Black Cat Weekly #81

Chapter 5-2

He cleared his throat, but his voice still cracked when he spoke. “I’m picking up on some anger.”

“Very good. The lesson here is that if you go mucking around with my emotions again, you will live long enough to regret it. I was a homicide detective. I survived the Fayetteville Street Riots of ’61. I have seen violence on a scale that’s never crossed your mind, and I took notes. Are we clear?”

Roth gulped and nodded. The soft, warm feelings that had been building in the back of my head dispersed like ash in a strong wind.

The rest of the half-hour ride was a thing of quiet. The autodrive took us off the highway and down a flat county road that didn’t even have a name, just a state road number that superimposed itself on the car’s windshield display. Around us, fresh snow frosted the tall grasses on the fallow fields. The charcoal clouds sent intermittent bursts of snow, but not in the volume or intensity it would take to make driving dangerous. Fat, wet flakes splattered on the windshield. The car glided over the salted asphalt as smooth and silent as if on magnetic rails.

I was about twenty seconds away from laying my head back in the cradle and drifting off when the car decelerated and a tone like a cardinal’s tweet warned me that the autodrive was relinquishing control.

Roth, who had fallen asleep, straightened in his seat and wiped the drool from his lip with the back of his coat sleeve. “Turn down there, just past that patch of scrub oak.”

hadI did as instructed. The rental car was rated for off road. I’d thought the upgrade was a bit of an extravagance when I signed for the car, but it wasn’t my money, so I didn’t make a stink. As we rolled over the frosty gravel and bounced through a rut so deep you could have dumped a body in, I had to concede that the powers that be had made a good call.

“There,” Roth said and pointed toward an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of a flat field.

I couldn’t say how big or prosperous the farm had been. I’m a city girl, born and raised; I think in blocks, not acres. The house, though, told a story.

It was just a single-story cube, big enough for the standard three-point-two-member family, but not much more than a step above a trailer. Old fiberglass shingles molted off the pitched roof. There were only two windows in the whole place, and that detail told me it must have been built around 2043 or early ’44. The brief glass shortage at the time had ground vehicle production to a halt and left whole neighborhoods looking like rows of tract bunkers.

When I pulled around to the far side of the house, I saw that a tree or something massive had all but bisected the master bedroom. The roof on that corner of the little house had been shattered to splinters, and snow fell unhindered on a four-poster bed.

With its two evenly spaced windows facing the road and the ruin of the master bedroom around back, the house reminded me of an old homicide I’d never managed to solve. The victim in that case had the back of her skull caved in with a single blow from an aluminum field hockey stick. It’s the type of image that sticks with you.

I parked the car and turned to my passenger.

“Are you going to tell me what I’m doing here?”

Roth closed his puffy coat, pushing the antiquated Corian buttons through their holes. His stubby fingers were surprisingly dexterous. “I’m supposed to acclimate you to the supernatural. You asked what I do for the Collective? This is one of the places I look after. We don’t know the history, not exactly, but something f****d up happened here. There’s a spirit bound to this house, a weak one, but there is a darkness… Anyway, I’m going to take you in so you can learn about ghosts.”

My molars ground together. I’d driven six-plus hours for nothing more than a meet and greet? “I’ve already spent three months getting lectured about spirits and dimensions and occult sewing circles. I’m read-in on the topic.”

Roth winced. “That’s the problem, I think. It’s one thing to read about it, but the first time you run across something ripped from the other side of the veil, you don’t want it to be when there’s a chance it can c***k into your mind. I’m here to put this thing on safe-mode and let you dip your toe in the dark water.”

I was too tired to suppress the smirk brought about by thinking of the soft young man making anything safe for me. “Well, thank sweet Jesus you’re here to protect me.”

“That thing I do where I can affect emotions?” he said, and I could hear the hurt in his tone. “I’m not doing anything physiological. I’m influencing the part of you that has emotions. The incorporeal things we find have that part, too, which means I can sense them. Sometimes, if I don’t mind the headache, I can push them one way or another emotionally.”

That was news to me. Mousy June hadn’t brought it up in my initial briefing on empaths, but I was beginning to suspect the Collective didn’t have their s**t together as much as I’d hoped.

Joining the Collective hadn’t been an entirely unforced move. I’d unloaded my service weapon at some blubbery tentacled abomination lurking in an off-grid rooming house. We were a long way from the Police Reduction Act of ’46, but not so far that a detective could turn in her g*n without explaining in detail where every bullet went. The out-of-the-blue solicitation from the Kinston Collective had given me an option that didn’t involve spending time in prison.

