My keys jingled against my hip as I walked. I’d already swept through every room in the house twice. I started pressing up against every flat surface I could, looking for secret doorways. The house was all crumbling Victorian facades and cobwebs in the rafters. Abandoned for twenty-five years, on account of the last owner being mysteriously strangled to death in his bed. I knocked against a bookshelf, three times, quick. Nothing. I kept moving.
I stormed my way into the parlor room, taking another stock of the place. Two exits, tall windows, and a defaced portrait of the Virgin Mary over the mantle. I could see my breath in the air. I grabbed at my keys to shut them up, stepped slow as I could. This one had been playing keepaway with me. I wouldn’t let it get away again. I found my way onto the couch, covered in dust and dry rot.
I only hesitated for a second before sitting down, making myself comfortable. I slid my Stetson over my face, closed my eyes to really sell it. One arm draped over the back of the couch, the other at my side so I had a quicker draw. I waited.
It wasn’t hard to figure out what was and wasn’t natural phenomena, not after five years of it. Wind whistling through the cracks of the house. Rats skittering in the walls. Creaking floorboards from temperature changes. Cold and rot loosening up the picture frames and crosses on the walls.
Something wailed in the distance. I felt my heart pounding against my ribcage. I tried to keep my breath steady, keep my body dead still.
But then there was the unexplainable. Frost crystals on the fireplace. Heavy footsteps for a few seconds too long. A single bedroom in perfect condition, ten degrees colder than the rest of the house. Screaming and sobbing that no wind or critter could make. The folks in the business for thirty, forty years will swear up and down about the looming unease that they can’t shake.
I’ve never felt a thing like that.
Something brushed up against my cheek, like icicles against my skin. I forced my eyes half-open, just to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind. My vision warped and twisted, kaleidoscope colors and nonsensical patterns. I blinked slowly, and it faded.
“Who’re you?”
My voice came out a little deeper than I wanted it too, gruff and cold and unused. The coldness pulled back in an instant. There was a creaking, footfall on moldy carpet. A hundred years ago, some poor girl was hacked to death in her bed. They say she never left.
She was right in front of me, shimmering blue in the moonlight, clutching at her dirt stained dress. I was on my feet in a second, already pushing the safety down on my Winchester. I never liked to play with my hunts. I aimed. She smiled, sharp and bloody and too many teeth. She charged. I fired. A wrought iron bullet ripped through her, lodged into the painting above the mantle. She hissed, screamed, clutching at her head.
I watched her crumple and dissipate. I mumbled a prayer for her soul.
☽◯☾
Sammy crossed himself as he stepped across the threshold. He shut the door behind him. Pulled the hat off his head, fixed his hair, put it back on. Lifted each foot to check for dust and cobwebs. He pulled his gun out, checked the barrel and the safety, holstered it again on his hip. Shoved his keys back into his pocket, replaced with a beat-up pack of Chesterfields and a lighter.
Then finally, lit cigarette in his mouth, he looked up to see me on the porch swing.
“Bring me something fun?” I asked.
He nodded, tossed me a vial of dark powder, told me it was sulfur. I turned it in my hand, marveling at how cold it felt. I slipped it into the inside pocket of my leather jacket.
“Where to next?”
He exhaled smoke before he answered. “Dinner.”
“Seriously?”
“Jonah.”
“You’re comin’ off the high of killing your third ghost this month, and the first word outta your mouth is dinner?”
He was already halfway back to my Camaro in a trail of smoke. “Jonah Odile, get in the car.”
“C’mon, cowboy, I expected some badass one-liner, not–”
“Let’s go back to that diner. The burgers weren’t bad.”
“They ran us two-fifty each! How much money do you think we have?!”
“Enough for gas and food.”
I slapped my hands against my thighs, standing up with a huff. He crossed his arms and checked the watch he didn’t have. I fished my keys from my pocket, and jumped down the porch stairs. He put out his cigarette on the brim of his hat.
“And beer,” he said as I was sliding into the driver’s seat.
I groaned. “You bastard.”
The engine purred as I reversed out of the gravel driveway.
☽◯☾
We’d been on I-64 for the better part of the day, and I was already sick of Jonah’s music. He made some halfhearted comment about stopping at a record shop when we had the chance. We both knew he wouldn’t. I tried to settle down and get some shut eye– he was always the type to drive through the night.
Jonah tapped me on the thigh. “Funny how fate works, huh?”
It was his favorite way to reminisce. We started from the beginning every time, bouncing details off each other.
