Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: Written for the Allhallowsfic Challenge on Livejournal. SPOILERS for all seasons.
Once upon a time, Lindsay Monroe had loved Halloween. She'd loved the cool autumn air and the rustle of the wind through the short scrub grasses that grew on the homestead. When she was little and her imagination more fertile and less threatening, she'd thought it was ghosts' feet shifting through the dead grass. Then again, to the ghosts, maybe it hadn't been dead at all, but green and lush like the valleys of Goshen. Maybe everything was inside out and upside down when you were a ghost, a photo negative of the world left behind.
It had made so much sense as a child. She'd cut her teeth on Sesame Street, learned about opposites on the knees of Gordon and Maria and Luis, and even then, she'd known that dead was the opposite of alive. Live butterflies flitted from flower to flower and wore the colors of spring on their wings. Dead ones curled on their backs, underwent a final metamorphosis into a dull-winged moth the color of dead leaves. They curled like them, too, and made the same dry, brittle crunch when you stepped on them with the toe of your Easter shoe. Dead people went to Opposite World, and so, if the grass was brown and withered in this world, then it was green and vibrant in theirs. Simple as that.
Back then, she had found the idea of ghosts and Opposite World comforting. Ghosts were old friends that peeked from behind houses and between bare branches in invitation to a midnight dance, and Opposite World was where sorrow turned to sugar. Sick people stopped hurting and started dancing, and dead babies played with Jesus in a field of sheep. Opposite World was Heaven in blue jeans.
And Halloween was its dark carnival.
She'd gone trick-or-treating for the first time when she was four, dressed as a scarecrow and shepherded through the mall by her frazzled mother. Her four older brothers hadn't wanted her to come, hadn't wanted to be burdened with a wide-eyed toddler with stubby legs, but all complaints had abruptly ceased when Mama had threatened to whip the hide off of them. Lindsay had been so excited, kneeling on the backseat with the plastic handle of her pumpkin basket in one small fist. Most of her life had been spent on the horse ranch on the outskirts of Bozeman, where stars outnumbered streetlamps and neighbors were often five miles apart. Going to town was an adventure.
She didn't remember anymore what her brothers had dressed as-cowboys or zombies or Alice Cooper in Mama's ratty pantyhose-but that first invitation to the dance had been the start of a love affair she had thought would be forever. She'd been enthralled by the gaudy decorations and the noise and rush of people as they wandered the mall in chattering groups. Lanky vampires and gangly Elviras had passed her, and the air had been thick with warm sugar and fake blood, caramel apples and greasepaint, candy corn and rubber spiders. And the lights. The dim green of a witch's brew; the diseased, bleary red of a backlit, cardboard cemetery; the acid-trip, fish-bubble black of the "haunted house" cobbled together in the mall backlot.
It had been nothing but a cramped, ramshackle huddle of particleboard and cheap carnival gags, but to her child's mind, the hallway had stretched into yawning eternity, and the roof had reached upward into infinity. She had explored every warped nook and cranny with relish and delighted in the furtive, giddy rush of fear. She'd stayed until she'd been pushed out by a peristaltic wave of incoming children, and once expelled, she had wanted to go back, to return to Hill House, Jr. on the cold, lumpy blacktop. But her mother's haggard, chivvying impatience and her brothers' insatiable hunger for sweets had pulled her inexorably onward, and she had spent the rest of the night breaking the cardinal rule of childhood and accepting candy from strangers. By the end of the night, her plastic, grinning jack-o-lantern's empty guts had been stuffed with more Smarties, Tootsie Rolls, and candy necklaces than she could've eaten. She had gobbled what she could for a few days after, her brothers had taken what she was too weak or lazy to defend, and her mother had chucked the rotting remnants the second week in November.
That Halloween had been her first taste, but not her last. She'd celebrated Halloween with gusto long after her brothers had grown too big for "baby games". She had agonized over her costume every year from August to October, spent hours in the derelict thrift shop run by old Mrs. Cormier, who wore rouge like fever blisters and lipstick like a bloody gash. Mrs. Cormier had worn green-striped knee-highs that had reminded Lindsay of the Wicked Witch of the West, and the milky cataract in her right eye had made her look like the Crypt Keeper. Still, Lindsay had lost hours rummaging through the haphazard racks of secondhand clothes and trunks of old bric-a-brac. She had found primo costume material underneath the dust and cobwebs, and her junior and senior year of high school, she had worked in the shop in exchange for first pick of the incoming clothes.
When she was six, she'd dressed as Alice in Wonderland and learned to curtsey, and when she was eight, she'd dressed as Strawberry Shortcake and gone trick-or-treating with Christie Halloran, who'd gone as Blueberry Muffin. They had giggled and licked their lips clean of the flavored lip glosses that had complemented their costumes, and up ahead, lost in the throng of white-faced vampires and Rexall witches, their mothers had swapped domestic horror stories over cups of coffee made to foam like a mad scientist's unholy concoction. Mrs. Monroe had been tall and thin as a stalk of Nebraska wheat, while AnneMarie Halloran had been a waddling, squat duck of a woman with thin lips and red hair, and Strawberry and Blueberry had followed their progress by standing on tiptoe and looking for wheat and fire. Best friends forever, or at least for that Halloween.
