Soul Catcher

by Bridger, Leigh

  I hugged myself, bent over and vomited into the soggy muck.

  Go back to the fire, Nahjee said urgently. Run back and burn the rest!

  Oh, my God. I raced back through the woods, my heart tearing itself against my ribs.

  The rest of the canvas was gone.

  Eight Toes had faked me out. He’d distracted me, moved me away from the fire, away from his master. Did that mean the lecherous, bloody-eyed thing, which I’d snared, was now free again, gaining strength and pissed off at me for trying to burn him?

  Slowly I lowered my gaze.

  Tracks. I saw tracks.

  Tracks. In my studio’s backyard. Tracks no living animal could make. Nothing known to man has eight finger-like toes on its paws, long claws, and a heel hook like the spur on a rooster’s foot.

  Not inside the city limits of Asheville, anyhow.

  I stumbled inside the bottom floor of Harken Bible and lowered the warehouse door as quickly as I could. Gasping, I leaned against my battered pick-up truck. My mind went blank. I was heaving, numb, terrified. I blinked. My mind cleared. I stared at the truck’s dusty passenger window, and then lifted my dusty forefinger to the words I’d written on the glass during that quick little trance.

  Beware my love. He’s found you, but so have I.

  - Ian

  My legs headed south. I sat down limply on the cold brick floor. Who the fuck was Ian?

  *

  Someone stuck a bumper sticker on my truck once, outside Dante’s club. Keep Asheville Weird, it said. You see that everywhere around town. It’s a state of mind. Freak capital of the south. More Wiccans and New Agers per capita than anywhere else. The big-little city sitting on a mountain of quartz bedrock that channels electromagnetic fields like a quartz watch spinning in every direction. So the spiritual gurus say.

  That night, after the canvas disappeared and I saw the tracks in my yard, then found the message from the stranger Ian, I needed to feel weird. Weird was good. Weird was familiar. I headed for the club early.

  The owner, Dante Fusion—probably a fake name, but no one would dare ask him about it—was a big, black, lean, mean, Zen-gentle kickboxer and martial arts master. He let me take classes for free at the studio he owned. He’d taught me to throw the knife. He seemed to know I might need to kill something.

  I smoked an herbal, hand-rolled cig as I drove up shady streets lined with old Victorians interspersed with modern high rises and turn-of-the-century office buildings. A collision of accidents and money and fate and heartbreaking dreams made Asheville such a seductive old city, bohemian and counterculture and filthy rich and Oh, that’s just another prophet singing on the sidewalk tolerant, a place of ghosts and memories and homebrew and weed and unexplained energies that could fuck up a person who didn’t have a solid identity to fall back on first. Me, I was solidly weird, so it worked.

  I flipped a page on the calendar lying beside me on the truck’s cracked vinyl seat. I wrote down strange thoughts and dates of infamy, sort of a personal almanac and journal, my own whacked horoscope of coincidental events. The calendar had cute kitties on it. I never let anyone see my kitty calendar. They would have laughed. Me. With cute kitties. Fuck ’em.

  I scanned the calendar page just to see what synchronicity I had going on for the night. A nasty little prickle went through my head. I pulled into the parking lot of the warehouse-cum-concert-club and lifted the calendar to the steering wheel for a second round of study.

  Asheville has plenty of dead notables. O. Henry. Thomas Wolfe. Various Vanderbilts. But I identified with one in particular. Zelda Fitzgerald.

  Zelda burned to death in an Asheville psych hospital in 1948. She was a seriously long-time schizophrenic—at least that’s what they diagnosed back then. I think her mind got fucked up by being F. Scott’s wife and for a lot of other reasons. Had she mourned for Scott and their gilded Gatsby age? Had she seen things in the shadows nobody believed but her? When the fire came, it went up the shaft of a dumbwaiter in the hospital’s main building. Nine women didn’t get out of the top floors. Zelda was one of them.

  I laid the calendar down slowly. Why do I collect this morbid shit? I said out loud, but my voice shook. I don’t know why the calendar notation creeped me out so badly.

  It’s not weird; it’s Asheville.

  In Asheville, you could find, do or be anything you wanted.

  But, in return, anything could find, do or be you.

  *

  “Are you bouncing or mixing tonight, Livia? And put that out. What’s wrong with you, sweetheart? You want to die young?”

