The hallway opens up on a broad, high-ceilinged space. Ladders and catwalks link through the air, accompanying what look like rusted-out conveyor belts. At one end, a hulking black furnace sits dormant. Most of it has been torn apart, broken down for scrap, but I can still see what it was. So much must’ve been produced here. The sweat of a thousand laborers’ bodies has soaked into the floor. The memory of heat still lingers in the air, god knows how many years later.
The farther I get into the room, the more crowded it feels. Something is here, and its presence is heavy. My grip tightens around the athame. Any minute I expect the decades-dead machinery to jerk back to life. The scent of burning human skin hits my nostrils a fraction of a second before I’m knocked facedown against the dusty floor.
I flip myself over and get to my feet, swinging the athame in a wide arc. I expect the ghost to be right behind me, and for a second I think it fled and I’m in for another game of whack-a-mole or ghost-darts. But I still smell it. And I feel anger moving through the room in dizzying waves.
He’s standing at the far end of the room, blocking my way back to the hallway, as if I would try to run. His skin is black as a struck match, cracked and oozing liquid metal heat, like he’s covered by a cooling layer of lava. The eyes stand out bright white. I can’t make out from this distance whether they’re just white or if they have corneas. God I hope they have corneas. I hate that creepy weird-eye shit. But corneas or no corneas, there won’t be any sanity in them. All these years spent dead and burning have taken care of that.
“Come on,” I say, and flick my wrist; the athame is ready to stab or slice. There’s a faint pain on my back and shoulders, where he hit me, but I shrug it off. He’s coming closer, walking up slow. Maybe because he wonders why I’m not running. Or maybe because every time he moves, more of his skin cracks open and bleeds … whatever that red-orange stuff is that he’s bleeding.
This is the moment before the strike. It’s the intake of breath and the stretching out of a second. I don’t blink. He’s close enough that I can see he does have corneas now, bright blue, the pupils constricted in constant pain. His mouth hangs open, the lips mostly gone, cracked and peeled away.
I want to hear her say just one word.
He swings his right fist; it slices the air inches from my right ear, hot enough to sting, and I catch the distinct smell of burnt hair. My burnt hair. There’s something Daisy said about the corpses … leathery bones and ash. Fuck. The corpses were fresh. The ghost just burns them up, dries them out, and leaves them. His face is a ruin of rage; the nose is gone and the nasal cavity scabbed over. His cheeks are as dry as used charcoal in places and wet with infection in others. I backpedal to stay clear of his blows. With his lips burned away, his teeth seem too big and his expression is a sick, constant grin. How many homeless people woke up to this face, right before they were cooked from the inside out?
I drop to the ground and kick, managing to drop him, but also singeing the shit out of my shins in the process. My jeans are fused to my skin in one spot. But there’s no time to be dainty about it; his fingers reach for me and I roll. The fabric rips loose, taking who knows how much skin with it.
The hell with this. He hasn’t made a peep. Who knows if he even has a tongue left, let alone whether Anna feels like speaking through it. I don’t know what I was thinking anyway. I was going to wait. I was going to be good.
My elbow cocks back, ready to slam the athame down into his ribs, but I hesitate. The knife could end up bonded to my skin literally if I don’t do it right. The hesitation lasts barely a second. Just long enough for the flutter of white to drift through the corner of my eye.
This can’t be. It must be someone else, some other spook who died in this godawful factory. But if it is, it didn’t die by burning. The girl walking silently across the dust-covered floor is pale as moonlight. Brown hair hangs down her back, falling over the stark white of her dress. I’d know that dress anywhere, whether it was too white to be real or made entirely of blood. It’s her. It’s Anna. Her bare feet make a soft, scraping sound as they pad across the concrete.
“Anna,” I say, and scramble up. “Are you all right?”
She can’t hear me. Or if she can, she doesn’t turn.
From the floor, the burning man grasps on to my shoe. I kick free and ignore both him and the smell of scorched rubber. Am I going insane? Hallucinating? She can’t really be here. It isn’t possible.
“Anna, it’s me. Can you hear me?” I walk toward her, but not too fast. If I go too fast she might disappear. If I go too fast I might see too much; I could pull her around and see that she has no face, that she’s a jerking corpse. She could turn to ash in my hands.