Page 19 of The Mare Rider of Cornwall Cove
The wind moaned and whistled through the cracks in the walls, with bits of snow falling in and landing on the busted floor tiles. I scrubbed and scrubbed, but the stain was not coming out of my new yellow puffer jacket. With a huff, I shoved the sock into my coat pocket and then stared at my reflection in a shard of the looking glass. I looked like death warmed over. Bad choice of sayings, but man, was it true. Using some more water, I doused my fingertips to scrub at the dried blood on my nostrils and upper lip. Ugh, poor Phil. I’d kissed him with bloody lips. What a fucking soldier he was. Most other guys would have left my weird ass behind months ago. Not Phil. He was as loyal as a Labrador and just as enchanting. Once I had the caked-on remnants of my bleed washed off, I poked at the bags under my eyes. I was running on about four hours of sleep, Phil even less since he never slept well when anxious. Plus, he’d had a brutally hard practice that had depleted him even more. Both of us were going to crash as soon as we hit the hotel. I hope we sleep for a whole day. I sure looked like I needed to pull a twenty-four-hour snooze.
Turning from the mirror, I gasped when I spotted a small entity, a child, a boy no older than ten in knee pants, a grimy shirt, and ratty leather boots. His eyes blackened compared tohis pale creamy face. I wondered if he had been beaten and had died from the beating, but he carried no other signs of abuse. I kneeled on the cold, cold floor.
“Hello, do you have a name?” I asked and got a nod as he stared at me with placid eyes like a fawn found in the woods.
“Timothy O’Neal,” he dully replied. “Are you special?”
“Not exceptionally,” I told him, but he seemed not to get the joke. People as tired as me should not try to be punny. “I’m teasing you, Timothy. I am special, yeah, which is why I can speak with you. Did you pass over here in this hospital?”
“Yes, sir, I did. I did bad things, sir. Awful things like smearing my shite on the floor or knocking my head into the wall. My mum died on the boat over. Then I got picked up for taking a fish, and they sent me here. Told me I’d be cured and help medical studies. They stuck a pick into my eyeball, and I never smeared my shite over the floor again. But I come down with the flux after that and died on the floor in the youth ward.” He wavered back and forth, his form holding together well. Shame I wasn’t holding it together as well as little Tim here. I wanted to cry at the thought of a child of this age being subjected to something as radical as a transorbital lobotomy. He was incredibly placid, watching me with an apathy that wasn’t uncommon for those undergoing the procedure. “Does your special make his kind go?”
My brow furrowed as I tried to understand what this boy was asking. “Make who go?” I asked as he simply stared at me with passive eyes. What had a child done to deserve this kind of treatment? Other than having the last name O’Neal, which, given the hatred of the Irish in the 1800s, could have simply been enough to get a poor child into the hands of medical science for experimentation. Perhaps he had been autistic. Phil was right. This place was the pits.
“Him.” He lifted a small hand. I glanced over my shoulder to see a pair of vibrant silver-gray eyes staring at me from a long shard of broken looking glass.
“Oh shit!” I yelped, tumbling to my ass as those silver-smoke eyes peered at me and then disappeared. “What the hell was that?” I asked the ether, not expecting a reply, but getting a mellow one from Timothy.
“Smoke Man,” he stated calmly. My sight flew from the mirror to the little boy rocking back and forth as if he and he alone heard a tune. Perhaps he did. I wished I heard a tune. All I could hear was my blood rushing through my ears as my body got another hefty dose of adrenaline. At this rate, I’d not be able to fall asleep until April.
“Who is Smoke Man?” I asked, my voice shaky, as I worked on regaining my composure. “He’s not a phantom like you, is he?”
Timothy shook his head as I stood, my legs feeling a little rubbery. “He’s the Smoke Man. Keeps us out of the pretty rooms. Eats our sleep. He’ll eat yours too. You should leave.”
That was two ghosts telling me to get out. A smart man would heed that advice. I liked to think I was somewhat intelligent. Not the top of my class, obviously, but smart enough to take sound counsel.
“Yeah, maybe we’ll say we had technical difficulties and wrap this show up early,” I said loudly in the hopes that Smoke Man would hear me. I dusted off my ass as my attention returned to Timothy. “You said he keeps you out. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of an apparition being able to bully other apparitions into doing anything. Not even poltergeists are that strong when dealing with spirits. How does Smoke Man keep you out?”
He shrugged slim shoulders. “He just does. Puts a finger into our heads, like a pick, and makes us different. He likes the humans better. He doesn’t like you. You should go before he sticks his pick into your head.”
With that final warning, he floated off humming “Three Blind Mice” as I followed him into the corridor. A dozen or so wraiths were in the lobby, all peering around the walls as little Timmy moved toward them. A portly woman with short hair in a ?20s bob reached out to the ghostly child, then they all disapparated.
