I stepped outside my motel room and walked down towards the office. My phone dinged and I glanced down at it. Lavinia had sent me a picture of a thin balding man, Frank, Dad's current body. He looked more like a clerk than a prison guard. I swiped it away and slipped the phone back in my jeans' pocket. Turning, I pushed through the office door and stepped up to the front desk.
The motel manager, Janine, gave me a bit of a smile. Her clothes were rumpled and she had a strained look to her. Her teeth looked darker today than they had yesterday.
"Janine, how are you this fine morning?" I asked, leaning a little on the desk. People sense evil in different ways. For me, it usually starts with a smell, a rotten, hamburger left out in the sun kind of smell. Just whiffs here and there.
"Just fine, Just fine," she said, reaching around to give me my bill.
I glanced at it, then handed her my card. The smell was in the air now. There's a little static shock after each whiff, let's me know that Janine isn't just unhygienic.
She swiped it and waited for the receipt to print. Her hair was thinning enough that I could see flashes of her spotted scalp every time she moved. "It'll take a second," she said.
"How long have you lived in Omaha, Janine?" I asked.
"It's my home," she said, smiling a little again. She handed me my card and the receipt. "I need your signature," she said.
"Sure, could I use your pen?" I asked.
"In the cup," she said.
I held up the empty black cup so she could see it.
"Oh," she said, frowning, "Here, sorry." She slipped one of the pens from the front pocket of her wrinkled blue shirt and handed it to me.
I signed my name, handed the receipt to her, but held on to the pen. "You mind if I keep this pen?" I asked, flipping over my copy of the receipt and scrawling some symbols across its white surface.
"Uh," she said.
"Pretty please, Janine?" I said, smiling.
"Okay, I guess."
"Perfect," I said slipping a thin strand of hair from my pocket and wrapping it around the pen. "Now, Janine. What can you tell me about Kelly Swinton?"
Janine's blank expression darkened. "Who?" she asked.
"Kelly Swinton," I replied. "She lives a couple miles down the road. Small house, real nice lady." I leaned forward a little. "She's been having some bad luck lately though. Pets dying, rats scuttling in the walls, blood in the faucets..."
Janine looked away. "That sounds just awful," she murmured.
"Janine," I said, and she looked back up at me. "Where is it?"
"I'm not sure what you mean."
"Where is it, Janine?" I asked again.
"Where's what?"
"Tell me where it is," I said. "Save us both a little time."
"I don't know what you're talking about!" said Janine.
I scratched the scruff on my chin. "The book. The old book you've been using to ruin a woman's life. Where is it?"
"You're crazy," she said.
"Where's the book, Janine?"
"I think you better leave," she said, folding her arms.
"What exactly do you think Kelly did to deserve this?" I asked. "Have you been by to see what those curses you've been chanting have done to her?" I waved a hand to her worn features and thinning hair. "Have you seen what messing around with that book is doing to you?"
"Leave now," she said, tightly. "Or I'm calling the police."
"Alright," I said, starting to round the desk. "Looks like we're doing this the hard way."
She backed away, reaching into her pocket and holding her phone up like a talisman, pressing buttons with her thumb.
"Leave now!" she said. "I've dialed nine-one-one, all I have to do is hit call!" She had backed all the way up against the wall. Her bony frame shook.
"Oh, I don't think you'll do that," I said, dropping the receipt with the scrawled symbols to the floor and raising the gifted pen wrapped in her hair. The receipt floated gently for a moment, but the instant it hit the floor, Janine's eyes widened, likely already feeling something happening to her. The receipt burst into flames and disentigrated to nothing. Janine froze, her body stopped shaking, her only motions were shallow, almost imperceptible, breaths.
"Now, Janine," I said, keeping the pen raised in my left hand and taking her phone with my right. "I was pretty sure you didn't know much about this kind of stuff. You just giving me something of yours while leaving strands of your hair lying around kind of clenches it, though." I waved the pen and her arms dropped to her sides. Her shallow breaths shuddered like suppressed sobs.
I leaned against the desk. "Plus, you didn't bother covering your tracks at all. I'm guessing you came across this book, it probably started whispering to you or appearing in your dreams or some such. Right?"
Janine blinked.
"Well, cursing people with demon books has consequences, Janine." I said, leaning forward a little. "And believe me, I'm the absolute best ending to your little experimentation with the dark arts." The pen was growing warm in my hand, I kept a loose grip on it and the hair wrapped around it.
She stared at the pen, managing to look incredulous and betrayed despite minimal control over her facial muscles.
"Look at me, Janine," I said.
She blinked and looked at my face with her wide, frightened eyes.
"Now," I said. "Since I figured you didn't know much about stuff, I was just going to steal the book and give you the chance to quietly walk back to the real world, but circumstances have changed and I need to move this along." I lowered the pen a little.
Janine sucked in a breath and almost collapsed against the wall. She tried to scream but her voice came out has a whisper.
"I know the book is in this room," I said, still catching whiffs of it as if through a revolving door. "Tell me where it is, and I'll be on my way."
She tried screaming again, but when it, once again, came out as a soft whispering breath, she started crying. Her face contorted and darkened and tears slid down her cheeks.
I felt kind of bad then.