She couldn't recall what or who she'd been when she was twelve, but she did remember that she'd been part of a quartet, a corner in the square of four who truly had been Best Friends Forever. Ashley and Candace and Christine and Lindsay. They had been burning brightly with the fire of puberty by then, sure that each was destined for greatness and happily ever after, but they had still been children, too, and they had linked arms and moved over the sidewalks of downtown Bozeman in a laughing human chain, unblemished and unbreakable.
Shopping bags had replaced the plastic pumpkins, but it hadn't been about candy by then, anyway. Candy was for little kids who could afford to lose their milk teeth to the sweet rot of sugar. It had been about the crowd and the sights and smells and the thrill of fear that had deepened into something else, something delicious and sharp that made her acutely aware of the ache in her budding breasts and the humid, sticky dampness that she sometimes found between her thighs, wet and glistening like an aborted secret. It had been about the forbidden territory of night, where ordinary objects and deeds acquired extraordinary curves without the harsh light of the sun to hold them to their places and toils. Everything was richer at night, deepened by the absence of light.
Even smells were stronger in the dark, more intense. She could still recall the acrid, burnt tire stink of the cigarette Candace had lit in the girls' bathroom their freshman year, how clear and sharp it had been over the stink of industrial hand soap and old urine, how sure she had been that they would be caught. Blood smelled stronger in the dark, too. She had learned that the Halloween she turned sixteen, when she had lost her virginity in a rick of hay at a barn party and blood had mixed with come on her exhausted, trembling thighs. It had been the first time she had learned that lesson, but certainly not the last. The job had reinforced it again and again in the intervening years, offered a refresher course each time she responded to a call in the middle of the night.
Darkness thinned the world, and it was thinnest of all on Halloween, when all artificial boundaries were swept aside and Opposite World bled into this one. Halloween was the night when she could shed her boring, Midwestern skin and step into another. She could cover her sturdy, unassuming body with spangles and bangles and teach it to dance to music it would never hear. She could exchange Lindsay Monroe for the Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, or a Rockette. She had, too, and had preened in the full-length mirror in her bedroom and pressed her palms to the cool glass of mirror maybe.
Halloween had exposed her to the possibility of a world beyond Montana and its endless expanse of cattle ranches and wheat fields. It had whispered of Out There and bright lights and made her belly cramp with an erotic longing. Out There, she could reinvent herself, be someone other than Lindsay, youngest and only girl. Good little Lindsay, who never broke curfew, and who learned to rope and ride instead of how to cook and sew and starch church dresses. She loved Montana, but it had become a glass cage in the end, a box that had penned her in and displayed her to the critical, rapacious gazes of her neighbors.
Especially after…
Especially after that night in the diner, when Daniel Katums came through the door with his shotgun and his blackened soul and sent your friends and a waitress to Opposite World. They looked you high and low after that, especially the parents who'd buried their girls in a square of Montana dirt. They wanted to know why you were left behind, why you got so lucky. They watched you at the memorial service, and at the wake; each came in turn to look you in the eye, search for the secret of your good fortune. You'd've quailed from the scrutiny if you could, because their tears burned like lye when they dripped onto your hands from their scalded cheeks and the ends of their noses. You never did, though, because you owed it. It was the price you paid for being "the lucky one."
The grieving parents weren't the only ones to gawk. Everyone did; you became Lindsay Monroe, newly-minted freak, the Only Survivor of the Kitty Korner Diner Massacre. Your picture was splashed across the front page of the paper for days afterward, your sunny, smiling yearbook picture a gross incongruity beneath the grainy photos of a bloodstained diner floor and three black-bagged bodies strapped to gurneys like sacks of feed. Whispers followed you like perfume, and pointing fingers jabbed your flesh like spears.
You can remember the precise moment when you realized that Montana was too small for you. You were in the Rexall, buying tampons. The cashier, Mrs. Dalton, had known you your whole life, had babysat for you and your brothers and changed your diapers once upon a time. She'd once babysat when you had chicken pox, and she'd distracted you from the miserable, insistent itch by showing you how to make macaroni art. You spent an afternoon building Noah's Ark with Kraft macaroni and making edible animals to march inside two by two. You'd kept that art long into middle school, until the glue relaxed its grip and spilled the noodles onto the floor like loose teeth.
You'd bought tampons there before, too, regular as clockwork. But that day, you came up to the counter with the box in one hand and crumpled bills in the other, and it was like she'd seen a ghost.
Lindsay. Her hand traveled involuntarily her throat, as if she were afraid you were going to lunge over the counter and tear it out.How nice to see you, honey.
But her mouth was lying. Her eyes told the truth. It wasn't nice to see you. It was a terrible nightmare from which she was trying to awaken. You were Nosferatu, the Living Dead Girl who'd dodged a hail of bullets, and she was watching the horror show unfold. She was mesmerized and horrified, and her fingers kept mistyping the price into the register, stutter-stepping over keys in a fit of digital epilepsy. 3.99. 23.42. .54. 505. You remember that one best because it reminded you of SOS. SOS, please. Have a nice day.
