“When you put that together with how Brenda won’t even leave me the number of where she’s staying, it’s… I don’t know. I just get a weird feeling about it.”
“Sounds like a scam to me,” Scotty said.
Jim switched the receiver from one ear to another. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Think about it. It’s obvious that she’s put her friends up to call you—just to get a rise out of you. To make you more interested.”
“How much more interested can I seem? Whenever she calls, we’re on the phone for at least an hour. I’d take her out in a minute, but I can’t seem to get the chance. She was too sick before she left and now she’s out of town.”
“Supposedly.”
Jim sighed. “Supposedly,” he repeated, somewhat reluctantly.
“Maybe she’s just getting back at you for not calling her after she sent you those flowers.”
“You really think so?”
“Hey, what do I know? Dear Abby I’m not. I’m just a guy who can’t get a date and when I do, the girl dumps me before we even go out.” He paused, then added, “Next time she calls, just ask her what’s going on.”
“What if there’s nothing? I’d hate to screw things up. I figure not calling her back right away was already one strike against me. I don’t want to add to it now because—”
A sudden beep on the line interrupted him.
“Just a sec,” Jim said. “That’s my call waiting. It might be Brenda calling.”
“I’ve got to go anyway,” Scotty said. “Call me tomorrow and let me know how things worked out.”
“Will do,” Jim told him.
Cutting the connection with Scotty, he took the other call.
21
I was really looking forward to talking to Jim tonight. I just wanted to hear his voice and connect with a world that didn’t involve ghosts or diets or strange voices, that come out of a haunted wishing well.
Following the railway tracks really cuts the distance to the general store. The highway takes a curve, but the tracks go straight through the woods. They’re overgrown, but not so much that they’re not easy to follow. I didn’t even need to use my flashlight. I just stepped from wooden rail to wooden rail, one foot, then the other, but slowly, every step an effort. I was so tired.
This flu bug I’ve caught made it seem as though I was walking all the way back to Newford. I kept having to stop and rest. I would’ve given up and just gone back, but by the time I started thinking along those lines, I’d already come so far that going back no longer made much sense. And besides, I had this real need to step outside myself and my problems—if only for a few minutes.
But now I wish I’d never called Jim, because it seems as though all my lies are coming home tonight: the ones Ellie pointed out that I’d used on myself, and the ones I’d told Jim. He didn’t come right out and say he didn’t believe I was out of town, but he kept asking all these questions about what my day had been like, had I got to see the sights, that kind of thing. Innocent enough questions, but I couldn’t help but feel there was an agenda behind them, as though he was trying to catch me up in my lies.
And then there was this business with Jilly calling him and Wendy wanting to pick up a dress from my apartment.
I don’t have any of Wendy’s dresses—God knows they’d never fit me anyway. At least they wouldn’t have before the diet. I could get into one of them now, I suppose; it’d just be a little short in the skirt and sleeves. But even if I did have something of Wendy’s, she’s got a key to my place anyway.
As soon as Jim started talking about their having called him I knew what was really going on. They were worried about me. They’d probably found out about my phone being cut off. Or that I’d lost my job. Or both. Wendy was probably upset anyway because of the way I’ve been avoiding her these past few weeks….
What a mess I’ve made of things.
I get off the phone as quickly as I can. Once I hang up, though, I don’t have the energy to go back to the motel. The general store is closed, gas pumps and all, so I just sit down on the steps running up to its porch and lean my head against the railing. I want to rest for a couple of minutes.
Once I’m sitting down I feel as though I’ll never be able to move again, but I know I can’t stay here. It’s not that I’m scared of running into the people who own the place or anything—there’s no law against using a public phone and then having a rest before heading back home.
No. It’s that I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched. At first I think it’s Ellie, but the watching has a hungry feeling about it, as though I’m being stalked, and I can’t see Ellie wanting to hurt me. If she ever did, she’s already had plenty of opportunities before now.
