Duck Duck Ghost (12 page)

The monitors gave them their first indication something was off. Gildy’s chair skittered across the floor, and the woman yelped in surprise. Her shout jerked Wolf’s attention back to the screen just in time to see all hell break loose.

T
RISTAN
KNEW
he was dreaming. Or at least it felt like a dream. His face was numb, and the bed he was lying on seemed to creak under him as he moved. A sliver of moonlight stretched over the unfamiliar white eyelet duvet covering him, and Tristan wondered who moved the window, because he’d never had a gloaming hit him from that side of the room before.

None of the shadows were familiar. His sleek-lined furniture was gone, replaced with heavy bulking forms looming menacingly from spots along the wall.

Even the air smelled different, slightly dryer and less green with a hint of salt in it. There was something earthier beneath the sage and pine, a pungent otherness he couldn’t quite identify. It smelled like—livestock of some kind.

He was also cold.

Again.

His limbs were stiff, frozen and tight. At some point in the middle of the night, his spine had crawled away. Probably after Wolf, since it seemed like the bed was empty of one skeptical blue-eyed Scotsman. His Scotsman, in particular.

“Simooooooone….”

The howling started low, then built up, echoing through the suite. It was a child’s voice. One burdened with a sadness as deep as the cold in his bones. He’d grown up hearing the laments of children. Sometimes in English. Most often in Chinese. He’d be counted fluent in Cantonese if he only spoke of sorrow and pain.

This child, however, surpassed them all.

There was movement to the side of him, a flicker of white and then a pale blur of something against the darkness. It took every drop of energy Tristan had to move his head, and the muscles in his neck screamed in agony with each inch he gained, but eventually, his cheek hit the pillow, and he could see the thing standing next to the bed.

It was definitely a child.

Or at least the remains of one.

He’d taken care of enough guests at the Grange to know dead children in the past often wore long dresses regardless of gender. Still, something about the nightgown-swaddled form standing next to his shoulder screamed little girl—even if her skull only boasted a few wisps of thin hair. He’d have guessed her to be about seven or eight, but it was difficult to tell since she looked stunted and drawn in. Even draped in a voluminous shroud, he could see the press of her skeletal rib cage through the thin lawn fabric, its sharp shelf curving in over a cadaverous belly.

Sunken, wrinkled skin covered where her eyes should have been, and for the life of him, Tristan couldn’t see any seam where she should have had lids. Instead, the concave space was unbroken from the top of her skull down to the thin slash of her lips. Her cheekbones stood out in painful juts, and dark lines webbed out under her skin, mottling her complexion. She looked parched, as if every drop of moisture was leeched from her skin and flesh until the only thing remaining was a husk of rattling bone wrapped in parchment.

And she certainly rattled when she moved, because Tristan heard her bones clacking against one another when she lifted her hand to stroke at his hair. Her fingers were cold and oddly elongated, tipped with broken nails nearly as long as her palm. They ran under the strands along his hairline, feeling less human and more like the scramble of a roach’s legs as it fought to clear itself from a spiderweb.

He would have shivered if he could move, but turning his head had depleted Tristan more than he’d have liked to admit, so he lay there, as trapped as the imaginary roach dying in his hair.

“Simone….” Her mouth barely moved, but the word creaked out of her lips. Her throat spasmed with the effort of speaking, and her body swayed back and forth with the effort of standing. “Kiiiiilll yooooooooooooou.”

“I’m not Simone,” Tristan croaked over his swollen tongue.

He couldn’t be sure the ghost even heard him. There was no reading her eyeless face. Nothing changed on her features. Even the crooning whispers from her slightly parted cracked lips slithered out with a smidgen of movement. Her hand and arm continued to move—stroking down to tangle in Tristan’s hair, then sweeping back in a circular motion where she jerked to a sudden stop, only to replicate the motion time and time again.

