Perdition

by PM Drummond

  I drove up the dirt road, hoping the rented Escort wouldn’t be swallowed up and never seen again in one of the deep jagged ruts. Nothing but trees and the road existed one minute and then suddenly a pocket of cleared land appeared. The cabin was nestled in a small clearing of dense forest, the dimming, late afternoon light throwing the little structure into soft relief.

  The building looked sturdy, built out of thick logs worn smooth and shiny in places by time. The front porch sagged a little, but the cover showed signs of a recent patch job. Only two windows showed on the front, both heavily draped.

  Flowering plants grew in abundance in beds and containers made of everything from old tires to broken toilets. A solitary rocking chair made of woven tree branches sat vacant but still rocking on the front porch.

  I parked behind a rusted, once-green Ford Fairlaine and got out of the rental. I stretched and tried to work out some of the stiffness accumulated in the last five hours of driving. When I felt like I could walk up the front steps without one of my legs falling off, I ascended the steps, shivering and rubbing my arms.

  I leaned on one of the posts supporting the porch roof. Someone was here, I could feel it. I quieted my thoughts, closed my eyes, and opened my senses to the immediate area.

  The first thing that struck me was the chaotic calm of the place. After years of living in a heavily populated, electrified, high-stress city, this place seemed to scream quietness and peace. It was like leaving a noisy construction area and getting in a well-insulated car. The lack of noise and motion made my ears hum.

  I let the feeling flow through me for a few minutes before I realized I’d been wrong. There was life and noise here. It was just more of a natural variety than I was used to—muted and less obvious, but still there.

  I sensed the energy of small animals around the clearing. Wind shushed softly through the leaves, and the trees . . . the trees here had a life signal unlike trees back home. The only term I could think of for the difference was “more connected.” In fact, everything here was connected, the trees to the earth and sky, the animals to the earth and each other. Maybe this connection was back home, too, but there was too much interference from the people and technology-infested environment to feel it.

  I caught sense of a flickering energy close by. It resembled human energy, but it was purer, and it flashed on and off like a signal beacon. Waves of emotion—curiosity edged with fear and anger—washed toward me from its source. The energy drew closer. I turned toward it but kept my eyes closed so I wouldn’t lose it. It edged closer, maybe ten feet away.

  I heard a sharp gasp, and I opened my eyes.

  An impossibly thin woman stood staring at me, her shaking hand covering her mouth. White curls hung to her knees and enveloped her tall, thin frame in a shining halo of hair. She wore a loose, faded cotton dress that looked like a thrift store discard. When my gaze traveled to her eyes, I froze. It was like looking into a mirror. Her bright green eyes seemed constantly in motion. If I were closer, I knew I’d see golden flecks near the irises. The same flecks I had in my eyes.

  She took her hand away from her mouth.

  “It’s like seeing my own ghost from thirty years ago,” she whispered.

  “Aunt Tibby?”

  She took a few tentative steps on the porch, her whole body poised for flight like a stray cat approaching an offered bowl of food.

  “Who are you, child?”

  I stood still, afraid of frightening her off.

  “I’m Marlee, Eunice’s daughter.”

  Her wrinkles rearranged themselves into a smile.

  “Oh, Eunice. How is she? She was always such a happy, bright girl.”

  “My mother?”

  A look of puzzlement crossed her face and then a scowl covered it.

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “She married that witch’s boy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothin’, nothin’.” She took another couple of steps, raised her right hand in the air toward me, and waved it slowly back and forth. It was the same movement Rune and Griss had used.

  “That’s what I came to talk to you about,” I said.

  She snatched her hand back and took a shuffling step away.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “The energy or power or whatever you want to call it,” I said. “I want it to go away, and I was hoping you could tell me how to do it.”

  Her mouth sagged open, showing rotted teeth. She straightened and scowled.

  “Why the hell would you want to get rid of it? I’d give my right arm to get it back!”

  “But . . .”

  “How old do you think I am?”

  “What?”

  “How old do you think I am?”

  I looked her up and down. I hated answering age questions. Nothing you could say was right. Guess too low, they think you’re lying or an idiot, guess too high, and they’re insulted, guess just right, and they’re disappointed because they wanted to look younger or older. Crap. She looked about ninety.

  “Seventy?” I said.

  She laughed. “Try fifty-five.”

  “But, but, you’re my great aunt—”

  “I’m your grandmother Beula’s youngest sister. She’s sixty-seven, I’m fifty-five, just eight years older than your mom.”

  At the mention of my grandmother my heart constricted.

  Tibby’s eyes narrowed. “What is it?”

  “What’s what?” I asked, trying to figure out how to tell her.

  “Your aura just shut down.”

  “My what?”

  “Your aura. Your energy output. What were you thinking?”

  A sigh escaped me, and my body sagged.

  “Grandma died a year ago.”

  Tears flooded my vision and great racking sobs blossomed from my chest.

  “Grandma’s dead and she was the only one who . . . I mean, I think she knew about . . . you know . . . the energy, but she didn’t say anything. She was just there for me. She loved me no matter what. She was my best friend. Now she’s gone, and I can’t control this thing inside me. And now this crazy doctor is trying to kidnap me and . . .”

