Duck Duck Ghost (25 page)

I
F
THERE
WAS
any proof of hell’s existence, Tristan was sure he’d found it.

Or at least a circle of it.

Looking around the small room they’d cleared out, salted the baseboards, then piled up with boxes from Sey’s estate purchases, Tristan counted at least thirty crates and boxes they’d need to go through. And by they, he meant him and one fluffy, foul-faced Persian named Crowley. Other than the cat, his only company appeared to be the boxes and a rapidly cooling cup way too small to hold the coffee he’d need to shore himself up as he dug through the dusty remains of other people’s lives.

The morning came in bright at first, with intermittent drizzles covering the grounds. With a promise to join him shortly, the Kincaids all peeled off into different parts of the barn to help out with the livestock, but the cat followed Tristan into what he now thought of as The Hall of Doom. Daylen had taken one peek at the stacks of boxes, paled, and declared himself too weak to help dig Tristan out of the trenches.

“Okay, let’s see what we can find in this one,” Tristan said to the cat, who’d found the single watered-down sunbeam in the room acceptable to warm his long gray fur.

They’d already come to an understanding of sorts. Crowley would lay still for a few minutes, then meep his disapproval at the dearth of rubs along his soft belly. That barely there squeak was Tristan’s cue that Crowley’s belly was open for rubbing business, and he would spend a second or two to ruffle the cat’s fur before going back to what he was doing.

Which was, so far, pretty much opening up crates to find himself staring at books, papers, and a Narnia wardrobe of junk drawer debris.

He couldn’t
not
go through everything. For all he knew, Simone was
this
empty spool of thread or
that
book of S&H stamps from 1942. There were a few toys and even one small box of pressed tin windups he’d have loved to play with, but he had to put them aside for what turned out to be a box of old German philosophy textbooks. His brain told him it wasn’t what he was looking for, but he couldn’t be sure. Not until he looked at
everything
.

He was dirty and tired, but most of all, he wished someone else would come in and rub the fucking cat’s belly so he could get through all of the boxes and do something else. Like tumble Wolf over the end of the bed or come up with an entire new series of zombie ducks who moonlighted as superheroes during the darkest of times.

“Hmmmmm. Zombie superhero ducks.” Tristan turned the idea over in his mind. “That could work. Kids like gory stuff. Hell, I like gory stuff.”

The cat mewed at him, and he scrubbed at its obviously neglected belly. Glancing down at Crowley, he said, “You know, you could help.”

“Be careful with that beast. He about took my face off when I tried to pet him earlier.” Daylen strode in, nattily dressed in a short-sleeved polo shirt and pressed Bermuda shorts. He carefully stepped around the cat oozing over the room’s floor. He handed Tristan one of the two water bottles he brought in with him, then collapsed into the only other chair in the room. “Please accept the water as my peace offering for being an arse. It’s just been… hell, I don’t have a word for what it’s been.”

“Overwhelming?” Tristan tossed in as he opened the chilled bottle. Taking a welcome swig, he swallowed slowly. “How are you feeling?”

“Well, emotionally or physically?” Daylen shot him an incredulous look. “I… can’t absorb everything that’s happened in the past day. To be honest, if I could have, I’d have left this place in my rearview mirror.”

“Yeah, I get that.” Tristan set his bottle down. “I wish I could tell you it’s going to be okay, but I think it’s going to be one of those worse before better things. Last time I went through this, it went to shit and gone pretty hard and fast.”

“Last time?” Daylen’s voice climbed to a squeak so high-pitched Crowley mewed his displeasure with a modulated growl. “I had a creepy skull girl-thing digging her hands into me! How much more shit can that get? That thing was… God, I can’t even—”

“It was a ghost,” Tristan broke in gently. “And honestly? I think a lot of what happened is kind of my fault.”

