SHADOWS

by Jonathan Nasaw

  "Amazing what money can do."

  "Just a citizen in need."

  "Yeah, like! as Martha would say."

  "That Martha. Seems like a hell of a kid."

  "To say the least."

  "So how was Nick's service?"

  "A drag. But everybody missed you. All your old drinking buddies were there. The good Reverend took the opportunity to lecture them about sobriety."

  "I rather thought she might."

  Selene had crossed to the dresser and was removing the tortoise-shell combs from her hair. "Where are you staying?" she asked, too casually.

  "Bed-and-breakfast in Olema."

  She picked up her brush and turned back to him. "I'm too tired for games, Jamey. Where do we stand?"

  "Funny you should ask." He patted the side of the bed.

  She sat down on the edge of the foam. "Hilarious."

  "No, really. It's all I've been thinking about since I left. I don't want to lose you, Selene. I can't apologize for what I said, but I won't ask you to apologize for what you did, either."

  "You'd better not," Selene replied, starting in on her hair again, brushing with short, angry strokes. "You have to admit, my way did work. We're all alive, and Aldo's not."

  "Let's hope so. You should have cut his fucking head off, though, before you left. To be sure he was dead."

  Oh, I'm sure, thought Selene. He has to be dead—not only was he a pincushion, he was the second man in the orgomancy. But she realized Jamey wouldn't have appreciated her reasoning. "By the way, you never did tell me what all you saw when you went flying."

  "Only my body. From above. Couldn't bring myself to leave it."

  Figures, thought Selene. Found himself by the Fair Lady's light. He took the brush from her. "Here, let me help." His long-fingered hands were skilled and knowing—and manicured again. "I missed you, these last two days."

  "Would you like to stay over?" She hadn't known she was going to invite him until just then, but it felt about right. Nobody should have to sleep alone after a funeral.

  He pushed her hair aside and kissed her on the nape of the neck. "I was counting on it."

  CHAPTER 10

  « ^ »

  After roaming the earth for what seemed like an eternity, Aldo Striescu's disembodied spirit had more or less reconciled itself to the idea that this was it, this was the afterlife. One thing sure, it wasn't hell: hell was down below where the people were. Every time he looked down from his restless flight they were up to something nasty: Hutus hacking up Tutsis with machetes, Serbs marching Muslims into mass graves—and all this during a time of relative peace on earth, as time and peace were measured down there.

  Even apart from the large-scale slaughters, there didn't seem to be a square mile of inhabited earth where he couldn't find some form of cruelty being practiced. Murders, rapes, child abuse… He had just about decided that if this was the afterlife, he could live with it, when suddenly, against his will, he found himself hovering above his own battered, blinded body again; struggle as he might against the process, he could feel himself being sucked back into it; it was like being drawn down into a whirlpool, drowning into life. If he'd had a mouth he'd have screamed—then he did—he screamed and screamed and screamed, for though he now had a mouth, he had no eyes.

  But if he had no eyes, how could they hurt so? He thought of the pistol. He could end the agony with the pistol. But as he began feeling around for the kit bag with the gun in it, his hand brushed against a small plastic pill bottle, and he remembered the Percodans. He tore off the rubbery plastic lid with his teeth and choked down a handful of pills.

  "That ought to do it," he told himself, breathing hard, his voice hoarse from screaming. Of course, what would really do it was blood—he remembered how cavalierly he had polished off the last of his stash last night. Or was it last night? Just as it occurred to him that he hadn't the faintest idea what day it was, how much time had passed since the striga's betrayal, he heard the sound of an automobile climbing the hill in low gear. Friend or foe? But Aldo had no friends here. He scrabbled around frantically for the kit bag, found it just as he heard a car door slam, then a man's voice calling "Hellooo? Mr. Patch? Hellooo?"

  Friend or foe? Neither—it had to be William Honey, keeping his appointment with Len Patch. And the day? Had to be Monday, 22 November, 1993. "Drac noroc," whispered Aldo as he slipped the pistol under the waistband of his trousers. "The cavalry has arrived."

