Soul Catcher

by Bridger, Leigh

  Then I hid it under my mattress, with the others.

  Every time she visited, Granny looked at the collection, her face stone-cold grim. “Good work,” she said.

  At night I felt the paintings trying to escape from beneath me. I dreamed about them coming to life, like a horror movie I couldn’t erase. My bones got tired from trying to hold the fear down.

  A soft, kind voice began to soothe me in the darkness. Not really male or female, a mix of both. I stared hard into the shadows each time but no one stood there. Just the voice.

  This is where it starts, again, Livia. It is meant to be.

  Again?

  *

  The next spring my beloved Daddy stumbled off a mountain cliff. He and Momma had gone up to Ludaway Ridge for a picnic on their eleventh anniversary. While she napped on a blanket, Daddy took a walk with his camera, as he often did, snapping pictures of the waterfall up there.

  Somehow, he tripped and fell. By the time the volunteer fire department found him at the bottom of the falls, he was broken beyond fixing.

  Momma retreated to her bedroom, her eyes like fractured silver marbles. Her grief was real; I never doubted that. It was why I never suspected her. My own heartbreak colored my view of things. I couldn’t think straight. Daddy was gone.

  Granny Belane, her eyes hollow with misery, moved in with us, because Momma couldn’t care for me or Alex in her grieving state. Late at night I lay on the floor beside Alex’s bed, where I took up guard duty after Granny went to sleep, and I heard Momma sob and shriek and mutter in hers and Daddy’s bedroom.

  Often she wandered the hall up to my locked room, then stopping at the open door of Alex’s room, standing there for an hour or more, staring down at me on the floor, and him. Alex remained sound asleep on the bed. I remained wide awake, holding her gaze, my eyes strained to bursting, watching her dark eyes recede into her skull. Eventually she would walk back to her room slowly, methodically, her footsteps a metronome.

  Eventually, I would doze, my face turned toward the doorway.

  One day she didn’t get out of bed. She stayed in bed for months. A psychiatrist visited from Asheville, prescribing anti-depressants and other drugs. People said she was heartbroken.

  Parts of her were, yes. But the rest?

  Granny sent me into Momma’s room carrying her lunch on a tray, and I found Momma curled in a corner with one wrist tied with a rope to the leg of her heavy, cherry wood dresser. She lunged at me with her eyes on fire and her teeth showing like a dog’s. The rope stopped her like a kennel chain, jerking her up short. She snarled at me, and yet her free hand shoved at the air, pushing me away.

  “Go away, run, honey,” she gasped between animal sounds. Then she collapsed in a heap. I dropped the lunch tray and ran to get Granny. She would see, she would finally see.

  “Mama’s having a spell!”

  But when Granny rushed into the room with me on her heels, she found Momma up on her feet, wiping the mayonnaise off the floor from my spilled sandwich, gathering the potato chips.

  There was no rope.

  “Livia gets upset so easily these days,” Momma told Granny. “I’m all right. I got out of bed. Felt a little woozy. I must’ve looked like I was about to faint.”

  I stared up at her. Was she lying or did she not remember?

  Momma smiled down at me sadly. It was her, the Momma I knew. Not a lie.

  The other Momma had disappeared again.

  That’s when I got worse about the drawing and painting. That’s when I started cutting myself.

  “What’s wrong with you, child?” Granny Belane said wearily. “You need to talk to me. You need to tell me what you’re feeling, and what makes you so worried all the time.”

  I shook my head. It was all locked inside me by then, too hard for sharing.

  Granny squatted in front of me. Her eyes bored into mine. “You can’t run from what you are any longer. You’re old enough to hear the truth, now.”

  “What am I?” I whispered.

  “A soul catcher,” she said.

  Without any more explanation than that, she loaded me into her truck, and we headed for answers on higher ground.

  *

  There are energy vortexes in the Appalachians powerful enough to conjure Godzilla out of a toilet in Tokyo. The vortexes around Asheville are party central for the dispossessed.

