by Anna Roberts
Gloria lights her own cigarette - a black seventies thing with a gold filter. It’s 1982 - it must be, but she’s still got the Farrah hair and the kitchen is done out all those eggplant purples and harvest golds that people thought were a good idea. After a certain age you stop keeping up with the decades. “Don’t,” she says. “Don’t you dare come in here and lay a guilt trip on me. I’ve just been to the hospital.”
“Yeah.” And he’s proud. He’s really proud. Holy shit.
“Wipe that fucking smile off your face,” she says. “You’re a pair of goddamn infants. I’m thirty-eight and already a grandma. Where did you even find that poor little white creature?”
“You mean Linda?” he says, and his grin is amazingly like the one Charlie sees every day in the mirror. “I know her brother. Turns out we had some things in common.”
“What things? Drugs?”
He laughs. “Nah. Hairy things. Once-a-month things.”
“Wonderful,” says Gloria. “So her brother is a werewolf and she’s just made a baby with another werewolf. And it’s a boy. Are you seeing the problem here, baby boy of mine?”
He smiles, but this time he’s baring his teeth and nothing more. If he had hackles they’d be up. “I’m not ashamed of what I am, Ma,” he says. “Remember all that shit you told me about the McBrides and the way they tortured her? Meg McBride? When they put her in thumbscrews and a scold’s bridle and poked her and branded her? Are you saying they were right to do all those things to her just because of what she was?”
“No, of course not, but –”
“ - but what? We’re not living in the sixteen hundreds any more.”
“Don’t be so goddamn disingenuous,” says Gloria. “It’s not about that. What do you want? Marches? Banners? Signs? Lycanthrope rights? They don’t call it the Civil Rights Struggle of The Werewolf, West. They call it the Curse of the Werewolf. Three nights a month you’re a howling, hairy killing machine, and if he’s really unlucky that little dot of a thing - my grandbaby - will end up the same way.”
“Good,” says West Lafayette. “Some people are predators, others are prey. My kid should be at the top of the food chain.”
“Food chain, my ass,” says Gloria, and just like that – like a faded snapshot – Charlie sees what’s in her head. A black cat purring, bumping its chin against her fingers. And the sad, limp, spilling-out mess that he left of it.
“Nobody who wasn’t starving to death ever tried to eat a housecat,” she says. “You just wanted to take her apart. See how she worked.”
His body starts with the retches again, the picture too vivid, what with the smell of blood and the crunch of bone still in his head.
There’s your natural selection, says Yael. There’s only so much you can blame on me.
*
She stole his car. If killing his best friend wasn’t enough to keep him away then she figured stealing his car would add just enough insult to injury for him to leave her to her fate. Besides, the moon was too close. Blue knew that Gabe, of all people, wouldn’t risk relying on makeshift shelter. Not after what had happened the last time.
The first fifty miles had hurt like hell, a dark and tearstained flight from everything she loved towards everything she dreaded. But then the sun came up and the world seemed like a much nicer place, swamp and city streaking by her windows as she drove.
For hours there was nothing but miles and miles of turnpike, the nervous shifting of fast moving columns of traffic, where one wheel skid or slow brake could end in catastrophe. Sometimes she passed them – mangled metal and screaming lights – but she resisted the urge to rubberneck and kept right on driving.
When she saw the skyscraper sprawl of Miami beyond the road signs she knew she’d been right not to listen to her doubts. A scruffy palm tree towered up into a cloudblown blue sky, the sun winking at the edge of her rear view mirror. A white pelican flew by and her heart jumped at the thought that this was so definitely home now.
Blue switched on the radio, and by the time she glimpsed the Keys she was singing along to a country station, having somehow found only music whiter than Stacy’s collection of mullet rock. The gas stations and seafood shacks and marinas breezed by, the ocean shining peerless crystal blue. She yodeled along with Kenny Rogers – The Gambler – a tune that lent an absurd western note to the showdown ahead. High Noon. Do not forsake me, oh my darling...