  * * *

  The realtor William Honey had climbed out of bed that morning with a song on his lips: "Timing and lo-ca-tion / Timing and lo-ca-tion," to the tune of "Some Enchanted Evening." Something about the date had been nagging at him ever since he'd made his appointment with the mysterious Len Patch last week. It wasn't until he saw the Herald that morning that it struck him: this was the thirtieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination—the first Kennedy assassination.

  But was it a good or a bad omen, that was the question. He played with the notion on the way to the office; he worked out of a small cottage on his place in the Carmel Highlands, so it was a short commute. Depended which way you looked at it, he decided, sitting down at his computer and accessing the Infolink program to print out a parcel map of the distressed property down the coast. Bad for Kennedy but good for Johnson. Bad for, what was his name,

  Vaughn Meader, that comedian who'd done such a funny impression of JFK, but good for Oliver Stone.

  And perhaps it would be good for William Honey as well—a comparable tear-down a few miles down the coast had sold for nearly four hundred thousand in October. He slipped the parcel map into his briefcase along with an abstract on the property, loaded a few tools into the back of his Volvo station wagon, and headed down the coast shortly before ten o'clock. The appointment with Patch wasn't until noon, but Honey hadn't been out to the property for months. By now the place might need a little fixing up just to qualify as a tear-down.

  When he arrived he noticed the cattle gate was open—good thing there weren't any cattle within a mile of the place—and when he drove on up the dirt road he saw the beige Toyota under the cypress trees. He parked next to it. His first thought was that Patch had also arrived early, but if so, he saw upon closer examination, it had been very early: the car was crusted with sap and bird droppings.

  "Helloooo? Mr. Patch? Hellooo?" No answer. In his blue blazer, khaki slacks, and brown loafers, Honey made his way through the tall grass, briefcase under his arm. Near shack looked about the same—still skeletal, stripped last year by squatters who were too lazy to gather firewood from up the hill. The first thing he noticed about the second cabin was the hole just inside the door—somebody'd put their foot through it for sure. He didn't know what to make of the other hole, though, the neat rectangular one from which the floorboards had been carefully removed and set aside. Perhaps Mr. Patch had wanted a look at the foundation, in which case he'd have been disappointed—there wasn't any.

  It was the condition of the third cabin, the best of the three, that started him swearing under his breath. Someone had been camping out in it. Flies were buzzing around a chicken carcass, a bottle of vodka lay on the floor beside an empty Pepsi bottle. When he saw the body lying on its back behind the open Styrofoam ice chest, his first stunned assumption was that whoever it was was already dead—but then one of the arms waved feebly at the circling flies.

  "Good Christ!" Honey dropped his briefcase and hurried inside. At the sound of his voice the mangled creature on the floor had groaned weakly; the realtor squatted down by the man's side, trying to keep his pants out of the blood that had pooled around the hideous head; the eyes were crusted with gore. "Don't worry, fella, it's going to be all right—just hang on."

  "Bluh!"

  "What's that?"

  "Blood. Need blood."

  "I've got a cell phone in the car. I'll tell them when I call for the ambulance. I'll be right back, I promise."

  "No… your… blood."

  "What about my blood
?" Honey bent over the body and put his ear to the lips to hear the reply.

  "Need it."

  "Well I don't know—"

  Those were William Honey's last words—appropriate enough, for he never did know what hit him. Just a muffled explosion and a blow to the midsection that drove the air out of him. He felt no pain as he pitched forward across Aldo's body: mercifully, the .38-caliber bullet that had torn through him had severed his spinal cord on its way out.

  November 22nd, 1993. Bad day for William Honey, good day for Aldo Striescu.

