Wildest Dreams

2

At the end of Hangman’s Point Drive, a tree with gnarled branches scratched the iron sky.

Not one leaf on that tree, and nothing grew beneath its bare branches. I stepped over slabs of bark that lay on the ground like scales shed by a dying dragon. Lover’s graffiti scarred the trunk, and fat black beetles scuttled in a pile of broken branches near a historical marker that looked more like a headstone.

Anyone else might have thought the hanging tree was dead. Ready for the chainsaw. But I knew that it was alive.

I could see that clearly.

The tree bore fruit. A fine crop of ghosts. Six Russian witches dangled from nooses that had rotted long ago, but the ropes didn’t seem rotten to me. To my eyes they were as fine and strong as the day they were knotted, like healthy stems bearing the weight of ripe apples.

The ropes twisted and creaked against the rising wind. The storm was coming on fast. I leaned against the trunk and stared up at the iron sky through a tangle of crippled branches. The smaller branches swayed against the surging storm, scratching the sky more eagerly now. Before long, I knew they’d slice heaven’s belly and rain would fall like cold droplets of blood.

I waited for that moment, and so did the witches.

Spaced evenly on low branches like decorations on a maypole, hands bound behind their backs with festive satin hair ribbons, the ghosts danced on the wind. A plump redhead here, a thin brunette there. A tall girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, her naked feet forever kicking just an inch above the ground. An older woman with long black hair that lashed her face like a scourge, and another who had shed one of her shoes and seemed to be searching for it with eternally downcast eyes.

But it was the sixth witch that held my attention. She was blonde, with features that might be described as noble. I threaded my way through the others until I stood near her, close enough to study her bright blue eyes.

She was Natasha Orlovsky, Janice Ravenwood’s spirit guide. She had to be. She was the only blonde in the bunch.

She looked down at me, and she didn’t blink. Her expression softened as our eyes met, so suddenly that it surprised me. Despite the claims of the woman at the new age bookstore, I had no way of knowing how long it had been since someone with a heartbeat had looked into Natasha’s eyes.

I was willing to bet that it had been a very long time, indeed. I wanted to talk to her, but I couldn’t see how that was possible. For one thing, I couldn’t speak Russian. But it wouldn’t have mattered if I could. Natasha Orlovsky’s spirit couldn’t speak to anyone, in any language. Like her sister witches, her lips were stitched closed.

In death, she was mute. There was no way that she could answer my questions, even if I could find a way to ask them.

There was no way she could tell me anything.

Me, or Janice Ravenwood, or anyone else.

“I’m sorry, Natasha,” I said, even though I knew she couldn’t understand me.

She moaned, or maybe it was only the branch that bore her spirit’s weight. Resignation colored her eyes. And then the rising wind caught her, and the rope twisted, and the storm turned her eyes away.

A raindrop splashed my hand.

The first of many.

It felt like a tear.

The house was small and old. Nothing more than a vacation bungalow, really, though Janice had tried to spruce it up. Flowerpots dotted the porch, and the knocker on the front door was a brightly polished brass sun that smiled cheerfully.

I entered the house and found Janice Ravenwood in the kitchen, making precious little hors d’oeuvres for a reporter from CNN.

“You’re a fraud,” I said.

I must have surprised her. She gasped and gave a little start, but even in the cold silence of my accusation her eyes refused to surrender their secrets.

But they would not hold those secrets for long. Not if I could do anything about it. “I guess Natasha didn’t warn you about me,” I said. “Then again, it’s pretty hard to say anything when your lips are stitched together like a torn mainsail.”

“What…what are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you. And Natasha Orlovsky-your spirit guide and co-author. She’s hanging in that tree out there. Her spirit is, anyway. If you really communicated with her, you’d know that. The same way you’d know that the men who strung her up stitched her lips together.”

A little silver shiver filled the ensuing silence. Janice was shaking; her bracelets made nervous music in the small kitchen. I listened to the sound, and I let her think about what I’d said. I smelled the fresh mushrooms and red peppers that she’d just finished slicing, the fragrant basil that waited in a wooden bowl. She held a small knife in her hand. It made music, too. The blade stuttered against the rolling butcher’s block that separated us.

Janice Ravenwood wasn’t one to give up easily. “There’s a reporter coming for lunch,” she said. “He should be here any minute.”

“A guy from CNN?”

The blade stopped stuttering and Janice started. “H-how do you know that?”

“I should have told you-I’m psychic.”

She stiffened. “Don’t play with me, Saunders.”

“Okay. Maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe I got your phone number from the local new age bookstore. Maybe I phoned you myself. And maybe I pretended to be a reporter, and you invited me to lunch.”

“All right. You’ve shown me how smart you are. Now tell me why you’re here.”

“Maybe I came here to find out about you. Maybe I wanted to see what you could do for me. Maybe I wanted to see what Natasha could tell me about a ghost without any skin. Maybe I’d like to know where a ghost like that might hide.