You tried to smile, tried to pretend you didn't see the revulsion on her face and smeared behind her lipstick like acting putty, but the world of Make-Believe had winked out of existence on the echoing roar of a shotgun blast, and your face was hard plastic on your skull. You could only stand there with dollar bills crumpled in your fist and wonder what Mrs. Dalton saw. It sure wasn't little Lindsay Monroe anymore, with her lopsided pigtails and faded, yellow sundress and the fear of old-time Jesus in her heart.
You know what she saw, interrupted a cold, pitiless voice nested deeply inside the base of her brain. The same thing you saw when you closed your eyes. Candace, facedown on the table with her lungs in her plate like uncooked livers. The waitress, with half her face torn off and her arm reaching for the tray of shakes she'd been bringing when the world ended. Ashley, staring blindly at the Christmas lights while her brains dripped down the back of her chair like cold oatmeal. And Christine, who'd just been talking about the possibility of getting into UCLA in the fall. She was on the floor beside her chair. It looked like she was trying to do a push-up until you realized that the towel she'd been lying on was actually her intestines, wadded beneath the hole in her belly like dirty gauze. She was seeing the blood on the windows and the brains on the floor, and maybe she even saw the high velocity blood spatter that clung to the ceiling and fell onto your shoulders like raindrops as you stood in the middle of room and breathed in the stink of blood and gunpowder.
You didn't know what made her see it, and you still don't. Maybe it was the tampons and their intimate promise of blood, their frank reminder of life and bloodshed. Maybe she imagined you in your bathroom with blood on your hands and smeared on your thighs and wondered if it was all yours. Maybe she wondered if you were washing what was left of them down the drain to ease your survivor's conscience. You never knew, but you did know that when you passed her the bills crushed in your numb fingers, she'd accept them gingerly and separate them from the rest, stuff them into the back of the till until you were out of sight and she could dispose of them. You also knew that you could never come here again. Bozeman and Montana were suddenly too small by half. You took the tampons and left the store on stiff, ungainly legs, and then you lurched around the corner and vomited on your shoes.
You vomited when they died, too. Bacon and eggs over easy and hashbrowns smothered and covered. They came up in a thick, chunky clot onto Christine's back.
Her guts look like sausages, you thought, with your hands on your knees and your hair in your face. A complete, balanced breakfast. Then you hiccoughed and giggled and burst into hysterical tears. The next you remember, you were crouched behind the counter with the phone on your lap, begging the 911 operator to hurry. The phone was still cradled in your lap like a kitten when the first officer on the scene found you. You didn't want to let it go, and he had to pry your fingers from the handset.
You vomited again in the back of the ambulance, a ratcheting burp that tasted of bile and the tart, liquid ozone of spent adrenaline. The paramedic handed you a sick bowl, and you sat on the bench in the back of the bus and heaved between wracking sobs and monosyllabic answers to the beef-necked deputy who squatted improbably on the running board. Your mouth tasted of bile and metal shavings, and all you could think was, Sausages. Her insides looked like sausages.
You vomited for a third time at the hospital, standing under the scalding, stinging spray of a hospital shower. Your clothes had been confiscated in the name of evidence, and your hair had been combed for trace, and no matter how hot the water was, you couldn't get warm. Your teeth chattered, and you wrapped your arms around yourself to conserve heat. But it slipped through your fingers like the water that sluiced and gurgled down the drain, and so you sank to the textured floor and watched the water carry the dirt away. Then you noticed bigger flecks, splashes of red and pink and grey.
A dim, detached part of you thought it was pretty, those grains and whorls of color in a river of grey silt. You reached out to stroke a particularly large clot as though it were a passing minnow, mouth pursed in concentration. It was thick and viscous underneath your probing finger, the smooth velvet of a horse's flank. You almost smiled.
Then water dripped from the sodden ends of your hair onto your hunched shoulders, and you were back in the diner and standing beneath a drizzle of blood. Comprehension dawned. It was a piece of Candace, Christine, or Ashley beneath your finger, a souvenir from your girls' night out.
You recoiled, breath caught in your throat, and scuttled to the far end of the stall. Your stomach spasmed, and then you were puking onto your breasts and belly in a warm, wet splatter. Each desperate breath brought a fresh wave of nausea and bile, and your tortured stomach throbbed. You collapsed onto your side and scrabbled weakly at the floor. On and on it went, until you were bringing up only sound, a guttural, lowing moan that reminded you of a steer struck by an inexpert slaughterman's hammer.
Sausage and oatmeal, you thought, and watched your hand clutch at raindrops.
A nurse found you sprawled in the shower, pruned and covered with soap and vomit, and you spent the night under observation. The doctors sent you home the following afternoon with a prescription for Valium, and you went home and dreamed of nothing, swaddled in the comfort of drugs and your favorite pajamas. Cops came and asked you questions. Reporters came with questions, too, but they were turned away by your father and brothers, and eventually, someone else's daughter had the decency to die and tempt them from your door with fresher grief.