Then the thought of Yael blew in like a hurricane cloud and spoiled everything. Even the halfwit DJ seemed to know and started fading in and talking over the end of the song, ruining it like they always did. She kept on driving. He was here somewhere, and the faster she got to Gloria’s the better.
She was almost completely out of gas by the time she reached Islamorada. There was no choice but to stop at the station opposite Charlotte’s Diner, where she ducked her head behind the vehicle and hoped that Darla hadn’t recognized Gabe’s car.
It turned out to be a vain hope. Blue heard the bell jangle from across the street and when she looked up to peek over the top of the car she saw Darla marching towards her, apron flapping in the breeze and hair a darker shade of artificial red than she remembered.
“What the hell are you doing here?” said Darla. “Where’s Gabe?”
“Hi, Darla. Nice to see you, too.”
Darla folded her arms. “You know what I mean. You can’t just take off before the body’s even cold and not expect people to talk.”
“I know that,” said Blue, slowly. “There were some...issues. And I know we –”
“ - whatever. You’re here, and about time, too. That Charlie’s been sniffing all over Gloria’s property, him and that tattooed, black-roots, lot-lizard-looking thing he’s been keeping company with.”
“Yeah. I thought he might.”
“Is there a will?” said Darla. “Because he’d steal the pennies off a dead woman’s eyes, that one. And he doesn’t deserve it. We all know it was Gabe and Joe looked out for her when she was sick, not Charlie. He never gave her anything but worry and aggravation.”
“I’m looking,” said Blue. “For the will.”
“Good girl.” Darla gave a tight smile and touched Blue on the shoulder. “Go get ‘em.”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t try. Do.”
“I will,” said Blue, thinking Darla made an unlikely Yoda. Especially with that hair.
“You might want to avoid Charmaine,” called Darla, as Blue made her way over to pay for the gas. “She’s out for blood after you left her in the lurch.”
“Gotcha.” Nothing to worry about. After flitting off in the height of the season Blue had always been reasonably sure she had no right to rely on her old boss for a reference.
Stacy was in Oregon, Gloria was gone; Blue was nearly as much of a stranger in Islamorada as she had been when she first arrived. As she drove by the pastel church she thought of poor, good Renee, always with a mouthful of platitudes and a thoroughly Catholic approach to suffering, for all she’d been as low church as they came. Renee left tracts about Armageddon in the laundry room and Blue wondered what on earth she’d think of her now. Blue may as well have been dancing with the devil himself.
The church stood just beyond an intersection and she paused at the stop sign. At first she thought the church was on fire, but none of the other drivers on the road seemed to be reacting to the pale smoke rising from the square, pink clapboard tower.
Blue felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Some new witchy sense, like a muscle you didn’t even know you had until you worked it in the gym, stretched and twitched and knew that it wasn’t smoke at all. This was something else, some tear in the fabric of the universe where you could see through and see how substance and essence met and mingled and repelled.
She pulled into the church parking lot and stepped out, staring up at the swirling cloud. As she drew closer she heard voices, so faint and babbly that at first she wondered if they were voices at all, or whether this was t
he beginning of her following Mom down the happy path to the nuthouse.
...don’t wanna don’t wanna let me go let me go...
...you’re pinching ow ow ow no you’re hurting...
The voices rose as she reached the church door, plaintive as children. They wailed, they wept, they begged for their freedom. Blue flung open the doors but nobody inside was paying attention to her. They were all writhing and moaning and talking gibberish, hands up and out to receive the Holy Spirit. At the head of the crowd was that ridiculous shiny-suit preacher with the Burt Reynolds facelift, his hands leaving sweatmarks in an old lady’s perm as he drove ‘out th’ deeeemon of tha dia-bee-tus!’
All in all it was a normal scene, for Florida, until you looked up and saw what was boiling in the air above the oblivious parishioners heads and upstretched hands. The air moved and rippled as though something was thrashing in it, like water when someone was trying to land a big fish. What she had thought was white smoke was a kind of metaphysical spray kicked up by their struggles, drifting up and out through the roof. It was so thick there that she could barely make out the rafters, but nobody else seemed to see it.
