Unholy Ghosts

Chapter Twenty-seven

Not quite an hour later, she followed Terrible across the flat, brown scrub grass at the edge of a long row of dilapidated storage units and down the block. The steady beat of a drum came from the far end of the row; a lot of bands rented places like these to practice, especially in Downside where neighbors with noise complaints used fists and knives rather than phones to make sure things quieted down.

Terrible’s broad shoulders blocked her view of the inside of the storage space, but the chilly air flowed around him and blasted her before she reached the doorway.

Cold indeed. Bump had apparently had this place modified. Dull steel lined the walls, broken only by the industrial mesh faces of heavy freezing units. Terrible had said “chiller” but she hadn’t thought he meant this. Her thin cardigan was no match for it. Might have been nice if he’d warned her, but then he looked completely undisturbed by it himself. His bare arms didn’t even roughen with goose bumps as he staked himself a spot off to the left.

Bump stood in the middle of the room, wrapped in a heavy fur coat, with a black silk top hat covering his fuzzy head and unnecessary sunglasses hiding his pale face. He looked like the Abominable Snowpimp.

“Well, well. Miss Chess gave up to come here after it all. Why ain’t my fuckin airport runnin, ladybird? Thought we had ourselves a fuckin deal, yay?”

The words made her head hurt. Or maybe it was the cold. All she knew was by the time Bump finished speaking he sounded like he was talking through a tin can and her temples throbbed.

“Takes time, Bump,” she managed.

“Bump ain’t got time. Got shipments. Got them pills waitin, got lashers need goin in my fuckin pockets. I ain’t get my fuckin pills, you ain’t get yon pills. You dig?”

Without waiting for an answer he stepped to the side, sweeping his arm to the right with the air of a man showing off his new car.

Slipknot’s body lay on a metal table, covered to the chest with a nubbly brown blanket that looked like it had been wrapped around car parts then wrung out in swamp water before being placed on his ruined skin.

“Bump thinkin maybe you take another fuckin lookie here, maybe you see all what you needs to see. What you say? Maybe you miss you a clue, it bein dark last time you fuckin see. Leastaways you give Bump some knowledge what thing we after, yay?”

“He’s a—like a hybrid ghost,” she managed to say. Wanted to say, because her feet felt stuck to the floor and if she talked she could delay the moment when she had to look at the body.

“What you meaning, hybrid? Bits of other fuckin spooks and all? How the fuck that happen?”

Chess glanced back, saw Terrible open his mouth. Fine. Let him explain it; she didn’t want to. Felt like trying to would make her even sicker than she already was.

Slipknot’s heart gave another horrid squelching beat when she stepped closer. The condition of his body had deteriorated further since she last saw him, or perhaps it was simply that without the blazing sunset gilding his body she saw him as he truly was.

Ghastly white skin like candle wax, covered with a fine sheen of what looked like oil but was probably some sort of secretion she didn’t even want to think about. The cold had slowed the process of decay, but hadn’t stopped it the way it would if he hadn’t been powering a spell; the magic keeping his soul trapped warmed his corpse enough to keep him from freezing.

Tears stung her eyes. She wanted to say something, do something to soothe him, but nothing came to mind. There was nothing. His soul was still there, but it was beyond communication, beyond any help she could give, at least until she managed to set him free. Guilt made her chest ache, a dim, faraway pain she couldn’t quite feel. She’d only taken a couple of pills, no more than usual, why did she feel so disconnected…?

Her vision wavered. She lifted a shaky hand to rub her eyes, but before she reached them, Slipknot’s heart beat again. Droplets of blood flew up from it. She saw each one, deep crimson against the wreckage of his body and the silvery walls, hanging in the air for what seemed like hours before they fell again, landing in tiny explosions on his raw flesh.

“Chess?” Terrible sounded like he was speaking from another room entirely. “You right?”

“Fuckin strange,” Bump remarked. “That heart of his ain’t beat but once every half hour or so, yay? So why’s it up now?”

The hand that hadn’t reached her eyes covered her mouth instead, pressing her lips against her teeth so hard it hurt, trying to hold back the scream. This was what she’d been afraid of, this was what she’d been half-certain had happened from the minute she found that fucking amulet and was stupid enough to touch it.

It had fed from her. She was connected to it. She was connected to the Dreamthief, and she was connected to Slipknot.

