Living on a Prayer Read online

  There was something else though. Something darker and more ominous. Something seriously, seriously bad had been here. Something beyond my ability to figure out.

  Gretchen felt it too. I could see it in the way she carried herself. A little stiffer, a little more alert. Her eyes darting from shadow to shadow, like she was waiting for something.

  Eli, meanwhile, set about moving a few old magazines off the couch and clearing a spot on the dining room table, each gesture kicking up motes of dust into the pale bars of sunlight leaking through the windows.

  “Have a seat,” he said. “Anything to drink?”

  “Lemonade, if you have it,” Gretchen said.

  “And for the young man,” he asked.

  “Lemonade’s fine, please.”

  Eli nodded and turned, heading towards the adjacent kitchen. As soon as he was out of sight, Gretchen cut me a look. She didn’t have to say anything. Neither of us did. We both knew what the other was thinking and it went something along the lines of “what did we just step in.”

  Eli came back a few minutes later, carrying three tall glasses of lemonade on a serving tray. He set a glass in front of each of us, then himself, with the casual surety of a man who’d spent more than his fair share entertaining and welcoming guests. For the next few minutes, Gretchen and Eli did the usual catching up while I sat, sipping my lemonade and trying not to look extremely bored.

  Thankfully, Gretchen wasn’t much for small talk, and after what one might consider a polite enough amount of time, she got down to brass tacks.

  “So, lay it on me Eli. What’s the story?”

  “There have been some…” he paused, searching for what I guessed was the right way to explain whatever was on his mind. “Occurrences.”

  “That’s vague,” I said.

  Gretchen tossed me one of those looks that implied my mouth would serve the conversation by remaining shut.

  “Go on,” Gretchen said.

  “It’s…” he hesitated. “There’s nothing concrete. I may even be overreacting.”

  “Well, I won’t know until you tell me,” Gretchen said.

  “Little things. Little things that I’m afraid are turning into big things.”

  Eli ran a hand over his face. His entire demeanor had changed from the confident showman I’d seen onstage earlier to something that was more wary, nervous, almost fragile.

  “Like?”

  “I think there’s something in my house.”

  I leaned forward just a bit so I could watch him talk. Even now, he had a certain air about him that drew people in. There was something about his voice. A strange lilt to it that was almost musical.

  “Something?” Gretchen asked.

  “A ghost, a demon, I don’t know. I believe, completely, that God will protect me, but there’s something here, Gretchen.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked, and Gretchen didn’t seem to mind my interjection this time.

  “It started out with little things. I’d put something down, wake up the next morning, and it’d be gone. I just thought I was getting old,” he said. “You know? Forgetful. Then other things started happening. Made me wonder.”

  “What kind of things?” Gretchen asked, and I could tell from the way she was sitting, turned a bit more towards him, that he had her interest.

  “Doors slamming and opening. The lights, they’d flicker. Certain rooms, they’d get hot, real hot, even with the heat off and the windows open. Could barely stand in ’em.”

  “It’s an old house,” I said. “Could be any number of things.”

  Gretchen looked over at me, and I saw a flash of pride. One of the things she’d beaten into my head over the years was that not all the things you couldn’t explain were monsters or ghosts or anything even remotely supernatural. Truth was, most of the time, the explanation was completely mundane.

  “Well, there’s more. Let me show you,” Eli said.

  Eli stood and led us upstairs to a room that was, I’m assuming, a library or study of some sort. A large desk served as its centerpiece, the ring stained top littered with legal pads, empty coffee cups, pencils, and crumpled up wads of paper. Bookshelves, most of them stacked with different books on religion, Christianity, and a treasure trove of quasi biblical prophecy lined the wall behind the desk. The other two walls were bare, save for two late seventies era paintings of Jesus, the kind you’d find in kitschy Catholic shops where the corona of light around his head looked more like a disco light show. The floor was carpeted, or had been once upon a time. Now there were just the stained remnants of what may or may not have been shag at one point in time.

  At first glance, everything looked normal. It was only after looking a bit harder that I started to see that things were off.

  Way off.

  The paint on the walls, which looked more like nicotine stains, had started to blister and peel in places like it had been exposed to extreme heat, just shy of fire. The same could be said of the Jesus paintings. On the desk, the edges of the paper on the legal pads had started to curl and blacken. There was a faint smell of wood smoke in the otherwise stale air, so barely noticeable it almost made me wonder if it was my mind playing tricks on me.

  “I think this qualifies as weird,” Gretchen said finally, letting her eyes move from the walls to the pictures to the desk and back again.

  Eli put his hands in his pockets and nodded.

  “I reckon that’s my take as well,” he said.

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  “Last night. That ain’t all though.”

  “This isn’t enough?” Gretchen asked, a hint of her normal sarcasm creeping into her voice.

  Eli ran a hand over his thinning hair. He shifted a bit on his feet uncomfortably.

  “What is it, Eli?” Gretchen pushed.

  Without saying a word, Eli lifted up the front of his shirt, showing his pale, almost concaved stomach. Cut into the skin were a series of deep scratches. The scratches crisscrossed into letters, the letters spelling out a single word.