  * * *

  By the time he crawled out from under the body of the realtor some fifteen minutes later, Aldo was feeling almost chipper, for a newly blinded man. It wasn't only the blood, but also the memory of roaming the earth as a disembodied soul that had him feeling so bubbly. For one thing, he was no longer afraid of death; he wasn't yearning desperately for it anymore, the Percodans having finally kicked in, but now he thought of it as an ally he might or might not have to call upon, rather than an enemy to be avoided at all costs. For another, more than just Aldo's relationship with death had been affected by his spiritual journey. Like Ebeneezer Scrooge after his experience with the supernatural, Aldo's entire outlook on life had been transformed. Always before he had felt himself cut off from the rest of humanity. The way other people, even the most virulent agents of the Securitate, were always going on about good and evil, Aldo had taken it for granted that some sort of moral absolute existed, and that he was outside it. Nor had it ever occurred to him to deny its existence, any more than it would have occurred to the tone-deaf Major Strada to deny the existence of music.

  But now, after—quick math—four days and nights of watching humanity in action, Aldo finally understood that Do unto others had always been the whole of the golden rule, and that the only reason he had felt himself outside the pale of humanity was that he'd been in the vanguard all along. The feeling of well-being didn't last long, however. No sooner had he realized that there was no moral absolute than it hit him that it was too late for him to take advantage of his new understanding: he was only a poor blind man lying on the floor of a tumbledown shack on a deserted, albeit half-million-dollar, hillside, with a corpse for company.

  Aldo buried his face in his hands. He would have wept—for the first time since childhood Aldo Striescu would have wept—but he couldn't. As if the irony inherent in the situation weren't already cruel enough, he soon discovered that whatever the striga had spat into his eyes had evidently destroyed his lacrimal apparatus as well: he had no tears to shed.

  He turned his sightless face to his cooling companion. "So, William Honey? Are you up there laughing at me? I don't blame you—you've certainly had your revenge. But now I'm going to have mine, eyes or no eyes, and when I'm done I'll join you up there, and together we'll fly around and look down at all the bodies, our own included. Then we'll have ourselves a real laugh."

  * * *

  Chores that should have taken minutes took hours. Locating the thermos, transferring as much of William Honey's blood into it as he could before the stuff went bad. Crawling around the bloody floor of the cabin, slipping and sliding and swearing, searching for his kit bag again, finding it not by touch but by smell—comfortable leather smell. Packing—he would take only the kit bag with him, along with his black-lensed glasses and collapsible white cane. Funny, how all those hours of pretending to be blind turned out to have been practice for the real thing.

  Not so funny, but equally necessary: finding the box of pop-up Wash'n Dri's, gritting his teeth as he soaked and dabbed the clotted blood and gore from around his ruined eyes. Searing pain, like pouring turpentine over an open wound, but it had to be done—didn't want some well-meaning Samaritan driving him straight to the hospital; bound to be questions asked.

  Also necessary, but seemingly impossible: sanitizing the scene. And what a scene, thought Aldo: inside, he had the body of a local man who would presumably be missed sooner rather than later. Outside, he had the man's own car. No sense trying to hide the body if he couldn't hide the car. Even worse, the Toyota was out there too, and could easily be traced to Leonard Patch of Croyden, whose belongings and fingerprints were strewn about the floor of the bloody cabin. And any fire large enough and hot enough to cleanse the scene would only bring the authorities that much sooner. This would be the greatest professional challenge of Aldo's career.

  Clearly the automobiles out there were at the root of the problem. He mulled it over as he fumbled around in his suitcase for a change of clothes, and a possible solution came to him as he pulled on a fresh-smelling shirt. He remembered the card clipped to the inside of the sun visor of the Toyota, a card he'd seen every time he'd flipped the visor down to check out his bloodshot eyes in the courtesy mirror, IN ORDER TO MEET OR EXCEED CALIFORNIA EMISSION CONTROL STANDARDS, it declared, THIS VEHICLE IS EQUIPPED WITH A CATALYTIC CONVERTER, and went on to warn of the danger involved in parking an automobile equipped with such a device directly over dry leaves or brush.

  Or high grass? High, dry grass? Aldo felt through Honey's pockets for his car keys, then tapped his way out of the cabin and started down the hill. He soon found that by keeping the buildings close on his right, staying in their shade, occasionally brushing the walls with his right hand—which had healed up nicely while he was off flying, thank you very much—he was able to make his way from cabin to cabin with relative ease. At the far corner of the third cabin, however, there was nothing for it but to launch himself headlong into the fearful sea of darkness with only the cawing of the crows in the cypress trees, the degree of slope to the hillside, and, once he'd left the shade of the cabins, the angle of the sun against his right cheek to orient him. Several times he fell; the last fall sent him sprawling against the side of the Toyota—he had reached the cypress grove.

