Scott Nicholson Library Vol 3 Read online

  Bone, solid, stuck her head out of the Orifice and gave a little wave. “Later.”

  “Wait. You were going to tell me about the end of the—”

  Bone was gone, and the Orifice shrank back to its usual size. Momma banged again.

  When Crystal opened the door, Momma stepped back as if punched in the face. “Pew. That dead boy sure had some funk.”

  “Maybe the Lurken scared the crap out of him.”

  “Where did he come from, anyway?” Momma peered past Crystal as if making sure neither Royce nor any other creature was hiding under her bed.

  “He probably got lost and went through the wrong door,” Crystal said, having no idea what she was talking about. “You could tell he was a few beans shy of a bushel.”

  “Well, he got in my potions and tossed things around a little,” Momma said. “I’m short on wog and that’s never a good thing. Especially at this time of year.”

  “What are we going to do about Pettigrew?”

  “You get on to bed and mull it over. I’m sure we can hatch a good lie by tomorrow. Or just let him be jealous. A jealous man is a lot easier to control.”

  “I don’t want to control him. I just don’t want to hurt him.”

  “You sure do got a lot to learn.” Momma smiled, and Crystal didn’t like the look of the expression. Sort of like a canary that had swallowed a snake.

  “How am I going to learn anything before I have to save the world on Halloween?”

  Momma sat on the bed beside her. “We’ll get through it together. That’s what Aldridges do.”

  And we also end up pathetic. Dying alone with 15 possums that end up eating our neglected corpses.

  “Momma, how come you didn’t cast a spell on Daddy and make him stay?”

  “That woulda been selfish. We use our powers for the good of others.”

  You sure have rubbery rules. Deciding Pettigrew is good for me, and becoming a witch is good for me, and staying in Parson’s Ford is good for me.

  “Now, get some sleep, and in the morning I’ll teach you a few chants.” Momma kissed Crystal on the forehead and went to the door. “Breakfast is oatmeal. We’re all out of bacon and eggs.”

  “I love you,” Crystal said.

  Momma was teaching her to be a better liar already.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When Bone arrived in the Graveyard of Second Chances, she expected the place to be pitch dark, as it had been when she’d left and which she assumed was a permanent condition.

  Instead, the neatly trimmed cemetery was bathed in golden light, with fresh flowers in front of every marker. The trees were in full leaf, and the Poot Owls had been replaced by cheerful meadowlarks. The mist had burned away to reveal that the bordering fence had all its stones, and the mausoleums sparkled as if freshly scrubbed for new owners. The atmosphere was one of spring splendor, the air ripe with pollen and dew.

  Royce was sitting on a concrete urn, using his toy switchblade to scrape moss from a headstone.

  “How did you get that back?” Bone asked.

  “I stole it.”

  “You’re good.”

  “Too good for this place, that’s for sure.”

  Bone drifted over to him and pointed to the name etched into the marker. “You know Poe?”

  “Yeah. We’ve hung out a little. He can drink a guy under the table, that’s for sure.”

  “I meant his poems. ‘The Raven’ and ‘Annabelle Lee’ and all that.”

  “Sure, sure. You know how writers are. They can never shut up about it.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened over there.”

  Royce folded his knife and tucked it in the back pocket of his jeans. “Forget it. That place was nowhere.”

  “Those are my friends you’re talking about.”

  “Hey, Dollface, take it easy.”

  “You’re such a jerk.”

  “That’s a little cold, after I went to all this trouble for you.”

  “Trouble?”

  Royce swept his arm out. “Colors and smells and stuff.”

  Bone studied her surroundings more closely. On Poe’s marker, the moss appeared bright green, almost translucent, like plastic. Maybe Royce hadn’t been scraping it clean after all. Maybe he’d been applying it, like an artist daubing acrylics on a canvas.

  She gave the grass beneath her feet an experimental tap. A crevice appeared in the sod. She poked the toe of her shoe into it and nudged. The sod peeled away, revealing a dark stubble of choked weeds and thorns.

