching. Cormac didn’t pay them any more attention than he did to his fellow prisoners. There was no point to it.
He hadn’t been trying to earn a reputation over the last few months, but he seemed to have one anyway. No one else sat with him; the others gave him plenty of room. He didn’t talk, didn’t try to make friends. That cold stare was enough to keep trouble away. So he ate greasy chicken and mashed potatoes with watery gravy in silence.
He didn’t want to think too hard about it, but keeping stock of his surroundings was too much a habit to quit: noting where the people around him were, how they carried themselves, where the exits were, what dangers lay in wait. The hunter’s instincts. He should have been grateful—those instincts were keeping him safe here. But they also made him edgy. Maybe it was the feeling of being trapped, that he couldn’t go anywhere in this place without being watched, without the chance that one of those uniformed, frozen-faced guards might decide to take him down for no reason at all. He hadn’t seen open sky in weeks. Even the yard was ringed with concrete and barbed wire.
He set down his fork and flattened his hand on the table, just for a moment, until the tension went away. He was doing all right. He just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
And he had to get rid of the tightness in his spine that said someone was watching him. That something around here was just a little bit … off.
* * *
The inmates told ghost stories.
“There’s a warden fifty years ago who hung himself,” the guy in the next cell, Moe, was saying. “Can you believe that? A warden. Hung himself on the top floor. That knocking sound? That’s him. Walking around.”
“Shut up,” hollered another inmate in another cell.
“You’ve heard it,” Moe insisted.
“It’s pipes. It’s old fucking pipes,” Cormac’s cellmate Frank said.
“You know the story, you know it’s true.”
The pipes acted up once a week or so, and every time Moe had to talk about the ghost of the warden who hanged himself. Cormac thought it was just the pipes.
Trouble was, inmates told lots of stories, and something here wasn’t right. That tingling at the back of his neck made him reach for a gun on his belt. Easy enough to brush it off, to tell Moe to shut up. But something dripped off the walls here. Of course a prison was going to be tense, all these angry guys penned up together.
But Cormac knew what was really out there. A prison filled with ghosts wasn’t the worst of it.
“I’m going to beat you if you don’t shut it!”
“I’m just telling you. I’m warning you!”
This would go on for another minute before Moe finally shut up. Wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.
Cormac pressed his pillow over his ear and tried to think himself away from this place. To a meadow up in Grand County, miles from anywhere. Tucked on the side of a valley, east facing so it got the first sun of the morning. Green grass, tall trees, blue sky, and a creek running down the middle of it. His father had taken him hunting there when he was a kid, and he never forgot it. Camping, waking up before dawn when a layer of mist clung to the grass. Drinking strong coffee heated over a campfire. He went back there, when he needed to get out of his own head.
* * *
The nameplate sitting on the desk read “Dr. Ronald Olson.” Cormac sat in the not-so-comfortable chair across the desk from an unassuming man in an oxford shirt and corduroy jacket. He even had glasses. He was maybe in his fifties, and his hair was thinning. He looked soft rather than weathered. Cormac classified him as prey.
“How are you doing t
oday?” Olson asked.
Cormac shrugged. This was just another hoop to jump through. Play nice for the camp counselor. He doubted the guy could tell him anything about himself he didn’t already know. Both his parents had died violently when he was young, his whole life had been filled with violence, he’d fallen back on violence as a solution to every problem, and that was what landed him here.
He didn’t know if Olson expected him to try to manipulate him, play some kind of mental hide-and-seek, Hannibal Lector–style. Cormac didn’t want to work that hard for so little payoff. But Olson was free to think Cormac was a puzzle he could pick apart and solve.
“How are you adjusting?”
“It’s just a place,” Cormac said, shrugging again. “One day at a time.”
“Any problems? Anything you’d like to talk about? It can be a shock, going from the outside to this.”
Cormac smiled and looked away. “Am I supposed to get pissed off because I can’t run out to McDonald’s and get a hamburger? That’s a waste of energy.”
“That’s an admirable stoicism. Are you sure you aren’t in denial? That can be dangerous as well.”
Cormac had a feeling the two of them looked at dangerous in completely different ways. He resisted an urge to glance at the clock, to see how much time they had left. He hadn’t asked for this—the guy had gotten hold of Cormac’s file and decided he must be crazy.
“I figure I keep my head down and get out of here just as quick as I can.”
“Goal oriented. That’s good.”
Now Cormac wondered if the guy was for real. He shifted, leaning forward just a little. “There’s one thing you could maybe tell me about.”
“Go on.”
“You hear many ghost stories around here? Do guys come in here telling about … things. Noises, spooky stuff.”
Olson’s smile seemed condescending. “I suppose every prison has its share of ghost stories. Some inmates have active imaginations.”
“There seem to be a lot of them around here. Like the guys have passed them down over the years. They say some warden hanged himself and now his ghost walks around, that a serial killer came in slitting inmates’ throats, that sort of thing.”
“You believe that?”
“The one about the warden? No. Not that one.”
“But you believe … something.”
“People tell stories because there may be something to some of it.” He wasn’t trying to rattle the guy; wasn’t sure much would rattle a prison therapist. That wasn’t a game Cormac wanted to start. But there had to be something to the constant chill that had settled in his spine.
Olson leaned forward to study a page in an open folder, Cormac’s file, as if he hadn’t already memorized it and was working from a script.
“In your deposition, you claimed your victim wasn’t human,” he said.
“I didn’t say that. I said she wasn’t all human.”
“Then what else was she?” He didn’t ask like someone who was really interested in the answer. He asked like a psychologist who expected his patient to say something damning. Hell, how much more damned could he be?
“It’s hard to explain,” he said.
