She told me about her Great-grandmother, who'd been cut down by the Cossacks eighty years ago yet often showed up in the shower, making suggestions on how to cook goulash correctly. Her MIA brother, Philip, held muddy maps over her face and pointed to his buried remains outside of Da Nang, begging her to bring him home. All the other dead she'd seen since she nearly drowned in Sutter's Creek as a child weren't nearly as aggressive. She caught glimpses of them here and there. Like the living, they too often offered unwanted advice.
"I tried Great-grandma's goulash but hardly anybody seems to like it the old-fashioned way. Too much salt. Do you think you would mind that?"
"Not at all," I lied, salt being the witch's bane.
Nobody believed Claire Marie to be psychic, and she'd spent the last five years of her life in and out of mental institutions, where she’d obviously made good use of the gym equipment. Upon her latest release she refused to return to her parents' home in Montgomery and was going to visit New England for the first time. She told me she wouldn't hurt me and I shouldn't think her too crazy. I didn't. Soft mental fibers of her under-mind pressed at me the whole bus ride.
When the driver pulled over for a break at a twenty-four hour roadside diner we were in one of those half a mile long towns without a name, somewhere on the Tennessee-North Carolina border. The summer night was cool and pleasant. A full moon crouched bloated in the sky like a toad. Twelve other passengers filed into the Drop-out Inn.
Claire offered to take my satchel for me. She said, "You look out on your feet."
"No, I'm okay. Really." For the past twenty minutes I'd been floating past her consciousness and speaking to her brother Philip. He had stories to tell.
A charge in the air popped static electricity as we entered the diner. Claire stared at a middle-aged man hobbling up to the counter and whispered, "He won't make another Christmas. His daddy passed on earlier this year and is already setting a place for this poor guy." I couldn't see that exactly, but my second self noticed a speckled aura, quite possibly bone cancer.
We sat and ordered sandwiches and coffee. The waitress was bright and perky for the graveyard shift, and spoke with a loud and lush southern, floral accent. Her smile was the kind that could turn men's knees to guava jelly if she fired it up all the way. The bus driver knew her from the run and they spoke in hushed tones with a few cute and embarrassed grins that connoted they were still friends though they'd slept together.
Claire ate and continued telling me about the wards she'd lived on in more than ten hospitals. "Some of them were like jail and others kinda like boarding school. Even though I'm not sick, I learned a lot about how to keep healthy. Therapy doesn't necessarily have to bring you back from the brink of insanity, you know."
"I know."
"It can give you the confidence to stay away from sharp objects and high ledges. On the overall, believe it or not, I had a lot of fun. I really think that, in a way, the time I spent in those places was well worth it."
"What finally made you leave?"
"I've only seen snow once. Just briefly. Actually, it was a hailstorm. I'd like to spend winter in Vermont. With a roaring fireplace. Chopping my own wood. Ice fishing. Have you done any of that?"
"Yes." It was excruciatingly boring.
She took another bite of her sandwich and sighed, as if New Englanders had a lock on homespun, homestead living fantasies. Amazing how such dreams take on lives of their own. Philip held up his maps to me again, urging me to Da Nang instead of Vermont.
I got up to go to the men's room and passed three kids sitting in a booth towards the back, staring wide-eyed at me as though I'd entered some Drop-Out inner sanctum. Two girls and a tall, somewhat gawky guy, they looked even more tired, haggard, and irate than the rest of us.
One girl, with a satchel at her feet similar to my own, had extremely pale features highlighted with the kind of burning emerald eyes you read about in stories but rarely see in life. Several jagged, raking scars disfigured the left side of her face, waving down through the eyebrow, tearing up the cheek and giving that edge of her mouth a yanking lift so that she seemed to be snarling.
As she turned to watch me walk past, her hand went casually but quickly to the inside of her jacket. I caught a glimpse of a strap that could have been a shoulder holster. Self uncoiled, sensing a threat, sniffed and said, Whewwwwww. Even I could smell the gun oil; she was probably too used to it to know how badly she reeked. She keeps her piece in damn good condition, fires it a lot. Catch the other odor?
