The Dead Won't Let Me Rest

Chapter 6: Blood Under the Floorboards

Kael made a decision in the space of two seconds.

Vail was on the street. The knock was behind him on the stairs. He couldn't deal with both at once, and whatever was wearing Vail's body was already visible to a van driver who was reaching for his phone.

He went outside.

The morning air hit him, cold and damp, carrying the smell of rain on tarmac. He crossed the pavement to the road in four strides and stepped directly into Vail's path.

"Hey."

Nothing. The body kept walking. Up close, the wrongness of it was worse. The movement had no weight behind it, no sense of a person deciding to place one foot and then the other. It was more like watching something being pulled on a wire. The hospital gown was wet through. The bare feet left faint marks on the road that were darker than water.

Kael looked down. The marks were reddish brown. Not mud.

He stepped sideways and put both hands on Vail's shoulders and pushed back, planting his feet. The body stopped. Not because it chose to. Because the resistance confused whatever was directing it. The face swung toward him, and for a moment the flat reflective eyes focused, not on him exactly, but on the space around him, as though something about him was visible in a way his face was not.

Then it went slack again and the body began pushing forward with a dull, mechanical insistence.

Kael held on. "Thomas," he said. He felt faintly ridiculous. "Thomas Vail. If any part of you is still in there."

The eyes didn't change.

The van driver was out of his cab now, standing in the road twenty meters back with his phone raised. Recording, probably. Kael needed this to be over quickly.

He did the only thing he could think of. He put his right hand flat against the side of Vail's face, the same way he had pressed his fingers to the hand the night before, and pushed whatever the building had given him outward instead of inward.

He had no idea if that would work. It turned out it did.

The effect was immediate and not subtle. The body went rigid, every muscle locking at once, and then the thing directing it seemed to simply let go. Like a hand releasing a handle. Vail's legs buckled and Kael caught him under the arms and took most of the weight, which was considerable, and they went down together onto the wet tarmac in an ungainly heap.

Kael knelt over him, breathing hard. Vail's face was slack, fully slack this time, and the eyes were closed. The bloody marks on his feet had stopped spreading. Whatever had been walking him through the streets of Blackthorn City at seven in the morning was gone.

The van driver was approaching. "Is he all right? Does he need an ambulance?"

"He's my uncle," Kael said, without looking up. "Sleepwalking. He has a condition. I've got him."

A pause. "His feet are bleeding."

"I know. Thank you. I've got him."

Another pause, longer this time, the kind that meant the man was deciding whether to believe him. Then footsteps retreating. A door. An engine.

Kael waited until the van had gone before he tried to work out how he was going to get a dead man back inside a building without anyone else seeing.

It took twenty minutes and required backing his car onto the pavement and using the boot as cover, which was undignified but effective. By eight o'clock, Vail was back on the embalming table and Kael was at the bottom of the stairs, facing the direction the knocks had come from.

The staircase went down as well as up. A door at the bottom, plain wood, with a bolt on the outside. His father's keyring had opened everything else in the building. He tried the smaller of the two brass keys and the bolt drew back smoothly, as though it had been used recently.

The smell that came up was old. Earth and stone and something mineral, like the inside of a well.

He found a torch in the kitchen drawer, clicked it on, and went down.

The basement was larger than the building's footprint suggested. Old brick walls, a low ceiling with timber joists, a dirt floor in sections where the original stone flags had been removed and not replaced. Shelving along one wall held archival boxes, each labeled in his father's handwriting. A workbench. A filing cabinet with the drawer half open.

And in the far corner, where the floor was still flagstone, a dark stain that spread from beneath the edge of a heavy wooden shelving unit and dried in a pattern that was unambiguous to anyone who had ever seen one.

Blood. A significant amount of it. Old, brown, nearly black at the edges.

Kael crouched at the edge of it. The stain was too large to be accidental. It had dried in a shape that suggested a person had lain here for some time before being moved.

He put his hand near it, not touching, and felt the grey marks on his fingers respond the way they had outside when he'd stopped Vail. A faint warmth. A pull, like a current in still water.

He pressed two fingers to the edge of the stain.

The basement flashed. A fragment only, a few seconds at most. His father's face, lit from below by a torch not unlike the one Kael held now. Fear in it, and something harder beneath the fear. Then a second figure, crouching at the shelving unit with both hands braced against a seam in the wall that shouldn't have been there.

The shelving unit was a door.

Kael straightened up and looked at it properly. Solid wood, filled with boxes, bolted to the wall at two points. Except the bolts, he saw now, were set into a frame. The whole unit was mounted on a frame built into the wall, and the frame had a seam around it, old and dark with age but a seam nonetheless.

He reached for the lower bolt.

From the other side of the wall, directly level with his hand, something pressed back.