He’d always known that Trappersville was small. Even so, he liked to think of himself as a man of some experience. Someone who’d done things, like tried Greek food or ate hotdogs with sweet peppers and mustard, but not ketchup. Aletia, however, made him realize how small his world really was.
The girl had been everywhere. She grew up in southern Mexico near the Guatemalan border and had moved to Oregon when she was thirteen. In the ensuing years, she’d been from San Fran to New York, from Duluth, Minnesota to Duluth, Georgia, from the northern-most icy plains of Canada to the southern-most tip of South America. Iceland to Australia, Spain to Japan… It was incredible.
“So Filipinos don’t speak Filipino?” he asked, confused.
“Nope. Tagalog,” she explained, pronouncing it tah-GAH-log.
“And ‘Filipino’ is spelled with an ‘F,’ but the Philippines is spelled with a ‘P H?’”
“Yep.”
“Whoa,” he sighed, leaning back in the molded plastic chair and looking down the alley.
“What’s on your mind, cowboy?” she asked playfully.
Dallas shrugged, succumbing to an unusual bout of shyness. “Just thinking that you’re pretty great, is all.”
“Awww, you’re cute when you blush, like un niño pequeño.”
“I ain’t blushing. It’s just, it’s hot in here. Johnson’s got the thermostat up too high,” he said, pulling at the neck of his shirt.
“Uh huh. It is a little warm in here, but I don’t think it’s the furnace,” Aletia said with a suggestive grin.
Dallas grinned back. “Well, I guess I’d better get a fresh round to help us cool off a bit. Same?”
Aletia gave a thumbs up in answer, and Dallas rose to head to the bar. As he made his way passed the lanes, he passed a number of regulars. Each nodded or waved a greeting, even Fancy Dan.
“Hot damn, Dallas. That girl’s a beaut! What’s she doing with you?” Dan called out.
Adorned in his usual eye-searing conflagration of colors and patterns, Fancy Dan practically glowed in the neon and black lights of the bowling alley. Squinting his eyes, Dallas responded with a well-executed middle finger. The two men had never exactly considered each other to be friends. Year after year, their teams had squared off during league bowling. The end result of those regular encounters was that Dallas thought Dan was a whiny little bitch, and Dan thought Dallas was a testosterone-laden brute. When Dallas’s team won the summer’s bowling tourney, it drove an even bigger wedge between the two men. The fact that Dan was one of the few folks who genuinely believed Herb was a vampire had helped thaw things between them a little, but not much.
Passing the shoe rental counter, Dallas involuntarily looked up at the board displaying the Roll-Masters Hall of Fame. His name stared back, prominently displayed at the top along with Herb’s and Stanley’s. Seeing it hurt in ways that Dallas couldn’t explain. Dropping his eyes, he pushed through the saloon-style doors into the bar.
Rhonda, the ever-present bartender, was working her magic. Her iron grey mullet passed by in a blur as she hurried from one end of the bar to the other, filling pints, rinsing out rocks glasses, shaking the martini shaker, and yelling at her son to stop fiddling with the karaoke machine and give her a hand.
Waiting for Rhonda to take his order, Dallas’s mind wandered a short ways to Aletia. She really was amazing. He hadn’t felt this way about a girl since…
“Lois!”
Herb’s ex stood next to him at the bar. She must’ve walked in right behind him. Strange that he hadn’t noticed her when walking from the alley though.
“We need to talk, Dallas,” she said in a serious voice while looking up at him, her face unreadable in the neon and track light glow.
Lois? When did she get here? he wondered. He glanced over to see if Rhonda was ever going to stop by… And there was a napkin on the bar. A square napkin. White, square. Definitely a napkin. It had been folded. Looking at it, he realized it had been folded twice. A twice-folded napkin. If he were to unfold it, it would be four squares. As it was though, it was just one square. One white, square napkin, folded. Check.
“Don’t be a jerk, Dallas. We need to talk.”
Someone was talking but not about napkins. That was weird. There was a stack of napkins right there. His eyes moved down the folds, trying to count them. Twenty? Thirty? Yes, thirty white, folded napkins. Check.
“Dammit, Dallas. What’s your problem?”
