“You have gorgeous eyes, Diana.” He handed her the replenished glass.
She sipped, and smiled coyly. “So does Beauty.”
“Who?”
“Beauty.” Only after she’d repeated it did she realize the nature of her mistake. They laughed in unison, the friendly laughter of a shared perception.
He turned to the dog. “Hey, Beast, you hear that? You got yourself a new name now. You’re Beauty.” He turned back to Diana, smiling. “Truly, she is a beauty, and I might call her that from now on. Beauty. Only thing is”—he refilled his own glass—“she’s fierce. You expect that in a German shepherd. They’re bred for it. But whoever trained her first…” He shook his head. “She’s a great hunter, I’ll give her that, but I swear she must be part wolf. You can bet she’s still got her mind on that deer out there. From the moment we got here, even before she could see it in the truck, she was in a state.”
“She was,” Diana agreed.
He sipped his bourbon with his eyes on Diana’s face again but his mind still on Beast, or Beauty, whichever she was to be. “I got her from Ravensburg, they couldn’t handle her. She ran down a couple of escapees, and deserves a medal for that, but she got to the second one before her handler did and tore him up pretty bad. There was a lawsuit, abusive whatever. So they were going to put her away, but I said let me have her. I figured she’d be a good hunter, and she is. And usually well behaved. It was the smell of the blood that got her all riled up.” He paused, then shifted gears. “You want to try the sauna now?”
“In a bit,” Diana said. “Tell me, why are you Tommy W.?”
He lowered his head with a modest smile, pleased to be asked about himself.
“The W is for my middle name, Wagner, after my grandpa on the mother’s side, Tommy Wagner. See, my other grandpa was also a Tommy, last name of Gilbertsen, and my older brother was named for him. So, growing up, he was Tommy G. and I was Tommy W. And it stuck. I guess I wouldn’t recognize myself by another name.”
That’s so sweet, she thought, though she knew better than to make any kind of comment. It was as if he’d told her his closest-held secret. Like Rumpelstiltskin.
“I need to get something from my purse,” she said. She looked around the room. “Where is it?”
“By the back door,” he said. “I’ll go get it.”
“No, no, stay where you are. I’ll get it.”
It was her diaphragm she was after. She knew it would be best to have that taken care of before they went into the sauna. If that was, in fact, in the cards. And yes, there was her purse. Another visit to the bathroom, and… But as she headed that way, Beast lifted her head and growled, and the shock of it (she’d forgotten Beast was there) was such that she started back, stepping on her loosened bootlaces—and fell over backward.
Everything in her purse spilled across the pine boards of the floor.
Tommy crawled forward from where he was sitting to help her gather up the contents of the purse. She got to the diaphragm first, and then her keys, her coin purse, the Maxipads. But it was Tommy who lighted on the plastic bag with the still unidentified roots.
He held it aloft, as earlier he’d brandished the bottle of Jack. “God damn, I know what this is. How in hell did you get hold of this?”
“You know what it is? What is it? I’ve been trying to find out.”
“It’s called mandrake. They use it in the sweat lodge at the lockup. It’s got some other Italian name, too. Every so often the medicine man from the reservation delivers a supply of different herbal stuff that gets boiled up together, and then when the rocks inside are super hot they slosh that brew on them. It’s got a nice smell, when you get a whiff of it outside. Mostly it’s sage. I got some of that brewing out there already. It’s a funny thing to be carrying around. What do you use it for?”
Diana explained how she’d found it drying in the spare room at her mother’s nursing home, and the little that Louise had told her about it, and how she’d brought the sample with her to see if there was someone in the Twin Cities who could tell her what it was and what it was supposed to do.
“Well, I guess I saved you that trip. It’s mandrake, all right. Like Mandrake the Magician in the old comic book. I’m no botanist or anything, but the chaplain keeps the sage and this stuff in a locker in his office, and every time they get the sweat lodge fired up, I go to the locker and measure out a few ounces. I could be wrong, but it sure looks the same—the color, and the way the roots twist round each other like little snakes. And from what you said about that Louise, she sounds like an Indian.”
