Patricia slammed her fist on the table. “God has never worked a day in His life, mother,” she reminded. “He’s a loafer, a lazybones.”
Juanita crossed herself as a shocked Joan clutched the big gold cross dangling above her cleavage. Patricia had not seen her mother wear that necklace since she’d thrown it at the television when America’s Most Wanted ran the last discouraging update on Katherine’s disappearance, six years ago.
“Oh, puh-leese, Mother,” Patricia moaned. “One little ghost and already you’re pushing your way past the ushers. Before too long, you’ll be singing again in the front row of the choir—if you can make the steps, that is.” She was standing now. “But that shouldn’t be a problem because God works in mysterious ways, right, Mom? He’ll not only cure your arthritis, but as a bonus for hopping back on the minstrel wagon, He’ll make it so you’ll sound just like Etta James—”
“Okay, okay, okay,” Duncan said. “Patricia, sit down. Please.”
Patricia lowered her head, suddenly ashamed. “Oh...Mom, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right, Patty dear,” her mother said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mom. Honest.”
As Patricia gathered herself, Duncan used the moment to confiscate Chris’s Walkman, and to finally make introductions.
Patricia looked at Juanita. “I’m sorry, but you’re here because...?”
“I make sure that nothing happens to the girl.”
“Why? Is something supposed to happen to her?”
“Si,” she said with heavy certainty.
Patricia turned to the girl. “And how do you feel about that?”
Smiling, she said, “Juanita worries too much, but I guess I feel safer having her around.”
Now to Chris: “And you have ESP?”
“That acronym encompasses all paranormal abilities and should, like, never be used to designate individual talents,” Chris lectured. Then he grinned. “But in my case, it pretty much sums it up.”
Patricia nodded, indulging him. “In other words, you’re a sort of supernatural jack of all trades?”
“And master of none,” Juanita grumpily added.
Chris glared at Juanita, poking his chest. “Hey, man, I just go where they tell me.”
“Do they ever tell you to go to hell?” Juanita said into her coffee.
“Juanita!” Rachel gasped, appearing both shocked and amused.
Juanita bit into a lemon cookie and shrugged.
Patricia half-smiled as she looked around the table. “This is just the tip of something, isn’t it? I can see it in everyone’s eyes. You’re not telling us everything.”
“We’re just as lost as you are,” Duncan assured.
“Juanita,” she said, “tell me what happens from here?”
“I do not know, Mrs. Bently.”
“What about you?” she said to Chris. “What are your psychic antennae picking up?”
“I know this: At sunrise tomorrow, your nice little town will go down in history as the place where it all began to end.”
“You mean like end of the world kind’ve stuff?”
“It will be like nothing you’ve ever imagined,” he assured.
Patricia was trying not to laugh. “In that case, I guess I’d better get some laundry on. I don’t want to gallop off with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse wearing a dirty bustle.”
“Think I’m full of it?” Chris said, soft but sinister. There was now a faint tick beneath his left eye. “Think I’m some idiot dealing Tarot Cards here?”
“Easy, Chris,” Duncan cautioned.
“Think I burn incense and gaze into crystal balls?” he continued with rising malevolence. “Then get a load of this. You haven’t been laid in over four years. You and your bowling buddies just got new jackets but they misspelled your name on the front. Pretty boy Marco at the Phillips 66 just robbed you of over three hundred bucks last week when he did absolutely nothing to your Accord except change the air filter. Your best friend in high school was K-Karen Koch who died three days ago in that Amtrak c-crash that killed f-forty-one people. She says hello and not t-to worry anymore about—about that diamond ring you stole f-from her mother’s j-j-jewelry box. And—and—” Chris fell from his chair, convulsing.
Patricia remained seated, staring at the spot he’d just left vacant.
Duncan and Rachel reached him immediately. The spasms were primarily occurring on his left side. His eyes rolled to the whites, and his hands, rigid and bent at the wrists, jerked and twitched above his chest. He looked like a praying mantis on crank.
