by Lori Titus
“How do you know this? What’s my father got to do with anything?”
“Apparently not much, since you don’t believe in souls. I am asking you to give a part of yourself you don’t believe exists.”
“In return for?”
“No more sleepless nights. No more ache in the gut. No need to drink anymore, but when you do drink, you’ll be able to put it down after you’ve had one, two at the most, without any desire to binge.”
“And what do you get out of it?”
He grinned. “There, you see? Now you’re listening. You work for me, for seven years. If we agree that the work relationship is beneficial, we continue for another seven. If not, we part ways. At which time, you get the part of your soul back that I will take away.”
“Wait a minute. You’re saying you’ll take part of my soul? Why not the whole thing? If we’re talking bargains that sounds like a shitty one.”
“Here’ s the interesting thing about this substance you claim you don’t believe in,” Ramshead said. “Take a man’s entire soul, and he becomes useless. He can’t feel anything. No joy, no pain, no anger, no grief. While human emotions can be quite messy, I find them to be excellent motivators. I would rather hold a piece of a mortal soul than all of it. Take a little part of it, and you keep all those lovely feelings songwriters go on about. I, like others of my ilk, have done deals where we’ve taken the whole thing before. What’s left to you once the spark is gone? Nothing but a sack of skin, bones, and shit. No direction, no ambition, and how do people say it? No more fucks to give. Most commit suicide within the year after their souls are harvested. To be good at my job one has to be more creative.”
“You’re saying you’re a demon?”
Ramshead nodded. “Demon smacks of being derogatory in this age, but essentially, correct.”
“Let’s say, for the sake of conversation, I believe you. What happens to this part of my soul when it’s taken from me?
“Nothing, really. It will have no consciousness of the transition or that it has been divorced from its whole. The soul is only energy, son. It knows nothing without the mind.”
“I’m not your son.”
“No. But I am older than any being you have ever met, so if I refer to you as ‘son’ rather than ‘maggot,’ consider yourself fortunate.”
He waved his hand in a dismissive manner. A surge of heat went up my legs and back. I stood up.
“I’ll give you a night to consider the pros and cons of my offer,” Ramshead said. “Come to my office at twelve noon tomorrow and let me know your decision. No later than that. If you don’t show up on time, I will come find you myself, and that visit won’t be as pleasant as this one has been.”
He vanished. I kept telling myself it couldn’t have happened. I was having hallucinations again.
Two of the bottles of liquor had busted when I’d dropped them to the floor earlier, leaving only the gin intact. I swept away the glass and threw a towel over the liquid. That was the best I could do before opening the gin and emptying half of it down my throat.
I walked back into the living room. In the chair where Ramshead sat only minutes before was a business card—this one red—and in white print, the address where he could be found along with a time: 12:00 PM.
The faint smell of cigarette smoke hung in the air, and a trace of ash remained on my coffee table.
Chapter Three
Natasha Taylor
My first day at home with Mama started out uneventful enough.
One thing about her is, though her mind has been going, she can still move around pretty well save the few aches and pains you might expect. It was more a thing of watching to make sure she didn’t slip in the shower... or worse, that she didn’t get it in her head to take a walk somewhere by herself. She did that one time last year, and it scared the hell out of me. That was before Indira was working for us. Luckily, I found her walking down the block. I had it in the back of my mind that she might try something like that just because her usual caregiver wasn’t around.
“Where’s Indira?” she asked when I gave her breakfast. I sat down in a chair in her room with my own toast and coffee.
“She needed a few days off,” I lied. “Her little girl has the flu.”
“Oh?” she asked sweetly. “Well, kids are like Petrie dishes. Hopefully she gets better soon. I don’t want her bringing any of those germs around me.”
I smiled. It was a bad lie, but it would buy me some time. I wasn’t really sure how she felt about Indira being gone, one way or the other, but I figured it was safe to assume she would miss her.
Telling her lies makes me itch, though. Not only because she’s my mother and lying to her is shitty, but because when she was healthy, any form of lie was as clear to her as a neon sign. She still had bits of that clarity now and again. It would be my luck that she would know just when I didn’t want her to.
I was still trying to come up with a plan for who would take care of her. Not everyone had the kind of personality to deal with Mama, and quite honestly she scares the shit out of people sometimes.
I mean, the obvious things are when she gets it in her mind to sleep with a weapon, (like that Deer Horn knife. I still haven’t figured out how she got that, but I have suspicions). The more subtle things that scare people are the stories she tells, or the sudden, unexplained intuition she seems to have about their lives.
Before Indira’s time with us, we tried a caregiver named Maria. She was a sweet woman, short and a little stout, with a round face and a long hair she wore in a ponytail. The two of them were sitting watching television one day when my mother told her, “now you know you can’t trust your husband around any woman, why would you leave your sister alone with him? Don’t blame her for what happened because she didn’t want him, but he kept pushing the issue until she gave in. She’s gonna tell you tonight. The first of the month, she’s moving out. She’s six weeks pregnant with your man’s baby.”
