Unclean Spirits

Two

In the middle of the afternoon there wasn’t much foot traffic. The address was a warehouse complex converted into living space for the Brie and wine set. Five stories of redbrick with balconies at each level. Tasteful plants filled the three feet between the knee-high wrought iron fence and the walls. According to the paperwork, the apartment Eric owned—the one I owned—was valued at half a million.

I tried to look like I belonged there as I walked in and found my way to the elevators. It was like sneaking into a bar; I didn’t belong there, but I did. I kept expecting someone to stop me, to ask for my ID, to check my name against a list and throw me out.

Why, I asked myself, does someone have a house and an apartment both in the same city? It wasn’t like he could sleep in two beds at once. Maybe this was his getaway. Maybe it was where his lover stayed, assuming he had one.

The elevator chimed, a low, reassuring bell, like someone clearing their throat. I stepped out, checked the number on the key ring, and followed the corridor down to my left. I started to knock, then stopped.

I stood there, silent, my breath fast. The door shone like lacquer. I could see my reflection in it, blurred and imprecise. I put the key in the lock and turned. I felt the bolt open, but I didn’t hear it.

The inside of the apartment was gorgeous and surreal. Wooden floors that seemed to glow, bronze fixtures, windows that made the city outside seem like it had been arranged to be seen from this vantage point. The ceilings were raw beams and exposed ductwork so stylish they looked obvious. Books were stacked on the floor, on the deep, plush couch. History books, it looked like. Some of them were in languages I recognized, some weren’t. A whiteboard hung on one wall, covered with timetables and scribbled notes. A huge glass ashtray held the remains of at least a pack of dark brown cigarettes, the scent of old smoke tainting the air. And the art…

At each of the huge windows, a glass ball seemed to float in the air. It was only when I got close enough to breathe on them that I saw the tiny cradles, three hair-thin wire strands for each, hanging from the high ceiling. When I turned around, I saw there was one above the doorway too. Candles in thick brass candlesticks covered the dining table in three ascending rows, and a picture framed in burnished metal hung at the mouth of a hallway. It was a picture of a young woman in nineteenth-century clothes, and I wasn’t sure from looking whether it was a photograph or a drawing. It seemed as real as a photo, but the eyes and the way she held her hands looked subtly off.

Silently, I went down the hallway. A fair-size kitchen with white tile and a brushed steel sink and refrigerator and stove. A breakfast bar with ironwork stools to match the fence outside. A bathroom with the lights out. A bedroom, and on the bed, laid out as if in state, a corpse.

I could feel the blood leaving my face. I didn’t scream, but I put my hand on the door frame to keep steady. My stomach tightened and flipped. I stepped forward. Whoever he’d been, he’d been dead for a long time. The skin was desiccated, tight, and waxy; the nose was sunken; the hands folded on his chest were fleshless as chicken wings. Blackened teeth lurked behind ruined lips. Wisps of colorless hair still clung to the scalp. He was wearing a white shirt with suspenders and pants that came up to his rib cage, like someone from a forties movie.

I crouched at the side of the bed, disgusted, fascinated, and frightened. My mind was jumping and screeching like a monkey behind my eyes, but there was something wrong. I had touched my nose before I figured it out, like my body already knew and had to give me the hint. He didn’t smell like a corpse. He didn’t smell like anything. He smelled cold.

I had started to wonder if maybe it wasn’t a body at all but some kind of desperately Goth wax sculpture when the eyes opened with a wet click.

This time, I screamed.

“You aren’t Eric,” it said in a voice like a rusted cattle gate opening.

“I’m his niece,” I said. I didn’t remember running across the room, but my back was pressed against the wall now. I tried to squeak less when I spoke again. “I’m Jayné.”

He repeated my name like he was tasting it. Zha-nay.

“French?” he asked.

“My mother’s side,” I said. “People usually say it like Jane or Janey.”

“Monolingual fuckwits,” he said, and sat up. I thought I could hear his joints creaking like leather, but I might have only imagined it. “You’re here, that means something happened to Eric?”

“He’s dead.”

The man sighed.

“I was afraid of that,” he said. “Explains a lot. The little rat fuckers must have sussed him out.”

The skeletal, awkward hand rubbed his chin like it was checking for stubble. When he looked at me, his eyes were the yellow of old ivory. In motion, he didn’t look like a corpse, only a badly damaged man.

“Hey,” he said, “where are my manners, eh? You want a drink?”

“Um,” I said. And then, “Yes.”

