“That happened this afternoon,” I told her, “Though I didn’t know for certain what to expect. For that matter, I didn’t even know that the portal would lead me back to this universe. What I did know was that if a furry little red-blooded mammal could live here, then I sure as hell could, too.”
“That makes sense.”
“That’s what I thought. So, I simply gathered the vine, pitched it into the portal and followed it in.”
“Where did you come out?”
“Near as I could figure, behind the site of the old research center, except that when I stumbled out of the woods, I was all the way out on Prescott somewhere.”
“Prescott? That’s about three miles from where we found the first portal.”
“I know.”
“I bet it’s the same one still. It’s just moved.”
“Probably. I don’t know. What difference does it make now?”
“What difference? Tony, we’ll need to find that portal again and figure out a way to shut it down. We can’t have an open door to the Eighth Sphere. Do you realize the potential consequences of that?”
“We don’t have to do it now, do we? I’d like to go home and take a long, hot shower first?”
She wrinkled her nose and nodded. “Yeah.” Then she cracked her window a little. “That might not be a bad idea.”
“Thank you.”
“So, what then?”
“I don’t know, then grab a bite to eat?”
“No, I mean what happened after you stumbled out of the woods.”
“Oh, that. Well, I started walking, of course. I tried to hitch a ride, but come on, look at me. I look like Charles Manson on a bad day. No one would pick me up. But that was okay. I’m used to walking. Done enough of it. I eventually bummed a dollar off a stranger and hopped a bus back into town. First thing I did was go to the house, but you weren’t there.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve sort of made Gloucester Beach my second home lately.”
“That’s what Ursula said.” I turned to Lilith and furrowed my brow. “Speaking of Ursula, what happened to her?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, she can do things now, things I know that you and no other witch can do.”
“Oh that.”
“Yes that. I called her from the house to see if she knew where you were, and do you know what she did?”
Lilith shrugged, but it seemed an easy guess for her. “She magically transported you from our house to hers in a blink?”
“That’s exactly right. How did she do that?”
“It’s a long story, but suffice to say, while you were gone, Ursula acquired the immense powers of the universe by absorbing the prime and quintessential elements.”
“She what?”
“Don’t worry. We’re working on a plan to mitigate that. It’s under control.”
“Really? Then why is it I don’t sense the conviction in your voice?”
“I have a handle on it,” she said, more sternly than the conversation warranted, confirming my suspicions that she did not have a handle on it.
As we got closer to the house, she asked me, “Do the guys know you’re back yet?”
“Yes. Dominic was home when Ursula umm….”
“Beamed you up?”
“Yeah, when she beamed me up. We called Carlos, and he came over right away.” I shook my head. “It’s a sad thing watching a grown man cry.”
She nodded. “I know. Carlos is a real softy deep down.”
“He is, but I was talking about me.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“So, how long ago was that?”
“I don’t know, half-hour maybe.”
“A half hour? How did you get to Gloucester so quickly?”
“Ursula did it. She just opened the atlas to Massachusetts Bay, put her finger down on Gloucester Beach and blinked. Next thing I knew, there I was, knee deep in the surf, walking toward the jetty.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. It was quicker than any portal.”
Lilith shook her head and smiled. “What do you know? She’s really getting the hang of it.”
“Hang of what?”
She shook her head again, this time to dismiss me. “I’ll fill you in later. Look, we’re almost home. You know it’s night now, Tony. You can take the sunglasses off.”
I reached for the glasses and adjusted the fit against the bridge of my nose. “No, I can’t, Lilith. I find the lights are too bright still. If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to leave them on.”
“Sure, no problem.” She smiled her approval. “Makes you look damn cool anyway.”
After pulling into the driveway and getting out, I waited for Lilith to come around to the front of the car. I took her by the arm, partly to keep her calm after what I needed to tell her next, and partly out of instinct to keep her from hitting me.
“Before we go in the house,” I said, “there’s something I have to tell you.”
