by Anna Roberts
“I mean I saw it, dummy. With my own eyes. I was in his house.”
“How come?” Lyle had never had a good word for swamp wolves, other than that they made the perfect whipping boys when you needed someone to blame.
“He needed a witch,” said Ruby. “And I was the closest thing he could get. Lyle’s guys grabbed me one day – put a bag over my head and stuffed me in the back of a van. I was scared out of my mind.”
“Lyle’s guys?” asked Charlie. “Like, a big biker guy and a little old guy – with like a thinning mullet thing going on?”
Ruby nodded. “Yeah. I think his name was Jim. He looked like a goblin. And there were two other guys. Young. Why? You know ‘em?”
“Nah,” said Charlie, which was kind of true, if you stretched the truth thinner than gum. He’d known them, but he didn’t currently know them, on account of them all being deader than disco. “They hurt you?”
She shrugged. “Not really. Lyle needed me. Wanted me to lift that voodoo that the wolf witch had laid on him. He all but begged me to lift the curse. Would have kissed all eleven of my toes if I told him to.”
“And did you? Lift it, I mean.”
She shook her head. “Couldn’t. The only person who can lift a spell is the witch who cast it. Another witch can only break it, and when you break a spell you have to deal with the broken bits. You don’t want that, because the broken bits can cause more damn mischief than the spell itself. The pieces of a spell always look for the other pieces, trying to put the whole back together, and they can stretch themselves into monstrous shapes in the business of looking. You sure as hell don’t want to be in the way when they’re tryin’ to put themselves back together.”
Ruby took a mouthful of her coffee. “Especially not this one,” she said. “That was a serious curse she laid on Lyle. He’d wake up with blisters popping out all over his tongue and the skin sloughing off the inside of his mouth like a snake. He said that at night the light fittings swung so hard that they bulbs blew, and when the place didn’t smell like dead things it sometimes switched it up and smelled like rotting garbage. One time he punched a hole in the drywall and all these flies came swarming out in a cloud. Just black – so many of them he thought he was having a stroke at first.”
“How did he know it was Gloria?”
“Duh,” said Ruby. “Only one witch in the entire state has that kind of mojo. Plus there was the writing. I figured that meant something.”
“West Lafayette,” said Charlie, feeling cold in the sweaty heat of the late morning.
“Yeah.” She frowned. “You know about that?”
“No,” he said, marveling at the dreams that had led him to murder.
“Do you know what it means? Because I know it’s not anywhere in the Keys, and the first search result I got was in Indiana.”
“No,” said Charlie. “I don’t know.” He tossed a handful of bills in front of her, his mind running in about fifteen different directions all at once. “I gotta go deal with something. Go buy yourself something nice, okay? Treat yourself, or whatever it is you girls like to do.”
*
Ruby had never pretended to understand men, but she could usually figure out what they were thinking. And when a man gave you money and ran off with a distracted look in his eye he was likely thinking of another woman.
But Charlie was different. Charlie had something in him that Clementine could reach out and touch; she could put pictures in his head, and sometimes – when she slipped back into Ruby’s – she tracked bits of Charlie’s thoughts with her, like wet footprints on the side of a swimming pool. They didn’t last long, but they were enough to show Ruby the competition.
There was a black girl with freckles; she seemed to be on Charlie’s mind a lot. She had a silly name – Blue – and lived down in Islamorada in a house that Charlie thought of as Gloria’s.
Gloria. She was there. And he kept trying to put Ruby off.
Ruby took a cab down to Islamorada, tracing the memory of wet footprints in her mind, ordering the driver around until she felt sure she was right. The house was a flat fronted, two storey affair, with a sagging porch built around the front and side. It didn’t look that much different from all the others in the neighborhood, but when the driver stopped and Ruby got a closer look she saw the mirror next to the door. It was a Cajun thing; you hang a mirror next to your door and the vain old Devil will be too distracted by his own beauty to enter your house.
“It’s here,” she said, talking half to herself. As she handed over the money to the cab driver she felt Clementine shiver.
