by Sarah Dreher
Maybe they should just hold hands and see if they could go back the way they came. Except that Gwen had been conscious then. What if they made it, and she didn’t? They’d never find her in this free-time, free-space world.
“Well,” said Aunt Hermione as she buttoned her red flannel man’s shirt. It hung down below her knees and made her look like a Christmas elf. “I’m going to make us a pot of tea and ransack the cupboards. We might find something for Gwen.”
“She probably needs blood,” Stoner said abstractedly.
“No doubt about that,” said her aunt. “But we don’t know her type, and we don’t have any way to get it in her.”
Stoner looked at her. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? She’s A+, like me. I could give her some.
But how? How would we get it from my body into hers?
There had to be a way. She’d seen it a thousand times, in movies. People were always rigging up ways to give blood in the wilderness, or in the wreckage of airline crashes, or on capsized luxury liners. This situation was a thousand times better than those. Wasn’t it?
So what do we do?
Tubes and hollow things for needles. And how do we get it to run from me into her?
“What are you thinking so hard about?” Aunt Hermione asked.
“Blood transfusions.”
“The trouble is,” the older woman said, “I do believe it’s the body we left behind that needs the blood.”
She was right, of course. No matter how you looked at it, the only way to save her was to get back there, and get there in a hurry.
Which brought her back to the original question—how to manage that. After all, it wasn’t as if they were accustomed to warping back and forth like...
But one of them was. Her heart started beating fast. They might be able to do it.
“Callie Rose,” she called.
The young woman popped her head into the room. “Yeah?”
“You’ve been going back and forth for a long time, right? Between one world and the next?”
Callie Rose shook her head in bewilderment. “Huh?”
“I mean, well, you’re dead, but you’re not dead. You go back and forth between the worlds, right?”
“I ain’t dead.”
“Sure, you...” She felt a tap on her shoulder.
“She doesn’t know that,” Aunt Hermione said in a low voice. “I think that’s been her problem all along. She died, but hasn’t accepted it. That’s why she hovers between two realities, as it were.” She cleared her throat. “If you don’t mind a bit of advice, perhaps I should be the one to break it to her. I’m much more comfortable with this sort of thing than you.”
“Be my guest,” Stoner said. “It’s beyond me. But hurry.”
Her aunt went toward the girl. “Callie, dear, I need to ask you a few questions. Do you mind?”
“Huh-uh.”
“Now...” She took one of Callie Rose’s hands between hers. “Do you have any recollection of your home?”
“Sure,” Callie Rose said. “It’s back in the swamp. Folks call us Swamp Rats, but we ain’t. We been homesteadin’ in there nearly a hundred years.” Her eyes glistened. “Got all kinds of stuff, too. Big house, us kids even have a separate bedroom, sugar mill, chickens. We grow our own corn and things. I can butcher, good as any man. You all come over to dinner some Sunday, we’ll serve you up a spread you won’t forget, and all of it grown right on our land.” She gestured toward Stoner. “That other one can come, too, even if she is peculiar.”
“We’d like that very much,” Aunt Hermione said. She smiled at Stoner. “Wouldn’t we?”
Stoner nodded. “Sure.” For God’s sake, get on with it. Time is doing bad things here. As in Running Out.
“That other lady can come, too. She’s fun.” She glanced down at Gwen. “And this one. She doesn’t talk much, but I’ll bet she’s nice.”
“Just one thing worries me,” Aunt Hermione said. “I’ve always heard the swamp is dangerous.”
Callie Rose shrugged. “Ain’t too bad, if you know what snakes to stay away from. Like the difference between a safe coral snake and one that kin kill you, you gotta know what you’re doin’. And the ’gators, they ain’t real friendly. And sometimes them government men come sniffing around.”
“Your father makes his own liquor, does he?”
Callie Rose clapped her hand over her mouth and her eyes got big. “I ain’t supposed to talk about that,” she said.
