JESSE WENT STRAIGHT TO THE CLARKE HOUSE TO RETURN THE KERIS. The closer he got, the slower the going. Since it was a holiday, maybe he should just try to sneak a second time into Dr. Clarke’s empty office and put the keris back on her desk before she even knew it had gone missing. Save him the embarrassment of confessing. Especially if Honor was around.
Still, he knew Kellie was right, that this was something he had to do. And if Honor was there, well, then it would be a way of telling her he wasn’t going to play any more of her games. His talk with Kellie had cleared his head on that.
Clouds trailed their shadows. The first yellow leaves of fall skittered along the empty streets. Porch wind chimes tinkled with sounds as sharp as cat claws. At the Clarke house, Jesse marched straight up to the door and pressed a stiff finger against the doorbell.
Dr. Clarke must have changed the chimer. Instead of a chirpy ding-dong, there was a low baung, a deep gong with a dying bass echo, the kind of thing you might hear in a cemetery with a few people gathered around a grave as a stiff wind fluttered their black coats.
Jesse shook his head to clear the image. No more tricks from you, brain. Just a stupid doorbell.
“Come on in, it’s open,” Dr. Clarke’s voice called out.
Jesse opened the door. A breeze darted past him and riffled the pages of the practice book on the piano. Everything else was silent. The living room was still covered with heavy canvas drop cloths.
“Hello? Dr. Clarke?”
“Down here.” Her voice drifted up the basement stairs in the kitchen.
Jesse hesitated by the open door. “Is that you?”
“Who else would it be?”
This suddenly seemed like a bad idea. He didn’t want to go down there. And why should he? This wasn’t a movie. He didn’t have to be the dumb-as-a-rock hero who creeps into the haunted cave just so the story could continue.
But what had Kellie said? Confront your fears head on.
He couldn’t find the light switch. Instead, he unsheathed the dagger. Holding it in front of him, he inched down the dark stairs to the bottom landing. In the dim stray light from the stairwell he could just make out the black-magic lontars in their cabinet. Their scribbling didn’t glow. Just old writing.
“Dr. Clarke?” he said, his voice tight and squeaky. It didn’t sound like the voice of somebody courageously confronting his fears. He tried again. “Dr. Clarke?”
In the back, a single overhead spotlight burst into light, shooting a narrow white beam into the partitioned furnace area. Jesse started, but when he settled back into his skin, he wasn’t jittery anymore. He was angry.
“Okay, Honor, you can stop with your tricks now.”
Silence.
“Are you back there? Well, you’re not scaring me.” He strode across the basement and came to an abrupt halt.
The beam fell onto the old freezer, spotlighting a damp white cloth covering a round object sitting on top of the rusty lid. Not the Rangda mask—there was no tangled black hair spilling from the edges. He took another step closer, smelling a swampy odor rising from the cloth, and noticed then the pale red wetness soaking its bottom edges, as if underneath it something bloody was being defrosted. Something with a long nose, making that little bulge in the cloth—
Somebody tapped Jesse’s shoulder.
He whirled around.
A headless man stood before him, wearing the Balinese temple dress of sarong and shirt. The white shirt was heavily stained, the fabric crusted brown across the shoulders, with big drops splattered across the chest.
Jesse’s throat seized up, blocking his shout. He backed up against the freezer. “Get away from me,” he managed to croak. “Get away!”
There was a wheezy chuckle as the headless man shuffled forward a step. His feet were bare and made no sound on the rough cement. To Jesse’s added horror, he realized this was because the feet weren’t solid. They were formed in their shapes by the dust and grit and even bits of bone of a cremated body, held together by circling wind eddies.
The headless man slowly lifted a hollow arm. Jesse could see the flecks of ash going around and around, faintly shimmering in the light. The man pointed a scorched and bony finger at him. The blackened nail scraped against the front of Jesse’s Windbreaker. From the bit of charred vertebrae poking above the shirt’s blood-stained collar came a wheeze: Jesse, Jesse, can you help me find my head?
With a shriek, Jesse slashed out with the knife, slicing the finger. He spun sideways across the top of the freezer, knocking to the floor the cloth-covered object that had been resting there. Something rolled out of the cloth. Jesse took an awkward jump to clear the object, but his trailing foot kicked it in front of him. It was a head, balding on top, and as it rolled from one ear to the other, the dead eyes looked straight up at Jesse for a moment.
He raced for the stairs and bolted out of the house. Behind him, he could have sworn he heard Honor’s mocking laughter.