#oooooops

I snapped my eyes back to where they were supposed to be. In my ... ponderance of dust and the mites that went with it making my eyes water something fierce, I'd forgotten to keep my eyes on the Flicker. Now, sitting about five paces in front of me and the washtub full of water I'd placed at my feet was an unassuming dining chair covered in a white sheet.

I sighed and rolled my eyes. Final Side shapeshifters always lacked imagination. "Hey, dumbass, you forgot the dust and cobwebs," I critiqued its poor attempt at sneaking up on me despite all good sense telling me I shouldn't taunt it. Couldn't be helped. It smelled wrong, like grave moss and dirt, and the shit that goes bump in the night always had a hard time hiding from me. I ain't exactly all the way from This Side or the Other. I am uniquely equipped for this kind of work.

My next taunt got stuck in my throat when the sheet parted into thousands of strands of dull white hair, revealing red eyes set on their sides, points up and down instead of left to right, in a horrible, withered face of graying skin. Four limbs unwound themselves from their farce of a chair arms and legs with the cracking of far too many arthritic joints. The Flicker shifted from a grotesque mimic of furniture to a tall, stooping ghoul that no longer bothered to play creepy ghost.

I carefully kept one eye on it at all times now that it knew I was on to it. You take your eyes off a Flicker that's on the hunt for more than a blink, and it'll disappear in a shadow and reappear next to you right when your eyes open again. Just so you have long enough to get scared shitless right before it rips the soul out of your body.

Yeah, souls are real. Sorry if that bums you out. I ain't mighty thrilled with that either.

Flickers are nasty creatures. They play games with their "food". Which was why this one had been hootin' and hollerin' and generally making a downright scary nuisance of itself in Joan Hagerty's attic for the better part of a month now. Good thing the old woman paid heed to that sick dread knotting up in her stomach and sent for me, cause I don't. Listen to the dread, I mean.

Crick. Crick. Crick.

It took a step towards me, long and yellowed curling toenails scraping against the wooden floor.

I took a step back.

It pointed at me with a knife-sharp talon as its mouth hung too open to moan my name. "Teeeeennnnyyyyyy."

I crossed my arms and smirked, tapping my boot against the metal tub with a clang. "You ain't so scary. I know all 'bout your kind," I taunted.

Truth of the matter is that I was quaking in those damn boots. Dealing with the Final is always dangerous and existentially unpleasant. My heart was thumping against my ribs like it was going to leave me behind for being too stupid to keep on living, and my palms were just about sweating rivers.

It smiled. Or I think it was a smile. A horrible oily gash spread open from the natural corners of its awful mouth, clear around the sides of its head.

I hate Flickers.

I swallowed my lunch back down and stepped back again.

"Hoooolllyyy waaatterr?" it asked, turning its head completely perpendicular to its long neck.

I licked my lips nervously. "Sure, yeah. You wanna take a bath? Heard you ghoulies don't much care for consecration." I silently begged for this reckless plan to work.

Crick. Crick. Crick.

It laughed like a saw stuck on creaking old wood and dragged itself to the tub. "Teeeennneeessseeeee," it groaned my whole first named and I swear on my mama's grave it winked at me with an evil sideways eye as it sunk one horrible foot after another into my tub of "holy" water. (Water fresh from an old iron handled pump that burned my hands enough that I said, "Holy shit" anyways.) "Wooooon't wooork oooon meeee," it hissed victoriously.

I let out the breath I'd been stubbornly holding in. "You stupid son of a bitch," I chuckled and turned my back on it to pull my real tools out of the old doctor's bag I repurposed for dealing with otherworldly pests. "Forgot to mention the fresh grave dirt that's in there, oops."

It was stuck. That's the trick to Final Side creatures. Grave dirt, and moss, even crematory ashes if you're not precious about desecrating someone's remains will do in a pinch. The trappings of death make very literal traps for ... well ... death.

The Flicker shrieked so loud the whole house shuttered like it might fall down. And given the state of the walls in the attic, I feared it might.

I ignored it. "Jackie, let's wrap this up!" I called as I pulled an old silver hand mirror and a long greenbrier vine (plucked fresh from a graveyard that morning) from my bag.

A pretty blonde head popped up through the attic door as I tied one end of the vine around my waist. "Is it safe?" she asked me as she came in anyways. We had been working together for a couple of years by then, she knew I wouldn't have called her unless I had it handled.

"Safe as it's gonna get, doll. Now, come here and hold this tight," I instructed as I handed her the other end of the vine. "Don't look it in the eyes if you can help it."

Jackie gasped, turning her eyes sharply to the ground. She had been looking at it. "Oh, why?"

"Cause it's disgusting. It can't do anything to you as long as you don't get in the tub with it."

"Tenny, don't scare me like that!" she cried, putting her hand on her chest in relief.

"Take this, you know what to do," I handed her a .22 revolver and her relief evaporated.

She grimaced but took it anyways. "I wish you wouldn't do this. What if I get it wrong?" she asked anxiety peaking her voice.

