Pale: 10.b - Interlude

One After Another – 10.b | Pale
Melissa leaned out the window, phone in hand, thumb scrolling through her phone.  It was abundantly clear: August first, the Dancers, minus Hailey, minus Melissa, were all throwing a big event to raise money so they could go to a competition in New York.  They were all over social media, promoting and trying to rally people to the task.

She put the phone down on the windowsill, and it clacked audibly.

“Why go to New York?  You’re not that good,” Melissa muttered aloud.  “You’re going to hype everyone up, take money people can’t afford to give, and then you’ll drop out of the competition round one.  You’ll cry, window shop and run around New York like tits, and you’ll come back with no shame you took a stupid vacation on everyone’s dime.”

It was hot out and her room was hotter still.  The house had no air conditioning, and she kept her door closed for privacy.  She’d spent a lot of time in her room like this, and it had caused a baked-in odor.  She was smoking as she leaned out the window, and the combination of smoke and the air freshener spray she used joined that baked-in smell.  The curling cigarette smoke mingled with teenager sweat, a faint fermented smell from the wrappers of gas station snacks, and acrid, artificial pine tree smells.

She leaned further out the window, then adjusted, trying to lift herself up to the windowsill, but her foot wasn’t strong enough and she was forced to move the tin lid she was using as an ashtray to the other side, along with the phone and air freshener, sitting the other way and pushing herself up with her other foot.

She settled in a slumped position in the windowsill, uncomfortable, half in and half out of the window, cigarette and injured foot on the outside.  She adjusted her sitting position and how she sat against the window three times before giving up.

She picked up her phone and held the cigarette between her lips as she flipped through to her gallery.

“Fuck you,” she whispered, throwing the phone onto her bed.  She looked outside at the night sky, and the residential neighborhood with its wide lots, uneven, patchy, and dotted with massive trees.

She froze, then swung her injured foot down a bit to twist around and look.

In the twilight gloom, small, narrow eyes caught the light peered out of the neighbor’s bushes.  Watching her.

“Shit,” she cussed under her breath.  “Shit shit shit shit shit.”

She grabbed the windowsill and fumbled for something heavy and large enough that wasn’t tied down by wires.  She found a scented candle, with cornered edges, about a foot tall and half a foot on each of the four sides, only a bit of a crater in the top.

She hurled it toward the bush, and it punched through the flexible branches, disappearing amid the green.  The eyes closed or turned away, and the bush was dark, with nothing unusual, now.

Melissa breathed hard, watching, waiting.

The candle came back, flung out of the bush and into the corner of Melissa’s house.  Siding banged.

Melissa struggled to adjust position, trying to climb through the window she was sitting in and finding it a more involved process than she wanted.  She almost fell back headfirst while trying to twist around and get her leg through, put her hand on her bedside table, and landed at the base of the window.

A sharp intake of breath made her take in too much smoke, and she coughed violently as she rose to her feet.

The eyes were still there.  There was rustling in the trees, moving up and toward the roof-

She swiped her stuff off the windowsill and slammed the window closed.  Glass rattled.

“Shit shit shit,” she swore.  She grabbed the lid of the tin off the floor and put her cigarette in the tin before closing the lid, then threw a shirt over the ash she’d just scattered.

There was a knock at her door.

“Shit,” she whispered under her breath.  She sprayed air freshener, got breath freshener spray and squirted her mouth, and then squirted her hands for good measure.  “It’s all shit.”

“What!?” she shouted back, annoyance giving the word three syllables.

“What was that noise?” her mom asked.

“There was an animal,” Melissa told her mom.  “Freaked me out.”

“What kind of animal?”

“I dunno.  A raccoon?  I was too freaked out to see, exactly, and it’s sorta dark out.”

Her mom studied her, frowning.  “Okay.  Your room’s a bit stifling.”

“Everything’s stifling.”

“Do you have to use that spray?  Wouldn’t it be better to stay on top of your laundry and put the garbage out more?”

Concern creased her mother’s features.  “How’s your foot?”

“Circulation’s good?  Sensations are there?  The doctor said to keep track.”

“Yeah, mom.  It’s good.  It’s still a f- screwed up foot, though.”

“We got really lucky, you know, that specialist doctor.  There’s another treatment in two weeks.”

“It’s still not going to make me a Dancer again.”

“Oh honey,” her mother said.  She entered the room, eyes darting around to this and that before settling on Melissa again.  She cupped Melissa’s face in her hands.  “I don’t know what to do for you.  You’re such a beautiful, clever girl.  You deserve better.”

“I wasn’t even in the top fifty percent of the girls before they dropped me and my foot snapped off.”

“Whoever told you that is an asshole, a liar, and a meanie.”

Melissa twisted away from her mom’s touch.  “I told me that, and confirmed it with data.”

Melissa looked back toward the window, then froze a bit.

Melissa’s mom moved closer, looked, and then froze as well.

Her mom let go of her, going to the window.  On the windowsill, sitting on top of the metal tin, was a lit cigarette, one end burning orange-red against the dark blue twilight outside.  Her mom picked it up, turned around and held it up for Melissa.

“I don’t- I didn’t-”

“What on Earth are you thinking?  You’re fourteen!  You’re still healing from a serious injury, do you think this is helping you!?  Poisoning yourself!?”

Her mom waved the cigarette in front of Melissa’s face.  Melissa’s eyes went wide and backed away, bumping into her open door, which wasn’t a stable thing to lean against.  She shifted and sat awkwardly against her computer desk, wincing as her foot came down wrong.

“You’ll stunt your growth!”

