by Mort Castle
With a sinking heart, Vicki listened to a long silence, and then Laura said, “and I am afraid that’s the way I still want it to be. For now, anyway.”
“I see,” Vicki said, as she thought, I want to cry.
“Vicki, I’ve got to think of my child,” Laura said, her tone softening. “You understand.”
Again Laura paused and then said, “Vicki, there is something seriously wrong with Melissa. I think we both know that.”
She knew Laura was speaking but she did not hear an intelligible word. This is it, Vicki thought, the moment in which I snap and go stark raving mad.
She did not cry but forced herself to tune in Laura Morgan. “Maybe I’ll feel differently after awhile. Maybe we can get together then, sort of play it by ear…”
“Yes, I do understand,” Vicki interrupted. And with Laura’s voice still coming from the receiver, she hung up.
Then she looked at the telephone and studied its shape and color, then touched its smooth plastic. Reality! She had to concentrate on the real world and nothing but if she were to maintain her sanity. She had to use her five senses and only those senses. No imagination.
And no memories. Not now. Cross out memories and imagination. Look there. A single blip of water hung from the kitchen sink faucet. She gave all her attention to it. When it swelled to drop size and tore free, she tracked it all the way down. It fell at a normal realistic speed, not too fast, not too slow. No special effects here.
Reality. The world as it is. No problem. No craziness.
God, Vicki prayed, please help me. Help us!
The telephone rang. She clenched her teeth and answered it.
“Yes?” She thought she sounded rational and calm.
It was her sister, Carol Grace.
“Yes, Carol Grace and how are you?”
Carol Grace had just been contacted. They had notified her as soon as possible. It was all so confusing, she didn’t know…
Yes. What had happened? What was it?
It was Evan, Carol Grace explained, telling her all that she knew, which was not really all that much. She’d be up on the next flight and…
As though someone else with a humanlike intelligence had taken over her body, Vicki found pencil and paper and scribbled down the information Carol Grace shakily presented.
Oh, God! Vicki hung up the phone. She remembered the awful night wind, that wind of insanity and nightmare. She felt that wind now as, powerful and deathly cold, it blew through her.
From the rec room below came the muffled sound of the television. Faintly, the sound of chilly metallic synthesizer music came to her—the standard all-rhythm, no-melody, kids’ show soundtrack.
Missy. All right. Missy. God help her. God help me! Damn!
Those were Vicki Barringer’s more coherent thoughts as she went downstairs.
Missy sat cross-legged on the floor less than three feet from the television. The program, a syndicated rerun of Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘N’ Wrestling, was jumping reds and blues and blockily drawn characters without shadows. Their figures moved in grossly stiff animation against the background of a sterile two-dimensional world. The television picture kept intruding on Vicki’s peripheral vision as her daughter ignored her.
“Missy,” Vicki said.
The little girl did not reply as the thin shifting colors of the TV screen played on her face.
“Your Uncle Evan…” Vicki said.
“…We were hungry,” said a cartoon Nicolai Volkoff, “Soviet. Get it? So. Vee. Ett! Ha, ha!”
Missy laughed.
“Something happened to him, something very bad…”
Missy kept on laughing.
Vicki moved in front of the television.
“You’re in my way,” Missy said, and she sounded annoyed, even threatening.
The little girl smiled.
Vicki looked at the child’s face and turned to ice, afraid of what Missy might do to her.
And no less afraid of what she might do to this inhuman clone of her child.
Above her and seemingly very faraway, there was the too cheerful sound of the doorbell.
I have been programmed to respond to doorbells, Vicki thought, as she went upstairs. She opened the front door.
She saw them, the woman and the man, and flickering, angled sheets of light cut into her mind. The world tilted on its axis. She thought, I definitely have gone crazy.
“Hello, Vicki,” David Greenfield said.
— | — | —
Forty-Four
David Greenfield tensely waited in the hall by the closed bedroom door. Baht, he thought. This was where fate had brought him, had brought all of them. It would have been a lie to say he understood much more than that, but that much was enough for him.
And what did Vicki Barringer understand? He asked himself. Pleasant, shy, soft-spoken, too serious Vicki, one of the women from his womanizing days. He couldn’t, in all honesty, remember much more about her, about the Vicki Barringer of his past, except that she wasn’t one who had caused him any problems. There had been no attempts to define herself through her association with him.
Vicki had been okay. He decided it was a compliment to be able to say that about any of his affairs during that period of his life.
Poor Vicki Barringer. She had obviously been shocked when David and Selena had appeared at her door. It was apparent that this was only the most recent shock in a series of shocks. Fluttery tics along her jawline, eyes too big for her face, Vicki looked like she had just that moment been released from several months’ solitary confinement.
They spent nearly an hour talking. That is, Selena had done most of the talking, trying to explain and often having considerable difficulty in telling Vicki what she knew and how she knew it.
