The waitress scribbles something else on her pad and then clicks her tongue once, loudly, against the roof of her mouth. “That certainly is an unusual name,” she says. “Narcissa. I don’t think I’ve ever once met anyone named Narcissa before.”
“It’s Greek,” Chance tells her, watching the four crows, and she pulls her hand away before the werewolf can touch her again. “Like Narcissus.”
“Well, I can’t say I ever met anyone named Narcissus before, either.”
“It’s a very old name,” Chance says sleepily, “from a Greek myth. Narcissus was a beautiful young boy who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water.”
The waitress clicks her tongue again, but not so loudly as before. “Is that so?” she asks. “Guess I should’ve paid more attention in school,” and Chance nods her head. A fifth crow lands in front of the car, and Five for rich, she thinks. The other birds flap their wings and make room for the newcomer.
“Well, anyway, you’ll still have to move your car,” the fat woman says.
“I’ll be fine, Narcissa, I promise. I’m just going to sit right here and wait for my breakfast.”
Narcissa turns back to the window, just in time to see two more crows light on the hood of the Ford.
“Seven for a witch,” Chance says out loud and laughs before she can stop herself.
“Excuse me,” Narcissa growls, sliding quickly out of the booth, pushing her way roughly past the fat waitress. “I’m going to move the goddamn car,” and then to Chance, “I meant what I said. You just remember that.”
“I know,” Chance replies. “I’ll watch from here.”
“You do that,” the werewolf snarls. The cowbell over the door jingles again, and Chance is left alone with the waitress.
“She your sister or something?” the fat woman asks.
“No, I don’t think she has a sister. I think she’s an only child.”
“I only ask ’cause she seems so protective and all. I’m sorry, about the car I mean, but Burt—he’s the owner—he rides my ass about shit like that.”
“No problem. We shouldn’t have left it there. We just forgot to move it.”
“Well, I hope she’s seeing a doctor, your friend, about those burns she’s got. You can’t be too careful about a thing like that.”
“Oh, we’re fine,” Chance replies, and then the black birds all take to the air at once, scattering noisily as Narcissa walks quickly across the parking lot towards them. Chance can hear their wings and taunting, cawing voices, even through the glass.
“Damn dirty crows,” the waitress sneers. “They shit on everything and get in the trash, strew it all around, you know. Someone ought to just kill all the dirty old things and be done with it.”
“Give her time,” Chance whispers, and the fat woman goes away, muttering and clicking her tongue; Chance takes a deep breath, leans her face against the window, and waits for Narcissa to come back.
The murder of crows shatters before her like a living sheet of black glass, each ebony shard an eager, shrieking spy hurrying back to its master’s ears. Feathers and bone and bird flesh to give up all her secrets, and Narcissa stands in the silent space they’ve left and watches as they all shrink down to pinprick stains against the pale mountain sky.
“What the hell are you doing now, child?” Aldous asks. “You never should have stopped here.” Narcissa looks around, but doesn’t see him anywhere. Maybe he’s crouched behind one of the cars or trucks, peering out at her with his dead man’s eyes, but she decides not to try to find him, that she won’t give him the satisfaction.
“You saw them,” she says. “The crows. Were you the one who told them where to find me?”
“You left her in there alone, Narcissa.”
“Yeah, I did. Now why don’t you leave me alone.”
“That fat cunt of a waitress, she knows your name now, and your face. By the time you get back in there, she’ll probably know it all.”
“Did you call the crows down on me, old man?”
“You better forget the damned crows. They were just birds. But those people sitting in that restaurant, they’re all watching you right this moment, and do you know what they see?”
Narcissa turns and stares anxiously at the long plate-glass window, the neon GOOD HOMECOOKING sign, Chance’s sleepy face gazing back at her.
“I’ll tell you,” Aldous whispers. “They see a madwoman standing in a parking lot, talking to herself. That’s what they see,” and he’s so close now that she can smell the faint scent, like dried sage and mildew, that clings to the flimsy shadows of ghosts.