“Isn’t that good?  Being tiny for my age was the one thing I had going for me!”

“Do you think this helps!?  It won’t be a cute kind of small, Melissa, it’ll be shorter arms and legs, prematurely aging, with bad skin!  Smoking makes you dumber, and you’re a smart girl!  Don’t ruin that for yourself!”

“Why not!?  Everything’s ruined!”

“You have so much going for you.  Your father and I have never shied away from giving you what you want, making the time-”

“Don’t lie!” Melissa shouted.  Her eyes barely left the cigarette as her mom’s hand moved, then went back to her mom’s face, making eye contact.  “You never cared!  You never understood what I meant when I was gymnastics level four!  You dropped me off and went to get coffee most of the time!  You don’t know what I lost!  My friends dropped me and they treat me like I did something wrong!”

“We’ve had this conversation before.  If you want to talk about you doing something wrong, I have it, right here, Melissa.”

Her mom held out the cigarette.

“Get that out of my face!”

“What are you thinking!?  You’re fourteen, I can’t get over this.  Where did you even get this?”

“Why should I tell you if you’re not going to listen to me when I tell you stuff that’s important to me!?”

“Do you want to get better?  You’re in a critical healing stage, Melissa, and if you sabotage your body’s ability to heal, you could feel the impact of that for the rest of your life!”

“I’m not going to get better, mom!  It’s always going to be a foot that snapped clean off and got put back on!  I won’t dance, I won’t do gymnastics, I won’t play soccer-”

“I don’t care about- I’m more concerned about your ability to walk without pain when you’re my age!  Except you reaching my age isn’t a guarantee with everything that can come from smoking!”

“You don’t care about it, I heard you!  You don’t care about my sports, you don’t care about my goals or things I spent hours every day working my ass off on!  You don’t care that my entire friend group bailed on me!”

“Your friend group came to visit!”

“They came to make themselves look good and because Coach Marie told them to!  During the school year I spent more time around them than I ever spent with you, mom!  I know them, I know how they think!  They act all nice to your face and they’ll be all ‘we’re so nice, including Avery even though she’s gay’, ‘we’re so kind to Pam even though she’s fat’, ‘we’re so nice to Melissa the cripple’, but if I start trying to hang around too much or demand too much of their time they’ll get sick of me and spread rumors about me online or something!  And they’ll still keep telling themselves they’re super nice while they do it, they’ll make me out to be the bad guy!”

“That is paranoid.  If they’re true friends then they’ll find a way.  You need to be receptive.”

“They’re not true friends!  They never were!  I never pretended!  But now I don’t even have fake friends!”

“We’ve had this conversation enough times before.  We’re going in circles.  Or you are.  I’m done with the pity party, Melissa.  I love you, but I’ve got to be a mom here.  Clean this room, empty the trash, every article of clothing on the floor, shelf, wherever, goes through the laundry, gets folded, and gets put away.  No hiding places for the cigarettes.  No money for- I presume you’re buying them?”

Melissa shrugged, her expression disgusted, eyes averted.

“No allowance money for cigarettes or junk.  I’ll put that money aside and you can have it all after if you get back on track.  We’ll buy something nice that you want and are motivated for.  And if I catch a whiff of air freshener you’re grounded for a month.  And if you smoke again, I- I don’t even know.  I’ll see if Aunt Kady can take you in for a special kind of grounding, removed from everything.”

“Jerome masturbates like, compulsively.  You can’t turn the corner in that house without him hurrying to cover himself with a blanket or zip up.”

“It gets you out of Kennet and away from whoever is giving you those.  Your cousin may be going through a phase, but your aunt has very strong opinions on how I should be doing things and at this point I’m not even sure she’s wrong.  So if you smoke again I’ll ship you over there and hand the reins to her and we’ll see if that works.”

“Ugh!” her mom retorted, holding out the cigarette.  “This!  This is ugh!  Get your first batch of laundry in the machine, now!  And this conversation isn’t over!  When your dad gets back from his night with my brother we’re going to bring him into this!”

Melissa’s mother walked over, smashed the cigarette down on the lid of the tin to crush it out, then snatched up the tin, air freshener, paused as she found the breath spray, and got that too.

“And put out your trash!” her mom barked.

“No, no, no!” her mom said, taking a second to turn around and then open the door again.  “Door stays open for now.”

Melissa huffed as her mother stormed off.

At the windowsill, a lit, uncrushed cigarette sat with the burning end just off the edge, glowing, a curl of smoke rising.

“What the fuck?” she whispered the words to herself.  She looked around for the culprit and couldn’t find it.  Nothing outside the window.  “Where are you?  Why are you fucking with me?”

She hesitated before picking it up, then crushed it against the outside of the house and flicked it out toward the lawn.

Melissa paused there, looking for the eyes out in the bushes or tree.  Nothing.

She shut her window.  Laundry basket.  She dumped out the laundry hamper, then began picking up clothes.

Sitting on her windowsill, same position, was the cigarette.

“Fuck you!” she swore at it.

“Fuck you, Melissa!” her mom shouted, from downstairs.  She’d apparently heard.  “I’m so mad at you right now!”

Melissa flailed, punching at the air for a second, before wheeling on the cigarette.

“What do I need to do?  What do I have to do to make you stop and not sabotage my life even more?” she asked it.

The cigarette made no response.

“Did those three girls from my class put you there?  Is this some trick to mess with me?”

“Is this because I threw the candle?”

She turned her head as her mother began ascending the stairs.  “Shit shit shit.  Please go away.  Please stop.”

She flicked it out onto the lawn.

“Have you gotten started?” her mom asked, from the doorway.

