WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1)

by Fowler Robertson

  “But what are they Maw Sue and why…why do I see them?” My voice was shaky and I had a terrible feeling I would never sleep again.

  “Willodean. I don’t want you to be scared of them, okay.”

  My neck straightened and I looked at her puzzled. “But they’re scary.” I yelled.

  “Understand this Willodean, if you don’t take anything else from this. Dresdens cannot hurt you or anyone else. They have been hurt enough already. It’s precisely why they are a Dresden. A person doesn’t become a Dresden unless they are wounded in unimaginable cruelty as a child before the age of maturity. It’s hard to understand this right now, because you are so young, but one day you will know more. It is in your gift to know more. Only those with the gift of Impathian can see a Dresden, so it is possible that this is your Cupitor gift. From what I can remember, this is a wonderful gift of compassion and you can feel and see things about people that no one else can. I’d say, we have found your gift, Willodean.”

  “Well, I don’t want it. How do I give it back?”

  Maw Sue laughed at my honesty but I was dead serious. I didn’t want to ever see another Dresden for as long as I lived.

  “You don’t get to choose your gifts Willodean, only perfect them, and endure them to greater good. And just like our other secrets, keep this one as well. Tell no-one about them, not your friends, not your dad, and especially not your mother. You know how she is about these things.”

  I sure did know how she was. The curse doesn’t exist. Not my child. Not my daughter.

  I’d always been a little on the edge, too rough and risky for Lena, but this had pushed her over a little farther than she could bear. Lena Hart had to keep up a good appearance for the town and she didn’t like to give anyone room to talk. She certainly couldn’t stand the thought of strangers gossiping nonsense about her family being cursed or her daughter a little different than the other girls. She simply thought Maw Sue told way too many tall tales and I read way too many comic books.

  After my first encounter with a Dresden I begin to see them everywhere. And this time, it was adults too, not just teens. I saw them at gas stations, at church, the dress shop, in passing cars at the red light, and at the playground. Everywhere I went I saw a Dresden’s in the crowd. The same kinetic energy, the same skin popping and the same fear. To keep from freaking out each time, which I really, really wanted to do—I simply pretended they wasn’t there. I remembered what their faces looked like before they transformed. And like a paper doll cut out—I inserted it right back on their necks so I wouldn’t have to look at the terrible awful. I avoided their energy, their creepy white mask faces, the slippery ghosts that whispered and I just went on with my life. I accepted them as my everyday vision. It was my normal. Which wasn’t normal at all but I endured, just like Maw Sue said. Before long, I realized I hadn’t seen one—in a while, not weeks. Maybe I wasn’t cursed after all. Maybe it was a fluke. Weeks passed, no Dresden sightings at all. They still came into my dreams at night, as they used to, but that was fine with me, as long as they stayed inside the house, inside me, I didn’t care. Until now. Until they decided to show up at the Clipper Snipper.

  Ms. Wilshire, the blabbermouth crow, transforms right in front of me. It was like watching a bird transform into a horrible disfigured creature. The mere sighting takes me back. I am flabbergasted and shocked so bad, the soda in my hand crashes to the floor, spilling out an orange puddle that turns to blood in my warped vision of the damned. I can feel the odd glances from Ms. Blanche and she looks concerned. I can barely breathe. Maw Sue’s words come back. The spirit of the Dresden is the child inside the adult, the child who is broken and wounded, separated from the adult spirit who is looking for a way back, a way home, where it belongs. For a Dresden to appear—something awful had to have happened to the child before the age of maturity.

  I am lost in thought and in between my mind ramblings I hear Ms. Blanche mumbling. The crow turned Dresden is talking too.

  “I justa love those shoes too. Makes you feets look dainty Ms. W.”

  “Oh. Really?” The crow said touching her hair and smiling at Ms. Blanche’s words of flattery.

