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I didn’t let the body fully register. I stared long and hard into the kitchen beyond it. None of the blood which drenched the pantry had been tracked across the polished floors there. The outside door was closed and bolted. No sign of forced entry or even a struggle. Hank Hallewell had died right here.
I steeled myself and examined the body.
No knife had killed this man. A chainsaw, maybe. The rips in his flesh were jagged and meaty. His eyes opened in sheer terror. The killer had either been too hungry to stop or they’d wanted him to watch. This was no animal hunger.
Blood had spattered the nearby hutch leaving behind ruby droplets and streaks across the glass and china, but nothing had been disturbed. The small pantry on the opposite wall remained perfectly organized. An animal would’ve rummaged through the food. Careened into the fragile glasses and plates during the struggle.
The rug under Hank had become marshy with the deep crimson of internal blood. He wore jeans and a shredded Western shirt, those pearly buttons a perfect companion to the exposed bone of his ribcage. A VFW uniform cap lay off to one side, white and oddly clean. The words “member for life” embroidered the bill.
Panic swelled in my chest.
This wasn’t a horror induced panic, it was a more pragmatic fear I’d suppressed even as a cop. Despite permission to be at a crime scene, a little voice inside always whispered that suspicion would blow back on me.
This? This was a worst case scenario. I was a black man standing over the body of a disemboweled white veteran whose house I’d broken into using a sacrificial dagger. And here I stood, contaminating the crime scene.
As always, the odds were not in my favor.
Whatever had killed Hank Hallewell left no trace. As far as I could piece together, he’d heard a noise, gone to investigate, knocked over his drink in the rush, and ended up here. Torn to shreds.
But I’d definitely seen his truck leave. Whoever or whatever took it had to be connected. They might be coming back which left no time to search for a rusty old sword.
Hallewell’s dead eyes stared up at me.
I had one way to get quick answers.
“No. No,” I whispered.
I stood indecisive over the gore, playing through the possibilities. I hadn’t even been willing to do this at my wife’s graveside. Things had been different then. I knew even less than I know now about magic. Maybe if this worked, I could go back to Baltimore and try again...
But I’d be vulnerable. One foot in the Below in a place which had already reached out to me in a very aggressive way, no telling what could happen. Either my earlier vision or the freshly dead Mr. Hallewell could overwhelm me. And I doubted the circumstances of his death had made Hank any friendlier.
The corpse continued to stare. He’d seen it all.
Too late to worry about consequences now. Arriving at a murder scene, I’d gone all in. Finding the sword and a quick disappearing act would be my only salvation.
I went to the liquor cabinet and grabbed the open bottle which had been removed from the tantalus. The “special occasion” stash. Smart enough to wear gloves to a break in, I still risked leaving behind more evidence, but it couldn’t be helped. I’d need something to entice his spirit.
I squatted by the corpse making sure not to so much as brush against anything else, only the toes of my Timbs steady on the wood floor. Using the knife, I dipped it in Hank’s blood and pressed the blade to my tongue.
That sounded worse than it was.
Cannibalism wasn’t part of Atofo’s magic. European explorers got it wrong. Sometimes women from the local tribes drank the blood of a person under a shaman’s care, especially if his patient was a young, healthy warrior. To take in somebody’s strength gave you power, but only if consumed in limited amounts.
To devour a person? To eat the dead? That rooted you in the Below. Shut you off completely from the Above. This World would soon reject you like the Below rejects the living. You became a demon.
Or that’s what Atofo says.
When Atofo gets drunk enough he bitches about early colonists bringing more than just plagues, war, and a codified religion disconnected from This World. Those colonists brought with them demons. Corruptions of the natural order. Beings who’d been around since the cradle of civilization first rocked and whom, he claimed, drove his people to the new continent tens of thousands of years ago.
Rambling justifications of a drunk mentor or whatever, I needed to get what I came for and dip.
“Hey Toya! Hey Toya! Hey Toya!” I called out to open the connection with the other realms.
My gift from Above, the vision of the owl, winked out. Darkness descended on the house. Moonlight turned harsh through the dining room’s lead-paned windows. In the pitch of the pantry, Hank Hallewell stirred.