“She is.”
“Yeah, well then. What do you say we add this in with the sage that I put in the kettle out there?”
Her first impulse was to demur, but hadn’t Fate almost ordained it? Perhaps the Goddess (whose realm includes a cupboard well stocked with herbs and simples) had elicited the growl that made her stumble just so this would happen. “Why not,” she agreed.
“And if you want something that will be comfortable in the sauna, try this on.” He rummaged through the pile of laundry and produced a white terry-cloth bathrobe. “It’s one-size-fits-all and fresh from the dryer. And before that from the Radisson Hotel. We had our convention there last year.”
“Does that mean I’ll be abetting a crime?”
He grinned. “I hope so.”
Beauty gave another growl, right on cue, and they both laughed. Then he went outside, and Diana slipped off her boots and went into the bathroom to change into the purloined robe.
She never ceased to be amazed at how these things happened, the people you might end up with. Her first impression of Tommy, when he’d honked at her and she’d yelled back at him, surely wasn’t the stuff romance is made of. When he’d rolled down his window and she’d had her first close-up view of his pockmarked face, along with the whiff of stale smoke, she’d thought him anything but good-looking. And certainly hostile. Just moments ago, when he’d knocked at the bathroom door, rousing her from her faint or blackout or whatever it had been, her first thought had been that he’d been spying on her. And now she was actually putting in the diaphragm. Was it pheromones—pheromones and nothing more?
If so, was that a bad thing necessarily? Smell is the most basic sense, the one closest to ESP, the one that connects to the roots of our animal nature. That was the logic behind aromatherapy—and shamanism. You couldn’t explain such things in the language of science, though people tried. But the Goddess understood, and guided, and when you sensed her guiding hand, then you must simply take her hand and follow.
When she had finished changing and had cinched the belt of the Radisson Hotel’s bathrobe about her waist (the hem came to just above her knees, like a chiton), Tommy had already taken off his clothes and wrapped himself in a sheet from the pile of laundry. “Ready?”
She nodded.
They polished off the bourbon left in their glasses and headed out into the shock of the winter air. It wasn’t below zero tonight (except on the Centigrade scale), but it was colder than just bracing. Walking on the compacted snow of the driveway and through the trampled drifts on the path to the sauna was a mild form of masochism—but that was part of the ritual of the sauna. A rite, literally, of passage.
The dead deer had been strung by its hind legs on a wooden frame beside the path. Its head rested in the snow next to the tub that held its entrails. It was not an unfamiliar sight. She’d seen many gutted deer before, in her childhood, and on visits to Carl and Janet in later years. But it had never struck her before in such a solemn way, as though she were witnessing a kind of pagan sacrifice and not a violation of nature. She did not linger over it, but neither did she glance away.
The deer had not fazed her, but her first sight of the sauna as they rounded the bare branches of a large, low willow gave her a start, for it seemed almost the twin of the smokehouse on the Kellog farm—the same gray and weathered walls, the same crudely shingled roof. At second glance it was not the same
at all. It was larger, the size of a small camper, and the log fire roaring in the pit at the near end did not vent into the structure. The smoke and sparks rose directly through a freestanding stovepipe into the night air, and the light of the blaze turned the snow cover for yards around into something altogether spectral. Diana got close enough to the fire to enjoy its warmth and the smell of the steam rising from the blue metal five-gallon pot on the grate.
Sage. With a tinge of something indescribably else.
“You go inside and take a seat back from the rocks,” Tommy told her. “Then I’ll bring in this tub.”
“Is that safe? It’s scalding hot.”
“I’ll be careful. I’ve done this before when I’ve had a lot more to drink than tonight. Don’t worry.”
She didn’t. She was in that pleasant condition of feeling completely trustful—in him, and in her own Higher Power, which could arrange for accidents to be the source of good fortune. The Goddess was in charge tonight.
