Duck Duck Ghost (30 page)

The dolls took up a cry of their own, more sound than words, but their rage was evident, a hard, raucous whine of air-forced voice boxes and high-pitched squeakers. The scrape of limbs on wood rankled the hair on the back of Tristan’s neck, and then in between the sliding hack of warbling floorboards, he heard it.

“Simoooooooooooone.”

There was no mistaking the evil in that childish giggle. Dripping with malice, the intent was clear. Whatever or whomever was using the doll to cry out was doomed, because Charity Sinclair was using every bit of power she’d gathered up to bring down mayhem on anyone in her path.

There was only one thing Tristan could do. Taking a few steps back into the room, he took a deep breath and cried, “Wolf! Get the hell in here! I think Charity’s come out to play!”

T
HE
WALLS
moved. The floor crawled. And the noise hurt deep down into Wolf’s teeth.

It was a widening procession of screaming, smiling, and painted masks, carried as swiftly as space would allow. The low crackle of their ad-hoc locomotion buzzed and clicked, an undertone for the wailing of Simone’s name. The heads skittered along, focused on reaching the living room until Wolf stepped into the foyer. Then their tide shifted, peeling away from their destination to head toward the warm body in front of them.

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Cin slammed into him from behind. “What the fuck are those?”

Wolf didn’t stop to answer him. A few of the heads were rapidly skittering around the corner and into the living room. Another step into the foyer turned up another surprise—an unpleasant one at that. It wasn’t just the heads that were moving. Anything remotely toylike lumbered through the space; from rolling eyeballs to articulated hands, the floor was covered with migrating body parts.

A stud-backed eye scrambled over Wolf’s foot, digging deep into his flesh. He kicked it off, but the damage was already done. His skin welted up, painfully swelling as it began to drip blood. It was too much of a reaction for such a small cut, and Wolf limped for another step before stepping on an upraised hand lurching in front of him.

“Fuck.” The pain was immediate, like a snakebite along the arch of his foot. “Cin, watch your step. These damned things hurt.”

“Just kick them out of—” Cin went down, his feet sliding out from under him. The dolls swarmed over the fallen Hellsinger, their gyrating limbs scraping into his eyes and forcing themselves into his mouth. Cin choked and fought to turn over, but he couldn’t get leverage with the ground shifting under him.

Wolf waded through the heads, trying to reach Cin. His cousin struggled to remove a baby doll arm wiggling down his mouth, its rubber ball joint bobbing like an untied gag around his lips. Cin’s teeth were clamped down over the joint to prevent it from slithering down any farther, but from what Wolf could see, the arm appeared to be winning the battle.

It was harder to get to Cin than he thought it would be. The toys were slippery underfoot, and more than once he glided across a slick, eerily moaning surface. They’d both come in and shed their shoes, walking around the house on bare feet, a decision Wolf sincerely regretted as he stepped on yet another sharp, pointy appendage.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the floor was black and sticky, coated with a slime that began to burn Wolf’s skin where it stuck to his feet. He fell, landing nearly on top of his cousin by a happy coincidence, and Wolf used the momentum to reach out and yank the burrowing limb from Cin’s mouth.

The hand wouldn’t let go. Its fingers were dug deep into the sides of Cin’s tongue, and his cousin gagged, frothing up blood from the cuts along the inside of his mouth. Sey was screaming at Gildy to get back, and from the corner of his eye, Wolf could see Tristan kicking at the faces as they approached the archway to the living room.

“Shit, I’ve got salt.” Wolf dug into his pocket while tugging at the wiggling arm. “Hold on, Cin.”

Cin gagged again, seemingly more reflex than fear, especially when the appendage slipped and hit the back of his throat. His cousin was fighting off other intruders, his hands busy at clearing away the bits and pieces of toys clambering over them.

Wolf came up with a handful of salt, and with an apologetic grimace at his cousin, he warned, “I’m gonna salt you, dude.”