“What?”
“There’s something in there.”
“Yeah, don’t worry. I know about that.”
“You do?”
“Yes. You want to tell me that you saw a squirrel in there. Well, I know. It snuck inside this morning when I went out to get the mail and accidentally left the door open. It’s no big deal.”
“Wait.” I pulled back on her arm to stop her. “Do you mean to tell me there’s a live squirrel in there?”
“Yes.”
“In the house?”
“Yes, Tony, in the house. It’s okay. I left the door ajar when I went to the beach. He’s probably long gone by now.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I bet that’s right.”
She jerked her arm free of my grip. “What’s wrong with you? Come on. Let’s go in. I gotta pee.”
“Lilith, wait. I think you should let me—”
That’s all I could get out before she pushed the door open and flipped on the overhead light.
“What the hell!”
I came up behind her to have a look and found the room in shambles; furniture tipped over, lamps busted, sofa cushions shredded. If not for the lack of powder burns and scorched walls, I’d have thought a bomb went off in there.
“I don’t believe it,” she said, shaking her head in dismay. “We’ve been vandalized.”
“No. I don’t think so.” I laced my arms around her waist and eased her back. “I think I can explain. You see, I didn’t tell you this, but—”
“Oh, my god. What is that?” She pointed to something that looked a lot like loose clumps of animal pelt scattered across the floor. “Is that fur?”
I winced involuntarily. “Yeah, I think it is.”
“And that. Is that a tail?”
I came around her and stepped into the room. “Yup,” I said, picking the thing up. “It’s a tail, all right. Probably squirrel.”
“I don’t get it. How did one little squirrel make all this—Whoa! Hello.” She stepped back and gestured a stab toward the corner of the room where, if I squinted hard, I could just make out his outline camouflaged behind a ficus. “Tony, please don’t tell me that thing in the corner is what I think it is?”
“What, that? Yeah, that’s Jerome.”
“Jerome?”
“Lilith, I can explain.”
“Explain? Tony, you brought a living creature from the Eighth Sphere back with you, into my house? What the hell were you thinking?”
“Good witch!” said Jerome. He came out from behind the ficus and padded up to Lilith with arms spread wide.
“Oh, no,” she said, palming his forehead to keep him at arm’s length. “Don’t good witch me, you lumpy-headed freak. Look what you did to our house.”
I took Jerome’s hand and walked him over to what was left of the sofa. “Jerome, sit.”
He pointed across the room and smiled a toothy grin. “Good witch!”
“Yes, I know, good witch, but right
now she’s a pissed off witch. Now just sit here and behave. I’ll deal with you later.”
I looked back to Lilith, who had already started picking up broken pieces of lamp and shredded pillows. “Lilith, I’m sorry. I tried to tell you before you opened the door.”
“Tell me what, Tony? That you brought an indigenous life form back with you from another dimension and that he was in my house, hunting squirrels and tearing the place apart?”
“Yes. No. I mean, I didn’t know you were keeping squirrels in the house now.”
She spun about on her heel and got her finger right up in my face. “Don’t you dare go there, mister.” She pointed at Jerome. “That is a wild animal. He may speak English, but he is not house trained. You had no right to bring him back with you, let alone bring him into my house.”
“You keep saying that. It’s my house, too, isn’t it?”
“I’m warning you, Tony. You’re this close.”
“All right, look.” I started collecting broken bits of knickknacks and righting tipped-over tables and chairs. “I made a mistake. I get it, but what was I to do? Jerome and I have been a team for five years and—”
“You mean five weeks.”
“No. I mean years. We’ve been through hell together. Just because I happen to stumble upon the portal home one day, that didn’t mean I should suddenly turn and say goodbye to the best friend I’d known since Carlos.”
“Carlos!” said Jerome. “Amigo!”
“Yes. Carlos is amigo,” I said, and I gestured for Jerome to crank it down a notch.
