Dead Things (6 page)

A wound opens in her gut, though I can barely see the knife. It tears and drags through her flesh while she flails against him.

I get up and cross the room to get a better look, fight my instincts to try to save her. I shut down every emotion I can. I have to pay attention. Now’s not the time to give in to grief and anger. I stand where he would be, examine the wounds as they open up. I somehow keep from vomiting. Phantom blood sprays through me leaving cold trails that linger in my chest.

She gives a sudden jerk, bucks against the wall. By this time she’s got no air left and her screams fall silent. She’s gasping like a fish on land. Her attacker throws her against the other wall with more power than anyone normal would have. Leaving a dent in the drywall I hadn’t noticed before.

Lucy jerks again as he grabs her and reams out one of her eyes with a finger. I force myself to watch. Been doing this my whole life and I’ve seen worse. But this is different. There’s nothing I can do but hope the scene drops some clue, gives me some opening to find this fucker and make him pay.

He continues to brutalize her. Breaks her legs, her arms. She’s got no fight left in her, but at this point she was still alive. He tears into her flesh, ripping off chunks of her scalp. Her jaw’s got to be broken in at least three places. He’s making a point of torturing her. Why do that?

He picks her up again, jerking through the air, a blood-soaked Raggedy Ann with the stuffing pulled out. Still alive, but barely. He shoves her against the wall he cleaned afterward. Grabs one of her broken hands, smears it in her blood, slams it against the wall, scrapes it along like a paintbrush. He starts writing.

Was there writing there when the police came? There couldn’t have been. They would never have wiped it off. It would be evidence.

I watch the words appear, watch him punctuate his message by slamming Lucy’s head against the wall, leaving a blotchy, red period. My rage at what he’s done turns into a spike of ice running through me. The room spins, my knees turn to water. This can’t be happening.

It’s a message the killer never intended for the police to find. He wiped it out after writing it, leaving it behind in a way they couldn’t have possibly seen it.

He left the message for the only person who would read it. The only one who could.

WELCOME HOME, ERIC.

He left it for me.

Chapter 6

I spend the next half hour throwing up in the kitchen sink. While I was watching, yeah, I needed to stay focused, not let it get to me. But it’s over now and I break down.

I sit on the floor in the dark, my stomach flipping cartwheels like a gymnast on meth. I tell myself that the tears are just some side effect of all the puking, but I know they’re not. Questions spinning through my head and I can’t focus enough to answer any of them.

Why did he kill her in the first place? What the hell does this have to do with me? Why did he torture her? I wash my face, rinse out my mouth. Pull it together.

The first question’s easy. She was bait. Bet that if he did this I’d come running. Whoever did this wanted me back in town. Wanted to get my attention.

Well, he’s got it. Don’t know why he’s got a hard-on for me, but when I find out who it is I’ll feed him his nutsack and ask him.

I can’t answer the second question. Not yet. But if I find out the why it might lead me to the who. File that one for later. And then there’s the torture question. What did the killer hope to gain out of that? Maybe he enjoyed doing it but I can’t imagine that was simple sadism. There was a reason for it. Had to be.

It comes to me as I’m pulling the Caddy away from the curb outside her house. I drive through an Echo in the street. The hastily scribbled wards I drew on the Caddy in black Sharpie shunt it aside, but not before I see a boy in jeans and a black leather jacket get shot in the back of the head.

Maybe he was in a gang. Maybe he was a bystander. Maybe he was a killer, or a saint, or his mother’s pride and joy. Whatever he was he was just like everyone else in one crucial way. He had a soul.

When you die it’ll go off to, well, to wherever it’s going to go. Heaven, Hell, Elysium, Valhalla. Depends on what you believe, how strongly you believe it, whether you’ve pissed anything off big enough to take an interest.

Sometimes souls stick around a while. You get Haunts and Wanderers. But ghosts don’t just happen. Your Uncle Billy’s not leaving a spook behind just because he stroked out during Thanksgiving dinner.

It takes trauma: physical, emotional. The more violent the death the more likely you’ll leave something behind. Gunshot wounds, car accidents, burn victims. Suicides, broken hearts.