His spirit came into being seated about where his body’s head rested. He didn’t acknowledge me, just picked up the bottle I’d left as an offering and examined the label.
Unlike Atofo, Hallewell hadn’t been dead for centuries. He grappled with his recent death in silence. He shouldn’t be a threat. But others had been trapped in this house much longer.
A scream tore through the empty dining room. Knife held in an underhand grip, I whipped out my gun and aimed wildly at the shadows. A pained, familiar voice called out for his son, over and over until it faded into a gentle rush of moans. I’d made a mistake. A big mistake.
“What are you doing in my house?”
I snapped back toward Hallewell. The taste of his blood on my tongue caused a sympathetic reflux. The moans of the dying ebbed and flowed, a welcoming tide. Death begged me to cross completely here. I spat out a breath and reigned in the fear.
“I’m the one who came looking for a sword earlier,” I said, avoiding the subject of him being deceased. I needed to ease him into this. Make him think we were continuing the same conversation, this time with no guns. “This sword would’ve been in your family for years. Maybe since before the soldiers came during the Civil War.”
His demeanor had none of the fire I’d seen this afternoon. Every movement was lost, dreamlike.
“War,” he said quietly. “I know war. I did terrible things.”
People say when you die your life flashes before your eyes. What’s happening, by Atofo’s teachings, is a reckoning about your place among the ancestors. If your place is unclear, you end up like him, trapped between worlds. Limbo. And it wasn’t some supernatural force which judged you but your own spirit. Hank here had begun the process. I felt guilty for interrupting, but he had an eternity to sort it out. Right now, I needed answers.
“Whatever you did then, you had to do.” Dropped into a warzone or trapped in the projects, people did what they had to do to survive. “That’s not your legacy. Family. Heirlooms. Things like the sword which you might leave behind—”
“Leave behind?” His eyes met mine and he clenched the bottle tightly.
I grimaced at the choice of words. I was pushing too hard. But the air here had become stifling and the shadows, deep enough to plunge into.
“A Civil War infantry sword,” I said, calm and emotionless. “It had been taken from a Union soldier. What do you know about it? Why did you contact Mr. Kitterling?”
Hallewell stared, dazed and numb.
The sound of water lapping, soft and hypnotic began to fill my ears. A gentle push of the prow of a boat gliding over the water. An oar breaking the surface. Death was coming. Whether for him or me, I didn’t know.
“The soldier’s name was Shaw,” I demanded. “Robert Gould Shaw.”
Hallewell’s face wrinkled in disgust and his befuddled gaze shifted. The old man’s tired eyes filled with a sudden rage. A cruel new face appeared over his like a translucent mask.
“Shaw? Figures one of you would come askin’ about him. He got what he deserved! Buried with the animals he’d put in uniforms!”
Even when the old man had stared me down over the barrel of a shotgun, he hadn’t shown this level of hate. The name of Shaw, an enemy so reviled by the ancestors of this house, had invoked the actual past.
“You aren’t Hank Hallewell.”
“Who I am is your better. You’ll never find what you’ve come to put your filthy hands on!”
“You? You’re the one who buried Shaw with his men and stole his sword?”
“It was mine by victory. The goddamn Yankees tried to steal it from me!” History may not be my thing, but unlike quite a few folks, I knew who’d lost that war. “They only came to my house on account of a loud-mouthed slave,” he snarled. “You see?! See what treachery your kind is capable of? Set them free and you learn they’re nothin’ but rats!”
The elder Hallewell’s possessed ghost climbed to his feet, and I rose to face him. On the other side of the boundary between worlds, I stood on his turf but wasn’t about to be thrown off my game. I needed to maintain control in the face of his raw animosity. I needed to keep a clear head.
He said they’d ‘tried’ to steal it from him. Did that mean they hadn’t gotten it? There’d been two swords in this mixed up story. The one which had been recovered Kitterling said had been questionable. Caleb had told me Shaw had owned two. I took a gamble.
“Which one did you give them? The English forged blade or Shaw’s old sword.” My dice came up four, five, six. One of his flared, angry eyes squinted and twitched. The spirit peered hard, like watching an animal perform a complex trick, too advanced to be possible. I pushed harder. “Tell me where you put the real sword.”
