Velveteen (34 page)

“Do any of you remember the story of the psychic in the early 1900s whose séances were known far and wide for their horrifyingly realistic finales?”

Velvet had no clue what she was talking about, but Isadora nodded, of course. She was one of the few in the crowd who did. Though Velvet suspected the girl knew nothing.

“Well, it was said,” Miss Antonia continued, “that he channeled the spirits of the dearly departed. And when they were through using him as a vessel, they became solid and spewed from his every orifice in a milky translucent cloud of gas that all present could see.”

There was a waller in the audience. No one had seen such a thing, and few had even heard of it. Velvet certainly hadn’t. In all her days of body thieving and breaking up sham séances, there’d never been any indication that the laymen had ever witnessed her presence, and she didn’t recall ever seeing a soul conjured in such a way.

Nick leaned over and whispered, “Have you ever had gas at a séance?”

He was such a dork. But despite Velvet’s decidedly highbrow sense of humor, she couldn’t contain a giggle, and elbowed him in the ribs. “Stop it. You’re going to get us in trouble.”

He shook in silent laughter next to her, his leg quivering
against hers. The sensation rippled through her, and she couldn’t help but leave her leg right where it was.

“Well, it was long believed that this medium was, in fact, legitimately gifted and that no one before him, nor since, had such an ability,” Miss Antonia continued. “That was not the case, however. In the summer of 1952, I was called to a Salvage operation in the small coastal town of Newport, Oregon. Shadowquakes weren’t nearly as violent in those days, and this one barely registered as an inky smudge obscuring the passing sparkle of souls above us. The station agent warned us, however, that there was something different about this disturbance, some undercurrent of evil that seemed to link directly between the lands of the living and the dead. Our team’s body thief’s name was Aloysius Clay.”

There was a familiar darkness in Miss Antonia’s eyes as she spoke the name, a tension to her jaw that Velvet suspected only she’d picked up on.

“He was a bright young man in the prime of his experience. He led us through the cracks to a string of beachside cabins called the Oasis Motel. It was rainy and clearly the off-season, as the streets were predominantly empty, except for several cars scattered around this one particular cabin, a gray clapboard box with a single window obscured by thick curtains. I remained ethereal on this particular mission, as the nearest dead were several miles inland and Clay reassured us he’d be able to handle the situation with little trouble. The motel clerk was his target, and he made short work of securing the use of the elderly man’s body. If only he’d found someone with more strength.”

Her words were ominous; her tone suggested that this story was not going to end well. Velvet scooted in closer to Nick, drawing Isadora’s foul gaze. She reveled in it, making a point to rest her head on the boy’s shoulder in a pointedly affable, totally non-girlfriendy kind of way. The other girl scowled and whipped her head back toward the stage.

“Clay rapped on the door to the cabin, but there was no response. Using the clerk’s keys, we entered and found the twin beds disassembled and propped against the wall. The lone table from the room had been moved to its center and was surrounded by several stunned men and women. Farthest from our vantage, a young woman, twenty-five years old perhaps, tossed her head back and belched a clammy fog from her mouth. It curled and glugged into the air, syrupy and sickening. One of the women in attendance fainted, falling forward onto the table with a bang.”

Velvet noticed that Logan was on the edge of his seat, mouth wide open, probably still hungover. Luisa grimaced as the Salvage mother continued her tale.

“Jerry, one of our poltergeists, sprang across the space and attempted to tackle the girl. She did appear to be possessed, after all, and the cloud of pearlescent gas was still issuing from inside her. What happened next marked the end of my tenure as an official undertaker, stripped down to the bone my will to protect purgatory. Jerry did not tumble out of the back of this girl but rather howled in pain from inside her and churned out of her mouth, transformed into what we now understand to be authentic ectoplasm. His cries of pain were excruciating.”

Logan clamped his hands to his mouth.

“Clay rushed forward, gathering all the strength he could muster from the withered man’s frame, and struck the girl. She rose from her seat, hands still clasped to the men at her right and left.

“She bellowed, ‘Die in this mortal coil, unclean spirit.’

