December's Thorn

by Phillip DePoy

  Issie squeezed her eyes shut. “I tried. Yes. I tried. But—but the love elixir, it had done its work.”

  “And when I went to Ireland to see where my ancestor had lived, you followed me?”

  “Yes.” She nodded, regaining a bit of her composure.

  I reflected then on a perennial observation of mine: most people never realize how transparent they are. They think that their fabrications are opaque; they think that their lies are impenetrable armor. But they’re always wrong. Nothing could have been more grotesquely pathetic than Issie Raynerd’s insistence on playing out the poorly written drama in her mind.

  And on, indeed, she did go. “I followed you to Ireland. I watched and waited. And when the moment was right, I came to you and begged your forgiveness. But you seemed surprised to see me. As if a wife’s place were not beside her husband, however troubled the marriage bed might be.”

  I tried to dig and churn up some memory of seeing Issie in Ireland all those years ago. I barely remembered her in Cornwall—one of a dozen students on the same study trip. But there was nothing in my mind, that I could find, to tell me that I’d seen her in Ireland.

  So I decided to give up, almost entirely, on playing the play. Torpedoes be damned.

  “I’m very sorry.” I sighed. “I think my recent difficulties might have erased some of my memory. I really don’t remember seeing you in Ireland.”

  Truth is a beacon that penetrates any darkness. Issie Raynerd was lost in a black, moonless night. Maybe a beacon would help.

  “But, I was there,” she said, again losing a bit of traction. “Really.”

  I shrugged. “Sorry. I mean, you do realize that when you first came to my door, I didn’t know who you were at all. I had no memory of you whatsoever. Whatever it is you’re trying to do may be, when all is said and done, entirely in vain, because I lost a part of my memory—along with my little toe—in a snowbank a year ago. Your whole little play here can’t hope to have the desired effect if—if I don’t know who you are. I’m very sorry, I truly am. I don’t know what you want. I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know who you are.”

  Ceri was sitting stone still, obviously waiting to see what my newly minted honesty would buy.

  David was still breathing in sobs, unable to calm himself.

  Issie’s eyes were desperate, and it seemed to me that she might be about to break, somehow.

  “The end of the story,” I went on, as if I hadn’t noticed anyone’s delicate state, “is that Iseult and Tristan continued their affair for quite some time until Mark finally caught them together, in a cave much like this one, only with a crystal bed. He would have found them sooner, but Iseult did something that at first she thought was clever. She substituted her handmaiden for herself in the marriage bed. You left that part out of the story.”

  Issie started to speak, then stopped, slumped, shook her head. “You don’t remember when I saw you first how I mentioned Brenda Gain? When you called Lucinda on the phone?”

  I thought hard. “Maybe. Gee, if you did, that would have been really clever. Brangaine is often the name of Iseult’s maid, and that does, if slightly mispronounced, sound a little like Brenda Gain.”

  “Explain,” Ceri said uncomfortably.

  “In the story,” I told her, “it’s usually this handmaid who confuses the potions at sea. And the maid substitutes for Iseult on the wedding night with Mark.”

  “Ah.” Ceri nodded.

  I turned back to Issie. “You actually did listen in my class. That’s so great. What happened to that part of the story, the part about the maid?”

  “What happened?” she snapped. “What happened? You were too goddamned stupid to get all the references. You’re supposed to be so smart. I said Brenda Gain and you didn’t even bat an eye. I dropped a lot of hints that you didn’t get until tonight, it looks like. Christ!”

  “Well, in my defense,” I began, glancing at Ceri, “I was in a coma for three months.”

  “And, if I may point out,” Ceri added, “you seem to have dropped the whole ‘we had a child’ element of the plot awhile ago. What was that?”

  “Maybe she just thought that up to explain David’s presence,” I responded, deliberately adopting Ceri’s derisive tone—seemed like the right thing to do. “There’s no child in the stories at all.”

  “Shut up!” Issie exploded.

  Instantly she was on her feet. There was an odd little pistol in her hand.

