Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(63)
***
The ghost-hunters are backed into the far corner of the diner, packed into the space that still holds the shadowy ghost of a jukebox, playing songs I'm too far into the daylight to quite make out. The temptation to drop down and hear them would normally be a problem for me, but at the moment, it's easy to ignore the phantom jukebox. The massive spectral dog standing between me and the terrified college students seems likely to be a little more important.
"How the holy fuck did you people manage to attract a Maggy Dhu?" I blurt out the question before I have a chance to consider its ramifications—namely, that it betrays my knowing more than I've been letting on, and that shouting is likely to attract the attention of the Black Hound of the Dead.
Sure enough, the Maggy Dhu swings its head in my direction, lips drawn back to display teeth like daggers, eyes burning the smoky, angry orange of midnight jack-o-lanterns and the sort of harvest fire that used to come with a side order of barbecued virgin sacrifice. I take a step back. "Uh, nice doggy. Good doggy. Don't eat me, doggy."
"I don't know what that thing is, but it is not Scooby-Doo!" wails Marla.
"Not Scooby-Doo, Maggy Dhu," I say, keeping my eyes on the dog. It's the only thing in this room that can hurt me. That means it gets my full attention. "It's the Black Dog of the Dead. It harvests souls. What did you people do?"
"N-nothing," says Jamie. He sounds like he's hanging onto his sanity by a thread. I guess when he said "ghost," he was picturing something nice, friendly, and human-looking, like, say, a hitchhiking dead girl from the 1940s. Not the afterlife equivalent of Cujo on a bad hair day. "We were just reading the incantations from the book, and then this...this thing..."
"It came out of nowhere," says Physicist Two. She doesn't sound as scared as the others, possibly because she sounds like she's talking in her sleep. We all have our own ways of coping. "It bit Tom. He's bleeding a lot. Can you make it go away?"
Shit. Well, at least that explains the screaming. I'd be screaming too, if a Maggy Dhu had just tried to take a chunk out of me. I don't remember whether they're venomous. I don't think so. There's a level at which things like venom cross into "overkill," and when you're a two-hundred-pound spectral hound, you're basically there. "I don't know," I say, with absolute honesty. The Maggy Dhu is still watching me. I think it's growling. That's just great. "I'm going to try something, okay? Nobody move."
Nobody's moving. I'm taking this less as a sign of obedience and more as a sign of blind terror. Whatever. The end result is the same. I take another step back. The Maggy Dhu finishes its turn, growl becoming audible. It's been summoned from the ghostroads to this dead little diner, and it's pissed. I understand the feeling.
"Fuck me," I mutter, and take off running.
***
There is no possible way for me to outrun an angry Black Dog for more than a few panic-fueled yards. That's fine, because a few panic-filled yards is all I need. These kids may be amateurs and idiots, but they're amateurs and idiots who've been turning this place into a giant ghost trap since the sun went down. I have no idea what it takes to catch a Maggy Dhu—I don't deal much with the totally non-human inhabitants of the twilight—but if there's a standard mechanism, I'd bet my afterlife that it's somewhere here.
Actually, that's exactly what I'm doing. I should let go, drop down into the twilight, and let the Maggy Dhu teach these kids the last lesson they're ever going to learn. I should remind them that there's a reason the living don't dance with the dead. And I can't do it. Maybe it's because Laura would expect it of me; maybe it's just that everyone deserves to be dumb, at least once, and you don't really learn from the things that kill you. So I keep my grip on the borrowed life I'm wearing, and I run like hell.
The pelesit got snagged in one of the half-drawn Seals of Solomon, but there are still five of them untriggered, scattered around the edges of the lot like a weird version of the home base in a game of tag. The first one is just ahead when I hear the Maggy Dhu's claws scraping against the gravel behind me. I put on a final burst of speed, feet easily clearing the lines of the unfinished circle. I feel like an Olympic sprinter. I feel like my lungs are going to explode. I don't think I like either feeling.
The sound of pursuit stops, and the Maggy Dhu starts to growl again. Now it sounds well and truly pissed. I stop running, bracing my hands on my knees and fighting for air as I twist to look back at the Black Dog.
It's pressed against the circle's edge, eyes glowing hellfire red and legs braced in the posture of a junkyard mutt getting ready to charge a trespasser. I've never seen an animal that angry. At least it hasn't realized yet that the circle's broken, or it would already be on my ass again. It'll figure it out eventually. Hopefully, I'll be breathing again by then.