by D A Fowler
She wondered what Bruce would say. (What would her mother say if she knew her sweet, innocent little daughter wasn’t a virgin anymore? And who cared?) When (not if) she and Bruce did it, he would probably say something along the lines of, “Haven’cha got anything a little more interesting?”
She cupped one of her breasts, allowing the other hand to slide over a flat abdomen to her golden pubic patch. Greg had known instinctively just how to touch her. She’d heard some girls say that their first sexual experiences had been awful. Not hers. She’d gotten a headful of lice from doing it in a hayloft, but she’d climaxed three times.
Sighing wistfully, she opened her top dresser drawer and pulled out a cotton nightie. She slipped it over her head, then turned off the overhead light and crawled under the covers on her bed, unaware of the shadow that suddenly moved away from the crack between her rosy curtains outside the window.
Nancy reached over and sleepily picked up the jangling telephone. She had gone to bed early—after fucking Jay’s brains out, as Dennis had suspected—untypically exhausted. The excitement was wearing her out. She hadn’t been sleeping well lately either. “Hello?”
The voice on the other end was so angry it sounded strangled. “I’ve figured it out, Nancy. And don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“Marla?” Nancy laboriously raised up to support herself on an elbow, her eyes narrowing into dark slits. The man in the moon frowned at her through the part in her curtains.
“You know it’s me. And I know you found something in that tomb besides that raunchy old cape. You found some kind of book, didn’t you?” Marla’s knuckles turned white as she gripped the phone tighter, waiting tensely for Nancy’s reply. It came swiftly, edged with sharp sarcasm.
“You don’t know a goddamn thing, Marla. Fuck off.”
The line went dead.
Thirteen
Jane was about to enter Goldie Bradshaw’s room to see whether or not her blue pads needed changing when Wilma waved to her from the nursing station at the end of the hall. Jane gladly postponed her duty and padded down the tiled corridor, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking rhythmically.
“Phone call, line two,” Wilma said disapprovingly. Personal calls were strongly discouraged.
“Harry?”
“No, some young girl, sounds like.”
Curiosity creating additional lines on Jane’s face, she stepped around the desk, pushed the lighted blinking button on the telephone and picked up the receiver. “This is Jane.”
As she listened, her eyes grew wide. When she finally had a chance to reply, she cupped her hand around the receiver and said softly, “I think we ought to talk about this tomorrow, when I’m off work. Can you come over to my place after school? Great. I live at the Timberline trailer court on Third, near the—Oh, okay. Number twenty-four. Right. Yes, that would be fine. See you then.”
She hung up, her hand trembling visibly. Wilma eyed her with concern. “Something wrong?”
“I don’t…know. I hope not,” Jane mumbled uncertainly, clumsily stepping through the low swinging door and around to the front of the desk. “Never mind. I’m all right. Need to go check on Mrs. Bradshaw…”
She trudged away woodenly like a sleepwalker, words batting around in her mind like marbles in a blender. Ambulance! Tomb! Rabbit! Strange markings!
SPELL BOOK!
Marla, having been excused from school for another day by her mother, drove over to Jane’s trailer house at 9:45 Tuesday morning.
A zombie answered her knock. Jane had hardly slept a wink the night before, and the few winks she did get were spent in a labyrinth of nightmares, horrid apparitions chasing her, catching her, locking her up in a cold, gray, smelly dungeon full of bones. In one heart-stopping scene the ground before her began to crumble upward, like a slowly erupting volcano, and bright, effervescent lava oozed up red through the cracks, black smoke billowing into a starless sky overhead. Then a head began to appear, a flaming crown under which eternal, evil eyes glittered, locked into hers, and destroyed her with a split-second’s contact. She had bolted upright in a silent scream, her gown soaked with sweat, not knowing at first if it had really happened or not. Then she’d heard Harry beside her, snoring contentedly, assuring her that she was still in the land of the living.
She couldn’t bring herself to close her eyes again. Not after that. To take her mind off the terrible visage, she had gotten out of bed and actually cleaned the trailer from top to bottom. It gleamed like a new penny.
