“You ready?” Heddy asked.
The sunlight glittered off her sandy hair and from the surface of her mad eyes. God, Crow thought, she’s the toughest woman on earth. She’s a goddamn goddess.
“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He pushed her behind and went out the door first, leaping over the steps to the hard dry ground. He let out a grunt from the pain that ran up his leg from the gunshot wound there. He turned to put out his hand and just had the tips of Heddy’s fingers in his palm when he realized she was pointing her gun at his heart. “Aw, Heddy...” he said. “Aw, hell, Heddy...”
“You never should have gone to see about that woman in there, Crow. You never should have kept the money secret from me.”
She pulled the trigger and the blast hit him in the center of his chest, knocking him back onto his heels where he staggered to remain upright. He thought the sky had opened because now lightning crackled and thunder filled his body from all sides. They were shooting at him from the trees, dancing him against his will away from Heddy. He twitched and jerked with each shot that entered his body, turning round and round like a wind-up toy. He screamed in agony and called out over and over, “HeddyHeddyHeddyHEDDY...!”
But she was gone, already out of his field of vision, suffering the same pain as he somewhere on her own away from him.
Dying hurt worse than he could have imagined. It was a shitty thing to happen to a guy.
#
THE gunshots peppered Heddy’s entire front from neck to groin, sending her sprawling back onto the steps, her head lying in the open doorway.
Jay had frozen where he’d landed on the ground, shocked at Heddy’s shooting of Crow, and then mesmerized further when the shots opened from the trees that sent Crow flopping around like a downed bird. He turned back just in time to see Heddy take her first shots to the chest and then he was all motion, moving up the steps again, trying to stop what was happening by shielding her, but by the time he reached the top step she had fallen back and he was the one taking the gunfire now, stray shots meant for Heddy that bore into his back like hot drills, knocking his breath from him, knocking his life from him, knocking the world off its axis. He stumbled. He noticed the gunfire had halted again and an eerie silence filled his ears with white noise. He stared down at Heddy’s dead face before he dropped to his knees, understanding pain, understanding death, and rolled off the wooden steps to the ground, all the world turning to black.
#
FRANK stood from behind his desk and put out his cigarette butt in the overflowing ashtray. Ashes were knocked onto the desktop. He pushed aside the ashtray and raked the ashes into his hand. He said to Emily as he dropped the ashes into the trash can at the side of the desk, “I’m sorry about your father.”
Emily glanced down at her hands. She still had the rock she’d taken from the ground behind the police car. It was this nice man who had stepped into the open and, grabbing her, took her to the ground and safety. She rolled the stone over and rubbed it carefully as if it might eventually glow with magic. There was a ruby vein in the stone running through the brown that reminded her of blood.
“I’m sorry too,” she said. “He was only bad for a little while.”
The psychologist cleared his throat and moved to her chair. He held out his hand to help her rise. “I’ll have someone take you back to the hospital to see about your mother.”
“Thank you.”
“Emily?”
“Uh huh?” She slipped the rock into the pocket of her shorts.
“I think you saved your mother’s life.”
Emily started to shake her head, but she stopped. She didn’t know if it was true but it was okay that he said it. None of it mattered now. “She’s going to be all right.”
“And so are you.”
She looked up into the kindly face and smiled a little sad smile. “Yes, I will. I’ll be fine now.”
“And Emily?”
“Yessir?”
“Thanks for staying so long to tell me how it happened. We couldn’t make it out, a cop’s family held hostage that long. It would have remained a mystery without your help to get at the truth of it.”
“You don’t have to tell the newspapers, do you? About Daddy and all?”
“No, I won’t tell them. It’s for my files and no one gets to see those.”
“Good.” She walked to the door and opened it, looking back over her shoulder, pausing.
“What is it?” He asked. “Have you forgotten something?”
“No, I was just checking.” She smiled and pointed to her head. “Just checking.”
Frank smiled back, thinking That’s some kid, what a great kid that is, and she really reads minds too. Christ.
Emily listened to those last thoughts, committed them to memory, then shut the door behind her and went with the police lady who was to drive her to the hospital.
She never looked back. She never had to. Mr. Hawkins knew everything finally so she didn’t have to live with it anymore. He knew the whole story, the terrible secrets, and all the sad deaths. She had given it away, the way you do when you have a best friend you can tell everything to. Those days on their trip south were all his now and she was free at last to start life new again. Her mother would take her back home to North Carolina. They’d return home safely in an airplane. Maybe at home, where accidental chaos hardly ever reared its head and life was very seldom a thing to fear, they’d be safe again.
Safe, she thought happily. Just like they said in baseball—home safe.
THE END
Please read on for the first two chapters of Mosiman's new novel, BANISHED.
