Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (31 page)

Batten's voice was a low growl. “I'm fond of Cheektowaga. Had the best twenty minutes of my life there.”

“Twenty minutes?” To avoid blushing hard, I performed a text-book emotional door slam. “More like five.”

“Harsh.”

“Honest.” I straightened my shirt, watching Mr. Davis walking out with some relatives, leaving his wife alone, forlorn in her chair. “You'd be wise to never mention Buffalo again. Harry knows damn well that he could have sheltered us from the mindfuck in the alley. He shoulders half the blame for the shooting.”

“And the other half of the blame?”

“You, jaggoff.”

Batten accepted this silently, as if he agreed. “You're not to blame for any of it?”

“Not in his books.”

“Why not?”

I watched as Harry noticed Mrs. Davis sitting alone, and move to fill the void. He bent slightly at the waist, made soft and comforting small talk with Mrs. Davis beside the casket, holding my leather jacket draped over one of his arm like a sommelier with wine and a napkin. She gazed up at him from her wheelchair with naked appreciation, tears glistening, one hand hovering protectively near her heart.

“Harry expects me to make bad choices,” I said finally.

Batten was opening his mouth, maybe to agree, when the closed lid of the casket blew open. In a sawdust cyclone of reaching, rotted arms, metal hinges cartwheeled through the air, screws clattered into the walls, wood shattered, shards spinning. A patchwork creature wrenched up out of her satin bedding and keened, her agonized tongue lolling in the air.

Harry sidestepped across the floor in a whirl of coat, putting himself in the line of sight between the casket and the grieving mother. He was too late. Mrs. Davis had seen, in violent Technicolor,
the thing that used to be Kristin with her butter-yellow funeral dress clinging wetly to putrid skin.

Mrs. Davis rocketed backward, her wheelchair hitting the wall with a thud as the crowd's screaming chorus drowned out her shocked objection. Her dead daughter threw her stitched-up chin back and wailed. Mrs. Davis' horrific shrill rose to an octave only me and dogs could hear.

Dead Kristin's head whipped around.

OK: me, dogs and ghouls.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Nothing I had ever seen in textbooks or online could have prepared me for the grotesquely rotted horror of Kristin Davis’ ghoul scuttling on the Berber carpet. Her skinless fingers coated in the slime of rapid decay. Too rapid, my brain noted, just before she looked up at Harry with eyelids sewn shut and my mental processes screamed to a halt, leaving all notion of sane thought behind in its wake.

Harry stared unblinking at her lids, achieving a sphinx-like stillness. The ghoul scrambled to snatch at my jacket in Harry's arms. Harry never flinched. He relinquished to the ghoul my leather jacket, melting slightly from solid statue to liquid motion, backing away with cat-like fluidity.

I vaguely heard Chapel ordering, “Get these people out, get the family out!”.

Dunnachie and Hood became heavily armed sheep dogs, their barking full of authority, their big arms ushering toward safety as the Big Bad Wolf keened, a ragingly terrible sound, as she stood knocked-kneed, rolling her head, tongue ululating.

Two things happened abruptly at once. Batten holstered his gun and took off from where he'd fallen to one knee, bolting like an Olympic sprinter for the rear exit. I hoped to get his kit. At the same time, a shoving, sobbing stampede crushed out the front doors, leaving only the group of us squaring off against the fetid monster, and Mrs. Davis mindlessly moaning in her chair, waving her pointer finger, lost without sensible words. No one had thought to wheel the grieving mother out.

Impossible. This wasn't happening. Kristin was dead, yes, but she had been embalmed and tidy, her body stitched up carefully, intact and pristine in her brand new, first time off the lot casket.

With difficulty, the ghoul forced open her sutured eyelids to reveal yawning holes full of brown-stained cotton between thick threads. She roared with frustration as the threads pulled at her flesh then ripped. She eagerly tore my jacket apart, seams flaying. Small polished gemstones thudded with my lip gloss, my pink Moleskine mini and emergency condom in a rain of personality on the carpet. A little plastic Ziploc bag with the ruined newt eye fell with a plop to the floor.

The ghoul dug frantically at the bag like a puppy at a burrow until the plastic split. She snatched up the eye, really just a stringy, pinkish filament of sclera now, and, pulling out the cotton in her sockets, pressed it there into her useless, gaping hole.

Okay, not a newt eye. I had a brief image of the ghoul digging at my entrails the way she'd dug open the Ziploc. Saw stars in the swirling black of my head, felt like I was pitching backward. Nope, blacking out now would be bad.

