Soft Apocalypses

by Lucy Snyder

  Karl was passionate, and sweet, and damn fine company. She first laid eyes on him at the gym; he was tall and lean and the smell of him made her blood sing. Karl had been reluctant to get involved with a married woman, but he was just as attracted to her as she to he.

  At first she told herself it was just a casual fling, but the more time she spent with him, the more she knew in her heart that she couldn’t bear to be without him. And she could tell how uncomfortable he was about having to sneak around.

  Karl deserved better than to be her dirty little secret. And William deserved her honesty. She didn’t know how she could do right by both men, so for now all she could worry about was keeping Karl alive.

  “Is Mr. Barrington still coming back from Mexico City next Wednesday?” Yolanda asked when Mary returned.

  “That’s his plan, last I heard.” Five days would suffice to get Karl strong enough to move to his apartment for the remainder of his recuperation. She shuffled into the kitchen and got a few slices of sourdough from the breadbox.

  “I’m starving, and I’m exhausted.” Mary said. “Would you mind fixing me some breakfast?”

  “Not at all.” Yolanda set a skillet on the stove to heat.

  Mary got a butter knife from the draining rack, found her jar of herb paste in the refrigerator, and sat down at the blond oak breakfast table. Yolanda made a face as Mary spread the thick, green-black paste on the bread.

  “I don’t see how you can eat that stuff.” Yolanda carried a bowl of oranges to the juicing machine. “It smells like shit.”

  “It’s full of flavonoids and antioxidants and it’s just the thing for a killer hangover.” Actually, it was just the thing for keeping Mary from aging rapidly and drastically as a result of the resurrection she’d performed. “A little rosemary for the brain, valerian for the nerves, ginseng for strength, ginko for the circulation, garlic for the heart ….”

  … and a little consecrated silver to fortify my spiritual strength, ground oak leaf to center my soul, and dried blood from my mother to preserve my flesh, she finished to herself.

  Mary set the half-eaten bread aside and laid her head on the cool wood table. Her skull felt like it was filled with sloshing quicksand. God. She’d really pushed it this time. She’d done a rejuvenation on her husband only two weeks ago—she had no business doing a full resurrection so soon afterward.

  But what else could she do? The longer she waited to raise Karl, the more decomposition set in, the bigger the risk he’d come out a twisted, soulless monster.

  She worried about the effect her rejuvenations had on her husband. He’d been in his late sixties when they met and was recovering from a quadruple bypass. All the signs indicated he wasn’t going to see the end of the decade. But he’d heard about her special services through a spiritualist he’d consulted for stock advice, and he offered her more cash than she’d seen before to cast a spell to add a few years back onto his life.

  She’d done twelve rejuvenations on him in the four years since then. He’d recently celebrated his seventy-first birthday and looked a fit fortysomething. But with each rejuv she’d cast, he’d grown a little colder in manner and mind. He still smiled, still laughed, still took care in his foreplay with her, but when she looked in his eyes, she sometimes felt she was staring out into the cold blackness between the stars. Once upon a time, she was sure she’d seen something like love in those dark eyes of his. Now she wondered if it hadn’t been a figment of her imagination, if she’d never really been anything more than a favorite investment to him.

  Or maybe she’d stopped letting herself see anything but his natural coldness to justify her affair with Karl.

  Yolanda set a glass of fresh juice on the table beside Mary’s head.

  “Now, don’t you fall asleep before I get breakfast ready,” Yolanda admonished.

  “Don’t worry, I’m awake.” With effort, Mary sat up and took a sip of her juice.

  Mary admired the graceful curve of Yolanda’s neck as the younger woman turned back to the fridge. They’d been friendly enough the past four years, but weren’t really friends. Mary had held Yolanda at arm’s length because she felt she had to keep too many secrets to cultivate a real friendship with her. Maybe that had been a mistake.

  “William hired you right out of high school, so you’ve been his housekeeper for, what, ten years now?” asked Mary.

  Yolanda nodded as she cracked two eggs into the hot skillet. “Yes, about ten years.”

  “Did you two ever …? You know. Get involved.”

  Yolanda gave her a sharp look. “What kind of girl do you think I am?”

