Cranberry Cove, page 6
Emberly doubted that meant Angelica disbelieved in companionship, considering that hint she’d found on the Princes of Darkness website. Angelica might live alone here, but she hadn’t always. Or she kept mementos of the past.
Or she didn’t live alone. Time would tell.
Emberly hugged her bag close and dug her fingertips into its side, where the leather creased around the reassuring shape of her handgun. She didn’t expect to need it.
But better to have it here in case this morning proved her wrong.
Nine: Superstition
Dawn’s light painted a welcoming scarlet beauty across the sky as Conner parked his Mazda at one corner of Washington and Mayhew, and none of that splendor passed to Cranberry Cove. The building remained the gray tumbledown he had seen the other day. It had lingered in this state for decades, and it would keep on lingering that way until it finally collapsed, haunted and unloved.
Haunted. The word rankled Conner as he killed the engine and eased his seat back a few inches. He might be sitting here for a while, waiting for the results of calling in a favor yesterday evening. Better he get comfortable until he had to force himself onto his feet and into that stale crypt. This early in the summer day, he could get away with merely cracking a window over running the car’s AC.
Shadows stalked the cracked sidewalk of Washington Avenue. Street kids were the true ghosts of this town, fading and forgotten. Vampires might slink through the alleyways.
“Enough creatures of the night,” Conner said, switching on the radio to an oldies station.
He had kept himself mostly sober last night, sipping only a quick whiskey to help get him to bed. Hopefully that wasn’t the case for Emberly. Between the Cranberry Cove encounter the other day, Ricard’s follow-up chastisement, and yesterday’s painful conversation with Duke, Emberly had plenty of reason to drink deep, smoke herself silly, and forget her last visit to this cursed place.
Not that she would actually forget. Often she remembered too much for her own good. Even if she couldn’t recall a particular unsavory memory, her body had written the past into her muscles and nerves. Conner saw it whenever a situation dared glance at going sideways.
Ricard knew it, too. That was likely why he wanted Emberly to keep her distance from Cranberry Cove.
In a way, they were all being ridiculous. Conner’s mother had been the same. She once bought a black goat from a farm upstate, with intentions of sacrificing it in some occult ceremony to protect the family at the next full moon. Conner had slipped the rope from its neck and chased it out of the back yard. Never found out what became of it, but he couldn’t let his mother slit its throat over nonsense, even if she slapped him, even if she told his father, with all the worse consequences that would have entailed.
Conner’s father never heard about the goat when he came back from his most recent trucking job. His mother didn’t punish Conner in that instance, either. She interpreted the animal’s mysterious absence as a sign of household blessing and never mentioned it again.
So sure, Conner understood Emberly’s entertaining the supernatural. That was an ordinary woman thing, and for all her extraordinary traits, she was as much a devotee to astrological hangups, ghostly presences, and generalized magical thinking as any other girl.
But Ricard—he knew better. He had to be looking out for Emberly’s own good, humoring her, same as Conner.
And then there was Duke. He must have known better, same as his father, until Emberly dragged the word ghost into their meeting yesterday. She may have succeeded in breaking the ice, but it hadn’t done any good for their investigation, let alone Duke’s wellbeing.
Conner would have to fix it all. Nothing new there. Grit his teeth, get his hands dirty, prove there was nothing more to Cranberry Cove than an old building, its solid-world secrets, and a sick man who needed to be put down like a rabid dog.
Emberly would call Conner’s approach insulting, disrespectful, sexist—a million words he’d forget in a day or so in the shadow of caring about her. Such names meant nothing when they were true. Those eyes saw right through him, and he didn’t mind.
Deep down, he wanted Emberly out of this business. Any debt she owed Ricard in treatments and reshaped flesh, Conner would shoulder it.
Really, she would be doing him a favor. He would worry less.
An hour crawled by while he listened to the oldies station dance between ‘70s and ‘80s hits and awaited an important phone call. Evidence of a favor repaid.
