Soft Apocalypses (9 page)

He shuddered. “I saw those people ... what were they, ghosts?”

I shook my head numbly. “Bait. Just bait.”

Then I took a harder look at him. “How did you know to come back? I didn’t call you. I
couldn’t
call you.”

“When I dropped you off, that place just gave me the creeps, you know? So I did a web search on the address. And there was ... there was a fire five years ago. The house ... it burned down with everyone inside.”

“What? Let me see.”

Alonzo pulled the news story up on his cell phone. “There’s all kind of jagged metal and holes and stuff in a place like that, and I thought I should check on you. My aunt would never let me hear the end of it if I left a customer someplace I knew was dangerous and they got hurt.”

I took the phone from him. It displayed a photo of the charred ruin of my father’s house. The article beneath said someone had doused the place in kerosene and lit it with a cigarette. Firefighters found three adult bodies in the wreckage, all burned down to bones and teeth. Arson investigators discovered the skeleton of an infant in the dirt beneath the porch. She had died of a skull fracture; either someone dropped her or someone strong had hit her just once.

“Oh, baby,” I whispered. Part of me had held onto some slight hope that my parents gave her up for adoption. Tears streamed down my face. “Oh, Leanna.”

My big sister had gone home to get her own closure, but something terrible and hungry had been born in the blood and ashes and lingering nightmares.

“I’m so sorry,” Alonzo said. “I ... I can’t believe nobody called to tell you what happened.”

I shrugged miserably. “How could they? Almost nobody knew me when I did live here, and that was long ago.”

I wiped my eyes, turned and fixed Alonzo in a hard gaze. “Were you serious when you said you wanted to make the world a better place for everyone?”

He swallowed nervously. “Yes, ma’am. I am dead serious about that.”

“That thing you saw? It’s still alive up there. If it can’t have me, I bet it’ll settle for somebody else. You think any of the folks in your aunt’s church would be willing to grab some machetes and blow torches and do a little weed control come sunup?”

He nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I believe they would.”

The Cold Gallery

Emma and her mother joined the line of kids and parents in Riggleman Hall’s foyer. They’d be waiting a while. The Freshman Orientation coordinators had scheduled far too few advisors for far too many students.

Suddenly, a chill crept across Emma’s back, and she felt a pair of icy hands close around her neck.

“Hey!” She whirled around.

“What’s the matter?” Her mom looked puzzled.

“Someone...” Emma trailed off. Not only was nobody standing behind her, nobody was within twenty feet of her. “Nothing. Just my nerves, I guess.”

“Well, this is nice.” Emma’s mother led the way into the dorm room and plunked down the duffel bag. “
Very
nice, don’t you think?”

“Um.” Emma set down her suitcases. The relentlessly beige room was smaller than it had looked on the university website. At least she had the place to herself. “Yeah, it seems nice, Mom.”

“The dorms we had weren’t nearly this spacious.”

Looking wistful, her mom opened her purse and pulled out the letter from her father, Professor Burke.

Her father
. It felt weird to even think the words. It was easier to think of him as the Professor. Growing up, the other kids at her school had fathers or stepfathers or erstwhile “uncles”, but never Emma. She couldn’t even remember her mom ever going on a date. Of course, with her grindingly long shifts at the hospital, it was hard for her to have much of a social life.

And that, at least according to her Aunt Mary, was entirely her father’s fault.

Emma’s mom rarely spoke of him, but her aunt wasn’t one to mince words or keep silent. According to Mary, her father was Edgar Burke, a chemistry instructor who dumped her mother when she got pregnant. Emma’s mom had to drop out of college and go to work as a nurses’ aide while he went on to become a full professor with a fat salary.  Mary wanted her sister to sue for child support, but Emma’s mother never followed up with the lawyers Mary contacted on her behalf.

It seemed the good Professor was determined to have nothing to do with his daughter. But on her 16th birthday, a FedEx guy delivered a fancy basket of Godiva chocolates to their little clapboard rental in Huntington. That night, Burke telephoned the house, and Emma had her first, awkward conversation with the man who until that day had only given her half her genes.

The support checks came Johnny-on-the-spot after that. And on her next birthday, right when Emma and her mother were starting to fret over college costs, he offered to pay for Emma to attend UC.

“Your father wants to meet with you in his office at noon tomorrow,” her mom said, reading over the letter. “He’s in Clay Tower.”

Emma suddenly felt nervous. She’d talked to the Professor at most six times on the phone, and he’d been away at a conference when she and her mom visited the campus before. “Are ... are you going to come with me?”

Her mother’s smile faded for the briefest second. “No, honey, I ... I have to be back at the hospital tomorrow. Look, it’ll be fine! Just be your regular sweet self. We can thank the Lord that he’s changed his ways and found the love of Jesus in his heart to finally do right by you.”

There were no crosses in Professor Burke’s office. Nor were there any Christian books that Emma could see in the floor-to-ceiling oak shelves that lined every inch of wall space beyond the doorway and wide window. The
Encyclopedia Paranormal
volumes and books on Voudun and Medieval witchcraft scattered amongst the organic chemistry and mathematics texts counted as a sort of religious reading, Emma supposed, but surely not the kind that involved Jesus or love.

The professor himself was sitting behind a wide desk, engrossed in a science journal. He was a lean, well-kept man in his late 40s or early 50s, and he was dressed much more stylishly than she’d expected. His handsome face was an odd mix of the strange and familiar: his nose and full lips were masculine versions of hers, and she’d seen his gray eyes in every mirror.

Emma wiped her sweaty palms on her khaki skirt and cleared her throat. Burke finally looked up and noticed her standing in the doorway. His face broke into a smile as broad and bright as the noon sun over Antarctica.

