by Anna Roberts
“Find him?”
No. L-Y.
“Fly?” said Blue. “I can fly?”
YES
“No, Gloria. I can’t. I fully admit that I don’t know everything, but I’m pretty sure that a hundred and twenty aerodynamically unsuitable pounds of me are not leaving the ground any time soon.”
Gloria’s paw went to G. Then R. A. Blue watched.
“Grandma ash?” said Blue, sounding out the words. To her surprise they made some kind of sense. Something to grab onto. “Wait,” she said. “That was in your recipe book somewhere.”
She got up from the concrete and went upstairs. The bulging black folder was where she had left it, tucked at the back where it was least likely to reproach her for her own drunken, Harry Potter foolishness. She hurried back to the basement; who knew when Gloria would turn uncommunicative again?
“Okay, I got it,” said Blue, flopping the binder open. It opened on a recipe for Parsi lamb curry. She turned the pages - a speckled chicken feather pressed flat as a flower, a blob of grease or wax. Cock a leekie, salmon mousse, marinara.
FLIGHT
The word was written in block capitals in the corner of a page. The words beneath were in tight, curly cursive. There was old oil on the paper and it had turned translucent, giving the ballpoint writing a strange, ghostly quality.
Take ash and grease. Cross the circle. Skyclad. Grease up and anoint with ash. Kneel and take a drink or five. To earth, to air, to fire, to water, to Celeste. Ascend.
Blue felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. No wonder that funeral urn had looked so light. “You used Celeste’s ashes?” she said. “Grandma ash?”
YES
“And you want me to do this?”
YES
“But she’s not my grandmother, Gloria,” said Blue, hoping that might be significant. Anything to get out of rubbing herself with human ash. “She’s yours.”
Gloria reached for the board again. W-I-L-L-H-A-V-E-T-O-D-O.
“Okay,” said Blue. “Please don’t tell me the grease has to be human too.”
NO
“Good.”
Only Gloria kept on going. X-Z-E-M-A.
“I don’t understand,” said Blue. Was it some incantation?
Gloria went back again, this time spelling out N-O first.
“Noxzema? Like the hand cream?”
YES
Hand cream and human ash. Somehow that was so Gloria that Blue wanted to laugh. She was reminded of all that crap they sold in the French Quarter – Tarot cards and fancy cups and little blunt spears made of onyx or rose quartz. Teen witch stuff, not Gloria’s grimy adult, kitchen witch version of magic, the kind that found power in everything from hand cream to menstrual blood to rusty junk jewelry. And there was power. Huge power. Gloria had turned herself into a wolf, for goodness’ sake.
It took a while to clarify the instructions, since Gloria spelled slowly and stopped every now again to chew the back of her ass or scratch her ear with a hind foot, but eventually Blue thought she’d got it right.
She had drawn a chalk circle on the floor, crossed through the center with two lines at ninety degrees to one another, so that it looked like a target. Or a launchpad.
In the middle of the circle and at points where the lines crossed the circumference were five shot glasses, each containing a finger of some cloudy green shit that looked like it had been sitting around in an unlabeled bottle since before they repealed the Volstead Act. Gloria said it was absinthe, but it didn’t look a thing like the turquoise stuff Blue had seen in bars. Old absinthe, Blue guessed. The kind that still contained wormwood.
“Well, if nothing else,” she said. “I guess I’ll be tripping balls.”
She undressed with her back to Gloria. It was always going to be strange taking all your clothes off in front of your seventy year old landlady, even if said landlady wasn’t a wolf. When she was naked she rubbed herself all over with the cream, thinking that if this didn’t work then at least she would have a funny story to tell Gabe.
Blue knelt awkwardly in the middle of the circle, Celeste’s open urn on her knees. Mostly she felt silly, but when she forced herself to uncover her breasts she felt a strange tingle in her nipples and up and down her spine. Especially at the top of her spine where it joined her skull and in the gaps between the bones themselves.
In the spaces inbetween.