  David backed away. That seemed like a bad sign. If the man who was trying to kill Skidmore with baling wire was afraid of what this woman might do with her pistol, that would be cause for alarm.

  Ceri appeared to remain calm. “Well, now we’re getting somewhere. Something happened in Ireland.”

  Everyone looked at Ceri.

  She continued. “If you shoot someone now,” she said calmly, “you’ll never get to the bottom of this. You’ll never get Fever to remember what you want him to, or do what you want him to do. He’ll never understand what you’re doing here, and a lot of work and planning will have gone for naught. But most importantly, you’ll never know what it is that’s eating you up from the inside. Because something is. And if you don’t fix it pretty soon, you’ll be gone. You might not be dead, exactly, but there won’t be anything of you left.”

  Ceri’s words unfurled in the dank air of the cave like the wings of some giant invisible bat that might devour us all. It took me a second to realize that she had somehow pitched her voice a way so as to induce the maximum amount of fear-inducing body chemicals. It was a tremendous trick, and I found myself wanting to learn it.

  Issie was only slightly stymied by the effect. The pistol lowered for a moment, but did not leave off pointing in our direction. David, on the other hand, looked as if he might explode at any moment.

  “But if I shoot you now,” Issie said directly to Ceri, “I could go on with my work, and Fever would suffer for it. And then I could kill him and be done.”

  “Good,” Ceri countered, “you’ve started calling him Fever again. No point in dragging out the scene when someone’s turned on all the lights in the theatre.”

  “I knew it wouldn’t work forever,” Issie said ruefully. “But I thought I’d get more mileage out of it than this.”

  Almost all of the character of the “ghost wife” was gone.

  Standing there before us was a hard, damaged, small-town mountain girl—with a loaded gun in her hand. Ask anyone: that’s infinitely more dangerous than a supernatural creature.

  For the first time in a very long time, I was genuinely, consciously afraid for my life. This woman would shoot me. I could see that.

  And I knew, with absolute certainty, that I’d be dead—this time—for good.

  24

  “Why are you doing all this?” I asked Issie.

  The time for any sort of pretense was gone. I wanted plain answers to plain questions—no more analytic babble from Ceri; no more mythic folklore from me.

  Issie appeared to be mildly surprised by that approach. “You really don’t know who I am, do you.” It wasn’t a question; it was a realization.

  “No,” I told her. “I do remember your being in my class; I vaguely remember seeing you along with the rest of the group in Cornwall. I don’t think you were in Ireland at all. That was a personal trip, the diversion to Ireland. It really didn’t have anything to do with the university study group.”

  “But something happened in Wales between the two of you,” Ceri said softly, “that made you both go to Ireland—or made Fever go to Ireland and Issie to follow.”

  Issie and I both looked at Ceri.

  “That much is obvious,” Ceri went on. “My favorite theory at the moment is that Fever discovered something about the Cornwall stones. He actually stepped through the hole in the stone and into another world. But the truth is probably something less fantastic and more—what’s the word?—mundane.”

  “Mundane?” I prompted.

  “S
ex,” she answered straightaway.

  I felt the same biochemical revulsion at the sound of that word as I’d had when I’d thrown up moments before in the interior of the cave. I was surprised to have such a sensation at the mere mention of the word sex, a word that ordinarily provoked delight—or something like it.

  Issie was grinning, a ragged, leering expression.

  I looked away.

  “Well,” Ceri said, almost to herself, “apparently there’s something to that. Fever shivers, Issie grins.”

  “You got to know what Fever was like back then,” Issie insisted. “He wanted you to fall in love with him. He did everything he could to make it happen: sing the songs, tell the stories, make a joke, touch your arm just right, so that it don’t seem forward, but you feel the burn of it.”

  I started to protest, but a split second of reflection prevented objection. I did want everyone to be in love with me back then.

  Issie saw all that on my face. “You see he don’t deny it.”

  Ceri looked down to hide a shadow smile. “I see that.”

  “That’s how it all started, really.” Issie’s eyes grew so cold I thought she might have suddenly been possessed by another personality.

