by Russell Moon
“A party?” I groan. “Listen, thanks, but…I don’t have the stomach for it right now. I was hoping to just lay low this weekend, go for some walks with my dog, find someplace for fish and chips, play a little Brainwave…so, you know, if we could just conduct whatever business we have right here, I can just get out of your way and you can have your funky weird party on the weekend without me. Take pictures, though, ’cause I’ll want to see….”
It is a convincing effect, six heads shaking in perfect synchronization.
“No?” I ask.
“What do they speak, Caledonianian or something where you come from?” Baron barks. Jesus, this guy. If he gets this pissed off over me sitting in his chair, what would he do if I threw him across the room?
As if he is yanked by a cable around his waist, Baron suddenly jerks backward and crashes into a batch of empty chairs. He jumps to his feet. “Who did that?” he says, hands raised in that straight-out, palms-down quick-draw I used earlier.
Everyone in the Council is shrugging, shaking their heads, or giggling. “Come on,” he says, louder. “Who’s the witch bitch?”
Arj waves at him as if he’s a football field away. When Baron looks at Arj, Arj draws his attention to me.
“Holy shit,” I say.
“What?” Baron says.
“Better not piss the man off,” Arj says happily.
Winston laughs. “Don’t make Marcus kick your ass, Baron.”
That does it. Baron is on his feet, marching toward me. He parts the group, which is happy to let him through. Thanks, guys.
He is very tense, Baron, and I am scared. “I don’t really know how to do this stuff, I swear it.”
Baron is thinking on his feet, which apparently is going to take a while. He turns to read the smiling faces behind him. Really, it’s one of those Murder on the Orient Express deals where anyone could have gladly done the crime since the guy is such a piece of crap.
“Okay,” Baron says finally. He stares at me a moment longer, apparently feeling he has to make more of a move before he can release me. “But if you sit in my green chair again I’m gonna kick your—”
The cable is jerked again, and Baron is folded tightly in half as he sails spine-first into the same unfortunate group of chairs.
Now there is not only laughter, but applause.
I feel my face turning red. “I didn’t do it,” I say, but nobody appears to believe me. “Did I?” I wonder out loud.
This is not my better self we are tapping here. I can’t deny it, but there is a brand-new something surging up through me. Or if not new, something previously hidden. Like there is a power switch in me that is kicked on by just being in this room. I did that? I could do that? He deserved it. And I gave it to him.
I shouldn’t enjoy that.
If only Baron weren’t such an ass.
So then, if I could throw him twice, I could probably twist him by the—
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Eartha says, grinning and pointing at me.
“Christ,” I say, feeling like I’ve been caught…well, caught. “You can see people’s thoughts too. Great.”
“No,” she says. “You were either trying too hard or you were constipated.”
Arj claps his hands loudly several times, and everyone takes this as a signal. We arrange ourselves in a circle, skipping the chairs altogether and squatting on the floor. Baron is slow to join.
“You coming?” Marthe asks.
I look over and see Baron still lying among the bowled-over chairs. “No,” he says. “Start without me.”
I for one am happy to start without him, if starting means finishing. I am out of my depth here and feeling it. I am alone in a crowd and more lost than I have ever been. Who am I? What am I? I want to be away from here. I am missing my mother and my dog.
“Let’s start without him, for crying out loud,” Winston says.
Better, I’d like to start without me. But this needs to happen. I need to know.
“Please, sit,” Marthe says softly, half standing up and guiding me into a sitting position on the cold floor. Just the touch of Marthe’s hands on my arm has a weird, soothing effect. She stares into me. “This must be really hard for you,” she says.
“You must have a lot of questions, huh?” Winston says, offering me some kind of lozenge.
I recoil. “This some kind of witch thing? Going to give me visions and make me writhe around the floor with a bloody dead chicken or something?”
Winston stares at his hand. “It’s menthol eucalyptus. It’s strong, but not that strong.”
