Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (36 page)

I went to get another Twizzler or two, sticking the licorice in the corner of my mouth. There was a chance that Scarrow was wrong about the poltergeist being free of demonic influence.

“Just to cover our butts, let’s find out if we’ve got a demon in the house. Ready to show me some love, asshole?” I asked around the candy, fetching the twine from the grocery bag.

I took the handkerchief-wrapped ring out of my jeans pocket. I forgot all about herbs and smudging and candle magic, and made a twine loop from which to hang the hoop of metal. If I were treading
a pure-white, right-hand path, I’d be doing this without the
influence of Asmodeus, Father of the revenant line and Demon King. However, using darkness to flush out darkness made a whole lot of sense, in
that “summon bigger fish” kind of way. Maybe He owed me a favor; maybe I owed Him one. Either way, I knew I had a sliver of His attention, especially when I was being intentionally, magically
naughty. Harry would cluck and flutter about tainting my soul, but I was becoming increasingly comfortable that some stains, even Clorox and Woolite wouldn't be able to get out.

“This is how I roll, cocksucker,” I told the empty room, hanging the ring out on front of me like I was fishing. “I may look little and soft to you – just a warm, mortal meat sack waiting to be drained. But I’ve got bad friends in dark places who owe me big favors. Like this guy. Does He smell familiar?” I swung the ring around in the corners of the room and back into the closet, inching the door open on its track. No ghost. No poltergeist. No demon. I sniffed the closet air for sulfur, brimstone, burnt sugar, singed molasses, absinthe, all scents that preternatural scientists could reliably associate with the unnatural. All I smelled in there was sneaker stink, mildewed fabric and — familiar cologne? I sniffed at the Habs jacket. No cologne. I lifted my face to the air and the smell got lighter. It wasn’t Harry’s 4711. I lowered my nose to my own shoulder and gave myself a sniff.
Old Spice
. Combat Butler’s scarf.
Duh, Marnie.

I closed the closet and held the twine up so that I could stare
through the ring. I imagined flames roiling along the interior, as
though I could draw them up from Hell to do my bidding. “
Water by water meet fire by fire; Turn you, demon, to face the pyre
. Show yourself, and kneel before the servant of your King.”

If there’s one thing demons don’t like, especially lesser demons,
it’s being reminded of their place. Human beings are free and
eligible for redemption and eternal peace. We live. We thrive. We improve. We become. Demons do not. Demons are stuck. Demons don’t get better with age or practice. Demons cannot fix their state or evolve or free themselves. If there was a demon here and I taunted it... well, I've done dumber shit. Rarely, but definitely dumber.

“I am,” I whispered, my eyes darting around the room to see if it made any difference. “I will transcend. The hands of the Blessed
Mother and Her Mighty Consort openly await my own.”

Nothing.

I glanced at the picture of John Briggs-Adsit and his mother, and tried a new tactic. “Hey Mama-Captain! Your son dicked every whore in Jersey—“

An invisible force thwapped
me in the face with my own Twizzlers, candy whips a ribbed, licorice scourge. For a moment the
air fogged, and I felt a push of cold fingers digging into the right hand side of my throat. I slapped at it and shrank away, holding up my demonic ring as though it could repel whatever was trying to touch me.

“Or maybe he didn’t! Maybe he was a very good boy who got the syph by accident.” The hand holding the twine got very cold, like
I’d stuck it out the window into the winter wind. “I mean, I can’t see how that’s possible. It was probably from all his whore-dicking,
but—“

The blast that followed was blunter, a ghostly backhand
crushing my lips against my teeth. The force of it made me stumble into the closet door and whack my head.

“Knock it off you frosty old twat. Your kid was soft in the head in more ways than one, but don't think you can pull that shit on me just because you're made of smoke and snot.”

“You talking to me?” Schenk leaned out of the bedroom to look down the hall at me.

“No.” I winced, using my left hand to cup my sore face. I took
the ring off of the twine and put it back in my pocket, tucking it under my sweater. “I just got pimp handed by Casper the
Unfriendly Ghost's bitch of a mother, I think.”

“Rough joint, eh?” Schenk said.

