Not Just Voodoo

by Rebecca Hamilton

  A door creaked open and a wedge of yellow light slid out across the back lawn, not quite making it into the trees. I returned to our yard to find Lida frowning at me from the back porch. I continued toward the house.

  “What did Mr. Danielsen want?” she asked.

  “He dropped his phone when he was here helping me.”

  “What were you two talking about?”

  “Not much.”

  “But you had a conversation,” Lida said.

  I rushed up the back porch steps and squeezed by her in the doorway, bumping into her walker just inside.

  “Hardly a conversation,” I said, paraphrasing the words Pluto and I had just exchanged. “Hey, I lost my phone. I thought maybe I’d come back to look. Sure, let me get a flashlight. Oh, never mind. Found it. Great. Well, gotta go. Bye.”

  Lida didn’t appreciate my snide byplay. She snapped at me. “That’s it? Nothing more?”

  “What else would there be?”

  The illusion she’d used this afternoon for Pluto when he’d brought Coco home had not been applied, so she was her everyday self, stooped, shriveled of heart, her hair lank and uncombed. Guilt swept over me. She wasn’t taking care of herself. We might not be getting along, but she was my grandmother. I should be stepping up to do it for her.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “I’m perfectly capable. I don’t need your help.”

  Once a witch, always a witch, including reading my mind.

  I’d often wondered what Lida’s special gift was since she didn’t care to share that with me. The ability to cause her granddaughter to feel uncomfortable in her own skin would make a dandy guess.

  “Don’t you ever miss mom?” I asked.

  This stunned her. Her jaw dropped; her complexion paled.

  “How dare you suggest I didn’t adore your mother.”

  “I don’t know. You have a funny way of not showing it. I don’t think I ever saw you cry, so evidently no grief there. You’ve never talked about her since that day. Though why should I be surprised? You barely talk to me, let alone about losing her. What did I ever do to–?”

  Grandma Lida slapped me hard across the face.

  “Shame on you,” she said. “Shame.”

  4

  Next morning I started awake from a nightmare, my heart beating in my throat like a trapped swallow, flapping crazily to get free.

  I’d dreamed of Coco. She was still alive. I could save her. The moment my headlights picked up her pale apricot fur, her little legs furiously trotting along the highway shoulder in the opposite direction toward town, I slammed on my brakes, opened my door and called to her. But she didn’t listen. She kept going. She was listening to someone else, responding to another call.

  It called her, drawing Coco toward her death.

  Shutting the car door, I cranked the wheel and burned rubber to get to her in time. In my dream, however, Coco vanished and it waited for me in the center of the road. It wasn’t afraid of the car. Thousands of tons of hurtling steel meant nothing because that couldn’t hurt it. I tried. I tried so hard to see it, but though I stared, looked straight at the thing, my eyes weren’t working right. I. Could. Not. See. It.

  Sitting up in bed, I put my hand to my chest, willing my pulse to slow and my breathing to return to normal after the dream. I couldn’t take much more of this. Not without the ability to do something about it. Why couldn’t there be another witch in town I could talk to? Besides my grandmother, that was, who hadn’t said another thing to me last night after telling me to be ashamed.

  I wasn’t interested in breakfast. Instead, for once I opted to go to work early, starting before my scheduled time. No, I wouldn’t clock in. Andrea strictly forbade clocking in until three minutes before shift, but she sure loved getting free labor on either side of official work hours.

  While driving, I thought about Grandma Lida. Perhaps it was time to move out. After turning eighteen, I’d stayed partly out of family loyalty and because I thought she needed me, partly due to financial reasons. California rents are unreal, even in Lost Cliff. Lida claimed she was fine physically, still able to manage on her own despite needing the walker. Who was I to argue? Not when it was clear she didn’t want me there. It was still her house. Her name on the deed.

  I drove into the city parking lot, choosing an open spot as far away as I could get from yesterday’s, turned off the engine, and laid my forehead against the steering wheel.

  Time to grow up, Saige, I could imagine my mother saying. Not every life is perfect every day. Show me how strong you are by dealing with what’s in front of you.

  “Okay, Mom,” I whispered to myself and to her memory.

  Grabbing my keys and crossover satchel, I locked the car and hurried out of the lot toward Scented Miracles.

  Coming to a dead halt in the middle of the street.

  Though my phone read 7:18 am, the door to the shop was flung open. I could smell the jarring mixture of scents from where I stood, hundreds jumbled together into a noxious, perfumed cloud. But that wasn’t what brought me to a stop. It was the hole in the plate glass window.

  At least eight or nine feet off the ground, the hole was unlike any damage I’d ever seen done to a window. Monstrous jaws had not broken the glass. They’d eaten it. That’s the only way I can describe it. The thing had simply opened that grossly distorted maw with its scythe-like teeth and consumed a section of glass the width of a chainsaw blade.

  Though no lights were on, someone inside Scented Miracles sobbed incoherently. Coming to life again, I rushed across the rest of the street and peered into the store. Andrea, arms waving, eyes streaming, paced in a circle that grew smaller and tighter and more agitated with each revolution.

  “Saige!” she looked over at me and said.

