“You’re kidding me,” I said.
Carolyn pulled the door open and motioned to a tiny vestibule inside. Its ancient paneling had been painted glossy red and dotted with lavender thumbprints all around. Since there was nobody there, corporeal or otherwise, I went in and headed for the palmist’s, telling myself to keep an open mind.
“Not there,” Carolyn said, closing the outer door behind her. “The shop’s upstairs.”
I looked up the narrow staircase and saw the thumbprints wended their way up. I climbed the creaky stairs with Carolyn right behind me. As we neared the top, I saw a haze of smoke around the single bare bulb. It smelled of burnt sage, incense and cigarettes.
On the second floor landing, the stairs turned and went on to a third floor, but the thumbprints stopped at a frame and panel door. It was painted yellow with blue stripes, and a sign hung in the center that read “Sticks and Stones” with the words formed out of twigs and semi-precious tumbled gems.
“Here,” Carolyn said, but I’d figured that from the stink of burnt herbs that lingered there. Did the sage keep the ghosts at bay? If so, I wondered if I could manage to use it without burning my house down.
I opened the door into a small shop packed with exotic stuff. A threadbare Oriental carpet covered a hardwood floor that was scratched and dull with age. Racks of scarves and other gypsy-like clothing ran along one wall. Shelves covered with devotional candles -- from Saint Agnes to XX Double Cross -- covered another. Plexiglas cases full of herbs, trinkets and stones blocked a bead-hung doorway from the rest of the one-room store.
Despite the onslaught of colors, textures, and smells coming from the shop, I turned my focus inward. The little hairs on my arms had stopped standing on end, and my heart was pounding hard more from climbing a flight of stairs than from panicking at the sight of the grasping dead. My panic started to ebb, a little.
Carolyn came in behind me and closed the door. “Crash?” she called.
Latin brass band music drifted up from the street, but a more pleasant a cappella number played from somewhere behind that doorway; bluesey and soulful, like a woman with a knockout voice humming to herself while she worked in her kitchen.
The soul music quieted as a hand parted the beaded curtain. A man’s hand, wrist stacked with black rubber bracelets and silver on every finger.
“Carolyn!” he cried, and the rest of him (which was equally as decked out as the hand he’d led with) burst through the curtain. Crash was maybe thirty, with spiked-up, bleached white hair and a ring through his nose. He wasn’t what I’d imagined one of Carolyn’s friends would look like. He was hot. Not that I thought anything would happen between the two of us. Cheating is the top entry on my “no” list, and I was in a relationship. “I had a premonition that I’d see you today,” he said.
“No you didn’t,” said Carolyn dryly.
Crash clucked his tongue, then looked at me, crossed his tribal-tattooed arms over his chest, and raised an eyebrow. “Hey,” I said, doing my best to seem like I wasn’t in a ghost-panic.
“Hey, yourself.”
“This is my friend, Victor,” said Carolyn. “We came to see you about healing.”
Crash pulled a rough, handmade-looking bowl out from under the counter and placed it on top. It was full of sand. I tried to imagine what he’d use it for: some kind of ritualistic cleansing? And then he lit up a cigarette and flicked the spent match into the sand. “No ‘Hi, how are you, I haven’t seen you in, what, a month? What’ve you been up to?’ That’s so cold.”
“I’m sure you’re devastated,” Carolyn said.
I wondered if all of their friendly banter was this chipper. If so, I hoped I’d never get either of them mad at me.
Crash crooked his finger at me. “I take it you’re the volunteer from the audience?”
The humming resumed from beyond the curtain, loud and clear, and although I’ve never been much for R&B gospel type music, I really liked it. I stepped forward, just as much to catch more of that music as to let Crash have a look at me.
Crash held up a hand. “That’s close enough,” he said quietly.
I stopped, and wondered if I was so contaminated that even a guy named “Crash” couldn’t deal with my proximity.
“What is it?” Carolyn demanded. “Do you see something?”
“Don’t get your panties in a twist, Little Miss PsyCop. I’m not in high gear all the time like you are.”
I tried to settle myself. If he thought Carolyn was in high gear, then I was practically in orbit.
“Vic is psychic,” Carolyn said.
