“Lilith.” I was out of breath, but excited beyond words. “You won’t believe this. I must have found the portal. I was there.”
“Tony, you—”
“Listen. I’m telling you. I was back there.”
“Tony...”
“It was awful. The malodytes almost got me. There were two of them. I tried to hide, but—”
“Tony! You weren’t there.”
“Wh…What?” I palmed the ground and pushed to put some distance between us. “What do you mean? Sure I was.”
She shook her head, barely disturbing the bed of dried leaves under her. “No, you weren’t. We saw you.”
“Ha, I get it,” I said, and laughed lightly. “This is a joke.”
“I’m sorry, Tony. It’s no joke. You didn’t go anywhere. We both saw you. You just sort of freaked out on us.”
“Ok.” I peeled myself off her, flopped down onto my back, flat out and gazed up into the trees. “I don’t understand it.”
She rolled over, laid her head on my arm and draped her hand across my chest. “I think you had a flashback. You thought you were alone. You were scared. We saw you gather up those leaves and hide under them. We tried to approach you carefully.”
“It seemed so real.”
“It’s okay now.”
Jerome came around the other side of me, settled into the dry leaves and scooted up close. “Is okay, Bossman. I protect you.”
He draped his hand across Lilith’s and laid his head on my other arm. I closed my eyes and let the warmth of the sun fill in the blanks.
Chapter 7
After my little episode in the woods, Lilith decided it’d be best if we temporarily postponed our search for the portal. Besides, she seemed convinced that its location would not reveal itself until atmospheric conditions grew more favorable, that is, once enough storm clouds gathered to excite the air with electrically charged particles sufficient to produce lightning.
Of course, that was all right with me. The thought of experiencing another flashback like the one that brought on the malodytes scared me half to death.
We returned home where Jerome found comfort in the wooded acreage out behind the house, and I found mine in bed, under the covers with the lights out and the shades drawn.
I awoke much later in the afternoon to the soft touch of Lilith’s warm lips upon my cheek. I rolled over and smiled up at her. She sat at the edge of the bed, leaning over me, her long black hair spilling onto my eyes.
“Hey,” I said.
She leaned in and kissed me again, this time on the lips. “We have company,” she cooed. “You want to get up and help me entertain them?”
“Company?” I slipped my hand up under her blouse and cupped her breast. “I have a better idea. How `bout I get something else up and entertain you, instead?”
“Come on, Tony. I mean it.”
I pulled the covers back and kicked them to the foot of the bed. She could see by the light from the alarm clock radio that I meant it, too.
“Tony...” She returned her eyes to mine and shook her head lightly. “You know I’d like to, but I told you we can’t. We have company.”
“Who?” I took her hand and slid it southward. She accepted my invitation with a wicked grin.
“Jehovah’s Witness. Who do you think?”
“Not funny,” I said, and twitched involuntarily as she began working her magic.
“Hmm, you’re right,” she squeezed her hand. “It’s not funny, but this is.” She reached over and turned on the nightstand lamp. “It’s Carlos, Dominic and Ursula. They’re in the room. Say hello.”
“What!” I fumbled for the sheet in a panic before realizing she was kidding. “Lilith!”
“Serves you right. Now come on. Move it.”
I sat up and propped my back against the headboard. “What time is it?”
“Seven-thirty. You’ve been sleeping all afternoon.”
I scratched my head, stretched and yawned. “Okay, give me a minute. I’ll be right out.”
She glanced down at my mid-section and made a tic sound through her cheek. “I’ll give you a couple,” she said, appraising my investment in the recently failed enterprise. “Looks like you’re gonna need it.”
I came out to the kitchen a few minutes later and found the four of them engaged in a hushed conversation, no doubt at my expense. Naturally, the subject changed to something lighter as I entered the room, the volume of their voices rising to reinforce the circumstance.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I know you’re talking about me. I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
Carlos said, “It’s nothing bad, Tony, but we are concerned. Lilith told us what happened in the woods this morning.”
“Yeah that.” I broke eye contact and headed over to the sink. For lack of nothing better to do once I got there, I took a glass out of the cupboard, filled it with water and took a drink. I could feel everyone’s eyes still upon me, perhaps expecting an explanation. The problem was I didn’t have one, so I tried redirecting attention elsewhere.
“Carlos, how come you’re not pulling night guard duty down at the jewelry store?”
“I didn’t get the job,” he said.
“Why not? Did they give it to Powell instead?”
“No. They decided not to hire anyone. Said no one could break into their safe anyway.”
“Huh, too bad then. Sounded like fun.”
“You know,” said Dominic, “not to change the subject but...”
“But you want to change the subject.”
“Tony, what happened to you today was serious. Don’t you think you ought to talk about it?”
I turned to him sharply. “Talk about it? Dominic, don’t you dare tell me what I should talk about. You don’t know what I’ve been through.” I waved my glass over the lot of them. “None of you know what I’ve been through.”
“Sure we do,” said Carlos. “We were there with you, for a while.”
“For a while, ha! Carlos, you couldn’t imagine the half of it.”
