Defy the Dark (6 page)

“A woman without a face?” the deputy was saying, uninterested. “Another one? We'll get someone out there as soon as we can, miss.”

Miss?
Cado looked down at himself, then quickly away. If he looked too long, he might grow breasts. Or if he looked directly at the dead woman, his own face might peel off for no reason. The world felt dangerously malleable.

He called Patricia.

“Cado? Is it over already?” The hope in her voice was painful to hear. “Cado?”

“Am I awake?”

A long pause. “You were when you left,” she said, all hope gone. “You sound weird. I'd tell you to come back, but it's in God's hands now. God's or whoever's. Why aren't you saying anything? Cado!”

“There's a dead woman on the sidewalk,” he whispered. “Her face—”

The line went dead.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the dead woman prop herself against the lamppost, giggling facelessly.

The phone cracked in his fist; otherwise Cado didn't react. If he ignored the dead woman, surely she would remember she was supposed to be dead and shut up.

A thick tearing split the air. Like whatever had stolen the dead woman's face had decided to rip it in half. Only nothing so small as a face—this was vast. Mountainous. The sound of the world clawing itself open so violently, the force of it snuffed out the scant halos of light beneath the lampposts.

The cathedral bells chimed but distantly, as if they were miles away instead of down the street. On the third chime, the trolley appeared.

Cado squinted against the sudden light it brought. The single burning headlight and the interior lights all cast a feverish glow. Even the trolley itself was the yellow of something spit up from a diseased lung.

The doors accordioned open when Cado stood. For several moments his legs refused to move forward, but once he took the first step, it became easier.

Cado noticed an animal stink as soon as he boarded, like the inside of an iguana cage. The odor emanated from the motorman crammed into the driver's seat, too tall for the space if the awkward jut of his knees was any indication. The motorman had no eyelashes, and his lids made a gummy smack when he blinked.

“One dollar.” It was the same sexless voice Cado had heard earlier, but it didn't belong to the motorman. It came from a speaker on the control panel. A recording.

Cado put two Sacagawea coins into the cash box. “I told you,” he said, proud that he no longer sounded like a girl. “Round trip.”

He turned to take a seat, and a sharp pain stabbed through the base of his skull just before the doors banged shut.

 

C
ado grabbed the back of his head and whipped around in time to see a stinger retreat into the motorman's palm as he grabbed the lever and set the trolley in motion.

“What did you do to me?”

The motorman punched a button on the control panel, and the voice hissed once again from the speaker. “Sit.”

Cado realized, just as he had with the cackler, that he was in the presence of something inhuman. Not just smelly and misshapen, but inhuman. Something he might have been tempted on any other day to stomp beneath his shoe, but today he did as he was told. He went to the back of the trolley and sat on the hard wooden seat. The sting hadn't hurt him; it simply made everything floaty and pleasant.

Above the windows but below the arched roof were old-timey ads for stuff like Dictaphones and athletic trusses and nerve food, whatever that was. The ad didn't show what nerve food looked like, only a woman holding her head in agony, and a bunch of words he wasn't close enough to read. He wondered if nerve food was good for what ailed him.

Cado touched the sore spot on the back of his head, and his finger came away bloody. The motorman had stabbed him in the brain or maybe the spinal cord. Both? Either way, Cado should have been dead. Or paralyzed. Or at least worried. But the only thing he felt was the trolley propelling him through town. And then out of town.

Cado no longer recognized the landscape. East Texas was thick with piney forest, but the passing trees were massive, big enough to tunnel through, which the trolley frequently did. After a few moments, it began a steep ascent, and the giant trees fell away as a city rose before him.

It was what Cado imagined New York City must be like, only with buildings so tall they were wreathed in clouds. The tracks twined about the mile-high, artfully sculpted towers like ribbon unspooling from a beautifully wrapped gift.

At the height of the track, the trolley paused and Cado's window aligned with the top window of one of the skyscrapers. A woman sat inside at a vanity applying mascara to the third eye in her forehead. That third eye winked at Cado just before the trolley plunged into freefall. Into darkness.

The track leveled off seconds later, and after Cado's stomach had settled back into place, he realized the trolley lights had shorted out, maybe damaged by the rapid descent. Outside, however, glowing pink corkscrews of light spiraled down in the dark like fancy New Year's Eve confetti.

After a few moments, it began to get lighter inside the trolley, not the same feverlight as before, but bluish and intense. Cado could see again, the motorman hunched at the front, the hand straps hanging like nooses, the ads. The nerve-food woman was still holding her head, but now she was laughing. Even though her body was peppered with almost comically large bite marks.

