“You don’t have to go,” came a voice from the blackness. Not just any voice. It was the one voice Onyx had longed to hear her entire life.
It was not the voice of God.
It was her mother.
Onyx had never heard her mother’s voice, but somehow she just knew it was her.
“Momma?” Onyx said.
“You do not have to go,” Jofranka Webb repeated.
“Where? Where don’t I have to go?” Onyx asked.
“The light,” Jofranka said. “The choice is yours, Onyx. Only you can decide.”
The light? What—?”
Then Onyx saw it.
It was nothing but a dot of white, as if someone had taken a pin and pushed it through the blackness. Then the light began growing, expanding, until Onyx could see what looked like a glowing tunnel before her.
The light was warm, comforting, inviting, and Onyx felt herself being pulled toward it—drawn to it as if she were tethered to a rope being pulled by an invisible force.
“You don’t have to go,” Onyx heard her mother say again. “You can stay, but you must fight. You must fight, Onyx. You must fight.”
Onyx suddenly found herself in the woods again, floating in the air and looking down as the wolves went about their mission of tearing at the flesh, ripping the muscles and gnawing at the bones of her once physical form, destroying what was left of her.
And she knew what she had to do.
She had to fight.
As if a faucet had been turned on, Onyx felt herself fill with a burning sense of anger and rage beyond anything she’d ever experienced or thought possible.
From nowhere, Onyx grabbed the scruff of the wolf’s neck from behind and spun it around, leaving the wolf snapping its bloody teeth at the air, unable to see what had taken hold of it.
Onyx could see the confusion in the wolf’s eyes, suddenly realizing the gray beast could not see her. To the wolf, she was invisible.
Onyx wrapped her arm around the wolf’s neck and lifted the animal off the ground, its rear legs kicking at the air in a desperate attempt to free itself as the other wolves continued their ravenous attack, unaware of what was happening.
As if being led by some knowing force, Onyx instinctively understood what she had to do. Wrapping her free hand around the wolf’s snout and placing her mouth over the wolf’s, she sucked in as hard as she could until the wolf went limp.
Onyx opened her arms and released the wolf’s lifeless body, allowing it to fall to the ground at her feet. Only then did the other wolves stop their attack and look.
They can see me, Onyx thought.
But how?
Onyx held up her hand and saw how much more solid her skin looked—skin that, just moments before, had been virtually transparent.
The wolves danced and howled but stayed where they were.
Ignoring her father’s advice, Onyx looked directly at the wolves and took a step forward. The wolves began to back away, then turned and ran toward the trees, disappearing in the darkness.
Onyx found herself alone now in the darkness of the woods, standing over what remained of her earthly body, her limbs torn and scattered on the blood-soaked snow. And then the reality of the situation finally hit her.
Onyx’s mother hadn’t said she could fight and live—she said she could fight and stay.
Onyx had fought. And she had won. She had managed to stay here in the living plane.
But she was dead.
She was a ghost.
Quote
“It is not the job of the universe to tell you what your destiny is. For that matter, no one is destined to become anything other than what they choose to become.”
The 31 Immutable Matters
of Life & Death
In Loll…
The girl went once again to the mirror on the second floor of the hotel, which she found easily now. The place was important, she knew.
She’d been there before, but not in this time. In another time—before this time.
She’d learned she did not have to touch the mirror to see into the other place. All she had to do was gaze into the mirror and think about the other place—imagine it—and it would appear before her.
She looked for the boy but had not seen him other than that once. And she looked for the woman, too, with the dark skin and big hair, but she was gone as well.
But she could see others—many, many others. Standing in a row, gazing into the mirror as if looking for something—or someone.
Her.
She knew they were looking for her.
They could not see her, which was good.
The biggest revelation was that the other place really wasn’t another place at all.
It was this place.
She’d discovered that while gazing in the mirror, into the other place. She could see the piano in the mirror behind her but also in front of her. And they were the same.
The grand, shiny black piano, with magnificent pearl keys producing sound like angels singing.
The piano existed in both places—this place, and the other place. And then she understood.
There were not two places.
Only one.
The piano and the people and everything were both here and there. The people were not looking into the mirror from the other side—they were both looking from the same side—as if occupying the same place but in another time.
She stood there, looking in the mirror and trying to understand how this was possible. She couldn’t. But she knew she was getting close.
And then she saw them.
Three of them. Not like the other people. They were dark silhouettes—black, without detail— standing there looking at her through the mirror.
And she knew they could see her as well.
The one in the middle stepped toward her— its movement stiff, jerky, advancing without having to walk—like a liquid shadow that jumped from one place to the next.
That’s what they were, the girl realized.
Shadow beings.
And then she remembered: Things were not on one side of the mirror and the other. Everything was on the same side.
They were not in front of her.
They were behind her.
Chapter Thirty-One
Episode 9: Ghost in the Woods
Chicago, Illinois
July 19, 1965
Rocky Dredge was flying high, but not on drugs or alcohol. He hadn’t touched a drop of booze, an ounce of cocaine, or gone on a heroin bender in over three years. Rocky was high on the success he was having with the club.
