Bellwether

by Jenny Ashford

  “As sure as I could be with just a hammer and a flashlight.” He wished he didn’t feel like such a jerk for lying to her—again—but he had to admit he did.

  “Huh.” Olivia tapped on her coffee cup with one violet-lacquered fingernail. “So, do you think you might have…let anything out?” she asked.

  Martin shrugged, trying to appear casual. “Maybe some dust and stale air. I guess if there was a demon or something I might not have been able to see it anyway. They’re probably invisible, you know.” He smiled, and Chloe reciprocated, weakly. “The furniture hasn’t started flying around or anything, and my head isn’t spinning around on my neck. So, maybe we’re safe.”

  Olivia laughed, but her eyes played no part in it. Both girls were still a little angry, and disappointed in him. He could tell. “I hope you’re right, Martin,” she said. “You really might be endangering all of us right now. If you’re telling us the truth, it looks like you’ve been lucky. So far.”

  Martin bowed his head again. “Yeah. I’m sorry again, you guys. I shouldn’t have done it. If anything bad happened, I’d never be able to forgive myself.”

  Chloe looked into his eyes. “Well, you’re right, you shouldn’t have done it, but at least it’s over now, and we know a little more. I do forgive you.”

  Olivia nodded. “Yeah, I do to. Hell, we all wanted to know what was going on back there. I can’t say I really blame you for trying to find out.” She finished her coffee in one gulp.

  There was a long pause before Martin finally felt he had earned the right to ask the question he’d been wondering about. “Did you two find out anything?”

  Olivia grinned, leaning back in her chair and narrowing her eyes. “Why should we tell you?”

  “Come on, I told you my secret,” he said, trying not to choke on the words.

  “Yes, but it was so anticlimactic,” Olivia said.

  Oh boy, if you only knew, Martin couldn’t help thinking.

  Chloe got up from the table and gathered the empty coffee mugs. “We did find out something,” she said. “We were going to wait until Ivan was here. It’s probably not that big a deal anyway.”

  “Come on, what was it?” Martin wheedled, though halfheartedly; the longer this went on, the less he wanted to know, especially after what he’d seen this afternoon.

  “When Ivan gets home,” Chloe said firmly.

  * * * *

  Forty-five minutes later, Martin had thrown on an apron and started busily frying some Portobello mushrooms. Chloe was setting the table in her meticulous way, and Olivia monitored a loaf of bread browning in the oven. The mood lightened considerably, though Martin’s shoulders were still tight with the tension of what he’d seen, and how he’d lied about it.

  As time went on, the mood darkened. Six-thirty came and went. Olivia glanced up at the clock, her brow furrowed. “I thought I saw his car in the parking lot when I left,” she said.

  Martin brought the food to the table. “Maybe we should just start without him. He’s probably running late.”

  The three of them sat and began serving themselves. For a long time they ate in silence, one or the other of them peering up at the clock every few minutes without trying to be too obvious about it. Olivia drank a glass of wine in one swig, and then another. Chloe looked at her, then looked at Martin, her eyebrows raised. He knew she was thinking of that girl who had come to the house that night, but Martin, for some reason, had more sinister ideas.

  At half past seven, Chloe finally got up and began collecting the dishes. No one said anything, but they all knew that Ivan would have called if he were going to be this late, especially on a night when Crandall’s was supposed to open at eight o’clock. Martin wiped his hands roughly on the apron he had neglected to take off. “I’ll call the music store,” he said.

  The phone rang four times before the machine came on, and Martin pictured Ivan’s recorded voice broadcasting its cheery message into the dimmed and empty interior of the shop, the tinny words vibrating off of all those shimmering guitar strings. The vision made his chest tighten. He didn’t want to say it aloud, but even when he’d picked up the phone to call the store, he hadn’t really expected Ivan to answer. He had already sensed that something was very wrong, and it had nothing to do with Ivan stepping out with some freaky chick who was stalking him. Maybe the others had sensed this, too, because neither of them looked terribly surprised when he placed the phone softly back in its cradle.

