by J M Fraser
Cassandra sighed. “At first I thought Brian was dealing with gremlins. He’s been reporting the most ridiculous problems with his car. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking an imp might be the cause. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
Abigail. One loathsome shoe. Rebecca’s cheeks burned. She couldn’t speak. The ringing in her ears would have drowned out whatever she said.
“Just as I thought.” Cassandra stood and paced the floor. “Rebecca, I don’t understand why a young witch would appear out of nowhere and take an interest in my son. What are the odds? We witches are few. We don’t grow on trees. Yet of all possible girls, a witch comes along. And she sends an imp as an advance scout?”
Rebecca bunched her fists. “It isn’t like that.”
“Tell me what it is like, then.”
Torture. By an imp who hates me for no good reason. Or an imp with a larger scheme? An imp in league with the void? No. The Abigails of the world were simple, foolish, clumsy creatures. Most fell into servitude for sorcerers. Some even served witches. She’d never heard of an imp who—
She’d never heard of a boy born to a witch, either. Maybe the world had more secrets than she’d ever imagined. Perhaps she was no more than a grain of sand trying to fend off a boulder. Or in this case, trying to fend off an imagination-eating void threatening to swallow the World of Mortal Dreams whole.
And she’d fend it off, by trusting a prophecy and following the code. But Rebecca didn’t know whether Brian’s mother took stock in the prophecy. So few ever had. Perhaps if she danced around the edges… “Mrs. Danahey, have you seen the growing darkness in this world?”
“You mean politically? Socioeconomically? Who wouldn’t?”
So Cassandra hadn’t seen it. Perhaps no one had.
The lake had gone wild again. Rebecca had nothing to fall back on for comfort except her own resolve. “The code says I can only reveal information through riddles, illusions, and dreams when courting. I’m not sure whether that restriction extends from Brian to you, but—”
Cassandra held up a hand. “I like you, Rebecca. You’ll be good for Brian. But if some imp has taken such a dislike to you she’s now treating him to her mischief out of spite or whatever, I do expect you to resolve the matter. And soon.”
“I’ll try.”
Rebecca swallowed. A grain of sand gaping up at a boulder.
Chapter 13
The world resumed its normal spin. No flat tires. No Wyoming-to-Wisconsin stalkers. An uneventful day of classes. Then another.
Brian’s initial relief faded into boredom. Anxiety followed fast on its heels. He needed to make things happen, tie loose ends, find Rebecca.
Then he met her in one more dream.
“I’m coming for you,” she said, “soon.” The promise quelled the burning urge to head west and find her. At least for the moment.
Ever since a music appreciation class in his senior year, he’d been a Beatles fan. The old Abbey Road album was a favorite of his. And so the morning after the dream, a verse played in his head. Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. The guy in that song fell into a dream—a great concept if Rebecca was waiting inside. But Brian had classes until noon and work right after. No time for falling into dreams or confronting crazy stalkers who might have let the air out of his tires a few days earlier. He barely had ten minutes to spare for reading the news today and saying oh boy, like John Lennon in the song.
Aunt April poked her head out of the kitchen, dragging a comb through her hair. “I forgot to grab the mail yesterday.”
“That’s not one of the verses,” he said.
She looked at him and smiled, not missing a beat, although she couldn’t have had a clue what he was talking about. “Let’s improvise.”
So he headed into the main entranceway of the condo complex, where everyone’s mailboxes held up a wall. He counted five across and three down, then opened his and April’s with a little key he was sure he’d lose sooner or later.
Bills, brochures, no letters, of course—who ever got those anymore?—magazines, junk mail. He cracked open a pink flyer wedged between April’s latest copy of Cosmo and the cable bill.
Rebecca Church, femme fatale at Club Intrigue’s grand opening! Tonight at eight p.m.
Everything spilled from his hands to the floor.
