Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits (3 page)

His car, the Honda, is off to the side of the road. The white SUV that t-boned them—a Yukon full-size—has a crumpled front-end but otherwise looks fine. No driver there.

But the Honda is on fire.

Cason runs toward the vehicle that’s bright and hot like the tip of a flare.

Alison starts to scream.

It’s not a horror movie scream, it’s not a just-saw-a-mouse-in-the-kitchen scream. It’s a jagged, jerking thing, as
alive
a thing as it can be—it’s the scream of someone burning to death.

Alison is burning.

And Barney—

“H
EY, MAN, YOU
from Philly?”

Cason shudders awake like a man rising out of cold water. He sucks in a hard gasp of air and looks around. The cab. Plexiglas. Torn-and-taped seat. Big dude driving.

“What?” Cason asks.

“You asleep?”

“What? No; well. Was.” He shakes his head, pushes the sleepiness back to the margins. Still hears the distant echo of that scream in the back of his mind. “What’d you wanna know again?”

“I didn’t mean to wake you, chief. I just ask: you from the city?”

“Kenzo. Kensington.”

“Yeah, man. I know Kensington.”

“I don’t live there anymore. Area turned to shit. It’s all drugs and jailhouse tats and—it’s trouble. Everything there is trouble.”

Outside, the sodium lights of the turnpike whizz past as they head north.

“You got family back there?”

Cason blinks.
Family
. “A brother.”
A useless insane fuck of a brother
. “You?”

“Got a big damn family, man. Big damn family. Brothers and sisters and cousins and my mother and more cousins and—you know. Big damn family. Right? Still live with them over in Gray’s Ferry.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Cason says, regretting the words as soon as they tumble out of his mouth, like so much ash. “Wait, hold up, I don’t mean anything by it—”

“No, chief, you’re right. It’s shit there. It’s all shit. Everybody mad at everybody else. Last week a woman got stabbed there, you know? Right on the corner. Drug corner or something. They don’t know if one of the dealers did it or one of the white-boy Catholics who are mad at the dealers, but it doesn’t even matter. Because a woman is dead.”

“That’s Philadelphia.”
That’s why I hate this town
.

“My brothers all want to pray, you see? They want to pray it all away.”

“They church folk?”

“No, no, Islam. Nation of Islam.”

“You’re Muslim?”

“Not me, man. Not me. I don’t believe in made-up fairy tales, right? That’s all bullshit, man. It’s all bullshit. You believe in that?”

I just saw a man turn to a skin-suit filled with feathers. A man who made me his indentured servant for the last five years because of a ‘bargain’ we made. A man who had a power over other people like I’ve never seen before and will hopefully never see again
.

He says none of that. Instead he just says, “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

“That’s the truth, man. That’s the truth of it all.”

“Truth.” Cason rubs his eyes. “Yup.”

“Where we going, anyway?”

“I told you. Bucks County. Doylestown. You need the address again?”

“No, man, I got that, I mean, what you got there? Who you got?”

“Family.”

“Not the brother.”

“Different family.”

“Parents?”

Cason shakes his head. “Both dead.”

“Wife? Kids?”

“I, ah, don’t know.” It’s an honest answer, but not a good one.

“Okay, okay, that’s cool, chief. That’s all cool.”

CHAPTER THREE

Homecoming

D
OYLESTOWN.
S
UBURB OF
Philly. Tree-lined streets. Little boutique shops. Old movie theater still up and running, the marquee bulbs pushing back the night. A town for nice people. A town for people with money.

The cab sits at a light. A gaggle of white kids comes out of a corner Starbucks, lingering and loitering in the middle of the street. Laughing. Playing grab-ass with one another. The cabbie blows the horn, rolls down the window, yells at the kids: “Hey! Fuck this, man! Move, move! Move your shit-cans!” Way he says
shit-cans
it almost sounds to Cason like
chickens
. The mob of kids break apart, mopey and indignant.

The car eases through the intersection. Turns down a residential street.

The closer they get, the more anxious Cason feels. He gnaws at a thumbnail. Chews the inside of his cheek. Feet tapping. Knuckles popping. He wants to punch something. Kick it. Slam his head into it. Every nervous habit built up over his thirty-five years of life come back to haunt him; ghosts of the body lured by the séance of a reunion he never thought would—or
could
—happen.

“This is it up here, man,” the cabbie says. No way to pull into the curb—too many cars parked on the street—but there’s no traffic, so he just pulls the car up and stops.

Cason stares. The house isn’t a big one—just a little white square plopped between a pair of old and mighty Victorians, each of those probably a mansion containing mansions. But the little white house is nice in its own way—flowers out front, a big tree giving the patch of lawn some shade, shutters slapped with a fresh coat of barn-red paint. Even a little house like this in a
town
like this probably cost bank. Money that came from where, he doesn’t know. And is afraid to ask.

“Hey,” the cabbie says, snapping his fingers. “I see what this is now.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You’re seeing a lady.
Your
lady. But you have not seen her in a long while. And you worry she does not want to see
you
. Maybe you two, separated. Maybe a divorce. Do I have this right, man?”

“Separated,” Cason says. True enough.

“I tell you what. I drive around a few times. I give it ten minutes. If you don’t come back out inside ten minutes I know your lady still likes you and you don’t need a ride.”

“All right. I appreciate that.”

“My name’s Tundu, but people, they just call me ‘T.’”

“Cason. Cason Cole.”