“You have us confused with voodoo,” Marthe says as simply as if she were a librarian pointing me toward the ornithology section. “We are not”—she sniffs—“voodoo.”
“What the hell are you, then?”
“We,” Arj stresses. “We, Marcus. That’s the first thing. We are a we. You are us and we are you and never the twain shall be cloven.”
“There,” I say, pointing at him. “There’s a word. That’s a bad one, right? Cloven. Hoofed? Evil, Satan, all that. This is one of those, right? Am I right? I don’t want any part of that crap, folks, sorry. I mean it.”
I am breathing heavily. Marthe is holding my hand, and Eartha is scowling at Arj.
“English,” she snaps. “Plain old twenty-first-century English will get us through this, Arj.”
“We are not devil-worshippers,” Marthe says.
“But you say you’re a coven,” I point out to Eartha. “And you’re telling me I’m a witch. For chrissake, a witch? That is so freaking corny.”
Eartha shrugs. I look around the room. Nobody can do any better.
I shake loose from Marthe and bury my face in my hands. “You people are not helping me, okay? You’re really, really not doing anything for me. Why am I here? Why am I even listening to you? I’ll probably wake up tomorrow and see you all on the news eating babies or setting yourselves on fire or some such eerie crap.”
There is a long gap in what is passing for conversation here. I don’t even want to look up. I want to open my eyes and have them, and have it, and have every minute of the past week gone and my life and every life I have inadvertently banged into put back the way it was with a Band-Aid and a kiss on the head and may we all go our separate peaceful ways. I grip my face ever tighter like that guy in the Scream painting, and boy oh Jesus boy do I want to scream, until I am sure I am about to remove the entire covering of my flesh to reveal the blood and tissue and mucus of me spilling onto the floor.
I hear nothing, other than my own panting, moaning….
Then nothing.
Slowly, I remove my hands from my face. They are all gone. Except Marthe.
“We figured this might be too much, too fast,” she says. For a Satanist, she has the aspect of an angel. She touches my arm again.
I jump up. “But of course you’re sweet and lovely. What would I expect, a serpent?”
“We do wish you would calm down,” she says.
“Yeah, well, I wish you would stop saying ‘we.’”
She nods. “Point taken. You going home now?”
“Am I allowed?” I sound like the second rudest person in Blackwater.
“Yes,” Marthe says, almost laughing. “May I walk with you for a while?”
I nod, and we make a quick exit.
Marthe walks me along the same winding, brush-heavy country roads and scrubbed, tidy-town streetlets that Eartha walked me along that morning. Every residential block of wood-framed, clapboard dollhouses is tree-lined, so that the hot-cold flashes of sun and shade are steady. “So why are you still here?” I ask. “Why aren’t you gone with the rest of them?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “You tell me. You’re the one who moved them all.”
“Will you people stop saying stuff like that?” I say, waving my arms like a madman. “I didn’t do anything with them. I don’t know how to do something that big.”
“Your modesty is charming
,” she says. “I think you should know, though, you’re probably capable of a lot more than you think.”
“What, the magic tricks? Big deal. Mumbo jumbo, and so what. There are magicians on TV who do more interesting stuff, like throwing playing cards through windshields and making the Statue of Liberty disappear. And they make mountains of money and sleep with supermodels for their troubles.”
She goes all serene with me. “An Obair,” she says.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s called An Obair, what we do, and it’s not mumbo jumbo. It’s Gaelic, and it means ‘The Business.’ It is our business, it is the stuff of our life. It is a magic unlike any other on earth.”
I am flatfooted here. She is deeply serious, and I don’t want her to be. She is unsettling, when I want her to be lovely, kind, and reassuring.
“Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said?” I ask.
“About money and supermodels,” she says flatly.
“Yes.”
There is a pause. I fear she is not contemplating my words.
“An Obair is you, Marcus.”
“The Business. Is me. I am The Business.”
“You are.”