Marla entered, nodding with approval though she thought the place a hovel. “This is cute. I don’t think I’d like to live in a trailer, though. Aren’t you afraid of tornadoes?”
“It usually looks like one’s been through here,” Jane admitted tiredly, not giving the question any serious thought. Twisters were the least of her present worries. God, how she wanted to sleep, escape into deep, black, dreamless paradise. She shuffled into the kitchen to pour her ninth cup of coffee. “Want some coffee? If not, I’ve got Pepsi and orange juice…” And plenty of beer, of course. Harry was never without a good supply of brew. But she didn’t think it appropriate to offer that, although the teen looked like she could use a double scotch.
Marla seated herself on the edge of the couch. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”
Jane poured her coffee, left it black, and joined her nervous guest in the living area. They stared awkwardly at each other for several moments, both wondering how to start such a conversation. Finally Marla started at the beginning and told Jane about seeing the tomb door open, and the events that had transpired since. Jane listened with growing tension, her muscles tightening into rigid cables. By the time Marla was finished with her story, Jane’s jaws were aching from clenching her teeth. She hadn’t even been aware of doing it.
“I really, really don’t want to believe any of this, you know,” Jane said. “I’ve run from this kind of thing all my life, and I never expected it to catch up to me. What scares me the most is finding out…finding out it’s real. Because if witchcraft is real, then I’ve got the damn Devil and Hell and mortal sin to deal with, and I don’t want to deal with any of it. I will help you…if I can. I honestly don’t know offhand what I can even do. But I’m involving myself to prove that all of this is just a bunch of ancient mumbo jumbo and superstition. That’s what I want it to be, you understand?”
Marla nodded. “Well, I sure as hell don’t know what to do. If I tell my mom, she may or may not slap my face, but I doubt very much she’d talk to Beth about it…that’s Nancy’s mother. She and my mom are friends from way back. Anyway, you saw how my mom was at the funeral. One word about anything like this and she’ll fly right off the handle. You know, because of Gramma. By the way, why were you asking what Gramma had to do with Morganna Ober? That’s why I came to you. You don’t think Gramma was just senile, do you?” And what am I doing here? she thought. What could this hag do to help me? How could anyone help me if Nancy knows how to use the power of the Devil? The woman before her was a fool, thinking it could all just be a bunch of nonsense.
Jane told her about the diary. Marla’s jaw set, but her knees began to shake slightly. “My boyfriend, Dennis, thinks it’s all just a prank, but after what happened to Mr. Montgomery, and now this diary stuff…I’m totally convinced Nancy found some sort of book in the tomb, and it does tell her how to…how to hurt people with black magic. And she did take Mr. Montgomery’s pen.”
Jane blinked. “What?”
“She stole Mr. Montgomery’s favorite pen off his desk, the day this all started. Haven’t you heard the stories? They have to have a personal belonging of their intended victim. Nancy used that pen somehow…oh shit, she’s got a million things of mine…”
Jane put her coffee cup down and looked at Marla sternly. “I think you’re—”
“We’ve got to tell the police. Do you think they’d beli
eve us? If we could just get them to search Nancy’s room—”
“Are you kidding? The police? They’d lock us up if we told them what we—”
“She’s going to do something to me, I know it! I should never have told her I suspected—”
“Marla, please! You’re getting hysterical,” Jane said sharply. “I’m sorry, but I’m just in no mood for that. We’ve got to stay calm, rational. We don’t know for sure if such a book even exists. Now what I want you to do, if you can, is take a look through your grandmother’s things. Maybe she kept a diary too, or some sort of memoirs. Will you do that? If there’s any answers to be had, I think that’s where we’ll find them.”
Marla wasn’t listening; she was too busy trying to keep herself together. It was all she could do to keep from screaming, running out of the trailer, and burning rubber all the way to Nancy’s house to retrieve her various possessions. She knew, in her heart of hearts, that her ex-best friend was invoking ancient evil, manipulating the material world with deadly spiritual forces. And the bitch had told her, the previous night, to fuck off.