Seven years ago, my folks moved to Odessa. It wasn’t the first time, it wouldn’t be the last. Military families never stay in one place for too long. I tried to keep to myself, especially in those first months. Jonah Odile, maniac he was– still is– had other plans. He sat next to me in History class. Talked my ear off and never seemed to mind that he was lucky to get a nod back.
We got real close, when I finally started talking back. We turned into trouble– usual suspects, paying off the nerds to do our homework, tossing paper airplanes at substitute teachers, playing hooky. He liked to drag me to the abandoned quarry a quarter-mile from the school. He gave me a cigarette there once, lit it for me and all. I couldn’t kick the habit after that.
Jonah was always the occult type. He’d keep crystals in his pockets, swore up and down that they did something for him. He got me in on it, playing with tarot, runestones, palm tracing. I could never figure out why he kept reading for me. No matter how he shuffled the deck, I’d pull the Moon, Four of Cups, Ten of Swords.
He swung by my house the night after we graduated, threw me a backpack and had me in his car before I could think about what I was doing. Said he wanted to see the West with me.
Jonah sighed, and tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. “Are we idiots, Sam?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, we’re two and a half years homeless, picking off ghosts for the Hell of it– huh?” He glanced over at me, like he hadn’t heard me right.
I flashed him a smile. He rolled his eyes.
“Do you hate it?” he asked, quieter than usual. “The hunt, I mean.”
I looked over to him, and felt my smile soften. “Somebody’s gotta make sure you don’t sell your soul to the pretty Devil at the crossroads.”
“It’s already yours, lovely.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. He turned his stereo back up.
☽◯☾
I pulled off into a rest stop around four in the morning, slept until sunrise in the driver’s seat with my keys still in the ignition. Sammy was the one to nudge me awake, just to tell me to keep the car unlocked while he ran inside. I got out and stretched, watching the sun come up.
I heard him before I saw him. He kept a keyring turned out in his pocket, just so it jingled when he walked. He swore it kept the ghosts away when he was hunting solo. I never questioned it.
I motioned up. “Red sky at morning.”
Sammy shot me a tired glare.
“Never heard that before?” I joked.
“We’re not at sea.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Sammy mumbled out some prayer for safe travels. I was never one for his Jesus crap, but it made him happy and I wasn’t going to argue.
He turned to me. “What’s the plan?”
“Drive ‘til you stop me.”
☽◯☾
I stopped him in Kentucky, found an abandoned farm in a corn field. Jonah insisted on following me in, and only paid with a twisted ankle as we were running out.
We stumbled back onto the open road. Jonah was still unsteady on his feet, tripping over himself and hanging onto me, free hand clutched against his chest. We found our way back to his car with the full moon as our guide, and he beamed as he collapsed backwards onto the hood. His eyes sparkled mahogany in the light. He held up his trophy of the night– a small vial filled with glowing blue liquid.
“Ectoplasm,” he mumbled, still breathless. “The real deal. I can’t believe it.”
“Don’t lose it.”
“I’d never.”
He shoved it into his pocket. For a minute, the only noise was the crickets and his slowing breathing. Then, quietly, Jonah started giggling. Louder, louder, until he slipped from the hood of his car onto the dirt road below, doubled over and clutching at his stomach.
“Some days,” he told me between gasps for air. “I think this is all some crazy dream. Like I made you up. I keep thinking I’ll wake up and be back home, seventeen all over again.”
“Some days,” I told him. “I feel the same.”
He tossed his head back, and went quiet. He pointed up. I tipped my head, feeling my Stetson slide back with the motion. The sky shimmered above us in dark blues and purples.
“Orion and Carina are out tonight,” he said.
“Meaning…?”
“Good fortune for us hunters.”
He got back on his feet, brushed the dust from his Levi’s, and looked over his shoulder at me. He had a glint in his eye and a grin on his face, the kind that told me we were in for trouble.
“How do you feel about Nebraska, cowboy?”
☽◯☾
We made our plan parked at a gas station under the stars in Nowhere, Missouri– take a rest day, do some research, axe a couple creepies on the Seven Sisters road.
Sixteen hours and three states of Sammy’s terrible navigation skills later, we crashed at a motel just outside Nebraska City. He fell into bed with his shoes and hat still on, out like a light as his head hit the pillow and his lips mumbled Amen in his evening prayer. I made sure to draw the curtains tight before I wormed in next to him.
That night, I found myself trapped in my first solo hunt again. I was an idiot, sneaking out under the full moon half a year into our forever-roadtrip. I’d heard of an abandoned power plant on the other side of the city, and Sammy wanted nothing to do with it when I told him the casualty count. It’ll bring nothin’ but trouble, he told me.
