Caitlin Kittredge - Demon Bound

“Jack!” Pete shouted at him from mansion drive. “It’s not a bloody hotel, so rouse yourself before noon, if it pleases you, and let’s get this done!”

He stumbled to the window and saw Pete standing with her hand in the car window. She hit the horn again. Jack slid up the sash and stuck his head out.

“One fucking moment, Your Highness! Some of us don’t roll from slumber ready for telly!”

“Hurry up!” Pete shouted. “I’m starving and the Naugh-tons hadn’t any food.”

“I’d be a deal faster if you’d stop blowing that fucking horn,” Jack returned, and shut the window. He had aches in every part of his torso, a throbbing in his head, and a raging hard-on. A morning at some point in the distant past might have started off worse, but Jack couldn’t think of it offhand.

He pulled on boots, dungarees, decided the undershirt he’d worn the day before—and the day before that—was still in service. He rooted through the drawers for something to keep out the cold.

The last occupant of the room had lived in the mansion during a time when lapels had sat wide enough to take flight and ties were made to blind oncoming pedestrians, but Jack found a flannel that smelled of stale tobacco and staler pot, shrugged his leather over it. Flick-knife, fags, lighter. The essential kit Jack Winter required to face the cold, cruel world.

Briefly, he debated asking for Pete’s help with the hard-on, and decided it would only get him smacked in his already tender head.

“Jack!” More of the horn. “I’m not a taxi!”

Before he left, Jack risked a look into the bedroom mirror. Nothing stared back at him except his bruised reflection, and that was terrifying enough.

He limped down the stairs and out to Pete, collapsing into the Mini with a grateful sigh. Normally, he despised the little car that folded up his more than generous legs like he was inside a Christmas cracker, but today it was a chariot of the gods moving him toward caffeine and civilization.

“Sleep all right?” Pete said, once they were out of the drive and on a road that could have doubled as a ride at Euro Disney. In the daylight, hedgerows stripped of foliage bent over the car, scraping the Mini’s paint job like bone fingers.

“Slept like the dead,” Jack lied.

“I had terrible nightmares, myself,” Pete said. Jack watched her profile as she downshifted to take them up a hill and around a hairpin turn, where the road narrowed from something chancy to drive to a route that should only be traversed by hobbits.

“Nothing like . . .” He winced as the wheels pitched them sideways into the ditch that grooved next to the road. “Nothing like the ghost dreams?”

“No,” Pete said quietly. “Not like that. Cold eyes, mostly. Silver eyes, pairs and pairs of them just . . . staring. Not blinking. Like they were waiting.”

Weirs like Pete could see the truth in dreams, and Jack was gratified that her dream-sense, at least, also believed the mansion was bedeviled by a haunt.

“It wasn’t anything like the things Treadwell made me see, but it was damn spooky,” Pete continued. “So much cold, predatory attention . . .” She stomped on the brake pedal as a lorry materialized from around a bend. “ Fuck! ”

Jack ricocheted off the dash, which set his aches aflame anew. “How does anyone bloody live here without becoming a statistic?”

“They’re fucking hermits, I suppose,” Pete fumed, reversing until she found a pull-off to let the lorry by. “No wonder Heathcliff went mad.”

After a time, during which Jack found himself gripping his seat in panic more than he’d ever admit to in public, they arrived in Princetown.

“There’s the police station,” Pete said. “I’ll go introduce myself and you—” she looked Jack over. He looked at the trickle of morning shoppers in turn, most in windcheaters and wellington boots, checkered caps or overcoats. He stood out like a Sikh at a skinhead rally.

“I’ll try not to set any fires,” he promised.

Pete crossed the street and entered the small tan police headquarters. As soon as she was out of sight, Jack unfolded himself from the Mini’s interior and lit a fag, leaning on the fender.

Princetown held a small market square, the usual compliment of pubs and a chip shop, the Jubilee and Memorial Railway Inn, which looked like a fine place to get yourself murdered in a cozy mystery on the BBC, and a tourist information center manned by a teenage girl with blue stripes in her hair and a surly look on her face.

Jack checked for cars, and quickly crossed the square, slipping down a side street. If he was quick, he could be back before Pete knew he’d been gone. This wasn’t the sort of social call he wanted to explain to anyone, least of all her. And honestly, Jack thought, asking him to sit in the car like a sidekick in a place like Princetown was simply cruel and unusual.

He walked past house after house topped with damp thatch, surrounded by dead flowers, and populated by stony-eyed moor folk who glared at the platinum blond sore thumb from behind faded sprigged curtains. No cinema, no decent pub, and not even a newsagent’s where one could indulge in the bored country vices of smoking, cheap lager, and porno mags.

“Cruel, Pete,” he said. “Definitely cruel.”

The house Jack sought out was how he remembered it, perhaps a little sadder, a little more sag along the roof line and a few more feet of dead, tangled grass in the front garden.

Sidestepping a drift of newspapers and mail, Jack mounted the steps and pounded on the door with the flat of his fist.

A youth in an overcoat, iPod buds dangling from his ears, opened the door and stared Jack over with bloodshot eyes before he shifted the wad of gum in his mouth and spoke. “Yeah? What do you want, then?”

Jack flicked his fag into the bushes. “Looking for Elsie. Her folks still live here?”

“Nope,” said the youth. “They kicked.”

“Simon!” A voice that could pierce a pit full of drunken punks twenty men thick echoed from inside the house. “Who’s at the door?”

“Oi, Elsie!” Jack shouted, shoving the youth out of the way. “Elsie Dinsmore!”

“Jack?” Elsie came barreling from somewhere in the shadowed interior, beyond the beaded curtains and head-high stacks of magazines. Her shawl and layers of skirt flapped behind her and enveloped him as she threw her arms around his neck. It was rather like being embraced by an enthusiastic parrot. “Jack fucking Winter! Always knew you weren’t dead, you sly skinny bastard!”

“Elsie Dinsmore,” Jack said with a grin. “You still look beautiful as when you wore your hair three feet high and wrapped yourself in DIY tape.”

She laughed from deep in smoke-scraped lungs. “You’re a flatterer, you are, but it’s Elsie Boote now. Haven’t used that shite stage name in ages.”

Elsie took Jack’s face between her hands, turned his head from side to side. “But you’re still Jack Winter, aren’t you?”

“Some of us are rubbish at moving on,” Jack said.

“Well don’t just stand there like a knob!” Elsie cried, grabbing his arm. “Come have yourself seat. SIMON! ” she bellowed at earsplitting volume. “Put on the kettle for our guest and get some of them chocolate biscuits I bought on a plate.”

Jack let himself be gently dragged into a sitting room smothered in tapestries and furniture made entirely out of pillows braced on wooden frames. Herbs hung in dusty clusters, so thick the ceiling beams looked like furrows of earth. Dozens of birdcages blocked the light from the window, full of dead birds with glass eyes that stared balefully at Jack.

The only bare surface in the entire space was a round table covered in purple velvet. A box made of carved bone sat at the center, scenes of nymphs and harvest orgies parading around the edge of its lid.