“From what Big, Dark, and Badass told me, you were the one who got that thing off of me.” Daylen used his foot to edge the cat away from him. Crowley batted at his sock-clad toe, and Daylen gave up trying to move the cat away. “You say ghost, but I guess I’m having a hard time—look, this is all so strange. I came here to learn about vintage toys. Not… vintage people. And especially ones that seem to want me dead.”

“I don’t think it’s you per se,” he reassured the man. “So far I’ve… look, what are you doing?”

Apparently Daylen took that as an opening to let his hand roam down Tristan’s leg. The man looked down, as if astonished to find his fingers brushing over the seam of Tristan’s jeans. It was odd to have someone other than Wolf touch him there, and Tristan’s brain froze, caught on the etiquette of how to throw someone’s hand off a leg in the most polite way possible.

Smiling, Daylen slid his hand up and down Tristan’s thigh and said, “I just wanted to say thank you—God, for everything, really. This is scaring the hell out of me, and you seem to be the only one who wants to talk to me about it.”

“Um, sure,” Tristan mumbled as he carefully closed his fingers around Daylen’s wrist and lifted it away. “Don’t… look, Wolf and I are….”

“He’s a bit angry, isn’t he?” Daylen didn’t seem to mind the reproach, although his mouth tightened around the edges. “Unless you go for that whole burly Scotsman thing. Some blue face paint, long hair, and a kilt, and he could be tossing cabers. And really, a parapsychologist? What kind of degree is that? Who gives that out? Did it come in a Kinder egg?”

It was a small sound but one that grew louder with every passing second. Tristan started, wondering if he was hearing thunder off in the far distance, but when the rolling shudder of sound continued, he realized it was coming from the boxes.

The same boxes he’d dreaded going through one by one were rattling, rocking back and forth in a jitter across the floor. Crowley took off at the first loud boom of a crate landing too close to his tail, weaving through the thinning paths in the room. Tristan grabbed Daylen’s shirt collar and tried to hoist him out of the chair, hoping to get them both as close to the open door as possible.

They didn’t make it. Daylen fought Tristan wildly, and they both stumbled over the shifting crates, crashing to the floor. The next loud boom they heard was the door slamming shut. Then the quaking began to increase, shaking the panes in the window until Tristan was sure they would crack.

He let go of Daylen to bat at the loose papers and things flying up at his face. The spools of thread he’d disparaged earlier seemed particularly pissed off at him, smacking Tristan in a rapid-fire barrage. The papers sliced and cut, drawing their edges along Tristan’s skin until his arms and cheeks were spotted with thin beaded red lines. The sudden impossible wind battered him back, pushing Tristan to take cover behind one of the heavier crates. Reaching over, he tried grabbing at Daylen’s ankle to pull him to cover, but the man wasn’t having any of it.

Then the moaning began, and the hell Tristan
thought
he’d been in came to him in full force.

His mind knew what it was seeing. Even if the press of tiny faces coming out of a crate’s wooden sides was impossible, it was definitely what Tristan’s eyes were taking in. Their mouths moved, growing sooty around the edges of their cavernous maws before the black began to slowly fill in. None of it made sense. Not the boxes growing and absorbing faces only to have others take their places. Not the weird keening moans creeping out of the boxes’ opening lids, and certainly not the serpentine crawl of sound coming out of Daylen’s stretched-apart jaws.

Any reason was gone from the man’s eyes. Instead, they were bleached out white, sucked free of any color. Even the pinpricks of his pupils were gone, replaced with a caul-like fuzziness where his bright gaze had been. Smoky blue and black veins began to thread under his skin, working outward from his nose, ears, and mouth, and Tristan could only watch in horror as they stretched out, eating away at the pale of his flesh in their burrow for his extremities.

“Simooooooooone,” the crates and boxes cried around him, and Tristan scrambled back when Daylen turned his sightless gaze toward him, an intense scowl pulling down his dark eyebrows until they nearly met over his long nose.

“Daylen, don’t let it—” Tristan didn’t know what
it
was exactly, but it seemed like the best word to use. “Don’t let it take you. Fight it.”