“You think something like that is going on here? Something that’s hard to explain?”
This isn’t about me, Cormac wanted to yell at the guy. But he settled back, didn’t look away, didn’t give an inch. “Maybe it’s just being in jail.”
“I just have a couple of more questions for you. Your parents both passed away when you were quite young. What do you remember about them?”
Cormac stared at the guy, his expression unchanging. “I don’t remember anything.”
Of course Olson didn’t believe him; Cormac hadn’t expected him to. They stared at each other, waiting for the other to break.
Olson glanced at his watch and said, “I think that’s enough for today. Until next week, then.” He smiled kindly. A guard took Cormac back to his cell.
* * *
Part of the general population, he was allowed out of his cell for meals, showers, time in the yard, and his work detail washing dishes. He’d put in for a better job, but that would take time, a review. He had to prove that he wasn’t going to cause trouble. He was trying to do just that. The days ticked on, hour by hour. Best not to count the time, but there it was.
His half of the cell was starting to look like it belonged to him—his small shelf displayed a growing collection of books, a small stack of letters he’d gotten, a couple of magazines. Frank had been here longer and had a radio and pictures of his two kids on display. None of those details could disguise the bars, or the fact that their bedroom was also a bathroom, with a stainless steel toilet and sink mounted in the corner. This was a cage in a zoo.
Yet another night after lights out he lay on the top bunk, staring at the shadowed ceiling, waiting for sleep to pull him under. He could almost hear the shadows shifting across the walls, moving through the building, claws scratching on concrete. The place was old, haunted. A prison had been on this spot for almost a hundred fifty years. If any ghosts had taken up residence during that time, he was stuck with them.
“Hey,” said Frank from the bottom bunk. Cormac didn’t answer, but Frank continued. “You got a girl waiting for you on the outside, don’t you?”
It was an odd question. Cormac kept staring up. “What makes you say that?”
“The way you stare, like you’re looking somewhere else. Guys only stare like that when they’re thinking about a girl. Not just a hot piece of ass, but someone they really like.”
Cormac’s thoughts flashed on a face and a name. The girl he liked. The one who wasn’t waiting for him on the outside.
He rolled over on his side and didn’t say a word.
* * *
Ghosts haunted the place. She built up her walls and they left her alone. She waited.
The first one who went mad was a veteran of the Great War who’d returned home to few prospects and been caught stealing an automobile. She had thought perhaps the chaotic visions swirling in his mind would prepare him for her. She was wrong. She slipped in quietly, tentatively, like dipping fingers in the surface of a pool of water to test the temperature. She whispered words, told him what would happen, that it wouldn’t hurt—she didn’t think it would. She hoped it wouldn’t. But it did. Her presence pushed an already disturbed mind past breaking. He woke from sleep screaming and wouldn’t stop. Said he heard voices.
Madmen who speak of the voices they hear was such an awful cliché. And yet.
She tried to be more careful. Her second attempt was a family man convicted of fraud. A stable, quiet man who’d committed a nonviolent crime and had much to keep him levelheaded. When he heard the voice, the whisper, and felt her tendrils in his mind, the spirit that wasn’t his own moving through his flesh, he split his skull trying to fight his way out of the cell.
And so it went. No matter how carefully she chose her targets, how gently she pressed against their thoughts, she broke minds, searching for one that would fit her. She was waiting for a certain quality of mind: intelligent, astute, observant, patient. So many of the minds that passed through here were troubled, ill, wracked by demons of their own making that had nothing to do with the supernatural. Weak, prone to violence, which was what brought many of them here in the first place. She waited a long time.
She might have given up entirely, let what was left of her fade to shadow, but the murders followed her. The curse of the demon should have ended with her death. But she hadn’t really died, had she?
She needed a body to resume the hunt, to finally destroy the curse. So she kept trying, kept making morbid sacrifices.
If she’d had any fear in her state, any feeling beyond the instinct to seek out what she needed, she’d have been afraid. She would lose herself in this place. The spell would never work to completion. She’d never find the vessel. She would fade, become simply another voice calling purposelessly to madmen. Another sh
ade to the miasma seeping from the stones.
Then, one of the minds recognized her.
He’d been primed, and he had the instincts. He recognized the irregular, the uncanny. Magic. He didn’t even know it. He’d lived with it so long, he only noticed it as a tickling in his mind.
He was violent, here for killing. But it was a controlled, chilled violence of necessity and will. In some ways, his ability to kill was less understandable than the ones who lashed out in the heat of violence and caused mayhem. They lost control and that was reason enough.
This man approached it like a job, with no more passion than he might mend a shirt or dig a hole. She was drawn to him and horrified—her, horrified! What was he?
Human, nothing more. She could see by the glow of him.
Most of all, though, she felt he was a hard mind. Resilient. He might hear a voice, but wouldn’t break from it like the dozen before him had. She was sure of it.
* * *
After breakfast the next day, an alarm sounded. Lockdown. Cormac lay on his bunk, waiting for news. The grapevine would start feeding rumors soon enough. Probably it was just someone trying to get out. It happened more often than he would have thought, inmates packing themselves into crates to be shipped out or squeezing through barbed wire. He didn’t understand how that could look like a good idea to anyone, even someone who spent twenty-three hours a day in a ten-by-ten cell. People succeeded more often than he would have thought, but seldom for very long. The guy who packed himself into a crate was found when they unloaded the truck at its destination. He was hauled back with a few more years added to his sentence.
The gamble wasn’t worth it. Just a few years, keep his nose clean, get out. That was the plan. He’d still have a life when he got out of here. Maybe even more of one than when he arrived. He could stare at the ceiling for a few years and not go crazy.
Moe, the flighty guy in the next cell over, said, “They found Brewster.”