  We drove into Preacher T’s yard after bouncing over at least two miles of rutted dirt road along mountain ridges only the hawks and clouds could reach. What I saw made me tremble in my jeans and Rainbow Brite t-shirt. I could feel my black braid shivering down my back.

  Preacher T had giant snakes in his yard.

  They crawled from the carcasses of junked cars; they slithered from the roof of his run-down cabin; they lay in sinister piles, like puppies sleeping, in the dark eye of his barn loft. Some were made of metal car parts; others were linked pieces carved from wood. All were painted in mind-blowing bands of color, the brightest house paint an old man could buy or scrounge from the county dump. All had wide, all-seeing eyes.

  And all had a white crucifix painted on their heads.

  “Is he plain crazy?” I asked Granny.

  “No, he’s one of your spirit guides,” she said. “You might as well know. He’s up here hiding. Or else they’d have killed him by now.”

  They? My head whirled. They who?

  Preacher T wasn’t your regular North Carolina fire-and-brimstone preacher; he wasn’t a preacher at all. He painted primitive art, folk art, outsider art, some called it. Outsider art bewilders most people, and some seem convinced it’s a kind of devil worship.

  It offers up a double-dose of doom and weirdness, and some of the artists who create it come off like homeless schizophrenics talking to invisible beings on street corners, preaching the soul’s apocalypse. For sure, Granny’s folk art cronies painted some bizarre-ass demons and unholy, weeping angels and devil-things. Plus they scrawled incoherent messages on their paintings and sculptures, like warnings encrypted in rambling Bible references.

  “Warnings and illumination,” Granny said. “That’s what this art is about.” Postcards from a war zone. Most Wanted mug shots off the post office wall. Illustrations from the programming manual at GoodVersusEvil.com.

  That’s what I am, I thought. An Outsider artist. Way, way outside.

  She locked the door of her big pickup truck and tucked a pistol in her macramé tote bag. “He’s not crazy. But he’s got the sight. And that makes people think he’s crazy. Come on, Livia.” She dragged me by the hand through that yard of huge, watchful snakes. “Don’t be scared of the beast in its hard form; these hold the spirits of guardians. You can call them angels if that makes you feel better.”

  I didn’t want to call them anything. I wanted to leave.

  A huge old black man in paint-smeared overalls rose from a circle of large dogs and green-eyed cats on the cabin porch. Dark tattoos covered his arms and forehead, merging with his dark skin in places. Religious symbols and images from his art hung from every rail and rafter. I stared at spiked creatures with angel wings. They didn’t look angelic to me.

  The cats perched on old kitchen cabinets like the ripped-out kind you buy at salvage stores. Preacher T had painted them with symbols and strange animals. The disembodied cabinets made a fort around him. Behind him, an open screen door let me peek into a dark room crammed to the ceilings with paint cans, brushes, bolts of canvas, and tools.

  “I’ve been waiting to meet this child a long, long time,” Preacher T announced in a voice like a bear. I squinted at him. For just one moment he grew a black-bear snout and fur. “I see the light around her, Jeannie. Maybe this time she’ll live long enough to become . . . ”

  Granny cut him off with a slash of her hand.

  Live long enough to . . . live to . . . maybe this time I’d live? My head swam.

  “She doesn’t know what she is?” Preacher T growled.

  “Godssake, Preacher, she�
�s only ten. She needs help. I thought she had more time to grow up, but the spirit is already upon her. She’s painting them, Preacher. Already. And now the girl has taken to cutting herself. Even when she’s got paint on hand, she uses her own blood. She’s done lots more paintings since Tom died. The other realms are already afraid of her, Preacher. I can feel them nosin’ around.”

  “Have you got an inkling for the whereabouts of her soul hunter?”

  Granny’s face darkened. “No, he’s lost, and I hope he stays lost. You know what it means when such as her doesn’t want her soul hunter to come home. It means he betrayed her some how.”

  “Well, she gonna need him sooner or later.”

  Granny snorted.

  Soul Hunter tucked itself in a distant corner of my brain, alongside Soul Catcher, not quite forgotten, but hidden under layers of worry.