She shivered, thinking of that sticky brown voice. Yael. Where was he? And what was he doing now? He was in somebody’s head – he had to be, but Blue had never wanted to think too much about that. Just so long as there was no chance of him getting back into hers.
“Okay,” Blue said, stifling her disgust as she dipped her greasy fingers into Celeste Thibodeaux’s ashes. As per instructions she did her feet first, smearing the dark paste on each sole. Then on the backs of her shoulders. W-H-E-R-E-Y-O-U-R-W-I-N-G-S-W-O-U-L-D-B-E, said Gloria.
Then the forehead, then the navel and then (ew) between her legs. No. This wouldn’t be a funny story for Gabe. Blue knew as soon as she did it that she would never want to tell another living soul about this.
She reached behind her for the first shot. To earth. Oh God, it tasted like rot and nail-varnish remover. “And people used to drink this for fun?” she said, wiping her watering eyes with the back of her hand. Gloria just sat on her haunches, watching with a fixed attentiveness that Blue had never seen before.
Four more shots of this filthy stuff. The second – to air – went down a little easier, partly because she was curious to ascertain just why it was so awful. That pungent edge of old mould; was that the magic poison that made it so addictive?
Three to fire. Four to water. Her head was swimming and her stomach was in revolt. She gagged and caught her breath as she lifted the fifth glass. “To Celeste Thibodeaux.”
Get it down, keep it down. Her eyes were watering so hard that Gloria was just a brownish blur. Blue gagged again, swallowed and got the word out between clenched teeth. “Ascend.”
Nothing. Maybe she should say it again, more clearly, but she didn’t trust herself to open her mouth. Not without puking all over the floor.
And then there was darkness.
It was cold and damp and there was no longer any up or down. She screamed and the air was like ice, rasping at the inside of her lungs. Somehow she knew that the banked, bulky dark shape beneath her was cloud, but that was impossible. That was ridiculous.
This wasn’t supposed to work.
But it had. It did. She was hanging there in the air and when she thought ‘forward’ she went forward, and it lit up her brain with a kind of exultation that reminded her – absurdly – of flying along on her bike the first time the training wheels had come off.
That brought her back. Slowly. Careful. Don’t get ahead of yourself. She knew the lesson there. Five minutes after she had been yelling “I’m doing it, Mommy!” she’d done it right into the kerb and got herself a big old gap that was there until her adult teeth came in.
Oh God, there was such a long way to fall. When she saw it she didn’t know whether to scream, cry or laugh. The ocean was so black it put her in mind of those weighty words of beginning – and darkness was on the face of the deep. The islands were gleaming clusters of hundreds and thousands of tiny electric pinpricks, strung like baroque jewels on a continuous ribbon of moving lights.
That tiny, twinkling thing at the bottom – that was Key West. Big Pine. Marathon. Islamorada. Somewhere down there was Gabe, the light from his window less than a dot. And Gloria. Gloria in her cage, looking at the empty space on the floor where Blue had been just a second ago.
Assuming I’m not still there, Blue thought. Perhaps she – or at least her body – was still in the basement. But then why was it so cold, and why could she feel the wet of the clouds on her skin? The earth seemed to be coming closer, and she spread her arms wide. To her relief she slowed, but now she was near enough to make out the shapes of the individual cars on the r
oad below. And more. Voices.
...every week it’s the same fucking thing...just tosses it on the bathroom floor...would it kill him to walk two feet to the hamper?...
...if I work two more months and don’t buy weed I can afford it. And then we’ll see...
...does nothing but mess with her eyebrows and take pictures of herself...
And right then Blue understood why Gloria had thought she would be able to find Joe, and also that Gloria had vastly overestimated Blue’s capabilities. It was a babble, a rising cacophony. Finding a single mind in that noise would be like trying to pick out a specific cup of water from the ocean.
...sure there were some motion sickness pills round here oh god don’t throw up on your brother...
...don’t know why anyone’s surprised...what do you expect when you elect a goddamn darkie as president...
...goddamn knew that car was gonna die one day, but why did it have to do it today? Fuck you in your eye-sockets, Cicero – I bet you poured sugar in my gas tank...