...can’t, won’t, don’t no no no no...
The garbled streams of tongue-talk acted like motors, turning the mouths of the congregation into vacuums, sucking down the frightened, protesting voices. There was no witchcraft at work here, just will. Enough intense, collective will to call down a whole bunch of spirits, none of whom wanted to be there.
And while Blue had never believed you could just call down the Holy Spirit by holding up your hands and babbling syllables, she’d seen it work in calling down a spirit. Namely Yael.
“Well, fuck,” she said.
In another church someone might have heard her curse, but not this one. Facelift preacher was booming over his mic and the crowd seemed to be trying to outdo him, but Blue’s ears had lately been tuned to a new frequency and all she could hear was the screaming of the spirits. They were so scared, terrified at the thought of being sucked down into one of those smelly fleshy holes and forced to inhabit a dark, sickening body.
...we are things of air, things of air, not blood and gristle and farts no don’t make us don’t make us...
“You have to stop,” said Blue, raising her voice over the moans and the songs and the hallelujahs. “Stop it! They’re afraid of you!”
...we are of such stuff as dreams are made on...
Nobody heard her. The preacher kept right on ranting. At the front a woman in red fell backwards into the arms of her waiting family, hallelujah, praise Jesus, praise his holy name.
The spirits whined and thrashed and whimpered in fear and pain.
Blue elbowed her way through the swaying, singing crowd. Someone was playing an electric organ, lending cheesy chords and stings to the drama onstage. “You morons,” she said.
Facelift preacher turned towards her, scenting dissent, scenting a fresh opportunity for theater. “My child,” he said, stretching out his catcher’s mitt sized hands. “My child, come on up here and receive the light of the Lord.”
She stepped up before she even knew what she was doing. He thrust a microphone under her nose. “You’re messing with things you don’t understand,” she said, her mouth turning dry. “You’re trying to cage things that were never supposed to be caged.”
As she said it she had a sudden, queasy insight; was this where Yael had started out? Sure, now he obsessed about being alive in the human sense of the word, but what if he had started out as one of these frightened, innocent creatures, pressed into service against his will?
Big, manicured hands descended on Blue’s head. “In the name of Jesus –”
“– you’re calling down spirits,” she said.
“And with the Lord’s grace,” said the preacher. “They will work miracles. A-men!”
“Amen!” cried the congregation.
“Jesus, let your holy spirit heal this woman of the devils of doubt...”
The air went right on boiling, the sobs and screams now so loud in Blue’s head that she could barely hear the din of the real world. “Let them go!” she said.
“Fill her with the light of your love, Lord...”
“Let. Them. Go.” She swatted his hands away, angry now, and she felt her will swell and whirl above the fierce wanting of even the most desperate in the crowd. Even the man dying of a brain tumor, even his hungriest urge to see another Christmas couldn’t hold a candle to the will of a witch.
“Go,” she said. “Get out of here. All of you. Go.”
She felt something whoosh above her head, tugging the roots of her hair. The air stopped boiling and the voices receded, now cheering as they went. A wisp of white hung below the rafters for the moment and then dissolved, like a swirl of cream in coffee. The organ burped a bum note and stopped, and the Babel of inspired ‘tongues’ ground to an awkward halt as people slowly realized that the fizz of near group hysteria had turned flat for no perceptible reason.
Did I do that? Blue thought. Did I really just empty a church of spirits?
If she could do this...there was hope. There was a chance for Charlie. The sense of her own power was enough to make her head spin, so that when she caught the preacher staring at her she couldn’t help but laugh at him.
“You old fraud,” she said. “Stick to playing pretend in future.”
They had hit on it somehow, hit on the right combination of hurt and song and will to summon these airy creatures, but they had no idea what they were working with. They thought it was the Holy Fire come down like at Pentecost. Well, except for the preacher. He didn’t care what it was, so long as people kept on coming and filling up the collection plates.
