Soul Catcher

by Bridger, Leigh

  Ian’s blood seeped from the gashes in his side onto the gray, weathered floor. This time I couldn’t heal him. I could only free him. Outside, in the strangely bright sunshine of a North Carolina morning, things you don’t want to imagine in your worst nightmares tried to rip the building’s big windows out of their aging brick sills.

  Downstairs, the broad chestnut doors of the old Asheville Bible printing shop bulged inward as Pig Face slammed it again. The wood began to splinter.

  I cocked the pistol. Everything inside me screamed against pointing it at Ian’s heart. I hated his body; I ought to be able to kill that body without caring.

  I knelt over Ian, straddling him. I put both hands on the shaking gun to steady my aim. My tears fell on his blood-stained face.

  He managed a rueful smile. “Now, that’s a sight I’ll remember to death and back,” he whispered. He clamped one bloody hand on mine. As always, we shared the choices, the pain, the passage.

  We had found each other again, across centuries. Why hesitate on a single sunny day in North Carolina?

  “See you later,” I said hoarsely.

  I pulled the trigger.

  About Leigh Bridger

  Leigh Bridger is the pen name for New YorkTimes bestselling women’s fiction author Deborah Smith (A PLACE TO CALL HOME, Bantam Books, ON BEAR MOUNTAIN, Little, Brown & Company, and A GENTLE RAIN, BelleBooks.)

  As Leigh Bridger, Smith writes the Solomon’s Seal mini-series and the Soul Catcher series.

  Visit her at www.leighbridger.com

  Soul Catcher

  Book One: The Outsider Trilogy

  by

  Leigh Bridger

  Bell Bridge Books

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead,) events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 30921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  ISBN: 978-0-9821756-8-2

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2009 by Deborah Smith

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers. You can contact us at the address above or at BelleBooks@BelleBooks.com

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo credits: Girl - Branislav Ostojic @ Fotolia

  City - Rolff Images @ Dreamstime

  Flame & Texture - Rolff Images @ Dreamstime

  :Le:01:

  Dedication

  For DD, my best friend, business partner, editor, adopted sister, and the only person who answers my emails at 2 a.m. For Myra and Myra Ann, the sisters I was fortunate enough to win in the marriage lottery. And for my husband, Hank, who has been my Soul Hunter since we started sitting beside one another on the bus in ninth grade. We didn’t speak—we are, after all, natives of the Geek Tribe—so we just sat there in silence, until college. But we knew it was love.

  Esse Quam Videri, “To Be, Rather Than To Seem.”

  — North Carolina state motto

  1

  Paint them. Trap them. Burn them.

  I found those words scrawled in jagged lines on the wooden floor beside my bed one morning when I was seven years old. A jar of my white tempera paint sat open beside them, its contents reduced to a dry, lumpy dough. I was already an avid artist, smearing watercolor scenes of the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina and flowers and portraits of my dolls on broad sheets of cheap paper Momma bought for me.

  We lived in Ludaway, a tiny town high in the mountains an hour north of Asheville, not much more than a post office, a grocery store, a gas station and two churches. The kind of town where ghosts and secrets thrive, and unspeakable acts are forgotten or turned into charming legends.

  Momma loved my paintings and taped them on the fridge, the doors, and, when I painted a smiling portrait of her and Daddy and my baby brother, Alex, she taped that one on the dresser mirror in hers and Daddy’s bedroom, next to Daddy’s UNC Tar Heels football stickers and Momma’s pictures of her cuddling me and Alex.

  “My Livia sees the world in such sweet ways,” she told people. “She has a special vision of beauty.”

  But not that morning. I stared at the strange words, then looked in shock at the crust of white tempera on my own fingertips.

  I had painted the words in my sleep.

  Paint who, trap what, burn why?