I have no idea why, and haven’t met anyone who’s ever had an answer. But the kind of ghost you get is a different matter. That comes down to will. Haunts don’t have enough will to leave the place they died. Wanderers have it to spare.

Drag the dying out and all that willpower drains away. The soul goes on, but there’s nothing left behind but a big old ball of trauma. All you’re getting is an Echo.

That’s why he tortured her. Lucy’s killer knew what he was doing. He wanted to make sure that’s what he left behind, not only so I’d see the message, but so I wouldn’t be able to ask her any questions.

But there are a lot of dead people I can ask.

—

I pull the Caddy into the motel’s parking lot, next to a beat up Volkswagen bus and a mid-80’s Volvo covered in gang tags. I dig around in the Caddy’s trunk for a minute and grab all the things I’ll need, then check that the wards I put on it haven’t faded.

When I get in the room I lock the door, push all of the furniture in the room as close to the edges as I can. I pour a circle of salt about five feet wide in the center of the room, place red glass grave candles at the cardinal points. Another circle of the last of the powder I used in Texas goes inside. I strip to the waist and touch up some of my tattoos with a black Sharpie. I lay out my straight razor, an antique silver soap dish to catch the blood. I do some stretches. I’ll be sitting cross-legged inside the circle. I’m going to be there for a while and I don’t need a cramp.

Some of this shit’s just pomp and circumstance. Some of it’s a focus for me. Some of it’s running on ancient laws that were laid down before men knew how to talk. I have no idea which is which, so it pays to follow the rules. Finally everything’s ready.

With a single wave and a whispered spell I light the candles, blow away the sunflower seeds and strips of palindrome-inscribed Post-it notes from the room’s threshold. The wards I set up on the room blow away like sand.

I can feel the ghosts taking notice. They can smell me. The ones who haven’t figured out I’m here yet are going to in a minute.

I hate this part. When Odysseus called forth the shade of Tiresias he bled a ram and fed the dead prophet its blood. You ever try to get hold of a goat after midnight in L.A.? Sure, maybe in Hollywood, but I’m not up for trawling through Craigslist ads.

I flip open the straight razor, press the tip of the blade against the scar-marked patch on my forearm, slice fast and deep, send out a mental invitation. Deep red blood hits the silver cup and the room lights up like Christmas. Standing room only in two seconds flat. Sound like a jet engine that only I can hear.

Wanderers from miles around burst into the room, eyeing the cup, licking their lips. A seething mass of stab wounds, suicides, bullet holes. Forty or fifty of them, it seems like. Hard to tell with them all crammed into the room, flowing in and out of each other in a blur of limbs and faces.

They yammer for a taste of the blood, for a lick of life. Please, please, please. Some tiny reminder of what it’s like to be breathing. Pathetic faces stare at me like the orphans in Oliver Twist.

It’s easy to forget how dangerous they are. Seeing them is one thing, but this is different. I’ve thinned out the barrier between worlds. Given half the chance, they’d eat me.

It’s not the blood they want, it’s the life in it. They’ll suck it dry if I let them. The silver dish is a focus to keep their attention. If they noticed it was my blood they’d be on me like a Sunday pack of church folk at a HomeTown Buffet.

The tattoos help divert their attention, and they can’t cross the circle of salt and graveyard dirt I’ve poured onto the carpet unless I let them, but it doesn’t mean some of them won’t try.

“Here’s the deal,” I say. “You want a taste, I want answers.”

The noise increases. Too many voices, too many sounds. They’re all shouting random shit like the audience of a game show, hoping they’ve got what I’m looking for, answering questions that haven’t been asked.

I start by culling the herd. I put my hands together in front of my like I’m praying, focus my will to weed out the dead. First, let’s see who’s been in Venice in the last month. The crowd parts in front of me like flesh under a scalpel as I separate my hands. Still too many. I split and shuffle, rearranging the dead like packs of cards.

I concentrate on the Canals, the day she died, the week before, the week after. Two weeks, two months. The long-gone, the newly dead. Every shuffle refines it down to the ones with enough awareness of the outside world that they can actually watch it.