Maybe I’m not James Bond, Rocky thought to himself. Maybe I’m Goldfinger!
Everything Rocky Dredge touched lately had indeed turned to gold. He’d recruited three new dancers, each better looking than the last. Pins & Poles was packed to the gills every night of the week. And profits were through the roof—even the bowling alley was finally making money. Maybe he didn’t need to get Mary Ann on the pole after all.
To Rocky’s mind, the only problem was the way the club looked. It looked tired. Dingy. James Bond wouldn’t even walk into the place.
If only he had a few extra dollars.
“How much dough are we talkin’ about?” Fat Sal asked when Rocky went to him, begging for a second loan.
“Five large ought to do it,” Rocky said.
“That’s more coin than you need to paint a bowling alley,” Fat Sal said. “You sure you want that much? I don’t want to see you biting off more than you can chew.”
Though Fat Sal made his living loaning money to desperate men—at interest rates ten times over what was legal—he genuinely liked Rocky Dredge, even if he was a darkie. Besides, it wasn’t good business to let the eggplant get in deeper than he could handle, especially since he owed Sal money from his last loan.
“I’m not just going to paint the place, Sal,” Rocky said with enthusiasm. “I’m putting in new poles, some better lighting, a decent sound system
, and resurfacing the lanes. Then I’m going to expand the bar and stock it with some decent alcohol, maybe even champagne. I’m going to turn Pins & Poles into a special place for special people, looking to get out of the house and have a special night.”
Suddenly, five-grand didn’t seem like it was enough.
Rocky also left out the part about making payments on the silver Aston Martin DB5 he’d purchased three months earlier, after seeing Goldfinger for the third time.
“You’re fooling yourself,” Phil Spilatro said. “Pins & Poles is a dump that caters to low-class, blue-collar scum who want to get drunk and watch girls shake their tits. That’s all the place will ever be.”
Phil had a point. Against his better judgment, however, Fat Sal agreed to the loan. “Now, don’t make me chase you for the money, Rock. You miss payments like before? I’m sending Phil and Chuckie to find you.”
“I hope he misses,” Phil said.
“Yeah,” Chuckie Bags said. “Sounds like fun.”
“I’m not gonna miss,” Rocky said. Why would he? Business was up, and with the remodel the sky was the limit.
What could possibly go wrong?
The old finish had been removed, and all four lanes had been leveled with a twelve-inch drum sander. Then the lanes were sanded again to remove the coarse marks left behind from the first sander.
The final sanding took place three days later, using a fine-grit sandpaper, followed by a series of screenings to close the pores of the wood—first with a rotary and then with an oscillator—to remove any swirl marks that the rotary might have left.
It was a long, arduous process.
“Looks great,” Rocky told the contractor from Brunswick doing the work. “But when in the hell can I let people bowl?”
“After the base coat and top coats of varnish have dried,” the contractor said. “I’m guessing ten days, two weeks max.”
Shit.
Two weeks might as well have been two years as far as Rocky was concerned. If he was going to make his next payment to Fat Sal, he needed the revenue stream from bowling to start flowing again.
After the contractor left, Rocky knelt down and felt the wood with his hand. Hell, it felt dry to him.
Three days later, a man on his sixth Budweiser accidently dropped a cigarette on lane three and whoosh! Seconds later, half the building was engulfed in flames. Who knew un-dried varnish was so flammable?
The good news was the sprinkler system Rocky didn’t even know was there worked and extinguished the fires. The bad news was the pins half of Pins & Poles was a total loss.
“You’re a dancer now,” Rocky told Mary Ann the day after the fire marshal signed off and allowed the club to reopen.
“What?” Mary Ann said.
“Look around, girl,” Rocky said. “There’s no bowling alley, so I don’t need counter help—I need dancers. Either you dance, or you’re fired. The choice is yours.”
Years earlier, when Mary Ann was working tables at the Chez Paree, she’d seen comedian Lenny Bruce perform. And she thought the man was a genius. Bruce’s open, free-style rants on politics, religion, drugs, and sex were unlike anything Mary Ann had ever experienced.
At the end of the night, as Mary Ann was cleaning up—long after everyone had gone home—Lenny Bruce stumbled from the bathroom to the bar and sat down. It was obvious he was high on one drug or another.
Mary Ann got the comedian some coffee, and for the next hour Lenny Bruce shared intimate details about himself—things Mary Ann could imagine no other human being doing, especially with a relative stranger.
What she remembered most about the encounter, even years later, was Bruce telling her about his desperate attempts to convince his then-wife, Honey Harlow, to stop doing her burlesque act. The idea that the woman he loved was flaunting her naked body in front of other men had almost killed him.
In the end, he divorced her.
“Avoid the pole, Mary Ann,” Bruce had said when he got up to leave. “You can lose your house, your car, your money, and still survive. But if you lose your self-respect? Man, you lose that—you’ve lost everything.”
“I will never take my clothes off for money,” Mary Ann said defiantly, snapping back to reality. “You hear me, Rocky? Never.”
