Scott Nicholson Library Vol 3 Read online

“My boyfriend? Pettigrew? The one who’s six-four and kind of jealous?”

  “Nah, the other one. The dollface.”

  Damn, I thought I was the dollface around here. Does he mean Momma? What in the world has she conjured up this time?

  “Momma’s going to be back any minute, but I’d be gone if I were you. She doesn’t take kindly to intruders and she rides a mean broom.”

  “I’ll be going as soon as I get what I want.”

  “Sorry, whatever-your-name-is, but you don’t look like you ever get what you want.”

  He slammed his fist against the cheap paneling. His blue stuffed-animal eyes shifted to red, with tiny streaks of lightning in them. Puffs of smoke jetted from his ears.

  Oops. The little tyrant has a temper to match his ego.

  “My”–he repeatedly pounded the wall to punctuate each word–”name—is—Royce.”

  Crystal contemplated fleeing to the bathroom and fumbling among Momma’s potions, hoping to come up with a concoction that would ward off minor-level demons, or perhaps make them disappear. But she’d shirked her studies. She was just as likely to turn him into a toad, or herself into a toad for that matter.

  “Okay, Royce. Chill a little.”

  The puffs of smoke thinned. Even his cigarette quit burning. “You know how it gets when some dollface messes with your head.”

  “I reckon. What did this ‘dollface’ do that was so horrible?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I see.”

  “I followed her here.” Now he simply looked lost, as if he’d been searching for something and had forgotten what it was. Or where he was. Or what he was.

  Happened a lot with Tweeners.

  “Well, sorry I can’t help you,” Crystal said. “Now, you be a good boy and get along home.”

  “I don’t know how to get back.” Now he looked wounded and a little cute. “I don’t have the script yet.”

  Damn. I hate it when guys do that. Just what I need. Another hottie in my life.

  “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. You go sit in the living room while I ...uh, check my email ...then we can figure this out.”

  “What if your momma comes?”

  It wasn’t the first time a guy had asked her that question, and she used the old stand-by answer. “Might be worth the risk, Royce.”

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe Dollface will come by while you’re waiting.”

  “Sure.”

  She closed the bedroom door behind her, wondering if Royce would steal the silverware. Not that they had any silverware. Most of their utensils were chewed-up plastic sporks from Bojangle’s.

  Bone was lying on the bed reading Cosmopolitan and wearing a lipstick-coated smile. She’d been playing in Crystal’s make-up kit and wore black smears of eyeliner and blotches of rouge on her cheeks. Her eyes resembled Roscoe’s, but the possum’s were closed in sleep. Roscoe would probably nap through Armageddon.

  “So, Dollface, where’d you pick up the boy toy?”

  “Just a coffin cutie I found in Darkmeet.”

  “And you let him follow you here? I thought that was against the rules.

  “I didn’t let him do anything. Besides, you know how I am about rules.”

  “I only know how you were. I don’t know nothing about how you are now. Ever since you died, you’ve been a little weird.”

  “Well, thanks for the unconditional love, Crystal. ‘Best friends forever’ has an expiration date, huh?”

  Crystal saw that her computer was booted up. “Were you messing with my Internet?”

  “Checking Facebook. Seeing who else unfriended me after I died.”

  “Score.”

  Crystal tossed her a bra, one of the white, unsexy ones. It was hard watching Bone strain her 16-year-old boobs into Crystal’s C cups without being jealous. She got her revenge with a hideous ensemble that was four months out of season and clashed with Bone’s red hair. She grabbed a floral-print blouse and lime-green Capri pants from the closet and flung them on the bed.

  “Make yourself decent so we can go out there and deal with this before Momma gets home,” Crystal said.

  “Hey, don’t get mad. I’m just a teen Tweener trying to make her way in the world. Whichever world it is.”

  Bone’s eyes were milky and gleaming, like twin moons on a foggy night. Crystal reached over and stroked her friend’s hair, surprised to find it silken and solid. “I’m here for you, Bone. You’re still my soul sister.”

  “Okay.” Bone’s pout retreated.