Rachel, on her knees, stared down into his face. Panicked, she said, “Is he trying to swallow his tongue? I think he’s swallowing his tongue.”
“He can’t swallow his tongue,” Duncan said. “We just have to wait it out. That’s all we can do. Just keep him from hurting himself until it passes.”
“Is he high on drugs?” Juanita said, now standing at Chris’s right shoulder. With her rosary dangling from both hands, she appeared ready and more than willing to give last rites.
“No, it’s just his...disease,” Rachel said.
Chris, still quivering and jerking, rolled his eyes back down, then winked at Duncan.
After the initial shock, Duncan grabbed a handful of shirt and pulled Chris to his face. “Just what the fuck is your major malfunction?”
“You asshole!” Patricia shouted, now back with the living.
Rachel, eyes closed, appeared to be searching for the manual that provided a list of all the retaliatory measures utilized by decent, God-fearing people who’ve been duped by lowlife punks with ESP. Finally, she opened her eyes, got up, and kicked Chris’s leg. Then she kicked him twice more before silently striding back to the table, fists clenched.
Chris was laughing hysterically now. He kept trying to say something but couldn’t find a wide enough spot to get the words through.
“I ought to kick your ass right here in front of God and everybody,” Duncan said, appearing to be an eyelash away from doing just that. “I mean, so far up between your shoulders that you’ll have to pull your shirt off to take a shit.”
Chris howled even louder.
The girl kneeled next to Chris’s red, twisting face. “You have a mean streak in you.” She grinned, then whispered, “I like that. A lot.”
Joan, raising her voice over the commotion, said to Patricia, “Darling, did you really steal a diamond ring from Mrs. Koch’s jewelry box?”
“Jesus, Mother,” Patricia said. “Not now!”
“You are sick!” Juanita said, bending over Chris, quivering with anger. Eyes black and portentous, she shook her fists. “Sick! Sick! We do not have time for this bullshit!” Then, like some raving exorcist, she slammed her rosary into his stomach. But the look on Chris’s face indicated that she had struck him with something considerably larger. A dump truck, perhaps.
He lay frozen in an odd posture, as if he’d been attempting to get to his hands and knees, but had slipped a disc halfway through the roll.
Just as the rosary had struck Chris, evicting all demons and giving the rest of his motley tenants something to think about, a powerful noise burst from the stairway; a shattering, crackling, glass-like sound.
6.
Duncan was already up and moving toward the stairs, as was Pillsbury, hackles up on both.
“Pillsy, you get back over here,” Patricia ordered. “Now!”
The dog stopped at the foot of the stairs, growling.
Patricia leered at the dachshund. “You’re only brave when company’s here.”
All eyes followed Duncan as he climbed. He stopped halfway up stairs and began inspecting a round stained-glass window. After a moment of scrutiny, he stepped back and leaned against the banister.
“Well?” Rachel hollered.
Appearing especially worried, Joan said, “Is the window broken?”
Duncan stepped up to the window again. “I think...I think it’s a mouth. And
an ear. Definitely an ear. There’s part of a nose, too.”
Chris was off the floor now, staring up at Duncan. No one spoke.
Pillsbury, after a thorough sniffing of the bottom stair, decided that Duncan could handle the situation without her, and rejoined the others in the dining room, growling at Chris as she passed.
“Well,” Rachel said to Chris, “you don’t have to have a ‘universal translator’ to know what she just said.”
Finally, Duncan looked down at the group. “Chris, you missing two earrings?”
Chris felt his right ear, then stared up at Duncan, incredulous.
Duncan returned his eyes to the window, nodding. Then, after an exchange of mumbled words, he descended the stairs.
Sauntering up to Chris, he said, “Looks like the joke’s on you, Hollywood.” He threw a thumb over his shoulder. “Somebody up there wants to talk to you.”
“Well,” Joan said, rising from the table, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could sure use an ice cream about now.” She moseyed into the kitchen, the dog in close second, both obviously more interested in Sidewalk Sundaes than talking, earring-snatching windows.