General knowledge and childhood common sense told him any boogeyman worth his closet would skitter off from decent lighting. Even a kid’s nightlight would do. A ridiculous perspective, but there was real-world application for it. Those same bright bulbs would reveal signs of trapdoors and secret passages, and then Conner would prove that whoever had attacked Emberly, and maybe Duke, had been nothing more ethereal than flesh and blood.
And Conner would spill that blood.
Sunlight warmed the street but refused to give it any color, only harshening one shade of gray over another. Had local businesses and residences sent this patch of town crumbling by mutual agreement? Or had Cranberry Cove’s downfall spread to everything it could see and touch? Even the sun had little business gracing the abandoned hotel.
Conner’s phone hummed beside the stick shift. That would be Latoya, and the favor. He dragged the phone to his ear without a word.
“You’re in business,” Latoya said in dry whisper. “But we’re even now, Bohme. Also, if you flip a light switch and it all goes up in smoke? Don’t blame me. Those wires have been mouse food since God-knows-when.”
“Since the ‘70s.” Conner smirked against his phone. “You’re an angel, Latoya.”
“Yeah, yeah, let there be light.” Latoya wished him good luck and hung up.
“God-knows-when,” Conner muttered to himself.
He shoved open the driver’s door and slammed it shut with his eyes on the hotel, as if daring it to respond. It stood silent, unmoving.
Conner scoffed. “That’s what I thought.”
He ambled to the Mazda’s trunk and fetched his black shotgun, loaded with every expectation for blowing holes through rotted plaster walls. And maybe floors, and the ceiling, too. He had come to fight an unseen enemy, and had he stayed on the phone a moment longer with Latoya, he could’ve promised her there were no mice chewing up the wires in Cranberry Cove.
Rodents knew better than to cross this threshold. Only men were so foolish as to believe they owned the world.
Conner crossed the street, pawed through the dark lobby, and found wall switches beside the dusty check-in desk. Lightbulbs flickered alive across dangling electric chandeliers. Water damage might have warped the ceiling, but the wires held strong for now, and Conner planned to make a swift exit if he smelled smoke.
Doubtful that Emberly would be awake this early in the day, at least after the night she should have given herself as a treat. Conner slipped out his phone and shot her a quick text anyway. She would find it when she finally woke up. Kindness dictated he let her know he’d arrived, and he would check in now and then. She would worry otherwise.
Completely unnecessary. He could take care of himself. As far as he was concerned, worrying was his job between the two of them. Ricard had made the right call in taking Emberly off this matter. Conner certainly didn’t want her checking out Cranberry Cove again.
If the longevity of electrical infrastructure seemed unnatural, he wouldn’t think on it too hard. Emberly might say not thinking too hard was his specialty. Do first, think second.
He crept toward the main stairway, shotgun braced to his chest, and eyed the shadowy patch at the landing between floors. Two days ago, the same darkness had driven an icicle down his spine. He hadn’t said a word about it to Emberly, but the landing here seemed ghostlier than anything else, its fingers threatening to reach for him.
Ridiculous. All of it. His fingers could threaten too, easy as flipping a wall switch.
Another set of bulbs flared to life, and their light stripped the shadowy patch clean off the stairway. It became what it had always been—an ordinary landing, its carpet scuffed through to wooden flooring, the nearby wallpaper having faded and peeled with time.
But there was no ghost to this spot. No supernatural maw to devour those who stepped here. Only the brief pause between one set of steps and another, up to the second floor of Cranberry Cove.
“Let there be light,” Conner said, planting a shoe at the foot of the stairway. “And let the devil fear it.”
Ten: Princess
Aquake unsettled Emberly’s bag. She snapped it open and dug gently past her handgun, where her phone had slid between a pad of tissues and a compact mirror. It glowed with a text message.
CONNER: Got CC bright like a Christmas tree
Emberly held her breath not to groan. Conner thought he was playing the hero, banishing the darkness. Would he have the wariness to keep safe in a place like Cranberry Cove? After a couple minutes, she hurried out a reply before Angelica could return from the kitchen with her coffee.
