Chapter 43
“Hazel?” Stephanie Chapman, obviously startled, still collected herself quickly. “Are you okay?”
Hazel couldn’t completely keep from laughing. “Hanging in there.” And really, except for the almost certain doom and the general threat of malevolent corpses in her den, she wasn’t doing badly.
“Oh jeez, I’m sorry. I’d heard—well, I Google us once in a while, my therapist says I shouldn’t, but it’s hard to resist, and I saw that—”
“A bear killed a reporter on my property?”
“Mm-hmm. Or that’s the official story. YouTube’s got a couple conspiracy videos, but they don’t have a lot of likes.”
“Oh Lord.” Hazel leaned back at her table, gaze drifting idly over her notebook and the book of runes she’d been reading while she waited for the phone to ring. A mostly empty mug of coffee sat nearby. She suspected she’d need a fresh one before long. “Let me guess: aliens.”
“One of them. And, um, one of them thinks you gave the bear drugs and trained it to attack trespassers.”
“I think I’m flattered. Do they say what kind of drugs?”
Stephanie allowed herself to giggle. “I didn’t check.”
“Probably not worth getting that data point into the algorithm. How are you all doing? No weird incidents?”
“Well, not any supernatural ones,” said Stephanie. She sighed. “It’s been an interesting few weeks. I’m almost tempted to change our name, except that feels too much like running away.”
“I get that,” said Hazel, who still maintained her web page as much as she could from a cell phone and occasional library trips. “The kids handling it?”
“Better than we are. Annette was getting into a whole goth phase already. I’m a little worried she might start messing around with, y’know, your kind of thing, to be honest. No offense intended.”
“None taken, believe me. It’s not a career I recommend.
” One of Hazel’s legs still ached after she’d been on her feet for a while.
She didn’t wake up screaming with visions of Chapman’s creature, but she suspected Maxwell’s presence helped with that, even when he was technically hiding in her closet.
“I’d just like her to learn how to talk to the living first, you know? And that’s hard enough at fourteen.”
Hazel winced in memory. “No kidding. I can have a word with her about the occult stuff if you’d like, though I doubt she’ll find out enough to get in trouble.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Stephanie said, either really meaning that or faking it well. “So, were you calling to check in?”
“No, I’m afraid I’ve got a question.”
“I asked you enough of them. The police haven’t told us a whole lot, though. Lee spent a day talking to them right after they discovered the, um, basement, and then they checked back in a week or so later, but nothing much since.”
“Not a problem,” said Hazel, staring absently at her notebook again.
Runes in different colors of ink danced along the margins, alone and combined, with scrawled lines of text around them.
Summoning and binding = Words of Creation?
read one diagonal phrase, and another noted virgin parchment maybe.
Her fingers had started cramping before she’d made coffee.
“I wanted to know about Clarence’s house. ”
* * *
She was lying.
“Since my laptop exploded,” said Hazel, handing Maxwell a mug of coffee and a toaster pastry, “I’ve mostly been printing out files and scanning them when I’m done, and Tiffany’s been great about it. We keep a couple ledgers that I really need to handle in person, though.”
That much was probably true. Maxwell suspected that Hazel knew the same thing he did: Falsehood went down easier the more truth it involved. Her employer likely did have ledgers that couldn’t leave the office—but Hazel probably didn’t need to work on them the next day.
“An overnight journey?” he asked.
“I hope not. I can’t be sure, though. It’s a couple hours drive either way.”
They sat on the porch, as was becoming habit when they were both awake.
Outside, one or both of them had a better chance of spotting any potential trouble—not to mention less temptation to indulge with two doors and a hallway between them and Hazel’s bed.
Casper was curled up between them, a chaperone too engaging for Maxwell to truly resent, and the midmorning light turned all the shapes in the yard crisp and bright.
It would have been quite a domestic scene if Casper hadn’t been translucent and Maxwell hadn’t resembled a sinister monk from a Gothic romance.
He took a bite of his pastry, which seemed to be mostly icing and a more solid kind of strawberry jam, and examined Hazel with an ethereal eye.
Her wound was progressing, he saw with no surprise—the wine could only hold off Perthrux’s influence for so long—but with an unpleasant lurch in his chest all the same.
Still, the corruption was moving slowly.
“I doubt a night in a hotel would cause too much danger.”
“From me…leaking, you mean,” said Hazel, nodding slowly. “But what about attacks?”
“More difficult to say. The journey should provide you with a degree of protection, since—” As he did every so often, Maxwell tried to bring out the demon’s name, testing his remaining bonds.
As they did every so often, the damned things held.
“—my master would have to use some energy to find you. It won’t do as much as the wards. ”
She nodded again, sipped her coffee, and sat with the steam curling up over her face. “Plan A is still to come home before I sleep, then, but getting a hotel room comes before buying amphetamines from a trucker.”
“Yes,” said Maxwell, “allowing for my lack of familiarity with both truckers and amphetamines.”
Hazel clicked her tongue. “And here I thought all the bright young things were constantly on drugs in your day.”
“That was largely cocaine. And morphine. Occasionally mescaline. I’d imagine they’re very different.” Maxwell attempted to give her a reproving look over his coffee.
