Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (49 page)

“That’s right, Marnie. Keep thinking about giant dildos. That’s how we’ll survive this. Power of the pervert.” I closed in on the other side as the ice crackled, groaned, and moved underfoot; I held back
the urge to hug my box and run the rest of the way just to get to safety. The shore was close enough that I could have thrown my
backpack to it, but making a stupid mistake now would plunge me into deep waters; unlike the other side, this shoreline did not have a shallow rim. I couldn't see the mud at the bottom here. My footing uncertain, I took it a hesitant half-step at a time, feeling rushed by new doubts about Scarrow and Schenk handling things without me.

With the edge just a few tantalizing feet away, I bit down hard on my tongue to resist jumping to it. “Dear Diary: This is my final entry, because I acted on impulse and wound up a Marnie-sicle. Love,
splash!
”

And then I was back on solid ground, so relieved I could throw up. I didn't waste time looking back at the pond. I found some solid
footing and began hiking up the incline to the top of the rise,
slipping only once and catching my shin on a log. I paused a second or two at the top to catch my breath and swear therapeutically, and noticed
three large ravens on a power line above me. One of them had a
blue-black streak, or maybe that was just the way this stormy day’s weird,
patchy light hit the feathers. Three more took flight from a nearby
tree and settled beside the first three, and my scalp prickled. One gave a loud and pointed
caw!

I stared at them. They stared back. The skin between my
shoulder
blades crawled unpleasantly. Refusing to entertain the exorcist’s raven psychopomp nonsense, I carried on, spotting the break in the trees where Scarrow had led Harry and me up out of the valley from
the Blue Ghost Tunnel. Had that really only been last night? It seemed like weeks ago. I definitely needed to un-fuck my sleep schedule once I got back to Ten Springs, starting with a very long nap.

I said a quick prayer (“
Lord and Lady, soothe my head / Quiet all the angry Dead.
”) and made my way through the snow drifts to the
tunnel as quickly as I could manage.

By the time I got to the tunnel I had lost all feeling in my toes, my jeans were frozen stiff around my aching knees, my knuckles
throbbed around the box of evidence, and the only part of me that was warm
was my upper lip, safely trapped under my ski mask and humid from my panting. I saw no ambulance, no car, no Schenk, and worst of all, no sign of Father Scarrow anywhere. I set the box down
outside the
entrance. Someone had attached a lock to the gate since we’d been here last. The canal authorities? The factory? Was this factory property? The police? Had Schenk come out here to do it? Had
Scarrow? Whoever it was, they didn’t bother blocking the hole in the brickwork. I peered inside while digging out my phone for light.

“Father Scarrow, are you in here?” Drips. Movement. Shadows. “Is anybody here? Longshanks?” I bit my bottom lip, lowering my voice. “John? Mr. Briggs-Adsit?”

I wondered, should I leave this box of stuff outside the tunnel or
keep it with me? Schenk said not to let it out of my sight, but
bringing John’s skull and Mama-Captain’s lacrimosa into the tunnel seemed like a supremely bad idea.
Damn it
.

“Renfield?” I yelled into the hole. Nothing. I lifted the box into the hole before me, grimaced, ducked, and took it real slow so as not to slip on the frost-slicked mud inside. I turned on the flashlight app on my phone. Holding the phone delicately in my teeth, I went gloved hands first, eyes searching for any movement in the shadows.

This time, I didn’t fall. There were no dogs to startle me with a
sudden yap.
Because the poltergeist drained them of heat until they literally froze to death. Like she did to Britney, who took her necklace, and
Barnaby, who
had her son’s skull. And now you have both.
“Happy thoughts,” I
muttered to myself.

I picked up the box and my backpack, no longer hurrying, vibrating on the edge of pure terror. Because my brain hates me,
House of Pain’s
“Jump Around” was playing in the back of my mind. I blamed Harry. He’d probably been rapping like an undead dork in the big,
beige bedroom at North House while I slept. That thought took the edge
off my terror.
I will not jump around. I will not get up, get up, and get down
. “Hello?” I kept my voice light and sing-song, stubbornly maintaining the hope that he was just crouching in here doing
something flakey or pervy. “Father Scarrow? Renfield? Hey, Mr. Rats. I’m calling you that thing you hate. Come out and spank me.”

