I spit some dirt out of my mouth and say, “My girlfriend with the inoperable brain tumor would beg to differ.”
The old woman nods. “Good. You're back to reality. Though ... I don't know what you kids are calling things these days, but by the sound of it, she's not so much your girlfriend as she is a one-night stand. Or, a hook-up?” She turns to James and Julie. “Is that right, a hook-up?”
My head's funny, like my skull's changed shape and my brain is being mashed into a pyramid. All the light in the world narrows to a tiny pinhole. In my mind, I watch Austin drinking from a glass of orange juice, her lips smiling around the edge of the glass. Now it's morning and she's throwing open the curtains in my bedroom, dust flying up in the sunshine. She's closing the door. She's gone.
* * *
What seemed like a mountain ravine when I was running down it is more of a semi-landscaped backyard. The old woman's ceramic garden gnomes give me accusatory looks as we walk up the hill, away from the trickling creek. The sun is hot overhead as we pass a small pine tree, lying sadly on its side, uprooted.
“Was that from me?” I ask, but we all know I tore up the tree. I still have the mark of its thorny branches on my fingers, raw and bloody.
Julie wraps one arm around my waist and assists me up the hill. I would tell her I'm fine—I can walk on my own—but her touch brings comfort. Even though I'm with three people, I'm so alone. I'm always so alone.
We reach the top of the hill, and I'm impressed the old woman is still leading the pack. The climb has me winded, but she shows no signs of exertion.
James and Julie's little blue Jeep is off to the side, therefore this house—no, this cottage—must be the back of the nameless Orange Crush gas station. The cottage is white, with dark wood accents, green-painted shutters, and wooden window boxes full of flowers. We've stopped here for gas dozens of times over the years, and I would have never guessed this fairy-tale-looking place was on the back. The building reminds me of those dolls you turn inside out by flipping the skirt to reveal an opposite creature—the wolf turns into Little Red Riding Hood, and so forth.
“I'm Heidi,” the woman says to James and Julie. We all shake hands, and she invites us in for tea, and to get me cleaned up.
Inside, we sit at a round, antique-looking pedestal table that wobbles when I put my bruised elbows on the edge. Julie swats my filthy elbows off the table and raises her eyebrows at my attire. My clothes look like the before photo for a laundry detergent commercial.
When the woman, Heidi, gives us our tea in delicate, chipped cups, I miss my Gran so much, a breathless sob catches in my throat. I cough into my hand to cover, then ask for milk and sugar.
Everyone's staring at me, and I wish they wouldn't. My mind is calm, but I feel like I'm slipping backward, slipping away from the world. “Did you say you have some sort of psychic ability?” I ask Heidi.
“Well, I don't read tea leaves,” she says. “So this is regular tea from the grocery store, in case you're wondering.”
“If you don't read tea leaves, what do you do?” Julie asks.
James leans back in his chair, craning his neck to look around the inside of the cottage. He's tilted back on two legs of the chair when Heidi's hand darts out and whips him back upright. “Mind the chair, it's an antique,” she says.
He reddens and apologizes.
Heidi answers Julie, “I read the palms.” She turns to me and offers an empathetic look. “Zan, if you'd like, maybe I can see a way through your problem.”
I don't remember telling her my name, but then again, I don't remember much of what happened by the side of the creek.
Heidi extends her hand across the table to me. James and Julie are both quiet. Julie's tea cup chatters against the saucer, her hand trembling. My hands don't feel too stable, either. “Right now?” I ask Heidi.
Heidi mutters something quietly and waves her hand over the table, then returns it to the spot just in front of me, open and waiting to read my palm—to look into me, and my secrets.
I turn to James and Julie for support, but they're both staring straight ahead out the window, their faces bland. Snapping my fingers doesn't jar them out of their ultra-calm state.
“None of us is getting any younger,” Heidi says. One of her teeth is gold. I want her to hug me, comfort me, but I think of wolves biting into me and I shiver.
“My hands are still dirty, I should wash them again,” I say, but even as I protest, I'm already resting my hand in hers.