Maria didn’t say anything about it until the next day. She came to work with tears in her eyes the following morning. “Bruja!” she whispered beneath her breath, probably thinking that I hadn’t heard her or didn’t understand. The scorned woman retold the entire story and then explained that she could no longer work for us. Her situation was just as mama predicted.
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the entire exchange. “Yeah bitch, you would know; your mama was one too. Don’t get mad at me because you’re married to a man whore.”
“Mama!”
She batted her doe eyes at me like she was the most innocent creature on the planet. “What?”
Maria ran for the door, and that was that.
There was a string of people who were fired or quit under similar though less dramatic circumstances. I told her that she just couldn’t read people like that and expect them to stay. People generally do not believe in the supernatural, and even those that do aren’t happy when you hand them bad news.
“Well I can’t help it, sometimes I just know.”
“Yes,” I said. “But why do you have to tell them? You’re scaring people. Most likely they can’t do anything but be miserable because they know about it.”
Other times, Mama would be so deep in her own thoughts that it didn’t seem she noticed people at all anymore. And then all of a sudden, she would pipe up saying something that was right on target.
Like she did just when I was about to take our empty plates back to the kitchen.
“You know, the store is only four walls, darling,” she said calmly, preoccupied with playing with one of her fingernails. “If you need to let it go, then do it.”
I felt like someone punched me in my gut—repeatedly. “What are you talking about?”
She looked at me with those huge, round, dark eyes of hers. “Zeke and I enjoyed having that store but like anything, it’s a possession. It wasn’t meant for you to kill yourself over.”
She returned to staring at the television
as if I wasn’t even there.
“Mama?”
I called her name a couple more times but she didn’t look up. I hated this. How she was with me one moment, her old self, and then gone the next.
It sounded like something she would have told me before the dementia. I also knew very well that it was meant to comfort me. She wouldn’t want to see all the work her and my Dad put in come to nothing. That and the house was really all they had to pass on. How could I let that go, especially while Mama was still alive? Many people didn’t get the start in life that I’d had. I would be damned if I would lose that advantage through bad luck or poor planning.
I went in the kitchen and grabbed my laptop off the table. I took it back into the living room, where I had a good view of my mother’s door. A glance at the clock told me she would probably be up another couple hours before falling asleep again.
When she fell asleep, it would be my chance to check the house again and make sure she hadn’t accessed my father’s weapons stash.
Most of what he’d kept was in a trunk in the attic under lock and key, but I also kept some of his things in my room. It was still a mystery where those Deer Horns came from. My favorites of his were a couple of daggers and a crystal necklace he gave me; but those were still where I’d put them.
I’d asked once why a priest needed such weapons. He told me to remember that most of the spirits he dealt with were tied to the flesh, and that sometimes it was necessary to war with both.
The only other explanation I had was that maybe they weren’t his, but hers from back in the old days. Katherine knew how to fight when she had to, and I didn’t put it past her to have a few pieces I maybe never knew about. I can’t say my parents hid anything major about themselves or their lives, but they didn’t go into the details about some of it.
I was okay with that. I mean, I don’t want to know the gory details unless it has some bearing on my life now. Things are complicated enough.
These days, there was no telling whether or not Mama could remember certain things or if her recollections would be correct.
Thankfully, being at home didn’t mean not working. I could get a lot done from my laptop, but honestly I missed being in the store. I missed having my employees or my cousin around to poke their head into my office door and tell me to stop and take a break.
Sometimes stopping is the healthy solution.
AROUND FOUR IN THE afternoon I found myself fighting sleepiness. I went into the kitchen and made myself some coffee.
While it was brewing, I realized something. The house was uncharacteristically quiet.
I rushed to my mother’s room.
Not only wasn’t she in her room, but her bed was made. How long had she been gone? She would have had to walk directly past me to get out... I realized she must have waited until I’d gone to the bathroom to make her exit, which meant two things. One, she’d only been gone a few minutes. Two, she had planned to get outside by herself.
I ran to the front door. The inside door had been locked, but the screen door stood open.
My mother was sitting on a chair with her legs crossed wearing her favorite red robe and slippers, looking queenly. Her hair was brushed a bit haphazardly and corralled into a bun. It still looked good on her.
“What are you looking at, little girl?” she peered at me. Her big eyes narrowed. I could never win a staring contest with her, so I looked away.
“You should have told me you wanted fresh air Mama, I would have come and sat with you. Don’t scare me like that.”
“Really,” she said. “You’re worried about me getting out the house, I really think you should be more worried about what might get in.”
I sat down beside her, willing my pounding heart to go back into a normal rhythm. It didn’t seem to be doing any good. On days like this, I wondered if worry might just kill me. Who would take care of her then? There were some things she would not let anyone else do for her. Her memory was failing but not her sense of pride.
