Secrets of the Hanged Man (Icarus Fell #3) (An Icarus Fell Novel) (7 page)

“Oh, oh. Bad luck,” she exclaimed.

“
No way.”

I hope not.

“This is the place,” I said and headed for the front door of one of the few houses with a complete set of street numbers.

Winter-dead grass lined the chipped and cracked sidewalk leading to the house and grew through the fissures in the concrete. No toys cluttered the postage stamp-sized lawn, no garbage or corpses of major appliances; in fact, a few areas of dense weed suggested gardens long since overgrown. Once upon a time, someone cared enough about this house to make it a home, but that time passed a while ago.

I climbed the four steps to the front porch, my fingers trailing along the top of the rusted iron railing in desperate need of a coat of Tremclad, and the ache in my calf flared as I reached the second stair. I paused and flexed my foot to stretch out the muscle before finishing the climb.

Most of the varnish had peeled off the door, leaving the wood weathered; a deep crack ran from beneath the clouded glass peephole to within two inches of the bottom, and a few flakes of gold clung desperately to the doorknob.

I reached out and rattled the knob.

“
It’s locked,” I said after giving it a jiggle.

“
Want me to try?”

“
I’ve got his,” I said holding up my hand to stop her. “I’ve opened doors before. Started cars, too.”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

I rested my hand on the cold knob and pictured the inner workings of the lock bending to my will, falling into place. Tricky, given I didn’t know the guts of a lock from the inner working of a trumpet, but I’d opened locks before. After a few seconds, I gave it another twist. Still locked.

“
What the Hell?”

I bit my bottom lip, waiting for the inevitable smart ass comment to exit the eight-year-old-with-attitude’s mouth, but none came.

Good. Maybe she’s realized who the adult is here.

I gripped the knob tighter, concentrated harder. I pictured a key sliding into the lock and turning with the snickt sound Wolverine’s claws make in the
Xmen
comics. Nothing. With my lips pressed together tight and eyes closed, I imagined the knob performing as it should, the door opening.

Still locked.

In desperation, I envisaged Tom Cruise’s character in
Mission Impossible
inserting his two little lock picking tools into the keyhole and finding a way to manipulate the thing. When Tom didn’t work either, I gritted my teeth and recalled a million cop shows and movies in which the police man kicks the door in with a well placed shoe beneath the doorknob. After no luck picturing it flying open, I decided to put the door-boot into practice in real life.

Before I could, the knob tugged itself out of my grasp and the door swung inward. I took a pace back and stared, astonished and impressed with myself, until Dido stepped into the doorway. I frowned.

“How did--”

“
The back was unlocked,” she said, moving aside to allow me past. I didn’t appreciate the broad grin on her face. “We’re just in time.”

I went by, studying her face to make sure she didn’t find too much joy in upstaging me. She did.

The front door opened onto a small entryway with scuffed linoleum and a tiny closet packed full of jackets, sweaters and shoes. I sidestepped the pile of footwear spilling out of it, a soiled pair of white athletic socks amongst them that made me think of my son, and went into the living room beyond.

Soap opera characters I shouldn’t have recognized but for the fact they’d graced the cover of
Soap Opera Digest
for the last twenty-five or thirty years danced across the TV screen. A woman sat on the couch, her back to us, while an exact but not-as-solid replica of her stood beside the television staring at her. I took a few more steps into the room and got a closer look at the body lounging on the sofa.

The woman was around my age—late thirties, as much as it pained me to admit—but the years hadn't been kind to her. Overweight and unkempt, she wore a fuzzy housecoat well past its fuzziest days. The tie around her waist had come undone and fallen open to reveal a flannel nightgown beneath worn thin in spots and one slipper dangled precariously from the big toe of her foot resting on the coffee table. Her tousled hair hadn’t been introduced to a brush yet that day and in her mouth, I saw the remnants of the sandwich responsible for choking her. The murder weapon. An accomplice smudge of jam on her cheek blended with her purple flesh.

“What’s happening?” the woman’s spirit said.

She appeared better than her dead self on the couch—thinner, more fashionable, hair parted in the middle and brushed back from her face—but with a sadness to her mien. I took a breath, giving myself a second to decide the best way to break it to her—a part of my job that continued to bring me discomfort.

“You’re dead,” Dido blurted out in the same tone she might use while playing a game of tag and touching the woman, proclaiming her ‘it’.

