Weird Tales - Summer 1990

by Vol. 51 No. 4

  Her son had been the recipient of many such therapeutic cookies. But after what he had been telling her, about all the trouble he had been hav­ing in high school, Blake Bloodsworth had been hoping for something more from her than a pastry panacea. He shook his head.

  "I'm not hungry. Jocks been slam­ming you against lockers all day, you wouldn't be hungry either."

  "Eat it," she insisted. "Since when do you have to be hungry to eat my cook­ies?"

  "Yeah, and I'm getting fat. It's bad enough being a geek without being a fat geek."

  He was in fact small and thin, as he had always been. She sat down at the

  ashwood kitchen table with him and gave him a hard look.

  "Eat the cookie," she ordered.

  Tired of fighting, he took the sweet hex-marked circle from her and in­gested it. Good, as always. God, why wouldn't she sell them and make her­self as rich as the things that came out of her oven? A peering middle-aged woman, ever housedressed, spending her days in the kitchen passionately baking, she did not eat much or have any visible source of income. She ap­peared to Blake to live on air, like one of those spidery tropical plants from Spencer's Mail Order Gifts.

  He wanted someday to make some­thing of himself. He was a good student, especially in logical subjects such as math and science. Maybe he could be an engineer or a scientist, get out of Diligence and out of poverty. His mother's take-it-as-it-comes attitude toward life irritated him. How could anyone so proud be so sloppy, so blurred at the edges, in the way she dressed, her thinking, her housekeeping . . . her kitchen, which might as well be her soul, disgusted him. Dutch-kid plaques on the walls, along with a heart-shaped wreath of plastic roses. More plastic roses perched atop the cupboards. He hated them, and he hated her kitchen even when it was clean, but (to add to his adolescent irritation) from where he sat he could see the mess her day's cookie-making had left in it: clouds of flour everywhere, Crisco and eggs sit­ting out on the counter along with her cookbook —

  "Hey." Blake's mood suddenly changed. Eyes glittering, he got up and went to look at the book as if he had never seen it before, though in fact he had been seeing it all his life. An old volume, handwritten and bound in black leather, it had belonged, so his mother told him, to his great-grandmother. Maternal great-grandmother, of course; he had no paternal relations. Not only was he a geek, but a fatherless geek as well.

  "Hey," Blake repeated. He was be­ginning to get an idea what to do about the jerks in school, one of the best ideas he had ever had; where had it come from? The recipe book looked plenty spooky enough for what he had in mind. On its black leather cover was em­bossed, of all things, the slant-eyed face of a cat. He flipped its pages. Between cobwebs of text (brown-inked in a fine, fine hand) he saw illustrations: stars, several weird kinds of crosses, hex de­signs of all sorts. Cookie decorations. But the buttheads didn't have to know that.

  "Mom," he demanded, "can I take this to school?"

  "What for?" she asked in her dry way, seeming as always to know what he was doing, what he was thinking, but ask­ing the proper questions anyway, as if to uphold a formality. Holding up his end, he always lied.

  "To show the teachers."

  "You expect them to read it? It's in German, you know."

  "Of course I know." In fact he hadn't given the inscrutable text much thought. "So I show it to the German teacher."

  She smiled with that odd weary pride and tenderness only mothers seem able to achieve. And if she indeed saw through him as he suspected, her pride had to be not for what he had said but what he actually intended to do.

  After supper Blake retreated to his attic, his dusty lair where his mother never came. Once he had turned ado­lescent she had seemed to understand instinctively his need for privacy and his own space, moving him up under the eaves and turning his former bed­room into her storage area.

  She understood too much. It was as if she looked at him and read his mind.

  Blake lay on his narrow studio couch of a bed and felt faintly uneasy despite his excited plans. It seemed odd to him that his mother had so readily given him permission to borrow the recipe book. She used it every day, or else kept it constantly by her like a lucky charm, and it had been written by her long-dead grandmother, for gosh sake. The grandmother she had been named after. Another Enola Bloodsworth. So it had to be precious to her.

  His mother was up to something, Blake decided. And no telling what. Enola Bloodsworth's thoughts and plans were strictly her own. All of Diligence knew her, yet she had no close friends. In a town full of couples and families she stood like a blackthorn tree, in proud isolation. Backward, the name "Enola" spelled "Alone."

