Thirteen Days of Midnight (18 page)

I’m sorry,
he says,
I’m sorry (I didn’t think) we don’t have much time (I’m sorry) Luke.

“Sorry for what?”

I never meant for
—
(this this sorry sorry)
the Book of Eight — (the Book is a labyrinth) I never meant for this.

“I can’t — Dad? You’re not making any sense!”

(the sequence shows the path) I’m sorry Luke (my papers my sequence) I’m so sorry I (regret) that this ever (the Book is a labyrinth) I’
m sorry Luke.

“What do I have to do?” I’m shouting now. “What sequence? What do I have to do?”

Dad looks at me, blinking. There’s something in his mouth. He’s choking. I’m trying to get up, but I can’t, I’m stuck in my seat, I feel so heavy —

Dad raises one hand to his face and opens his mouth. He’s choking and spluttering, and I can’t get up to reach him.

I
’m lying on my back in wet grass. I’m wearing jeans, a T-shirt, black sneakers, a raincoat. I can feel that I don’t have my wallet or phone, which is a problem. There’s a beer bottle lying on its side in the grass barely an arm’s length away from my face. I sit up. I’m in the middle of someone’s lawn. The sky is unbroken gray. I’m not cold or warm or even hungover. Something happened last night. I can’t imagine anything good that would end in me lying on a lawn, but I just don’t remember what happened. I know who I am but not where I am or how I got here. The gray of the sky is starting to unsettle me; it’s less the gray of an overcast day and more the gray of a blind person’s eye, lit from no particular point. I have no way of knowing what time it is. The sun is presumably up there, somewhere.

I get up, look at the back of the strange house, and remember that it’s Holiday’s. What was I doing here at Holiday’s house? I know there was a party . . . I keep digging around, trying to remember something else, something that matters, but I can’t quite reach it.

I know I’m in trouble. There’s trouble at home, Mum’s not well, I need to get back and check on her and Ham. It’s not good that I’ve been out all night.

I go into Holiday’s house through the back door and find it empty. The lights are off, the rooms are lit only by the dim sunshine that’s filtering down through the clouds. I decide not to hang around. I need to get back to Mum. The kitchen is deserted and sort of creepy, empty bottles and cans covering every surface. You’d think someone would’ve started to clean up after a party this big. Where are Holiday’s parents?

Not wanting to linger in the quiet gray house, I open the front door and walk out onto the street. The quickest way back to Wormwood Drive from Holiday’s house takes me through the park, and after twenty minutes of walking down Wight Hill, the gray clouds still flawless and toneless above me, I’m walking in through the east gate of Dunbarrow’s park. I cross the main field, and as I crest the shallow hill in the middle of the park, I see some people I recognize sitting in the bandstand. They’re a fair distance from me, down by the river, but I can tell who it is: Kirk, Mark, Alice, and Holiday, plus someone else sitting with his back to me, some boy I don’t know.

I wave at my mates and walk downhill toward them. When I’m a little ways away from the bandstand, the boy sitting with them turns around to look at me.

I stop right where I am.

I — or rather, someone who looks exactly like me — am sitting between Holiday and Kirk. The impostor’s hair is brown and thick, mussed with styling wax. He is wearing my exact same outfit, same jeans, same sneakers, same hooded raincoat, and smiling as he looks at me, as if it’s completely normal that he’s sitting there with my mates. He seems to be humming some kind of tune to himself. He’s wearing a black ring on his right hand, and when I look more closely at the ring, there’s a terrible flash, like red lighting striking my head, and I remember what happened: Dad’s death, the Host, the Book of Eight, the sigil, Elza Moss, the party, the ritual, the cat with a dark gash carved in its stomach, the weird pulsing light that came out of it. The Fury, the flame-eyed demon, the sounds it made as it ate the Vassal whole. I remember everything.

“I don’t understand it,” Holiday’s saying, eyes wet and red-rimmed. Given the state she was in last time I saw her, unconscious on her bed with the Prisoner threatening to cut the life out of her, it’s actually a relief to see her sitting here crying. “Our
cat,
who would —”

“Sick bastards,” Mark says.

“What’s going on?” I ask them.

