Girl of Nightmares (6 page)

“Me,” I say. “It was made to answer to me. To my line.”

“Maybe,” he replies. “Or was your line made to answer to
it
? The longer I talk to you the more my head fills up with wind. There’s more than one thing going on here; I can feel it, like a thunderstorm. And so should you.” He nods his chin toward his grandson. “And you too, Thomas. I didn’t raise you to be off the ball.”

Beside me, Thomas straightens up and looks at me quickly like I’m a page he’s been caught not reading.

“Can you not be creepy this early?” Carmel asks. “I don’t like any of this. I mean, what should we do?”

“Melt that knife down to scrap and bury it,” he says, clapping his palm against his knee for the black Lab to follow him back to his bedroom. “But you’re never going to do that.” On his way out of the kitchen he pauses and takes a deep breath. “Listen, kid,” he says, looking at the floor. “The Obeahman was the most twisted, hungry thing I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across. Anna dragged him out of the world. Sometimes your purpose is fulfilled. You need to let her rest.”

*   *   *

“Well that was a bust,” Carmel says on the drive in to school. “What did Gideon say this morning?”

“He didn’t answer. I left a message,” I reply. Carmel goes on a bit behind the wheel, about how she doesn’t like what Morfran said and something about having the willies, but I’ve only got half an ear on her. The other one’s on Thomas, who I think is still trying to hone in on the vibe Morfran got off the athame. From the look of near constipation on his face, I don’t think he’s having much luck.

“Let’s just get through the day,” Carmel says. “Another day of skating through the end of the year, and we’ll figure all this out later. Maybe we can hit up a different ghost this weekend.” She shakes her head. “Or maybe we should lay off everything for awhile. Until we hear from Gideon at least. Shit. I was supposed to do an inventory of the decorations for the hall before the Graduation Committee meeting.”

“You’re not even graduating this year.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m not on the committee.” She huffs. “So. Is that what we’re going to do? Lay off and wait for Gideon?”

“Or for Anna to come knocking again,” Thomas says, and Carmel gives him a look.

“Yeah,” I say. “I guess that’s what we should do.”

*   *   *

How did I get here? It wasn’t a conscious choice. At least it doesn’t feel that way. When Carmel and Thomas dropped me at home after school, the plan was to eat two servings of my mom’s spaghetti and meatballs and vegetate in front of the TV. So what am I doing in my mom’s car, four hours and I don’t know how many miles of highway behind me, staring at dormant smokestacks jutting up against a darkening sky?

This is something from the recesses of my memory, something that Daisy Bristol told me about only a month after Anna’s house imploded with her inside it. I’d listened with half an ear. I was in no condition to hunt, no condition to do much of anything but walk around with a hole in my center, wondering. Constantly wondering. The only reason I answered the phone was because it was Daisy, my loyal tipster from New Orleans, and because he had been the one to lead me to Anna in the first place.

“It’s a place in Duluth, Minnesota. A factory called Dutch Ironworks. They’ve been finding the remains of bums on and off for the last decade or so,” Daisy said. “They find them in batches, but I think that’s only because they rarely look. It takes someone reporting a broken window, or a bunch of drunk kids partying in the lot, before anyone does a walk-through. The factory’s been closed down since sometime in the sixties.”

I smiled then. Daisy’s tips are sketchy at best, constructed on flimsy and mostly nonspecific evidence. When I first met him, I told him to get more of the facts. He looked at me like a dog does after you take the last bite of your cheeseburger. For Daisy, there’s magic in not knowing. He gets excited over the possibilities in the spaces in between. New Orleans’ love affair with the undead is in his blood. I guess I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My eyes roam across the abandoned Dutch Ironworks, where something has been killing the homeless for at least a decade. It’s a sprawling set of brick buildings, with two enormously tall smokestacks. The windows are small and covered in dust and grime. Most of them have been boarded up. I might have to break something to get in. The athame flips lightly between my fingers, and I get out of the car.

As I walk around the building, long-dead grass whispers against my legs. Looking ahead, there’s a glimpse of the black, seething mass of Superior. Four hours of driving and that lake is still with me.