How the hell did you fight something you couldn’t even see? What weapons were effective against a witch—or a girl who was playing the role of one?
An urgent knock at the door startled them both. Jane got up to answer it, walking on legs weighing a hundred pounds each. She wanted more than anything at that moment to just crawl back into bed and sleep for a hundred years, have pleasant dreams about finding suitcases full of money, recapturing her youth, landing the starring role in a Broadway musical, dying and finding out death is just a trip into wonderland. No judgment. No books. No show and tell. Just an eternal amusement park.
As soon as the trailer door was opened, a chattering gadfly swished into the room smelling of rose essence, her old-fashioned red-and-white-checked cotton dress, inappropriate for the season if not the decade, hanging loosely on a tall, willowy frame. Mousy brown hair streaked with ribbons of gray was pulled up in a well-sprayed French bun. Cat-eye glasses perched on the end of a long, twisted nose. Quick, probing eyes examined Marla through them, and revealed a hint of disappointment. Edna had seen the Cutlass parked behind Jane’s Volkswagen, and had gleefully surmised that Jane could be found in the arms of a virile young lover. God knew it wouldn’t be much of a surprise, considering the potbellied slob she was married to.
Jane suddenly realized what she’d done: she’d just let in Edna Crassfield, president of Gossip International, without first warning Marla to keep her mouth shut about things supernatural. About anything, really, except maybe the weather. But it was too late now. She shut the door with a despairing sigh. “Edna, this is Marla. Marla, Edna Crassfield.”
Edna extended a bony hand. “Well, so very nice to meet you, Marla. But my, shouldn’t you be in school today? Are you sick, dear, or perhaps in a pinch of trouble?” Her voice sounded hopeful.
Marla released the dry, grasping fingers with a dour smile and, in spite of Jane’s frantic signal to Zip Up, spilled out, “Everybody in this town might be. I think my ex-best friend found a book in the Obers’ tomb about how to do black magic. Mr. Montgomery was going to suspend us, but the very next day he had to be rushed off to the hospital in an ambulance, and I saw her take his pen off his desk the day before, the same day she—”
“We don’t know this for a fact, now, Edna—” Jane interjected desperately.
Edna ignored her and lowered herself slowly into Harry’s favorite chair, her eyes riveted to Marla’s face, her mouth open and rounded as though waiting for a banana. “Now, what’s this? Tell me all about it, dear.” Jane slapped a palm against her forehead and groaned, picturing the headlines of the next morning’s Sharon Valley Gazette: Woman Claims Witch Hunt Now in Progress. Harry would see his wife’s name listed as a source, and would absolutely blow a gasket. But telling Edna to keep her mouth shut about this would be like telling a waterfall to reverse its course.
She hoped Marla would find something in Jasmine’s belongings that would quickly put the whole ugly thing to rest. In the meanwhile Jane knew of only one person she could go to for advice in such a matter, much as she hated to admit it. Her mother.
The girl halted Lana in the hallway by reaching out and grabbing her jean jacket. Lana whirled around and recognized her as one of the two she’d met at the park on Sunday. She had been hostile then. Now she was smiling. “Hi, remember me?”
Lana nodded warily. “Yeah, the park.”
Nancy’s dark eyes glittered like wet onyx. “That’s right. Sorry I wasn’t very friendly. I was…jealous, I suppose.”
“Jealous? Of me?” Lana was surprised at the admission. Finding such open honesty in a teen was pretty rare; she thought of herself as rather unique in that respect. But she remained slightly suspicious. The girl was, after all, Marla’s best friend, and the rabbit business was still unsettled. “Hey, you don’t have any reason to be—”
“It was petty of me, I admit,” Nancy interrupted, glancing up at the clock above their heads. “Damn…I’ve gotta run. Bunch of crap that we only get five minutes between classes, huh? Anyway, my name is Nancy. What was yours again?”
“Lana. Lana Bremmers.”
“Lana…” Nancy repeated the name with an approving nod. “Well, Lana, we’ll have to get together sometime.”