I’m one of the few living pretty much all of the dead can see. For good or ill I’ve made myself known to them enough times that it’s stuck. Most of them have no clue there’s even another side. I split the group further to match my needs, pulling some back, pushing others away. They don’t like it, but fuck ’em.

Each time I ask my questions. What did they see? Who was there? Describe the place, the people. I scatter a few drops of blood into the crowd as payment whether or not I like the answers. I don’t.

Five hours into it, the parade of dead an incomprehensible blur, I get a hit. Barely more than a kid. Mid-1920’s, maybe. Slicked-back hair, smart suit with cravat, straw boater on his head. Half of one, at least. The rest looks like it went the way of most of his skull. He’s missing the left side of his face. Gunshot, sledgehammer, who knows. He probably doesn’t remember himself.

“A man,” he whispers. “Dressed in rags. He was there that night. I saw him crash through the window. I heard screams.”

I’ve heard a dozen stories so far, most of them vague hints at events that were either too late, too early or never happened. The dead don’t lie very often, but their memory’s for shit. So far none of them knew anything about the window.

“How tall was he?”

He looks me up and down. “Tall, but not overly so. Thinner than you.” He looks around the room. Points at a ghost near the bathroom. “His height.” From what I recall of the gray blur I watched kill Lucy, I’d say he’s two for two.

“Did you see it happen?”

He shakes his head. “Only the end. He wrote something on the wall. He used her body as a brush. Are you Eric?”

Bingo.

I drag a description out of him that narrows it down to about fifty thousand medium build, black haired, men. Maybe Latino, maybe Hawaiian. Dressing like a homeless guy might or might not help, but I’m not going to bet on it. He didn’t have anything with him. No backpack, shopping cart, suitcase. Nothing.

“There was something about him that frightened me,” the ghost says. “He glowed with a white fire. He felt dead, but he wasn’t. And he had black eyes. I’d never seen that before.”

“Black eyes? Like he’d been punched?”

“No. Like he had no eyes. Black pits. Nothing more.”

I can think of a dozen different things that look like men and don’t have eyes. But most of them aren’t urban. And what’s with that white fire?

“How long you been around?”

He shrugs. “Long enough.”

“You got a name?”

“Herbert, I think, but I’m not sure.”

“You’re a lot more put together than most,” I say.

He laughs with a sound like leaves on the wind, points at his head. “That’s one I’ve never heard before.”

The candles are almost burned out, the sun is peeking through the blinds. I could go on another five hours and not get anything else. Time to wrap it up. I’ve been steadily dripping blood into the cup all night. A drop here, a drop there. It adds up after a while. I’m feeling a little woozy. I’m going to need a steak after this.

I squeeze a few more drops from my forearm into the cup, push it out of the circle with the tip of my straight razor. It breaks the salt line, but that’s just a marker for the border. The magic is what’s holding the circle together.

I don’t let any part of me cross it, though. Herbert looks like a decent sort, but I don’t doubt he, or the rest of them, would jump on me the second I crossed that line and drain me dry.

“Thanks for the information, Herbert,” I say. “Here you go.”

He doesn’t look at the blood. He’s got a lot of self-control. Damn few ghosts would wait. “What’s your surname if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Carter.”

“You’re welcome, Mister Carter. I hope you find what you’re looking for.” He reaches down to the cup, dips his fingers into it. The cup clatters as he pulls the life out of the fresh blood. He’s neater than most, too.

He seems to get more solid for a moment, then fades back to transparency. “Good night, Mister Carter,” he says.

“Good night, Herbert. See ya around.” I watch Herbert step through the wall and disappear. The rest of the assembled dead look on, envious.

“As for the rest of you freeloaders,” I say, “beat it.” A few hastily scramble away, but some of the others, more hopeful or more stupid, don’t get the message.

“I said fuck off.” I clap my hands together and they make a sound that ripples through the room like thunder, breaking the ghosts into shards that fade away like smoke. I know more than I did earlier, but not enough to make a damn bit of difference.

Chapter 7

I manage to pull out a few hours of fitful sleep. My dreams are full of bloody writing and broken bones. Lucy asking me over and over why I left and didn’t come back. Blaming me for all of it. Her body shattering like glass.