Pay Dirt Read online

  Alice set Michael down on the living room floor. Without taking his eyes off me, he toddled over to a little kid-sized armchair, picked up a picture book, and sat down.

  “What are you reading there, Michael?” I asked him.

  He just stared at me, flipping pages without looking down at them. Poor kid had bags under his eyes even bigger than mine. Must’ve been some bad nightmares. Alice met my eyes and gave me a look to tell me not to worry.

  “Say,” I asked her, “you haven’t heard from Early by any chance, have you?”

  She frowned, shook her head. “Not since yesterday morning. Why? Is he okay?”

  “I’m sure he’s fine. Probably got caught up in some work and forgot to charge his phone. If you hear from him, though, get him to give me a call, huh?”

  “Of course.” She narrowed her eyes. “Does this have something to do with why you’re all beat up?”

  I shrugged and took a big gulp of coffee.

  “You’re not going to tell me what happened, are you?” she asked.

  “You know I can’t.”

  She opened her mouth to argue, then just sighed and shook her head. “You’d think after all these years I’d get used to seeing you like this.”

  “You’re really are starting to sound like Mom.”

  Alice gestured to Michael. “Ozzy, I am Mom.”

  “That’s a scary thought.”

  “Well, it’s scarier from this side, let me tell you.” She eyed me over the rim of her coffee mug. “This isn’t a social visit, is it?”

  I shook my head. “Afraid not. I need your help with something. You took most of our old school stuff out of Mom’s attic when you moved, right?”

  She frowned. “Yeah. Why?”

  “There was a school trip Holden and I went on. We must’ve been fifteen or sixteen. I can’t really remember the details. I thought it might be in one of the yearbooks or something.”

  “Maybe, but…Ozzy, what the hell is this about?”

  “I can’t—”

  “—tell me,” she finished the sentence for me. She looked like she was grinding her teeth together. “Of course you can’t. You never can.”

  She glared at me for a few seconds. From his seat in the corner, Michael watched the two of us, unspeaking.

  Alice studied my face. “You’re still trying to help Holden.”

  “It’s not just about Holden.”

  “You always idolized him,” she said. “He’s not who you think he is, Ozzy.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but the words got stuck in my throat. It was no surprise she was talking like this. She’d never liked Holden.

  The look in her eyes, though… There was something more there. And the last few days had taught me I didn’t know Holden as well as I thought I did.

  “What do you mean by that?” I said slowly.

  Alice opened her mouth, shut it, shook her head. “Never mind.”

  “Alice.”

  She sighed. “All right. All right. I wasn’t going to tell you this. I didn’t want to spoil your memory of your friend.”

  My stomach began to twist. “What? What do you know?”

  “Do you remember my friend Philippa? She was a year below me.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I think I remember her. Short girl, right? Dark hair.”

  “She used to volunteer at the animal shelter. Her boss at the shelter started to notice that every few months there’d be three or four people coming in over the stretch of a few days, looking for their missing pets. Those pets hardly ever turned up.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “So one day Philippa’s manning the desk, and this guy comes running in with a spaniel in his arms, blood all over him, and starts screaming for the vet.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. Dog was dead by the time the vet got to it. But that wasn’t the worst thing. Someone had…” She glanced at Michael, then lowered her voice. “Someone had cut the dog open. Apparently the vet said it looked like someone was trying to cut out its liver.”

  “Seriously?”

  “That’s not all, Ozzy. The guy who found the dog, the one who’d brought it in, he’d interrupted it happening. His apartment building backed onto a vacant lot. He’d heard the dog whining out back and had gone to investigate. He saw it happening. The description he gave…Ozzy, it was Holden.”

  “What?” I sat up straight. “No. It can’t have been.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you—”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have, because you’re wrong.” I found myself standing up. “Hell. You really think Holden was some sort of…some sort of pet torturer? That’s serial killer stuff. Jesus, Alice.”

  Alice raised a hand. “Ozzy, calm down.”

  “I am calm!” I shouted. “I’m real fucking calm.”

  “Ozzy!” she snapped, looking pointedly at Michael.

  The toddler was staring at me with wide eyes, his hand frozen mid page flip.

  I took a deep breath, shame churning in my stomach. “Sorry,” I said to Michael, then I turned back to Alice. “Sorry.” I sat back down heavily and let out a long sigh. “I’m a little on edge.”

  “A little?”

  “A lot, then, maybe. But it can’t have been Holden, Alice. You heard the story third-hand. Someone got confused along the way.”

  “Maybe,” she said. She sounded doubtful.

  “When was this?”

  “Just before Holden left town. The rash of missing pets stopped after that, apparently.” She paused. “Philippa said she heard that they later found animal bones buried in that vacant lot.”

  “Sounds like another Lost Falls urban legend to me.” I sat forward, dragged my hand along my beard. “Look, I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe Holden is everything you think he is. Maybe he’s some kind of monster. That doesn’t change what I have to do.”

  Alice nodded slowly. “I didn’t think it would, to be honest. You still want those yearbooks?”

  “Please.”

  She stood. “Might take me a few minutes to find them. Can you keep it together for a few minutes while you watch Michael?”

