Dead Endings: Chapter 7

Cailen awoke with a dry mouth and a radiating headache. She licked her lips, or at least, she tried to. Her tongue felt as thick as a sponge.

She opened her eyes. She still couldn’t discern any difference in her surroundings when she did this, so she closed them again.

After a few hazy moments, she located her hands. They were somewhere behind her–or at least, she thought she could feel them there. She wiggled her toes. They were still attached. All body parts were confirmed present. This cheered her immensely. She took a few minutes to shake off some of the fogginess from her brain.

Cailen sighed. She didn’t bother asking where she was, or why she was there, for that matter. Unless she was having the mother of all hangovers, it seemed likely that she’d been had.

“So it was Miss Scarlet, in the Kitchen, with the Knife,” she rasped into the darkness.

Nobody answered her, but she could make out the faint pinging of water in pipes like the heavy iron radiators in her apartment.

Inside, then, she thought. Her arms were tied behind her, probably to one of those metal pipes. An experimental tug made her aching shoulders sing with pain. The throbbing in her arm gave her some indication of how long she’d been trapped. She’d been…wherever she was…for at least a few hours.

Cailen could feel her fear twinkling around somewhere in the back of her head, but she decided to ignore it for the moment in favor of more productive emotions.

“I have not peed myself,” she declared to the dark with some satisfaction.

She’d always wondered how the kidnapped on TV shows fared in this regard, and she secretly sympathized with them on this often unmentioned, and probably unrealistic, omission. In her case, it seemed like she could thank the astringent properties of red wine. Dehydration was a useful thing in some ways, at least. The sound of a door opening interrupted any further thoughts on the virtues of alcohol.

Feet tapped on stone or concrete as someone descended from somewhere to her right. Cailen squeezed her eyes shut even tighter and tried to pretend to still be out. The feet scuffed to a halt in front of her. A light clicked on.

Cailen didn’t dare move.

Asleep, asleep, asleep, she beamed at the other person.

She heard a rustle of clothing. A spot between her shoulder blades began to itch horribly. The air changed subtly and Cailen sensed someone squatting in front of her.

Ahaha! she thought a little hysterically.

A sharp, stinging slap whipped her head to one side. It was so unexpected that it didn’t hurt at all.

“Wake up,” Elizabeth said. “I can’t wait anymore.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t fucking drug people’s wine!” Cailen snarled back, eyes snapping open.

Elizabeth drove a large kitchen knife into the packed dirt floor between Cailen’s legs. They both stared at it.

“I want to ask you something,” Elizabeth said calmly.

Cailen said nothing as she eyed the dull gleam of the blade.

“If a ghost…possesses you, will it stay?”

“I don’t know,” Cailen said truthfully. Her attention remained on the knife.

Elizabeth took Cailen’s chin in hand and lifted it to look her in the eyes. “If I kill you, will he live?”

“What? Who?” she croaked.

Something stirred the air and Cailen felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle. Elizabeth looked back over her shoulder, as if expecting someone else to walk through the door. The portal remained dark on the other side, as far as Cailen could see, but Elizabeth sighed deeply as the air lifted again.

Cailen risked a glance around the room and saw that she was, indeed, in a basement, probably of an apartment. The large cellar was paved in cracked, concrete flooring, with a few unfinished patches of raw dirt. Broad metal containers that Cailen guessed were boilers or water tanks surrounded her. She was tied under a large, squat vat close to two doors. One was the entry that Elizabeth had used, the other had windows tacked over with old newspaper.

“I know…” Elizabeth said softly, as if in answer to a question.

Cailen jerked her chin from the other woman’s hand and craned her neck trying to see more of the room. Her spiritual radar started pinging like crazy.

Elizabeth stood and began pacing.

“I know, I know,” she repeated. “This time, I promise!”

As if in answer to her, something blue and indistinct appeared along the ceiling by the door. It coalesced here and there, in and out of sight as it crawled along the piping.

Cailen’s heart dropped. She was so fucked.

Throwing her hat into the ring of ‘ain’t got shit to lose,’ she asked again, “Who? Who is he?”

Elizabeth stopped pacing. Her hands tangled in her long hair and she twisted curls round and round.

