by Harvey Click
Amy glanced around and saw that several men and women were now gathered in the darkness, all of them armed, and she knew that if she tried to bolt she wouldn’t get far. So what was it going to be for her—just a hard flogging with the switch or would it be hot rocks pressed against her flesh? She saw Ivan wheeling the barrow full of them into the circular shed.
The man with the grizzled beard was already undressing, so Amy turned her back on him and pulled off her T-shirt and shorts. “Underwear too,” Neoma said, so she pulled off her panties and stood there looking at the circle of men and women half hidden in the shadows, all of them staring at her.
“Into the hut,” Neoma said, and Amy followed John and Jake into the small building. A shallow circular pit in the center of the dirt floor was filled with red-hot rocks, and the air was sweltering.
Neoma followed Amy inside and shut the door behind her, and now the little circular room felt like a blazing oven. “Sit,” she said, and Amy and the two men sat down on the dirt floor around the glowing pit.
Neoma poured a pitcher of liquid over the hot rocks, making a thick cloud of scorching hot steam that filled the room. Standing above the pit, her face weirdly illuminated by the glow of the rocks but nearly hidden by steam, she began to chant. It was a simple plainsong melody with words in a language that was maybe Latin, Amy couldn’t tell, but it was strangely soothing, like a hypnotic lullaby that made her eyelids feel heavy and her body feel light.
The steam was so intense that she thought her skin might blister off, but the song was so comforting that she didn’t care about the heat. The chanting stopped, and then she was dimly aware that Neoma had left the hut and shut the door behind her, but she didn’t care about that either.
Whatever Neoma had poured on the rocks wasn’t plain water, because the steam had a heady, suffocating odor of strange herbs or incense. It seemed to have some sort of psychotropic properties, because Amy’s mind felt as cloudy as the tiny room. She felt her heart pounding like a hammer and was afraid she might be dying, but then she seemed to collapse into herself and became utterly weightless, like a warm ball of living energy peering down from the sky.
She was peering down at Billy’s house, and though there was no light except what came from the moon she could see the roof clearly and noticed that some shingles were missing and the mortar between the chimney bricks needed to be repaired. She smelled the air and listened alertly to find out if the crying man or the listener was in the house, but no, it seemed to be empty now, dark and sad and empty.
She wondered how she could be up here so high, peering down at the roof, and then she realized that she was perched like an owl in a branch of the tall maple in the front yard. As soon as the word owl occurred to her, she spread her wings and took to the air.
It was an amazing feeling, flying, but she was certain that she had done it before, somehow, somewhere, if only in her dreams. She was soaring above Billy’s field of marijuana, the night air sleek against her feathers, her eyes so sharp that she could see each separate leaf of each plant if she looked closely, but she knew that wasn’t what she was looking for.
She flew to the woods on top of the hill and perched in a tall pine to rest her wings. No sign of any burnt rubble here, and she swooped to another tree and looked again, and then to another tree. No, no rubble, no cooking shed, it was all a lie. Billy had been growing marijuana but not cooking meth.
She flew then to the knoll where she had lain hidden that afternoon and peered down at the tree where monstrosities had devoured Jerry Jefferson. There were no magi there now, and even the bones were gone, maybe carted away and buried by Sam Ebbing, that dirty bastard, but she could still see the chalk circle glowing faintly in the moonlight.
She sat there for a long while, perched in the fallen tree on the knoll, thinking that now she’d be able to fly wherever her wings would take her to search for her brother, wherever he was. Then the night air began to feel hotter and still hotter, hot and suffocating like steam, and she was choking and gasping on the dirt floor of the sweat hut.
The door was open now, and Ivan was standing above her. She looked around and saw that the two men were gone. Ivan grasped her hand, helped her to her feet, and led her out of the hut.
She looked around, dizzy and reeling, her thirsty tongue nearly glued to the roof of her mouth. The older man with the grizzled beard was nearly dressed already, buttoning up his shirt, and John was pulling on his underwear, his backside blazing with pink welts.
