The Dead Withheld, page 7
Both their eyes went black and the searing heat of her touch made the magician scream as she read his sight for the last time he’d seen Lonnie. One of the dolls clapped a hand over his mouth. She soared back through six years of his sight until she recognized Lonnie’s fleeing form in the white dress, the struggle in the apartment, and finally her lying back-broken over the railing and gasping for breath. Walter took her soul into his mouth and breathed it into a large, gold coin, something like a Spanish doubloon with a torch on its tails-side.
Dizzy released him and searched his pockets while he moaned there, blinded and bleeding. She found it, turning out his inner jacket pockets and nearly sobbed when she could feel the energy coming off it. It could easily have been another ghost he’d stolen from someone else but she knew this one was Lonnie. And it hadn’t been Hagenti who dropped her, though it was certainly the demon’s fault. It was Walter.
She stepped away, running her fingers along its worn surfaces before stashing it in her trouser pocket and digging out a set of brass knuckles.
He only cried out once, the first time she hit him. After that, sounds like words or prayers began to tumble with the spittle from his lips as she struck him until all the bones in his face were broken or burned beneath swollen flesh. She felt keenly the moment he died, like a rush of warm wind as the ghosts let his body slump to the restroom floor.
Almost immediately, something like a blast rocked the room, and outside she heard screams and shattered glass. She moved to the door but III held her by the wrist, an accusing “you promised” in his gestures toward the other dolls.
“Yes, fine,” she said, impatient. A snap of her fingers and the monsters reverted to idle dolls on the floor around the dead magician, their ghosts fleeing past her in their own gusts of air.
The gallery floor was a chaos of frantic people half-blinded by projectile glass and dropped chandeliers trying to navigate the colorful shard pools covering the floor. At their center, a bull-man in a vantablack suit roared in pain or embarrassment, it was hard to tell which. Without the magician, Hagenti couldn’t hold his form. She was glad Carmen and Ash were out of there.
Dizzy skirted the main floor, sticking to the elevated walkway that ringed the room on the way to the freight elevator tucked behind heavy crushed-velvet curtains. She moved quickly, noticing that Hagenti had calmed and began sniffing the air around him angling in her direction.
“Which of you’s the witch?” he demanded in a hellish growl as people scattered around him.
Dizzy ducked behind the curtains just as his eyes met hers and she mashed the UP button rapidly until the doors opened. The panic sounds died away and she was left with the hum of the elevator and her own subsiding adrenaline. The doors opened and she was in a backstage area of the auditorium illuminated scarcely by work lights. Drapes and snares of rope cast shadows on sledgehammered walls and the old wood of the floorboards groaned beneath her feet.
She made her way to centerstage where screams and sirens echoed beyond the theatre doors. The balconies were dark. Work lights edged the main floor, bright enough to see the Japanese damask wallpaper hanging torn and peeling from where the walls had warped over decades of sweltering heat.
Three thousand empty scarlet seats. She’d dreamed once of playing this room and having every one of them filled. A large block of the velvet center seats and carpeting had been removed as renovations started, stained as they were from where the vaulted, ornate ceiling had sprung leaks, so now the place only smelled slightly of mildew and more of just time.
It was in this open space her spiral of blood stones began.
In her preparations, she placed a lone stool at the center of a protection circle she’d drawn at center stage. What she hadn’t done was leave the guitar she now found leaning against it.
A note attached read:
If you have time to kill. C.
Dizzy smirked and took a seat on the stool, lighting a caapi cigarette and looking out over the empty auditorium. The sounds from the floor below were increasingly violent. She exhaled smoke and flipped Lonnie’s coin over in her blood-stained palm. In fact, much of her was stained with Walter’s blood—her knuckles were budding bruises.
She remembered kissing Lonnie goodbye at the train station headed east to a shoot somewhere greener. She’d always preferred the scenic route. There was little glamor about her: jeans and a white t-shirt she’d pulled wrinkled from a pile of clean laundry. But her lipstick was plum colored and left Dizzy’s stained something similar. Lonnie’d laughed as she tried to wipe it away.