  From what Blake had heard, his great-grandmother hadn't been mar­ried either. He wondered if that long-dead Enola had done as his mother had done, taking a man for purposes of in­semination then discarding him. His mother was quite frank about his father: the man had been no more than a make-do in her life, she scarcely remembered his face, his name was of no importance. She was just as frank about her reason for having seduced her unlikely lover: she had wanted a child badly. Too bad she got me, Blake thought. Probably she had been hoping for a girl to carry on the rather eccentric Bloodsworth breed­ing tradition.

  Never mind, Mom. Plenty of the guys in school keep telling me I'm the next best thing.

  It was tough being small in Diligence, a steel-mill town where even the nouses stood tall and square-shoul­dered like the cock-of-the-walk foot­ball-playing Irish and Slavic and Italian guys in their muscle shirts and gladi­ator footgear. Quite aside from the fact that the jocks sometimes used him as their medicine ball, Blake had a prob­lem with girls. He liked them. There was a word that rhymed with hex, and it was often on his mind, but he hadn't had any. With all the hunks to choose from, girls laughed in his face when he approached.

  His mother knew, of course, though he told her nothing. "Someday there is going to be a special girl for you, Blake," she had said to him one evening out of thin shadowy flour-clouded air. "You're small and dark, and that means you're smarter than the others. So let the gadabout girls choose the big dumb brutes for now. Someday there will be a beautiful girl who appreciates you the way I do."

  And then she had pushed cookies at his face.

  Damn her, she adored him as only a mother could. And he hated her devo­tion, because it only made him ache for a similar love from . . .

  Lying on his chaste bed, Blake al­lowed himself daydreams: not of any girl he knew, because they all scorned him, but of an ideal lover he had never seen. Passionate. Exotic. Erotic. A few years older than he, maybe, taller than he, even, but only his lovemaking could satisfy her. Greek profile, with that wonderfully patrician straight or slightly bowed line from brow to nose. Masses of black hair, huge dark — no, green — no, purple eyes above fashion-model cheekbones. In his imagination he kissed those cheekbones and her full hot lips and her exquisite collarbone and so on down her lithe, throbbing body to her breasts. She had more than two. The ones that showed through her clothes were full and bobbing, like a cheerleader's breasts, but on the rib-cage just below them were two more, smaller ones with supersensitive nip­ples that excited her to do unspeakable acts, and in all the world only he, Blake Bloodsworth the Master Lover, knew of them —

  Jesus, Blake mocked himself, adjust­ing the position of his hands. Stop now and maybe you won't go blind.

  Trying to leave the fantasy woman behind on the bedsheets, he got up and went to his high, narrow window. It was dusk. An orange September moon was rising. Just outside the glass, so near that he could see their ugly little faces, bats were swooping down from the eaves, as they did every nightfall. Things that flew in the dark, like the succubus he could still feel writhing in his brain stem.

  Far below, on the stones of the alley, sat a sleek black cat with its aristo­cratic head tilted back, looking up to­ward him.

  "Hey, Geek," Jason Trovato cheer­fully greeted him the next morning out­side the school. "How's your l
ove life?"

  "Talk to your dad lately?" someone else put in.

  "Long distance?" another butthead, Dane Orwig, suggested. More had gath­ered, grinning. They never let him for­get. As kids they had chased him down and rubbed his face in the dirt. Their tactics hadn't changed much since.

  "I've had it, you guys," he told them, his voice coming up squeaky out of his narrow ribs. "Lay off. I'm not going to take your crap anymore."

  He knew they loved it when he tried to act tough. As he had expected they would, they laughed and stepped closer. But this time instead of wincing he smiled. For once he felt strong in his secret way, because he had a plan.

  "Look," he told them quietly, "I'll warn you once, because hex magic is nothing to mess with. I've got hex witch blood, and now I've been anointed. Any­time I want I can put a curse on you."

  He did not himself believe any of this. His plan was to scare them, nothing more. Most of them had been nurtured under an incense cloud of Catholic mys­ticism. The few Protestants among them had received their share of fiery Rev­elation under revival tents pitched in cow pastures. He hoped all of them would at least halfway believe him. Maybe they did. They were still laugh­ing, true, but it sounded forced.