When I round the corner and see the door, hanging ajar with the lock broken, my chest tightens and my whole body starts to hum. I never wanted to be here. It didn’t hold any interest. But now that I am here, I can hardly catch my breath. I haven’t felt this tuned, this pulled-by-a-string, since I faced down the Obeahman. My fingers tingle around the knife handle and there’s the odd, familiar sensation that it is part of me, welded into my skin, down to the bone. I couldn’t let it drop if I wanted to.

The air inside the factory is sour but not stagnant. The place is home to countless rodents, and they move the air around. But it’s still sour. There’s death underneath the dust, death in every corner. Even in the rat shit. They’ve been feeding on things that are dead. But I don’t detect anything fresh; there won’t be a stinking bag of meat waiting for me around a corner, nodding a greeting with a falling-off face. What is it that Daisy said?
When the cops find another set of bodies, they’re practically mummified. Bones and ash. They mostly just sweep them out the door and straight under the rug. Nobody makes a big fuss over it.

Of course they don’t. They never do.

I’ve come through the back and there’s no telling what part of the factory this used to be. Everything worth taking has been looted, and all that’s left is bare scraps of machinery I can’t identify. I walk down the hall, the athame out and at my side. There’s light enough coming through the windows and reflecting off things so I can see just fine. I pause at every doorway, using my whole body to listen, to smell strong rot, to feel out cold spots. The room on my left must’ve been an office, or maybe a small employee lounge. There’s a table pushed back toward the corner. My eyes zero in on what looks at first like the edge of an old blanket—until I see the foot sticking out of it. I wait, but it doesn’t move. It’s just a body, used up, nothing much left but raggedy skin. I walk past and let the rest stay hidden behind the table. I don’t need to see it.

The hallway opens up on a broad, high-ceilinged space. Ladders and catwalks link through the air, accompanying what look like rusted-out conveyor belts. At one end, a hulking black furnace sits dormant. Most of it has been torn apart, broken down for scrap, but I can still see what it was. So much must’ve been produced here. The sweat of a thousand laborers’ bodies has soaked into the floor. The memory of heat still lingers in the air, god knows how many years later.

The farther I get into the room, the more crowded it feels. Something is here, and its presence is heavy. My grip tightens around the athame. Any minute I expect the decades-dead machinery to jerk back to life. The scent of burning human skin hits my nostrils a fraction of a second before I’m knocked facedown against the dusty floor.

I flip myself over and get to my feet, swinging the athame in a wide arc. I expect the ghost to be right behind me, and for a second I think it fled and I’m in for another game of whack-a-mole or ghost-darts. But I still smell it. And I feel anger moving through the room in dizzying waves.

He’s standing at the far end of the room, blocking my way back to the hallway, as if I would try to run. His skin is black as a struck match, cracked and oozing liquid metal heat, like he’s covered by a cooling layer of lava. The eyes stand out bright white. I can’t make out from this distance whether they’re just white or if they have corneas. God I hope they have corneas. I hate that creepy weird-eye shit. But corneas or no corneas, there won’t be any sanity in them. All these years spent dead and burning have taken care of that.

“Come on,” I say, and flick my wrist; the athame is ready to stab or slice. There’s a faint pain on my back and shoulders, where he hit me, but I shrug it off. He’s coming closer, walking up slow. Maybe because he wonders why I’m not running. Or maybe because every time he moves, more of his skin cracks open and bleeds … whatever that red-orange stuff is that he’s bleeding.

This is the moment before the strike. It’s the intake of breath and the stretching out of a second. I don’t blink. He’s close enough that I can see he does have corneas now, bright blue, the pupils constricted in constant pain. His mouth hangs open, the lips mostly gone, cracked and peeled away.

I want to hear her say just one word.

He swings his right fist; it slices the air inches from my right ear, hot enough to sting, and I catch the distinct smell of burnt hair. My burnt hair. There’s something Daisy said about the corpses … leathery bones and ash. Fuck. The corpses were fresh. The ghost just burns them up, dries them out, and leaves them. His face is a ruin of rage; the nose is gone and the nasal cavity scabbed over. His cheeks are as dry as used charcoal in places and wet with infection in others. I backpedal to stay clear of his blows. With his lips burned away, his teeth seem too big and his expression is a sick, constant grin. How many homeless people woke up to this face, right before they were cooked from the inside out?

