Chapter 1 - Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

PART 1

The house didn’t look haunted, but few of them ever did.

Hazel had sent spirits onward in high-rise apartment buildings, exorcised double-wide trailers, and once spent a horrible weekend in a converted loft, laying to rest the ghosts of the poor workers who’d died when it had been a warehouse. The ethereal world lay right alongside the material, and the boundary could break at almost any moment.

She didn’t like the Chapman house, but she didn’t put that down to any special sense she’d developed as a medium. The condominium sat squarely in the middle of a well-trimmed lawn, two stories of perfectly maintained sand-brown siding and peaked roofs that would have screamed respectability if that hadn’t been an oxymoron. Her parents probably still dreamed about a home like it—probably dreamed even more about the gated community and the country club five minutes away—and Hazel was old enough to know her own biases.

Knowing didn’t mean overcoming, though, and she was halfway bristling already when she knocked on the door. The middle-aged white man who answered didn’t improve the situation. He looked like he came free with the house and inspected her like she was milk two days past the expiration date.

“Hazel Lewis,” she said, and didn’t smile. He wasn’t her client.

“The…medium,” said the man, holding the word at arm’s length and then dropping it quickly.

“Yes.” Hazel offered her hand, poking at his boundaries now rather than just being polite. It was petty and unjustified—he had every reason to be skeptical about her—but the drive had been long, the bag over her shoulder was heavy, and the work ahead was unpleasant.

The man shook quickly, getting it over with. “I’m Lee Chapman. My father’s inside.” He stood aside to let her enter, then followed, barely pausing to shut the door.

Hazel took in the living room at a glance: grays and whites, two sofas that looked rock hard, a couple of pictures on the walls, and a low table with a bunch of folded newspapers on it. An empty coffee mug and a half-eaten sandwich on the same table were the only real evidence of human occupation. Otherwise, it could have been a photo in a home decor magazine.

Her skin started prickling as soon as she crossed the threshold, goose bumps forming in a sudden ripple of cold that had nothing to do with air conditioners or shade. The other side was always cold—Hazel had more reasons than professionalism for going to work in a blazer and slacks—but it rarely made itself known so fast. A faint humming had started in her ears too. This was going to be a tough one.

“Mr. Chapman,” she said, turning to the man who was clearly watching to make sure she didn’t steal the silverware, “what’s your perspective on your father’s situation?”

Lee blinked at her. “Why are you asking me? He’s the one who hired you.”

“Not all my clients can see their cases clearly. The more information I have, and the more sources I have it from, the easier this process will be on everyone.”

He snorted. “Then my perspective is that you’re taking advantage of a delusional man in the last couple weeks of his life, and you should be in jail, but there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.”

“I could figure that out,” Hazel said, fighting the urge to stuff her hands in her pockets. These conversations went better when she looked composed, no matter how cold her fingers were getting. “His nurse corroborated some points of his story.”

“His nurse is way too suggestible to be in medicine. The room’s always been a heat sink, the house makes noises, and Dad’s vision went wonky five years ago. He could see the Rangers starting lineup in the shadows.”

“And the insects?”

Lee rolled his eyes. “Bugs. Probably got in through a window, or maybe the contractors fu—messed up when they were redoing the room. Maybe they like the smell of his medicine. I don’t know, but I know it’s not ghosts.”

“So you’ve never seen any evidence that he’s experiencing paranormal activity?”

“I haven’t seen it because it doesn’t exist.” A shadow flickered deep in Lee’s eyes. “Look, this is all bad enough without pandering to a bunch of half-baked theories and delusions. Doesn’t matter, though. My father spent eighty-six years knowing he was right about everything, and he’s not going to stop until he’s underground, so do what you think you have to do and then get out of my hair, okay?”

Hazel forcibly settled her emotional prickles. The man’s father was dying. She could cut him a little slack. “Then I’ll make this as quick as I can,” she said, “and if everything he and Mr. Ren told me has a normal explanation, at least I’ll have settled his mind a little. Do you want to wait out here or come in with me?”

It helped to give people what choices she could.

“I—I’ll wait,” said Lee, still truculent but shaken enough to back down a notch. “My father doesn’t want me involved.”