Logically, I know I’m safe. I’m just a little sick, weak from this flu bug I’ve caught. Maybe it’s the flu that’s making me feel paranoid. But logic doesn’t help me feel any better because, logically, there shouldn’t be ghost voices in the well and ghosts running through my dreams. Logically, I shouldn’t keep having conversations with the deceased proprietor of an abandoned motel.
Finally, I drag myself to my feet and start back. I have to rest every fifty feet or so because I just don’t have any strength left in me at all. The feeling of being watched gets stronger, but I’m feeling so sick it’s as though I don’t even care about it anymore. I have cramps that come and go in painful waves. I want to throw up, but I’ve got nothing in my stomach to bring up. I can’t even remember if I had any dinner or not. When all you eat is the same thing, popcorn and lettuce, lettuce and popcorn, day in and day out, it’s hard to differentiate between meals.
I don’t know how I make it back to my room, but finally I do. Dawn’s pinking the eastern horizon, casting long shadows as I stumble to my bed. The birds are making an incredible racket, but I almost can’t hear them.
My bed seems to sway, back and forth, back and forth, as I lie on it. I keep hearing ominous sounds under the morning bird calls. A floorboard creaking. A shutter banging. I’m too sick even to turn my head to see if there’s someone there. There’s a wet, musty smell in the air—part stagnant water, part the smell you get when you turn over a rotting log.
I really want to turn to look now, but the cramps have come back and I double up from the pain. When they finally ease off, I fall asleep and the ghosts are waiting for me.
They’re not familiar any longer—or rather, I recognize them, but they look different. It’s so awful. All I can see is drowned people, bloated corpses shambling toward me. Their faces are a dead white and grotesquely swollen. Their clothes are rotting and hang in tatters, they have wet weeds hanging from them, dripping on the floor. Their hair is plastered tight against their distended faces. They have only sunken sockets, surrounded by puffs of dead white flesh where they should have eyes.
You’re only dreaming, I try to tell myself. You’re sick and you have a fever and this is only a dream.
I manage to come out of it. The light’s bright in my eyes— must be mid-morning already. It’s impossible to focus on anything. I have some dry heaves which only makes me weaker. I try to fight it, but eventually I fall back into the dreams again.
That’s when I finally see her, rising up from behind the ranks of the drowned dead. She looks just like the picture of the rusalka in that book. A water-wraith. The deadly spirit of the well.
22
Wendy stayed over at Jilly’s studio Saturday night. She slept on the Murphy bed while Jilly camped out on the sofa— over Wendy’s protests. “I’ll be up early working,” Jilly insisted, and refused to discuss it any further. And sure enough, when Wendy woke the next morning, Jilly was already behind her easel, frowning at her current work in progress.
“I can’t decide,” she said when she saw that Wendy was awake. “Have I made it too dark on this side, or too light on the other?”
“Please,” Wendy said. She put on the kimono that Jilly used as a bathrobe and shuffled across the st
udio toward the kitchen area, looking for the coffee. “At least give me a chance to wake up.”
The door buzzer sounded as she was halfway to the coffee carafe sitting on the kitchen counter.
“Would you mind getting that?” Jilly asked. “It’s probably Geordie coming by to mooch some breakfast.”
“Wonderful,” Wendy said.
She was barely awake and now she had to put up with Geordie’s ebullient morning cheer on top of Jilly’s. She considered writing a sign saying, “Quiet, please, some people are still half asleep,” and holding it up when she opened the door, but she didn’t have the energy to do more than unlock the door. When she swung it open it was to find a stranger standing there in the hallway.
“Um, is Jilly here?”
Wendy gathered the kimono more closely about her neck and looked over her shoulder. “It’s for you,” she told Jilly. Turning back to the stranger, she added, “Come on in.”
“Thanks.”
Jilly looked around the side of her easel, her welcoming smile turning puzzled.
“Jim?” she said.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said.
