M. Hanover - Graveyard Child

“Well, there’s that, anyway. If we can’t beat the bastard, at least we can spend its money in ways it wouldn’t approve of.”

I pulled my phone out of my pocket, ready to make the call. A tiny numeral 1 was next to my texting icon. Somewhere in the drive, I’d missed the alert chime. It was a response from Curtis:

Help me. Its here.

THE SUN was gone, the day as dark as the night had been. Every third thing on the radio was a severe weather warning or someone advising anyone that didn’t need to be on the roads to get off them. I drove home for the last time. The curbs were starting to vanish under the depth of snow, and only the bigger streets were clear enough to drive on. I’d gotten the SUV to drive through the snow and ice of northern New Mexico. If we’d been in one of the little sports cars Ex liked, we’d have been walking.

I felt calm but not peaceful. I wasn’t ready, and I knew I wasn’t ready, and I was going in anyway. To their credit, Ex and Chogyi Jake hadn’t asked me to reconsider or wait. We were rushing in where angels feared to tread because there was no option. When it came to possession and riders and evil things from outside the world, we were the pros from Dover. I knew where the panic was in me, and I could chose not to feel it. Later, if there was a later, I could break down. Not now, though. That wasn’t the person I’d become.

At the house, the windows were all bright. The Christmas lights blinked and glowed blue and red and yellow and green under the thickening snow. Icicles as long as butcher’s blades hung from the eaves. The family home at holiday time. It should have been beautiful, but it seemed obscene.

In the backseat, Ozzie growled. When I stopped the car, she looked from me to the house and back, her eyebrows raised. It was the perfect pantomime of you’re-not-going-in-there-are-you? I reached back and scratched behind her ears.

“Okay,” I said. “Here’s the plan. I’m heading in. I’ll distract it. You guys go around the outside and come in the back. When you hear the signal, we’ll try to beat the sonofabitch down enough that Ex can run an exorcism.”

“And what will the signal be?” Chogyi Jake asked, hefting our one remaining shotgun.

“I was thinking something like ‘Get him,’ ” I said. “Simple, direct.”

“Works for me,” Ex said. “Let’s go.”

“Wait,” I said. “If there’s a question . . . if it looks like we can’t stop this thing without hurting Jay . . .”

I couldn’t say the words. They were there at the top of my throat, too thick and hard to speak. For more than a century, this thing had been eating my family. The math on the sacrifice was obvious. Lose one person to stop the death and degradation of dozens more. But it was my big brother.

“It’s not going to come to that,” Ex said. Chogyi Jake didn’t say anything, but I knew what was in his mind. Whatever happens, happens. We may die. We may kill. Terrible things or wonderful or both together, inextricable as milk poured into tea.

“I just needed to say it,” I said. “You know.”

“All right,” Chogyi Jake said.

I got out of the car, and before I could stop her, Ozzie clambered out with me. She pressed her body close against my knee and looked up expectantly.

“Okay,” I said. “But you’re not going to like it in there.”

We went up the walk, me and my dog. I didn’t bother knocking or ringing the bell. The door wasn’t locked.

As soon as we stepped in, Ozzie started growling low in the back of her throat. I felt it too. Everything was as it had been, but it was wrong. A parody of my childhood home. A grotesque version of it. The smell of gingerbread filled the air so thickly, it nauseated. The dead Christmas tree was decaying in its stand. I gathered my will and pressed out, making a warm place at my heart and expanding it like a bubble all around me. The sense of transcendent madness and evil lessened a degree, even if it didn’t evaporate.

From the kitchen, something laughed. It was a sick sound, wet and phlegmy. I walked in. They were at the table. Mom, Dad, Curtis, and the small, twisted tumor of a thing that had once been my brother Jay. Thick nylon rope bound all of them except it. Bright red Christmas stockings were stuffed in their mouths as gags.

The Graveyard Child’s grin split its face, and it cackled obscenely.

“Hey there, sister,” it said, and smacked its massive frog-like lips. “I was hopin’ you could come.”

“Abraxiel Unam,” I said.

“Sure, whatever,” it said, waving a hand like it was shooing a fly. Its skin was pale as maggots, its hands larger than a grown man’s, and thick. Its knuckles seemed to sink into its flesh. “Call me that. I’ll call you Little Janie Pees-Her-Pants. Or whatever. Your Royal Majesty if you want. Might as well fuck a horse as a supermodel where I come from.”

It shuddered. Its black eyes quivered. Ozzie barked once, and the Graveyard Child barked back, spraying spittle across the room. Ozzie got behind my knees but didn’t retreat past that. I could feel her growling. The thing at the table was madness. Not stupid, not out of control. It was vast intelligence gone necrotic. It hopped down from its chair and reached for a plate of cookies beside the stove. Everything it did seemed rich with meaning and menace. Even putting a cookie in its toothless mouth.

“You want some, sister? They made them for everybody but you. You’re the fucking Whore of Babylon,” it said, then winked massively. “I should know, right?”

“What do you want?”

“I want what’s mine back !” it shouted, its mouth a square of rage. “You took my things. You took my stuff. Do you have any idea how long it took me to build all that up? All those places, all those houses? All that lovely, lovely money? Because you know what money is? It’s power.”

It sighed.

“So here’s the deal. You get out of my sister’s body, and I won’t kill all these people. Sound good?”

“You’re not talking to her,” I said. I did, not the rider. “You’re talking to me.”

“Sonnenrad! Darling! Why the cold shoulder? I know you’re in there. I fucked you into her,” it said, then pressed fingers to its lips. “Oh. Hey. Was that rude? I never know where the line is.”

It took the plate of cookies and trundled back to its chair, chewing with its mouth open, unself-conscious as a baby.

“Let them go,” I said. “You don’t have an issue with them. You have it with me.”

It reached down with one foot, hooked an ankle under the rungs of the chair Dad was tied to, and tipped it back. Dad’s eyes went wide as he fell backward. I shouted and moved forward, but I still heard the thump when his skull hit the floor. It popped another cookie into its mouth and looked up innocently.

“No? All right,” it said, its deformed face a picture of wide-eyed guilelessness that melted into a leer. “How much do you think it would take?”

“I am not here to bargain,” my voice said without me.

“Didja come to mud wrestle? Because I’m all for that shit. Of course you’re here to bargain. That meat suit you’ve got on is mine. I tailored it. You only got to borrow it for a while, and then you were supposed to give it back. I mean, honey. I’m your daddy, right? You wouldn’t steal from your own daddy?”

“I have no father,” the rider said, and I could feel the power of the words in my throat. “I am the Black Sun and the Black Sun’s daughter. You are no part of me.”

“Okay, not daddy, then. Favorite midwife. It doesn’t matter. The thing is, all my toys are tied to that meat sack. And I want ’em back. You can crawl up out of there and give her to me, then you can swim on back to the Other Side and all these poor bastards can fall into lives of denial and alcoholism, or I burn them all and you besides. Jayné Heller turns into that icky Ball Park frank that’s been in the cooker since last August, and her fortune goes to her only living relative, her poor brother Jay-bird.”