I let out an annoyed breath and stopped myself from giving the young girl shit for her lack of tact. She shouldn’t be here, so how could I expect her to know how to act? I’d find time to explain it to her later, after I chased the frightened soul as she ran away from her ultimate fate the way my first harvest did when I made the same mistake.

The muscles in my thighs tensed, waiting for her to make a run for it. She didn’t.

The spirit contemplated her corpse, probably wishing she’d chosen different attire to be found dead in, or regretful she hadn’t wiped the unattractive glob of jam off her cheek. Possibly considering Cheerios might have made a better breakfast choice, too. After fifteen seconds, she looked back at me, wide-eyed and fearful.

“It’s okay,” I pulled the scroll out of my coat pocket for a quick memory jog, “Meg Medlin-Williams. Everything will be okay.”

She shook her head. “He did this.”

Remember the line on my forehead that shows up whenever I’m puzzled? It made a return appearance. I raised an eyebrow in an attempt to disguise it, but she’d turned away, staring off into space. My lips parted, getting ready to ask who she meant, when Dido decided she wanted to be involved.

“
No one did this to you,” she said. “It’s your time.”

Apparently, she didn’t quite understand when I told her to stay out of the way, so I shot her a look I figured should make it obvious I meant her to be quiet and leave this to the professional, but she took a step toward the woman anyway. I slipped between them, blocking her out.

“I’m going to get you where you need to go,” I told her, crossing to her to put my arm around her shoulders. Comforting and preventing her from fleeing. “Everything will be fine.”

“
He killed me,” she said, her voice shaking. “He killed them all.”

“
No, Meg. The little girl is right.” I winked at Dido and she glared back at me; I took mental note for the future, filing away her dislike of being called a little girl. “No one did this. Your time has come, is all. It happens to everyone.”

Well, most of us.

I led her past her corpse and to the open front door. She hesitated crossing the threshold, so I gave her a gentle push to keep her going. I didn’t worry the escort angel might tire of waiting and leave because they literally had nothing else to do, but I didn’t want to spend my entire day here, either.

“
Will I be safe from him now?”

“
Who, Meg?” Dido asked, forgetting my threatening expression. “Who did this to you?”

She looked at the girl, then at me. Fear might as well have been the color of her eyes.

“My son,” she said, voice trembling. “He’s the devil.”

Cory followed the trail through the park, his boots squelching in mud rimed with frost. Normally, he avoided the park whenever he could. Too many people frequented it, and he didn’t enjoy being around people, but today, with the sun shining on his face and the cold nibbling at his flesh more than usual, his mood bordered on a place it hadn’t visited in a very long time: happiness.

And he suspected Trevor Fell was somehow the cause of it.

He didn’t know how or why, but he sensed he’d found a person with whom he shared a kinship, someone who might understand him. If he had to remain in this world, Trevor might make it a sliver closer to bearable.

His street dead-ended at the edge of the park and he stomped his boots on the pavement as he emerged from the trail, knocking off some of the mud clinging to the sides and stuck in the treads. For a change, he didn’t dread returning home to the depression living inside his house, or to the mother who avoided him.

Maybe he’d even speak to her today.

He sauntered along the street, humming the one Shadows Fall tune he remembered and contemplating the pattern of dirt splashed across the toes of his boots like a mobile Rorschach test. The shape on his right boot resembled a bat, the left nothing but a random blob. What would a shrink say about that?

Cory looked up at the sound of a door closing ahead of him and saw a man, a child and a woman emerge from a house.

His house.

He stopped, watching, then drifted to his right to hide behind a rusted washing machine sitting on the Burns’ lawn, a decades-old memorial to the failure of the Maytag repairman. Once, in his youth, he’d shut a cat inside and, as he observed the three people descend the steps from his front door, he wondered if its bones might still be trapped within.

The woman with the group was undoubtedly his mother, though she appeared younger and thinner than he ever remembered her. She wore a flower-patterned spring dress he’d never seen before and no coat. Cory’s forehead creased—he didn’t notice the winter chill, but his mother often complained about how cold it was inside the house and never went out without a coat between September and June.

The girl walking beside his mother couldn’t have been more than ten years old, twelve at the most. Her nondescript red short-sleeved tee-shirt and blue pants shimmered as she walked, as though he saw her from a distance on a hot summer day. The man with them wore a dark overcoat. Cory sensed a familiarity about him, but too much distance between them made it difficult to be certain.