Everything changed after that night. Opposite World came to stay in yours, and the ghosts were no longer the friendly Caspers of childhood, but bloody and ragged, with gaunt faces and accusatory fingers and black, bloodless holes where stomachs and brains should have been. You were Lindsay Monroe, the little stained-glass girl, and the townspeople shied from your taint. Only your family stayed close, and your mother drew close enough to smother you in the throttling protection afforded by her apron strings.
Daniel Katums blew a hole in the veil between the worlds with his double-barreled shotgun, and it was never again as thick as it ought to have been. You saw things from the corner of your eye, shadows that flitted in corners and curled around the window eaves like smoke. Sometimes, the shadows passed outside your bedroom door and made the reassuring strip of light that filtered in from the hall stutter and dim. Sometimes, they looked like feet and lingered in front of your door as though someone were poised to knock. When that happened, you hid underneath the bed and pulled the coverlet over the gap between the bedframe and the floor so you wouldn't awaken to the scrutiny of pupilless eyes in the middle of the night.
You tried to tell your parents about the shadows, but your father was a practical man, and he merely embraced you in a bearhug and whispered gruffly that the nightmares would stop soon enough, Little Bit. Your mother twittered and soothed you by making too much of your favorite food, and she stared at you whenever she thought you weren't looking, eyes bright and glassy and bruised with concern. She was waiting for her little stained-glass girl to crack and shatter.
You couldn't tell the police or the psychiatrist for fear that they would think you were crazy and dismiss you as an unreliable witness, and your only teenage confidantes were buried under six feet of Montana earth and held together by mortician's putty and rotting skin. The other kids wanted nothing to do with The Girl Whose Friends Had Been Murdered; no one wanted to take their places beside you at the table, lest the Devil reappear for another sup.
So, you had no choice but to hold your tongue and watch the shadows dance and slither over your world like fog. You tried to be as practical as your father and told yourself that shadows had no faces, no arms, no light-blocking feet that stood before your bedroom door. No clittering, bony fingers fisted to bang upon it. Opposite World and its inhabitants were just a figment of your imagination, one that had been warped and corrupted by the peppery smell of cordite. You tried because you wanted to believe it, and because you wanted to be a good girl again, but you never could. Because you saw too much even when your eyes were closed.
You thought the shadows would fade over time and recede beyond the veil, but they didn't. Instead, they got stronger and more defined. You saw Ashley for the first time in January of '97, in the bathroom mirror. You'd just emerged from the shower and were combing conditioner into your hair. Your toothbrush was resting neatly on the edge of the sink, dutifully awaiting its nightly foray into your mouth. You were humming tunelessly, and you sometimes wonder if that isn't what summoned her, that thoughtless moment of happiness.
You flipped your hair and reached for the medicine cabinet, and there she was, reflected in the fog-smoked glass, swaying and grinning. She was solid, and a rancid blue-white that made your belly crawl because it brought to mind the fetal pig you'd dissected in tenth-grade biology. Her teeth were black, and so were her lips, and her head-what was left of it-was a ruined, concave mass, a deflated football from which one filmy green eye peered with avid malice. She reached for you with one awful, long-nailed hand, and that's when you realized how close she was. Close enough to touch the nappy flannel of your pajamas and snag her fingers in it.
Close enough to wrap those horrible, fleshless fingers around your neck and squeeze.
Fingernails keep growing after you're dead, you thought with a heady, swooning horror, and whirled to face the monster.
There was no one there. The towel rack held out its offering of dry towels, and the hamper regarded you blankly, its hinged mouth set in a thin line of disapproval. The only sounds were your panicked breathing and the intermittent, waspish buzz of the light fixture. The yellow wallpaper mottled to brown at the edges as it had always done, and the white trim warped where it met the damp, wooden floor. It was business as usual.
You took a deep breath and told yourself to get a grip, and then you turned around and brushed your teeth. You brushed too hard, and the bristles came away pink, and when you leaned over the sink to spit, you saw the eye peering at you from the drain. It was milky and swamp-water green and burning with malice. The drain catch had rusted to nothing and been discarded years ago, and your bloody spit struck the eye dead center. The water gurgled and chuckled as it sluiced down the drain, and you swore you heard a voice from deep within the pipes.
Hi, Lindsay.
There was nothing for it but to scream then, and you screamed loud and long, loud enough to bring your father on the run. He shouldered the door off its hinges and stood in the threshold in his longjohns and undershirt. Your brother, Paul, was there, too, nineteen and reedy behind your father's hulking bulk.
What is it? What is it, Little Bit? your father demanded, wild-eyed and thrumming with fight or flight.
N-nothing, Daddy, you stammered, and hid your terror and confusion behind the damp curtain of your hair. 'M so tired, I think I started to fall asleep at the sink and scared myself.
Your father sagged with relief and pulled you into a clumsy, one-armed embrace. Scared the hell outta me, Little Bit, he sighed, and planted a firm kiss in your hair. Get some sleep. Go on, now.
Yes, Daddy, you murmured, and slipped past him without looking at Paul, whose fear was dissolving into irritation at your fit of screaming memes. You went to bed, but sleep was a long time coming, even with the aid of a Valium chaser. You kept seeing faces in the window and in the shadows cast by the tree in the backyard.