He fell into a dream for the rest of the day, pulling the flyer out of his pocket again and again, not to reread the printed words but the promise between the lines—a reboot of the Brian/Rebecca super team. He counted the hours to the appointed time, oblivious to the chaos of lectures, study groups, elbows by friends who wondered why his brain had locked down, and the raised voice of a supervisor later at work wanting to know the same thing, only with greater urgency.
How could he explain? Other guys’ girlfriends texted, tweeted, liked, instant messaged, called, or simply came knocking with the numbing regularity of a metronome. Their girlfriends didn’t turn the sun off by disappearing, until they later parceled out a few rays with a dream, a poem, another dream, before bursting back into their lives in one massive flare of a flyer.
Scented with pine, no less.
Nobody else had gotten one. He’d peered through the little windows of the other mailboxes. Rebecca’s flyer had been no mass-mailing coincidence, no random announcement by a wandering Irish gypsy. He’d gotten a waking-world poke from an amazing girl who finally managed to track him down.
The tide had turned. Everyone else lived the first day of school. He now lived the last. They were stuck in Monday morning. He’d found Friday night.
But shortly after work, Brian tried and failed to find a Club Intrigue on the Internet.
No sweat. Just a new place without a website yet.
Hey, that rhymed. Rebecca brought out the poet in him.
Anyway, website or no website, the universe had not started hiccupping again.
He wanted to rush to the club early, get there first, but April slowed him down.
“I cooked for us.” Her voice held a note of triumph. Neither of them was good with an oven, or even the microwave, for that matter. They typically fell back on carry-out, the greatest invention since the spoked wheel.
Truly out of it, Brian hadn’t even noticed the mouth-watering aroma of roast chicken until she said those words. He grabbed a seat at the kitchen table and tried to listen between bites while April asked why his brain was locked down, why he wasn’t holding up his end of the conversation, and why he actually scarfed down those beets she’d ladled onto his plate as a joke.
“What do you mean, beets?” He almost gagged. Not even a chocolate-banana smoothie could kill that aftertaste.
An hour later, the bitter taste of doubt picked up where the beets left off. Brian stood beside his car in the parking lot of an old warehouse. Red neon letters sizzled, blinked, stuttered, came to life—Club Intrigue—then staggered again, barely holding their own above the canopied entranceway. Every window in the upper floor was broken.
He shoved his hands into his pockets, headed over, tried the door. Locked. He peered through the glass at an empty cashier’s cage, a concessions counter without attendants, a few sawhorses scattered about.
A placard on an easel summed up the situation. Opening night?
Okay, so Rebecca’s performance announcement was her little joke. She just wanted to meet him here. But where was she? And why pick a half-renovated club in a bad part of town?
He glanced around the lot. A few drivers waited in their cars with engines running, as if maybe the place would open if they idled long enough. The glow of cigarettes and low murmur of conversation at a corner of the building revealed some hardier souls who’d gotten out of their vehicles.
He walked over to three spikey-haired guys in leather jackets and a girl who’d gone too heavy on the black mascara, all puffing away.
“Hey,” he said.
The girl grunted. Two of the guys nodded. The third dropped his cigarette butt and ground it out
with a shoe.
“No show tonight?” he asked.
“And to think, we’ve been living for one,” the girl with overly darkened eyes said.
He turned from one unfriendly face to another but didn’t give up. Rebecca had to be on the grounds somewhere. “Have you seen another girl out here?”
One of the guys tilted his head to where an asphalt path broke away from the driveway and snaked around the building. “Some chick headed that way,” he said.
“No, she didn’t,” dark eyes said. “You’re a liar.”
A half-broken, flickering streetlamp halfway down the path perfectly summed up the odds of finding Rebecca behind the building, but Brian had nowhere else to turn. He followed the trail until it ended at a weedy area of broken glass, discarded wooden crates, and a pile of old tires. Just beyond, the gloom of night took hold with staggering density. A black void stretched high enough to snuff out the stars. It swallowed the moon.
