Needle Rain (24 page)

The Bloodwoman stepped forward. “My ancestors say, like a ghost but not.”

“I think I may know what it is.” Thom Drager ran a hand through his hair.

Glossy and black, that hair, if stuck with a few twigs. Heloise fumed. He was a peacock, and one that sometimes turned into a snake. What could he know? His advice would be best approached with a long stick.

“I need to take somm.” He looked around at them all.

She burst into laughter then jammed her hand in her mouth to stop herself. Warmth flushed her face. “What a surprise that is, Mr. Drager!”

“Why?” asked Omi.

“Here,” said the Bloodwoman, holding out a fretwork box, as if she’d known what he would ask for.

“That can’t be a good idea,” Heloise said.

As quiet and sudden as death, the Thing was beside her.

Running was no longer possible. Beneath her and behind her, the chair squeaked in protest as she crammed herself backward.

She sucked in air to shout a warning...

The world
froze
.

Her heart stopped.

Silence hung, with only the faintest, prettiest ringing.

The Thing was inside her, having slipped, as easy as a scalpel, through skin, flesh, brain, and found her soul.

It clung tighter than any other ghost.

Yet it was ghost.

Where those before this had fitted themselves into her like a hand inside a glove and stayed there, moving the strings to make her dance, it never stopped spinning. Each revolution felt as though a flail of razors shredded her, turning her insides to mince.

She screamed then, a piercing scream that went on forever. Her mouth was open, her arms outflung, the tendons of her body were stretched and taut, and her eyes bulged from the strain. The sound seemed to shock those around her. Through her agony, she saw them all. A still montage of useless humanity.

The only one who moved was Drager.

He snatched the box from the woman, took out a beetle and planted it on his arm. Within seconds his eyes rolled up and he slid to the floor. Her scream went on, as Thom Drager slowly crawled toward her.

His arm stretched out.

He clamped a hand around her ankle.

Inside her the Thing kept spinning, the pain winding up inside her. Then she heard a voice.

Drager’s voice, murmuring calming words, nonsensical ones perhaps, as if he tried to calm a crazed animal. Something eased inside her and the pain wound down, losing that terrible writhing energy, spinning slower...slower.

She wasn’t screaming anymore.

She was on the floor.

Lying on her side on the cold timber, with her eyes closed, she huddled in on herself and listened as Drager began to tell a story.

“I wasn’t there when you needed me, I know that, and though I cannot change it, I want you to know that I love you. Somehow, when you died...” He paused as if the words had become too large and ungainly to say.

And Heloise had time to figure out that he spoke to his daughter, Leonie. This twisted ghost was she. It’d been Leonie seeking her. For vengeance? Or perhaps she somehow remembered that promise, that Heloise would keep her safe.

“When you died, this other person, somehow, must have tangled up with you. You have to free yourself, darling. I’ll help you if I can.”

Dada?

The child’s voice stunned Heloise. Tentatively she reached out her senses and found the girl
there,
a part of the Thing, but woven between the motes of the girl’s
self
was the ghost of another. This other was someone who had been so distorted they were barely even a remnant of a human.

As she struggled to remain conscious, Heloise realized, the gheist weapon had done this.

Spliced ghosts. They’d been cut and tangled by the insane energy discharged by Tinman’s gheist weapon, Toad. No wonder. Kill someone with a ghost and you make a mess of a human. On this freakish occasion, things had gone one terrible step further.

What happened after that blurred in her mind. She knew that Drager gently coaxed Leonie and the other one apart and she felt the release and the awful sadness as Leonie left her. This would be the last time Drager could talk to his daughter.

The sadness, was it hers, or was it Drager’s? Both.

Then she was alone, except for the other ghost that clung to her. Drager had no power over it. This one was hers.

If she’d crumpled then and given in, the ancient ghost might never have found its way out. Instead she crept close to it, examining the hold it had on her body. She could see the fading imprints where Leonie had been. They were revealed, painted in a stark coat of flamboyant white.
There
. She peeled away its grip in one place, and
there
...and
there
.

The ghost reluctantly released each tendril from each niche until all were done bar one. She wriggled that one loose also. A moment later, Heloise felt a subtle shift. The ghost sucked all the shreds of its spirit into one fragile mass then left her body.

Free.

That was her final coherent thought before a cooling oblivion settled over her.

Like a well-trained dog left off its leash, Samos found he was free to roam the ship. Except this dog yearned to do things to his master no respectable pooch could ever imagine. After a day without her, Samos cornered Tatiana in the outer room and asked her the reason for abstinence.

“Because,” she said, with a calculating yet mischievous glint in her eye, while carefully keeping her hands behind her back. “We need to show restraint. Because I like you too much to throw you away so quickly.”

That explanation had lasted another two days. So he’d asked again, and received a similar answer. “No! Why? Because the next time is to be the last!”

The last. Nevertheless, it puzzled him that she delayed because he could see the smaller signs of illness returning.

