Four Ghosts Read online

  McBride nods. “Right. Let’s get this done.” Taking a sip of his marvelously smooth drink, he fishes the house keys from his jacket pocket. Inserting the key in the lock, he tries to ignore the mumbling whispers from behind him. The tumbler catches, the bolt slips from its casing. He grimaces as a wave of nausea ripples through his viscera. He pushes the door and through the black crack of the threshold’s opening comes a whisper of cold air carrying the corrosive stink of bleach and the coppery tang of dried blood.

  Upon Jason Kirkland’s return to Boston, his parents, siblings, and friends watch him to ensure he doesn’t return to his home where his wife killed his dog, his son, and then herself. Two days after his return, he is missing. Plainclothes officers and patrols comb the area in case he comes to 3842 Sawmill Lane. So far, no one has seen him. It is like he slipped into some sinkhole in the world never to be found again. McBride can’t blame the guy; what else can anyone do with so much grief?

  The psychic woman can’t give us any answers to the murder-suicides of mothers and their infants. There are no answers, not in this world or the next. Of that, I am certain.

  Chapter Two

  The moment the skeptical cop opens the front door, Samira can feel the waves of carnage pulse against her cells like radiation. Most people think that she can see death but that’s not true. It’s not like death is invisible; there’s nothing more present than a corpse.

  It’s energy that she reads. Like some diviner, Samira reads the lingering patinas of emotional energy left behind and from them, can see the truth of things.

  Or perhaps, it’s nothing like that at all. When asked, she only responds that she “Does what she can.” Any explanation beyond that is by definition, inadequate.

  She slips into the house behind Asher like a shadow and grips the paper cup of tea between her hands as if it is a talisman. Silly, considering that she is all but drenched in them. From her neck hang baubles of protection and strength, on her wrists are bracelets inscribed with sigils and runes for precision and accuracy. The most powerful weapons in her arsenal are the rings that glisten in the dark and bleed shadow in the light.

  Like its exterior, the house is grandiose in its normality. In the foyer, winter leaks through frosted sky lights splashing the living area in a ghostly glow. The entryway lies between two great rooms: a dining room to the left and a smaller sitting room to the right. Samira ducks her head a bit to be sure she sees what she sees. Minute scarlet particles drift from the northeast corner of the ceiling.

  “What?” Asher asks.

  “Is the master bedroom up there?” She points to the delicately designed ivory-colored crown molding, slowly being blotted out by the red dust.

  “Yes. Why?”

  Samira shakes her head. “No reason.”

  McBride chuffs derisively and she wonders if her involvement in this investigation is worth the precondition of his presence. Both rooms are decked out in leather furniture, plush carpets, and tranquil paintings of seascapes. Bookshelves are adorned more with knick-knacks and framed photographs than books.

  “So, do you need a tour or--”

  “No,” Samira replies. Asher is half a foot taller than she is so it takes some maneuvering for her to see beyond him, the cop, and the hallway that bisects the front rooms from what she’s guessing are the laundry, kitchen, and family areas. “It happened in the master bedroom, right?”

  Asher nods.

  “Take me there.”

  McBride snorts. “Shouldn’t you know where it is already? I mean, you’re a psychic and all.”

  Samira senses the tension rolling up Asher’s back and rest like a manifest nightmare onto his broad shoulders. He wears a thick, long sleeved thermal t-shirt, snug designer jeans, and winter boots she’s certain cost as much as her monthly mortgage payment.

  Before Asher can reply Samira steps from behind the younger detective and stands between him and McBride. The energy coursing off Asher’s muscular figure is heavy with frustration, anxiety, and (for some reason), guilt. McBride on the other hand is swarmed by buzzing lines of fear and insecurity. Either way, they’re both making an already volatile environment even more unstable. And she hasn’t even seen the crime scene yet. If they keep it up, her reading will be so distorted by their machismo bullshit all traces of a potential presence will be wiped out. Emotional energy is fragile, frangible, and brief.

  “I don’t give a fuck what you think, McBride.”

  The older man raises an eyebrow.