“And the cloud dissipated, her eyes cleared up, and she sat there looking around, bewildered and confused. Later, Clay questioned the girl, and she told him that she didn’t remember a thing, that she didn’t even live in Newport but in Salem. How she got to be in the Oasis Motel surrounded by these people, with the death of our poltergeist Jerry on her hands, remains a mystery.”

Miss Antonia leaned forward and held up one excruciatingly long finger as a warning. “But there are theories that this girl was an instrument of some unidentified spirit acting from purgatory through her slight frame to disrupt our Salvage team. And disrupt our team, it did. Jerry was gone, Clay disappeared shortly thereafter and was never seen again near the dormitories, and our second poltergeist transferred to another quarter. As you can see, I stayed, but in a different capacity entirely.”

Why is she telling this particular story now?
Velvet wondered. Did she suspect that the revolution and Aloysius Clay had access to the kind of horrific power that had killed Jerry?

Velvet raised her hand.

Miss Antonia scanned the crowd with tortured eyes. Storytelling might be sustenance for some, but it certainly didn’t work that way for this storyteller. Her eyes brightened slightly when she lit on Velvet waving madly. “Yes, child?”

“Is there any indication that the events of that night might be happening again?”

Miss Antonia shook her head. “No one knows for certain. There’ve been instances of Salvage teams arriving late at the locus of a disturbance and finding nothing but bewildered humans with no memory of anything happening at all.”

“Yes,” Velvet said, “but couldn’t those have been …” She hesitated to say it aloud.

The crowd around her gawked, wide-eyed and clearly disturbed by the Salvage mother’s story.

“Go on,” she said. “In light of the revolutionaries popping up everywhere, it’s important that we discuss these things openly.”

“Couldn’t those people have simply been the targets of rogue body thieves, who dispossessed them prior to the team’s arrival?”

The audience turned in unison toward Miss Antonia. The woman had no response. But Velvet could think only of that horrible creature lounging in the bowels of the Cellar, of its struggle to keep Madame Despot in its grasp and Nick in his crystal cell. And for what purpose? For nothing more than to create shadowquakes? To disrupt the fabric of purgatory? None of it made sense. And what about this ectoplasm stuff? Surely that wasn’t real. Some parlor trick to hide Jerry’s escape into the world, perhaps. The alternative—that Jerry had been processed as though the medium’s body were no more than a ghost blender—was too horrible. Velvet shuddered at the thought. But if it was real, then what had torn apart Miss Antonia’s team?

What had happened to Jerry?

What had made Clay run away and get involved with the revolution?

Velvet looked around the room and noticed Isadora glaring at her intently, not with her regular pious judgment but with something else. Fear lurked in the soft glow of her eyes.

They sat and listened to one of the singers accompanying a new record that had been swiped on a recent Collection run. It reminded Velvet of the disco her mother used to sing and dance to while doing the dishes. Velvet even used to join in—when she was younger, of course—her mother twirling her around and bumping her with her hip. Those were good times, but she rarely called upon the memories for comfort. It was better not to. Sadness could take hold of you in purgatory like nowhere else. She saw it all the time, people sobbing on the railcar, on benches, even within the dorms. She’d been awakened by the tortured cries of someone who couldn’t leave the memories well enough alone. It’s as though souls forget that there is an afterlife and they’re living it, which means that those who have been left behind will eventually be in purgatory themselves, or, hopefully, somewhere less gritty and crowded.

Nick stood up beside her and wandered into the crowd. Her eyes followed him as he slipped up the stairs and out of sight.

With Nick gone, her focus returned to Isadora.

Isadora reached across and patted Velvet’s hand. Her touch sent shivers up Velvet’s spine, shivers that threatened to spike through her head. She slapped the girl’s hand away.

“Oh, so infantile,” Isadora hissed. “Clearly you’re intimidated
by my looks and ability to snatch your man right out from under you. Because, really, what do you have to offer? That sour expression? Terrible hair? You could benefit from an actual personality, Velv. It’d counteract all
this
.” She swept her hand around Velvet’s general vicinity.

Velvet tried to calm herself, but the girl leaned in farther and really put her foot in it.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you were a revolutionary, like everyone’s been saying,” she hissed into Velvet’s ear. “Creeping around like you do.”