“Your room smells like smoke.”

“Because I moved my clothes, maybe.  Trapped smells?”

Her mom stared at her, studying her.

Then she moved on, taking her laptop to her bedroom.

Melissa turned back to the window, and was relieved that there was nothing.

She turned toward the door, and she saw that little orange glow.  The cigarette laying half-on, half-off her computer desk.

She went to her bed, where she’d thrown her phone, and she dialed.

“Oh, he’s okay, good,” Lucy said.  She made a face.  “But that’s a lot of smoke.”

“It’s best if you don’t ask questions, sorry,” Avery said.  That blonde kid that was a little younger was beside her, wearing a shirt that read ‘Oppo-rtunistic’, with an opossum butt, tail, and legs sticking out the top of a trash can.

“I hate that.  That I can’t ask questions.  You keep saying that, refusing to answer.”

“For good reason,” Lucy said.  “Every time you push you get in deeper.  Now stuff like this is the side effect.”

“If this thing keeps showing up and making my mom think I smoke, I’m going to get sent to live with my jerkass aunt and weird cousins.”

“I don’t know why the cigarette is fixating on you, but we’ll see about making it stop,” Lucy said.

“Body snatchers, weird cigarettes, magic…” Melissa said.

“Stop,” Lucy told her.  “Seriously.  Especially with Louise here.”

“I know there’s weirdness out there,” Louise said.  “I let myself forget it, and it all slips away.”

“It’d be great if Melissa had done that,” Lucy said.

“Past tense?” Melissa asked.

“I think you’re always going to see the occasional weird thing,” Avery said.  “But as long as you’re here, you should be safe.”

“In Kennet,” Lucy clarified.

“And if I wanted to travel?  Say, go to New York sometime?  Or Europe?”

“Then you’d want to be extra careful,” Avery told her.  “Remember the watch guy?  He went after you, and I think he went after you because you’re vulnerable, sorta?  It’s easier now.”

“And the eyes outside my window?  The random cigarette appearing?”

“Again, best to talk about without Louise here.”

“Why is she here, then?  If you guys are going to shut me up any time I start asking about stuff?”

“Because you called her, first, and she called us,” Lucy replied.

“Melissa,” Avery said.  “We’ll ask about the cigarette and the eyes outside your window.  But the super important thing for you to do is to not panic.  Don’t freak out, don’t give them attention-”

“It’s ruining my life!  I got in trouble with my mom for smoking.”

“You do smoke though,” Lucy said.

“I wasn’t going to get caught!”

“Right, uh huh.  Look, we were talking with some people about options, and we wanted to run them by you.”

“With Louise here?” Melissa indicated the very tired looking woman who wore a t-shirt, jeans, and had a sweatshirt wrapped around her waist.

“With Louise here, yeah.  Look, the big thing, number one, is you could stay in Kennet.  But you’ve got to stop sticking your nose into things.”

“Avery talked about bringing me into this.”

“Avery’s way more optimistic than I am.  Or any of our friends we talked about this with.”

“I’m way less open to the idea since our last one-on-one talk,” Avery said. “Sorry.”

Melissa shrugged.  “So if that’s not option two, what is?”

Lucy answered, “That you keep on doing this.  People who get stuck in this stuff tend to… they end up in these quirky situations where their entire lives get weird.  And we’ve talked about it, worked out some of it, and had a friend look up some stuff with these cards she has, but we think that if you get stuck, there are two good possibilities.  And how you act and what you do decides it.”

“Possibilities for what?”

“How you get stuck,” Avery said.  “Two-A, you keep sticking your nose in, you let these sightings influence you, and you become someone who gets wedged in, like, really stuck in it.  You’re stubborn and that could become how you get stuck.  There are people out there who have the job, basically, of warning others off.  And you’d be the opposite of that.”

“Pathologically resistant, and every time you resist it’s one step toward the next big incident, like the day before yesterday.  It might already be happening, which is why the cigarette is so stuck on you.  Or you’re stuck to it.”

“Strangers and people say don’t do this, you do it anyway, and you find out there was a good reason not to do it,” Avery said.  “A spooky reason.  And it could be you making that spooky stuff happen, in a way.  Like they tell you not to make a certain face and you make it regularly and then weirdness bundles up and… yeah.  And that happens to you a lot.”

“Until you die or something,” Lucy added.

Melissa shook her head.  “This is stupid.”

“Two-B,” Avery said.  “You’re really good at filling in the blanks.  You found Reagan and Gabe’s places really easily and you worked out that sheet of Verona’s you copied onto your phone really quick.  Verona’s really good at this stuff and she hadn’t finished that.”

“That’s less stupid.  So a superpower?  I get to learn about this stuff?”

“We don’t think you’d learn,” Lucy said.  “We think you’d connect dots and stumble into stuff until you blew yourself up or let something out of its cage.”

“You’d run into stuff like at Reagan’s house on the regular,” Avery said.  “Digging up… what are they called, in the murder shows?  Cases with nobody investigating them?”

“Cold cases,” Louise said.

Avery nodded.  “I think it was something else when I head about it.  But thanks, that works too.  Cold cases and finding people who don’t want to be found.  Anyway, there’s no guarantee we’d be there next time, Melissa.”

“One, keep your head down, try to ignore it.  Two-A, fight recommendations, get into trouble.  Two-B, go looking for dots to connect, connect the wrong dots, get into trouble.  Three, this is really why we wanted to talk to you,” Lucy said.  She glanced at Avery.

“Well?  Dish!” Melissa asked.