Chris couldn’t move, was petrified of what awaited him up the stairs. Not counting his refrigerator, this was the kind of thing he expected when he went journeying through the human mind, or what he’d come to call Wonderland. But this wasn’t Wonderland. This was Massachusetts, USA, where windows were supposed to mind their own fucking business.
With a hard and totally unexpected push from Patricia, the spell was broken, and he made his way up the stairs, albeit slothfully.
Duncan told everyone else to stay back, that this was between Chris and the window.
The stained glass window was a round multifoil, two-and-a-half-feet across its center, with an unpretentious sunburst design radiating outward in fat, orange squares, then gradually ending in narrowing rectangles of fire-yellow. The digressing pieces from there were choppily grouped, ranging from cobalt blue to blue-gray, and a ruby fringe worked nicely to capture the colors.
It appeared to Chris as if someone’s face had struck the glass from the outside, at an angle, left-center, leaving the raised, multicolored impressions of a forehead, an eye, cheek, an ear with two of his own steel hoop earrings, and half of a nose and mouth.
The lips moved.
“Holy shit!” Chris shrieked. “What—who the fuck are you?”
“Sonny Bono,” said the lips in a strangely familiar voice. “Now come closer.”
“Come closer my ass.”
The lips sighed. “Are you man, or mouse?”
“Don’t mess with me, dude!”
“Just get your brave self over here.”
Chris inched along the carpeted stair. The eye followed his progress with lustful anticipation, as if he were a busty blonde just two pasties and a G-string away from a table dance finale.
“Closer, closer.”
“Alright, okay,” Chris said, now up close. He leaned as far back as he could, as if the mouth had garlic breath. “What gives?”
“First off, kindly remove your jewelry from my ear.”
Chris complied. “Okay, so what’s the deal?”
“It’s Juanita’s fault. Like you, she has a gift. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know how to use it yet.”
“You mean it’s, like, dormant?”
“If you’d only concentrate, you’d know, just as I do, that she just acquired it.”
“Cool,” Chris said. “What’s her specialty?”
“You’re staring at it.”
“What? Like, she can warp glass into caricatures and shit?”
“Hey, stop playing stupid. It’s you you’re talking to here. Literally, you know as much as I do about Juanita’s gift.”
Chris concentrated. “Okay, it’s some kind of...wait...some kind of telekinetic energy.”
The eye just stared at him.
“Okay, wait, it’s...she can transfer...oh shit, she can transport the essence of character, in whole or in part.” He held up a victory fist. “She can move minds. Dude! She can relocate souls!”
“Ssshhh, keep your voice down,” said the lips. “That’d be my guess. Except she can’t hit the broad side of a barn from two feet out, as you can plainly see. She needs your help.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Before we get into that, I have something to say. You think that was pretty cute what you just did over there, feigning an epileptic attack, squirming around on the carpet like that, scaring those people? Well, I got news for ya—knock it off, asshole! That shit’s getting old! Fortunately, by releasing me it worked in your favor this time. Ever hear about the boy who cried wolf? Yeah? Well, that’s you, wolf-boy. Your dreaded Tourettes is gonna flare up again, but no one’s gonna believe you when you’re telling them in your own peculiar way that the sky is falling.”
“Now you’re talking Chicken Little, dude. And Sonny Bono slammed into a tree, not a window.”
“That’s another thing—your smartass mouth. Put a sock in it.”
“Yeah, okay, whatever,” Chris groused. “So, you want me to realign, calibrate, and adjust?”
The eye rolled. “No, Mr. GoodWrench, what I want you to do is play Santa Claus and put a present under her tree. Tonight.”
“Dude, do you know how risky that is?”
“Of course I do. I’m you, remember?”
“Ah man, anyone but her!”
“Listen to me, wolf-boy. I’m not asking you—I’m telling you. Get Juanita plugged in before she hurts somebody. And it wouldn’t kill you to straighten up and start showing a little more respect. In case you forgot, everybody’s here because they’re supposed to be. Hey, after tonight, we’re gonna need all the friends we can get, right?”
