“No way,” said Steve.
“Sure, this is it. Go on up the drive.”
Steve twisted around to look at Ghost. “You’re tryin’ to tell me a witch owns this place?”
Ghost looked hurt. “Miz Catlin’s not a witch. She was friends with my grandmother. You think my grandmother was a witch?”
Steve remained tactfully silent.
Ghost scowled. “Well, anyway. Miz Catlin just knows about medicine, that’s all.”
Steve maneuvered the T-bird into a wide circle of gravel at the top of the driveway, trying not to run over any of the chrysanthemums that nodded in the sun behind a tiny white picket fence. As he got out, another goose pecked at the toe of his boot, then flapped up onto the hood of the car and fixed him with a baleful eye.
“Stare at him,” Ghost said. “They won’t bite you if you keep staring at them.”
Steve backed away. “They bite?”
“Not really. They hiss at you, mostly. The only time geese are ever dangerous is when you happen to be standing on the edge of a cliff. I heard about a guy who almost got killed that way.”
“By geese?”
“Yeah, there was a whole flock of them coming after him. All hissing and cackling and stabbing at his ankles with their big ol’ beaks. He didn’t know you had to stare them right in the eye, and he panicked. They backed him right over a fifty-foot cliff.”
“So how come he didn’t die?”
“This guy had wings,” said Ghost. “He flew away.”
Steve sighed with the air of one long-suffering but patient.
“Miz Catlin?” Ghost said, putting his head around the screen door. “You here, Miz Catlin?”
“GHOST-CHILD!”
A tiny old lady came barrelling out of the store’s dimness and launched herself into Ghost’s outstretched arms. Ghost lifted her off the floor and hugged her hard, knocking her big flowered hat off. Steve picked it up and held it awkwardly until Miz Catlin’s little sneakered feet were on the floor again.
She adjusted the hat over her long gray hair, smiling up at Ghost. “How the hell did you ever get so big, child? You grow another inch every time I see you.” She turned to Steve. “I was there when this kid saw his first light. My sister Lexy delivered him. I gave his mama a spoonful of motherwort in wine, but there weren’t no need. He was the easiest baby I ever seen. Once I pulled his caul off, he just laid there and watched us all with them holy blue eyes. I gave him a decoction of pomegranate rind for the runs once. Ate too many of my fresh green apples and couldn’t stay off the pot for ten minutes at a time. He weren’t but this high.” Miz Catlin held her hand a couple of feet off the floor.
The little lady herself wasn’t much taller; the top of her flowered hat reached about to Steve’s rib cage. Steve thought he remembered hearing this story before, but he smiled at Miz Catlin. Ghost was studying the ceiling, the rose-and-vine-patterned wallpaper, the jars of bright penny candy on the shelves. He saw Steve looking at him and scuffed his toe on the wooden floor.
Miz Catlin disengaged herself from Ghost’s arms. “You and your good-looking friend just come out to brighten up an old lady’s day, or you need some medicine?”
“It’s my wisdom teeth.”
“O Lord. Let me see ’em.” She peered into Ghost’s mouth, prodded his gums with a wrinkled forefinger. “You’re lucky. Got a big mouth. You won’t have to get ’em pulled. I’ll make up that balm directly. You want to poke around in the back room like you used to?”
A crazy light came into Ghost’s eyes. “Shit, yeah! Steve, wait till you see what’s back there.”
Miz Catlin’s dried-apple face registered astonishment. “This isn’t Steve? That skinny kid who used to hang around with you all the time? Well, age surely made you handsome, Mister Steve Finn.” The old lady stared at Steve with such frankness that he wanted to look away, but he thought that might be rude. Finally Miz Catlin giggled like a little girl and waved her hand at them. “Listen to me—I never could give up flirtin’. Anyway, you kids take a good look back there.” She indicated the contents of the front room: baskets of hand-dipped candles, patchwork quilts, potpourris. “All this stuff, it’s for the tourists. Back in the back—that’s my real stock. Ghost’ll show you. He knows.”
After the white-painted, sun-dappled walls of the front room, the back of the store seemed dark, the air heavy and oppressive. There was a scent of dry antiseptic dust, of strange oily spirits. Of herbs. As Steve’s eyes got used to the light, he realized that he and Ghost were standing in a room lined with thousands of small boxes and bottles. There were shelves crammed with them, tall glass-fronted cabinets displaying them, open drawers stuffed with them.