“What are you talking about, Mama?” I asked. I was sure that I didn’t want to know, but curiosity had the better of me.
“You’re telling me you can’t see those things standing just past the gate?” she asked in disbelief. “I just don’t understand, honey. Where did Zeke and I go wrong with you? There shouldn’t be anything you can’t see.”
I looked out into our front yard. I hadn’t managed to keep begonias and roses going along the edges of the lawn like Mama used to. I did pay a gardener to come by and trim the grass and the hedges, so we had some descent greenery. The fence at the end of the property was old-fashioned chain-link. Beyond that was just a strip of sidewalk and a quiet, tree-lined street.
Mama continued to look out into the street, but she grabbed my hand and squeezed it.
“You can see,” she whispered fiercely. “Look again.”
I looked out to the street.
At first, I saw nothing out of the ordinary. It was only when I looked out the corner of my eyes and readjusted my focus that I saw them.
The men stood shoulder to shoulder, wearing black coats, and black fedoras. The two nearest my gate looked like twins. There were holes where the eyes should have been, filled with something that look like white spotlights. Even though they stood still, their bodies seemed to vibrate, like an image on a digital screen fading into pixels.
There were many more outside on the street. The block was teeming with them.
I turned to Mama. She held one hand out and closed her eyes. I watched as one by one they burst into flame. When the fires were gone, there was nothing left of the men.
“That’s how you take care of them, child,” Mama said. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”
When I looked back, the street was as quiet and tranquil as always. No smoke, no dust marked where those grim creatures once stood.
I hustled Mama inside the house and locked the door behind us. The first thing I did was go upstairs for Daddy’s shotgun. My own gun was stored in my room, and I grabbed that too before coming back downstairs.
My mother was sitting serenely on the couch. “What were those things outside,” I asked her.
“Nethers,” she replied.
“You sure?”
She nodded with certainty.
I took a breath. “You could have told me that.”
“I tried, you weren’t listening. Those things can’t hurt us.”
I took a peek out of the window. This time, I didn’t see them. The street was empty and quiet as normal.
It had been a long time since I had talked aloud to anyone about such things. Sure, I still read about them. Though I hadn’t read my father’s journals since I was a teenager, there were plenty treatises on the occult at the store and in the house too. Since my mother seemed to be having one of her rare days, I decided to try a question.
“What exactly are they, again?”
She turned her gaze on me. There was that seriousness, the frown that sometimes meant she was having difficulty putting together her thoughts. “They are... a form of shadows. Used by demons to watch humans. They can’t hear, all they do is watch, and they tend to travel in packs. You’ll never see one of them alone,” she said. “Baby, what’s going on here? Why would those things be watching our house?”
Chapter Four
Victor Ramshead
On a good day—when the smog dissipated—the view from my office window stretches across Los Angeles from downtown all the way to Venice Beach. On a sunny, bright day I could even see a swath of blue ocean.
“Sir, your appointment is here,” a female voice said over the speakerphone, startling me from my thoughts.
The receptionist was named Monica. She worked for the firm for nearly a year but to me she was as forgettable as wallpaper: a washed out thirty-something with dyed blond hair and a penchant for biting her lower lip. Most days I wasn’t sure why Henry had hired her, or why exactly she remained in our employ.
“Mr. Stuckey,” I repli
ed. “I’ve been waiting for him, my dear. Send him in.”
“Yes sir,” the secretary said. There was a short breath, and expectant pause. She was waiting for further instruction.
“Send him in, Monica, and take the rest of the afternoon off.”
“Sir, I...”
“Thank you, Monica that will be all. I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow.”
Moments later, Christopher walked through his door.
Stuckey was tall and thin though heavily muscled. Even with all the alcohol he’d consumed lately, he hadn’t yet lost the physique that came as a byproduct of hard training. He looked much different today in a clean suit, shirt, and tie. The stubble was gone. The blue-eyed blond had gotten himself a crisp, clean haircut. Ramshead found the man’s eyes very expressive. While the rest of his face remained passive, the eyes showed every emotion he experienced. It was not the best attribute for a soldier, but Ramshead was sure Lieutenant Commander Stuckey was used to shooting his enemies before they had a chance to look twice, much less read his expression.
“Christopher, have a seat,” Ramshead said. “I’m glad you could make it.”
He sat down, unbuttoned his jacket, and shrugged. “I’m still not sure exactly why I’m here. I prefer it to you breaking into my home. Which, while we’re on the subject, that will not happen again. And if we’re going to do business together, it’s Chris.”
Ramshead nodded. “That’s more than fair. A man’s home and castle and all of that old-fashioned nonsense,” he said. “Chris.”
“If I were to accept your offer, how would it work?”
“The plan has a seven-year term. You work for me...”
“In what capacity?”
“As a lawyer.”