So this was Jim Bradstreet, Wendy thought as she continued on her quest for a caffeine hit. He wasn’t as handsome as she’d imagined he’d be, but there was a warmth about him that was directly evident. Mostly, it had to do with his eyes, she decided, the laugh lines around them and the way his gaze had immediately sought her own.
Behind her, Jilly laid down the paintbrush she’d been using. Wiping her hands on her jeans, which left new streaks of a dark red on top of the other paint already on the material, she sat Jim down on the sofa and introduced him to Wendy. Wendy offered him coffee which he luckily refused, since there was barely one cup left in the carafe.
“Well, this is a pleasant surprise,” Jilly said. “I didn’t think you even knew where I lived.”
Wendy brought her coffee over to where they were sitting and curled up on the end of the sofa opposite Jim. That was Jilly, she thought. Always happy to see anybody. Sometimes Wendy thought Jilly must know every third person living in the city—with plans already formed to meet the rest.
“I looked the address up in the phone book,” Jim said. He cleared his throat. “Uh, maybe I should get right to the point. I’ve been kind of worried about Brenda ever since you called yesterday. You see, I got the impression that you didn’t even know she was out of town.”
Jilly’s eyebrows rose quizzically, but she didn’t say anything. Wendy stared down at her coffee. She hated getting caught in a he—even one so well-intentioned.
“Anyway,” Jim went on, “when she called me last night, I tried to find out where she was staying, how long she’d be gone—that kind of thing. I was trying to be surreptitious, but I could tell she felt I was grilling her and she acted very evasive. We hardly talked for more than five minutes before she was off the phone.”
Nice-looking and kindhearted, too, Wendy thought. Obviously concerned. She wondered if he had a brother.
Jilly sighed. “Well, it’s true,” she said. “We didn’t know anything was wrong until yesterday when we found out her phone was cut off and she’d lost her job.”
“But it’s the paper that’s sent her out of town,” Jim began before his voice trailed off. He nodded. “I get it,” he added, almost to himself. “She just didn’t want to see me.”
“I don’t think it’s quite like that,” Jilly said.
“She’s been avoiding everybody,” Wendy said. “I haven’t seen her in three weeks.”
“And you say she’s lost her job?”
Jilly nodded. “Brenda will probably hate us for telling you about any of this, but you seem to care for her and right now I get the feeling she needs all the people she can get to care about her.”
“What—what’s the matter with her?” Jim asked.
“We don’t know exactly,” Jilly said.
With Jilly having opened the Pandora’s box, Wendy realized she couldn’t hold back herself now. She just hoped that it wouldn’t put Jim off and that Brenda would forgive them.
“Brenda’s got a serious case of low self-esteem,” she said. “Way serious. She’s always had money problems, but now we think she’s quit smoking and gone on some weird crash diet. If you’ve done either, you probably know how it can make you a little crazy. With everything coming down at once on top of that—losing her job, obviously way broke— God knows what she’s thinking right now.”
“She never said anything….”
“Well, she wouldn’t, would she?” Wendy said. “Do you lay all your problems on a woman you’ve just met— especially someone you might like a lot?”
“She said that?” Jim asked. “That she likes me a lot?”
Wendy and Jilly exchanged amused glances. It was almost like talking to Brenda, Wendy thought. That’d be the first thing she’d center on as well.
“When you were talking to Brenda,” Jilly asked. “Did she say where she was staying?”
Jim shook his head.
“Well, I might be able to fix that,” Jilly said. “Or at least, Lou might.”
She got up and dug her phone out from under a pile of newspapers and art magazines and dialed a number.
“Who’s Lou?” Jim asked Wendy.
“A cop she knows.”
“Yes, hello?” Jilly said into the phone. “Could I speak to Detective Fucceri, please? It’s Jilly Coppercorn calling.” She listened for a moment, then put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Great,” she told them. “He’s in.” She removed her hand before either Wendy or Jim could say anything and spoke into the phone again.
“Lou? Hi. It’s Jilly. I was wondering if you could do me a favor.