“Your secret is safe with us,” said Aunt Hermione. “Did you know whiskey is legal now?”
The girl wrinkled her nose. “Nah.”
“It is. And has been for some time. You see, dear, you’ve been away from home for a very long time.”
“I know. I got lost. I know I’m real close, but I can’t find it. I never got lost before. They did something to the swamp, didn’t they?”
“Yes,” said Aunt Hermione. “They did.”
So that was it. Sometime after Callie Rose’s death, Disney had bought and drained the land. And now she couldn’t find her way home.
“Tell me,” Aunt Hermione said. “What’s the last thing you remember before you got lost?”
Callie Rose frowned and screwed her face up tight. “My Ma sent me out to see Granny Conjure.”
“Why was that? Was someone sick?”
“Couple of the kids come down with something, burning up and coughing like the Devil had them ’round the throat. Couldn’t breathe, none of our remedies helped none. We figure it was Old Cornstalk Man put some kind of spell on us.”
“Old Cornstalk Man?” Stoner asked.
“That’s what we call him, on account of when he walks it makes a noise like dried corn stalks in the wind. Like he’s stuffed with old corn huskin’s. Like a old scarecrow, only he ain’t no scarecrow. He’s a Voodoo man...” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Likes to steal the breath out of little babies. Leans over their boxes and just sucks the breath right out of them. I know it’s true, too. He done it to my baby.”
Her baby? She wasn’t more than twelve or thirteen. A child. “You had a baby?” Stoner asked.
Callie Rose nodded and beamed with pride. “I sure did. Prettiest little boy, ’til Old Cornstalk Man took his breath. Just a little thing. Wasn’t even baptized yet. Put him to bed just fine. Old Cornstalk Man came in the night and next morning he was gone from us.” She looked at Aunt Hermione in a sad and frightened way. “You think my baby went to Heaven? Weren’t baptized.”
“I’m sure he did,” said Aunt Hermione. “In fact, I happen to know there’s some very, very special places in Heaven for babies like yours. Jesus knows it wasn’t your baby’s fault. Or yours, either.”
“Boy,” said Callie Rose, “I sure am glad about that. I been worried.”
“After you went to find Granny Conjure, what happened then?”
“I dunno. It was a bad night. Big storm. Bad wind blowing through the trees.” She chewed her lip and thought harder. “I kinda remember something...Yeah, something fell outa the sky and hit me. Something like a old tree branch. Hit me real hard. Knocked me down, I remember that. ’N I got all dizzy and lay down for a minute, and when I woke up everything was funny.”
“Funny?” Stoner asked.
“Different. I know I did a bad thing, laying down for a minute when they was waitin’ on me at home. But I felt real bad, like I was gonna lose my supper, and I couldn’t think right, and it’s perilous to travel the swamp at night if you’re not thinkin’ right.”
“It seems to me,” said Aunt Hermione, “that what you had was a concussion. A hard hit on the head. That’s why you felt dizzy and sick. And it must have caused bleeding inside your head.”
Callie Rose’s eyes grew very large and dark. “Bleedin’ in my head? That can’t be. Thing like that’d kill you.”
Aunt Hermione looked hard and calmly into the girl’s eyes. “We think it did kill you, Callie. That’s why you can’t find your way home.”
/> “Passed on?” Callie Rose asked.
“Well, part way, anyway,” Stoner said. “You seem to have gotten stuck along the way. Maybe it was the concussion.”
Callie Rose turned that over in her head. “Nah, that wasn’t it. I think a ’gator et me. I got knocked out, then et by a ’gator. That’s how come nobody come and found me. Wasn’t anything left to find.”
“You don’t seem very upset,” Stoner said, “about being dead.”
“I gotta get used to the idea first, don’t I?” The girl shrugged. “Doesn’t seem much different from how it was before. Now that I know where I am, anyhow.”
That was encouraging. If Callie Rose knew her way around here, maybe she could help them find the tunnel. “You know where you are?”
