Thirteen Days of Midnight (22 page)

The final ascent is something like a nightmare. Her boots slip in the mud, and twice Elza nearly falls. Her hair is plastered to her face, obscuring her terrified eyes.

“I can’t . . .” she says.

“You have to! I can’t do this without you! Keep going!”

Her feet slam, slam, slam on the ground.

My body clears the last wall between it and us with an easy vault, slides down the muddy bank, and sluices through the waterlogged bowl in the middle of the field; its hair is domelike and glossy with rain, its face twisted into an expression of furious good cheer. My body’s fingers move in clutches and spasms, like the tendrils of anemones. Ham is ahead of Elza now. He’s more used to running, terrified by the thing he knows isn’t truly me.

Elza is twenty feet from the houses of Bareoak Drive.

“How close . . . is it?” Elza rasps.

Ten feet.

“It’s still way, way behind you!” I lie. “You’re OK! Keep going!”

The ground is flattening out.

My body is closing the distance.

Elza sprints for a gap in the fence, a narrow alleyway. Ham vanishes ahead of her. The rain is coming down hard. I’m moving above her, higher than the fences and houses, like a helicopter camera. My demon-ridden body rushes up the hill toward her. It’s making whimpering noises, a parody of Elza’s own.

“Left!” I yell down to her, “go left! You need to find people!”

I don’t know how strong the Luke-thing is. Maybe it can kill anyone who tries to help her. Elza sprints along the alleyway and ducks to the right, sprawling out sideways on the pavement. She’s fallen. I dive toward her as the demon closes in. My body is running down the alleyway, sneakers heavy with clumps of dark mud, arms flailing, idiot mouth grinning —

Elza isn’t getting up, she’s still on the ground, she —

My body reaches the end of the alleyway, and Elza kicks out as hard as she can, catching its foot with the solid heel of her boot. For an instant my body is caught sprawling in midair, not a single part of it touching the ground as its momentum carries it forward. I hear the solid thump of my body’s head as it encounters the side of a car. The alarm starts to whine and chirp. Elza gets to her feet, gasping so heavily she can’t even talk. My body is lying completely still, sprawled out on the pavement.

“Did you
kill
me? Elza, seriously. Tell me you didn’t just kill me.”

Elza bends down and then rasps and rasps and vomits water onto the concrete.

“Ulmhff —”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Me . . . neither,” she says, wiping her mouth. She carefully kneels and holds my wrist for a few seconds. I see that my body is wearing the sigil on its right hand, which means Elza just solved two problems with one well-aimed boot. “It’s . . . you’re . . . alive. Unconscious. I wasn’t sure if that could happen to someone who was possessed. I just couldn’t go on anymore. That . . . that was it.”

“What do we do now?”

“Get some rope?” Elza shrugs. “Tie him up. Work out what to do with him.”

Ham reenters the scene, padding around from the side of a parked car. He’s all scraggly with mud and water, fur exploding from his face in all directions. He noses at my body and then recoils as if it smells bad. The car alarm continues to wail. Elza starts to pull at my body.

“Heavy?” I ask, not that there’s any way I can help.

“It’s only one street to go. I can manage.”

She settles for looping her arms under its armpits and then drags my body backward along the road, my ruined sneakers dragging along the sidewalk behind us. I’m astonished she can even lift herself off the ground after that chase, but she just does it.

“I’m all hopped up on adrenaline,” she explains. “I just keep wanting to laugh. Even when I was being chased. It felt so funny. Like this bad joke. You know?”

“Not really.”

Halfway down the street, someone comes outside, too late to help us. An old man stands on the stoop of his house, disturbed by the car alarm. He doesn’t say anything, just sniffs and stands and watches as Elza pulls my body along, Ham trotting beside her.

“Too much to drink,” Elza huffs at the man, fake cheer barely disguising her pain.

The man sniffs again and shakes his head. Flame-colored leaves spiral down in his garden.

My body lies faceup on the duvet in Elza’s spare room, lashed with the synthetic rope that her DIY dad has at least three miles of lying around in the garage. The ropes coil over one another like a nest of snakes, fastened by impervious-looking knots. My body’s arms and legs are bound together, and then my bound limbs are attached to the bedposts. I float up by the ceiling, looking down into my own face.

