Paint It Black Read online

  Sometimes, she did things that helped.

  But sometimes…

  Oh, but that was the past. Nothing had happened in a long, long time, and maybe it had only been, I don’t know, a bad couple of months or something for her. Maybe she’d just snapped, had a nervous breakdown, maybe…

  Whatever. I didn’t need to think about that. I didn’t have to think about that except when the ghosts sometimes got inside my head and they dragged things out that I’d rather keep hidden.

  Usually, I could handle one ghost like Mrs. Michaelson, without doing a purge. Usually, I would wait until there were at least five before I went out and tried the oil. The oil was a conduit for supernatural entities. I could use it to try to channel something strong, and then that strong energy would absorb any ghosts that had attached themselves to me. I was going to do that with Mrs. Michaelson. I was going to do it now, because I couldn’t handle having her talking to me in that other voice.

  It was going to be hell, though, because the ritual took a lot out of me. I’d be on my ass for ten or twelve hours afterward, and it would take days to feel like myself again.

  It would be worth it to get rid of her.

  So, I got the Airstream ready to go, and I hooked it back up to my truck, and I pulled out of the campsite, heading back onto the road and out of town.

  That was when my phone rang.

  I pulled it out of my pocket and answered it, leaving it on the dash on speaker phone. Two minutes later and I would have had my music on and blaring, probably some loud, obnoxious rock band popular before I was born, because I knew that Mads hated that, and I wanted peace from her as well. But for now, it was quiet.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey, Deacon, what are you up to?” came Wade’s voice.

  “You know, I’m just getting out of here.”

  “What? You’re leaving already?”

  “Uh…” Damn it.

  “I was calling to see if you wanted to grab a greasy breakfast at Celeste’s.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Deacon? You there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “What do you say? Come to breakfast at least. Come on.”

  I sighed.

  “I don’t want you to leave. This is Olivia fucking Shields, man. She’s dead. It’s like the shattering of our adolescence, and we have grieving to do. You have to stay. I need you.”

  I sighed again.

  “Why’d you leave so early last night anyway? I think Lisa was really into you. You could have hit that.”

  “After Olivia’s funeral?” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess not,” he said.

  “You took that Cammy chick home, didn’t you?”

  “No,” he said. “Not after Olivia’s funeral. I have a soul. When can you get to Celeste’s?”

  “Uh… twenty minutes,” I said. I was going to have to turn the Airstream around.

  * * *

  I couldn’t say no to Wade.

  Like I said, Wade was all I had.

  I remember the first time I met him. We were kids. It was summer, like it was now, but early summer back then. Maybe June. The campground where my mother’s motorhome was parked had a lake down at the far end, and there was a cave off the lake. Nothing big. I think it was maybe four feet high and four feet deep. It was all full of graffiti on the walls and stacks of old beer cans and piles of dead leaves.

  Wade was in there.

  He was smoking a cigarette and he had a shiner the size of Jupiter. His eye was black and blue and that awful green color skin gets when it’s trying to heal.

  We were ten.

  “You can’t tell anyone I’m here,” Wade said to me in greeting.

  “Fine,” I said, crawling into the cave.

  “I didn’t say you could be here,” he said.

  “It’s a free country,” I said.

  He seemed to accept this as an answer that made sense.

  I settled into the cave. I liked it there. It was dark and cool and I could look out at the lake, which seemed peaceful and pretty, unlike everything else in my life right at that moment.

  You know, I would say that up until a few weeks before that day in the cave, I’d had what I would call a good childhood. My mother was always crazy, but she seemed to love me. She was good to me. We traveled all over, and she did seances, and people gave her money, and sometimes they got mad if they thought she was playing them for fools, but mostly it was good. My mother was a fake medium. That was how she made her living.

  But then everything went to hell.

  And right then, all I wanted was some kind of refuge. The cave was that refuge. If I had to share it with some kid with a black eye, I didn’t care.

  “You want a cigarette?” Wade offered me one.

  I took the cigarette, even though I had never smoked one. I recognized it as a peace offering.

  “You know how to smoke?” said Wade.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  He snorted at me. “You don’t know shit. You’re some baby-faced dumb kid.”

  “I’m not,” I said, hugging my knees to my chest, the cigarette dangling between my thumb and forefinger, unlit. He hadn’t offered me matches or anything.

  Something in my tone must have convinced him that I was telling the truth, because he just got out a lighter and lit my cigarette. “Don’t suck too hard on it yet. Just puff it. If you go too hard at it, you’ll start coughing your head off.”

  I obeyed, but I coughed anyway.

  He laughed. “Man, puff it.”

  I coughed. My eyes were watering. I tried again. I was still coughing. I decided I was just going to hold the cigarette and occasionally bring it to my mouth and not actually puff or suck or anything.

  That seemed to work.

  We sat and smoked in companionable silence for some time.

  “These are my dad’s smokes,” said Wade. “He’s an asshole.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Your dad an asshole too?”

  “I don’t know. I never met him,” I said. “But my mom, she’s…” A long pause.

  “Yeah,” he said finally, as if he understood. Maybe he did.

