by Julia French
Most of the garden was finished for the year, but True had hilled the soil around the few late vegetables that remained. Behind him in single file, Rachel walked among the barren rows, looking at the frostbitten remains of lettuce, the still-green tops of carrots and potatoes, and the browned vines that had once borne tomatoes. A little way ahead True stopped, bent down, and burrowed under the soil with his strong fingers, coaxing out a piece of thin white root.
“Here, take this home and put it in a pot. After the leaves grown, pick some when the moon is new and some when the moon is full. You’ll taste the difference.”
She cupped the sliver of root in her hand. “What is it?”
“Parsley.”
“Oh. Thank you.” She knew he’d seen her disappointment. “I thought it was going to be something weird, like wild yam.”
“When someone says to you that they can’t make water, tell them to put parsley in their soup, not the store-bought dried stuff but the living leaves. And you’re not ready to learn about wild yam yet.”
“Why? What’s it for?”
He smothered a laugh. “Take care of the parsley. Don’t forget to water it.”
“I won’t, and I’ll put in some used coffee grounds for fertilizer.”
“Now that’s what I call a superstition!”
Rachel closed her hand tightly around True’s gift. They stood silently together in the dying garden in the dying day, and as she returned his gaze she saw a flash of strangeness play across his face, a queer sort of distant tension as though in that second he were a hundred miles away and in a place he didn’t like.
She saw this only for a moment, and then it passed and his features grew calm. A thin, lonely breeze sprang up and twirled the dead leaves at their feet, and they watched the rust and caramel-colored spiral settle to the ground. Then he motioned that they should go back inside, and as they walked back to the house, he took her arm affectionately, casually, as a friend might.
Chapter Sixteen
True stared in pity and horror at the thorns growing out of the man’s face. They were in all stages of growth. Some were mere nubbins at the centers of inflamed and painful red welts, others had broken the skin and oozed creamy yellow pus. The largest ones were a full inch long and curved downward, giving the man’s cheeks and forehead the appearance of a drooping, leprous rose.
“How…” True began, but couldn’t finish the sentence. He’d never seen anything even close to this.
“This morning. Highway twenty-four.” The man was sparse with his words, since every movement of his face brought fresh pain. “Twenty-four goin’ into Yarwich. A black car out of nowhere. I almos’ hit it. The guy inside, he yelled at me. Then this.” The man dabbed at his chin with a blue bandanna. A blackish clot of congealed blood peeled away with the bandana, and his eyes watered with pain. Underneath the clot was the pointed head of another erupting thorn.
True’s hands were already busy mixing herbs. “What did the driver look like? Big or small? Fat or skinny? White, black, brown, what?”
“A smallish guy, kinda skinny. Pale white like a fish belly.”
“What was he driving?”
“Dodge sedan, brand new, black. License plate PS7—something.” The man broke off and clapped a hand to his cheek. Another thorn had broken through the skin.
The water on the stove was boiling. True sprinkled the dried herbal mixture into a teacup, tipped some of the boiling water into the cup, and covered the cup with a saucer. After the tea had steeped for several minutes, he ran cool water into the liquid so the man could drink it right away. This herbal mixture had been his great grandfather’s treatment for leprosy, and while True’s patient didn’t have leprosy, he did have an extreme skin condition, so it was worth a try.
He handed the man with the thorns a straw to sip the liquid through, then went to the kitchen windowsill, took down a thick, heavy book, and thumbed through it. The book’s title, clearly visible to his patient, was Pacts with Mephistopheles.
Straw in his mouth, the man tried to attract True’s attention. “Mmmm! Mmm!” He shook his head back and forth emphatically—no deals with Satan! Laughing, True showed him the piece of plastic laminate pressed between the pages of the heavy volume to keep it straight. True took the sheet out of the book and set it back on the shelf. Next he cut two circles the size of quarters and peeled off the protective backing. “I need three hairs from your head,” he told the suffering man.
The man with the thorns handed True three short brown-and-gray hairs. True placed them in the center of one circle, sprinkled a thin line of salt around the hairs, and pressed the other plastic circle down on top of the hairs and the salt to seal the rough amulet.
“Salt is for protection,” he explained. “These hairs are you, protected inside the salt circle.” With the tip of his hunting knife he pierced a small hole near the top of the rough charm, and a length of white garden string completed the necklace. “Wear this around your neck until this guy’s forgotten about you-I reckon twenty days is enough. Then take it off and bury it in your back yard. Don’t throw it in the garbage! Make sure you dig a hole and bury it.”
The man nodded as he slurped the last of the cooling medicine from the teacup.
“Do you feel better yet?”
The man moved his jaw experimentally, and this time the words came easy. “A little bit. It doesn’t hurt as much.”
“Your face should look better by sundown. If it doesn’t, come back to me tonight. If you get worse at any time, come back, and I don’t care what time of day or night.”
“I promise. Thanks, Mister Gannett. Without your help I’d be dead for sure.”