“It’s all medicine,” Ghost said with reverence. “Antique patent medicine. New ones, too. Herb remedies. The stock of a hundred old-time pharmacies. Miz Catlin’s got it all right here.” He stood in the middle of the room swaying gently from side to side, seeming to take in the essence of the place. His hands hung limp at his sides.
Soon Ghost’s eyes seemed to go transparent. Steve thought that if he looked close enough he could see all the way through to the whorls of Ghost’s brain, to the vaulted chamber of Ghost’s skull. The first time Steve had seen his friend go into this state, when they were kids, it had alarmed him. He thought he was either watching the start of an epileptic fit or Ghost was about to die on him. Now he was used to it. Ghost was just getting real heavy into some mind-groove, as their friend Terry might have put it. Other people thought hard, sometimes, but Ghost tranced out. Steve watched him for a moment, then shrugged and started exploring the room.
He found big brown bottles with murky contents gone to powder, little bottles of heavy blue and green glass, cardboard boxes whose corners had gone softly ragged with age, their colors sifting down to the dusty wooden floor to mingle with the cobwebs. Tucked into odd corners of the shelves were all manner of pharmaceutical curios: brass weights and measures, stained mortars and pestles, a glass globe full of brightly colored pills that looked like candy, a scale whose sign, YOUR WEIGHT AND FORTUNE, was almost obscured by dust. A row of large amber bottles, all marked in a flowing black script: ELIXIR MALTO-PEPSIN, AQ. ROSAE AND GLYC, HEXATONE. A drawer full of patent medicine bearing once-bright labels of yellow and red and green, fabulous claims, long arcane lists of ingredients. In a blue box stained with what must be rusty water marks, DOCTOR DeBARR’S MANDRAKE BLOOD AND LIVER PILLS. In a big bottle of pure white glass, NOAH’S LINIMENT—FOR ALL CREATION—MAN OR BEAST.
“Come and look at this stuff,” Steve told Ghost. “It’s got something in it called uva ursi. What the hell is uva ursi?”
Ghost didn’t answer. He was still in the middle of the room swaying. “Aloes,” he said softly. “Bear’s-foot root, elm bark, gentian, Jamaican ginger root . . .”
“Look at this shit,” Steve said. “ ‘Powdered Nutgall Suppositories.’ Nice, huh?”
“Indian rhubarb, nux vomica, quassia chips, asafoetida, peppermint…”
Steve saw a little brown bottle on a high shelf. “ ‘Extract of Cannabis’!” He reached for the bottle.
“Leave it alone… mullein leaf, boneset leaf, senna pods, anise, snakeroot… liverwort.” Ghost shook himself and opened his eyes. “Sorry. I was smelling.”
“Balm’s ready!” Miz Catlin called a few minutes later.
Ghost took a final sniff of the room’s delicate crumbling scent. As they turned to leave, Steve stepped onto the YOUR WEIGHT AND FORTUNE scale and dug in his pocket for a penny. “It doesn’t work,” said Ghost. “It broke a long time ago.” But Steve had already put the coin in. The scale clattered, clanked, ratcheted. A yellowed card fell out of the slot.
“It never did that before,” Ghost said.
Steve handed him the card. Ghost read it twice, first silently, then aloud: “ ‘Pain lies ahead for you and your beloved.’ ” Ghost’s eyes were dark and troubled.
“Big fuckin’ deal,” said Steve. “I don’t have a beloved.�
�� He crumpled the card.
Miz Catlin eyed them suspiciously as they came out of the back room. “Somethin’ the matter?”
“Your scale gave Steve a bad fortune,” Ghost said. He told her what had been printed on the card.
She shook her head. “Well, I wouldn’t pay it too much mind. That old thing usually stays broke, but once in a while it gets temperamental. You can predict a passel of woe in anyone’s life if you’ve the inclination.” She stared at Steve, and her eyes sharpened. “You, though—I remember what Deliverance said about you. I don’t have the gift like her and Ghost, but I can see it too. You’re hotheaded, and you let your temper lead you. Don’t listen to your good heart as much as you ought to. Deliverance said you’d hurt somebody someday, no doubt about it—but that you’d end up hurtin’ yourself worst of all.”
