"I gotta go back to school," she whispered.
'Take me with you! " Virginya said, a note of pleading in her voice that tore at Chalice's heart. She could imagine what life was like for the little girl with an alcoholic/drug-dealing, drug-addicted mother, the constant comings and goings of the various men in her mother's life, along with the continuous ebb and flo of lowlife that was in and out of the apartment everyday. She imagined it was much like her own childhood had been.
During the semester break, Chalice had spent as little time as possible at her sister's apartment, even though it was the only home she had to go to. She couldn't afford to stay on campus with Jackie, though he called and invited her to on New Year's Day. She had to work and earn as much money as possible to abet her loans and an academic scholarship for school. She had left very early each day, long before her latenight-partying-sister got up. At night, she had tried to return as inconspicuously as possible, slipping in amidst the partiers and drug customers and going directly to her room after checking on Virginya. She had worked two jobs; on weekdays at a Quizno's sandwich shop, taking double shifts and overtime whenever possible, and on weekends waitressing at a high-class restaurant, the Old Duck Mill, where she made great tips. The few days off she'd had were spent much the same-away from her sister-with the major difference being that she took Virginya along with her.
"I wish I could take ya with me now, Baby Girl, but I can't. I'm sorry." She couldn't stand to see the disappointment that came over the little girl's face. "Listen," she added quickly, "I graduate this year an' I'm gettin' my own place. When I do, ya can come over an' stay any time ya wanna."
Virginya's disappointment was replaced with a smile of hope. "Can I come live with you?" she asked.
Chalice hugged her to keep from bursting into tears. "I would love that, hon, but we'lljust have to wait and see, okay? First, I gotta get my degree so I can make the big bucks when I graduate, and then we're gonna spend tons a'time together."
Virginya nodded, her smile weakening, the glaze of disappointment returning to her eyes.
Chalice saw it, and it tore at her heart, but there was nothing she could do, not now, not yet. Fighting back threatening tears, Chalice kissed her niece's cheek, gave her another quick hug, and dashed out of the apartment. She didn't hear her niece yell: "Wait! I've got to tell you something!"
Fifteen minutes after Chalice left, her sister, Stella, stumbled out of her bedroom, nearly tripping over her daughter sitting cross-legged in the middle of the hallway.
"What the fuck a'ya doin'?" Virginya's mother demanded angrily.
"Aunt Chalice left."
"Goddammit, Ginny, how many times I gotta tell ya that ain't her name? Her name's Ida. I don't give a shit if she changed it-it's still her name an' always will be. I got stuck with mine, and she got stuck with hers ... just like you got stuck with yours, too. So stop actin' like a fuckin' retard." She staggered into the kitchen, took a bottle of beer from the fridge, cleared a spot on the tabletop amid the debris of bottles, cigarettes, and drug paraphernalia, and sat down. She cursed under her breath at the mess in the kitchen, but didn't make any move to clean it. Instead, she took a long pull from the bottle and followed it with an equally long belch that was so loud she didn't hear what her daughter, who had followed her into the kitchen, crawling under the table where she liked to sit, said next.
"I hope the witch doesn't get out," Virginya said, knowing her mother wasn't listening; she never listened to anything Virginya said. But someone else was, her mother's boyfriend, Uncle Eddy. He stood in the kitchen doorway wearing nothing but a leather thong, scratching his hairy, flabby body with both hands.
"You are fuckin' weird, kid. You know that?" he said as he walked to the table.
"Thank you," Virginya answered softly, but her thoughts were with her aunt. Be careful, Auntie Chalice, she thought as hard as she could, hoping that the special thing she could do with her mind would push the thought out to her aunt. She'd never tried this before. When the special thing happened she was always the receiver, never the sender. But lately, she'd been thinking it could work both ways.
Like with the witch.
Virginya wasn't exactly sure how she first connected to the witch, but she knew where-in a dream. It had been weeks before Christmas and she'd been sick with the flu and running a fever of 103 that her mother had medicated with children's Tylenol and cough syrup. At one point her temperature had spiked to 104.1 and the fever had fueled her dreams.
