SHADOWS

by Jonathan Nasaw

  The dying man opened his eyes. "Who's that? That you, Marty?" Daddy Don's bed had been moved down from the loft when he lost the use of his legs entirely back in August.

  "I'm here, Daddy Don." She reached across to the bedside table and switched on the Harley lamp that Selene had given him as a gift for his sixtieth birthday. It had a miniature bronze '56 Hydra-Glide for a base. "But where's that miserable Dirtbag? He's supposed to be staying with you till I get back."

  The bikers were taking care of their own; rather than send Baechler back to the VA hospital to die after he'd refused palliative radiation, they had been helping Martha care for him at home. Dirtbag had always been a reliable night nurse before—a crankhead, he was considered as unlikely to fall asleep on the job as he was to raid Daddy Don's morphine infuser.

  "Sent him on a beer run. Twitchy motherfucker was getting on my last nerve."

  "You hurting much, Daddy?"

  "Naw, I'm P-far." Pain Free At Rest was the best the doctors at the VA had been able to promise him. At rest meant not moving a muscle. The bitch of the thing was, the way the tumor was progressing, in a few weeks he wouldn't be able to move a muscle. "Just roll me back down."

  Martha lowered the bed and adjusted the pillow under his head while he held his breath against the pain. "Arms in or out?"

  "Out."

  "Whiskers?" She pulled up the covers and began to tuck him in.

  "Out."

  The girl lifted the old biker's footlong ZZ Top beard out from under the sheet; it fluttered down like a ragged-edged white battle pennant across the army blanket. "How long ago did Dirtbag take off?" she asked, kneeling to check the urine bag tied to the bottom rail of the bed. She didn't like leaving him entirely alone, even for a few minutes.

  "Half hour?" A barely perceptible shrug of the wasted shoulders, then a wince. "Me and time ain't exactly been tight lately, Sugaree. But you go ahead, I'll be fine."

  "Naah, I can wait." A lie—if she didn't make it to Mill Valley by the start of the ceremony, her initiation would have to be postponed until the Yule Sabbat. And after hearing Selene's Tale, she was more eager than ever to join the coven. Imagine, not just rituals and incantations and praying to the Goddess, but powders and potions and revenge. She could think of a few boys who could stand a little brucinetta in their Long Island Iced Tea.

  Fortunately, Dirtbag showed up within minutes, carrying a six-pack of Green Death, a carton of Kools, and a bag of Slim Jims; when he entered the house Martha was forcibly reminded of how he had earned his name—she blew him a kiss, but gave him a wide berth on the way out.

  Martha drove to Mill Valley with the top down on the white VW Cabriolet Selene had given her for her sixteenth birthday. Due to the lateness of the hour and the chill in the air, there were only a few trick-or-treaters left on the streets. It was too cold to have the top down, really, but the stars were so splendid overhead that she couldn't bear to shut them out, so instead Martha zipped up her thin nylon jacket and turned up the heater and the blower. She tried to turn up the CD player too, to make up for the added noise of the fan, but by the time she got the volume cranked high enough to hear, it was so distorted she had to eject Counting Crows and punch up Primus. A little distortion never hurt Primus.

  The most noble ladies, in hooded forest green robes, had already taken up their forked brooms when Martha arrived at midnight, as Samhain Eve turned to Hallowmas. The brooms, known as besoms, were for sweeping, not flight, as the witches prepared the already immaculate white carpeted floor of Catherine Bailey's living room for the casting of their circle.

  After determining that Selene was not among them, Martha changed into her robe in the hall, folded her clothes and placed them under her purse, grabbed a besom, and swept her way alongside Catherine. "Heard from Selene?" she whispered from under her hood.

  Catherine shook her head.

  "She promised she'd be here for my initiation. Maybe she forgot about spring ahead, fall back?" Daylight savings had ended at 2:00 A.M. the previous morning.

  "Then she'd have been here an hour early," the plump older woman pointed out sensibly enough; she stopped sweeping and drew Martha over to the side of the room, beside the cantilevered floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall picture windows looking out over a heavily wooded hillside north of Mill Valley. There were no neighboring houses to mar the view—or the privacy. "I know how you feel, sweetheart. But if she doesn't show up, we can go on with your initiation without her. The coven is what matters; this is not a cult of personality."