“At this very moment, I expect that fat cunt is picking up the phone to call the police.”
“No, she isn’t,” Narcissa says and forces herself to turn towards the Ford again, so no one inside can see her lips move. There’s a big gray-white smear of crow shit on the windshield, and she thinks about getting something to wipe it off before it dries.
“She’ll describe you and that pregnant woman. She’ll tell them about your burns. Someone will connect the dots—”
“Get in the car,” another of her voices mutters urgently, one of her killings and it doesn’t much matter which one anymore, far too many for her to count or keep track of, too many faces and everyone’s blood is the same ten thousand shades of red. “Get in the car and drive. If you go right now, right this minute, you might make it. They might not catch you.”
“Oh, they’ll catch her,” Aldous snickers in her ear. “One way or the other, you can bet on it. They’ll catch her and shoot her down like a rabid dog. They’ll catch her and stick her in some jail somewhere to rot until it’s time for her turn in the electric chair.”
“Go to Hell,” Narcissa whispers.
“Been there, child. Been there these past fifteen years, just waiting on you to join me.”
“It won’t be long now,” another of the voices chimes in.
“They’ll have a big ol’ party in that yellow house on Benefit Street,” Aldous says. “Soon as the news gets back, they’ll throw a soirée fit to wake the dead.”
Narcissa takes a hesitant step towards the Ford, and then she sees the child sitting in the backseat, watching her with its deep green eyes that are not quite male and not quite female.
“Everywhere you turn, girl,” her grandfather laughs, “everywhere you’ll ever go, there’s something got its eyes on you.”
“Get in the car and drive. Drive fast.”
“No,” Aldous says mockingly. “She ain’t gonna run, not this one. Not when she’s so damn close, not when she’s got Mother Hydra watching her ass and such a fine, plump offering for the hounds.”
The child in the backseat is pointing a finger towards the diner now, and when Narcissa turns around to see, the fat waitress is standing in the open door, hands on her wide pink hips, shouting something Narcissa doesn’t understand. Something she doesn’t hear, because now so many of the voices are talking all at once, crammed in behind her throbbing eyes and squabbling for her attention. But Aldous Snow’s papery voice rises clear above the din.
“I count seven heads,” he says. “But you can’t be sure how many might be hiding in the kitchen. Better get started, girl.”
“Yeah,” Narcissa whispers, as she draws the Browning 9mm from her jacket, pulls back the slide, and aims at the fat woman’s head. “Now shut the fuck up, old man, and let me do this.”
And for an instant, the time it takes to squeeze a trigger, Narcissa sees the world through the eyes of seven crows, looking down on the world from their privileged places in the sky, and through the glassy titan eyes of something ancient and unthinkable, half-buried at the bottom of the sea. She sees herself through the widening eyes of the fat waitress in the doorway, and Chance, and the eyes of the unborn child still watching Narcissa from the backseat of the Thunderbird. And finally, her grandfather’s ghost, her father’s ghost, grinning triumphant from the scabby hole he’s dug in her soul. All these things, and more, r
olling faster than starlight through her head, damning slide-show blur before the pistol roars and kicks, and the waitress drops like a broken doll.
“Is that the way you want it, Aldous? Like that?”
“That’s one,” he says, and Narcissa nods her head and begins retracing her steps to the diner door.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Stations of the Cross
The same dream every time Deacon closes his eyes long enough to begin drifting down towards sleep, the same dream or close enough that it may as well be, all the horrors of Sunday night replayed again and again as if he’s looking for some way to make it all come out differently. Some alternate, happy ending yet to be discovered, hidden deep within the minutiae, right there for the taking if only his stubborn subconscious self is allowed to pick through the broken pieces enough times. Guilt and regret and a loss that he’s only just beginning to comprehend, not even two days between him and the loss of her, and there’s only the bourbon in his belly and the migraine that doesn’t get any better no matter how much he drinks.