“And maybe I saw another ghost when I got here. Maybe I saw six of them.” I glanced through the kitchen window at the dead witches swinging in the rising storm, and I described each ghost to Janice Ravenwood.

She listened without a word. I wondered what was going on in her head. One thing was sure-she wasn’t letting go of that knife. She stared down at it while I talked. By the time I finished, I could tell she’d regained her composure.

When she looked up, her gaze was appraising. She had questions of her own. The first one began, “Your gift-”

“Don’t call it that.” I wasn’t going to let her take control. “What I’ve got isn’t any kind of gift. It’s a curse. I was born with a caul. I see the dead…or haven’t you guessed that by now?”

“I’ve met people like you before. I’ve even worked with a few…”

She wouldn’t stop staring at me. She was getting too brave.

I pulled the K-bar.

She saw the blood on it.

That shut her up.

“Don’t waste my time,” I said. “I know your game. I’m all done playing it. You can’t give me the answers I came for. But you can give me some answers I need.”

She put down her knife and took a step backward, her hands raised conciliatorily. “I know you don’t believe me. I know you think I’m a fraud. But I can help you if you let me. I do have powers. Maybe not the powers I’ve claimed, but if you’ll give me a chance I’m sure I can tell you anything you want to know.”

Her eyes locked with mine. There was a door behind her. It stood open. Less than five feet separated us, but she was on the other side of that rolling butcher’s block.

I shoved it out of the way and it crashed into the sink, spilling sliced mushrooms and red peppers and basil. Janice turned to run but I caught a handful of her long blonde hair and stopped her cold.

One pull and she was on the floor at my feet. Before she could take a breath, the K-bar blade was against her throat.

Words crossed my tongue like ice. “If you’re not a fraud, then you can call up Circe Whistler’s ghost.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I want to talk to Circe’s ghost. I need to talk to her. If you’re not a fraud, you conjure her up, and you do it now.”

“I… I can’t do that. What you want is impossib-”

“Then you’re a liar.” The blade nicked her skin. “And I’ve got no use for a liar.”

“Wait! You’ve got to believe me! I swear that I can help you if you just give me a chance!”

I’d heard the desperate sound of begging before…and the sound of empty promises. Still, I hesitated. Maybe because this was about the little girl. Maybe I just wanted to give her every chance I could, no matter how slim.

Janice’s fingers brushed my left hand, the hand that held the knife. But she didn’t try to push the blade away.

Instead, she reached for it.

Gripped it. The blade sliced her skin silently-just a shallow cut-but deep enough so that I heard the gentle patter of blood on the scarred linoleum floor.

Janice stared at me.

Her eyes held more secrets than they had a moment before.

“The first one was a long time ago, in Reno,” she began. “You still felt bad about it in those days. His name was Eddie Budz, and he was a blackjack dealer with a bad habit of pocketing chips. You stabbed him six times and he painted you red before he fell. After that, you learned to take them from behind. You killed in Baltimore and Austin and Denver. You spilled blood on Florida sand, and on the snow-blanketed Canadian prairie, and on the sharp black lava of Hawaii.”

Janice kept on talking. I thought she’d never stop.

She was telling the truth, of course.

“The last one was in Los Cabos.” She eyed me hard now, making me pay for my disdain. “But of course, I already know all about him. My gifts aren’t necessary to relate that little tale. Diabolos Whistler was alone, except for those mummies stacked in his library. You came up from behind and stabbed him just above the first vertebra. He gasped a little bit. Then he started mewling-”

“That’s enough.” I pulled her fingers off the blade. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

“Ask me anything,” she said. “If this knife was involved, I can give you an answer.”

“Yesterday I found my knife in Circe Whistler’s chest. Someone stabbed her and skinned her alive. I didn’t do it. I need you to tell me who did.”

“I can tell you many things, but I can’t tell you who killed Circe Whistler.”

“You can,” I said. “And you will.”

I raised the K-bar.

A familiar voice behind me: “Drop the knife, Mr. Saunders. For once, Janice is telling the truth.”

The voice raised gooseflesh on my neck, but I didn’t drop the knife. I pivoted fast, catching Janice in a headlock with the blade pressed to her throat.

“Janice can’t tell you about my murder,” Circe said. “You see, I’m not dead.”

Unfortunately, she was right. Diabolos Whistler’s daughter stepped toward me, and she wasn’t a ghost by any stretch of the imagination. Circe was very much alive. Her strong arms were outstretched, and she followed a Colt Python that filled her black-nailed hands.

“You’re full of surprises,” I said.

“So are you.”

“What are you doing here?”

“You think I’m going to miss an interview with CNN? Satan himself wouldn’t miss that.”

I had to laugh. That was why Janice had revealed the true nature of her powers. It was a stall. She wasn’t trying to help me. She was waiting for Circe to bail her out.

“You really had me fooled,” I said. “I really thought that you were dead. Who was the corpse, anyway? One of your doubles?”

“Oh, I don’t think I’ll do any more of your homework for you, Mr. Saunders.”