Thoroughly unreproved, she giggled. “Expert, were you?”
“Hardly. Translation work barely supported my ventures into the occult—it wouldn’t have stretched to a drug habit. Mescaline made for an interesting evening or two, but the only times I had morphine were when I had my tonsils out and when I broke my wrist in university.”
“Very vigorous note-taking, I assume.”
Maxwell laughed, swallowed another bite of the suspect pastry, and let Hazel draw out the story of a drunken evening ice-skating. He knew she’d lied. He suspected she knew that.
Knowing that she had a plan to lie about brought him closer to hope than he liked.
* * *
Clarence Chapman had, one might say, had an active retirement.
He’d grown a little more cautious without the badge and the flashing lights to give him cover, his hunting grounds had shrunk once he no longer felt confident driving after dark, but he’d killed his last victim two years before his death.
Reduced range, age, and maybe simple overconfidence had taken some toll, though: Four of his last six victims had turned up while he was still alive, giving the police and grieving relatives a start on putting names to parts.
Grass had grown on Pam Gallagher’s grave since her family had buried her five years earlier, but a fresh wreath lay by the low granite tombstone.
Her handless, tongueless corpse had washed up on a riverbank about three miles from Chapman’s house.
After the discoveries in Chapman’s basement, Pam’s sister had offered her DNA to the police.
While matching it to any of the trophies would take time, Cindy Valenzuela’s terse statement in the article Hazel had read suggested that it was only a technicality, and Hazel thought so too.
She wouldn’t have come to the graveyard otherwise.
A quick glance around showed her that there were no witnesses. While Eternal Light Memorial Park was closer to civilization than Hazel lived, it was still on the rural side of the suburbs, and nearly deserted on a weekday afternoon.
She kneeled in front of Pamela’s grave, placed candles and water in front of her, picked up her knife, and let the ritual rise up around her again.
The world shimmered. Shadows elongated. The air turned faintly blue, and the temperature dropped a few degrees.
The landscape didn’t lose much detail, though, or become particularly strange.
A few headstones grew, a few others shrank or took on different shapes, but that was all.
When many people and their emotions constantly passed through a place, no one mind could particularly shape the ethereal.
Contrary to popular belief, cemeteries were among the places where the worlds matched most closely.
Hazel saw a few ghostly forms as she surveyed the graveyard again, but none close to her. She hadn’t really expected much; five years was a while, even for murder. Pamela was simply the most obvious victim—and just because she didn’t greet Hazel instantly didn’t mean she was completely gone.
She scooped out a small trench in front of the candles, the earth cool and moist against her skin, then took three kids’ thermoses out of her backpack.
Milk went in first, then honey, and finally the small amount of cow blood she’d bought at the butcher’s that morning, making sure she was far enough from her house not to be recognized.
Odysseus had gotten the basics right, but Hazel didn’t need a prophet or a host of fallen comrades. She could cut down on the scale.
“Pamela Claire Gallagher,” she intoned quietly. “I invite your company. I ask for your counsel. If you can hear, I beg that you pay heed to my request. If you can come, I beg you to meet me here.”
The small sounds of life, even in the ethereal, faded into the background. Hazel’s vision blurred. Chills ran from her fingertips to her elbows, and she ignored them as much as she could.
“I offer white milk. I offer red blood. I offer sweet honey.” She inhaled deeply, then spoke again, as loud as she dared in a public place. “Pamela Claire Gallagher, I wish to speak with you.”
The light reflecting from the tombstone’s polished surface shifted and began to take a human shape. As Hazel refocused, it defined itself further: a short, rounded body in a knee-length dress. Curly bobbed hair surrounded a heart-shaped face with wrinkles at the eyes and a wide, generous mouth.
Pamela kneeled by the trench and cupped her hands to drink.
* * *
The summons yanked Maxwell forward like a fish on a line, barely giving him time to answer before slamming him out of the material world and into Perthrux’s court.
Shapes spun by him, then blurred into patches of darkness and searing light, and momentum sent him stumbling half-blind across the stone floor.
He didn’t see the servants come up on each side of him, not until heavy hands grasped each of his arms.
It was too late to fight then, but it wouldn’t have done any good anyhow.
Perthrux spoke as its minions dragged Maxwell forward, its voice reverberating through the chamber. “I thought you were too smart for treachery.”
Ice lanced through his veins. The servants kept pulling him toward Perthrux, their maggot bodies squashing against the stone floor, but Maxwell barely noticed. “I—my lord—”
Think, speak, you have to say something. Silence means assent, assent means guilt, guilt means—you know what guilt means.
Memories of watching Perthrux’s other punishments jolted his tongue out of immobility. “I don’t know what you mean, my lord,” he said, and even managed to sound convincing to his own ears. “I’ve carried out all of your orders to the best of my ability.”
The servants stopped just before Perthrux’s throne and shoved Maxwell down in front of it, bruising his hands and knees. He didn’t dare to lift his eyes to the demon, but he saw its spindly legs as it stood, and off to the side he saw a form he recognized as his vision cleared further.
Chapman stood there with his arms folded over his chest and his feet apart, the perfect picture of stern, if undead, law enforcement—except for the smirk he didn’t bother hiding.