“Where the hell were you, Deke?” Downs asks him again, but then Deacon remembers that it’s only the dream, so this time he doesn’t have to answer if he doesn’t want to. He’s standing in the hallway outside the apartment, looking at the bloody handprints on the open door, deep gouges in the wood like someone’s been at it with a knife or an awl or some other sharp, gouging tool.
“Or claws,” one of the policemen says. “That’s what it looks like to me, like a big ol’ dog’s been at the door. You got a dog, Mr. Silvey?”
And for the fifteenth or twentieth time he says no, no, he doesn’t have a dog, he hasn’t had a dog since he was a kid, and the cop shrugs his shoulders, for the fifteenth or twentieth time, and says well, it sure looks to him like something a dog would do. Deacon tries to ignore him and steps quickly across the threshold, before he can think better of it and change his mind, change his mind and wake up, because then he’ll just have to start the whole dream all over, and there’s absolutely nothing behind him that he ever needs to see again. The meandering blood trail from the parking garage, beginning at the butchered mess that used to be Alice Sprinkle, winding up the fire stairs and down the third-floor hallway, all the dark and drying splotches and smears, the boot prints on the scruffy brown carpet leading to the door and into the apartment and then leading back out again.
“You know, maybe he had a dog with him,” the cop says, and “Who?” Downs asks. “Maybe who had a fucking dog?”
“The perp,” the cop replies. “It’d help explain the condition of the body down—”
“Are you a goddamn detective?” Downs asks him. “Is anyone paying you to be a goddamn detective? Did some asshole hand you a promotion when I wasn’t looking?”
“Look, all I said was—”
“Carter, why don’t you just shut the hell up until someone’s stupid enough to ask for your goddamn opinion.”
Deacon wants them both to shut up and go away, but knows they won’t, not yet. He’s been here and now enough times to know that they’ll follow him inside, Downs watching him like a hungry, attentive vulture, the street cop sulking in the detective’s shadow.
Scarborough Pentecost is standing near the bedroom door, his blood-stiff clothes and one of Chance’s fossils, a dark, tightly coiled ammonite, in his right hand, the black hole like a third eye in the center of his forehead.
“Jesus, man, you look like shit,” Scarborough says and then goes back to inspecting the fossil.
“You been anywhere near a mirror lately?” Deacon asks him and then turns his head, his eyes following the boot prints towards the front of the apartment, the raisin-colored streaks along the tall hallway walls. Halfway to the living room, there’s a huge circle drawn on the wall in blood with a smeary line of charcoal underneath. The circle and the line, Sadie’s red moon for a werewolf, red moon for vengeful Gaelic fairies.
“Well, hell, at least you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” Scarborough sighs and sets the fossil back down in its place on a small walnut curio shelf hung on the wall between the bedroom and the nursery.
“Isn’t this shit bad enough already, without having to talk to you every fucking time?”
“Hey, it’s not my dream,” Scarborough replies. “I’m not the one who keeps sticking me here.”
“It looks like she put up a fight,” Downs says, and Deacon knows he can’t see or hear the changeling’s ghost skulking about at the end of the hall. “She didn’t go easily. There’s a knife in the kitchen we think she might have tried to use as a weapon.”
“Where were your men?” Deacon asks, reciting the question like a stray line from a play, something learned through painful, tiresome repetition, and the detective coughs but doesn’t answer him.
Scarborough laughs and shakes his head. “Aren’t you getting tired of this yet, Mr. Silvey? It isn’t ever going to get any prettier, you know.”
“She isn’t dead,” Deacon says, but that only makes Scarborough laugh again.
“Yeah, well, maybe not, but she may as well be. In fact, right about now, she’s probably starting to wish she were.”
“She isn’t dead,” Detective Downs says, straining to sound hopeful, and Deacon takes a deep breath before he touches the blood smeared down the wall. The throbbing in his head swells expectantly.
“You keep picking at that thing,” Scarborough whispers, “it ain’t ever gonna heal.”
Deacon sets the tips of his fingers against the drywall at the center of Narcissa’s circle, and the wall feels soft and warm, sticky, and he’s done this enough times now to be pretty sure it has a pulse. He presses gently, and there’s a faint popping sound before his hand sinks in up to the knuckles.
