“You’re going to break my arms!” Janice yelped. “Let me go!
I did, glaring at her now.
I slapped her again. “That lie wasn’t pretty,” I said. “Now tell me the truth.”
“I am telling the truth!”
I drew back my hand. This time she didn’t cringe from the blow. She intercepted it, grabbing my wrist so that my palm thudded against her shoulder.
Her fingernails dug in and broke skin. “Let me go, you bastard!” she shrieked. “I told you the truth!”
The rain beat down on us. I spun her around and grabbed her from behind and she tried to squirm away. The creek rushed below. My arms closed over her breasts and she scratched at my hands, screaming at the top of her lungs.
I told her to shut up if she wanted to live, but she wasn’t listening anymore. I swore in spite of myself as her nails raked my flesh and my blood coursed over her fingers, and a fresh torrent of screams poured down with the rain.
But the screams did not come from me, and they did not come from Janice Ravenwood.
They came from the thing at the far side of the bridge.
A thing too tall to be a little girl’s ghost.
I saw it, of course. Only in silhouette, but I knew that it was a dead thing. A ghost. Just an oily smear against the forest.
The way I was built, I couldn’t help but see it. But Janice saw it too. She gripped my bloody hand, and her psychic gift surged through my blood, and she saw through my eyes.
Just as she’d wished.
The thing came forward, a black streak of shadow. Janice held me tight, her thoughts scrabbling inside my skull like a hundred frenzied spiders. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t do anything but watch, and listen, and wait. All she had to do to banish the ghost was let go of my hand, but she held on tight. Out of fear, out of fascination…I don’t know what made her do it. All I knew is that she couldn’t let go.
The thing took another step, stumbling in the dark, and then another. Blacker than the night, a shadow’s shadow. A bar of light cast from the dropped flashlight lay in the thing’s path.
It avoided the light, clinging to the bridge railing.
It stopped just a few feet away from us.
The dead thing’s screams faded to whimpers. But it wasn’t the sound that raised my hackles. It was the stink of death.
I took a shallow breath, and Janice retched against a terrible perfume born of murder and blood and the rot of an early grave.
Janice struggled in my arms, trying to break contact. She didn’t want to see the world through my eyes. I could sense that. She didn’t want to draw back the veil of death. Not anymore.
“Don’t look away, Janice,” the thing said. “I want you to see where your marble road leads.”
Lethe Whistler’s ghost laughed against the storm. Janice struggled harder, wet and slippery in my arms. She kicked the fallen flashlight and it whirled madly on the bridge, white rivulets spilling everywhere, slicing the forest, spearing the night and the thing that lurked there.
The beam found its target crouching low to meet the light. A sharp blade of light speared the dead woman as surely as the one that had killed her, revealing her gristled ribs and skinned sex and a cleaved, lipless smile laughing under blue, blue eyes.
Janice broke free of my grasp and ran.
Almost immediately, she was swallowed by the night.
I snatched up the flashlight and aimed it at the dead thing. A snake of illumination slithered across Lethe’s pitiless eyes. She said, “Kill that bitch, or you’ll never see the little girl again.”
I didn’t have time to think. I drew a pistol as I spun away from the ghost. I aimed the flashlight into the forest, but its range was much too short to reveal the woman who had wished to see the world of the dead.
I couldn’t see her, but I knew that she was there all the same.
I closed my eyes against the rain and emptied my pistol into the darkness.
7
The cold rain sliced my face as I trailed Lethe Whistler’s ghost across a beach shaped like the blade of a reaper’s scythe.
I did not follow too closely. I aimed the flashlight beam just short of Lethe’s bloody heels, sparing myself the sight of her. The wind off the water did the rest, banishing the sickening miasma that accompanied her.
The clean scent of salt air washed the darkness, but the bracing smell did nothing to clear my head. A foghorn sounded in the distance, and waves crashed against the shore, but it was the thunder of gunfire that rang in my ears.
My left hand stank of cordite. Back at the bridge, I’d emptied a pistol into the dark forest. I had no idea if I’d hit Janice Ravenwood. If Lethe’s ghost knew the answer, she wasn’t saying. Apart from the threat that had forced me to draw my gun, she hadn’t said a word.
That threat had been enough, because it was accompanied by an unspoken promise to take me to the girl. Still, I didn’t know if I could believe Lethe had the little girl, any more than I could believe that the child was indeed Circe Whistler’s ghost.
It seemed impossible. Circe was alive, and the little girl was dead. But if the little girl and Circe were indeed one in the same, that would explain why Lethe’s spirit had attacked the child. Even if I couldn’t understand the connection between the girl and the woman, Circe had admitted that she orchestrated her sister’s murder. That was certainly reason enough for the hate Lethe had directed toward the little girl’s ghost.
Golden sand sparkled beneath the flashlight beam. A gust of wind pounded against my back and knocked me forward a step, and the harsh light played over Lethe’s skinned calves. Stripped muscles danced against ribbons of tendon and naked bone.
The wind changed and the scent of Lethe’s pain caught me straight in the face like a stunning blow. But Lethe didn’t slow down. She moved forward. Whatever her motivation, it drove her like a slave master’s whip. Needles of rain stitched her shade, and the wind tore through her like an open window. She was nothing more than air, but the storm could not carry her away. She would not allow that to happen.
It was obvious that we were heading toward the bottle house. I didn’t know why, and Lethe wasn’t telling me. She never looked back once. She knew I would follow her, just as she knew that she could safely turn her back to me.
Lethe had nothing to fear from my guns or my knife. She was already dead.
She pulled ahead as we neared the cliff, the same way the little girl had. Through the whispering beach grass she went, and up the trail, and to the cracked concrete stairway that led to the bottle house.
I followed as best I could. Icy wind blasted the cliff. The storm lashed my wet body as I crossed the patio, but the bottle house was not an inviting sanctuary.
Lethe waited in the open doorway. The wind howled through her, sweeping across the black maw while screams and gasps and moans echoed behind its concrete lips.
The sound was only the wind in the bottles. I played my flashlight over the rain-slicked glass, and told myself to get a grip. But what I saw wasn’t half as powerful as what I heard. And what I heard were a thousand voices, as if a horrible party waited there in the dark.
“It’s a party for the dead,” Lethe said, as if she could read my mind. “But you’re invited.”
I stood in the storm, as cold as a corpse.
Lethe was trying to scare me.
For the first time in a long time, I hesitated.
Wondering if I was really as smart as I thought I was.
Wondering if I should be afraid.
Lethe smiled her red smile, and the black mouth swallowed her whole. Her voice joined the others, beckoning me inside.
A deep inhalation.
I stepped forward.