“Do you mind?” asked Crash. He held his hand palm-out toward her, instead. “I can do it myself.”
“I’m just trying to help,” Carolyn said, a trace of poutiness in her voice. Crash stared at me, alternatingly gnawing at his thumbnail and taking drags off his Camel Light. I stood there like a lump. Carolyn watched Crash watching me.
“He’s a medium,” she muttered, like she just couldn’t keep it in.
“A big overblown TV antenna. Yeah. I get it.”
Well. It was the first time anyone’d ever called me that.
“Something’s unusual about his reception,” Carolyn told him. “That’s why we came to see you.”
“Maybe you should’ve taken him to Radio Shack.” He squinted at me, considering.
“If you’re not up to it, just say so,” Carolyn said. “It’s not like you’ve got the only metaphysical store in Chicago.”
Crash huffed a little and then looked at me. “Only the best one,” he said, his eyes boring into mine. “Okay, c’mere.”
I shuffled forward another step and he grabbed me by the sleeve of my jean jacket, dragging me halfway across the plexiglassPlexiglas countertop. “Hold still,” he said. “It’s not like I can see the problem written on your forehead.”
I was close enough to see his eyes, pale green, like jade. The bluesy humming seemed to intensify as I stared into them. He flashed a tongue stud at me, grazing it across the ridge of his lower teeth. I couldn’t tell whether he’d done it on purpose or if it was just a habit.
“You’re not right,” he said. I thought he’d let go of me with that, tell me to get the hell out of his shop and stop dirtying his vibe.
And then he grinned.
I swallowed. He probably liked it dirty.
He leaned the cigarette into the bowl of sand and slid his fingers down to my bare wrist beneath the sleeve of my jacket. I assumed he’d do something theatrical, but instead he closed his eyes and tilted his head like he was listening to a faint whisper.
Even Carolyn stayed quiet.
Crash let go. “I’d do a gemstone cleanse first,” he said. “And once that’s done, take a look at fine tuning.”
I snorted before I could even censor myself. Here I was, swarmed with dead and my liver about to explode, and he wanted me to play with crystals? “That’s it?”
Crash found his cigarette, took a drag and exhaled slowly so that the smoke drifted around his face. “What did you expect -- the numbers for tonight’s lottery? You’ll have to go downstairs for that. Actually, that’s not a bad idea -- pretty soon they’re gonna replace mediums with radios and video cameras that’ll let everyone see spirit energy. The government’s got it in the works even as we speak. And then you’ll be out of a job.”
“Listen,” I said. I caught him by the wrist this time, the non-cigarette wrist, and pulled him forward. Not only did he allow it, but he smirked about it like I’d invented some fun new game. “I have a health problem. Can’t you tell me something I can use?”
Crash’s smirk slipped a little. “I was serious about the gemstone cleanse. If you really are a medium and not just a bullshit artist, it might even help you shield. Unless you live beneath high tension wires, in which case there’s nothing to do but move. It’s all energy: particles and electrons.”
The thought of shielding appealed to me. I’d done it once before -- on Jacob, not myself -- to kee
p an incubus from feeling him up. I imagined myself learning to shield so well that I’d be surrounded by an aura so strong and pure that the grasping dead just dissolved on impact.
And then I realized Crash had just called me a fraud. I think.
I suppose I could’ve flashed my federal license at him and told him I was a level five medium, and in fact that was my initial impulse, but I stopped myself before I did. It just felt lame. “How can crystals help me shield?”
I heard the shop’s door open and Crash looked over my shoulder instead of answering me. “Well, well, well,” he said, and his eyes narrowed.
How could I not turn and look, too? It was Jacob.
Jacob crossed his arms. He was in his suit, so he looked reasonably imposing already, but his sleepless night had left him with a don’t-fuck-with-me expression that I personally wouldn’t have challenged.
“Are you here to tell me you’re sorry,” said Crash, “or are you just tagging along with Carolyn today?”
Jacob’s eyes narrowed. “I’m only the chauffeur.”
“How ridiculous, thinking an apology might come out of you, seeing as how you’re always right.”
I crossed my arms and wished someone had given me a heads-up on the bad blood. I felt vaguely guilty for noticing Crash’s looks, but that was stupid. Jacob wouldn’t read anything into the wrist-grab. Would he?
