Finally, Heidi rubs her hands together to warm them, and points at my belly button. She breathes on her fingers to warm them up, which is really thoughtful.
Despite my awe and fear of her, I find myself not hating the woman.
As her finger goes into my belly button, I say, “Thanks for warming your hands, that's very considera—” I lose the rest of the word as the room rises up and yanks me under.
Chapter Seven
Dirt is piling on me, getting in my mouth. I spit. Dimly, I'm aware of James and Julie and the table full of chipped cups of tea, as that whole world fills with colorless, flavorless gel. My visions always take over like this, suffocating and making me panic, but this time it's worse.
Outside my physical body is Slow World, moving at a snail's pace, and I'm entering Heidi's personal Secret Town, her psyche, or her spirit, or whatever it is. This is Heidi's secret life, though I don't know if I'm in the past or the future.
All I know is I can't breathe. The dirt is caked in my mouth, sticking to my tongue like ash, and everything is dark.
Death.
I focus on the idea of rewinding, of backing up, going left instead of right. I can't see anyone, but I know people all around me are crying, and I don't want to be here, wherever and whenever here is.
I pull back, thinking about my intention to move back in time, while I also seek Heidi in this darkness. Why is it so black?
A patch of blue sky opens, and someone falls from above, landing on top of me. The pain. It's over.
Heidi, take me to Halloween. I talk to her from inside my mind, assuming she can hear me, though I've rarely tried direct questions within the visions before. Where were you on Halloween?
I feel something like recognition, a familiarity, a sense of having done all this before.
I've only been able to control my visions as much as the regular dreams I have at night, which is to say damn little, but I'm stronger today. I know I can access the time line at any point, if only I put my will to it.
Halloween, I command. Halloween. Take us there.
The vision is still dark, but it's not from dirt and death. Now it's as though all the lights are off from a power outage. I see Heidi now, and I'm with her. We're at a grocery store, a big chain one, buying bags of miniature candy. I squint and will the vision to brighten, but my efforts only make my head ache.
The cashier doesn't seem bothered by the dark, so I guess it's just me, and not a power failure. Perhaps we have a bad connection due to Heidi being so old—I've mainly tried my power on girls my age.
I move myself as close as possible, until I'm practically overlapping with Heidi, and only then can I dimly make out what's in front of her on the counter. She's not buying candy after all, but miniature packs of raisins, to give to trick-or-treaters. The woman is SO evil.
I push for the vision to move a little faster, and I follow her in the dark, as she goes to a friend's house, a woman about the same age. They drink tea and hand out candy to the little ghosts, Spidermans, and princesses coming to the door.
My head hurts from trying to see. The vision is falling apart, with entire blotches completely black and missing.
The vision feels true and accurate, but like an underexposed piece of film that reveals no information, even when you artificially brighten the image or enhance the contrast. There's nothing here in this murky blackness. Nothing but her alibi for the day of the murder—proof of Heidi's innocence.
* * *
I come back out of the vision and get up from my chair. My head feels light, my mouth waters, and the whole world shrinks to a tiny dot.
* * *
When I come to, James and Julie are looming over me. Julie is crying again. “I don't know what I'd do if anything happened to Zan,” she sobs.
“I'm fine.” I prop myself up on my elbows. “Level with me, guys, did I just faint?”
“Like a girl,” James says.
Julie wallops him on the arm. “Sexist.”
“The sighted are very sensitive,” Heidi says, looming over me from where I'm lying on the floor. “There are side effects to the visions, and the seer is not always just a watcher, but participant.”
From where he's squatting next to me, James turns to Heidi and asks what she means.
She answers by gazing into my eyes, prompting me with a chill.
“I felt the vision that time,” I say. “More than usual. But I couldn't see a damn thing. It was all dark.”
Heidi frowns. “All dark? Curious. Has this ever happened before?”
“I don't think so.”
“What did you see, exactly?”
“I barely saw you buying Halloween treats and having tea with another lady. But the other part of the vision was … abstract.” Talking about the dirt and the death sensation is the type of thing people might freak out about, so I am keeping that to myself. Despite my vagueness, Heidi gives me a resigned nod.
She knows.
Her time in this world is nearly up.
“I'm afraid Zan's aware of my secret now,” she says to James and Julie. “I should have warned him.”
James and Julie turn to me.
“She's dying,” I say.
Julie starts to bawl, hugging small, fragile Heidi to her. James seems to be having trouble keeping his own eyes dry, as am I.
“But she didn't kill her brother, Newt,” I say. “So, she's officially cleared as a suspect.”
The twins are still crouched around me, and I shift to get myself off the floor. Heidi offers her hands to help me to my feet, and when I place my palms on hers, I get a zap, like electricity.
Something's happening.
I'm not in the kitchen.
I'm in a vision, in a domed room made of glass, and the outside is covered in vines and plants. This vision isn't dark, and I like this place, which is humid and comforting, and feels rich in oxygen. My lungs are doing the opposite of suffocating, which is such a relief for a vision. Embedded in the glass walls of the dome are two doors. One is unmarked and a dull yellow, and the other is dark blue, bearing a sign that reads Bridge Club, no entry except to members.