BANISHED
By
Billie Sue Mosiman
Copyright 2011 by Billie Sue Mosiman, All rights reserved.
Cover art by Neil Jackson, Copyright 2011
"The Magician rearranges the Universe to make himself the center, the Mystic rearranges himself to find the center."
CHAPTER 1
THE LITTLE DEATH
She could barely breathe she was so hot. She could hear the night birds call and the rustle of her mother’s palm grass skirt as she moved about the small hut. She could see just the light from the flames of the fire in the center of the floor, but she could not make out anything beyond.
She closed her eyes to blessed darkness and wondered when she would die. She knew she would never be well again, never stand and walk, never kiss her mother’s cheek, or feel the comfort of her mother’s loving embrace. She had not lived long, a handful of years, so there was not much to miss. Yet she knew she must fight against death. She must not willingly let it take her.
A blanket of coolness slipped over her bare skin and it was not from the water her mother had been sponging onto her. She tried to reopen her eyes to discover the cause, but her lids were too heavy. She was so hot! The coolness that temporarily enveloped her was not helping. She wished they would carry her to the sea and float her in the waves.
Dark grew darker. Grew to pitch black. Grew to encompass a vast void. She struggled to take a breath. It would not come; her lungs would not obey. She thought, Death has me. Death has slipped his arms around me and holds me so tightly I cannot breathe.
Faintly she heard her mother’s wails, but she couldn’t lift a hand for her to come near, nor could she whisper the compassion she felt for the loved one she was leaving behind. She couldn’t even say goodbye.
Take me to the sea, she begged of Death. Take me from this heat and pain and let me float in the cool frothy waves. I always loved…I always loved the sea.
The heat grew like a malevolent cloud in the darkness until it filled the void. She couldn’t feel her body. She knew she was but a pinpoint of matter, a tiny bit of consciousness floating in the emptiness. It seemed time had stopped or it was moving so slowly it would last forever and nothing for her would ever change.
I’m not ready, the child complained. I’m too young.
And
then she was swept off into the dark beyond where there was no more thought or heat or life.
She was done with this world.
CHAPTER 2
A NEW TRUE BEGINNING
“Life. A wriggling mass of cells blindly replicating, always in motion, endlessly in search of food. Is that life? They say it is.”
The girl lay dying. Her week-long fever had put her into a coma and though her mother kept bathing her with cool water, her skin felt like hot coals. Though fevered, her light coffee-colored skin shone smooth and beautiful as a river stone in the flickering firelight.
In the little one-room shack made from date palm leaves the heat was stifling. Not one stray breeze made its way through the open doorway. Flies were so thick they congealed the air and had to be batted away constantly from the comatose child.
The mother, frantic about losing her only child, knowing in her heart death stood close with a skeletal arm extended, ran from the hut crying to the night heavens. She sped along the lone path through the jungle to the witch doctor’s hovel and stood outside wailing loud enough to wake the dead.
In her native tongue she told the witch doctor about the dying child and begged for him to save her.
It seemed to take him forever to gather his special feathers, shells, rocks, and sticks tied in bundles with strings of dried pig skin. As the mother raced back along the path to her baby, the witch doctor stayed at her side, pacing her, a pale sickle moon at their backs.
Bursting into the hut where a small fire in the center of the floor burned, grotesque shadows swathed the little girl who lay against the back wall. Both mother and witch doctor knew it was over and done with.
The child’s arm lay limp off to one side, her head was turned toward them, her eyes open, glazed, and forever stilled.
The mother turned to the witch doctor and in her grief made the ultimate request. She knew of the rumors.
“They say you have raised the dead. Raise her up!”
“I have only raised a few animals,” he said. “Never a human being.”
“Raise her!”
It was true he was renowned across the island as the most powerful witch doctor ever to have lived, but what the woman was asking he thought was surely beyond his powers. He had brought a dead chicken back to life. A dead dog. And once, even a dead panther, just to see if he could. But a human being? He had not dared try. He was not even sure that the gods would allow him that kind of power.
“I will give you anything,” the mother cried. She beat her chest and rolled her eyes. “Anything! Anything!” She was close to madness.
The witch doctor’s countenance darkened, his eyes took on a glow. His gaze left the mother and settled on the child. He stepped closer, two steps. Three. He went to his haunches and studied the girl. She was undeniably the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Her skin was lighter than most islanders, as if it were lit from within by soft white flame. Her nose and lips and eyes and brow were perfection, and the face was shaped like a heart. Her long dark hair was smooth, shiny with whale oil, and it fell in curls like coiled snakes from her scalp. He reached out and trailed his fingers along her cheek. It was cold, so cold. It was a shame she was dead. It seemed to Mujai that the gods were intentionally cruel when children died.
