Slow Funeral

by Rebecca Ore

  Contents

  * * *

  Slow Funeral

  1 - RECALLED FROM BERKELEY

  2 - GAME PLAYED WITH GREEN STONES

  3 - CROSSING THE REAL

  4 - THE BALLAD CHAIN

  5- YOUR GRANNIE HITS ME WITH HER CAST

  6 - WORKING THROUGH TIME-BOUND MEN

  7 - STONE PATH

  8 - DIFFERENT EYES, DIFFERENT IMPROBABILITIES

  9 - OTHER PEOPLE’S DEATH

  10 - BURIED BY MACHINE

  11 - CHICKEN FIGHTING

  12 - PREDESTINATION CONJURIES

  13 - LIES AND GUNS

  14 - NO DIRECTION, NO RETURN

  15 - DOOMED TO IT

  16 - THE HOUSE’S INMATES

  17 - MACROSLEEP

  18 - HEX VARIATIONS

  19 - VISITATIONS

  20 - PREACHING TO DEAD EARS

  21 - FINALITIES BESIDE THE GRAVE

  POSTSCRIPT

  TOR BOOKS BY REBECCA ORE

  COPYRIGHT

  I’d like to thank Jim Beard and Laura Chiudioni, Theresa Croft, R. D. Howell, Margaret Prunty, William Sowers, and Ed Stone for information and signs. I’m especially grateful to my editor, Claire Eddy, for suggesting Bracken County had a novel in it.

  Also, I’d like to thank the woman on Stuart’s Main Street who said, “How can you get a god to work for you unless you can threaten to go to another god?”

  I’m dedicating this book to the memory of my paternal grandmother—

  NANNIE SUE ORE BROWN

  1

  * * *

  RECALLED FROM BERKELEY

  That morning, if Maude Fuller had been a horse, people would have said witches had been riding her, leaving her hair in brown knots, her body sweaty, her long nose puffed, her eyelids thick around her eyes. But, no, sex and a technical man left her that way. Ultimately, though, she would figure she had been witch-ridden.

  Maude, who hated witches, lived in a Berkeley witch house where she was the only real witch. The morning after she met the man at the bar, Maude woke up in the house with a call in her brain. Her Bracken County kin wanted to nag her home. She looked to see if her new lover, the engineer who was curious about magic, lay beside her. Nope, just a sweat blotch on the linen.

  Last night, Doug (wasn’t that his name?) announced to the bar in general, “In the forties, one of the atomic scientists was a disciple of Crowley’s. That’s what a real witch would be like, a real twentieth-century god, not some poor hippie.” He’d been blond, good broad mouth, snub-nosed, in his thirties. A few acne scars gave him character, but also hinted to Maude an adolescence spent with computer kits and shortwave radios, not girls. He looked like he ran and lifted weights, not excessively, just enough to broaden the shoulders and keep his hips trim.

  Maude said, “You’re sort of right, but you don’t quite understand it.”

  Doug was a man who got hard-ons from intellectually stimulating conversations with women.

  Perhaps the argument’s energies attracted her kin’s attention. Don’t want to go home. Maude pulled on a robe. She’d never gotten used to Berkeley’s casual nudity, as much as she slept with—fucked—strange men. From the basement room on cold concrete, Maude, smelling of her latest lover, went upstairs to the bathroom.

  The bathroom door was open. Susan, the blonde wannabe witch from Ukiah, sat on the floor with one of Maude’s Ferragamo shoes. Her pupils were so dilated she seemed black-eyed. LSD. The toilet gurgled as if trying to digest something large. “I’m debating the fate of your Ferragamos,” Susan said. Maude looked in the toilet and saw her left shoe. Susan cuddled the other shoe in her arms.

  Dumb cunt acidhead. That engineer had more idea what a real witch would be like, Maude thought as she pulled her left Ferragamo out of the toilet. She shook out the water and wondered if she should call on her own powers to dry it. The call in her brain intensified enough for her to recognize her grandmother. No, not even just a little magic.