Lilith said, “Yes it did. That’s exactly what that meant. The minute you stumbled across that portal, you should have sat Jerome down, explained to him that your great run together was over and then said your goodbyes.”
“Well, maybe you’re right, but I just couldn’t do that. What’s done is done now. I can’t change that.”
“You can and you will.”
“Excuse me?”
“Tomorrow, I’m going out and I’m going to locate that portal, and when I do, that animal is going back where he belongs.”
“Animal? Come on, listen to yourself. You like Jerome. Since when is he just an animal to you?”
“Since he crossed over from another dimension and entered a world where he doesn’t belong.”
“But you don’t understand. You can’t just—”
“No, Tony. You don’t understand. How can you explain him to anyone? Where would he stay? What would you feed him? There’s only so many squirrels in New Castle.”
I gave her an uneasy shrug. “He doesn’t just eat squirrels. As it happens, he has a diverse appetite.”
My argument left her unmoved. She continued picking up the room without looking at me. “There’s no way in this world,” she said, “that it could ever work out. Besides, what makes you think he’d be happy here? This place is foreign to him. He’d never see another driget as long as he lived. Don’t you think he’d eventually get lonely, or worse, horny? Then what? Ho-ho, no.” She shuddered at the thought of it.
I didn’t know how to answer her. Her points were all valid. Bringing Jerome back probably was a mistake, but I couldn’t have left him behind any more than I could have left Carlos behind if the tables were turned.
I looked back at Jerome. His eyes had morphed into eyes that looked just like Lilith’s. He may have been an animal, as Lilith so delicately put it, but he was smart enough to know exactly what we were talking about. He also had a heart, this animal, the kind that beats harder just before it breaks. Just like mine.
I went over and took his hand. He didn’t resist.
“Come on, pal,” I said. “Let’s go outside and see if we can find a nice place for you to bed down for the night. Would you like that?”
He looked up at me and smiled, his pointed, serrated teeth spotted red with squirrel blood. “Bossman bed down, too?”
I smiled back at him. “For a little while, yeah. Bossman bed down, too.”
As we headed for the back door, I glanced back at Lilith. She had stopped picking stuff up. Her hands were free; her arms limp by her side. She had angled her body toward the bedroom, but she was looking at us. Her lips were thin and tight, the way I’d seen them so many times before when she was at her angriest. Yet her eyes seemed blank, cold, expressing the empty stare of a hollow victory.
Welcome back, I thought to myself, after having imagined a much different reception. Welcome the hell back.
I took Jerome outside and led him to a small storage shed at the back of the yard. I thought I’d find comfortable shelter for him there, but when I opened the door, I found its contents strewn about as though someone had picked the shed off the ground and shook it up crazy-like. I looked at Jerome and he at me. We both just shook our heads. I shut the door.
“Is okay,” Jerome said to me. “I sleep here.” He pointed to a tree that seemed strangely out of place, but for the life of me, I could not imagine why.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “That looks like a good place.”
I sat down at the base of the tree and waited for Jerome to do the same. Instead, he began picking up dry twigs and small branches and collecting them under his arms.
“Jerome. What are you doing?”
He looked at me as though I should know. “Bossman build fire?”
“Fire? No. We don’t need a fire. Come here.” I gave the ground next to me a gentle rap. “I want to talk to you.” He padded over to me and dropped the kindling. “Go on. Sit,” I said, “Please.”
He folded his legs and sat, looping his tail and using it as a seat cushion. “Bossman talk?”
“Yes, Jerome. Bossman talk.” I hiked my thumb up over my shoulder and pointed to the house. “Lilith’s mighty upset, you know.”
“Lilith good witch.”
“Yes, Lilith is a good witch most of the time, but she can do some bad things when she’s angry.”
“Witch angry at Jerome?”
“No, not so much. She’s angry with me, but I won’t lie to you, buddy. She’s angry because I screwed up when I brought you back here with me. You know we’re not in the Eighth Sphere any more, don’t you?”
