“It’s not smart to mock us.”
“I’m not mocking you. Hell, I’m on your side. I’ve been dead too. A couple of times. I know how much it sucks. Come on. We’re on the same team here.”
“We will be soon.”
More chuckles from the peanut gallery.
“You will never leave here.”
“You know you’re not the first dead assholes to threaten me, right?”
“No. We’re the last.”
“I see why you were bored before. You’re boring. You’re boring ghosts and that’s just sad. You have all day to figure out spooky stuff and all you’ve come up with is ‘boohoo we’re dead and everyone with TiVo has to die.’ ”
“You’re going to die.”
“Yeah, excuse me while I ignore you.” I see shadows overhead. I shout, “Hey. I’m down here goddammit.”
“They can’t hear you.”
“Stop shouting. It’s annoying.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to be a bad guest. By the way, you know I’m going pee in one of the corners in a few hours, right? I mean, it’s just biology. I can’t help it.”
Ghosts swirl around me again. When the faces resolve themselves this time, they don’t look happy.
I touch the wall to see if I can find any hand- or footholds. My hand comes back wet and slimy, covered in Eidolon Whiskers. The wall is way too slippery. No way I’m climbing out. I can’t see doors or openings of any kind. I take out Mason’s lighter. If I can make enough of a shadow, maybe I can come out to somewhere above and find the others.
“Adios, crybabies.”
I flick it on and get closer to the wall. The room is dark, but even so, the light is feeble. I hold the lighter up higher, looking for the best angle. The next second, the ghosts are all over me, whirling around my head and flying through the lighter flame. It goes out. I spark it again. They come back, blowing through the flame like a fucking annoying breeze, snuffing it out. I try cupping my hand around it, but they squeeze between my fingers and douse it again. I put the lighter back in my pocket. It was never going to work anyway. It just wasn’t bright enough.
The ghosts are cackling up a storm. An easy crowd. And I wasn’t even using my A material.
“You invaded our home and now you’ll die here.”
“Yeah, you keep saying that.”
“You can starve slowly over weeks or you can end things quickly. Use one of the stones or pieces of metal to cut your wrists.”
“I’m going to go with door number three. The year’s supply of car wax and a weekend in Hawai’i away from Spooky Town.”
A rock hits the side of my head. Someone shoves me so hard I almost fall. Pieces of drywall and metal slam into the wall around me. Some of these dead pricks are tougher than others. Not just specters but full-on poltergeists. Some scratch my face, going for my eyes. I duck and get my arms up to block them, but their spectral bodies flow around them like fog with talons. Dropping an arm to my side, I manifest my Gladius, an angelic sword of fire. I swing it in front of me, turn and raise it overhead, bringing it down again right through the thickest part of the ghostly crowd.
They burst out laughing. Big, nasty belly laughs.
“Look, everyone. The mighty wizard is using magic against us.”
“I hope he doesn’t kill us, don’t you?”
The ghosts drift away like they’ve lost all interest in me. They move around the room, full-body specters now, chatting and telling jokes about what an idiot I am. I drop down onto one of the beanbag chairs.
The dead creeps are right, of course. Practically all my hoodoo is about hunting and killing. Not much use against someone who’s already dead. I take out a cigarette, but when I try to light it, they again blow out the flame.
“You are the worst dead people I’ve ever met.”
They go on with their little coffee klatch, hoping I’ll go nuts and off myself.
I put the cigarette away.
“Hey, do any of you spooks know about a crazy ghost? I mean crazier than you. He’s in some kind of Roman bath or something.”
A couple of them nod. One says, “No one talks to him. He’s mad.”
“Yeah, I think I already said that. Thanks for nothing.”
So far, Kill City is living up to its name. I have no intention of letting Casper and company kill me, but I’m seriously stuck here. And I don’t like cemeteries. Not one little bit.