  "Hey!" called a big freckled football hero named Patrick Sullivan. "How'd you manage that? Does the coven meet in your ma's garage, or what?"

  "Yeah, geek!" Jason Trovato sounded genuinely eager. "Tell us the details."

  "You stop calling me geek and you can come watch."

  "Sure, geek."

  "So they meet in your ma's garage," someone else put in conversationally, "and they have rites, like? What do they do, geek? Dance naked?"

  No, dammit, their laughter was not forced. They were loving every minute of this.

  "Human sacrifice," Dane Orwig sug­gested.

  "Hey, geekie-poo!" Patrick Sullivan pushed forward to physically accost Blake. "Burn any virgins lately?"

  God burn them all, they knew quite well he was a virgin himself. Coldly fu­rious, Blake threw off the hand clutch­ing his arm. "Shut up. All of you. I mean it."

  Of course they would not shut up. At this point they should start throwing him around. But Blake truly did not feel afraid, and something hard and glinting and more than a little sinister had gathered in his black eyes, because Enola Bloodsworth's black textbook rode in his jacket pocket. He pulled it out and held it up with its face toward them, like a hellfire preacher shaking the Bible. Slantwise the cat stared at them from its cover.

  "I can give you acne like you wouldn't believe, Sullivan," Blake challenged. "Hell, why stop at acne? I can give you AIDS. How would you like that, if I gave you AIDS?"

  Because he wished it were true (though he knew it was not true) his voice deepened, intense. He knew they would not hit him now, because of the power in his voice. As in fact they did not. They stood wide-eyed, their grins pasted on their faces, and he opened the black book so that they could see the pages, the spiderwebby handwriting gone brown with age, the weird horned moons and pentacles and pyramids and hex circles and embracing snakes. They stepped back, then glanced at each other and seemed to find a second wind of truculence.

  "How you gonna give him AIDS, geek?" Dane Orwig jeered. "Slit your wrists and drip on him?"

  Blake told him, "For the last time. Don't call me geek."

  "Greek, whatcha gonna do about it? Call up your faggot lover, the one with the red tail?"

  "You're so nice, Orwig, I'll give you a choice." Blake began to flip through the pages of his grimoire. "Root canal work," he read, or pretended to read. "Sexual impotence. Drug-induced hal­lucinations. What do you say? Which would you prefer I cursed you with?"

  Orwig stared at him.

  Raising the black book, Blake smiled like a skull and began at random to read, phonetically intoning the weird foreign words. The recipes or whatever they were sounded wonderfully im­pressive when read aloud in a sonorous voice.

  "Hey!" Dane Orwig flinched back. "You Goddamn geek, what the Hell are you trying to prove?"

  Blake showed his teeth and read. Even if it was only the ingredients for snickerdoodles, still there was something potent in the feel of the gibberish coming up blood temp from his lungs, his gut, and rushing out of his mouth. He wished the hotshots would hit him, because he had a feeling they could not stop him even if they did.

  But they did not. "We're gonna be late," somebody nervously suggested, and the group backed off and moved down the sidewalk, collectively saun­tering so as to save face.

  It was victory, glorious heady victory, but Blake had his pride. He did not yell yahoo! Instead, eyes darkly sparkling, he stood still and finished reading his curse, for effect.

  By what must have been either in­credible good luck or because of nerves, Dane went home sick at noon. And Blake's enemies watched him sideward and let him alone pretty much all the rest of that day.

  "I had phone calls from the school today," his mother informed him over supper. "I understand you were draw­ing satanic symbols in your notebook during English class."

  Good old Mrs. Xander, founder and adviser of the Bible club. He knew he could count on her to spread the word. She was so paranoid, she believed the Procter & Gamble symbol was satanic.

  "So what did you say?" Blake asked. It was impossible for him to tell what bis mother was thinking. She had spo­ken in the same level way as ever.

  "I told her it was good for children to draw satanic symbols."

  "Good going, Mom!"

  "She is not pleased with me."

  "I bet she's not."

  "And then I had a call from your prin­cipal," Enola Bloodsworth said. "It seems you had been heard to claim you have hex witch blood."