  I looked at the kid. “Sure. If he’s not too scared of me now.”

  “I actually think you’re one of the few people he kind of trusts.” Alice crouched down by him. “Ozzy’s going to watch you for a few minutes while I go down to the basement, okay? Maybe you can show him some of your books.”

  Michael nodded and stayed sitting where he was. Alice gave me one last look and then left the room.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I went and sat down on the floor next to Michael. He watched me silently—not scared, but not entirely sure of me either.

  He was a cute-looking kid. His hair was a wild mess, despite Alice and Val’s attempts to tame it. His big dark eyes didn’t miss a thing.

  “Sorry about before,” I said. “I shouldn’t have shouted.”

  He tilted his head slightly to the side. He didn’t speak.

  I didn’t know what I was expecting. The poor kid had been through a lot. Early and I had worked hard to reverse the spells that damn goblin sorcerer had cast on the boy. Somehow we’d been able to turn the creature he’d become back into the boy he used to be. Physically, at least. But who knew how many lasting scars remained, buried deep beneath the surface. It was a miracle he was doing as well as he was.

  Hell, it was a miracle he was still alive.

  A wave of sadness washed over me. My little brother, Teddy, hadn’t been so lucky. It was a long time now since he was taken. A long time since he died. But sitting here, looking at this kid who even now was older than Teddy had ever been…

  “Ozzy sad,” Michael said.

  I started. I’d only ever heard him speak in mumbled whispers before, usually while his head was buried in Alice’s or Valerie’s shoulder. His voice now, though, was soft yet strong, and pretty clear for a kid his age.

  I gave him a little smile. “Just thinking of someone you remind m
e of.”

  “Teddy,” he said.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Alice told you about him?”

  Michael didn’t answer. He turned the last page of his book, then flipped it over and started again. This time he took his eyes off me long enough to glance at the pictures on each page before turning to the next one.

  Did we do the right thing? I wondered. Maybe it’d been a bad idea to palm the boy off on Alice and Valerie. They were good parents, and Valerie was a doctor to boot. But after all Michael had been through, maybe he needed something else. Therapy or something. Except we couldn’t take him to an Unaware psychologist, could we? And the supernatural community wasn’t exactly overflowing with qualified counselors.

  “Do you like it here, Michael?” I asked. “With Alice and Val and the boys.”

  He looked up from the book. I could see his little mind thinking through the question. He nodded.

  “It sunny.”

  “Sunny?”

  He nodded again. “Outside. Sunny.”

  I glanced in the direction Alice had gone. “Do…do you remember when it wasn’t sunny? When you were underground?”

  Michael went silent again. From somewhere else in the house I could hear Alice shifting old boxes and riffling through papers.

  “Alice says you’ve been having bad dreams,” I said. “Nightmares. Is that what you dream about? Being underground?”

  He paused, then shook his head. “No.”

  “Then what do you dream about?” I asked.

  “Door,” he said.

  “You dream about a door?”

  “Bright man.” He thumped his little fist against the book. “Knocking.”

  “What?”

  “Bright man wants to come in.”

  For a moment, Michael’s eyes seemed to cloud over. He was still looking in my direction, but he wasn’t seeing me. His eyes grew wide, staring at something I couldn’t see.

  Then he blinked, and he was back to normal. The kid flipped to the end of his book once more, then dropped it on the floor and went over to the toy box. He pulled out a wooden horse on wheels and began to drag it around the room.

  I licked my lips. “Michael. Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yes,” he said simply.

  “Are you…are you sure?”

  He stopped dragging the horse around and turned back to me. “She wants talk.”

  “What? Who wants to talk?”

  “Dead lady.”

  My phone started buzzing. Still staring at Michael, I tugged it out of my pocket and answered without checking the screen.

  “Early?” I said.

  “What? No, it’s me.”

  Lilian. I opened my mouth to speak, but the words caught in my throat. Dead lady. I looked at Michael. He was playing with the horse again and ignoring me completely.

  Had to be a coincidence. A toddler’s ramblings.

  “Ozzy?” Lilian said. “You still there?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. You sound better.”

  “I feel it,” she said. “I think my ritual worked. Partially, at least.”

  “You’re not going to go on any undead rampages?”

  “Not unless I don’t eat something salty and greasy within the next two hours. I’m pretty tired, but I think I’m under control. I left the hag’s around midnight. But Ozzy, I think I found something you might want to look at.”

  “What is it?”

  “I couldn’t get that name you said out of my mind. Morley the Profane. I knew I’d heard it before. I just couldn’t remember where. The hag was no help, so when I got back to the estate I asked Alcaraz if she knew anything. She sent me to a guy she thought might have some information, and he sent me on to this other woman, and…well, eventually I found something in an archive. It’s an old handwritten account, gotta be more than a century old. It’s probably easiest if I just show it to you.”

  As Lilian spoke, Alice reentered the room. There was a spiderweb in her hair and she was carrying a stack of old yearbooks and other assorted school crap in her arms. I gestured for her to dump them on the couch. Spreading them out, I started to flick through them.

  “All right,” I said. “Where are you now?”

  “Ollie’s Diner.”

