Move Me (2 page)

“Thank you,” Belle said. “I want to catch up.
I’m just not ready yet.”

“This is Kingaken,” Susi warned. “I sell the
only groceries or toilet paper for thirty miles. If you’re planning
to avoid me, it’ll take a fair piece of work.”

Belle laughed in spite of herself. This was
the Susi Jenkins she’d have been friends with even if she’d been
born somewhere big enough to have a choice.

“Point taken,” Belle conceded and bent to
give Susi a quick hug.

For a moment before the feeling evaporated,
she was glad to be home.

~

Belle’s dread returned in force as she gassed
the laboring rental car up Uncle Lucky’s steep rutted drive. His
house had to be half a mile from the access road - all of it
uphill. Trees closed in on her from both sides: evergreens mostly,
with a blood-bright scarlet maple bursting out here and there. The
overgrowth turned her route into a gloomy tunnel, an impression
that didn’t lighten when she reached the equally overgrown
two-hundred-year-old house.

Like the general store, the residence was two
stories and white clapboard. Unlike the store, here the film of
dirt had settled deeper - not so much picturesque as morose.
Wildings, fallen branches, foot-high grass, and weeds lent the
appropriate hermit’s charm to the yard. Wisteria had swallowed the
attic dormers, the flickering leaves making it easy to picture
ghosts nearsightedly peeping out. The concrete birdbath where Belle
and Danny had staged imaginary pirate battles lay in pieces by the
barely discernible flagstone path.

Seeing the state the place had sunken into,
Belle wondered why it had only taken six weeks for her uncle’s
corpse to be found.

She grabbed the groceries she’d bought at
Susi’s, then picked her way across the front yard jungle to the
porch, glad for the protection of her tall riding boots.
Scotch-taped to the chipped navy door was an envelope with a short
message scrawled on it. Someone at the lawyer’s office had let the
movers in. The boxes of necessities she’d shipped ahead of her were
inside. Nestled in the envelope was a simple metal ring with three
keys. Belle pulled in a breath for courage and stuck the likeliest
one in the lock.

To her relief, all she smelled inside was the
recent cleaning someone had given the living room - not a cursory
one either. Back in Manhattan, Belle owned a rent-a-maid service.
She knew a good top-to-bottom job when she saw it. The wide plank
floors were shining, the solid furniture covered in fresh white
sheets. Though still shrouded in ivy, the window panes had been
washed. Notably absent was her uncle’s favorite leather armchair,
the one he’d reportedly expired in.

“Thank you, Mr. Tickner,” she murmured,
making a mental note to tell the lawyer that in person.

Her stack of neatly labeled cartons sat in
the center of the dark Turkish rug, but they’d wait to be unpacked.
Belle intended to tour the house before her nerve ran out.
Fortunately, the power and water hadn’t been disconnected. The
lights went on when she flicked the switches, and water ran from
the tap. Very little had changed since the afterschool afternoons
she and Danny had spent here, waiting for their parents to get off
work. There was the farmhouse table where they’d done homework,
here the squeaky screen door to the fateful back yard clearing.
Uncle Lucky’s library-office smelled precisely as she remembered,
its shelves filled with musty books and odd natural specimens. He’d
dreamed up his many inventions here: some lucrative, some
completely pie-in-the-sky, but all more compelling to his attention
than his niece and nephew.

Danny had been more curious than Belle about
his activities. Her overtures had been swatted aside enough times
for her to pretend disinterest. Because Danny was as smart as he
was persistent, Uncle Lucky had thawed for him.

Magic is science, and science is
magic
, Belle heard him say in her memory.
Both seem
mysterious until you study their principles.

Most of Uncle Lucky’s pie-in-the-sky
inventions stemmed from his belief that the principles of both were
valid.

On a nearby shelf, its spine sticking out
slightly, a tattered black and white composition notebook caught
Belle’s eye. She pulled it out from beside the “nonfiction”
Goblins and their Habits
and opened it. Her heart clutched
at the sight of the handwriting. This had been Danny’s, written
only months before his disappearance. He’d been nine, and Uncle
Lucky had been teaching him what he called the language of the
esoteric. Danny had learned it too. Belle couldn’t understand half
his childishly penciled words.
E pluribus Unum
was as much
Latin as she knew.