It clung to her like the cordite, but I couldn't quite make it out. Yeah, what is it?
Maybe some whacked form of Khem. Straight out of Egypt—the land of dark people—and root word for chemistry; the black arts. Self liked her eyes, the flavor of fear within that dreamy green, but her snarl sort of put him off. Why don't we just get back to the bus, find us some shine and southern honeys?
I looked at his claws and the marks on her face.
The other two kids must have been brother and sister, each with the same deeply black hair and dark, nearly Egyptian features. He wore a knife sheathed on his belt, which was a pretty common sight in these parts. I didn't doubt that his sister, too, had a weapon on her; she wore leather boots that came up over her calf, a nice place to stash a blade.
I leaned against the sink in the bathroom and thought about it. All three of the kids seemed driven, separate and haunted. Even more than that, I had seen a kind of courage that comes into focus only after a long period of running and hunting. Something akin to a soldier's sense of duty and dedication. Hatred and frustration.
These were the moments to beware of; fates sometimes collapsed and collided in places like this, at times like these when people were tired and edgy and the veneer of daylight lives is worn away. The static followed me as I walked back to my seat, electrons snapping against the metal counter and clicking across the floor. There were pockets of heat in the cold air of the diner, strange arcana at work. Claire Marie Rundlemann looked at me and her smile immediately vanished. Self memorized the recipe for goulash and asked Great-grandma if she knew how to make babaganoush. She did.
"We'll be leaving in five minutes," our bus driver announced. The waitress gave him a nice sloe-eyed look that he could carry with him until his return.
"I'm staying for a while," I said.
"Staying?" Claire spun in her seat, and I braced up in case I got another shot to the ribs. "Here? You've got to be kidding—I thought . . . . "
I suppose I knew what she thought. New England winters and roaring fires were meant to be shared. I had been quiet enough on our trip together to appear acquiescent to her fantasies.
"But why here for God's sake?" she said.
For God's sake? Self repeated. Heh, now that's funny, and let loose with one of those vicious giggles that gave me fevers. Claire actually wept softly as I escorted her back onto the bus. Self waved good-bye to Philip and Great-grandma as I waited for the kids in the parking lot shadows.
Except for the two eighteen wheelers, the only other vehicle was a light green van with large Dayglo daisies painted on the sides. It looked a little like the Mystery Machine, the van Scooby Doo and his gang drive around in. Self gibbered away, reciting obscure Italian librettos, German arias, and the remainder of Coleridge's unfinished poem 'Kubla Kahn.' His hold on humanity—even the intricacies of our history—was growing better every day, and I didn't know why.
After a while, my head started to pound and he massaged my temples, licking sweat from my eyebrows. I felt as if I was suffering through an allergy attack. The arcana grated against my nerves. Self felt it too, his eyes red and teary, and he sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his arm. We sat against the curb, moon hanging over our heads as sweet honeysuckle wafted and dripped nearby.
Weird stuff tonight, Self said.
I know. Is it eldritch in nature?
No. He sniffed the air, fangs gnashing, lips trembling as he nibbled at the weirding Khem scent. Maybe
. The fact that he didn't know disturbed him, and me. Maybe some kind of mutant strain of sorcery. Death in the works, and yet, something else. A variant with a lot of miles and millennia on it. Kinda like . . . His eyes suddenly widened, tongue snaking out as he hopped and frantically tugged my arm, drawing me down. Watch it!
They came at me from darkness. Night filled with motion, everywhere in the sensual air, all this touching at once. I was slapped, thrown and flipped as easily as a scarecrow. Beautifully smooth moves. My shins cracked loudly together as I hit the pavement hard, my satchel crushed beneath me. A strike drove my jaw to my shoulder, and my body followed, spinning out of control. The copper taste of blood flooded my mouth and drove Self crazy. The gawky boy wasn't gawky at all, but skilled and smart, having climbed out the men's room window to get behind me. I fell over and he picked me up and threw me down again, and again, until I tumbled backwards down the embankment into a wide, black ravine.