Cado tittered nervously and turned away, but the strange light had destroyed the exterior view. He could only see his own reflection, half asleep like a boy daydreaming in class. Or nightmaring. Waiting for a rap on the knuckles to snap him out of it. But there was only the motorman who had stabbed his brain and robbed him of his fear, which was fortunate because Cado realized he could see inside his own head.

The blue light shone through him like radiation, his brain barely visible, obscured by a thick whitish soup. Like whatever the motorman had shot into his head had turned it into a giant zit. Without thinking, Cado put his hands over his ears and squeezed. Patricia would have done it if he had allowed her to come. He could no longer remember why he'd been so against it.

Fluid gushed out of the hole at the base of his skull and splatted against the back window. He could see his brain now, clean and clear. Everything was clear. And so bright. Not just in the trolley. He could see past his own reflection to a moon as big as the Himalayas crowding the horizon so closely, Cado could see its pockmarked texture. The light it cast fell on him like a weight and killed even the possibility of shadows.

The gleaming stretch of track skated over swirls of rock, valleys of ice, but his view of the terrain was eclipsed by a horde of creatures that mobbed the trolley, scuttling alongside like fans chasing a pop star's limo. But these fans, like the motorman, weren't human.

The creatures were small. Half Cado's size. Children, really, from the waist up, but from the waist down they had too many legs. Too many to count. So many they were able to easily keep up with the trolley, which had begun to slow down.

They peered at Cado, their gummy eyelids smack-smack-smacking at him. Interested in him. Waiting for him.

After the trolley came to a complete stop, the motorman unfolded from his seat and faced Cado. The sick moonlight shone through him, revealing an unfamiliar grouping of organs, a swish of pale blood, and the motorman's legs—his real ones—unfurling wetly up the walls to make room.

Cado, without realizing it, had begun whistling “Tango Etude No. 5” to give himself something nice to listen to instead of the motorman's scabrous approach. He wished the poison in his head was back. There had been no room for fear then—now fear was the only thing he had. That and his flute case.

He reached for it, careful not to look down and see his own quivering guts, his frozen blood. He still couldn't feel his fingers, but he saw them snatching open the latches, saw through them without meaning to, his own blood not frozen but red and frantic when he grabbed the hunting knife from the case, the one he'd killed the cackler with. It was a foot long at least, bone handled, and sharp enough to decapitate a wild hog.

Cado's arm whipped at the motorman, at those endless legs, at the chest, at the face with its gummy eyes shocked to see prey fighting back. Cado let his seemingly demonic arm do all the work as the rest of him screamed while blood splashed over the trolley walls like water.

When the spider children began to scream with him, an almost beautiful sound, like wolves howling, Cado's arm stopped swinging. Because the motorman was dead, just an untidy leggy heap.

Cado clambered over the motorman and settled into the driver's seat. He put the trolley into reverse and hid from the light as best he could.

 

T
he trolley pulled up in front of the St. Teresa stop and Cado exited, his eyes so traumatized by light that several seconds passed before they adjusted enough to see Patricia sitting on the blue bench. Her sunset gown covered with a black silk robe. Her feet bare.

Her toe polish chipped.

“You came back,” she said wonderingly, staring at him like she'd never seen him before.

Cado grabbed her and lifted her off her feet. “Why are you running the streets barefoot like a country girl?”

“Never mind my feet!” She squeezed him even harder than he was squeezing her. “You sounded so weird on the phone. I just knew—”

Whatever she knew was drowned out by the cathedral bells striking four.

He'd only been gone an hour? It had felt like a million years. Yet there was the dead woman, as faceless as ever but no longer animated. The lampposts were on again. Maybe they'd never gone out—he had gone out.

Cado buried his face in her neck. “You smell good.”

“Like Paris, still?” said Patricia, amused that he thought such things when he'd never been out of Texas. “Or maybe like Amsterdam?”

“Like life.”

“You know now, don't you?” she said. “What I meant about reality?”

He nodded, then tried to speak, but it took a while. Patricia understood. She lived in a town where everyone understood such things. But only he had survived it.

He sat with her on the bench and told her what had happened.

“How strange,” Patricia said when he was done, staring at the trolley and the spidery surprise inside. “But it'll make a nice addition to the museum exhibit, I'm sure. Can I see the knife you killed it with?”

“You can have it,” said Cado, handing her the case. “That can be our symbol, since you hate flowers.”

“Your flute can be our symbol?” said Patricia, confused.

“My flute's in the trunk of my car still,” Cado explained, snapping the latches open. “I lost the sheath to my hunting knife, so I've been carrying it around in this old case ever since.”

