Blood from the Air by Gemma Files

Author:Gemma Files [Files, Gemma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror
Publisher: Grimscribe Press
Published: 2023-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

The house stands on its own in the middle of nowhere, bordering a classic industrial zone—warehouses, scrub-lots, an abandoned factory the city just hasn’t gotten around to knocking down yet, let alone turning into condos. There’s a nightclub banging away in the distance, but otherwise it’s denuded and almost silent, lit up by spill from the lights down at the docks, where shipping containers get loaded and unloaded. These are places where the map runs out, where the city becomes unpredictable—the places you have to Google to get there and almost always end up getting lost along the way anyhow.

Her social worker says Ciara really shouldn’t bike, not on the meds she’s giving her. “It’s not riding, it’s driving,” she likes to tell Ciara, as though that makes a bit of difference, aside from etymologically. “I’d lobby for all bicycle owners to be licensed, if I could.”

“So why don’t you?” Ciara asked once, or maybe just thinks she did—not out of interest so much as simple need to say something in response, when the woman insists on nattering on like that. It’s only polite to keep up your end of the conversation, or so her family eventually managed to teach her through painstaking repetition, trial and error, home training: stop speaking long enough to listen to what the other person is saying, nod and smile, act like you care even when you don’t. File the basics away, so as to make sure you’re able to answer questions.

But her worker simply shook her head and let it slide, and weeks later, Ciara doesn’t recall the subject ever having reoccurred. Another functionally meaningless interaction, same as every other—she wouldn’t go at all, if she could get away with it. Why should Ciara be legally forced to shoulder the burden of someone else’s diffident attention every week, their useless pseudo-sympathy, simply to maintain her access to scrip? Especially since she could easily swap Garth for the exact same psychoactives, almost, then wander away high but “readjusted,” with what small part of her dignity remains intact . . .

A lifetime on parole, she thinks, when I never did anything to anyone but myself—nothing permanent, any rate. There’s no justice in it.

Yes, and no justice anywhere else, either, for that matter. But this is old news.

It’s a witch’s lair, Ciara thinks, still looking at it, wondering vaguely just how long that may have been going on. Two-story, detached but flat on one side, as though it used to be one half of a duplex, the other section long demolished. It’s got a front-gabled roof, shingles peeling, gutters rusty and sprung; the narrow windows leer and squint, dirt-cataracted. The porch roof sags, but not dangerously so—and is that something peeping down at her now, curling round from behind the chimney, a sinuous shadow, black-furred yet boneless as a snake?

No, obviously. By no means. Not at all.

She parks the bike against the steps, mounts them, knocks, waits. Knocks again. Avoids looking too long at the knocker itself, for fear it’ll develop a face.

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