Our Eyes at Night Read online

  Also by M Dressler

  The Last Ghost Series

  The Last to See Me

  I See You So Close

  The Deadwood Beetle

  The Medusa Tree

  The Floodmakers

  The Wedding of Anna F.

  Copyright © 2022 by Mylène Dressler

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  Visit the author’s site at mdressler.com.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021949493

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Cover photography: © Tatiana Maksimova / Getty Images (woman); © Diana Robinson Photography / Getty Images (Middle Drinks Canyon); © Adam Hynes / 500px / Getty Images (The Milky Way)

  ISBN: 978-1-950994-23-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-950994-43-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  We settle for soul and body, but here I am, something more—and so are you

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE THE HUNTER

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  PART TWO THE HUNTED

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  PART THREE THE RUNNER

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Prologue

  When Tom Grunn, the last resident left in Briscoe, Utah, saw, at the far edge of town, an abandoned house being suddenly gussied up, made over with salvaged wood and straightened-out flashing, he could only shrug at first and wish the foolish squatters well. It wasn’t, he reflected, the first time this high, lonely, desert plateau had attracted dreamers, adventurers, off-the-gridders. Remote country tended to—or, at least it used to—suck in idealists, people of few resources but energetic imaginations, most of them doomed to fail. Before this latest batch of wanderers had shown up, the hard, dry scruff had hosted, in reverse order, frackers, bikers, miners, Mormons, sheepherders, soldiers, the Navajo, and the Ute. And long before these, ancient, rock-etching cliff dwellers. The slot canyons and scarred cliffs of the Four Corners had seen them all.

  What was notable about these new arrivals, though, apart from the fact that Grunn hadn’t seen them or any of their faces yet, was the timing of their experiment, which wasn’t only foolish, but dangerous. The former fracking zones were still busily causing earthquakes. The wells in this part of the county had been running dry. Still, it wasn’t until Grunn noticed that some of what was being nailed and framed up had actually been stolen, scavenged from recently vacated properties, places abandoned when the land became more valuable for what lay underneath it than for the baked ground on top, that his white-whiskered frown deepened. It was one thing, he thought, to build your folly out of materials you got by your own sweat. It was a whole other thing to tear pieces out of the carcass of a town while it was still squirming, a little ashamed of the way it had sold out.

  Stealing was the word he was mulling over as he went to check on the junkyard behind his decaying barn. He’d been saving and selling scrap back there for years, since before his wife had died of liver cancer. “Architectural elements” Doris had always called them, trying to dress them up. Truth was, he just liked to keep things other people got rid of. It made a man feel scrupulous. Moral. Safe. He knew every piece of wainscoting and curled shingle out there in the old corral, preserved by the dry heat or else by the corrugated steel roof he’d thrown up to babysit some of the gentler items. No one had ever messed with any of it, not without his permission. He’d gone off that morning to Cortez, Colorado, driving over the state line for a last run of supplies for the road, but it was clear that while he was away someone had come in and made off with three good joists and some solid timber. Whoever had done it must have thought he was already packed up and gone—when he was only nearly or almost so.

  Grunn swore and trudged back to his pickup truck and sped through what had been, even at its brightest hour, the meager outpost of his native town. He crossed the closed railway line, heading toward former cattle range, stopping finally at a weedy plat just shy of a sunken cattle guard. The squatters’ house lay on the other side of this barrier, at the end of a ruin of gravel road, hardly visible for the cheatgrass and Russian thistle tangling over it.

  Out of his truck he leapt, and stood and stared.

  Fast work the strangers had been doing. One story had risen to two since he’d last looked. Windows had been glazed with old, rippled glass and excrescences tacked around freshened eaves—funny, curlicued scrolls, additions more common, he knew, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than in the twenty-first. He recognized two of the turned, cracked porch posts. Those had been toothpicked from the heap behind his barn.

  Plain thievery. He flexed his hands, his temper outpacing the heat. Old Poston, the rail manager who had once owned this property, he might be long gone, but he, Grunn, was still here, wasn’t he? For a few more hours, anyway. And while he was still here, and even if it wasn’t for much longer, no one had a right to assume his, or his former neighbors’, belongings. He marched forward in his boots, ready to call out the trespassers and with a .45 in his back pocket if he needed it. Some things in the West just weren’t open to discussion. He lifted one foot above the cattle grate.

  And there he fell back, thrown off balance.

  It was like a wall of ice. Like some unseen barrier, a meat locker’s door, had slammed in his face. He tried again to walk forward, to push through the invisible blockage, the unyielding, unreasonable weight. He heard no sound, but felt a pressure. Again he was shoved back. He stumbled and looked down. His feet were still under him, but his knees wavered.