Lana thought she smelled a rat, but she heard herself responding, “Sure, that would be great. I haven’t made any girlfriends yet. Ever’one here seems to be so—”
But Nancy was gone, disappearing in the throng of students. Lana finished to herself, “so stuck up.”
Bruce and Lana ate their lunches—chips from the cafeteria vending machine—at the park. She’d just told him about her earlier encounter with Nancy.
“So what’s goin’ on, you think? Am I bein’ set up?” Shaking his head at the autumn-gray sky, Bruce answered, “Dunno, but I’d be careful if I were you. I saw Dennis earlier and he said his plan worked great. But Marla didn’t even say anything to him about you—had something else on her mind, he said, and that kinda twirked him off—he was wanting to rub it in. So maybe she’s just gonna blow it oif. Then again, she might be planning to lure you up in the woods so she can shave your head and spray-paint your whole body green.” He grinned widely, showing golden flecks between his teeth.
“That’s all I need.” Lana recalled Nancy’s face as she’d grabbed her in the hall. Had the smile been real? Or had it been bait on a hook controlled by Marla, a girl Lana had never even seen as far as she knew, but who probably hated her guts. High school games! Her shoulders slumped, a heaviness settling over her. “I hate crap like this. Good grief, I didn’t even kiss Den—well, I guess I did once. But that was all. An’ he’s the one who asked me out—I didn’t go chasin’ after him. What am I s’pose to do? Run from Nancy if I see her again?”
Bruce grinned. “Nah, might give her a complex. Just take it easy…even if Marla does hate you, that doesn’t mean Nancy’s got to. She’s got her own mind, she can like anybody she wants. Could be they had a fight, and now Nancy is shopping around for a new best friend.”
“An’ what would make Marla madder than for Nancy’s new best friend to be the girl who’d gone out with her boyfriend. I’d just be gettin’ used again, only this time by a girl,” Lana said, jabbing the toe of her shoe at a stone. “But frankly, I don’t know that I’d wanna be Nancy’s friend anyway. I still think she had somethin’ to do with that rabbit.”
“I wouldn’t presume guilt on such circumstantial evidence,” Bruce cautioned, though he had done some serious presuming of his own in that regard. “But there’s two things in this world we can pick: our noses and our friends. Hard to find good ones at this age. Friends, I mean. Ah, the trials and tribs of a teen.” He stuffed some more Doritos into his mouth and added between chews, “We die a million deaths before we even get out of high school.”
Lana looked up, surprised
. “Do you write poetry?”
Bruce took an oratory stance in front of the bench. Lifting his bag of Doritos high, he began: “Roses are red, violets are blue—”
“Bruce.” Lana rolled her eyes.
“I got a worm hanging out my kazoo.”
“Bruce, how gross!” Lana crossed her arms and glared at him hotly. “You have to make a joke out of everything, don’t you? Are you tryin’ to insult me?”
He dejectedly returned to the bench. “Hey, no way. You looked like you were getting all bummed out, so I was just trying to make you laugh. Why would I try to insult you? I like you…a lot. This much—” He held his hands as far apart as they would go.
Lana’s anger quickly melted away. She mischievously tossed him back a little of his own medicine: “Oh, is that all?”
“My arms won’t stretch any further.”
“Well, next time you wanna make me laugh, don’t tell me about the worm you got hangin’ out your kazoo…yuck. You were just makin’ that up, weren’t you?” Bruce forged a look of embarrassment. “Gee, I hope so. I don’t check it out very often.”
Lana grimaced.
It was time to go back to school. They tossed their empty chip bags into a trash container bearing the inscription Fuck It, which someone, obviously in need of an attitude adjustment, had scrawled with a sharp object into the white paint. They sauntered lazily toward Bruce’s pickup, merging slowly together until their fingers brushed, and then it was only natural that they should join hands. In spite of what Nancy and Marla might have up their sleeves, Lana felt happy. With Bruce around, she doubted she could stay depressed about anything for very long. Except, perhaps, Sam’s disappearance. The pup was still missing as of the time Bruce had picked her up for school that morning.