“Ethan… He…” She shook her head violently in dissent. “I will!” she cried. “I can do it this time!”

“Don’t listen to him!” Cailen shouted at her. Privately she thought, Who the hell is Ethan?

The blue haze drew closer. It dropped from the ceiling and hovered at chest-level near Elizabeth. Her head cocked, listening to something Cailen couldn’t hear. Elizabeth turned in its direction and stuck her arms out like a blind man feeling for a wall. Groping sightlessly, she passed it, then turned again in response to some signal. Finally, her hands brushed the edges of the spirit. She burst into tears.

Cailen looked on with mixed feelings of pity and fear. “Ethan” started to take form. While Elizabeth sobbed, the spirit stretched and became man-shaped. He was tall and clothed in slacks and a blue, collared shirt. Cailen stared at him hard, trying to take in any details that might help, and he turned and stared right back.

His lips curled into a smile. She bared her teeth at him as he pounced.

The spirit flooded into her with a rush and her head clanked loudly against the pipes. Ice caught in her lungs and swirls of a familiar, mad joy threatened to overwhelm her.

She hadn’t had much time to rebuild the nascent defenses she’d been working on before Markle’s apartment, but she felt a new, definite firmness to her consciousness. She used that as leverage to keep her head above water and tried pushing, but she could hardly stay surfaced. Her head clanked against the pipes again while she and the ghost struggled for control.

The pain seemed to dislodge a little of the spirit’s handhold. Just like at Warner’s apartment when she’d hit the cabinet, the pain gave her an edge. She smacked her head again, deliberately this time, but it was hard to land a solid blow against the skinny pipe. She moved on to a spontaneous and desperately inspired Plan B.

Pop.

The small sound caused a disproportionately painful action. Cailen found dislocating her pinky much easier than expected.

And effective. The pain expelled the spirit instantaneously.

She would have cheered if she weren’t so busy crying. Through her streaming eyes, she saw the shock on Elizabeth’s ravaged face.

“Not a chance!” Cailen gasped through clenched teeth. “Find another meat suit!”

Elizabeth came over and dropped to her knees. The knife, still in the ground, was between them once more.

“Why won’t you just let him…?” Elizabeth whispered harshly.

Cailen scooted as far away from the knife as she could and gently probed the damaged hand behind her back. She kept it hidden from sight.

“Try again, and I’ll just kick his ass back out!”

“Don’t you understand?” Elizabeth wailed. “We just want to be together! I need to… I need to…”

“Who is this guy?” Cailen pressed.

“My fiancé! He’s still mine and I’m still his!”

Ohhhhhhh, thought Cailen. Oh yeah. That guy. Alex had mentioned another dead guy in Elizabeth’s life.

“Why the hell are you killing people, then? If you’re so bent on being together, go throw yourself off a bridge or something!”

Elizabeth’s eyes widened. “No, no… He promised… He said…this time…this time we can go together.”

Cailen wondered if she could kick far enough to reach the other woman’s head. She tensed her lower half and leaned forward in preparation. Her shoulders weren’t having any of that from her awkward position, though. With a grimace, she uncoiled.

“He’s been with me the whole time,” Elizabeth went on. “I’ve always felt him.”

“Then why kill Jacob? Or Portia? Or Christopher! Christopher was your friend, wasn’t he?!”

Elizabeth recoiled as if she’d been slapped. She rocked back on her knees and her hands went to her hair again. “I had to… I had to talk to him…”

She suddenly leaned forward, her face inches from Cailen’s. “I knew he wanted to see me. I could feel him when I was sleeping. He was lonely. He wanted to be together. But…” She sat back again. Her fingernails dug into the fabric of her pants. “I’m a coward.”

Cailen started to get the picture. This was a haunting, of sorts. A very specific and localized haunting of an already disturbed person, torn apart by death. Driven to death…

“It doesn’t make sense, though,” Cailen said furiously. “You can’t go together. He’s already dead, dammit! Killing other people isn’t going to bring him back. They just die, too! If you have a death wish, then don’t take others with you!”

Elizabeth stared at her. Her eyes were rimmed red and so dark they looked black.

