Ignoring this, refusing grief, she focused on only the now. There was this moment solely, then only the next, the next, the present was all that existed anymore. Get through this. Keep moving.
She shoved the door open with her shoulder, the glass pane’s fragments crunched out and tinkled in splintered gouts upon the inner floor.
The hall inside was impossibly narrow by modern standards, yet very tall of ceiling. Black paneling, peeling wallpaper. A moldering tapestry to the left gave a glimpse of a black-night stairway which led on high above. In front of Sophie appeared a way into a porcelain-tiled kitchen, and to her right the sitting room where Aunt Jemm had once called her “sweet patoo” when she had spilled her tea.
For the first time in decades Sophie crept into that sitting room, clicked on the flashlight, and was startled by the wildly-angled shadows brought spinning up by the piece of nylon mesh snagged over the flashlight’s lens. She pulled the plastic off and tilted the light’s cleansed beam into shelf-filled corners, and she followed the arc of light with the SMG’s shaking barrel. The room was desolate, the once-beautiful hardwood floors were scraped down to deep pale gouts of sawdust and shavings, where the room’s furniture had been hacked apart and dragged into the back dining room for… what? Kindling? Coffins? Cover from armed invasion? The only true features of the room, beyond the ominously tall and boarded-over windows, were an ornate tile-and-stone fireplace, the one huge shard of mounted looking-glass above it, and a pile of gilt-framed portraits tumbled down into the ashes of a recent fire, mounded behind a sooty and rusted screen.
Sophie winced as her flashlight’s beam coursed over the broken mirror’s triangle and reflected back in her face. For long seconds, she was blinded. She lowered her light in silence, barely breathing, listening. No one. She stepped further into the room, winced as another mirror shard she had not seen crackled under her suit’s boot.
She approached the fireplace. Only one thing had not been swept off of the mantle, an almost-antique Polaroid camera of the same vintage as Mitch’s Vega. Sophie peered at the camera, hoping to find some clue to her loved ones’ whereabouts, but the contraption was old and poorly cared for, covered in a layer of dust beneath the fresher sawdust. It had been there for a very long time.
She put the flashlight on the floor and knelt, lifted up the nearest picture which glinted beneath the light’s yellow beam. There, frozen in frame, sat the old eccentric cat lady with her widow’s peak and obvious glass eye, Auntie Jemm. Behind her in solemn profile brooded her husband and third cousin, Caleb — an overall-suited man seemingly plucked straight out of American Gothic, scowling off to one side, perhaps looking out of picture for his pitchfork.
Sophie smiled, letting her guard down ever so slightly for the first time. It was then, gazing down in wonder at this old portrait, that she saw the dust motes in the air cease their hovering and beginning to race over her fingers, billowing upon a dank and earthy current of rising air. There was a reflection in the picture, of a curtained alcove far behind her, a curtain puffing out with a rush of air, But no one was there…
The ghosts.
The bang of a door, echoing from some entombed level of rooms beneath her feet, the creak of hinges deep underground. The foreboding abrupt and echoing horror-sound of urgent and heavy footsteps, thumping up cellar stairs. The voice of Patrice shrieked in Sophie’s mind, Don’t turn around, run run run now and never look back, you’ll die, you’ll die!
She did look back. She crawled away from the flashlight, readied the gun, and crouched down in a corner, ready to kill.
VI-6
The Rising of Souls
A tall and thin white humanoid shape surged into the room, wielding a crowbar like a club. It fixated on the flashlight, then turned with a jolt as it discerned the crouching Sophie in the shadows.
“Don’t move!” Both of them, the man in the helmeted and vapor-tight DuPont Plasmesh hazmat suit, and Sophie — her voice muffled by the breathing filter — shouted the words together all at once.
The gaunt-framed man faltered but clutched the crowbar higher, a batter choking up on a bulky mallet and ready for one final swing. Staring up into his under-lit faceplate, Sophie saw the haze of a wiry and grizzled beard bunched up against the bottom of his visor. The bearded man saw the gun held by the woman and he froze. Something in his silhouette, the way he held himself with uneven shoulders and elbows askew, that curious air of grace despite the constricting hazmat suit, a scarecrow hollow of greater darkness pinned inside the gloom, it was all uncannily familiar.
The man whispered, “You?” His arms fell to his sides, the half-gripped crowbar dangled and chopped down into the hardwood floor like a dull and weighty chisel. He stared, swaying from side to side, shielding his gloved hands against the glare. “Is it you?”
There was a patter of footsteps, a second spirit both small and frail tripped its way up the stairs, scuffing at the steps with duct-taped boots too large for rapid movement. The curtain tangled out again and a young person emerged, floundering for balance with waving and shaky arms. The sleeves and legs of an adult DuPont suit had been carefully shortened and re-bonded with duct tape, leaving the suit torso ridiculously long and the helmet huge. But underneath the dusty transparent visor, lit by the fleeting blue-and-amber glow of digital readouts, that face, That face…
Very slowly, unblinking, Sophie put down her gun. She began to crawl out of the corner.
The little person punched her visor up, pressurized air puffed out, swirling dust down to the floor in dwindling circlets. A lock of fine blonde hair spilled out of the helmet’s illumination and the little person sloppily tugged her own hair out of the way with a hugely-gloved bumbling hand.
The little girl ran across the room, tripping into the man and rebounding off, shrieking, screaming and weeping even as she fell into Sophie’s arms.
“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”
She was sobbing so hard, collapsing at Sophie’s feet, her face puffed and streaked with oily grime, that Sophie at first wondered if she had journeyed back in time and somehow found a seven-year-old Patrice. But oh, it was Lacie. Sophie lifted off her breathing filter. She clutched at her daughter’s helmet in both hands, hushing her, kissing the wispy fleece of gold, her hair, until she could find her daughter’s tear-moistened cheek.
“Oh,” Sophie gasped as she swept the girl up in her arms, her legs giving way and slumping down against the wall, bearing the tiny burden with her. “Am I so blessed, my Lacie love? Am I? Am I?”
And Lacie went perfectly still. Her wide and tragic eyes were scarlet-rimmed and tearless then, the pupils widening. She had that strange, poetic, almost tragic smile of Patrice on her petulant lips, but her lips were spread in a smile of wonder. To Sophie’s eyes, her six- then seven-year-old daughter (Happy birthday, love, sorry I’m very late) had aged at least a year.
“Mommy,” Lacie breathed, “I dreamed. I dreamed you here.” She blinked, gave her mother a savage bear hug, then suddenly let go. She was looking up at the tall man, who had pushed the gun away toward the fireplace and picked up Sophie’s flashlight, which now was hovering its shaky haloes over the spectacle of mother and daughter.
Lacie backed away. The man dropped the crowbar down the rest of the way and held out his hand, and he hoisted the fallen Sophie to her feet. Through his voice-com, the clack of his metallic and static voice buzzed with a lilting hum: “Sophie Ingrid? It’s you. Oh God, it’s you! Ingri!”