  Crisis over, for the moment. Nothing like dealing with the Drama Queen of the Damned. Crystal nodded toward the door. “Now, what are we going to do about him?”

  “Not my problem.”

  “Whoa. He came tagging along like a puppy at your heels. And I’m sure you didn’t do anything to encourage him.”

  “Well, maybe I talked to him a little.”

  “A little? He’s calling you ‘Dollface.’”

  “I asked him out, sort of.”

  Crystal got off the bed in a rusty rush of squeaks. “What, like you guys were just going to cha-cha-cha from the Land of the Dead and go get a Big Mac on bowling night or something?”

  “I was trying to throw Tim off the scent.”

  “Tim? That dweebie boy who died of cancer in seventh grade?”

  “He’s not a dweeb, he’s just kind of...not hot. Gives off this ‘little brother’ vibe.”

  “Well, Royce here has got him all beat on the Fahrenheit scale. What does he measure, 55 degrees or something? He’s so cool, he’s frigid.”

  “I don’t meddle in your love life, so please stay out of mine.”

  “Except for two things. You do meddle in my love life, and your coffin cutie is in my kitchen, probably trying to figure out how to work a microwave.”

  As if on cue–and Crystal wasn’t sure how keen a ghost’s sense of hearing was–a pot clanged in the kitchen and Royce called out, “Hey, Dollface, come cook me up some eggs.”

  Crystal folded her arms. “It’s your date, you take care of him. And you’re not borrowing my bed.”

  Bone’s lips tried to curl in disappointment but it was a lost cause. Crystal wondered if her best friend was a permanent lost cause. But friends were friends, until the end and back again.

  Bone rolled off the bed and slouched toward the door. “All right.”

  “He is kind of cute,” Crystal offered in encouragement.

  Bone sighed and adjusted the hideous floral-print blouse. “Isn’t this a Cindy Summerhill hand-me-down?”

  “Go get ‘em, Tiger.”

  Bone went out, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear.

  As the door swept closed, Crystal called out something Momma might have said. “And have him back in the grave before midnight.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Minerva had suspected something was up as soon as Crystal had assured her nothing was wrong. When nothing was wrong, that meant everything was wrong.

  But she hadn’t suspected things were so far gone. The Lurken had been growing bolder by the day, apparently annoyed that the Year 2000 hadn’t resulted in the End Times after all. They’d have to destroy the world in a steady, measured, and fairly exhausting fashion.

  The Aldridge bloodline had warded off evil for at least a millennium, despite the culling of the herd by the Catholic Church and the Salem Witch Trials. Now it was down to her and Crystal, and she wasn’t sure her daughter was up to snuff.

  The way Crystal avoided talking about Dempsey led Minerva to suspect a crush. And she didn’t doubt for a second that Darkmeet would play dirty. All was fair in love and war and interdimensional conquest.

  Minerva had intended to circle the trailer park and then cut the engine, because her Chevelle had a couple of holes in its rusted muffler and a stealth approach was out of the question. But the dang-blasted Spindale tomcat, which was black as night and twice as slick, darted in front of the car.

  A little voice implored he
r to mash the gas and grind the little puff-puss to Purina, but she’d learned to ignore those little voices. Instead, she swerved, running her passenger-side wheels into a drainage ditch and getting stuck tighter than a cork in a guinea hen’s noonie.

  The cat was perched on the fence, its tail whisking joyfully under the orange streetlight. Minerva was hunting for a chunk of gravel to hurl when headlights swept over her.

  The truck rumbled beside her and the driver’s window descended. Pettigrew’s strong chin thrust out.

  He’s not up there in looks but if you ever needed to hammer a tent peg, his chin would come in mighty handy. Plus he’s tall.

  ”Hey, Miss Aldridge, you need a hand?”

  “I got two already, but if you got a chain, I’d sure be obliged.”

  “Happy Hooker Towing Service & Auto Service at your service.”

  As he backed up and lowered the winch cable, she said, “Crystal talked like ya’ll weren’t going out tonight.”

  “Yeah, but her voice sounded kind of funny. I decided to drive by and check on her.”

  “She don’t take kindly to that.”

