literature

Dead of Night 22

Deviation Actions

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On Ghosts

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"… a zombie?"

"Oh, man!" Hanna jumped as if he had forgotten his own green skin, which glowed unripe avocado in the fluorescent light of the apartment landing. Abruptly, the straight, energetic line of his narrow back caved a little: he fidgeted, tucking his bag of tools behind him and shrinking backwards, out of the circle of light. "Yeah. It, uh. Heh. Helps me … get in the mood. Method acting, y'know. Helps me understand the enemy."

Hanna topped off his offering of crunched bravado with a weird gun hand-motion, then wrenched his mouth into a painful-looking grin. The small young woman, still entrenched safely within her doorway, did not look impressed. Her tired gaze was also lingering too long on the stitches on the investigator's cheeks, but Hanna's partner drew it away and caught their newest client's attention with a wide, simple hand-motion.

"I apologize if our methods make you uncomfortable, but I assure you they're effective. I'm Hanna's assistant," he explained, extending his hand. The young woman, pretty and curvaceous with long hay-thick blond hair folded into a black clip, looked up at him, expression caught between dazzled and confused as his lanky gloved hand engulfed hers. "Are you the one who phoned us regarding a possible haunting?"

"Uh. No. Not at all. I think that was my … Dee?" she called into the house without taking her eyes off of them. After a moment, a taller woman – an equally exhausted-looking brunette – poked her head into the doorway and immediately clapped her hand over her mouth.

"What are — Jesus!"

"Excuse us a moment," the blond said tersely, and promptly shut the door in their faces.

The Detective felt the sharp slam hit surprisingly deep in his chest, but he had nothing to worry about: far from stung, Hanna seemed to be happily distracted, humming one of the Moonlighters' new songs (he was revving up for the concert the following week) and knocking things around in his rucksack. The older man had wondered if it was too soon for a case, but Hanna's enthusiasm had the uncanny habit of always pushing him out the door no matter his doubts. Assured once again, the Detective leaned back against the wall, thin arms crossed, and waited.

After a few minutes of conversation both heated and muffled, the door opened again and the brunette stepped around her friend (who still looked distinctly unimpressed) and stuck out her hand.

"Hi. I'm Dee. The one who … called you." They shook and Hanna thrust his own hand out too, a bit of a dopey smile budding on his face. Dee shook his after a moment's hesitation, her mouth twitching into a grimace (likely at the cool, dry grate of Hanna's palm), then stepped away from the doorway with no small amount of nervousness. "Come in."

Marie, the shorter of the two, was a graduate student who favored sweaters and crossed arms. Dee was a tall, lanky woman with slim jeans and dark wavy hair clipped close to her triple-pierced ears. A white coat hung on the back of the door alluded to her profession. The two had been experiencing trouble with something that displayed significantly ghost-like traits.

Dee led them around the sizeable, utilitarian flat, which was a comforting mix of used and clean-enough, and explained the things they had heard and seen. Neither of them had been sleeping well for two months, disturbed by strange noises and temperature changes that had escalated worryingly over the past two weeks alone. Marie had seen strange shadows and heard soft footsteps. Both had been lured from bed by unexplained luminescence, thinking they had forgotten to shut off the bathroom light, only to walk into a completely dark room. Several times, the door had slammed shut behind them and no amount of banging or door-rattling from the inside would free it.

When they finished their tale, the Detective nodded respectfully and waited. After a few moments of silence, he realized both of their clients were looking at him and not Hanna, as if he were the expert. Stymied, the older man glanced over and frowned immediately: far from drawing stunning conclusions from the information he was given, Hanna was gazing mistily at the two girls, green fingers tangled in the hem of his turtleneck.

"Hanna?"

"Huh?" the zombie mumbled, breaking into a convulsively huge grin when Marie (objectively the prettier of the two, in the Detective's eyes) looked at him dubiously and stepped a little behind Dee. If the young investigator had been alive, his partner had no doubt that Hanna would have been bright red. Sighing softly, he turned to give a wait one moment sign before taking Hanna by the shoulders and steering him (a mostly symbolic) three feet away.

"The sooner we can figure out what's troubling them, the sooner we can stop it," he reminded his partner, putting their backs to the girls. Hanna looked up at him and fairly blasted the older man with his best dewy zombie eyes.

"But … girls!"

"Not the type who'd be interested in you, Hanna," he said under his breath, remaining impressively deadpan.