“You know what,” I say, shaking my head, staring at the lovely stream and trees and unclouded sky that now don’t penetrate my quite clouded senses, “I hope I’m not. All this…whatever you people want to call it…it feels awful to me. If I am The Business, then I’m sorry, but we are out of business, okay? Even if I do have any kind of power, like you say—it doesn’t seem to me to be such a terrific thing. Your creepy little group there making things fly, they don’t seem to be getting themselves anyplace in a hurry. Why would I want to be like them? I don’t have any interest in being Merlin or Harry Potter or Puff the Magic-freaking Dragon. I don’t want to be any of all that. You know what I want to be? Alone.”
She is shaking her head at me, but smiling, again, angelically.
“Right, but I can’t, can I? Because we are one, our little freako society Key Club spooks. Well I don’t want to be one. I want to be…well, one, but one by myself.”
I know I am not helping myself. I am not solving anything. I am not ridding myself of their unwanted attention or these stupid unwanted powers, lame as they may be. And I am not fixing things. Things that I know need to be fixed.
I am fighting, but I am not clear on whom, what, or exactly why.
I need to get clear.
Angel Marthe stops, pulls me by the hand, and kisses me, fully, in the same way, in the same spot, that Eartha did this morning.
And I slow down. My thoughts, my flailing hands, my heart rate.
This does not feel bad. It should. Guilt and heartache, memory and loss, should be what I am flooded with now. I have none of it. I drift further out into the dream.
Am I ever awake now?
She releases me and regards me with the kindest almond-eyed understanding.
“What, then?” I ask slowly. “Am I to get the impression that witch girls are, like, all available all for me? And that’s supposed to make it all better?”
She stares at me, waiting.
“Well, yes,” I say, “it makes it better, but it doesn’t make it all better.”
Marthe either has incredible self-control—which the evidence suggests is not quite true—or she is unshakable. She is more patient than I deserve.
“We are not easy,” she says. “We are one. And we are all we’ve got. If you think about it, you will come around to it.”
I am shaking my head as we resume walking, because I am still quite some ways from coming around to it. But she certainly makes me want to try.
“I mean it, you know, that this Obair stuff doesn’t seem like such a wonderful thing. Whatever I have, I’d be happy to see it gone already. I’d do anything to get rid of it.”
We walk.
She nods. “Everybody thinks differently about it. There are some people in our group, who hate it so much…you just want to put them out of their misery. There are others who just think it’s a kick to be able to move stuff. And then there are, well, most of us, who think about the possibilities, think about the kingdom, the power and the glory, and they—”
“And you?”
“Me?”
“What, am I speaking Port Caledonian or something? Yeah, you. What is your vision?”
“Noted. Well. Well, well. All right, here it is. I think An Obair is art. I mean, the art. Because, you see, I write poetry, but not very good poetry, and I make sketches, which are better but not a lot better than the poetry, and I like to sing…but none of it…that is, all of it…It’s all about limits, isn’t it? Everything else, it’s all about where it stops, about what you can’t do. An Obair is art times a trillion. Art times infinity. Art times everything. The thought of having it, of having access to it, all of it, absolute unfiltered creative power…the art of essence, Marcus. It is our individual pieces of God. And you have a bigger piece than any of us.
“Have you ever wondered what you could do, if you could do anything at all?”
I am watching her as much as I am listening to her, and small hotwires of Business crisscross my body from tip to tip. I don’t believe it is possible to fake what Marthe is doing. I am, for the moment, willing to relax my rigid disbelief for her.
And if I do believe her?
What could you do, if you could do anything at all?
Do we really want the answer?
“An Obair,” I say tentatively.
“An Obair,” she says, “is the answer.”
Where do you go from there in a conversation? Silent. We go silent for a while. We are approaching my house, and we veer off to sit on the bank of the stream. I throw rocks in as I talk, finally.
“How long have you known Eartha and Arj?”
“Years and years and years.”