  “Look,” David said nervously, “I’m not so sure this is a good idea anymore. I mean, I’m all for screwing with this guy’s life for all kinds of reasons, but we got the law on us something awful now. State patrol, Issie. And worser than that: Orvid! You ought to leave off. Come on back to the hollow and lay low for a while. Really.”

  His entreaty had no effect on the woman at all.

  But I saw that David had dislodged himself from the entire matter, and was ready to bolt. With him out of the way, maybe Ceri and I could gang up on Issie and overpower her, gun and all. At least that was my thinking.

  “I don’t know any hollow where you could hide from Orvid,” I said calmly. “You think he couldn’t find you?”

  David’s eyes acquired a faraway look. “I guess he could at that. If he wanted to, he could find me anywhere in this world.”

  “And how do you think you’d do with baling wire wrapped around your head?” I asked. “Getting tighter and tighter—hour after hour.”

  His faraway look intensified. He was watching Orvid torture the man about whom he had spoken earlier. I knew that he was.

  Unfortunately, seeing David’s face in such pain and distress only made me pity him. So I was not entirely surprised to hear myself ask, “What had the man done, David?”

  He knew exactly what I was asking. “That man that Orvid killed in such a way? He’d—he laid hands on Issie.”

  Issie’s head snapped in David’s direction.

  “She was a young’un,” David went on, “about thirteen, I’d have to say. This man, he got her and was feeling of her. She ain’t have no trouble get him to leave off—kicked him in the nuts real hard. But when she told her mother, her mother got tore up about it. I don’t know exactly how it happened after that, but Orvid got involved. I was a lot younger then, and I wanted to go with Orvid to kill this man. So I did.”

  “You and Orvid were going to kill a man because he touched Issie for a second or two?” Ceri asked, apparently unaware of certain maternal instincts abroad in my hometown environs.

  “Well, that’s the thing,” David went on, “the mother, Issie’s mother— she said that this man— said he had his way with Issie. Said Issie was, you understand, with child on his account.”

  “What?” Ceri asked, astonished.

  Issie closed her eyes.

  “I knew it weren’t so,” David mumbled, “but I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Issie’s ma—nobody did. You’uns can see that.”

  Ceri looked at Issie. “You didn’t try to stop it? You didn’t correct your mother?”

  “He’d laid his hands on me!” she hissed. “I wanted him to suffer.”

  I wished at that moment that I could somehow, by telepathy or even some secret note passed between Ceri and me, share my instinct about hard, damaged, small-town mountain girls. I wanted to make Ceri understand that we were in danger of our lives.

  “Your mother,” Ceri went on, clearly not receiving my psychic bulletin, “she’s someone you’ve mentioned a lot. She helped you to go to the university; she paid for your trip to Wales; she gave you the love-philtre. Which was actually what, exactly?”

  “Shut up talking about my mother,” Issie warned.

  “Okay,” Ceri said quickly, “but there was something on that boat trip with Tristan. Something your mother gave you that made you both behave incorrectly.”

  “And shut up talking to me like a doctor!” Issie shouted. “Damn!”

  Without warning Issie pointed the gun straight up and fired a single shot. The sound of it was so loud that it deafened me for seconds. David hit the floor. Ceri flinched and covered her head.

  “Next one goes right in your big mouth,” Issie whispered to Ceri. “You understand me?”

  Ceri nodded, still covered up.

  David was up and headed for the cave entrance.

  “Where the hell you think you’re going?” Issie growled.

  “I got to pee,” he answered, picking up his pace toward the exit. He was clearly making an escape.

  “David!” Issie warned.

  “I got to go!” He began to sprint, crouching low.

  Issie fired another shot. The bullet hit David’s thigh and blood spattered the fire and the stones. David leapt forward, into the tarp that covered the cave opening. He didn’t make a sound. He flailed at the tarp, and tried to swim across it to the edge where he might escape.

  Another bullet hit him square in the back, and I thought I could hear it crack his spine. He was dead before his body stopped moving.