“That’s not true—I called you just last week to ask you out for lunch but you were too busy, remember?
“How soon we forget.
“What? Oh, right. I want to get an address to go with a phone number.
“Well, no. I don’t have the number yet. I need that as well.”
Wendy sat fascinated as she listened to Jilly deal with number traces and the like as though she were some TV private eye who did this all the time. Jilly passed on Jim’s number and the approximate time of Brenda’s call to Lou, then finally hung up and gave Jim and Wendy a look of satisfaction.
“Lou’ll have the address for us in about half an hour,” she said.
“Can anybody do that?” Jim asked.
Wendy just looked at him. “What do you think?” she asked.
“What’s the big deal?” Jilly asked. “All I did was ask a friend to do us a favor.”
“But only you would think of tracing Brenda’s call,” Wendy said.
“But everybody knows that the phone company keeps records on that kind of thing—don’t they?”
“And only you would know who to ask and have them actually do it for you,” Wendy finished.
Jilly waved her hand dismissively. “Anybody want some breakfast?” she asked.
Jim glanced at his watch. “But it’s almost noon.”
“It’s also Sunday,” Wendy told him. “Normal people are only just waking up about now.”
“So call it brunch,” Jilly said.
It took Lou closer to an hour to get back to Jilly, by which time they’d all eaten the somewhat complicated Mexican omelet that Jilly had whipped up for them with her usual careless aplomb. Wendy and Jim were cleaning the dishes and Jilly was back behind the easel when the phone finally rang.
“You’re sure?” Jilly said when she had finished writing down the information he had given her. “No, no. I’d never think that. I really appreciate your doing this, Lou. It’s just such a weird place. Yes, I’ll tell you all about it next week. Thanks again.”
She hung up the phone and then stared at what she’d written.
“Well?” Wendy said. “Aren’t you going to tell us where she is?”
Jilly shrugged. “I don’t know. The call was made from a public phone b
ooth in the parking lot of a general store up Highway 14.”
“A general store?” Wendy said.
” ‘Ada & Bill’s General Store.’ It’s almost in the mountains.”
Wendy’s hopes fell. “That doesn’t tell us anything.”
Jilly nodded her head in glum agreement.
“I’ve got a car,” Jim said. “Anybody want to take a drive up there to see if we can find out more?”
All Jilly had to do was change her jeans for a clean pair and comb her tangled hair with her fingers. Wendy was dressed and ready to go in a record five minutes.
23
Everything stands still when the rusalka appears. She’s tall and gaunt, a nightmare of pale flesh clad in the remains of a tattered green dress, hair matted and tangled, the color of dried blood, the eyes burning so that looking at them is like looking into the belly of a furnace.
She’s what’s been haunting me, I realize. She’s the curse of the well. It’s not her granting wishes that makes her so terrible, but that she steals your vitality as a vampire would. She sucks all the spirit out of you and then drags your body down into the bottom of the well where you lie with all the other bodies of her victims.
I can see the mound of them in the water, a mass of drowned flesh spotted with the coins that have been dropped on top of them. I know that’s where I’m going, too.
She steps up to me, clawed hands reaching out. I try to scream but it’s as though my mouth’s full of water. And then she touches me. Her flesh is so cold it’s like a frost burn. Her claws dig into my shoulders, cutting easily through the skin like sharp knives. She starts to haul me up toward her in an awful embrace and finally I can scream.
But it’s too late, I know.
That’s all I can think as she drags my face up toward her own. It’s too late.
She’s got jaws like a snake’s. Her mouth opens wider than is humanly possible—but she’s not human, is she? She’s going to swallow me whole… but suddenly I’m confused. I feel like I’m standing on the edge of the wishing well and it’s the mouth of the well that’s going to swallow me, not the rusalka, except they’re one and the same and all I can do is scream, and even that comes out like a jagged whisper of sound because I’ve got no strength in me, no strength left at all.
Ivory and the Horn Page 14