In the thick fog of fever sleep she had been dreamrunning-her term for the leaping, floating, gliding ability she had when running in her dreams-like leaping from one trampoline to another in a long line of them. She was running on a narrow roadway that ran along the top of a low ridge of round-topped mountains. Though it was a cold night, there was someone ahead of her on a bicycle pedaling furiously in an effort to get somewhere fast despite the chill night air whipping by.
Virginya increased her own speed, gracefully leaping in long, arcing bounds until she was alongside a teenage boy riding a bicycle that looked more like an actual motorcycle than a kid's bike. When the kid turned and looked at her, his appearance shifted and he became an old lady. Virginya was reminded of the mean old neighbor lady in The Wizard of Oz and how she had ridden her bike so meanly. Even without that image coming to her, Virginya knew as soon as she looked at her that the old lady on the bike was a witch-a real-live-true witch with magical powers.
And the witch was up to no good.
Virginya had watched with a growing sense of unease blossoming into fear followed by outright terror. The witch boy rode his bike to a house that was not his, and went in. He was in a bedroom that was not his own, staring with evil intent at a girl-Rachel-no older than Virginya.
Ginny shuddered.
The witch-boy was drooling. In a frenzied flurry of movement, like a flock of milling pigeons suddenly disturbed a-flutter, the evil witch-boy swept into the room, knocked the poor little girl to the floor, and beat her senseless with several hammering blows to her face. The vision was horrible, but it was nothing compared to what followed. Trapped like a fly between windowpanes, Virginya was unable to escape the scenes playing out before her. The more she watched, the more she realized the witch was like a marionette master, like the one who had come to her school this year. The boy was her puppet, and she made his body dance to her tune.
What was worse, Virginya was pretty sure the boy was completely innocent-completely unaware of the evil force controlling him. Virginya wanted to cry out, slap the boy, do something, but she could only watch as the witch-boy called the sleepwalking father from the other room and commanded him to carry his daughter out to his car. Like a balloon tied by a string to a child's wrist, Virginya was tugged along as the witchboy followed the overweight, dirty drunk out to his beat-up Cadillac and put her in the rear seat. Next, he told the father to put his bicycle in the trunk.
"Get in and drive where I tell you to," the witch boy had commanded in a voice both young and old at the same time. Virginya could hear the old lady's tenor woven into the young boy's uneven, adolescent voice. She was pulled into the vehicle as the witch-boy got in with the man and his unconscious daughter, and they drove off. She hovered over the unconscious girl in the backseat. Blood seeped from her nose, mouth, and ears.
She looked dead.
In her fever sleep/dream Virginya had no voice, only eyes and ears, watching and listening as the car parked on an isolated stretch of dark back road, far from lights and people. His task completed, the father listened to the witch-boy whisper in his ear for a few moments; then he curled up in the front seat and promptly went to sleep.
As she sensed something terrible was about to happen, Virginya's first instinct had been to run away lest the witch see her and come after her, but a weird thing happened. The witch looked in Ginny's direction as if she sensed someone there, but she couldn't see her. It was an exhilarating and scary moment, scary enough to wake her. She had wanted to
chalk the dream up to the fever-she'd had crazy dreams once before when she had the flu-but she knew that just wasn't true. Deep down she knew that what she'd seen was real, not a dream. Just as she also knew, deep down, that when the witch-boy had finished with Rachel, he had sent the father off on a cross-country drive, oblivious of his dead daughter in the trunk. As far as she knew, he was still driving, or had gotten caught somewhere far from home and with no memory of what had happened to him or his child.
Somewhere out there was a teenage boy with a witch living inside him. She didn't know how that was possibleif the witch was a ghost or what. It didn't make any sense, but it was true. Worse, as Aunt Chalice had just said good-bye, it had come to Ginny in that moment that Aunt Chalice knew the boy with the witch in him.