“What were you tonight, John, and where were you?” Neoma asked.
“I was a deer again, just like last night,” the boy said. “I was standing in the trees beside the Phillips house.”
“What did you see?” she asked.
“Nothing much. A gray car pulled up after a while and two men went inside. Didn’t seem to be nothing much going on.”
“Jake?” Neoma said.
The bearded man said, “I was a coyote again the way I was before. I was prowling ‘round the old factory, but the windows is covered up so I couldn’t see nothing. I heard plenty though. There was snarling and howling and teeth snapping inside like all hell was breaking loose.”
“What about you, Mary? What were you and where did you go?”
“I was an owl,” Amy said as she pulled on her T-shirt. “First I was looking down at Billy’s house and then I flew to his woods and then I sat on the same knoll where I was this afternoon. The bones are gone but the chalk circle is still there.”
“Was anything else different?” Neoma asked.
“No. The house was dark even though I left the lights on. Maybe somebody turned them off or maybe the electric has been shut off.”
“Okay, you men are done for the night,” Neoma said. “Mary, you come with me.”
Amy followed her to the house and said, “Can I please have the rest of my water now? I’m so thirsty I feel sick.”
“You can have one glass now and another one after your shower.”
Apparently Neoma had forgotten that she’d already had one and a half glasses and was only supposed to be allowed one and a half more. Amy felt as if she had won a great victory. A moment later Ivan came out of the kitchen with a very tall glass of water, and it even had ice cubes in it.
She sat on the sofa and sipped her cold water. It tasted better than any wine she had ever drunk, and though she wanted to gulp it she forced herself to take tiny sips, swishing each one around on her parched tongue like a connoisseur savoring a priceless Burgundy.
Neoma sat across the room from her, her beautifully sculpted chin resting on her fingers, watching her with a cool, unreadable gaze that would have made Amy uncomfortable, except she was too thirsty and exhausted to feel any other sort of discomfort.
At last the delicious water was gone, but there were still four small ice cubes in addition to the one that Amy was rolling around in her mouth like a delectable piece of candy. She felt incredibly tired and strangely calm despite the horrors of the day.
“You can have your shower now,” Neoma said. “Bring your suitcase upstairs.”
Somebody had brought it in from her car and left it in the living room. Amy’s arms felt so weak that she could barely haul it upstairs to the bathroom. It was shabby and outdated like the rest of the house, but the shower felt good, washing away the greasy ointment that had become sticky with sweat. She washed her hair too, towel dried it, and then brushed it at the stained mirror of the old medicine cabinet. She put on a clean T-shirt and a pair of gray cotton sweat shorts.
She was almost too tired to go back downstairs, but she did because she had been promised another glass of water, and she wanted it even more than sleep. It was waiting for her on the dining room table, another tall cold glass, though the ice cubes were nearly melted. She sat down and drank.
Neoma was seated across from her at the table, and again she watched Amy drink with the same steady and unreadable gaze, something almost like a faint smile on her lips, maybe the smile of a c
at watching a mouse. Amy looked away and concentrated on the marvelous wetness of her water. Too soon it was gone. She let the last pebbles of ice slide into her mouth and set the glass on the table.
“Bedtime,” Neoma said. “You’ll sleep with me.”
Amy looked up at her eyes and suddenly understood what their steady gaze meant.
“I think I’ll just sleep on the sofa,” she said.
“No. I can’t trust you, so I’ll keep you close. You’ll sleep with me.”
“I’m not attracted to women,” Amy said.
“You are,” Neoma said. “But I won’t press the issue, at least not tonight.”
Amy followed her upstairs and carried her suitcase from the bathroom to a medium-sized bedroom with one regular-sized bed. A small lamp glowed dimly on a nightstand, and a small air conditioner hummed in one of the windows, making the room much cooler than the rest of the house.