  “I’m not here,” she glances back at Asher to make sure he’s aware he’s being chastised too, “to be part of some bullshit pissing contest. If you don’t want to be here, then don’t be here. I have a job to do and I’m not letting either of you stand in the way of it. Do you understand?”

  Asher’s jaw drops and McBride is looking nervously at his cup of hot chocolate.

  “If you’ve both lost the ability to speak, then I need to give that speech to a lot more people.”

  Asher half-smiles and nods his head. “I understand.”

  She looks toward McBride.

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  “Fine. Let’s go.”

  The two men follow her up the stairs. She chastises herself as she is supposed to let both or one of them go up first. That way if there is something . . . lurking . . . she gets time to avoid its questing gaze. She takes a sip of her tea and thinks, fuck it.

  The two cops clod up the stairs like elephants, grating her nerves as she doesn’t like loud noises in general and also because she senses that the house itself is still traumatized. There are stains ground into the eggshell grey carpeting. Some rust red, bile yellow, dirt black. Still reeling from savagery, the house needs peace and quiet to heal. She places a hand on the wooden railing and thinks thoughts of release and serenity. Once this is all over, she’ll return to this place with Jada and Salvi and the three of them will cleanse the house with self-gathered smudge sticks and incense.

  A pang of guilt and shame shoots through her viscera.

  Dammit. The thought of return, of bringing others here, of caring for this place as if it were her own . . . it’s a crack in her armor.

  People, Samira. People lived here. A family. They loved ea—

  She shakes her head as she follows Asher down the hall toward the northeast side of the house. With every step, it becomes more and more difficult to stave off the humanistic litany intent on distracting her away from the objective, paradoxically emotionless aspect of her investigation. Her heartbeat quickens and a sliver of dread slithers down her spine.

  Find something still, baby.

  Samira smiles as the memory of her Grandmother’s voice lilts through her mind. At twelve, Samira’s “gifts” began to show and were it not for Granny Aspen’s (birth name, Annie Aspen Stokes, after marriage, Holland) wisdom, patience, and experience, Samira would have ended up in a mental institution far sooner than she had.

  She looks up and admires the bland architecture. Similar to the first floor, the hallway features high ceilings with skylights beaming at opposite ends of the hall. As such, the natural light throws a pallid, murky cast into the air.

  And the chill. She looks ahead of her and McBride and Asher are flanking either side of the door like scared yet loyal sentinels.

  Asher cocks his head. “This is it.”

  Heart thudding against her ribs, the chill is rising beneath her clothes and against her skin as if she is standing in a flooding meat locker. This is not psychosomatic, not imagined, not figurative. Behind that door, living memories of a massacre and the force of its pain is stealing the breath from her lungs.

  Breathe

  Samira inhales sharply.

  “You alright?” Asher says, taking a step toward her. She shakes her head. “Yeah, I’m fine. Listen,” she glances at McBride, who is absurdly chugging down his hot chocolate.

  Finishing, he lowers the cup, and smacks his lips before realizing he’s being watched.

  “What?”r />
  Samira raises an eyebrow. “Was it that good?”

  McBride shrugs, embarrassed. “It was alright.”

  She can’t help but chuckle. “Here’s the deal. No matter what you hear on the other side of this door, do not” she looks hard into each man’s eyes “do not attempt to enter.”

  “Samira, what if--”

  She shakes her head. “If anything happens to me Asher I want you to call Crow. Okay? Tell him where we are and tell him that I need help.”

  He winces as if injured but nods.

  “How uh, how long should we wait for you to . . . do whatever?”

  It’s the first time she’s heard McBride’s voice almost entirely free of derision. It’s nice, a deep, rumbling timber like Sean Connery without the brogue.

  Sighing, she quirks her eyebrows; “Great question but, unfortunately, I don’t have an exact answer as this is hardly an exact art.”

  She braces herself for some skeptical retort but the detective is quiet and attentive.

  “It’ll probably take me at least fifteen to twenty minutes.” She thinks for a moment. The murderous chill has reached her waist and a wave of panic threatens to seize her.