“Swords are for officers not men who believe themselves equal with niggers!”
I cracked my neck instead of his. I’d put up with some racist clowns, but the elemental nature of this dead confederate had started to break down my defenses. The stress of being in his realm, the building burning sensation in my chest, the sound of the boatman getting closer — Colonel Sanders here needed to be on point because he was about to get eaten.
“Tell me where the sword is,” I growled.
He leaned in close. The sound of lapping water I’d heard became an insistent pull. “Only your dead son knows.”
“You motherfucker.”
In one fluid motion, I holstered my gun and brought Atofo’s knife to his throat. The otherworldly metal gleamed in the moonlight. Far from intimidated, Hallewell’s ancestor spirit gave an eager sneer, his eyes reflecting my barely restrained violence with rapturous intent. I wadded his shirt in my fist, driving him into the wall.
Another mistake. I’d dived headfirst over the final threshold, the kinetic movement translated into real consequences outside. Plates rattled in the nearby hutch. Several crashed to the floor.
He hadn’t even been on about my son. His beef was with the man who’d been brought into this room centuries ago, dying. Whatever. The words had cut.
The dead Confederate decided surrender wasn’t his legacy. His ghostly shirt ensnared my fist like a sheet of muscle. Meanwhile, Hank Hallewell’s terrified gaze separated from the translucent spirit like a pair of broken binoculars with jumbled lenses.
Hank, the confused old man, went slack as his eyes fell on his eviscerated corpse.
“No,” he whispered. “No!”
I heard the water again. Closer now, the gliding skiff approached the shore. Blood bubbled in the back of my throat with each stroke of the oars.
I slammed the spirit against the wall, my forearm jammed into his throat, and Atofo’s knife dug deep into his cheek. Cold forged metal not of This World made the snarling ancestor wince. Black ichor wept down the blade point.
“Time’s almost up, witch doctor!” He spoke rapidly, eyes darting toward the kitchen. I saw the polished floor ripple like a gentle disturbance on a pond. “You’ll never get your chance to wield that sword against us!”
Wield it? I’d come to collect the sword, hand it off to Kitterling, and be done with this damn place. The history? Whatever. I just wanted out of this damn town.
“I don’t need a sword to cut you,” I said, driving the point of the knife harder into his cheek, my forearm grinding against his throat even as his shirt slithered and constricted. “But you’re gonna tell me where it is.”
Atofo’s blade sunk deeper. I could tell by the spirit’s wild desperation he felt the cut beyond the grave.
“Yes, I gave those Yankees a decoy! So damn smart, aren’t you, nigger? I made your boy there bury it,” he cackled nervously, “along with the rest of our treasures. But you’ll never find it!” His maddened, flitting gaze fixed on a spot right over my shoulder. He pointed and screeched, “You ready to join me, boy? No rest in this world for me, there’ll damn well be none for you!”
A sudden chill prickled the nape of my neck. Like earlier in the woods, I felt bestial eyes on me. The glance I started to make became a full on stare.
A shadow crouched in the window. By size alone, it could’ve been a pony. But the stalking posture of the broad shoulders was all wrong. A short and muscular neck supported a heavy head set with a single glowing red eye. Night gleamed off drool-covered fangs. As the beast growled, a deep rumble shook the plates on the dining room table, making them skitter and chime.
Numbly, I tried to release the ancestor spirit. His shirt swam and clutched tighter. A sharp twist of my knife and the wretched man screamed in pain, dispersing like smoke as I cut free. Hank Hallewell slid down the wall, his face contorted in anguish beneath the remnants of the fleeting spirit. His eyes weren’t fixed on the dining room window, but on the kitchen.
I held my knife ready and kept the table between myself and the beast outside. Had this been what ended Hank? Stalked me through the woods? Was it ready to deliver me next into Death’s waiting hands?
I reached for my pouch and watched as the monster coiled on all fours. Steely muscles unleashed and the beast sprang. Shadows cast by the windowpanes striping the wall shattered and broke apart even though the window didn’t break. I grabbed a fistful of salted earth and flung it in a wide arc, hoping it would be enough.
Maybe not.
The persistent splash of water from the kitchen stopped. A bell tolled a single, mournful sound. Death had come.