  Preacher T took my arm in a huge hand etched with words on the backs of every finger. PRAY. WATCH. GUARD. RESIST. He touched the fine cut marks in the cusp of my elbow. He studied me and my scabs a long time. Then he reached behind him, into a pile of whittled amulets, and pulled out an ankh on a leather thong. “This’ll do for a start,” he said, and slipped it around my neck.

  Granny took the necklace off and handed it back. “She wears a cross, see here?” Granny lifted the small gold emblem that dangled from a chain near Rainbow Brite’s cartoon face. “Here momma might be upset at un-Christian symbols. Poor Carly’s got some mental . . . well, she’s not feeling too good since Tom died. She gets upset easy. She’s always been too gentle for her own good.”

  Preacher T scowled. “You better find another way then. This ain’t no game. The good spirits are drawn to peaceful symbols. This child needs to lure all the help she can.”

  “What are y’all talking about?” I asked in a low, horrified voice.

  Preacher T squatted in front of me. “Livia Belane, you’re special. It’s a gift or a curse, but you got it, either way. I know you don’t understand now, but you will, child, I’m sorry but you will. You got to be strong. There are trials and tribulations for the holy, that’s what the Bible and all the other good books tell us. You remember that, whatever happens, it’s the spirits trying to push you this way or that. Try to think for yourself and whatever you do, don’t stop your painting. What do you see when you paint pictures, child?”

  “They’re monsters. I’ve never seen anything like them in movies or comic books. Not even in Star Wars. I’m scared to sleep. I can almost hear them. And when I do fall asleep . . . that’s when I paint them.”

  “Those are demons, child. Demons and their helpers. When you’re grown up and powerful enough, you’ll be able to see them outright. And not just demons. But angels, too. You’ll know the difference.”

  “The things I paint are real?”

  “Yes, baby. I’m afraid so.”

  Did this meanthe drawing I’d made of Momma might be a demon?

  I backed away. “I don’t want to see them!”

  Granny grabbed me and stroked my hair.

  Preacher T made a soothing sound. “I know, child, but your soul chose this job for you, and it knows best.” He looked at Granny. “Has she gotten any messages about her way, yet?”

  Granny nodded. “She’s been told to burn the paintings.”

  “Good.” He smiled at me. “Now here’s what you do, Livia. When you wake up and find that you’ve painted a demon during the night, you take that picture outside right quick! And you burn it.”

  He jerked his head toward Granny. “Your grandma’ll help you with the chore. But you do it every single time, all right? ’Cause that’s your way to send a demon out of this life forever. It’s a banishment.”

  “We’ll burn the paintings she’s made already and all the ones from now on,” Granny assured him.

  “Good. What’s happening, child, is that you’re snaring demons in your art. Like you’ve set a rabbit trap in the woods, you understand? And once you catch one, don’t you set it free again! No, ma’am. You got to banish it while it’s trapped in your painting. Right quick.”

  He was telling a ten-year-old that the light behind the very air we breathe really does hold horrors. And that the green marker thing I’d drawn when I caught Momma pushing Alex into the closet might actually live inside Momma. But . . . if I’d trapped her demon already, how come it was still inside her? “Are they always trapped when I paint them? They can’t hurt anybody anymore?”

  “If you’ve seen them clear enough. You just a baby, it’s amazin’ that you even dream ’em clear enough to catch ’em, yet.”

  “You mean, if my painting isn’t good enough then the demon is still runnin’ around loose?”

  “Well, yeah, but it’s like you’ve put a ol’ chain-gang ball on its leg. It ain’t able to create as much trouble. It’s held back. That don’t mean it can’t hurt nobody, just that it can’t do as much damage as it would if it weren’t hobbled by your painting. But I promise you, Livia, as you get older and your vision gets stronger, you’ll see ’em better than you ever wish to, and you won’t just slow ’em down, you’ll trap ’em permanent, and then you’ll send ’em to Nothingness. If you don’t, they’ll kill all who you love, and lots more besides.”

  Nausea boiled in my throat. Momma had been the last person to see Daddy alive. I gagged. “Did demons kill my daddy?”