EMBERLY: be careful
CONNER: Always, and you too
EMBERLY: yes I know you care
CONNER: With all the grace of a brick, but it’s honest
Emberly wanted to keep talking, but she would only distract him. He’d bent his thoughts too far toward her protection, and that meant keeping subtle walls between them.
She could trust him to care, but not always to help. Each time a bad moment came her way, she had to seal it tight behind her lips. A skull made a good cage for secrets, and Conner was too much of a boy and a knight even in his early forties for Emberly to share with him about that evening two months back when a handsy man outside Shipley’s Pub wouldn’t take no for an answer. Delicious as breaking one of his fingers had felt, his mewling cries never stripped the memory of his touch from Emberly’s skin.
It lingered, even now.
And she couldn’t share incidents before that with Conner, either. The young man at that New Year’s party who thought she hadn’t noticed him drop a tablet into her red plastic cup. And the drunk who’d groped between Emberly’s legs a year before her surgery. And the curious dockhand who’d spotted the edge of her Jolly Roger shoulder tattoo and wanted to see the rest without asking.
All those who felt entitled to touch or speak to her, who noticed her early in her transition and chose to make her life a living hell, who demanded she be grateful for their attention. Each time she stepped out into the world, there was a chance of threat. A roll of the dice.
Conner didn’t understand. He saw these types of incidents as flareups in the flesh of civilization, not a constant everyday persistence. As existence.
What was Emberly supposed to say? Call it a symptom of the pink tax? She would sound like she was talking nonsense.
Conner couldn’t know her general experiences or any singular experience, from traumatic monument to typical street harassment, when anything he said or did was useless against both past and future. Nothing had ever happened, far as he knew, even when something had. To share would only burden him with rage. Kind as he might be toward Emberly, he wouldn’t be kind to himself for his failure to travel through time and undo these moments. Perhaps he never thought of being overpowered in body, but his soul knew better.
Easier to be silent, no matter how much he cared for her.
“Cranberry Cove,” Angelica called from the kitchen. Her voice grew louder with each word, a warning of her approach. “That’s what you were calling about. You’re lucky I keep the hours I do.”
“I know,” Emberly said. “I’m grateful.”
“Well, mine’s not quite a busy schedule these days.” Angelica stepped into the living room carrying two scratched-up coffee mugs, both black. One bore a painted skull and crossbones, an echo of Emberly’s ink.
“It’s for a paper.” Emberly thanked Angelica again and took the coffee she would only pretend to sip. This was not a household she could trust. “One I’ve been putting off, and firsthand sources are the best kind.”
“That was a long time ago,” Angelica said, circling the coffee table. “Only went there once, you know.”
“I did not,” Emberly said.
Angelica eased into her oversized burgundy seat, and the giant robe folded around her. She looked almost childlike sitting between the chair’s massive arms, a shrunken figure against its gargantuan back. Her tiny shape clutched the steaming mug as if she’d come in moments ago from playing in the snow and needed hot cocoa with marshmallows.
“The Princes of Darkness,” Angelica said, almost nostalgic. “Those were the days. We were outsiders everywhere we went, but hell, they made me feel queenly. You should’ve seen me, I was quite the prize.”
“Do you have photos?” Emberly asked.
“Never, never.” Angelica waved a hand through coffee steam. “Back then, we kept our business quiet. No pictures, that was a rule. I could never understand when the queerer bunch of us would pose for snapshots outside our club gatherings, like they thought if they meant well, the photos wouldn’t get slurped up by some homophobic fuck with a dark room.”
Emberly blew across the rim of her mug. “I understand.”
She meant it, too. She’d spoken with her elders, people of a different time, and people who’d come into themselves in the ‘80s, before digital made capturing every moment a breeze. Photographs weren’t easy like these days. Film was expensive then, and few had a Polaroid or dark room to handle development.