In the end, though, Vicki made it plain she understood all she needed to. In a tired voice, she said, “I couldn’t explain how I know it, but I believe, I really believe God has sent you to help my child.”
“Yes,” Selena said.
No, Vicki could not take part. She must not. She might be hurt, or she might bring about harm to others—David, Selena, or even her own daughter.
She had to stay out of the way. She could see that they were not disturbed. She should pray. She should trust in God and in God’s Truth. Good was more powerful than evil. That was what the Romany believed, that was what the Gaje believed, that was what all good men believed, even those who were unwilling to profess belief at all.
Truth to tell, David mused, he had scarcely a more active role than Vicki Barringer. He was to guard the door.
And in his hands he held the mulengi dori, the Romany string.
The Romany know of many magical draba charms and amulets, their power appropriate to the situations in which they are employed. Garlic, the Romany believe, affords protection against evil changelings even as it strengthens the blood. A silver knife, a tschuri, can be a weapon against minor wicked spirits. Sea shells ward off lesser, ordinary misfortunes, but a NAV sea shell, one which miraculously bears the name of God in its chambers and swirls, provides good luck for all of one’s life.
Far more potent than any other draba charm, though, is the mulengi dori, the Romany string. Mulengi dori could be more precisely translated as “dead man’s string,” but certainly no Rom who values his well-being would call it that. The mulengi dori is an inch and a half wide strip of white cotton (white is the Romano color of death) which measures the coffin of a Rom. The cloth strip is then cut into lengths of about 18 inches, each with a knot tied in the center. These mulengi dori are given to those who have reason to honor the mulo, the dear dead one, and to call on him for protection in the most threatening times.
The mulengi dori David Greenfield held had measured the casket of the father of Pola Janichka.
The mulengi dori, Selena had told him, would mean the destruction of the diakka—and Selena’s own salvation.
It was David’s responsibility to use the mulengi dori when it was needed; Se
lena could not call on its great magic herself.
She would not be here.
She would be in a world between worlds, a world that was neither the land of the living nor of the dead. She would be in the void with the diakka.
“What do you want? This is my room. You get out! I don’t want you here!” The little girl was sitting at her small table when Selena entered.
Selena said nothing but approached cautiously. The child’s eyes beamed hate and distrust.
From her pocket, Selena took a half-ounce plastic squeeze bottle.
“What are you doing? Hey!” the little girl protested, hands coming up too late as Selena dribbled the water taken from a clear running stream onto her head.
In Romany, the language not only of truth but of magic, and therefore the natural tongue of an ababina sorceress, Selena prayed:
As the water is pure
May the child be pure
May her soul be pure
As the water is pure
She passed her hand over the child’s head.
Spirit, I implore you, take your leave
and cause no more to grieve this child and
those who love this child, this tschai
may she be free of you
The child’s eyes glazed over. Her mouth opened slackly. She was no longer the same; something had left her.
No!
The voice snapped suddenly, not in Selena’s mind but in a domain of special consciousness that was hers by birth and learning.
I want to live! I must live!
Without uttering a sound, with her heart and her spirit, Selena answered the diakka. In a way that was not speaking but was ever so much more direct than speech, she said, “You cannot live. Now is not your time to live.”
I live and I will live!
“…but I can help you.” Selena spoke simply to the spirit child, her voice that was not a voice colored with the compassion she gave her clients in her work as a psychologist. “I can help you to get rid of all the hurt inside you. I can help you to find peace.”
Peace? I don’t know what you mean! I want to be alive! I want to be happy!
“Being alive doesn’t always mean being happy. You know that…”
Maybe I do. So what?
“I came to help Melissa. And I came to help you, Lisette. You told me your name. Do you remember?”
Yes…
“Lisette, there was more you wanted to tell me, more you needed to tell me. I know that. I am sorry. I could not listen to you then. I was afraid. Now I am not afraid. I know you have to get your hurt out of you, share it with someone else, if you want your hurt to go away.”
I don’t know. I just don’t know.
“Let Melissa alone, Lisette. Give her back her life. Let me help you to leave behind your pain and your anger and go where you will find peace.
“Lisette?”
There was a pause, an endlessly expanding moment in time, then hesitant and hopeful the voice came.
Help me…
Selena stroked the head of the dazed little girl seated limply at the play table. Her touch told her the child was Melissa Barringer and no one else.
“Sleep, Melissa Barringer,” Selena said. As though hypnotized, Melissa folded her arms on the table and rested her head on them. She slept instantly and deeply.
Please. Help me…
Selena sighed, squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them. “I will come to you.” Selena sat down on the foot of the bed. She wove her fingers together in her lap. She squared her shoulders.
And she willed her spirit to loose itself from the confines of her body and this earth and this time…
…as the soul of Selena Lazone traveled to a place that belonged neither to the living or the dead but to the lost and lonely…
The Void…
…where the diakka awaited.