There was a spot ahead that constantly dripped water, and I had to scoot closer to the slick wall to avoid it. That’s when I noticed the
MUCE hanging in thick runners from between the bricks. My upper lip curled in distaste at the snot-like encrustation. “Is that you,
Mama? Or is that just John?”

The dripping stopped and I glanced behind me at the spot. The
water still flowed, but now it just hung there frozen in midair, icicles attached to nothing at top or bottom, growing longer as the new
drips
coalesced and froze. I squinted at them, awkwardly aiming my
phone’s light app at them while balancing the evidence box in both arms.

“Shivering shinbones! That’s not science-y. That’s wrong. Stop doing that, water, that’s the wrong thing to do.” I inched closer. “What kind of assholery is this? Obey gravity.”

But they did not obey gravity. The frozen droplets hung there
stubbornly with their crystalline beards, as if to prove a point:
I see you. Now you see me, too
.

“Okay, okay. Hi. Very good. You’re fancy, you can freeze drips midair. I admit it: I do believe you can do a great many things to the physical realm. You’re clearly manipulating energy. But I have to say
I’m disappointed with some of your choices. Pulling thermal energy from your surroundings, really? Thermal energy is pretty low quality. Second Law of Thermodynamics, high entropy, babe.
Now,
what you wanna do is draw your energy from a low entropy, high-quality source, like an electrical socket, or a human being. But then, as I say
this, I realize you’ve got that last bit all figured out, haven’t you?" I chuckled nervously, ignoring the way my pulse was suddenly drumming in my ears, and carried on down the tunnel away from
the bobbing icicles. “I’ll write a paper. I’ll put your name in it; how’s that? I was
wrong about you; science is wrong about you; Father Scarrow is
right. I will apologize to him the second I see him.”

And I would, but he wouldn’t hear me. I was almost to the
caved-in end of the tunnel when I spotted the black lump sticking out of the water.

I EXHALED HARD,
muttered, “Shit,” and hurried forward as
quickly as the slippery mud between the railroad ties would allow. Frost slid and squelched underfoot, but I managed to stay upright.

His head was underwater, face down, his heels sticking up, toes
hooked onto the last railroad tie before the tunnel dipped and
became
waterlogged. The entire end of the tunnel stank of sulfur and
charcoal
and singed wood. I set the evidence box down carefully, flung off my backpack, and crept forward. No bubbles. No movement. The
water was slick and glossy with ectoplasm, and though a sheet of MUCE obscured his head, I knew from the black skinny jeans on the ankles under the cassock that this was Father Scarrow. A King James Bible with sticky tabs along all three paper sides rested as though neatly
placed on top of a railway tie, centered between two clusters of spindly, snow-white mushrooms. Scarrow’s simple cross was
centered on its well-worn, black leather cover, and a folded piece of paper was stuck in it like a bookmark.

“I’m sorry, Father Scarrow,” I whispered, tiptoeing closer,
getting low near the boots. In the corner of my eye to my right, the darkness grew meatier, solidified. I told it, “Relax, whoever you are. I have to check him.”

I removed my gloves and pinched the edge of his jeans where they were stuck in his boots. They clung wetly to his leg, but I could
already tell by the rock-hard coldness of that leg that Scarrow was dead and frozen solid. Again reminded of a frozen turkey leg, I wiggled one of his boots until it came away and set it aside.
Scarrow’s stiff body bobbed up and down in the water, dark hair fanning out from the back of his head.

That mass to my right shifted and I heard a sigh. “No, no,” I told it angrily. “Shut your cry-hole. I gotta make sure. Just going to press on the posterior tibial artery by his ankle, here…” When that yielded no result, I shifted my two fingers to his foot to check for a pulse in
the dorsalis pedis. It was hopeless. Father Scarrow’s heart had stopped long before I got to the Blue Ghost Tunnel. I sat back on my heels and let regret rinse down through me for a moment,
wondering if I could
have saved him if I’d come straight here when Schenk said he was missing, or if I’d stuck with him when he’d asked me to. He should never have come here alone. Was this my fault? Had I left him no
choice?