  I ran through the house, found Momma standing very still and strange in her oversized sweater and skinny jeans, her bare feet making sweat marks on the kitchen’s checkerboard linoleum floor. She stood staring at nothing outside the window over the sink. I pulled her by one hand to my bedroom.

  “Paint ’em, trap ’em burn ’em, Momma. What’s that mean? Why’d I paint this while I was asleep? I’m scared, Momma.”

  She recoiled as if I’d spit on her. Then she drew back a hand and slapped me so hard I careened off the Malibu Barbie sheets of my bed. I gaped up at her. Momma did not hit us. Ever. Her gray eyes had gone a color I’d never seen before, like rust. “Momma?”

  Without a word she twisted a fist in my long, black hair and dragged me to the front hall. She shoved me into a coat closet of our small, clapboard house. Nearly suffocating among the overcoats and sweaters, I yelled, I begged, What did I do wrong, Momma?

  “Conniving bitch,” she said in a voice I’d never heard before.

  Then she slammed the door shut.

  Alex, only three years old, heard me pounding the door. He plopped down outside and jabbered at me worriedly. “Livvy, don’ cry, Ize here. Mommy be back. Don’t cry, Livvy. Love you, Livvy.”

  Daddy and his mother, Granny Belane, were off on one of their business trips, buying folk art from the secluded mountain folk, they said, which they resold to galleries throughout the South. They would never have let Momma hit me or put me in the closet, if they’d known. In fact, they couldn’t have believed that beautiful, loving, kind, Carly Belane, who composed children’s songs on an old guitar and loved to knit, quilt and sew, had suddenly turned into an abusive mother. I couldn’t believe it myself. She had changed overnight, as if my words, painted on the floor, were a warning to us both.

  While I continued to bang the door she scrubbed the floor in my bedroom and scraped flecks of white paint from the wood until her fingertips bled. She threw away all my paints and papers and brushes.

  And then came the sounds of struggle. Of Momma’s body slamming against the walls.

  Alex wailed.

  I bent my face to the streak of light at the bottom. “Stay here, close to me, okay, Bubba? It’s okay. Stay right here next to me.”

  He wiggled a hand under the door crack, and I stroked his fingers.

  The house went stark silent. I heard Momma staggering down the hall. She collapsed outside the closet door, sobbing. “Something is happening to me,” she said. “I’m sorry, Livia, I’m sorry, Alex. Babies. My babies. Something is wrong with me. Oh God. I don’t know what it is. I’m trying to fight it.”

  I heard Alex mewl again, “Is all the bad gone, Mommy?”

  “All the bad is gone, baby,” she answered between heartbreaking sobs. “I’m so ashamed. Livvy, please don’t tell Daddy. I swear this will never happ
en again.”

  I pressed my cheek to the door. “I won’t tell him. I won’t tell anyone. It’s okay, Momma.”

  She let me out then. Her peculiar spell was over. She begged me to never again say or write the words I’d painted on the floor. I hugged her legs and cried and promised I would not, although I was scared of her and for her. Hard new lines carved her pretty face; she cried and hugged me back. Her hands shook as the three of us ate ice cream in our pretty little kitchen, decorated with Momma’s hand-sewn curtains and my innocent artwork, which now looked like postcards from some previous life.

  How could I keep myself from painting in my sleep? I tried to shove the fear and confusion deep in my brain and forget it, the way children do. I loved her dearly and wanted to please her. I would not, could not, tell Daddy or Granny what had happened. I didn’t understand it myself.

  *

  Momma returned to normal, or pretended to, when Daddy and Granny came home.

  My tall, gentle father, Tom Belane, hoisted me into his arms and danced with me each time I ran to meet him. Then he would grab Momma, and kiss her, and she laughed and hugged him and turned her beautiful, kind face up to his, and he beamed at her with the most romantic look in his eyes.

  He’ll stop loving me if I tell him about her. Maybe he won’t even believe me.

  I was intimidated by Granny Belane, but I trusted her. I sat with her at nights on the back porch of our little house, struggling to tell her about Momma, but never able to say the words.