A jolt goes through my arm, like I used to get whenever I stirred two pots at once on Gran's stove, before she got the ungrounded electrical plug fixed.
Her voice stony, Heidi says, “She's terribly ill.”
I yank my hand back as though stung. “Stop,” I say. “You're lying. You don't know anything.”
Heidi slowly opens her wrinkled eyelids. There are little ridges on her eyes, where the white part meets the iris. “The long-haired girl you love left in the morning, just as the clock struck,” she says confidently.
James and Julie continue to stare straight ahead, not even commenting.
Heidi gestures to her open palm with her chin. A wave of surrender passes over me as I put my hand back in hers, then close my eyes. Her other hand clamps down on mine, snapping shut like a trap.
* * *
I'm in a black room, surrounded by stars. Heidi sits across the table from me, only she's younger. Her hair is brown, not gray, and falls in waves, moving like the ocean.
“You didn't see any future for Austin,” Heidi says, inside this vision.
“Right. I saw nothing.” My voice sounds big and angry, and small and pitiful at the same time.
“Because she has no future. Not on this plane.” Heidi sways left and right, then the blackness splits in half along a horizon, and I realize this room has no walls. But of course. We aren't in a room at all. There's a sound, like a coastal storm, coming from her undulating brown hair, which is snaking around the base of my chair.
“How long do I have?” I ask. “I want to spend every moment with her. Do we have the summer? Do we have a year?”
“No.”
“I hate all of this!” I yell. As the words emerge from my mouth, my voice becomes visible, red threads spraying from me. “It isn't fair!” The words, as red threads, wriggle into Heidi's undulating hair and disappear.
My anger swirls around me, distorting reality—no—distorting the unreality. None of this is real. It's all a trick, a hoax.
Heidi stands, towering over me like a redwood tree. Her face pulls further and further away until all I can see is the cloak she's wearing, flowing down from her and around me. Brown, coarse fabric piles up, pinning my arms to my sides, reaching around my throat, choking me. Now her hair and her cloak are as one, tightening.
I call out to Heidi for help, but she's so far away. I catch a glimpse of her face, contorted into a frightening mask of evil.
Oh, crap.
I have no body here, but a chill registers anyway.
A woman's voice whispers in my ear: She wants to take your power.
I have to get away. I scream, but all that comes out is more red threads, thin as strands of fine hair. The word-threads fall back on my face in tangles.
Instead of yelling with my mouth, I do so with my mind. GET OUT OF MY HEAD. The waves of Heidi's long brown hair around me loosen for an instant, then close in twice as tight.
I feel revulsion at the idea of her holding my hand, touching me. Her spit. She used spit to clean my face, and now I can feel her saliva, all over my cheeks and forehead, burning like acid. This is what dying is like when you don't pass away peacefully in your sleep. You think, over and over again, I guess I'm dying, I guess this is what it's like. And it isn't fair.
GET. OUT.
Chapter 11
From deep within the vision I'm sharing with Heidi, I think of James and Julie, sitting across the table from me. Why aren't they waking me up, pulling me out of this? How much time h
as passed? I remember their glassy eyes. Did Heidi put them in a trance?
Focusing my rage, I yell at Heidi again. GET. OUT. I may as well be yelling at a forest, for all I see of her is a thick, brown, gnarled tree trunk.
There's a buzzing in my head, so I open my mouth to release the maddening hum, and bees come out. A gushing, endless stream of bees. They're flying through my teeth, through my cheeks, even.
One stops at eye level and slows. Green body, ruby throat. They aren't bees, they're hummingbirds. He winks at me and flies up. More stream from my nostrils. They're bees and hummingbirds both, at the same time. I'm breathing them, deep in my lungs, vibrating.
The air is hot with steam now. I breathe the steam in and it hurts like fire, like the time I tried smoking a cigarette. The vibration is growing, expanding, and pouring out of me. The clock is striking the half hour, the hour, the half hour, and I'm splitting in half. Now it's not just bees and hummingbirds, but giant crows, with greasy black wings.