I drop to the ground and kick, managing to drop him, but also singeing the shit out of my shins in the process. My jeans are fused to my skin in one spot. But there’s no time to be dainty about it; his fingers reach for me and I roll. The fabric rips loose, taking who knows how much skin with it.

The hell with this. He hasn’t made a peep. Who knows if he even has a tongue left, let alone whether Anna feels like speaking through it. I don’t know what I was thinking anyway. I was going to wait. I was going to be good.

My elbow cocks back, ready to slam the athame down into his ribs, but I hesitate. The knife could end up bonded to my skin literally if I don’t do it right. The hesitation lasts barely a second. Just long enough for the flutter of white to drift through the corner of my eye.

This can’t be. It must be someone else, some other spook who died in this godawful factory. But if it is, it didn’t die by burning. The girl walking silently across the dust-covered floor is pale as moonlight. Brown hair hangs down her back, falling over the stark white of her dress. I’d know that dress anywhere, whether it was too white to be real or made entirely of blood. It’s her. It’s Anna. Her bare feet make a soft, scraping sound as they pad across the concrete.

“Anna,” I say, and scramble up. “Are you all right?”

She can’t hear me. Or if she can, she doesn’t turn.

From the floor, the burning man grasps on to my shoe. I kick free and ignore both him and the smell of scorched rubber. Am I going insane? Hallucinating? She can’t really be here. It isn’t possible.

“Anna, it’s me. Can you hear me?” I walk toward her, but not too fast. If I go too fast she might disappear. If I go too fast I might see too much; I could pull her around and see that she has no face, that she’s a jerking corpse. She could turn to ash in my hands.

There is a gristly sound of meat twisting as the burning man crawls to his feet. I don’t care. What is she doing here? Why won’t she speak? She just keeps walking away, ignoring everything around her. Only … not everything. The dormant furnace is in the back of the room. A sudden sense of foreboding clamps down in my chest.

“Anna—” I scream; the burning man has me by the shoulder and it’s like someone just shoved an ember down my shirt. I twist away, and in the corner of my eye I think I see Anna pause, but I’m too busy ducking and slicing with the knife and kicking this ghost’s feet out from under him again to really tell.

The athame is hot. I have to toss it back and forth between my hands a second, just from that small, nonlethal slice that is now a narrow fissure of red-orange across his ribcage. I should just put him down now, jab the knife in and pull it out fast, maybe wrap the handle in my shirt first. Only I don’t. I just incapacitate him temporarily, and turn back.

Anna stands before the furnace, her fingers slipping lightly across the rough, black metal. I say her name again but she doesn’t turn. Instead she curls her fist around the handle and draws the broad door open.

Something in the air shifts. There’s a current, a ripple, and the dimensions skew in my vision. The opening of the furnace yawns wider and Anna crawls in. Soot stains her white dress, streaking across the fabric and across her pale skin like bruises. And there’s something wrong with her; something about the way she moves. It’s like she’s a marionette. When she squeezes through the opening, her arm and leg bend back unnaturally like a spider being sucked into a straw.

My mouth is dry. Behind me, the burning man drags himself onto his feet again. The sear in my shoulder makes me move away; I barely notice the limp brought on by the burns on my shins.
Anna, get out of there. Look at me.

It’s like watching a dream unfold, some nightmare where I’m powerless to do anything, where my legs are made of lead and I can’t scream a warning no matter how hard I try. When the decades-dead furnace surges to life, sending flame spewing into its belly, I scream, loud and without words. But it doesn’t matter. Anna burns up behind the iron door. One of her pale hands, blistering and turning black, presses against the slats, like she’s changed her mind too late.

Heat and smoke drifts up from my shoulder as the burning man grasps my shirt and twists me around. His eyes bulge out of the dark mess of his face and his teeth gnash open and shut. My eyes flicker back to the furnace. There’s no feeling in my arms or legs. I can’t tell whether my heart is beating. Despite the burns that have to be forming on my shoulders, I’m frozen in place.

“End me,” the burning man hisses. I don’t think. I just shove the athame into his guts, letting go immediately but still scorching my palm. I back away as he falls jerking to the floor, and run up against an old conveyor belt, hanging on to it to keep from going down on my knees. For a long second, the room is filled with mingled screams as Anna burns and the ghost at my feet shrivels. He curls in on himself until what’s left looks barely human, charred and twisted.