  Ensconced in a dark corner of the club’s empty bar, I looked up at Dante over the glowing tip of my cigarette. I found his die young comment so very amusing. “It’s herbal,” I said.

  “Still bad for your lungs.” He reached over and pinched the cigarette from my fingertips. I stuck my hands in my lap. Now what would keep them from shaking? Dante doused my smoke in a glass of water then bent across the tiny table, scrutinizing me in the purple light of a lion’s head wall sconce. He was maybe forty years old or a thousand, his face timeless, his hair in short dreads. He favored black pullovers and black parachute pants. The muscles in his arms looked like steel cords. Whenever he wanted to he disappeared into the shadows.

  Occasionally, a brave soul joked about him. Dude thinks he’s in charge of the Matrix.

  Maybe he was.

  A pale white line slashed his throat from ear to ear. He said it was a birthmark. I stared at that ominous line. He stared back. “Livvie, why weren’t you at class today, girl? You don’t miss class. No one misses my classes, not if they want to stay.”

  I shrugged. “I was busy.”

  “You never miss class. What’s wrong?”

  “Look, I’m here on time for my shift, and that’s all that counts. So which is it—do you want me to work the back room or the front room tonight?”

  He frowned and straightened. “Work the front.” He pivoted and started away, then halted and looked back. “You know, if you need help, just tell me.”

  He was one of the few men who didn’t say pretty things just to get laid. I’d worked at his club for three years, and he’d never once hit on me. I wouldn’t call him a friend, because that might doom him. People tended to die around me. But I did think highly of him.

  “I’m fine. I just like being a mystery,” I said.

  He shook his head and went upstairs to an office that overlooked the club floor.

  I got up wearily and walked behind the bar. The skin of my hands glowed amber in the light reflecting off the bourbon bottles. My family name, Belane sounds vaguely French but it’s actually a Celtic surname. I was very white, my hair very black. Granny Belane had said we were part Cherokee, like a lot of mountain southerners. And Scots-Irish, which is also a standard mix. At any rate, I looked like the living dead. Yeah, that’s how I felt.

  It was only seven p.m.; barely wake-up time for the denizens of the dark. Dante’s Room was still empty except for a couple of early-shift waitresses flipping through their order pads and adjusting their fishnets.

  I twirled a long paring knife, stabbed a lemon with it, and began carving wedges. The club was Goth with a side order of bondage-and-discipline types. Lots of black. Lots of tattoos and piercings. Music that sounded like a funeral dirge on uppers and steroids. I spent every night until at least three a.m., closing time.

  “Hey, Livia,” Ronnie Bowden said as he loped past, earrings jangling. “You’re whiter than usual.”

  “Eh,” I answered.

  Ronnie, who worked as the club’s sound man when he wasn’t hustling tips on the street as a fire eater, began testing the system. The soft hiss of reverb made me jump.

  “I won’t go easy,” I said to the darkness.

  *

  Gigi, the pink witch, arrived by nine. A few months back I’d rescued her from some boozed-up rednecks who stole her tip jar and tried to pull her clothes off while she posed on a sidewalk as a Goth-Wicca
n 1880’s saloon girl. She’d been my personal pet puddy-tat ever since.

  She pirouetted up to the crowded bar and grinned at me under a wide-brimmed black hat adorned with pink feathers and pink faux fur, also anchored with streamers of glass beads and silver charms. She claimed her last name was Dumond, but word on the street said she’d made that up.

  Gigi lived in a tiny house outside town with six other student witches, all of them more students than witches, since they were undergrads at UNC’s Asheville campus. By day she worked at a New Age shop called Mystic Road. She spent her nights at the club charging a couple of dollars a head for tarot card readings. The shit she told people about themselves freaked them out. She also performed as a street mime, sold handmade jewelry, cast love spells and mixed healing charms, and advised on herbal fragrances to improve one’s mood.

  Just your average Asheville Wiccan. Cute like my calendar kittens.

  “I have another necklace for you to try, Livia.”

  “I told you, I’m not buying.”

  “It’s a gift.” She offered it, hidden inside a small, pale hand decked out in fingerless pink lace gloves. Weird-shit little Wiccan. Wiccans wear black, as a rule. Gigi dutifully wore black leggings and long, belted blouses she bought at Goodwill then dyed black. But somehow, their original bright colors still winked through.