Everything. I'll hit her with everything I've got. The tree trunk begins to tremble.
I hear Julie's voice, Julie crying. “You prick!” she's yelling. She's so far away, but I lock onto her. I lock onto Julie, who's yelling, “Again, you little pricks!”
Something deep within pulls at me, zippering up, from my middle, like a hiccup. I close my mouth and open my eyes. Nothing changes. I open my eyes again. How are they still closed when I keep opening them?
Julie lets out a string of curse words. I grab onto her words, as though they're a safety rope and I'm a man falling off the side of a mountain.
With absolute focus, I hold onto Julie's curse and force my eyelids open.
I'm back.
Heidi's eyes are still closed. She's old again, maybe even older than before, and she's small.
I shift my body, and the wood table wobbles, sloshing my tea. My hand is still enveloped in hers.
Julie's rubbing her arm. “Can you believe this crap?” she asks me. “A bee stung my arm. Again. How did a bee even get in here? There are screens on all the windows.”
James continues to sit rigidly in his chair, moving only to take another sip of his tea. If he's not in a trance, he's doing a damn fine impression. Julie doesn't seem to be aware of anything weird going on, so annoyed is she by her second bee sting in two days.
My voice is hoarse as I whisper to Julie, “How long was I in there?”
She glances up at the clock on the wall. “How odd,” Julie says. “It was about noon when we got here, but now it's ... two?” She picks up her cup of tea and takes a tiny sip. “Ice cold.”
Across from me, Heidi's head sways and the corner of her mouth twitches. “Bees,” she mutters. My hand is still locked inside hers. She's just a little old lady, and I'm sure I can get away, but while she's locked in this state, I should really think about what I'm to do next.
I look around her cottage, taking a thorough inventory. There are things on the walls you don't expect to see in a nice little old lady's house: stuffed and mounted crows, bleak-looking photographs of skulls, and a Hello Kitty calendar with today's date circled in red. In the middle of the table we're seated at is a large, crystal punch bowl, empty. I'm struck with the desire to hit her with it, a thought so violent, I'm shocked at myself. Something silver and metal is lying next to Heidi, and its shape keeps shifting.
“Wasn't that a teaspoon a moment ago?” I ask Julie, still whispering. “Don't make any sudden movements, but I think James is in some sort of trance, and the old lady here may be trying to murder me.”
Julie looks to her brother, then me, then the item on the table. “It's some sort of knife. A dagger,” she murmurs. “No, it's a spoon. No, it's a dagger. Holy crap.”
“On the count of three,” I say.
She gently shakes her brother, who blinks drowsily at her.
“One,” I say.
James spots the dagger on the table and jumps to his feet, knocking his wooden chair over. Heidi moans, low and rumbling like summer thunder.
“Three! Run!” Julie screams.
James doesn't ask questions, just bolts for the door, fishing his keys out of his pocket at the same time.
A flash of light illuminates the room as Heidi opens her eyes. They're not the same as before—not filmy with bumps on them. They're empty. Utterly empty. She hisses and grips my hand tightly with one hand as she raises the dagger in the air with the other.
Something's digging into my shoulders—Julie's hands—pulling me back. As my hand slides away from Heidi, she slumps forward limply.
James swears at the complicated-looking padlocks on the front door. “We're locked in!” he cries.
Julie rolls her eyes and points her thumb over her shoulder. “Let's go out the patio door, the way we came in, genius.”
James lumbers across the room, all limbs and angles. With a thick-sounding thump, he collides with the glass door, then slides down.
Heidi is still slumped forward, unmoving. My heart pounds and my pulse screams in my ears. Everything's brightly-lit now, and I fear that at any second she could jump up and bite my face off, but I equally fear she's dead, of a heart attack, and I killed her. The thing in her other hand is a teaspoon. It's just a teaspoon?
“Julie, was that a dagger or a teaspoon just now?”
“Zan,” she says. “I don't know what's going on here, but I think it's time we left. Come on, help me with James. When did he get so heavy? Stop standing there staring at a teaspoon, let's go.” Julie pries the vehicle's keys from her brother's hand as she opens the patio door.
