October Girls: Crystal & Bone (6 page)

She heard the moist
slorp
of a footstep in the grass, and she ducked behind a tombstone.

Not now. Not when I’m so close to escaping.

Out of nowhere, Tim squatted beside her. “Hi, Bonnie.”

“Tim? What are you doing out here?”

“You obviously can’t watch out for yourself.”

“You creep. Are you stalking me?”

“Didn’t you know who that was?”

“I ask the questions around here.”

“Which is why you never get the right answers.” Tim pushed his glasses up his nose.

“Okay, I’ve been playing nice because you were sweet once. Plus you had that whole pity thing going for you. But now it’s getting way past old.”

“That greaseball you made googly eyes with? None other than Royce Dean.
The
Royce Dean.”

“Like that’s supposed to mean something?”

“James Dean’s twin brother. The movie star.”

“James Dean didn’t have a brother.”

“Not one who was born, anyway. But this is Darkmeet.”

“Oh.” Bone looked around the graveyard, wondering what the unborn siblings of a tragic Hollywood heartthrob had to do with her. James Dean was the Johnny Depp of his era, so cool that kids today—the living ones—still watched his movies.

“Royce was supposed to have been a twin,” Tim said. “He’s got a giant chip on his shoulder because he felt he should have had all the fame, the chicks, the money, the fatal car crash, the whole bit. Film makes you immortal, dying young makes you immortal, and dying famous makes you immortal, and Royce is not only not immortal, he hasn’t even been mortal yet.”

“That makes sense. Not. But what does this have to do with me? It’s not like I’m actually going to date him.”

“But you said—”

“You’re so sixth-grade sometimes.”

“Been dead longer than you have.”

“Good for you. You can stay dead, for all I care. I’m going back.”

She headed for the mausoleum, but Tim grabbed her arm. His fingers were squishy and cool, or maybe that was her arm.

“The tough loner who doesn’t play by the rules,” he said. “We get it already. But don’t you think the pieces fit together a little too neatly?”

“Hey, I’m just in it for
numero uno
. The one thing I’ve learned about eternal life is that it’s every girl for herself. At least on Earth you could count on friends. Here, you got nothing.”

She tore free and flitted across the graveyard, inches above the cellophane grass.

“This isn’t just about you,” Tim said, floating beside her. “It’s good versus evil.”

“Stuff it, twerp,” she said, raising her voice so that it carried across the stillness of the cemetery.

“Good versus evil. Get it?”

“Kahlil Gibran wrote that there is no evil, only hunger and thirst.”

“Kahlil Gibran never met Royce Dean, either.”

She stopped at the mausoleum gate, Tim settling beside her. The moon filled Tim’s eyes, washing out some of their bleak hollowness. With his haunted aspect diminished, he was actually kind of cute. Like a puppy that you didn’t mind petting but still didn’t want to follow you home.

“Okay,” she said. “What’s the big deal?”

“Doesn’t it all seem a little too coincidental? The Judge gives you a slap on the wrist. Nobody’s guarding the Orifice on this side when you want to cross over. Royce could have any girl in Darkmeet, maybe Marilyn Monroe or Princess Grace, yet he goes for you.”

“I’m not exactly chopped liver.”

Though I
looked
like it when that UPS truck got done with me.

“Something’s going on, and you’re in the middle of it,” Tim said.

“What happens in Darkmeet isn’t my problem,” she said. “This isn’t my world. I don’t belong here with losers like you.”

“Just killing time, right?”

“I’m not done over there. Clothes and candy and guys and entertainment and all the new versions of the iPad. The way I look at it, I got cheated out of a good 60 years of fun and Facebook.”

“Nobody gets cheated. None of us were ever promised anything.”

“You’re such a downer, Tim.”

“You can’t go.”

“And you can’t stop me.”

Bone drifted to the mausoleum, the sweet aroma of grass and flowers giving way to the musty funk of moist masonry. Vaults lined the walls, the marble doors held by giant brass screws. They bore etched names, but it was too dark to make them out. Bone wondered if any Tweeners would come sliding out of their holes before she slipped through the Orifice and back to Earth.

“Bonnie,” came a voice, too deep to be Tim’s.