“Little fraidy cat,” she said, only this time she said it in her head. “Nobody can hurt you; you’re a spirit.”
She walked around the rickety porch; the windchimes jingled and clanked as she passed, and she could have sworn she smelled something like wood smoke on the wind. Yeah, this was it. She could feel the witchy crackle all up and down her back and between her legs, and somewhere in the narrow space between this world and the next she could hear Clementine, crying and pleading. Oh no no no, go back. Please go back. Don’t do this.
“Cry all you want,” said Ruby. “You can’t die.”
Ruby followed the narrow dirt path around the side of the porch. She glimpsed tightly boarded basement windows and was even surer she’d come to the right place. Moreover she could feel a kind of connective web, like supernatural tripwires, criss-crossing the whole property. Whenever she stepped through them the stray hairs on her ankles rose like hackles and her feet felt warm. Witch balls, she guessed.
She tried the back door, and to her surprise she found it swung open. There was that smell of burning again, and she saw smoke rising from already charred holes in the door frame. Iron.
“Overkill,” she muttered, but even as she said it she smelled something sticky and brown. Not like the sweet orange scent of Clementine, who was curled up in a ball and whimpering like a baby. No, this was more like molasses, a dark burnt sugar taste that coated her tongue and the roof of her mouth.
And strong. Holy shit. Shivery as cold beer and deep down buzzy like new batteries in the vibrator. It snaked between her thighs and up her spine, a new voice licking at her brain.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Oh God, no wonder Clementine was scared. This thing was like a thousand of her. This was the thing that had been in the Raines house. Ruby stared around the stranger’s kitchen, trying to ground herself in the smell of Lysol and the fear of trespass, but the dishes in the drainer were trembling against one another and a corn dolly shook itself loose from a shelf and fell to the floor.
“Who are you?” said Ruby, and she swore she could feel the thing flash back down her spine and burrow into the space between her hips, circling the organ she had tried – again and again – to keep from changing with the moon.
It laughed. Oh, honey, it said. I think I might just be the answer to your prayers.
15
Grayson had no idea where he was. They had placed a sack over his head – Guantanamo style – before leading him out of the house and onto the truck.
“I ain’t hanging around here gettin’ picked off one by one,” Ro had said, when they had finished trying – and failing - to find what else was left of Kaiden. “This place is a shithole anyway. Wanna be king of the real castle.”
Maybe three days earlier Grayson could have hated Ro for casting than slight on his home, but three days earlier his leg had been in one piece. How he’d cursed that stupid, swollen foot and the way it tingled and complained and went to sleep when he needed to move, but now he missed it. He’d poked at it and worried about the length of time it took for the impression of his fingertip to smooth back out, but he may as well have been a child playing with Play-Doh for all a puffy foot was a real concern.
His foot was turning black now. The blood must have pooled there when Ro took the sledgehammer to his kneecap. Every jolt on the road sent shards of pain up Grayson’s leg, a
nd he wondered if one of those jolts would be the one that knocked a clot loose and sent it racing through his veins to somewhere where it would stick. In his heart or his lungs or his brain. He was sure he was dead anyway, and he prayed he could go now, quickly and with as little pain as possible. The thought of a full moon on top of a shattered kneecap was the kind of thing that would have had Torquemada taking notes.
The truck stopped. Grayson breathed in through the weave of the potato sack, trying to gauge where they might be from the smell. But it was no different – still the same brackish swamp mix of humidity and wet leaves and sweat both fresh and stale. A Florida smell.
“C’mon, you,” said Ro, and pulled Grayson’s arm around his shoulder to help him down from the truck. Grayson would rather have put his arm around a rabid dog; ever since the sledgehammer incident he’d dreamed red, splattery dreams about picking the thing up and taking it to Ro’s sick, stupid, greedy head.
But you needed to stand firm on two feet to swing a sledgehammer, and there had been no more solid sightings of Joe. Jared had said he’d seen the big pale wolf moving like a ghost out there among the trees, but that could have just been fear talking.