"… 'cos I'm dead?" he nearly whined, shoulders slumped.

For one as observant as Hanna, it was a bit of a shocker that he had missed the single bed.

"Among other things." He put a hand on the young, oblivious zombie's head. "Focus, Hanna. They need our help."

Hanna's dry little chest heaved and emptied in a resigned, flustered sigh, but when he turned around, his hand was to his chin and he was looking around the small apartment with an infinitely sharper gaze.

"Okay, okay. So, uh … You've seen and heard a lot, but have you come into contact with it directly?"

"Only Marie has actually…" the taller woman began, then kneaded at her sleeves and looked hesitantly to her girlfriend. Marie seemed to have to decide on something before facing the two investigators, cherub face solemn.

"It's only really targeted me."

"Targeted?" the Detective clarified, one brow jumping up.

At an encouraging wince from Dee, the pale young woman sighed and pulled up the sleeve of her sweater: underneath was a sprawl of nasty bruises, some ripe and wet-looking, others fading into rotting browns and yellows.

"Holy smokes! It did this to you?" Hanna exclaimed, sounding genuinely surprised.

"I've fallen three times in the past two weeks."

"Bad falls," Dee put in anxiously. "And she's not clumsy. She nearly broke her arm on the bathtub a few days ago."

"Things just get … tossed around. Suddenly, the room is in an upheaval. Pots, drawers, chairs, everything," she explained, exhaustion and disbelief alike creeping into her voice. She gestured to the bedroom. "Even Himuro almost got crushed the last time."

"Himuro?"

"Our cat."

The Detective looked around until he spotted a litter-box by the door, but that was the only sign of a feline resident. Dee pulled an ugly face at the pair of investigators as Marie went off and tsked and chirped dotingly for the cat. She was clearly displeased with either the cat-calling or the cat in general.

"Himuro. That's a … weird name for a cat," Hanna put in, watching Marie's progress across the tiny living room.

"He was actually a present from Dee's aunt."

Yes, from the sour look on Dee's face, that present hadn't sat well with her. At all.

"She moved to Japan on a whim. We named him after the place she said she got him: Himuro-something. It was a mansion, I think. He got his tail crushed the last time I was attacked. It's almost like he can sense it before it happens, too. I hear him growling and then everything goes to hell."

Hanna's brow twitched up into a suspicious expression but cleared the instant Marie gave up her search and rejoined them. Then she pointed upwards, smiling wanly.

"Oh wait, there he is. Silly kitty."

The Detective took an instinctive step back as a deep black shadow bulged over the top of a cabinet, dotted with two hard yellow eyes. A little farther back, a black tail with a white stripe of a bandage swished tensely back and forth so quickly that, for a second, the older man saw double. He hardly realized he was reaching blindly for Hanna's open rucksack when the zombie nudged him in the side.

"What, you don't like cats, Pluto?" Hanna asked, grinning up at him. High above them, the cat bared its tiny needle teeth and whipped around the corner, dropping out of sight; somehow freed, the Detective blinked heavily and pushed his hair back. He frowned up at the place where it had disappeared, muttering something noncommittal, then turned his attention back to their clients.

"Alright, so, we have some facts now. We know it's angry, it's powerful enough to toss pans and it only really attacks you. That seems kinda … personal," Hanna eked out, drumming his fingers together and wincing at Marie. "This could be a stupid question, but do you have any idea what this could be? Or who, maybe?"

The couple traded another uncomfortable look.

"If it's anyone, it's my grandfather," Marie admitted after a moment, fingers knitted tightly at her waist.

"These flats have been here for forever, they've only been renovated recently. Marie's grandfather helped build them originally and took one for his own, then died here," Dee explained, own long fingers busy with her curly hair. "We moved in about a year ago. He was very attached to it, wanted it to stay in the family. Really saw it as a mark of his independence, you know."

"I can't sleep. Neither of us can. But when I do finally drop off, I've been having weird dreams. Most of them are of him. I can't understand him, but he's very angry and I think he wants me to get out of the house," Marie said dully, blue eyes downcast. She took a moment to rub her face, slumping slightly into Dee's tall frame when her girlfriend slipped an arm around her thin shoulders. "He was a … difficult guy. Gentle wasn't exactly a word you'd use to describe him, but I just don't get why this is happening."