  LIAR

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, my mouth acting before my brain could intervene.

  “Jonah!”

  “I don’t reckon he had much hand in it, Jonah,” Eli said.

  “Who did?” Gretchen asked.

  Eli shrugged.

  “Happened in the middle of the night. Felt a burning, like someone was drawing on me with a cigarette, and there it was,” Eli said. “Last night, matter of fact. Still hurts like the devil.”

  Eli looked like he wanted to say something else, but Gretchen’s attention was focused solely on the word cut into his stomach. She leaned forward, and I could see her pupils expand to the point that they almost blotted out the green in her eyes. She was looking at the wound’s spiritual side, searching it for any echoes of power or traces of the thing that had done it. Her eyes lingered for a minute, maybe two, until the phone started ringing downstairs, snapping her attention away from the wound. Her pupils shrunk and she stood up.

  “If you’ll excuse me?” he asked.

  Gretchen nodded, and as soon as Eli was out of the room, fell victim to a coughing fit that left her almost doubled over. I put a hand on her elbow, steadying her.

  “You alright?” I asked, more concern than I intended creeping into my voice.

  She coughed for another thirty seconds, finally wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, and stood.

  “Fine, fine,” she said, still slightly out of breath.

  “You don’t sound fine.”

  “And you don’t sound like a doctor. Now, are you gonna figure this out or am I gonna have to plant my foot in your narrow ass?” Gretchen said, the corners of her lips pulling towards a smile.

  “You can’t just tell me?”

  Gretchen coughed again, though it was nowhere near as bad as the coughing fit she’d just had.

  “Where’s the fun in that?”

  “You’re too old for fun,” I muttered.

&nb
sp; “What was that?”

  “Nothing, ma’am,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said. “Now, tell me what’s going on.”

  I turned my attention back towards the room and let the limits that I had put over my senses start to fall away. I moved a little too quickly, and the myriad display of colors and shapes—ebbs and flows of energy that went unseen by people that didn’t have my gifts—came slamming into my consciousness hard enough to stagger me. I closed my eyes, struggling to get my bearings. Far away, I could feel Gretchen’s hand, solid and real, clamp down just above my elbow.

  “Easy there, killer,” I heard her say, her voice far off and distant, like an echo of an echo.

  I had to shut everything down and try again, gradually putting each mental wall back in place, only to tear them back down, each in turn. Finally, I opened my eyes. The shock to the senses was still jarring, but manageable.

  “That a boy, Jonah,” Gretchen said, and this time she sounded closer, more solid. “Now, tell me what’s going on here. What do you see?”

  I took my time and let my eyes drift over the blistered paint, the threadbare carpet, the books—trying to take as much of it in as I possibly could.

  “Tell me what you see,” Gretchen said, her voice gentle. She was standing behind me, at my shoulder, so as not to put her own aura in the mix and make things that much more intense. “Start with the floor, work your way up.”

  “There’s smoke, or mist, maybe?”

  “Tell me about the mist.”

  “It’s gray, like fog. Knee-high. It doesn’t seem right, like it doesn’t belong here,” I said, and my voice sounded strange, the tone and pitch different, somehow musical.

  “Okay, keep going. What about the books?”

  I turned my attention towards the bookshelves, trying to take in each individual book, the way the shelves bent under their weight. Every detail I wanted to commit to memory.

  “They’re glowing. White. Some of them more than others.”

  “Because?” she asked.

  “Those are his favorites. He reads and touches those more than the others. There’s more of his energy left on them.”

  “Good. What else?”

  “The walls. There’s more fog. It’s on the desk, too,” I said.

  “What spirits do you see?”

  “None.”

  “And that’s?”

  “Not right. There should be something, at the very least.”

  “Right. Go ahead and shut it down,” she said. “Take your time. Don’t rush.”

  I closed my eyes and did what she said, reconstructing all those mental walls and closing off the spirit world. When I opened my eyes this time, there was almost a feeling of disappointment. The world had gone from magical, awash in colors, to something much more flat, more bland.

  “You good?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I’m good.”

  “Alright, tell me what’s going on,” Gretchen said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “It’s not a demon,” I said, trying to track the different signs and options through my brain. “Definitely not a spirit.”

  “Because?”

  “Because something strong enough to come back continuously, and more so, hurt a human, isn’t going to waste it’s time doing either.”

  “Essentially.” she agreed. “So that leaves what.”

  “I…I’m,” I said, stammering over my words. I thought I had an idea, but I wasn’t sure. The last thing I wanted to do was embarrass myself. “I’m not sure.”

  “Yeah, you are,” she said.

  “I’m,” I took a deep breath. “Ghost?”

  “Close enough for government work,” she said. “It’s, for lack of a better term, a poltergeist.”

  “Like an Amityville, ‘come into the light Carol Anne’ type of poltergeist?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Afraid so,” Gretchen said, running one hand over the wall’s blistered paint.

  “So, what exactly do we do?”

  “What’s a ghost, Jonah?”