  “A young and pretty one. And don’t tell me he’s too proper to sleep with his employees, because I’m still on the payroll.” She paused. “Look, I’m not going to get mad; I’m just asking.”

  Yolanda sighed, staring down at the coagulating eggs.

  “I was nineteen,” she said quietly. “I couldn’t say no to him. I didn’t want to say no. I dreamed that he might fall in love, and make me his wife. But it was just sex to him, and he lost interest after a few weeks. Afterward, I felt like I’d been his whore, and thought about quitting … but jobs that pay this well aren’t easy to find. Not for girls like me, anyway. So I stayed.”

  Yolanda gave her a quick, worried glance. “He hasn’t tried to touch me since he brought you here, if that’s what you thought.”

  Mary shook her head. “No, it’s not that. I just wondered how well you knew him. Sometimes I don’t think I know him at all.”

  “Why do you say that?” Yolanda turned the eggs and put two pieces of sausage in a separate pan.

  “Yolanda … do you think he loves me?” Mary asked.

  “He ought to love you, after all you’ve done for him.”

  “I haven’t done that much. I’m just a nurse.” The savory smell of the frying sausage made her mouth water.

  “Mary, I have eyes. I’ve seen the change in him. He was an old, sick man, and now he’s back in the prime of his life.”

  “But do you think he loves me?”

  Yolanda spoke carefully. “I think men like him know how to possess things and take care of things. They don’t know how to love as women need to be loved.”

  Mary quietly sipped her juice while Yolanda grated sharp cheddar onto the eggs.

  “Speaking theoretically,” Mary finally said, “how angry do you think he’d be if I took a lover?”

  “He’d be furious. Mr. Barrington doesn’t like to share.” Yolanda brought the steaming breakfast plate to Mary.

  “Oh, this looks yummy, you’re a lifesaver!” Mary picked up her knife and fork and started digging in.

  “Mary … you’ve been going out an awful lot. Mr. Barrington might not have noticed yet, but … just please be careful. I would miss you if you were gone.”

  The phone rang.

  “If that’s William, please tell him I’m asleep,” Mary said.

  Yolanda hurried over to the phone in the corner.

  “Yes? Oh, hello, Mr. Barrington,” Yolanda said. “Is everything okay? Yes. She’s still asleep upstairs. Tonight? Yes, I’ll tell her. Are you sure everything is okay? Fine. Goodbye.”

  Yolanda hung up and walked back to the table. “Mr. Barrington wants to talk to you about something. He’ll call back at 10, and he wanted me to make sure you’ll be here.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Even if she had the energy to go out, she wasn’t about to leave Karl by himself. “I wonder what he wants?”

  Mary speared another piece of sausage. Mid-lift, her hand began to shake, and the hairs rose on the back of her neck and arms. Her heart began to pound, faster and faster.

  “Are you okay?” Yolanda asked.

  Mary’s chest felt constricted; it was hard to breathe, and harder to talk. “I—I don’t know—”

  Suddenly, Mary was floating disembodied above Karl’s bed in the upstairs bedroom. The walls and curtains were on fire, but the flames were the wrong color, deep red an
d purple and green. The air was filled with thick red smoke and the stench of black magic. Karl was coughing and weakly calling for help. He looked old, his face sunken. He almost looked like William. Through the smoke, she saw a corpse lying in a wide pool of blood beside the bed. Her horror deepened as she realized the body was hers ….

  Mary came out of the vision and found that she’d fallen out of her chair and lay crumpled on the floor. Yolanda was beside her, trying to help her up, but her legs weren’t cooperating.

  “What’s the matter? Should I call for a doctor?”

  We’re going to die, Mary tried to say, shaking her head, but the words wouldn’t come. Her vision clouded, and everything went black.

  Mary came to a few minutes later as Yolanda hoisted her onto the bed in the first floor guest suite.

  “What—” Mary began, still disoriented.

  “Shh, be still. I’m going to … call you a doctor,” Yolanda said between gasps, winded from the effort of carrying Mary down the hall.

  “No, don’t. Don’t need a doctor. Just need to rest,” Mary slurred. She couldn’t keep her eyes open. “I’m fine … just need a nap. Please don’t let me sleep too long ….”