  In the past, on the fringe between Atlanta and deep magic, a truck smashed her parents.

  “Ferragamos are amazing symbols,” Susan said, handing Maude her other shoe. “Can you dry it with my hairdryer?”

  “I wish you’d asked me before you tried to drown one of my shoes and worship the other. Where did Douglas go?”

  “Douglas?”

  “Douglas, the guy I came in with last night.” The engineer wanted desperately to have weird sixties weekends. He must have had long hair then, Maude thought.

  “He had to go to work,” the girl said. “You know, with the shoes we can bring in money.”

  If they were both dry and polished, if I had on a Leslie Fay on top of them, or a charcoal suit with a white silk blouse, if I told them I went to Barnard and faked the rest of the resumé. Maude felt her left foot squish in the wet shoe. “By putting one in the toilet?”

  “My mother has them. My mother is rich. So how did you get them?”

  “I inherited the shoes from my mother. My father bought them for her for her forty-fifth birthday. Daddy wanted to prove he could do better by her than her own people. The Ferragamos and a house in Atlanta were all he could do for her.” Maude had fled Bracken County in the Ferragamos.

  What had her mother meant, leaving her the shoes? To say, honor your father’s people, flee the witches. Or to say, here’s the best he could do for me.

  Susan said, “Mom’s stingy about what she sends me.”

  Maude shrugged and squished to her car with one wet foot. The fog might have hallucinated the ten-foot-tall agaves in the yard, rosemary and palm trees, a dream desert for a bitter city fog. Maude never got used to Berkeley weather.

  She’d fled both her mother’s possible messages and drifted, having magic slip through her from time to time, not wanting to concentrate on magic, but never committed to the other world. She came to Berkeley which was logic-shaped enough to fight will-shaping. But Berkeley had an undertone which made it seem more familiar than a purely logical city. Maude knew she hadn’t completely rejected magic’s temptation. I’ll be good now, but not forever, she thought, spinning a twist on Saint Augustine’s request that God should save him from sin, but not quite yet. Berkeley dabbled in magic.

  Semiotic hash, that’s what these Berkeley witches make. Fake magic repelled most real magicians. Karmachila, the psuedomagic collective, kept Maude safe from the fate threads spun out and cut by the Norn who lived in the abandoned spinning and weaving store in Bracken on the road to Kobold. The Norn’s presence was just an example of the thousands of deals between entities and men, men not always winning, never winning forever. The Norn herself, who spun fate close and personal, came to the wishes of a woman who couldn’t admit she’d left her child alone in a dangerous hunting time. The Norn spun death for the man who’d fired the gun, and for the woman who called her up.

  People feared their passions in Bracken County. Passions called up old entities furious that their worship had been neglected.

  She remembered her mother’s burial in the cemetery by the old family house. The living needed to keep watch over the dead, but her mother married one of the powerless locals from tenant farm stock. He’d gone to Virginia Tech and majored in civil engineering. His people took his body back. One car crash, two funerals. A funeral, I’m being called back for a funeral, Maude realized. As far as she knew, her grandmother was still alive. Maude had called Grannie Partridge from a pay phone last week. So the witch kin knew she was in Berkeley. Her Grannie didn’t follow the witches these days, but made mind patterns in quilting fabric and thread, logical interlockings. Maude wished all those geometric energies could have gone to building machines, computer programming, but her grandmother was born too early.

  After she parked the car at Tilman Park, Mau
de changed into the hiking boots she always kept in the back of the MiniCooper and went out into the chaparral.

  A hawk circled overhead. It didn’t feel like a magical hawk, but rather a biological one waiting for her to flush game for it. One feather was missing, shot away, perhaps, an unlikely touch for a magic hawk.

  The sage smelled like sage. Maude sat down under a tree near the top of the ridge and looked down over Berkeley and the bay. She opened her purse and looked at her fake ID, the medical card, the food stamps. No one looked closely at insane people’s Ids. The social security number was real—a British guy who’d faked citizenship to work and get food stamps in America showed her how to get one from a dead child.

