Sparkle (4 page)

In the last second before he moved in, something thumped hot and deep in Eddie’s heart, and he felt his mother’s presence. It was not a good feeling. It had a nagging quality, a hard reminder of something he could never remember. He had to wait until it faded and the pounding quieted. It didn’t take long, but it happened before every job.

Eddie failed to anticipate it every time.

Once the sensation started, though, Eddie knew how to wait it out, gently but persistently pushing against it with the Shiny Gold jingle until it faded away. It would not hinder his work, and he knew when it had passed. He always took one deep involuntary breath, like a sigh.

“Bye-bye stains.”

Eddie moved through the room slowly, pushing through the vivid sensations as though he were underwater. Three victims. A family.

He turned and caught a glimpse of himself in the huge gilt-framed mirror on the wall.

The reflection looking back at him was six years old. He stared at the image quizzically for a moment. There was a faint, gauzy blue form behind him. It looked like a little girl. He didn’t see a face or any features. The image was too vague and indistinct. But Eddie realized she was crying.

Eddie was especially eager to help her. He could feel that her spirit was confused and not ready to move on. But he had to do everything in the right order. He couldn’t hurry, and he couldn’t skip any steps.

Eddie felt a strong residue of evil in the house, but he wasn’t too worried about that. It was all too familiar. In a way, it was almost as if the same person had committed every crime he’d ever experienced. Even the suicides. Or different individuals blurred into the same shape by the force that infected them. He knew it couldn’t hurt him. He wasn’t capable of feeling fear anyway, and he knew from experience that the evil force, whatever it was, would simply go away, starved, once he properly did his job. Although the evil was often a serious distraction, sometimes almost to the point of being painful, Eddie had learned that the best course was simply to ignore it and focus on the victims.

If there had been any throw rugs or carpets in the house, they had already been removed, along with most of the furniture. All Eddie had to take care of were the walls and floors. He walked into the room very slowly, feeling his way in like a dowser. When he reached the perfect spot, he fell to his knees, sprayed Shiny Gold, and began scrubbing the hardwood floor.

Eddie scrubbed lightly but rapidly. He was perfectly aware that scrubbing wasn’t a great way to clean up blood. Not this much. Blood is a tough substance to clean, sticky and deeply penetrating. He’d eventually have to put in earplugs and fire up the excessively heavy, OSHA-approved, wet-dry steam-powered vacuum. It was noisy and crude. He didn’t care for it at all, but it got part of the job done. The uninteresting part. And nobody was better, even at the boring stuff, than Eddie.

But that would come later. First, Eddie had to get on his knees and scrub. He had to come in contact with the blood so he could get completely in tune with what had happened here. No machine could do what he could do with Shiny Gold.

Looking clean was not the same thing as being clean.

Eddie knew that the irresistible overwhelming impulse that killed—not the killer, but the essential killing force—was never satisfied with its frenzied moment of violence. Whenever it could, it stayed and fed on the victims’ spirits, trapping them even after death in an unending cycle of fear and pain.

That was what could make a place filthy, in a way that it could never, ever be clean again.

Eddie’s chosen spot wasn’t far from the front door, where the father had fallen. He was nearly killed by the first blow, and after that his only thought had been a looping, panicky concern for his little girl. Mercifully, his spirit was gone now, and only that trace remained. Eddie reached out to the echo of fear with his mind. He focused his attention on one spot of the father’s blood: a streaked handprint on the floor. He stroked and scrubbed until it faded away. The man was gone now. The rest of his blood was just lifeless stuff, and Eddie could clean up the bulk of it with the machine. He’d go over it again by hand to get any stubborn or stray drops.

Eddie stood and moved quietly to where the mother had died. Her spirit was mostly gone too, but one spot—in sight of where her daughter had died—fairly screamed at him. The woman had been tough, and she had paid for it with suffering. Eddie could sense her huge guilt over not being able to save her little girl. He chose a small smear and focused all of his attention on it.

It had been made by her hand, and it looked like the outline of a bird.

