Silver Zombie dspi-4

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “An evil twin?” Ric put my thoughts into words.

  I’d never told him about Lilith, another dirty little secret kept to ensure his peace of mind and my keen sense of privacy.

  “The TV soap operas are dead, Helena,” he said, dismissing his foster mother’s theory. “They lost their audience years ago. Evil twins have been a hokey plot device since forever.”

  “Call me hokey. Few would dare, young man.”

  How fascinating to watch the two revert to a non-blood-kin parent/son mode. I liked Ric going hot-blood and testosterone-y in my defense, something he’d never do if we were facing real danger. I’d never had an inner teenager— except for Irma, come to think of it, who acted like an eternal teenager—but I felt like a prom queen now.

  Wichita was peeling off all my hard-won defensive layers. I couldn’t indulge that luxury for too long.

  “I’m talking about a post–Millennium Revelation effect,” Helena said. “The dates when ‘Delilah’ was picked up for juvenile delinquency are after January first, two thousand.”

  “I was never ‘picked up’ for anything,” I protested.

  “You admit you don’t remember a lot about your childhood, until after high school, really,” Helena pointed out.

  “Who does?” Ric argued. “You remember the high and low points. I know I do, and I’m a star graduate of your methods, Helena.”

  She sighed. “The records show her—you, Delilah— with a history of running away from the group homes and hanging out at pool parlors, garages, tattoo and piercing shops with ‘a bad crowd.’”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I hid out in plain sight, in the group homes. I had a metal nail file for a weapon, yes, but it was against those creepy half-vamp punks who gave me a hard time. I wasn’t even menstruating then, but they still came after me.”

  Helena’s lips folded tight. Then she said, “I believe you, Delilah. I believe you had your own history in your mind, and … this person in the police photographs was never a conscious part of yourself.”

  “Or an unconscious part,” Ric insisted. “She was a virtual virgin. Only it was real. She had a lot to overcome before we … became a ‘we.’”

  “Did she bleed the first time, Ric?” Helena sounded all cold-blooded physician.

  He glanced at me, embarrassment a no-show in this emotionally charged conversation.

  “Why should she, Helena? Did you?” he fought back for me. “Modern girls are way more active than some kind of … Victorian fading flower. The hymen can break in school sports, horseback riding—” He turned to me. “Does Our Lady of the Lake have riding stables?”

  I nodded numbly. Some of the girls were even rich enough to keep horses stabled there; some of us just snuck in and patted them, or were occasionally invited to ride. I didn’t feel these details merited breaking into this semi-mother-son debate.

  “Ric.” Helena’s gaze turned steely. “You know and I know and Delilah knows she’s got a deeply ingrained phobia against lying on her back, in bed or out of it. I can literally see the black cloud of suppressed fear hovering at the rear of her brain, and that’s a formidable barrier to sexuality. You’ve done an admirable job of easing her around that barrier, but you can’t change the underlying pathology.”

  “It’s no ‘job,’” Ric exploded. “It’s a labor of love, and I can live with that black hovering ghost without knowing its name forever.”

  “Can Delilah, Ric? The files show an off-the-books medical ‘procedure’ when she was twelve. With an obgyn. Mrs. Haliburton can lie, but the files can’t. It’s against the law to destroy them, although they can be censored and blacked-out and buried in bottomless circles of bureaucratic hell. Somebody came along later and knew they’d be liable for something. The trouble is, whatever went so very wrong is also buried in Delilah’s psyche.”

  “I don’t care what those files blacked out,” he answered. “I’ll find every last blotted-out name—doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, ‘bad crowd,’ whatever, including supernatural stalkers. I’ll track them down and I’ll take that wolf-hound with me to gnaw the balls off them until they squeal their guts out.”

  I believed every word, remembering how Ric had gone after Haskell, the rogue cop who’d roughed me up. And maybe my big dog had too.

  “You have to face it,” Helena said. “Revenge won’t erase whatever it is Delilah confronted at a way-too-early age, likely rape.”