  In Bracken, I’d have had to kill the child for it, Maude thought. The brush suddenly smelled like end products: chemical tars, burnt ash, soap.

  Bracken County was calling.

  Maude told Bracken County that it was insane by twentieth-century intellectual standards.

  The chemical smell intensified. The fog carried Bay Area traffic fumes and industrial gases. Maude’s nose found them over the sharper natural smells which faded as her brain identified the industrial odors: electric ozone, burnt grease and rubber, sulfur.

  Olfactory hallucinations are rare, Maude told herself. She picked a sage leaf and crumpled it under her nose. Sage, then mold. Maude sat breathing until her brain tired of all the odors.

  I need to do something. Maude looked at her watch and saw 12:00, noon. The sun wasn’t overhead, but noon wasn’t invented in California. She picked herself up and brushed away the duff on her backside and legs, then walked back through oaks with leaves grown tiny and thick against drought.

  When Maude first saw the Bay Area landscape, she thought it was scrub from overgrazing. No, it was scrub by its own nature.

  Bracken County oaks had full juicy leaves. Bracken County dandelions grew tender leaves.

  In Bracken County, the air smelled of whatever the majority wanted.

  That’s true of Berkeley, too, Maude thought, here the majority wants car and industrial smells. She broke into the magic pulling at her thoughts by looking at her watch again, time cut to bits logically. 12:20. Did I really sit thinking so little for twenty minutes? Minutes lost from a magic instant, Maude walked faster, got in the car, and drove to Alameda County Mental Health Clinic at Berkeley.

  The clinic was dismal, a small redbrick building with a flat tar roof. Maude sat twice a week through a group therapy session for stabilized psychotics and got her welfare. It was easy to be declared insane. Maude just told them witches wanted her and suicide seemed more moral than becoming one.

  “But I believe in the impersonal universe,” Maude said aloud as she got out of the car, only she knew the other one was real, too, a personal universe with no accidents. She wondered some days if she was insane. Perhaps Bracken County magick was just small-town mass paranoia? Magick with a k.

  Maude suddenly realized her life in Berkeley was grubby, a fool’s game, without even insanity’s romance. Whether that was part of the current Bracken County call to her or sheer reason, Maude wasn’t sure. I’ve always been ambivalent, my one true schizophrenic symptom. She signed in at the clinic and sat on an imitation-leather couch until the social worker, Alice, called her group in. Even though two upholstered couches had spaces to sit, the black guy who suspected Maude faked insanity for welfare sat down in a hard chair. He was one of two blacks in the group. He always wore a suit, overpressed and stiff as though Salvation Army disinfectant or cheap dry cleaning had damaged the wool. He called himself the Reverend Julian Springer.

  Maude wondered why he sat in uncomfortable chairs when he didn’t have to. The group room had folding metal chairs; his ass would be pained enough in a minute or two.

  When everyone who was coming had checked in, the social worker, who was impossibly fat, shepherded them into the group room, with its double doors and recorders whirring on the therapist’s desk.

  The others moved in tiny jerks and had face muscles sludged with disease and major tranquilizers. Maude tried to flatten her affect, felt even more stupid coming here than ever. Why is it better to be a fake mad woman than a witch? Did she ask herself that, she wondered, or did Bracken County?

  “We need to go around the room and talk about what happened to us over the weekend,” the social worker said, sitting down in a large fake-leather covered chair. Maude doubted the woman could get her hipbones, much less the rest of her butt, on a metal folding chair.

  This weekend, the group seemed to have done the usual things people on welfare did: window-shopped, got thrown out of bookstores for excessive browsing, went to cheap movies, watched television, sat in the library watching sane people. Maude hated the banality of the insane. In Bracken, even the madness…

  “I’m using a false ID,” she said to them. ‘Tm not really crazy. I’ve been faking it.”

  The social worker controlled her face after seeming startled for a second. Her expression settled back into that of professional concern. She said, “What is your real name?”

  “Maude. My social security number is…”

  “Why are you telling us this now?”

