We Will All Go Down Together (5 page)

I’m sorry, were you saving that crushed-flat mummified cat for later? Because—we really did have to get rid of it, even though it didn’t smell anymore. Not like the year-old litter-tray, weirdly enough. . . .

Then again, maybe she wouldn’t even notice. She had other things on her mind, after all.

Oh, but:
Let’s not talk about
me
, Mister Horse-Kicker—

(
stop
thinking
about her, idiot
)

(
stop acting like she can’t HEAR you, when you do
)

That scratch at the mind’s eye again, that cornea-scarring
rub
. Though he didn’t want to look her way long enough to confirm this, he suspected she might actually be smiling.

“What do you know about spirit guides?” she asked him, out loud.

Okay, technical terms: Sy could do that. “Not much. Uh—des Esseintes had one, called it ‘Semblance.’” He used the French pronunciation. “‘My other self.’”

“Yes, and that’s telling, isn’t it. Non-Spiritualists always think these guides are things from the outside that attach themselves to the medium, parasite-style: surviving intelligences, Seekers From Beyond, demons. And I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, but . . . there’s other stuff. Things you can stumble into doing by accident, ’specially if you’re not well-trained.”

“Which she wasn’t?”

“Early days, so—not really, no. Nobody was. Most people just heard about the Fox Sisters, thought ‘hey, that sounds cool,’ and made it up as they went along.” She held one of the Polaroids up to the light, squinting again. “Don’t suppose Abbott told you the rest of the story, though, about this thing.”

“Lardner and Honeycutt?”
‘
Crime
scene,’ riiight.
He shook his head, embarrassed.

“Mmm.” Those vague eyes switched back to him, suddenly shrewd. “How old are you, again? Well, okay: maybe you weren’t paying attention to local news; I’m sure Abbott keeps you busy. Or maybe Abbott just didn’t tell you because he likes to play it that way—to make only one person the control in any given situation.” She paused, took yet another picture, the Polaroid’s wheeze a short, sharp sigh. “But then again, you probably knew that already. You don’t seem stupid.”

“. . . thanks.”

“So, anyhow. Melinda Lardner and Guy Honeycutt were married, blended family. She had a daughter from a previous marriage, Loewen, people called her Lo. Fourteen when they bought the Thanatoscopeon. Guy was in antiques, brokered sales under the counter, so I think the idea was to pony up and pass it on, but they got stiffed and it went in the garage, along with a bunch of other ‘sure sell’ items. Melinda and Guy weren’t getting along too well by that point—she was back in school doing law, plus one of her professors. Also, Guy liked coke. Lo spent a lot of time looking for somewhere quiet, and her primary hiding-place was—” She nodded box-wards. “—that.”

“I wouldn’t think it’d be too—”

“Oh, it’s uncomfortable as all hell, but it does lock from the inside. And it’s dark. And there’s other benefits too, if you’re in serious need of a friend.”

“. . . Kate-Mary’s guide?”

“I think that’s what it
thinks
it is, yes.”

Ghost stories told without any visible proof in a series of almost-empty rooms; that was all his career boiled down to, really. The vocabulary alone was ridiculous. But . . . looking at her, then back at the cabinet’s dark expanse, both their reflections crawling deformed and luminous-numinous across it, like orbs. . . .

“Okay,” he said, carefully. “So—what is it really?”

The hint of a smile became something more, almost gleeful. “So glad you asked.”

Glenda Fisk had told her it was something all mediums did, and she had no reason to doubt that.
A mnemonic device, Miss Devize, that’s all—just far more palpable. You take a splinter of your own core, your innate substance, and split it off, the same way you use your own detritus to render the spirit flesh; deeper, of course, though. And thus, far more lasting.

“You use it to get over that conceptual hump,” Devize said, flatly. “To convince yourself you actually can do what you’re already afraid you can. Glenda helped me with mine, that first night in the Folly—budded it off me like an amoeba, whole and entire. It didn’t even hurt, and it was. . . .”

Amazing. A miracle, pitch-black and shiny as La Brea pit-tar.

“So it’s a doppelgänger?” Sy asked.

She shook her head. “More like a fetch, I guess. What the witch sends out to do her will? A tool, perfect for companionship, for utility; something that loves you and wants what
you
want, because that’s all it’s ever known. People see it here and there, think it’s you, and in a way—it sort of is. Thinks it is, like I said.”

