Dust to Dust

This is another test. A little while back I got some Reckless Deck Cards and figured I’d give them a try before NecronimiCon here in Providence. I bought them from a guy that was also promoting a full cast podcast called Dark Providence (not to be confused with Cthulhu: Dark Providence board game) from Chaos Assembly Audio which is definitely worth checking out.

This is just a short scene that takes place sometime after the full story I’m writing for the detective Jimmy MacSparran set in 1930 Providence. Even though I didn’t really keep to the prompts, it did spart a lot of ideas and even a character I’ll want to add to the series at some point down the road.

DUST TO DUST: A MacSparran Flash Fiction

It was two minutes to midnight by the time I broke into the abandoned mansion on the edge of College Hill. The words of the Swamp Yankee Witch were still burning in my ears. “That which has taken the youth of the children will also take hers. She has until midnight.”

I had two minutes to save Serafina.

“You can save the youth of… hey, where are you going?” were the last words she managed before I was already out the door and into the night. I hadn’t stayed for the rest. I was already running the numbers on the clock and losing.

I knew Serafina wasn’t a good person. I knew it the way you know a stove is hot before you touch it, and you touch it anyway. But she didn’t deserve to end up like the others. The desiccated husks the witch had shown me, children reduced to something that looked like bad taxidermy, human raisins with hollow eyes. Nobody deserved that.

I kicked in a door on the ground floor. Dust and mustiness rose up around me and I barely registered it. Whatever the Knotted Heart had wound through my blood when it had its hooks in me, some remnant of it was still there, threading its way through my circulatory system like roots through old mortar. It had its uses.

“SERAFINA!”

My voice bounced off of walls that hadn’t heard a sound in years. I moved through the dark with my Smith and Wesson out, kicking in doors, sweeping rooms that smelled of rot and abandonment. Another door. Another empty room. Another half minute gone.

Then I heard the cough.

I put my shoulder into the door at the end of the hall without breaking stride, piece raised, ready to empty it into whatever was on the other side before it was too late.

“You’re too late, Jimmy.”

She was alone. Sitting on the edge of a bed in a room lit by nothing but the pale suggestion of a streetlamp through filthy curtains. A cigarette burned between her fingers. Her head was low, her face curtained by blonde hair that hung lank and dull, nothing like the lush hair I held in my fist from a few nights ago. Nothing like it at all.

“Not that you could have helped.” She took a drag. When she exhaled, the smoke didn’t rise the way smoke rises. It seeped out from around her, from under her hair, from places smoke had no business coming from.

I lowered the gun. I didn’t holster it.

Her delicate fingers tapped the ash from the cigarette and what fell onto her stockinged legs wasn’t ash. Or wasn’t only ash.

“Devil take you,” she hissed. “This is your God-damned fault.”

That’s when I saw it. First in her hand. What was left of it. The skin and sinew had gone, flaked away to nothing, leaving fingers that were only bone wrapped in the ghost of what had covered them. She turned her face up to look at me and I held her gaze steadily and I was very glad my hands were steady too.

One eye burned with fury. The other was an empty socket. Half of her face had turned to dust before my eyes.

“I wasn’t even really hungry,” she said, and her voice had a dry, papery quality that hadn’t been there before. “But you had a vitality. Damn you. It made me ache for it. I wanted to drink every last drop.”

She raised the cigarette again but the smoke just drifted out through the gaps in her jaw and dissipated.

She dropped the butt on the floor. “You gave me some kind of horror autotoxicus with whatever is in your blood, MacSparran.” A cloud of dust plumed up from her chest as she coughed. “My body is destroying itself because of you.”

She suddenly  lurched forward off the bed towards me, reaching for me with her boney fingers.

But her legs gave way beneath her. What hit the floor wasn’t quite a woman anymore. She managed one last thing before the end.

“135 years gone… because of you…”

Then she was just silence and dust that took no account of the consequences of their own actions.

I stood there for a moment in the dark of that ruined room, considered whether that smoldering cigarette might find something convenient to ignite, and thought about the Swamp Yankee Witch standing in her doorway still talking after me while I ran for the door.

I probably should have listened to the rest of what she had to say.