With the door open, James tumbles out, and Julie steps over him. “Come on.”
I take one last look at the old woman, to check if she's breathing. At last, she twitches.
I blink. In her hand is a dagger, not a teaspoon. Definitely a dagger. My cue to exit.
I run outside to the back lawn, help James up, with Julie's assistance, and the three of us stagger to the Jeep.
“You drive,” Julie says, throwing me the keys, then stuffing James in the back seat.
I jump in the driver's seat, adjust the rear-view mirror, and put on my seat belt.
“Really?” Julie says. “Seat belt? Drive! Let's blow this taco stand.”
My hands shake as I put the keys in the ignition. Truck's not going to start, I think, but it roars to life. The truck starts! I throw it in gear, stomp on the gas, and back up into a tree. The pine tree sways, then falls over.
“Dad's going to kill me,” James grumbles from the back seat.
Something moves—just a flash—near the side of the gas station. I squint to make out what it is, but whatever moved is obscured by a cloud of dust that's come out of nowhere. I don't want to know. The voice is back in my head. Drive, she says.
I get the Jeep into the proper gear and hit the gas, pulling out onto the road, right in front of a big Mack truck.
The big truck on my tail is honking. Honking. And that's fine by me, because the driver's right—this is an appropriate time to honk, because this is indeed an emergency situation.
I push the gas pedal to the floor. People always talk about pushing the pedal to the floor, but I've never done it. You'd think the pedal would increase in tension, like a spring, until you couldn't push any further, but the truth is, you get to the bottom and there's nothing but air, like when you think you're at the bottom of a set of stairs, but there's one more and you're lurching down.
Julie's screaming, her scream mingling with the honking to form a terrible, unmusical chord. For the second time in one day, I think, This must be what it feels like when you're dying. The grill of the truck behind us fills the rear-view mirror. The fasten-seat-belt light comes on in the dashboard. Bing, bing.
The little Jeep's engine roars. My foot is still punched through into nothingness, but I can feel the acceleration in my body. Bing, bing.
“Fasten passenger seat belt,” says the nice lady's voice.
Julie buckles up.
The tru
ck grill in the rear-view mirror gets a bit smaller. Just a bit.
I don't let up on the gas until we're over a hill and out of sight of the truck. I can't stop checking in the mirror, not even with a mile of distance, so I pull over to the side of the road and wait for him to pass. The truck roars by, loaded with two tanks bearing a gas station logo.
“I may need a new pair of pants,” James says from the back seat.
“Really? You crapped your pants?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “I figured now would be the perfect time to say that particular line. Can you guess what movie it's from?”
“Nobody cares what movie except you,” Julie snaps.
I check the gas gauge, which shows a full tank of gas. “When did you get gas?” I ask James.
“When we stopped at the gas station,” he says.
“Didn't you go running after me?”
“Not right away,” he says. “Julie had the situation under control, so I ... got gas, and then I came after you.”
“Can you hand me a soda?” I ask as I put on the blinker and look very carefully, both ways, before I pull back out onto the highway.
“All we have left is Orange Crush,” James says.
“Better than nothing,” I say as I hold my shaking hand out for the can.
* * *
On the drive back to town, we don't talk about Austin, or any sort of brain tumor. Julie attempts to comfort me, once, and I beg her to never speak of Austin or cancer again.
We talk, instead, about the mysterious events of the afternoon. Julie's not entirely clear what happened back at the cottage, between the serving of the tea and the moment the bee sting snapped her out of her trance.
“I told you bees were good luck,” James says. “We're lucky that bee got you when it did. I couldn't move, but I was aware of everything that was happening. I was locked in, like a person in a coma, in a horror movie.”
“Do you think she really would have killed me?” I ask.
“I don't know. Let's not overreact,” Julie says. “Are we going to phone the police and tell them a little old lady tried to murder you over a cup of tea?”
Witches and Ghosts Supernatural Mysteries Page 118