“Never is a long time, sugar bear,” Rocky said.
Six weeks later—having tried every bar, restaurant, and help wanted ad within a ten-mile radius without luck, and with two kids to feed and no way to pay the rent—Mary Ann walked back into Rocky’s Pins & Poles.
“Okay, I’ll dance,” Mary Ann said. “But under two conditions. I get to wear a wig so no one knows who I am. I only dance after midnight so no one I know sees me, and you never use my real name from the stage.”
“That’s three conditions,” Rocky said, “but who’s counting? You got a name picked out? I was thinking Chartreuse or Krystal. Or maybe something with food in it. Guys like that. You know, like Cherry Pie or something?”
“Vanilla,” Mary Ann said.
“Vanilla?” Rocky said. “I like it! Got a wholesome, white-bread sound to it,” Rocky said. “Trust me, Mary Ann, the pole is going to be very good to you.”
But Mary Ann wasn’t listening. She was already on her way out of the room, biting her lip and doing everything she could to keep from bursting into tears.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Crimson Cove, Oregon
April 3, 1939
“Make sure you focus the camera before you start filming this time, you dizzy twit,” the first teenage boy said, perched atop a moss-covered gravestone. He was wearing a suit three sizes too big for his frame, face painted white with dark circles around his eyes, and smoking a cigarette.
“Who are you calling a twit?” the second teenage boy asked, pacing nervously between the tombstones, his face made up the same as the other boy. “You’re the one who showed up without knowing his lines.”
“I was told I was playing a mummy,” the first kid said, the tip of his cigarette glowing red in the dark. “I didn’t think I had any lines.”
The second kid continued pacing. “This place gives me the creeps. I don’t understand why we have to start at two in the morning.”
“George told you. He can’t cop the camera until his old man hits the sack,” the first kid said, taking one last drag off the cigarette and flicking it into the darkness.
“Yeah, well, still,” the second kid said, holding his hand up before his face. “It’s so damn dark I can’t even see my hand.”
“Check your pants,” the first kid said.
“Ha, ha, very—”
Both kids went silent and completely still when they heard the noise.
“You hear that?” the second kid said.
The first kid pushed himself off the mossy slab of cement and landed on his feet. “Shush,” he said, remaining as still as possible.
Several seconds later, they could hear the noise again—this time even louder and longer than before—a moaning, groaning sound, as if someone had been stabbed in the stomach and were taking their last dying breath.
Mmmmmmmmm.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” the first kid gasped when George and his girlfriend jumped out from behind an enormous pine tree.
“You should see your face,” the girl said, laughing.
“Yeah, I wish I had the camera rolling,” George said. “You got white as a sheet.”
“That your old man’s new camera?” the first boy asked, lighting another cigarette. “Let me see it.”
“Okay, but you break it, you bought it,” George said handing the camera over. “It’s a Standard Eight, uses Kodachrome color reversal film.”
“Color? Really?”
“I shit you not,” George said.
“Don’t be crass,” George’s girlfriend said.
All four kids were big fans of horror movies, going to see whatever had finally made its way to the tiny seaside hamlet of Crimson Cove. Someti
mes it would take a year or more after its initial release in larger cities before the scratched-up reels of film arrived at the Night Owl Theatre where George worked as the night projectionist.
The best part about working at the theater was that the Spilatro family, who owned the place, were rarely there. Rumor was they spent most of the year in Las Vegas, connected to the mob somehow.
George didn’t know anything about that, and he didn’t care. All he knew was he had the run of the place and could watch any movie he wanted at any time, his favorites being horror movies—Dracula with Bela Lugosi, The Mummy with Boris Karloff, The Monster Walks with Vera Reynolds—and fifty others.
Most recently, George had fallen in love with The Old Dark House, starring Boris Karloff, Lillian Bond, and Charles Laughton. It was about a group of travelers who find themselves stranded in a gloomy mansion inhabited by a psychotic pyromaniac who eventually sets fire to the place.
“What are we shooting?” the second boy asked.
“I’m thinking we should shoot the fire scenes tonight,” George said. “There’s no moon out tonight and a fire will give us some swell lighting.”
“We’re going to make a fire? Here in the cemetery?” the second kid asked.
“Sure, why not,” the first kid said, lighting another cigarette. “It’s not like anyone’s going to complain.”
It took almost an hour for the kids to gather enough fallen tree branches and dry leaves to make a fire as big as George had envisioned.
“When are we gonna start shooting?” the first kid asked. “It’s freezing out here.”
“When I’m good and ready,” George said.
George Dietz knew that getting his name on a movie poster required perfectionism, spending countless hours studying the movie business. In particular, he’d studied James Whale, the man who directed the three greatest movies in the history of Hollywood: The Invisible Man, Frankenstein, and the Bride of Frankenstein. As a result, George had become a student of shots, angles, spacing, depth, foregrounds, backgrounds, focus, framing, motion, zooms, blocking, staging, lighting, set dressing, props, costumes, stunts, special effects—and how each of those elements could be used to enhance the story.
Onyx Webb: Book Three Page 13