Wolf assumed the gurgling sounds coming from his cousin’s mouth were approval for his plan. He wasn’t fluent in captured-tongue speech, especially since being a dentist was his idea of hell, but it was all he had. The one person who might have had a clue about how to fight the damned things off had to go and get himself throat leeched.

“Sey, can you get me water? He’s going to need it when he gets this thing out,” Wolf shouted at his other cousin. Dribbling a stream of rock salt into his cousin’s already filled mouth, he leaned back when the rubber limb began to smoke. One good yank and the thing was free, its fingers wiggling helplessly in the air as Wolf flung it down the hall.

Cin came up spitting out chunks of salt, but he tilted his head at Sey’s shout, then snatched a water bottle out of the air when it came flying at him. The cap was off the bottle before Wolf could get to his feet, and Cin was rinsing his mouth, spitting the salty water onto the doll pieces around them.

The toys smoked lightly where Cin’s spit hit, and the black goo under their feet bubbled. The stinging was growing too much for Wolf to take, and he picked his way through the mass, trying to get to the living room. It was taking too long to cross the short distance, and for every step he was able to get forward, he slipped and slid what seemed like five paces back. Heads and arms were dropping down the walls, hitting tables and knickknacks.

One ceramic shepherdess seemed to wobble between answering Charity’s siren call and remaining inert. A grinning clown doll holding a bunch of plastic balloons took care of her indecision, smashing her to the hard floor. Trapped in Charity’s thrall, the pieces flew but not before squeaking an eerie moan demanding Simone’s death.

“Wolf! The doll—it’s floating in here,” Tristan said over the chitter coming from the foyer. “And it’s crying. I think it’s… Simone. I think Simone’s in there.”

“Makes sense,” Cin choked out through another mouthful of water.

They got another few inches when the ground behind them exploded in a spray of ceramics and wood.

The shotgun blast deafened them, and Wolf felt the splatter of shot hit his jeans. The pellets stung, but he didn’t think he was hit. Cin, however, swore loudly, and the smell of spilled blood filled the air. They each dove, Wolf toward Tristan, but Cin’s leap went sideways, taking Sey out of the foyer. They tumbled into the empty dining room, and from the sounds of things, they’d taken a few of the wooden chairs with them.

“Get down. I’m reloading!” Gildy screamed from the end of the hall. “Bastards don’t know what’s hitting them!”

“Fucking hell.” Wolf scrambled to get over the crawling horde, but his hands were wet with sweat and he slipped, going down on his elbows a few inches from Tristan’s feet. His toes felt like they were on fire, and the pricks in his hands and arms stung as if he’d rolled in a vat of pissed-off sea urchins.

“I’ve got you.” Tristan grabbed at his wrists, yanking to draw him clear of the toys. They were advancing, despite Gildy’s shotgun blast. What wasn’t shattered kept crawling forward, in some cases limping along on damaged bits. “Wolf, tell her to put down the damned gun.”

“Gildy, drop the fucking gun! Are you trying to get us killed?” Wolf kicked at the heavy marionette tangling his feet. A two-foot-tall nutcracker snapped at Wolf’s toes, its powerful jaws nearly breaking his joints.

She didn’t hear him or just didn’t give a shit because there was another cock of a barrel snapping together. Then the hallway went bright with another flash and boom.

The air was filled with ash, powder, and burn, with bits of flaming toys bouncing down off the walls to land around Wolf’s prone body. Tristan fell back, and for a panicked second Wolf thought he’d been hit by the blast, but he rolled over onto his stomach and flashed Wolf a smile.

“I’m okay,” Tristan reassured him. “But she’s sure as hell pissed someone off. Charity’s out for blood.”

Wolf kicked free of the dolls’ hold, smashing as many as he could, and got loose. Sure enough, he didn’t need an EMF reader to tell him Charity Sinclair was walking on the remains of Sey’s stock, and she was heading straight for him.

Her feet were bare like his, but unlike Wolf’s smarting soles and toes, the little girl was untouched by the shards and goo. She appeared as she had every other time, sealed skin pulled down over her eye sockets and her mouth curved up under her cheekbones, a gaping black stretch held together with tattered strands of viscera and tendon. Shreds of her tongue slipped out between the torn pieces, licking at the air like a snake tasting a scent on the wind.