  “I can be there in about ten minutes.” I threw aside one yearbook and opened the next one. “Hey, before you go, you haven’t heard from Early, have you?”

  “Early? Not since he dropped me off at the hag’s the day before yesterday. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not sure.” I found an old picture of my high school class, with me towering over the other kids. Holden’s name was listed under the absences. I kept flipping. “I haven’t seen him since yesterday morning. He didn’t come home last night. With everything else that’s going on…I’m just getting a little worried, is all. Did he say anything to you the other night?”

  “Uh…let me think. That night’s a bit fuzzy. I think he said something about checking out some people from out of town.”

  “Yeah, he mentioned that to me as well. I didn’t catch any details, though. Did he say anything else to you about them?”

  “I don’t think so. Just that some of the locals had taken note of them, thought they looked suspicious. I think a couple of ogres saw them skulking around. Oh, wait, I remember one thing. He said something about a museum.”

  I paused. “A museum?”

  “Yeah. I think that was where they’d been seen congregating. Some kind of private museum a little ways out of town. Ring any bells?”

  I flipped another page. And I found it.

  Our school was small enough and shitty enough that almost every half-assed field trip made it into the yearbook. They had to fill those pages somehow.

  This trip was no exception. It got a half page to itself, complete with typo-ridden write-up and a few poorly arranged photos. The photo at the bottom showed our class streaming out of the bus into the tiny parking lot. I was easy enough to spot, as usual. I found Holden beside me, half-hidden by one of the taller girls. Only his fiery red hair gave him away. Behind us was our destination: a broad, squat wooden building with shutters over the windows. It had once been a general store, I think, back in the days when Lost Falls was a mining town.

  The new owner had kept the aesthetic when designing the new signage—the paint was faded and flaking, the letters barely legible against the sun-bleached timber. Lost Falls Mining Discovery Center, it proclaimed, which was much too grandiose a title for the tiny museum.

  “Ozzy?” Lilian said.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I got a few bells ringing right now.”

  I scanned through the write-up, my eyes stopping on a sentence in the second paragraph. The museum, which is owned and curated by local man Dwight Stuckey, boasts over three hundred…

  There it was. Stuckey. As I stared at the photos, they illuminated some dim corner of my memory. I remembered the guy now. He’d been in his mid-fifties at the time, so he had to be in his sixties by now. A round, balding man with liver spots and a nose that could double as a harpoon. Holden and I had made fun of the crusty sweat stains in the underarms of the man’s shirt.

  You only had to take one look at the guy to know he was an obsessive. He’d practically bounced out of the museum when our class had arrived that day, his eyes shining even more than his forehead. As he led us through his dank little museum, he’d gushed about the history of every rusted pick-axe and old miner’s lamp. When he introduced framed maps of the networks of mine shafts that ran through the hills around Lost Falls he’d acted like he was showing us the Mona Lisa. He never seemed to notice that we were all falling asleep on our feet or sneaking away from the group to hang out in the spiderweb-filled corners, chatting amongst ourselves.

  Strangely, Holden had been one of the least scornful of the whole class. Sure, he’d slouched through the place with the rest of us, taking sips from his hip flask whenever the teachers weren’t looking. But some parts of the museum seemed to actually interest him
a little. Like the collection of curios miners had dug out of the earth around Lost Falls over the years. Holden had spotted some sort of weird homunculus talisman amongst the collection. He’d been so taken by it he’d decided to swipe it.

  And now, years later, Holden had recruited Stuckey into this new scheme of his. I guess it made some kind of sense. Stuckey probably knew the old mines better than anyone, except maybe the goblins, who kept to themselves in their caverns beneath the mountain. Maybe he even knew more about Lost Falls’ secrets than he ever let on.

  But Habi’s journal suggested something had gone wrong. Stuckey hadn’t shown for the job, and they’d had to go on without him. That was a few days ago. And not long after, Early had gotten word that there were some unfamiliar folk hanging around a museum outside town. And soon after he started investigating, he’d gone missing too. Call me crazy, but that didn’t sound like a coincidence.

  My gut knotted. What did you stumble into, old man?

  “Lilian,” I said into the phone, “I’m about to do something reckless and stupid. I could do with a little backup. You want to tag along?”

  “Is this your idea of a second date, Turner?”

  “I’ll buy you a milkshake on the way.”

  “Oh my. We are racing into things.” She paused, the humor leaving her voice. “Is this about Early? Is he in trouble?”

  “I think he might be.”

  “All right,” she said. “Bring your gun.”

  15

  Lilian looked like shit. Which was rich coming from me.

  She bore no injuries from her electrocution treatment—none that I could see, anyway. But her face looked haggard, her eyes dark and hollow. She favored me with a tired smile when I picked her up from Olly’s Diner. She looked a little like she might fall over dead—well, deader—on the way to the van, but once she was in motion she seemed to find her strength.

  She wore a woolen beanie that managed to look fashionable while also covering up any sign of the nails that’d been driven into her skull. I didn’t know whether she’d taken them out again. I decided not to ask.

  She was grasping a couple of crumpled photocopies in her hot little hands. I glanced down at them.

  “Is that what you found?” I asked.