Blood Brothers Page 0,44

don't you tell me what made you head down the woo-woo trail, writing-wise."

"That's easy. I always liked spooky stuff. When I was a kid and had a choice between, say, Sweet Valley High or Stephen King, King was always going to win. I used to write my own horror stories and give my friends nightmares. Good times," she said and made him laugh. "Then, the turning point, I suppose, was when I went into this reputed haunted house with a group of friends. Halloween. I was twelve. Big dare. Place was falling down and due to be demolished. We were probably lucky we didn't fall through floorboards. So we poked around, squealed, scared ourselves, and had some laughs. Then I saw her."

"Who?"

"The ghost, of course." She gave him a friendly elbow poke. "Keep up. None of the others did. But I saw her, walking down the stairs. There was blood all over her. She looked at me," Quinn said quietly now. "It seemed like she looked right at me, and walked right by. I felt the cold she carried with her."

"What did you do? And if I get a guess, I'm guessing you followed her."

"Of course, I followed her. My friends were running around, making spooky noises, but I followed her into the falling-down kitchen, down the broken steps to the basement by the beam of my Princess Leia flashlight. No cracks."

"How can I crack when I had a Luke Skywalker flashlight?"

"Good. What I found were a lot of spiderwebs, mouse droppings, dead bugs, and a filthy floor of concrete. Then the concrete was gone and it was just a dirt floor with a hole-a grave-dug in it. A black-handled shovel beside it. She went to it, looked at me again, then slid down, hell, like a woman might slide into a nice bubble bath. Then I was standing on the concrete floor again."

"What did you do?"

"Your guess?"

"I'd guess you and Leia got the hell out of there."

"Right again. I came out of the basement like a rocket. I told my friends, who didn't believe me. Just trying to spook them out as usual. I didn't tell anyone else, because if I had, our parents would have known we were in the house and we'd have been grounded till our Social Security kicked in. But when they demolished the house, started jackhammering the concrete floor, they found her. She'd been in there since the thirties. The wife of the guy who'd owned the house had claimed she'd run off. He was dead by then, so nobody could ask him how or why he'd done it. But I knew. From the time I saw her until they found her bones, I dreamed about her murder, I saw it happen.

"I didn't tell anyone. I was too afraid. Ever since, I've told what I find, confirming or debunking. Maybe partly to make it up to Mary Bines-that was her name. And partly because I'm not twelve anymore, and nobody's going to ground me."

He said nothing for a long time. "Do you always see what happened?"

"I don't know if it's seeing or just intuiting, or just my imagination, which is even more far-famed than my guts. But I've learned to trust what I feel, and go with it."

He stopped, gestured. "This is where the tracks cross. We came in from that direction, picked up the cross trail here. We were loaded down. My mother had packed a picnic basket, thinking we were camping out on Fox's family farm. We had his boom box, his load from the market, our backpacks full of the stuff we figured we couldn't live without. We were still nine years old. Kids, pretty much fearless. That all changed before we came out of the woods again."

When he started to walk once more, she put a hand on his arm, squeezed. "Is that tree bleeding, or do you just have really strange sap in this part of the world?"

He turned, looked. Blood seeped from the bark of the old oak, and seeped into the soggy ground at its trunk.

"That kind of thing happens now and again. It puts off the hikers."

"I bet." She watched Lump plod by the tree after only a cursory sniff. "Why doesn't he care?"

"Old hat to him."

She started to give the tree a wide berth, then stopped. "Wait, wait. This is the spot. This is the spot where I saw the deer across the path. I'm sure of it."

"He called it, with magick. The innocent and