"I really hope the witch doesn't get Aunt Chalice," Ginny repeated and received a hard kick in the side under the table from Uncle Eddy, who had joined Ginny's mother at the table for a beer.
"Shut the fuck up, kid, and get outta there, ya little perv. Lookin' at my package, huh?" Eddy slurred.
Unexpectedly, Stella struck out and slapped Uncle Eddy hard across the face. "Don't you talk to her like that! She's only fuckin' six and she don't give a shit about your fuckin' package! You're the fuckin' perv!" she shouted.
"Yeah? Well, fuck you!" Eddy screamed at her. He got up from the table and stormed off to the bedroom. A few moments later he came out in a New York Yankees baseball cap, jeans, and a torn black T-shirt, carrying his sneakers and a fleece-lined denim jacket. He left the apartment, slamming the door behind him.
"Good riddance," Ginny said from under the table and received another kick, from her mother this time.
"Shut the fuck up and go to your room!"
Jackie Nailer sat at his desk in his dorm room with a can of Coke and a pint of Southern Comfort in front of him. He opened the Coke, downed half its contents, and refilled it with Southern Comfort. He swirled it around, took a sip, grimaced, and followed it with a large gulp of the drink. His cell phone rang and he looked at the number.
fen.
He didn't answer it. He had talked to her weeks ago and that had been bad enough. He was still reeling from it. He had called her New Year's Day to ask her if it had been hers and Jeremy's idea, or if her sisterin-law had acted on her own in dressing like Eleanor Grimm. After leaving the party, he had been a little shaken, but after thinking about it while driving back to campus, he had become angry. He had been all ready to lay into Jen, but she had poleaxed him with:
"You thought she was dressed as Eleanor Grimm? She was the Little Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe! Anyone could see that!"
Jackie's anger had quickly dissolved to be replaced by confusion, then embarrassment. Doing a quick cover, he claimed he was joking and ended the call abruptly. He hadn't spoken to Jen since, but he had called his mother to get her take on Debbie Watson's costume and was flabbergasted when she, too, told him it had obviously been the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. He didn't tell her who he thought it was, ending his call with her rather abruptly as he tried to understand what had happened.
He had spent the rest of his semester break on the nearly empty campus, sleeping too late, eating out too much, drinking too much, talking long distance to Chalice too much, and avoiding the book more than all the above. He became an expert at procrastinating; knew he was doing it, but did it anyway. He even found an appropriate poster at Annie's Secondhand Bookstore in Northampton one afternoon that read: Procrastination is a lot like masturbation-it feels good, but in the end you're only screwing yourself. He hung it over the desk that he did his best to avoid working at.
By the time February arrived, and the first day of spring semester, all he had managed to write was a very sketchy outline of the book's chapters, which he had scribbled down one night at 2:00 a.m. in a flurry of alcohol-driven inspiration. In the sober light of day, however, he could see it was little more than a chronology of the events in his life thirteen years ago, starting with the first day he saw Eleanor Grimm outside Roosevelt's Bar & Grill in Amherst to the last day he saw her pushed into the crematorium oven. In the outline form he held in his hand now, it looked like something, but he knew there wasn't enough there to sustain a book of at least 75,000 words or more, the required length the editor had expressed to him.
He looked at the outline again and frowned. He tossed it aside, drained the Coke and Southern Comfort mixture, refilled the can with pure Southern Comfort, and went out to visit friends. Though he would obsess over it constantly, Jackie wouldn't work on the book again for months.
It was almost a full week before he got back together with Chalice after semester break ended and she returned to campus. It wasn't that they avoided each other; it was more a result of too much to do and too little time in which to do it. They talked on the phone at least once a day during this time, the general topic of conversation being when they could get together. Finally, five days after returning to their dorms, they managed to hook up and lock themselves in Jackie's room. His roommate had acquired a girlfriend-a townie who worked at the university-since his return to campus, and she had her own apartment where he now spent most of his time.