  I didn’t reply at first. Nothing, absolutely nothing, recognizable remained of the store’s interior. Imagine a shop filled with thousands of candles, glass bottles, and jars; tables, shelves, and glass display cases; a checkout counter and cash register, even pendant lamps hanging from the ceiling. Now visualize someone fitting a razor-sharp Cuisinart blade fourteen-feet across in the very center of that store. Press PULSE to start the blade whirling and keep pressing it until there isn’t a piece of anything left larger than a woman’s thumb. Debris lay in a layer more than one foot deep and a yard wide ringing the outside edges of the room. Glass slivers speared the walls and atomized wax drifted in the air. Splinters of wood and bits of metal had embedded themselves deep in the ceiling and the impossibly hard terrazzo tile floors.

  “What the f–” I said.

  “Exactly,” Andrea moaned.

  I understood at once why Andrea paced in circles at the core of the vortex. It was the only clear floor space left, and she’d had to trudge through piles of stuff to get there.

  “How did this–”

  “Who the hell knows,” Andrea said. “Earthquake? A microburst through that hole up there?” She jabbed a finger in the direction of the floor to ceiling window where it had gained entrance to the store. “A tornado?”

  “An indoor tornado?”

  “Do you have a better explanation?”

  “Do we have a shovel?” I asked. “Maybe a snow shovel?”

  “Why?”

  “So I can start cleaning up.”

  “No!” Andrea said. Just like that, the waterworks shut off and she stopped crying. One moment she was inconsolable, the next the hardened businesswoman. I’d never seen anyone who could change moods faster. “You’re not to touch a thing. Not until the insurance guy gets here.”

  “We could take pictures,” I said.

  “And you think he would believe them? Would you believe them?”

  “Saige?” a familiar voice spoke with concern at my back.

  I looked over my shoulder. “Pluto?”

  This was the third time we’d met in a day, the second time within minutes of me pulling into the cit
y parking lot.

  “I was driving by and saw,” he said.

  I studied him and frowned. He didn’t look himself. His hair was less than perfect, his clothes rumpled. His right brow, the slightly mangled one, drooped more than usual. A day old beard gave his face a dangerous look and his eyes were red. I didn’t smell any alcohol on him, but who could tell with the gag-inducing scent coming from the store’s blenderized interior?

  “That must have been one heck of a party Stephen Hawking threw last night,” I said.

  Pluto didn’t hear me, engrossed instead by the debris zone inches inside the door. Naked concern filled his eyes, quickly absorbed by his Nordic machismo a second later. Finally, he looked my way.

  “I’m sorry, what?” he said.

  “Did you wake up on someone’s bathroom floor in that shirt?” I asked.

  “I was out late.”

  “I can see that.”

  He blew off my comment, not taking my bait to spar or banter. He shook his head at the mess, his expression grave. “Things are deteriorating,” he said.

  I had no clue what he was talking about, but the ultra-serious tone of his voice flipped a switch, frightening me. I gave the inside of Scented Miracles another study. Sometimes it’s the simplest things that can undo a person’s bravado. For me, it was noticing something about this disaster I hadn’t until now, the windows. Other than the entrance hole, both floor-to-ceiling windows were untouched. Not a crack, pit, scratch, or stain. Not even a smudge of wax.

  How powerful was this thing anyway? What sort of surgically precise energy did it possess? What couldn’t it destroy, maim, or kill?

  I’m the only one who can stop it? I asked myself. How?

  I started to shake. My hands actually trembled as I reached for the door frame to steady myself. I looked up helplessly at Pluto. Miraculously, he read my fear.

  “You need to get out of here,” he said and took me by the shoulders. “We’ll go get coffee.” He turned me toward the Starbucks on the corner. We started walking.

  “Oh, by the way,” Andrea stopped pacing inside the store and called after us. “You’re fired.”

  I owned enough financial preservation to pause and look back at her.

  “That’s right,” she shouted at me through the window. “I’d be nuts to reopen. Not when I can take the insurance money instead.”

  She had a point. She always had hated the place.

  5

  “Tell me what’s going on with you,” Pluto said, once we ordered our coffees and had scored my favorite overstuffed leather chairs in our Starbucks’ only private corner.

  I babbled. I no longer cared how much of a freak it made me. I couldn’t hold it inside anymore. Not all of it anyway.

  “That thing that ate Coco,” I said. “I think it did what we just saw at my job.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.” My expression dared him to disagree with me. “I do.”

  “Okay.”

  “And it’s not the first weird thing.” I mentioned the seagulls with the red voodoo pin prick feathers in their breasts, the human toe found in the tide pool. “They’re connected somehow. To this.”

  He nodded, humoring me obviously.

  “Plus, I feel it.”

  “Feel what?” he asked.

  “It. The thing. Did I tell you a woman came into the store yesterday who had seen it along the highway? No, of course, I haven’t told you. Well, she did.”

  “What did she say she’d seen?”

  “That’s just it. She couldn’t say. She was literally so scared she couldn’t vocalize what it looked like. But I knew right away she was talking about our thing. My thing, I mean. Whatever it is out there that wants...that wants…”

  My jabbering slowed, my hysteria running out of steam.