  “Yes. You’re right. It does. Doesn’t it.” The crow said in reply. She mirror primped and smiled. All I could see was her sharp fanged teeth. Puffs of white smoke tendrils spilled in and out of her hollow sockets till I thought I might be pulled in with them. I locked my hands on the edge of the red bench and hung on for dear life. In my vision, she was flour ugly, eye holes, disjointed, Dresden creepy. Then as if the air went poof—she was back to her former, cruel self. I rubbed my eyes to make sure what I seen was what I seen. Sure enough, in no time flat, she was barking orders at her hair dresser and snapping her fingers as if she was the goddamned queen of the curling iron. The beauty shop returned to its normal buzz but I was still hedged up in the corner hoping everything I just saw was a dream and I hadn’t woke up yet. I tried to pinch myself on the leg so that I would come out of it—but no luck. Before I knew it, Ms. Blanche was in front of me, bending down with a towel, wiping up the orange soda I had spilled. She was humming and she stared deep into my eyes, enough to rattle me to life and out of my daydreaming, nightmare, vision. I felt all sorts of strange, as if with one glance, she was able to slip inside me and search me out. It was an invasion that lasted only seconds, then gone. It made me wonder if I had eye sockets like those Dresden’s, allowing things to creep in where they are not welcome. “You sees them too doncha child?” She said without blinking. I froze up. Ms. Blanche knows. How does she know? Did she see them too?

  Maw Sue said we should always keep it a secret. How would Ms. Blanche know? Did she see it inside me, grab my thoughts and feelings and pull them out? I was shaking senseless with a mirage of wild, impervious thoughts. I didn’t know what to say. Was it a trick? I knew there was other seekers out there, I just never thought I’d meet one. It’s one thing to talk about it with Maw Sue, but a whole ‘nother thing to discuss it with strangers. That was the sort of thing that could get you into trouble. I was cautious to speak at all. I assumed the gifts only affected my direct lineage of family, my ancestral tree sap, not other people. I have to ask Maw Sue. I just don’t remember it all. Ms. Blanche grabbed the bench with one hand and the soda bottle with the other. She lifted herself up and sat next to me. The bench squealed from her weight and my skin jumped from the electrical charge she gave off.

  “I knows you is young child and its sums scary things, fo sho.” She said. “One day you wilt knows mo about it. Hurt people tend to hurt others, yes they does. They donta knows any better causa you see child—someones hurt them badly a long time ago. They are trapped by those Amodgians. Can’t find their way back.”

  Her words were similar to what Maw Sue had already told me. Ms. Blanche paused and looked up, terror stricken. I looked up as well, but I didn’t see anything that would cause that much palpable fear. I expected the Amodgians to show up any second, instead an anomaly of strange wind trickled over my skin and licked me with a fear so powerful I thought my skin would split from my skeleton, slide off and melt on the floor. Whatever was happening, Ms. Blanche understood it as much as I did. I felt her fat fingers slide over mine, rubbing back and forth. I thought of the red stone around Maw Sue’s neck and how soothing it must feel to her mind that she has it. I wished I had one too.

  “You’ll be okay child.” Ms. Blanche said. She squeezed my hand similar to how Mag does when she’s scared. “You are a pugnator. I can see it in you. You’ll do just fine.”

  A pug what? I couldn’t speak, my tongue was thick and my mind sifted. A tall blonde with clicking heels was walking towards us, and then she turned and stood beside the wash basin, tapping her heels on the floor, tap, tap, tap and staring a hole through Ms. Blanche as if she wasn’t allowed to sit down.

  “I need a conditioner and a hot towel on my pores.” The blonde said hastily.

  “Yess, honey, I’ma comin.” Ms. Blanche said getting up. She
let go of my hand and I almost fell over. She glanced back at me before she walked away. I saw her eyes melt together in milk as if she had no pupils—as if the darkness behind her eyes swallowed them. I felt that eerie pull of energy again—the same feeling I get when I’m around a Dresden. The next thing I feel is Lena’s hand jerking me up and yanking me out of the shop. She mumbled something the whole way home, but I didn’t hear a word of it. What the heck is a Pugnator I pondered?