Once you saw your friends in the shadows, you couldn't unsee them. The feet outside your door became a nightly occurrence, and in February, when the snow was thick upon the ground, Ashley paid you another visit. Her arm did, anyway. You were building a snowman in the backyard, and all that was left to do was the head. You'd stooped to gather another armful of snow, and the twig you'd used for the snowman's left arm shot out and snagged the sleeve of your coat.
Suddenly, it wasn't a twig anymore, but Ashley's clawing fingers, black-nailed and blue-white and cold as frozen steel.
Best friends forever, whispered a mischievous, malevolent voice beside your ear, and you shrieked and staggered backward. You fell on your ass in the cold wet snow and stared into the face of the snowman, sure that his coal button eyes would be green. But they were only coal, and Frosty grinned at you in idiotic glee, twiggy arms oustretched.
Hi, Lindsay, it seemed to say. Want to be friends?
It was a fair question, given that you'd spent the morning and part of the afternoon building him from the ground up, but you wanted nothing to do with him. You lurched to your feet, brushed the snow from your frozen, wet ass, and punted Frosty square in the invisible jimmy. He crumpled as any man would, but that empty grin never faltered. He was as chipper as you please. He was still smiling his empty, sunny smile when you smashed in his face with the heel of your boot. I love you, Lindsay. Let's be friends.
You kicked and stomped until there was no trace of him, until even the coal was so much black dust among the snow. You spread his remains like salt over unhallowed ground, and then you fled into the house. Your mother mistook the color in your cheeks for happiness, and she was so buoyed by the delusion that you let her go on believing it. You choked down half a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup, and then you sought the refuge of your bed. It was safe there, warm and snug, and as long as the door was locked, the blinds were pulled, and you faced the window, you could sleep.
You saw your friends often after that, as often as you blinked, but you never said a word because your folks wanted things to go back to normal, and because you didn't want to lose your mind on top of your friends and your innocence. You saw them in corners and mirrors and crouching in the corners of the stalls when you mucked the horses.
You saw Christine during a ride on the back forty. She was knee-deep in the icy water of a creek, intestines floating on the gunmetal-grey water like a lily of mourning. She smiled, and her teeth were the dingy grey of a ruined city, not unlike the buildings that would one day hem you in like prison bars. Her eyes were sunken and clouded, and when her throat worked, all that emerged was black blood and grey creek water.
She beckoned with her dead finger. Come with me, Linds. It's where you belong
You didn't come. You ran like hell, ran all the way to the University of Washington. You thought it would be better there, and for a while it was. There was orientation and the heady rush of new experience. You buried yourself in new friends and classes and reveled in the wonders of life in the big city, where the lights were always on and ever bright. The dorms were never dark. There was the ever-present glow of the emergency lights and the periodic spark of a desk lamp from beneath the doors. The shadows had nowhere to hide.
By the first week of October, you thought you were going to make it. You'd left your friends behind in Montana, and they were no longer waiting for you in closets and bathroom mirrors, no longer rising out of the shower steam with their clutching hands and rotting faces. Even the nightmares had become less frequent and less intense. You'd shed them like old skin, and you were free to redefine yourself. It was exhilarating and glorious, and you spread your wings and let them touch the sun. You plastered your side of the dorm room with pictures of New York and L.A., Boston and Chicago, and dreamed of the brightest lights in the biggest cities.
And then you got invited to the Phi Kappa Tau sorority Halloween party. You should've known better; you knew that the veil between the living and the dead was thinnest on that night, and that Daniel Katums had made it thinner still with his gun and his malice, but you wanted to remember the lightness of merriment, and besides, Opposite World was four hundred miles in your rearview mirror.
You dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and for a while, the innocent magic of Halloween returned. The only ghosts you saw were white-sheeted frat boys who drifted at midnight and went bump in the night at two in the morning. Your suitemate was the queen of Sheba, and her boyfriend, Todd, was a tiger in orange and black greasepaint. You danced and drank spiked punch, and when a frat boy dressed as a cop molded his hands over your gyrating hips and mouthed your neck, you let him. Thirty minutes later, his lips were on your cunt in the back bedroom. He reeked of sweat and rum, and you left your mark on his shoulders and the curve of his ass. You never knew his name, and it was wicked and deliciously nasty and so fucking good.
You left him passed out on the sheetless mattress, sounding his successful tapping of you ass with sonorous snores that heralded the sleep of the well and truly bombed. You went bobbing for apples after that, on your knees over a battered tin tub with your ruby slippers sticking from beneath the hem of your sensible, blue dress.
Here I go for the poisoned apple, you mused as you watched the apples bob in the water, and smiled at the sticky, satisfied ache between your legs. I'm such a bad little farmgirl.
You'd braided your hair in a bid for authenticity, and the plaits sank into the cold water like heavy fishing lures as you lowered your face into the tub. Apples grazed your cheeks, minnows and silt against your rapidly numbing skin. You opened your mouth and tasted iron and Washington Reds, and the water was a knife on your tongue. You stretched and lunged for the tender, ripe bellies of the fruit, and you were exhilarated by the steadily increasing pressure inside your chest. Sex and death on Halloween night. God, it was good to be alive.