I didn’t listen to him. Of course I didn’t. I had a flashlight, a flask of holy water, and a couple packets of diner salt to keep me safe.
I could never remember the thing that dug into my thigh and left claw marks up my body. I remember running like I was fine, only realizing I was bleeding as I stumbled back into the motel room. Sammy stripped me down and stitched me up. His fingers were too sharp, and the needle didn’t hurt. He looked up at me when he spoke, and maggots were falling from his lips.
When I spat out the belt I was biting down on, the first question I had was how I’d get the blood out of my upholstery.
I came out of the nightmare with sweat-soaked clothes and the start of the sunrise flooding the carpet. I wiggled out of Sammy’s dead-tired grasp, grabbed my keys, and laced my boots– I figured I just needed a drive to clear my head.
I found myself in a 24-hour diner on the other side of town, sipping lukewarm decaf from a chipped mug and watching the sun crawl up the sky.
I always thought it was the strangest thing. I never had dreams until I started hunting. Sammy told me it was because my heart was too open– he always had some bull about the Devil coilin’ up around my soul. I slept easier in his arms, but I still felt like I was packing a wound with salt.
My thigh ached, right over my scar. I always hated it. Sammy always thought it was his fault. On the rare nights I got too drunk to drive and he got too restless to think, those hot nights when we remembered we were pent-up 20-somethings, he’d ask to see it. He’d press his lips to it, mumble apologies into my skin, run calloused fingers over it like he wanted to rub it away.
I hit the bottom of my coffee too quickly for my tastes and flagged the waitress down. She asked if I wanted to order anything else. I told her no, and asked if she had a newspaper. She did.
I flipped through just for the hell of it– road closures, store openings, births, obituaries, some restructuring of the school district, blah, blah. The back page was for the personal ads. A few missing family pets, a widower trying to pawn off a motorboat, some poor guy trying to have his Pina Colada moment.
Tucked into the bottom corner, trying to hide, one woman calling for an exorcist. Now that was something we didn’t see every day.
I left a few dollars on my table and took the newspaper with me. It took Sammy’s place in my passenger’s seat on the drive back.
☽◯☾
Jonah beamed as he threw the paper to me. “I’m a genius, cowboy! A genius!”
I’d just pulled on my roper boots and brushed the knots out of my hair when he burst in. He stared at me expectantly. I skimmed the ad– Exorcist needed. I felt my expression turn. “That’s not our job.”
“It’s perfect! C’mon, this is something we’ve never seen before!”
“I’m not doin’ this.”
He huffed, walked over and ripped the newspaper from my hands. “God, you’re such a buzzkill.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in my Jesus crap.”
“Isn’t this a chance to prove it?”
I couldn’t stop myself from sighing. “I’m tryin’ to send souls back to the Lord, not become one.”
“So let’s go together–”
“You’re no good on a hunt–”
“We’ll figure something out–”
“I can’t get distracted protectin’ you–”
“Who says I need protecting?”
I went quiet. Jonah was never one for church. It was the only thing we’d fight about. I’d trace crosses into the small of his back when I held him. I prayed for him every night. He would’ve gotten himself killed twelve times over by now, if not for the Lord and my dumb luck.
There weren’t any other hunters. Not that we knew about, anyway. The thought of Jonah giving up the hunt, or worse, was–
“Sammy.”
I looked up, and Jonah was right in front of me, quiet and gentle and bright. My stomach was tying itself in knots. He reached out, cupped my cheek, looked at me like I was gonna shatter.
“Sam,” he said, almost a whisper. “Samwell DuPine. Light of my–”
“Someone’s gonna see us.”
“Screw ‘em all. I’d burn down the world for you. You know that, right?”
I closed my eyes, leaned into him, tried so hard not to look pained. “I can’t get you hurt again.”
“You never did.”
My heart tightened.
He pulled in a breath. “We stick close together. Get out at the first sign of trouble. Hell, I’ll swing past the church and see if I can pick up a blessing or two.”
“That’s not how that works.”
“I know.”
☽◯☾
“This is still stupid,” Sammy said as I parked.
I looked over at him, one hand still on the wheel. “How so?”
“Should’ve scoped it out in the daytime. Should’ve met the guy first. Made sure it wasn’t a trap.”
“You worry too much.” I waved my hand, trying not to look like I was writing him off. “Besides, she said her husband left three-hundred bucks on the coffee table. Our payment for staying overnight.”
“You’d walk blind into Hell for three-hundred dollars?”
I flashed him a smile, popping my door open. “I’d do it for three. C’mon, cowboy, let’s hunt.”
