Funk-N-Fiction

Our first flash fiction story of the day comes from Amy Lane, and from a ghost story that that she calls “the book of my heart”.

I’ve missed Tucker and Angel —
Amy

The Iron Fist of Time

A while ago, I released a book called All the Rules of Heaven—it was the book of my heart, and I wanted there to be an entire series, but alas, time and chance did not allow. Still, the story of Tucker, a sex-driven empath haunted by the ghosts of the strangers he let down and of Angel, a ghost he met at his Great Aunt’s mansion after she passed, is a story I’m not ready to let go of.

So when I saw this picture, of the fog creeping along a rural road, I thought immediately of Tucker, living with Angel and a kitten named Squishbeans in a rambling house in the Sierra Nevada mountains. What mysteries still await around every corner of the house with an uncountable number of rooms and a thousand ghosts?

And are any of them lurking down that road…

*********************

Tucker had finally finished redecorating Brigitte’s and Sophie’s room. True to the completely batshit decorating scheme of Daisy Place, he made the walls a happy, pretty peach, added a wallpaper that had tiny peach flowers on it as a bottom accent, and asked Josh and a visiting Andover to haul out all the furniture except for the artifact covered desk.

Tucker was very aware there were still things on that desk he had to touch, in order to clear out some of the spirits in the mansion. Yeah, sure, he and Angel had cleared the graveyard, creating a release valve so the spirits didn’t fester there (and so the entire community could enjoy a time period free from the ghosts of dead grandmothers showing up for family dinners as though nothing was wrong) but the mansion?

Yeah. That was still a cauldron of trapped souls—and Tucker was apparently still the chimney.

So as soon as his ribs knitted and he could breathe out his nose properly again (although it might always whistle when he wasn’t paying attention) he was back at the remodeling.

He had Josh and Andover move the desk into the next room in the second week of October, right when the drafts really started to creep under the floorboards.

“Tucker,” Josh said, his dad voice both comforting and irritated. “Man, if you’re going to keep renovating this old crap-pile, I wish you’d at least dress right. Don’t you have some sweatshirts? Some flannels? Something? And you need boots man. Work boots. You keep trying to do this in tennis shoes,  and even if a ghost doesn’t suck you through a portal to an existential crisis, I’m afraid you’ll step on a nail.”

Tucker smiled at his friend, grateful for the human companionship. Angel still flickered into view now and then, but so far, Josh Greenaway was far to grounded to see him.

“I do,” he confessed. “I’ll wear them next time. This time, I just want to see what’s in the next room.

He gestured for Josh to open the door, to spare him any unpleasant surprises. He had cotton gloves in his pocket, because touching things in this house was still like fishing around for an electric wire with his bare skin, but he still hadn’t explained how he used his empathic abilities to clear ghosts from Daisy Place, and the Greenaway family had been so nice to him after all the terrible events of August, he didn’t want to freak them out now.

“Yeah—that Chrystanthemum room…” Josh scowled. He still claimed he had no memoryof what had happened to him there, but Tucker was pretty sure the general feeling of badness wasn’t leaving any time soon. “What are you going to do with this next one?”

Tucker did a slow pan around the next bedroom of the old B&B, and got an impression of… well, sailor blue and ocean gray, really. Strange colors for a place this deeply rooted in the browns and greens of the hills above Auburn, but pretty.

“Oh, hey,” Andover said. “Look—these brass light switch covers—Tucker, have you seen anything like them?”

Tucker moved next to Andover, smiling when the young man barely registered Tucker’s physical presence. Yeah, getting Andy out of Foresthill and into the city where he could meet people and get laid had been the right move. Tucker was still too old and too damaged for Andover Greenaway, but it was good to know he was still a friend.

“Oh how interesting,” he murmured, staring at the embossed brass etching. It was almost an English countryside, with overgrown flowers encroaching a dirt path—the detail work in the brass was incredible, in spite of the tarnish of the years. “That’s… that looks really familiar, doesn’t it?”

Josh and Andy both shouldered their way in front of him, staring, mesmerized, until Tucker felt compelled to say, “Don’t touch it!” They’d both jumped, startled, and backed away, glancing at him in concern. Tucker didn’t get that tone in his voice unless something important was going on with an object, and both Josh and Andy had learned not to ignore him on these matters.

Andy was still frowning though. “It was weird, Tucker,” he said, as he and his father both started looking around the room to see what would need to be moved out and what should probably stay. “I could swear I saw… I don’t know… like a person in that etching. It was so small, but it was like I was there.”

“A person? You don’t’ say,” Tucker replied blandly. Andy gave him a sharp look and then rolled his eyes.

“You’re going to investigate with out me, aren’t you.”

“Seriously, Andy,” Tucker said, shaking his head, “if Angel and I need any help, I’ll call your mother.”

“How’m I going to learn to use my gifts—”

“You don’t have any gifts,” Josh said staunchly, and Andy rolled his eyes heavenward this time.

“Sure dad, and mom isn’t witchy as hell, and Tilda doesn’t talk to ghosts and—”

They bickered back and forth while Josh made notes on his phone and took pictures to see if the bed or the bedstands or the dresser were antiques. Josh pretty much had a line on anything—if they were antiques, Tucker would refurbish them, and if they were just dry-rotting piles of crap, Tucker could burn them and clear out ghosts that way.