Blind and lame, Grayson hobbled alongside Ro. He could feel solid ground under his one good foot and when he blinked down into the tiny peephole he’d found at the bottom of the sack he saw that he was walking on a neglected brick drive. And the smell had changed. Now it held an all too human note, although that could have just have been Ro’s eyewatering body odor.
“Here we are, Jennifer,” said Ro. “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.”
Someone opened a door, and the smell that came out nearly knocked Grayson backwards. He held his breath as Ro led him to a set of stairs where he could sit, and then the sack came off his head, and the full stink of it hit him in both nostrils.
He was sitting in the atrium of an actual McMansion. Directly opposite him was a clamshell shaped nook in the wall, presumably there to hold some dubious object d’art – maybe an Art Deco lady holding out a fold of her china gown, or a prancing crystal unicorn. Only it was empty now, and beside it was a fist sized hole in the drywall, revealing not only that the veneer of luxury was just that, but also that someone had punched the wall hard enough to bleed on it.
Light fittings had been pulled out of the walls here and there, and the marble floor was filthy, covered in a kind of thick black detritus that on closer inspection was made up of the corpses of a million flies. Grayson stared up into the grand stairwell with a growing sense of madness, reminded of the scenes on TV when they’d gone into Libya and soldiers had rampaged through Qaddafi’s palaces, looting the expensive kitsch they found there.
And at once he knew exactly where he was. This was Lyle’s place.
“This is more like it, huh?” said Ro, and he actually looked pleased to be here, in this dump that smelled like death, clogged toilets and palmetto bugs. “Livin’ the good life.”
“Is this Lyle’s?” asked Grayson.
“Damn right. He never invited you neither, huh?”
Grayson shook his head. Jared had opened a door, revealing the inside of a downstairs toilet so dirty it was barely recognizable.
“I wouldn’t sweat it, Jennifer,” said Ro. “He was a stuck-up piece of shit. Got what was coming to him. Come on – get your ass up.”
He held out his arm and Grayson pulled himself up on the banister, hobbling where Ro led him into a dining room. The table looked as though it had been gouged by hellhounds and of the few remaining chairs, several had the stuffing hanging out of the upholstery. The whole place reeked of death.
She’d done this. Gloria. Somehow that tiny old woman - from hundreds of miles away - had turned this place into a piece of hell so horrible that Lyle had moved out to a motel.
“It’s kind of a fixer-upper,” said Ro. “But you can make it look nice. Y’all supposed to be real stylish like that. Ain’t that right?”
He dumped Grayson down on one of the least disemboweled-looking chairs. He did so clumsily and the pain was so big and so sickening that the world turned black round the edges and Grayson thought ‘Here we go again’ and waited for the floor to come up and smack him in the face once more.
But it didn’t. He blacked out for maybe a second or less, and when he refocused his eyes through the pain he was looking at a wall daubed with gory writing. The blood was dried almost to black and if anyone had tried to scrub it off they had obviously done so without success. It said WEST LAFAYETTE in large, gruesome capitals.
Ro looked at it and sucked his teeth. “That mean anythin’ to you?”
“No,” said Grayson, breathing hard and wondering just how many places in the US were named Lafayette. He had a feeling there were a few. “Nothing.”
Ro reached out and scrubbed a finger down the lower limb of the L on LAFAYETTE. He inspected his fingertip and wrinkled his nose. “Huh,” he said. “Well, best get scrubbing, Jennifer. I want this place lookin’ nice for when my Ruby comes home.”
*
Ruby clutched the edge of the sink for support. The thing – the spirit – was huge. She could no longer even hear Clementine’s whimpers; the thick, sticky black-brown thing had swarmed up inside her, filling her head and breasts and belly until she thought she would explode, or tear apart into a new shape like she did every full moon. Holy Christ, it was massive, it was monstrous. Bigger even than the wolf.
You’d better believe it.
That voice again. She knew she was the only one who could hear it, but it was loud enough inside her head to make her eardrums quiver from the inside out.