Mrs. Davis was chanting, “She had Krissie's eye, she had Krissie's eye!!” over and over in revulsion from behind her hands.

“I didn't know,” I said, mostly to myself.

I drew fierce focus on the perfectly smooth oblong stone by the ghoul's foot, red jasper. My head cleared. Dead Kristin was wearing patent leather flats, now dotted with gobs of meat. I dragged my gaze away from them and back to the red jasper. If only I could get to it, without getting close to it… her? I didn't know what to call her anymore. This was not Kristin Davis, and yet it was. I had no doubt that the young girl's spirit was trapped inside it.

I heard wheezing sounds coming out of my mouth, heard words forming. Incredibly, I was making sense.

“She shouldn't be rotting, why is she rotting?” No one needed to hear that now, but I couldn't stop myself saying it. “Why is she rotting so fast?” I had a light bulb moment, a rare 100 watt one. “Exothermic reaction. Heat. Flesh magic.” And then, as all the hair on my scalp pricked straight up. “Demon.”

“What is that thing?” Batten demanded behind me, throwing his kit open in a clatter on the floor. Green bottles of Brut cologne and holy water jostled with silver chains that caught the overhead lights. “Marnie, what is it? A zombie?”

The ghoul withdrew its soiled fingers from the muck of her face and bayed in seeming pain. Paralyzed now, I could only stare, pulling with my lungs but getting no air. Something else was stirring, just beneath the surface of reality. An awful perfume worse than death, black magic encountering and bruising the underside of my own grey power. The ghoul felt it too, and knew its source.

Dead Kristin's head wobbled atop a ruined spine as it creaked in my direction, held upright only by infernal magic, vertebrae grinding audibly.

Batten barked, “Marnie, get out!” but Harry was already moving toward me, pointing at the front door commandingly.

“Harry, get Mrs. Davis!” I ordered. As Harry came away from her, Mrs. Davis lost it. She wailed hysterically,

“My baby. My baby! Get away from my baby you monsters!” reaching, grabbing Kristin's elbow.

The skin sloughed off in her hand in a long wet sheet. Mrs. Davis’ gurgling scream raised my hackles. The ghoul took two more loping strides toward me and I shouted:

“…Carna come unlock the door/Remove the boundaries I implore!”

When it happened, I felt it: blinking disappearance, sudden incorporeal lift, flinging bodily through the sludge of limbo-space, appearing in a windless shock in the opposite corner. I didn't look to see how my little jump had affected anyone but the ghoul. She stopped, trained in on me again, lifted those melting lips off her teeth and snarled frustration.

Mrs. Davis teetered face-first out of her chair; Harry changed directions mid-stride. With eye-blurring speed he swooped her up and whisked her out the front door, where ambulances were starting to noisily arrive.

Dunnachie hissed, “Witch,” at me, and crossed himself.

“You can roast me later, if you think that'll make your version of God happy,” I said distractedly, not taking my eyes off the ghoul. Dunnachie made a strangled noise.

Hood choked on the stench as the thing wafted past him, “Tell us what you need us to do, here, Baranuik.”

I'd stepped up to bat. Sometimes I'm stupid like that. One half of my brain said, fuck this noise, and tried to convince me to run for it. I really wanted to listen to that part. The other half said calmly, “This is not a zombie. This is a ghoul. It doesn't want to be here any more than we want it. It is enslaved by a demon.”

“So what can we do?” Hood demanded.

“No sudden movements.” I jerked my head in the direction of the front door. “Nice and easy, get the fuck out of here. And tell those EMS guys to stay out. Treat it like a fire: don't send a bunch of extra bodies rushing in.”

Dunnachie was drawing down on it with a massive horse of a gun, some kind I'd never seen but definitely a force to contend with, while his mouth moved silently. I was betting he was reciting the Lord's Prayer. Fat lot of good the prayer or the gun would do him, tonight. The ghoul itself was under the direct control of a lesser demon, and she didn't want Dunnachie. The ghoul didn't notice anyone now but me. Yay me!

While Beethoven for beginners played in the next room, the young girl who would never play again gave my ruined jacket a long sniff and then writhed along the floor in my direction, her shoulders undulating slowly like a puma in a cage at the zoo, padding with otherworldly precision. So much for music soothing the savage breast. The smell she shed in her wake was a rank heavy wave; my stomach lurched as bile stung and churned high in the back of my throat.