  Momma acted as if the closet incident had never happened. But from then on I was always nervous; I stuck close to Alex, especially when Momma was near him. Moon-faced and cheerful, Alex was incapable of recognizing any emotion other than love. What if she went crazy again? He needed protection.

  Yes. Beware.

  In the gray light of dawn I stared in horror at those new words, gooey and pink, on my bedroom floor. A cake of my pink bath soap lay nearby, one end scraped flat. I looked at my hands, caked in dried pink soap.

  Shaking, I snatched off my Smurf night shirt, spit on the floor to wet the pink words, and used the shirt to scrub the floor clean.

  Momma had given me a wonderful Cinderella clock for my birthday. From then on I set Cinderella’s alarm, and she woke me every morning before dawn. And every morning I got up in the dark, took a flashlight from under my pillow, and checked the floor for words.

  I even hid my school supplies in a dresser drawer at night, with my pencils and ink pens tied tight with twine, hoping I couldn’t find them in my sleep.

  Not that I slept much, anymore.

  *

  Normal didn’t last long. Over the next year or so, Momma began to suffer spells when she was alone with me and Alex. She would forget to cook meals; she would disappear on long walks, even in the worst weather. She would sit at the windows for hours, saying nothing, not moving. She would turn dark, strangely gleeful gazes on us, the way cats watch birds.

  Worst of all by far, there began to come times when I overheard her growling at invisible people. At least, they seemed to be people. She talked to them as if they were listening. You can’t protect her forever, she said. And, I’ll bide my time.

  But every time Daddy and Granny Belane came home from their latest business trip, life went back to something like happy. Every time I verged on telling them about Momma’s bizarre moments, love and fear stopped me.

  As long as she didn’t try to hurt me or Alex, I stayed quiet. I learned how to give her a certain look when she got a savage expression on her face, and she’d leave us alone.

  I chewed my fingernails to bloody nubs.

  *

  One day, when I was nine and Alex, five, I caught Momma trying to shove him into the hall closet, just as she’d shoved me. Alex looked bewildered, and was struggling.

  I grabbed a green marker from Daddy’s office, and a notepad. Daddy used markers to color-code the inventory notes for his folk-art business. I ran back to the hall, where Momma was about to slam the closet door shut with Alex inside.

  I swiftly drew a creature with a knotty head and claws, a green horror with its mouth open in a snarl, rows of jagged teeth dripping green drool. I couldn’t say why the image of that thing came into my head. It was as if a potent Knowing suddenly channeled my hands.

  I thrust the drawing at Momma. “I see you,” I yelled.

  Momma stared at that drawing with her eyes going furious, then scared, then dark and sad, like mirrors were shifting inside her. She clicked back to normal. Trembling, she looked down at her own hands as if she couldn’t fathom being rough with Alex. She jerked the closet door open. “Baby, come out of there.”

  Alex bounded out, his face pale. “It’s okay, Momma,” he said, weaving his gaze from her to me. He looked startled but, as always, forgiving. “You were just playing.”

  I grabbed him and clamped the drawing to his chest, facing outward, like a shield. I glared up at Momma. The old words rose in my brain.

  Paint them, trap them, burn them.

  But . . . who was them?

  “I’ll keep this drawing, Momma. Just to help you remember what you look like when you’re not feeling right.”

  Momma sagged. “I try to tell the doctor about these . . . feelings, but I can’t make the words come. It’s like a hand around my throat. Oh, honey, I don’t want to be taken away from my family.”

  “I promise you, Momma, I won’t tell anyone. Not so long as you behave.”

  Momma clutched her head in her hands and shuffled to her bedroom, as always, secluding herself behind a closed door.

  I hid the drawing of the monster.

  Somehow, that drawing would keep me and Alex safe from her.

  At least for awhile.