At least now she knew why Ereshdiran hadn’t killed her the other night at the Morton place. Why do that when he could feed off her so easily, keep her as a second power supply should Slipknot’s body fall apart so much it could no longer hold his soul?

She stumbled back, trying to keep cool but not quite making it.

“Chess,” Terrible said again. “Chess, you need a seat?”

“Why you all white, ladybird? You ain’t sicking up on Bump, is you? Aw, fuck, this ain’t—”

“I’m fine.” She forced her hand down, clenched it in a fist at her side. Bump and Terrible were both watching her, Terrible concerned, Bump unreadable.

This thing was attached to her. Connected to her blood, to her soul. Was this why her reactions at the Morton house had been so slow?

“Tonight.” She drew a hard breath through her nose and let it out slow. Fuck the airport. She’d either find out if there were other ghosts there or she wouldn’t, but there was no fucking way she was letting an entity attach itself to her like a fucking metaphysical tapeworm. “We do the ritual tonight.”

Terrible slid his Chevelle into a spot on Thirty-fifth as neatly as a puzzle piece. Chess got out before he’d made it around to open her door for her. It didn’t feel right to let him do it, not anymore. If it bothered him he didn’t say anything.

She’d never visited the pipes here, but the man guarding the door looked familiar. He barely looked at her as he nodded at Terrible and stepped out of the way.

“Hey, Bone,” Terrible said. “Old-timer Earl in there?”

“Aye. Five minutes ago, maybe. Sent him down, but I ain’t tell him you coming.”

“Good. C’mon, Chess.”

She followed him through the heavy wooden door into the hall covered with faded green paper and carpeted with thick brown shag. The faint odor of Dream filled it, Dream and bodies and whiskey from the saloon at the end. She would have known she was in one of Bump’s rooms even if she hadn’t known, just from the color on the walls and the jazzy lounge music piped in. He thought it helped keep fights from breaking out while people waited. Probably not true, as it drove everyone she knew nuts, but Bump insisted.

On busy nights and first thing in the morning the line to use the pipe room would stretch all the way down the hall, even into the street on a weekend, but afternoon traffic was light. They headed into the saloon, where another guard waited to open the door for them.

“Want a drink first?” Terrible asked, but she shook her head. Who could think of drinking anything, of doing anything, when they were so close? And it had been so long. She needed her pills, but Dream…Dream was like a dozen pills all at once, Dream was like falling asleep on a cloud. Dream was forgetting the world even existed, much less her own self.

And she couldn’t have any. Not now. But she could smell it, she could watch. She could live vicariously through the lucky few lounging with their pipes. When this was all over…

The room she usually visited, the one off the Market, was blue. This one was red, a rich crimson that glowed in the light from the candles and the dim oil lamps under the pipes. Red glass chandeliers floated in the space between the high, arched ceiling, once white but now dirty ivory from smoke, and the vast room below. Red couches, curved like seashells, rested in groups around the gleaming hookahs in the back and trays of single pipes near the front.

Most of the couches were empty, but some held people, their bodies stretched on the wide seats as they smoked or stared at the ceiling or dozed off.

And even in the middle of the day the attendants wandered ceaselessly between the couches like characters in a well-choreographed ballet, spearing small lumps of sticky Dream on long, silver needles and shaping them expertly over silver dishes, ready to pop into the pipes to be dissolved into smoke. They handed out fresh pipes and took the used ones back to be cleaned, wiped out Dream bowls with tools like tiny hockey sticks and collected the ashes. They trimmed the lamp wicks and refilled the pots of oil. All of these tasks they performed silently, with only the scraping of metal against metal and the snick of their trimming scissors announcing their presence.

With no windows it could easily have been nighttime down here in the cellar, but the feeling of daylight still clung to Chess’s skin and clothing. The cavernous room was less like an escape than it was a cafeteria before the lunch rush, a stage set for a party no one was attending. Even the smell of smoke, so heavily ingrained into the furniture and walls she doubted it would ever come out, didn’t manage to change that impression.

“That’s he, there.” Terrible nodded to one of the occupied couches and headed down the stairs. Chess followed, trying to pick out which one he’d indicated while at the same time watching her step.

They reached the bottom and turned, weaving their way between the couches and the attendants, until they reached a low, straight, padded platform against the wall. On it lounged a man who could only be Old-timer Earl.

Old-timer wasn’t quite right. Ancient worked better. No other word fit the wizened creature on the cushions, his bony legs drawn up almost to his chest, the knobs of his wrists huge against his scrawny forearms and arthritic hands. An attendant rolled his bowl for him, manipulating the Dream ball with her needle, moving off to the side when Terrible jerked his head at her.