  Mary was running up the stairs of the mansion. Her legs moved too slowly, as if the staircase were covered in a foot of sticky tar that was sucking her down. The air stank of brimstone. From Karl’s bedroom, she could hear a low, slithery voice chanting in a language older than mankind. The sound chilled her to the core. Something terrible would happen to Karl if she didn’t stop it.

  Mary finally got to the second floor and ran to the bedroom. The door was ajar, and a deep red light glowed from within. She pushed inside. The red light flared bright, blinding her, and the serpentine voice rose to a roar—

  “Mary!” Yolanda was shaking her. “Wake up!”

  “Oh God!” Mary jerked fully awake, breathing hard.

  “Shh, shh, it’s okay, it’s just a nightmare. Everything’s okay,” Yolanda soothed, laying a cool hand against Mary’s forehead. “I heard you call out in your sleep, and I thought I should wake you.”

  “Thanks.” Mary sat up. A pain like someone had shoved an icepick behind her eyes lanced through her skull.

  “God, what time is it?” Mary asked, clutching her head.

  “Nine p.m.”

  “Twelve hours?” Mary threw off the thin quilt. “That’s your idea of not letting me sleep too long?”

  She rolled out of bed and staggered into the adjoining guest bathroom, turned on the faucet and splashed cold water on her face.

  Yolanda followed her into the bathroom. “I tried waking you earlier, but you wouldn’t get up. I didn’t want to push you.”

  Mary found a bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet, and gulped down four tablets along with a handful of water. Her nerves were still humming from the alarm his ward spell had set off. “You’ve got to get out of here. Something really bad’s going to happen.”

  “Mary, what’s going on?”

  Mary shook her head. “I can’t explain. There’s no time.”

  She stepped back into the bedroom and stuck a hand in her pocket to find the key to Karl’s bedroom. Her fingers found nothing but lint. She’d left the key in her dirty jeans upstairs.

  “You didn’t happen to bring the dirty clothes down to the laundry, did you?”

  “I put them in the wash.” Yolanda reached into the breast pocket of her apron and pulled out the key. “Are you looking for this?”

  “Yes.”

  Mary reached for the key. Yolanda dropped it back in her pocket.

  “No. Not until you explain,” Yolanda said. “I am responsible for this house when Mr. Barrington is away, and if there’s a danger here, I need to know exactly what it is. ‘Something bad’ isn’t a good explanation.”

  “Dammit, I can’t—”

  “When I was upstairs, I heard a noise in the second-floor bedroom. I was surprised the door was locked, but not half as surprised as when I found a strange man in there.” Yolanda paused. “The blood on your shirt wasn’t from a deer, was it?”

  Mary took a deep breath. “No. It’s wasn’t. The man in the bedroom is … my boyfriend Karl. He wrecked his bike, and I brought him here.”

  “That boyfriend of yours is a real cutie. But he has an awful lot of stitches in him. I’m no doctor, but I think I can tell when a guy’s had his head sewn back on. So how come your boyfriend is still breathing when he should be in a morgue?”

  “I’m … a healer. A white witch. That’s why William hired me. I could keep him alive when the doctors couldn’t.”

  Mary closed her eyes for a moment, trying to steady her nerves. “Last night, I had a vision that Karl had an accident. He was dead when I found him, so I brought him here to bring him back. Since then, I’ve had … bad premonitions. Something very evil is coming here, and I honestly don’t know what it is. I do know that if we don’t get out of here, it’s going to kill me and Karl, and probably you, too.”

  Yolanda paused, looking skeptical. “Maybe all this is happening because you helped Karl cheat Death?”

  “No. I’ve done resurrections before, and nothing like this happened. Besides, by that logic, the spells I cast on William should’ve brought evil down on us, too. Heart failure is just as fatal as decapitation. Neither of the men in my life should be alive right now.”

  Yolanda stared at Mary. “I knew of a Santeria witch woman once. She claimed she did white magic, too, but there was a blood price for everything she did. There was a balance. If she cured a cold, a chicken or a lizard had to die. If she helped someone stay alive, someone else had to die.”

