The Haunts & Horrors MEGAPACK®. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ you get the what-might-have-beens, you drive me crazy!”

      “When you get rude, you drive me—” he began, then appeared to think better of it.

      “You want to spend the night in the car, parked someplace else?”

      He faded away, then reappeared, looking extra-solid. He frowned at her. “No. I hate it when you threaten me! That’s no way to run a relationship.”

      She was already cringing inside, because she knew he was right, but she didn’t feel like apologizing. “Let’s go to bed,” she said gruffly.

      “I don’t think we should let the sun set on this. Besides, you haven’t had any dinner.”

      “Quit being such a mommy.” Her stomach was starting to relax as the tension drained out of her. Sometimes her moods would shift without her understanding why. Only since he died. Before he died, they could have kept the argument going all night, orchestrating dynamics from piano to fortissimo and back.

      “You have to eat.” He shook his finger at her, looking stern, then put his hands behind his back.

      “Oh, yeah, rub my nose in it,” she said, but she could feel the laughter bubbling up, inexplicably. “What are you doing?”

      “What could I be doing?” He gave her his heavenly angel smile, his hands still hidden.

      Her stomach growled and they both stared at it.

      “What did I tell you?” he asked.

      “Okay, okay.” She got the locket out of the secret compartment in her suitcase (it made him really nervous when she left it there—what if, he asked her, someone stole her luggage? Where would he be?) and fastened the chain around her neck, and they left together.

      * * * *

      She got drive-through tacos. When he was with her, she ate in the car. Too many times they had started heated discussions in restaurants, and people had gotten upset with her for shouting at air.

      “Let’s go to the house,” he said.

      “Goofus! The little old lady still lives there. What’s she going to think if she sees a car lurking out in front of the house? She’ll call the police.”

      “Park down the block. I want to investigate.”

      “Suddenly you’re a detective?”

      “Why not?”

      She shrugged, drove to the neighborhood where she might or might not live, depending, where Malcolm might or might not reside, depending, and parked half a block away from the house they had picked. The house was small and khaki green and had a “Sale Pending” sign in the kitchen window.

      “I do,” Malcolm said, apropos of nothing. “I like this neighborhood. I know it seems like a suburban nightmare, just the kind of thing we sneered at in the sixties, but.…”

      “Yeah, we’re older now,” said Wendy. “At least, some of us are.” She slathered hot sauce on her soft flour taco and took a bite that dribbled taco juice down her chin.

      “My perspective has changed, or mellowed, or something. Hold the fort.” He slid out through the door and strolled up the sidewalk toward the house.

      Wendy wiped her chin with a napkin and watched him. He paused in front of the house and glanced back at her, then walked up the path to the front door and vanished.

      She hoped this wasn’t one of those times when he got visible. Every once in a while there was some sort of slip-up—or maybe it was supposed to happen; she and Malcolm weren’t sure of the rules yet—where other people could see him. Sometimes, everybody else; sometimes only one other person. Wendy didn’t know whether the house’s owner would be susceptible. When she and Malcolm had gone through the house with the realtor, whom they had already established as Malcolm-oblivious, the little old lady had been out somewhere. This afternoon during the whole house inspection Wendy had finally met the owner, but Malcolm had been at the hotel.

      While they were driving away after their first visit to the house, the realtor explained that the owner hadn’t wanted to part with the place, but her husband had died fairly recently and it was just too much for her to keep up alone, so she was moving to a retirement community. Wendy didn’t say anything about her husband having died recently too. That wasn’t the level she liked to relate to people on. It clarified for her the difference between generations, though: obviously this older woman had depended on her husband to take care of all kinds of things she didn’t want to handle herself, whereas Wendy had tuned the car, Wendy had kept the checkbook, Malcolm had done the cooking—while he was alive. They were still trying to work out rules of matter manipulation to see if he could handle cooking now, but so far their experiments hadn’t uncovered laws that would let him. He could move some things, but the ability came and went.

      If she had lost Malcolm completely, would she have had the strength to go out and buy a house, start a new phase in life? She wasn’t sure. Some small part of her told her she might have locked herself up in the apartment with all the curtains closed, living on cheese and crackers and letting her awareness decay.

      It wasn’t a side of herself she wanted to recognize. Good that it hadn’t come to that.

      When she met the owner, Wendy liked her immediately. It seemed a shame to buy the house and take it away from her. It would be a mess if Wendy had to ask for a lot of repairs before she closed on the place.

      She had finished her tacos and Chico-fries (Tater Tots by any other name) and was feeling much more even-tempered (Malcolm had told her she got really jittery if she went too long without eating; since he didn’t have a job anymore, he spent all his time observing her, and often told her things she wasn’t interested in hearing, especially when they were true. It was an aspect of their new relationship she was just getting accustomed to) when a head and some shoulders stuck out through the wall of what she was already thinking of as Her House. The hair on the head was gray, not glossy black like Malcolm’s. The face turned toward her, peering through the twilight. She covered her mouth with a paper napkin. Her throat was too tight for her to swallow the mouthful in her mouth.

      She was seeing a Ghost.

      He slipped out of the house and walked to the edge of the front lawn, staring at her with fierce eyes. She shrank back in her seat. She tried to swallow. Instead she coughed chewed Chico-fries into her napkin. The ghost shook his fist at her and yelled something, but she couldn’t understand him.

      “Malcolm,” she squeaked, just the way she had almost twenty years earlier when they went to one of the early showings of The Exorcist and Linda Blair’s head had turned all the way around. Back then, she had been able to bury her face in his shoulder, and feel his arm around her, even though she thought he was a—what was the word for nerd in those days? Square? She couldn’t remember. It wasn’t until ten years later that she had realized what a terrific human being he was and they had gotten married. But that friendly shoulder had helped plant the suspicion in her mind that he couldn’t be all bad.

      Malcolm materialized beside her. “Drive,” he said.

      She turned the key without depressing the clutch. What a racket! She couldn’t seem to remember which foot did what, and her hands were shaking so badly she could hardly grip the steering wheel, but СКАЧАТЬ