Dark eyes’ voice rose softly in the distance, “You’re such a liar, Dave.”
“I call ’em how I see ’em,” the guy said.
“Rebecca?” Brian stepped toward what had to be a thick patch of fog. Maybe she’d walked through it to the other side.
Something at his feet glimmered in the reluctant light cast by the nearby streetlamp. A brownish coin, but too large to be a penny. He would have stepped over it and looked for Rebecca behind the fog, but the coin changed color briefly, from gold to silver and back. Weird lighting. He picked the thing up and flipped it over in his hand, almost dropping it at the sight of a familiar engraving on either side—a hag whose long hair billowed in the wind.
Use it to buy something, Brian, first chance you get. That’s what Rebecca had said back at the cabin when she’d given the very same coin to him. His heart pounded.
The thing was as warm in his hand as if she’d just been holding it seconds earlier. “Rebecca?”
No answer.
A cold gust of wind blew through the lot, bringing worry as dark and thick as the blanket of fog looming ahead. Suppose Rebecca wasn’t anywhere within a thousand miles of this place. Suppose she hadn’t been the one to send the flyer or hold this coin. He tightened his jacket.
A footfall on the gravel sounded behind him. Every nerve in his body twitched. He swung around.
Dark, scraggly hair, downturned mouth. Of all people to find out here. Abigail.
“I warned you to stay away from her.” The crazy stalker crossed her arms and stared him down with mean eyes.
This girl had to hit the road, and fast. “Why are you in my face at all the wrong times, Abigail?”
She brushed past him, walking straight up to the fog. “Suppose you did something so terrible you couldn’t live with yourself. What would you do?”
“I wouldn’t stalk someone.”
“I’d embrace the darkness,” she said.
“Knock yourself out.” He turned his back on her.
A banjo sounded through an open window of the warehouse. A fiddler joined in, then a trumpet, and a drummer, all combining into the signature chaos of a band doing warm-ups. The best sound he’d ever heard. A show after all.
Brian hurried around to the front. Spotlights from the top of the building bathed the driveway. More cars had parked. A short line of people filed through the open door of the place.
He went inside and stepped up to the cashier’s cage.
“The cover charge is two bits,” a girl said from behind the bars.
The hair on the back of his neck prickled. Hadn’t bits gone the way of furlongs in the parade of forgotten words?
“Come again?” he asked.
“Twenty-five cents,” she said.
A quarter to get into a night spot? And what did that remind him of?
How much for gas?
Couple bucks oughta cover it.
The time had arrived for a return to the mother ship before this weird, alternate universe devoured his brains.
But Rebecca was here. Somewhere. He had her coin in his pocket to prove it.
Or did Abigail bring the coin here and drop it?
No way.
He glanced at his watch. Almost the eight p.m. show time. “Do you have a performer named Rebecca Church?”
“I haven’t seen the program,” the cashier said. “Maybe she’s doing one of the poetry readings.”
“Now you’re talking.” Poetry and Rebecca went hand in hand. He fished in his pocket for a coin—no, not that one—found a quarter, and nearly fumbled it to the floor before handing it over. Hard to hold steady when landing in the last day of school, Friday night, and Christmas all at once.
A silent hostess led him down a saw-horse-cordoned pathway across an unfinished, plaster-strewn hall so cavernous their footfalls echoed.
He tried to keep up with her, bouncing questions off her back as they walked. “Is Rebecca Church reciting here?”
No answer.
“Red hair, about your height, likes to dress retro?”
The hostess ignored him.
Awesome dimples when she smiles? Reader of hieroglyphics? Sharer of coins? Visitor of dreams? He held his tongue. No point spilling his heart out.