  “Your dad do that to your face?”

  He nodded. “He only does it when he’s drunk.”

  “My mom…” I wasn’t sure how to explain it.

  “It’s cool, man,” he said. “I get it. Fuck parents, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Fuck them. Really hard.” I nodded vigorously.

  In the distance, my mother’s voice carried. “Where are you, Deacon? Get your ass back here, you little shit.”

  * * *

  All through breakfast, Wade’s barnacle was making me feel sick to my stomach.

  Maybe it was a hangover. I don’t know. I hadn’t had that much to drink the night before, but I still had a little twinge between my eyes, even after I drank a whole glass of water at Celeste’s. Celeste’s was a diner. We used to go there all the time when we were in high school. Order coffee and sit there for hours, getting refills and then leave without tipping. We were shits back then. The waitresses must have hated us.

  Back then, I would never have had any kind of hangover, not after drinking twice as many drinks. My youthful body shook it off like nothing.

  Now, I was an old man at twenty-five.

  Seriously, what the hell was I doing with myself? More and more, I was beginning to realize that at my age, I was supposed to be a real adult. Most people had degrees and jobs and were married or at least living with someone serious. Some people my age even had kids.

  I was just drifting. After I had gotten the inheritance from my father, I didn’t need to work, and once I fixed up the Airstream, I didn’t need a place to live. I could pull up stakes and go where the wind blew me, one town to the next. I did occasionally take odd jobs. I was actually an okay cook. I could get a job at a restaurant if I needed it. And I could usually hack a mechanic job, fixing up cars. I knew the m
oney I’d inherited wasn’t going to last forever, so I did try to supplement when I could.

  But I had no goals or anything. I wasn’t working toward anything.

  I was drifting.

  Maybe I was running. Maybe I thought if I went far enough away, the ghosts wouldn’t follow me. But then I came back home to Thornford, to the only place I could really call home anyway, and there was Wade with that thing attached to the back of his neck.

  And with a hot rush of shame, I realized that I’d been about to leave town and leave him with that thing on there.

  That was low, even for me. I didn’t like to get involved with this ghost stuff, and I sure as hell didn’t know what it was that was stuck on him or how to get it off, but I was also the only person that knew it was there.

  I needed to do something.

  Wade was my best friend.

  When I was sixteen and I finally got my driver’s license and that truck, I finally got away from my mother once and for all. I had come to Wade, and Wade had taken care of me. Without Wade, I didn’t know if I would have made it.

  Wade’s father was reformed these days. He and Wade’s mom were divorced, but Wade’s dad had cleaned up and gone to AA and done all his steps to get his forgiveness. And now, as penance, he foot the bill for Wade’s college career, as long and illustrious as it was. I thought that Wade stayed in school partly just to drain his old man dry.

  I knew Wade hadn’t actually forgiven him.

  Maybe his dad was sober now and he didn’t take his fists to people, but Wade still had all the scars. The ones you could see and the ones you couldn’t.

  So did I.

  Anyway, I owed Wade. And even if I didn’t, I cared about him, so I had to do something. I just didn’t know what.

  I toyed with the idea of telling him that the thing was attached to him, but that was a big can of worms to open. Oh, by the way, the whole time you’ve known me, I’ve seen dead people, but I just never mentioned it since I didn’t want you to think I was crazy. And now, there’s something attached to your neck. What is it? I haven’t the foggiest, but I’m sure it’s not a good thing, and we need to get that taken off.

  I was sure that Wade would take that all quite calmly. Yeah, right.

  It wasn’t a ghost, at least I didn’t think it was. It didn’t seem like the ghosts I saw. But it was something supernatural, and it had to be related.

  “You know,” said Wade, “Heather Olsen fell out of a window too.”

  We were walking now. We’d left Celeste’s and we were walking the streets of town. To get onto campus, all we’d have to do was cross the road over here. The campus sprawled over half of the town.

  “Who’s Heather Olsen?” I said.

  “The woman that haunts Ridinger Hall,” he said.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “You went into some haunted house.”

  “Dorm,” said Wade. “It’s a haunted dorm.”

  “Whatever,” I said. It only stood to reason that it was all connected, right? But he’d said that nothing had happened when he and Rylan went into the place.

  “It’s been bothering me,” said Wade. “How they both died that way. I don’t know, it cheapens what happened to Olivia.”

  “How so?”

  “Because she’s like some shlocky ghost story, and that’s not cool. She was more than a story, you know?”

  I nodded slowly. “You think that they’ve got something to do with each other? Did Olivia go into that house with you guys?”

  “No,” he said, and he stopped walking to look at me. “Hey, why would you say that? You don’t even believe in ghosts.” He squared his shoulders and started walking again. “Hell, I don’t believe in them either.”

  We crossed the street and turned onto campus. The scenery changed. Instead of houses on either side of the street with porches, there were big brick buildings with signs in the front. McLaren Hall, the center for the Social Sciences. Tawnee Hall, center for study of language. That kind of thing. I didn’t go to school on this campus, so I didn’t know where anything was. I was just following Wade.