On the fifth day, he begged her on his knees to relent in front of half the crew up on deck. By then they’d left the Million Isles behind them and a thin line of cloud and some visiting seagulls signaled the approach of land. As on any other day, he scarcely noticed the crew, they were nobodies and the world circled around Tatiana, just as it should.

“Tonight,” she whispered.

Elation filled him. Tonight. The last time. And on the surface felt no dismay, only a strange kind of relief. The prospect of being the one who gave his love the fuel to stay alive was enough to satisfy him.

On the way back to the cabin, almost at the door, Joss approached him. His smaller hand fumbled and tried to place something into Samos’s hand. The jade pendant! Its aura warmed him. With the ease of his Immolator reflexes, he turned his palm away and stepped quickly back. The pendant tumbled to the deck.

“Samos!” Joss hissed. “Take it!”

He could have shouted then, but Joss was still a friend. “I cannot,” he said, quietly yet firmly. “I must not touch it. I’m sorry.” The command given to him that first night held him.

Yet as he took a step, his boot kicked the pendant and it slid, airborne just enough to clear the lip and zip beneath the door. He hadn’t touched it, not really. Once inside, with the door closed he ignored the stone, though his boot caught it again. It skittered across the room, disappearing under some cupboard. It wasn’t any business of his. It could stay there, where no one could see it.

Outside the wall of her enchantment, his true self seethed. So close and yet so far.

****

Through the fringe of her eyelashes, Heloise watched the room beside her bed change in fits and starts as she woke and slept and woke again. The timber chair beside the wall mostly had Bull squashed into it but at times he was joined by the little priest who was called Omi, or the girl, Mara, or Grunt, treadling and nesting on someone’s lap, and once by the Bloodwoman, Momma Abeywa. Never Thom Drager.

She wondered where he was. Grunt hopped onto the bed, did umpteen circles to settle in at the bottom of the bed, and lay down nose to furry tail, purring. A day passed and then another night, and to her relief, no ghosts arrived at all. It made for a peaceful sleep.

At the trilling call of a blue-throated honeyeater that flitted onto the windowsill of the room, Heloise woke and stayed that way. The world was still out there and she couldn’t, shouldn’t, stay in bed forever.

For the first time in ages she could see hope on the horizon. She whispered a small prayer, to give thanks. Leonie was at peace, and in her passing, a gift had been given. Having disentangled one ghost from her being, Heloise felt she could do this again. She moved her fingers before her face. Each miniscule place inside her – the bright white places, the linking points that the ghosts used to control her body – each was mapped in her mind. As far as she could tell without actually doing it, she knew how to pry them loose. Ah yes, the next ghost who tried would get a nasty surprise.

She swung her legs across and sat on the edge of the bed. She wriggled her limbs, leaned this way and that, and listened to what her body was telling her. Aches in legs, arms, the back of her throat, as well as the other niggling pains she’d learned to ignore that came with the broken needles. Nothing more.

Bull sprang to his feet. “Don’t move!”

“Why?” She shut her eyes, breathed in through her nose and found it filled with delightful aromas: coffee, honey blossoms, salt, and freshly cut timber. In the distance an axe
thwocked
into wood.

“Because. You’re sick?”

She stood and stretched, joints popping, jaw cracking, feet tingling. “No. I’m not. Where’s breakfast? I’m starving.”

“Lunch, you mean.” He grinned. “That’s my girl! Oh!” He strode over. “Need a hand?” Awkwardly he put his hand beneath her arm in support.

“No. Bull...I can walk. But first get out of here. Shoo! I have to get changed.”

She was wearing only a long-sleeved cotton shift with no underwear.
Hope that Bloodwoman dressed me.
Maybe they don’t use underwear?

In a chest nestled a pile of folded clothes. The two sets that she’d brought. Plain ordinary leather leggings, brown shirt and vest. Underneath that was the fancy blue set with the teardrop leggings, blue tunic and silvered-steel mesh top.

“You are it,” she muttered, pulling out the blue set. “Yes.”

On fine days the dining area for the orphanage was outside under an awning. After Bull scrounged up some goat stew and bread, Heloise sat and ate her fill. Bull mostly leaned back in his seat and did more smiling while she ate. The local lizard life had Grunt enthralled, and he prowled and pranced, hunting the gray-backed skinks, scattering leaves as he swatted in vain.

“You know,” Heloise said, pursing her mouth and pointing with her spoon. “This place’s been built quite well. Except for the foundations on that far block. There’ll be subsidence there if I’m not mistaken. Give or take three or four years.”

“What?” Bull’s forehead creased.

Oops.
Where had
that
come from? A chill trickled through her bones. The architect. The time at her apartment when she’d woven a mat from thread. Milly’s talent. Knowledge, skills, were filtering through from the ghosts. She swallowed the mouthful of stew that had been sitting in her mouth. It went down like a cold lump.

She tapped the spoon against the bowl while rubbing her temple, trying to think. It was too early for revelations.

“Are you sure you don’t want some?” she asked Bull for the third time.

“Nope. Besides, here comes that little priest.”

The priest. Omi.