Charity’s face turned toward Gildy, her neck twisting all about until her chin touched her spine. Her arms stretched outward, and her forehead tilted back, nearly severing her face in two. Her chest filled, expanding nearly to bursting. Then Charity screamed, unleashing an inferno of scorching sound—engulfing the hall in flames.

I
N
THE
confusion that followed, Tristan only cared about one thing—getting Wolf into the living room. He grabbed a hold of Wolf’s shirt and pulled, nearly yanking his own shoulders out of their sockets. It was funny how his lover never felt heavy when Wolf was lying on top of him, but now, when their bodies were about to be immolated, dragging Wolf seemed like trying to heave a VW Bug up onto a curb.

“Fuck, no more Red Vines for you,” he grunted, giving Wolf one final yank. A few of the doll parts clung to them, but they were mostly smoking remains, burned pieces of melting vinyl clinging to Tristan’s hands as he tried to scrape them off Wolf’s back.

“They’re fat free,” Wolf grumbled. “Tell me the doll’s still around.”

Looking over his shoulder, Tristan spotted the blond-wigged toy spinning in gentle circles near a music stand in the corner. Its dress caught on the metal flat, pulling it along as it drifted through the open spaces. It continued to mewl, haunting echoes of cries buried beneath pleas for Charity’s mercy.

“We need to find out what happened.” Wolf began to head back to the hallway, but Tristan caught him before he threw himself back into the fray. “Let me go, Tris—”

“Stop,” Tristan ordered, pointing across the break in the walls toward the dining room. “Wolf, they got Gildy.”

“I’m going around to see what the damage is!” Cin shouted over the crackling remains, coughing at the plumes of sticky smoke filling the space. “Stop this bitch. Sey’s got Gildy. They’re going to get outside!”

“But—” Wolf growled, then turned on his heel. “Fuck this. We need to get rid of her now.”

The ghost was gone from the hall, but the scent of her touch lingered, and there was no doubt she’d be back. The toys seemed to have stopped their progress for the most part, but a few stalwart pieces scrabbled on, rolling over the bodies of their defunct companions.

“There’s a fire extinguisher down the hall. Cin’ll find it.” The sooty air burned his eyes and nose. He’d swallowed too much smoke, and it tore at his mucus membranes. Coughing, Tristan searched the living room for the salt packets Wolf’d made earlier in the evening. “It’s just you and me, Kincaid.”

Wolf limped into the room and tugged at one of the couches. “Help me get this across the opening. We’re going to have to stop anything from getting in here. I get the feeling if one of those things out there gets a hold of this doll, things are going to go to shit on us.”

Tristan had to stop and gape in astonishment at the man who shared his bed. “
This
hasn’t gone to shit? What the hell—”

“Just help me, Thursday.”

They left the doll to its dance and toppled over one of the heavy davenports, angling it across the opening to the hall. Wolf’s feet left bloody marks on a beige carpet. Tristan’s weren’t much better. There was a filmy grit on his skin, and no matter how much he wiped his hands on his pants, he couldn’t seem to get them clean of the fine oil clinging on the whorls of his fingers.

“Where’s the doll?” Wolf looked around the room for the blonde toy. He snagged it, yanking it down, and the doll fell over, Simone’s hold on its form giving way to Wolf’s touch. He moved quickly, catching its head before it smashed against anything. “Damn, this thing is still crying. We’re going to have to go new school on this.”

“What does that mean?” The problem with being in a household of Kincaids was they had their own language, and Tristan apparently failed Frankenspeak before he even signed up for the course. “Wolf, talk to me like I’m a kid. What do you need me to do? And hopefully it’s not something that’s going to get me eaten by that ghost out there. Or wherever the hell she is.”

“Tell me you’ve got your music player with you.” Wolf grinned foolishly. “Remember when you cranked up the tunes and shook up Winifred? We can use sound to keep her back long enough for us to get some rune lines down.”