  “One of us should go look for him,” Chloe said.

  “Let’s call his cell phone first,” Olivia suggested. Her eyes were wide, but apparently still dry.

  Martin tried the number, but the phone was apparently turned off. “I’ll go find him,” he said, taking off his apron. “You guys don’t have to open tonight if you don’t want to.”

  “It’s all right,” Chloe said, moving closer to Olivia as if in solidarity. “It’s a weeknight, it won’t be too crowded. We can handle it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” Olivia’s voice was quiet, but certain. She and Chloe trained their twin gazes on him, round and solemn. Martin felt as though they were transferring all of their worst fears onto him, to carry with him on his mission. Perhaps he even deserved the burden, after what he had done to the wall, after the promise he had broken. Perhaps, a little voice inside his head piped up, he released something from that hole after all. Only instead of going after him, it had headed straight for an innocent victim—his best friend, Ivan.

  The weight of his guilt pressing down on him, Martin grabbed his keys from the pegboard by the back door. He waved at the girls, mock-cheerful, though he hated himself for trying to put a happy face on this. Chloe smiled a wan smile at him. “Be careful,” she said.

  As he crossed the backyard and got into his car, he tried to tell himself that they were being ridiculous—sure, a few weird things happened lately, but nothing dangerous, not really. Ivan had been late coming home from work before; more than once, in fact. Maybe he’d been persuaded to go out for a drink with one of his pupils, or maybe he’d stopped somewhere to run an errand and lost track of time. There was no reason to assume the worst immediately. They were all just being paranoid.

  So why did the knot in Martin’s stomach get tighter and tighter as he pulled out onto the main road?

  The sky had gone a dusty midnight blue, the waning light at the horizon exploding in countless vivid hues. Martin flipped on his headlights as he maneuvered through the thinning traffic.

  A few endless minutes later, he turned into the strip mall where the music store was. The lot was mostly empty, except for a few cars parked before the small supermarket, and one or two in front of the liquor store. As Martin nosed the car over the speed bumps, he saw something that turned the blood in his veins to ice water.

  Ivan’s Civic was still sitting in the parking lot.

  A growing sense of dread gnawing at his brain, Martin pulled his car up alongside Ivan’s and killed the engine. He was trembling so badly that it took him almost five full minutes before he could fumble the door open.

  A quick glimpse through the Civic’s windows was enough to show him nothing out of the ordinary; as always, Ivan’s automobile was a small-scale hazardous waste dump, with old fast-food containers and soda cans littering every surface that wasn’t necessary for driving, and caseless CDs garnishing the whole rancid pile like silver tomato slices on a garbage salad. Ivan’s guitar was not in the back seat, and Martin reasoned that he must have taken it with him when he’d gone…wherever he was now. Martin’s eyes suddenly teared up, and he turned from the car with a jerk.

  He crossed the mostly empty parking lot and approached the music store. It was obviously closed, and when Martin tried the door, he wasn’t surprised to find it locked. Just in case, he pressed his face against the glass window and peered inside, his m
ind coughing up horrible possibilities: Christ, what if there had been a break-in and Ivan lay across the counter with half his head blown off and bits of his brain matter splashed all over the wall-mounted guitars? The image was so vivid that for a second Martin thought he could actually see Ivan’s blond hair matted and ruined in a pool of blood. He blinked a few times, looked again, and there was nothing. The shop was dim and undisturbed, a red exit sign glowing benevolently over the hall to the back entrance.

  Martin backed away. It was fully dark out now, and he could clearly see his pale, disheveled reflection staring back at him from the window like an evil twin, eyes deep in chasms of shadow. I’m sorry, man, he thought, talking to Ivan, or perhaps to his madman reflection in the glass. I shouldn’t have punched a hole in that wall. I really didn’t know what would happen, but I should be the one to suffer for it, not you, Ivan. I’m so sorry.

  “Looking for your friend?” The voice came from off to his left, but for a brief moment he thought his reflection had actually answered him.