“Fair’s fair,” I said. “But I really could use the help. I get the feeling that I’m a little out of my league with you.”

“Don’t sell yourself short-you surprised me, too. And you caused me a lot of trouble. You weren’t supposed to run.”

“Sorry I wasn’t more cooperative.” I angled toward the open door. “Maybe you should have filled me in on your plan. Then I would have known just what to do.”

“All you had to do was die.” Circe smiled. “And it’s not too late for that.”

Circe’s gun was five feet from my face.

I figured she knew what to do with it.

I pulled Janice’s head closer to mine as I stepped through the open doorway.

“Circe,” Janice begged. “Listen to him. Give him a chance to tell you what he wants-”

I tugged her hair and we went back another step. The adjoining room was small and dark, its lone window draped with spiderwebs and a half-dozen fat black arachnids. Crammed with boxes and bookshelves, this was obviously a storage area. I hadn’t spotted a door yet, but I hoped I’d see one soon. I didn’t like the idea of going out through the window with all those damn spiders Circe cocked her pistol.

“No!” Janice said. “Oh, Circe…please don’t shoot!”

“Shut up,” Circe said.

Janice squirmed. I yanked her hair.

“Move again and I’ll cut your head off,” I warned.

Janice whimpered.

“She’s having a really bad day,” Circe said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It doesn’t seem fair. We should settle this. Just the two of us.”

“That suits me.” Circe lowered the gun. “It could be I’m wrong. Maybe we can work it out. Like you say: just the two of us.”

As soon as she stopped talking, I knew that wasn’t what she wanted at all. Something stirred behind me. Instantly, I knew Circe had taken a page from Janice’s book. She was stalling me, too.

She didn’t want to talk. She wanted me dead.

Some things never change.

I pushed Janice into the kitchen and whirled just in time to see Spider Ripley raising a pistol in the darkened storeroom. He was wedged in behind a stack of boxes but that didn’t stop me.

The K-bar gleamed as I went for him. Ripley elbowed a couple boxes in my direction and managed to dodge as the blade came down for the wrist of his gun hand. I was in close and his gun was aimed at the floor. There was no way he could get a shot off, but that didn’t mean he was helpless. Ripley slammed an elbow into my head and knocked me off balance. Then he followed through with his knee, catching me hard in the belly, and I dropped my knife as I stumbled backward.

I slammed into a bookcase. Books rained down on me as the case rocked back and hit the far wall. Then it fell forward, just as Spider got a shot off. The bullet tore through a paperback and into the wall as I leapt at Ripley, and the bookcase continued forward and caught the door that led to the kitchen. The door slammed closed and we were in the dark then and I hit Spider hard, both of us plowing into the near wall as the bookcase crashed to the floor and blocked the doorway.

Circe was on the other side, rattling the knob, shoving at a door she couldn’t open. I dug my fists into Ripley’s scarred belly and he grunted and dropped the gun and it was lost in a pit of shadow that was much too far from the webbed window.

No light crawled there. But a Spider did.

He did more than crawl. He came for me, and he came hard. I ducked two sweeping hooks, then caught another elbow. The room went black as the first midnight flash of a strobe light. A lost second and I was back with him and the fist he sank into my ribs was like a chisel on ice. He pounded with it, again and again, chipping away until I went down hard, flat on my back.

Cold cold pain froze my ribs but my anger burned it off when I felt the K-bar pinned beneath me on the floor.

I snatched it up and went for Spider Ripley again.

Pain knifed my ribs and brought me up short.

I only managed to slash Ripley’s chest.

He fell back against the wall, caught in the spider web of sickly light from the lone window, and that was when I saw it.

Not his torn shirt, or the blood pulsing from a fresh slash beneath it, or the branded ankh on his chest.

No. The thing I saw eclipsed Ripley’s ankh.

It hung on a crude rawhide necklace that snared the big man’s neck.

It was a silver crucifix.

In dead light born of a brewing storm, Spider Ripley’s blood pulsed over polished metal.

I stared at him, and he stared at me.

Hate and embarrassment burned in his eyes. Then the doorknob rattled again.

It was Circe. She’d had enough. Just as Spider was about to launch another attack, a shot went off and a hole appeared near the doorknob. Ripley jumped back and Janice Ravenwood screamed from the kitchen, but that didn’t stop Circe. She fired another shot, and the bullet tore through the door and broke the window, sending a half-dozen spiders scurrying in their webs.

I still didn’t know how Ripley had entered the storeroom. 1 hadn’t found another door, and I didn’t have time to look for one. In the kitchen, Circe yelled at Janice, telling her to get out of the way or else she was going to end up dead, and then another bullet pierced the door and Spider ducked low.

“Ripley!” Circe screamed. “If you’re not dead, open the fucking door!”

Spider didn’t answer. He didn’t even raise his head.

And I didn’t waste any time. I jumped through the window. My ribs screamed as I dove into a puddle of rainwater that was much too shallow, but I came up fast and started running.

Bullets splintered wood and hissed past me into the forest. I didn’t look back at all.