The Good House

by Tananarive Due

  There was a perfect pool of crimson-black blood on the cellar floor, its edges rounded like a cloud’s. Blood ran into the cracks in the concrete, snaking toward the empty wine racks in a thin, jagged line. The smell of blood was so thick, Angela coughed, gagging.

  “Youmotherfucker,” Angela said. On cottony legs, she tottered down two steps to focus her camera, leaning over to snap her picture. No matter how tightly she held the camera, her hands shook so much they were nearly useless. But she clicked the camera three times, doing her best to capture the blood on the floor, then she lurched back up the steps, slamming the door behind her.

  Angela’s stomach heaved. She ran blindly through the leaves in the library to the bathroom, a closet of a room that was also overrun. Angela vomited into the toilet, drowning the single leaf that floated in the bowl. Her abdomen tightened, expelling everything in her stomach. Perspiration ran into Angela’s eyes. She sobbed as she vomited.

  “All right,” she gasped, between her stomach’s pulsing, sinking to her knees because her legs felt like sand. Her kneecaps banged against the tile floor with currents of pain that forced tears to her eyes. “All right, Gramma Marie…you better be right here, and you better start showing me what to do. You better tell meright now what happened to Corey, and how to stop some more of these people from getting killed. ’Cause you know what? I can walk away. I didn’t start this shit. I willtake my ass home.”

  In the boxlike bathroom, Angela’s voice echoed around her. Rain spattered against the bathroom window, and she jumped at the sudden wetthump of a fat droplet.

  Was that her message? Was it in the hiss of the heater? The hollow noises in the drain? Angela listened with all her being for sounds beneath her words, for a response, for anything that might carry significance.

  “You were saying prayers for two hours every morning and you didn’t teach me evenone?” she said. “You taught me all these writers and you didn’t leave me anything fromyou? What the fuck was wrong with you?! You thought what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me? This shit isstill here, Gramma Marie, and it took my son! You hear me?”

  Angela collapsed to the floor, her chest heaving.

  Shit, shit, shit. Gramma Marie wasn’t here. Or if she was, her modes of communication were so esoteric that Angela was exhausted from the effort of hearing her. Angela was sick of symbols and clues and premonitions; she’dnever wanted to heed the part of her that wasn’t her brain. No, she wanted to open her eyes and find a neatly typed note waiting for her, a goddamn stack of papers, written especially for her by Gramma Marie. Abook on how to kick the ass of whatever was kicking her ass. That was what she wanted, and damn Gramma Marie for not leaving it for her.

  “Gramma Marie, I can’t do this alone,” Angela said. “I can’t do this.”

  For an hour, Angela lay amidst the leaves on the cold bathroom floor and waited for a sign that never came, fixing a hundred interpretations on everything around her. She tried to see order in the leaves on the floor, hear Morse code in the pattering rain, hear muffled whispers in the pauses between her breaths. She tried every way she knew and some she didn’t, searching foranything .

  The answer, instead of arriving as an outside voice from somewhere unseen, glided into Angela’s mind as a keen, vivid thought.

  Gramma Mariehad left instructions in the house. Corey had gotten to them first.

  Twenty-Four

  JUNE28, 2001

  IFOUND SOMETHING,”Corey said.

  It was now or never. He’d put it off as long as he could, trying to decide if he wanted to speak up. He and Sean had nearly finished their two large slices of Meet the Meat pizza at Pizza Jack’s, crusts sagging with pepperoni, sausage, and ground beef, and they were working on the melting ice of their two Super Large root beers. There hadn’t been any customers outside with them at the white plastic picnic tables when they first arrived, but now a monster pickup had just pulled up, full of high school kids sitting beside muddy dirt bikes strapped to the bed, so the place was about to get crowded. Sean probably wouldn’t want to stick around if a lot of people were here. Sheba and Chestnut, who were tied to a telephone pole ten yards behind Pizza Jack’s, didn’t like strangers.

  Sean slurped the last traces of his soda, his eyes glued to Corey’s. “Did you find money?”

  “No, some papers. My great-grandmother wrote them.”

  “Too bad it’s not money. What’d she write?”

  “Magic spells.” Corey said the words as coolly as he could, as if magic spells were a part of their everyday conversation, but he felt his ears burning. This was embarrassing as hell, and it would only get worse.

  “Magic spells,” Sean repeated, neither a question nor a statement. He left the words hanging.

  “Yeah, she knew voodoo. Well, the actual word is pronouncedvo-DOU orvo-DUN . She was a priestess, what they call amanbo . She wrote some spells.” There was more to Gramma Marie’s papers than spells; it was part personal history, part religious document, part cautionary tale. Some of its pages were so dense, with her talk of gods, demons, and curses, that Corey didn’t have the patience to read it all. But the spells were the jackpot. The mother lode.

  “What kind?” Sean said.

  “All kinds. Good luck. Love spells. Hexes. Bringing back things you lost.”

  Sean stuffed the last of his crust into his mouth. “No way. Do they work?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m trying one tonight, at The Spot. At midnight.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No.”