Her throat choked up as her fingertips
stroked the yellowed paper.

Danny
, she thought.
I miss
you
.

Though it caused her eyes to spill over, she
kept the book clutched against her side for the rest of her
wanderings. Upstairs to the three small bedrooms. Downstairs to
re-light the pilot on the furnace. Everywhere she went, everything
had been tidied. Uncle Lucky’s clothes were in taped-up boxes, his
personal items like toothbrushes and razors thrown away. The more
she saw of what Mr. Tickner’s staff had done, the more impressed
she became. This was true thoughtfulness. She could sleep here
tonight without feeling overwhelmed.

Small town people did have their good
qualities.

Heartened, she called the second number Susi
had given her, before it was too late in the day to hope the man
would come over. The shower in the single bathroom wasn’t running,
and - while she could take a bath - she felt more human after a
pounding spray. Despite not being puny, a couple of the windows
were jammed worse than her strength could open, and the rooms
needed airing out. If no more than that was seen to, she’d consider
the handyman’s time well spent.

John Feeney picked up after the fourth
ring.

He
sounded
like a curmudgeon, but
Belle had been warned. Though she exerted what charm she’d learned
from running her own business, he wouldn’t promise to stop by that
evening. He’d try, he said, but tomorrow suited him better. There
was a game tonight, and he was settled in. To top off the sparkling
impression he was making, his goodbye was as grumpy as his grudging
acceptance of the job.

Belle snapped her cell phone shut with a
snorting laugh. She debated calling Susi for another name, then
decided to hell with it. She was on small-town time now. People
hereabouts, no matter how short of funds, weren’t necessarily going
to jump for her.

Left to accomplish what she could herself,
she cleaned up a little more, made herself a grilled cheese
sandwich dinner, and - once she’d removed the sheets from the
furniture - tried to watch her uncle’s unexpectedly fancy dish TV.
That service hadn’t been turned back on, so she had a choice of
browsing Uncle Lucky’s creepy metaphysical book collection or
finishing the mystery she’d loaded onto her too-small iPhone. As it
happened, the mystery centered on a serial killer who was on a
killing spree across rural America.

“Should have taken Susi up on the pie,” she
muttered.

Something rattled an upstairs window,
probably the wind shaking the glass in its frame. Belle was used to
the city, to the thick white noise of its million sounds blending.
She’d forgotten how sounds stood out in the country.

You are not getting spooked
, she
ordered herself. Curmudgeons weren’t afraid of bogeymen. Her hands
gone icy, she pushed determinedly from the leather couch she’d
sprawled on. Her ex-boyfriend Tom would have loved seeing her
distressed. He’d always claimed she was too independent for her own
good.

Bleh
, she said to Tom’s un-missed
memory. Though he’d been cute and okay in bed, part of her had
known she shouldn’t depend on him. It was stupid to stick with
people who couldn’t take you as you came. Since, in the end, she
couldn’t take Tom as he came either, it was just as well they’d
parted.

Susi’s wedding diamond flashed in her mind
again.

Because she didn’t want to traipse down that
God-you’ll-die-a-spinster road, Belle forced her feet to climb the
narrow staircase to the attic. This was the one section of the
house she hadn’t looked over, but if she was going to be haunted,
she could at least choose the ghosts.

Fortunately, the bare bulbs that lit the
attic were working. Beneath their sharp-edged glare, she found the
sort of garret modern homes didn’t have. Non-insulated eaves
slanted to a cobwebbed peak, sheltering antique toys blanketed in
dust and chests stuffed with lost treasures. Imaginative kids that
they were, this had been Belle and Danny’s favorite place in the
house to play.

She suspected they were the last human beings
to leave their footprints here.

She smiled through blurring eyes, which at
the moment were watering more from the musty air than her
nostalgia. Generations of Luckes and Benningtons had stashed their
junk up here. Belle spied broken chairs and fringed silk
lampshades. A cast iron kettle leaned in a corner next to a bicycle
so antique its front wheel was bigger than its back. To her
delight, her and Danny’s prize steamer truck sat exactly where
they’d left it in the center of the bare floorboards.