Avery explained, “Stuff’s going on, Louise knows more about this, but something bad happened earlier in the spring.  And ever since, stuff’s been getting worse and worse.  Kennet’s not a great place to be.  You’re protected, kind of, but it’s like having people swear to protect you while you’re in the middle of a war zone.”

“And you’ve got a target on your back.  The people who haven’t sworn to protect you see you as easy prey,” Lucy said.  “You could leave.”

“We called a friend,” Lucy said.  “In Winnipeg.  Cheap apartment in an okay building.  In-house counselor.  Some friendly faces.”

“I know your friends here ditched you,” Avery said.  “And I know how hard it is to break into the social groups when there aren’t many girls our age in Kennet.  It’d be a fresh start.”

“Out of the warzone.  But this doesn’t play nice with option two,” Lucy added.  “If you… pursue stuff, or if you can’t listen when warned about something, don’t go there.  We wanted to let you know because this stuff, even Kennet as a whole right now, is sort of dangerous.  There might be a day we disappear like Reagan, Gabe, and Collins did.  And if you figure out they’re gone maybe you’d figure out we’re gone too.”

Melissa set her jaw, studying them.

“If we do disappear like that, or die, or all end up in the hospital, or all move out of town all of a sudden, without contacting you, treat it as a worst case scenario.  Louise is a friendly face,” Avery said.  “You know that.  Charles… we’ll give you his information.  He’s less friendly, but he knows more.  And with Clementine’s info that’s three people you can go to if we disappear.  With her info you can disappear, kind of.  The building is supposedly safe, if you stay clear of the residents.”

“You don’t have to get it,” Lucy said.  “God, just-”

“Melissa,” Louise said.

“They’re serious.  These are emergency plans for if they die or get kidnapped.  Treat that with the respect that it deserves.”

“Whatever, okay,” Melissa said.  She put her hand out.  “I’ll take it.”

“I’ll send it as an email.”

Lucy typed for a second.  “Saved it as a draft, we were going to email you it in the morning, after checking in with Verona.  Just need to find your email… there.  And sent.”

Melissa’s phone buzzed.  She ignored it.

“Option four,” Avery said.  “This is all a dream and pranks and other stuff.  Blame your meds or something from your foot.”

“Blood poisoning or organ stuff.  When my kidney acted up I went a little crazy,” Louise said.

“That’s a bit of a leap,” Melissa said.

Louise shrugged.  “I spent too long not focusing on stuff I should, let my health go.  It’s not that hard to turn that kind of thinking toward this stuff.”

“When I go home I’m going to be mega grounded, for going out at night when I’m already in trouble.  To show you guys that thing.  The reason I go looking for this stuff is there’s nothing else.”

“Speaking of this thing…” Lucy looked down at the cigarette.  “Go on.  Leave Melissa alone.”

“Nothing else?” Avery asked.

Whatever she said next was heard by Louise, Lucy, Avery, and Snowdrop alone, because Lucy threw the cigarette down the road.  The wind picked it up, and it was carried away, through spaces that weren’t Kennet.

The Parker table met on Thursdays.  Thomas Parker arrived early every time.  He had met four of the people who regularly turned up at a grief support meeting.  The rest were people of a similar wavelength.  Not all grieving, but sympathetic or comfortable with the tenor of things, where a lot went unsaid until people needed to open up.  Support was shared out.  Sometimes they met at Parker’s house, but when the weather was warm and not too rainy, they’d sit at the corner of the patio outside the strip mall, far enough away from the door they could smoke up a storm, while enjoying a view of the water.

If the group didn’t meet, over holidays or anything else, and if Thomas Parker wasn’t holding the group, he would show up here, whatever the weather, whatever the event.  Sometimes it was only standing there for half an hour to an hour to smoke.  Sometimes he’d even thrown events at his house, called to check in with those who hadn’t shown up, and then had left his own gathering at his own house to stop by here.

Because some of the people here were parents who had lost children or husbands who had lost life partners.  They weren’t huggy, they only rarely poured their hearts out – that was for Mondays, the grief support group that some of them attended.  But for some this corner of a patio and the regularity of friendly faces and mild conversation were all that kept them putting one foot in front of the other and progressing from week to week.  Three times, Thomas Parker had come out to this patio on a day the group hadn’t met, or on a day one person hadn’t had it in them to show up at his house, and found someone here, alone with a beer or alone with a cigarette, badly needing the company.

Parker already had two cigarettes spent and smouldering by the time the others started to arrive.  Beer, cigarettes, and a late meal for Catherine, who worked until eight forty-five and always arrived ravenous.  Sometimes they pulled tables together, but this time the tables were still together from the Thursday prior.  Vince and Kristina sat at the end, Vince pulling out cards and dealing out their hands.  Pleasantries were exchanged with each new arrival.

Staff came by to take orders, and to light candles that were mounted on the fence, to add lemon-scented smoke to the growing haze and drive away the mosquitoes.  Not that it was a crowd predisposed to complain.

Fred Burris joined the group and immediately steered conversation toward the pottery classes he was taking.  Burris was divisive, prone to putting his foot in his mouth, and rather obnoxious.  Some of the group had already hinted he should stay away, but Parker had encouraged him to stick around.  Some wanted him gone, some wanted him here, for his own sake.  He’d moved from America to Canada twenty years ago, for political reasons, and had said he wouldn’t go back until things were in a better place.  He’d cut off his daughter or vice versa, over politics, and he grieved the loss and the eighteen-year silence between them even though she still lived.  For those who had lost children, like Catherine and Anthony, and for those who thought he should compromise -especially when they didn’t agree with his politics- it was a slap in the face.