He led the way back to the kitchen. I perched on one of the stools while he poured two generous fingers of brandy into a water glass. I’d seen pictures of people who survived horrific burns, and while he didn’t bear those scars, the effect was much the same. I could see it when his joints—shoulder, hip, elbow—didn’t quite bend the way they were meant to. He walked carefully. I wanted to ask what had happened to him, but I couldn’t think of a way to phrase it that didn’t seem excruciatingly rude. I tried not to stare the way you try not to look at people with harelips or missing hands, but my eyes just kept going back.

Guilt started pulling at me. Even if it was officially my place, coming in the way I had was rude. Clearly Uncle Eric had been letting the guy crash here. He poured a glass for himself, then took a wood cutting board from the cabinet beside the refrigerator and a knife from its holder.

“So,” he said. “He didn’t tell you a goddamn thing about all this, did he?”

“Not really,” I said, and sipped the brandy. I never drank much, but I could tell that the liquor was better than I’d ever had.

“Yeah. Like him,” the man said, and put a cast-iron skillet on the burner. “Well. Shit, I don’t know where to start. My name’s Midian. Midian Clark. Your uncle and I were working together.”

If I pretended I was listening to Tom Waits, his voice wasn’t so bad.

“What on?”

A scoop of butter thick enough to make a dietitian weep dropped onto the skillet and started to quietly melt.

“That’s a long story,” Midian said.

“Was it why he got killed?”

“Yeah, it was.”

“So you know who killed him.”

Midian shifted his head to the side, his ragged lips pressed thin. He sighed.

“Yes. If he got killed, I know who killed him.”

“Okay,” I said. “Spill it.”

He frowned quietly as he took a yellow onion, half a red bell pepper, and an egg carton out of the refrigerator. I drank more brandy, the warm feeling in my throat spreading to my cheeks. I cleared my throat.

“I’m not blowing you off. I just think better when I’m cooking,” he said. “Okay. So. There’s a guy calls himself Randolph Coin. He came to Denver about a year ago. He heads up a bunch of fellas call themselves the Invisible College, okay? They think that all the ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties you’ve ever heard of really exist. Vampires, werewolves, zombies. People doing magic. You name it. You like onions?”

“Not really.”

“Not even grilled? Tell you what, just try this. If you don’t like it, I’ll make another one. So the Invisible College, they also think they know why all these things exist. It’s about possession. Something coming out of this abstract spiritual world that’s right next to ours and worming its way inside people and animals. Hell, sometimes even things. Knives.” He held up the cutting blade. “Whatever.”

“Demons taking people over,” I said. He looked up, smiling at the skepticism in my voice, as he sliced the onion in neat halves, peeled away the skin, and started dicing the pale flesh.

“Well, yeah, a lot of it is about demons. Or spirits or loa or whatever you want to call them. Seelie Court, Unseelie Court, Radha, Petro, Ghede. Ifrit. Hungry ghosts. All kinds of them. The generic term’s riders. They get inside a person, and they change them. Make them do things, make them want to do things. Give them freaky powers. Normal people who’ve got a feel for it and the right training—call ’em wizards or witches or cunning men or whatever—they can do some pretty weird shit, but nothing compared to what riders are capable of.”

“So not just demons, but magic too,” I said. He dropped the onion into the spreading pool of butter, where it sizzled angrily. The pepper was next for the block.

“Thing is, kid, the folks that believe that shit? They’re absolutely right. That’s exactly how the world is. Let me give you a fer instance. I know you’re wondering what the fuck happened to me, right? Well, how old do you think I am?”

“I…I don’t…”

“I was born the year they stormed the Bastille. The year of our Lord seventeen hundred and eighty motherfucking nine.” His voice had taken on an angry buzz. The blade in his hand flickered over the cutting board. “I crossed the Invisible College, and they cursed me. I’ve been wandering around ever since. Coin is direct apostolic line from the pig fucker who did this to me. He’s the only one who can take it back.”

He put the peppers in with the browning onions. Wisps of smoke and steam rose from the black metal.

“I came to Eric because he’s the kind of guy who knows things. Helps people. I needed help.”

“You’re telling me that a bunch of evil wizards killed my uncle?” I could hear the raw disbelief in my own voice.

His yellowed eyes locked on me. He took an egg from the carton and cracked it deliberately on the countertop.

“I’m telling you the world’s more complicated than you thought,” he said. “And I’m not wrong about that.”

While he whipped eggs in a tiny steel mixing bowl, I sat hunched over the breakfast bar, brandy in my hands. I felt like I’d been on an amusement park ride one too many times. Confused and dizzy and a little sick. We both knew he was giving me time to think. Time, specifically, to decide he was a nut or a liar. My first guess was both. But he was the only thread I had that might lead to Uncle Eric and whoever had killed him.