“But . . . it’s not.”

“Not even close.”

She looked back down, that same weird smile playing around her lips, stretching them even wider, ’til a narrow rim of teeth began to show. And slowly, so slowly he barely knew when it had happened, Sy realized that crawly feeling at the back of his neck was less the standard
oh-crap-she’s-listening-in
than a genuine coolish dew, the sweat-sting of inescapable understanding:
Something has changed, and not for the better. But—

—is she . . . unlikely as it seems, could she really be. . . .

(happy
about all this?
)

(whatever
all this
was)

“So yeah,” Devize went on, as though neither of them had noticed, “Glenda and I had a whole lot of fun with our respective shadow-selves for a day or two, doing the things skinny little ghost-whisperer girls do. But then . . . the house kicked in, and it ate them alive, like everything else. Everybody. And afterwards, I just never bothered doing it again.”

Never had to, really. No shortage of real ghosts vying for the position.

“We only have one trick, when you boil it all down,” she said, as if to herself. “It’s a doozy, though: just open up and invite things in, and half the time, we don’t even ask for names, beforehand. Which does tend to make it pretty hard to get them out again, afterwards. . . .”

An image growing at the corner of his eye—tumoresque, neoplastic—before wiping itself away, an unset photo-image: Carra Devize done inside-out and backwards, a reflection in black marble, grey-skinned with long black hair and cold white eyes. Blank eyes, their sclerae static-touched, whose flickery pupils shone whiter than teeth.

Sy made a painful noise at this fresh intrusion, an aural wince, and was surprised—yet again—when Devize grimaced back, as though in sympathy. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m projecting, aren’t I?”

“. . . maybe a little.”

“Okay, well. Let’s move things on a bit.”

She stepped forward, past him, and snapped the cabinet open.

Inside, as out, Kate-Mary des Esseintes’ Thanatoscopeon was dark indeed; darker by far than the single light-source merited, a concentrated snarl of nothing much cooked to sludge from years on years of waiting, followed by the briefest possible burst of hunger slaked, loneliness assuaged. Devize—Carra—thrust both hands inside, up to the bandaged wrists, and didn’t even flinch as words the colour of haematomas came crawling up her arms, her cleavage and neck, to bruise her very face like slaps: NO, NOT THIS NOT FOR YOU, NEVER
YOU
, KEEP OUT KEEP OUT
KEEP OUT
.

“Poor Lo Lardner,” she said, ignoring the unseen hecklers doodling on her flesh, each scratch a rotten fruit chucked straight from the choir invisible’s peanut gallery. “Melinda’d been down the anorexia path herself, so she thought she knew what was best; Guy went along to get along. Why not? Didn’t cost him anything but money. And the Clinic, they were all good people, but—how could they possibly know the truth? That half her body-weight,
more
than half, kept being sucked out every night, siphoned off to make fake flesh for something she didn’t know enough to say ‘no’ to?”

A full red hand-print, palm plus five fingers, rocked her jaw to the left, then the right. But Carra kept on talking.

“Oh, it told her it loved her, and she liked
that
, because nobody else did it much, anymore . . . told her it would punish her parents for their neglect, that all she had to do was break out and run home, and they’d always be together. And hell, maybe it wasn’t even a lie, because that’s where the cops found her, sure enough: inside this thing, all curled up with her arms ’round herself like she was giving herself a hug, shrunk down to the size of an Inca mummy. All
desiccated
.”

The slaps looked more like punches now, and Sy felt himself jolt with each impact, braced to—what? Jump to her aid, throw a few jabs himself? Like he’d really be able to
do
anything to—whatever-it-was—

(
You could
try
, goddamnit, considering. At the very
least
.
)

But in the same instant the thought formed, Carra was already glancing back, one blackening eye crinkled, odd half-smile a genuine grin. “Oh, Sy,” she said, her tinny headcold voice gone suddenly lush with deep, true warmth. “That’s really nice.”

Not necessary, though.

“And yes, I
am
happy, for once. Because usually I can’t do a damn thing but say ‘yup, haunted!’ no matter
how
much power I supposedly have—how high I measure on Abbott’s stupid scales. But this . . . I
can
do something about this.
This
, I can handle.”