A month later she’d kissed the same lips but they were pale and cold and supported by gauze and wire.
She brushed away an errant tear and huffed herself back together, tapping ash onto the stage. She picked up the guitar and let her fingers decide what to do with its strings.
I guess I keep a-gamblin’
Lots of booze and lots of ramblin’
It’s easier than just waitin’ around to die...
The auditorium acoustics were tinged with a crackle of small, falling debris. Guitar sounds resonated warmly in the empty room and her voice gradually found its strength again. She’d gotten through a verse and a half when the bull crashed the doors and stood huffing at the back of the room. Flashing blue and red lights at his back illuminated his hulking form as he stalked forward and entered the outer ring of her blood stone spiral.
“You are the witch?” he bellowed. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a magus in this era?”
Dizzy kept playing, only now she sang her incantations in the cadence of her song. She had nothing to say to him. She inhaled the smoke and exhaled its tendrils until she could see them drawn into the spiral’s center.
“Answer me, human!” Hagenti crashed through seats, batting them away like flies as he stalked toward the stage. Dizzy shut her eyes tight and chanted and prayed for the dead to take no more than what was theirs for the demon was her offering to them tonight.
“Oh, the masterpieces I will paint with a deadwalker’s blood…” Hagenti roared. His voice was so close it startled Dizzy’s eyes back open just in time to see him lunge for her—
Only to be held back by the edge of the circle.
He yanked and pulled as if against a chain tethering him to the center of the spiral but once the dead were inside it, none could leave.
Together we’re gonna wait around and die
Dizzy sneered as a skeleton hand clasped her shoulder. Uma stood beside her, glowering down at the demon.
“What is this magic?” Hagenti demanded. His pitch black eyes were trained on her while the dead rose in the circle behind him. One. Two. Ten.
“You owe the dead a debt. We come to collect.”
“The dead hold no dominion over demons,” Hagenti grunted.
Uma laughed her three-voice laugh. “You say that, but...”
At once the twenty dead who’d sprouted from the ground around them descended on the demon.
“You should have stuck to your own,” Uma told him as the dead slashed and dragged him back to the center of the spiral.
He fought back fiercely, even loosing his wings in great glittering obsidian arcs to sweep off their grasp. But the longer he stayed in the circle, the longer his essence was drained. There was no killing the dead and nothing but time subdued them.
“Dizzy girl, you ready?” Uma sighed like the dragging of demons was an everyday distraction from watching her stories.
Dizzy watched as Hagenti was pulled, beaten and cursing, into an unseen pit and figured she might as well be more dignified about her own departure. She stood and began to step out of her circle when Uma yanked her back.
“What are you doing? Chile, ain’t nobody coming for you. I’m asking did you get what you come for? Did you find Lonnie?”
“Oh.” Dizzy frowned, exhausted, and handed over the coin. “From our last conversation I assumed the dead wanted me.”
Uma rolled it between her fingers. “Well you know they say assuming makes an ass out of you.”
“That’s not how that goes.”
“Mm-hmm.” Uma waved her off and snapped at her minions. “Y’all get Mr. President or whatever he calls himself under control? We are not long for this world and our hostess is going to have quite a time explaining all this to the law here in a minute.” She jumped from the stage into the summoning circle where her bones began to smoke.
“What are you going to do with him?” Dizzy asked.
“Deliver him to evil. But that’s his problem, not yours.” Uma looked back at Dizzy. “Do you want to see her?” she asked.
For years the automatic answer to this question had been yes. Dizzy never imagined there would be a reason to pause. But here she was, tripping on her thoughts about what to say and what would come of it if Lonnie’s ghost could say nothing back. She could apologize for not protecting her, for taking so long, for growing as comfortable as she was now with Carmen. But she wasn’t prepared for her apologies to possibly go unaccepted. That might kill her.
“Would you believe I’m not ready?” she replied. Hagenti’s cries died away, making the words seem louder, more toxic in the emptying room.
Uma nodded. “I do. She’ll understand. The dead’ll keep her safe ‘til you’re ready. But don’t keep her waiting too long. I raised you better.”