  "And?"

  "I told him it was quite true."

  Blake had lived long enough to feel some puzzled apprehension; things were going too well. Nevertheless, he smiled widely and asked her, "You mind if I take your book to school again tomor­row?"

  "No, I don't mind. Have some gin-gersnaps."

  He took several, to thank and please her. All of the dark spicy cookies were marked with hex signs: star hexes, swirl hexes, compass hexes. Come to think of it, this was odd, that she should have started decorating with hex signs. Blake had seen his mother spend hours inscribing the distelfink, the luck bird, by hand on the cookies she gave to ac­quaintances, but he had never known her to use these other hexes before.

  He ate the things. They burned in his mouth and throat, as gingersnaps will. He noticed that his mother ate several too.

  The black cat sat under his window again that night, and was still there in the morning, and though it welcomed no familiarities it walked to school with him, stalking at his side like a comrade to combat.

  That day things stopped going well.

  First thing, during homeroom period, Blake was called to the principal's of­fice, where the latter, Mr. Lipschitz, awaited him with compressed lips. Mr. Lipschitz was a big man, an ex-Marine whose excess weight had not affected his confidence in himself. Even the jocks were a little afraid of him.

  "Blake Bloodsworth. You stand there and tell me exactly what you have done to Dane Orwig."

  To his chagrin, Blake could do no bet­ter than to squeak, "Nothing!"

  "Listen, you punk." Mr. Lipschitz moved closer. "I've known the Orwig family for a long time." The look Mr. Lipschitz was giving Blake quite clearly expressed the principal's opinion of Blake's lack of such a family. "They are solid people, not the sort to get upset about nothing. So when I get a phone call from them in the middle of the night and they say you did something to Dane, I believe them."

  "What am I supposed to have done? What's the matter with him?"

  "You tell me, Bloodsworth!"

  Blake wondered briefly if he had ac­tually done something to Dane besides worry him. No, that was nonsense. He did not believe in magic, as a future scientist he could not believe such rot, he had to be logical. One of two things must have happened: Dane had worried h
imself sick, or Dane was smarter than Blake had thought, smart enough to outfox him. Because the Orwigs were indeed not the sort to get excited, he decided on the latter. Dane had to be a better actor than anyone knew.

  "Is he saying he has AIDS, or what?"

  School administrators in steel towns are not often heavily committed to mod­ern educational ethics. Therefore it was nothing new when Mr. Lipschitz bar­reled out from behind his desk and started to slap Blake around. Some of the hotshots were almost used to this. But not being built sturdily to stand up to this sort of treatment, Blake began to whimper.

  "I didn't do anything to him! It was just a joke!"

  "Don't sound like no joke to me, put­ting a curse on a person!" Mr. Lipschitz tended to forget his grammar when im­passioned.

  Blake yelped, "If you knew, why'd you ask?" and Mr. Lipschitz hit him again.

  "Where's the black book?" Mr. Lip­schitz bellowed, mauling him. "Where is the devilish thing? Anything you bring onto school property I got a right to confiscate!"

  Blake felt the dark stirrings of anger, and with it, some courage. No way was this rhinoceros going to get hold of his mother's book. Blake had stashed it above the suspended ceiling in the boys' restroom on his way to the office, and no amount of abuse was going to make him say where it was.

  "You answer what I asked you, boy!"

  Lipschitz smacked him on the ear. Blake said nothing, did not cry out, but with sudden angry strength pulled himself away from the man and glared at him with smoldering eyes. Lipschitz went pale and stepped back, stagger­ing, fumbling at air with his hands. The big man seemed to be suffering some sort of shock. His fat heart bothering him, maybe, from overexertion. Blake could feel no sympathy for him.

  "Evil eye," Lipschitz whispered. "Don't you evil-eye me, Bloodsworth. Get out of here. Stay out. Get away from me!"

  Blake stared a moment longer, then left the office without getting his hall pass initialed. Now he was an outlaw, not a geek. Being an outlaw felt better, and he decided to keep going. He re­trieved his mother's cookbook from its hiding place first thing, afraid that if Lipschitz searched he would find it. Then for the same reason he left the school building and walked home, shaky but defiant.