He would have thought she was a repeater, but there was something anchored about the child, something darker than a flashing bit of personality embossed over the ether. She’d come looking for someone—a Simone who’d left her—and most of the repeaters he’d seen in the past didn’t interact with the corporeal world at all.

The little girl shouldn’t have been able to touch him if she were an echo. And he certainly wouldn’t have been pinned in place by a frigidity so deep he feared his legs would be broken beneath its weight.

“Think, Tristan.” Scolding himself seemed to at least jar his brain into some sort of forward motion, because suddenly it scrambled for a way to get off the bed and out of the room. If he could just edge out of her touch, he might be able to break loose.

If
being the operative word of his plan, because so far, his legs and arms seemed reluctant to respond, and the nearly mummified little girl was quite content to play with his hair until he eventually joined her.

Fear played with his balls, rolling its icy fingers along his thighs and knees. His spine seemed to be back, locked into a hard line, much like the ghost’s lips. Grunting, Tristan tried twisting his shoulders to break contact with the girl’s hand, and he was rewarded by the slight squeak of the bed beneath him.

The jostle was enough to pull his head farther away from the young ghost’s touch, and she responded by cocking her eyeless head, and her thin mouth pulled back, forming a thick seam that began to stretch inhumanly far back under her sharp cheekbones. The line stretched and stretched until its end points were nearly to her tiny earlobes. Her skin suffered for the pull, thin crackles appearing on her face, and bits of broken skin flaked off. They peeled away from her dry face, catching on some unfelt wind to spiral away from her in a scabrous cloud.

“Hurt meeeeeeeeee.” While her expression remained fixed, the rise of her howl grew in screeching steps. Terror filled Tristan’s belly, and he choked when a flood of bile rushed up from his guts. She shuffled forward, and her serpentine fingers grabbed a chunk of his hair, wrapping the strands tightly around her bony knuckles. “Simoooooooone.”

His mouth worked hard, and he gurgled around the sour pressing on the back of his throat. Coughing, he finally was able to spit out the obstructive fluid, horrified when it bubbled down his chin and over his chest in an oozing black spill.

“Goooooooooooo!” Her head unhinged, broken open at the seam of her exaggerated lips. Broken teeth studded her rotted jaw, and cankerous sores dotted her stretched inner cheeks and tongue. Her throat cracked open, pulled apart nearly to an obtuse angle, and her uvula flapped back and forth in a flaccid dance against the pocked roof of her mouth.

Tristan couldn’t find his breath, although the furls of cold mists coming from his mouth told him otherwise. His screams were trapped behind his own tongue, unwilling or unable to make it past the chunk of meat. The ghost’s threadbare skull crackled with energy, and her thin strands of fine hair stood out around her face in an unholy halo. The black lines beneath her skin thickened and thinned, gathering in spots along her cheeks, arms, and neck only to scatter out again, much like a spider searching its web for prey.

Tight with rage, the ghost began to scream, an endless brightly pitched howl high enough to make Tristan’s ears bleed. He felt something pop along his left eardrum. Then his face started to lose sensation, a numbness creeping down his cheek and lips.

The furniture against the walls shook, and the bed thumped despite his weight. It jumped across the floor, pushed by the ghost’s rage. Pictures flew across the room, glass shattering when the frames careened into anything solid. Beneath him, the floorboards buckled, carrying the bed off in its tidal wave flow. Somewhere, someone was crying out, and Tristan wondered if it was his own sobs he was hearing.

Another burst of pain along his eyes hit him, and Tristan knew for sure this time it was his own voice he was hearing. His throat bled with the sound of his pain. The house quaked, twisting into an Escher landscape around his screams. Tristan tried blinking, but his lids refused to move, and dust pummeled his bared gaze, a thousand pinpricks driving down into his eyes.

Just when he thought the pain couldn’t get any worse, the little girl mounted the bed, and her spittle-flecked maw hung over his face, spraying him with acidic drops. Her tongue lashed out, winding up around her nose and temple to lick at the flakes coming up off her chafed skin, and when it drew back down into its hollow, its blackened surface glistened with translucent specks as bright as newly fallen snow.