“Sure. I’m jest about home, ’cept the world moved on.”
“I mean this place, this world.”
The girl shook her head. “It’s all mixed up to me.” She brightened. “I seen you before, though. When you come through on the boat. You and her...” She pointed to Gwen. “And a bunch of folks.”
She had seen them. When they’d been on the Land ride. The figure waving from the upstairs window had been Callie Rose. And she had made phone calls from Spaceship Earth. And somehow gotten from the prairie fire to this house. Obviously, Callie Rose had some way of transporting herself.
“Please,” Stoner said, “think real hard. How do you get from one place to another around here?”
The girl just looked blank.
“There must be some method. Callie Rose, Gwen’s life might depend on it.”
“You ain’t passed on, then?”
“Not yet. Like you, we’re stuck.”
“And this ain’t Heaven?”
Stoner wanted to scream. “It certainly isn’t. Do you think all these terrible things would happen in Heaven? Do you think we’d be in this mess in Heaven?”
“I dunno,” Callie Rose said, seeming to draw into herself.
Stoner knew she was scaring her, but she couldn’t stop herself. She was frightened, and angry, and it was all just too much. “What in God’s name makes you think this place is Heaven?”
The girl looked at the floor and scuffed her bare foot along the boards. “Count of the old Granny there.” She looked quickly toward Aunt Hermione, then away.
“She’s not an old Granny,” Stoner said. “She’s my aunt.”
Now it was Callie Rose’s turn to get angry. “Is, too,” she shouted, and stamped her foot. “She’s a old Granny and a Conjure Woman. I heard that lady say so back at the orange farm.”
Aunt Hermione reached out and patted Callie Rose’s arm. “I’m not that kind of a witch, dear. I can’t make things happen like your Conjure Lady.”
“So how come you met that other one?”
“I’m not sure,” Aunt Hermione said. “She must have asked for me to come, Spirit to Spirit. But here on this plane… well, here on Earth I’m just as helpless as you are.” She looked hard into Callie Rose’s face. “You do know something, don’t you, dear?”
Callie Rose blushed and stared back at the floor.
Aunt Hermione stroked the girl’s hair. “Please, Callie. Our friend needs our help very badly, and we need yours.”
She glanced up. “You gonna put a spell on me if I don’t tell?”
“Of course not.”
“She doesn’t do things like that,” Stoner said.
“If I tell, you’ll make me go, won’t you?”
“It’s time for you to go, Callie,” Aunt Hermione said with a smile.
“An’ then I won’t have no old Granny no more, and no friends neither.”
Aunt Hermione pulled the girl onto her lap and hugged her tight. “You’ll have lots of friends on the other side. Your parents are there, and your baby, and all your friends from before...”
“But no old Granny,” Callie Rose said with a sniffle. “I never had no old Granny.”
“There are lots of old Grannies on the other side,” Aunt Hermione said, and rocked her a little. “And I can come and visit you sometimes, too.”
The girl looked up. “You can?”
“Yes, I can. When I’m sleeping, or meditating, I can go right to where you are for a short visit. All you have to do is come and get me.”
“That funny lady, too?”
“I don’t know about that. Marylou may not have the temperament for traveling to the Spirit realm. But, you know what?” She pretended to whisper in the girl’s ear. “You can come and visit her, and scare the be-Jesus out of her.”
“Yeah?” Callie Rose giggled.
“Aunt Hermione,” Stoner said, appalled.
“Oh, hush, it’d do Marylou good. She’s much too Earth-bound.”
To be perfectly honest, she did rather like the idea of Marylou being haunted by the spirit of a young woman. Marylou would probably like it, too.
“Well, okay,” Callie Rose said. She got up. “I’ll show you how to go. But it ain’t fun.”
* * *
“Get up,” David said through clenched teeth.
Millicent Tunes laughed. “This is absurd, David. We have to get out of here, and we have to do it together. I don’t know what you think you...”
“I want your gun.”
“People might be here any second. We don’t have time for games.”