  Sean’s eyes grew to three times their normal size. “You havegot to let me come watch.”

  Corey grinned. That was what he’d hoped Sean would say. “Hell, yeah,” Corey said, and he and Sean slapped palms and shook hands across the table. Corey hadn’t enjoyed the idea of walking to The Spot by himself in the middle of the night, but Gramma Marie’s spells were specific about time and place, and he wanted to do it right. Within reason, anyway.

  “Is it cool if I spend the night at your place tonight? Otherwise, I’ll have to sneak out. You know how that goes,” Corey said. He had an elevenP.M. curfew, one more of Mom’s dictates.

  “No problem. My dad won’t care, as long as I’m not out past one,” Sean said. “This is gonnarock! What kind of spell are you doing? Nothing with negative energy, right?”

  The way Sean said that, it was as if he already had respect for it, which was good. Corey had skimmed through parts of Gramma Marie’s manuscript, but he’d read enough to know that she didn’t think magic was a game. She thought magic had gotten her in trouble, and if she were here, she wouldn’t want him to try even the most harmless spell until he’d taken a hundred precautions. But he’d already decided not to do anything dangerous. Corey was glad Sean felt the same way about it, so they wouldn’t have to argue later.

  “One of the easiest ones is called The Lost,” Corey said. “It’s a spell to bring back something you lost.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not sure. Probably nothing too big. Pick something small.”

  “I get to pick something, too?”

  “Yeah, we’ll both pick something. That way, we’re in this together.”

  “I got goose bumps when you said that,” Sean said, his face suddenly serious, contemplative. Then, his smile came back. “This isawesome . The lost spells of a voodoo priestess!”

  Corey waved his hand, warning Sean to lower his voice. Three girls from the pickup had already gone inside to the counter to order, but three boys were standing outside the door, probably talking about the girls who had come with them. The bigger one looked familiar to Corey, and he and his two friends were staring toward their table already.

  Corey spoke softly. “Pick something you knowfor sure you lost, so if it turns up later, you’ll know it was magic. Something you haven’t seen in years.”

  “What are you going to pick?” Sean said.

  Corey hesitated. How many of his family secrets did he want to tell?r />
  “There’s a ring of my mom’s I lost when I was in fifth grade. I want to get that back for her.” That was true, but Corey wasn’t ready to tell Sean the rest yet. Gramma Marie had written in her papers that the ring’s symbols would help him do thereal magic, much more than the spells she’d described. If he’d known in fifth grade what he knew now, he damn sure wouldn’t have given that ring to Sherita. There were generations of tradition attached to that ring.

  “How does this work? You don’t have to sacrifice a goat or anything, do you?” Sean said.

  “Hey, man, don’t laugh, but yeah, you’re supposed to use a chicken. I’m using some chicken blood from the supermarket. It’s a compromise.”

  “Will that work?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not ready to start cutting off chicken heads. She has alot in there about blood—the meaning of the sacrifice, how blood is the life force of the world. It’s deep. I can see the point, for real, but I’d rather not go that route. I might want to be a vet, you know? How am I supposed to go around killing animals?”

  Sean went silent. He shook the ice at the bottom of his cup, then took off the lid and flung the ice down his throat. He chewed for a while, crunching, then spat most of it out. “You know what? I think I’m chickening out,hombre.”

  Shit. Suddenly, that sounded like common sense.

  Corey had waited this long because he wanted to be careful. No doubt, if Dad hadn’t shown up, Corey would have tried a spell right away. But Dad’s arrival made everything else less important, and he had barely given the papers a thought for those first couple of days. The three of them were acting like a family, doing things together, falling back into rhythms he’d nearly forgotten. Mom was laughing again. For a while, that had been magic enough for him.

  But his curiosity was back. He had changed his mind about experimenting with the spells three dozen times. He wanted to see magic so badly he could barely stand it, but Gramma Marie’s papers sounded like a legal document, with every other sentence a caution.Complete all cleansing rituals before trying to implement any lesser formulas, she wrote, orbeware of grave danger to the untrained hand. What was he supposed to do, listen to the parts he liked and ignore the parts he didn’t? He read most books that way, but this felt different, like he should slow down and take his time. Gramma Marie said she’d already messed up the magic herself. And she was an expert.

  But, shit. Just one little spell. Nothing to hurt anyone or make somebody love you out of the blue, or to try to take anything from anybody. This was a spell to make something come back. A spell to get Mom’s ring, which was God-knows-where by now. A spell to undo one mistake.

  He would do the cleansing ceremonies later, he told himself. He didn’t have time now. Gramma Marie’s cleansing rituals were repetitive, and the lists of necessary ingredients endless. When was he going to have time to collect cedar, sage, rosemary, and lavender? How the hell could he find a parchment, holy water, and goats’ horns? He didn’t want to be avodou priest, he just wanted to see magic. One little thing.

  “No problem if you don’t come,” Corey told Sean. “I’ll just hang with you tonight, then I’ll go make a major fool of myself, chasing after bullshit in the woods.”

  “You really think it’s bull?” Sean sounded surprised.