Usually, when Tucker was alone in the house, Angel would hold his hands over the objects in the room and tell Tucker what was loaded with psychic presence and ghostly impressions and what was just, say, a hole puncher or the dowel used to keep a toilet paper roll in place, but given he was hiding form Josh and Andy today, Tucker had to do his best guess.

And his best guess at the end, as he and Josh and Andy walked down the stairs talking about the end tables and how they’d look really good with a sort of light gray finish, was that there might be objects in the end tables that would be important to touch, what was really important in that room was the light switch covers. Two of them. Each one showing a different bend in the road of an achingly familiar country lane.

/

Tucker waited for Josh and Andy to have lunch and leave before he pulled on a hooded sweatshirt and went out into the October chill as the sun cast long shadows through the trees. Daisy Place sat on a huge plot of land, most of it ghost infused, but since clearing out the graveyard, Tucker hadn’t felt nearly the animosity from the shadows of past lives as he had before that was done.

Now he simply nodded at the young women in Edwardian dress, walking arm in arm, waved amicably at the newlywed couple wearing WWII uniforms who were weeping on the porch swing, and skirted the scads of squealing children who ran wild on the lawn.

He was heading some place specific.

The driveway that rolled up next to the house didn’t really end where people parked vehicles. Tucker knew that. Instead it wrapped around the house, around the back, became a walking bath, clogged by rosebushes, and, as it got closer to the stream that ran along one side of the yard, just far enough away to hear but not close enough to see, blackberry bushes.

By all laws of physics and nature, it should have been long overgrown with thorny greenery to keep out any human travelers—but it wasn’t.

An invisible force seemed to keep the thorns at bay, and the first bend in the path toward the stream, looked a lot like… exactly like the first light switch cover.

Tucker paused at that bend in the bath, looking carefully to make sure.

It was then that he felt a familiar presence at his side, and the corporeal strength of Angel’s long, graceful fingers in his own.

“Hello, Angel,” he said, relaxing into Angel’s presence. He turned to look at the… ghost? No, he knew Angel wasn’t a ghost. Had known, since before he and Angel had become lovers.

Ghosts didn’t have the diaphanous tease of wings flaring out and beyond the peripheral vision when one looked at them straight on.

Angel’s face and form hadn’t changed since they’d become intimate—he was still the young man with the dark blond hair, the faint rough of stubble on his square chin, the amazing bottle-glass green eyes.

But now, when they were alone, he held Tucker’s hand and kissed his knuckles.

“I told you there wasn’t anything in that room you needed to touch,” Angel said.

“That’s only because you didn’t look at the light switch covers,” Tucker told him dryly. Around them, the light fell, and the path grew even darker.

“I don’t need light,” Angel sniffed, and Tucker laughed fondly. In the dimness of light afternoon, early October evening, he could see the ambience Angel wore like a cloak.

“Of course not,” Tucker told him blandly. “But this was more than a light switch cover. Even Andover could see it.”

Angel turned toward him, alarmed. “Oh no—what did Andy see?”

Tucker gestured with his chin to the bend of the road.

It was gray in the twilight, but that wasn’t what caught the attention of Angel and the empath. What they saw was the absence of light and color, the grayness wasn’t what happened when the sun went down, it was what happened because the sun never touched it.

“Oh, Tucker,” Angel murmured. “This… this is a bad place.”

“Wait,” Tucker said. “It’s about to get worse.” He’d stopped, at an invisible line he’d felt in the fuzzy twilight. He knew, if he looked down at his feet, he’d be able to see brown or sepia tones in the dust on his tennis shoes.

But if he looked at the dirt in the rutted path only a few feet ahead, he would only see shades of gray.

That wasn’t what his eyes were seeking out now, though.

What he was searching for in the darkness by the gray bend in the road wasn’t dust or color. It was…

“Oh…” Angel breathed. “I see it… oh, Tucker…”

“Yeah,” Tucker said. “Yeah.”

At the bend in the path where the twilight merged to darkness, a sort of haze emerged. A mist, amorphous at best, a fog seeping from the dry earth that had seen no rain in weeks.

It only grew thicker, wetter, as thick as an ocean front mist, but tighter, congealed…not quite human shaped, but not simply a cloud either.

“Oh Tucker,” Angel said again, and Tucker tightened his own fingers in Angel’s.

“Yeah,” Tucker said. “Angel—that… that is a very bad thing.”

“Whatever you do,” Angel told him, “don’t go into the gray.”

“No plans to,” Tucker said. In fact, he took a step back. A tap on his shoulder made him scream, and he glanced behind him to see he’d almost run ass-first into a blackberry bramble. “But maybe…”

The mist was getting closer, and while Tucker had the feeling it would stop at that line, the line where brown became gray, he also knew that, as the sun slanted more and more toward the earth, that line would stretch further, closer to the house, and safety would become more amorphous, until it was less substantial than the mist.

“Yes,” Angel said, tugging at his hand, and together, they turned and fled back toward the house, toward the lawn busy with ghost, and the kitchen and bedroom they had made their own and quite human in all the supernatural chaos that was Daisy Place.

As they jogged, not quite breathless, Angel said, “I guess we should start researching that room now, before winter comes and the whole world turns gray.”

Tucker could have cheerfully smacked him.

But he also spoke the truth. Yeah, the last two months had been nice—resting up, healing, making love, learning to trust each other—but it was clear that not even the dead could wait indefinitely.

Whatever was in that fog needed to be exorcised, and Tucker and Angel had a job to do.