But he still grieved, in his way.  He smiled and talked more than any two members of the group put together, smoked more than anyone.  His cigarette joined the ashtray in the center.

Five cigarettes resting there at the edge of the one glass ashtray as drinks were had, meals eaten, while the four sitting at that end smoked.

“I’ve been seeing my son in my dreams,” Anthony Wenzel said.  “Was going to say it in group, but it felt stupid.  “Every night for almost a week.”

“Good dreams?” Parker asked.

“No.  They keep getting worse, too.  Sharper in definition.”

“Could see a doctor about that.  Probably something they could give you.”

“Might be stress,” Catherine said, between bites.  “Making it worse, brain trying to tell you something’s wrong, and that’s the biggest red flag it can put up.”

“Let us know how that goes?” Parker asked.

“Yep,” Anthony said.  And there was no elaboration.  He picked up his cigarette and it shook in his fingers before he steadied his hand.  The cigarette was one out of four.

A cigarette settled on the edge of the windowsill, close to the frame, not easy to see.  The warm house and the cool air outside blew the smoke out and away from the room.

Melissa had sorted out her laundry, putting everything in baskets, all lined up and ready to go out the door tomorrow.  Her computer was on, showing some social media page, and it was all about the event on August first.

“Can I close my door when I sleep?” she called out into the hallway.

“Don’t you want the airflow?”

“I want the privacy.”

Her mother walked over to the door and peered in.  “You did a good job cleaning up so far.  Can I trust you?”

“Yeah.  No smoking.”

“We love you, you know.  We want good things for you.”

Melissa waited for a bit, then scrounged under her bed.  She pulled out a big blue pill bottle.

“They want me to fuzz the brain a bit, forget the supernatural?” she mused, quiet.  “This could work, right?  At least my ankle won’t be twinging.”

She tossed back two pills and washed them back with some water.

The cigarette rolled across the page of a book, dropping little embers and dots of hot ash.  The oscillating fan oscillated, and blew the cigarette the other way.  As the fan turned away, the cigarette rolled back, a few lines down.  Another drop of ash.

“About ready to turn in,” Matthew said.  “Thank you, Cig, for your service.  If it’s not an emergency, save it for the morning, please.”

The cigarette rolled to the edge of the book, lit end against the corner.  Fire started, then rose upward, creeping along the book’s surface.

“Woah, woah-” Matthew said.

Edith, already sitting in bed with a book, gestured.  The fire went out.  “Cig is done.”

“Scares me every time,” Matthew told her.  “We need a better system than a potential housefire.”

“Do you want me to translate?” she asked, not looking up from her book.  She reached out for the notebook.

“I got it,” he said, moving Cig to an ashtray, then picking up a notebook.  He went back a few pages until he found the starting point.  All down each page, letters were burned out of words.  He took note of what those letters were, quick, then used diagonal slashes to separate words and figure out the sentences.

“Police station has settled, the original McKay arrived, a little worse for wear after his hospital stay.  Nobody’s raised an alarm, nothing’s gone wrong.  They’ve got him on desk duty.  Some muttering about his drinking already.  He might not be around for long.”

“And our Mckay?” Edith asked, putting the book down.  “The drunkard doppleganger?”

“You don’t need Cig to tell you that.  He left without incident.  Bound and Sworn to only go after bad cops and corrupt lawyers who drink, which is most cops and all lawyers, in my frank opinion.  He has to out them and dismantle the systems they’ve built on his way out.”

“Heavy karmic load,” Edith said.

“Well, that’s what the girls expect.”

“Not reading Cig’s notes for this, but since you were at your sister’s, uh, Reggie the Composite Kid is doing a patrol with the ghouls.  Chloe ate recently so she probably won’t eat him.  Bridge the watch-parasite is refusing to swear the oaths.”

“Outside the perimeter.  We see glimpses now and then when out on patrol.  They’re not strong enough to come in, but if they did, it’d be a mess.  The fact we caught the others has them hesitating, I think.”

“Good,” Edith said.  “Come to bed.”

Matthew closed the door, adjusted the fan, checked the windows, and then slipped into bed, beneath the one sheet, bringing the notebook with him.  “Back to Cig’s notes.  Melissa Oakham is maybe dealt with.  Did you send Cig and goblins to harass her?”

“Not to harass, exactly.  I told them to nudge her on her way if they could do it while sticking to the rules, if it looked like she might be willing to move on.  Why?  What happened?”

“She found Cig or Cig found her and she called the Carmine Beast murder witness, who called Lucy and Avery.  The girl went home, cleaned up, made nice with parents, then took painkillers.”

“Only two.  Codeine, I think left over from her ankle.  To fuzz her Awareness and maybe let go of it.”

“It’s not like you to get alarmed like that.”

“I think Edith doesn’t like the idea,” she answered, quiet.  She laid a hand on her chest.  “Her heart’s pounding.  She’s not very coherent, there’s barely anything of her in here, but the body remembers that.  How much it hurt.”

Matthew settled in, laying on his side, and placed his hand over hers.

They had a moment, lying together like that.

“We could talk to her,” he said.

“If it works, isn’t it better than the alternative?” Edith asked.

“I’m not sure I like that.  It goes bad places.”

“I know.  And- Edith doesn’t like those bad places.  Can we change the subject?”

“And agree to keep an eye out for her, see where this goes, how well it works?”

She nodded.  “I don’t want to dwell on it if it makes Edith unhappy.  What else did Cig report?”