Hold it together, Marnie, I thought as I stepped backward inch by inch, nodding. “That's right, sweetheart. This way.” I kept my voice steady, pointing at Dunnachie and Hood. “Mark, clunk Curly and Larry's heads together and get them the fuck out of here, so we can deal.”

Batten wrested several long, sharpened stakes out of elasticized slots in his kit.

“Mark… are you listening? That shit isn't gonna help,” I said, shedding my high heels in case I had to bolt in my stocking feet. I abruptly ran out of space again in a corner. I didn't think another spell to lift me through limbo-space was such a brilliant idea, since I was getting angry red hives all up the inside of my arms from the not-so-white magic.

The ghoul stopped for a minute and shuddered long and hard like it was preparing to vomit. Batten was creeping up behind it, the preternatural incarnation of the Crocodile Hunter.

“Hey dicksmack,” I barked. “Try listening!”

Sightless, the ghoul nonetheless stalked me as I sidled right. I tried a feint left, and it matched me easily. Her muscles tensed like a cat getting ready to leap. I went for the Beretta, knowing it was pointless, wanting it anyways… and found it missing. Fuckanut. I heard Chapel to my left check his clip and cock his gun.

Out of reasonable options, I bellowed: “Harry?”

The revenant returned too fast for human eyes to track, blowing past them in a blur of billowing coat and pale flesh. Dunnachie fired off two rounds in rapid succession, hitting Harry in the back. Flesh and cloth flew from his wound.

Harry grunted, “Father, shield her!” and cast his hand at Chapel.

Harry's coat fluttered over him like a descending murder of crows on an abandoned dirt road. Too shocked, what I cried out wasn't a word. Chapel made a short, horrified bellow of agony, doubling over. Batten shouted something I couldn't make out. The ghoul ignored it all, encroached on my personal space another stalking, creeping step.

“Restless spirit, I implore you!” I cried. “I do not have anything else for you! Harry? Harry, answer me! Mark, help him!”

The ghoul reared up, bent fingers scrabbling at the terrible stitches all around the bloat in its delicate yellowing throat. Fat goblets of bruise-blue and greenish flesh rained down from the chin as it shook her head madly, gurgling. Something that looked like bloody snot poured out of its nose. Half of its scalp slid forward, auburn hair a sticky mat.

Harry writhed, relentlessly pressing forward across the stained Berber despite an inhuman howl brewing in the back of his throat. He held up a warding hand as Batten circled with a stake. How he knew that Batten was fixed on the ghoul and not on finally staking a wounded adversary, I didn't know, but Harry rasped with full confidence, “She will turn on you. Please do be careful, lad.”

Batten said, “Hope you mean the ghoul.”

Hood regained the ability to speak. “Baranuik, how do we kill it?”

“Fire,” I answered. “Shoot it a hundred times, or cut it in a million pieces, it will just keep coming. Only fire, or the one who raised it, can end this.”

“So what do I do?” Batten snapped, knuckles white on the stakes. “Get a fuckin’ flamethrower?”

I heard Harry's wry, muffled, “Shruff and cinders.”

“You let me deal with it, for fuck's sake,” I snapped, balling my fists. Under my breath, I called to her. “Kristin. Krissie.”

The ghoul came around to face me again, and this time Chapel fired, two pops that sounded fake, but which took a piece of Dead Kristin's shoulder off in a spray of bone chips. She ignored it, lifting parched lips off pale gums to snarl at me, flashing plaque-packed metal braces. As she gnashed her teeth together, enamel snapped and she spit the bits. I slid as far as possible into the corner, pressing my back into the wall hard. Her skin had slipped off some more and now half of her face was just so much raw meat. One socket, crammed with the clear fleshy shred of a ruined eye like a pile of scrambled egg white, attempted to blink at me. The other cavity just goggled, raw and open, waiting.

“Krissie, I didn't know it was your eye, I swear,” I breathed. “I don't have the other one with me.” I showed the sightless creature my shaking hands. “See?” Of course it doesn't see, stupid. Does it? “I don't have it. Look!”

I focused hard on my palms, an idea forming. It was crazy, but even as I thought that, my fingertips spread and cupped to form a wide bowl.

Drawing down the moon was a long shot, but as my lips started to move, nascent light immediately shimmered to life between my fingertips. It grew quickly, flashing in roping lines across the skin of my palms. There, written on my flesh, was the promise of the Goddess. When I doubted, She did not, and it was time to trust Her opinion.