Chapter 11
Taptaptaptap.
She was getting ready for bed when she heard the noise, standing at the bathroom sink and rubbing peach-scented moisturizer onto her face.
Being a channel for unearthly forces was no reason to give up on a beauty regimen, after all, and dry skin got itchy after a while.
More importantly, the routine and the scent kept her grounded in normal, physical reality.
So Hazel tried to ignore the sound at first. It was probably an animal—a squirrel on the roof, a bird at a window, maybe even a rat downstairs. She’d have to deal with the third eventually, but even it could wait for daytime.
Taptap.
The movement by the window hadn’t been an animal.
Maybe. She still wasn’t sure whether she’d seen the face or not; stress and her reflection in the darkness could produce all kinds of images.
Even if it had been there, that didn’t mean every other unexplained sight or sound was supernatural.
Hazel had seen plenty of moths beyond the glass and heard plenty of creatures living their lives just outside her walls.
Taptaptap.
None of them had sounded so regular, though. None of them had kept going.
As Hazel put the cap back on her moisturizer, the hair on the back of her arms was standing up, and the skin underneath was beady with goose bumps.
She wasn’t sure if the temperature had dropped or if she just expected to feel cold—years of training herself to distinguish between real reactions and psychosomatic ones seemed to have disappeared overnight.
Everything was different from the inside.
Tap.
The sound wasn’t getting any nearer, but it wasn’t going away either, just slowing down. Waiting, Hazel thought. Maybe taunting her, like a kid in a game: come out, come out, wherever you are…
Hazel closed the door of the medicine cabinet and stared into the mirror.
Cracks ran out from one of the top corners, a problem that had made it onto her list of things to repair but that she hadn’t thought much about.
The mirror let her check her teeth for spinach, and she wasn’t exactly planning to put on eyeliner any time soon.
Now she noticed how the tip of one ran right into her temple, looking like a head wound just before the blood started. She turned, and it went into her eye.
The best response to a creepy coincidence is definitely to stare at it. That will help.
She turned away, crossed to the toilet, and made sure that the lid was down, even though she’d seen it from the mirror, then tweaked the shower curtain so it covered another millimeter of the tub.
Tap tap.
“Bug off,” Hazel said, but quietly, almost under her breath. She sounded whiny to her own ears and hated it.
The bathroom, like most bathrooms, didn’t offer her much of a weapon selection.
She wouldn’t have known how to use most actual weapons anyhow—even after laser surgery, her eyesight had practically gotten her laughed off a shooting range in college—but she missed her knife and its replacement in her bedroom.
A toilet plunger made a very bad substitute.
“It’s-a me,” she said to the empty room, and laughed too loudly at her own Nintendo-based joke. Then she slowly opened the door, peering through the crack at the dark hallway until she could glimpse the thing lurking there.
* * *
Hazel, who didn’t run the electric company and wasn’t made of money, turned the lights off whenever she left a room. The hallway was pitch-black except for the tiny sliver of light from the bathroom’s doorway.
A shape crouched at the end opposite Hazel.
She couldn’t see much more than that in the darkness, but it clearly wasn’t a rat. Rats didn’t get as tall as her knees. The outline was wrong, too, as far as Hazel could make out: spindly where it should have been round, round where it should have been long.
Tap tap tap tap.
Without the door to block it, the sound seemed much louder. Part of the shape moved to make it—moved in a slow and purposeful way that Hazel didn’t associate with any wild animal—and then the whole thing settled back into near stillness that somehow pulsed.
Hazel gripped the useless plunger, opened the door an inch wider, and stared at what the light revealed.
It was a hand.
A giant hand, the pinky almost as long as Hazel’s forearm, balanced on the tips of its rotted fingers.
The skin was pallid and greenish, the nails black.
One had broken off or been peeled back, and the meat underneath swelled up, gray and puffy.
It lifted the index finger and tapped it against the floor again as Hazel watched, almost as though it was greeting her.
Come out, come out, wherever you are, except it knew where she was now, so maybe it was a different chant. Red rover, red rover, let Hazel come over…
“Nope,” she said, “absolutely not.”
The hand tapped a final time, then curled its index finger and dragged it toward the palm, making a gelatinous noise against the floor. It left faint grayish trails and a small chunk in one place.
I’ll need more bleach, Hazel thought. Maybe all the bleach. Does linoleum burn?
Now she could see that the fingers were themselves too long for the hand, with too many joints, and that the whole hideous thing ended in a ragged cut just above where a wrist would have been. The flesh around that cut was bruised black, necrotic. Any touch there would sink in to the bone.
The hand beckoned again, losing more of its flesh in the process.
It was really a fascinating gesture, Hazel thought, the slow way it curled and uncurled each of the many joints.
She wondered how many the thing had. There was no way to tell from her distance and with as little light as she had, but she might get an accurate view if she just took a couple steps out into the hall.
Her former fear started to feel silly, like a nightmare that became absurd in the light.
Whatever the hand offered couldn’t be that bad.