  "But what if something's wrong—you know she took the Fair Lady today? What if she needs us?"

  Catherine threw back her hood and brushed several unruly strands of I Love Lucy orange curls away from her face. "Do you remember when Selene was so badly hurt, about six or seven years ago?"

  "When that guy who thought he was a vampire tried to rip her throat out?"

  A barely perceptible pause. "Ahhh… yes. Nick Santos. It happened at the Yule Sabbat up at Tahoe."

  "At Mr. Whistler's. I remember. I was like ten."

  "And a few weeks later, after we'd brought her home, Selene threw a pulmonary embolism—know what that is?"

  "An embolism's like a blood clot. Daddy Don had one in his leg."

  "And your godmother had one in her lung. Selene was alone up at the A-frame. When the embolism lodged she was paralyzed by the pain. Managed to take in a sip of air every now and then, but other than that she couldn't move a muscle. Which they said later probably saved her life, because if she'd jarred the embolism loose, its next stop would have been her heart, and that would have killed her."

  "So what happened?" asked Martha warily, not sure where the lesson was going.

  "Half the coven showed up at her house within the hour. I'll never forget; I was watching TV, suddenly there was a roaring sound in my head—not my ears, my head—accompanied by this overwhelming sense that something was wrong with Selene. I called her number—no answer. Sherman was off somewhere" (Catherine's husband was Sherman Bailey, the eminent Mill Valley psychologist) "so I jumped in the car and took off. MV to Bobo via the Panoramic. I was over the mountain in twenty minutes, at her house in thirty. I still don't know how I managed it. When I arrived, though, Carol was already there, and had called the paramedics. And while we were waiting for the ambulance, the two Barbaras showed up, and we compared notes: we'd all gotten the same weird feeling at more or less the same time."

  Catherine pulled her hood back over her head, picked up her besom again, and began sweeping. "Point is, sweetheart," she said over her shoulder, "if Selene wants us, one way or another, she'll let us know."

  * * *

  Martha had to wait in the kitchen while the others cast the sacred circle. She was in a state somewhere between shock and despair. It had been Selene who'd taught her everything she knew about Wicca, Selene who'd introduced her to the coven, Selene who'd encouraged her to take her initiation. Martha knew what was coming from studying her Misikidak, and it was hard for her to imagine accepting the five-fold kiss, much less a forty-stroke scourging, from anyone other than her godmother. When the bell rang in the living room Martha marched down the carpeted hall as though she were being summoned to her execution instead of to her initiation into the mysteries of Wicca.

  Although she'd grown up around clothing-optional beaches, hot springs, hot tubs, and topless biker mamas, and attended one or two lesser sky-clad Sabbats as a guest of the coven in the preceding year (always leaving before the orgy), it still gave Martha a jolt of adolescent discomfort when she turned the corner of the living room to see the eleven other women, ranging in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-sixties, standing naked in their circle.

  She wondered, not for the first time, if she were going to turn out to be a lesbian—not because she found the bodies sexually arousing or anything, but because they always fascinated and disturbed her so. She had time for a quick peep around the circle: Catherine was an opulent, heavy-breasted, round-bellied ur-fertil
ity goddess; next to her old Faye was a dowager-humped question-mark crone; Carol, twenty years after childbearing, scored with stretch lines, was a brown tiger with black stripes; Heloise was pink, with white scars and wrinkles; and so on, all the way around to the two Barbaras, who were holding hands, their backs to Martha as she entered the room. One Barbara was pear-shaped from behind, a lush, blush-colored overripe Bosc pear with legs; the other, standing with her feet pressed primly together, was long-necked, narrow-shouldered, straight-hipped, graceful, and white as a lily.

  Too weird, too funny, too mysterious. Too much flesh and too much shadow. There was something awfully powerful about a woman's body, something that included sex, but went beyond it as well. Martha couldn't name it, but she couldn't deny it either. The girl suppressed a quick shudder: it was her turn to join them.