  Martin turned and saw a small woman in a pink dress standing on the sidewalk a few yards away. He hadn’t heard her approach. “It’s you,” he said, because of course this must be the girl that Ivan had told them about, the one who’d turned up in the backyard that night. I think she’s trying to get me to join her church, Ivan had said. Terrific. She was pitifully hard to look at, but Martin just managed. “I was looking for him, actually.” Martin ambled toward her in what he hoped was a non-threatening way. She was definitely creepy, Ivan had been right about that. In a way, he almost wondered if it would have been better if Ivan were shot in a robbery, rather than getting mixed up with this freak. “Is he in there?” he asked, pointing to the door behind her.

  She stood her ground and smiled a disturbing, lopsided smile, but her eyes looked hard. “Why don’t you come in and find out?” she said.

  So that’s your game, is it? Martin thought, tamping down the urge to kick the girl over. He gritted his teeth, but tried to keep his voice pleasant. “How about you go and get him for me? Tell him Martin’s here.” His heart was pounding, and he hoped she didn’t notice. He wasn’t afraid of her, obviously, but what had she done to persuade Ivan inside? Martin didn’t think his friend was one to be easily talked into hanging out with a bunch of religious wackos. Maybe the others inside the church had taken him by force. It seemed farfetched, but he supposed weirder things had happened. He felt his blood beginning to boil.

  The girl folded her arms across her chest and glowered at him like some diminutive Hindu goddess. “Your friend does not want to see you,” she said with the petulance of a child. “He is with me now. With us.”

  This was all starting to look very bad. Martin glanced past her at the glass door of the church, as though he could see everything and everyone inside with his x-ray vision. What was he supposed to do? Storm in there and bodily drag Ivan out? He didn’t know how many overzealous nuts he’d be up against, and besides that, what if they were armed and went all Waco on him? After a few moments of frenzied consideration, he decided to try a more psychological approach. “If that’s true, then he can come out here and tell me.”

  The girl’s misshapen but sunny face wound itself into a deep scowl that dragged all her features towards the middle. “I told you he doesn’t want to see you.”

  “I want to hear that from him.” Martin crossed his own arms and planted his feet wide apart, as if to show that he couldn’t be budged. He knew he was still taking something of a chance; all the girl had to do was shout and have all her crazy buddies out here.

  She stared at him for a few minutes more, and then without another word she whirled around and disappeared through the glass door. Martin stood still in the pale orange glow from the big sodium lights in the parking lot, wondering if he could get to his car fast enough if a whole pack of God-loving loonies came piling out of the door with guns drawn. He slipped his hand into his pocket, felt the cool, reassuring contours of his cell phone. It wasn’t a weapon, but it was better than nothing. He tightened his fist around it and pulled it out, ready. His knees were filled with sloshing water.

  As it turned out, though, he needn’t have worried. When the glass door opened again, the person who came out was not armed or particularly dangerous-looking. It was also neither the dwarf nor Ivan.

  It was the beautiful girl, the one who had turned up on his doorstep that day like a fallen angel, propositioning him with her big doe eyes. Oh no, he thought. His fingers poised on the cell phone buttons. He suddenly wished Chloe and Olivia were here, pressing close to his back. Standing here in this mostly closed strip mall in the deepening twilight was making him feel uncomfortably alone and out of his depth.

  “You’ve really upset Lily,” the girl standing by the glass door said. She was even more beautiful than the first day he’d seen her, a small fairy princess in a snug red dress. She didn’t sound angry at all; in fact, her voice conveyed an obvious lilt of amusement, as though she and Martin were sharing some delicious secret. For reasons he couldn’t quite explain, this frightened him more than anything.

  He had to swallow three times before he could get any sound to come out of his mouth. “I’m sorry, but I just wanted to talk to Ivan. I know he’s here.” His voice shook, and he found his whole body tingling with a mixture of desire and fear.

