Wildest Dreams

6

It was midnight by the time I made it back to the bridge where I’d met the little girl’s ghost.

I had no business going there. I should have gone straight to the banged up truck I’d bought in Baja. By now I should have been halfway to San Francisco, figuring a way to get myself a ticket on the first flight to parts unknown.

I knew that the same way I knew I’d been set up at Circe Whistler’s mansion. But I just couldn’t leave. Not until I knew what had happened to the little girl. She was seared in my memory. There was no escaping the look of horror I’d seen in her eyes when Circe Whistler’s shade grabbed her. At that moment, fear had stilled the little girl’s tongue. But she didn’t have to speak. Her eyes said everything for her.

“Save me, Clay,” they said. “Please, please save me.”

I couldn’t forget that. I couldn’t forget those pleading blue eyes staring at me as the little girl vanished in a whirlwind of blood and shadow, kicking and screaming against a flayed embrace.

I’d never seen anything like that in my life.

Oh, I’d seen plenty of ghosts. Since I was a little boy, I’d seen them. Probably from the day I was born, when the doctor tore the caul from my face. I’d studied the spirits of the dead. Most of them were sleepwalkers, completely unaware of the living. Some were trapped so deep in pits of pain that the only thing they could do was suffer. And others were like the deputy I’d murdered at Circe’s mansion-aware of their surroundings, alert to the presence of the living, but unwilling to accept the simple fact that they were dead.

The way I saw it, the dead weren’t much different from the living. They could hate just as deeply. I knew that, just as I knew that hate was what had driven Circe’s shade when she attacked the little girl. I’d smelled it in the air-that miasma born of murder and blood and the rot of an early grave-and both my gut and my heart recognized it for what it was.

But why would Circe Whistler hate a little girl? And why was the child powerless in Circe’s presence? Why didn’t she try to escape?

Why did she turn to me?

Why did she plead for help with those innocent blue eyes?

I didn’t know the answer to those questions any more than I knew how to help her. Me, a guy who killed for a living, a guy who made ghosts with the sharpened blade of a K-bar knife. The living feared me, but I was powerless against the dead. I hadn’t done a thing while a skinned specter kidnapped a dead little girl.

She’d said we were like Hansel and Gretel. Lost and alone, just the two of us. But now she was gone and she hadn’t left anything behind, not even a trail of bread crumbs.

I didn’t know how to find her. I didn’t know how to save her. But I hoped there was someone, or something, that could do what I couldn’t. And I hoped that the girl would return to this spot, the place where she spent her days, and show me that there was a reason to have faith in something intangible, something I couldn’t see or hear. Something I had to feel.

I waited on the bridge for a long time. It was dark. A full moon hung somewhere overhead, but it could no more penetrate the redwood shroud that covered the bridge than could the sunshine of the previous day.

The darkness didn’t matter. If the little girl was here, she’d find me, no matter how dark it was. The night gathered close. I tried to be patient, as patient as the girl had been all the years she’d spent on this bridge.

But I wasn’t a patient man. I started thinking about other things. Circe Whistler, in particular. The way she’d looked coming out of that swimming pool, the way her muscles moved under her tattooed flesh, the way her skin brought the ink alive.

And then I remembered the wall of the guest room, papered with bloody tattoos. So much blood, but more hate. It was a rage killing. I’d seen a few. I knew what one looked like.

Soon enough the rest of it clamped down on me like a guard dog’s bite.

I wondered who had set me up.

Janice Ravenwood? Spider Ripley?

Those were the obvious suspects, but I imagined that there was one other I could add to the list.

A fellow named Diabolos Whistler.

I nearly laughed out loud. The idea reflected my desperation, and I discarded it. I wasn’t ready to start jumping at shadows. Not just yet.

My thoughts, as they always did, turned to more conventional matters. Matters I could understand. I started thinking about all the money I was due. Money for cutting off an old man’s head. Money I would never collect with Circe Whistler dead.

But I didn’t like thinking that way. Not here. Not in this place under the redwoods where a creek whispered as it rushed to the sea.

I’ll admit that my feelings surprised me. I thought about the little girl instead, remembering the things she’d said. The things she’d done, too.

She took me to the bottle house, even though the place scared her. And she followed me to Circe’s mansion, too. She came because she was worried about me.

She wanted to protect me.

The little girl was willing to do that.

Just because I talked to her.

Just because I sat by her side, watching a steelhead swim upstream.

Just because I tried to hold her hand.

I swallowed hard and closed my eyes. Another kind of man would have said a prayer, but I wasn’t another kind of man. I was the same man I’d always been. A man who killed for money. A man who saw ghosts.

With my own eyes, I had watched men and women die. I saw what death held for them. I stared down while they surrendered their souls in the bright light of day and the black shadows of night. I watched them face that light, and cower in those shadows, and go on the same way they had when they’d drawn breath.

But never once did I see an angel come for one of my victims. Never once did I hear pearly gates swing open to the strains of a heavenly choir. Never once did I scent brimstone on the wind, or watch as a ghost took the cold hand of Charon.

Sometimes I saw nothing at all. Only an empty corpse. Another kind of man might take that as a sign of a greater power beyond mortal comprehension, but I couldn’t do that.

It was beyond me. I was a man who couldn’t even conjure up a prayer. The thoughts in my head flowed on tides of memory, cold waters filled with sights and sounds I couldn’t escape or forget.

The music of the ocean, and the haunting melody of a spectral wind fluting through a house made of bottles, and the hungry buzzing of a hundred flies. An old man mewling as he died alone in Mexico, and the cries of a deputy who didn’t realize that I had stabbed him in the heart. I listened to all of it. And when those sounds were swept away I was left with the midnight wail of a scarlet whirlwind that gathered together the ghosts of a vengeful woman and a terrified girl and took them to a place I’d never been.

I wondered about that place.

There was no way I could imagine it.

It, or any other place I’d never visited.

One thing was certain. If it existed, that place of a thousand dark imaginings, then I was bound for it.

It was only a matter of time before I’d get there.

There was no use in a man like me praying. But there were other things I could do. Things that other men couldn’t. Maybe, if I did them right, the little girl would return to this place. Maybe, if I did them right, she’d sit with me again.

Maybe I could try, one more time, to hold her hand.

I wanted that more than anything.

I opened my eyes.

Dawn was coming on fast.

I had work to do.