It was stupid to talk to the thing eating away at Daylen’s brain. He clearly couldn’t respond to Tristan. Or at least not in the way Tristan hoped he could. Instead, the young man who’d come down from Ontario to learn about soft-bodied teddy bears and craze-cracked doll heads was now getting to his feet in a loose, broken-limbed shamble and seemed intent on heading right for Tristan.

“Tris! Open the door!”

Wolf’s voice came through, but anything following his name was buried under the avalanche of noise hurtling toward him. Tristan tried to dodge into any open space he could find, hoping he could at least reach the door to unlock it, but one of the heavier crates slammed into his side, and he gasped at the sudden rush of pain.

Suddenly the faces on the crates were no longer merely apparitions. One clown head, its eyes bleeding red from the diamonds painted around its extruded sockets, snapped at Tristan’s clothes and nipped at the tender skin under his arm. Yelping in as much surprise as pain, he tried to pull free, but the mouth held him fast. Another snapped over his bicep, its mouth stretching unimaginably wide to clamp over Tristan’s muscle.

All of it was unimaginable, he reminded himself. These were wooden crates and cardboard boxes, caked with dust and neglect from sitting in storage after their owners passed on to wherever they’d needed to go. As material as anything else in the room, they shouldn’t have been rattling and gnawing on Tristan’s limbs.

Even worse—even stranger—was Daylen’s elongating arms being pulled down past the ends of his sleeves by God knew what—or whom.

More terrifying than the screams was the sound of bone and skin cracking in front of him. There was only so much give flesh had before it tore, and whatever was now living in Daylen’s body had little concern if its vessel survived the experience.

Daylen’s joints stretched and snapped, the bones beneath his skin warping out as he tried to reach Tristan over the crates blocking his way. Small cracks began to form on his skin, and then a gush of blood spurted across the crate’s lid, splashing the undulating faces growing there. The pressed-out visages mewled and screamed in response, and the black in their maws snapped out like tentacles to suckle at the splashes before the dry wood could soak it up.

Unperturbed by the forest of ebony cilia clamoring for his wounds, Daylen mounted the crate, and Tristan gulped when he realized Daylen could almost reach him. Kicking at the heavy crate, Tristan tried to get some distance between them, but the thing wearing Daylen’s skin wasn’t having any of it.

More pops, and this time, cracked bones exploded out of Daylen’s forearms. His hands craned forward, their tips broken, and his finger bones creaked slowly out, nearly brushing Tristan’s face. They were turning black, spiraling out into claws. One snagged a tangle of Tristan’s blond hair, and he yanked his head to the side, breaking contact.

A confetti of old papers momentarily clouded the space between them as the gusts picked up, and the tiny pieces littered Daylen’s shattered body. They stuck wherever he leaked blood, and another cracking twist of his arm separated something deep in Daylen’s bones, because as he tried to snag Tristan’s face again a foamy chunk of spongy red material fell out of a crevasse in Daylen’s upper arm. The mouths on the crate fought a fierce battle with their lengthening cephalopod extensions, slapping at whatever was near to fend off competition.

“Simoooooone!” Daylen screeched, his fingers hooking and kneading the air. “You kiilled meeeeeeeeeeeee. You tooooook heeer and killed me!”

“I don’t fucking
have
Simone!” Tristan shouted back. “I don’t know where she is!”

It would be easier if one of the boxes actually screamed back that it held Simone. Shit, Tristan would have welcomed a ghostly version of Marco Polo if it would just get Daylen free. But other than screaming along with the possessed man, the faces were no help in finding what the ghost was searching for.

“Sheeee ruuuuiiinnned everythiiiiiiiiiii—”

The man didn’t even look up when the door blew in. Tristan did, and when he spotted Wolf bringing up the muzzle of a dangerous looking shotgun, he dove down among the crates as best he could and covered his head.