13 Bullets Read online

  There were buildings around them—old, very old farm buildings. A two-story house, white with gingerbread trim. A barn with an open hayloft. A silo made of metal slats that looked as though it would leak pretty badly. Sunlight slanted through it and striped the side of the house.

  A black-and-white hex sign hung above the house’s front door, painted with geometric patterns more elaborate and more delicate than any she’d seen before, and Caxton had seen a lot of hex signs in her life. Typically they looked quaint and colorful. This one looked spiky and almost malevolent. It made her not want to go inside. Caxton saw a flash of yellow at one of the windows and saw a little blonde girl looking down at her. The girl twitched shut a curtain and was gone.

  “Urie!” Arkeley shouted. Presumably he was calling his friend. “Urie Polder!”

  “I’m here, I’m in here,” someone said from behind the door of the barn. The voice was very soft, as if coming from far away, and thick with an accent she hadn’t heard since she was a kid. They walked around the side of the door and into the barn and Caxton took off her sunglasses to let her eyes adjust to the barn’s dimness.

  She didn’t know what she’d expected to find inside. Perhaps cows or goats or horses. Instead the barn was used as a drying shed for some kind of animal skins hanging in almost-perfect darkness. They were draped on equally spaced racks about as tall as her shoulder. They were not uniform in shape or size, but they shared a pallor so intense that they were almost luminous in the dark barn. Caxton reached out toward one, wanting to know its texture. Before she could touch it, however, a shadow passed across its surface, or rather five small, oval shadows like the tips of fingers pressing on it from behind. She gasped and yanked her hand back. Had she made contact, she knew, she would have felt a hand pressing back against hers, and yet there was no one behind the skin, no one anywhere near.

  “What is this?” she demanded. Arkeley frowned.

  “Teleplasm,” he told her. She didn’t know what that meant. “Go ahead, head in,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I’ve had about enough of weird shit.” But his face didn’t change. He would wait there all day until she walked farther into the barn.

  Caxton walked between two racks and stepped into darkness. The shadow inside the barn was nearly complete—after a few steps she was inching forward in almost complete blackness, the only light coming from the luminescent skins on either side. The substance drew her eyes, since there was nothing else to look at. She couldn’t see her own hands held out before her, fingers outstretched, reaching for the far wall of the barn, but she could make out every tear and fold and blemish on the skins. They seemed to shimmer, or perhaps they were simply fluttering in a draft. They had an illusory depth, as if they were windows into some moonlit place. She felt like she could look through their textured surfaces, where faces seemed to pass and vanish as fast as breath on a cold pane of glass. The only thing about them that stayed the same from one moment to the next was their color, though occasionally from the corner of her eye she would think she had caught a flash of pigment, a reddish tinge like a bloodstain fading from view.

  She walked carefully so as not to trip in the darkness, but also so she wouldn’t touch the skins. After her first encounter with the ghostly fingers she’d had enough.

  She was nearly at the far end of the barn—or so she guessed, as the racks of skins suddenly stopped and beyond lay only darkness—when something seemed to brush her hair. She spun around and heard a faint voice whisper her name. Or had she imagined it? Before she’d even really heard the voice it was gone and the barn’s silence was so complete, so certain that it seemed impossible she had heard anything.

  “Arkeley,” she cried out, “what are you doing to me now?”

  There was no answer. She turned around and saw that the barn’s doors had been shut behind her. She was shut inside with the skins, the teleplasm, whatever that was, and she wanted to scream for help, or just scream, scream for the sake of screaming—

  “Laura,” someone said, and this time it wasn’t just in her head. But that voice—so familiar, so impossible. It was her father’s voice.

  He stood there. Behind her. One of the skins had lifted away from the rack, flapped away and folded itself into a mostly human shape. It had her father’s voice, and his eyes. It was wrapped in chains that rattled as he glided toward her, chains that shook and dragged on the floor of the barn, holding him down, holding him back. She put out a hand, either to touch him or to push him away, she didn’t know. He’d been dead for so long. She knew it wasn’t really him. Was it? Was it some remnant of him, left over after his flesh had rotted away?