It was an awkward reunion at first. Though they had spoken on the phone frequently over the break, they had not gushed and professed their undying love for each other, or their feelings of emptiness and loneliness at being apart. But now, entwined in Jackie's narrow student bed, they reveled in renewing their love and lust for each other.
"Let's get an apartment together," Jackie said as they snuggled. He surprised himself with the offer almost as much as Chalice. It just slipped out with no forethought.
"That'd be great," Chalice responded slowly, her voice still thick with orgasmic pleasure, "but I can't afford it."
Again Jackie spoke without thinking: "That's okay. I can."
Chalice was quiet for a moment before snuggling closer to kiss his neck and whisper, "Okay."
Jackie hugged her, wondering what the hell he was doing.
A week later, for Valentine's Day, they were celebrating their new apartment, which was right in downtown Amherst, by waiting in line at Roosevelt's Lounge in Amherst to see an underground Goth band called Witch Season.
"You ever been here before?" Chalice asked.
Jackie shook his head no, but that wasn't completely true. He had never been inside Roosevelt's, but he would never forget his first day in Amherst thirteen years ago when he'd first seen Eleanor Grimm, right over there, leaning against her black, finned hearse. He didn't tell Chalice that though; he instead told her everything else he knew of the infamous site of one of Eleanor Grimm's mass homicides.
"Do you know what happened here?" he asked her.
"Yeah ... they said something about it on that Barbra Waters show about you guys. Eleanor Grimm killed someone in here, right?" Chalice asked.
Jackie nodded. "Four guys died here in all-three of them were UMASS students,"Jackie explained. "To this day the cops, and everyone who's ever investigated it, don't know what happened inside that day. It's known that Eleanor Grimm was seen going in before the shootings, and was seen leaving after the bartender shot the three college kids, then himself. She was observed driving away by a policeman who didn't remember seeing her until after she was dead and her crimes exposed. With so many murders and disappearances being attributed to her after her death, the murders here were considered to be part of her legacy, though it's never been proven she had anything to do with them."
"Wow! " Chalice remarked. "I wonder if that's why they got Witch Season to play. It's kinda cool, huh?"
Jackie found it more unnerving than cool that this particular band, Witch Season, was playing at this particular bar. It made him feel displaced, twilight zone-ish. Eleanor Grimm had been on his mind too much of late, what with his failed attempts at writing the book, and what had happened New Year's Eve at Jen's. He had chalked it up to that and tried to let it go. After thirteen years' distance and a lot of therapy, he was fin
ally comfortable with such reasoning and no longer looked at it as justification. After all, he'd proven to himself countless times in thirteen years that Eleanor Grimm was truly gone, hadn't he?
So why, then, did shit like this still freak him out? he wondered. His cell phone rang, beeping the opening notes of doom from Beethoven's Fifth. He fished it out of his jacket. It was Jen. With Chalice looking over his shoulder, he had to take it. His sister was excited and loud in his ear.
"I've got some incredible news! Remember what I told you about at Christmas? Well, it's happened. I'm pregnant-due October fourteenth! And guess what! You are not going to believe this! Mom's in love! She's got a beau, and he sounds like a hunk, and best of all, Steve and her are going to move in with us and Mom's going to help out while I'm carrying and work with me at the B-and-B! Can you believe it?"
"What?" Jackie couldn't believe either piece of news about his mother-they were both completely out of character for her. Jen filled him in on the details, her exuberance rising so that he had to hold the phone away from his ear. He and Chalice, and several other accidental eavesdroppers in line, listened with smiles as Jen squealed out the news.
"Wow! That's great!" Chalice said to Jackie after the call was finished.
"Yeah ..."Jackie said pensively.
Chalice caught his tone and nudged him. "What? Ya don't approve?"
"No, it's not that. I ... I don't know what it is-I can't believe my mom's in love and is actually going to go live at Jen's with Steve. I've just got a feeling, that's all. A bad feeling."
Grimm Reapings Page 18