One of her feet moved as if under its own will, taking her forward. The hand curled. Hazel felt the call now, a pull against her mind.
NOPE. It was a yell from her real self, rising up in a desperate burst of strength that broke through the creature’s hold. Realization streamed in even as the hand yanked at her thoughts again.
Hazel slammed her eyes closed and bolted backward into the bathroom, only remembering that she’d been holding the doorknob when the door banged shut behind her. She sank to the floor with her back against it, letting her head fall forward until it rested on her knees.
Now, instead of the tapping, she could hear the finger dragging itself back and forth across the linoleum. She could still see it behind her eyelids too.
“Shit,” said Hazel, voice breaking at the end of the word.
* * *
More profanity rose within her, and beyond that the howling of a thwarted child: I don’t want this! and It’s not fair! and Make it stop!
Nobody would, though. And while she didn’t, obviously, want a giant, hypnotic dead hand between her and her bedroom, and while its presence wasn’t any more fair than the rest of Hazel’s situation, none of that mattered.
She’d known that since she was nine and started to see into the ethereal, and if she’d forgotten, there were apparently several jars of tongues in Clarence’s basement whose former owners could have reminded her.
“Fairs are for tourists,” she said, quoting the woman from Vermont who’d taught her the cinquefoil ward, and turned on the taps in the sink. The sound of running water drowned out the hand’s noises, and Hazel sat down on the edge of the bathtub to go over the situation.
Full manifestation. The bits of flesh on the floor made that clear.
Just walking through it wasn’t an option.
Single entity. Probably not a ghost. The hand seemed to be able to sense her, might even have had a will or the equivalent, but Hazel didn’t think she could reason with it.
Fighting would be a bad idea, too, even if she’d had more than a plunger—even before she’d gotten injured, nobody would have confused her with Xena.
Staying in the bathroom had its merits, like a large, solid door between Hazel and the thing out in the hall. The ward she’d set up seemed to be holding. Manifestations tended to fade, and dawn often banished the ones that happened at night, if they lasted that long.
Not always, though. And she’d never been a conduit before.
The hand might vanish. Or it might get bolder.
Dawn might send it off—or Hazel’s protections might fade as the manifestation pressed against them.
The door might not be that much protection once the wards were gone; the hand hadn’t really come up against a physical barrier yet.
She pictured it grabbing at her through the shattered remains of the door, long, gray-nailed fingers stretched out to grasp.
Oh no. No no no.
Her knife was in the bedroom. So were salt, candles, and a vial of blessed water. Hazel had been at full strength when she’d cast the wards there. Perhaps most importantly, her bedroom had her bed, her desk, and two large chairs, all of which could make great barricade material.
The hallway wasn’t that wide, not really.
She opened the door a crack. The hand was still there. She’d expected that and still hoped, in a dim and childish maybe Santa will bring me a pony way, that it would have vanished after she’d turned on the taps, mission over once it had scared her.
It crooked just the tip of its upraised index finger toward Hazel, showing her the yellowed bone that had started poking through the flesh. The skin along its side was starting to split in places too. Black goo trickled out.
Hazel shut her eyes again, raised the plunger to guard her side, then threw the bathroom door open and made a run for it.
The house was small. Three steps crossed the hallway between the bathroom and Hazel’s bedroom, a distance that she’d never even noticed before.
She felt each time her feet hit the floor and every frantic lunge of her muscles as she bolted forward.
One palm hit the opposite wall as the hand made a hideous pulpy noise over on her right side, and she was turning her head to investigate before she remembered that was a bad idea.
She caught herself with her eyes half open, snapped her head back to face fake wooden planks, and so only got a fuzzy impression of the hand jerking backward with its fingers clenched into a fist. The barrier held—for the moment.
Better not test it.
A few sideways steps brought her to her bedroom door. She fumbled left-handed with the knob, not daring to put down the plunger, not thinking about how little good it would probably do. Outside her vision, the hand scrabbled and squished.
In her mind’s eye, Hazel saw it reaching for her, finding a hole in the ward and stretching its too-long fingers out to wrap around her ankle—
The door opened, and she tumbled into her bedroom.
She had the presence of mind to deliberately turn and close the door this time, and then to half drag, half shove the armchair up against it, waiting all the time for the heavy thump and the shuddering wood that would mean her wards had broken.
It didn’t happen. Hazel pushed her desk over to reinforce the chair, not that IKEA’s finest work was much extra weight, and bolted back to her bed.
The space underneath showed no obvious signs of haunting, but she still yanked her feet up as soon as she sat down.
Any dangling appendage felt too vulnerable.
The bed was farther from the hallway than any place in the bathroom had been, but Hazel could still hear the hand. It had started tapping again. If she hadn’t known better, she really could have mistaken the distant sound for a bird.
Taptap. Tap tap tap. Tap.
She leaned off the bed just far enough to yank open the nightstand drawer where she kept her knife and retreated as soon as she’d closed her fingers around the hilt. She drew her knees up to her chest and sat there, clutching her knife, watching the door, and praying for silence.