  “It ain’t that I don’t trust her.”

  You got a good heart, son, but your head is packed full of axle grease. You’ll learn soon enough that “trust” and “woman” seldom go together.

  Pettigrew tugged the Chevelle out of the ditch, then they both stood looking down the row of mobiles homes to the Aldridge residence. The oversize sardine can looked a little frayed and dented, and the light leaking from between its curtains didn’t radiate a sense of security and comfort. Minerva sometimes wished she’d used her powers to pile up a fat bank account, but the Rule of Three worked against greed. The harder you wished, the faster the money went.

  Or, as Roy Reed used to say, “Want in one hand and poop in the other and see which hand fills up the fastest.”

  “What do I owe you?” Minerva said.

  “Shucks, Miss Aldridge, we’re practically family. But a root beer would sure be nice about now.”

  Minerva knew he was angling for an invitation, and his fondness for root beer had made it easy to dose him with her most powerful love potion. But she wasn’t sure what she would find when she entered the trailer.

  For all she knew, The Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or at least the Lennon and Harrison portion of it, would be smoking marijuana through a tuba. Or Julius Caesar and John Belushi would be throwing a toga party. Or Vincent van Gogh would show up looking for his ear.

  “It’s a school night,” she said.

  “It’s Friday, and her GED class is on Wednesday.”

  “She was feeling poorly and said she was turning in early.” Minerva coughed, hacked up a dry clod of mucus, and spat as if the Aldridge home were a quarantine zone.

  “I was kissing her just this morning, so I probably got it anyway,” he said.

  Minerva had not yet perfected the love spell. The trick was to get him head over heels without him jamming his tongue against her tonsils. She didn’t want to think about the other things they might be jamming.

  Crystal would eventually be called upon to manufacture a female descendant, but there was no big rush. Plus it would be that much harder for Minerva to tutor her daughter in the arcane arts if Pettigrew lived under the same roof.

  Plus, Crystal might actually fall in love for real. Talk about your complications.

  “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll go in and see if the coast is clear, then signal you.”

  Pettigrew nodded as she pulled away in the Chevelle. She parked beside the porch and goosed the accelerator, hoping the noise would alert Crystal and give her time to stop any funny business.

  Pettigrew parked at the foot of the trailer, engine idling, awaiting her signal. She entered to grunts and sloppy, sloshing sounds, and braced for the sight of Crystal making out on the couch with that Dempsey fellow. Instead, she got a good-news/bad-news deal.

  Bad: A strange man in your trailer.

  Good: He’s fully dressed.

  Bad again: He’s attached to a Lurken.

  An oily tentacle protruded from beneath the couch and was wrapped around the young man, towing him toward the dusty darkness. The man, dressed in black leather boots, tight blue jeans, and white T-shirt, had a frantic grip on the oven-door handle. He was pleading for help, apparently not used to creatures from beyond. Crystal stood on the couch, whapping at the tentacle with a broom. Wet farting noises spilled from beneath the couch.

  “I can’t leave you alone for a minute without all hell breaking loose,” Minerva said, but her heart wasn’t in it. After all, hell would probably have broken loose even if Crystal had been away.

  That’s just what hell does: it breaks loose. It doesn’t have a whole lot else going on.

  “Give me a hard time later,” Crystal said, straws flying from the broom as she flailed it up and down. “First, we got some housecleaning to do.”

  The male intruder kicked at the tentacle that held him captive, but the Lurken only applied more pressure. Anyone with a lick of sense would have played possum, let his body go limp so the Lurken would go off in search of fresher prey. Despite his lack of wits, he was quite a specimen, and his jeans were snug. As Lurken bait went, you could do a lot worse.

  “Hold on,” she said to him, stepping over the tentacle and heading down the hall.

  “Where are you going?” he yelled, with an embarrassing, near-pubescent crack in his voice.

  “To call in the cavalry,” she said.

  “Momma!” Crystal said.

  “A fat lot of good you’re doing,” Minerva called back. A breeze skirled down the hall from Crystal’s bedroom, carrying the aroma of roses and rot, but Minerva didn’t have time to make sense of it.