She entered the sauna, which was lighted by a battery-powered lantern set on a low table in front of two wooden stools. She didn’t sit down until Tommy appeared with the tub of steaming water. He was using the sheet draped over his shoulders as potholders, which allowed a glimpse of his private parts. He already had an erection, but not one, to Diana’s relief, of Paul Bunyan proportions.
Tommy set the tub down beside the rocks at the farther end of the sauna, closest to the fire outside.
Diana, unbidden, closed the door and fastened a hook into its eyehole to keep it closed, then took a seat on the nearer stool. Tommy dipped up the fragrant water with a long-handled ladle and, at arm’s length, poured it over the superheated stones. At once, with a loud hiss, the water was transformed into steam that filled the sauna.
Diana could feel it penetrate every pore of exposed skin. And then, with her first inhalation, her lungs and, by degrees, her whole body. You could actually feel the change, the metamorphosis, cell by living cell. Awakening impulses, stilling anxieties, making mind and flesh mesh.
Tommy had slumped forward, elbows propped on his knees, oblivious of anything but the impact of the heat and the steam. The sheet covering him had molded to the contours of his body, and his hair had become a garland of ringlets. He looked like a statue in a museum, Greek and geometrical. An archetype.
Neither of them spoke. What they were sharing was better than speech. A preparation for something that would also (she hoped) be better than speech. From time to time he would add more of the tea of sage and mandrake to the rocks, and the lantern-lit steam would become denser, more obscuring, lovelier.
Slowly their bodies adjusted to this new atmosphere. He raised his head and swiveled it to the left and right. She admired the elegance and naturalness of the motion. He seemed at home in his body in a way that Diana never had been, even at moments like this.
“You did the right thing,” she said.
He raised his eyes to meet hers, with an open regard that dispensed with the courtesy of a smile. “How’s that?”
“To build the sauna and not a garage.”
“Yeah. I know. Sometimes when I’m in here I’ll think of those guys in the sweat lodge there in Ravensburg. And it’s like, I don’t know, we’re all in the same situation together. We’re all in these bodies. You know?”
“I think so, yes.”
“It’s all they got, in a way. The one good thing.”
“That’s sad. For them.”
“Mm-hm,” he agreed, slumping forward again.
Then, with a deep breath, he pushed himself to his feet. “What do you say we head back to the cabin? It’s not good to stay in here too long. It can knock you out.”
“You’re right,” she agreed. “Let’s go inside.”
She led the way. The shock of the cold seemed less extreme this time, for her body retained, for a while yet, the sauna’s heat. This was the moment true believers would take a roll in the snow. But Diana had no such intention. She sprinted to the door of the cabin and, once inside, hesitated over whether to leave the door open for Tommy, who had paused beside the gutted carcass of the deer. She left it open and crossed to where she’d left her clothes neatly folded on the recliner. As she was considering whether to get dressed again, she heard Tommy come in the back door with a crash.
He had stumbled over the doorjamb and was on his hands and knees. He must have been more drunk than she’d thought. “Oh, dear,” she said, “let me help you.”
But as she stepped forward to offer her hand, he reared up—and he was no longer Tommy, nor entirely human. Antlers had sprung from his head, and the hands by which he tried to raise himself had become hooves. Even as she watched, transfixed, his eyes grew larger and darker. He bellowed in alarm, and shook his no longer human head, striking the neon light fixture with his antlers and shattering it.
His dark lips writhed, but they could no longer produce human speech. He had risen to his full height, and the sheet had fallen from his torso to reveal the body of a mature stag.
Beauty attacked without warning, sinking her teeth in the stag’s front shoulder and trying to pull him down with her own weight. But the stag rose up on its hind legs, and the dog lost her grip. The stag’s hooves came down on Beauty’s back, and she backed away with a yelp, then whirled round to take a defensive posture, baring her teeth in a snarl.
The stag tried to escape through the back door, but his wide antlers struck the doorframe. The stag that had been Tommy spun round to face the dog, lowering his head, snorting a hopeless defiance.