Strands of hair floated into your field of vision, and you thought one of your plaits had come undone. You shook your head to clear it, but it only drifted more thickly still, a shoal of blackfish in a tiny pond. Another more vigorous shake, and you saw a flash of white, fish belly and defleshed fingers. It wasn't either of those things, please God that it had been. You froze, and terror overrode sense. You opened your mouth to scream, and water flooded your gullet.
Candace grinned at you, and her hair framed her white, puffy face in a writhing tangle of Medusa coils. Her chest wound was a sucking, black void. Tattered remnants of withered lung fluttered inside the hole like kelp, and the exploded sac of her heart hung like a dead tubeworm. Dead like everything else. She held out her hand, and bits of sloughed flesh marked its passage through the water and landed on the sedately bobbing apples like sea lice. The slender crescents of her fingernails squirmed like maggots, and your drowning gorge rose in mutiny.
Come with me, Lindsay, she warbled. I've been waiting for you for a long time. We all have.
You vomited your guts like a squid in flight and came up screaming. Water sloshed over the side of the tub as you recoiled and scuttled away, vomit thick and sour in your mouth. The crowd, which had been happily goading you in the chase for the forbidden fruit, was silent and wary, huddled in twos and threes around the ruined tub. The girls brushed their hair behind their ears with nervous fingers and chewed their lower lips in stifled pity. They guys looked at you askance if they looked at all, and their averted eyes registered gratitude that they hadn't been the ones to lay you down on a lumpy, backroom mattress. No one stepped forward to help, and you were relieved beneath your fear and shame. You stammered a thick-tongued excuse about having one too many beers and took your leave, wet hair plastered to your scalp. No one protested your departure, least of all the mortified suitemates who'd brought you in the first place, and you returned, alone, to your dorm room, where you quailed and shivered beneath a mound of blankets.
The story of your Halloween meltdown made the campus rounds, and invitations to parties dried up. Your reinvention had been a success, but not in the manner you'd hoped. You weren't the hayseed Montana farmgirl anymore, but neither were you the popular social butterfly you'd imagined while you thumbed through magazines with glossy pictures of exotic places like New York. You were the weird girl who screamed at invisible monsters and barfed into the tub of apples like a naïve frosh.
You didn't mind the solitude. Better to be left alone than to be marked as the dupe by prettier girls with lye and petty hatred in their veins. You couldn't level their trust-fund slanted playing field, but you could beat them on yours, and you did. While they wasted their beauty on one-night stands and empty-headed dreams of glamour, you studied your way to the Dean's list and a double major in Criminology and Biochemistry and turned your tassel with honors. Their futures were only as bright as the fading star of their youth, but yours was fixed in the bedrock of science.
You sent out applications to all the major police departments-New York, L.A., Boston, Miami, Philadelphia-but nobody was interested in a petite rube with no real-world experience, so you tucked tail and returned to Bozeman, where they were in desperate need of new blood to replace old cowboys who either went out with their boots on or died in the saddle. You spent three years riding shotgun with a morose, overweight deputy and two years as a CSI, swabbing blood from the floor and scooping brains from bowls of congealed oatmeal, and every one of those five years, you resubmitted your resume to the metropolitan police departments in the hopes of escaping your lifelong fetches. You prayed for New York, of course, but you'd have taken Philly in a trice.
Then Mac Taylor called in late summer 2005, and six weeks later, you touched down in JFK. New York, New York, and surely you looked like every idiot tourist to ever jam the city streets, standing in the middle of the seething concourse with your bags over your shoulders and crowded timorously at your feet while you gaped. You were an easy mark for a pickpocket, slack-jawed and starry-eyed while the city jostled around you and brushed past with hard, impatient shoulders. Hick in the city, with her head full of dreams and unreasoning hope. You could get lost here. If you could disappear anywhere, surely it would be here, in this city of teeming millions and eternal light.
You buried yourself in the city and its myriad cultures and immersed yourself in the job. You did your best to fit in, to be part of the crowd because crowds had no faces, no names. No past. Your fetches couldn't come for you if they couldn't see you. You rented a shabby apartment and went to the opera and told yourself that it was safe now. You were hidden in a forest of stone.
And you were safe, for a while. That first Halloween passed without incident, without the merest rustle of curtain. You sat up all night and waited for the feet beneath the door and the wan faces in the window, but the light spilling beneath your bedroom door never dimmed, and the pages of a windblown, old newspaper were the only visitors to your window. When dawn bled into the sky and the ghosts returned to their crypts for another year of slumber, you thought the nightmare was finally over. You let out a ragged breath and danced a whirling jig on the bedroom rug, arms outstretched and teeth exposed in a delirious smile, the last victim of St. Vitus' Fever. New York was your haven, and the bogeys of Opposite World had no power here. Free at last.
Except it wasn't, they did, and you weren't. They found you. It just took them a while, that's all.
They had found her on the day Flack had been injured in a bomb blast, had made their grand reappearance while she had hovered awkwardly outside his hospital room and gazed through the glass wall at his still, pale body. Christine had blinked into existence at his bedside, loops of intestine trailing her legs like garters. She had reached out a hand and rested it on Flack's forehead in a gentle caress, and then she had turned her head and grinned at Lindsay with blackened, pointed teeth.