 My phone chimed and vibrated in my back pocket, announcing a text, and while I dug it out, I drawled at Schenk, "No, this is great. I wish this was a hotel. I’d stay here every night. The room service is kinda punchy, but at least there's hot and cold running ghosts."

Harry’s text read:
Are you quite all right?

I answered:
Yup.
Because really, when you’ve had your face
whipped by your own Twizzlers, you don’t brag about that shit.

After a pause, he texted:
Lies.
I should be happy to go to your tunnel, if you would but grace us with your presence tomorrow.
I didn’t have to
wonder who “us” was, or where I’d be doing said gracing. I
supposed
that seeing my parents was unavoidable, now that they’d let Harry visit. If I didn’t go, I’d forever hear how
he
came and their own daughter would not. I decided against suggesting a completely
different tunnel he could happily grace again, and was struck with an idea.

I dialed Father Scarrow to warn him that Harry would be joining us at the tunnel, and the invisible force clubbed me on the other side of the head, clipping me in the eye, knocking the phone clear across the room. I chased it across the floor and picked it up.

“Hey, Scarrow. There's a really mean ghost in Barnaby
Nowland’s pig sty,” I whispered into the phone, “what should I do?”

“Play hard to get?” he suggested. “Wait, do you know how?”

“If I wanted cold I've got the ghost for that, Captain Tightpants.”

“Want me to come for a sleepover?”

“Renfield!”

“You can trust me. I'm a man of the cloth. Who’s with you?”

“It’s just me, Schenk, and an elaborate bag of goodies.”

“I meant the ghost. Which ghost is with you? Did you find the skull? The pictures?”

“Skull, pictures, and some of your notes.”

“Well, you’re doing something wrong. Stop tormenting the ghosts.”

“I’m not!”

“I know you better than that, Marnie,” he said, his tone that of a father chiding a wayward daughter.

“You’re supposed to call me Miss Baranuik,” I corrected.

“Did you just call to reap my sympathy, or do you want something?”

I opened my mouth to inform him about Harry and decided against it, because fuck the exorcist and his cheek. He could just
meet my immortal companion without warning on a dark and stormy night in
the middle of nowhere. And then take a flying fuck at a rolling
donut on a frozen gravel driveway.

Like he read my mind, he said, “Whatever you’ve got up your sleeve, I’m ready for you, Marnie. I’m more than ready.” Then he hung up on me.

“Douchecopter,” I exclaimed.
Boy, I’m glad Mr. Merritt isn’t here.

Schenk's head popped back into the doorway. “I'm still running
a tally for the swear jar. And I wouldn't have taken you for a Browncoat. You're more of a
Star Trek
chick, aren't you?”

“You arrange a threesome for me with Captain Picard and Jayne Cobb, and I will love you forever, Longshanks.”

When he disappeared again, I texted Agent de Cabrera for
emergency positivity.
I got socked by a poltergeist. I wanna give up.

Elian texted:
Winston Churchill said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
He ended with a smiley face.

I texted back:
Probably,
Churchill wasn’t being punched in the gob by
eldritch spirits.
Then, to add that pinch of positivity, I added,
I’m
positive his enthusiasm was a sign of mental instability.

There was a thud from somewhere beyond the hall, and a shout of alarm.

“Uh, Marnie?” Schenk’s voice rose to a bellow. “Marnie!”

I heard reverberating female sobs growing to a wail before I got to the bedroom, and changed gears from a cautious, don't-trip-on-the-crap creep to an actual hurry, ignoring the throbbing in my face.
I had no time to register the full horror of the room; there was too much, and it would have to wait. My eyes focused on Schenk,
standing there with his arms out, as though to catch the black film floating around him, weeping pitifully.

Schenk had the necklace hanging from his fingertips. “All I did was touch it.”

“Put it down!” I shouted, looking for someplace he could do so. “Just there, on the bed.”

He dropped the necklace onto the tangle of dirty bed sheets.

The wailing stopped, like a song snatched away by a blizzard’s gale, and the shadowy mist swirled to the floor immediately and disappeared.