Marie pressed her hand over her eyes and let out a shuddering breath, and Dee turned and swept her against her chest without missing a beat, raking her fingers through the smaller woman's blond hair. They murmured back and forth to each other, Dee comforting her girlfriend in husky, firm tones. I'm just so fucking tired, I can't even think. I know, I'm so sorry. I just want this to be over.

Their complete comfort and lack of fear was admirable; the Detective averted his eyes to give them a shred of privacy, but Hanna seemed to have missed the embrace entirely. He was almost glaring at the entrance to the bathroom, where the door stood open.

"When do most of the attacks happen?" the zombie asked after a moment, voice unexpectedly hard.

"When I'm by myself," Marie whispered, separating herself from her girlfriend. "It's always when Dee is at work or running errands."

"By yourself … with the cat?"

"Um. I guess."

Marie glanced up at the Detective, face crinkling with slow confusion. The older man had no answer for her, but Hanna gave a short nod, something obviously clicking in his mind.

"The ghost isn't your problem."

"We have a ghost and it isn't our problem?" Dee said incredulously, mouth falling open.

"Yeah, uh, and you have to leave."

They stared at him. Hanna's luminous blue eyes were locked intensely on the ajar bathroom door as if he wasn't aware of his clients' presence, then looked back at them as though it were a relatively mainstream idea for two young ladies to leave their own house and allow two slightly insane strangers full access to anything they pleased.

"No, really, you have to go," Hanna insisted flatly, shooing them. "Go take a walk or something, there's something I want to … talk about. Wiiiith my partner. Totally, like, logistics, nothing important. About the ghost. Just about the ghost. That's totally your problem. Yeah."

The Detective looked at his partner quizzically and a little sternly: he could feel the couple's rising incredulity behind him. In explanation, Hanna just made a few stifled motions over his shoulder that translated to something completely incomprehensible but still highly urgent (and something which definitely required solitude to speak of), so the Detective did what he thought was best. He led them outside, through a considerable amount of high-pitched demands and expletives.

When he came back, confused didn't even begin to describe what he felt. Part of him even briefly wished for the old Hanna, who was purely incapable of messy deception.

"I just had them lock us in and handed them my wallet as collateral," he said flatly, pulling his gloves tight. "What's going on?"

"Good thinking! We have to make sure it doesn't get away." Hanna ran to the door and, before his partner could do anything, took out a sharpie and drew a shell-like sealing rune on it and popped the cap shut. Hanna watched it flare bright blue and fade down to a navy smolder, sucked into his work all the way down to his checkered toes. When he turned around, the Detective was staring at him expectantly, hands on his hips. That seemed to snap the small zombie back a bit and remind him that he actually had a partner who occasionally needed to be let in on his oft insane-seeming thought processes if he was to know how to proceed with the case.

"Sorry, Milo, I couldn't talk about it with them close. It's not the ghost that's their problem."

"You said that. What is their problem?"

"There's a reason you don't like that cat," Hanna told him, slinging his rucksack off of his shoulder and kneeling around to rummage in it. "I can't believe I didn't see it right off. As far as I can tell, it's a bakeneko. Or a nekomata, if its tail has already split. Nasty stuff. It's an evil cat demon, originates from Japan. Fits all of their sightings."

"And it's … capable of telekinesis?"

"No, but I'll get to that. A bakeneko haunts any house its put into. It messes with people while they're trying to sleep and conjures up these big balls of ghost-fire to lure people places. It feeds off of poison mostly, from small animals and stuff – you can bet if there was a snake problem around here, it's long gone – but also basically sucks the life out of the mistress of the house. And if the host is getting too weak to be tasty, like Marie probably is, they have this really bad habit of eating them alive and shape-shifting into their double. Dee's lucky she decided to call before both of them became kitty-chow."

"So there's a demon cat in that bathroom," the Detective managed to say after a considerable pause, once more struck with how little he knew about the world he lived in. "But what about the ghost? Do you think it's her grandfather?"

Hanna straightened from his rucksack with a leather bag in his hand, raising his chin as if sampling the stale apartment air or straining to hear a sound. He frowned, shaking his head.

"I can definitely feel him. He's here. It feels really old and kinda angry, kinda edgy, so it's gotta be her granddad, but … bakenekos don't have that kind of tossing power and I don't think he's throwing crap around for no good reason."