Patricia turned the knife, cloudy with alien blood, this way and that. “What's the symbol?”

“That our love can destroy anything.” As soon as Cado said it, he regretted it, struck by a powerful image of Patricia and him rampaging like Godzilla, trampling whole cities into rubble.

“Cado”—Patricia clutched the knife to her chest—“that's so sweet!”

He took her in his arms, carefully, and then kissed her. “And just for the record,” he said, “that wasn't a good-bye kiss, either.”

Some time later, after Cado had insisted on dressing her feet in his Chucks, they began the walk back to Patricia's house.

“Are you brave enough to make a decision now?” she asked him.

“Rice,” he said immediately. “If they'll have me.”

Her squeal of joy echoed over the whole town.

“I feel stupid to have been so worried,” he said, the bricks of the sidewalk cool beneath his socks. “Life's too short not to do what you want.”

“Sorry I didn't believe in you,” Patricia said as they stepped over the dead woman in unison. “I do now. You look like one of us—brave and confident. A touch insane.”

His stomach growled.

“And hungry.”

“I can't be hungry,” said Cado, almost offended by his stomach's insistent rumbling. “I was nearly killed, like, ten minutes ago.”

“Life doesn't stop just because a spider creature nearly lays eggs in you, Cado. Of course you're hungry. There's lobster salad left over from lunch.” She smiled. “Or we could have tea sandwiches and caviar.”

Cado sighed. “Do I have to wear a tie?”

“I'll make an exception,” Patricia said generously, “just this once.” Arm in arm, they disappeared blithely into the dark.

Malinda Lo

Ghost Town

1. October 31, 11:57 p.m.

M
cKenzie shows up at the Spruce Street Guest House a few minutes before midnight, dressed all in black as if she's some kind of ninja. She's even got a black stocking cap pulled over her blond hair, which is sticking out from the bottom in a luminous sheet and ruining the disguise. She's carrying a backpack, out of which she pulls a flashlight. “Ty?” she whispers.

She can't see me. I'm leaning against the back of the house, and the light of the half-moon doesn't reach that far into the covered porch. I step forward and she squeals in fright.

“Jesus! You scared the hell out of me.”

“Sorry,” I say. “You sure you want to do this?”

She huffs a little, as if I've offended her. “Whatever, you just startled me. I'm prepared for what's in
there
.” She clicks on the flashlight and sets it on the top step while she opens her backpack to rummage through it. “I brought an audio recorder and a video recorder, although it probably won't pick up much in the dark.” She pulls out a slim metallic device and hits the power button. A tiny red light glows at the tip. “Audio's on. I'm putting it in the outer pocket of my backpack so it'll be recording the whole time.” She stuffs her video camera into her pocket and slings her backpack on again. “You ready?” she says, picking up the flashlight.

“I guess. I didn't bring any equipment.”

McKenzie grins. “That's what I'm here for. This is your first ghost hunt; how would you know?”

“Uh . . . TV?”

McKenzie laughs and climbs the porch steps. “Don't believe everything you see on TV.” The back door is locked, but McKenzie pulls a key out of her pocket.

“Where'd you get that?” I ask.

“Kelsey's mom's on the Pinnacle Ghost Tour staff. Kelsey swiped it and made a copy.” She unlocks the door and pushes it open. The hinges whine, a thin, shrill noise as unpleasant as fingernails down a chalkboard. “You ready to see what Pinnacle's all about?” McKenzie asks.

There's a hint of a come-on in her voice and, despite everything, it gets to me. I wish I could see her face, but it's too dark. “You bet,” I say, and I follow her inside.

Pinnacle, Colorado, bills itself as the Salem of the Rockies—except there have never been any witches here, and it's not exactly in the mountains. But people love that slogan, even if it's a marvel of false advertising. Pinnacle is a dinky little town on the flat part of Colorado (people always seem to forget about the flat part), an hour and a half from the Rockies and a light-year from San Francisco, where I grew up. I moved here with my parents and little sister in August when my dad got a job at a technology company. They like to think of Colorado as a social experiment—a chance to see the middle of America—but I think of it as time in purgatory. I have one year left of high school, and then I'm heading back to Cali.

The only good part about being here, at least until tonight, has been McKenzie.

She enters the kitchen and shines the flashlight around. It's dirty and dilapidated and creepy: everything a haunted house is supposed to be. A bunch of the bottom cabinets have rotted, making the counters slope toward the floor. The upper cabinets have mostly lost their doors, turning them into yawning black boxes displaying a few pieces of chipped china. The ancient stove looks like it hasn't been operational in decades, and the once-white sink has reddish stains in the bottom. “Gross,” McKenzie murmurs as she looks down into the sink.