That happened. Sometimes people wanted to keep their loved ones safe, and sometimes they worried about looking silly in front of them. In this case, the latter seemed more likely. The Chapmans probably needed a good therapist as much as they did a medium, but that wasn’t Hazel’s problem.

She’d learned what she needed to know, anyhow. The haunting might be bad, but it wasn’t causing any blatant manifestations, which meant that the border was still mostly intact. Thank God.

Lee led her across the living room and through a door. Both the humming and the cold got worse as soon as Hazel stepped into the short hallway on the other side. Even Lee, who almost certainly couldn’t feel them, hunched up his shoulders and grimaced.

“The door on the right,” he said. “Bathroom’s opposite. I’ll stay in the living room.” He wasn’t regarding her with any less suspicion, but maybe there was no silver to steal back here.

Hazel nodded. “Thank you. With any luck, I’ll be out soon.”

She didn’t hear Lee if he replied and only noticed his departure when the door shut behind him. Already she was loosening her grip on the material world, letting the humming rise around her and Clarence’s room fill her vision. Each step she took toward it became slower and heavier until she stood in front of the bland white door and grasped the handle.

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* * *

The room descended on her in an ice-water rush and the whine of a dentist’s drill. At first she couldn’t process anything else, could only stand still and let herself adjust; forcing the issue, Hazel had learned, did not go well. She took the cold and the noise, knew that they were happening, let her brain come to grips with them until the sharpest edges had worn off and she could make sense of the normal world again.

Clarence Chapman lay dying in a big room with yellow and white wallpaper, dark furniture, and three taxidermied heads on the wall above the king-size bed. A coyote and a deer flanked a black bear, their glassy eyes reflecting the light of a large, old-fashioned TV, and Chapman looked like a fourth trophy as he lay beneath them with the covers pulled up to his neck.

He wouldn’t have made much of an ornament. Clarence was practically a skeleton with skin, and that was weathered and yellowed, the product of an age when tobacco, lead, and tanning were the cornerstones of civilization. In Hazel’s half-otherworldly perception, shadows stretched away from him, shadows that the wasted form under the blanket should never have been able to cast.

He turned gray eyes on Hazel, cloudy with cataracts and yet weirdly sharp. “Are you the girl I sent for?” he rasped.

“I’m Hazel Lewis,” she said, keeping her voice light. “The medium you hired.”

Clarence snorted acknowledgment, picked up a remote from a pile of golf magazines, and turned off the TV. “Paid enough for it. What do I have to do now?”

“Not much, really. It’s in my hands.” Hazel looked around the room as her vision focused more, noticing bottles lined up by height on the top of Chapman’s dresser, their reflections wavery in the warped mirror behind them, and an angular brown armchair on the other side of the bed. A pile of flies lay in the corner beyond it, and a couple moved as Hazel watched. “How long have those been there?”

Clarence shrugged. “Ren swept last night. Since then. Getting nervous?”

His smile showed a surprising amount of teeth for a man in his state. Big and healthy, except for about seventy years of tobacco stains, they reminded Hazel of a horse’s. Lay the cube flat on your palm, she remembered her camp counselor saying to a bunch of squirmy eight-year-olds. He could bite your fingers right off if he gets confused.

“I try not to relax too much in my cases,” she said. “It always pays to stay alert.”

“Good girl.”

That didn’t merit an answer. Hazel set down her bag and began unpacking: four candles, bone runes, a silver knife with a birch handle, blessed water, scented oil. She felt Chapman watching her and tried to ignore it, just as she noted and ignored the voices that had begun to speak beyond the humming, using no language she’d ever heard from the living.

Four manifestations so far. Only the flies were physical. It could be worse.

She fell into the ritual, keenly aware of each motion, taking comfort in their regularity and precision. Black silk slid beneath her fingers as she smoothed the square out onto the floor. Supple leather gave in her grip when she shook and threw the runes, five of the raven-bone tokens coming up with their carvings visible.

Raido, the rider, was the rune nearest her. That always happened because she was controlling a powerful force, guiding much larger beings in the direction she wanted them to go. The nauthiz rune was nearest to Chapman, speaking of need and constraint. No great surprise there either. The other three landed on the eastern edge of the cloth.