No entry? The skull symbol below the lettering on the sign is taunting me to try.
I reach for the door handle, but it pulls away as the round, glass atrium expands in size. I run to the door as fast as I can without a body, which is barely faster than the door's moving away from me. I leap, soaring through the air, my fingers just grazing the surface of the doorknob—
And I'm flat on my stomach.
In Heidi's kitchen.
Her hands are in the pockets of her apron, and she's saying, “Oh dear, oh dear.”
James and Julie are both frowning at me, looking equally confused and annoyed.
“I'm sorry,” I say, though I don't know about what. I get up—this time without fainting—and back away to the door. I think when my palms touched Heidi's, I was taken into her power, seeing something she's been trying to hide. Was her attempt to hide some secret the reason my own vision was so dark?
These are all things I'd like to think about at my own leisure, far away from Heidi's cottage. By now the tea is cold and I have the sense we should have left ages ago.
We thank her for the tea and cluster by the door. I offer to give her my phone number, in case she thinks of anything else that might be a clue, but she says she doesn't use telephones.
“Figures,” I say, and everyone laughs with fake-sounding, forced merriment. The woman's brother has been murdered and she's dying soon. No part of this is funny, yet it feels better to laugh than cry.
The three of us are quiet as we leave and walk around to the front of the gas station.
As we near the Jeep, Julie says she's too emotional to get behind the wheel, and asks James to drive. I call shotgun and hop in the front seat.
As we pull out onto the highway, Julie comments from the back seat about how nice Heidi seemed and how lovely the cucumber sandwiches were.
“There w
ere no cucumber sandwiches!” I yell.
James shakes his head. “You're so funny sometimes. Just because you didn't eat any doesn't mean there were none.”
* * *
The gritty taste of dirt lingers on my tongue.
Time is short.
The idea of loss overwhelms me when I check my phone and confirm we're out of cell phone range. Austin hasn't sent me many text messages so far today, but now I'm guaranteed not to hear from her until tomorrow. It's been over a week since I've even seen her, and I still have the beautiful necklace I bought her for our four month anniversary.
We talked on the phone last night, and I tried getting her to cancel her physio appointment and come along with us to the lake, but she insisted I have a nice weekend with fun people. I then made the joke of, “I don't want fun people, I want you!” and she didn't even laugh.
Julie thinks Austin is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a one-person performance, and the only jokes she gets are the ones she makes herself. I want to say Julie's wrong.
I turn around and look at Julie, sitting cross-legged in the back seat. “Hey Julie, poke your finger in my belly button. I want to make sure my power is working.”
“No.” She picks up a magazine and starts reading.
“For science,” I say.
She gives me the middle finger. “No way.”
“I guess I'll have to get some random girl at the lake to poke me.” I sigh dramatically.
James yells, “INCONCEIVABLE!”
Julie says, “Translation: he's excited about hooking up with new lake skanks.”
James honks the horn and jumps up and down in his seat. “Lake skanks!”
I yell, “James, no honking in non-emergency situations!”
“Sorry,” he mutters.
I turn to Julie. “Come on Julie, old buddy, old pal, it'll just take a second. I already know you were born with a little tail. What else is there?”
She flips a page and picks at her teeth.
“Don't be a tease,” James says to Julie.
She smacks him across the back of the head with a rolled-up magazine.
“Finger tease,” he says.
“Why don't you put on a skirt and do it yourself,” she says to James.
“It doesn't work that way,” I say. “It only works with females. I can't fool myself.”
“What about a transgendered person?” Julie asks.
“I don't know. We should definitely do more testing. Come on, Julie, just a quickie.”
She holds her magazine up between us.
James asks, “What did you mean back there about feeling the vision?”
Dirt in my mouth. I reach forward and turn on the heat, pointing the vents at myself.
“Fine, don't talk about it,” James says.
A few minutes later, he starts singing a made-up song about lake skanks. “I love to go, a lake-skanking ...”
“Sexist and offensive,” Julie says.
“So's everything that's fun,” he replies.
Julie mutters about identical twins having all the luck.
* * *
At the log cabin owned by James and Julie's family, we do our usual search of the place for items left by the business associates of the twins' parents who sometimes borrow the place.
From inside the bedroom she uses, Julie lets out a blood-chilling scream and we both come running. We find her pointing at an open condom wrapper.
James laughs. “Dude, it could be so much worse.”
“We're switching rooms,” she says, and they argue for a bit, but don't switch rooms.
I search the cabin some more on my own and find four wine coolers—one for each of us, plus a carefully-measured third each of the last one.
After I give the barbecue a good scraping, we grill and eat our customary meal of tofu hot dogs. James and Julie are particularly goofy from the one and one third wine cooler they've each had and alternate giving each other piggyback rides around the deck.
With James on her back, Julie twirls around in a dizzying circle, yelling, “I am strong! Look at me! Look how strong I am!”
She is strong, too, and can hold her brother up longer than he can hold her. “Girls are stronger in the legs,” he says as he tries to stand without wobbling. “Piggybacking is all in the legs anyways. If we had a bench-pressing contest, I'd win.”