If I can't have you, I guess I'll have to take him instead, she had whispered, blood and sewer mud and moldering vocal cords. Her fingers had brushed the hair from his forehead in an obscene, greedy parody of a lover's intimacy, and Lindsay had understood with dull, nauseated clarity that she meant it. If she had stayed in the warm, shifting knot of family that held vigil behind the wall, Flack would have died, victim of an inexplicable heart attack or pulmonary embolism. So she had fled, had pleaded wooziness and exhaustion from her inconsequential scrape and begged Danny to take her home. She had left the hospital and its sterile sodium lights and dragged Christine into the darkness with her.
Danny had not understood her pathological need for escape, and he had never forgiven her for impressing him into service as her knight in shining armor. Oh, he said he did, murmured his empty assurances into her ear when they lay tangled in the sheets, but he was a terrible liar, betrayed by the stiffness of his body and the restlessness of his gaze. Forgiveness granted under cover of darkness was gone by daylight and the harsh light of the labs. Danny's eyes told more truth than his mouth ever did, and they were distant and guilty and followed Flack's every ginger, white-faced step.
"I shoulda been there," he had said more than once, low and bitter, and underneath that confession was an even dirtier one: You're the reason I wasn't.
And dirty as it was, it was just as true.
She had thought Danny could protect her; he was brash and full of swagger and had the bald balls to run down suspects without batting an eyelash. He was Bronx mouth and Hell's Kitchen sex, rough and dirty and sharp at the edges, and he apologized for none of it. He was New York, take it or leave it, and the very taste of him was gritty, cigarettes and cinnamon and sauerkraut.
But Danny was full of cracks beneath all that bravado, hairline fractures that went as deep as the bone. He walked around bone on bone, and sometimes, when he crouched at a scene to collect blood swabs, she heard them slide, rattle, and pop beneath the skin. He was the Tin Man to her Dorothy, and he lived in a place darker than Oz by far, a place that called itself kin to Opposite World. Sometimes, she woke in the night and tasted him on her lips, and shuddered beneath the sheets, suddenly aware of how close she was to true darkness.
To be fair to Danny, she doubted any of them could protect her. Not Stella, with her no-nonsense mettle and John Rambo kinship with a gun, and not Mac who thought Semper Fi was a Biblical commandment. Certainly not Flack, though he would count it his duty to try, and not Hawkes, who had a scientist's mind and a surgeon's hands. It had been selfish and naïve to ask of them an impossible task, but then, those who knew her best, her three faithful fetches, would have said that was par for the course. Lindsay Monroe, always taking more than she deserved.
She had hoped to outrun them, to bury them with time and distance, but she had known in her heart that it was useless. You could never outrun what belonged to you, and the dead were infinitely patient. After all, they had nothing but time, and what was distance in a world without roads? They had been looking for her for ten years, pursuing her over rutted, dirt roads and subway tunnels and the yawning expanse of bridges, and now the chase was almost over. Underneath the ferocious, instinctive terror was a shameful relief. She was tired of running.
Stella squatted a few feet away, head bowed over the rubber-masked corpse sprawled indecorously on the pavement. Blood pooled beneath his head and back. It was red darkening to brown, and though she knew it was real-the smell of iron hung in the air like ozone after a lightning strike-Lindsay thought it looked fake in the beam of Stella's flashlight.
Turn him over, and he'd look like Christine, she mused. Is that her latest and greatest calling card?
"No shell casings," Stella murmured. "Stabbing, maybe?" She shone the beam over the rubber mask. "No hole in the mask, though. And who stabs somebody in the head?"
"Someone out of control," Lindsay offered, and joined her beside the body. Behind her, Flack directed the milling uniforms assigned to canvassing and crowd control, and the crime scene tape rattled like rustling leaves.
Stella shook her head. "No. See, there's a stab wound here-," she pointed her beam to the ragged hole in the vic's t-shirt, "-but no corresponding hole in the mask. Either our killer stabbed the vic in the back of the head first and rolled him over to finish the job, or the blood underneath the head has a different cause."
"You're thinking multiple assailants?"
"Only one way to find out." Stella reached for the thin, rubber seam of the mask.
Lindsay mimicked her motion. "A bit like Scooby-Doo," she observed, and Stella snorted in wry amusement.
No stab wounds on either side of the head, but the left side was lumpy with shattered bone and so perversely concave that Lindsay's eyes hurt to see it.
Like that scene in The Haunting where the bedroom door bulges inward in defiance of logic.
"Ouch. Looks like our perp treated himself to some mindless violence for Halloween."
Lindsay looked over her shoulder to see Flack looming over them, notebook in one hand and the other hand on his hip as he surveyed the carnage. His mouth quirked in a dourly amused grimace, and his eyes were bright and alert inside his face as he watched Stella photograph the mess. The ambient red light from the patrol cars parked beyond the tape gave his close-cropped, brown hair an ethereal, silver sheen that reminded her of a ghost.