The drive back to town was subdued. The day had clouded over, grown muggy and stifling. Steve’s hangover was starting to come back. Ghost let the guitar lie on the floor. From time to time he hung his head out the window and checked the sky, his nostrils flaring anxiously, trying to scent rain.
Ghost knew the next rain would bring on a cold spell; soon after that it would be time to batten down for the winter.
“What the fuck is that?” said Steve when they were halfway home.
Ghost looked. They were past the spot and over the swell of the road before he registered what he had seen: a lone angular figure huddled behind a flower stand. ROSES, said the painted wooden sign. The figure was tall, pale, wrapped entirely in black. Black cloak, black hat, big dark sunglasses. Even his hands were sheathed in black gloves.
“Some fun, huh,” said Steve, and nervously cranked up his window. The air in the T-bird grew thick, smothering. Ghost didn’t know why the figure at the flower stand gave him a sick feeling, but he did know that such feelings seldom came to him without a reason. The worm of worry for Ann was still gnawing away in him too. And until he knew the reason, there was nothing he could do about it. Ghost put his forehead against the window and didn’t think again until they were home.
17
Morning on a sunny road with the music cranked up and the wine flowing free. Morning in this new world without long days at school and wasted evenings spent smoking too many cigarettes at Skittle’s. Morning, and someone to wake up with, three someones with their warm friendly bodies and their interesting, meaty smell. Nothing realized now that they smelled of blood, both old and fresh, and he found himself getting used to it, liking it. And at last he was in the South, with its green cathedrals of kudzu and its railroad tracks to clatter over at eighty miles an hour.
Around lunchtime Zillah passed out tiny squares of paper—blotter, he said. “Crucifix” from New York. Molochai and Twig gulped theirs down. Nothing looked thoughtfully at his. He had only taken acid twice, weak stuff called Yin/Yang, bought off Jack for three dollars a hit. Then he shrugged. The tempo of his days would be different from now on; he might as well enjoy what came with them. He touched the square of paper to his tongue and let it dissolve there.
Soon afterward they stopped at a Waffle House. Molochai wanted pie, and Twig requested a burger cooked very rare, but Zillah ordered only a glass of water and Nothing did not dare eat anything. Already he could feel the acid beginning to tickle inside him.
Molochai and Twig spread their fingers on the greasy tabletop, laughing over some obscure private joke. Molochai started opening packets of sugar. Zillah was quiet, but Nothing could feel his gaze, green and hot and somehow demanding. Nothing toyed with the cream pitcher, shredded the corner of a paper napkin. What should he do? What did Zillah want him to do?
He looked at Molochai and Twig, hoping for some kind of clue, but they were tussling. Arguing over who had more room in the plastic booth, it seemed. “I only have one inch—”
“I know you only have one inch, stupid, why are you telling me about your dick?”
Nothing’s stomach tightened and his head swam. This was going to make the other times he’d tripped look like children’s games, like dreams of dreams. Thousands of tiny fingers came alive inside him, crawling. He rubbed his hands over his face. His skin felt numb, tight, rubbery. His throat was closing. He breathed deep and with an effort was able to swallow. The spit ran down his throat, syrupy, slicking its way along the passages of his body. He started wondering about something he’d never thought of before: where did spit go when he swallowed? Did it all go to his stomach, and did that mean his stomach was full of spit?
He wanted to stop thinking.
He stared across the table at Molochai and Twig, who appeared to be primping. Twig took out an eyeliner pencil, pried Molochai’s left eye open, and drew a shaky line along the tender edge of the lower lid. Molochai sat through it without a protest. Despite their squabbling, the two seemed to trust each other unquestioningly.
Nothing’s gaze dropped to the table. At some point the others had gotten their food and devoured it; the remains of their meal lay there, mangled. Bits of Twig’s hamburger, fragments of meat and onion stuck to bread stained pink. The ruins of Molochai’s pie, smears of strawberry bleeding into smudges of whipped cream, gory as a roadkill. In the midst of the carnage rose Zillah’s glass, immaculate, free from fingerprints, half full of cold clear water.