Tundu—‘T.’—continues to stare at Cason. Unblinking.

“What?”

“Still gonna need that money, my man.”

Right. Cason thumbs another seventy-five bucks out of his wallet, and into the drawer it goes.

“Good luck, chief.”

“I’m gonna need it.”

And with that, Cason steps out of the cab.

H
E HASN’T FELT
this way in a long, long time. Hell—he hasn’t felt much
at all
in a long, long time. Being with E. was like what he heard happens to meth-heads: the first high is the best high and everything after that is just diminishing returns as the dragon you’re chasing flies further and further away. Worse, it blows out your brain’s ability to make dopamine, and so the only way you feel anything resembling joy or happiness or excitement is by—drum roll please—smoking more crystal.

Being around E. was the high—everything brighter and shinier, all the sharp edges rounder, all the hard surfaces softer. All is glitter, all is gold. But then he’d go back into his room or into the basement or out to some club and it’d be that magic trick where someone pulls the tablecloth out from under the place settings, except here the trick fucked up and all the shit fell to the floor—silverware clattering, plates breaking, wine spilling on once-nice carpets.

But this,
this
...

Cason feels alive again.

Giddy and sick and nervous.

Like a kid on Prom night about to see his date in her dress for the first time. No! Like a kid
asking
a girl to Prom—and not knowing how she’ll answer. That sour pit of battery acid in the gut. The shallow breathing. The heart doing laps.

He walks up to the front door. It’s just past nine and the lights are still on inside—squares of golden glow like portals in the blue-dark.

Cason holds his breath.

Says a small prayer to whatever saint is listening.

Then knocks.

Footsteps on the other side.
Thump thump thump thump
.

Little feet. Quick succession.

The door opens and there stands his son.

Barney. Now seven years old. Cason feels like he’s looking in a mirror—a circus mirror, maybe, a mirror that takes off his age and vacuums up all the excess paunch he’s built up over the last few years, but they share many features. The mop-tangle of black hair. The dark little eyes. Strong nose above thin lips.

“Hey, buddy,” Cason says. Eyes burning with tears that he blinks back.

Barney just stares. Takes one step backward.

He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t remember. Jesus, how could he?

A flutter of curtains at the window.

Then—

Alison.

Red hair pulled back in a ponytail. Pale as a swan with a long neck to match. Long and graceful and thin as a reed, and even the floppy yellow latex dishwashing gloves that go to her elbows and drip soap suds can’t cheapen her beauty.

“Al,” he says. He can’t say her full name because his voice is about to crack and he knows he’ll sob, and this moment can’t be all blubbering bullshit tears.

She sees him.

She recognizes him.

Her eyes narrow—

She takes a half-step back into the kitchen. He hears something—metal on metal.

Then she’s back. And she’s got a stainless steel skillet in her hand.

Alison moves fast. Says something to the boy, who retreats into the hall as she pushes past, coming at Cason with the speed and determination of a starving cheetah—he backpedals off the stoop and back down to the walkway, almost tripping over a couple of solar lights stuck into the grass.

His reflexes are like boots stuck in mud. He hasn’t been in a fight—hasn’t been a
fighter
—in years. He throws up his arm but between almost tripping and straight-up not-believing this is even happening, he’s too slow.

The skillet cracks him across the head.

Fireworks flash behind the dark of his eye—he staggers backward, falls onto his side, onto his hip. “Alison! Alison, it’s Cason—”

Wham
. The skillet comes down between his shoulder blades. Once. Twice. A third time. Hard, too—she’s stronger than she looks. She always was, maybe, but this is different. This is power a human does not normally possess. He turns, stops the next attack by catching her wrist—

“Alison,” he pleads.

But her eyes are wild. Frenzied. Barely even human.

This isn’t anger. Or bitterness. Or lost love.

She wants him dead. Genuine bonafide grade-A
dead
.

The spell. The curse. Whatever the fuck it is, it’s still ‘on.’ Still
active
.

And then the frozen wall slams down inside his head and a terrible thought is captured there in the ice:
You’re not free at all, Cason.

Alison bares her teeth and hisses. He gives her hand a twist and the fingers open—the skillet thuds into the grass. She screeches like an owl. Mouth open. Hungry teeth ready to bite. Cason’s muscle memory kicks in; he’s older, slower, sloppier, but written into his body are reflexes that cannot easily be deprogrammed—

Her anger, hot and present, still falls against the old ghosts of his training. Cason twists his body beneath her, reaches up, flips her onto her back—the air blasting out of her lungs, her eyes losing focus.

“Al, please, don’t do this.” Maybe if he can just—get through to her somehow? Clear the fog, move the clouds, pull her back down to earth. “It’s me. It’s Case. Baby, c’mon, think,
think
—”

Suddenly—there’s Barney. Standing next to him. Face the very model of placid, child-like innocence. The undisturbed waters of a mountain lake.

Moon eyes and pursed lips.

And a glint of gold. A ribbon of window-light caught in a small blade.

A paring knife, by the look of it.

“Hey, buddy,” Cason says, and he’s about to ask,
Whatcha doin’ with that
—

Barney stabs the knife into Cason’s back.

Pain blooms like a bloody rose.

Cason cries out. Tumbles off Alison with the knife still stuck. Gets his feet under him—starts to run, but then the dewy grass is slick under the soles of his boots and he goes down again. She’s on him. Fists beating into the sides of his head. One hand grabs the knife, starts yanking it like a lever.