The Detective began to ask more questions — perhaps the most important question of and what are we going to do about this – but Hanna raised a hand and motioned him towards the bathroom. The older man couldn't miss the switch from thinking-mode to doing-mode and knew the time for words and explanations had passed, so he just followed. The small zombie paused only long enough to toss him the red-inscribed  hammer before pressing himself flat to the door and slowly nudging it open.

The bathroom was surprisingly nice, tiled in creams with square skylights and a wide vanity mirror that covered one wall. It must have looked nice in the daytime, but past midnight, the skylights transformed into inverted wells of darkness and the tile appeared pale and sickly with a bone-like texture. The very air seemed sour.

The two investigators slipped in, treading lightly on the cold floor and visually dissecting every well-lit corner, looking for a slither of black. The older man shut the door behind them, which made Hanna jump a foot in the air. The small zombie looked back with a sheepish grin, then stepped into the middle of the bathroom, sharpie flip-flopping precariously between his fingers.

"Hey, kitty-kitty …" Hanna cooed, clearing his throat and patting his leg. "Come on out. I've got some string for you … it's kinda tied up in my arms and stuff, but you can totally give it a shot."

The bathroom stayed utterly silent, a frozen image of two interlocked lives painted in cockeyed toothbrushes and damp towels, until Hanna took a step towards the shower. The white curtain bulged and a flash of black made them both turn sharply. A low, grating yowl issued from the dark space and the sound alone made the Detective's back prickle viciously. The bathroom echoed with an eerie, drawn-out squawk, a whine, and then a short, crisp hiss.

He saw a black tail whip back and forth under the curtain, a thick shadow clinging close behind. Doubling it. The Detective tensed and raised his hammer the moment the lights flickered out, plunging the bathroom into complete darkness.

He made an alarmed noise and looked around in the pitch black, instinctively searching for the rucksack and the flashlight he knew was in there, but he didn't even have time to consider going back for it. The guiding blue headlights of Hanna's eyes were briefly overwhelmed by a flare of bright light. When the older man's vision adjusted, he saw Hanna standing in front of the sink, holding a glowing blue ball of magic, face grim under the opaque sheen of his chunky glasses.

"Sorry, kitty. I'm a little too old for hide and seek, and I'm betting you are, too."

The bathroom's tub and curtains twitched and twisted warily in the silvery shadow of the beacon, but otherwise revealed nothing. The Detective's fingers gripped and re-gripped the handle of the hammer, attempting to fight off the sudden chill underneath his skin – or so he thought. His next tight breath brought a cloud of steam rising in front of his eyes. Mystified, he swiped a hand through it, and through the cleared space his eyes locked on a four-legged shadow against the far wall: a barrel-chested lump that was knotting and doubling up and rising into something distinctly bipedal.

"Hanna, by the window!" he shouted, pointing. Hanna turned, but the shadow had already whipped into the next patch of darkness with a piercing, baby-like squeal that evened out into the most threatening rumble the Detective had ever heard, minus the djinn. It filled the room, dark and rough: the push of it left the older man feeling as though the demon had no corporeal form and could slide over the walls like an oil spill and get behind him.

To his left, Hanna backed up haltingly, his dark, flickering reflection mimicking him. The full-length mirror doubled everything, creating a split-tail world. The Detective edged towards the door, hammer in front of his chest, then froze entirely.

Next to the counter, both too close and far too high for a cat, two huge, glassy yellow eyes burned up at him.

Before he could shout out, Hanna slid in front of him, wet ink on his palm. Throwing the blue ball into the air, the zombie shot a handful of yellow-green blasts into the corner, which lit up the bathroom like a cheap horror house. The Detective recoiled, grabbing for the side of the bathtub as the strobe-effect filleted his senses and scattered them. A snarl ripped through the small room, paired with the chemical stink of burning fur, which made the older man look up. The last of the flashes silhouetted a long, impossibly feral shape as it jumped over Hanna, mouth and eyes gaping yellow, and slammed into the Detective.

The hammer went flying. His head hit the ground with a crack he heard as much as felt, but his hands still shot out and tangled into the sticky fur around the demon's muscled neck, forcing it away from his own with a strangled noise of pure effort.

"Gnnh!"

"Ulrich!"