Are they arresting her?

Stranger things happen, but it didn’t explain her weight loss and reverse ageing. Cory peered out from behind the washing machine, watching them move away and waiting for them to disappear around the corner before hurrying to his house. The unfamiliar but pleasant sensation he’d experienced walking through the park dissipated, draining out of him as though someone poked a tiny hole in a water balloon and he left a wet trail behind him with every step closer he got to home.

He hurried up the uneven sidewalk, past his mother’s long-abandoned flower gardens, and jumped up the four steps in one bound. His fingers gripped the knob, twisted, pushed.

Unlocked. His mother never left the door unlocked.

He rushed through, leaving the door open behind him and tromping muddy footprints across the entryway floor. Incredibly, his mother sat on the couch, right where he’d left her, the TV blaring its insidious drone of afternoon romance and stomach-turning intrigue.

Cory stared, mouth agape. She didn’t turn to look at him; she never did anymore.

“Ma?”

She neither responded nor acted as though she heard, but why should he expect her to? He rarely heard her voice except when she whispered to some friend or other on the phone. Of course, it was rare he bothered to speak to her, so her opportunities to respond were severely limited.

He tracked mud to the end of the couch, his leg bumping noisily against the table supporting last night’s empty pizza box, and she still didn’t move, but now Cory saw why. For a change, it wasn’t her hatred of him and all the things that happened in her life since his birth that caused her silence. For once, disdain and fear of her only living child didn’t keep her from speaking. With the calmness of fulfilled expectation, Cory regarded his mother’s purple face, her bulging eyes staring at the TV.

He knew this day would come. They all died eventually.

But then who was...?

Something clicked in his mind, a voice in his head whispering the answer in his ear. He rushed back to the door and stared down the street, searching for the three people, already knowing they were long gone, but he remembered where he’d seen the man before, and knowing meant he knew what happened here.

Cory returned to the living room, hunted down the remote control sitting on the couch against his mother’s thigh—within easy reach before she lost the ability to reach—and clicked off the TV. He tossed the remote on the table beside the slipper fallen off her foot as she choked, then kneeled in front of her, holding himself level with her dead, staring eyes. A glob of jam on her cheek distracted him; he stroked it off with his finger.

“
What did you tell him?” He wiped the jam on her robe, smearing it across the pocket. Her bulging eyes stared and he thought he saw reproach in them. “What did you say?”

Silence.

***

Drops of water fell from the tips of Cory’s fingers, ran down his chest and arms and legs. His hair stuck to his back, plastered between his shoulder blades as the remnants of his shower circled the slow-running drain. The wetness on his skin cooled quickly, even in the steamy washroom, and the cool porcelain edge of the sink pressed against the top of his thighs. With two swipes of his hand, he cleared a circle in the center of the misty mirror and stared at his own face.

He peered deep into his own brown eyes, so different from his mother’s blue ones, and wondered for the thousandth time what color his father’s eyes had been. She would never talk about him other than to say he’d died before Cory’s birth. And yet she’d given him his name: Medlin.

Cory leaned closer, inspecting the two weeks of stubble peppering his smooth, seventeen-year-old skin. He rubbed his hand across the whiskers, touched their roughness, heard the dull scrape of his palm passing over them.

He sneered, examined his teeth, and found them no pointier than anyone else’s, or longer, whiter, sharper or more yellow. No prominent canines to tear flesh. He passed his tongue over them, found their surface as smooth and benign as ever, then opened his mouth wide: pink tongue, normal-sized mouth, the thing dangling at the back in the right place. His jaw didn’t detach in the manner of a python swallowing its prey.

He shut his mouth and pressed his lips together, regarded the face that might have been the face of any seventeen-year-old boy for another moment before shifting his focus lower.

The skin on his chest was smooth with a few hairs getting their start around his nipples. Other than being skinnier than other boys, nothing unusual. Cory turned and stood on his toes, craning his neck to see his back in the mirror.