Nobody else in Darkmeet called her “Bonnie” except the officials. Which meant—

“Um, I’m fresh out of Milk Duds,” she said. It was a lie but not her first, and it was only a minor sin.

The Judge stepped out of the shadows of the mausoleum, his robe seeming to merge with the darkness of night. “I heard a rumor you were prepared to trespass.”

Tim, you little twerp. Ratting me out like that.

“Nah,” she said. “Just going for a stroll to get a little fresh air.”

“Your lungs no longer function.”

Busted
. “Old habits die hard.”

“You walked in midnight graveyards back on Earth?”

“Hey, I was a quirky chick.” She glanced behind her but Tim was long gone, probably safely back in his casket, reading comic books.

The Judge spread his arms, holding out the folds of his robe as if he were a bat about to take flight. He must have ditched his shades. His red eyes glowed in the vacant hole under his hood and cold mist rose as he spoke.

“’Was’ is the operative word,” he said. “You keep forgetting you belong to us now.”

She looked up at the surrounding treetops, where small creatures fluttered and squeaked. “So, I guess a few Milk Duds bribed you for the past, but didn’t pay it forward?”

The eyes glowed a deeper shade of red, and tiny yellow sparks glinted in them. Bone thought she smelled sulfur, or maybe the Milk Duds hadn’t agreed with his digestion. Tim had babbled something about good and evil. She didn’t know which side anyone was on, including herself.

Why couldn’t Darkmeet do the whole harps-and-haloes thing and give the bad guys pointy tails and pitchforks?

“You’ve violated several provisions of your probation,” the Judge said, flapping his concealed arms and stirring a graveyard wind that whispered through the underbrush and stirred the musty air in the mausoleum.

She was mulling another snappy comeback when she noticed movement on the top of the mausoleum. A Poot Owl could have spied her and then summoned the Judge, though she hadn’t heard the tell-tale screech.

It wasn’t a Poot Owl. Tim was crouched on the edge of the roof, his deathly white face lit by the moon and showing his cracked grin. He gave a little wave.

What are you up to, Twerpness?

“The Graveyard of Second Chances is sacred ground,” the Judge droned. “And surely you understand the need for balance. One soul in the wrong place tips the scales.”

“Drop the Darth Vader bit.” She was buying time, mulling her options: bluff her way past the Judge, flee for the woods, or back the Hooded One up enough until she could figure out what Tim had in mind.

She glanced up at Cancer Boy. He bobbed his head and beckoned her forward, and as much as she hated to rely on him, she was curious about his game.

“The dead are restless,” the Judge said in his booming voice, his robe shaking as if he were rubbing his hands—or claws—together. “If one goes back, then soon they all want to go. Life and death lose their meanings.”

“Like that’s a bad thing? I suspect it’s you control freaks that get all uptight over the details. The rest of us just want to party.”

“Rules are rules.”

“Okay, you win,” Bone said. “But let me offer a plea bargain.”

“We’ve done that already. You have nothing to offer. You’re guilty.”

“I can prove I’m on the winning team,” she said. “Bop over to Earth, do a few good deeds, set things right. Take care of unfinished business.

Like I could ever erase that thing I almost did to Crystal
.

“It’s never that simple,” the Judge said. “There’s black and white, even in Darkmeet, but it’s mostly shades of gray.”

He swept one rodent-like paw out to indicate the grim graveyard, the bleak sky, and the suffocating mist. He had a point.

“Okay, then,” she said. “Here’s the deal. I’ll show you where I pass through and you let me go in peace.”

“We are curious about your passage. But we need more than information.”

“I can score you some Goobers and Raisinettes, and maybe some sour gummy worms.”

His deep voice squeaked a little. “Ooh. The kind sprinkled with sugar?” Recovering, he went somber again. “I mean, we have interest in what’s happening on Earth, because it helps us prepare for souls yet to arrive.”

Tim had crouched back into the concealment of night again, and Bone resisted the temptation to float up and see what was going on.

She pointed into the mausoleum. “There’s a loose brick in the back. You remove it and then go into a tunnel, and before you know it, pop goes the weasel.”

The Judge turned and peered through the steel bars of the mausoleum gate. “How do you get through the bars?”

“Move closer and I’ll show you.”

Bone risked a glance up and moved forward, the Judge close behind. The gate had always been unlocked before, and she realized this must be some kind of test.