It was strong; his arms shook violently before he wrenched the huge cat's impossible weight to the side, rolling over and immediately fighting to pin the burly creature to the floor. Aching hands digging into its neck, the Detective leaned down to push his knee into its middle, then reared back with a strangled cry when the bakeneko's paw crashed into his face. All he could feel was the blunt pain of the blow until the blood trickled thickly down his narrow nose and the stripes began to sting atop the ache.

"You've got it! Now grab its tail! I'm sorry, really sorry, but you're doing great! I'm almost done, just give me a few more seconds!"

He looked up long enough to see Hanna swipe up a stick of lipstick and slash a heavy red circle onto the surface of the mirror, then turned his attention back to surviving. He blinked the blood out of his eyes and grabbed downwards without thinking, pushing his face close to the cat's barrel chest to be out of clawing range. The bakeneko yowled angrily and writhed underneath him, big paws slapping down over the back of his neck.

The tail thrashed in and out of his fingers a few times before the Detective felt the fork between the two slithering threads of fur-wrapped bone and couldn't help but grunt in surprise. Then he clamped down hard and the cat-demon shrieked so loudly it was nearly deafening, gouging its claws into his neck. The stinging pain combined with the grating noise and the ache in his head almost made his grip loosen, but Hanna's piercing voice brought him back.

"Okay, okay, I've got it! Can you get it up? You gotta throw it at the mirror, right where I drew the seal!"

It was a battle to get to his knees, but the zombie's partner heaved himself all the way to his feet with a doggedness made ghastly by the blood oozing down his cheeks and neck. The demon struggled and spat against his chest, shredding his orange shirt and grazing the soft skin of his belly. Face twisted in a grimace of pain and exertion, the older man dug his hands into the cat's neck and tail and, with a roar, heaved it at the sloppy circle on the mirror.

Half of him expected the mirror to crack, but there was a terrifying break in inertia where the cat hit the glass without a sound, without a bounce, and stuck there in a tortured sprawl. Something in the air clamped down and the seal burned like a brand. Between the wicked distortion of the floating blue magic ball and the silver film of the mirror, the cat appeared as if it were twisting on a molecular level, sprouting limbs as its head strained wildly, bulging yellow eyes locked upwards.

"Got you," Hanna muttered, jaw clenched. He glanced back at his partner, who was leaning heavily on the bathtub at the end of a trail of bloody handprints, all stark black in the blue light. The zombie turned back to the trapped demon, own eyes flaring angrily. "Oliver's never gonna want to get a cat, because of you. You totally just ruined my Christmas plans. Dick."

The creature's only response was a raspy hiss, which was all Hanna needed to dig out the leather bag, throw a handful of the powder on the mirror and begin muttering under his breath. The demon flickered in the swirls of shadow and light, becoming a blot of black and muscle and fur, knotted around a threatening, grating whine. But the longer it went on, it changed from a cat sound into another sound: a deafening roar that had been hiding underneath the cat sound, out of the range of human comprehension.

The Detective found himself fighting to breathe, pulling away from it through instinct. His empty chest pulsed alarmingly, cold and dangerous. Hanna's mutters rose to fight the steady roar, and the cat's body lost all dimension and became a tangle of black, no texture, just void. Pure emptiness.

He tried to watch but, after only a minute of the exorcism, the wild jittering and flashes of vibration were only a fraction of what he simply couldn't stand.

He ducked under his own arm and shut his eyes tightly until there was a burst of noise too loud to hear and an answering silence too deep to comprehend. He realized he'd been holding his breath when he opened his mouth and air rushed in, relieving his cramping lungs. He twisted around, and his mouth dropped open.

The lights were back on. Hanna was slumped against the counter below the mirror, leather bag clutched between his cockeyed knees, face drawn. Above him, the red of the lipstick seal had been blasted outwards, circling what should have been the dirty, scorched silhouette of a cat. He said 'should have' because very few cats that he knew of had two tails and six legs. Or could be reduced to nothing but a smoking skin by an incantation and a magic seal.

"You're bleeding," Hanna rasped. The Detective thought about it for a moment before pressing two fingers to his numb face; they came back bright red. He shook his head.

"What do we do with the skin?"

"We have to burn it," the zombie said tiredly, already pushing himself to his feet. His partner attempted to follow suit but stumbled, knocking into the wall. The older man was too tired to be surprised at the strength of the dry hands that hooked under his arms and helped him up, Hanna's voice close in his ear. "Purifying salts, incense, the whole kit and kaboodle. Otherwise the banished spirit could find its way back to its skin, and then we'd be in real trouble."