An ugly purple bruise made the bump at the top of his ass crack noticeable. He prodded the spot with his index finger and winced at the pain; it didn’t just resemble a bruise, it hurt like one, too. To anyone else, it might have appeared the injury of a teen who fell off his skateboard. But he didn’t board, and the hard lump under the black-and-blue flesh had grown larger in the three weeks since he first noticed it. It started off a small mark, then became a bump, but it now protruded three inches from his body. The swelling hurt when he sat and was becoming difficult to hide beneath his pants. If it continued growing, he’d have to wear a long coat to conceal it.

He pressed it again, his teeth clenched against the pain. His finger sank into tender, swollen flesh until it found a bony strip at its center. He exerted more pressure.

The bump moved. It didn’t shift, the result of his curious prodding, the thing jumped away like it tired of his examination.

“Fuck me.”

Cory jerked his finger away and lifted up farther on his toes to get a better view, his calves protesting. Nothing there but the purple-black mark. He turned sideways, dancing en pointe, an awkward ballerina seeing how far the protrusion stuck out from his body. It didn’t move again.

Exasperated, Cory lowered his heels to the slippery, wet floor and moved to turn away when a mark on his back caught his attention. He took a step toward the mirror, his neck cranked around owl-like to get a closer view.

An inch above his right shoulder blade, a black square the size of a postage stamp marred his otherwise smooth back. He stared at it, mouth open a crack, then reached his left hand over his shoulder, stretching to touch it.

His fingertip grazed a spot not merely a discoloration, but hard.

Cory rubbed the pad of his finger back and forth across it and found the patch neither smooth nor entirely rough. It reminded him of a piece of beach glass, its surface dulled and pitted by rocks and the sea, or the top of a fingernail in need of a manicure. He rubbed a circle over and around it, fingered its hard edge disappearing into his skin, clicked the tip of his fingernail against it and frowned.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t there the last time he showered.

He yanked the towel from the rail beside the bathtub and threw it over his head, inhaled the scent of fabric softener as he dried his hair, then his arms, legs and chest, leaving his back until last. As he drew the towel across his shoulders, the hard spot moved, wiggling against his flesh. It grated on him, out of place and annoying.

Angry, Cory threw the towel to the floor and groped over his shoulder again, digging at the top and sides of the hard, rough spot. They extended beneath his skin, disappearing into his flesh, but not the bottom.

He inserted the edge of his fingernail underneath the free side and pulled it up; it moved, so he tugged harder, until it hurt. The underside seemed attached to his skin, like a fingernail.

Or a scale.

***

Cory dressed in the same black pants and long-sleeved black shirt he’d worn before having his shower. The loose waist of his jeans threatened to slide off his hips, so he slipped a belt through the loops and buckled it before heading to the front door to don his boots and dig a long coat out of the hall closet to disguise the bump.

“
I’m going out, Ma,” he said and snickered.

How long had it been since he last bothered to tell her when he left? Or spoke to her at all?

Or her to me?

Her death had done wonders to improve their relationship.

With a scrape of hangers, he shifted aside a parka they should have gotten rid of years before, three of his mother’s coats he presumed would hang there until they rotted, and a wind breaker she’d bought him at a yard sale and he’d never worn before finding the long gray coat for which he hunted.

He yanked the overcoat free and the hanger sprang off the bar in the closet, landed on the floor amongst the pile of shoes and boots with a clatter. For a second, he considered rehanging it, but decided not to and pulled the coat on instead. His late stepfather had been broader than him across the shoulders, so it hung loose, but the sleeves were the right length and the back of it hung to his knees, hiding the disfigurement above his ass. He stuck his feet into his boots, buckled them, and flipped up the coat’s collar in an attempt to look cool instead of resembling an undercover cop or a used car salesman. He seized the door knob, jerked the door open a crack, then stopped; something didn’t seem right.

It was too quiet.

He went into the living room, grabbed the remote control and turned the TV on. Some reality show he’d never seen winked to life on the screen: three young women and two men arguing about something unimportant. He tossed the remote onto the couch beside his mother’s leg and leaned down, kissed her on the forehead.

Her cool flesh on his lips made him shiver. This close, he inhaled the soapy aroma of her cheap body lotion and the odor of the peanut butter and jam sandwich lodged in the back of her throat. His stomach rumbled at the smell of it, the first time in over a week it showed signs of hunger.

“
There you go, Ma. Hope you like that show,” he said stepping away and going to the open door. “I’ll be home late. Don’t wait up.”

With a quiet laugh to himself, Cory went out into the night, locking the door behind him.