Without thinking how it’d look to the gathered crowd, Velvet clenched her fist and drove it straight into Isadora’s jaw.

There wasn’t a crack, as there would have been had living flesh and bone connected, but all the same, Isadora dropped off her stool and thudded against the stone pavers like a burlap bag full of flour. The powder coating her skin puffed away from her in tiny mushroom clouds, and she even coughed up a wad of sparks that bounced around on the bodice of her far-too-dressy dress.

Velvet expected the girl to get up, return the punch, and turn the altercation into one huge brawl, but instead, Isadora just lay there, her expression wounded and pitiful. The girl sought out the help of the strangers around her, reaching for them to help her to her feet, playing the victim for all it was worth. Velvet turned to Luisa for support.

“Jeez, Velvet. Harsh” was all the little girl had to offer.

Velvet turned toward the staircase, but Nick hadn’t returned. Nor was Miss Antonia anywhere to be seen. The
rest of the dorm tenants were glowering at her now, shaking their heads in disapproval. Velvet felt the nerves exploding in her cheeks, across her chest, the humiliation of being seen as the brute in the situation setting in and finding a home.

When she peered over the table to see Isadora explaining the horror of the attack to a miraculously reappeared Miss Antonia, Velvet nearly exploded. She ran through the crowd to the breezeway and out into the streets.

V
elvet needed to hit something.

To break. To destroy.

To kill.

When she broke out of the Retrieval dorm it was at a full run, boots pounding the cobblestone in blunt echoing clops. Scissoring through groups of people chattering and vendor carts rolling away for the night, Velvet rushed toward the only purpose that could effectively employ her anger.

Moments later, she burst out into the forest glen. A crunch of leaves nearby heralded a deer stunned by her presence. She kept going, her pace quickening toward the desolate farmhouse, itself a dark smear against the pastoral scenery. She blew through fencing and livestock before stepping foot on the gravel approach to the Simanski farm. And pressing forward, Velvet sprinted past the house quickly, then
the van, rushing headlong into the small shed stinking with hate.

Bonesaw loomed over his victim from behind the chair. He’d set her chin and head in a horseshoe-shaped binding. A prong jutted downward from the device, ending in a loop attached to a belt strapped tightly about her chest. It looked like a tuning fork, and the girl’s cheeks were indented so painfully that Velvet could swear she felt the memory of the thing biting into her own flesh. The tool’s purpose was clear and sickening. The girl struggled to turn her head but couldn’t. The binding prevented all but the most minor movement. The girl’s eyes flinched and blinked painfully as she tried to see what her captor was doing.

You don’t want to see
, Velvet thought.

It was bad enough that Velvet could see the man arching in, the grater nearly scraping against the girl’s ear, ready to abrade the cartilage down to hot bloody gristle. His doughy face was flushed. His eyes were mad with lust.

Velvet rushed to the workbench and began slapping her palms against the table. Knives and cleavers jumped and clattered together, and when she peered over her shoulder, Bonesaw had dropped his grater. It lay tilted and askew atop his big bare foot.

But it wasn’t the lack of a weapon in his hand that made Velvet smile. It was the fear written across his face in a trio of
O
s—his gaping mouth, his wide eyes. She grabbed a paring knife and tossed it toward the door with enough force that it grabbed a hold in the wood about a foot above the floor, right between a pair of bare legs.

Velvet gasped as her eyes traveled quickly upward past the long satiny basketball shorts, the tank, to Nick’s beautiful face, turned ugly in a shocked grimace.

“What the hell?” His eyes darted between Velvet, Bonesaw, and the man’s terrified victim. “What the hell is going on here?”

She staggered backward, completely at a loss as to what to do … or to say. But when she shot a glance back at Simanski, just in time to see him recovering the grater from the floor and beginning to cross through the shed to check out the paring knife, she acted.

“Nick! You’ve got to follow my directions really closely. This man is a maniac. If you can possess him, even for a second, try it. I haven’t been able to, and we’ve got to save this girl!”

Nick nodded and watched the man as he approached, lumbering over in his black rubber apron, which was slick with God knew what. Velvet watched as the boy bit his lip, steeled himself by puffing a short burst of air from his mouth and hopping a bit, and then lunged into Bonesaw.