  Catherine took a formal step backward. Outside the circle, which had closed behind her, she and Martha exchanged passwords—"Perfect love," "Perfect trust"—and a quick peck on the lips. Then Martha produced from the pocket of her robe five nylon cords of red, blue, violet, green, and brown. Catherine took them from her. "Take your robe off."

  Martha grabbed the neck of her robe in either hand and pulled it off over her head; embarrassed again, she busied herself in folding her robe and placing it with the other discarded robes on the table in the adjoining dining room.

  "Now I'm not going to blindfold you," Catherine explained. "But you have to keep your eyes shut until the Ring of Power is actually on your finger. It's part of the test—if you open your eyes even once before then, you'll have to wait until the next Sabbat to try again."

  Catherine stepped behind Martha, and with her left arm around the girl's waist tugged her gently backward through a gap in the circle. The Barbaras parted for them, and closed behind them. Then the older woman knelt before the acolyte and tied one cord around Martha's left ankle and the other around her right knee. "Turn around, and put your hands behind your back."

  Martha obeyed and Catherine bound her hands loosely with the three remaining cords while delivering the charge of the Goddess, the one that begins, "Oh listen to the words of the Great Mother…" and ends, "So mote it be."

  Charge completed, Catherine took the girl by the waist again and led her twelve times around the circle. Several times during the course of the circumambulation, Martha came perilously close to opening her eyes; she came even closer when it was time to receive the five-fold kiss. Ever since she'd learned of it, she'd assumed it would be her godmother's dry soft lips brushing her ankles, knees, vagina, breasts, and lips, and somehow that would have been okay with her. With Selene doing it, it would have been more like being born than anything sexual.

  But instead it was Catherine's lips, full and warm, that were kissing her, first the bound ankle, then the unbound, and in between kisses it was the red-headed witch reciting the formula: "Blessed thy feet that have brought thee…" Next her knees were kissed and blessed; then—whoaashit—those soft insistent lips were pressed firmly against the front of Martha's pussy, a quick little O of a kiss. "Blessed the womb, bearer of life…"

  Catherine stood, then bent to kiss each of Martha's nipples.

  "Blessed thy breasts, Goddess-formed in beauty…" Finally a brief pressure of the soft lips to Martha's own—"Blessed these lips, that would speak sacred names"—and the first part of the ritual was over.

  Now came the scourge. "Will you suffer to learn?" was Catherine's ritual question.

  "I will."

  "Then kneel before the altar."

  Martha almost opened her eyes again to look around for the altar, but caught herself just in time. Catherine took her by the waist and led her over, helped her kneel, then whisked her three times across her bare buttocks with the leather scourge.

  It didn't hurt—not physically, anyway, not much, which was just as well, as the first three blows were followed by a series of seven, nine, and finally twenty-one strokes. But there was something so emotionally powerful about being whipped publicly—not just whipped, but whipped naked, kneeling, and bound—that Martha couldn't help sobbing anyway, tentatively and without focus at first, until her mind, casting about for a suitable sorrow to weep over, settled briefly on Selene's absence; halfway through the last round of strokes, though, Martha decided she was crying for Connie and Moll as well—for all her missing mothers.

  But by the time it was over and Catherine, cautioning her to continue to keep her eyes shut, had helped her to her feet and untied her bonds, Martha was feeling much lighter, as if something had been released from deep inside, and she was even ready to consider forgiving all three mothers for having so cruelly deserted her.

  The ritual anointing, although it also involved her privates, was a piece of cake compared to the kiss and the scourging. Catherine daubed her above each breast, then over the vagina, first with oil, then with wine, then with spit, nine daubs in all, while leading her through the oath: "May my own powers against me move / Should I false to this oath prove…"

  Martha sensed the commotion, rather than heard it. A soft shifting of weight as the circle parted after the final daub, and then Catherine must have stepped back: the girl stood alone in the circle for the first time since crossing into it. But only for a moment—then she felt a stirring in the air as someone approached her across the intervening blackness.