  A smell of him, of shampoo and Old Spice, flooded the air around her. The temperature in the barn dropped twenty degrees in the space of a few seconds. He was close to her, so close she could feel the roughness of his hands. She could feel the hair on the backs of his arms, though they had yet to actually touch. She had missed him so much. She had thought of him every day, she had even thought of him when the vampire had held her up in the air the night before. Nothing had been as good since he’d died, nothing had been right, not even when she met Deanna, it hadn’t healed that wound.

  “Daddy,” she breathed, stepping into his embrace. And then the lights switched on and there was just a skin, like an animal pelt, hanging on a wooden bar.

  “Right you are,” someone said. A very human, very live voice. A man was standing behind the racks, a Caterpillar baseball cap on his head, his sideburns growing down to meet each other under his chin. His eyes were soft and deep. He was staring right at her. His voice was pure Pennsyltucky, down to the throat-clearing swallow he used like audible punctuation. “Right you are, Arkeley. They’s drawn to her, ahum. She’s ghost bait.”

  “It’s not the ghosts I’m concerned with,” Arkeley said. He was standing no more than ten feet away from her.

  The other man—Urie Polder, she presumed—stepped around one of his racks and came up to her. He was tall enough to look down into her face and try to hold her eye. She broke his gaze, though, as she imagined most people did when they met him. He was missing his left arm. The sleeve of his T-shirt dangled over a wooden branch that he wore in the arm’s place, a length of gray-barked tree limb that had a knotted elbow and even three twiglike fingers.

  What really freaked her out about Urie Polder’s arm wasn’t that it was made of wood. It was the fact that it moved. Its thin fingers wove around his belt buckle and hitched up his pants. His wooden shoulder and his flesh shoulder shrugged at the same time. “We oughter take her into the house, ahum. Vesta’ll do it there.”

  “Yes, alright,” Arkeley said. He looked worried.

  Caxton rubbed at her eyes with her hands. “My father—that was my father’s ghost. You showed me my father’s ghost just to—just to—” She stopped. “What the hell is teleplasm?”

  “Most folks’d say ‘ectoplasm,’ which is all but the same, but then you might have guessed,” Polder told her. “It’s ghost skin, ahum.”

  “How do you skin a ghost?” she demanded.

  “Well, now,” he said, grinning sheepishly, “not in any way the ghost might like, ahum.”

  17.

  I t was cold in the barn. It was cold outside for an autumn day, but in the barn it was pure winter. The two men turned toward the open barn door to leave, but she stood rooted to the spot. Caxton felt rage bubble and spit in her stomach. “Hold on,” she said, and surprisingly enough they both stopped. “That was my father. You have my father’s ghost hanging on a rack.” She had no idea how it had happened, no idea at all why her father’s ghost in particular was in the barn, but she wasn’t taking another step until she’d figured it out.

  “Well, now, ghosts, them’s tricky, ahum.” Polder scratched his chin with his wooden hand. “It don’t really come down to that.”

  She shook her head angrily. “I know his voice. I saw his eyes.”

  “Yes,” Arkeley said. “It might even have been him.
His spirit, anyway—or it could have been any kind of mischievous spook who wanted to toy with you. It might not even have been a human apparition. But whoever it was isn’t trapped here in one of these pelts. The teleplasms aren’t ghosts themselves. They’re more like clothing that ghosts can pick up and put on. It’s a substance that occupies this world and the other simultaneously, that’s all.”

  She nodded at Arkeley. “I can guess what this was all about, though I’m pissed off at you all the same. If the teleplasm reacts strongly to me, that means I’m somehow open to psychic phenomena. I’m a ‘sensitive.’”

  “Young lady, based on what we just saw, I think you could moonlight as a medium,” Polder said. “Please, we need to go inside the house. Your visit with your father made a lot of noise in the spirit world. Anyone who was listening would have heard it—and they might come looking for you.”

  As they pushed her toward the house she said, “So if I’m sensitive to ghosts I’m also sensitive to vampires. This explains how the vampire was able to hypnotize me so effortlessly last night.”