I hated this part too, but for very different reasons.

Double-checking my vine I walked back towards the Flicker, pulling Jackie along with me. "You ain't gonna get it wrong. You're the smartest person I know, and the only one I trust to do this."

I understood her anxiety. I was about to take a trip to the Final Side and some people on a day pass don't come back. Oh, something will come back instead in your place if you ain't careful. And it'll gladly take your body for its own nefarious purposes. "If that vine wilts or breaks, you know what to do. Don't wait for "me" to come back if it does."

As I stepped into the tub with the thrashing monster, I raised the mirror in front of my face so that it saw it's reflection, it froze. Jackie pulled the hammer back on the gun and pressed it against my temple. "Come back right, Tenny. Don't make me live with killing you."

I only nodded and then I held my breath.

The thing about holding your own breath is that holding it until you pass out is near impossible to do. And it takes so damn long, you're like as to get bored and start breathing again just for something else to do.

I started counting in my head down from one hundred, slow as I could go until I started to get light headed and my lungs started to lurch to try to force me to breathe. As I felt my consciousness begin to drift, I grabbed the Flicker's arm and we dropped through the bucket into fathomless depths of water.

Do you know what drowning feels like? I do. It fucking hurts. The thing about taking a trip to the Final Side is that you kind of have to die to get there. Your body doesn't actually die, in fact, it stays behind on This Side, but your soul still feels it happen. Filthy water flooded my nose and lungs as panic began to set in, but I kept my grip on the monster until we fell out of the water and landed on washed out dry land.

It was over before it really started, but all that water I swallowed and breathed in had to go somewhere. Back out, mostly. And while I was busy retching up dirty water, I accidentally let go of both my mirror and my monster.

Mirrors are tricksome little things. They're a very handy tool in the arsenal of any practicing monster hunter or aspiring cosmetologist. They seem to confound things that come from the Final Side, ghosts, monsters, and spirits, good and bad and everywhere in between. You can use a mirror to trap some, and distract others.

Flickers are not to be trifled with, they can be tricked by a mirror for a time. It only works if a living thing is holding the mirror and it don't work forever. A couple of minutes if you're lucky, a few seconds if you're not. In these matters, I generally count myself luckier than most, but good luck doesn't supersede being a clumsy and a fool, unfortunately.

Crick. Crick. Crick.

A bladed finger curled menacingly around my shoulder before digging into the meat of it. I'm not ashamed to admit that I screamed about three octaves higher than was necessary as I pulled myself free. It felt like I was bleeding but seeing as my physical body was somewhere else, it was just a feeling. Still, I could die there. I didn't need to be in my body to get torn to shreds or consumed by something meaner than sin and twice as ugly.

Shit.

As I saw it, I had two options. Well three, but two had the same end result. The first, and stupidest, option was to panic and give the Flicker an opening to kill me. The second was to try to find the mirror, which would in practice end up like the first because the second I took my eyes off of it, it would kill me.

So I did the third thing. Something so ridiculous that you won't believe it's the truth: I called for my mama.

"Mama, I need help!" I yelled out to the overcast sky.

The Final Side is a very peculiar sort of place. And it doesn't look the same for every soul that goes there, being a reflection of the general condition of your soul once you're dead, but it mostly looks terribly dull and gray for visitors. Still being attached to your body keeps you from experiencing the fullness of Death. And finding specific souls who have passed on is very difficult in most cases. A real seance is difficult, unpleasant and very dangerous.

But mama made a deal with something when she died. God, some other higher power, the devil? I don't know. She didn't exactly leave me with an explanation or anything other than a cryptic note (some hogwash about always being with me in Death, or so I thought,) and a gaping hole in my heart. I would have preferred she had just stayed living, but no one asked for my opinion about it.

I didn't wait. I turned and ran, holding my breath as I did.

"Run!" a gentle breeze whispered in my ear. My mother's arms wrapped around the Flicker from behind and it shrieked and thrashed again.

It's not really fair that you also have to kind of die to get back to This Side, but I wasn't consulted for my opinion on that bit of inter-planar travel either. I opened my eyes with a horrible clenching in my chest and water and snot dripping from my nose. Cold metal pressed against my temple before I even had a chance to swallow some air. "Your name," Jackie demanded coolly, just like I taught her.

"Tennessee Jean Puck-Phillips," I answered without moving, fearful of startling my long-suffering assistant.

"Your parents, and their parents?"

"Come on, two generations?" I griped before my good sense caught up to me. Jackie pressed the barrel harder against my temple as a warning. "All right, fine. My mama was Edie Puck and she married my dad, Tennessee Phillips. Mama's parent's were James and Mae Puck and no one knows who spawned Tennessee Phillips but it had to be the two most miserable sons of bitches on the Other Side who did."

The hammer clicked as she released it and she exhaled shakily. "Don't you ever argue with me while I have a gun to your head ever again!" she chided me seriously. She'd have been right to slap me if she was so inclined.