  Closing her eyes, she places both hands over her belly. The words spill from between her lips in a whispered stream of security and safety, a litany of protection from mother to child. Her heart skips a beat. The fetus is no more than six weeks old and she knows that scientifically there is no possible way that it has gestated long enough to have muscles, let alone conscious movement.

  But she feels it anyway; a warmth that blossoms from deep inside her womb and warms her bones like sunlight. Hot tears spring behind her closed lids and she wishes that this impossible response were happening to her in her home, with Varju’s hand on her belly and Mally the Alaskan Malamute panting in excitement on the floor.

  She will never know it, but across town, Varju pauses with one boot flipped in his hands and a foot just about to enter and listens closely in the morning quietude because he swears he just heard someone call his name.

  Samira opens her eyes. The door is smooth and polished, the wood dark and kissed with a tint the color of merlot. She reaches out and places a hand on the door handle. It is icicle cold in her fingers.

  Her eyes remain steady on the door. “Remember guys, wait twenty minutes for me. If I’m not out by then, do not come in. No matter what you hear, do not come in: Call Crow.”

  She doesn’t know if Asher or McBride nod or speak or turn back flips down the hall, so intent is she on the milieu building inside the room. Yes, there is pain and brutality and cruelty beyond measure on the other side of the door.

  Yet there is something faint but familiar, something she knows she once feared. It is the lingering scent of perfume a woman – a mother even—leaves in her wake as she turns away from small, outstretched, pudgy arms starving for tactile affection. It is the gust of displaced air produced when the mother returns and finds her child has become a hollow, glass-eyed, cavern of a girl. It is the creak of wooden floorboards beneath the weight of a dying body.

  Turning the door handle, Samira soundlessly steps inside the room, shuts the door behind her and locks it in one fluid motion.

  The void is the womb is the mouth is the grave.

  Chapter Three

  The door clicks shut and Samira waits a few heartbeats before opening her eyes. The residual energy of savagery flicks across her skin like thorns. It is insistent, restless, and eager. Her breath quickens. She is ashamed for misleading Varju, but if he knew the truth he would do everything in his power to prevent her involvement. Although, if he knew the whole truth maybe he’d shove her into the waiting abyss with a smile on his fa—

  “Stop,” She softly tells herself.

  Not in this place. This place, this room in particular, is far too . . . saturated for distraction. The bedroom is cold, but not the sort of cold that permeates the rest of the house. The air here is gravestone cold. She can hear her heartbeat, her breath, even the slight creak of the detectives’ weight in the hall, but each sound is muffled and still, as if she has bits of soundproof sponge jammed into her ears.

  The chill has quickly sapped the warmth from her exposed fingers, and she balls her slight hands into fists. She hopes that the baby inside her cannot feel her fear.

  “Alright,” she says to the room clearly, “show me.”

  This is not a command for any “spirits” or “ghosts,” such things aren’t real. The words are for her, a technique taught to her by her husband to reassure her of her self-control.

  She opens her eyes.

  Once, this master bedroom was tastefully decorated in warm shades of chocolate brown and cerise. There is a cherry wood armoire against the wall to her left, with matching nightstands on either side of the four-poster bed, and a bureau opposite the large cabinet. The carpet is a deep sensuous red and if the pile weren’t crushed all to hell and drenched in black blots of blood she’d love to run her toes through the plush material. Instead, she walks toward the bed, and feels the telltale sizzle in the air. The bed has been stripped and the mattress has been pushed halfway off the box spring. There are smears of blood on the bed, but she’s guessing that most of it is on the floor and in the baby’s crib.

  A few feet from the bed the crib sits. It is of course empty but approaching it fills her with an almost unbelievable sense of doom. She breathes a miniscule sigh of relief: the bassinette pad was gone. The base of the crib was grimy with dark streaks of something and there were great rends and punctures in the wood.

  Fear stinks. It rolls off the crib along with the slaughterhouse belch of blood and carnage. She gags as another smell, a funky organic smell crawls into her nostrils. And she realizes what that brown, pasty looking substance is in the base of the crib. She quickly turns away as her stomach roils and her mouth fills with sour spit. Clamping a hand over her mouth, she reaches out with the other to keep herself upright by leaning against the wall.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…breath. Fuck, just breathe . . .”

