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Heathcliff

It’s fucking miserable outside. Rain dashes against the windows, like some god is tossing bucketfuls of the sea over the land—a storm off the coast, moving inland. We’re only an hour’s drive from Hunting Island, so we get the storms quick and hard, before they’ve had time to go gentle.

I’m nursing a beer. Running my thumb up the slick amber glass, watching condensation pool along my nail, then slide down in fat drops. The TV’s off, and I’m just chilling, listening to the rain. I like the way it sounds, hammering against the windows, as if it wants to be let in.

A log on the fire pops and splits, its edges crumbling. I shake myself a little, tip the bottle against my lips for another swallow. Lockwood microbrew, dark and smooth and rich. Best in the county.

Then a door slams and I startle for real. Feet stomp through the big house, and Hindley storms into the living room. I’m a couple inches taller, but he’s thickly built, his broad body stretching out the dirty white tank top he’s wearing. He rakes a hand through his greasy, red hair.

“What you doin’, boy?” he growls.

“Watching the rain.”

“Fucking weirdo. Get up. We’ve got a job to do, a big one. Gonna need your mojo.”

I gulp my beer again. “You gotta be more specific. You talking my rizz or the other thing?”

“The other thing. Get your ass off the chair and let’s go. His tattoo’s almost six months old, probably near faded by now, so it’s gonna be a tough one.”

“Faded?” I rise slowly. “What do you mean? Faded after six months?”

“This ain’t no ordinary guy, okay? He’s something different.”

“What kind of different?”

“Didn’t ask. Money was good. He’s one of the customers who pay for the roof over your goddamn head, so get your jacket and let’s go!”

“Fine, fine. Keep your panties on.” I swallow the last of the beer and hurl the bottle into the fireplace. It smashes, and the flames leap for a second.

“You’ll be cleaning that up,” warns Hindley.

“Sure.” I grab my jacket off a peg in the hall and follow him outside, hunching down under the pelting rain.

The truck door creaks loudly as I pull it shut, and the engine coughs as Hindley tries to start it.

I want to ask why Hindley doesn’t buy a new truck, if our clients pay so well.

But I know where the money goes—trips to Vegas, online gambling, whiskey poured down his throat, and coke sniffed up his nose.

There’s a whole bunch of ways to make yourself poor real quick, and Hindley’s an expert at all of them.

“How far away is this guy we’re supposed to raise?” I ask over the roar of the motor as the truck finally starts.

“Hour and a half. Then we go by boat.” Hindley clears his throat. “He’s on the island. At the old Lockwood mansion.”

“Why is a client of yours at the Lockwood mansion? And why the fuck is he lying dead there?”

“He’s a friend of the guy who bought the house off the family a while back. As for how he died, you know that’s none of our business. We do the job. That’s it. We ain’t detectives.”

He’s getting too riled, so I switch to a safer question. “How long has he been dead?”

“Couple of hours, maybe? I was busy. Didn’t feel my tattoo buzzing until now.”

“Shit, Hindley. You were high, weren’t you?”

“Shut up.” His hand flies before I can stop it, cuffing the side of my face. “You may be drinkin’ age now, but I can still whup you, got it?”

“Whatever you say,” I mutter, glaring out my window. A dull pain blooms through my cheekbone. He knows I’m stronger than him. Always have been. He also knows I don’t fight back. He thinks that’s weakness, but I tell myself it’s power. It’s a mercy I don’t cave his face in with a single punch.

I’m unnaturally strong. I’ve learned to manage it, but if I ever give in completely to my rage, I might kill him.

And staining my soul with Hindley’s toxic blood isn’t something I want to do.

So I’ve always let him use me as a punching bag, ever since we were kids.

It’s a habit now. Uncomfortable…but hell, I’m used to it.

“Any idea what state the body’s in?” I ask.

“Could be bad.” He sniffs, rubs a hand across his eyes, and peers through the streaming windshield and the swishing wipers.

Hindley is one of the last of the Charleston Lockwoods—one branch of a sprawling family tree, gifted with the power to drag souls out of the grave and put them back in their bodies.

The gift has deteriorated with each passing generation.

Now it’s so weak, he can barely manage to perform basic necromancy on his own.

He can serve as a tether, carrying one half of the matching tattoo that links him to the person being raised, but he needs an external power source to complete the task.

A generator, as it were, to give him extra juice.

The generator—that would be me.

I was never asked if I wanted to join the Lockwood family.