“I really hope this holds,” Elza says. “I’ve never tried to keep a possessed person hostage before; I don’t know how strong they are.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Some kind of exorcism, I suppose.”

“Do we shout that the power of Christ compels it?” I ask.

“If you like. We could try it now.”

“Nah. I’d feel stupid.”

“I bet there’s something about this in the Book. If we could just read it, I know we could come up with something . . .”

“Maybe —”

The room begins to shake. At first it sounds like a clothes dryer is turned on in the room below, but quickly the noise reverberates and intensifies and the room begins to physically quake, furniture rattling.

Ham howls in the kitchen. The dusty bookshelves jostle and mutter, paperbacks plummeting to the ground. The duvet convulses, the bedside lamp topples over, casting huge wild shadows. My body begins to scream and thrash. It strains at the ropes like an animal and begins to shriek. A choir of horrible voices comes from its throat, wailing without words.

Black smoke streams from my body’s mouth and nose. Every argument you’ve ever heard, the voice of every drunken prick at closing time, is bellowing at thunderstorm volume. The noise is unbearable. Elza claps her hands over her ears, brow creased with pain. The smoke congeals and the voice grows louder, ranting and screaming. The Fury looms over the bed, eyes like furnace doors, a volcanic rift of a mouth.

“Get out of here!” Elza yells. “Get out of my house! Go!”

The thing grows larger. The room is darkening, like the demon is drawing all the light into itself. It must be eight feet tall, nine feet, as broad as the bed. There’s a flash of ravenous orange flame, and the demon’s whip is swinging from its hand. Faster than a scorpion’s tail, it flicks its wrist backward and sends the lash coiling toward Elza’s body.

I don’t have time to think about what I’m doing. I dart my ghost body in between the demon and Elza, placing myself in the whip’s path. I brace myself for it to cut me in half, like it did the Vassal, but instead, the flames coil around me and stick there. There’s no pain, the lash doesn’t sear into my spirit flesh. I’m stuck tight. The Fury roars even louder and tugs at the whip, trying to free it.

“It can’t hurt me!” I yell. “My Host can’t harm me! Use the stone!”

Elza lunges forward, dodging around the swinging end of the fire whip, and presses her wyrdstone into the demon’s face. There’s a searing flash, like a tiny star, and the demon explodes away from the stone, bursting into a bloom of black smoke, which spirals in the air, seeming panicked, and then races for the window and boils its way out through a crack in the frame.

“Elza!”

“That went better than expected,” she says, looking down at her right palm. I see the wyrdstone in her hand has dissolved into gray dust.

“What happened to your stone?”

“Banishing a spirit like that was too much for it. But that thing, the Fury, it’s gone. It can’t come back in here again. And we’ve got your body back.”

I take a good look at my body. My hair is lank and wet, plastered to my forehead. There’s mud all over my legs and feet and mud on the bed as well. It feels strange to suddenly notice that we’ve made a mess of the room. It’s a really small concern. When you’re trying to survive, you forget that you’re not supposed to track mud into people’s houses. My body’s face looks bruised and ill, and there’s a nasty bump forming where my forehead hit the side of a car.

“Why did it leave my body in the first place?” I’m wondering.

“Easiest way to free itself,” Elza replies.

I float above my body, which is still tied to the bed. Blood is coming from the corner of my mouth. I’ve been away from it for only a day, but I’ve gotten used to floating, being invisible, walking through walls.

My face grows closer and closer, enormous, pale, streaked with dirt. I’m not exactly clear on how this is going to work. When I went into Ham’s body, I just moved into his skin like passing through a curtain, but entering people might be different. I move closer to my own face. I fall into my eye.

I am at the center of the earth.