  “Yes, baby. Your daddy is one of your spirit guides. Demons always try to pick off the spirit guides first.”

  I exploded. “How come he didn’t see the demons?”

  “Spirit guides can’t see ’em the way you can. They can get a feel for ’em, but smart demons can fool a spirit guide.”

  “He’d fight! My daddy wasn’t tricked! He fell off the high falls at Ludaway Ridge. He tripped and fell!”

  Granny turned me to face her. “No, Livia,” she said in a low, sad voice. “While your sweet Momma was napping, demons lured him to the cliff, and they pushed him.”

  I stared at her until I thought my brain would melt. No, that demon inside Momma pushed him. It’s tricking you, too.

  “Can a person have a demon inside them and still be a person?” I whispered.

  “Sometimes. Demons can take over fully, or they can take charge just part of the time. Depends on how strong the soul is that’s wrestlin’ with them.”

  “How do you get the demon out of a person?”

  Preacher T and Granny traded a dark look. Preacher T patted me on the back. “Child, you ain’t no demon.”

  They didn’t suspect my point. Good.

  Granny grasped my hand. “Do you understand, Livia? Don’t be thinking there’s something wrong with you. You’re on the side of right and good. Okay?”

  I nodded. “But if somebody else has a demon inside them, how would I get it out?”

  They went quiet for a minute, then Granny said bluntly, “You have to kill the person’s body, and then, when the demon shows its true form, you have to see it well enough to paint it quick and then burn the picture before the demon rips you apart. It’s a hard trick to master.”

  “That’s why the child needs to find her soul hunter to stand guard for her,” Preacher T said grimly.

  Granny glared at him and shushed him. “I’m tellin’ you, there’s got to be a good reason she’s alone in this. You can’t trust soul hunters all the time, you know that, Preacher.”

  “That’s not how I see it.”

  My heart sank. I wasn’t listening to them anymore. I stood there thinking, I can’t kill Momma. I can’t. What if I’m wrong about her? What if she’s just sick? I gulped for air. “What if . . . I paint a drawing of a demon that might live inside a person? What if I burn the drawing? Doesn’t that work?”

  Preacher T shook his head. “No, baby. You can’t banish a soul that’s taken up haven in a living body of this world.”

  Granny stared hard in my eyes. “Don’t you worry. We’re gonna protect you until you’re fully vested in your powers.”

  My breath s
huddered. “Something touched me on the head last year. Something invisible. It . . . patted me. Like it was trying to make me feel better. And I’ve heard a voice at night. Telling me it’s time to begin again. It sounds like a nice . . . voice.”

  Preacher T grunted. “Good. You got some friends out yon, child. You can’t see ’em yet, but they are fightin’ for you in the other realms.”

  I looked at Granny for confirmation. She nodded. “You don’t need to ask a lot of hard questions right now, baby. Just know that you’re safe, I swear to you.”

  No, you don’t see what’s inside Momma, and I do.

  If Momma had a demon in her, I just better hope my drawing of it was good enough to keep that demon on a chain. When I was grown and my powers got strong enough, I’d rescue her from the demon. Somehow.

  Still, the thought that Momma might be possessed was too terrible. My brain sucked it deep and hid it in scar tissue. I pulled away then stumbled across the yard, halting in the middle of Preacher T’s junk-art snakes. I looked at one of them, banded in white and purple with the white cross gleaming between its black eyes, and my vision blurred, and it seemed to me, it seemed at the time, that the snake pulled back its lips and smiled at me.

  I screamed.

  Granny grabbed me up, cooing. I went nearly limp in her arms. I felt as if my eyes would roll back in my head.

  “The child’s heard enough,” Granny told Preacher T. She nuzzled my black hair with her cheek. “All you need to do for now is learn and grow,” she whispered. “And don’t stop painting.”

  Preacher T came down from his ramshackle front porch, his animals around him. “Jeannie Belane, you protect that child with every spirit symbol you can,” he boomed. “I tell you, you do it now. This world is filling up with demons and they’re getting worse every day. She’s got a job to do and this time, by God, she better live to do it.”