  She was next to me in an instant and grabbed my arm.

  “Doctor?” She shook me. “Did you say doctor?”

  She darted looks around the clearing.

  I tried to stop crying, but the last few days had finally caught up with me. With a vengeance it seemed. I spoke through hiccupping sobs.

  “Yes . . . Dr. Sarkis . . . his men attacked me . . . and a man saved me, but he isn’t really a man . . . and I had to come here cause you are the only one who might be able to help.”

  She pulled me toward the front door.

  “Get in the house.” She opened the door. Anger and fear radiated from her. She glanced once more around the perimeter of the yard before pulling me in the house and slamming the door. She hurried to the window and peeked out the curtain.

  “Do you think he followed you?”

  I looked around the dark, dingy room for tissue but didn’t see any, so I fished around in my jeans pocket, found a receipt, and wiped my nose on it. My sobs were down to intermittent sniffles. I hated to cry.

  “Answer me,” she shouted, still peering out the window.

  “No. I used a false ID and cash to get here, and I left from a friend’s house miles away from mine.”

  She let the curtains drop.

  “You’re sure they didn’t follow you to your friend’s house?”

  “I’m sure. The doctor’s men were sort of unconscious last time I left them.” Of course, so was I, but I didn’t want to tell her that.

  “Did you make ’em that way?”

  I shrugged. “Two of them. My friend got the other two.”

  She thought for a minute and smiled. “Good. Rat-bastards deserved it. Want some iced tea?”

  Her mood changed so rapidly, I didn’t know what to expect next.

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

 
My vision adjusted to the lack of light. The cabin consisted of one large room, about twenty feet by thirty feet. Meager furnishings included a small floral-print couch, brown chair, and a coffee table arranged by the front door. A kitchen area in the back right corner held a rustic, rough-hewn dining table and three mismatched chairs along the rear wall by the back door. The largest thing in the room was an odd plywood enclosure built snugly around a small bed. A section of the plywood hinged open, forming a door, and a rope ran through a hole where the doorknob should be. Knots on either end of the three-foot rope served as handles and kept the rope from falling out. I’d never been in a cabin before, so I had no idea if the bed/cage was normal or if this was her way of fashioning a bedroom for herself. Stacks of books lined the enclosure. In fact, stacks of books, hundreds of them, lined all the walls of the cabin.

  “Have a seat at the table.” Aunt Tibby unwound twine that connected two kitchen cabinet door handles together and pulled a glass pitcher of tea and glasses out of the cupboard. She poured tea into the glasses, replaced the pitcher in the cupboard, and rewound the rope.

  “Hope you don’t mind it warm. Shouldn’t really have called it iced tea I guess. No ice box. No electricity. So not much sense to have an ice box.”

  I looked around the cabin again. There wasn’t an electrical device in sight. The feeble light in the room came from up-tilted crude wooden louver blinds on the south wall which was in the back of the cabin. No electricity, an enclosure around the bed, cupboard doors tied together, and she could feel my energy . . . a thrill ran through me.

  Aunt Tibby stood in front of the table with a glass of tea in each hand, a wary look in her eyes.

  “You still have it,” I said.

  Anger, then resignation flashed across her face. She sighed and set the glasses on the table with a thunk.

  “Pieces of it,” she said. “The pieces that Sarkis didn’t fry. Tell me about my sister, and I’ll tell you about being a virago.”

  “A virago?”

  “This thing God has chosen to bless and burden us with. The chosen women in our family were dubbed viragos centuries ago. It means female warrior or some such nonsense.”

  She eased her bony frame onto one of the kitchen chairs and pointed to the chair at the opposite end of the table. “Sit.”

  I grabbed my glass of tea and sat.

  “Tell me about Beula,” she said in a low voice.

  “She had a heart attack last winter. It was out of the blue. She was healthy as a horse one day, and she was gone the next. Her neighbor found her on the kitchen floor.”

  Tears flowed from my eyes. This wasn’t crying, just a torrent of tears showing up of their own accord, like my soul wept and forgot to tell my brain.

  “You were close?”

  I nodded. “She’s the only person I’ve ever really been able to say that about.”

  “She didn’t know about your power?”

  I sighed. Thinking about my grandmother made me hurt. Talking about her was agony.

  “I don’t know. She never mentioned it, but I think she did. I think she and my mom used to talk about it. You know, things would happen like I’d walk in the room and they’d quit talking, and they’d look uncomfortable.”

  Aunt Tibby turned her glass around on the table with her index finger and thumb and stared at it.

  “Did she suffer?”

  “No. The doctor said it was probably instantaneous.”

  “There was no sign of struggle or anything suspicious?”

  “No.” I sat up straighter. “What are you getting at?”

  “Nothin’. Nothin’.” She sipped her tea but wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  The image of a tall, thin man with glasses and frizzy hair and the name Sarkis flashed through my mind. My eyes went wide.

  “You think Sarkis could have been involved? Is he the tall man with glasses?”

  Her eyes snapped to mine and held there.

  “Stay out of my head,” she said.

  I gaped at her.