  “None of it’s real,” she said.

  “It’s as real as anything,” Royce said, standing up and slouching a little. “So, you ready to make out or what?”

  Don’t you have to be in love for your first time?

  Oh, she’d come close, back on Earth ...so close that only a UPS truck could stop her. But she was kind of glad now, because she didn’t get to do that thing she’d wanted to do. A guilt trip like that had no end. So in a way, her death was divine justice.

  Except justice is blind and the Judge is a sugar junkie.

  Royce, despite his cuteness and the beguiling rough edges, was a little too forward. Bone found herself longing for some romance, a few laughs, and just maybe a little respect.

  “Out here in front of everybody?” she said.

  “None of them are paying attention. Their eyes are stitched closed, anyway.”

  Bone felt self-conscious and underdressed, though the sweater she had borrowed from Crystal was causing her to sweat. It was the first time she’d sweated since coming to Darkmeet as a fresh spirit. She tried to keep calm, but since she had no heartbeat, she couldn’t tell if her pulse was racing.

  “So you’re playing hard to get?” Royce plucked a bouquet of fresh red roses from Poe’s grave and thrust the flowers toward her. “Here. Now, let’s swap tongue.”

  Bone folded her arms across her chest, looking around. This first date was going as badly as most of her mortal ones. The only difference was it didn’t come with a free dinner.

  She remembered something her mother had told her once: Women get plenty of time to make up their minds, but no time to change their minds.

  “I like you, Royce,” Bone said. “But I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

  “Here, take the flowers.”

  She did. A thorn pierced her palm but she couldn’t feel it. “We should spend some time getting to know each other.”

  “What you got in mind?”

  Somewhere dark but safe. “How about a movie?”

  Royce’s upper lip curled sideways. He gave a chopping motion in the air with one hand and the birdsong stopped as if on cue. The cemetery was eerily silent, even for a place whose occupants were supposed to be sleeping.

  “A movie,” he whispered.

  He gave a muscular but awkward pirouette, one boot thumping the concrete urn. He lifted his arms and turned his face to the sky in a martyr’s gesture. “A movie,” he said.

  “Take it easy. It was just a suggestion.”

  He threw himself on the ground and yanked fistfuls of artificial grass, tossing green tufts in the air. “A movie!”

  “For Gosh sakes, Royce, pull it together. You’re acting like a brat.”

  He did one wriggling, wormlike flop and rolled onto his back so that he lay in the depression of an ancient, sunken grave. The granite headstone was too worn to reveal a name.

  “Acting,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Huh?”

  “I coulda been a contendah,” he said, rolling to his knees and throwing a couple of shadowbox punches.

  Bone looked around, hoping none of her friends saw her with this lunatic. Not that she had any friends, or cared what they thought. Well, she did have one friend, but Crystal was too busy playing Lungs Are for the Living to help a sister out in a time of need. Even Tim was nowhere around.

  “Brando,” he said. “Get it?”

  “Sure.”

  He hopped up on a tombstone, wobbled f
or a moment on one leg, and then stuck his arms out like a bird trying to catch the wind. “I’m the king of the wooooorld!”

  “Leo, right?”

  He leaped from the tombstone, did a surprisingly masculine dance across the grass, and kicked his heels together, bowing with one arm outstretched toward an invisible audience. “West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, Grease, I could have done those. I just never got my big break.”

  Another person who didn’t get a fair shake, huh? Well, get in line, because that one runs around the block and down the golden stairs.

  Still, his movement had caused her cheeks to flush just a little. Maybe passion could stir her to life. Maybe fatalism was a state of mind, maybe if she wished hard enough—

  “Are you looking at me?” He gave a malicious sneer and quick-drew his pointy finger as if it were a pistol. “Are you looking at me?”

  “DeNiro in ‘Taxi Driver.’”

  “I could have played Travis Bickle even better. Not so over the top, a little more vulnerable.”

  “Were you an actor?”