"Why is it," the Detective groaned, realizing he had bumped his head a little harder than he thought when he looked at the buzzing lights and was swept with a sudden and violent urge to vomit, "that no matter how dangerous an encounter we survive, there was always the possibility of it being infinitely worse?"

"It's 'cos we're just lucky," Hanna said with a weak smile, which his partner eventually accepted with shrug and a rousing attempt to stand on his own.

"So Dee's aunt sent the cat to kill Marie," the Detective spoke up a few minutes later. They stopped to regroup and clean up as best they could; unable to bend or use his hands, he sat watching Hanna attempt to unstuck the grisly-looking cat pelt from the bathroom mirror. "And Marie's grandfather was attempting to tell her to get away from the cat. To protect her."

"Yeah, but it got muddled and she thought he wanted her out of the house," Hanna answered over his shoulder, pausing to yank fruitlessly at the very stuck fur. "That happens a lot with ghosts."

"Ghosts can communicate that way?" the older man asked curiously.

"Yeah, absolutely! Ghosts can get into your dreams if they really want to, or just your head. They're just floating balls of energy; they don't really play by the rules. That's what's so creepy about them, honestly. Only problem is, unless they've died really recently, or maybe if they're magic-users and know how to control their energy, they're not really good at communicating.

"Most of its just, like, an emotion or an urge or a wish that can be misinterpreted. They can't really control their emotions. The grandad was probably angry at the cat, angry at the lady in Japan, and that bled into the urgent message of 'get away from the cat' except he forgot to add in the cat part. Honestly, he probably didn't even understand what was happening either. He just reacted and lashed out to protect her. Sensed something bad and went 'Hulk Smash' with the pots and stuff."

Legs split by the side of the lightly bloodied bathtub, the Detective leaned against the wall and looked up at the skylights, lost in thought as he palmed the hammer back and forth between his hands. Lost in his own strange dreams, more precisely. It seemed impossible not to be able to tell the difference between what your own brain generated and what came from outside, from a separate entity. The fact that someone, dead or alive, could invade your head and you wouldn't be aware of it was a little unnerving to him.

Struck by the idea, he thought briefly of the woman with the bright green eyes. She had seemed very real. She seemed almost … inserted or pushed into his dream. A perfectly focused image in a collage of blurry, sensory-smeared photos.

"I hope he's okay."

Hanna's partner looked over. Hanna was sitting on the edge of the counter, the rescued demon pelt in his hands, a bottle of hand-soap suspiciously overturned and half-emptied. His expression was oddly wistful.

"Now that his grandkid's safe, I mean. I hope he knows that he doesn't have to be so freaked out anymore. And maybe that he can … go take a vacation? Get out of the house for a little while? 'Cos, I'm sure having a granddad is great and all, but having a dead one around all the time, always watching, could get a little creepy."

"I'm afraid our authority as paranormal experts runs dry when it comes to giving therapy. I think they will just be grateful that their house is demon-free," the Detective said mildly, fighting his creaking knees to get to his feet. "Let's go get them."

Hanna nodded, then looked down at the sagging, scorch-marked cat skin as if seeming to remember that it was once regarded as a beloved family pet and not a monster (Marie and Dee would have to be informed of that). The zombie took a deep, dreading breath.

"Oh man, how do I keep killing pets?"

In the entryway, the Detective had to mentally count to three and take a deep breath before opening the front door. Both Marie and Dee stood up from their angry crouches by the wall, but the couples' faces dropped in tandem to see the drying blood on the older man's face and shirt. Questions filled the air to a suffocating degree. An insufficient explanation of the ghost activity followed, topped off by a squirming foray into demonology that was only really legitimized by an ashamed presentation of the still-smoking skin of the demon-cat known as Himuro.

The Detective fought to keep his face straight, bracing himself for everything from tears to wild screams. It wasn't surprising, then, that one of the girls began to sob harshly. The surprise lay in the fact that it was Dee who gave air to the first sob, as well as what she followed it with.

"I hated that fucking cat!" she half-screamed, turning to Marie. "I knew something was wrong with it!"

"You can't say that! You just hate cats!" Marie yelled back, voice watery with shock. Her terrified blue eyes locked on the shell of her pet again, lightly freckled face whitening further. The Detective put a hand out, prepared to catch her if she started to totter too extremely.