  And his hands were trembling. In 104 degrees of heat.

  From the other side of the cattle guard he heard a childish whispering.

  He looks so funny now, Miss. Doesn’t he?

  Impossible. There had been no children in Briscoe, not for years. And where was that other murmur coming from? A muted, older voice, female, saying:

  Hush now. Be careful. Let’s see what the int
ruder does.

  He inched backward, away. Slowly.

  Then faster.

  Better . . . better get on over to the county sheriff and report this, he thought. Ghosts were still illegal in these United States of America, even if there weren’t so many left now, and even if other countries, other places, were careless enough to give them a pass. Phantoms, to Grunn’s, to any decent person’s mind, had no business being anywhere. Even out here in the middle of nowhere where there wasn’t much business left to be had.

  He would call this in. Definitely. It was his duty. Probably the last thing he would ever do for this town where he had once lived so happily.

  If only he hadn’t thought again of his wife. “When I’ve gone,” Doris had whispered from her hospice pillow, her eyes yellowed with jaundice, “I’ll know better than to wander back across the line between life and death. I know it isn’t allowed. I’ll stay put. But just in case you need to hear it, you remember: we were lucky to be alive and live in this beautiful, wild place and never see any real trouble, though surely we could have, the way so many others endured it. We were lucky to be left alone and in peace together, by the living and the dead. Sometimes I wonder how we managed it. For a while, anyway. With all the tragedies some places see.”

  To honor her simplicity and kindness, then, and for no other reason—certainly not the childish laughter following him—Tom Grunn hurried back to his truck and decided, Just go. What did it matter now, anyhow? Everything was finished in Briscoe. Whoever had come here, belatedly, foolishly, they’d just fade away, too, in the end, as everything else did under this blazing sun. The desert, it devoured. Even the dead, he thought as he fired his engine, would do no better here than the living had trying to scratch out a home in this place that had seen the unhoming of so many. After his wife’s death, Grunn had gone to her grave and wept to her, inconsolably: There’s nothing for me to do here anymore. No way to fashion a living. Nothing to occupy a man. Hardly even a phone signal, and no neighbors left to bitch about it to. Not in this rising heat, with more and more people escaping, retreating every day to oases of green, as even he, with at last some money in his pocket from the government, forgive me, please forgive me, honey, was about to do.

  Let the vultures have what was left. “Who cares?” he said aloud, and gunned it.

  Behind him, in his rearview, the squatters’ house seemed to retreat as well, the thorny weeds in front of it growing smaller and smaller, quivering, while all around the desert wind charged at the sage and the blackbrush and the pale desert primroses, which stood their ground, as he had not, white skirts licking against the red earth.

  PART ONE

  THE HUNTER

  1

  Philip Pratt felt himself finally beginning to enjoy his work again, especially now that he’d taken up an assignment in a good-sized metropolis.

  In this sparkling city by its Great Salt Lake, on a quickly warming June morning, he sat lounging at a sidewalk café on the shady side of a busy street not too far from the civic center. He’d spent several good, productive days ferreting out a ghostly remnant in the Utah Governor’s Mansion. Revivifying, it was, getting some intensely focused work done. No longer chasing after a chimera, the one that got away.

  The haunt in the Governor’s Mansion had been a vagrant male, forty-nine years old, recently killed after falling asleep inside a construction dumpster tipped into a sanitation vehicle—like many cities with a rising population, this one was full of overflowing bins of detritus, building sites fringed with cranes, churning cement trucks. The haunting had begun soon after the man’s death. The governor’s wife had reported to her security detail seeing an unauthorized guest on the staircases leading to the upper stories of the house. She had recognized the poor man, as many had, from the news—he’d been a well-known Olympic skier before becoming an addict and then drug counselor. The First Lady, a good politician, had persuaded her husband to publicize both the haunting and the removal as a way to express deep sympathy for two pressing issues at once while at the same time giving it as her opinion—correctly, to Pratt’s mind—that the afterlife of the spirit was even more painful than his lived life had been, and so it would be inhumane to prolong it.

  Pratt, called in as he always was thanks to his reputation for thorough work, was able to reassure the governor, the city, and the prying press that the cleaning would be meticulous and humane. What he didn’t share was that such cases—souls who might have been on a path to death but who did not, at that moment, intend to die—were often pitiable, their confusion in the afterlife so much like their confusion in life—where am I, how did this happen, why did this happen, how did I get here?—that hunting them became a quick, melancholy exercise, like chasing after a leaking balloon.