“Sure you would, jamtart,” I say as I attempt to jump on his back.
He ducks and twists, sending me to the ground, where I land flat, knocking the wind out of my lungs. I'm so impressed by his move that I would laugh, but I can't breath. My lungs have been flattened and refuse to work, refuse to allow air in past my mouth.
Just breathe. How? Have I forgotten how to breathe?
I lie on my back, trying to calm myself as Julie insists on giving James one more spin on her back to see who gets more dizzy.
Finally my breath comes back, just in time for me to get out of the way of them falling over, a tumbling twin ball of elbows and knees.
I clear the paper plates into a garbage bag while they argue over who is less dizzy and standing straighter than the other.
* * *
After dinner's cleaned up, the three of us make our way through the wooded trail to the lakeside to build a bonfire. We don't usually come here in the winter, and the evening air is surprisingly cool by the water.
No sooner do we sit on a big log to enjoy the crackling fire than Julie starts crying for the second—no, third—time today.
I've had a girlfriend for four months now, so I know a thing or two about girl emotions. “Julie, do you have PMS?” I ask.
James shakes his head at me and makes the universal symbol for shut up, a hand across the throat.
Too late. Out it comes. Shes not having PMS and how dare I even ask, but since I did, I may as well know she's upset because the guy she liked, Liam, didn't come to the Halloween party and she doesn't think he likes her at all. She'd like to have a boyfriend, so she's been trying so hard to act like she doesn't, to not scare him off, and now she doesn't know what she wants. More sobs.
“Sounds like you do know what you want,” I say. “This guy. But he's not into you. So you have to try liking a guy who likes you back.”
James repeats the shut up gesture a few more times, getting progressively more graphic. Now he's pretending to stab out his eyeballs.
Julie puts her face in her hands, which breaks my heart to see.
I move closer to her on the log and put my arm around her shoulder. “You can't trick a guy into being your boyfriend. You can't be all casual, until it's too late and he's taking you to prom, even though he doesn't remember asking. Not unless you get, I don't know, a love potion or something.”
She wipes her nose on the sleeve of my jacket and looks up at me with her big eyes, her tears lit up by the flickering fire. “Can you get me a love potion?”
“Those don't exist,” says James. “Wait. Do they exist? Zan. You have to hook me up!”
I assure them that even though I took a mysterious tea last summer that allowed me to travel outside of my body, and I got that tea from an herbalist in Chinatown, I'm pretty sure love potions aren't real.
But now that I mention her, a dim light bulb blinks on in my head. The herbalist woman, Susan. She's another magic-associated person I could question about Newt.
Julie sniffs. “I could meet someone at college next year. Someone older. Boys my age are immature, they have no life experience whatsoever.”
“That's right.” I keep patting her shoulder. “Now would you stick your finger in my belly button?”
She jumps up. “You're all the same! Selfish!”
“I'm sorry,” I call after her as she stomps away, presumably back to the cabin.
“Dude, Julie's still in love with you,” James says.
“No she isn't. She likes whatsisbutt. Liam. Isn't that an Irish name or something? No way is that guy Irish.”
“But who does he look like? He looks like
you, man.”
I disagree with James, because aside from the obvious physical similarities, Liam is nothing like me. He's on the wrestling team and he's always running in the halls, never walking. He's a Jack Russell terrier, whereas I'm more of a Labrador.
James and I watch the fire for a few minutes. The sun has long since set and we're bathed in the bonfire's orange glow. The front of me is too hot and my back is too cold, but when I turn around, I have the reverse problem.
I'm about to suggest we pack it in for the night when James looks up and starts rubbing his hands together. “Cackle, cackle,” he says, which is a new strange thing he does when he's crafting a diabolical plan.
“Girls?”
“Cackle, cackle.”
At first I think my eyes are playing tricks on me, but they aren't. The girls approaching the fire are twins. Honest-to-goodness identical twins. They have matching black cornrow braids and sexy hips. I'd like to say I feel no attraction at all for these girls, especially not the one on the right, with the big hoop earrings.
They join us and we all enjoy the easy camaraderie of a bonfire bringing together strangers.
The girl on the left says, “I'm Shay and this is Dawna. Our parents messed up our names, though, because Dawna's the shy one, but I'm not.”
Dawna gives us a wordless wave. She's the one wearing the big hoop earrings, and true to what her sister said, she lets Shay do all the talking. I wonder if she was always shy, or if Shay started saying that so she could be in charge.
James tells them a little about us, and the girls share their story. They're nineteen, and driving across the country to fulfill the dream of their older brother, who died a year ago in a construction accident.
“How'd he die?” James asks.
“Fell off a high-rise he was working on,” Shay says. “It was over instantly. Once he hit the bottom.”
“How many stories?” James asks.
I try to catch his attention, but he's not looking at me, so I say, “I apologize on behalf of my friend. He doesn't mean to be intrusive.”
“I don't mind,” Shay says. “I'd rather answer questions than have people stare at us like we're freaks.” She stands and warms the backs of her legs in front of the bonfire, so her face is now in silhouette to us. “Twenty stories,” she says.
Witches and Ghosts Supernatural Mysteries Page 131