"But this cat! This cat! I bet she made it to hunt you down, or something equally fucked-up. We never should have accepted anything from that woman!"

"Is your aunt a witch or something? Is that why?" Hanna asked tensely. From the alertness in his face, the Detective knew he already had a theory going, and Hanna's own curiosity was as important to him as most anything else. No matter if the immediate problem was solved, there were still questions.

The two looked over at him as if they had forgotten there were other people in the room, then took a tiny step away from each other, the hot air between them abruptly cooling.

"It just … she wasn't very happy with us living together," Marie said quietly, eyes drifting downward. Dee, after a second of hesitation, crossed the one step between them and grabbed the smaller woman's hand, giving it a quick squeeze.

Hanna looked purely confused, raising a finger.

"Huh? Why would she be upset that — ohhhhhhhhhh."

The Detective literally couldn't stop himself: he smacked his forehead. Blood splattered further over his shirt. He barely stopped himself from smacking his forehead again.

"Oh. You're those kind of roommates. Those kind of girls who live together. Not the other kind of girls who live together." Hanna blinked, seemed to mentally make the switch, then smiled cheerily. "Okay."

The girls just stared at him awkwardly, a scene that Hanna's partner interrupted fairly brusquely with the second presentation of Himuro's remains, wrapped in a blackened towel from their bathroom. The couple waved it away, adamant that they wanted nothing to do with it. Relieved that he didn't have to actively requisition their pet's corpse from them, the older man gave the skin to Hanna, who bundled it into the rucksack. As smoothly as he could, the Detective brought the conversation back around to services rendered and price bargained upon.

After receiving their payment in his reclaimed wallet (Dee dug in her own pocket and shoved an extra hundred into his open palm, face wet with grateful tears. He gave it back: they would need it to replace the bathroom mirror), they quickly excused themselves. The snap of the apartment door seemed to herald the end of their night proper, leaving them in grand silence, the kind the older man could finally breathe in. The scratches on his face and stomach were already stinging less and the cool air was almost soothing to the pain. The two were walking down the steps and the Detective was feeling almost proud of himself in a quiet way when Hanna, wordless for a grand total of thirty feet, suddenly chuckled to himself. But it was a hollow, disparaging kind of chuckle, making his partner look down.

"Hey, maybe we shouldn't have fried kitty so fast," Hanna said, looking up with a faintly miserable smile. "Thing about bakenekos … Legend says they can reanimate a corpse by jumping over it."

Pleased warmth in his chest condensing into a lump, the Detective simply reached over and looped his scarf around Hanna's neck. He knotted it tight against the sudden blast of cold air that confronted them at the bottom of the stairs. They pushed out onto the street and, as they rounded the corner, the older man felt the signature weight of a small hand hooking onto his trench-coat pocket.

"Thanks, Copernicus," Hanna said under his arm, small and genuine.

"Copernicus?" the older man asked just to ask, hand on the zombie's back.

"Oh, you don't know? He was the guy who taught everyone what the earth revolved around. The sun. Instead of, y'know, the other way around. Heliocentric, I think it was called. It was a really good idea, the right idea, but nobody believed him and when he kept trying to tell them, he got thrown in jail for it. Sucks to see what nobody else does, huh?"

The Detective smiled and they walked home, where Hanna insisted on cleaning the majority of the blood off of his face as the single bathroom bulb buzzed like the center of the galaxy, yellow and bright and all they needed to see by.
Yay, real detective work!

I know everyone trembles to hear the term OCs, but rest assured, unless this story takes a screeching left turn somewhere, my plot devices – AHEM, OCs – will last no more than a chapter or two.

Now if you’ll scuze me, I’mma go write unZombie a love letter.

Warnings: language, supernatural shenanigans, disturbing imagery, unZombie wumping, so much gay, how so much gay
© 2010 - 2024 Demyrie
Comments17
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DesdemonaKakalose's avatar
Good lord, it's gay even when it's not gay. <3

I don't understand what the big deal about OCs is. You shouldn't have to be ashamed of them unless they're hogging all the spotlight like bratty children. BUT THAT'S A QUESTION FOR ANOTHER DAY.

I am in love with the PLOT here. Bad-assery and supernatural beings I've never heard of. Things are happening and they are happening in episodic bursts and I love that. Excellent job of tying the big plot into the little plot too, what with the whole Vesser's-mom-might-be-haunting-me suspision.

<3