“Good. You are up.” He bowed with his hands together. “There is someone who needs to speak to you.”

“Who?” she asked, suspiciously.

“I think you know. He’s there.” He pointed up the slope, toward the sea.

“Hmm. Before I go, can you tell me why there are no ghosts here?” She waggled the spoon about.

“None, you mean, apart from the strange one that followed you? That would be because of an arrangement I have with the Bloodmen. They believe Vassbinder’s ghost remains inside the ruins of his mansion. I am doing research on Vassbinder and they hope it will help to correct some past wrongs that he did. Does that suffice? Please, Miss Ormitrad, go to him.” He walked away, sandals flip-flopping.

By the time she’d decided it didn’t quite suffice, he was gone. How could his research right an ancient wrong? Why had he made that arrangement?

Bull made as if to rise.

“Stay here, Bull. Please?” she said.

He glowered.

“I
have
to see him by myself.”

A track led up the slope to the windblown cliff above the sea. It was a long walk and it gave her too much time to think. What would she say to him?

She found Thom Drager sitting under a pandanus palm. He was motionless and looking out to the flat horizon. He’d tied his black hair into a clumsy braid that rested down the middle of his back. The deluge from the storm had drained away quickly in the sandy soil and the sky was clear of all but a flimsy scarf of white to the south east while the sea was clear of waves any higher than a seagull’s chin.

The little girl, Mara, was amusing herself nearby, humming to herself while she dug holes with a small spade and planted seeds.

Heloise stopped dead as she drew closer. Climbing all over Thom Drager, like miniature orange goats on a mountain, were innumerable somm beetles.

Her words came out squeaky. “What, in all the hells and heavens, are you doing?” She moved round to stand at his side. His eyes were shut.

“Regaining my composure, I hope. Resisting temptation. Either that or I’m making a fool of myself, Miss Ormitrad.” Despite his flippant tone, sweat trailed down his body, darkened his shirt, and stuck a few strands of his hair to his face.

Taking somm again had done this. The demon he’d fought off, his addiction, was back.

“Heloise will do. And have you resisted temptation? I ask not to mock you, but because this seems excessive.”

“So far, I have. With only one, I might have doubted myself. This way, I know for sure.” He opened his eyes. “Heloise? Then, you should call me Thom.”

Mara said quietly, still concentrating on her digging, “His real name is Mister Noname, but everyone here calls him Thom.”

“Oh, do they? Um, sure. Thom.” She shrugged, trying to be nonchalant. “It would be silly to stand on formality after what happened.”

Suddenly, inexplicably, she was embarrassed, feeling like a teenager out with her first boyfriend. Stupid, but there it was.

To cover it, she folded her legs under her and sat, after checking the ground for beetles. The warmth of the earth soaked into her. Autumn it might be, officially, but nature hadn’t quite decided. An ant climbed up and over her ankle.

She drew in a deep breath just to smell the fragrances: The late-blossoming flowers, the clean salt of the sea, and the hints of crushed grass and fish. Beaches always smelled of fish.

“This is so beautiful.” Anchored a half mile out was a long, low ship. With sails furled, it wallowed in the lazy ocean swell. “There’s a ship out there.”

“Can’t say I know ships. It’s pretty enough.” Thom slowly exhaled. “Heloise, I don’t know where to start talking with you.”

“That goes for me too. All the bad stuff...” She waved her hand and grimaced. “It seems a long time ago. At least, after the other night, it does.” She wound a finger into a lock of her hair and twisted it – a nervous habit she’d thought she’d broken.

He nodded, watching her finger twisting and untwisting the hair. “When I first came here, I tried to forget the past, the places where I went wrong, but it will always be there, Now, I’m just happy to try and fix what I can.”

“Like the other night.” When he’d been inside her head. Her face grew hot. Those dark eyes of his, were enough to make her want him in her bed, let alone her head.

When he was a hundred miles away, she’d found it easy to hate him, but now, right next to him and able to see him as real, she was letting her body do her thinking.

Disgusted with herself, she made her next words harsh ones. “When I first saw you, I thought you were an idiot.” She indicated the beetles. “Addicted to these, despite, well, a good life being there for you.”

His forehead wrinkled. “My wife had died. That’s not a trivial thing.” He composed himself, nodded. “I’ll give you that. Maybe I was a fool.”

“Maybe? On the way here, all I could think of was sticking my dagger in you. I dreamed of you bleeding, of vengeance, of terrible vengeance.” She stabbed a twig into the soil next to her ankle. “I planned to betray you and tell the enforcers about you afterward, even if you did get the needles out of me.”

There was a long silence.

“And that confession was meant to make me like you?” He smiled sadly. “Maybe we should start again.”

Frustrated she blew out through her nose. She could go round and round in circles forever. And tomorrow she could be dead. “I’m telling you that because after last night, I find that I understand you better. I don’t hate you, even if it seems I should.”

Damn, she’d almost said
like you
instead of
understand
. But was that true? Throwing aside all her distaste wasn’t going to happen in an instant.