Like most things in my life, shit just happened to me.

Hindley’s dad, Buckland, told me he was at some mountain gas stop in Tennessee when he saw me, a dirt-stained boy of five or six, crouching over a mangled dog that some truck had just smashed into pulp.

I had my hands on the corpse, eyes closed, blood dripping from a bite on my hand, self-inflicted.

A few minutes later, the mutt got up, good as new and perfectly healed, and started bounding around me.

“I didn’t ask who you belonged to,” Buckland used to say.

“I knew whoever let you run loose on your own that young, so close to the road, was too damn careless and deserved to lose you. With a gift like yours, you belonged to us.” Then he’d ruffle my hair and laugh as though he’d done me some great favor by kidnapping me.

I didn’t understand that it was kidnapping until I was maybe eleven.

At that point, I thought about telling the police, but the cops in this neck of the woods have got clay for brains and red brick for hearts, and I figured they wouldn’t much care.

Besides, I had a roof over my head and work to do, which is more than some folks get.

Plus, if I told someone about the kidnapping, the Lockwoods might tell the authorities about my abilities, and that could only lead me into way deeper shit. So I kept my mouth shut.

But as Hindley drives us toward the coast, I let myself wonder what my other life might have been like.

Different family, different business. A mom, maybe.

Siblings I might have actually liked. Christmases that didn’t involve drunken brawls among Hindley, Buckland, and the cousins from Coosaw.

Birthdays with actual presents and a cake, instead of me sitting in my closet, hiding from Hindley so he couldn’t give me more bruises.

Imagining another life is a fool’s pastime, though. Who’s to know if it would have been any better? People suck no matter where you live.

When we get to the marina, we rent a boat and head for the island. The rain has slacked off, and there’s a sickly yellow dawn leaking from under the bellies of the thick, gray clouds as we skim over the surface.

“Smell that?” Hindley sniffs the air.

“Smoke.”

“Whoever killed him burned the place afterward. Probably thought it would get rid of the body.”

“Wouldn’t it?”

He shakes his head. “Normal bodies, sure. Not our guy. His tattoo links him to a Lockwood, and the house knows it. It’ll keep him intact…mostly. Gonna be tough to bring him back in prime condition, though. You good for it?”

“Am I allowed to say no?”

Hindley cuts me a glance, keen as a hunting knife. “Nope.”

“I didn’t think so.”

My help on these missions is never a question, always an expectation. And my well-being afterward—that’s of little concern to Hindley as long as I recover quickly enough to be ready for the next resurrection, whenever that comes.

The Lockwood mansion rears up, solemn and eternal, from the crest of the island as we pull up to the dock. A couple small boats are already there, bobbing on the choppy waves. The bittersweet smoke of charred wood hangs in the air, but there’s not a flake of ash on the sloping lawn or on the porch.

I try the door. Locked. But when Hindley touches the handle, it opens easily.

“Thought you said this place was sold,” I comment as Hindley leads the way inside.

“You can’t truly sell a house like this. Sure, we sold it on paper, but like I said—the place knows Lockwood blood. Shit…there he is.”

The body lies near a sofa that looks like it’s seen at least a century. In fact, all the furnishings in the place are super old.

“It resets to its original condition every time it gets destroyed,” Hindley says. “Everything goes back exactly like it was on the day it was first spelled.”

I’ve heard the Lockwood family discuss this place before, though they’ve never explained its origins. As much as I want to ask Hindley more questions about it, I know better. All I’ll get for my trouble is another slap, and I’m gonna be in enough pain soon, judging by the state of the corpse.

Once, a couple years ago, I hit Hindley back. I thought I’d won the fight, too, until I woke up in the middle of the night with the muzzle of his favorite revolver jammed into the soft tissue under my jaw.

“We got a good thing going here, Heathcliff,” he said hoarsely, his face hovering near mine in the darkness of my bedroom. “You and me—we’re sym-by-tick, you might say.”

“Symbiotic,” I whispered.

“Shut up. You sass your mouth at me one more time, raise your hand to me once more, and you’ll be out on your ass.

You won’t have a pot to piss in, and I’ll send the cops one of them anonymous letters, telling them all about your powers.

They’ll catch you and lock you in a lab somewhere, if I don’t kill you myself first.”

I could have fought him then. But I knew an all-out fight with Hindley would end with one of us dead, and I wasn’t ready to go that far. So I yielded, and I waited.

Since then I’ve been waiting, saving, drinking—dying.