Page 78 of The Thirteenth Child
I struck a match, bringing a small glow to the room, and jumped, stifling a scream.
Kieron’s face was just scant inches from my own.
His dead, unfocused eyes stared in my general direction with the terrible hollowness of no recognition. His nose had begun to rot away, leaving a tattered hole where fragments of gray cartilage poked out. And his mouth…
His mouth was too wide, too large, and without any lips. It hungopen and slack, a perfect circle, like a lamprey’s, and then suddenly it was on me, pressed against the hollow of my throat, not biting, not mauling, but sucking.
In vain, I swatted at him—I couldn’t touch ghosts, but they could certainly touch me—extinguishing the match in the process, and the room fell dark once more. I heard the creak of the bed ropes as he followed me, as other figures I hadn’t seen followed him, and I realized with a start that all my ghosts were here. They’d found a hole in the salt wards—Aloysius was right, there were too many doors here, too many feet walking over too many thresholds—and stumbled and staggered their way through the endless miles of halls, and now they’d found me.
I thrashed, feeling the pressure of their lips and the disgusting tugging sensation as they got what they wanted and pulled.
It didn’t matter that I’d been acting upon the will of the deathshead, that it had been sanctioned by my godfather, that I’d been given a gift from an actual god—each of the ghosts had been victims of murder. Even as I’d tried to do my best, providing them with clean and easy deaths, their last moment of life had been one of confusion and fear and rebellion. There was nothing the dying wanted more thanmore.
One more minute of breath.
One more minute to remember the good parts of their life.
One more wish to magically fix what was happening.
One more, one more, one more.
And so, in death, the ghosts followed me, wanting more.
They went after my memories of them, pulling and sucking at me like leeches.
Some—the soldier, the baker—didn’t have many to consume.
But Mama. Papa.
Now Kieron.
They drew my thoughts of them from me like a healer would excise a guinea worm, inch by inch, slow and winding. It felt like walking into a spider’s web; I could feel the telltale sticky threads on me for hours after.
The ghosts had only caught me unaware a handful of times, but each attack had been brutal. I relived the memories as they fed, saw their deaths again and again, the horror, the pain.
Papa in particular had not gone down easy.
And Kieron…I had no idea what Kieron’s last moments had been like. I’d been in the Between, killing him with the swift fall of a candle snuffer. What memories would he pull from me?
I had to get out of the bed.
I kept a vial of salt with me in my valise for moments like this, moments when I’d been distracted, moments when I’d thought myself safe.
I rolled through their grasping hands, wincing as their bony fingertips scratched at me, clawed at me. There would be no marks left behind, but it still hurt in the moment.
I fell out of bed and their disintegrating shapes paused, sensing their prey had departed. Papa tried to get around the bed first but stumbled and fell and began to drag himself over the mattress ticking, lumbering after me like a seal on dry land.
In the dark, I fumbled to find my bag, and once it was in my hands, I easily located and opened the vial. I threw a handful of salt at their approaching figures and they flinched, air rustling over throats that would never again make a sound.
Where to put them? Where to put them?
The armoire in the corner. It wasn’t very big, but it would have to do for now.
There wasn’t enough space in the room for a clear path to the piece of furniture. The only way to reach it was by going through the horde of spirits.
As I crossed by the soldier, he grabbed at my arm, and I felt something stretch from me, like taffy on a confectioner’s pull. My head throbbed, my mind screaming in all the ways I wanted to but could not.
“Get in,” I hissed, opening the door to the armoire and flinging more salt at the ghosts. I herded them past me, back and back, until they had nowhere else to go.