  Once he’d arrived, been introduced to the governor, and been let into the mansion, confirming the housekeeping staff as well the family were vacating (though not, usefully, the entire security detail), Pratt had slowly gone over the place—a lavish, almost gaudy nineteenth-century palace, with an opulent, curving double staircase as its centerpiece. The stairway had been the location of the first visitation. He took readings there as well as on the first floor and then went up to the labyrinthine second. After an hour he had concluded, with the intuitive skill he charged substantial fees for, that the poor man had taken shelter on the second story behind a paneled wall. There the ghost’s unguarded energy, which Pratt felt like a fist reaching inside his chest, was strongest in a room being used as a small library.

  The paneled end of the room, where the ghost’s charge was strongest, offered no obvious access point, not without destroying some antique maple chair rails. Happily, a security guard knew the name of the city’s heritage officer, Praveena Ayer, a very professional voice on the other end of Pratt’s cell phone who explained to him that during a Christmas fire early on in the millennium, parts of the house had suffered smoke damage, and at that time certain rooms had been renovated and foreshortened to accommodate access space for cables and modern technology.

  “I could come to the mansion with the original plans,” she had offered.

  “It’s better I come over to you,” he said and thanked her. The fewer intrusions at a site the better, Pratt had learned the hard way, over the years. Collateral damage during hauntings was extremely rare; but it happened, and it had happened to him. Now he took care and only allowed security or law enforcement to accompany him during cleanings. He agreed with Ms. Ayer that they would meet at her office in thirty minutes.

  He’d found her in a bright, sunlit space at City Hall, where she’d unscrolled original blueprints from the house on a lighted panel, showing him exactly the place that had been created for fiber-optic and other necessary lines that had been common at the time, and where an access panel was hidden, behind a maple bureau. She was surprised security had forgotten about it. But then everything was wireless now.

  Her elegant wrists under her colorful blouse rolled the prints away.

  “I should be able to get to that fairly easily, then,” he confirmed.

  “Yes,” she said. “It should slot right out.”

  “Perfect. I can’t thank you enough for your prompt assistance. Sorry for the trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble at all. And I hope everything goes smoothly. I know the governor and his family will appreciate it.” She smiled, the encouraging beam of one living being reassuring another: everything is going fine, we are all on the right track, don’t worry.

  Praveena. Such a beautiful name, Pratt had thought, driving back to the mansion.

  With the bureau shoved aside and the panel summarily removed, matters went forward appropriately and quickly. He knew the job would be an easy one now. All ghosts sought shelter; most mistook how safe their shelter was. They might appear on staircases but generally fled open fields for darker corners. The remnant of the Olympic skier, his spirit hollowed out by some sadness that had probably excavated him long before his death, was easily spotted once P
ratt had squeezed into the access passage. There the ghost leaned, his pale, translucent cheek resting against the breakers of a dusty junction box, as though he’d become exhausted from having to draw on his own, depleting current.

  “It’s hard,” Pratt said kindly, approaching him, “what you’re feeling.”

  “It is,” the hollow whisper answered. “Help me.”

  “That’s what I’ve come for.”

  “No one listens to me.”

  “I know.”

  “Not even here. I thought they might. In this place.”

  “I understand.”

  “How is anyone supposed to live like this?”

  You aren’t, Pratt could have said but didn’t. He made an effort, wherever possible, to avoid cruelty, especially with any soul so obviously ready to be released. It was different with the resistant ones. Sometimes every strategy had to be employed to hold a stubborn ghost still for its sentence. But usually there was no reason to be harsh, unfeeling. The people living in this house had every right to live undisturbed. But the dead were the disturbed, the pitiable. It was Pratt’s task to bring peace to all.

  “I have,” he offered it, “something in my hand that will help you.”

  Like children, the weak ones. They always wanted to look. And that was their undoing.

  Pratt raised his arm. A brief, fearfully bright flash. A quick cry from the dead, soft and loud at once, like the sound of a firework before it gives itself over to light and destruction.

  And it was done.

  Pratt had pulled down his jacket sleeve, concealing again the metal cuff that was both his weapon and his bond. He brushed the ash and dust from his chest and exited the wall space, calling in the security guard to come seal it behind him. Then he left the mansion by a rear door to avoid the press or any gawkers lurking nearby, anyone unexpected or unnecessary.

  And if there were, at moments like this one, a fleeting sensation, a rapid blinking—he sometimes thought he caught a glimpse of a familiar face, someone watching him, closely, reproachfully—he reminded himself this had always been an aftereffect of the intense physical nature of his work and its burst of fire: a lingering halo in the eye.