There. Right there. Cicero. Blue moved closer and saw her as clearly as a picture on a television screen. A young woman with blonde hair, black roots and eyes as dark as the ocean. Thumb out, booze soaked – blood and Southern Comfort. Red. Smell of red, like iron and disappointment. She was bleeding from a cut inside her elbow, but that wasn’t where the red was coming from. The red was her name and Blue realized she couldn’t speak it but she could taste it somehow. Sweet and bright like the tooth-cracking candy on an apple. And that was a Gloria thing – tasting names. Or maybe it was a witch thing.
...what’s that in Spanish anyway? La bruja loba...gotta be around here somewhere...
The wolf witch? What the hell? And then just like that, with just another little push Blue saw it, smelled it. Miss Candy-Apple Red was a werewolf. And she didn’t want to be bleeding any longer.
...I know what she did...I saw the flies, and smelled the blood in the storm drain and the writing on the wall...
Something fizzed, flashed. Like interference or a channel abruptly changed, and then Blue was standing on solid ground. “What the hell?” she said, and although she could somehow still feel herself falling she was standing still, in a room so distant in memory that it took her a moment to connect the dots.
It was the first place she had ever lived - the blue house - one of those little boxes where the front door opened directly into the living room. She recognized the houndstooth couch and the round rag rug on the floor, but when she remembered how often her own small fingers had traced the spiral of that rug she realized what was missing. She was missing. There was no toy chest in the corner, no pink plastic dollhouse or any of the things she associated with this place. They had moved when she was around six.
“No, this isn’t right,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
And then a door opened and her mother walked out. It took longer than a second for Blue to recognize her because Regina looked so different. So good. Her skin was smooth and shiny; no dark patches or that hateful yellowish tinge that came from too many nights hiding from the sun with a bottle in her hand. Her gray hairs were gone and her figure – clearly revealed in a slinky black satin dress – was impressive. In her hands she held a picture, a painting. She held it out for Blue to look at and Blue saw that it was the same picture that Reggie had painted over and over again. The palm fringed beach with its gin-clear waters.
“Here, baby,” she said. “I made this for you.”
She swayed forward on the balls of her feet and kissed Blue on the mouth. Not a mother’s kiss. Blue drew away sharply and caught sight of herself in the mirror, then she nearly screamed again. Instead of her own face in the mirror there was a man, a white man with dark, floppy hair and the eyes of a fallen angel.
Blue felt something thud, like she’d landed on her ass, then it was gone. All of it. She was back in the basement with a bellyful of bad absinthe and an elderly werewolf yawning at her through the bars of her cage.
“What was that?” she said, but she knew Gloria would be no help. And on some level she knew the answer already, because the door was open at the top of the stairs and she could see it.
The light fitting was swinging all on its own once more. “Oh shit,” said Blue, swallowing down a fresh wave of nausea. “You’ve been in here the whole time, haven’t you?”
8
Blue stared into the toilet bowl, trying to remember if she’d already scrubbed it. Her mind kept flying off in all directions, giving her the uneasy feeling that something inside her was now - if not irreparably broken – then changed in a way that was going to take a hell of a lot of getting used to.
You couldn’t just go back to cleaning toilets like nothing had happened. Not when you knew what clouds tasted like.
She reached for the disinfectant, her head throbbing. She hadn’t slept enough and she was afraid to do so now that she knew Yael was still here. As she straightened up she glanced out of the bathroom window, across the hotel lawn. No Gabe. The boat wasn’t back yet and he’d been out so long that she had to tell herself – quietly and patiently – that he’d probably come back and gone back out again during one of the times when she wasn’t staring out of the window like Sister Anne. No use borrowing more trouble; the ocean was smooth and crystal blue, weather for amateurs, a cinch for experienced sailors like Gabe.
A noise made her turn her head too fast, waking that queasy feeling that came from no sleep. The brush was in the toilet and she couldn’t remember if she’d left it there, but from a small place of madness came the knowledge that the brushy-splat noise that had made her look in the first place was exactly the noise a toilet brush made when it hit the water.
