Cameron Haley - Skeleton Crew

“Vi Victa Vis,” I said, and my force spell hit Tony in the chest like a wrecking ball taking a shot at a condemned building. His body hurtled through the air away from me and slammed into the side of a family mausoleum, the marble cratering from the impact.

“Terrence,” I called over my shoulder, “your fucking nephew wants to eat me.” I heard sounds of a struggle from the grave behind me and I remembered Terrence was having his own issues.

“Smoke him,” he grunted. “He’s family, but that shit only goes so far.”

“A great flame follows a little spark,” I said. A ball of fusion fire appeared in my hand. I flicked my arm and threw it at Tony, and it streaked toward him like a meteor burning through the atmosphere. The fireball exploded when it struck the zombie. I had to shield my eyes from the blast, and the shockwave lifted my hair from my shoulders. When I looked again all that was left of Tony was a blast shadow on the mausoleum wall.

I turned and looked back toward the other grave just as Terrence leaped back. He flowed a rhyme from a gangster rap and liquid fire poured into the grave. Keshawn screamed as he burned, but the screaming stopped long before the fire did. I walked back to Terrence and stood beside him, and we watched the flames dancing in the grave.

“That was fucked up,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“It must have been Mobley. He must have put a spell on ’em, done a ritual or something.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But what if it wasn’t Mobley?”

Terrence looked over at me. “What you mean, Domino?”

“I mean, what if your nephews aren’t the only ones?” I looked around the cemetery, and shivered. “What if they’re just the first?” two

That night, I sat on my bed with my laptop in front of me and searched for Tony and Keshawn on FriendTrace. com. I typed their names in the search box and poured juice into the spell I use to contact the dead.

I got a white screen with the words No Results Found on it. I couldn’t force Terrence’s nephews to take my call, but that’s not what my spell was telling me. It was telling me Tony and Keshawn weren’t in the Beyond. Since they were dead-again-there was really only one other place they could be.

I shut down the laptop, threw on some clothes and went out to the living room. Honey, my piskie roommate, was on the coffee table with four of her sisters. They were playing Chinese checkers, but the game seemed more about pelting each other with marbles than the strategies I’d learned as a child. There was a fair amount of violence in it, since the marbles were almost as large to the piskies as a bowling ball would have been to me.

“Hi, Domino! Wanna play?”

“I need to cross over for a bit. Hold down the fort while I’m gone.”

“I can come with you.”

“Play your game. I should be in and out.” I sank onto the couch, spun my spirit-walking spell and crossed over to the Between. I grabbed the Colt Peacemaker from the closet and belted the rig around my waist. The weapon had belonged to Wyatt Earp and they called it the Dead Man’s Gun in these parts. They also said it was cursed, but it was still a comfort in a place where I couldn’t use sorcery.

I left my condo and strolled down the blue-lit nighttime street outside my building. I entered the pale mist that shrouded the streets of the shadow city, and the world seemed to spin around me like a vinyl record on a turntable. When I stepped out of the fog, I was standing at the gates of the cemetery.

This was my first time visiting a cemetery in the Between. I’d expected it to be a happening place, the ghostly equivalent of a busy hotel. Instead, it was deserted, quiet and still. In the real world, it had been designed from the sod up to ooze peacefulness and serenity. It was pleasant enough you could almost forget it had corpses buried in it.

In the Between, that calm and soothing ambiance was replaced by something else entirely. Not danger, exactly-I didn’t feel threatened by it. The vibe I got from the place was more like loneliness, regret. The cemetery was the last station at the end of the line. “Everyone gets off here,” it seemed to whisper. “There’s no place else to go.”

I went in through the gates and walked down the winding road toward the graves. The ambient blue light of the Between at night was dimmer here. There were no leaves on the trees that flanked the road, and they cast no shadows.

Tony’s grave was still open, a stark, black shape like a doorway in the ground. I walked to the edge and knelt beside it. “Tony?” I whispered. No response. I tightened my jaw, lay down on my stomach and reached into the grave. It was empty-even the coffin was missing. I hastily stood up and brushed the grave dirt from my clothes. I looked around, and seeing nothing, I walked over to the mausoleum where I’d torched Tony with the fireball spell.

The blast shadow was still there. As I approached, it rippled and flowed away from the wall, and then floated toward me. I jumped back and drew Ned, pointing the pistol more or less at the center of the shifting shadow.

The apparition raised its hands. “Yo, Domino, it’s me, Antoine.”

“What the fuck, Tony, you scared the shit out of me.”

The uppermost part of the shadow-presumably Tony’s head-swirled around, like he was checking himself out. “Yeah, kinda creepy. Sorry ’bout that. You nuked me, guess this is the best I can do.”

“You tried to eat me, Tony.”

“Yeah, I got to apologize for that. Your ear okay?”

I nodded. Honey had dusted up a nice healing glam our for me and my ear was good as new. I’d have to get it pierced again, though. “So what was up with that? Why’d you bite me?”

“I don’t know what got into me, Domino. I just needed it, you know? It’s like when you’re real thirsty and you see some water and you just got to have it.”

“Like an instinct.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I didn’t decide to eat you, my body just needed it. I guess it’s a zombie thing, like in the movies.”

“That fucking bite better not turn me into a zombie, Tony, or I’ll come back and kill you again. I’ll come in with a plan and take my fucking time about it.”

“I don’t think it works that way, Domino. I didn’t get bit by a zombie and I still turned into one.”

“So what now, you’re a ghost?”

“Yeah, I guess, but I’m stuck here.” Tony floated toward me again and then stopped abruptly. “See? This is as far as I can go from where you lit me up. It’s like I’m chained to the fucking muslim.”

“Mausoleum.”

“What?”

“It’s a mausoleum, not a Muslim. So you’re trapped in the place where your body was destroyed.”

“Yeah,” Tony said. “Keshawn still over there, too. We was talking earlier, before you showed up. He can’t leave his hole.”

I had a spell that bound ghosts and I thought I might be able to reverse it to free Tony. I even had a spell that could banish a ghost to the Beyond. Problem was, I couldn’t cast either spell in this place. I could try to summon Tony into the mortal world but the odds didn’t seem good with him tied down in the Between. “Have you tried to manifest in the physical world, Tony? If you can, I might be able to cut you loose.”

“Nah, Domino, I can’t go nowhere. Like I said, I’m stuck.”

“I could shoot you. If I destroy your ghost form or what ever, maybe it would set you free.”

Tony didn’t say anything for a few moments and I got the feeling he was looking at Ned. “Maybe we could try something else.”

“I can’t really think of anything else, Tony.”

“I can wait. Maybe something will come to you.”

I nodded and was about to respond when a writhing mass of fleshy tentacles flashed down from above and coiled around the shadow. Tony screamed as the tentacles lifted him into the air. I looked up.