I watched him furrow his brows in contemplation before looking up into the night. That’s when it hit him. For the first time in his life, he looked into a blackened sky and saw millions of tiny, twinkling lights blinking back at him.
“Ooh, shiny!” he said. “Decussaday.”
“No,” I answered, and laughed. “That’s not a decussate. That’s just a regular old night sky here on planet Earth.”
He pointed up and started counting. “One, two, three, four—”
“Jerome.” I grabbed his wrist and eased it back down. “You can’t count them all. Believe me, I’ve tried. There’s more stars up there than there are grains of sand in this whole world.”
“Jerome want one.”
“Of course you do.” I patted him on the head. “Maybe someday, but for now, I want you to listen to me. As I said, we’re not in the Eighth Sphere anymore. That’s why we don’t need a fire. There are no malodytes to worry about, no treklapod, no moss mites and no drigets like you. You’re one-of-a-kind here.”
He stuck out his bony pigeon chest and thumbed it with balled knuckles. “Jerome one kind. No mess wit.”
“No, sir.” I held my hands up in surrender. “No one messes with you.”
He seemed to find pride in that. I gestured with a nod into the woods beyond the shed. “You know, now that you’re here on Earth, you’re going to see lots of small animals like that squirrel you ate this afternoon.”
“Squirrel.” He rubbed his stomach. “Jerome like squirrel.”
“I know you do, but you can’t eat them anymore.”
“No eat?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Sorry, but they’re off limits now, and so are opossums, raccoons, cats, dogs and anything else you might come across. We’re not in the wild anymore.”
“What Jerome eat?”
>
“You’ll eat what I give you, but don’t worry, It’ll be good. There’s plenty of food here in my world.”
The words barely left my lips when I thought how strange that sounded to me. My world. It didn’t feel any more like my world to me than the Eighth Sphere did the first day I walked it. Sure, it was familiar, like an old friend, something I knew a long time ago, but was no longer a part of.
Jerome must have noticed my gaze drifting beyond the reach of time. He gave a tug on my shirtsleeve and pulled me back to the present. “Bossman not happy?”
I pretended I didn’t hear him.
He put his finger in the air and twirled it. “We go home now?”
I knew what he meant, the twirl representing the portal. I just didn’t know how to answer him truthfully. “We are home,” I finally said to him, and left it at that.
He scooted closer to me, reached his arms around my waist and laid his head on my chest. “Is okay, Bossman,” he whispered. “We go home someday.”
Chapter 3
Jerome fell asleep quickly. I slipped out of his arms and went back into the house. Lilith had already finished picking up the broken mess and returned the rest of the furnishings to their upright positions.
The overhead light was off and a double row of candles lined the hallway like runway lights all the way to the bedroom. As I started a glide path for a final approach, I passed the bathroom and heard the water in the shower running.
Landing aborted.
I paused at the bathroom door and contemplated going in. At that moment, the knob turned and the door creaked open several inches. I peeked inside in time to see Lilith in the mirror, bare-ass, stepping into the shower.
I walked in, removed my clothes and pulled the shower curtain back. “Got room in there for me?” I asked.
She hooked her finger under my bearded chin and coaxed me in. I pulled the curtain closed. A swirl of steam rushed in to fill the void of empty air. It surrounded and embraced me, blurring my vision like a dream. Yet, even that could not dim the twinkle in her eyes or diminish the elegant form of her naked body. Her radiance astounded me. Her soft, smooth skin glistened in the lathered effervescence flowing from her hair and cascading down her breasts.
I slipped my hands around her waist and let the shower splash upon my face and in my eyes where my tears could masquerade as rain. She did the same, pressing her body to mine, resting her cheek against my shoulder. Her warmth invited me. Her touch excited me. The fragrance of earth and nature enticed me.
BURY THE WITCH: Book 10 (Detective Marcella Witch's Series) Page 2