As he focused, Eddie captured a quiet sense of the happiness this woman had felt for much of her life. She had been an optimistic, trusting, and positive person. Eddie concentrated on that, drew it toward him, and willed it to grow stronger, ignoring the scream until it faded and shrank. He promised to take care of the little girl, sprayed the blot with Shiny Gold, and carefully wiped it clean.

The scream died away. Now Eddie could use the machine here, too. The rest of the mother’s blood was just blood, completely devoid of spirit.

Anybody could clean it up.

The next part would be challenging and delicate. The girl’s spirit was still in the room, with a stronger presence than Eddie usually experienced. She clearly hadn’t expected to die, and she didn’t understand death now. She was frightened, lost and confused. Eddie tenderly knelt down by the splayed chalk outline of her body.

He chose a single tiny bloom next to where her head had come to rest. “Shiny Gold,” he said softly, and sprayed the cleaner.

When Eddie touched the blood, an electric shock ran up his arm. He flinched slightly at the surprising pain, but he didn’t stop.

Mom. Dad. Mom. Dad.

Eddie reached out with his mind to let her know that her mom and dad had gone, and that she should go, too. He had no idea where his victims went, but he was certain that it was a much better place than the scene of their deaths.

“Shiny Gold.” Louder, now. Eddie closed his eyes for a moment and concentrated all his energy on breaking through the girl’s looping, nauseating fear. He caught a flicker of how joyful she had been during her life. He put all his energy into that. He realized something about her and tried to help her understand, too: the horror had really been only the briefest moment in her otherwise peaceful, blessed time on earth. There was nothing to worry about here. Nothing to worry about ever. And something wonderful, Eddie was sure, to go toward.

“Shiny Gold.” The words cut cleanly through the air, deep and resonant, as Eddie’s confidence peaked. He would take care of everything.

Something clicked in his head, and Eddie looked at his watch. Noon. Time for lunch. As if a switch had been thrown, Eddie’s perceptions of the spirits in the room faded, and the Shiny Gold music in his head grew louder. He would help the girl when he was done.

Eddie allowed himself a precise fifteen minutes for lunch. The Shiny Gold music played loudly while he ate. Otherwise, in his altered state, he would not have touched the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, apple, and chocolate milk he always found in his brown bag. Too much information about the victims would capture and hold him. But as the music played comfortingly, the room looked almost normal again, spiritless and quiet enough so he could plainly hear the raindrops hit the big windows that looked out over the bay. Eddie heard them as distinct and separate sounds, confident he could calculate their number if he had a reason.

After he was done eating and had put away his things properly, Eddie stood silently for a moment and let the music fade. He could hear a little girl crying softly, and as he looked toward the place where she had died, he could see her body start to emerge, vague and pale. This was not unusual. He was used to seeing shades of the dead. When they left the room, he knew all was well again.

But what happened next had never happened before. As Eddie concentrated on her, the room shuddered violently and the little girl was suddenly solid, real as life. She sat up, covered with blood.

The shock of it was so great that it didn’t quite register.

Eddie’s first thought was that she was a real mess. Cleaning floors was one thing. Spraying Shiny Gold on a little girl, dead or alive, was clearly out of the question.

Without breathing, his already heightened senses stretched to the limit, Eddie moved to her. He felt as though he were being pushed from behind and had no sensation of his legs moving.

The little girl looked up at him and stopped crying with a suddenness that was jarring.

“My name is Lucy.”

Eddie was used to accepting whatever came his way during a cleaning, but this was off the charts. There was something vaguely, nauseatingly familiar about the girl, something about the situation that triggered an ominous vibration at a deep, hidden frequency.

Eddie rarely made eye contact with anyone for more than a fraction of a second, but his wide hazel-brown eyes were dragged to the little girl’s vivid blues and he could not tear them away.

“Why?” she asked. “Why did this happen?”

The question hit Eddie like a hammer—but the place it hit him was hard as rock. It hurt bad, hurt his head with physical pain, but it didn’t penetrate, didn’t sink in.