And monetary cost aside, there were dangers to evidence. Queer folk back then had to keep long memories when photographs could fall into the wrong hands and shatter lives.
“I don’t expect you to remember everything about Cranberry Cove,” Emberly said.
Angelica sipped her coffee and aimed the mug across the table. “Well, you should. I’ll never forget that night. Hard to shake the moment you met the man of your heart.”
Emberly held herself still as she glanced over the tremendous chair, the occult decorations, and the robe draping Angelica’s rail-thin body. She had guessed right. Angelica might not believe in marriage, but she did not live in this packed little house by herself. There was a giant here, perhaps bigger than Conner, someone fit to make a throne of that enormous burgundy chair.
“I’ve had a lot of loves,” Angelica went on. “Before him, alongside him. What would you kids call it today? I don’t know, but that was us. We were free lovers, and the Princes of Darkness—well, in togetherness, we were safe. That autumn of ’76, the club rented out Cranberry Cove’s convention hall and dining area. We didn’t tell them what for, of course, but they could’ve figured it out with enough rubbing the old brain cells together. Princes of Darkness. What did they think we were, Black Sabbath wannabes? Didn’t matter. It was a private engagement, otherwise they’d have called the cops. You know how it is.”
Emberly gave a slow nod.
“Anyway, the club named me princess that night.” Angelica laughed into her coffee, sending brown droplets bouncing. “Meant nothing in the long-term way, purely ceremonial. Got to have your fun, right? And we had our fun all the time, giving each other titles, desecrating the memory of monarchies in our own manner. We did that all the time. No power to it besides choosing a partner, and anyone could refuse. Of course, my refusal was the issue. There was a man that night—Hob, or Bob—funny, I don’t know for sure? Bodybuilder sort, a real cock of the walk, you know?”
“I try not to,” Emberly said, one hand squeezing her knee. “But yes, I’ve known the type.”
“Of course, he wanted me to choose him,” Angelica said, leaning back. “Damn, did he. The princess and her lackey. He was persistent, insistent. Really made him sore when I passed up his wall of muscle for my sweet sorcerer.”
Emberly’s nails dragged over her thigh. The tension stiffened her arms and back, but she couldn’t see a reason for it, only felt it bone-deep. Woman’s intuition, as Duke would call it, and he’d be wrong. More like someone walking on her grave.
Or maybe it was the fabric of the universe rubbing against her body like a snake shedding its skin against a rock. She might feel the friction, but the presence would slither away, leaving only the translucent warning that a larger, more dangerous universe than the one she used to know now hunted existence. A universe where the impossible was true.
“Sorcerer,” Emberly echoed. She watched Angelica take another sip of coffee, her mind clearly wading into an ocean of nostalgia.
“Oh, it’ll sound like nonsense to your generation, I’m sure.” Angelica let out a pleasant sigh. “But back then, we knew. In the secret places, you could keep a wild world alive. Our time was over by the next decade, despite all those silly idiots caterwauling about Satan and board games and heavy metal in the ‘80s. But for a span, those princes of mine knew true darkness. My heart knew it best.”
“Your heart.” Emberly felt hers thudding.
“Yeah,” Angelica said, wistful. “My love, Grant Lodestar.”
Ice crackled down Emberly’s spine with a wintry bite and glacial weight, as if a cold breastbone now pressed against her back. She leaned forward without meaning to, fighting her own body and its muscle memory.
She could imagine a snuffling creature might soon touch her hair and skin, moments before asking its awkward question in a vicious whisper.
Summoner. Grant. Where?
Eleven: Method
Conner hummed to himself as he paced Room 2A for the dozenth time. The song’s name and lyrics eluded him, risen from the past, heard second on the radio this morning, but since then an hour’s worth of other songs and nervous tension had buried everything besides the tune. That didn’t keep him from humming it, but the forgetfulness added another layer to his frustration beneath the unyielding glow of the ceiling light.