So much for trust
.

She grasped the bars and shook the gate, trying to remember some of the spells Crystal had practiced. Nothing. She’d always been lousy at tests. “
Mumbo jumbo, I’m a dumbo
.”

The Judge fumbled in his robe and pulled out a key. He held it aloft and it was gilded by moonlight. “Looking for this?”

Something scraped above, the scruff of movement across stone. “Look out below,” Tim shouted, causing the Judge to glance up.

A black foggy liquid oozed down from above. Bone skittered away as the gunk poured down on the Judge’s head. He wriggled his hood in an attempt to flee, but the hem of his robe was caught in the marble stonework. He squeaked and groaned.

A couple of drops of the tar bounced onto Bone’s cheeks, and she flinched in expectation of a good scorching. Instead, the gooey substance was cold and hardened instantly against her dead flesh.

Within moments, the Judge was encased in the tar, frozen like a statue, leaving his outstretched hand holding the key. Bone plucked it away and stuck it in the mausoleum gate. She was just swinging the squeaky gate open when Tim appeared by her side, wearing his skeletal grin.

“What do you think?” He raised his puny arms and flexed flaccid biceps.

“Not bad. What was that stuff?”

“A bucket of instant karma residue,” he said. “The groundskeeper was mopping up around John Lennon’s grave and just left it lying around out back.”

“Christ, don’t they know kids hang around graveyards? What are they trying to do, poison them with toxic waste?”

“Well, you got your key.”

“Yeah.” She looked down at it, then at Tim’s wan, wistful face. “Appreciate the help.”

“Sure. Anytime.”

“About this Royce thing—”

He waved his hand. “Never mind.”

“I got to run. I’ll be late for the party.”

“Yeah.” He lifted his chin as if listening for Poot Owl wings in the night sky. His eyes glistened under the moon, and she figured it was probably the wind, not tears.

Probably.

She ducked into the shadows of the mausoleum and vanished before he had a chance to say anything else.

D
empsey Van Heusen rubbed his hands together. The gesture was melodramatic, the gimmick of a B-movie mad scientist about to open Pandora’s Box, but it was satisfying nonetheless. And a measure of showmanship was expected by his little coven, though they were a little distracted by the smoke of wolfsbane and datura. The burning herbs were just for show, along with the blood-red candles scattered around the room, and he’d weakened their resistance with a Dempsey Van Heusen movie marathon.

Not that they’d offered much resistance. In classic brainwashing technique, the manipulator deprived his subjects of sleep, isolated them from contact with the outside world, and engaged in a long campaign of systematic depersonalization.

But brainwashing required brains, and Dempsey had chosen followers who had precious little gray matter.

“When do we get to the black candles?” Lacey Summerhill said, giving her 16-year-old pout. She was a spoiled brat, but Dempsey needed her, since her father was county commissioner. If religion failed, he could always turn to politics.

“Black candles are for midnight mass,” Dempsey said. “And it’s nine in the evening.”

“Boring,” she said. “Do the dark arts have to have so many lame rules?”

Dempsey did the thing with his eyebrows where he made them arch into arrow tips. “The coven must be of one mind,” he said. “And that takes discipline. Without discipline, there are no disciples.”

“I thought we were acolytes,” said Willard. He was sipping Dr. Pepper from a bottle, using a straw. His acne and freckles gave him the aspect of a strawberry. Willard was a social-media genius, working Parson’s Ford’s teenagers and spreading the good word about Dempsey’s movies. It was his Facebook and Twitter efforts that had brought Dempsey’s little inner circle together.

“We’re all servants, no matter the name,” Dempsey said. “This is about serving the vision.”

“The television?” Snake said, all red-eyed. Dempsey suspected the teen was a stoner, but he was in no position to judge. Right now, he needed warm bodies, grass-headed or not.

He thumbed the remote so the sound died on the movie. On the flatscreen, a monster prop constructed of trash bags and dryer hose was wallowing over the scantily clad body of a screaming woman. The creature suffered from a lack of passion, and the actress was forced to fling the dryer-hose tentacles about so they would appear animated.

Eventually she floundered and flopped until she’d succeeded in dragging the creature into the nearby lake, and then the scene cut to a sinking trash bag emitting bubbles.