  “There has to be a balance, yes. You can’t generate magic out of nothing. Healing requires a lot of spiritual energy, and the easy way to get it is to take it from another life. But my mother taught me a better way: I can generate the energy myself, if I stay fit and eat right and all that good stuff.”

  “So you don’t kill people?”

  “Not unless they’re trying to kill me.”

  Yolanda considered this, then pulled the key out of her pocket and tossed it to Mary. “Let’s get your boyfriend and get out of here. If something happens to the house … well, that’s why Mr. Barrington has insurance.”

  After checking on Karl and replacing his I.V. bag, the two women went up to Mary’s bedroom. Mary quickly laced on her old hiking boots and threw a few changes of clothes and some toiletries into an overnight bag.

  “We’ve got to be really careful with Karl.” Mary shook her head. “He shouldn’t be moved at all, but we have no choice. There’s an old wheelchair up in the attic. We can use that to take him out to the car.”

  Mary left her bag on her dressing table and knelt down beside her bed. She reached under it and pulled out a battered steel case.

  “First things first,” Mary said. “We’ve got to be able to defend ourselves.”

  Mary undid the combination locks and opened the case. She pulled out a large revolver, flipped open the cylinder and checked the contents. Satisfied, she closed the cylinder and held the pistol out to Yolanda. “Here, take this. It’s loaded with consecrated silver bullets half-jacketed in cold iron. Ammunition against most anything, dead or alive.”

  Yolanda stared at the gun as if it were a very large spider. “I have never fired a gun in my life.”

  “It’s easy: just point the gun at the thing you want to kill and squeeze the trigger.”

  When Yolanda didn’t reach for the gun, Mary said, “Look, you’ve got to take it. It’s iron; I can’t have it on me, or it’ll screw up any spells I try to cast.”

  Yolanda reluctantly took the pistol and stuck it in one of the deep side pockets of her apron.

  Mary lifted an ancient silver-bladed bronze dagger in a red leather sheath from the case. It was an Irish priest’s scían, made sometime in the fourth century. She stuck the holy weapon in the waistband of her jeans under her pullover. “Please get the wheelchair, and I’ll prep Karl for t
he trip.”

  Mary grabbed her overnight bag and hurried down the stairs. The aspirin had only blunted the pain in her head, and her stomach was growling unpleasantly. At least her overlong sleep had given her most of her energy back. Once they had Karl squared away at a motel someplace, she could order a pizza and cast a divination to figure out what the hell was causing her visions.

  Her stomach growled again, loudly. God, she was so hungry! If she didn’t get more food soon, she’d lose what little concentration she had left. Mary dropped her bag beside Karl’s bedroom door on the second floor landing and headed down to the kitchen.

  As she was hunting for a Powerbar in the pantry, the back door opened.

  “Who’s there?” she called, putting a hand on the hilt of her dagger.

  “It’s just me, dear.” William Barrington stepped out of the darkened entry hall into the light from the kitchen. He looked alert and cheerful, despite his long flight. “I’d have called to let you know I was returning early, but that would have spoiled the surprise. Please meet Nala, my new nurse.”

  A tall, beautiful model in a tailored green suit stepped up beside William. Her silken auburn hair cascaded down over her shoulders, and her eyes—Mary blinked, and did a double-take.

  The woman’s lovely high cheeks, pouting lips and green eyes seemed transparent, and behind the beautiful mask of a face Mary could just barely see the visage of something ugly and gray, something with skin that writhed and eyes like molten lead.

  “I met Nala in Mexico City a few months ago,” William said. “I appreciate all you’ve done, but the fact is, it’s not enough. Nala can give me eternal youth. I’ve got to say her magical skills are quite impressive. Did you know she can pull a man’s guts out through his mouth, and keep him alive indefinitely? She can also make the dumb son-of-a-bitch who’s been fucking my wife wreck his motorcycle. Neat, huh?”

  Mary’s stomach dropped as she remembered her visions.

  “But you can’t be young again and remain William Barrington, can you?” she said. “So you have to become someone else. I get it. You planned to have her magic Karl’s bones and teeth to look like yours, then kill me and burn the place down.”