And then she knew she was going crazy, because the thing started to scrub the toilet all on its own.
She dropped the disinfectant. It would be better to be crazy, really, because that would mean she was imagining this, and deep down she knew she wasn’t. She had learned to fly, lit a candle with her mind and talked spells with an old wolf using a Ouija board. The toilet brush going all The Sorcerer’s Apprentice on her was almost quaint.
Poltergeists attached themselves to people, especially young girls and women. She remembered hearing that somewhere. Regular ghosts haunt places, poltergeists haunt people; and whatever Yael was, he was not some regular ghost.
What if he's haunting me?
Her foot felt wet. She looked down and the sharp smell of artificial pine brought her back to herself. She was standing in a puddle of spilled disinfectant, bright green staining the expensive white bathmat.
“Shit.” The toilet brush stopped what it was doing. She dumped the bathmat in the tub and ran water over it, her head spinning so hard she thought she’d pass out. As she tried to scrub the stain out she realized this hadn’t been the first stain, and hardly the most unthinkable. Red wine puke, blood, brains, bits of werewolf – she’d cleaned them all. No wonder she wasn’t quite right.
And yet there was a faint buzz up and down her spine, the feeling that was going to take some getting used to, the feeling that it no longer mattered that she wasn’t quite right in her head. If anything it was an edge; it opened you up, let you do the crazy things that would set you flying through the night sky with the whole island chain beneath you, glittering like diamonds in the dark. That feeling knew more than just how to set a toilet brush in motion.
Grayson would know what it meant. Blue fished out her phone, but once again as she passed the window her eye was drawn – like a tongue to a sore tooth – to the end of the pier. Gabe’s boat was still not back.
She took the bathmat down to the laundry, passing Charmaine on the lawn. “Did you see Gabe today?” she asked. “He’s been out for hours.”
Charmaine arched a thin brow. “If he didn’t tell you, it’s not my place. What happened to that mat there?”
“I spilled something on it. It’s fine. I’ll put it in to soak. But what about Gabe?”
The housekeeper sig
hed. “Good lord, girl. If he didn’t tell you...”
Oh.
“He got fired?” said Blue.
Charmaine nodded.
“Great.”
Of course. The hotel mooring was only his as long as the job was. Without it he’d have to take the boat to a marina and pay hand over fist for the privilege – money that none of them had. Not even Gloria. In her darkest hours Blue had actually gone through the house, searching for cash in mattresses and tea-caddies and all those old-lady hiding places, an exercise that left her feeling like a miserable scavenger, no matter how many times she told herself that if she did find money it would be spent on Gloria’s turkey.
When she got back to the house, Gabe was there, peering morosely into a beer. It was only four o’clock.
“I heard,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He sighed. “It’s not the first time. Won’t be the last, either.”
“It’s bullshit,” said Blue. “It’s not your fault.”
He shrugged. “It is what it is. What am I gonna do? Say ‘Sorry, I can’t work full moons – I’m a werewolf’?” He took a mouthful and peered unsteadily down the neck of his beer bottle in a way that made her think this wasn’t his first. “But you know what? I still have my boat. And I still have my certificates. And if I can’t make a living as a diving instructor in Isla-fucking-morada then I may as well go out and cram a hose up the car exhaust right now, right?”
She put a hand on his shoulder, wanting to reach him but not sure she had a chance. Lately there had been a whole lot of problems that nobody could kiss better.
“And Joe’s gone,” he said, with a catch in his voice. “So I’ll probably lose the house.”
“There’s always a home for you here,” said Blue. “You know that.”
He looked up and squeezed the hand on his shoulder. She wasn’t sure if she’d overstepped some line; it wasn’t her house and she had no business extending invitations.
“Eli’s wrong,” said Gabe. “You can speak for Gloria; that’s exactly what she would say.”
“Tell him that,” she said, pressing her face into his hair to hide how pleased this had made her. His hair – with its usual tang of brine and fresh air - smelled only of shampoo today, and that was sad somehow, like holding a shell to your ear and not hearing the sea.