(
That’s why it’s afraid of me.
)

The box was vibrating now, base thrumming on the locker’s concrete floor, kicking spume. Its scrim ruffled back and forth like a rattler’s tail, doors straining to slam, an eight-foot, velvet-lined mahogany pitcher plant. Yet—

“No,” she told it, “of course you don’t want someone like
me
, somebody who actually knows what they’re doing. But that’s okay.” Voice dropping further, breathy-rough, almost verging into a growl, to add: “I don’t much want
you
, either.”

Later, examining her dropped fan of Polaroids—slick and stinking, their negative-on-positive images degrading even as he watched, cured in a strange mixture of developing agent and ectoplasm—Sy would finally see what she probably saw, at that moment: what she’d been looking at all along, with it very much looking back. A face like a mask, whose underside could be glimpsed through the empty sockets of its eyes, peering from beneath the cabinet’s glossy skin like some albino goldfish studying passersby through its aquarium walls. In the final one, taken from a particularly vertiginous angle, Carra had managed to catch her own reflection—the thing, spore or seed of Kate-Mary’s experiment, with its head fake-lovingly bent to hers, mask-wings twined in her mass of colourless hair, trying desperately to whisper in her ear.

To convince her, perhaps:
I am not so bad, after all; mistakes were made, but even so, I deserve to exist, surely. I could change. Lost and lonely, left behind—how can I be blamed? I am . . . just like you.

“Oh, Semblance,” she told it, shaking her head. “But there’s nothing
for
you here, is there? Not now they’re both dead. And you—”

—you need to be gone.

Both hands in the box, sunk deep and shaking, some vile current coursing through her like a
grand mal
seizure; Sy saw Carra fold back and stepped in to catch her, instinctively. Braced himself against any sort of spillage, inadvertent or otherwise. But all he felt was bony flesh muffled under multiple layers, the sadly light weight of a woman whose substance was gnawed at by every passing phantom, someone probably too distracted to eat much even under normal circumstances, unless reminded. One good thing about the Clarke, he supposed; they had an investment in keeping residents alive, even if it meant the occasional bout of tubal feedings.
Skinny little girls with eating disorders, and the invisible friends who love them. . . .

“What can I do?” he asked out loud, no longer worrying about sounding—let alone feeling—stupid. Only to watch Carra shudder on, head jerking slightly, eyes ticcing up-turned beneath their lids in a REM-state frenzy until more words came crawling up past her cuffs: Different font this time, different script. An almost Palmer-method scrawl, thankfully easy to read, that answered—

NOTHING THANK YOU SORRY JUST LET IT PASS.

THANKS FOR ASKING.

A gleam gilding the letters now, all up and down—sticky-slimy, a perspirant flood, gelid as Vaseline. Something sucked in hard then expelled through the pores, broken down to its original components: scrubbed, purified, diffused. Rendered harmless.

His arms starting to go numb, he laid her down by degrees, with as much care as he could. “I, that guy Paul . . . I mean, they’re expecting you back by now, right? Curfew. I should probably call—”

DONT NO POINT SERIOUSLY IM FINE.

BEEN OVER TWENTY MINS ALREADY.

ALWAYS HAPPENS THEYRE USED TO IT W ME.

“Well, then maybe I could—”

JUST WAIT OKAY.

STAY WITH ME OKAY SY THATS ALL I NEED.

JUST STAY.

Another long breath while he thought about it, then nodded. One hand crept into his, long fingers vibrant, bitten nails adrip. He clenched it back, hard, and watched as the fit dulled, frenzy becoming languorous, dormant, dazed. ’Til at last she lay prone and blank on the dusty floor, her ecto-coating gone dry, and he watched the bulk of it peel off like sunburn, flake to glitter and disperse, blown away by some impossible wind.

That long, at least. And at least a half-hour longer.

Two weeks later, he was back to see her again, without Abbott’s blessing (or knowledge).

Carra sat by the TV room window, street clothes replaced with a fetching johnny and terrycloth robe combo, hair hung back down like a living veil. Big brown slippers with little rodent faces, beavers by their buck teeth and trailing black heel-tails. Her pale arms hung nude once more, clean of sutures and messages alike, aside from that tape-anchored meds-jack stuck in the left-hand elbow’s crook.

“Thought you’d like to know,” he said, sitting down, close enough she could touch-test him for solidity if she wanted to. “Abbott wanted to keep the Thanatoscopeon, ’specially once I told him you’d cleaned it out—guy has a serious case of archivist fever, and that’s not gonna change anytime soon. But I don’t have to tell
you
.”