“Yeah?” he sneered. “You had plenty of times for games before. When you were my therapist, getting me to do this job, lying to me. Lots of games, Doctor Tunes.”
“David,” she said reasonably, “we can sort this out later. There are transference issues at play here, maybe even...” She choked on the word. “...a little counter-transference. I’m certain we can...”
He cocked his pistol. “I don’t know what those words mean, and I don’t care. I’m pissed. Do you know what that means?”
“Of course, I…”
“It means you’re in big trouble, Doctor Tunes.”
She started to get up.
“Down!” he snapped.
“All right, David. You have the power for now. What do you want me to do?”
“First, hand over your gun.”
She did. “Now what?”
Trouble was, he didn’t know now what. They were here in this tunnel, with just two possible exits, going through the falsely boarded-up door into the working tunnels, where he didn’t attract attention in the day time but surely would at this hour of night, with nobody there except security and laundry people. Or climb out this exit to the park overhead—the exit he’d dug himself, late at night, over months of time, risking getting caught night after night—yeah, he had to admit it, glad to do it for her. Damn. He was a fool, all right. Impressed by her education and looks and professional manner. Superficial shit. Should have known better. Should have remembered what his mother always said, “Don’t judge a book by its cover, Davey. All that glitters isn’t necessarily gold.”
Well, this book sure wasn’t gold. This book was pure, unadulterated S.H.I.T., pardon my French.
And he was stuck with it. Stuck in this lousy hole in the ground with this… this… un-spayed female dog.
They were going to get caught. He’d bet money on it. And it was back to jail for him, probably for the rest of his life. Jesus, the rest of his life watching afternoon talk shows.
The worst of it was, he’d probably be tried with her. They were in it together. A pair. His name linked to hers forever. Next thing you knew, some Bozo’d come sniffing around wanting to write their story. And she’d talk. Boy, would she talk. He could tell just looking at her that this dame would do anything for a buck. So there’d be a book, and paperbacks in all the airline terminals, with their pictures on them—lousy pictures, too, all grainy and fuzzy, he could bet the farm on that—and a TV mini series, with reruns during summers and holiday weeks. They’d make up some cute name for them, like the Orlando Two. Only worse. Some Disney World kind of name, like Mickey and Minnie Louse, the Louseketeers, the...
“I’m waiting,” she said sweetly. “Tell me what to do, big man.”
His mind was a complete and total blank.
He’d never been clever. He’d known that his whole life. Responsible, but not clever. He was going to have to be clever now.
“Walk,” he said.
“Where?”
“To the room.”
“And what do we do after we get there?”
He didn’t know, but he figured the walk would buy him a little time. Maybe enough time to think what he’d think if he were clever.
* * *
They stood at the entrance to the cellar stairs. The steps were old and splintery. The space at the bottom was black. More than black, hollow, pulling blackness, like the darkness left behind when color has been sucked away. Like a vacuum, trying to draw them in, to drain their strength to feed its own emptiness. They’d made a crude stretcher for Gwen out of the quilt. Stoner tightened her grip on it. Aunt Hermione held the other side. Callie Rose stood one step down, ready to lead the way. Behind them in the kitchen, Marylou was putting the finishing touches on a sandwich of home made bread and home made jelly she found in a cupboard, all the while chanting “Not real, not real” in a sing-song voice.
“I’m afraid,” said Aunt Hermione, “Marylou is—as you young people put it—losing it.”
“She’ll be all right. She has to handle things in her unique way. Actually...” Stoner went on as she peered into the darkness, “...maybe her approach isn’t such a bad idea.”
“This part’s easy,” Callie Rose said cheerfully. “Wait’ll you see that thing they got over where the man talks all the time.”
She was referring to Spaceship Earth, of course. And the Pit that didn’t exist at the bottom of the stairs that didn’t exist, in the tunnel that didn’t exist. “I’ve seen it,” Stoner said. “I hope we don’t have to get involved with that.”