  “Don’t I get arrested?”

  The other black guy, whose ribs showed below his cutoff T-shirt, said, “You bullshitting again?”

  “Why do you want to be arrested?” the social worker asked.

  Bracken County’s got me but I don’t want to go back. Maude knew the explanation would sound crazy. She said, “I just wanted attention.”

  “You phony strumpet, cheating the poor.” The Reverend Julian Springer said this, the one who’d always felt she wasn’t insane. Maude thought he hated her because of her Southern accent.

  The rest of the group, all certifiable, looked at Maude as though they all agreed, all hated her. They also looked at her as though she hogged the trick of escaping insanity, kept for herself knowledge that they craved.

  The social worker looked at all of them, then said to the group, “We’re all supportive of each other here.”

  A redheaded woman with greasy hair and the jerky movements of antipsychotic drug brain impairment said, “We always wondered why she wasn’t on meds.”

  “She is on meds.”

  Maude felt more fear than she had when she confessed to faking her ID. “I am on meds.” She didn’t take them.

  “Maude’s doing fine,” the social worker said, meaning for someone with chronic paranoid schizophrenia.

  Maude realized everything she said was heard allegorically. She said, “I think I ought to transfer back to Virginia.”

  Even that meant something more to the social worker, who said, “I guess you don’t feel wanted here.”

  The rest of the group imperceptibly nodded. “She makes a mock of being really insane,” the young black guy said.

  The social worker said, “Roger, I wonder if you’re not being hostile because you can’t reach the people who hurt you in Georgia.”

  “No, I’m hostile because the bitch’s not walking like a robot from the drugs.”

  “We can give you more meds for that.”

  Maude felt guilty. She sat back and didn’t comment on any of the other stories. The social worker finally said to her, “You may have more education than these people, but is it fair to sulk if you’re not the center of attention?”

  “Sorry.”

  The Reverend Springer asked, “Is she supposed to have a car?”

  The social worker couldn’t find an allegorical meaning for that one. “Do you have a car, Mary?” She was probably trying to figure out why this paranoid schizophrenic called herself Maude, what Maude meant.

  “A fake ID doesn’t bother you, but a car does?”

  “You didn’t tell us you had assets.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a car. It’s old.”

  “Austin MiniCooper,” Springer said. “She whores in it.”

  The social worker wrote something down. Maude decided she’d driv
e back to Virginia that night, stay just outside of Bracken County and call in.

  Just as she was leaving, the social worker called, “Maude?”

  Maude turned. So it is your name, the social worker seemed to be thinking as they both stared at each other a moment. The social worker said, “Faking insanity is a sign of serious illness.”

  “I could just be crazy with a fake ID so I don’t embarrass my family.”

  “Do you have other assets under your real name or another fake name?”

  Yes, Maude thought, but didn’t say. I have powers. I can bespell time itself. She said, “Can you keep my secret or do you have to report me?”

  “You should have told me in private.”

  “You don’t like to see us in private,” Maude said.

  “Most of the time, you guys just want extra attention, competitive with each other as though I was your mother. Individual attention just tempts you to act out or fake symptoms. The group focuses you on other people’s responses.”

  “So, I’ll see you next week,” Maude said, faintly imitating the therapist, meaning the exact opposite.

  “We can set up an appointment to contact your family. Perhaps they’ll be more supportive than you think. Do you still hear voices?”

  But will I be as supportive as they want? Maude thought. She said, “Only from real entities,” and left.

  I need to leave, I need not to leave. Maude knew the social worker would assume her ambivalence was a sign of illness, but Maude doubted a drug could make up her mind. She opened the door to her room in Karmachila, saw a note on top of the dried semen on her bottom sheet. Doug called, he wants you to call him. Thanks, Susan. He’d given both his work and home numbers.

  Maude wondered if Susan thought she would work sympathetic magic putting the note over Douglas’s come. She called Douglas’s work number. At least, I know he’s single because he gave me his home phone number, she thought as the secretary put her through. But then Maude remembered this was Berkeley.