Left was kaunaz, which meant fire or torches, injury or death. It pointed roughly to the space beside the TV, and Hazel glanced there quickly, but her half sight didn’t show her any threats. Still, it probably wasn’t a good place to cross the border.

One of the last two runes had fallen on top of the other, making a sort of cross at the cloth’s right corner—the top was thurisaz, the bottom algiz. The symbol for protection lay below the rune meaning giant or thorn or, often, trouble specifically from men.

Clarence could certainly be trouble—the client often was. Good people could get haunted or cursed if they accidentally moved into the wrong place, picked up the wrong object, or pissed off the wrong person. The nasty ones drew otherworldly parasites like rotten meat drew, well, flies, and generally for the same sort of reason.

She scooped the runes back into the bag, folded the cloth, and got to her feet.

Protection was protection, even with trouble added. Hazel set her first candle in the right-hand space that the mixed runes had signified, lit it, and began.

With the candles lit, the room grew darker.

Shadows that had seemed too long on Clarence’s bed and too dark in the corners sent out tendrils like little fingers, finding other patches of darkness and knitting themselves together. The overhead light faded to almost nothing, the candle flames burned blue, and the room took on a chill that matched the cold sinking into Hazel’s flesh. A rhythmic tapping mingled with the voices behind the humming, starting and stopping erratically, like a giant hand running toward her on its nails.

Hazel had been pretty sure Chapman’s haunting was hostile—insects were usually a bad sign—but she’d been hoping it wouldn’t be quite so strong. Communication was probably off the table, and there was a chance she’d have to temporarily seal the place and come back with reinforcements.

Chapman was staring at her, so expressionless that a witness in the material world might have thought he was dead. He’d folded his hands over his chest, which didn’t help the impression, and his spindly fingers stretched too far down their backs.

At least he wasn’t asking questions or telling her to hurry up. Hazel pulled her attention back to her work; the sooner she got on with it, the sooner she’d be done with the house and the man. Picking up the flask of blessed water, she poured some of it onto a square of white linen, then dragged the cloth along the blade of her knife, calling its power back to the surface. The silver began to glow.

Hazel breathed deep, dragging chilly air into her lungs despite their protests, centering herself in herself and in the connections she’d made over the years as she raised the knife above her head. On the exhale, she brought it down in one smooth movement. It cut cleanly through the barrier between worlds, and its radiant trail hung in the air for a moment.

Then the other side rushed in.

Once Hazel had opened the way, transition was instant. Darkness filled her sight for a second, and when it passed, she was standing by a bed made of crude iron. The dresser and its pills had vanished, leaving a mirror that took up half the wall and was even more warped than the one in the material plane. Bulges pressed against the wallpaper, each shaped like a reaching hand, and Hazel saw a spot near her where the bloody ends of fingers had broken through. The mouths of the trophy heads opened, and long, red tongues hung out, nearly reaching the bed below them.

This was Clarence’s true home. Consciously or not, he’d molded the ethereal to his deepest impulses over the years, and what he’d shaped was decay and carnage. Hazel turned to stare at the man who’d hired her. “What are you?”

Her voice came out in a whisper. He didn’t respond.

Across the room, the air began to squirm.

Empty space writhed before Hazel. Her eyes stopped focusing for a second, her brain’s desperate effort to save itself, but that didn’t spare her completely. Space tore itself apart around two figures. The one on her right was tall and lean, wearing a black robe fastened with brass buckles that shone slickly in the room’s uncertain light. The robe’s hood shadowed its face except for a pair of glowing red eyes.

The figure on the left, by Clarence’s bed, sent panic surging up Hazel’s stomach and into her throat.

A headless figure covered in bubbling red skin nearly scraped the ceiling with the top of its torso. It was almost as skeletal as Clarence, but with none of his fragility—its spindly arms and legs were clearly very solid, and its feet and hands had talons like razor blades. A pair of very human-shaped eyes, completely white except for the pupil, stared at Hazel out of the middle of its chest.

Two mouths lay below the eyes. The bottom one was expressionless as far as Hazel could tell, a lipless gash with fangs. The top one, unnervingly toothless, was smiling triumphantly.

Clarence smiled almost exactly the same way.