“Then tell us,” said Lilith. She stood and eased her chair toward me. “Sit down and tell us. Help us help you, because you know you need it. You definitely returned with some serious baggage, and I don’t just mean Jerome.”
“I’ll thank you to leave Jerome out of this.”
“Leave him out of it? Tony, he’s an indigenous life form from another dimension! How the hell can I leave him out of it?”
“Because without him, Lilith, I’d have never made it back here, and frankly...” I let my words fall away, not certain that I even meant what I was about to say next.
“Frankly what?”
I shook my head. It didn’t matter. It was probably true anyway, “Frankly, I don’t know how I could live without him now.”
Lilith seemed remarkably unsurprised at that. She lowered her voice. “We’ll cross that bridge in good time. For now, we need you to open up to us.”
“We?” I said, suddenly realizing what was going on. “What is this, an intervention?”
“No. It’s just us, your friends. Your family. We’re here to help you, but we need to understand what you’re going through.”
“Understand? Hell, Lilith, I don’t understand it myself. I tell you I’ve been gone five years and you tell me it’s only been five weeks. That’s insane! Isn’t it? How does anyone understand the insane?”
“Okay, maybe we can’t understand it, but if you tell us what you’re going through, maybe we can help you cope with it.”
“I’m coping just fine, thank you.”
“Are you?” She turned and pointed out the back door. “Does coping mean sleeping outside in the dirt, cooking squirrel over an open fire and eating it with a talking lizard? Does coping mean living with hallucinations of monsters chasing you through the woods? What else has happened to you since you’ve been back? What else don’t we know? What else are you,” she did the little quote marks in the air with her fingers, “co
ping with?”
“All right, fine.” I set the glass down on the counter by the sink. “You want to know? I’ll tell you. First of all—”
“Wait,” said Lilith. She gave the chair a nudge. “Sit.”
I crossed the room, pushed the chair back to the table and sat down. Lilith grabbed a fifth chair and squeezed in next to Dominic and Ursula.
“There were a couple of other tiny incidences yesterday,” I said. “No big deal.”
“Like what?”
“At Doctor Sloan’s office, I might have freaked out a bit when he shined his penlight in my eye.”
“That sounds normal,” said Dominic. “Your eyes had been adjusted to the dark for so long that maybe the sudden intense light to the pupil triggered an involuntary reflex that made you jump.”
“Jump? I wish,” I said, and laughed callously. “I didn’t just jump. I thought a photon burst was about to vaporize the entire room, and so I screamed and hid under the examination table.”
“Still,” said Lilith, “I could see how that might happen.” The others nodded in agreement to mitigate the absurdity of the claim. “What else?”
I told them about the incident in the CT machine, how it sounded like malodytes beating their drums. They seemed to think that was understandable, as well.
“Then there was the bus stop,” I said.
“What about the bus stop?” Dominic asked.
“I panicked again. When the bus pulled up, I couldn’t get on it. Just the thought of being cooped up in that…that tube with all those people; it scared the hell out of me.”
“Crowds. Sure, that’s not surprising, either. You’ve been isolated so long that, of course, you’re going to feel claustrophobic, even paranoid in the midst of a group of strangers.”
“So it’s all normal, then, is it?”
I watched Dominic’s eyes shift to Lilith’s to Carlos’ and back to mine. “I don’t want to say it’s normal, but—”
“What then? Am I going crazy?”
“No. It’s not as bad as that either. Listen, Tony, these things you’re experiencing, be they flashbacks or hallucinations, maybe you’re having trouble sleeping or concentrating; it sounds to me like...”
“What?”
“Okay. You know I’m no psychiatrist, but it sounds to me like you’re suffering from PTSD.”
“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?”
“Yes. Didn’t Doctor McMillan have this discussion with you?”
“Of course not, Dominic. How could he? I couldn’t very well tell him that I just spent the last five years of my life living in another dimension; that I’ve had to kill everything I ate or be killed by those same things. Oh, and by the way, Doctor, those five years I mentioned, they all passed in under five weeks. Please, he’d have had me locked up in a padded room, hopped up on antipsychotics and waiting for a transorbital lobotomy.”
“Nooo,” said Carlos, scoffing insensitively. “They don’t treat PTSD with lobotomies. That’s for OCD.”
“Then you better watch it, because you’re a prime candidate yourself, my friend.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Boys!” said Lilith. “Let’s keep it productive.”
“There’s nothing productive about this intervention,” I said.
“It’s not an intervention.”
“Whatever it is. I don’t care. The thing is...” I stopped and took a deep breath to defuse the intensity of the moment. “Look, honestly guys, I appreciate what you’re all trying to do here. The truth is that I know I have some issues to work through, but it’s my cross to bear. You really can’t do much to help me, and I certainly can’t discuss it with a psychiatrist. Anything I tell a doctor pertaining to my recent experiences would be a definite career killer for me, and that’s not going to happen.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Carlos.
“Why?”
He looked over at Dominic and hooked his brow. Dominic nodded back.
Carlos replied, “Because the captain said you could go back to work tomorrow if you felt up to it.”
“He did?”
“If you feel up to it,” Lilith repeated, apparently harboring reservations about the idea.