“It’s not right,” Kirk says. “None of us were even that wasted.”

“We called the police,” Holiday says. “Mum and Dad are with them right now. I just can’t . . . how can I
sleep
in that house again? I’m just glad my brother wasn’t there, but . . . how can I feel safe again? It’s so horrible . . .”

“I know,” Mark says. “Someone drugged us, I’m telling you.”

“Kirk,” I say, “who’s that sitting next to you?”

“It’s just, like, disgusting,” Alice says. “Anything could have happened to us —”

“It’s aliens,” Kirk declares. “I saw this video on the Internet, of Roswell, right —”

“Hello?” I say. “Can you hear me? Did I go mute this morning?”

“— come in a UFO and, like, turn off your brain waves —”

“— and the policeman thought it might be a
gas leak,
as if that explains Bach —”

“— I’ve never felt like that in the morning, not from just wine —”

“— this one guy, they took tissue samples from his arse with this needle —”

“CAN ANYONE HEAR ME? HELLO! GUYS!”

They ignore me. Holiday is glittery-eyed with new tears. The other Luke isn’t saying anything and keeps looking at me with a sly grin.

I realize I’m dead at the same moment you’d usually wake up in a nightmare. It’s the same kind of jolt. Like walking up a staircase in the dark and trying to put your foot on a step at the top that isn’t there. They’ve cut me loose. I’m the ghost now, and my body is being controlled by the Fury.

The Fury, the other me, stands abruptly. Everyone looks at him, like they’re expecting him to make an off-the-cuff speech, but all my body does is point right at me and start to laugh. It’s not happy laughter either. It’s the laugh of someone with a leather mask and a chain saw they’ve been greasing with a loving hand for weeks. It’s very loud, and everyone just stops talking as my body laughs and laughs before standing and striding right up to me, my spirit, whatever I am now, and laughing. It pushes its way right through me and past me and heads up the small hill in the middle of the park.

“What the hell?” asks Kirk.

“Is Luke . . . all right?”

“He seemed OK this morning,” Mark says. “We all woke up in your garden with your parents there, remember? He was as all right as anyone.”

“I dunno, mate,” Kirk says. “Did he, like, actually say he was fine, though?”

“I guess he just mumbled . . . he looked fine.”

“I’ve not heard him say a word all day,” says Holiday.

“That was the creepiest thing, like, ever,” says Alice. “I keep telling you, that guy is bad news. There’s a weird vibe about him. I never liked him. He brought that freak Elza last night? And then she vanished just before everyone passed out? I bet
they
know something about this.”

I give Alice the spectral finger.

“Nah, come on,” says Kirk.

“He’s sweet,” says Holiday. “He’s having a hard time.”

“We should get him to a hospital,” says Mark, uncertain. He and Kirk stand up and follow my body. By way of a definitive experiment, I take a deep breath and then run at a fair pace straight into the two of them. I pass through their bodies like I’m made of mist. Definitely dead, then. Walking through walls, all that jazz.

Or am I dead? The Host can’t kill me, I know that much. Whatever their ritual did, my body doesn’t seem to know it’s dead. It’s still standing at the top of the hill, and Kirk and Mark are approaching at a slow, wary pace. I move closer to them.

“Luke, mate, what’s the matter? Are you all right?”

“Do you need to, like, lie down or something?”

My body turns around. It moves over to Mark and gently, calmly puts one hand on his shoulder. Whispers something to him that I can’t hear. Mark’s face goes white, and when my body moves away from him, he just stands there, staring at nothing.

Kirk’s looking from my body to Mark and back, not sure what to do.

“Luke? Mate? Mark, help me?”

My body has its back turned to them. It raises its arms, as if about to conduct an orchestra.

“Luke, seriously,” Kirk says, “this is not even funny anymore. Stop it.”

Mark is shaking, breathing like he just ran a marathon.

“Please, let’s go . . .” Mark whispers. “Let’s go.”

There’s an explosion of sound and shrieking and a great whooshing noise as every single crow in every single tree in the park takes flight at once, streaming up out of the branches, whirling above us in a screaming black knot. Mark and Kirk cringe. The cloud of birds closes up tight as a fist and then expands, dissolving away into every corner of the sky. A single dead crow drops from the air and lands on the grass by my body’s feet. A few dark feathers fall after it, glossy, like gasoline-coated petals.