I was around fourteen when it happened. Balthazar Roszak, the spoiled little prince of a powerful Sub Rosa family, decided he didn’t like me. It had nothing to do with family rivalries or magician envy. It was just one of those dog-pack bully-and-victim games that young boys play. Balthazar played harder than just about anyone. His clan was rumored to practice heavy Baleful magic on the sly. Maybe he was out to make his bones in the family or maybe he was just a stone bastard, but when he came after me one night, I knew he was going to kill me.
I had a lot of power even when I was fourteen, but it was mostly show-off stuff. Unfocused tricks to amuse friends or impress girls. It was nothing at all like Balthazar’s hoodoo. He’d been training since he was a goddamn fetus. If he wanted me dead, I knew there wasn’t much I could do to stop him.
I hid in the Golden Hills Cemetery not far from my house. Golden Hills had been a big deal in the fifties, but that was a long time ago and now it was barely hanging on. The grounds were kind of weedy and the place was generally starting to fall apart.
I went inside through a place in the wrought-iron fence where I knew a post was missing. Headed straight for the trees and the big tombs where the families with money had planted Grandma and Grandpa years before. I was hoping if I stayed in the shadows, Balthazar wouldn’t be able to follow me through the wet December grass. But the fucker came right along where I’d run. He wasn’t even moving fast. He knew some kind of tracking hoodoo that I’d never heard of. All I could do was keep moving and hoping that he’d get bored and go home.
After an hour, I was running out of steam. It wasn’t that I was tired. It was that Balthazar was relentless. No matter what I did—running straight, doubling back, climbing trees—he’d always find me. And he’d let me go to run some more. He wanted me to give up and offer myself to him. I wasn’t that far from doing it.
I ran into the hills that gave the cemetery its name. The oldest part of the place. All the families that could afford the view had long since moved to better neighborhoods with better places for their dead. No one ever went up to the hills anymore. The grass was long and slippery. Some of the gravestones were beginning to tilt in the soggy ground. A lot of the mausoleums had cracked foundations and walls. The far end of the hill was a straight hundred-foot drop to the freeway. The other end faced down the slope to where Balthazar was coming. I’d cleverly run myself right into a dead end.
I crept across the top of the hill trying to spot where Balthazar was coming up, but he was nowhere in sight. There weren’t any trees up there, so I climbed on top of one of the tombs.
From somewhere below me, someone said, “Boo.”
It was Balthazar. I was so startled that I started to slide off the slanted roof and only stopped myself by jamming my heels into the raised edge. There was a crack and a crash and the whole tomb seemed to drop a few feet. I thought the roof was going to collapse and take me with it. But it held together. I couldn’t hear Balthazar anymore. It was a perfect moment to finish me off, but nothing happened.
I climbed down and there he was, lying under a marble pillar from the tomb. It had come down across his chest. His head and arms flailed and pushed at the pillar, but his legs were at a funny angle and didn’t move. When he saw me he tried to yell, but it came out rough and wet.
“You. You did this. You’re dead.”Even hurt, Balthazar was strong. He threw a couple of fireballs at my head. They missed, but only by inches. I was stuck. Terrified of helping him. Terrified of leaving. He tried a spell to raise the pillar. He managed to get it up a couple of feet before it fell back down on his chest with a soft frightening sound.
“Help me,” he said. “Or I’ll kill your whole family.”
I knew he meant it. I couldn’t move. I was so scared of him that I wanted to help him. But I was too afraid to move. Then he started to cry. Big, wet-eyed wails. That was when I understood. I walked away and left him up there on the hill.
There was a Laundromat not too far away that still had a working pay phone. I dialed 911, didn’t give them a name, but I told them that a boy was hurt inside Golden Hills. I didn’t tell them exactly where. I didn’t want them to find him right away. Then I went home.
The next day it was all over the local TV news. The boy who’d died in a tragic accident in a poorly maintained graveyard. When the medics had found Balthazar, they’d taken him to an emergency room at a good hospital. But it was full of civilian doctors. If they’d known to take him to a Sub Rosa clinic like Allegra’s, they might have been able to save him. But I didn’t want that.