He sighed, adjusted some, and then checked the notebook.  “Cig was looking at some people who’d be likely targets, vulnerable and open enough to outside influences or interference.  Found a situation for Alpeana to deal with, maybe.  She’s been overworked, sounds like something that might have slipped past her.”

“Sounds good.  Um.  Creepy dude at the motel, none of the women working on that street like him much at all, he’s been showing up more.  They were talking about it.”

“We could steer him away.”

“Family showed up there too, pretty stressed, fighting, seems like car trouble pushed things over the edge.  Them being here isn’t helping the situation.  Blood everywhere, more aggression.”

“We were going to send the goblins out with the compasses tonight, again.”

“I did.  Tatty’s gang.  Anyway, that’s it for tonight.”

“Not so bad,” Edith said.  She turned around and looked over to the ashtray.  “Would you give a wife and her husband some privacy, Cig?”

On Fridays, those traveling to cabins by the lake on the weekend sometimes stop in Kennet.  The rush begins at noon.  It’s a bustling group, mishmash, gathering for meals, and it’s the sort of activity that drives more activity.  Fast food places and a trio of family restaurants have staff ready, and friends gravitate toward where friends are working, to ogle those passing through.  Some teenage guys flirt aggressively with girls.  Two employees bring their kids, telling them to be good and stay in sight, and the young boy and girl run around with a bucket in the parking lot shared by multiple chains, offering to wash cars.  They steer well clear of the underweight man with the scraggly hair who stops people to ask for money, who has bullied them in the past.

It is a good thing they steer clear, because today he is in a dark mood.  Someone says something rude and he tries to smash their car window with his hand.  It doesn’t work, and he injures himself.  As the man tries to get him away from the car, he kicks the door, denting it, which provokes a fight.  A hundred-and-twenty pound malnourished addict against a two hundred pound dad.  It’s a more even fight than it should be.

Police arrive and cart off the addict and the dad, leaving a mother and the three children in the backseat of the car stranded in Kennet.  Secretly, the police are happy to have an excuse to arrest the addict.

Some parents and couples watch it all from the area of the lot marked with paint, legally far enough from the fast food places to not catch anyone in the cloud of secondhand smoke.  Here and there, people are called or decide to move on and throw cigarettes they haven’t finished into the tin that’s nailed to a post.  Some hit the ground.  And one cigarette lies there, nearly full length, not getting shorter as it burns.

There is nothing supernatural about the altercation, except that the ground is soaked in blood and nobody can see it.  It makes the aggressive more aggressive, pushes those on edge closer to the edge.

On Friday evening, teenagers and twenty-somethings tend to gather.  Those staying overnight in the inexpensive accommodations in Kennet include some families who are traveling to their new cabins for the first time, who want to make the final leg of the trip in daylight.  Of those families, a pair of teenage sisters join the gathering of teenagers.  Some of those teenagers were the same ones aggressively courting girls at lunchtime.  They get ‘lucky’ more than some would guess, because they are handsome, confident, and low-stakes, and they have beer and they have pot.  The girls will move on in the morning and a hot-and-heavy makeout session or whatever else they end up doing will be little more than a memory.

The youths are young men and women who have graduated or dropped out of high school and have not gone on to University or College.  Many are unemployed or work only part time.  They still manage to afford to get inebriated every week.

Rowan Kelly and Laurie Schmidt are in this group.

So is an Other that stalks through the darkness between campfires.  It has slipped the perimeter.  A teenage girl, slouching, hair greasy, avoiding attention.  The occasional drunk calls out to her, and she turns away, moving as far from them as possible.  More simply glance, then glance away.  She isn’t conventionally attractive, with big ears, prominent front teeth, and an overbite, and she moves furtively, wearing a sweatshirt too warm for the summer evening, clutching it closed at the top to hide the bloodstain on the shirt beneath.  Her other hand holds a bag so heavy she can barely keep it on her shoulder.  When she adjusts the strap, the indentation remains in the shoulder of her sweatshirt.

When she thinks nobody is looking, she unzips, adjusts her top, and reaches for her chest.  She has performed surgery on herself and an infected wound runs diagonally across her upper body, inflamed and puckered around the machinery inset there.  A clock ticks where her heart should be and pipes are fused to organs with a mixture of welding and scar tissue.  Fluids trickle down from the inflammation, soaking her pant leg.

A boy calls out, with the voice of someone who has had enough drinks he can’t control his volume.  “Hey, you, want to hang out!?”

She pauses, zips up, and looks back, biting her lip.  In the light of the nearby, entirely unnecessary fire, her eyes move.  Counting the number of people nearby.

She moves away, head turning as she looks at a girl squatting in tall grass, pants down, who flips her middle finger up as she realizes someone’s looking.  At a couple making out on a blanket.  At a trio of guys with fireworks.

Hunting for anyone isolated enough.

A cigarette lying on gravel disappears as a person walks past it, blocking it from view for a moment.

At Edith’s house, the same cigarette came to rest on a candle by the kitchen window.  Outside, Matthew and two friends from his work sat with Edith, drinking.  Matthew looked happy, and Edith seemed happier to see him happy more than she enjoyed the company itself.

As the candle wick ignited from the cigarette, Edith, her back to the window, turned, then rose to her feet, pulling her phone out of her pocket.

“I need to step out.  I won’t be long.  Local council thing.”

“We thought that might happen.  You can’t call someone else?” Matthew asked.

“It’s fine,” she said, leaning in to kiss him.  “I shouldn’t be long.”

By the time she was in the kitchen, a map sitting atop a stack of textbooks had a hole burned in it by the cigarette there.  Edith put a hand flat over top of the candle, extinguishing it against her palm, and closed fingers around the liquid wax.  She checked the map.