Neoma unzipped her jeans and pulled them off. She took off her blue work shirt and stood facing Amy, wearing nothing but a taunting half-smile. Her body looked perfect, tall and ideally shaped like a classical Grecian statue.
“I think I’ll sleep on the floor,” Amy said.
“Suit yourself.”
Neoma pulled two blankets from a cedar chest and tossed them on the floor at the foot of the bed. Amy folded one of them into a long rectangle, put it on the bare wood floor, lay down and pulled the other blanket over her. The blanket beneath her was too thin to provide much cushioning. She saw Neoma sitting up in her bed watching her with a smirk, her back resting comfortably against two or three plump pillows.
“Can’t I at least have a pillow?” Amy asked.
“No. I don’t want my nice pillows on the dirty floor.”
Amy got up, unlatched her suitcase, and pulled out a pair of jeans. She rolled them up into a ball and angrily shoved it under her head as a pillow. Neoma’s pettiness over a pillow had been one insult too many, and Amy’s temper flared as the zipper of the jeans pressed against her ear.
“O royal and mighty highness, I know you hate questions from your lowly and worthless subjects,” she said, her voice sharp with sarcasm. “But may I please ask just one? Pray tell me, great queen, what dreadful sin that poor boy committed to earn his whipping. I need to know so I don’t commit the same sin and offend your gracious majesty.”
“Oh, he didn’t do anything wrong,” Neoma said. “Tonight was his second cleansing, and whipping is always part of the second cleansing. Tomorrow night I’ll whip you.”
She shut off the lamp on the nightstand and added, “I look forward to it.”
Chapter 9
When Amy got up, she found Neoma downstairs eating bacon and eggs at the dining room table while peering at her laptop computer. She was again wearing blue jeans and a blue work shirt with the sleeves cut off, but this one looked fresh and clean. The man with the short red beard was also at the table, staring at Amy while he buttered his toast.
“No food for you today, but you can drink all the water you want,” Neoma said. “In a little while you’ll be taken to a bank. As I told you, I want a thousand dollars for saving your butt, but if you want any more money for yourself, then I suggest you draw everything you can out of your checking account or savings or credit cards or whatever. After today you’ll have a new identity and banking won’t be an option.”
While Amy was trying to make sense out of this, Ivan emerged from the kitchen and set a glass of ice water on the table in front of her. She drank it, staring enviously at Neoma’s food and coffee.
“Can’t I at least have some coffee?” she asked.
“No.”
“Can I have a cigarette?”
“Nope.” Neoma wiped a bit of egg from her plate with the last chunk of her toast, ate it, and said, “Since you’ll be leaving the compound you need to anoint your body and hair with incense ointment again. It seems you don’t want me to touch you, so I’ve asked Ivan to help you rub it on.”
“No fucking way,” Amy said. “You can help me do it.”
“As you wish.” Neoma picked up a jar of ointment from the table and said, “Well then, get your clothes off.”
The man with the short red beard looked up eagerly from his plate.
“No,” Amy said. “We do it somewhere private or we don’t do it.”
Something, maybe the sudden firmness of her voice, had caused Neoma to smile. It was a closed-lip smile, but at least it didn’t look like a smirk.
“As you wish,” she said.
There was a downstairs bathroom that Amy hadn’t noticed before, obviously an addition because the fixtures looked fairly new, though cheap and utilitarian. She took off her clothes and began to smear on ointment, expecting Neoma to try to humiliate her by rubbing her fingers where they didn’t belong, but this didn’t happen. Neoma respectfully watched with her arms crossed, and when Amy was done she touched up only the part of her back that Amy couldn’t reach.
“Do you know the exact time of day you were born?” Neoma asked.
“Huh?”
“You heard me.”
“My mother said exactly one minute after midnight.”
“Interesting,” Neoma said. “Okay then, get dressed and get your purse. Your car’s waiting outside.”
Amy was surprised and annoyed when she stepped out and saw that Neoma had literally meant “your car”—her own Toyota was sitting there with two men in front and another standing by the side. He opened a back door, and after she got in he climbed into the backseat with her.