For better or worse, I was committed to this course of action. I slid the car door open and motioned for Roth to do the same. “Okay. Let’s get this done and get you back to work. I don’t want to be the reason you lose your job.”

Other than a little water damage and a thick layer of dust, the house was well preserved. I looked to Roth to see where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do, but he swept his hand in a semi-circle, palm up, like a vidhost inviting me to explore. I used the XED light I habitually wore on my belt to get a look around the dark building.

It didn’t take an ounce of the extrasensory perception I didn’t have to know that it had not been a happy home. The den walls were decorated with dents and food stains that told of dinners thrown in fits of rage. All the interior doors showed signs of being forced at one time or another, and one still bore a fist-sized hole that had yet to be patched.

I went to the master bedroom to get my bearings. The whole house was cold, but when I opened that door, an icy wind caught me full in the face and momentarily blurred my vision. The cloud-dimmed sunlight shining through the broken roof revealed a room hardly changed since it had been abandoned.

The nightstand held a framed wedding photo, a physical print, not a resin cast. Moisture had long since obscured some of the lighter areas, but I didn’t need to see their faces to know the couple in the picture were as different from each other as a pair could be. The young woman wore an old-fashioned wedding dress, her posture so straight she practically floated, as though bouncing on the tips of her toes. Despite that, her partner loomed over her. The giant man’s big shoulders barely fit within the confines of the picture frame, and his rented tuxedo jacket looked fit to burst at the seams. He’d starched and pressed his jeans to within an inch of their life, though. The crease, running from his cummerbund to the top of his boots, was crisp enough to sharpen a stick on.

I moved on to the next room, sweeping my light inside, checking my corners out of training and habit. The posters on the walls gave the impression of a sixteen-year-old’s tastes: all generic fitness models in various states of exercise/undress. The lamp on the nightstand was kids’ stuff, a cheap sss knockoff of a Disney “Diver Dan” fish light. The bed that huddled in the far corner of the windowless cave was barely five feet long, obviously meant for a child.

It read like a room that had been simple to begin with and then hadn’t grown with its occupant. My suspicions were confirmed when I found a pair of size-eleven Devin McCoy high-tops on the stained and threadbare rug that took up most of the floor space. I shone my light back on the tiny bed. The kid must have slept curled into a ball every night.

I reached the kitchen last. I recognized the layout from my childhood as I’d seen it often enough bouncing between my grandmothers’ equally humble apartments; everything that could be covered in tinfoil was.

There was a flyleaf kitchen table pushed against the wall that made a crowded dining nook. Four ladder-back chairs circled the table on three sides, the last tucked in the corner opposite the stove and sink.

I dialed my light in to focus on the wall behind that seat. At first, I thought I’d just found more food stains, but the rusty horizontal streaks in the wallpaper couldn’t have been anything other than blood.

Someone had taken a beating in that corner.

A chill gradually inched its way up my neck like a spider climbing a sleeping man’s leg. My skin, wrinkled as it is, tightened with goosebumps, and my heart hammered in my ears. I caught something out of the corner of my eye, a pale shape in the darkness. When I spun to catch it though, all I found was a sad, empty kitchen.

Just an animal, I told myself.

I reached out an admittedly unsteady hand to open the cabinet doors, fully expecting to find a rat or raccoon waiting to hiss at me. I swung the door open and…nothing. Cleaning supplies and brushes.

Just as soon as my attention locked onto the cabinet, the pale shape reappeared in my peripheral vision. My hand drifted to my hip, feeling for the g*n I’d had to leave behind with my career. I made myself turn slowly, intending to creep up on whatever was stalking me. I gritted my teeth to keep them from chattering.

As my light gradually swept around, I found Timur Roth and his stupid poofy coat standing in the doorway to the den.

“That’s a ghost you’re feeling,” he said. “Or spirit or soul or however you want to think of it.”

“Where is it?” I asked and was ashamed by my breathlessness.

Timur raised a hand to shield his eyes from my light. “It’s a little bit everywhere in the house. Think of it like a smell. It can permeate a whole area or concentrate in a space. Right now, it’s agitated by us being here and trying to manifest. Your brain is trying to block it out, make you not see it, but if you relax, you can catch a glimpse in the doorway there.”

I sucked in enough of the cold, dry air to sting my nose, then slowly released it in a stream that formed a cloud in front of my face. And again. And again. After the third breath, my shoulders settled, and I felt some of the tension in my neck unwind. I slowly turned to the doorway, my flashlight pointed to the floor.