“Big. Serious?  I won’t be long,” she said.  She picked up Cig and then flicked him in the direction of the living room, helping him on its way.

Cig was limited in where he could go.  He stuck to places where butts littered the grass and the treeline.  Ridges that had a view of Kennet.  He couldn’t follow the woman with the clockwork heart as she dragged an unconscious body with her through the darkness, toward the denser trees.

A minute passed.  Then two.

Teenagers cheered as fireworks went off.  They were holding the stems and letting the contents of the cardboard casing fire off individually, in series.

A tiny orange light appeared in the woods.  Then another.  Then another.

There was enough affinity in the little flames for the cigarette to go there.

The girl with the clockwork heart looked around, frantic, as candles appeared all around her, on tree branches, on the forest floor.  She stood over a young lady who was unconscious and bleeding from a head wound.  The bag she’d been carrying was on the ground, brass pipes, tools, and clockwork things had scattered out where it had been dropped.

She bent down, picking up a pipe.

“Too reckless and stupid to be useful,” the Girl by Candlelight spoke, voice ethereal, carrying through the woods.  “You have to know this is someone’s territory.”

“I need a new heart.  I clean up after myself.”

The spirit emerged from the woods, separated from Edith, carrying a candle.  Parts of it were marred, smudged, blackened, and the eye flickered like an echo’s might, not quite fit into place.

“At the very least, you ask first,” the Girl by Candlelight told the intruder.  “I was having a nice night with my husband.  You interrupted.”

“Husband?  I can’t imagine.  I can’t- I barely survive, like this.  Kidnapping, modifying, then harvesting the modified parts.  It would be so nice to have someone.”

“Maybe if you’d asked first, you could find a place here.”

“I’ll go.  I’ll leave, I- I meant no insult, I-”

The girl reached for her chest, grimacing, the hiss of her strained breath joining the hiss of the metal.

“Convince me you’re worth sparing.”

“I- I’m desperate, I’m sorry.  I acted on impulse, but I- I know things, I didn’t want this life, I accepted a cure for a lifelong problem but then it spread, and I have to keep replacing what doesn’t work-”

“I don’t want excuses.  Or apologies.  How can we use you?  Can you find missing things?”

“I don’t know.  I can heal, kind of.  I can- this hurts.”

The metal was changing color from the heat.  Flesh bubbled.

“We don’t need a healer.  We need someone who can find things.  Or remove problems.”

“I can.  I can deal with people, I can-” the girl with the clockwork heart doubled over, hands at her chest.

“If this is how you hunt, then we don’t need you.”

Metal got visibly hotter, flesh sizzled, and the girl stopped responding, only making sounds of pain.  She pried at what was in her chest, and some of the metal was hot enough to deform as fingers pried.  Those same fingers burned as they did the prying.

Then the life went out of her.  The clockwork heart ceased ticking.

The spirit bent over the girl who had been knocked out.  A finger glowed as she pressed it to the wound.  A bit of echo slipped into her, head and face aligning with the girl’s head and face.

“Let what is injured know what the echo does, what kinds of thoughts should be where,” the Girl by Candlelight murmured.  She traced the scalpel wound that ran down the girl’s front.  “Cauterize the wound.”

The burn scar was so thin as to be barely visible, the wound sealed shut.

The spirit adjusted the clothes that had been pulled up and out of the way, fixing things, then stood straight.

“Oh.  You’re here.”

The cigarette lay there, burning in the dirt, amid candles.

“Good looking out.  Not a word of this to others.”

She bent down, then picked up the body and the bag of brass things.

“Carry on with your night, Cig.  I’ll dispose of her.”

Cig carried on, back to the party for now.

Late in the evening on Fridays, after the bars had closed, people staggered home.  Others took their time going back, standing outside the bars, smoking.  A girl sat on the sidewalk, very drunk, weeping, as she pet a man’s dog, as the man stood patiently by and let her have the dog’s company for a few minutes.

In a house nearby, an Echo sparked into existence, fleeting, borne of fury, and then was claimed by the Ruins almost immediately.  It would not trouble Kennet, but where it appeared, others might emerge.  If enough similar echoes appeared, they might stack together and bleed out of the ruins as a wraith, if they had enough commonalities and external power to draw on.  The Carmine Blood all but guaranteed there was enough of that external power, and enough events for a wraith to emerge.

A place to watch and check in on.

An uneventful Saturday morning.  Then noon, a handful of people on their way to their cabins, stopping in to stock up because they were going into Northern Ontario and this was a last gasp of civilization before the turn off.  There were bigger cities far away with more conveniences and there were small towns, but Kennet struck a balance.

At the motel, it was mostly quiet.  A few kids were running around the lot in an area most kids were told to avoid, having a water fight.

A car pulled up, worth noting only because it was an odd hour for someone to decide they needed a motel room.

He had black hair like he’d woken up with bad bedhead and had done little else but push it back from his face.  He wore a t-shirt, and jeans that were caked in mud from the knee down.

He arranged for his room, then dropped some things off at the motel room.  From there, he went out to the parking lot, to talk to a guy that was smoking.  He borrowed a cigarette and lit it, then chatted for a minute.

Lis, standing off to the side, held Cig but didn’t smoke him.  “What do you think?”

The chat continued, and following after that brief conversation, the man with the messy hair and messy pants legs put the cigarette down for a moment, and walked over to the kids who were having the water pistol fight.

Cig shed a stream of hot ash.  Lis let the cigarette go.

Cig ‘landed’ in such a way that he nudged the other cigarette from where the man with the messy hair had placed it, knocking it into the ashes, half-burying it there.  Taking its place.