  Rape. The only four-letter word that rocked my world off its axis. I’d sensed the ugly word circling and hovering in my blacked-out history and now it was in the open, slavering for my will and soul.

  “Thanks, Ric and Helena.” I finally spoke for myself. “I’m perfectly capable of decoding those defaced files. I’m an ex-reporter, remember? I know Wichita history, names, and places.” Then I looked only at Ric. “I’m pretty damn good at fighting impossible odds. And Quicksilver will get his teeth into any dirty work required more enthusiastically for me than for anyone else on the planet.”

  He stopped cold, unable to keep up the façade that I hadn’t been seriously damaged, here and then. In Wichita, years ago.

  “Now, let me see those files,” I told Helena. “I appreciate your help, Madam Freud, but they are mine, you know. I’d like a printout to take back to the motel room. Can you manage that without letting the hotel staff get a duplicate file, or snoop? I don’t trust anyone about now.”

  * * *

  “WE NEVER HAD a decent real meal today,” Ric commented from Dolly’s passenger seat as I drove us back to the Thunderbird motel, a sheaf of rare hard copies in a folder on the red leather seat between us.

  “Takeout time,” I said. “Let Quicksilver choose.”

  We passed a Wendy’s, a McDonald’s, and a Captain Kirk’s before a sharp bark came from the backseat. Red Riding Hood’s, wouldn’t you know? We got the family basket. Brisket and cottage fries.

  Leaving Quick on night duty with the bulk of the basket, we brought the remainder inside to pick at.

  I fanned through the folders.

  “I love you, and I don’t want you hurt, now or in the past,” Ric said.

  “I know the feeling,” I pointed out, with feeling. “That’s why I was leery about coming back to Wichita.”

  “I was so sure you were haunted by just a natural, general fear because of the Revelation hitting when you were only a preteen.”

  “Maybe that’s all it is. I do know if an abscessed tooth is a constant pain, you need to pull it out before it poisons you.”

  WHEN RIC FINALLY fell asleep, I got up and went to the cheesy medicine cabinet over the sink mirror I’d avoided seeing myself in.

  I really didn’t want to mirror-walk in Wichita. That disconcerting new option was a Vegas wrinkle. Helena was right that the Millennium Revelation revved up paranormal powers in ordinary people.

  I suspected now that I’d never been ordinary, the thing I’d longed for most as a kid. I wasn’t worried about facing Loretta Cicereau, the vengeful ghost I’d bound. She was in mirror-suspension back in Sin City. I was beginning to see that even supernatural power depended on places as well as people.

  Wichita had its own circuit box. Power could travel from node to node, but you could tap into only what mojo you had built up in various locations. Here, I was more plugged in than I wanted to be.

  I took out my gray contact lenses, although they could be worn for weeks without changing. Then I leaned the heels of my hands on the cold sink surround and pushed my trademark blue eyes close to the cheap-grade mirror.

  “So you had to stick me with a sealed juvie record, Lilith? You sure weren’t borrowing my clothes in those days. They were all Goodwill and buttoned up to here and down to there to keep the creepy boys away. How did I get funneled into a socially and psychologically deviant population? I was just an orphan. And you did everything you could to hurt me.”

  The blue eyes in the mirror blazed with anger and angst. Me, or Lilith, or Memorex?

  “It e
ver occur to you, Dee,” my mirror lips curled in answer, “I was taking the pressure off you?”

  Her glossy black head of hair shimmered like Midnight Cherry as she shook it. We really had great hair. Why I had never seen that? Because Lilith was hot, and I was not.

  Now she was saying she took the … heat … off, so I could remain safe behind my defensive devices, my solitary ways, my old movies, my wounded shyness?

  “So hopelessly naïve,” she went on. “The times they were a-changing, but you just wanted to soldier on in your stupidly smart, safe, low-profile way.”

  “Your escapades gave me a record.”