  Corey shook his head, flicking his finger at an escaped piece of sausage on his paper plate. As usual, Sean could see straight through him. “Nah,” he said. “Ritual magic is practiced all over the world. Why not, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s my point. Just be careful fooling with it.”

  Corey heard laughter, and he saw the three girls from the pickup walking back outside from the counter through the glass door, cracking up over their pizza box. One, a fresh-faced girl with ringlets of curly blond hair, was laughing so hard her face was bright red. Corey couldn’t look away, engrossed by the sight of her. All the girls Sean knew were out of town for the summer or had just graduated from high school, moving on to bigger places, he’d said, so girls were scarce this summer. These girls were older, probably seniors, and they were definitely cute.

  As soon as Corey heard the voice, he realized he must have forgotten where the hell he was.

  “Who thefuck are you staring at, nigger?”

  What was he thinking? Here he was in Hicktown, and he hadn’t thought about the girls being white, or his being black. He wasn’t used to keeping that in his head all the time.

  Corey didn’t have to look around to see who had spoken, his voice killing the laughter. The boy wasn’t big enough to be fat, but he wasn’t more than a few bacon cheeseburgers off. This was the boy who’d been staring at him on Main Street the day he’d met Sean, the one in the rebel flag T-shirt. Closer to him, Corey noticed a deep cleft in his chin and a weird gray streak in his black hair, a faint checkmark over his temple. Corey recognized his broad-legged stance; he was a football player, or wanted to be one. He was six feet tall. And he had friends with him.

  This could turn into an ass-kicking fast.

  “Hey, Bo, you don’t have the right to talk to him like that,” Sean said, before Corey could step on Sean’s foot under the table and tell him to keep quiet.

  “Shut up, faggot. Afraid I’m gonna hurt your black boyfriend’s feelings?”

  The two other boys, who weren’t nearly as large but were large enough, chuckled. One of the girls smiled vacantly, too, but the other two were crowding near Bo, as if to restrain him. This wasn’t the first time they’d seen him acting like a fool, Corey guessed. He wished he’d invited his father to lunch today. Nobody would start any shit with Tariq Hill nearby.

  “Oh, Bo, drop it. Nobody did anything to us. Leave them alone,” one girl said.

  “Bo, let’s just grab the pizza and go,” the other girl said, the blonde Corey had been staring at. She didn’t look so pretty now, the way the side of her mouth was turned down, her eyes so tired. Corey hoped one of the boys would try to talk the big-mouth down too, but neither did.

  Fuck saving face, Corey decided. Dad had told him he’d be surprised how often he could keep out of a fight with a little respect, even if he didn’t mean it. “Hey, man, if I insulted you or your friends in any way, I’m sorry,” Corey said to the boy, looking him in the eye. “There’s no need to call names. I didn’t mean you or your friends any disrespect.”

  Corey was proud of his bullshit, but he must have said the wrong thing. Or said it the wrong way.

  The gray-streaked boy took two lumbering steps to their table, fast. Corey rose to his feet, sure he was about to get jumped. Sean sat holding his empty plate, not moving. Sean wasn’t going to be any help if anything really went down. Corey could tell that already.

  “Are you trying to be a smart-ass? You supposed to be better’n me?” Bo said, so close that Corey could smell his Old Spice. And beer. Bo’s eyes were pile drivers, and Corey couldn’t look him in the face. If he did, he knew he would either get pissed or start laughing.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man,” Corey said. His first week in Oakland, he’d almost gotten thumped outside a movie theater with this exact same conversation. People accused him of being a snob before he’d hardly said a word. Mom told him he should always use proper English, but it sure as hell didn’t do him much good.

  “You trying to act like you ain’t a nigger? You sound white, but a skinny nigger’s all I see.”

  Corey backed up a step, fuming. He had just read about this same shit in Gramma Marie’s papers, about his great-grandfather being pulled from his bed in Louisiana in the middle of the night, killed by white men calling himnigger . His attackers might have castrated him and burned him and who knew what else kind of madness; Gramma Marie hadn’t been able to make herself write it all down. This racist kid needed to learn what year it was, and Corey wished he could be the one to teach him. Motherfucker . But there was a big difference between wishes and reality. He knew that.

  “Let’s go, Sean,” Corey said, still keeping his
eyes low. He prayed Sean could take a hint.

  Sean didn’t need to hear it twice. As soon as Corey spoke, Sean was on his feet, headed to untie the horses. There was nothing but woods a few yards behind the telephone pole, and Corey didn’t like to think about the kind of hurting three guys could put on him if they were out of sight.

  “Where you think you’re going?” Bo said. “Did I say you could go anywhere?”

  Ass-kissing wasn’t going to work this time. This kid was a bully who didn’t like black skin, plain and simple. Corey brought his gaze up to meet Bo’s, remembering Dad’s second lesson: Give ’em something to think twice about. Corey squared his shoulders, raising his chin up to the taller boy. He pushed away the plastic chair that separated him, like he was ready to throw down.

  “I ain’t scared of you,” Corey said. “I don’t soundblack enough for your ignorant redneck ass? How about this?Fuck you.”