  “What does it want, Saige?” he asked.

  “Me? I think?”

  Pluto smiled at me, just a slight curve of the lips like he already knew the answer when I didn’t and I’d almost gotten it right. It was such an unexpected reaction to everything I’d just said, I didn’t know what to make of it. We were silent for a bit, each taking a swallow of coffee. I studied his face, the stark Norwegian cheekbones in contrast to his full lips, the square, male model jaw, and the deformed, paralyzed brow that marred everything. His eyes, how had I never noticed his eyes before? They weren’t gray or brown, but a mix of the two, the color making me think of a stone standing tall and strong and magical in the sun.

  “Tell me about your mother,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve met your grandmother, but you’ve never talked about your mother. She died before my family moved to town, right?”

  I hesitated.

  “Please. I’d like to know.”

  “When did you move here?”

  “Right after I turned nine.”

  I nodded. “It happened when I was eight,” I said. “I loved her. More than anything.”

  “What about your father?”

  “Not in the picture.”

  My father had run off on us when I was a toddler. He’s not dead. I know that much. Every year or two I’ll get what I call a guilt card from him. Not a text or a phone call or God forbid a visit, but a card by snail mail. It’s always one of those greetings with no greeting inside, just a blank, and the messages he scrawls out read like the obligatory writings of a second cousin who’s been told to keep in touch, rather than a dad’s. I’ve long since given up hope of there being a check in one of the envelopes. As far as I know, he never paid child support while I was growing up. Not once.

  “He was gone before I was three,” I told Pluto. “My grandmother never approved of my mother marrying him, and I think that’s why Lida doesn’t love–” I paused abruptly, switched subjects. “My mom, though, I think she loved my father even after he abandoned her. She was like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Love. She was pure, undiluted love.”

  “How did she die?”

  “We were out on the cliffs. It’s stupid, but the name Lost Cliff really does fit this town.”

  He sighed, his sympathy immediate. He knew what I meant. Anyone who had lived here for any length of time knew about the disaster.

  “She was part of the cliff accident here,” he said.

  “We both were,” I said. “It was May, wind blowing off the ocean, with the water sparkling on the surf below. My mom and I walked out to the lookout. She’d planned a picnic for the park, but first we wanted to go look down at the water, scare ourselves silly by tiptoeing to the edge. So to speak.”

  My throat cramped.

  “We didn’t go beyond the railing, though,” I added quickly. “We weren’t careless.”

  The corners of my eyes threatened to spill over as they still did whenever I thought about that day.

  “What we didn’t understand, what no one realized is that the lookout was weakened by an earthquake that had struck fifty miles offshore during the winter. A huge crack ran through the ground from the bottom of the cliff, slicing at an angle upward to about seven feet behind the railing and just beneath the surface of the trail.”

  “It crumbled,” he said.

  “It crumbled,” I said. “My mother and I fell more than one hundred and forty feet, along with five others standing at the railing, and hundreds of tons of dirt and rock.”

  “What do you remember of the fall?” he said, and then when I didn’t answer, “Do you remember the fall?”

  “Yes.”

  He waited.

  I took a deep breath and went on. “When I was a kid, I believed huge nests of snakes had fallen with us, but I figured out when I was older the hissing came from the sand and dirt dropping under our feet. I remember a clacking like bowling balls the size of cars knocking against each other. Those were the boulders. The blue sky got messy over my head with all the dust. And the seagulls on the beach below, they were so angry.”

  One particular gull had wheeled in
front of me, knocked about by the rubble. Its wings were speckled with blood.

  “I screamed,” I told Pluto. “I heard the other people screaming, too, as they plunged to their deaths.”

  I swiped at my eyes with the back of one hand. This wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t control myself in front of him. He handed me a napkin.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have made you relive that.”

  “No. It’s okay.” I continued. Once started, I had to finish. “My mom didn’t scream. She was the only one who didn’t. She flung out her arms at me and shouted something. For years, I pretended it was I love you, but that’s not what it was. I don’t know what it was. I’ll never know.”

  I did, however, know what she’d done. With her special gift, the ability to forever go through life unharmed, she could have survived the fall, no problem. Instead, when the railing gave way and our fates were sealed, my mother used her gift to protect me. She gave up that special part of herself and passed it to me for that one moment so I could live. I rode the landslide down to the beach surrounded by a soft blue light that repelled anything that threatened to hurt me, dirt, rock, other bodies, slamming into the beach, even the tide I might have drowned in minutes later.

  I lied to Pluto. “I don’t know how I survived, but I did.”

  I’d come out of the disaster with nothing more than a broken toe. Even that had probably happened when the cliff first gave way before my mother sacrificed her life.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “What a horrible thing to have to survive.”

  After coffee, we climbed into his SUV and went for a drive. I didn’t question why I agreed to leave my car in the parking lot again to fetch later. Pluto said I needed time to relax and not worry about driving or anything particular, just let the morning go by. So that’s what I did. Riding in the soft leather passenger seat, I allowed the road to mesmerize me. At first, I worried the thing that still didn’t have a name would jump out somewhere along the line to attack us, but he reassured me.