The frustrated voice didn’t make a lot of sense. Why get mad at Dallas? Houston, sure. Lots of problems with Houston. The Oilers hadn’t been around since Bud Adams moved them to Tennessee and renamed them the Titans. Dallas though. Dallas still had the Cowboys. The cheerleaders wore white cowboy hats. Like napkins, he realized. They wore white napkin cowboy hats. Check.
“Oh crap, the spell. Hang on a sec,” he heard a voice say. Nodding vaguely, he fixed his eyes on the white square on the bar. Napkin.
“Septul dhanna rigosstro vale. I am here and you will see. Distracted, you’ll no longer be.”
A thunderclap sounded between Dallas’s ears, and suddenly, Lois was standing right in front of him. Startled, he jumped back with a, “Holy shit!”
Pressing a hand to his chest, he continued in a calmer tone. “Jesus, Mary and a paternity test, Lois! Why you sneaking up on me like that? You damn near gave me a heart attack.”
“Everything okay here?” Rhonda asked, finally making her way over.
“Hi Rhonda, we’re fine,” Lois responded, still peering up at Dallas with an inscrutable look on her face.
“Lois? Well, I’ll be,” Rhonda said. “I didn’t even recognize you without your, um. Is that dress new? It’s very. Black.” Rhonda laughed nervously. “And that’s gotta be a new shade of eyeliner…” Rhonda leaned across the bar, flooding Dallas’s nose with a mixed bag of smells. Nicotine, a cherry throat lozenge, sweat, and a heavy perfume that wanted to be daffodils but smelled more like dill pickle. “Oh you poor dear, that’s not eyeliner. You look exhausted!”
Lois’s eyes finally broke from Dallas’s. “Hi, Rhonda. I’m alright. I just, I’ve been…” she trailed off, returning her sunken eyes to Dallas. “We just really need to talk, and this probably isn’t the best place. Can we go back to my place?”
“And why would he do that?” Aletia asked, her accented words clipped off to sharp edges. “Friend of yours, Dallas? Maybe someone I should be properly introduced to?”
Dallas’s head whipped around and saw Aletia standing just inside the bar’s entrance. Every inch of her radiated anger.
Oh crap, he thought.
“Aletia! Hey babe, this is Lois. She is, um, was, ah. Well, she works at the diner at Ronnie’s Truck Stop, and she was, um. Well, remember that vamp I staked? Before he was a demon thing, he was my buddy, you know? Herb. My buddy Herb. He and Lois. Um.”
“Herb and I were on a date when Dallas killed him.” Lois stated in a flat voice. For a moment, it seemed like the lights in the dim bar dimmed even further, and shadows seemed to pile up around her. “Who’s the new tramp, Dallas? Doesn’t look like your usual floozy. She seems even more,” Lois tapped her chin, looking for the right word. “Trashy.”
“Said the goth wanna-be in Bumblefuck, Wisconsin,” Aletia shot back. “Where did you get those clothes, puta? Rags ‘R’ Us or the Sack Barn?”
Rhonda barked at the two women. “No funny stuff in my bar, dammit! You two either simmer down or get the hell out. The last time a fight broke out in my bar, I had to replace the burned carpet.”
Aletia’s long legs moved her to Dallas’s side, and a possessive arm slid around his waist. She glared at Lois with all the animosity of a cobra eyeballing a mongoose for a long moment, but then her expression changed. She looked confused, then surprised, then angry again, the reactions passing across her face in a flash. With a forceful shove, she pushed Dallas behind her and dropped into a crouch.
“Get back, Dallas!” Aletia commanded. Her hands made a series of
quick gestures, finishing with her arms extended and fingers intertwined.
Lois stepped back hard, as if she’d been slapped in the face, and her already serious expression turned mean.
“I said you stop it right now! Knock it off, or I’m calling the cops!” Rhonda huffed, shaking a thick finger.
“Cops won’t help,” Aletia growled. “Fortunately, there just happens to be a bruja hunter in the room, and she has one of these!”
Aletia’s hands broke from their strange intertwining, and one grabbed for a long necklace beneath her shirt. Pulling it out, she brandished a darkly shining pendant. Lois took another step back and then regained her footing.