I knew the moment Balthazar started crying that I was dead. No matter what he said after that, no matter what he promised or how much he pleaded, he’d never forgive me for seeing him so weak. He’d kill me the first chance he got. So I did the only thing I could do. I left him lying in the wet grass.
Balthazar was the first person I ever killed. I don’t like to think about it, so I work hard at not doing it. Sometimes I see his face on an opponent when I dream about the arena. I looked him up in Hell when I was Lucifer. Found him in Butcher Valley with the other killers. Turns out I wasn’t the first kid he’d come after. Still, remembering him on the ground bothers me, though not so much that I would have changed what I did.
I wonder sometimes if leaving Balthazar in a graveyard is why I’m tied so closely to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. A cemetery was Balthazar’s exit and my entrance into this world. Two fucked-up kids connected forever by a land of bones.
That’s why I hate cemeteries.
The Kill City Cemetery is in even worse shape than Golden Hills. Tombs are slapped together from collapsed concrete and drywall. A few graves were hacked into the floor, but most are just covered with debris. Mini burial mounds. Someone made crosses from old water pipes. Angels are tacked on some of the graves, torn from Valentine candy displays. A Star of David is crudely hacked out of an acoustic ceiling tile.
I pick up a Big Blue World snow globe from the floor and toss it at the nearest cross. It bounces off with a satisfying ping. I get up and tear the cross out of the grave, find another, and tear it out too.
“Stop that,” says a ghost.
“Fuck you, Jacob Marley.”
I bang the metal crosses together, shouting, “Hello. Hello. Hello.”
When I don’t hear anything I toss one of the crosses up and out of the ghost wall into the corridor above.
“Stop that,” screams one of the ghosts.
They swarm around me, pushing and shoving, trying to knock the second cross from my hand.
“Aw. You don’t like that? How about this?”
I push through them and pick up a piece of concrete with some rebar sticking from it. Using it like a sledgehammer, I bash one of the makeshift tombs to pieces.
“Stop him, someone.”
“Please.”
“He’s insane.”
A mummified body lies among the ruins of the tomb. I pick it up by the neck.
“Any of you ever see The Muppets? I loved that show. Let me see if I can do Kermit’s voice and work the mouth at the same time.”
“Stop. Please.”
“Why should I stop? You can only kill me so dead.”
I kick a plywood support from the side of another tomb. It leans to one side and slowly slides to the ground.
“Please. No more.”
“I’m going to pull every single body out of these graves. I figure I can make half of you into lawn gnomes and the other half into ventriloquist dummies. The tourists will love ’em, don’t you think?”
A spook screams in my face, “Do not desecrate our resting place.”
Before any of them can stop me, I pull Mason’s lighter and touch it to the corpse. It goes up like a torch in a Frankenstein movie.
“According to you assholes, this is my resting place too. If it is, I’m going to redecorate it any way I like.”
“Stop. You can go.”
I drop the burning body.
“What was that?”
“Please put out my corpse and we’ll let you go.”
I get one of the beanbag chairs and drop it on the body, smothering the flames.
“Okay. I put it out. How do I get out of here?”
“There’s one more thing you must do. Take our bodies with you so they can be buried in the earth.”
“Are you crazy? What are there, twenty or thirty of you? I can’t carry that many bodies.”
A poltergeist swoops down from the wall and flicks a knucklebone from one of the unearthed corpses at me.
“A single bone will do. One from each of us. Bury them in the ground somewhere. If you promise to do that, you can go.”
“I’m going to have to mess up your little garden even more to do it, you know.”
“Do what you have to, but please don’t be cruel when digging us up.”
“How am I supposed to carry all these bones with me?”
The poltergeist tosses something in my direction.
“Look down. There are shopping bags everywhere.”
It’s a thick plastic bag advertising a 50 percent opening weekend sale at Victoria’s Secret. Pictures of attractive women in panties and bras. I fill the bag with bones, the smallest ones I can find from each body. Yes. This is exactly how I wanted to spend tonight.