  I took to carrying my drawing all the time, wrapped in a plastic clingy sheet from the kitchen. I tucked it into a pocket of my shorts or jeans or, when I wore dresses, inside my panties, even as I slept.

  Her spells got worse. I was outside in the back yard with her that fall, pounding little nails into our wooden fence on which to hang Christmas lights, when she suddenly turned toward me with her hammer aimed at my head, smiling. “Happy Holidays,” she said in a voice like a rock grinder.

  My heart froze. I didn’t know what else to try so I said very quietly, “I’ve got that drawing on me right now.”

  Her hand spasmed. The hammer fell to the ground. She looked toward something only she could see. She made that grotesque hissing sound I’d heard before. Her eyes narrowed. She glared down at me. She went back inside.

  I sat down on the lawn with the hammer clutched to my chest, and cried.

  I felt an invisible hand stroke my head, but the comforting sensation only terrified me more. Maybe I’m turning crazy like Momma. Maybe I would start seeing people who weren’t there. Maybe, when I was in a mood like hers, my eyes would gleam with a shimmer like red stars in the dark.

  Go away, go away, go away, I told the hand.

  And it did, but trailed gentle fingers over my face as it disappeared.

  *

  I had to reach out to Granny. I had to try.

  At night, the fields and farms of our valley spread before us like a broad moat stroked with lines of growth. Behind them, the high, round peaks of the mountains scalloped the blue-black sky. I regarded it as a secret world of terror and wonder, the future, the past, life itself, an untaught Waiting. In the twilight I listened in bewilderment to the muted sounds from my parents’ bedroom, the gentle murmurs and laughter.

  Was I the only one who saw Momma’s dark side?

  “Granny,” I said on the porch one night, “One day a couple of years ago, I, uh, got this strange notion. And I drew a . . . a kind of monster. You think that’s weird?”

  Granny Belane’s hand jumped. She flicked hot, red sparks off her cigarette into the night wind. Suddenly I could imagine ghosts floating down the mountainsides and from the deepest hollows, drawn to those tiny lights. “Have you drawn any more?” she asked. />
  “No, just the one. But I . . . one morning, before the monster painting, I woke up and saw I’d painted some words on the floor.”

  More sparks shivered off her cigarette. “Tell me.”

  I looked furtively toward the light in Momma and Daddy’s bedroom window, then dropped my voice to a whisper. “Paint them. Trap them. Burn them.”

  Granny crushed her cigarette on the arm of her chair. She watched the glow as it faded on the wood. I could hear her breathing hard. “Is that why you threw away all your paints and brushes?”

  “Maybe.”

  She turned to me in the darkness. Her voice low and hard, she said, “Don’t tell another soul what you just told me. I’ll buy you some new art supplies. You are meant to paint whatever comes . . . through you. You should paint a picture of it, good or bad. It’s important. Hide the paintings under your mattress. Don’t tear them up, don’t throw them away. I’ll find out what you’re meant to do with them. Do not,” she repeated, “tell anyone about this.”

  “W-What about the first one I drew?”

  “You’ve kept it?”

  I nodded shakily. One hand moved to the pocket of my jeans.

  “Good. That one is the most . . . ” she hesitated.

  “The most what, Granny?”

  She took my hand. Carefully she said, “It’s a clue to what scares you the most.”

  Thoughts of telling her about Momma fled before a new and different fear. Granny added more weight to my worries. Her fears showed there was substance to them. I was too afraid to ask more questions.

  She bought me the art supplies, and I set them on the desk in my bedroom, and at night I laid on the covers staring at them, trying not to sleep. But I couldn’t stay awake forever.

  I began to paint in my sleep every night. Grotesque things. Wicked animals. Creatures that didn’t exist. Some more human than not. Cinderella woke me every morning, and I cleaned up the spilled paint, the smears on my hands, the brushes scattered on the floor. Shaking, every morning I aimed the flashlight at the newest horror on my art pad.