The Spruce Street Guest House is on Old Main, which was the center of town during its heyday in the late 1800s. Back then, when coal mining was Pinnacle's chief industry, this place was the Wild West equivalent of a bustling metropolis, complete with eight saloons, a brothel or two behind the tracks, and plenty of gunslingers who went around shooting people whenever they had a bad day. When the coal mine dried up, so did Pinnacle, and for a long time it really was a ghost town. During the tech boom of the nineties, it came back from the dead. Now there's a brand-new “downtown,” centered on a strip mall anchored by a Super Target. But the buildings on Old Main were abandoned, and they developed a reputation for being haunted by the ghosts of those gunslingers and their victims.

Personally, I think it's all a big gimmick, but the first thing I learned when I moved here was that the locals take their legends seriously. Every Halloween, Pinnacle dusts off Old Main to create a quote-unquote ghost town for the annual Pinnacle Spooktacular, a week of “family friendly” activities celebrating the ghostly remains of the town's outlaw past. It culminates in the Spooktacular Spectacle, a dance in the ramshackle theater on the eastern end.

The guesthouse is on the western end. We can't hear the music down here, though I know the party's still going on. By now all the little kids have gone home, and the few teens who remain are being edged out by adults in sexy zombie nurse costumes. I saw some of them lurching around half drunk on my way to the guesthouse.

McKenzie heads out of the kitchen and I follow. The only sounds are the whisper of our footsteps and the occasional groan of the floorboards. It's in pretty good shape for a building that's been abandoned, and I know it's because the Pinnacle Spooktacular has renovated it—discreetly, of course—to make sure that tourists don't accidentally fall through the floor on the ghost tour.

Still, it's definitely got a creepy vibe going on. We walk down the long hallway toward the front of the building, passing the door to the basement, a dining room with a crooked chandelier, the decrepit powder room, and finally the main parlor, where all the furniture is draped with yellowing sheets. In the foyer, a staircase that used to be grand sweeps down from the dark second floor, and McKenzie turns to face me.

“Have you heard the story about this place?” she asks.

I shrug. “Somebody died?”

Her lips curve up in a slight smile. “Yeah. Somebody died.” She starts up the stairs. “This used to be a boardinghouse, and one of the people who stayed here was a woman named Ida Root. She was from the East Coast and came out here for a teaching job. She didn't have a lot of money, so she ended up sharing her room with another girl, Elsie Bates. Ida came back from school late one night, after dark. She was feeling sick and decided to go straight to bed.”

McKenzie stops at the top of the stairs and waits for me, the flashlight beam pooling on the floor. The last step creaks under my feet. “What happened then?” I ask.

“In the morning, Ida woke up. Elsie was right there in the room with her . . . except she was dead.”

McKenzie's a good storyteller, and a shiver runs down my spine.

“Somebody murdered her and wrote a message on the wall in her blood.”

I step closer to McKenzie, so there's only a foot of space between us. She holds her ground, but the flashlight wavers in her hands. “What did it say?” I ask.

“That's the weird thing,” McKenzie whispers. “There's no record of that. But there were plenty of rumors going around town about Ida and Elsie. Whether they were more than friends.”

McKenzie's expression is unreadable, but warmth flushes across my own face, and it pisses me off. I've heard this story before, although it's usually set in a college dorm or at summer camp. I can hardly believe that McKenzie thinks I'm going to buy it.

“The room where Ida stayed is the third door down,” McKenzie says. “Want to take a look?”

“You think her ghost is in there?”

“Maybe,” she says coyly.

The door has an old-fashioned crystal handle, and McKenzie fumbles with it for a few seconds before she gets it open. She goes inside, but stops abruptly.

“Oh my God,” she says, her voice quivering. “Oh my God.”

I follow her in. The moonlight shines through the window, which is hung with lace curtains. The room has a rusted metal bed frame in it, the mattress long gone. A chipped pitcher and basin rest on a bureau that's missing half its drawers. A rocking chair is pushed into the corner, the woven seat eaten through in the center. McKenzie trains her flashlight on the wall over the bed. A word is scrawled there, red letters dripping down the peeling wallpaper.

DYKE.

A shock jolts through me, hot and cold all at once. I become aware of a dim buzzing in my ears as I stare at the word. The whole effect is, I have to admit, very well done. The drips look just like blood, and it ties in perfectly with the story McKenzie just told me, although I know that the word isn't about Ida and her maybe-girlfriend Elsie.