Suddenly, and without knowing how it happened, the witch doctor fell in love with the dead child. If he hadn’t known better, he might have suspected he was under a spell not of his own making. His face softened, his lips parted, and he let out a little sigh. He swiveled on his haunches to face the mother at the hut’s door opening.
She was silhouetted in the firelight, a gaunt figure with clenched hands held before her breasts. He could feel her grief as if it were an extra person in the hut. It loomed over her, a dark, heavy figure bearing down on her thin shoulders.
“You will give anything if I raise her up? Anything? You will even give up your child to me?” He must make sure she meant it.
A look of dawning understanding and then dismay filled the mother’s eyes. She hung her head. Her tears kept falling, drenching her sweaty naked breasts. She had to decide. Bury her child in the cold ground or see her rise up and walk again, alive and well, but belonging to someone else. Belonging to…
“Yes,” she said, jutting out her chin in defiance. “Yes, I told you, yes. Anything. If you must take her, then take her, as long as she is alive again.”
The witch doctor stood and came to the child’s mother. “When I raise her, she will be mine. You understand? Forever mine. I will take her from here and she will live with me. One day, when she is old enough to wed, she will be my bride. Tell me you understand.”
Since the mother made no protest beyond the horror of what she was doing to her only child reflecting from her eyes, the pact was sealed.
“If you break your promise, I will kill you,” he said. “I will come in the night like a shadow and kill you.”
She turned aside, unable to look him in the face.
He left through the low door and stood a moment staring up at the starry sky from whence he derived part of his power. The sky, the earth, the sea, they all gave him just a particle of their powers, but it was enough. Enough to raise a human being he did not know yet, but enough to hope to raise one.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Keep away the family, let no one see her, allow no ceremony for her spirit. Tell no one, ever, of what happens here, good or bad, you understand? And while I'm gone keep the flies away too,” he added. “She must be kept clean and free of vermin.”
He hurried off into the night, loping like a gazelle. His talismans were left behind, discarded on the floor near the dead girl. For this he would not need them, and in fact, they would play no part. He required special plants that grew deep in the interior of the jungle, and water from the sea, and earth from the foot of the great sacred rock where all former witch doctors had been buried. Three times he had raised the dead with the secret potion, but if he was successful this fourth time it would be such a great accomplishment he might think himself a king rather than a witch doctor.
And the little girl would be his queen.
#
The island the witch doctor searched in the dark for his magic ingredients had no name for the people. Later in history it would be called Hispaniola. It was home to a few hundred aborigines who did not remember how any of them had come to be on the island and none of whom had ever tried to leave it. The land was merely home, the place where they lived out their lives. Centuries later the island would be conquered and ruled by the Spanish, who changed the name to Santo Domingo. In 1697 a formal division of the island occurred changing the name again into Santo Domingo and Saint-Domingue. Finally, it was changed to Haiti, what an ancient people used to call it. From that period the island was ruled over by despots and dictators.
But in this time before time was kept, it was nothing more than a jungle-encrusted plot of land in the Atlantic, neglected and ignored, its people savage and superstitious and alone, so very alone.
There were other witch doctors, and other small tribes, on various parts of the island, but Mujai knew he was the greatest of all. He had learned well everything his father and his grandfather had taught him about the witch arts, until he surpassed them and discovered, really by chance, the potion that brought the dead back to life again.
His reputation had spread and, after it was known he raised up a panther, some even feared him so much they let themselves die of fevers and infections rather than call for him. Others, however, knowing his value, came to his door and kept him rich with food and weapons for his prized wisdom. Perhaps, he thought, they were afraid, too, so they left him bribes. They gave him feathers of the rare ni-ni bird that had tail feathers of royal purple and emerald green. They brought beautiful shells taken by skilled divers from the sea floor, shells radiant with rainbow colors. And every fruit and every fish and every varmint that walked the island had at one time or another been deposited before his door as a gift.
It was true the chicken did not cluck after it was raised. And the dog did not bark. But the panther, yes, it had been almost as before, roaring, leaping, hunting prey. But it had seemed to Mujai, following the dead-before-now-alive panther’s trail for several weeks out of curiosity, it had seemed the big cat had turned into quite a voracious beast. Keeping well-hidden and down wind, Mujai watched it many times take it’s prey apart nearly on the very moment of impact, at the instant of its death from the panther’s vicious long teeth. Flesh went flying skyward, to the right and to the left, and still the beast attacked, ripping and tearing in such a frenzy that its entire face and chest was slathered with blood from its victim. It did not feed so much as battle and destroy.
Mujai loped harder and tapped on his chest for protection, thinking of the beast he had raised and how dark the night still was, dawn some hours yet in the distance. Where was that hungry beast now? And was it on the prowl anywhere nearby for the fearful master who had raised it from the dead?
BAD TRIP SOUTH Page 20