  Arkeley confirmed it. “I was surprised how little resistance you had. So I brought you here, where we can do something about it.”

  Polder stood before the hex sign over his front door and waved his arm at it, his real arm. He drew a complicated pattern on his forehead with his thumb, and something invisible relaxed. Caxton could feel the hex sign let go.

  “Urie is a hexenmeister. I imagine you know the term?”

  “Mostly where I grew up we called them pow-wow doctors, because they were supposed to have all kinds of secret Indian magic.” Caxton had never taken the old stories that seriously, but then she’d never really believed in vampires either. After her adventures of the previous night and what she’d seen in the barn, she was willing to suspend a little skepticism.

  They headed inside the house, where a woman waited for them. She wore a long black dress with a tight collar around her throat. Her blonde hair stood out from her head in enormous frizzy waves. Her long white fingers were covered in dozens of identical gold rings. “Vesta, it’s been too long,” Arkeley said, and he kissed her cheek. The woman’s eyes never moved from Caxton’s face.

  “I’ve got water on for tea. Darjeeling, just as you like it,” she said. “With sugar, not honey, and a touch of milk. Please, don’t be surprised, Laura Beth Caxton. I know a large number of things about you already. I intend to learn many more.”

  Caxton didn’t even open her mouth. She turned her head because she’d seen a flash of yellow out of the corner of her eye. It was the girl she’d seen in the window, and she vanished as quickly as she had before.

  “Now you, Special Deputy, you should be kinder to this one. She’s risking much to help you in your vicious crusade.”

  Arkeley hung his head.

  “Don’t look so glum. I have a little something for your wife’s foot, here,” Vesta said, and handed the Fed a plastic bag full of a reddish, fibrous plant matter. “Make it into a poultice and have her wear it every night until she feels better.”

  “You have a wife?” Caxton demanded.

  “I killed a vampire twenty years ago, and another one last night. I had to keep myself busy in the meantime,” he told her. He thanked Vesta for her remedy, and then he and Urie Polder went deeper into the house. Caxton was not invited. Instead Vesta Polder led her into a sitting room, a dark but tidy space with a raging fire and a lot of heavy, dark wooden furniture. Six straight-backed chairs stood against the wall. A round table with a velvet cloth sat in the middle of the room, a horsehair-stuffed armchair crouching behind it. Vesta took this chair, lounging across it with one leg hooked over an arm. Caxton stood before the table for a long while before she thought to take one of the chairs from the wall and put it across the table from Vesta.

  On the table were the teapot and a single teacup as well as a large, carved wooden box with a Chinese dragon on its lid and a slim deck of cards. “You’ve seen these before, in a movie,” she said, tapping the cards against her wrist and then shuffling them with one hand. “But you don’t know what they’re called. They’re Zener cards.” She fanned a few of them as if she were demonstrating a poker hand. “They are used by parapsychologists to test extrasensory perception. They possess other virtues, as well.” On one side each card showed a single symbol in thick black lines: a triangle, a star, a circle, three wavy lines, or a square. “Now,” she said, “your instinct is going to be to tell me what you see.” She cut the cards and held one up so that Caxton could see it—a star.

  “It’s a star,” she said.

  “Yes, dear, I know it is.” Vesta put the card down on the coffee table and opened the carved box. “I see all. Now, please. From here on don’t say anything. Don’t try to project, don’t give me any clues. Just look at the cards.”

  Caxton never touched the tea. One by one Vesta lifted the cards so that only Caxton could see them. After a moment she would put them facedown on the table. Occasionally she paused to study Caxton’s face as intently as if she were sketching it. Then she would reach into her Chinese box and take out a long brown cigarette and an equally long match. She would puff at the cigarette, filling the room with pungent, foul smoke until Caxton’s eyes watered. Then she would draw another card. This went on until she ran out of cards: then Vesta would shuffle the cards and start again. With each shuffle there were new instructions. Caxton should try not to look at the card. She should speak the card’s symbol in her mind, rather than visualizing it. She should try to clear her mind of thoughts altogether. Time seemed to slow down, or perhaps stop. Maybe there was something more in the cigarettes than tobacco.