  “Were? Were?” He echoed the DeNiro bit, going a little over the top, letting his lower lip tremble and one eyelid twitch.

  “Sorry, nothing personal.”

  “Everything’s personal in the Graveyard, Dollface.”

  “I guess I’m still getting used to all this.” She waved her hand at the sky, which looked like an upside-down bowl of mashed potatoes. “Being dead, I mean.”

  Royce, ignoring her with all the self-absorption of an unknown celebrity, said, “Were I an actor, the world would have been saved.”

  Bone wasn’t sure the grammar was correct, but he’d spoken with an emphatic British accent and she dared not challenge him. “I didn’t know the world were lost.”

  He swooped an oily lock of hair from his forehead, eyes grown weary now with the gravity of it all. “My rightful place among the stars was denied, and the design of heaven thus was frustrated.”

  “Shakespeare?”

  Royce shook his head and the lock fell back over his eyes. “Nah. Mine. I’m a screenwriter, too.”

  With lines like that, you ought to be as famous as...as famous as...

  She couldn’t think of any famous screenwriters.

  “Tell you what, Royce,” Bone said. “I just wanted to see a movie, not be a movie. Maybe we can just go for a walk or something.”

  “Brando.”

  “Huh?”

  “I would have been good for him. His problem was he didn’t have anybody to push him. He settled because he didn’t have any challengers.”

  “He had James Dean.”

  Royce’s face twisted as if someone had dropped a handful of hell’s hottest coals down his pants. Puffs of smoke boiled from his ears and his eyes grew narrow, the pupils glistening yellow. When his lower lip curled in a pout, she finally noticed the resemblance.

  “Hey, come to mention it, you kinda look like him,” she said, figuring it would flatter and placate him.

  After all, Dean had been a deity of the cinema, all the more revered because his career had been cut so tragically short. He’d courted some of Hollywood’s most beautiful starlets, and the rumors had tied him to some men as well. Sure, he was pretty much squaresville now, compared to Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Robert Pattinson, and the modern breed of boy candy, but legends never die.

  “James.” Royce spat the name as if it were a slimy bug that had flown into his mouth. “The no-talent hack didn’t do nothing right but die young.”

  “A tad jealous, are we?” Bone had known some kids in the high school drama club, and the ones that weren’t gay had been insufferably vain. But competing for attention with a dead person seemed like overkill even for a drama queen.

  “You don’t get it,” he said. “You’re just like all the rest.”

  “Thanks for making me feel special.”

  He ruffled his hair and thrust his hips forward. “Come on, Dollface. You been dead how long now?”

  “A year and nine months, give or take a few centuries.”

  “And you figure I’m dead, too.”

  “You’re in Darkmeet, aren’t you?”

  “I can’t be dead, because I was never born.”

  “Excuse me?” She wasn’t sure about all these crazy afterlife rules. For all she knew, half the souls here were waiting for someone to call their number, like picking up an order at a Chinese restaurant.

  “It should have been me.”

  “What?”

  “It should have been Royce Dean who lived in Hollywood, who got a star on the Walk of Fame. I should have been the showstopper and the scene stealer. I should have gotten the dough and the dames and the fast cars.” Royce’s face twisted in a mocking sneer. “But it all went to him.”

  Royce spun, hurling a fist at the monument beside him. As the punch cracked against faux marble, Bone cringed, momentarily forgetting that Royce was unborn and couldn’t feel pain.

  “Hey, those are the breaks,” Bone said.

  He turned away. His shoulders shuddered.

  Christ. Is he ...he’s CRYING.

  He suddenly became much more irresistible. She drew closer, hating herself. But a tough guy who could weep? He had to be dynamite in the sack.

  “What happened?” she said. “You can tell me.”

  “We were twins,” Royce said, standing over the rubble of the Poe monument, hunched against a cold wind that skirled from the northern edge of the cemetery.

  “James Dean didn’t have a twin.”

  He wiped at his eyes and his voice strengthened. “Exactly. I was a possibility that didn’t happen. I’m deader than dead. I never even got born. At least you had a life. All I got is woulda-coulda-shoulda.”