Inside the center of the earth I’m sitting in the backseat of a car the same car we had when I was six and my dad’s in the driver’s seat I know it’s him by the white suit and his long hair hanging over the collar and we’re driving through a forest of dark trees with endless branches that fork and split and I can’t see the tops of any trees they go too high for me to see. We’re driving and driving and we keep turning at these forks in the road lurching left or right and on the road signs I see numerals scrawled in Dad’s handwriting and each time we turn left the signs are reversed and I start to feel like there’s some pattern I can’t quite grasp. I’m listening to Dad’s voice echoing saying
(that Book is not a product of the conscious mind)
and the tree trunks scroll past us and the trees have pale leaves and I see that they’re pages yes thin yellow pages an infinite forest of pages and there’s something else in the car with us something dark and hunched and bloody sat in the backseat next to me but I can’t turn my head to look at it I’m too scared but I can hear it breathing and we keep driving and
(the sequence reveals the path)
and I’m saying Dad I don’t understand and he’s gesturing with one heavy-ringed hand saying
(we don’t have time for this)
and all the while I’m trying to pretend I can’t hear the other passenger breathing beside me I’m looking out of the window because if either of us shows that we know there’s a third person in the car something terrible will happen. I just know it.
(My sequence shows the path)
Dad’s saying and pointing at the road signs with their numerals
(do you understand)
and as he speaks I can hear the thing next to me moving feel it leaning my way hear its whisper saying
don’t you know me?
and Dad can’t hear it he doesn’t seem to realize it’s there and I’m frozen here I can’t turn around
(the Book is yours now) (show you are the master)
and the forest is endless tall forking trees it’s all around we’ll never get out and I’m saying should I know you and the thing beside me whispers
you’d better know me, you ought to know me, because I’
m your brother.

“Luke!”

“. . .”

“Are you OK?”

Elza and the demon really did some work on me. Every bit of me hurts. My body feels like a writhing sack of aches, each one starved and rabid, desperately clawing at its competitor aches in a bid to become the alpha ache and reign supreme. Even my teeth are throbbing. Glad as I am to have my body back, there are things I didn’t miss.

Ham rushes into the room and thrusts a soothing nose into my ear. I manage a smile.

“You were convulsing,” Elza says. “I got worried.”

“I was dreaming,” I say.

“You’ve only been back in your body about five minutes. What was the dream?”

“Uh . . . it was horrible. But it was important. I wish I could remember. . . . My dad . . .”

“Your dad was in your dream?”

“Yeah . . . there was someone else as well ”

The dream keeps slipping out of my grasp, like dreams do. Dad was trying to tell me something. Whether it was actually him . . . I wonder what happened to him once he died. Why haven’t I seen his ghost hanging around anyway? Did he already cross over? Is the Host keeping him away somehow?

I decide to focus on the concrete facts. It’s the twenty-sixth. Five days until Halloween. We’ve got the Book of Eight. The sigil is back on my finger. We’ve got a chance. Ham grumbles and sets himself down in the doorway of the bedroom.

“OK,” Elza says, sitting on the bed. Her knee rests against mine. “Good news.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“The good news is I’m making chicken fingers and baked beans for supper.”

“That’s excellent news.”

“Please don’t judge me. The freezer was, like, Old Mother Hubbard’s freezer.”

“You’ve never had my cooking, Elza. I don’t judge.”

“So,” she says. She’s still wearing her raincoat. She reaches into the inside pocket, pulls out the Book of Eight, and places it in front of me, on the bedsheets. “Body returned to rightful owner. We’ve made some progress, and we’re actually back at square one now. We’ve got the Book and the sigil and your dad’s weird numerology code. And no idea how to put them all together.”

I run my left thumb over the cold eight-sided stone set into my sigil. I remember my dad’s hands on the steering wheel. Tall forking trees all around us. Something stirring beside me in the other seat. I look at the Book’s green cover, the eight-pointed star. I feel like the dream was more than just a dream.
(That Book is not a product of the conscious mind.)
Where am I getting this from? Is that what Dad told me?

“What we need to know is inside the Book,” I say. “I’ve seen the Shepherd using it. The Host wouldn’t take it if it weren’t important. We know it’s not all blank. I’ve seen things written inside it.” I’ve stood up, and I’m pacing as I think, body aching.

“Right,” Elza says. She looks exhausted, wrung out. She looks as bad as I feel. The sharpness I saw in her when we first talked about the Host, in the graveyard, has dulled. We need to finish this soon, or neither of us will have the energy to go on.

“The Shepherd . . . the first time I spoke to him, he said the Book of Eight was infinite. He said even experienced necromancers would find pages they’d never seen before.”