  “A spirit world manifestation of a person’s grief that’s basically tethered to said person,” I said, reciting the answer from rote memory. I knew it like I knew that a werewolf was a person born bound to a wolf spirit, or that the Fae were the closest supernatural being to humans, only they were born with a flipped moral compass and were completely devoted to indulging their base instincts. The same way that I knew Angels were the collective faith of billions of people in the seven cardinal virtues, given form. Gretchen made me learn all of this early on, to help understand the various things I had, or would, see as I developed my abilities.

  “A poltergeist is the same thing,” she explained. “Well, sort of.”

  “Okay?”

  “Instead of grief, they are anger, and anger is?”

  “One of the most, if not the most, powerful emotion. Magically speaking.”

  “Right, so that means?”

  “This thing’s an asshole?”

  Gretchen gave me a look that said she expected better, but I wasn’t wrong.

  “Close enough,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. “What do we do?”

  “Well, we need to find it first. One step at a time.”

  I was going to fire off a litany of more questions, but the door to the room opened and Eli stepped in. His demeanor had changed, eyes downcast, shoulders slumped.

  “What is it Eli?” Gretchen asked.

  “Winona Mercer,” he said. “She’s dead. Murdered.”

  “The woman from last night?” I asked

  Eli nodded.

  “She had cancer. Don’t get me wrong. I know I can’t cure cancer, or much of anything really, but the Lord lets me give them time to say goodbye. Only this time, well, he didn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “Someone stabbed her in her kitchen last night.”

  “I’m sorry, Eli,” Gretchen said, putting a hand on his arm. If he noticed the touch, it didn’t register on his face.

  “I’ll be handling the funeral for the family. There’s gonna be another assembly tonight. I thought maybe we could use it to celebrate her. She was a good woman, faithful.”

  Tears streaked down his cheek, leaving a few seconds of uncomfortable silence in their wake.

  “We’ll give you a few minutes,” Gretchen said.

  I followed her through the house and into Eli’s backyard. From the looks of it, he hadn’t been out here in a while. The grass had grown almost knee-high. A swing set, one of the cheap ones that was made of metal tubing and plastic, sat in the back corner of the yard near a copse of pines. Like the tin roof, it was fighting a losing battle to the elements, and rust was creeping over the once blue paint, giving the whole thing a sort of sad, lost vibe.

  “I want you to go with him tonight,” Gretchen said.

  “What? Why?”

  “One, because I need you to keep an eye on him. Two, because you might be able to see whoever it is that’s tied to this thing. Three, because I said so.”

  “No. Seriously, what am I supposed to do if this thing is floating around holy roller central?”

  Gretchen opened her mouth to say something and started coughing again. This time it was more violent, and she actually had to put a hand on my shoulder to keep her footing. When she finally finished hacking up a lung, I tried to tell her that maybe it was time for us to head back. Instead, she shook her head and dismissed me before the words had even made it to my mouth.

  “Don’t do anything,” she said. “Just let me know what you see.”

  “Okay, so that’s later. What are we going to do in the meantime?”

  “Well first, we’re going to go in and make Eli lunch,” she said.

  “Why are we going to do that?”

  Say what you will, but Gretchen was a lot faster than she looked. Her hand shot up, connecting to the back of my head in an open-handed slap. Appa
rently, she was a lot stronger than she looked too, as that little slap to the back of my head rocked me enough that I had to take a step forward to keep my balance.

  “The hell?!” I asked, my temper flaring.

  Gretchen didn’t seem even remotely phased. She crossed her arms over her chest, raised one eyebrow, and stared at me with a look that was ninety percent boredom and ten percent amusement.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, rubbing the back of my head.

  “As I was saying, you’re,” she said, putting emphasis on the word you’re, “going to make Eli lunch because it’s the right thing to do. He just lost someone close to him.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me? I’m going to drink one of his beers, be his friend, watch you make him lunch, and then take a nap. Not necessarily in that order. Then you’re going to go with him tonight, keep your eyes open, not do anything stupid, and we’ll go from there. Just like I told you. Comprende?”

  “Yes ma’am,” I grumbled.

  “Good. Get crackin’, kiddo,” Gretchen said, starting up the back stairs. I watched her take the steps, a little slower than I thought normal, and sighed. Something was wrong, bad enough that she wouldn’t tell me what it was. I thought about pushing for an answer, but given the situation, it was probably best to wait until the drive back home.

  I went inside a minute later, and, as commanded, made sandwiches for the three of us. Gretchen and Eli sat on the couch in his faded out living room, Gretchen doing her best to console her grieving friend. The next few hours went fast enough, and Eli and I set out for his makeshift church just as the sun was starting to drop towards the mountains.

  • • •

  Eli played old country on the way back to the tent. Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson filled the tiny cab of his truck. He kept the volume low even though we weren’t talking, seemingly content with the crooners to serve as background noise. The drive was maybe twenty minutes, but with music that wasn’t exactly my taste and a driver who hadn’t said much of anything since we’d gotten into his truck, it felt more like a few hours.