  Next challenge: moving the vehicles. He tapped his way around them in ever-widening circles, trying to ascertain how the Corolla and the other car—a station wagon, by the shape of it—were aligned in relation to each other and the trees, how much room he'd have to back out, what sort of angle he'd need to cut the wheels before driving forward into the grass. He decided to try driving the Toyota first—it had an automatic shift—but turned on the Volvo's radio in order to be able to find his way back to it.

  Aldo started up the Toyota and backed it a car length or so, cocking the wheel tentatively to the right, listening for the shriek of metal on metal which would tell him if he'd cut the angle too close to the station wagon. When the front bumper had cleared the other car he straightened the wheel, then drove forward until he could hear the tall grass whispering against the front bumper, then brushing the undercarriage.

  He left the Toyota in park with the motor running, followed the sound of the station wagon's radio back down to the cypress grove, and repeated the process of backing and cutting and shifting, with a great deal of clutch grinding and gear slipping and bucking and stalling, until finally the front grille of the wagon fetched up against the rear bumper of the Toyota with a satisfying thud. He set the hand brake, grabbed his kit bag, and climbed out without shutting off the engine. Then it occurred to him that perhaps the wagon had some sort of manual choke. He reached in through the open door and fumbled around the dashboard, found a knob that pulled outward, and adjusted the idle speed until the engine was whining like a dentist's drill.

  There, he told himself, backing away from the car, then turning around slowly like a dog about to lie down in high grass, until the sun was warming his right cheek again. That ought to get that catastrophic converter heated up nicely. He set off down the hill, kit bag in one hand, white cane in the other, chuckling at his fine English pun.

  Laughing in the dark? Sure, but when everything was dark, where else was there to laugh?

  CHAPTER 11

  « ^ »

  Selene should have been enjoying herself more. What was not to enjoy? Almost every night she and Jamey dined in another fine restaurant, took in another show, had fabulou
s sex in (and out of) her new top-of-the-line Simmons Beautyrest. Mornings were spent with Martha, talking over old times while Martha copied out her own Book of Shadows by hand. They reminisced about Daddy Don, whose funeral Sunday afternoon had gone off without a hitch, though the roar of a hundred hogs had sent residents of Stinson Beach scurrying into doorways seeking shelter from an earthquake. The riders carried small paper bindles of ashes; as the procession wound up Highway 1 past Dead Woman's Curve, each sent his or her few grams of Daddy Don wafting over the side of the cliff to join Connie.

  Selene's afternoons were full as well. Luncheon with one or another of the most noble ladies, then a few rounds of serious shopping—couch, chairs, lamps, rugs, wall hangings, knickknacks—she had decided to redecorate the A-frame top to bottom.

  If she got home before sunset Jamey would still be asleep under the blackout tent in the loft. Selene would bring him a waker-upper from one of the bags in the fridge (he had renewed his connection with Blood Bank Bev, the former doyenne of Vampires Anonymous), and together, fog allowing, they would watch through the Plexiglas bubble of the skylight as the sky darkened and the stars came out. Then off to dinner at a fine restaurant, and so on. Not a hard life.

  So why the vague sense of dissatisfaction that colored her days and nights? Probably equal parts post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from the events of the last few weeks, and what might be called pretraumatic stress disorder, stemming from the inescapable knowledge that by the end of the week she and Jamey would be off to London to confront his father.

  But there was something else troubling her as well, the same question that had been nagging at her since long before Halloween: even if everything went smoothly in London, she still had no idea what she was going to do afterward. Jamey seemed to be assuming the two of them would take up where they had left off before he had married Lourdes. He hadn't proposed to her again yet, but it seemed pretty clear to her that it was only a matter of time. He'd already dropped a few hints to the effect that, given her current disaffection with Wicca, there really wasn't anything holding her back from resigning her position as high priestess now, was there?