Maybe he's been dead all this time. Maybe I wasn't fast enough, and Christine killed him, smothered him with her cold hand or strangled him with the festering umbilicus of her intestines. He's been dead since last May, but he never left. He stayed to carry out his sworn duty and look out for his Nerd Squad. He's Casper with a badge and a five-o'clock shadow.
Then Flack shifted, and he was just cop, a heavy, protective presence at her exposed back. His badge gleamed in the dim light. "You thinkin' multiple doers?" he asked.
"Can't get anything past you, Flack," Stella responded amiably, and rose from her crouch.
Flack snorted and shook his head. "Rumor has it that I can walk and chew gum at the same time."
"Amazing."
"Yeah? Get this." Flack leaned toward Stella and said in a conspiratorial whisper, "I even remember to put the seat down when I'm done."
"That's too much information, Detective," Stella said, but she was smiling, and her eyes sparkled with secretive amusement.
"I thought you'd appreciate thoroughness," he retorted, and grinned. Then, before Stella could rob him of his victory, "I'm gonna round up some of the looky-lous and get their statements, but I wouldn't count on much. Most of 'em are probably in the bag or high on "sugar." He rolled his eyes and loped toward a crowd of onlookers who lingered beside his squad car.
It was comforting, the unthinking bonhomie between Stella and Flack, and she wondered how much longer she had to enjoy it. Not long, she suspected. The shadows had begun to crouch at the foot of the bed she shared with Danny, hunched, arachnid forms that scuttled just beyond her field of vision. Last night, she had awakened from a dream to hear the sibilant, clandestine tread of bare feet on thick carpet, and when she had peered into the darkness, she had seen a flash of white-teeth or fingertips-at the edge of the coverlet, hovering in the blacklight darkness like a UFO. Then, blink. Gone. And somewhere behind her ear, near the supple, soft nautilus that Danny liked to kiss, a laugh, fingers drawn lightly over yellow, dusty piano keys. Ready or not, here I come.
They processed until two in the morning, and though Lindsay said nothing, she saw flickers of movement outside the crime scene tap, areas of deeper darkness without physical cause. Once, she smelled Ashley's perfume, jasmine and oleander. Now and then, she stole sidelong glances at Stella to see if she noticed the blackness beyond night that lived outside the tape, but Stella had eyes only for the task at hand. The veil rested comfortably over her eyes as she studied the scene for the last time.
The body made the trip to the morgue in the sleek, black hearse of the coroner's van, and Stella followed in its wake in the Tahoe, Death's vassal in four-wheel drive. Lindsay sat in the passenger seat and pretended to notice neither the strained silence from the driver's seat nor the leering, distorted faces in the tinted window. She wished Stella would turn on the music, but she knew better than to ask. She had spent all her good graces during the Cole Rowen case, when she had still hoped to ignore truth by ignoring the past. So they drove in silence. It was cold in the car, colder than it should have been, and her breath danced past her lips on the cusp of visibility.
A pebble bounced of the road and struck the window with the sudden, insistent plick of a tapping finger, and she recoiled.
Stella never took her eyes from the road. "You okay, Lindsay?"
"Hm? Yeah. Just tired, and my mind is playing tricks on me." Peekaboo, and I see you.
She was exhausted by the time they returned to the lab, and when Flack offered her a ride home, she almost accepted. The silence of his car would be civil if not friendly, and the interior would not reek of piss and stale sweat like the subway. Maybe he would even put in an audiobook, and she could listen to the sane, recorded voices of real people instead of the malevolent, triumphant whispers of the dead but never departed inside her head.
In the end, she refused. He looked as tired as she felt, dark, bruised circles underneath his red, strained eyes, and in the subterranean basement of her mind, she was reliving the night of his bombing, when Christine had promised to take him if she could not have her. Maybe Christine had gotten greedy after her long pursuit. Maybe one was no longer good enough, and she would take Lindsay and whoever was with her when her hand groped from beyond the veil. Flack was a decent guy who deserved to have a wife and kids and grow old surrounded by lazy dogs and rambunctious grandchildren, not to be another casualty of her cowardice. It was a risk she could not take, and so she left him in the foyer of the precinct and let the darkness swallow her whole.
She trudged to the subway station, sure that every step would be her last, but she descended into the watery, underworld light without incident and shuffled to the platform. The only other occupant was a wino dressed in a filthy rain slicker. He reeked of booze and garbage and smiled at her with a gummy, toothless mouth, but she was grateful for the company. The only thing worse than dying was dying alone.
From down the tunnel came the throaty, grinding rumble of the train, and a wildly hopeful voice in her heart murmured that all was not lost, that maybe she could outrun her fetches one more time. Then the cold from the SUV returned, a serrated knife against her breastbone and a wet cloth over her mouth, and she knew. No more running, no more dodging bullets meant for her. No more sandcastles built on hope and hubris. It was the witching hour on Halloween night, and there was no more road beneath her feet.
The train pulled into view and lurched to a halt, and the doors opened with a pneumatic wheeze.
"Not long now," croaked the wino in a brittle, phlegmatic voice, and smiled. His gums were blackened and bleeding.
"No," she agreed quietly, and stepped onto the waiting train, braced for the curl of a frozen, white-blue hand around her ankle.