"Where is the book, Janine?' I asked, keeping my tone even. I had seen what Janine's curses were doing to her neighbor, Kelly Swinton's house and life were decaying around her, but I also knew what something infused with dark power could do to the person who found it. Janine wasn't entirely at fault here.
She whimpered and pointed near my feet by the wall.
I was starting to smell the hair around the pen starting to burn. Keeping the increasingly warm pen in my hand, I knelt down and, feeling about with my right hand, found a hidden seam in the brown carpet. Sighing a little, I pulled open a hidden compartment in the floor.
A gust of foulness made me cough. The book was wrapped in a black trashbag and it was almost too big for the compartment. I guessed at one time this was the location for a floor safe. I pulled the tome, still wrapped, out of the floor with one hand and slipped it under my arm.
"Thank you, Janine," I said. The pen was starting to burn in my hand and the honey colored hair was darkening and shriveling. I dropped it to the floor and rubbed my stinging hand against my jeans. The pen blackened and melted into the carpet, its power dissipating. Janine, suddenly free, fell forward on her hands and knees, breathing and coughing as her body slowly returned to normal.
"Next time a creepy book starts putting thoughts in your head, don't listen. The voices aren't your friend," I said, stepping back around the desk. The book had an unpleasantly wet feeling beneath the plastic trashbag.
I saw her coming in the corner of my eye and jerked back. Her strained face was alight with fury, her eyes wild. In one hand she had a kitchen knife, its edge gleamed in the overhead light. She just missed me as I jerked back and dropped to the floor. Burying the knife in the cheap, yellow wall papered, wall, she snarled and tore it out.
I jumped up and held out a hand. "Janine," I said in my calm voice. She brandished the knife as I backed away. "Janine, let's just take a deep breath," I continued. "We both know this book is bad for you."
Janine hissed and slashed at me, but I moved to one side raising the book across my chest with my right hand. The knife cut through the plastic and into the thick leather cover, something thick and black dripped onto the floor. I caught her wrist in my left hand. She growled in her throat like an animal, pulling against my grip and almost yanking me from my feet.
"Janine!" I shouted, and she looked up at me. Eye contact with her wild eyes and physical contact with her wrist were all I needed. "Sleep," I said.
A look of confusion crossed her face and then she went limp. I dropped the book to catch her and lower her, gently to the floor. I looked down at her a moment. She was breathing quick, panicked breaths. But whatever hold the book had on her wasn't strong enough, apparently, to pull her back into consciousness. Though she was likely suffering some horrific nightmares.
"Don't worry, it'll be out of your system soon," I said, twisting the knife out of her fingers and tossing it across the room. "The book is going to be looking for someone else...Oh," I reached into my pocket, and said, "Here's your phone back." I laid it next to her.
Taking a deep breath, I stood up, grabbed the book, slung on my backpack, and walked out the door, but not before turning the "closed" sign.
Grayish light from the rising sun and not too many cars on the wide streets greeted me as I crossed to the far sidewalk. A pawn shop was already open, an electric sign burned against its black windows.
Walking from Nebraska to Nevada could be done in the real world, technically. A hundred years ago people had walked further than that, but a lot of them had also died on the way, and it had taken forever. When mom had told us to walk to her funeral, she hadn't ever intended it to be a walk in the real world, not entirely anyway.
I turned at a street corner by a twenty-four hour diner. Briefly, I considered stopping for a bite, but I was kind of anxious to get this trip started. Besides, the quicker I was out of Omaha, the quicker the stinking book under my arm would get out of Janine's head. I crossed before the crosswalk.
Mom had called them roads through the mist, the Ley Lines. They kind of stitch different worlds together, creating a path that slips in and out of different planes of existence. They have a unique kind of energy, like how the dark magic bleeding off the book under my arm had a unique kind of energy.
I crossed another street to a conspicuously less cared for part of town. Weeds sprouted from cracks in the asphalt. I could feel the nearest Line now, like feeling momentum pull at your clothes when a car speeds past you. I walked closer to it, nearing a broken down house, the only one on this particular road.
When you follow the Ley Lines, most of the real world around them has this used, forgotten look to it.
I crossed the abandoned house's overgrown front lawn, brown weeds pulled at my jeans.
The only exception was where Ley Lines intersected. When enough of them cross each other, that's where the real world starts taking notice. The power from those places builds up and real people can feel it. For some people, it's the only experience with the other worlds that they'll ever have.
Particularly powerful crossroads often...though not always...end up with real world markers that also act as places of power, magical conduits: the Aztec pyramids, the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge...Dad thought that every megalith and monument constructed at these points had somebody involved in the construction that knew what was really going on. Like, sure Pharoah I'll design your tomb, how about we put it...here.
Mom disagreed.
They disagreed about a lot of things.
I crossed from the weeds in the front yard to the weeds in the back yard. A rusted truck from the fifties rotted in the far corner of the yard. What was left of a gray wooden fence gave a vague indication of the property line.
I could feel the Line strongly now. It was only a step away and it felt like standing next to a racing train. It pulled against me, trying to suck me in. I stood back for a moment, gripping the book under my right arm. The first step was always unnerving, a plunging into cold water kind of unnerving.
Spitting into the weeds, I took one long step and entered the Ley Line's current.