They reached a small section way in the back. Just a dozen or so cocktail tables and a little stage. Unlike the larger area, this one was finished, up to a point. Murals on a wall depicted knights, maidens, and dragons in medieval settings. They brought Rebecca’s sketches to mind, until the resemblance faded three-quarters of the way to the ceiling. Pipes and catwalks hanging down from above dragged him back to the real world. The contrast between fantasy and urban ugliness must have been meant as a statement, like one of those modern paintings he’d seen in the Art Institute—brick buildings under construction reaching for the sky right next to old tenements crumbling to the ground.
The hostess brought him to a table right by the stage. Couldn’t have been better, if Rebecca was actually here, waiting to perform, or doing her rendition of gotcha, planning to catch him from behind like when they first met on the side of the road.
“I didn’t get a program,” he said.
The hostess walked away.
Thanks for all the info. At least he had a good line of sight to both the front door and the stage. Rebecca had to show up in one spot or the other. He pulled up a chair.
A waitress hurried by, balancing a tray of drinks in her hand, wearing the deer-in-the-headlights look of someone with too many orders to fill.
“Wait, I have a quick question.”
She slowed but didn’t stop. “Yeah?”
“Rebecca Church is performing, right?”
“Is she the redhead who set this up?”
Brian’s heart raced. He tried to thank her, but she got away before he could form coherent words.
The lights dimmed and curtains parted, revealing a noose hanging above a wooden chair, for a poetry reading and some songs?
The others at their tables chattered away, laughed, shouted for waitresses.
Brian eyed the exit and started pushing his chair back. Creepy from the get-go, this place had now raised the hair on his arms.
Rebecca picked that moment to pad onstage from behind the rear curtain in bare feet, dressed in black. Their eyes met, and for a perfect moment, he shared a long-overdue smile with the girl who turned his heart to mush.
But she shifted her attention past him to the larger audience, giving them a long zombie stare before speaking.
“Nineteen poor souls hanged in sixteen ninety-two.
The claims
against them were threadbare.
Witches on their broomsticks stoking fears anew.
The cause?
The girl with auburn hair.”
Rebecca climbed onto the chair, put the noose around her neck, tightened it, and jumped.
Chapter 14
For the briefest of moments, Brian couldn’t process the image of Rebecca swinging at the end of the rope. He didn’t accept that the gathered group
offered some light applause and then continued chattering, laughing, and tinkling their ice-filled drinks. For that one tenth of a second, Rebecca’s much-earlier words rang in his head.
People always think they’re awake, even when they’re sleeping.
No.
Not even in the darkest, craziest region of his subconscious mind could he conjure a nightmare this horrific. The scene was real.
He sprang out of his chair, overturning the table and sending his drink crashing to the floor. Somehow, the clatter of breaking glass accomplished what Rebecca’s hanging failed to do. The audience quieted.
He rushed the stage.
Two hulking, shaved-headed bouncers grabbed his arms before he could get halfway up the stairs. “Are you crazy? You’ll ruin the show,” the bruiser on the left shouted.
“The recitals are about to start,” his buddy on the right added.
They hustled him toward an exit.
Brian twisted, kicked, got an arm free, and lashed out with it. “She’s hanging!”
“Who?”
He managed to break away and turn to the stage, but before he could take a step forward, Rebecca, the noose, and the chair shimmered.
And faded away.
The room swam. He collapsed into the waiting arms of the two bouncers.
A simple stage trick must have fooled him. Mirrors and lighting can work wonders.
He met the gazes of a few others in the club, but most looked away. The unspoken message couldn’t have been clearer. Beat it, and don’t come back.
A teenage girl took the stage, clutching a sheet of paper in her hands. She turned to the saner people still at their tables, people who didn’t randomly go berserk over nothing. “I’ve written a poem about unrequited love.”
The bouncers shoved Brian out a side door and slammed it behind him.
End of story? No. He’d messed up. Clearly. But he’d come looking for Rebecca, he’d seen her in there, and he wasn’t leaving without a chance to talk to her.
He hurried around front and back into the club.
Another bouncer folded his beefy arms and blocked the way to the seating area. “There ain’t no admittance after the show starts.”