“Lady gotta word with you, Earl,” he said. “Bump wants you tell her some things.”

Earl pulled his mouth away from the pipe and glared at Terrible with dozy eyes. “Ayegahnotrubblooump,” he rasped. It took Chess a minute to translate that in her head to I got no trouble with Bump. Great.

“Ain’t say you got trouble with him. Only might be, you don’t answer the lady. Aye?”

Earl frowned. Terrible nodded at the attendant, who pulled her needle away, leaving Earl with an empty pipe.

“Ey!”

Terrible shrugged. “Answer the questions, she bring it back.”

“Fy, fy. Brinback, aye? Esswastin.”

Once she got used to his slurred speech, it wasn’t so bad. A good thing, because when she asked him about Chester the floodgates opened.

“Always bad, there. Bad luck. Don’t know why they built that damn thing there. Back in forty-one, y’know, things was booming. Then the war started, got booming even more. And so many people! This city sure something to see back then. Even here. Never a rich part of town, get it, but we had style then. Not like today.”

Chess and Terrible exchanged glances. He was describing a time over eighty years before, how did he know what the city was like then? He looked old, sure, but…

“I see what you’re thinking.” He gave a short, sharp cackle that made Chess jump. “You don’t know how old I am, neither do I. But I was there, oh yes, maybe a little older than Mr. Terrible here, and I remember it all. Lots of us grumbled when they built that airport. Wasn’t right, using that land again, no ma’am it wasn’t.”

Wan’tight, usinatlanagin, nomamiwan’t. The cadences of his speech drew her in, made her lean forward. “What do you mean, using it again?”

He took another long drag from his pipe and blew out a thick steam of dirty tan smoke. “I’m getting there, missy, don’t you rush me.”

“Ain’t got all day, Earl.”

“Don’t you start with me either, boy. I tell it my own time, my own way. You wanted me to talk, you’re getting talk. Just you relax.”

Terrible raised an eyebrow, but did not reply. Earl nodded.

“Some of us tried to tell them no, when they talked about it. Building there, I means. Those days there was more land than you could shake a stick at. Guess it was kind of like it is now, only half the population hadn’t died. Or hadn’t died yet. Those damn Nazis and their Jap and Dago buddies sure killed enough in the years to come, oh yes. Near enough killed me, at least, one of them traitorous slimebag Vichy did. Wanna see my scar?”

His leer should have disgusted her, but the smoke was going to her head and she was finding his offensive patter oddly amusing. She’d never heard such words actually used in conversation before. It fascinated her.

At least, it did until she thought about Lex, about what those bygone words actually meant. Earl probably wouldn’t have been so eager to show her a scar on what she thought must be someplace normally hidden by layers of cloth if he knew who’d been seeing her bare skin—and exploring it fairly thoroughly—only a few hours before. Twice. Lex wasn’t Japanese, but she doubted Earl would care about the distinction.

“No, thanks.”

“Got some scars of your own, I see. And bruises. Did Terrible here do that to your face?”

“What?” She’d actually almost forgotten. “Oh, no! No. I fell.”

Earl made a face. “Sure you did. My momma used to say that, too.” He sucked in another chestful of smoke, his eyelids fluttering.

“But like I said, there was plenty of places for them to build their airport, instead of on those grounds. Wouldn’t have been so bad if they built homes or stores, but to bring planes there again just seemed wrong.”

“What do you mean, planes? Nothing was on that land before—what was there before?” The documents at the Church hadn’t said anything about the way the land was used before Chester was built.

Earl shook his head. “Such a terrible tragedy. I was just a boy then but even I remember when it happened, the night bright like I’d never seen before and didn’t see again until I got shipped overseas. Them flames rose so high looked like they were trying to burn down heaven—that was when we thought such a thing existed, you know, I ain’t saying it now.”

“Of course. Go on, please. What burned?”

“The base. The air base. Thought the Hun had crossed the ocean to get us.”

“The Hun? Wasn’t Germany the Nazis then?”

He glared at her. “What you think, missy, you think I don’t know the difference betwixt Hitler and Wilhelm? I say the Huns I mean the Huns. That fire happened when the air base stood, the base, not that damned Chester Airport. Not World War Two. The Great War. That base—Greenwood, they called it—burned down in 1917.”