  “I didn’t—”

  “You just did. I felt it,” she said. “It’s rude, and I don’t like it.”

  Could I have done that?

  “Is he tall with frizzy hair and glasses?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  The image in my head must have come from her, because I’d never seen him. Now that I thought of it, I’d gotten flashes like that all my life. I thought everyone got them, that they were just ideas or intuition. How many had been my own thoughts, and how many had I stolen from other people? I’d been a cerebral peeping-Tom. How many other things did I do that were abnormal that I didn’t even know about?

  I put my elbows on the table and my face in my hands.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Tibby. I didn’t mean to. I can’t control this thing. I just want it to go away.”

  A short bark of brittle laughter escaped her.

  “No you don’t, child. That’s like saying you want your lungs to go away because you have the hiccups or your eyes to go away because they burn and won’t focus right. Being virago is a part of you—it’s a part of everyone, just not as strong.”

  “It’s ruining my life.”

  “Only because you’re fighting it. To lose it is a sort of half-death. Trust me—you don’t want to find out what that’s like. Why do you think I look so old? I age faster now that it’s gone.”

  I looked up at her. She gazed at the twirling glass again.

  “But you still have it—pieces of it, you said.”

  “It’s like losing part of your hearing or part of your vision. What’s left of it is sporadic and damaged. It comes to me at night sometimes when I dream of,”—she took a deep breath—”of Sarkis. Then, sometimes it comes in a huge wave, and I can feel and hear everything—everything in the world it seems, and I can’t think because so many other people and things are in my brain thinking and feeling.”

  The glass of tea shook as she raised it to her lips.

  “I just want to be normal, like everyone else,” I said.

  She laughed.

  “There are no normal people. Haven’t you ever looked into their thoughts? They all have secrets. They all have abnormalities. You’d be surprised how many have crazy relatives living in the woods.”

  Her eyes met mine and crinkled with a sad humor.

  “It’s so wonderful to talk to someone about this,” I said. “Someone who knows. I can’t talk to people very well. I’m afraid something will slip, and they’ll know I’m a freak. If they’re high-energy people, I absorb from them. If they’re low energy, they wind up hanging around me because they mysteriously feel better. I think they absorb the energy I throw off.”

  “I remember those times,” Tibby said. “Low energies can’t absorb and store like we can, but they can . . . oh, I don’t know, what would you call it?”

  “Collect?” I said.

  She snapped her fingers.

  “Yes, that’s it exactly. It’s like they collect it on their skins, but it evaporates as soon as they’re not around us for a while.”

  She stared at nothing, as if lost in memories.

  “There was a girl named Bunny when I was a kid,” she said. “She was big and slow, and she had the lowest energy of anyone I’ve ever met. She would find me no matter where I was and follow me around like a shadow. I’d hide from her, but she could always find me. It was like in her own way, she could sense me.”

  Tibby’s eyes focused back from the memory and a frown formed in the deep wrinkles around her mouth.

  “I hadn’t thought of that in years. I wonder what happened to her.”

  The lack of electricity and people made this piece of wilderness a haven of low natural energy. I was still relatively calm, but a slight tremor now shook my hand as I reached for my tea. Blaming it on the caffeine, I pushed the tea aside and tried to catch up with the conversation.

  “So, you’ve never gone back home?” I asked.

  “No. When I escaped Sarkis, I
just ran. I wound up here. I thought it was by accident until I met Daniel Risingmoon.”

  “Who?”

  She stood and hobbled over to the sink.

  “Daniel was a Blackfoot and a medicine man of sorts. He said he felt me in his dreams and called to me. He used to call me Broken Star.”

  “Used to?”

  “He died a few years ago. He was in his fifties when I came to him, and that was ages ago.”

  She looked around the cabin and waved her arm once through the air.

  “He built this place for me, instructed his family that they were to let me live here as long as I wanted.”

  She laughed.

  “They will, too,” she said. “They’re afraid he’ll come back to haunt them if they don’t. He called me here and patched me up physically and mentally as best he could—heck, as best as anyone could have. He saved me. Although, sometimes I wonder what good it did. I’ve been hiding out here ever since, with my books and the trees and the nothingness. Daniel used to bring me books. He knew I loved to read. Now his family brings them, like offerings, and leaves them on the front porch.”

  She turned, parted the curtain above the sink and peeked out. After she let the curtain drop back, she rubbed both her upper arms.

  I rubbed my own tingling arms, absent-mindedly watching her.

  “What did Sarkis do to you? How did he find you?” I asked.

  She shuffled back to the table and sat.

  “Oh, you know, people gossip. They talked about the witch of Duncan, Oklahoma, who could move things and read minds. There’s a military base in Lawton not too far from Duncan. A lot of boys I went to school with wound up there trying to escape farming. I figure that’s where he heard of me.

  “He showed up at the house one day in a big Cadillac. Made me feel like I was special—not a freak or a witch. He said he could teach me to be powerful, and in turn I could be the key to teaching others how to do what I did.

  “I was twenty-one, and he was in his thirties and so smart. I guess I was a little smitten with him. He was the first person to ever treat me like I was important. I left with him, and at first it was all right—even fun sometimes. He worked with me to build my abilities.”