Self's fangs dripped ichor as he readied to leap, stuffed with the desire to tear into meat.
Cool it, I commanded.
You kidding? What, you want to get laid out and buried in a ditch?
Back off, let me handle it.
Oh right. I can see how well you're doing. Just in case though, what do you want written on your headstone?
Without fully realizing it, my fists were already fixed with murder: burning blackly, Babylonian hexes ignited. My instincts had been honed to the kill. I drove my hands into soil and bled off the lethal majiks. In a couple of days, all the vegetation in the area would be dead.
The disfigured girl came rushing after me, agilely charging down the grade, green eyes flashing. Reams of moonlight reflected off her gun—a nice Browning. That funky arcana still surrounded her, a few faint sparks flew off her heels as she ran towards me. The brother and sister must've been working their way behind us.
"Listen to me," I said.
Self perched on my shoulder ready to rip her throat out. She grabbed a fistful of my hair and screamed into my face, "Who in the hell are you?" Shadows of trees cut even more ragged slashes across her lips. She must've been beautiful at one time. "Answer me!"
"A friend. I'm here to help."
"Bullshit. What are you?" She threw me back down, kicked me twice in the ribs, and placed the gun firmly at the base of my neck. Incantations whispering at the bottom of my brain pan would have tangled her viscera in the treetops.
"That's enough, kid," I said, surprised at the angry edge in my own voice. Self jittered, eyes rolling back in his head, jaws slavering and snapping, his claws inches from her scars as if he might caress the fish-white flesh before he removed the rest of her face. God, my rage, I had to keep control. I wasn't as good at pretending to be calm as I'd thought. She pressed the barrel of the gun harder into the sensitive ganglia of nerves behind my ear.
After a second, as the metal touched my skin, more sparks skittered like erupting blue static. She jerked and said, "What the . . . ?" and I wheeled and drew a sigil in the air. It went spinning forward and knocked the gun from her hand. She cried out and bent to retrieve the Browning, but I was a fraction faster, and managed to kick it into the dark ditch.
"Stop. I really am here to help."
Self's mouth continued to water. Christ, how he loved her looks now that he saw her in action; the disfigurement made him hungry and horny. He unwound from me and lapped at her ankle, cooing, tongue unfurling, those faint sparks popping in time with his ragged breath. Her eyes bugged.
The brother and sister team broke from the brush behind us at the other side of the ravine. I wondered what had honed the three of them into this deadly unit, and what the variant majik might be that they were so on guard against.
They played it smart and aggressive and heartless—the boy, physically stronger, stayed a few steps behind his sister as she drew her own knife, allowing her to test me. "Come on, kids," I said. "You're getting a little carried away here." She came forward with the blade held perfectly—not in an overhand stabbing motion, but balanced lightly across her fingers, ready to either jab of slash.
"Don't," I told her.
She was cautious, patient and skilled. Her brother stood ready, watching for errors on my part, any vulnerability, waiting to join the attack the moment he saw an opening. I really didn't know if I could beat her hand to hand, so I called up a Persian evocation that would knock her on her ass.
"Don't," I repeated.
Just as she dove forward to strike, and my palms flared with black flames, Claire Marie Rundlemann burst from the woods and punched the girl in the stomach, driving her to the ground.
Self muttered, Whoa.
Nobody knew what to do. The boy stood his ground. Claire rushed to my side and said, "Hey, you've got to be tough on the wards."
Philip had his own sidearm out, and Great-grandma held a pitchfork.
The scarred girl said, "That's enough, Ellie. Relax, Paul . . . I . . . we were wrong about him."
The boy did not look relaxed. "How can you be so sure?"
"Trust me, I am." She looked around at her feet as if searching for my self, who now lay on her leg hugging her knee, murmuring love ballads. She frowned at me and asked, "Who are you?"