  “There.” Issie turned back to us.

  Ceri sat. I stared. David’s body bled slowly into the snow on the floor around it.

  “Now,” Issie told us, the gun steady in her hand, “I kind of liked David. He got me out of the Milledgeville. On the other hand, I don’t care a thing in this world for either one of you. Does that give you an idea of where we’re going? You asked me, while ago, Fever, why I was doing this. Have a seat. Maybe now it’s time to let you know what happened.”

  “David needs help,” Ceri said, but all of her confidence was gone.

  Issie’s upper lip curled back in a grotesque parody of a grin. “He’s past any help you can give him.”

  “Issie,” I said, trying to steady my voice, “you just shot and killed David.”

  She looked confused for a second. “What? Why are you telling me that? I know I shot David. What’s the matter with you? You really did lose your marbles when you’s in the hospital.”

  “I—I think I must have,” I murmured vaguely. “A lot of this doesn’t seem real to me—a lot of what’s happened since you came here.”

  “Oh,” she coughed, laughing, “it’s real all right. Real as rot.”

  “You pretended to be Iseult, thinking that would mean something to me,” I began, “but it wasn’t ever clear to me, not at all, what you were doing.”

  “That’s the part makes me laugh,” she sneered. “You supposed to be so smart! I use some soggy old story you told me once, and you don’t even figure on it, not ’til it’s too late. Doctor Devilin.”

  “Do you hear your voice?” I asked quickly.

  “What’s that?” She wrinkled up her nose.

  “Your voice, your diction, your vocabulary,” I went on, “in fact, your entire way of speaking—it’s all quite different from the way you spoke when you came to my door.”

  “No it ain’t,” she protested.

  “The woman I met a few nights ago,” I demurred, “would never have used the contraction ain’t, for example.”

  “Yes she would have,” Issie railed. “Shut up!”

  “Her accent was more genteel,” I continued, “and her voice was pitched at least two tones higher.”

  “I don’t even know wha
t that means.” She was simmering.

  I knew that I was doing something entirely foolhardy. I was poking a crazed wild animal. Eventually one of two things would happen: she would crack and cry, or she would shoot her gun. My reasoning was that she was planning to shoot her gun anyway; I was only trying to give us another option.

  And then, mirabile dictu, Ceri was back.

  “I think you’re right on this one, doctor,” she said to me, as if we were in some sort of academic consultation. “This person we’re seeing now? That’s another personality.”

  “Shut up!” Issie shrieked suddenly. “I had all that I could take at the Milledgeville! I can act a hundred different ways! That don’t mean I’m a hundred different people! Christ on a cross!”

  And she fired her pistol.

  The bulled grazed the outside of my right upper arm.

  For a second I was so startled that I didn’t feel it at all. Shock is actually a very strong ally in a situation such as that one. It absented me from pain long enough for me to flip the crate-table forward and upward, directly into Issie’s arms and midsection.

  She toppled backward, dropping the pistol. She landed hard and cursed more vilely than I had ever heard another human being speak.

  She scrambled, but I was up and managed to kick the pistol away toward the back of the cave.

  Issie was on her feet and swung her fists, as if they were a single club, directly into my wounded arm. That hurt. That hurt a lot. My vision went white and I dropped to my knees.

  The next thing I knew, Ceri threw the chair she’d been sitting on, and it connected with Issie so forcefully that Issie hit the floor again and slid across the cold stones toward David’s still-bleeding body.

  Ceri grabbed the back of my jacket and hoisted me to my feet.

  “Time to go,” she whispered firmly.

  “Absolutely,” I assented.

  We headed toward the back of the cave. I searched the floor and found Issie’s pistol, scooped it up as we passed, and plunged into the darkness beyond the open cavern.

  “You had to get the gun?” Ceri asked, gasping as she ran.

  “Yes I had to get the gun!” I told her, irritated. “First, I don’t want her to shoot me again. It really hurts. Second, I’m not convinced we won’t run into that damned bear again.”