“You’re going to make cracks about my clothes when you’re wearing jewelry from a gumball machine? Some nerve. Holen dah, mik’spentu ran! Warding broken, worthless token!”
The pendant that was dangling from the silver chain split with an audible crack and opened like a pistachio. Dark pieces of faceted gemstone fell away, leaving a bright red gumball firmly affixed to the chain.
While Aletia gaped at the gumball, Lois took a deep breath and let it out very slowly.
“When you’re done with your flavor of the week, come to my place. We need to talk,” she said to a stunned Dallas. “It’s about Herb.” With a parting glare at Aletia, Lois turned and shoved her way out of the saloon-style doors.
Dallas watched her storm off, noticing for the first time the black shift and matching loafers she was wearing. It was such a break from her usual brightly colored halter tops, slim-fit jeans, and trendy high heels that he wondered if it really was Lois walking from the bar. His brain chugged in place, trying to put the pieces from the last few moments together.
“You’re dead vampire friend’s ex-girlfriend is a bruja, a witch?” Aletia asked, astonished. “You really know how to pick ‘em. We have to tell Colton. Vampires, boo hags, and now a bruja? This place is a total hell spawn hot zone.”
Dallas shook his head emphatically. “No, not Lois. She’s no witch. Look, I don’t know what all that was just now, but that’s Lois. She’s not. I mean, she can’t be. No way.”
In response, Aletia held up her silver chain with the red gumball.
“That was a two hundred year old talisman, fashioned at the request of William Stoughton himself after he presided over the Salem Witch Trials. That puta cracked it like a Cadbury Egg and turned it into a gumball. A gumball!” Aletia shook it for emphasis. “And you are seriously telling me she’s not a witch?”
Grabbing Dallas’s arm, she dragged him toward the exit.
“Come on,” Aletia ordered. “We’re going back to camp.”
“But she said it was about Herb,” he finally protested. “She wants to talk about Herb. Lois hasn’t talked to me in weeks. Not a word, except for the, ‘get the hell away from me,’ kinda words. If she wants to talk, I have to go see her. I mean, maybe she’s forgiven me. Maybe she finally understands what I had to do when I,” he coughed, throat gone momentarily dry. “When I killed… it. Him. When I killed Herb.”
Unbidden and wholly unexpected tears welled up and streamed down Dallas’s face.
“I killed him, Aletia. I know I had to, and I know I saved Lois and a lot of folks, but Lois doesn’t understand. Look, you have to let me talk to her. I don’t know if she’s a witch or whatever, but if she is, it’s a phase or something. It has to be.” The idea made sense and dug stubborn roots as he talked it through.
“She was real broken up when Herb died. She probably just, you know, got kinda confused, and maybe Charmed was on. I don’t know, but if she thinks she’s a witch, she’s not a bad witch. Not Lois.”
Aletia looked ready to spit, like she’d bitten into a mealy apple and realized it a second too late. After a moment though, her expression softened. With a sigh, she placed a palm on Dallas chest before reaching around him and pulling him into a hug.
“I never told you why I joined the Society,” she started, voice heavy with emotion. “Now’s probably not the best time for the whole story, but…”
Aletia looked up at Dallas, eyes gone moist beneath her long, dark lashes.
“I know what you’re going through. Go talk to her, Dallas. When you’re done though, you come straight back to camp. You have to tell Colton about this. If you don’t, you’ll leave me no choice.”
Stepping back from him, she stood up straight, arms still on Dallas’s shoulders.
“We’re the Society, Dallas. We’re all that stands between the world of men and the monsters of the dark. Brujas might be humans, not monsters like vampiros or werewolves, but they choose a side the second they cast their first spell. They open themselves up to the dark, and that’s it. They become the enemy. But if she’s a new witch, well…” Aletia looked down for a moment before seeming to reach a decision.
“Maybe it’s not too late for your friend.”
Dallas nodded eagerly and turned to go, but stopped when Aletia spoke again.
“But Dallas, if it is too late, you have to be able to do what’s needed.”
Neither spoke again as they walked from the bowling alley, but Aletia’s words rolled back and forth through Dallas’s mind like heavy crates on a storm-tossed ship, threatening to break open and unleash the full import of their contents on a strange and confusing world.
