Chapter 28: Marina Murders (8)

When I opened my eyes, we were pulling out of a drivethrough.

“Good, you’re awake.”  Penelope noticed and handed me a steaming styrofoam cup.

“Thanks.”  It was coffee, but laden with an unhealthy amount of sugar and milk.  I thought about complaining, then shrugged.  It burned the roof of my mouth, tongue and everything afterwards.  The scalding liquid eventually settled at the bottom of my stomach where it radiated warmth.

I like iced coffee.  Black.  Always black and always iced.

Looking out the window, I realized that the sun was starting to set.  The street lights were on already, but it wasn’t as bright as they should be.  Out in the suburbs, it’s like that.  Especially a small town like this one.  

“How long did I sleep?”

“An hour.  Give or take.”  Lev said from the front.  He was shoveling a burger into his mouth, getting ketchup all over his shit.

I eyed the brown paper bag that lay between me and Penelope.  Catching my look, she nudged it towards me.

Fries and a Cheeseburger.  Perfect.

The next moment was full of chewing and comfortable silence.

I can’t remember the last time I ate around other people.  At school, I had to eat in the bathroom if I wanted a peaceful day.  At the foster home, well, I was lucky if I had anything to eat at all.

It was kind of nice.

“So, what happened back there?”  Lev asked after stuffing his burger down his throat.  I’ve seen seagulls eat with more manners.

The scene came back to me, hitting me with the metaphysical weight of a wrecking ball.  I closed my eyes and wrapped up the rest of my burger.  Beef patties didn’t smell so appetizing anymore.

“You don’t like burgers?”

“Not hungry anymore.”  I lied,  “You two go first.  What’d you see?  How much of it did you understand?”

The two shared a look in the rearview mirror.

“You did something.”  Penelope said, the neon-blue tips of her hair stuck out from beneath the headrest, “Then it got cold. Not because of the snow.” she added quickly, “It was... different. Slimy.  It felt so…”  She paused, searching for the right word.

“Empty.”  Lev added.

“Empty.”  She agreed, “And the longer you just stood there, the stronger this feeling got.  Then you started talking and I could’ve sworn I saw someone there.  But every time I looked, I couldn’t find it.  I just knew that something was there you know?  Something that just kept appearing in the edge of my vision, but when I turned to look, it wasn't there anymore.”

“And when you were asking the questions, it felt like someone was trying to answer back.  It could’ve been the wind, but I know it wasn’t.  Even for me, knowing that you’re a practitioner and that you were trying to communicate with the ghost…”  She trailed off then shrugged.  “It was weird.”

When Penelope finished her side of the story, I mulled over the details.  Her story told me a lot.

She knew about the existence of ghosts.  That was a given, or else, she wouldn’t have come to me in the first place.  Maybe my being able to talk to ghosts wasn’t a given, but it was within the realm of possibility for her, and she was obviously smart enough to put two and two together.  

The girl knew that I could do something –which was the whole reason she brought me here– and that something just happened to be me reaching out and talking to the other side.

Which in turn, told me a lot about what Penelope knew and didn’t know.

First, she definitely knew what Practitioners were as well as the fact that they could do magic stuff. Which wasn’t a lot, because that was exactly as much as I knew.  

Second, she didn’t know the details of the how.  Her account of my pseudo-sèance sounded too close to how i’d describe it if I couldn’t see Susan.  

Third, Penelope couldn’t see the ghost, but she could sense it.  

The question was, could she sense it because of something I did, or because of what she was?

Which raised some interesting questions.  

Could regular people feel the same thing Penelope did if I did the same ghost-summoning in front of them?  Or was it a spectrum, like how everything was these days?  Humans on one end and  Practitioners in the other, with everyone else in between?  And exactly how in between was Penelope and Lev?

“Jain?”  Penelope’s voice alerted me that I wasn’t alone in the truck, that I had been in the middle of conversation.

Too many things were happening at once and the more I learned, the more I became locked in my own head.  It reminded me that I still had a host of things to do and I had obtained fuckall for my efforts.

But it was time to cash in.

“You’re right.”  Then in a whisper, “That’s my big secret.  I see dead people.”

“Heh, I saw that movie.”  Lev quipped.

Penelope wasn’t nearly as amused.  Maybe she doesn’t like movies.

“The person, I mean ghost, was Susan Rightly.  One of the bodies found on that riverbank.”  I tried to do anything but think of the corpse photos.  But with the combination of Susan’s last memories and the photos, my stomach churned with the undeniable fact they’d live on picture perfect in a small room in my head.

I mentally shut the door on the part of me in that room that started screaming.

Nightmares could wait.

“What did you find out?”  Penelope found out.

I swallowed.  “I… look, all you asked me to do is take a look?  This is what I got.”

“Whatever you’re dealing with, it’s evil. The thing enjoyed doing that to its victims.”  I spat the words out in a rush, somehow afraid that speaking it aloud would garner the attention of my newest nightmare, “It didn’t just kill its victims.  You know how all the faces were messed up?  It peeled the skin off the faces.”

“That’s a pattern.  Isn’t that a spirit?  You said so.”  Lev said excitedly.

“It is, but I don’t think it was a spirit.  It almost felt like...”  I hesitated, “Like it was choosing to rip off the faces.  A ghost would be compelled to rip off the faces, and it would have limited choice in how it did.  Ghosts are like a video on repeat, it can only reenact the scene through which it died.  So I don’t think it’s a ghost.”

“Then there’s the fact that this thing is smart enough to cover its tracks.”  I finished, “Which means it knows it could get hunted for the murders.  Again, unlikely to be a spirit… but if it is, it’s smart.  Intelligent.”

“You said it knows it can be hunted.”  Lev sounded excited.  “The fact that it tries to hide its tracks, means that it’s afraid of drawing attention.  There has to be a way to kill it.”

“But to kill it, we need to know what it is.”  Penelope confirmed, then looked at me for my reaction.

“...I don’t know.”  I sank deeper into the truck’s backseat, wrapping the blanket tighter around myself.  “Probably.  It could be Fae.  Fits the bill.  Or something else.  But your guess is as good as mine.  Sorry.”

“Why does it feel like we had this exact same conversation before?”  Lev asked, then deadpanned, “Oh yeah, we did.”

He was right.

We knew no more than we did before regarding the identity of the creature.  Yes, we could cross ‘ghost’ off our list; but that left dozens of others things that it possibly could be, as well as the hundreds of other things it could be that I didn’t even know existed.

I sighed.  “There’s more.  Susan was walking by the docks.  The thing kidnapped her and dragged her into what looked like a tunnel.”  I looked out the window then had the random thought of a supernatural being peering back.

I quickly turned away.

“Now that,”  Lev whistled.  “Is useful.”

“Good.”  Now I didn’t have to feel like I was ripping them off.  I leaned forward, pointing at an orange-and-pink donut store chain in the distance, “Pull over there.  Time to pay up.”