“Luke . . .” Kirk says.

My body treats them to a large smile and then, with a relaxed movement, bends at the waist and picks up the dead bird and forces the entire thing, beak and feathers and scabby feet, into its mouth, gulping slightly to fit the whole body in there. It swallows and swallows and the bird is gone. Consumed. It treats me to a grin and a wave and then sets off with a spring in its step, moving north.

To their credit, my mates don’t ask more questions. They sprint away from my body, heading back down to the bandstand, yelling at Holiday and Alice to run.

So about being a ghost, or whatever you want to call it. It’s not easy to describe. I think your mind is so fixated on experiencing things one way that it takes a lot to convince it that things aren’t like that anymore: like me, say, not realizing I was a spirit for all the time I spent walking through Holiday’s house and down to the park. You don’t get cold or hungry, you can’t feel anything very much, but you don’t notice that you can’t feel the ground under your feet or the wind blowing. It takes real conscious effort to realize that you’re not really walking on grass but rather making walking motions. I could imagine ghosts not knowing they were dead for weeks, or even years.

You can fly, or float, if you decide you want to. The whole thing is as tricky to explain as trying to describe what goes through your head when you want to move your hand to scratch at your stomach. You decide it will happen, and then it does. You can move fast, too, much faster than walking or running. Exactly how quickly I don’t know, but it occurs to me that every time the Host seemed to disappear, they might have just moved somewhere faster than my eye could follow.

I consider following my possessed body, but I need to find Mum, and I head for home instead. I float up to Wormwood Drive, but I start to feel weird about it after going down a couple of streets and just jog instead. I don’t know why. I suppose it’s because when I fly, I remind myself that I don’t have a body anymore, and it makes me want to panic, like I’m hanging off a cliff by my fingertips and keep looking to see how far down I would fall. Anything that is normal and helps me forget, like walking, is good.

I see a few dead people on my way through Dunbarrow. There’s a woman with a clearly broken neck sitting on one of the benches in the main square, looking at flowers, and a couple of men wearing fancy suits and frilled shirts, who could’ve stepped out of some old painting. None of them tries to talk to me, which I’m fine with. I make good time, now there’s no need to wait at pedestrian crossings, and I reach my house in about thirty minutes.

The windows are all closed, the door is locked, Mum’s yellow car is still parked on the gravel driveway. Nobody passing by would have any idea there was something wrong, except perhaps for the fact that there are dead animals nailed to the trees on each side of the front gate, and they aren’t clearly visible from the road: They’re close to the ground, partially hidden by branches. I walk closer, frowning. One is a ferret or stoat, the other is a small fox.

I take another step toward the gate, and they shudder into life. Their heads move like stop-motion puppets, swiveling around to glare at me with sunken eyes.

Mustn’t touch,
says the fox. Its voice is tiny, shrill, like a whistle of wind in your ear.

Go away,
says the stoat.

Naughty.

Go away. Go away.

“Or what?”

Mustn’t touch.

I look closely at the driveway. There’s a line of dark blood, spread between the two trees, blocking the entire path. I move my hand near the blood, and it begins to glow with a ghastly light. I retract my hand, and the glow dims.

“I’m guessing I can’t cross this?” I ask the sentries.

Get lost.

“You should wonder why you’re working for the guys that nailed you both to trees.”

I abandon the driveway and walk in a loose circle around my house, pushing my way hazily through bushes and the wall of the neighbors’ shed. Every tree in our garden has something — a crow, a badger, a rabbit, an owl — nailed to it, all chanting,
go away, go away, go away,
in a hushed chorus. Every time I try to cross the boundary of our property, I see the same telltale glow of blood on the ground, feel an electric resistance to my hand or foot as it nears the edge of the barrier. My house has new owners, and they’ve changed the locks. Mum’s on the other side. It’s so frustrating to know she’s in there and not to be able to see her. The last time I saw her was Friday morning, more than a day ago. I hope she’s all right. I hope Elza was right, I hope they’re keeping her alive. About all I have right now is hope.