Chapter 15
Another day, another room full of horrible wallpaper.
The latest pattern featured roses—or maybe carnations, or possibly cabbages—in shades of yellow and green.
They might have been bright and cheerful about thirty years before, but by the time Hazel picked up her paint scraper, they’d faded to an assortment of dingy, barfy hues.
Removing the paper was practically an exorcism in itself.
Rain poured down beyond the window, falling hard enough to bend the weeds and turn the ground into reddish mud.
The house’s builder had redeemed themselves a little bit by putting on a tin roof, and the sound of the rain soothed Hazel into a constant, slow rhythm as she continued working, letting her mind switch off after a morning of numbers and occult theory.
They did need the rain. That was basically Pennsylvania’s state motto, but it was true, and Hazel had eaten enough local produce to appreciate it. Besides, she always liked the aftermath of a storm. She could almost smell the combination of damp earth and cleansed air already.
No—that wasn’t the smell.
The scent grew stronger, rising above the faint odor of old wallpaper.
It was earthy, kind of, but sweeter and muskier too, and less natural the more Hazel smelled it.
Perfume, she thought, the cheap kind they sold in drugstores.
A teenage girl might have still had to save up for it, especially one whose parents had a small farm in the seventies.
It would have meant adulthood, excitement, romance.
There was no source for it now. When Hazel stepped away from the wall, the odor still filled the room. She went over to the door, faced out into the hallway, and took a breath. The smell was just as strong, and the edges of the hallway were starting to blur.
Oh.
She turned back and saw only blobs of color where the cabbage-carnation-roses had been, yellow and green smudges fading into each other like watercolors where the artist had gone too heavy on the water part.
The window frame had flattened into a white outline, the electrical sockets on the baseboards had become simply tan squares against the wallpaper, and as Hazel watched, the concrete floor smoothed out to a uniform shade of gray. Seeing it made her eyes feel crossed.
Looking away didn’t help because she looked down at her hip, where the wound was glowing chilly gray-white and the lines it was sending out had become much more visible, scars Hazel could see through her T-shirt and shorts.
The infection is spreading, she thought, clinical and distant except for the sudden tightness in her stomach. As before, she touched one of the lines and felt nothing: no pain, no substance between her fingers that she could pull and try to uproot, just denim and the flesh below it.
It didn’t hurt. That was a small blessing. The unclaimed ethereal seemed to be spontaneously manifesting, which wasn’t great and probably had even less great implications, but at least it wasn’t a painful process. Honestly, the decor was kind of an improvement.
She raised her head, and the flowers were back on the wallpaper. This time they had mouths.
Small, flat teeth ringed a lipless hole at the center of each blossom, opening and closing with the mindless motion of dying worms on the sidewalk.
Each set made a moist little click as they met and another wet sound as they parted again, a regular rhythm just like the rain had been, and one might have been quiet but there were hundreds on the walls.
Hazel stumbled backward, which brought her out into the hallway.
The threshold didn’t save her this time; the doorframe stayed blurry and flattened, the glowing lines on her body didn’t fade, and the flowers stayed on the walls, teeth clicking and parting and clicking.
The holes between the teeth had more dimensions than anything else in the room, stretching far back into a space that wasn’t really behind the wall.
They went out, too, and off to the side, and Hazel had to close her eyes as a nauseating sense of vertigo swept over her.
The darkness of her own head came as a relief, even with the constant noise of the flowers’ teeth, and Hazel’s options became clearer.
She inhaled deeply, smelling the perfume again and finding it almost comforting this time.
The ethereal in the room wasn’t predatory and warped by its own nature.
A person had lived there once, a girl who’d felt strongly enough about her first high school dance to leave a forty-year-old memory sealed in hyacinth and citrus.
Whatever the flowers were, or whatever had sent them, the room wasn’t their place.
Hazel drew her knife from its clasp, and the familiar weight of it in her hand brought the next steps to her muscles as much as her mind, triggering the memories not so much of particular actions but of the role she’d played off and on for twenty-some years.
She was a professional. She dealt with hauntings.
The flowers were still there when she opened her eyes, but three steps brought her into the center of the room, and once she kneeled there, her focus narrowed to the blank canvas of the concrete floor.
Hazel set the point of her knife there and dragged it up and right in a long, sweeping arc, leaving a glowing blue line behind it.
Hundreds of teeth kept clicking around her. The rain was falling somewhere, but Hazel couldn’t hear it.