Beauty began to stalk the man who’d once controlled her and led her about on a chain, edging alongside the sink and stove, her head lowered, growling. The stag, reluctantly, moved back from the doorway and any hope of escape, backing toward Diana, who stood clutching her bundled clothes, paralyzed. Not with horror or fear, but simply wonderstruck at her own power. She knew that the Goddess was working through her to bring about this violation, and fulfillment, of nature, and there was a glory in that knowledge.
The stag had backed away from the dog step by step, until he stood in the far corner of the cabin, between the stove and the bathroom door. Beauty made a feint, and the stag tried to rise again, to strike with his hooves, but his antlers struck the ceiling of the sleeping loft.
Beauty made a rush and locked her teeth in her victim’s throat. The stag fell sideways, knocking down the stove and sending a cloud of soot from the disconnected pipe. Beauty lost her grip, and the stag managed to scramble to his feet.
Their eyes connected for a moment, Tommy’s and Diana’s, and his seemed to ask, without accusation but with a wonder equal to hers, why she had done this, why this betrayal, why there could be no love between them.
She looked away from him.
“He’s yours,” she told the dog, with a savagery now fully conscious and triumphant. “Finish him.”
Beauty obeyed.
20
When the first knock came on the door, Alan rolled over in his bed and tried to hold on to the dream. A nice dream, but strange. He was inside a cloud, all misty and moist and very warm. There was a lady in the dream, all in white, with a white, pointy hat on her head, and he had laid his head in her lap and she was stroking the horn on his head, because he was a unicorn. And wasn’t, at the same time. Because earlier in the dream he was just himself, and the lady was Diana, and she’d said to him, “You’re a dear boy. Very dear.” And he’d tried to tell her how much he loved and respected her, but he couldn’t. Because he was a unicorn, and unicorns can’t talk.
But you can’t be inside a dream and figure what it means at the same time, and when the knock knocked again, he knew he’d left the dream and didn’t try to get back there. “Yeah? What?”
He was still dreamy enough that when it was the voice of Louise Cottonwood that answered and not his mother’s, he was surprised.
“It’s your lawyer,” Louise said. “He says he’s got news for you. He wants you to call him.”
&
nbsp; All at once he was full of adrenaline. He pushed himself up from the lumpy mattress, and the dream, every trace of it, was gone.
“What time is it?” he asked, confused, because outside it was still, dimly, day. But Louise had already gone downstairs, and the electric alarm clock by the bed said 5:30, which did not seem possible. Then he realized it was 5:30 in the afternoon. He couldn’t remember lying down to take a nap. He almost never took naps. And if he did, he didn’t dream. And he had been dreaming, though he couldn’t now remember anything of it, except that it had been about sex in some way. And Diana had been in it.
He was fully clothed, and (he checked) his fly was zipped.
He went down to the kitchen, where Louise was in the middle of fixing dinner for the old ladies. “My lawyer called? What’d he say?”
“To call him.” Louise was opening a huge can of string beans.
“I was asleep.” He thought he needed to explain that.
Louise just gave him a sideways look. “His number’s by the phone.”
Alan headed for the hallway, where the pay phone hung beside the front door.
“Not that phone,” Louise called to him. “In here.”
Alan looked at the phone on the little table at the far end of the kitchen, which only Mrs. Turney and Louise were allowed to use. Everyone else was supposed to use the pay phone.
“Call him collect,” Louise said, answering the unasked question. “Hell, just call him. She won’t know.”
Alan realized that since it was a call from his lawyer, Louise was probably as much concerned as he was, since it must have to do with her son. So he dialed the number and got the lawyer’s secretary, and this time there was no runaround, she put him right through.
“Alan. Good to hear your voice.”
“Thank you. There’s news?”
“There is indeed. As I’ve told you before, the lab’s been equivocating about the results of the first tests.”
“Pardon, sir?”
“Equivocating. Seesawing. One day it’s yes, the next we can’t be sure. But the new tests are positive. No equivocating with those. They say that it is your father’s blood, beyond any doubt.”
THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft Page 12