  Seven

  I was vulnerable and naked and drying off with a plush bath towel when it drifted inside the fractured walls of my mind. It wasn’t a revelation or an epitome, it was simply the number 500 flashing its neon sign. Most thoughts swirled in chaos through the rafters of my unstable mind but this one simply sat there like a third thumb. Since the divorce it was fairly common for me to drive myself bonkers, over analyzing interpretations of words, dreams, images or random thoughts in my head. It was a consequence of a broken knob, along with the curse. Maw Sue warned me this would happen. Her words spoken to me as a child are seeping back into me as if I heard it yesterday. Time has dulled most of my memory, but from what I can remember, there are powerful agents that seek my demise, the shadowy figures of my soul, mind menaces, strange imps who oppress me, and want to claim my destiny as their own. They are everything I’ve ever feared, all thrown together, both carnal and supernatural growing up with me, attached to me, a second skin I can’t shed, only wiggle around, adjust, endure. At full capacity they intercept evil thoughts into my mind and they come to life, as if the bowels of hell are clustered in compartments, held up in hidden rooms, inside the house that harbors terrible secrets.

  When I wake up, the first thing I do is climb the wondering tree. Each wave of a tree branch has opened doorways into the unknowns, into the house inside me, into my past. Each time I climb down, I see, hear and feel my surroundings entirely different than before. Maw Sue said it was the gift, the eyes to see and ears to hear, a perceived depth of spiritual understanding from the otherworldly places, a disciplined interpretation of discerning good and evil and a sight to see the world in a different way. Seekers are designed and created to look for the crumbs in daily life, those rare, almost unnoticeable glimpses of another side, the events that are dispensed magically within our world for discovery. Each crumb is made uniquely for individual insight. It appears on its own terms, in its own way, in its own timing, and only my eyes reveal the magnitude of its appearance. I am the only one to understand what it means, what it says, what it represents to my heart and my heart alone.

  Crumbs are made for the recipient. No one else can understand the relevance of its message. When a crumbs is received, accepted and consumed, sweet surging memories are unleashed with each taste, unleashing bits and pieces of the past, both tasty and sour as life is bitter and sweet. The bitter taste is one I’d rather do without but it looms on my tongue and crawls down my throat creating a burn that gurgles when it hits my stomach. I still taste the bitterness in my mouth so I brush my teeth and wrap a towel on my wet head and hope it soaks all the crazy out. Good luck with that. Sigh.

  I face the mirror and the unknown woman’s reflection. A bubbly little girl of yesteryear fades in and out of me, emerging with me and beyond me, unreachable, unobtainable, out of my grasp. A random thought occurs. Talk about poverty—I don’t even own a towel and the borrowed one on my head looks like a big dollop of whipped cream. I can't help but laugh. True. I own very little in possessions, but in a way, it’s okay. Just the woman and the child in the mirror. All I have. There was a time not long ago, when the thought of not having would send me into a compulsive downfall of blue bell, hair dye, Cognac and risky sex and God knows what else when the broken knob has its way.

  “Who are you Willodean Hart?” I say out loud. “Who are you?”

  The mirror answers back through vapored misty lips of a child that hovers a ghostly apparition, a shadow of me from a distant time.

  “You are enough.” She says with a giggle. Her tone was magic as if to believe anything else was unfathomable. I almost smiled with her but before I could, I heard a zip in the air and the mirror instantly changed to a darker version of a girl, and she was splattered with gray and black paint and then the specks turned to shadows until she was as darkened and damaged as I remembered her being.

  “No one loves you.” She said in spite. Her eyes deadpanned. Her demeanor venomous. The cascade of dark shadows join her blending in with voices and whispers, condemning and crude. Her negative energy makes my stomach turn.

  “You’ll never measure up.” She spat. “Look at you. Everything you’ve done? No one would love you.” She glares at me up and down. “They laugh at you, talk about you. When will you see it? You’re cursed. It’s in the genes. Look at that hair, that nose, your teeth! Ugly. Inside and out, ugly. You don’t belong! You never belonged.”

  She held my gaze inside a vice so that I was forced to see her, hear her, feel her and taste her bitter crumbs of disdain. The house inside me twisted and buckled, doors rattled, windows cracked and broke, the wondering tree shook and bent but didn’t break.

  “I know who you are. YOU don’t fool me at all. Go ahead and play along with crumb finding and tree climbing. Pick your damn field of lilies—but don’t you forget.” Her fierce voice turned to a simmering gurgle and I heard each bubble pop and each time, I jumped.