  The girl smiled enigmatically at him for such a long moment that he thought she wasn’t going to answer. Martin opened his mouth again to speak, but then she said, “Yes. He is here.”

  He had a sudden urge to just turn and leave, get the fuck away from here before he got in any deeper. The hell with Ivan; he was a grown man, after all. Maybe he genuinely wanted to be in there hanging out with the God squad. Who am I to stop him? Martin thought. He even moved ever so slightly toward the parking lot. He couldn’t do it. He had known Ivan for nearly twenty-five years, since they were both kids. Something was wrong, and he’d be damned if he left his friend behind. “I want to talk to him,” Martin said, trying to sound firm and commanding and only partly succeeding.

  “Well, of course you do.” The girl stepped out, holding the door open. Her red dress reflected a burgundy smear in the dark glass. “Come on in, he’s waiting for you.”

  Martin hesitated, then dug his feet in again. Ivan had apparently gone in there, and now something weird was going on. Ergo, Martin was not about to repeat Ivan’s mistake. “Make him come out here.” His voice still shook, but it was hardly noticeable now. He was still plenty scared, but now rage had come to the party too, and was beginning to overtake the fear.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, we won’t bite you.” She laughed, but her eyes were fixed on his, flint-like and wary behind the innocence.

  I beg to differ, Martin thought. I think you might do something considerably worse than biting me. He drew himself up to his full height, which was a less-than-intimidating five-foot-six, and balled his hands into fists. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but I am not setting foot in there, and I’m not leaving until I talk to Ivan, so tell him to get his Russian ass out here right now!” He was glad he hadn’t stumbled over his words, that he’d sounded almost as furious as he felt. His heart was pounding hard, and he’d started to sweat despite the autumn chill in the air. The horrible thought that Ivan might already be dead kept nagging at the back of his consciousness, but he pushed it brusquely away.

  The girl stared at him for a few more seconds, just as Lily had done, and then went back inside without saying anything. This time, Martin only had to wait for a brief moment before the door opened again.

  The girl came back out. Behind her, so close that he could have stepped on the backs of her shoes, was Ivan.

  Martin took a few steps toward him before he realized that he was moving. Ivan certainly looked all right, and yet somehow, he didn’t—Martin couldn’t put his finger precisely on what the difference was, but he knew it
was there. He felt his heart sinking before his best friend even opened his mouth to speak.

  “Martin,” said the man who looked like Ivan, but was in some indefinable way not Ivan.

  “Well, at least you remember my name.” It came out much more flippant, much nastier than he had intended, but he didn’t try to apologize or make it better. There was no time for niceties; too much was at stake. “What did they do to you, man?”

  Ivan looked at him with those familiar ice-blue eyes; they now seemed unnervingly blank. “I’m going to stay here for a while, Martin. I belong here now.”

  “Bullshit, Ivan!” Martin’s voice was quavering, his eyes fogging with tears. He was losing it, he realized that, but at this point, he didn’t think he could stop himself. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to. Would Ivan care if Martin bawled or screamed or begged for him to come back? Would any emotion make an impact on that scary, nobody-home expression he wore? “What in the hell is going on in there?” he asked, barely keeping his tone even. “Who the fuck are these people? You don’t even know them. You don’t belong with a bunch of wackos, you dumb ass, you belong back at the house with your fucking girlfriend, Olivia, and your best fucking friends.” His whole body was shaking, adrenaline coursing fiery paths through his nervous system.

  “I think your friend has made his wishes clear.” The girl was leaning against the glass door, arms crossed, a look of perfectly detached amusement on her now cruelly beautiful face. For some reason, it occurred to Martin, that she had not once referred to Ivan by name.

  He turned on her. “What the fuck kind of place is this, you little bitch? You’d better tell me or I’ll call the cops and have them find out.”

  She didn’t flinch, and her smile remained intact. “I’m not sure exactly what you’re planning on telling the police. This is simply a legitimate spiritual center. People come to us of their own free will. You may ask anyone inside if they are being forced to stay here. I assure you that they are all quite happy and fulfilled.”