  Pressing the back of her fist against her lips, unpleasant thoughts flit through her mind. At least, they distract her from the nausea. Jaxson Kirkman was probably sleeping before it happened. The world is alright. Jaxson Kirkman had probably smiled or cooed when he felt and saw his mama. Such warmth. Jaxson Kirkman was scared and hurting and so goddamn confused and who knows when, like it matters, but that baby voided his bowels in terror and pain and none of those fucking cops or evidence techs or anyone had the decency or compassion to clean it up.

  Samira crumples to her knees, and the sobs leak out of her mouth in raw bursts of noise that would scare her if she had any more room inside to be afraid. She can hear his cries, his anguished pleas in the universally understood language of a voice stained with pain. It is a flight of razors soaring through the carmine sky of her heart. Unlike the cops and the techs and whoever else has come in this room, she knows what Jaxson Kirkman felt like while his mother stabbed him to death. Not knowing in the way of the empath, she knows in the way of—

  “Fucking stop it!” she hisses.

  She holds her hands to her face, wipes away tears and snot and rubs her palms against the thighs of her pants.

  “Alright. Just fucking do this.” She doesn’t realize it, but she’s rocking back and forth slightly, just enough to give the memories embedded in her body a little infantile comfort.

  Standing, not thinking, she walks back over to the crib and places her hands on the railing. It is a strange tableau: on every finger glistens a ring of some precious metal while behind it is a mess of blood and shit. Some of the rings are contemporary in design, all straight lines and rigid angles, shaped like rounded squares with symmetrical slices of polished onyx, lapis lazuli, or jade. Other baubles are heirlooms inherited directly or otherwise earned; heavy filigreed bands of purest silver braced around chunky blocks of amethyst and garnet. On her right ring finger is the sapphire cabochon that was previously
worn by Grandma Aspen and her mother before her. Inside the band are sigils of warding and protection. It is her most treasured piece of jewelry, even more so than she and Crow’s wedding rings; cheaply designed, mass-market, “silver” bands with a shoddily designed chaostar overlaid on a field of black. He had proposed to her with the hideous thing and hoped (he later told her), that given her disposition and occupation, she’d find the gesture funny. She had of course.

  Rust red particles dance at the edges of her vision. Not the child, she knows too well what he saw. The mother. What did the mother see?

  ~*~

  Something wakes her. The place beside her in bed is empty. A moment of panic, then memory: Jayson is still in Nebraska. Will be back in three days. Sleepily, she looks to the alarm clock on the nightstand: 4:17am. She sits up, the room is dark. Where’s the dog? She pushes her hair back, slick tendrils were stuck to her skin. Why is it so warm? Mallory frantically shoves away bed sheets and comforter and peers into the dark to find the source of her unease.

  The crib.

  "Oh my God." she whispers.

  Blood-red light pours from between the wooden slats and stains the dark, polluting her vision. Mallory rubs her eyes, blinks, but it's all still there. She stands up on weak legs. She's taken two of seven steps from the crib and the thing inside snicks its new teeth together. It's the sound of a straight razor being sharpened against a leather belt, a block of flint scraping along the beveled edge of a cleaver, the slide of starving scissors seeking something tender to divide.

  Her inner-eye is filled with the memory of the figure from before: the figure that lurked in the dark, outlined in bloodied light, it stood at the doorway to their bedroom the night after Jayson’s trip. Like whatever is nesting within that crib, the shape too was haloed in a fiendish red glow that screamed damnation.

  "Let the unclean thing be still." she says to the demon. She's sure it's a demon. Mallory Kirkman has never believed in anything spiritual in her thirty-one years of life, but the alien thing that was once somehow familiar could only have come from a place of hellish torments. She gasps as pinpricks of pain ignite across her body. A needle-like jab at the swell of her left breast brings tears to her eyes. She clutches herself, haunches over defensively, knowing all the while that the motions are useless. Another piercing stab, this one, into her neck, just below her earlobe. She screams, and the walls (corrupted too by the poisoned light) bounce her panic back to her. Another, an arrowhead of white-hot pain just above her bellybutton.