Intersections Read online

  Although the ghosts hadn’t threatened her previously, Lily’s muscles twitched in preparation to run if things were different here than in Purgatory.

  “Relax, Lily,” the Ouija said in her mind. “They need you.”

  Before she could work out the meaning, they’d reached her.

  “The Angels and Demons have forgotten they were once part of a whole,” the portly gentleman said. “Good has become evil and dark has become light.”

  “They need to join together. Help us remind them. Help us build a new world so the dead have somewhere to go,” the businesswoman said.

  “This is the reason we chose you through the Ouija. To be the planchette,” the little girl said. “To give us a voice.”

  A surprising streak of anger rose, and Lily touched the spirit closest to her. “You used me? You had the Ouija protect me so I could give you what you wanted?”

  “You got what you needed as well, Lily. Protection. Be our voice, our planchette,” the girl said. “You just have to let us in.”

  Lily hesitated. A burst of Angel fire lit the sky. A Demon flew as if he moved through molasses. And Uriel’s sword slowly came down. The battle was waking up.

  “What will happen if I do?” she said.

  “The Earth will belong to the humans again.”

  Lily let go of the ghost and nodded.

  Wind kicked up. It stirred the dust, scattered ashes, and settled around her like a cyclone. From within, the first glimmers of silvery blue appeared. They grew stronger and brighter until they ensconced Lily in a spectral tornado. Then they rose high into the sky. Like a single organism, they dove into her. She drank in the power coursing through her. Instead of being the protected, she was now the protector. Lily opened her mouth. She roared.

  Multitudes of voices spilled out. Languages old and new wound together. Young and old, gruff and sweet, all vibrated in the air. The Angels covered their ears and tried to slink away. The Demons smiled. The Angels screamed. The Demons laughed. The voices of the dead continued to speak.

  They spoke to the Angels. Reminded them of who they once were, of the souls they once had, of what they could be. The Angels tried to run and found they couldn’t. Tried to throw fireballs that fizzed and died in their palms. The blue fire in their eyes died out. The dead spoke to the Demons then. Spoke of the return of their souls with the ascension from Hell, the compassion they now had, to remember what it was like to be one with the Angels.

  The Demons raised their red fire orbs but discovered they too died in their hands. The Angels looked at them with hope. Confounded with the failure of their magic, they marched en masse toward the Angels. The dead urged them on. A Demon hurled a fist at an Angel and they merged. Sensing an escape from a brutal death, the Angels swarmed the Demons until each had absorbed the other. The dead sighed.

  Before Lily stood creatures neither Demon nor Angel. Semi-transparent gossamer wings reached from shoulder blades. Blue skinned and eyes crackling with both Angel and Demon fire, they watched Lily. Waited. The voices of the dead built inside her. Her mouth stretched open even further until she thought her jaw would dislocate. A wall of sound issued forth. It surged toward the new beings, covered them. The air shimmered and they all disappeared into it.

  Lily collapsed. The Mother-of-Pearl beams sucked back into her body but the faint opalescence of the letters remained. They shimmered along the smoky obsidian coating her skin. Residual power tingled along her nerves and spoke of hope. Spoke of creation, of a new world for humanity and of one for the dead.

  She stood up—legs shaking but holding—and scouted around for her backpack. It lay beside a smoking patch of grass. Shouldering it, she let her gaze wander around the camp. Empty. But not completely, she felt eyes on her as she began walking toward the gate. Silently, she wished the refugees luck and slipped from the camp.

  The dead had more to say.

  Chris Marrs

  Chris Marrs lives in Calgary, Alberta with her daughter, a cat, and a ferret. She has stories in A Darke Phantastique (Cycatrix Press-2014), the Bram Stoker winning The Library of the Dead (Written Backwards Press-2015), and in Dark Discoveries Issue #25/Femme Fatale, October 2013. Bad Moon Books published her novella Everything Leads Back to Alice in the Fall of 2013. Her novella, Wild Woman, was published in September 2015 as part of JournalStone’s DoubleDown series. Entangled Soul, a collaborative novella with Gene O’Neill, was published by Thunderstorm Books in November 2016.

  You can find her at www.hauntedmarrs.com, on Facebook where she “likes” more than posts, or on Twitter.

  For more information:

  @Chris_Marrs

  chris.marrs.14

  www.hauntedmarrs.com

  Gallow’s Grove

  Brad C. Hodson

  1

  Though I'd been responsible for creating a few, I was thirteen when I first saw a ghost. That was the same day we were hired for what the papers later called "Death and Magic at Gallow's Grove." That incident would put us face to face with something, well, different than the ghost we confronted in a parlor in Chinatown that morning. As Madame Nephthys would later say, there's a certain symmetry to matters supernal, and I suppose it fitting that we began our journey by staring at the face of death.

  The red paper lanterns hanging outside and exotic music playing had worked wonders with a gray November sky to put us in the proper frame of mind for something fantastic. It was no surprise that, when the phantom finally appeared, everyone gasped. There were twelve of us, thirteen counting Qin Shi Huang, each gripping another's hand around the table. The room black as midnight, the spirit had no difficulty materializing.

  Silence. The air smelled of incense and old flowers.

  "What is your name?" the elderly Chinese man asked with a touch of an accent.

  Little more than a torso with a cherubic face hovering above it, the pale-green image stared at nothing.

  "I am Marie."

  She had the face of a fresh corpse and, if I hadn't been prepared for the sight, it might have troubled my sleep for the next year.

  "Marie," the elderly man next to me said, his breath hitching and his hand trembling in mine.

  The medium nodded as though there could have been no other outcome. "How did you die?"

  "Wet lungs," she said.

  The old man wept. "Influenza. My daughter died in the epidemic. Marie? It's really you, isn't it?"

  She didn't look at him, continuing to stare into the dark. "Father?"

  The table shook and a guitar on the wall played a few haphazard chords.

  The phantom began to sink back into the table.

  "Marie?" The old man stood.

  "Do not break the circle," the medium commanded.

  It shook harder.

  Someone screamed.

  And then a beam of light erupted and illuminated the room.

  The ghost froze, its eyes wide.

  "Well, now," Persephone said, flashlight in hand. "Would you look at that?"

  The ghost, as it were, was a woman standing in a hole in the middle of the table. Dressed all in black, luminescent paint covered her chest and face and provided the pale green glow.

  "How dare you?" The medium was on his feet, cheeks red with anger, the string running from his foot to the guitar ripping it from the wall. It crashed, the neck shattering and sending wooden shards across the floor.

  That was my cue. I rushed to the doors, threw them wide, and whistled. Six coppers rushed in, the crowd dumbfounded.

  Well, all except the old man. He wept into his hands and whatever excitement I felt at busting the charlatans slipped away. The poor guy had thought he'd been talking to the spirit of his daughter.

  As they cuffed the medium, Persephone stepped up and ripped the clear tape from Qin's eyes. I have to admit, it was one of the better Oriental get-ups I'd seen, at least in the dark. Without it and the long, braided wig, the guy looked positively Irish. What do they call that these days? "Cultural appropriation?"