  “Nope. Don’t fool me at all. I know your secrets. I know what you did.” Her eyebrows leaped upwards on her forehead as if she held all the cards in her hand. Her voice was a thousand hissing snakes. An evil laughter followed, from the shadow figures, a dark anthem of my youth, hidden in the chambers of my mind—a broken mind with a broken knob. I closed my eyes to bid her away, to erase her from my sight.

  “I am enough.” I said trembling. “I am enough.” I gritted my teeth and bit down on the words to hold them inside me, absorb into me. The girl shape shifted and slid underneath my eyelids, her face a thousand nightmares of remembrance. My black heart believed her words and for a second I wanted to crumble, fall apart but a small part of me, a pin light of otherworldly substance would not let me surrender, it would not let me give in, not to her. Not this time. When I finished wobbling and opened my eyes, the only reflection in the mirror, was my own.

  The big white dollop of whipped cream sat unmoved on my head. I glanced down and there was a tube of red lipstick. Lena Hart’s apparently, left over from the 70’s. On impulse I grabbed it and started scribbling on the mirror, on every inch of space, over and over again, leaving only a round circle for my face. I AM ENOUGH! I AM ENOUGH! I AM ENOUGH! I AM ENOUGH! I AM ENOUGH! I AM ENOUGH!

  A lipstick banner of truth to remind me. I am enough. Sure…, I realize I’m a mess, a broken house of ruin and regret, leaking and cracked, unrepairable, but if there is something left of me inside the depravity, some smidgen of hope, then there is hope that I too, am enough. Everything I could have been, everything I used to be, everything I should have been...is gone. But right here, right now, I am enough.

  I finished getting dressed, something I hadn’t done in months, actually get out of a nightgown. My mind is filled with all that has happened since I moved in. My childhood bedroom has resurrected a lot of memories including the Tallow tree.

  I was only a kid, wrapped up in a dreamy state of mind while sitting in the tree tops, doing what the tree made me do…wonder. Wonder about this, wonder about that…wonder.

  “Whatcha doing? Wondering in the wondering tree?” Mag said poking her head out from my bedroom window. We were seven or eight, I don’t remember but from that moment on, the Tallow tree garnered its new namesake, the wondering tree. It made us both happy. Just two kids who wondered about life, about love, about growing up, about God, about the here and now, the beyond, what was and what wasn’t, just life in general. Late at night when the moon was at its full, we’d climb out and sit in the tree while the beams of light shined on us like spot lights from heaven. The night creatures were active and loud. We�
��d try to figure out their voices, who belonged to what, crickets, frogs, cicada crackles, howls, barks and other weird ones we never did figure out. Being in the wondering tree, we were safe to talk about things we couldn’t say around grown-ups. How Mom and dad fought and made us feel yucky when they argued, or dad drinking too much and stumbling around the house, scaring us to death. Or Lena getting angry and talking bad about him, how it was all his fault and that alcohol was of the devil. If that was true, then Pine Log was going straight to hell. Our only refuge was the tree. Maybe that’s what adults are missing—maybe they need a wondering tree. It didn’t take me long to climb back out my window as a full-fledged adult, and climb the tree. Instantly, I felt better.

  When I sat down, another memory emerged out of nowhere. It was Maw Sue’s favorite poem, called Seven.

  The first time I heard it I asked her, “Why do you want God to make you a number?” It made no sense to me. “What’s up with seven? Why not one? Or ten?” Of course, I hated math anyway. It was hard enough passing school without calculating my own life into the mix. Adults were complicated. Their stories were even more complicated.

  “The number seven is complete. The finished product. Whole.” Maw Sue said answering me swiftly as if not to give the Amodgians any room to snatch them away. She knew a thing or two about trickery. “Remember that space between Adam and God’s fingers?” I nodded. Her eyes held me in mystery. I fell into them and before I knew it, I was tangled up in the mayhem that was inside her, a dark demented void with no bottom. I had a terrible fear of heights and falling, that sick pit in your stomach when you know you can’t stop, a dream that never awakens, just falling and falling and falling. When I was sure I’d be a splat on the ground, I wasn’t. I was still sitting at her feet listening intently to the story of Seven.