She drew another line. The pattern spiraled out from under her knife. She half expected the flowers to start screaming or making threats, but they just kept on opening and closing their mouths, never changing their speed.
She could see the movement at the edges of her vision, the holes in the world and the flat, human teeth around them.
Hazel focused on the sigil and brought a Greek phrase up out of her throat.
Power came with it, energy with a weight like an anchor that hit the material world and yanked.
The concrete under her turned rough again in a shiver of transition, leaving her briefly off balance as a small depression opened under one knee, and the baseboard above it got its cracks and warps back.
And, thank God, the mouths in the flowers vanished.
The room was normal again: ugly, dingy, with half the wallpaper torn off and duct tape covering cracks in the windowpane.
“Hooray,” said Hazel to the silence.
* * *
The silence didn’t last. As Hazel settled her weight back on her heels and considered getting a snack before going on with the wallpaper, a high-pitched noise from outside cut through the steady drumming on the roof.
She was inclined to dismiss it as a bird at first—she didn’t think they usually called to each other in the rain, but what did she know?
—but after a few seconds, she heard it again.
Awooooo.
Since she was listening that time, she heard the series of yelps that followed the howl.
It didn’t take Summer’s skill with the wilderness to know what that meant: A dog had gotten into her yard.
Somebody’s puppy had run off and now was outside being aggressively miserable.
Hazel couldn’t blame it, not with the rain outside, but the afternoon of phone calls and muddy paws waiting for her got a “god dammit ” as she pushed herself to her feet.
Look on the bright side, she told herself. A wet dog can’t do much damage to this place.
She grabbed her raincoat from the closet and then, not trusting the locals to keep their pets up to date on shots, added the thick pair of rubber gloves she used for scrubbing floors. The dog kept barking while Hazel shoved her feet into galoshes.
“Oh, hold your horses,” she called back, but she hurried down the hall. If Rover decided to give up and try their luck elsewhere…well, the road was nearby and people didn’t brake well in the rain. Throwing open the front door, she hurried out onto the porch.
Two clunky steps out, she stopped in place, blinking.
The dog wasn’t wet. The dog wasn’t alive.
A translucent blue canine shape, floppy-eared and feather-tailed, sat on the edge of Hazel’s porch, not letting his lack of physical lungs or vocal cords get in the way of a good solid ruckus.
It was a purposeful ruckus too, because the ghost dog stopped barking as soon as Hazel came out the door.
“If somebody’s fallen down an old well,” she told him, “I’m going back inside and ordering a crate of vodka.”
Her visitor whined, pawed at an object on the porch, and then whined again as his paw went right through its target.
He’d gotten Hazel’s attention, though. She saw the leafy end of a long vine, which hadn’t been near the porch this afternoon, just before the plant lifted itself a few feet into the air.
Getting her attention had evidently been a team effort.
Just looking at first, Hazel followed the vine out through the wet mud and over to the tree line. It joined others there and became a version of the many-legged shape she’d bargained with, but this time the figure was taller and more bipedal. It had to be, because it had made itself into a cage.
Hazel drew her knife again—clearly she wasn’t fated to leave it sheathed for more than five minutes that day—and started across the yard with the ghost dog at her heels.
She didn’t want to keep the bramble-thing waiting, but caution made her stop as soon as she could get a better look at the creature it was holding for her.
It didn’t seem able to hurt the brambles, but that was no reason to assume it was safe for humans.
The being inside the cage was just a dark shape at first, one standing so still that Hazel wondered if it was dead or pretending to be.
A couple steps forward showed her that it was a little taller than her and roughly human-shaped.
A couple more revealed that it was wearing a dark robe with a hood.
That was a pretty common wardrobe choice, especially among humanoids who weren’t entirely human, but Hazel didn’t even bother trying self-delusion anymore. As she neared the tree line, she knew what her ally had caught, and her heartbeat sped up.
Glowing red eyes met hers from within the hood.
It had fallen back slightly, giving her a glimpse of the face underneath: roughly human, but silver-skinned, with dark red figures twisting paths along the high, sharp cheekbones.
The thin lips quirked sideways as Hazel approached, and the figure arched dark eyebrows.
“Congratulations,” they said in a low voice with an accent that reminded Hazel of Shakespeare plays. She recognized it from her dream, and her raincoat suddenly felt too hot and tight. “Now, what exactly do you intend to do with me?”