  I ignored her as I mixed a martini. “I don’t take gifts.” She sighed. She huffed. Gigi was short and pudgy, with a scruff of lanky brown hair she tinted pink around her face. She drank herbal tea and secretly listened to Celine Dion on her Nano. That kind of music would get you jeered out of Dante’s. People would throw their Cure CDs at her. Gigi was no Goth. She was the tag-along kid sister I’d never had and couldn’t afford to encourage. Especially now. Like I said, the people in my life didn’t last long.

  Her good-hearted innocence rammed icicles into my brain. She reminded me of Alex.

  “I owe you a gift,” she insisted. “Come on, Livia. I keep trying to give you a gift. I’m learning to mold glass pendants.”

  I stabbed a paring knife into a lemon. “What part of ‘Fuck off,’ do you not understand? I don’t want your gratitude and your cheesy gifts, all right? Stay away from me.”

  Her face crumpled. “You don’t understand,” she said in a small voice, which made me feel like the mean bitch of all time. She laid a tiny crystal snake on the bar. Purple striped, with pink dots of molten glass for eyes. “This isn’t just about you. You need all the help you can get. Here’s a friend for Nahjee. She needs a little sister. This one is named Tabitha.” She hesitated, looking a little awkward. “After Samantha and Darren’s daughter in Bewitched.”

  By the time I’d finished staring at the pendant, she’d disappeared. How did she know Nahjee’s name? I’d never told anyone, anywhere. Ever.

  Nahjee said gently, Gigi’s friendship is no accident, and we do need her help. She and Tabitha are no strangers to your soul and mine.

  My hands shook as I put the necklace on. The tiny glass snake snuggled close to Nahjee.

  Long time no see, Tabitha said.

  Welcome back, Nahjee answered.

  *

  By midnight I was filling drink orders on autopilot. Numbness had set in. The lost canvas. Demon tracks. The message from Ian. Gigi’s psychic divining of Nahjee’s name. The reunion of snake charms.

  Once or twice I almost laughed. A sick, tight, terrified tickle kept crawling up my throat. My self-defense mechanism, I guess. It was one way I coped.

  Beware, my love. Beware. He’s found you, but so have I.

  That chant kept circling my brain. Ian. Had I ever known an Ian? Never.

  I’d spend tonight up here in town. Hang in a coffee shop, sleep in my truck. I didn’t want to be alone at the studio.

  “You look as tired as I feel,” the stranger said in a deep, pleasant voice. He sat by himself at one end of the bar, steeped in shadows. I didn’t remember noticing him walk in. But then, I’d been off in my own world all evening. From the main room came the thick thump of drums and the abrasive chords of amped-up guitars. It was hard to hold a conversation. And yet I heard his voice clearly. It was not southern. It seemed to flow with the sensual roll of the music.

  My radar said he was clean. Nothing dark around him.

  I swiped a bar towel near his hands. Big hands, strong, no rings. “Sorry. Didn’t notice you. What would you like?”

  “Just a beer. Something local, please. I hear you have some nice microbreweries around here.”

  “Yeah. Do you want a lager or . . . ”

  “That would be nice, thanks. You pick it out. I’m not much of a drinker. I don’t do the dark ales.”

  I filled a cold mug from the taps, set it on a napkin in front of him, and inhaled his scent. My God, what kind of cologne did he use? He smelled good. Warm and fresh, like a memory . . . the high mountain balds in springtime, when the rhododendron blooms. Like sky and granite and sunshine and earth; a view across endless blue mountain ridges. Daddy, Momma, Alex and I had picnicked in one of those high mountain meadows one spring. That painfully sweet memory, long hidden, suddenly seemed as vivid as my own breath.

  “You have a wonderful smile,” the stranger said.

  I blinked. His outstretched hand lay near the mug. I’d let my hand settle near his on the bar top when I placed his drink there. The heat off his fingertips seemed to enter mine and flow through my body. Comfort. Friendship. Safety. Affection. Sex.