It's for me.

I've been to the Dyke March in San Francisco and seen women with the word tattooed on their shoulders or written across their chests in lipstick. I've never used it to describe myself because it sounds so old. But it doesn't bother me, either. It stopped offending me a long time ago.

Seeing it like this, though, is a lot different from seeing it tattooed on a girl's arm with a heart around it. I feel like I just got my breath knocked out of me. As if someone came over and shoved me, then spit in my face.

I hate Pinnacle.

All the frustrations I've felt since I moved here knot up inside me in a burst of hot anger. I want to punch the person who wrote that on the wall.

I know that McKenzie's watching me, trying to figure out why I didn't scream and run out of the room in terror. I'm not sure what to do. To buy time, I walk past her to the wall and reach out to touch the red letters. “What are you doing?” she cries.

The stuff that was used to write the word is still a little damp, and it rubs off on my fingers. I sniff it.

“What is it?” she asks.

It's sticky and has a chemical smell that I recognize. It's fake blood. They probably bought it at the Super Target in the Halloween aisle. “I don't know,” I say impulsively. “It's kind of . . . warm.”

“It's warm?” She sounds confused.

“Yeah,” I lie. I rub the fake blood residue onto the wallpaper, leaving a streak next to the
D
. “I heard a different story about this house,” I say as I turn to look at her.

She visibly stiffens. “You did?”

“I read it on the town blog.”

“Oh?”

Her tone is skeptical, and I wonder if I'm pushing it too far, but the anger inside me is developing a reckless edge. “Yeah,” I say. I cross the room toward the window so that I can peek at the backyard. There's nobody there, or at least nobody I can see. “You want to hear it?”

McKenzie hesitates. Then she says, “Sure, why not.” It's not a question. She's acting all cool, but I can tell she's trying to figure out if I know what she did, and if so, how.

It's so clear to me that the word on the wall isn't
real
to McKenzie. It's a four-letter word chosen for dramatic impact. She doesn't get that the word and her ghost story suggest that a woman was murdered in this room for being gay. She probably thinks it's funny. I almost choke on my disgust for McKenzie. But I force myself to swallow it, because now I know what I'm going to do.

“I read that back when this place was a boardinghouse, two chicks died,” I say. “One was probably the girl you told me about—the one who died in this room. But another girl died here a couple of days later.” I pause for dramatic effect. “She hanged herself in the basement.”

McKenzie's breath hitches, and I know I've got her.

I walk over to her and take the flashlight out of her startled hands. “What do you say we go downstairs and check it out?”

“The basement? Are you crazy?”

I hold the flashlight up so that it illuminates our faces from below, classic ghost-story style. I give her a sardonic smile—one of my best, if I must say—and she blushes. “I thought you wanted to go ghost hunting with me,” I say. “Are you scared?”

“Of course not,” she snaps. She crosses her arms defensively and adds, “It's just not safe down there. Kelsey's mom says the tours can't go into the basement.”

I cock my head at her. “I thought you liked to live dangerously.”

Her gaze flickers briefly to the window, then back again. “Fine. Let's go.” She holds out her hand. “Give me back the flashlight.”

“Not yet,” I say, and lead the way out of the room.

“Ty!” she objects, but I don't stop, and since she doesn't want to be left in the dark, she has no choice but to follow.

A latch holds the basement door shut, and when I lift it, the door pops open with a sigh. A scent of dampness and rot wafts up from the darkness below. A chill runs over my skin, and I wonder if this is a good idea.

“It smells down there.”

There's something prissy about the way she says it, and it completely annoys me. My anger comes back, hard as armor, and I'm not scared anymore. I want to do this, even if it's stupid, because if there's anybody who deserves to have their safe little bubble popped, it's McKenzie. “Come on,” I say, and I point the flashlight down the narrow wooden stairs.

The basement is really more of a cellar. The floor and walls are hard-packed dirt, and the ceiling is the bare rafters supporting the floor above. When I reach the bottom, I turn and shine the light up at McKenzie, who has paused halfway down.

“I don't think this is a good idea,” she says.

I can practically feel the dark against my back, cool and slightly wet. But I see that she's on the verge of splitting, so I say, “There's nothing down here.” To her credit, she descends the rest of the stairs, and when she steps onto the dirt floor, I offer her the flashlight. “You can be in charge now.”

She takes it, and when our hands touch, I notice that her fingers are freezing. She sweeps the light around. There isn't much to see. The room is small and bare, except for a pile of broken wooden crates next to the stairs. The light skitters over a door on the far wall, and I reach out to grab McKenzie's hand.