Hindley is one of the last of the Charleston Lockwoods—one branch of a sprawling family tree, gifted with the power to dragsouls 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 wonderwhat 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 thecrest 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 meoncemore, and you’ll be out on your ass. You won’t havea 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.