Molochai put his fingers into the pie and licked them. He smiled across the table at Nothing. His eyes seemed all pupil, black-ringed and enormous, hectically shiny. There was red goo in the spaces between Molochai’s teeth: pie filling. It reminded Nothing of the bottle hidden under the mattress in the back of the van, still half full. That taste rose again in his mouth. Sharing their weird blood cocktail somehow made him feel closer to them than any drug or kinky sex act could. It made him more a part of their psychedelic nighttime world.
For the blood was the life—
He frowned. Where had that thought come from, out of what acid-swirled corner of his brain? A feathery touch slid up his thigh. Zillah was smiling at him too, a smile like the Mona Lisa’s, if the Mona Lisa had crazy green eyes and was blasted out of her mind on Crucifix acid.
“Are you having fun?” asked Zillah.
“Sure,” said Nothing, and realized that he was. He marvelled at how the world could shift in an instant. A moment ago he’d been getting tied up in mind knots, half-afraid of his new friends. His friends who were more exciting than anyone he had known before, their company more intoxicating because somehow they were like him. They accepted him. This was what he had wished for on nights alone in his room, rubbing the ash of incense between his fingers, drifting among the stars on the ceiling, bleeding from the wrist or from somewhere deep inside. What was there to be afraid of?
They got back in the van, cranked the music up again, and drove. Later in the evening they took another round of Crucifix, and sometime after midnight Nothing was just coming into the thick of his trip. He lay curled up on the mattress, his hands pressed to his eyes, watching the brilliant checkered patterns that swirled in the darkness behind his eyelids. His insides shifted; he thought he felt the ends of his intestines twitching. His mind plummeted, raced, soared. He wanted to raise his head and talk to Zillah, but just then a new design swirled up from the depths of blindness all black and silver and crimson, and he could only lie there and watch it.
“Cool,” said Molochai happily, as if he too could see Nothing’s designs. But Molochai was out of his head. He and Twig had taken two doses of Crucifix each, and they were tripping hard. Molochai might have been talking about the luminous colored stars in the sky or the moth that had just smeared itself stickily across the windshield or the sweet taste in his mouth.
Twig snorted. “There’s no room for another hitchhiker. Anyway, we’ve already got one.”
“I want that one too,” said Molochai, enraptured. “His hair was full of flowers.”
“We don’t know quite what we’ve got, do we?” Zillah mused. “This would be a good chance to find out. If not—then more for us.”
Nothing d
idn’t know what they were talking about, but he felt the van lurch to a stop. Zillah’s warm breath touched Nothing’s ear. “Wake up. We have a surprise for you. We’re taking on a passenger.”
Nothing looked up. Molochai was opening the side door. The hitchhiker climbed in, staring at the colored stickers, the graffiti, the dark stains all over the walls and the mattress, as scared and eager as Nothing must have looked yesterday. He was a boy of thirteen or fourteen, a boy too small and thin for his years, a pale child whose feathery white-blond hair hung in his eyes, escaping in wisps from a blue bandanna. As Nothing watched, the boy lifted a delicate hand and took a long drag on his cigarette. His clove cigarette. His mouth would taste of ash and spice, and surely of his tears, as it used to. If it was him… if it was impossibly, magically him.
“Laine?” said Nothing.
“Omigod,” breathed the boy, and then they were hugging each other fiercely. Nothing was brushing Laine’s hair from his eyes, forgetting how Laine had annoyed him, how he had risen above the futility of his friends’ lives, how he had felt such scorn for their complacent desperation. He had not thought he was homesick, but now seeing Laine was almost like being back in his room. The damp salty taste of Laine’s mouth made him remember the stars on his ceiling. Tears. Laine’s mouth always tasted of tears.
“I found you,” Laine said. “I can’t believe I found you. I knew I would.”
“What happened to you?”
“I left the day after you did. When we dropped you off at the bus station, I realized you were the only thing in my life that wasn’t bullshit. You were the only one of that whole crowd I ever cared about. I had to get out of there too. I didn’t know if I’d ever find you, but I had to try.” Laine kissed him again, timidly touching Nothing’s lips with the wet tip of his tongue.
Nothing looked up. The other three were watching him avidly. Twig looked on with a mild predatory interest. Molochai’s mouth hung open; his teeth glistened with spit, and his cheeks were flushed pink. He looked almost healthy. But Zillah… Nothing tried to disentangle himself from Laine. Zillah was sitting up very straight, his black-nailed hands clenched on his knees, his eyes full of that cold green fire again.
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