  Vesta gathered up the deck and shuffled it again. “Alright. This time, try to think of a symbol other than the one you see.” Caxton nodded and got to it. After they’d gone through five or six cards, Vesta surprised her. “You’re worried about Deanna.”

  It was hard to concentrate on the card in front of her, but Vesta rattled it between two fingers and Caxton looked away from the other woman’s face. “She’s been out of work for a long time.”

  “She’s been having bad dreams. Violent dreams—you had to wake her up last night because you were scared she would hurt herself. She’s scared too, scared that you’ll be killed.”

  That makes two of us, Caxton thought.

  “Focus on the card in your head, even when you look at the card in my hand. She is afraid of the future, it sounds like to me. Afraid because she does not know if you will let her stay with you. Yet you have never even considered asking her to leave.”

  Caxton bit her lip. It was hard to even see the card in Vesta’s hand when she thought of Deanna. “You can read her mind, too? But she’s fifty miles from here.”

  Vesta sighed. She put down the cards and took another cigarette out of her box. It was her fifth so far. “I see the portion of her that exists within you.” She scattered the cards on the table. “This is hopeless. Some people grasp the technique in a moment, while others need additional help. Given enough time, enough sessions, I might teach you some rudiments of psychic self-defense. For now, this must do.” She opened her box again and took out a brass charm on a black cord. “Wear it always, and try not to make eye contact with anyone who might harm you.”

  Caxton took the pendant from Vesta and slipped it around her neck. The charm was a tightly wound spiral that she could pass off as jewelry. Caxton was glad for it—she had half expected a pentacle or a gruesome crucifix.

  “Those wouldn’t work for you. Their power requires faith which you do not possess.”

  Caxton touched the cool metal at her throat. Deanna. Now that she was thinking about Deanna she couldn’t stop. “It’s not just a question of not kicking her out. I don’t want to lose her the way I lost my mother.”

  Vesta stared at her and said nothing. It was as if she expected Caxton to tell her all about the sad, sorry tale of her mother’s insanity, the depression that had struck her after her husband’s death, her ev
entual suicide.

  “She hanged herself,” Caxton said, finally, blushing. “In her bedroom. A neighbor found her and cut her down and tried to make her look presentable. My mother had always been very proud of her looks. When I got there she was laid out on the bed and her hair had been brushed and someone had even put some makeup on her. But they couldn’t hide the rope burn all the way around her neck.”

  Vesta nodded and exhaled a plume of smoke. “You worry about losing Deanna. Well, that’s just natural. But when the time comes you’ll be ready to let her go. You’ll have to be. I see it as strongly as I see the waves in your mind’s eye.”

  That last bit confused Caxton—until she finally looked at the card in Vesta’s hand. It showed three wavy lines.

  “Now, come, let’s collect the boys.” They rose and headed into the kitchen, where Arkeley and Urie sat around an enormous table that had once been a door and now was mounted on plain wooden trestles. They had between them a pile of small objects, triangular in shape and almost pearlescent in color. Caxton picked one up and saw it was a vampire’s tooth. After killing the vampire the night before, the Fed must have pulled out all his teeth with a pair of pliers.

  Urie Polder swept the teeth into a satin bag and tied it closed with a thong. “Now that’ll do just fine, in way of payment, ahum.”

  “What are you going to do with those?” Caxton asked.

  “He’ll find something they’re useful for,” Vesta told her, ushering her toward the front door. “Waste not, want not.”

  As they drove away the little blonde girl watched them from the window. Caxton had not gotten to meet her, and didn’t even know her name.

  18.

  C axton drove to State College, only a dozen or so miles away, just to get out of the suffocating atmosphere of Pennsyltucky. The tree-lined avenues of the university town were full of students in bright and colorful parkas and windbreakers. They walked in pairs or groups of four or more, laughing amongst themselves, shouldering backpacks, their faces red with the cold but their heads bare. They were alive; that was the main thing. Very much alive, and their concerns were for the simplest things—sex, grades, beer. None of them wanted to skin a ghost or drain the blood of a living victim. They were young, too, unwrinkled, innocent in their own fashion. It did her good to see them.