She stepped down from the stage and walked back down the now hushed aisle, conscious of the faint rustlings of one or two bolder spirits who were lurking – curious – between the pews.
“Get on out of here,” she said. “Before they call you back. Before you get turned into something you hate.”
Blue had no idea why she had said that, but as the words rolled off her tongue from nowhere they bulldozered what was left of her brief, dizzy power high. Was this how Yael had started out? And what if captivity had been the very thing that had made him grow teeth?
It wasn’t a thought she wanted to linger on, not right now, not know she recognized that it bothered her deep down to the roots of her soul. Introspection would have to wait; there was work to be done.
9
This was what it came down to in the end.
There was something uniquely sad and orphaned about the property of the newly dead, and the house was no exception. Its silence smothered every last nerve ending that was still tingling with power. The mail was piled up on the mat, the end table covered with a film of three weeks dust and the spider plants gray and drooping in the heat. Gloria’s blue fuzzy slippers were neatly stashed on the bottom of the shoe rack, where they had waited patiently the whole time for her feet to revert back to a shape where she would need them again.
Blue picked up the mail, determined not to cry. She had expected to feel secure in the house, but when she had walked through the yard the only buried spells that had felt warm under the soles of her feet had been the ones she herself had cast. Gloria’s were gone. There was no will left to sustain them and that, Blue thought, was that. Perhaps some silly part of her had imagined Gloria might still be here in spirit, but whatever immortal part of her that was left, Gloria had taken it out to the ocean along with her body.
But there was something left here. This house had kept Yael in before, and the practical measures against Yael would still hold, like the iron and the yew wood. Blue could shore up those defenses and make a few of her own. She just hoped she had enough mason jars in the house.
She locked the door behind her. The basement door was open, a gaping reminder of an ugly night. The stairs creaked beneath her feet, the steps and the inside of the door scarred from countless claws and near misses. She
hesitated before switching on the light; if it started to swing she didn’t know what she’d do. Had she just drove eight hours to stick her head straight in the lion’s mouth?
Click.
Nothing.
The basement was as she had left it, gray, dusty and pungent with more than a faint bouquet of wolf piss. The dog dishes were stacked neatly. The Ouija board sat silent in a corner of a cardboard box. The other boxes were stuffed with old boys’ toys and photographs, and Blue searched immediately for the battered, gray-white carton among the rest.
It was there. Ruby hadn’t taken it, thank God. Presumably swamp wolves had ways of keeping their relatives remains close that Blue preferred not to think too much about, and besides, Celeste had been no kin of Ruby’s.
The urn was nearly empty. First job after she got the house back in order, get Gloria’s ashes.
God, she had no idea if Charlie had even cremated her. What if he hadn’t? What if he’d gone and buried her, or worse, fed her to the swamp? No, he couldn’t have. Unlike most werewolves Gloria had died official, with police boats and searchlights and a morgue locker. Even a certificate. There was no way he could have disposed of her body in any other way than the conventional methods, not in plain sight like that.
Blue reasoned with herself as she drew out the circle in chalk on the basement floor. She found the absinthe in the kitchen cupboard, hiding Gloria’s favorite Bacardi rum, then went back downstairs to take flight.
Her belly cramped at the first shot, but she did them all - north, south, east, west, Celeste. Ascend.
She closed her eyes and breathed in.
The air was damp, cool in a way that only comes with altitude. She could have cried for joy when she opened her eyes and saw the Keys curled below her, green palms and white sand against the azure blue of the ocean. She could see the teeth of the reef just a mile off shore, the narrow connecting string of the highway, now shimmering like quicksilver from the light of the sun reflecting off hundreds of windshields. Something white came wisping up from the ocean’s edge towards her. At first she thought it might have been those spirits she loosed from the church, but as the white swirl wheeled upwards and she swooped down to greet it she saw it was a flock of sandpipers, their tiny black eyes like wet ink dots.