  “Everybody wanted to pin a case file on you and forget you. I met their expectations and then they left you alone.”

  I could feel my fingernails trying to dig into fake stone.

  “Lilith, did you get me raped?”

  The blue eyes in the mirror shut.

  Funny, I could see that.

  Was this denial or …

  “Lilith, did you get raped in my place?”

  She tossed that superstar hair of ours, and flashed our ultrabright baby blues.

  “A little.”

  Oh, my God.

  She shrugged and sneered and went on. “But the system got you, after all, in its own way. It always does.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that. I’m not. And that’s why I’m in here and … you’re not.”

  “You have more than a mirror existence,” I told her even as I realized it. “You have powers. You didn’t really kill yourself to get autopsied on CSI V Las Vegas?”

  “TMI, Delilah Street. I can see why you wanted to disown me, though.” She turned her half-profile to me. I could see the tiny blue topaz in her right nostril. “The only personal distinguishing mark you ever voluntarily went for. And you lost it fast. Because of me.”

  Had I lost more than a subtle piercing, because of her?

  I sighed. “Lilith, I don’t like where this road trip to Hell is leading.”

  “It’s not a theme park joyride, Dee, but you have way more allies than I ever did.”

  “You’re not one?”

  “You want to claim the tattooed lady with the smokin’ past?”

  “Hey. I can always use chutzpah in Mirrorland.”

  “Yeah. But where you need it is here and now, baby. Kiss the past and my baby blues good-bye. And screw Ric for me while you can.”

  My fist headed for her face on that last taunt, but my knuckles stopped on cold mirror and at the brink of my own confused, angry image.

  Lilith was right. The only way of going forward to the future was back to the past.

  It was a paradox, and my vehicle was not a DeLorean car, but one of Detroit’s nostalgia best, Dolly. Frankly, the vintage past I so loved in general had been pretty much a real-time bust in my case.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “TWELVE YEARS TO young people your age,” Helena Troy Burnside told Ric and me with a rueful smile, “may seem like an eternity. Luckily, it’s just a little over a decade for us old folks.”

  She flashed the printout of a Wichita map from the Web. We’d come to her hotel suite that morning to pick her up for the drive to where I’d been sent twelve years ago for a mysterious gynecological procedure at age twelve.

  “We have the same cast of characters,” she added. “Not encouraging to you, Delilah, as a patient, but as a reporter you know what that means.”

  I nodded grimly. “They know what happened to me there, and why.”

  I didn’t add that I’d been freshly armed with several dire hints from my mirror twin. Why hadn’t I ever told Ric about Lilith, the last secret I’d kept from him beside my internal invisible friend, Irma. I knew why.

  Who wants to be dating The Three Faces of Eve, even if he’s too young to have ever seen that old movie on multiple personalities?

  Of course, I was firmly my own person; I just had these slightly weird add-ons. Some people called that “baggage.” Before and after the Millennium Revelation, some folks called that “haunts.”

  Ric rubbed the nape of my neck, massaging away tension, secretly caressing a shared intimate mark, and tapping my inner “chica.”

  “We’ll be with you,” he promised.

  Yeah. That’s what made it so scary.

  Leonard Tallgrass had requisitioned Quicksilver again. While Ric and I were delving the personal side of my Wichita links and past, the local ex-FBI agent was drawing a bead on the area’s powerful paranormal and criminal elements.

  Frankly, I couldn’t wait to get my angsty stuff over with, and get back in the field with the crime fighters.

  Ric drove us to another bland three-story building. I was beginning to long for the soaring hubris of Vegas with its gouts of spot-lit fire and water and neon spitting up at the cloudless sky.

  The office waiting room boasted the usual upholstered chairs and magazine racks, with a huge fish tank framing a lethargic trio of clown fish.

  Helena accompanied me to the reception window, leaving Ric to flip through an actual print edition of Modern Mother and Infant featuring Madonna and her latest adopted Third World child on the cover. Menopausal adoptions were the new “Follywood” superstar rage.