“And have they always looked like that?”
Marthe is about to throw her own rock. She stops and looks at me sideways. “Nobody always looks the same, Marcus, you know that. You getting freaky on me now?”
I probably am. Slowly it is coming over me that I am slipping between the cracks of two worlds—the one where people and boulders and cows do pretty much what you expect them to, and this world—and anything I say, anything I think I understand, will need to be checked at the door between those worlds.
But Marthe makes you feel like you can trust her. So you go ahead and be foolish.
“Do you know of any reason,” I ask, “why one person should look to you like another person?” I throw bigger rocks, making bigger plunks in the water. “I mean, why, and how, would it be possible for one person, who you knew, so, who you really and intimately…so there is no mistaking that this is the face….” I have to stop. In my mind, Jules’s face is in my face. Her eyeballs are pressed to my eyeballs, her lips to my lips.
“You knew somebody….” Marthe probes.
I nod.
“And you see her face.”
I nod.
“Not just sort of.”
I shake my head no, wildly, no. I throw a big rock, too hard, missing the stream completely and breaking a bottle on the opposite bank.
“Hmm,” Marthe says thoughtfully.
She is holding back. I am as certain of it as I am of the water before me.
“Who is Eartha?” I say urgently. “Is she Eartha? Is she Jules? Will somebody finally tell me the truth about what is going on?”
I am holding her eyes. She cannot look away or throw a rock or drop off to sleep. If she is, as she seems, for real, Marthe is going to be the one to finally clue me in.
“Whoa,” she says, lurching sideways, and glaring over my shoulder.
I turn to see a thick black snake squiggling through the air, then splashing down into the water.
“I moved it for you,” she says. “It was—”
“I know,” I say, sighing, “about to bite me. It does that.”
“You need to watch that snake.”
/> “I need to watch all snakes. Snakes suck.”
“Yes, well, you need to watch that one more than the rest. That one has a temper.”
I gesture wildly at the snake, at the squiggle crossing the midtempo current of the stream. “You know that snake, personally?”
Marthe does a nervous bit of double-take. “It’s Eartha’s snake.” She looks across the water, searching. I look too, and there is no sign of it. “And it has big ears. Listen, Marcus, I should go now. We’ll talk again.”
I stand there, kind of frozen, watching Marthe as she scuttles up the bank, then stands, looking back toward the water.
Eartha’s snake. A snake with ears. I should be surprised. I can’t afford the luxury of surprise.
Up the bank in three steps, I catch up with Marthe. I stare hard at her, and the snake incident does not change a thing. “Please,” I say. “Please?” I sound like a lost child, even to myself. “You were going to tell me…why I’m seeing Jules.”
“I’m not sure, Marcus—”
“Please—”
“Right,” Marthe says tentatively. “This girl…Jules? She was special, huh?”
I bite my lip. I grunt in the affirmative.
“Well, I’m not the most knowledgeable…that would be Arj—”
“I can’t ask him!”
“Okay,” she says gently. “Well, it sounds to me like you are haunting yourself.”
“Haunting. Am I a ghost now too? What the hell?”
She is shaking her head. “No. Terrorizing yourself is probably more accurate. Listen, I can’t tell you everything, but what I do know, and what you have to know, is that you are a very, very powerful individual, Marcus. You are capable of much more than you ever imagined. Much of what you see, you’re controlling, whether you’re fully aware of it or not.”
I am a steady two beats behind her, trying to gather it all in, as every thought she utters becomes heavier for me to bear. I am staring at her beseechingly.
“Right,” she says, reaching out and putting a hand on one of mine. “So if you are seeing things, seeing people, superimposing somebody over somebody else…there may be a good reason. You may be haunting yourself for something you might not even be sure of. The key question is, did you possibly do something very bad, something heinous to this person? Because if you had done something truly horrible—and I’m not saying you did—then sometimes what happens is that you begin to carry the person, trapped inside….”