In the van, the silence contained multitudes of brooding, with rifles and scuba gear rattling in the back. Already this group of strangers was jam-packed with assorted sins, fears, and loves. Self quietly snapped his fingers and hummed a cartoon theme song. Scooby-Dooby Doo, where are you?
The disfigured girl—Cyndy Hutchins—drove with Claire sitting in the front seat beside her, glowering. The brother and sister—Paul and Ellie Taggert—flanked me in the back. We were all only a hair's breadth pull away from death: no sudden moves.
"What's your game?" Paul asked.
"No game. I'm here to help."
He nodded, his corded muscles ready to snap beneath his t-shirt. "I see. So you just sit around in the parking lots of podunk diners waiting to jump teenagers." He had one of those voices that sound cool and intelligent even with razors of sarcasm slicing through. "And your girlfriend boards buses and then hops off down the road and comes running."
"Exactly," Claire said, "that's just what we do. Every day wandering through the Appalachians." The pause lengthened and the mood around us thickened further. "Hey, why don't you three just knock off the crap, huh? I know you're scared, and I know death hovers around you all the time, kind of nipping without actually killing you off. You could use a couple more friends."
Paul visibly stiffened. We rumbled into the mountains; the kids definitely had a particular destination in mind. Cyndy knew these backwoods and drove down dirt roads that were little more than paths cut in the brush.
"And just how do you mean to help?" Ellie whispered. It was the first time I'd heard her voice, and there was hardly anything to hear.
"I'm not sure yet," I said. "You haven't told me what the problem is."
"Why would you want to get involved?"
Several answers breezed through my mind; and though I should have, perhaps, opted for the truth, nothing came out. Maybe I wanted to say, You remind me of myself. Or, When I was your age I made the worst choice in the world and my love died for me. Still, the words wouldn't come.
I finally said, "Does it matter?"
Cyndy stopped the van as the road receding into blackness came to a fork. To the east it led back up into the hills, and to the west fell rolling towards a valley. A weather-beaten but carefully hand-crafted sign pointed west and read: WELCOME TO MIDNIGHT FALLS. Owls screeched into the headlights, and there was scampering in the woods. At least we were getting to the punch line; this movement meant a greater deal to the kids, and that awful blood Khem strengthened. I felt that arcane allergy attack coming on again. Claire rubbed her eyes and Self sneezed just as Cyndy threw the van into drive and proceeded into the hills.
The road wound around the well of the valley, giving us a perfect view of the lake below. Train tracks ran down from oblivion into
the water, and debris floated in collected bundles of rotting woods and rusted metal. The tips of trees and buildings could be seen clawing from the depths: a church steeple, what looked like flagpoles, gabled Tudor bargeboards, and maybe a courthouse balustrade. A dam had either burst or been blown, and the lake had washed out the whole town.
"What is that down there?" Claire asked.
"We don't know anymore," Ellie whispered. Unlike her brother, she held a constant solemn attitude. Her already dark features were nearly hidden by the night, so it seemed that only folded shadows spoke beside me. "We haven't been home for a while."
"Home?"
"This is it."
"Geez. What happened here?"
"A madman. A mass-murderer. He destroyed Midnight Falls."
We passed a cluster of gutted roadside jalopies, and beyond them a small graveyard where iron fences ringed certain graves: proof of Romany—Gypsy—ancestry, who believed the dead are bitter and seek revenge on the living, and so must be imprisoned in their graves. Great-grandma crossed herself. I could see the kids were of Romany blood, who according to legend refused to help Mary on her flight to Egypt and were cursed to have no homeland. Gypsies were a magical people in their own right. We hit a clearing and the moonlight boiled across their pale faces until they nearly glowed. I saw too much of myself in these kids, the same trappings of damnation, and all the fighting in the name of some unnamable purpose.
Self chattered on, elucidating on his theories, wondering what had caused those scars on Cyndy's face, how many people she'd killed and why, if she liked Champagne. Claire took my hand and squeezed it gently.
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