We stared down at the necklace. Then we stared at each other.
Then we stared up at Barnaby Nowland’s bed. Schenk had kindly
kept
what he’d discovered about Nowland’s hobbies to himself when he’d joined me in the kitchen to see the skull. I was grateful for that
because it offered me fifteen minutes or so of blissful ignorance that he was
not enjoying. Now, seeing it for the first time, I had to work to keep from bolting from the room; getting backhanded by a ghost had
nothing on what my eyes showed me.

The four-poster bed had been decorated on three sides with skulls, all human, and all undeniably authentic. The closest had teeth
missing and a broken nasal bridge. It looked whiter than the others. I was betting Nowland had tried to bleach it and weakened the bone. His bedspread was black satin; what might have been sexy on another man’s bed was creepy and revolting here, under the watchful gaze of
the desecrated dead. There were snake skins decoupaged across the upper curve of the cast iron headboard like Alice Cooper's worst holiday garland. There were five clusters of bones, perfect crib
mobiles for a serial killer’s baby; long bones, short bones, lumpy bones, bones filed to points, all gathered with craft wire and strung with mini lights. I wondered how many had been taken from animals, and prayed he was just friendly with the local butcher. My biologist’s eye told me not to fool myself, and I had to look away.

“This is why Barnaby had to fuck rubber vaginas,” I told Schenk
very seriously. “And, to be perfectly honest with you, that was
probably the best destination for his cock this side of a wood chipper.”

“I’m afraid that’s not all he fucked,” Schenk said, but didn’t
elaborate. I glanced at the night table. The drawer was open a little. I snuck a peek up at Schenk’s face for clues, and though he wouldn’t meet my eye, he shook his head minutely to advise against getting a
better angle on the contents. The Blue Sense tickled me with
Schenk’s revulsion. For once, I let someone else’s opinion trump my curiosity; I trusted the look on his face.

“This guy’s on the flaming Slip ‘N’ Slide straight to Hell. Your M.E. is gonna need a month and a half-dozen interns to ID all these bones,” I said. I looked at the necklace, and held up my phone to take pictures of it. “Was that the necklace you entered into evidence from Britney’s purse?”

“Looks like it.”

“Thing fucking wanders like Sauron’s ring.”

“The last time I saw it was Thursday when I interrogated Simon Hiscott. You were in my office with the box.”

“And Father Scarrow,” I said. “I believe he lifted it from the
evidence
box.” I related, quickly, the Clumsy Coffee Caper. “Then, when
Barnaby
stole the skull and the photos from Scarrow, he took the necklace too.”

“Is it getting colder in here?” Schenk asked, and I saw his words on the fog of his breath.

It was, and not just a little colder; the temperature had taken a
sudden and alarming drop. My own breath fogged out rapidly, though I was trying not to freak out. “That’s no ordinary necklace,” I
said, “not that I think that comes as any surprise. Just a second.” I forwarded a few pictures to Harry’s phone, and he dialed me immediately.

“What a lovely lachrymatory, darling,” Harry exclaimed.
“Wherever did you find such a specimen?”

My teeth started chattering, and I held my phone gingerly between
shoulder and ear so I could zip up my parka. Then I put him on speakerphone. “A what, now?”

“That is a tear vial, Dearheart. Also known as lacrimosa, or mourning vessels, or widow’s crystals. The one you have there is a
later design,
fashioned during the American Civil War.” He made a sound of
discovery as he pieced two clues together. “Well, might one assume this has something to do with the
carte-de-visite
and the young lad in uniform who visited you the other night?”

A tear vial. “Would these vials generally belong to a woman?”

“Not necessarily, dove. I myself have owned one, though not on a necklace such as the one you have there. I believe it is in storage at home. I can show it to you someday, if you would like to see it. It’s quite lovely.”

"Tears should always be kept in something necklace friendly," I proposed. I leaned over it and peered at the tiny plug in the top. “Whine cork."

I handed Schenk the bundle of old, faded photographs. He began to sift through them quickly. The edges were worn soft by
time, and some
of them had crumbling folds. He took care not to rip them as he scanned again, stopping on one that he showed me, nudging me with his elbow.