  “I’ve got it worse, because I know what I’m missing,” Bone said, stroking his cheek and digging the stubble. “For you, life is like watching a movie. All you see are the actions and motions and lines. You don’t know what it’s like to feel.”

  He looked at her with those dewy blue eyes, heavy lashes drooping. “Oh, I feel it, Dollface. So much it hurts.”

  “This place,” she said, waving her hands at the pristine graveyard. “The worst thing about it is it imitates life. It mocks life.”

  “Yeah,” he said, sneering again. “That’s why I’m going back and doing it right.”

  Bone shook her head. “No. You belong here now.”

  She wasn’t sure if she said it out of a lingering sense of morality or because she was afraid to lose whatever chance they had together.

  “This is bigger than me,” Royce said, putting on his stage face again. “If I don’t go back, the world will never turn out the way it was supposed to be. I’m the future.”

  He sure had the ego to be a star. But she didn’t see how Fate could hinge on a teddy boy’s screen tests. His defection was likely to upset the balance of both sides, just like the Judge had warned.

  “This is all hard for me to wrap my head around,” Bone said. “You have to save the world?”

  “Yeah. In a movie. But then the movie becomes real life.”

  “And all this happens in Parson’s Ford?”

  “Gotta start small and work my way up.”

  “Why not hell or Hollywood?”

  “Same place. You know Marilyn?”

  Bone ran down the mental list of her high school classmates. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “Marilyn Monroe. Talk about a dollface. Whooo-whee.”

  Charming.

  “Anyway,’ Royce said. “She said Hollywood is a place where they’ll give you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.”

  “And still you want to be a movie star?”

  “I don’t have a soul, Dollface. Sold it long ago.”

  Great. I really know how to pick ‘em.

  But she needed information if she was going to be able to help Crystal. And herself. She put an arm around him before he launched into another routine. “Tell me more.”


  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Dempsey was the first customer of the day. He had a stack of VHS tapes under his arm and looked like he’d been watching them straight through until morning.

  Crystal was still two cups of coffee from awake herself. “Hey, Dempsey.”

  “I’m returning these.” He was as brusque as she was, slapping them on the counter.

  “Wait a sec,” she said. “These aren’t the ones you checked out.”

  “I’m donating them.”

  “Look, I had a rough night. I don’t want to deal with this right now.”

  “If you had come over to my place, your night would have been a lot better.”

  “I have a boyfriend.”

  “Sure you do. Every girl has a boyfriend until she goes out with me. I understand. Gotta protect yourself, right?”

  Pettigrew’s pick-up pulled in front of the store with its throaty rumble.

  “No, I mean I have a boyfriend.”

  “Whatever. Put these in circulation for me, okay?” He winked one crusty, bleary eye.

  “First I’ll need the boss’s approval, then I’d have to list them in inventory and bar-code them and everything. It’s a real pain in the butt.”

  The bell jingled as the door opened. Crystal kept her attention focused on her customer, though she was sizing up Pettigrew’s stride out of the corner of her eye.

  “I made these, okay?” Dempsey said. “You promised to help.”

  Crystal didn’t remember making any promises. “Cheesy horror isn’t my thing.”

  It’s just my life.

  “Do you know how hard it is to get an audience these days? You can’t get a screen unless you’re Paramount, Sony, or Pixar.”

  “Ever heard of YouTube?” Crystal said.

  “Take them,” Dempsey said, raising his voice. “Spread the gospel according to Royce.”

  “Royce?”

  “You bothering the lady?” Pettigrew said, in his Wild West-marshal voice. Or maybe he had a cold.

  Now that they were side by side, Crystal could do some comparison shopping. Pettigrew had four inches on Dempsey, and a little more in the shoulder department. But Dempsey had that leather thing going on, and the black eyeliner gave him an alluring air of mystery. Pettigrew was big-chinned and clear-eyed, the kind of guy you could trust.