5.1
“What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die?”
- Mephistopheles, “Dr. Faustus”
There’s a man standing outside the diner. He’s very tall - probably taller than Walker, even, and Walker has to duck to get through certain lower doorways. His hair is cut close to his head on one side and dyed the color of a pomegranate, and on the other, it’s long and straight, the shiny black of a crow’s feathers. He’s wearing a bizarre top that starts below his shoulders, ends above his midriff, but has sleeves that cover him down to his wrists. He’s been standing outside the diner for at least an hour, just leaning up against a telephone pole, occasionally checking something that looks like a pocket watch. No sign of coming inside. He never comes inside. He’s been doing this every day for the past week, and it’s starting to make Landis very, very antsy.
There’s no way it’s related to the lake, he tries to reassure himself, unclipping his nametag from his work uniform and stuffing it in his pocket, still watching the diner’s front windows out of the corner of his eye. It’s been two years since the thing in the mines. If it was coming back - it would have come back by now. Right?
The hostess at the front counter gives him a little wave as he passes by, and Landis returns it half-heartedly. He stops at the door, looking out, lingering with his fingers on the cold metal handle. He’s left work for four days so far without the man outside saying so much as a word, but somehow he knows in his gut that this has something to do with him. He keeps catching almost-glimpses of someone following him, something skulking in the shadows of the apartment complex parking lot in the early mornings, but whatever’s there, it’s always gone before he turns around.
“Maybe he’s another one of those serial killer groupies,” Mal suggests dryly over his shoulder, and laughs when Landis jumps. “He does kinda look like those other goth kids who kept hounding you about the lake. You should tell him to skip the foreplay and just get straight to the blood sacrifice this time.”
Landis shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. He tries not to talk to the ghosts while he’s at work. His reputation in town is still shaky, even a couple years after everything came to a head, and talking to himself where other people can hear is a little like shooting himself in the foot. Resolutely, he shoves the diner door open, and marches outside, into afternoon air that’s thick with humidity.
“Hey,” he says loudly, as he makes his way down the steps to the sidewalk.
The strange man glances up from his pocket watch. Up close, his features are striking - long, graceful neck, Roman nose, shiny eyes that are either black or very, very dark purple. He doesn’t say anything. Just quirks up one eyebrow in a silent question. Yes?
Landis swallows, and balks for a moment, before clenching his hands into fists and trying to resume. “Who are -”
He’s cut off by the tinny, electronic jingle of his cellphone ringing in his pocket. He glances down to fish it out, and when he looks back up, the strange man is nowhere in sight. There’s nothing to even indicate that there was another human being standing anywhere close by just a few moments ago. Landis is completely on his own on the sidewalk, phone pressed up against his ear, turning around in circles like an idiot to try and figure out where the strange man could have gone.
“That was weird,” he mutters.
“What’s weird?” Grace’s voice chirps through the cell phone’s speaker. “Landis? You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m -”
Landis takes a breath, running a hand through his hair. Probably better not to tell Grace about his stalker. Not until he knows what he’s dealing with, anyway, because once she hears, she’s going to want to open up a whole new paranormal investigation to hunt down this mystery man. That’s been her new thing lately, since she’s been honing her mediumship skills. Paranormal investigation. And it’ll turn out in the end that the stalker is just a mean-spirited ghost fucking with the still-living. That’s how it always turns out.
“I’m okay,” he settles for. “What’s up?”
“You’re never gonna believe this,” Grace says, which is the way she starts most phonecalls.
“What?”
“You’re done with work for today, right?” she asks. Landis already doesn’t like where this is going.
“Yeah, I just got off, but -”
“Okay. I’ve got a case.”
“Oh, Grace.” Landis frowns, jamming his free hand into his pocket, pacing around the sidewalk. Mal gives him a curious look, but he ignores it. “I don’t really think -”
“No, no, no, wait, hear me out on this one, okay? It’s - it’s important. You know me, Landis, I wouldn’t call unless it was something I thought you’d want to know.” Grace sounds a little put out, verging on actually upset.
Might as well hear her out, if she really thinks it’s this important. She’s usually not wrong. Landis sighs. “Okay. What’s the case?”
“Someone is, um,” Grace pauses. Landis can almost hear her struggling to find the right words. “Well, someone in Antlers is killing ghosts.”
Landis nearly drops his phone. “What?”
“Yeah. They’re there one day, and the next, they’re just gone. Wiped off the map.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I didn’t think so either,” Grace says quietly. “But some of the ones I’ve been practicing my mediumship with, they’ve been disappearing. At first I thought maybe that’s what ghosts do, they get bored after a while, move on to haunt somewhere else. But your friends, and Austin’s dad, they follow you around all the time, right?”
Landis looks over his shoulder at Mal, who’s trying very hard to look like he’s examining his lack of reflection in the side of the diner instead of eavesdropping. “Right.”
“So, I figure, most ghosts probably do that, or stay in one place.”
“That’s been my experience, yeah.”
“Well, that’s why I started to get kind of suspicious when these ghosts started disappearing. And just last week,” Grace lowers her voice conspiratorially, “Mary, you know, the cute flapper ghost who hangs around Dante’s Books? Really chatty? She was telling me that she was noticing it too, all the ghosts starting to go missing. And a couple days after that, poof, no more Mary.”
“Okay, but -”
“And just now,” Grace plows ahead, before Landis can finish his thought, “a ghost comes to me, in my own apartment, telling me that she knows I can see her and that I’ve got to look into this all because she thinks it’s some kind of serial killer on the loose.”
“A serial killer in Antlers, Colorado?” A tiny smile tugs at Landis’s lips. “Unheard of.”
“Yes, Landis, ha-ha, are you going to help out or not?”
Landis swallows hard. He looks at Mal again, the air bending around his translucent form in the heat. He thinks about the stranger who’s been following him - following me, or the rest of the band? The stranger with the shiny, dark eyes who can vanish in the split second it takes to look away to pick up a ringing phone. Something unpleasant squirms in Landis’s gut.
“Well?” Grace asks.
“I’ll be right over,” Landis says, and hangs up the phone.