  Martha's slender body swayed against an unsubstantial wind as she fought the instinct to open her eyes. It was Selene coming toward her, and yet it was not Selene. Or it was Selene gone to hell and back, a hot dry Selene with a scorched and bitter scent, kneeling before her, slipping a heavy ring onto the third finger of her right hand, kissing the back of her hand with lips so hot they left a burning sensation.

  "Have you chosen a name?" A dry, pained whisper—but Selene's voice nonetheless.

  "Hecate."

  "Then welcome, Hecate, to the Coven of Diana. I bestow upon thee the Ring of Power."

  Martha was seized, embraced briefly; she smelled smoke, felt a feverish body pressed against her and a birdlike heartbeat against her own.

  Selene managed one last dry whisper—"My power I will unto thee"—before collapsing into her goddaughter's arms. Catherine sprang forward, and the two of them helped lower the high priestess's body gently to the floor.

  CHAPTER 6

  « ^ »

  When Selene came to she found herself lying on the floor of Catherine Bailey's living room staring up at a pair of watery blue bloodshot eyes magnified by round-lensed spectacles. "Sherman."

  "Selene." Catherine's husband, a tubby man with a walrus mustache and sparse ponytail, stared down at her with practiced concern. "Are you back with us?"

  "So far as I know." No throat pain as long as she whispered.

  "Thank God for that. I don't know why people expect a psychologist to be any use in emergencies." He helped her to a sitting position; she indicated she wanted to stand, and he gave her his arm. "If you'd been conscious I could have consoled your inner child—beyond that I'm out of my depth."

  "We'll take care of her now," said Martha, hurrying to Selene's side and taking her other arm.

  "Are you going to be okay?" Sherman asked. "Do you want me to drive you over to Marin General to get checked out? What'd you take, anyway? Smells like you did a Richard Pryor with it."

  "Belladonna," she whispered. "But I'll be fine."

  No response.

  "Really, Sherman. You can go on back to whatever you were doing."

  He still seemed reluctant to exit a room full of twelve naked women—and one naked girl; eventually Catherine walked him down the hall, explaining that the orgy hadn't been canceled, just postponed for an hour or so. "The troops are getting restless," he replied.

  With her loosely curled fist she demonstrated what the troops could do with themselves, then kissed him and gave him a gentle shove. When she returned to the living room, Selene was lying with her head in Martha's lap on one of the sofas that had been shoved back against the wall o
pposite the picture windows. The two of them were still naked, but the other ladies were rerobing and reforming their circle, seated this time, in front of the sofa. Upon seeing Catherine, Selene sat up and patted the cushion next to her. "Cathy, over here," she whispered hoarsely. "I have to ask you something before we go on."

  Catherine detoured past the dining room, grabbed the last three robes from the table. They were identical except for size; she donned the 16, carried one 6 over to Martha, and helped Selene slip the other 6 over her head before joining her on the couch. "What did you want to ask?"

  Selene reached out and adjusted Catherine's hood, pulling it back from her eyes, fixing her with a meaningful if somewhat bleary stare. "After supper tonight, did you sneak down to the laundry room and eat a napoleon?"

  Catherine's mouth fell open. Before she could answer, Selene turned to Martha. "And you, my darling—Daddy Don was asleep—you went out to the shed and pinched a bud from the drying rack, smoked it in your little silver pipe, the one with the turquoise beads. Yes?"

  Martha nodded, her gray eyes gone round and solemn, just as Catherine found her voice. "Sherman and I," she began haltingly. "We're trying to lose weight. But no one could have—"

  Selene turned back to her with a trace of the old twinkle in her eye. "While you were down in the basement with Napoleon, Sherman was in his study with Sara Lee."

  "Why that cheating son of a bitch!"

  Selene stroked the smooth satin over Catherine's thigh with a warm gentle hand. "I'll tell you something else. In the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk, Sherman has a stack of dirty magazines. He took out a few to browse through while you were doing the dishes. They were Plumpers and Big Women, Meaty Mamas, and Fat Femmes. So if you're dieting for your hubby, dearie, you're wasting your time."