  “The dorm,” I said. “People still live in it?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s been abandoned for years.”

  “Because it’s haunted?”

  “Because some chick fell out of the window in the ‘80s and they closed it up to evaluate whether it was safe to live in and must have decided it wasn’t. I don’t know.”

  “But if you guys went in there to film things then there must be a history of screwy things happening there, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “What kind of things?”

  He turned to me again. “Why are you asking me this stuff?”

  I needed to tell him. I really did. “You know, when I said to you that I didn’t believe in ghosts—”

  “You didn’t so much say it as ridicule every single person who did,” said Wade. “I think you referred to them as sad suckers on a few occasions.”

  “Well, yeah, but the thing is—”

  “Hey, I get it.” He raised both of his hands. “It’s because of what your mom does for a living.” My mother was a traveling psychic who claimed to be able to reach into the beyond and communicate with spirits. The only thing was that she couldn’t do that at all. My mother was a giant fake. She had smoke machines and rigged pulley systems to knock on the walls and she was a pretty decent actress. She took people’s money for that shit. She had justifications for doing it, I guess. It was true that people wanted to believe. “And like I said, I don’t believe in that stuff either. But I’ve got an open mind. When Rylan asked if I wanted to be in her youtube thing, I thought it might be fun, that’s all.”

  “I have an open mind,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows at me.

  Now we were walking down a sidewalk that seemed to be falling into further and further disrepair the more that we walked. It was cracked and crumbling and scraggly weeds were pushing their way up through the concrete.

  “Look, I know I always said that I didn’t believe, but the truth is that I maybe kind of do.”

  “Maybe kind of?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Uh…” He looked around. “I think I’m instinctively walking there because we’re talking about it.” He gestured.

  At first, I couldn’t see it, and then we moved forward a few steps and cleared the overgrown tangle and there it was. The brick building rose intimidatingly over its unkempt surroundings. It was brick and formidable. Built in the style of old dormitories, it had a stately design—large pillars looming, windows narrow and tall. Ivy grew up the sides of the walls. The dorm glared down at us knowingly. It was keeping secrets.

  I peered up at Ridinger Hall, hoping to see something that would give me a clue to its hidden depths. Maybe a figure at a window or maybe Heather Olsen herself, whoever the hell she was.

  “Creepy, right?” he said. “But nothing happened while we were in there.”

  “This Heather Olsen person,” I said. “What’s the deal with her?”

  “What do you mean? She fell out of a window. That one up there.” He pointed to a window in the top story.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did she kill herself?”

  “I don’t think so. I think it was an accident. She was probably drunk.”

  I folded my arms over my chest.

  A hissing sound from Wade.

  I turned to look at him. It was the barnacle. It was changing. It had hair now—long, ropy dark hair. And it had eyes too—or it had eye sockets. They were empty and hollow and dark. The barnacle looked like the vague shape of a woman, and she was running her fingers through Wade’s hair, cupping his jaw, and shaking back her hair, gaping up at the sky. Then she let out some kind of scraping, screaming cry. Or maybe it was a moan. I couldn’t tell if she was frightened or pleased.

  “Let’s get away from this place,” I said to him.

  CHAPTER FI
VE

  “Oh,” said Mads, sitting on the counter next to the sink in the Airstream, “now you want to talk to me.” She crossed her legs and gave me a hurt look. She was wearing a pair of cut-off jean shorts that exposed nearly all of her thighs.

  “I do,” I said. “I want you to tell me about that thing that’s attached to Wade.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe I’ll ignore you. You can see how it feels.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Geez, Mads, I’m sorry. It was a bad night last night. Besides, you can’t blame a guy for trying. I got you to stop showing up for what? Fifteen years? Now you’re back, all because I couldn’t ignore you.”

  “That’s not why I’m back.” She hopped down off the counter. “You didn’t make me go away with ignoring me. That’s not how it works. I couldn’t get through to you for years.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was too weak.”

  “Why were you weak?”

  “Is this what you want to talk about?”

  I looked her over. “Can you… wear actual clothes?”

  She snickered. “I’m not wearing any clothes at all, really. It’s all a projection.”

  “Well, project more fabric,” I muttered. I bent down and opened the refrigerator and took out a can of soda. So, like I said, Mads used to be my imaginary friend when I was a kid. I mean, she showed up at the same time as the ghosts did, but I didn’t put two and two together right off that she was a ghost. Not until I touched her and she was just like them. Anyway, at some point, I decided I would stop paying attention to the ghosts, hoping they’d go away. And Mads did. So, that was part of the reason why I steadfastly ignored them.

  Although, come to think of it, maybe it hadn’t really worked on any other ghost besides her.

  So, I hadn’t made her disappear? Something had happened to her? Why had she been weak?

  I opened the soda and raised my gaze to Mads, who was now wearing a nun’s habit. “Very funny,” I said.

  She giggled. “You like?”

  “Look, about the barnacle.”

  “The what?”

  “The thing attached to Wade. I started thinking of it like a barnacle because it’s stuck on and won’t let go. Is there another word for it?”