Page 2 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

She didn’t hear Lee if he replied and only noticed his departure when the door shut behind him. Already she was loosening her grip on the material world, letting the humming rise around her and Clarence’s room fill her vision. Each step she took toward it became slower and heavier until she stood in front of the bland white door and grasped the handle.

* * *

The room descended on her in an ice-water rush and the whine of a dentist’s drill. At first she couldn’t process anything else, could only stand still and let herself adjust; forcing the issue, Hazel had learned, did not go well. She took the cold and the noise, knew that they were happening, let her brain come to grips with them until the sharpest edges had worn off and she could make sense of the normal world again.

Clarence Chapman lay dying in a big room with yellow and white wallpaper, dark furniture, and three taxidermied heads on the wall above the king-size bed. A coyote and a deer flanked a black bear, their glassy eyes reflecting the light of a large, old-fashioned TV, and Chapman looked like a fourth trophy as he lay beneath them with the covers pulled up to his neck.

He wouldn’t have made much of an ornament. Clarence was practically a skeleton with skin, and that was weathered and yellowed, the product of an age when tobacco, lead, and tanning were the cornerstones of civilization. In Hazel’s half-otherworldly perception, shadows stretched away from him, shadows that the wasted form under the blanket should never have been able to cast.

He turned gray eyes on Hazel, cloudy with cataracts and yet weirdly sharp. “Are you the girl I sent for?” he rasped.

“I’m Hazel Lewis,” she said, keeping her voice light. “The medium you hired.”

Clarence snorted acknowledgment, picked up a remote from a pile of golf magazines, and turned off the TV. “Paid enough for it. What do I have to do now?”

“Not much, really. It’s in my hands.” Hazel looked around the room as her vision focused more, noticing bottles lined up by height on the top of Chapman’s dresser, their reflections wavery in the warped mirror behind them, and an angular brown armchair on the other side of the bed. A pile of flies lay in the corner beyond it, and a couple moved as Hazel watched. “How long have those been there?”

Clarence shrugged. “Ren swept last night. Since then. Getting nervous?”

His smile showed a surprising amount of teeth for a man in his state. Big and healthy, except for about seventy years of tobacco stains, they reminded Hazel of a horse’s.Lay the cube flat on your palm, she remembered her camp counselor saying to a bunch of squirmy eight-year-olds.He could bite your fingers right off if he gets confused.

“I try not to relax too much in my cases,” she said. “It always pays to stay alert.”

“Good girl.”

That didn’t merit an answer. Hazel set down her bag and began unpacking: four candles, bone runes, a silver knife with a birch handle, blessed water, scented oil. She felt Chapman watching her and tried to ignore it, just as she noted and ignored the voices that had begunto speak beyond the humming, using no language she’d ever heard from the living.

Four manifestations so far. Only the flies were physical. It could be worse.

She fell into the ritual, keenly aware of each motion, taking comfort in their regularity and precision. Black silk slid beneath her fingers as she smoothed the square out onto the floor. Supple leather gave in her grip when she shook and threw the runes, five of the raven-bone tokens coming up with their carvings visible.

Raido, the rider, was the rune nearest her. That always happened because she was controlling a powerful force, guiding much larger beings in the direction she wanted them to go. Thenauthizrune was nearest to Chapman, speaking of need and constraint. No great surprise there either. The other three landed on the eastern edge of the cloth.

Left waskaunaz, which meant fire or torches, injury or death. It pointed roughly to the space beside the TV, and Hazel glanced there quickly, but her half sight didn’t show her any threats. Still, it probably wasn’t a good place to cross the border.

One of the last two runes had fallen on top of the other, making a sort of cross at the cloth’s right corner—the top wasthurisaz, the bottomalgiz. The symbol for protection lay below the rune meaning giant or thorn or, often, trouble specifically from men.

Clarencecould certainly be trouble—the client often was. Good people could get haunted or cursed if they accidentally moved into the wrong place, picked up the wrong object, or pissed off the wrong person. The nasty ones drew otherworldly parasites like rotten meat drew, well, flies, and generally for the same sort of reason.

She scooped the runes back into the bag, folded the cloth, and got to her feet.

Protection was protection, even with trouble added. Hazel set her first candle in the right-hand space that the mixed runes had signified, lit it, and began.

With the candles lit, the room grew darker.

Shadows that had seemed too long on Clarence’s bed and too dark in the corners sent out tendrils like little fingers, finding other patches of darkness and knitting themselves together. The overhead light faded to almost nothing, the candle flames burned blue, and the room took on a chill that matched the cold sinking into Hazel’s flesh. A rhythmic tapping mingled with the voices behind the humming, starting and stopping erratically, like a giant hand running toward her on its nails.

Hazel had been pretty sure Chapman’s haunting was hostile—insects were usually a bad sign—but she’d been hoping it wouldn’t be quite so strong. Communication was probably off the table, and there was a chance she’d have to temporarily seal the place and come back with reinforcements.

Chapman was staring at her, so expressionless that a witness in the material world might have thought he was dead. He’d folded his hands over his chest, which didn’t help the impression, and his spindly fingers stretched too far down their backs.

At least he wasn’t asking questions or telling her to hurry up. Hazel pulled her attention back to her work; the sooner she got on with it, the sooner she’d be done with the house and the man. Picking up the flask of blessed water, she poured some of it onto a square of white linen, then dragged the cloth along the blade of her knife, calling its power back to the surface. The silver began to glow.

Hazel breathed deep, dragging chilly air into her lungs despite their protests, centering herselfinherself and in the connections she’d made over the years as she raised the knife above her head. On the exhale, she brought it down in one smooth movement. It cut cleanly through the barrier between worlds, and its radiant trail hung in the air for a moment.

Then the other side rushed in.

Once Hazel had opened the way, transition was instant. Darkness filled her sight for a second, and when it passed, she was standing bya bed made of crude iron. The dresser and its pills had vanished, leaving a mirror that took up half the wall and was even more warped than the one in the material plane. Bulges pressed against the wallpaper, each shaped like a reaching hand, and Hazel saw a spot near her where the bloody ends of fingers had broken through. The mouths of the trophy heads opened, and long, red tongues hung out, nearly reaching the bed below them.