“Hey, you don’t have any right to mess with my car,” she said, but nobody answered her.
It occurred to her that these dumb hicks working for Neoma probably didn’t own any decent cars, but that still didn’t make it right. The driver seemed to be waiting for something, and while they sat there idling she noticed that all three of the men were dressed in black and wearing obvious disguises. The one beside her had a thick brown mustache that was pasted on crookedly, and the two in front wore thick black beards that clearly came from a costume store. She was disappointed: she hadn’t expected anything so amateurish from Neoma.
She heard a car start beside the house, and a moment later an SUV pulled in front of them. Maybe it was intended to ride point, looking for any trouble ahead, because Amy’s Toyota followed it up the lane and onto the road.
As soon as they were on the road the man sitting beside her pulled a piece of black cloth out of his pocket and tied it over her eyes as a blindfold. She didn’t say anything—what was the point? Obviously they didn’t want her to know where the compound was located, and obviously she wouldn’t be able to change their minds.
They drove for a long time it seemed, maybe an hour and a half, mostly on bumpy back roads at first, but later on smooth highways where she could hear plenty of traffic. Eventually they slowed down, and she knew they were in a city because they kept stopping for lights.
The man sitting beside her pulled off her blindfold, and she saw that all three men were now wearing dark sunglasses that made them look even more obvious and foolish. A minute later the driver parked at a curb and shut off the engine.
They were sitting across a street from a branch of the bank where Amy kept her account. Apparently Neoma had looked through her purse for her checkbook to find out where she banked.
The man in the backseat and the one in the passenger seat got out and followed her into the bank. She had a small savings account as well as her checking, and the transaction took some time because the teller had to go to the manager’s office to get permission to close both accounts for an out-of-state customer. Probably the fact that her skin and hair were greasy with strange-smelling ointment didn’t help to ease his suspicions.
Amy was feeling nervous and jumpy, from hunger as well as the situation, and while the teller was gone she turned around and looked at the two men who had come in with her. One of them was standing in line right behind her, and the other was leaning against a nearby check-wri
ting table with one hand in his jacket pocket as if he was clutching a gun. With their dark glasses and cheap disguises they looked like dumb gangsters in a comedy, and she noticed that a guard standing near the door was watching them carefully. If this was the best that Neoma could do, she wondered if she wouldn’t be safer on her own.
The manager came out with the teller, looked at her driver’s license, and approved the withdrawal. The teller counted out the money, two thousand five hundred and fifty-two in all, and put it in an envelope.
She slipped it into her purse, and as she stepped away from the counter, the two men immediately were on either side of her to accompany her out of the building. What a clown show, she thought. Did they think she was going to try and make a run for it? Where would she run? As soon as they were outside, each one grasped one of her arms to escort her to the car.
The driver pulled quickly away from the curb and shot around a corner as if he thought they were being pursued. The guy in the passenger seat called someone on his cellphone and said, “Five minutes.”
Soon the nice business district gave way to an area that was far from nice: boarded-up houses, graffiti, and clusters of gangbangers loitering on dirty sidewalks. The driver turned into the parking lot of a boarded-up muffler shop, pulled around behind it, and stopped beside the SUV that they had followed out of the compound.
They pulled her out rather roughly and moved her to the SUV. Now she was sitting in back between two of them, and the third guy was in the passenger seat. She recognized the driver of the SUV—it was the man with the short red beard who had been eating breakfast with Neoma.
He pulled out of the parking lot in a hurry, and she yelled, “Hey, what the fuck, you can’t leave my car back there! Somebody will steal it!”
“You no longer have a car,” the driver said.
“I want my goddamn car back!” she yelled.
The man on her left was trying to get his hand over her mouth, and she smashed her fist into his right ear.
“Damn!” he yelled.
He and the other guy were trying to grab her wrists, but she managed to punch the man on her right in the mouth before they were able to get a pair of plastic handcuffs on her.