“You must be Emma,” he said, standing and gesturing toward one of the high-backed chairs in front of his desk. “Please, come in and have a seat. So, you’re settled in the dormitory okay? Got all the classes you wanted to take?”

“Yes sir,” she said as she sat down.

“Good, good.” He opened one of his desk drawers and pulled out a sheet of paper. “I took the liberty of getting you a job here on campus at the Erma Byrd Art Gallery. It’s just ten hours a week, and they’ll work around your schedule. I’m sure you could use a bit of pocket money, and it will look good on your resume.”

He passed the paper to her. It was a job acceptance letter signed by the museum curator. All official and addressed to her, just as if she’d applied on her own. She was going to be an evening attendant, whatever that meant.

The art gallery was in Riggleman Hall; the tall, dark windows striping the building seemed much more ominous than they had the day before. Inside, it felt like the building’s AC was cranked up too high, although students jostling past her on the first floor were complaining about the heat. Emma took the stairs to try to warm up, but she felt even colder by the time she got to the gallery.

The curator, Mrs. Plymale, was a bright, cheery woman in her mid-30s.

“What you’ll mostly be doing is keeping an eye on things and answering questions,” she told Emma. “I’ll give you a packet of information about all our artists and the paintings on display. It’s usually pretty quiet here, but we’ll give you a walkie-talkie in case you need to call maintenance or security. Also, we have special events like weddings on some weekends, and we’ll need help setting up and tearing down. Nothing very hard or intense.”

Emma had been rubbing her arms to try to warm them a little. Mrs. Plymale seemed to notice her goosebumps.

“Is it cold to you in here?” the curator asked. She was wearing a light, sleeveless dress. There was a faint sheen of perspiration at the base of her neck.

Emma nodded. “A little.”

Mrs. Plymale smiled sympathetically. “It’s like that for some people who are ...
sensitive
, I guess is the best word. My advice is, don’t stay too long after your shift is over. It might be worse after dark.”

“Worse? How?”

Mrs. Plymale held up both hands. “Mind you, I haven’t felt anything weird myself, so I don’t put
that
much stock in stories of this place being haunted. But people have sworn they’ve heard voices, felt strange touches and cold spots. Things like that. Mostly after sunset.”

“The building is haunted? By
what
?”

The curator laughed uncomfortably. “There’s a story that a girl died. Killed herself when she found out she was pregnant. Some people say she jumped off the roof, others say she poisoned herself. Lots of rumors, not much evidence. They wouldn’t be able to keep a student’s death out of the papers nowadays, but decades ago ... well, who knows what might have happened here?”

Emma’s first shift in the gallery was deadly slow. Two visitors came her first hour, and nobody after that. She’d brought a cotton jacket with her, but even so the chill got to her after a while and so she spent the last hour pacing up and down the glossy checkerboard floor, reading Mrs. Plymale’s handout on West Virginia Women Artists.

Afterward, she decided to take the stairs back to the ground floor. The hallway door had just shut behind her on the landing when she thought she heard a whisper.

Blood for blood.

A wave of cold vertigo hit her, and suddenly she pitched forward, arms windmilling, barely able to catch herself on the safety rail. Trembling, she got to her feet, her wrenched shoulder aching sharply. She was alone; surely the disembodied voice had just been her imagination.

But her fall had been far from imaginary. If she’d missed that railing, she’d have gone headfirst down the stairs, probably breaking her neck in the process.

No more stairs for her, not if she could help it.

Her next shift involved a few more visitors, but the last hour was just as quiet as before. She began to circle the gallery, looking at the paintings.

On her third circuit, she saw something on the wall she was sure hadn’t been there before. It was a charcoal drawing in a battered round frame. It depicted a man and a woman watching a sunset from atop a square building with long, dark windows. Riggleman Hall, Emma realized. The drawing was amateur compared to the rest of the works in the gallery, but something about it kept her riveted.

The shivery vertigo took her again, and suddenly she was standing on the roof, gazing into the grey eyes of a handsome, wispy-bearded, shaggy-haired boy of 18 or 19. He wore a butterfly-collared green shirt and bell-bottoms.

He was shaking his head at her. “We can’t have a kid, Linda. I’m not even close to being done with school; I can’t be tied down right now. I’ll drive you to Columbus; we can get it taken care of up there and your folks will never—”

“No,” she heard herself say. “I’m havin’ our baby, and you’re gonna be a man for a change and do the right thing.”

A cold, hard anger gleamed in his eyes. No love there. “You don’t get to push me around, girl.”

“Fine.” She turned and began to walk away across the gravel rooftop. “We’ll see what your Pa has to say.”

Suddenly he grabbed her arm and jerked her sideways, nearly off her feet. Eddie was stronger than she’d expected, too strong to resist. In a heartbeat he’d thrown her off the building and she was tumbling through the air, the merciless concrete steps rising to meet her—

Emma was back in her own body, crumpled on the floor beneath the enchanted painting.

Blood for blood
, the murdered girl’s voice whispered inside her head.
If I can’t have him, I’ll take you
.

Emma felt the ghost’s tormented emotions burning like rattlesnake venom in her veins. The pain of betrayal. Rage over her destroyed future, lost motherhood, forgotten name. And blind hatred for Emma, her murdering lover’s child, the adored daughter of the relationship that should have been hers—

“No,” Emma gasped, her heart twitching jaggedly in her chest. “That’s not how it’s been. Please, listen.”

She opened her memories to the ghost, praying Linda wasn’t so bent on vengeance she wouldn’t care about the truth....

“Come in; it’s not locked.”

Professor Burke looked supremely surprised to see his daughter push open his office door.

“Emma? I didn’t expect—”

“—that I’d still be alive? Us girls, we’re full of surprises, huh? Can’t count on us to save you from thirty-year-old blood curses or
anything.
”