* * * *
Joshua stood back from the stream of warm water and ran the bar of soap over his belly. Water pattered upon his bare feet and upon a yellow curl of soap that had somehow fallen away from the bar. He watched it swirl and catch on the lip of the drain as he continued to massage his stomach with the soap. The smooth motion of his hand halted as the bar caught on something, and he felt a sickening pang as he peeled the soap away from his middle. Something was wrong down there.
The brownish-red spike twisted and wormed outward from his belly button. It was one, two, three inches long and growing, thrusting forth from his white flesh like the horn of a unicorn. Through the shock and nausea he could see that the thing was not rooted deep within his body but anchored shallowly upon the layers of muscle and skin over his navel.
Water raining into his eyes and mouth, Joshua lay on the bottom of the bathtub, gripped the invading spike with both hands and rocked it back and forth. The growth continued to mushroom under his hands as he forced it over first to one side, and then the other, ignoring the nausea. One side of the base started to peel away from the flesh underneath and he redoubled his efforts, clenching his teeth ferociously with the strain. His frantic tugging bore fruit. Like a loose tooth the giant thorn popped away cleanly, leaving a rough circular crater resembling the butt-end of a pumpkin. All was not as it had been, however. Underneath the weird horny growth, his belly button had disappeared.
Panic turned to fury. Joshua threw the thorn against the bathroom wall, where it left a watery pink streak on the gray tile. He didn’t need a crystal ball to know where the thorn had come from and why. Whoever had helped the waitress at the truck stop had also helped the man on the highway, and it had to stop. He had to make it clear to this do-gooder that his or her interference was not welcome, and if that clarification would happen to prove fatal, well, that was no concern of his.
Chapter Seventeen
True stared into the fire, thinking. In the past week two people had come to him with complaints that could be traced back to one man. One curse might have been a passing impulse, but two curses so close together in time and place showed a pattern of evil intent. For that reason, when the man with thorns i
n his face had departed, True had turned the thorn curse back upon its owner with added determination, like a punch from an invisible fist. The more uncomfortable the return postage got the greater the chance that this man would decide that hanging around Raleigh County wasn’t worth the price.
That should have been the end of it, but for some reason True couldn’t let it go. During Rachel’s visit this afternoon he’d managed to hide his growing worry but now, sitting before the fire, he allowed himself to obsess about the “smallish guy.” Who was he? Where had he come from, and why was he here?
True had only a few pieces of information: the physical description of the man, the fact that he drove a brand new black Dodge sedan with license plate PS7—something, and the irrefutable fact that the man was definitely the real thing: a genuine witch-man and nothing to trifle with. Whatever True chose to do about it, he had to do it right and for good, and to accomplish that goal he wanted-no, needed-to know more. He decided that his focal point would be the black car.
Leaned back in the overstuffed chair, he closed his eyes and summoned up a picture in his mind. One black car. One Dodge car, a sedan. His breathing slowed and grew deeper, and the sound of the crackling fire receded into silence. Sooner than he’d expected, there came the familiar swooping sensation as though he were falling. Experienced in astral travel, True relaxed and allowed his etheric body to fall.
A smallish man, pale white like a fish’s belly…a black sedan…in his mind’s eye True zeroed in on his patient’s description of the car, and soon the idea came into his mind that he was standing in the presence of a black late-model Dodge sedan. Someone was sitting in the car, but the figure was shrouded in reddish-black fog. The landscape in back of the car was an empty and desolate wasteland, and it came to him that the reddish-black fog meant death and destruction, and that the wasteland wasn’t a real physical place but an analog, a mental picture that symbolized spiritual desolation. From the back, True approached the car to check the license plate: PS7, then a 3 and what looked like a 6, but he couldn’t keep the image in his mind from blurring. When his vision cleared he started to walk toward the front of the car, and the dark fog lifted long enough for him to see the pale man who sat in the driver’s seat.
Reacting to True’s presence, the man turned his head to face him and his mouth moved, but in dreamlike fashion, and only a faint, tinny sound reached True’s ears. True concentrated on the movements of the man’s lips and the words penetrated his consciousness with a roar: my way is death and my will be done! My way is death and my will be done!
Suddenly True was standing in total darkness. He knew he was in a basement, for he smelled dampness and felt the hard concrete floor under his feet. The pitch darkness was disorienting. He put out a hand to touch something, anything, and felt an iron grip clamp over his wrist. The grip jerked him off balance and he felt himself falling, falling. The back of his head struck the concrete floor and for an instant he blacked out.
When he came to he found that the unknown force had been busy, for his hands were bound behind his back and his feet were roped together, and something heavy lay across his neck like a yoke. Cursing and kicking, he struggled against the ropes and the yoke, and didn’t hear the swish of the angled blade, but at the last instant he looked up and saw the massive steel wedge of the guillotine descend toward his neck. He squirmed but couldn’t move out of the way in time and the shining blade sliced through the flesh of his throat, split the cartilage of his Adam’s apple, and smashed through the vertebrae underneath, crashing with a bang into the bottom half of the yoke around his neck.