“No, that’s bullshit,” I said under my breath, angry with myself, angry at Scarrow, looking down at the distinct lack of rash on my DaySitter fingertips, where one touch of the holy man’s bare skin
should have made it flare. “He had my number. He could have called. He
should
have called.” I scowled at the bobbing corpse. “I
could have helped you. Why didn’t you call?”

Because he thought you were a lunatic
, my cruel brain reminded me.
Because he was pissed that you sent away his test-tube ghosts.

Just to the right of Scarrow’s abandoned boot was a crouching shadow. I pulled the evidence box to me, loosened the lid a bit, unzipped my backpack, and took out the scrying board to set on the
ground.

Without looking directly at the cowering shadow, I said bitterly, “Hello, John.”

The ghost did not react to my presence. It seemed to be staring at
Father Scarrow. Ghostly fingers clawed at a spectral mouth, padding at the filmy shape of his bottom lip. He had far more form than the congress had, clad in his civil war uniform, minus the hat. I
wondered if he’d been wearing the uniform when he died, or if Mama-Captain had dressed him in it for his burial, wherever that had taken place.

“John, do you see me?” I asked, putting the planchette on the
scrying board. I poked it toward HELLO. “Captain John Briggs-
Adsit, I’m calling you. Do you see me?”

The ghost’s eyes cut in my direction at once. In a voice barely louder than a breath, he told me, “You do not belong.”

“Well, no fucking offense, shitcart, but neither do you.”

He paddled his lips some more, and began to giggle. It was the worst thing I’d heard since the squeak of Ruby Valli’s rubber boots on snow when she was coming to kill me; my shoulders scrunched up with revulsion.

The specter stopped his lunatic gibbering with a jerk and looked up at me like he only just noticed me. “You do not belong here.”

“Uh huh, you said that already,” I said. “Did you hurt Father Scarrow, John?”

He started to moan, softly at first, building to an agonized howl from the belly. The tunnel amplified it and it echoed around us. I was impressed with the spirit’s ability to project so much sound. The
groan dropped abruptly. “It’s dark,” he whispered, sending one spectral arm out into the air around him. It trailed fog through the
air, stealing thermal energy as it went. “It’s too... it’s dark. I want to go. I want to go. I remain.” He started, and for the third time noticed me. “You do not belong here.”

“Oh, John,” I said with a sigh. “You stayed with him, at the end, didn’t you? You knew Father Scarrow was in trouble.”

His voice was joined by another; this one, I recognized.

“You do not belong here,” Father Scarrow’s spirit whispered. Then, confused, “I remain.” And, stronger now, “You do not belong here.”

I stood, and flashed my iPhone light around until I found a dark spot that wouldn’t light up. I squinted at it. “Don’t jizz a brick, holy
roller,” I said. “It’s not like I’m out here eatin’ corndogs with the devil. I was trying to save your skinny ass. Looks like I got here too
late.”

His shadow had no shape; Scarrow was having trouble forming more than an amorphous blob, but his voice was clear and gaining power. “The graves. The watery graves…”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re not drawing me back into the cemetery for a game of Graveyard Grab-ass, are you?”

I turned the planchette to GOODBYE and said, “Captain John
Briggs-Adsit, I release you. Go into the light, John, and rest in peace.” The shadow flickered, like someone was quickly turning a
light on and off, but when the flickering was done, still he remained. “Why isn't it over? Go into the light, soldier!”

John said, “You do not belong here.”

“Neither do you,” I damn near bellowed. “You’re dead, Captain. Fuck off into the light!”

Father Scarrow’s spirit made a mournful sound. Even dead he was a judgy judgypants.
Eat me, you skinny-jeaned stiff
.

“It’s Mama,” I figured. “Right, John? Maybe your mother wasn’t always dangerous, but she changed, didn’t she? The sicker you got, the worse she got.” The crouching shadow had nothing to say, but his eyes flew wide with terror. “You didn’t want to witness this shit, but you’re stuck with her.”

The shadow shifted. Ghostly hands slid over ghostly ears. The shadow began to rock back and forth just out of the range of the light from my phone. When I swung it in his direction, the shadow vanished. I turned the phone away only slightly and there he was, crouching and rocking.