Stacia Kane: Unholy Ghosts

She moved her hand, reaching again for Hyram. This time her fingers connected with something solid, something that felt warm and alive. Hyram. He wasn’t alive. She was dying.

But in death she could grab hold of him and drag him into the broken circle. In death she could use the strength of her will to bring the Ectoplasmarker down on Hyram’s suddenly solid flesh. In death she could mark him with his passport, the symbol to identify him to the psychopomp, and physically hold him in place.

Desperately she scrawled the figure on his arm, while her soul stretched between Hyram and the dog like a taut clothesline. She didn’t dare look away to see what her physical body was doing.

She managed the last line as her vision went entirely black. Pain shot through her as she fell to the floor with a house-rattling thud, but it was physical pain this time, bone pain, not the agony of having her living soul ripped from her body as it had been moments before.

She opened her eyes just in time to see Hyram Dunlop disappear through the rippling patch of air.

Her fingers scrabbled at the clasp on her heavy silver pillbox, lifting the lid. She grabbed two of the large white pills inside and gobbled them up, biting down so the bitterness flooded her taste buds and made her nose wrinkle. It tasted awful. It tasted wonderful. The sweetest things were bitter on the outside, Bump had told her once, and oh, how right he’d been.

Her fingers closed around her water bottle and she twisted off the cap and took a gulp, swishing it around in her mouth so the crushed pills could enter her bloodstream under her tongue, so they could start dissolving before they slid down into her stomach and blossomed from there.

Her eyes closed. The relief wasn’t everything it would be in twenty minutes, in half an hour as the Cepts were digested fully. But it was something. The shaking eased enough for her to control her hands again.

Cleaning up was the worst part of Banishings. Or rather, it was usually. This time the worst part had been feeling her soul pull from her flesh like a particularly sticky Band-Aid.

Carefully she put her altar pieces back in her bag, wrapping the dog skull in hemp paper before setting it on top of everything else. She’d have to buy a new one. This dog had tasted her. She couldn’t use it again.

Her Cepts started to kick in as she swept. Her stomach lifted, that odd, delicious feeling of excitement—of anticipation—making her smile without really realizing it. Things weren’t so terrible, after all. She was alive. Alive, and just high enough to feel good about it.

The Sanfords arrived home just as she knelt outside their front door with a hammer and an iron nail.

“Welcome home,” she said, punctuating her words with sharp taps of the hammer. “You shouldn’t have any more problems.”

“He’s…gone?” Mrs. Sanford’s dark eyes widened. “Really gone?”

“Yep.”

“We can’t thank you enough.” Mr. Sanford had a way of speaking, his voice booming out from his barrel chest, that made his voice echo off the stucco walls of the house.

“Part of my job.” She couldn’t even bring herself to be mad at the Sanfords right now. It wasn’t their fault they were honest and haunted, instead of faking like ninety-nine percent of Debunking cases.

She finished driving in the nail and stood up. “Don’t move that, whatever you do. We’ve found that homes where a genuine haunting occurred are more vulnerable to another one. The nail should prevent it.”

“We won’t.”

Chess put the hammer back in her bag and waited, trying to keep a pleasant smile on her face. Mr. and Mrs. Sanford shuffled their feet and glanced at each other. What were they—

Oh.

“Why don’t we go on inside, and we’ll finish off your paperwork and get you your check, okay?”

The Sanford’s anxious expressions eased. Chess couldn’t really blame them. If she was about to be handed fifty thousand dollars from the Church just because she’d had an escaped ghost in her house, she’d be pretty relaxed, too. Just like she would have felt if she’d gotten her bonus. It would have been ten grand on this job, enough to pay Bump and have something left over until the next one.

Stupid ghosts always ruined everything, like loud babies in a nice restaurant.

They offered her coffee, which she declined, and water, which she accepted, while they signed various forms and affadavits. It was almost nine-thirty by the time she handed over their check, and she still had to stop by the graveyard before she could get to the Market. Damn Mr. Dunlop. She hoped he was being punished justly.

The market was in full swing when she got there just shy of eleven, with her body calm and her mind collected. A quick shower and blow-dry of her black-dyed Bettie Page haircut, a change into her off-work clothes, and the sweet relief of another Cept working its way into her beaten bloodstream were all she’d needed to feel normal again.

Voices colored the air around her as she walked past the crumbling stone plinth that had once been the entryway to a Christian church. The church, of course, had been destroyed. It wasn’t necessary anymore. Who wasted their lives believing in a god when the Church had proof of the afterlife on its side? When the Church knew how to harness magic and energy?

But the plinth stayed, a useless remnant—like so many other things. Including, she thought, herself.

Against the far wall, food vendors offered fruit and vegetables, gleaming with wax and water under the orange light of the torches. Carcasses hung from beams, entire cows and chickens and ducks, lambs and pigs, scenting the cramped space with blood. It pooled on the dirt and stained the shoes of those walking through it, past the fire drums where they could cook their purchases.

Then came the clothes, nothing too professional or clean. The salesmen knew their clientele in Downside Market. Tattered black and gray fabric blew in the wind like ghosts. Bright skirts and black vinyl decorated the teetering temporary walls and erupted from dusty boxes on the ground. Jewelry made mostly of razor blades and spikes reflected the flames back at her as she wandered through the narrow aisles, paying little attention to the strangers darting out of her way. Those who knew her lifted their heads in acknowledgment or gave her a quick, distracted smile, but the ones who didn’t…they saw her tattoos, saw witch , and moved. By strictly enforced law, only Church employees were allowed to have magical symbols and runes tattooed on themselves, and Church employees, no matter what branch, weren’t exactly welcome everywhere. Especially not in places where people had reason to resent their government.

It used to bother her. Now she didn’t care. Who wanted a bunch of people poking their noses into her business? Not her.

Chess liked the Market, especially when her vision started to blur a little, just enough that she didn’t have to see the desperate thinness of some of the dealers, the children in their filthy rags darting between the booths, trying to pick up scraps or coins people dropped. She didn’t have to watch them huddle by the fire drums even on a night as unseasonably warm as this one, as though they could store up enough heat to see them through the winter ahead. She didn’t have to think about the contrast between the middle-class suburban neighborhood she’d just left and the heart of Downside. Her home.

Somewhere in the center she found Edsel lurking behind his booth like a corpse on display. The stillness of his body and his heavy-lidded eyes fooled people all the time; they thought he was sleeping, until they reached out to touch something—a ceremonial blade, a set of polished bones, a rat’s-skull rattle—and his hand clamped around their wrist before they could even finish their motion.