“Yeah you did.”
In three steps, Uma’s bones collapsed to dust within the circle and Dizzy was alone again with the dark and the caapi buzz in her skin. Flashlight strobes and authoritative voices from the busted-open door told her the police had arrived and would be stumbling upon her soon. Dazed and feeling sick, Dizzy grabbed her guitar and made her way uneasily back to the elevator. Her hands up, cops on the gallery level took her for another injured patron and shuffled her off through the exit toward medical attention.
The entire glass facade of the building was blown out and the shards twinkled in colors of emergency lights on the steps outside. The fresh midnight air breezed clear and cool and helped to steady the waves of nausea that swept through her in the post-caapi afterglow. Damn, she could use a drink.
She searched for Carmen among the terrified, confused faces of the injured around her. Her phone vibrated.
NEW MESSAGES
CARMEN 23:47 - By the car
Dizzy carved her way through the crowds to where Carmen waited, leaning against the passenger side door, her head cocked curiously and a smile playing about her lips.
“Good to see you’re still alive. How’d it go?” Carmen smirked and made fruitless efforts to fix Dizzy’s blood-smeared shirt.
“The guitar was a nice touch,” Dizzy replied, appreciating for what felt like the first time the way Carmen’s hands worried over her.
“I thought so. So did you—”
Dizzy kissed her first this time, deeply and propelled by something like relief and gratitude and a sea of things it didn’t make sense just now to say with words. There was more to the sparks where their lips met than just Carmen’s sweet venom. There would be time later to visit Maia and Emmanuelle, to help ease their heartache with the news and solidify any alliances against whatever hell intended next. All Dizzy needed right now was Carmen.
Heh, she thought, smiling. Maybe the venom does work.
“You’re sticky,” Carmen finally said, smiling against Dizzy’s teeth.
“I know, right?” Dizzy laughed, delirious but also for the first time in a long time, happy.
“You need a shower.”
“You sure? I was thinking this is the perfect time for that date. We’re right here,” Dizzy joked.
“No, you’re a walking health code violation. You can make it up to me later.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Give me the keys. You’re high as gas. I’ll drive.” Carmen headed to the driver’s side.
“You can drive stick?” Dizzy raised an eyebrow and tossed her the keys.
“Dizzy, do you know how old I am?”
acknowledgments
Thank you…
...makers of paper and music, readers of books, speakers for the dead.
...Bean, Mochi, and Churro for being sustaining forces.
...dave, of course, and cover artist Shan Bennion.
...folks whose deadlines I frustrated by doing too much at once.
...everyone who ever asked “how are edits going” and tolerated whatever shrieking I did in response.
...Suzan, Marty, Jo for fitting the story into your lives.
My greatest thanks to Brent Lambert, my perfect reader, who was subjected to this story in a thousand iterations over the years and didn’t let my intense and pointed questioning of his approval dim his enthusiasm for Dizzy and her shenanigans.
And Karintha, who knows why.
about the author
L. D. Lewis (she/her) is an editor, publisher, and Shirley Jackson award-nominated writer of speculative fiction. She served as a founding creator and Project Manager for the World Fantasy and Hugo Award-winning FIYAH Literary Magazine. Past lives include roles as the founding director of FIYAHCON and researcher for the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. She pays the bills as a literary nonprofit administrator. She is the author of novella A Ruin of Shadows (Dancing Star Press, 2018) and her published short fiction and poetry includes appearances in a number of online publications, Neon Hemlock anthologies, and Jordan Peele’s Out There Screaming. Her debut novel Year of the Mer is forthcoming from Saga Press in 2026. She lives in Georgia on perpetual deadline with her partner, two cats, and an impressive LEGO build collection.
about the press
Neon Hemlock is a Washington, DC-based small press publishing speculative fiction, rad zines, and queer chapbooks. Publishers Weekly once called us “the apex of queer speculative fiction publishing” and we’re still beaming. Learn more about us at neonhemlock.com and on social medias at @neonhemlock.
L.D. Lewis, The Dead Withheld