True’s body arched. His long limbs thrashed, and the overstuffed chair tipped over and spilled him onto the floor. Against the real-life sensory input the vision of the guillotine evaporated, but the metallic taste of his own blood lingered upon his tongue.
His cheek pressed against the warm stones of the hearth, he lay quiet for a time, and as soon as he felt able to move he sat up and explored his body. A raised tender line like a welt ran around his neck where the phantom blade had cut him and there were rope burns on his wrists where he had struggled against his confinement. Otherwise, he was unharmed. The guillotine had been an illusion, but illusions could kill if the victim was too frightened. Even knowing this, he had still been caught in the pale man’s trap as easily as a mosquito into a frog’s mouth. He’d underestimated the witch-man’s power and had been too prideful of his own, and it had nearly cost him his life. Deeply ashamed, he knelt in front of the fire, absorbing the radiant heat into his body. Anger, fear, doubt—he allowed his emotions to flow through him without resistance until he felt he could think clearly again.
The journey of True’s life had been a hard and lonely one. Now in the afternoon of that journey he had reached the place where he wanted to be and was living the life he wanted to live. He had much to lose and nothing to gain by taking up this battle, especially one that he stood a powerful chance of losing. He had cured the waitress and the man with thorns in his face. Why not let it stop there? Let the pale man do whatever he wanted. Innocent people died every day, all over the world. What was that to him?
The fire faded away to a lemon-colored glow. Night crept into the cabin, and True continued to kneel on the warm hearth, his face in his hands. He didn’t believe in the loving, compassionate God of his own generation or in the vengeful punishing Being of his forefathers. He did believe in other phases of existence and in the survival of the soul after death, and he believed in good and evil forces because he had seen too much not to believe in them, but it had never occurred to him to pray to any of them, nor did it now. He was praying to the only person who had ever loved him.
Great grandfather, help me.
The silent night wrapped itself gently around him, and tears stung his eyes.
Great grandfather, tell me what I have to do.
Outside, the rising wind blew across the top of the chimney with a hollow, moaning sigh.
Great grandfather, I don’t want to take up this fight.
The fire was dead, and a random gust of cold air wended its way down the chimney and curled itself around him like an icy feather.
I want to leave well enough alone.
The wind moaned, and True smelled vomit. The side of his face itched. He rubbed it with his finger and felt the prick of a thorn. Another tendril of freezing wind reached down the chimney and stroked his face. He felt something hard bulging under the skin in his armpit, feeling like a hard rubber ball under the skin. The lump was painful to the touch. Somewhere in the darkened room, he heard the croak of a raven.
He could bear it no more. He jumped up and switched on the lamp. There was no raven, no thorn, and no lump. Forget the witch man, save yourself, his traitorous mind whispered, and in that moment another vision bore down upon him with the thrust and power of a freight train: Rachel, her face covered with weeping thorns, her slender naked body writhing away from…he couldn’t bear to look.
An invisible hand lay softly upon his shoulder. “True,” whispered the wind in the chimney. It was his great grandfather’s voice, and in it was his answer.
Chapter Eighteen
“It started with Naomi’s coat.” The old man cleared his throat, and Rachel waited patiently for him to resume his narrative. “It was a cold winter, colder than a witch’s—colder’n the dickens. My wife’s coat had a button missing. I took a scrap of wood, carved it into a circle and put some holes in it, you know, for the thread. It wasn’t pretty, she said, so I made a pattern on it ‘cause women like pretty things. Her friends saw that button and they wanted the same thing. They all had to have handmade buttons just like my wife’s. That’s what gave me the idea of selling them.”
“They’re beautiful.” Rachel fingered the beaded edge of the sample button he had given her. “How do you do such fine carving?”
“Oh, dental tools. They’re good for somethin
g besides teeth.”
“Do you plan your designs beforehand or do you just start carving?”
“I just do it, and when I’m working the pattern grows itself.”
“This apple tree is very clever.” Rachel held up the button. The old man had worked the holes of the button into the design to appear as apples.
“I couldn’t hide the holes so I make them part of the pattern. Why hide what’s plain as day?”
“Do you use other materials beside wood?”
“Leather, bone, shell, plastic, even stone sometimes, but I have to use a regular drill for stone. Here’s another button for you, Mrs. Jeffries. Keep it, show your friends,” he urged. “My buttons are just the thing for a vintage coat or sweater.”
Rachel accepted the second button, which looked like aged ivory. The face of it showed a thatched hut shaded by a lushly fronded palm tree. The tiny waves upon the distant ocean curled and thrashed, throwing bits of spray into the air. A minuscule flying fish frozen in mid-leap hung over one of the billows. “This is amazing! But it can’t be real ivory.”
“Everyone knows real ivory’s illegal. It’s a fake.”
“How do you do it?”
“I brush burnt sienna oil paint over a bone button and rub most of the paint off, but it stains just enough to look like the real thing. It does look real, doesn’t it?”
She had to agree. “I have one last question for you, Mister Geller. Why should I buy buttons from you? I can get nice inexpensive buttons at any fabric store. What makes yours special?”