The answer to your prayers. It’s already there, Ruby. Just a little bundle of cells. Already in motion. Already dividing and dividing over and over.
“I’m pregnant?”
Oh my, yes. Congratulations – it’s a boy!
Her knees were shaking so hard that she slid down onto the floor opposite the fridge. The voice made her blood roar and her heart feel like it was going to explode; it was like a freight-train running through her, but she was a werewolf, she was used to it. And she was hungry enough to know that she needed that power.
“I’ll change,” she told the voice, and she no longer knew if she was speaking aloud or in her head. “I’ll change with the moon and I’ll lose him. I’ll lose my baby, like all the others.”
Maybe, baby. But maybe not. Maybe I can help you out...done this before...
The voice faded for a second, and she breathed easy enough to focus on a picture on the fridge - a strip of pictures from a booth, like you get for ID’s. There were three and they all showed the same unsmiling old lady - lank white hair, hard blue eyes and cheekbones bulging from missing teeth. “It’s her,” said Ruby, and then her head was full again, so full she could only see what the voice had put there.
She saw a woman standing ankle deep in the clear blue waters of a Florida beach, long blonde hair whipped into witchy tassels by the breeze.
You’d never know to look at her, would you? But you never can tell. Eyebrows that meet in the middle, pointer finger longer than the middle, blue eyes, born on Christmas Day - all bullshit, Ruby Tuesday. All bullshit. You can’t tell a werewolf by looking at her.
She was wearing a long kaftan-type dress, held up over her knees, and when she turned Ruby saw that she was pregnant. Hugely, gloriously pregnant. Just weeks away from giving birth. And then she smiled and her cheekbones rose in a way that resembled those of the witch in the photographs.
“She did it,” said Ruby, near dizzy with the possibility. The wolf witch had done it. She’d had her baby and kept the moon at bay.
It was a boy that time, too.
Charlie, thought Ruby.
Charlie is my darling, my darling...
“You’re a spirit,” she said. “Like my Clementine.”
Oh my darling if you say so I’ll be yours forever thine...
“Please, yes, help me,” said Ruby, almost crying with want and need. �
��Help me keep my baby. I’ll do anything.”
Kiss the book and swear it so, Ruby Red.
She glanced wildly at the shelf above the counter. There were dozens of books there – Soups, Cakes For Occasions, Fifty Ways With Potatoes. “Which one?”
The voice began to laugh, and for a moment she and it were of one mind, and – as clearly as if it had been lit up in letters of fire – she saw the one it was thinking of, an old black binder so stuffed with yellowed recipes that the cover was splitting to reveal the cardboard beneath.
“This one?”
She reached out, but then her head was full again. This time it was a picture of a bassinet with blue ribbons, standing in the middle of a lovely nursery whose walls were decorated with decals of seahorses and smiling, leaping dolphins. As she approached she heard a soft, wet gurgly noise, like a baby blowing spit bubbles, and she could already see him in her mind’s eye, her little blond boy, his tender head filling her palm as she lifted him, his wavering dark blue eyes and his perfect tiny waving fists. And just thinking about breathing in the new, clean smell of his gossamer hair made her eyes sting and her heart ache with love, so much love that it hurt...
“Baby,” she said, and then she saw what was in the crib.
A heart. A whole human heart, still pumping somehow, blowing bubbles with its own blood.
“Stop it,” said Ruby. “Oh God, stop. Why are you showing me this? This isn’t what I want. I just want my baby.”
A gunshot rang out, so real and so loud that she wondered for a moment if someone had come in and shot her as an intruder, but she couldn’t smell the cordite. Instead she smelled blood and salt, and now everything was dark and moving and she realized - with terror - that somehow she was miles out to sea, bobbing around on the ocean.
She heard a splash.
“Please stop,” she said. “Please, I don’t understand...”
A virtuous woman has a price beyond Ruby’s. Or so they say. I wouldn’t know. The last one was hardly virtuous, and look how that turned out. Full fathom five thy father lies...