With an effort Eddie squeezed his eyes closed against the pain. After a long moment he opened them and risked a glance around. The rest of the room had misted out entirely—but the girl was still solid and real, unmoving. She stared into him, waiting for an answer.

“You never know,” he said finally. It was always hard for Eddie to speak. Hard to form the words and harder to get them out. It was nearly impossible now, but the words came gagging up of their own volition.

What he wanted to say was that Lucy needed to go away, needed to go to the good place, and that he was just there to help her do that. He had only one job to do—only one job he could do. That job was cleaning, not answering questions. He had to clean, and he had only so much time.

“You do know,” she said. “You know way more than you say.”

It was another blow, harder than the first, and Eddie felt himself stagger. He knelt on the floor next to the girl, close enough to touch her.

“I need to know. I need to know why this happened,” she said.

“You never know.” Eddie’s face was as impassive, his words as forced and uninflected as always, but he felt as if he were falling backward into himself, with nothing to grab to stop his plunge.

“You have to find out. You have to tell me why. You have to make the catch.”

Her words began to echo, over and over. Eddie closed his eyes again, his hands pressed hard against his head. “Make the catch?” What did that mean?

“You never know. You should…just let go.” The words were vaguely familiar, but Eddie wasn’t sure where they’d come from.

“I can’t. I’m stuck here. I’m scared. You have to help me go. You have to tell me why. You have to make the catch.”

There was nothing Eddie wanted more than to help her go. But if he didn’t do it in his ordinary—extraordinary—way, he had no idea how to proceed.

“I have something for you,” Lucy said. “Take it. Take it. Take it and promise me.”

Eddie didn’t want it, whatever it was, but he couldn’t help himself. The girl held out a closed, bruised little fist to him, and he saw his outstretched palm go toward her. His rubber glove looked disembodied. He couldn’t feel it. It was like it belonged to someone else.

She put something into his hand and it burned like fire as he closed around it.

He tried to pull his hand away but he couldn’t. It was held by an irresistible force that almost seemed to emanate from inside himself.

“Promise.”

Eddie hated to make promises. You never knew where they might lead, and they never let you go until they were fulfilled. A promise was a bond.

But hadn’t he, in a way, promised to get this place cleaned up no matter what? If this little girl got stuck, he would have failed—for the first time ever. That was simply not acceptable.

“This will help you. You’ll find out. Then you’ll tell me. You’ll tell me the truth. You have to make the catch. Promise.”

“I’m…just a cleaner,” he forced the words to come. His voice was flat, but every nerve in his body was protesting. Why did she want to know about what was over and done? This wasn’t right. “You never know.”

“Take it,” the girl said. “Promise.”

Like a puppet, Eddie felt his lips move and spoke without meaning. “Uh huh,” he said. “Okay.”

Eddie’s hand was suddenly free. He didn’t look at what Lucy had given him. He didn’t want to. He felt himself grabbing his glove at the wrist and pulling it off inside out, so the object was inside. He hoped against hope that what had just happened wasn’t real.

He closed his eyes tightly again and waited for things to shift back to normal. But when he opened them, it was worse.

The little girl was gone. Now Joe was lying in her place, six years old and covered in blood.

Eddie stumbled backward. He looked at his hands. They were the hands of a small child, and they were covered with blood. He stumbled across the room and looked down to where Lucy’s mom had died. His own mother, peaceful and covered with the blood he knew so well, had taken her place.

He desperately didn’t want to look at the dad, but there was no stopping it. He had no control over his actions. There he was: his own father, lying dead.

Eddie fell to the floor and, with a relief as sweet as anything he had ever experienced, felt things go black.

Chapter 5

When Eddie came to, he found himself standing by the door. He was fully suited up, the way he always was when he was finished and it was almost time for Joe to come back.

Eddie looked at his watch. Five minutes to five. Three hundred seconds. Joe was very punctual. Sloppy, but punctual. He turned around slowly. The Shiny Gold music wasn’t playing anymore. The place was clean. There was no sign of the little girl.

Eddie walked through the room, senses straining. She was gone. Her parents were gone. The job was done.