  She wheeled into the bathroom and noted with dismay that Crystal had been playing in the potions again. Perhaps the Lurken’s visit wasn’t accidental after all. Crystal could have knocked together an accidental concoction that would draw Lurken like flies to horse dooky.

  Problem.

  The bottle of wog essence had somehow fallen behind the toilet and leaked a good half of its contents. The swampy aroma of frogbirth filled the tiny lavatory. Every decent summoning spell required a foundation of wog, and barely a spoonful remained in the bottle. At the most, Minerva would be able to conjure a were-bunny, and then it would only be effective once a month under the full moon.

  Minerva hurried back into the kitchen, where the struggle continued. “You were meddling,” she called to Crystal.

  “Just peeked,” she answered, still wielding the broom against the aggressive tentacle.

  “This is what happens,” Minerva said, retrieving a butcher knife from a drawer. “You mess around and meddle, and before you know it, you’re dealing with forces beyond your understanding.”

  “You chicks are crazy,” the man yelled, his face red from exertion as he kicked and twitched. The Lurken held tight.

  Crystal jumped forward and smacked him with the broom. “We’re not chicks,” she said. “We didn’t hatch and we don’t go ‘cheep cheep.’”

  Minerva chopped the butcher knife against the tentacle, and a purple, viscous fluid welled from the wound. It had the consistency of maple syrup, but smelled of rat rumps and fermented yak milk, both of which she’d had occasion to sample. The drops of purple goo spattered on the floor, collected themselves into tiny balls, and rolled down in the grids of the heating duct that connected to the oil furnace.

  Great. Now we’ll enjoy that lovely Lurken smell all through winter, assuming we survive the night.

  “Make it let go!” With his free hand, the man batted at the tentacle, which had slithered another six inches up his thigh and was threatening to crush some soft bits.

  Minerva was sawing the blade back and forth across the tentacle, wishing she’d taken Ronco up on its offer of a Ginsu knife set for only $19.95 plus shipping and handling.

  A second tentacle roped from beneath the couch, its tip
quivering in the air.

  Make that two knife sets.

  “There’s another one, Momma,” Crystal shouted.

  “It’s the same one twice,” Minerva said, lamenting Crystal’s ignorance. Maybe she should have sped up the apprenticeship, but Crystal had never been strong on book-learning, plus she’d seemed a little more absentminded than usual since her best friend Bonnie had died.

  “Don’t let it get me,” the man whined.

  “Shut up,” Minerva and Crystal said in unison.

  A geyser of goo shot from the knife blade. Minerva dreaded the clean-up job ahead.

  The price of playing hostess.

  “Maybe we should give it what it came for,” Minerva said.

  “Noooo,” wailed the man.

  While Crystal slapped at the second tentacle, which dodged the blows like a mosquito eluding a baseball bat, Minerva tossed the knife toward the sink and yanked open the fridge. The second tentacle froze in mid-air, and Crystal nailed it a good one with the broom.

  Minerva rummaged among the breakfast meats and emerged with a half pound of hickory-smoked sugar bacon. She ripped the package open and held it up, letting the odor of preservatives, salt, and pig fat seep across the room.

  The second tentacle undulated toward the bacon while the first loosened its grip on the man’s leg. Soon both tentacles stood erect like begging puppies. The glistening nubs on the ends of both tentacles throbbed with unwholesome appetite.

  “Works better if it’s cooked, but this will do,” Minerva said.

  She delivered an ancient chant that had been handed down through a thousand Sabbats and Walpurgis Nights, and even a few family recipes:

  Out of fat and into fire,

  Let go of this dork,

  Back to Darkmeet with a gift,

  A sacrifice of pork.

  She tossed the bacon toward the crevice under the couch and the two tentacles writhed and whipped after it, briefly tangling in a tussle before sweeping the bacon into the darkness beyond.

  A slithery thumping followed, as if the Lurken’s tentacles were working in opposition, then came a slobbery smacking of what could only be grotesquely oversize lips and bare gums.

  Then came a belch that sent a rancid, porcine breeze across the kitchen, and peace once again reigned.