Hardly aware she’d moved, Belle dropped to
her knees before it, undid the buckles, and pushed up the lid. The
most extraordinary scent wafted out, not dust but a soft
papery-perfume aroma - as if the past itself had been bottled up.
Belle closed her eyes. With that smell surrounding her, she could
see Danny’s nine-year-old face: his ski slope nose with its splash
of freckles, his straight brown bangs and bright green eyes. She
heard his giggling laughter as if he were really there.

I’m the prime minister!
he announced,
the brim of a black top hat slipping down his face.
I’m marching
to Parliament.

He’d assumed a ridiculous British accent,
much better at Latin than he was at mimicry.

I’m a flapper
, Belle had returned, her
skinny thirteen-year-old body swimming in its own outfit.
I’m
going to swill Prohibition gin
.

When she opened her eyes, the costume from
her memory lay on top of the trunk’s otherwise jumbled pile. She’d
folded the delicate garment, her characteristic neatness
manifesting even at that age. The feathered rhinestone clips still
attached the straps to the low-cut bodice. She could have smoothed
them into those curls yesterday.

Unable to resist, she lifted the vintage
dress and rose to her feet to shake out the dust. Gosh, the thing
was pretty. Rayon hadn’t existed when it was sewn. Real silk-satin
caressed her fingers, stirring a sensual pleasure she hadn’t felt
in ages. The slippery fabric was midnight black, cut on the bias so
it would cling. Her great-whatever relative’s dress might actually
fit her now. If it did, maybe in a couple days she’d convince Susi
to join her for a night out in the next bigger town.

No matter how impulsive she was feeling, the
attic was too dirty to undress in. Belle carried her find to the
door. As she did, her path took her past the rear dormers. An eerie
glow stopped her in her tracks. She stepped into the window
embrasure to get a better look.

The light came from Uncle Lucky’s old
workshed. No garden tools were stored there. The ramshackle wooden
building was where Uncle Lucky had built and tested his more exotic
inventions. He’d abandoned it after Danny disappeared, going so far
as to nail the door shut under multiple two by fours.

I’m
not
spooked
, Belle insisted, her heart hammering in her chest.
Maybe John Feeney had come over. Maybe the boards had fallen off
and he’d lit a lantern to search for a spare hammer.

The problem with this theory was that the
glow wasn’t issuing from inside the shack’s windows. It surrounded
the whole structure, as if the weathered wood were infused with
blue-white phosphor.

Belle
, she thought she heard a voice
whisper.
Belle, I’m so sorry
. An instant later, the light
winked out.

Belle shivered so hard her teeth clacked
together.

Whoever that raspy whisper belonged to, it
hadn’t been Danny.

DUBHGHALL
the faerie prince was in
dire need of a new name. His truename, which wasn’t Dubhghall, had
been unearthed by his enemy, who could now use it to compel him
against his will.

This would have been unfortunate in itself,
but Mor was trying to leverage his stolen knowledge to extort the
throne of Talfryn from Dubhghall’s folks. Since Talfryn was one of
the few stable territories left in Faerie, this fell under the
umbrella of a Bad Thing.

Mor’s own country had long since fallen into
magical anarchy, which happened when an area’s governors couldn’t
agree on what the laws of reality ought to be. Hungry for new land
to rule - which he seemed unlikely to do a better job of than
before - Mor pursued Dubhghall across Faerie, trying desperately to
get close enough to spell him.

Mor was no tissue-paper foe. Older than
Dubhghall’s parents by half a millennium, he more than outmatched
Talfryn’s youngest prince. For a while, Dubhghall sheltered with
relatives in the Pocket city of Resurrection in New York. That
city’s merely half-magic nature made it easier to hide from seeking
charms. Finally, however, Mor tracked Dubhghall there. They fought
an epic battle in the men’s department of the downtown Macy’s,
injuring a number of less powerful bystanders in the fray.

Mor had the advantage of not giving a
tinker’s damn about them.

Though not as experienced or ruthless as his
adversary, Dubhghall still knew a few tricks. He’d magically sealed
Mor’s mouth before the sorcerer faerie could use his Name. Enraged,
Mor had stabbed Dubhghall in the side with an iron knife. Dubhghall
repaid the favor by breaking a metal garment pole on Mor’s skull.
He’d escaped while Mor staggered, but only just.