Chapter Twenty-Four

I put my hand down on Maw-Maw’s shoulder. And this time, I really felt her shoulder. My hand didn’t slip into her like it usually did.

Then I reached out until I could cup Ashara’s cheek, the one Howard had cut.

“Look at me, Ashara. Look at me. Come on, honey.”

Ashara rolled her eyes toward me. “That’s good. You’re going to be okay, sweetheart. You’re going to get through this. I want you to keep looking at me. And I want you to think about how mad you are.”

Her eyes shone with fear.

“No, Ashara. Don’t think about being scared. Think about how mad you are. How angry you are that he’s got you tied up, that he’s treating you like an animal.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“That’s it,” I said.

I could almost see Ashara’s anger well up around her, surrounding her in a red haze.

“Good, that’s right, Ashara.”

Behind me, I felt Maw-Maw’s angry heat. And I opened myself up to them.

Howard had used the time to move up between Ashara’s legs. He dropped her left leg so that he could reach up and grab her breast.

An angry noise escaped her. Howard leered at her.

“You like that?” he asked. “Huh? You like that, you nigger bitch? Well, you’re gonna like this even more.” He let go of her breast to tug at his penis, clearly recovered from the earlier shock of Ashara’s kick to the groin.

I imagined pulling, tugging Ashara’s anger into me, then Maw-Maw’s. And I remembered what the son of a bitch who had killed me had done to me beforehand. And I felt the anger-energy slide into me. Just when I felt that I couldn’t hold any more, that the anger of three people was somehow going to spill out of me, I saw my body begin to glow.

Apparently, so did Howard.

“What the hell is that?” he asked, letting go of himself.

I gave a mental push, shoving every bit of concentration into my own incorporeal body.

Howard took a step back from Ashara.

I looked down at myself and realized for the first time since my death what I must have looked like the day they found me.

My clothes were in tatters, sliced away with a box-cutter. A slit in my stomach dripped blood down my already-bloody legs. Shiny visceral glints showed through various cuts.

I took a step toward Howard, holding out my arm, pointing at him with my index finger. Blood dripped off the end of the finger where the nail should have been, and I remembered that the son of a bitch had pulled them out. For fun. The blood didn’t hit the ground—it was as incorporeal as the rest of me—but it certainly had an effect on Howard.

He fell backward, scuttling away from me like a crab as fast as he could go.

“Let them go,” I said as loudly as I could. I had read the word “sepulchral” before, but never actually experienced it. But that’s how my voice sounded now, deep and sonorous, as if it were echoing from some deep grave. I sounded like I belonged in a Gothic novel. It was kind of cool.

Howard cowered where he had run out of scuttling space, up against the wall of the barn. I lifted my feet off the ground and floated until I was hovering over him. I leaned down, putting my face close to his. I didn’t know what my face looked like, but if I remembered correctly—and if Howard’s expression were anything to go by—it wasn’t pretty.

“You’re going to die a slow death,” I whispered in my ugliest voice. “A slow, painful death. You’re going to hurt and bleed and pray for death before it comes to you and when it does, you’ll wish it hadn’t. Because you’re going to hell.”

Like I was one to make such a prediction. The living might not know jack about the dead, but I don’t know jack about any afterlife other than mine. I don’t even know if hell existed. But in Howard’s case, I sure hoped it did. And apparently, Howard bought what I was saying; he covered his head with his arms and started whimpering. I guess a bloody, sliced-up corpse of a ghost is a pretty convincing when it comes to predictions about hell.

And that’s when I almost did it.

I almost killed him.

I took my hand and I slid it right into his chest, ignoring the shock of cold that slammed up my arm. Like I said, it’s pretty cold on this side, too. I used my arm as a lever to pull him up to his feet.

His face went white, all the blood running out of it as he looked down at my cold, cold hand stuck in the middle of his body.

I could feel his heart. I could feel its panicky, butterfly beating, first steady, then faster, then fluttering in odd rhythms. I ran my finger over the left ventricle—if my memory of high school biology serves—and watched his face turn gray.

I’m going to give this man a heart attack, I thought.

Truth be told, I almost didn’t care.

But I couldn’t untie Ashara and Maw-Maw by myself.

And ultimately, when it came right down to it, I wasn’t a killer. It wasn’t up to me to exact vengeance.

Even if I was a ghost with super-creepy killer powers.

So I pulled my hand back out of his chest. He collapsed to the ground, whimpering and panting.

“Untie them,” I said, pointing at Ashara and Maw-Maw.

He pulled himself up to his feet and staggered back over to them. He untied Ashara first, pulling her bound hands off the hook and then shakily untying the knotted rope around her wrist. She gulped at the air, gasping when he removed the bandanna from around her throat. As soon as she could, she jerked away from him and pulled the duct tape off her mouth.

She glared at Howard and then spat in his face.

“Pick up the knife, Ashara,” I said, “and cut your grandmother free.”

Howard watched them with hate in his eyes, his color slowly returning. I drifted up behind him, whispered in his ear.

“Don’t even think about it,” I said. I could see the coolness of my breath as a mist in the air by his ear. I ran my hand along his shoulder, letting it sink in just a freezing inch or so. He shuddered and stepped back away from all of us.

Ashara finished removing the ropes from Maw-Maw and helped her to her feet.

I moved around to face Howard.

“Run,” I said. I smiled evilly as I said it. “Run as fast and as far as you can and maybe I won’t find you.”

His eyes grew huge.

“But then again,” I said, running a cold, dead, bloody, fingernail-less finger across his cheek, “maybe I will.”

He whimpered a final time, and then bolted for the door.

A few seconds later, we heard a car door slam and the engine of the SUV rev up as pulled away from the barn just as quickly as he could.

“Why the hell did you do that?” Ashara asked. “Now he’ll get away!”

I shook my head. “No, he won’t. Because you’re going to get yourself to his house and call 911 and I’m going to follow him. The police will pick him up.”

“I’m proud of you, girl,” Maw-Maw said, looking at me.

“Of me? Why?”

“For not killing that man. He sure deserves it, all right, but you’re right to leave it up to God.” She smiled wryly. “Or at least the state of Alabama.”

I wasn’t sure that was what I had done, but still, I felt Maw-Maw’s pride as a glow in the center of my being.

A very different kind of glow from the one I had been emitting when Howard was in the room. That glow was fading now, and when I looked down, I looked like I had always looked to myself. Non-bloody. With fingernails. I preferred it that way, really. If I have to be a ghost, at least I’m not an All Creepy, All The Time kind of ghost.

This also probably meant that I could follow Howard again without him knowing I was there.

I left the barn to catch up with him. Ashara and Maw-Maw limped out after me, leaning on one another.