“I tried,” she whispered. She held up her hands for Cailen to see. There were raised lines running from her elbows to wrists. “I was so scared… I couldn’t do it again. I thought…” Her nails went back to digging at her jeans. “I thought if I went with someone, I could do it.”

Cailen was momentarily speechless. When she worked some moisture back into her mouth, she said, “Jacob Warner.”

Elizabeth nodded slowly. “I went home with him. He said he’d go with me, but then…he didn’t want to.”

“So you helped him along, anyway,” Cailen said flatly.

Elizabeth looked scared for a moment, as if it had just dawned on her that she’d murdered a guy, but then she smiled. “You know what?”

Cailen tensed. “…What?” she asked cautiously.

Elizabeth smiled radiantly. “That’s when I heard Ethan. He spoke to me, and I was right. He missed me.”

Cheesus on a cracker, Cailen thought. This has got to be the most fucked-up thing I have ever heard, and that’s not an easy title to take. She worked with renewed energy at the ties binding her hands, but her numb fingers couldn’t hope to undo the mass of knots. How the hell was she going to get out of this mess?

“And Portia Jones? Christopher?” she asked, stalling for time. “Why again after Jacob? You got to talk to your fiancé, so why not…go meet him?”

Elizabeth hung her head until her face was obscured by a curtain of hair. “I just…wanted to talk to him again,” she whispered.

Cailen didn’t know what to say to that. Somebody willing to kill other people just to carry on a conversation with a dead guy, fiancé or not, probably didn’t appreciate basic standards of human decency. The odds that a logical argument would sway Elizabeth now were pretty slim. Cailen thought about trying to take the illogical route when the air pressure started dropping.

“Oh ,shit,” she muttered, and then added with more feeling, “It won’t work. There’s no way I’m letting him in, and killing me won’t give him access, either.”

Elizabeth swept her hair to the side and studied Cailen with a dangerous glint in her eyes. Her long fingers traced circles on the handle of the knife.

“In fact,” Cailen added, trying not to look at the blade, “If you kill me now, my spirit will just drag his down with me, and you’ll NEVER hear from him again!”

It was complete bullshit, but Elizabeth couldn’t know that.

Elizabeth fixed Cailen with an unnerving stare a few moments longer before she plucked the knife from the ground and stood up.

“So you’re saying that if it’s not willingly…it won’t work.”

“Exactly,” Cailen confirmed. “But if you let me go, I’ll–”

Elizabeth turned briskly and walked to the stairs by the door.

“Hey!” Cailen shouted.

The door clicked shut behind her.

In the ensuing silence, Cailen cursed loudly and colorfully. Then she shouted and screamed over the hum of the boilers.

Neither the living nor the dead answered her. She considered dislocating her thumb next, in the hopes that she might miraculously slip the ropes that way, but with her pinky already out of joint, she didn’t think she could bring herself to do it again. The very thought made her nauseous. After some time, the door opened again and spared her from further unpleasant contemplation.

Elizabeth approached her, holding Cailen’s coat. She sat down on the steps and draped it across her knees. The knife she placed on the step to her right. She didn’t look up or say anything.

Cailen watched her warily, adrenaline singing in her ears as she prepared herself to do whatever she could to survive. The flash of the knife as Elizabeth had set it down filled her with dread.

She would fight to the very last. If this was it, she’d do her damndest to take a piece of Elizabeth with her. Cailen faintly, absurdly appreciated that she’d had such good wine earlier, if she was about to die.

Elizabeth finally looked up. Without taking her eyes off of Cailen, she took out an iPhone. She placed it on top of the coat. Elizabeth fished again in her back pocket and placed another phone on the coat. Cailen’s. Between the phones, she placed a small, white square of paper.

Cailen stared hard at the piece of paper and recognized Gabriella’s business card.

Elizabeth smoothed down the ends of the jacket. “You have about fifteen minutes to decide before she gets here. If she arrives before we get what we want, I’ll kill her. Then I’ll kill you. If you let him in and don’t fight it, she lives.”

Cailen’s heart stopped. The world paused.

“Fourteen minutes,” Elizabeth said. “Decide.”

To be concluded in Chapter 8.

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