13 Bullets

The road took them over a ridge and down the other side, then swerved to follow the course of a winding creek. The sun rode next to them, skipping along on top of the water. It kept getting in Caxton's eyes and eventually she put on a pair of sunglasses, which helped a little.



Arkeley turned again later to take them across a covered bridge. Even rolling along at ten miles an hour the bridge rumbled and shook around them. Beyond the valley turned golden and brown, the grassy pasture land changing to cornfields that stretched for miles. Ancient electric fencing stretched alongside the road, rusted and intermittent. They passed old shacks that had collapsed in the wind and the rain, their wooden planks silvered with decay. She saw an aluminum silo that had been struck by lightning years earlier, its domed top blasted open as if by a giant can opener. The road narrowed down to a single unpaved lane but Caxton wasn't worried about oncoming traffic. There was something old and quiescent about the valley they sped through. There were crows out in the corn, enormous black birds that took turns leaping into the air and scouting for danger. There were surely mice in those fields, and gophers and hares and snakes but there were no people anywhere.



"You sure your friend is out this way?" she asked. "It looks pretty deserted."



"That's the way he likes it." The road forked and Arkeley took a left. Within minutes the road had disappeared almost completely, replaced by a pair of narrow ruts in a strip of grass between two corn fields. The car bounced and jumped and threw Caxton around but eventually, finally, Arkeley pulled to a stop in a cloud of dust. Caxton got out and looked around, hugging her arms against the chill in the air. There were buildings around them, old, very old farm buildings. A two-story house, white with gingerbread trim. A barn with an open hayloft. A silo made of metal slats that looked like it would leak pretty badly. Sunlight slanted through it and striped the side of the house.



A black and white hex sign hung above the house's front door, painted with geometric patterns more elaborate and more delicate than any she'd seen before, and Caxton had seen a lot of hex signs in her life. Typically they looked quaint and colorful. This one looked spiky and almost malevolent. It made her not want to go inside. Caxton saw a flash of yellow at one of the windows and saw a little blonde girl looking down at her. The girl twitched shut a curtain and she was gone.



"Urie!" Arkeley shouted. Presumably he was calling his friend. "Urie Polder!"



"I'm here, I'm in here," someone said from behind the door of the barn. The voice was very soft, as if coming from far away, and thick with an accent she hadn't heard since she was a kid. They walked around the side of the door and into the barn and Caxton took off her sunglasses to let her eyes adjust to the barn's dimness. She didn't know what she'd expected to find inside. Perhaps cows or goats or horses. Instead the barn was used as a drying shed for some kind of animal skins hanging in almost perfect darkness. They hung draped on equally spaced racks about as tall as her shoulder. They were not uniform in shape or size but they shared a pallor so intense they were almost luminous in the dark barn. Caxton reached out toward one, wanting to know its texture. Before she could touch it, however, a shadow passed across its surface, or rather five small, oval shadows like the tips of fingers pressing on it from behind. She gasped and yanked her hand back. Had she made contact, she knew, she would have felt a hand pressing back against hers, and yet there was no one behind the skin, no one anywhere near.



"What is this?" she demanded. Arkeley frowned.



"Teleplasm," he told her. She didn't know what that meant. "Go ahead, head in,"



he said.



She shook her head. "I've had about enough of weird shit." But his face didn't change. He would wait there all day until she walked into the barn. Caxton walked between two racks and stepped into darkness. The shadow inside the barn was nearly complete-after a few steps she was inching forward in almost complete blackness, the only light coming from the luminescent skins on either side. The substance drew her eyes since there was nothing else to look at. She couldn't see her own hands held out before her, fingers out-stretched, reaching for the far wall of the barn, but she could make out every tear and fold and blemish on the skins. They seemed to shimmer, or perhaps they were simply fluttering in a draft. They had an illusory depth, as if they were windows into some moonlit place. She felt like she could look into their textured surfaces where faces seemed to pass and vanish as fast as breath on a cold pane of glass. The only thing about them that stayed the same from one moment to the next was their color, though occasionally from the corner of her eye she would think she had caught a flash of pigment, a reddish tinge like a bloodstain fading from view.



She walked carefully so as not to trip in the darkness but also so she wouldn't touch the skins. After her first encounter with the ghostly fingers she'd had enough. She was nearly at the far end of the barn-or so she guessed, as the racks of skins suddenly stopped and beyond lay only darkness-when something seemed to brush her hair. She spun around and heard a faint voice whisper her name. Or had she imagined it? Before she'd even really heard the voice it was gone and the barn's silence was so complete, so certain that it seemed impossible she had heard anything.



"Arkeley," she cried out, "what are you doing to me now?"



There was no answer. She turned around and saw that the barn's doors had been shut behind her. She was shut inside with the skins, the teleplasm, whatever that was, and she wanted to scream for help, or just scream, scream for the sake of screaming-



"Laura," someone said and this time it wasn't just in her head. But that voice-so familiar, so impossible. It was her father's voice.



He stood there. Behind her. One of the skins had lifted away from the rack, flapped away and folded itself into a mostly human shape. It had her father's voice, and his eyes. It was wrapped in chains that rattled as he glided toward her, chains that shook and dragged on the floor of the barn, holding him down, holding him back. She put out a hand, either to touch him or to push him away, she didn't know. He'd been dead for so long. She knew it wasn't really him. Was it? Was it some remnant of him, left over after his flesh had rotted away?



A smell of him, of shampoo and Old Spice, flooded the air around her. The temperature in the barn dropped twenty degrees in the space of a few seconds. He was close to her, so close she could feel the roughness of his hands, she could feel the hair on the backs of his arms, though they had yet to actually touch. She had missed him so much. She had thought of him every day, she had even thought of him when the vampire had held her up in the air the night before. Nothing had been as good since he died, nothing had been right, not even when she met Deanna, it hadn't healed that wound.



"Daddy," she breathed, stepping into his embrace. And then the lights switched on and there was just a skin, like an animal pelt, hanging on a wooden bar.



"Right you are," someone said. A very human, very live voice. A man was standing behind the racks, a CATERPILLAR baseball cap on his head, his side burns growing down to meet each other under his chin. His eyes were soft and deep. He was staring right at her. His voice was pure Pennsyltucky, down to the throat-clearing swallow he used like audible punctuation. "Right you are, Arkeley. They's drawn to her, ahum. She's ghost bait."



"It's not the ghosts I'm concerned with," Arkeley said. He was standing no more than ten feet away from her.



The other man-Urie Polder, she presumed-stepped around one of his racks and came up to her. He was tall enough to look down into her face and try to hold her eye. She broke his gaze, though, as she imagined most people did when they met him. He was missing his left arm. The sleeve of his t-shirt dangled over a wooden branch that he wore in the arm's place, a length of gray-barked tree limb that had a knotted elbow and even three twig-like fingers.



What really freaked her out about Urie Polder's arm wasn't that it was made of wood. It was the fact that it moved. Its thin fingers wove around his belt buckle and hitched up his pants. His wooden shoulder and his flesh shoulder shrugged at the same time. "We oughter take her into the house, ahum. Vesta'll do it there."



"Yes, alright," Arkeley said. He looked worried.



Caxton rubbed at her eyes with her hands. "My father-that was my father's ghost. You showed me my father's ghost just to-just to-" She stopped. "What the hell is teleplasm?"



"Most folks'd say 'ectoplasm', which is all but the same, but then you might have guessed," Polder told her. "It's ghost skin, ahum."



"How do you skin a ghost?" she demanded.



"Well, now," he said, grinning sheepishly, "not in any way the ghost might like, ahum."