“Well, that’s…that’s good,” I said.
Dominic added, “I think it’s exactly what you need.”
“Indeed,” said Ursula, who had remained surprisingly quiet during the intervention. “When one falls off the donkey, one must get right back on and ride.”
“You mean horse,” said Lilith.
“Oh, no, sister, I am afraid of horses.”
“All the more you should get back on and ride it.”
“But I did not fall off a horse.”
“I’m just saying if you did.”
“Oh, if it were but a small horse, a pony mayhap, I suppose I—”
“Ladies, please.” I slashed my hand through the air to cut their chatter. “This is not about horses. This is about me.”
Ursula’s face soured with indignation. “So it is,” she said, and then turned to Lilith. “I see what thou doth mean.”
Lilith smiled back. “I know, right?”
I let it go. “Carlos, when did you talk to the captain?”
“About an hour ago. He said Doctors Sloan and McMillan approved your return, and since your CAT scan showed no anomalies, he didn’t see any reason to delay it.”
“Wow. Okay, that’s…that’s wonderful.”
Lilith said, “You don’t sound too happy about it.”
“No, I am. I’m happy. It’s just that it’s been...” I laughed, hoping to make light of my obvious apprehension.
“Been what?”
I took a steady breath, held my chin up high and said, “It’s been a few weeks is all, but I’m ready.”
“J-man!”
I looked at Carlos, who was pointing at the back door. We all turned and looked to see Jerome, his nose pressed to the glass, his suction cup fingertips stuck to the pane like eight little tree frogs. He smiled at the sight of us all looking at him.
“Amigo!” he said, fogging the glass with his breath.
“Aw, Lilith.” Carlos got up and started for the door. “Can’t he come in?”
“No. Absolutely not. I don’t want him in the—” Carlos opened the door, “house.”
“J-man!”
“Amigo!”
Carlos picked him up and hugged him until Jerome accidentally got his tail coiled around Carlos’ neck. It was all Lilith and I could do to untangle the two.
After the commotion died, Lilith said, “Hey, Carlos, I have an idea. Why don’t you take Jerome home with you tonight?”
“Really?” He seemed delighted by the prospect.
“Sure. It’d be good. You two will have fun.”
“Yeah we will. Won’t we, Jerome?”
“Amigo fun!”
“Damn straight, little buddy. That’s okay with you, Tony, isn’t it?”
“Please” I splayed my hands to lay it back on him. “He’s all yours.”
“No!” cried Jerome. He pushed Carlos away and wrapped himself around my leg. “Jerome belong to Bossman! You no give Jerome away.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I’m not giving you away. I’m sharing you with your amigo. Wouldn’t you like that?”
He rolled his big alabaster orbs up at Carlos, who seemed visibly hurt by the sudden rejection. “Bossman share Jerome?”
“Yes.”
He pointed. “With Amigo?”
“Yes, share. I’d never send you away for good. Would I, Lilith?” Lilith rolled her eyes and turned away. “See? Go on. Go home with Carlos. Have fun. I’ll see you again tomorrow.”
Jerome unwrapped himself from around my leg and reached for Carlos with both hands. Carlos scooped him up in his arms and sat him on his hip like the big child he was…Jerome that is, not Carlos.
A short while later, Lilith and I were showing our guests to the door. As we waved goodbye,
I leaned in close to her and said, “Feel like going back into the bedroom to finish what we started earlier?”
“Oh?” she said, teasing my lips with her fingertips. “I’d have thought you’d have finish without me already?”
“Without you?” I took her hand and led her down the hall. “Why would I do that? You started it.”
Chapter 8
I reported to Captain Zevic’s office the next morning at seven o’clock to sign papers, collect my reissued ID and badge and register my old service revolver as my primary weapon.
I spent the next hour making the rounds, saying hi to everyone in the precinct and perfecting my one-liner explanation for what happened to me. “I went on the most forgettable vacation I’ll never remember,” I joked, laughing lightly to prompt a similar response.
It was good enough that most people did laugh politely and nobody pressed me for details. The overall majority seemed genuinely happy to see me back from the grave. Those that weren’t, Powell for instance, simply kept their distance. Others, and I suppose there are always a few in every bunch, thought it originally funny to try and convince me that I owed them money, which made it all the more difficult for those whom I actually did.
Up on the detectives’ floor, Dominic had already rearranged the desks back to how they were before I disappeared. He told me it was Carlos’ idea to move them around in the first place, but I didn’t care. I was dead, as far as they knew. He could have kept them where they were. Of course, I didn’t tell him that. He had already gone through the trouble.
I took a seat behind my old desk and sipped the coffee Dominic had prepared for me. He seemed pleased that it pleased me, and for the first time in the three days since I’d been back, I was beginning to feel at ease, if only slightly.
“So?” said Dominic.
I set my coffee down and smiled up at him. “So what?”
“How’s it feel to be back?”
“A bit surreal, if you want to know the truth.”
He nodded. “I’m sure this is the best medicine for you. As Ursula said, it’s like getting right back on that horse.”
“You mean donkey.”
BURY THE WITCH: Book 10 (Detective Marcella Witch's Series) Page 7