  “Hmm.” The receptionist frowned. “I don’t find a ‘Delilah Street’ in the records. You’ve been here before?” she asked, her gaze darting between Helena and me.

  I looked too old to need escort to the gynecologist’s office.

  “It was more than a decade ago,” Helena said so briskly the receptionist almost saluted. “Dr. Youmans was the physician.” She nodded to the door behind us, which read YOUMANS, HORTON, AND FLIEDERBACH.

  “And you are Miss Street?” she asked, her flicking glance settling on me.

  She knew her patient name game. Helena didn’t look young enough to carry an offbeat name like Delilah.

  I nodded.

  “First visit, virtually,” the receptionist said. “The doctor will want to do a thorough exam.”

  “So will we,” Helena said sweetly.

  We went to sit with Ric, where his foster mother proceeded to tell him how the cow ate the cabbage. This cow was in a much better place than the zombie-driven herds moving through the dark of Kansas nights.

  “They won’t let you in,” Helena told him. “You’re not related.”

  Ric was cool with it. “I’ll wait until I hear the doctor going into the consultation room, then get a ‘family emergency’ call on my cell and barge right in.”

  “Ric,” Helena said. “This is women’s business. Did it occur to you that Delilah would prefer to keep it private from you?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “and I hate to intrude behind those pink doors, but we don’t have much private from each other, and she knows I can take it.”

  And he knew I’d seen his soul stripped bare. Turnabout, fair play.

  Helena shook her smooth blond head. “What a different generation. Philip would sooner be waterboarded than set foot in a gynecologist’s office.”

  Ric grinned. “You might be surprised, if it involved your well-being.”

  She shrugged and smiled to herself.

  Then my name was called, for everybody in the waiting room to hear.

  “Delilah Street.”

  Helena accompanied me through the door. I saw Ric station himself at the brochure rack near the receptionist’s pass-through to keep an eye on the action in the hall and consulting rooms.

  “Does this ever change?” Helena asked after we were shown into a room.

  We’d sat on two light side chairs. I eyed the rolling stool near the sink counter, and the recliner lounge with the metal stirrups at the foot and a paper cloth down the center. It sat against one wall like a bizarre sacrificial altar.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been in such a place before.”

  “You mean this specific place, in your memory.”

  “I mean, never.”
>
  “You’ve never had a gynecological appointment?” She sounded shocked. “Not at college, or after?”

  “My … phobia.”

  “But … you’re in your mid-twenties. Birth control.” She was looking flustered.

  “I’m on the Pill for severe menstrual cramps. Have been since college.”

  “You had to have had a pelvic exam done then?”

  “No. There are underground places where you can get all sorts of pills.”

  And I’d managed to avoid such routine school inspections for years. Amazing what a determined minor can do. I was newly impressed by Teen Me. I was also getting tired of apologizing for my back-lying phobia and my monthly pain and my apparently abnormal history.

  “The only pelvic exams I’ve ever had were from your foster son.”

  Her face produced a raging flush I thought only my ultra-pale skin could show.

  “Sorry, Delilah. I deserved that. You were indeed a ‘virtual virgin,’ as Ric said. How clumsy of me to ask those questions. I needed to know what to expect when the doctor comes in and wants to do that procedure.”

  “It won’t go well,” I said, “but why would we need to go that far? I just want to ask some questions. You’re certain this is the doctor who saw me when I was twelve, with the result that I buried the experience deep in my subconscious?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Even the nurses are the same. The doctor is in his early sixties now and president of the local medical society.”

  “Which doesn’t know he was doing pelvic exams and who-knows-what-else on helpless twelve-year-olds?”

  “I would think not. Let me ask the questions, Delilah.”

  “I was a reporter. I’m good at that.”

  “I know. I know his type too. He’s of the doctor-as-God generation. He’d respond better to someone of my maturity. Don’t you trust me to be your advocate?”