“Your friend Captain Urich’s been asking questions about me,” Dunia said resentfully. “Wanted to make sure I was in town all morning. What’s happening?”
She referred to the captain by his real name, abstaining from his more widespread nickname, Crazy Al. Honor among outcasts, Andy thought.
“We’ve been to your old house again,” Nate said.
“Not my house.”
“Someone’s living there.”
Dunia waived her right of reply, ink-black cold-war eyes locked on him. Then she glanced down at the volume in his hands.
“I plan to return it,” Nate explained, “but first I need to ask you a few questions.”
“I don’t want that thing in my house!” she exclaimed. “Do you know what happens to people who read this book?”
“I can’t read it; I’m just going through your father’s notes, and I need help.”
He’d managed to carry the book inside at this point, with Dunia following. Andy closed the door behind them. As her pupils adjusted to the wallpapered gloom, she spotted something new in the cluttered foyer—a large package sitting next to the door. One torn half of a mailing label read “Banned Books, San Francisco.” She flipped open the lid and pulled out a book with the word “Vampire” on the spine.
The cover featured a dark-haired temptress leaning over another woman on a canopied bed, red hair cascading over the mattress. Undying Lust. Seventh entry in the Vampire Sorority series.
Suddenly she noticed the ongoing conversation in the living room had halted. Dunia was watching her from the threshold, a fresh cigarette in her hand.
“Sorry, I…” Andy then noticed the author’s name hiding in a corner under the displaced bedsheets: Dunia L. Morris. “Oh. This is your latest novel?”
“Uh-huh.”
Andy flipped it in her hand. “Uh, can I keep it?”
“Sure,” Dunia sighed.
(Offering it to her.) “Would you?”
Dunia put her on hold for a second, cigarette caught between her teeth. She lit it, puffed the first drag out through her nose, then took the book. She led her into the living room to her workstation by the bay window. A green-shaded lamp spotlighted a pile of books, a notepad, and a personal computer. Dunia wielded a black marker.
“Your name was?”
“Andy Rodriguez.”
She scrawled a line on the title page and handed the book to her. Nate came next, carrying the Necronomicon under his arm.
“I need to talk to you about your father’s arrangements.”
“Once more: I didn’t get along with my father,” Dunia said resentfully, retreating to her beanbag couch.
(In a side paragraph, Andy put the anonymous farewell message under the lamp and compared it with the dedication in the paperback: To Andy Rodriguez—remember to share, heart, single-stroke signature. No match.)
“But you said he was able to raise the dead,” Nate insisted. “Several books in Debo?n Mansion expand on an alchemical process to distill the essential salts out of a person’s remains, from which you can raise avatars—”
“I’m going to stop you there,” Dunia cut in. “I’ve read those books.” She noticed Nate’s odd reaction, then clarified. “The Dark Revenants, by Bob Howard.”
“You’ve read Bob Howard?”
“Yes! Wow, you read pulp horror too?” she said, pitch gliding off the sarcasm scale. “Finally someone sophisticated. I’m sick of this town of Milton hooligans!”
“Okay, Howard used the salts theme in a book, but you said your father could do it—he could bring back the dead!”
“No, I said he could talk to them. That’s what the avatar is supposed to be: a ghost, the sublimation of a spirit from bodily remains.”
“Yes, but only as long as you keep it inside the pentacle.” Nate dropped the grimoire on the sequoia table.
“Don’t—” She curled up her legs, grimacing at the tortured symbols on the page. “Don’t fucking open that book in here!”
“Howard said what your father says here: that the avatar would try to ‘pour itself into a living vessel.’ Which is poetic phrasing for possession. What if your father prepared in advance his own essential salts, died, and waited for someone to raise his avatar so he could possess them?”
“And what meddling asshole would be stupid enough to do that?!”
Andy stepped in just then, in full eye-contact-luring mode. Nate registered it, swallowed back the line he had almost delivered.
“Let’s say Wickley,” he put forward.
“Who? The salamander klutz?”
“We know he’d been hanging out in the house for some time. He reads something he shouldn’t, the avatar is raised, it possesses him.”
“Wickley was not possessed,” Dunia chuckled, a hair-thin crack in her voice. “I know that much. I know my father; he was nowhere inside that pathetic man.”
“Okay. What about me? Could he be inside me?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“You would know. You would fight it. You can’t have another person’s soul inside and not know—especially Debo?n’s. He would make…an impression.”
“But he wouldn’t be in me anymore; I’m telling you there’s someone in the house already. What if I was just a vessel?”
“You’d still know. Because the vessel is soiled.” Dunia smirked. “Same thing happened in Howard’s story. Remember? The second astronaut?”
Nate stopped, flipped some pages in the grimoire until he found again the notes he had seen in the attic.
“?‘But each transference shall cost the Avatar dearly, for once it stains one Vessel it can never pour itself out completely, and every Vessel shall remain polluted after the Avatar reaches its Source,’?” he read again.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Andy asked. “If someone had been a vessel for Debo?n, how would they know?”
Dunia’s eyes drifted away, imagining, the cigarette she’d been speed-smoking throughout the conversation almost out. “I don’t know. You would feel…violated. Like…like there was a smear in your heart that you couldn’t wipe clean, and it would stay there, always, darkening the world around you, making everything taste bitter. You would have nightmares every night. Hallucinations. Glimpses of his world. You would rely on alcohol or drugs to dull the pain, and even then, you would just wander through the motions. You’d feel…lost, bereft of purpose. At best, you’d become an underachiever, forget the goals you once had. At worst, I don’t know. Jail. Mental institutions. Suicide.”
She focused back on Andy. Andy looked across the table at Nate, and Nate at the sofa on his right where Peter sat listening.
PETER: Shit. Does that sound familiar, anyone?
“But it could be worse, of course,” Dunia remarked through a bitter smile.
Andy wondered, genuinely astonished, “It could?”
“Yes, because…the problem is not that you carry a bad piece of soul with you. The problem is it doesn’t belong to you. And eventually the owner might want it back.”