“We’re going to find her,” the detective says. “But you gotta help us, Deke. You gotta start telling us the truth.”
“Maybe he don’t know the truth,” the cop named Carter says. “Maybe he don’t even want to know the truth.”
“Didn’t I just fucking tell you to shut the hell up?” Downs snaps, and Deacon’s hand sinks deeper into the wall, wet and living flesh closing tightly about his wrist and holding him there, too late to turn back now, and he glances past the bickering cops at Scarborough before it begins.
“Better be careful,” Scarborough says, looking around the corner at Deacon. “I’ve seen people lose fingers that way.”
“Frankly, it’s not my fingers I’m worried about,” Deacon replies, and now he’s digging about inside the wall, plaster and raw muscle, greasy lumps of fatty tissue and fiberglass insulation, and he’s starting to think maybe this will be one of the dreams where he can’t find what he’s looking for. One of the dreams where he doesn’t even get on the roller coaster, and it’ll cost him another half-pint of booze just to stand in line again. “Come on,” he snarls, grimacing, driving his arm in up to the elbow, forcing it past the reluctant lips of the slit.
“It might be a breech birth,” the cop named Carter says, glancing over Deacon’s shoulder. “My wife had a breech birth with our second girl.”
“So now you’re a goddamn obstetrician?” Downs grumbles.
“No, but we’ve had three girls, and you learn a few things if you pay attention.”
Deacon closes his eyes, shutting them all out, the cops and Scarborough Pentecost, as the entire universe pulses to the sick rhythm of his headache and then slowly contracts down to a single speck of pinprick brilliance. The whole cosmos to pass effortlessly through the eye of a needle, and Deacon knows he must be in the wall up to his shoulder now, can smell the rotting flesh, the mildewed softwood studs.
There it is, he thinks through the blur of pain and stars. Right in there.
And then his hand closes around bone, a rib or the smooth shaft of a femur, something Chance would know blind, would know by touch alone, but it really doesn’t make any difference to him. The brass ring, that’s all it is, and he holds on tight as the universe begins to swell, reexpanding about h
im. The wall makes an angry, squelching noise and tries to push him out again. No place he was ever meant to see, nothing he was ever meant to touch, the infinite, slippery dimensions crammed in between time and space, flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood. Something broken deep in his soul, that he knows these things at all, can slip back along these paths that have been rolled up forever and hidden away from prying eyes and curious brains.
The scraping sound, like claws against the apartment door, stainless steel claws to dig deep gouges before Narcissa Snow is done having her fun and simply picks the locks. Deacon opens his eyes, but it’s still too dark to see, still dark because the lights are out all over town.
“Little pig, little pig,” Narcissa whispers through the door. “Let me come in.”
“Fuck off, bitch!” Deacon shouts back, wondering why no one even tried to help, the neighbors on both sides, until he remembers that the guy in 306 was out of town and 308’s still sitting empty.
“Little pig? Can’t you hear me? Aren’t you listening?”
“Leave her alone,” he shouts, and the scratching sounds stop, a moment or two of nothing but the thunderstorm raging overhead before he can hear her start to work on the locks.
“No? Well, that’s okay,” Narcissa says. “I can let myself in.”
And when Deacon turns his head, there is a little light back that way, right there behind him, hazy gray light through the tall living room windows and Chance silhouetted at the end of the hallway. She’s standing very still, staring through him towards the door, and there’s a bread knife in her right hand. He can’t see her face, her eyes, but he knows how afraid she is, can hear her heart racing and can smell the electric adrenaline charge coming off her. The air around her sizzles and cracks, and she takes a step towards him.
“No,” Deacon says. “You can’t stop her, Chance. Nothing can stop her.”
“I have a gun,” Chance says, trying to sound brave but her voice too unsteady, unconvincing, and she grips the handle of the knife tighter. There’s a loud click, then, as the dead bolt is unlocked, the rolling of well-oiled tumblers like the thunder from the sky, and she takes a step back towards the living room.
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