“I love stories,” the man said.  “I write, so it’s great inspiration.  I’ll pay for any you can find.  Real ones, I’ll know if they aren’t real.  Anything spooky, anything weird.”

“There was a guy hanging around the other night, not here, but close,” the girl said.  “Weird, people were talking about him a lot, about asking him to leave.”

“I’ll ask around about that,” he said.  He pulled out a bill.  “Is your mom around?”

“I don’t want to go giving you money if your mom isn’t okay with it.  Come on, let me talk to her.”

“I think she’s sleeping in.”

The cigarette burned where it had been left.

It took a minute.  The guy returned, and picked up the cigarette, giving it a puff.  He popped his trunk and got bags, and then walked into the room, past the no-smoking sign fixed to the motel room wall.  He shut and locked the door, then unpacked.

Gun.  Gun.  Shotgun.  Long-distance rifle.  Unpacked, put together, and laid out on the table.  He sucked on the cigarette, then exhaled.

Angel statuette, which he placed at one corner of the desk, adjusting it so it sat there, the base aligned with the edges of the desk, the angel looking out over everything he’d laid out thus far.  He pulled on gloves, then laid out more weapons.  A knife, blackened and burnt metal.  Setting it on the desk made the angel statue shift slightly.  He fixed it.  Another twist of metal, followed by tools.  It was obvious he was making his own weapons.

His teeth bit into the filter of the cigarette as he bent down, getting a jar, and set it on the desk.  He uncapped it, then, teeth still biting, took firm hold of the cigarette, waiting until he had as firm a grip as possible before releasing it with his teeth.

Cig burned, fast, from tip to filter.

The man thrust Cig toward the open jar of fluid, ready to plunge his hand and Cig in at the same time.  The heat singed his fingers, his hand jumped, and Cig fell.

The cigarette didn’t touch the contents of the jar.

Cig landed and set about lighting the candle at Edith’s.  It didn’t take Edith long to find him.  She was already on the phone by the time she was downstairs.

“Lis?  Cig’s here.”

Cig burned the spot on the town map, the orange outline around the burn marking the most recent location.

“Yeah.  A bit mangled but he’s fine.  You were suspicious.”

Cig rolled, landing on the book that was held open by a weight on the top.  W-I-T-

“Witch Hunter,” Edith said.

The cigarette rolled off the counter.

“Yeah,” Lis replied.  “He does have that feeling to him.  Works alone, apparently.  They don’t usually.  To me, that says he’s either new and unpredictable, or very good.”

Edith’s voice was audible only as a murmur from the phone.  Lis picked Cig up and held him in the same hand that held the phone.

“He hit the ground running, was asking questions within a few minutes of checking in.  Either he’s very thorough and he’s covering territories, or he was tipped off by something.”

“It doesn’t take much to realize something’s off about Kennet.”

“Yeah.  Cig’s battered, so our guy realized something’s off about him.  But our guy isn’t freaking out.  He looked out the window for a minute, then went back to his business, getting stuff from the car.”

“Stay in touch, keep an eye on him.  Be safe.”

“Will try.  Stay on the line in case there’s anything else to report?”

A few minutes passed, and then the door opened.

The man was freshly shaven, his hair wet, washed, and parted, and he wore nice clothes that didn’t really suit Kennet.  More Mormon than anything.  A messenger bag was slung over his shoulder, heavy, and he wore shoes that were nice but suitable for walking.

“Following.  He cleaned up nice, he’s organized, he’s moving with purpose, like he knows where he’s going.  Heading downtown.”

“Be careful.  If he found Cig he might be able to find you.  Ask Cig if he’s the type who might trap the motel room.”

“Then we’ll hold off on prying there.”

The man walked fast enough that Lis had trouble keeping up.

He paused at a crosswalk, turned his body, and looked in their general direction.  After a bit of searching, his eyes fell on Lis and stayed there.  Lis didn’t even look at him, window shopping.

“He’s practically got eyes in the back of his head.  I’ve been spotted,” Lis said.  She slipped out of view, passed a group of people in line outside the little combination convenience store post office, and midway through the crowd, she became a man, heavyset.  She changed her pace and lowered the phone so her hand was at her side.

“Don’t put yourself at risk.”  Cig heard, but Lis didn’t.

The man wove through the lunch hour crowd that had gathered around the crosswalk, disappearing from view.

Lis stopped in her tracks.

He’d done a u-turn, using the crowd to hide from view.  His eyes searched.

Lis, very casually, made a right turn, stepping into a store.  The door was glass surrounded by metal, cracked where someone had damaged it a bit ago, yet to be replaced.  Lis let it close behind her, then used the little latch to lock it behind her, before ambling into the store.

The door banged as the man pushed on it.  He’d used enough force that a bit of glass fell out of the broken portion, slipping down past the cardboard that had been taped up there.

While he had everyone’s attention and employees hurried to the front, Lis became an employee, stepping around the counter and into the employee-only area.

“He’s dangerous,” Lis reported, pulling off her employee cap.  “Doesn’t miss a trick.”

“Should I come to you?  Do you want me to keep trying?” Lis asked.

“Don’t risk your life.  Come to us, on your way, see if you can’t approximate his appearance for us.  Did he have guns?”

“Those are often for practitioners more than Others.  Okay.”

Lis changed again, and changed direction.

The man walked by the far end of the parking lot, looking.  He didn’t zero in on her this time.

“Let him go,” Edith said.  “And very quietly, let’s warn the others who are cooperating with us.  Let him hunt the ones who aren’t.”