Raising one arm, the little girl slithered up over Tristan’s torso and patted his cheek with her gnarled fingers. Bending down, she hissed into Tristan’s aching ear, the edge of her tongue flicking along his lobe as her hand moved down his throat, finally resting on his chest.

“Not living with me again, Simone,” the specter whispered. Then she plunged her hand through Tristan’s chest, shattering the ice in his veins into a prickled anguish through his blood. The world tilted, and as everything went black, the little girl kissed his cheek and murmured beneath his keening scream, “Not ever again. I won’t let you.”

“S
HIT
,
GRAB
Gildy and get out!” Wolf screamed at Sey as he headed to the door. “Going to find Tristan!”

He barely had time to get out of the room when another rattle grabbed the house. A flash of thin moonlight from the window outlined the tree line, where nothing moved, not even a rustle of wind through the leaves of the oak growing in the side yard. One of the cows mooed sleepily from its stall in the barn behind the house, and a nighttime bird called out, a peaceful croon totally at odds with the chaos tumbling through Sey’s home.

Taking the stairs two at a time, Wolf nearly stepped on a puffed-up gray Persian hissing on the landing. The feline’s eyes were wild, and it curled back, arching up when Wolf ran past. A tug on his sweats told Wolf the cat snagged him with a claw when he went by, but he kept going, hoping the Persian got loose, or it was going to be pulled behind him like a water skier.

His bare feet squeaked on the polished floor when he turned down the hallway at a jog. A few long strides took Wolf up to their bedroom, and he grabbed at the knob, turning it back and forth, but the latch didn’t give. Putting his shoulder to the door’s solid heft, Wolf tried the latch again and shoved hard. The door remained stuck in its frame, refusing to budge.

“Fuck this.” The floor buckled under him, and Wolf lost his footing, slamming into the landing’s high railing. One of the pointed newels dug into his side, and he huffed at the sudden pain. Wolf pushed off the handrail and slammed back into the door, and it cracked under the push of his weight.

Another hit left him reeling, but the door gave, splintering from its frame. Wolf’s momentum carried him into the bedroom suite, and he stumbled in, rolling onto the floor before coming to a rest at the foot end of their wrought iron bed.

He lay there for a stunned second, drinking in the silence, until he realized he not only ached along every inch of his body, but the house was quiet, with only the minute sounds of things settling back down echoing through its winding halls.

Standing up took a little bit of effort, but it was worth it. Especially when he realized the heavy panting he heard was coming from the blond man lying on the bed. Staggering to get to his feet, Wolf grabbed at the foot of the bed frame and pulled himself up.

Tristan lay under the duvet, his eyes screwed shut and his fingers fisted into the linens. The covers were wrapped tightly around the man’s body from twisting in his sleep, cocooning him in place. If the blond’s pained mewls weren’t alarming enough, what Wolf saw arranged around his lover’s twitching body made his blood run cold.

Every inch of space of the bed was covered, packed in tight with cracked porcelain doll heads, their fragile ivory skulls crazed from impact, and just as Wolf reached over to peel the shattered heads away from his lover’s prone body, Tristan’s eyes snapped open, and he began to scream.

“H
EY
.” W
OLF
nested up behind his lover and slid his hands around Tristan’s waist. Pressing his chest into Tristan’s shoulders, he laid a kiss on the man’s long neck. Sighing contentedly, Tristan relaxed, leaning into Wolf a bit as he stared out into the fog-shrouded pastures beyond the old house.

It was funny how the mere push of Wolf’s weight on him made Tristan’s heart skip. He couldn’t decide if it was because they were touching or just the simple trust the other man had in him, but after a moment of wondering, Tristan realized he didn’t care one way or another—so long as Wolf was there, fitting into him as easily as breathing.