“Thanks,” I whispered, turned, and ran like hell back to the game room. We were leaving. Right now. And if we lost subs or Roxie got mad, we’d just deal. I barreled into the game room, looked around, and saw something that would terrorize my dreams forever. Phil sat on the ground, back against the far wall, his camera lying on his lap, chin on his chest, sleeping bag resting over his legs, sound asleep. Kneeling over his powerful thighs was an entity that was part man part smoke, its mirrorlike eyes locked on Phil as its long, pointed fingers sunk into my boyfriend’s head. No blood pooled around the pick-like fingers, but Phil jerked violently.
“Get away from him!” I roared at the top of my lungs. The being ignored me, its shadowy form shifting back and forth from the shadow man to something almost not there. This was no ordinary ghost. I’d seen and studied wraiths ever since I was old enough to understand Grandpa’s lessons before I could even read. This thing was possessed of a malevolence that I’d never encountered before.
I ran at the being and was shocked when I hit something thicker than the misty form of a ghost. When we connected, the Smoke Man roared as if in pain, his long fingers pulling free of Phil’s head, as it spat words at me in a language I didn’t comprehend. It sounded Eastern European on a guess. I felt the world teeter to the left as a wellspring of visions invaded my head. The floor rose up to meet me. Then darkness, but for a mere second, before I was shaken awake by the force of impact with the wall. My head flew back to the old plasterboard with a crack that sent my glasses flying. All the air left my lungs asblackness danced around the edges of my sight. I fought back the urge to faint. The being was violently angry now, spewing things at me in a tongue I wished I understood. It threw tables about, most aimed at me, as I rolled to avoid the incoming barrages. Thankfully, my years of being the skinny Asian weirdo in grade school paid off as I was pretty nimble and deft at avoiding incoming volleyballs, baseballs, and spitballs.
“Vile retched otherling, walker of the lands of dead and living,” it growled at me in broken English as it stalked over to Phil, who had slumped to his side, the camcorder lying on his lap with the green power light now on. “Your language is piggish on my tongue, much like the taste of your mother’s—”
“Fuck you! Donotspeak of my mother!” I raged at the fiend. It paused a few feet from Phil, mercury-colored eyes locking on me. I could see a face, and then not. One second a human mask, then one that had no nose or lips but still managed to smile at me. A grim grin much like that of the groundskeeper.
“Ah, little Chinaman, your devotion to a woman long dead is admirable.” I shot to my feet, ready to take a swing, when he drew back, his face disappearing into a cloud of black smoke. It paused, took a step back, then another, as it clawed at me like a cornered cat. “The stench of a mother of magic oozes from your pores like a plague.”
“Yeah, I know I stink!” I shouted but had no idea what I was really saying.
I just wanted to be sure this thing didn’t sink its claws into Phil again. Fumbling about like Velma fromScooby-Doowithout my glasses, I bumped into Phil’s big boot, planted my feet, and did the only thing that I thought might matter. I reached into my pocket to extract the gris-gris bag. The Smoke Man dove into Phil as if he were a pool of water. My boyfriend trembled madly, his eyes flying open as he began to levitate off the cold floor. His camera hit the ground with a sickly snap of plastic, the sleepingbag slid from his lap, and upward he floated until his chest rested on the water-stained ceiling. Fuck. I had really fucked this up. Instead of keeping this thingfromPhil, I pushed it into possessing him. Fuck. Fuck.Fuck.
I stood there like a brick, staring at my love levitating at the ceiling, his body stiff as a board, his breathing rapid, and I had a moment of utter panic. This was way out of my knowledge. This being, this Smoke Man, was not the run-of-the-mill phantom. I feared this being was malevolent. That scared me to my marrow, but I had to do something to help Phil. Looking around, I found a card table that had been flung aside in the highly unfriendly interactive’s—and I was pretty sure this was what we were dealing with because, wow, was he unfriendly—rampage a few moments ago. It wasn’t the sturdiest thing I’d ever seen, but it would have to do.
I dragged it under where Phil was floating, climbed up on it, and placed the gris-gris bag against Phil’s back. The expulsion of the entity was instantaneous. A huge smoky form exited Phil with a shriek that made my ears ring. Once the smoky form fled through the ceiling, Phil fell. Right into my arms. The table splintered under us, and we crashed to the floor in a heap of arms, legs, and broken card table. The impact was jarring. Phil groaned as his pretty blue eyes fluttered open. He lay atop me, his face a mere inch from mine, my wheezing exhalations hitting him in the face. And I had yet to brush my damn teeth.
He seemed stunned, his vision fuzzy perhaps.
“You aresoheavy,” I rasped as I reached up to cradle his face. “This is…why I top.”
The joke fell flatter than I was at the moment. Phil inhaled a shaky breath and then began to weep. Huge, racking, heartbreaking sobs. “Oh, baby, oh, baby,” I murmured, over and over, as he buried his face into my neck. I held him close,battling for every breath, as he wept like a newborn. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
“No, no, it’s not,” he managed to croak out and then pushed back to sit on his heels. I sucked in all the cold air that I could manage to draw in and slowly sat up. My ass was sore from the impact to the tile floor, and my shoulder ached, but nothing felt broken. Other than my poor boyfriend, who was now crying into his hands. “Oh God, my dreams were so fucked up. My mom…I never…what I told you and everyone…lies…”