Chapter 21
Dallas pulled his truck into Lois’s drive, killed the headlights, and rolled to a stop. Like most of the homes in Trappersville, Lois’s little rambler was set back in the trees and fairly isolated from her neighbors. For a moment, the only sound was the rumble of Deloris’s V8 engine. With a determined turn of the key, silence prevailed. This wasn’t the regular silence that Northwoods dwellers were accustomed to though. Usually, a silent night was still full of the small sounds of the woods. Stepping from his truck to the gravel drive, Dallas felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle and stopped to consider the cause. His head cocked first one way, then the other as he listened. Nothing. Not a sound. No breeze through the stubborn leaves still on the trees, no motors from the nearby road, no bird calls or rustle of small, nocturnal woodland creatures going about their evening mischief. It was truly and completely silent.
As he crunched his way toward Lois’s front door, Dallas felt distinctly out of place. Each step, each breath seemed to crash and echo around him while the silence waited disapprovingly for his rude noises to dissipate.
Finally reaching the steps leading up to her door, he steeled himself and reached out to knock. A split-second before rapping his knuckles against the storm door, he heard voices and froze. Lois’s voice was easy to identify. The other voice was much quieter and sounded… Dallas searched for the right word.
Tinny, he thought. Maybe the radio?
Hearing Lois’s voice again, he decided that must be it. She was probably on the phone and had left the radio on. Knocking lightly on the door, his sharp ears heard Lois say, “Shhh! Quiet,” before footsteps crescendoed as they approached the door.
“Who’s there?” Lois asked.
“Dallas. I, uh. You said you wanted to talk and, well. I’m here,” he finished, lamely.
“Are you alone?”
“What? Yeah, I’m alone. Just me. What’s going on, Lois?”
A deadbolt thocked, a chain clinked, and the door opened a sliver. Lois peered out, looking first at and then past Dallas. Satisfied that he was alone, the door opened further, allowing Dallas to step inside.
The front door opened into a small living room. To the left, a galley kitchen peeked out through a narrow doorway. Across the room, a hallway led to where he assumed were the bedrooms and bathroom were. Taking in the space, Dallas again found his expectations at odds with reality. Her home didn’t look at all like he thought it would.
It seemed like every flat surface held a candle, most of which were lit. The candles themselves were black, deep red, grey. Some were tall, slender tapers in elaborate candelabras. Others were round or square pillars, their sides marbled wi
th the cooled tracks of once-molten wax.
Beside, between, in front, and behind the candles were an extensive assortment of oddities. His head turning in a slow arc, Dallas took in the strange ornaments, gleaming baubles, glass vials, and what appeared to be a whole family of squirrel skulls neatly arranged in a row. Eyes widening and nose twitching, he wondered at the variety of vases holding clumps of drying weeds and dead flowers.
His head finishing its left to right circuit, it reversed course and swept the room again. Tables and shelves that still had space between the candles and curios held books. Dallas wasn’t exactly an avid reader. Sports Illustrated and bar menus did a pretty good job of satisfying any urges he might get to read the written word. That said, he still knew what books were and what they were supposed to look like. Stanley, for example, had a lot of books. They were normal things. Normal sized packages of words with front covers, back covers, and stories or facts or pictures in between.
The books in Lois’s house didn’t feel like books. Sure, they had covers and bindings and pages, but their resemblance to what he considered books to be ended there. Lois’s books made him nervous. They were all sorts of shapes and sizes, and they all seemed to radiate something. His molars vibrated like there was diesel generator somewhere nearby, a tad too far away to be seen or heard but close enough to be felt. Flummoxed, he let out a slow whistle.
“Gee, Lois. I, ah, like what you’ve done with the place. It’s really, um. Exotic like.”
Lois stood in the center of the room. Her hair was pulled back, drawing the lines of her face into sharp angles that caught the flickering lights of the candles and gave her visage an otherworldly appearance. The effect was accentuated by the dark black shawl that was pulled tightly around her shoulders. It made her pale face appear to float detached from the rest of her body, and her hands gripping the shawl looked more like a strange, twisted broach than the usual collection of fingers and thumbs.
Monsters in the Midwest (Book 2): Northwoods Wolfman Page 12