“Okay,” I said as he poured the yellow-white froth over the peppers and onions, “let’s say I buy it. What were you two going to do? Track this Coin guy down and give him a good talking to?”

“The Invisible College is here for a reason. Every few years, they have to come together to induct new people into the club. They have to call up a rider, open the poor sucker who’s signing up for the horror show, and infect them with it. Things start moving just outside the world like sharks coming up for chum. When you get too many riders bumping around, the barrier between the physical world and the abstract gets…well, not thin exactly, but weird. That started in April. While that’s happening, the Invisible College has its hands full. Eric and I were planning to disrupt things before they could eat the new crop of people. And while we were at it, kill Coin.”

“You were going to murder someone?”

He put his hand on the handle of the skillet, flinched back from the heat, and reached for a dishcloth to protect himself.

“Coin’s dead, kid,” he said. “Coin’s been dead since the day they made him Invisible. We were looking to kill the thing that’s living in his body.”

He lifted the skillet, and a flick of his wrist spun the omelet in the air, folded it, and caught it. The ragged lips twisted into a satisfied smile. He waited a few seconds, then flipped it to the other side.

“That’s how it works with them,” he said. “You take the unclean spirit inside, and it devours you. It’s not always like that. Other kinds of rider, you maybe don’t need a ceremony. You get bitten, you pick up the wrong guy at the bar. You get assaulted. Maybe it kicks you out of your body, puts you someplace else. Or it just hangs out in the back of your mind, making suggestions or taking over in little ways so you won’t even notice.”

“That’s…” I didn’t know whether I was going to say horrible or gross or implausible. Midian shrugged.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “Thing is, the Invisible College bastards? They’re strong, and they’re smart, and they’re organized. Every one of them that penetrates into the world makes Coin stronger, and the stronger he gets, the more he can protect his own. Think Amway, but for demonic possession.”

“And killing the thing inside Coin would fix you?”

“Killing that fucker would undo everything it’s done in the physical world. Me and a whole lot of other things besides. He’s the center of the whole damn infection. Here, lemme get you a fork. Blow on it a little, it’s still hot.”

The taste was more than a few eggs, onions, and peppers seemed to justify. It was lush and hot and rich. He smiled at my reaction and slid the rest onto a plate for me.

“That’s really good,” I said through my mouthful.

“There’s a secret to it. Always drink some brandy first. There. Enjoy. So, yeah, we were looking to break the Invisible College ’s back. Get rid of Coin, disrupt the induction. It’d be just like penicillin taking out a case of the clap. We both knew it was dangerous. I don’t know how they got to Eric, but I’m dead sure they did. Your average mugger would have been out of his depth with him. Guys like Eric don’t die at random. He got hit.”

I took another bite of the omelet, chewing slowly to give myself time to think. On the one hand, everything Midian said was clearly insane. A two-hundred-year-old man cursed by demons. A cabal of evil wizards planning to engineer the demonic possession of a new batch of cultists. And my uncle in the middle of it all, dead because someone caught wind of his plan.

On the other hand, if anyone had asked me a week before what my uncle did, I would have guessed wrong. And even if every word coming out of Midian’s mouth was crap, it seemed to be crap he believed. And so maybe this Coin guy believed it too. I’d had enough experience with the kind of atrocities that blind faith can lead to that I couldn’t discount anything just because it was crazy. If Coin and the Invisible College believed that they were demon-possessed wizards and that Eric was out to stop them, that could have been reason enough to kill him. Things don’t have to exist to have consequences.

I was lost in bitter memories for a moment. The flare of a match brought me back. The deathly face was considering me as he lit a cigarette.

“I’d think it was bullshit too if I was you,” he said. “You doubt. I respect that. Doubt’s important stuff.”

He took a long drag, the coal of his cigarette going bright and then dark. Long, blue smoke slid out of his mouth and nostrils as he spoke. It didn’t smell like tobacco. It was sweeter and more acrid.

“Thing is, kid, you gotta doubt the stuff that isn’t true. You go around doubting whether pickup trucks exist, you’ll wind up on the curb with a lot of broken bits.”

I put my fork against the side of the plate and looked up at him.

“I’m taking this to the police, you know,” I said.

“Won’t do you any good. They’re just going to think you’re nuts. They have an explanation that suits them just fine.”

“All the same—”

A hard tap came from the front room. Both of us turned to look. The little glass ball that hung over the door had fallen. It rolled uneasily along the unseen slope of the floorboards. While we watched, the ones over the windows fell too, one-two-three. Midian grunted.

“When you came in,” he said, “you didn’t drop something behind you? Ashes or salt, something like that?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing.”

Midian nodded and took another drag of his cigarette.

“That’s too bad,” he said.

With a bang like a car wreck, the front door burst in.