Chris nodded. “Okay, I’ll take care of Juanita.”
“Gnarly,” it said. “Oh, and another thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t tell her or anyone else about our little conversation here. It could come back to haunt you in Wonderland.”
“Yeah, I know,” Chris said.
“I know you know.”
Backing away, Chris said, “Will you be, uh...are you going to have to stay there, like, indefinitely?”
“After you get Juanita squared away, I’ll be able to split. And we’ll be one again.”
“Great, okay, well...Can I, like, get you anything?’
“Could you turn on the TV?”
“Yeah, sure. What channel?”
“The evening news,” said the lips. “And hey, could you maybe turn it this way a bit? Take out just enough angle so that Katie Couric doesn’t look like Karen Carpenter?”
Feeling like he’d just left the dentist’s chair, Chris started back down the stairs. He opened his hand and stared at his earrings. “Dear diary...” he mumbled. He was not looking at all forward to entering Juanita’s psyche. Oh, he liked the challenge of building dreamscapes, but Juanita already had it out for him, no love lost there. And if her subconscious were to somehow see behind his disguise...He shuddered. The chances of ending up a corpse in someone’s mind just went from pretty good to damned likely, now that it was Juanita Santiago’s.
7.
They’d gathered around the dining room table, quietly discussing their bizarre new tenant.
“Let me get this straight,” Duncan said to Chris. “When Juanita hit you with her rosary, she knocked a piece of your psyche out hard enough to smash it, mold it into that window?”
“Close enough for government work,” he said. “Can I have my Walkman back now?”
“No,” Duncan said. “So, what makes Juanita so special?”
“Like, even you could have done it,” he said. “Just the right mixture of anger, a religious token and a lot of faith, and bingo—Tiffany does parody.”
“You’re so full of crap,” Patricia said.
“Ditto,” said Rachel.
“Come clean—” Duncan stopped,
glanced at the attentive face in the window, then turned back to Chris, his voice lower but no less menacing. “Come clean or I swear I’ll beat the holy snot out of you!”
“Hey, cut me a break,” he said to everyone. “I’m just as mystified about it as you guys. Well, almost.”
As if just reminded by dense smoke that there was a pie in the oven, Kathy jumped up and said to Patricia, “Would you like to see a trick?”
“I thought I already did.”
“Not this one you haven’t,” she promised.
“Kathy,” Rachel cautioned, “if it’s what I think it is, I don’t think your mom and grammy are quite ready for that yet.”
“It’s all right,” Duncan said. “I think they can handle it.” He was sure Walt Disney himself could levitate from this very table and piss Dumbo’s profile on the ceiling without so much as raising an eyebrow. He looked at Patricia. “You can handle it, right?”
She nodded, smiling. “Yeah, I guess I’m feeling pretty numb.”
“Follow me,” Kathy insisted, “before it’s too late.”
Everyone gathered in the adjacent living room.
Kathy tugged on a curtain cord, but nothing happened.
“Help her with the drapes, Duncan,” Rachel said.
Without a hitch, Duncan parted the green and gold curtains to reveal a large (and, not surprisingly, clean) ordinary window. He pointed to the glass. “Hey, Juanita. This is how they’re supposed to look.”
Eyes glaring, Juanita twirled her rosary around her forefinger. It might have been some kind of obscene gesture she’d picked up from a roguish nun. It was hard to say.
Patricia stood there, arms folded. “Let me guess,” she said to Kathy. “You’re going to make a rabbit appear on my dead lawn.”
Kathy rolled her eyes. “Just watch, silly.”
After she told her grammy to have a seat on the sofa, she placed her hands on the glass.
An image instantly appeared. For Duncan, having watched it happen on a passenger window of a 747 and now on a twelve-by-fifteen feet piece of glass was a stunning lesson in contrast.
This scene was identical to the first, as if Kathy had plugged both times into the same stationary surveillance camera, one staring down upon a simple, tidy living room.
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