— | — | —
Forty-Five
Where the spirit of Selena Lazone journeyed, the Void, Nothing was the rule and the reality. Selena Lazone, her essence unfettered by flesh, felt herself engulfed in Nothing, enveloped by it. She experienced in somber waves the dread and desolation, the cold discontent of those souls condemned and exiled here, the enduring and infinite unhappiness.
A sound came from everywhere/nowhere. It was an atonal chorus of those souls who lingered here, neither alive nor dead. Most sorrowful were the voices of the detlene, the souls of lost children, crying out in eternal loneliness for mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and friends.
And she heard one voice, singular and distinct from all the others.
Help me…
I am coming.
While here existed neither geography nor three-dimensionality nor time, the human mind cannot abide a vacuum, cannot cope with or make sense of sheer nothingness, and so Selena’s perception of everything was determined and prescribed by the familiar shapes and forms of the physical plane.
She saw herself, the spirit of Selena Lazone, as simply…herself, Selena Lazone. There was nothing at all mulano, ghostly, about her. She walked along a narrow path of twists and turns as sudden and sharply angled as comic strip lightning bolts, a path that led through black nothing and gray nothing and smoky nothing, non-colors that camouflaged flitting forms, lost souls of beseeching eyes, uneasy spirits that performed skittering staccato dances of despair, that imploringly reached out to her—and could not touch her.
Then Selena saw the diakka, as it appeared like a developing print coming into focus on photographic paper.
She was delicate and blonde, finely featured, clad in the too elaborate, ruffled dress and ankle shoes of a long-ago America. As Selena approached, she felt waves of emotion emanating from the diakka—the loneliness, of course, always the loneliness, and the rage, the outrage at the great wrong done her, the ravenous need and will to be alive, to have what she was robbed of.
“Lisette,” Selena said, and she took the diakka’s hand, the lost child’s hand. “Your pain and your anger, Lisette. I want to know, Lisette.”
Do you? Do you really?
“Yes.”
All of it overwhelmed her, a crushing, smothering avalanche of overwhelming pain, psychic and physical.
Uncle, please Uncle…Oh, don’t, don’t, you’re hurting me…
««—»»
abandoned
Mama? Mama, please come back. Don’t leave me alone. Don’t die…
the need for love,
a need that was exploited and twisted
and turned to something foul
…touch you, be nice to you, do what you want, do whatever you want, love me, lovemeloveme…
the tortured
last
moment
of
life
No! I won’t die! I won’t!
that should have been
the ending
but was
the beginning of
the diakka
Selena Lazone understood.
“It is all right, it is all right,” she said, gratified she did not have to use clumsy words so that all she meant would be clearly understood by the tormented spirit, the lost soul, the lonely little girl.
There are moments when there are no meaningful differences between an act of the spirit and an act of the flesh.
Somewhere in a Void that lay between worlds, a woman put her arms around a weeping child and hugged her close.
In the hall at the bedroom door, David Greenfield tapped his foot and rubbed his fingers on the ends of the mulengi dori. As tense as a garage door spring, David Greenfield waited.
Downstairs, in the kitchen, the room that would always mean assurance and stability, Vicki Barringer prayed and tried to tell herself that it would all be over soon, that God would deliver and protect. For flickering instants, she believed it; she had to or go mad.
And Selena Lazone, in the Void, very close to a house in Grove Corner yet at a distance that might not be measured in miles or inches or mi
nutes or weeks, said, “Now, child, you must go on. There can be no place for you in the Nation of the Living. You belong…”
No!
“… in the Nation of the Dead!”
But I want to live…
“You cannot. It is not your time.”
The diakka turned and fled.
Selena pursued her.
He had to get home.
Later, there would be moments when he puzzled over the how and the why of that thought, trying to determine how that powerful obsession had sprung to his mind. He would sometimes think that she called him and he came.
But now, acting because he was compelled to act, he hurried from his university office, wiping off his list of concerns the appointment with a student he was scheduled for in ten minutes. He buttoned his coat as he ran to the parking lot and jumped into the Volvo.
“Your pain, Lisette. I will take it from you. It is your hurt that has kept you here, that has made you seek life that is not yours to have. Give me your hurt and move from here to a better place. Give it to me.”
Lisette quizzically tipped her head. Her eyes were puzzled and suspicious.
Can you? Can you take away all my hurt?
“Yes,” Selena said. “Give me your pain.”
And the solitary pain of the diakka speared her, radiating throughout her being. Though she had no body, though she was just and only the soul of Selena Lazone, the anguish manifested itself as though physical, with a twisting of her guts and a brutal thrusting invasion into her sex—and with dozens of dull, thudding aches on her arms and legs.
The pain filled her. The pain consumed her. The pain flared, subsided, then attacked again more furiously as she said, “Lisette, now you are free to find peace. Go from here to the Nation of the Dead. Akana mukav tut le Devlesa. I give your soul over to God’s keeping.”