  I stepped back, put my hand by my side, and stared at him. I didn’t roll over for seductive men. I’d never had what you’d call a positive sexual experience. When you get popped at eighteen by a fellow nutcase in the psych ward you tend to develop some warped attitudes about intimacy, not that my other attitudes were cozy-sweet. Lust, like fear, was something to be controlled. Women make stupid choices when they let their bodies do all the thinking.

  And yet . . . who was this guy? I looked him over seriously. He wasn’t a Dante’s type, to say the least. Too tanned, for one thing. Not a night crawler. And older than our average, at least thirty. And way more conservative. No piercings, no obvious tattoos. He wore a beautiful leather bomber jacket over a golf shirt. I walked out from behind the bar to deliver a drink and noted his creased tan slacks. Slacks. A golf shirt. Jesus. Had he wandered in from a Young Republicans Convention? Bodybuilders for Jesus?

  His shoulders and arms were huge, and his neck bulged with muscle. He must be six-four, six-five. Even sitting on a bar stool he loomed above the scrawny drinkers standing at the bar’s other end. His face was strong-jawed, almost Dudley Do-rightish in its angles; he had short, glossy brown hair, a dimple beside the left corner of his mouth, and riveting gray eyes.

  He smiled. His teeth were even and white. His smile was mesmerizing. “I don’t fit in here, no,” he said.

  I caught my breath. “You’re a little too bronzed, that’s all. You could use some white foundation and some eyeliner. And a lip stud. But we’ll let you drink here anyway.”

  “Thank you.” His smile simmered. Sadness seeped into it. “It’s a cold winter night. I walked down here from my hotel. Asheville’s covered in fog and so is Atlanta, where my flight was headed. So we landed here, and I’m stuck for the night. No offense. I’m sure this is a great town. But I’m trying to get to Miami to see my mom. She’s sick.”

  I have a sharp ear for bullshit, especially the kind designed to get in my pants, but this guy radiated nothing but wistful honesty. In a world full of geeks, Goths, come-ons, put downs, loneliness, terror and demonic hallucinations, he was a big, hot slice of apple pie with a sickly mama on top. Talking to him pushed the morning’s fear further into a corner where I could pretend it was all just my imagination.

  “Would you like something from the kitchen?” I asked. “This is Asheville, where we have more vegetarians than you can shake an organic carrot at. How about an avocado sandwich on multi-grain bread with a side of Indian dal, hummus dip and raw mango rice?”

  He
laughed. “Whatever you said, okay.” He held out a broad, handsome hand. “My name’s Greg Lindholm. I’m from Minnesota. Land of the Swedes and Lutherans.”

  “Livia Belane,” I answered, and clasped his hand. “I’m from wherever.” He squeezed my fingers so gently. The heat. My God. He made me feel I’d never be cold again.

  *

  I wasn’t stupid, all right? Just lonely and scared shitless. Just desperate for the hope that every night of my life didn’t have to be bleak. I wanted to believe I deserved a Barbie Doll romance with someone nice, someone I could trust.

  After the club closed Greg said, “I’m not sleepy. That’s not a come-on. How about coffee and donuts at that all-night diner down the hill? My treat.”

  “Yeah, sure.” I shrugged into a black leather jacket. “I’ll drive us. Hope you don’t mind an ancient pick-up truck with no heater.”

  “I don’t mind at all, Livvie. I’m just glad to have more time with you. Believe it or not, I’m not much of a talker, usually. But you make me feel comfortable.”

  “I stunned you. You probably don’t meet many starving artists with five studs in each ear.”

  “I’ve never met anyone like you before, and I mean that as compliment.”

  Oh, he was good. I decided to see where the rest of the night took us. If we ended up at his hotel room, fine by me. After we fucked I’d get to sleep, really sleep, in a comfortable bed with his thick, hot, serenity inducing arms wrapped around me. No demons could get past that much Midwestern weight-lifting muscle.

  I drove us a couple of blocks down the hilly, empty city street past a string of little buildings that housed small businesses and shops. Asheville doesn’t tear down much of the old, so the downtown streets are a nice hodgepodge of styles, most of them built before the nineteen sixties, some going back to the eighteen hundreds. There are lots of trees just off the main drags, and the hills sink down into dark, forested valleys before rising again with the lights and lawns of in town neighborhoods. That night, everything was shrouded in a pearl-white mist of fog. The streetlamps pooled their auras in the soft glow.