“So can you help Victor,” asked Jacob, “or is this just another waste of time?”
“I can do plenty,” Crash said. He huffed into the back room and left the beads clanking behind him.
I looked at Jacob and he glowered at me as if he dared me to say anything. I wasn’t going there.
Crash knocked the bead curtain aside with a heavy box woven from some kind of cane or bamboo. He slammed it onto the plexiglassPlexiglas and Carolyn and I winced. Jacob was motionless.
A black woman with a flowered scarf covering her hair followed. She was big, well over two hundred pounds, and looked to be at least sixty. A blue caftan covered her body, hanging loosely over the mounds of her breasts and wide curve of her hips. Her skin was dark and shiny, and she fanned herself with a cheap paper fan printed with the likeness of Saint Anthony. I realized she was the one who’d been humming in the back room. Crash didn’t introduce her, and I was too freaked out about the state of my liver and Jacob’s big, bad attitude to ask.
Crash pulled a sheet of paper, copied on both sides, out of the basket, and a few baggies of polished stones. He unzipped the baggies and dumped the stones onto the counter, and then considered them. The black woman pointed to a particular stone, and he pulled it out. “I made up this chart that’ll tell you how to place the gemstones,” he said, working fast as if he just wanted to get our visit over with. “Turquoise, hematite, citrine, rose quartz, sodalite -- pay special attention to this one since you’re psychic, it’ll keep your third eye clean.”
He went too fast for me to follow. I hoped the chart was color-coded.
The black woman pointed at a pile that Crash ignored as he scooped everything into a small paper bag. The woman shook her head. “The corresponding colors are on there so it shouldn’t be a problem.” I tried not to wince outwardly at the thought that maybe he’d read my mind. He began to roll up the bag, and then stopped and looked to the pile the woman had indicated.
She pointed again. “And here,” Crash said. “Take this double-terminated smoky quartz, too.” He pulled the instructions out of the bag, scribbled something on them, and stuffed them back inside along with the final crystal. The black woman nodded and went back to fanning herself. “Use that one on the brow chakra along with the sodalite.”
He thrust the bag into my hands. “That’ll be twenty-six fifty.”
Chapter Eight
The swarms of ghosts seemed thinner when we left Crash’s shop, and though none of them came running at me, there were still a lot more of them roaming around than I was accustomed to seeing. Jacob, Carolyn and I walked five blocks to the car in silence.
The ride home was pretty quiet too, until Carolyn spoke with a suddenness that made me jump. “Crash was Jacob’s last boyfriend.”
Well. The animosity between them made sense. I wasn’t jealous, exactly, but the thought of Jacob in bed with someone younger, wilder, and much more self-assured than me didn’t do much for my mood. I closed my eyes and sighed.
Jacob didn’t say anything.
“They were together for quite a while, six months or so.”
“Seven,” Jacob muttered.
“That’s a long time for Crash.”
It's a long time for me, too. Once the truth had been stuffed into the car with us like a big, reeking sack of garbage, Carolyn stopped talking. I wondered how she could deal with so much truth without taking out her service weapon and swallowing a bullet.
We pulled up in front of the apartment and I made a break for the courtyard gate with my chicken calzone and my bag of rocks. Jacob’s quicker than I am, and he was right on my heels. “Carolyn shouldn’t have to be the one to tell you what’s going on -- it should be me. It just never seemed like the right time to go into all of that.”
I clutched the bags to my middle and knocked my gate open. The hinges were rusty, and it never rewarded me with a satisfying bang no matter how hard I shoved it. A young black woman materialized to my right, with long blonde hair that was obviously a wig. She wore a pair of short shorts that let her ass cheeks hang out and a lavender tube top. A knife handle protruded from the center of the tube top, right between her breasts, with dark blood seeping out in a big, black circle around it.
“Hey, white boy. You want a date?”
“Jesus,” I said, and walked faster. “Go away.”
Jacob, who didn’t see Jackie, the World’s Most Irritating Dead Prostitute, thought I was annoyed with him. Come to think of it, I’d never seen her before, either. I usually just heard her. I tried to look on the bright side; at least now I knew where she was.
The three of us were almost at the vestibule door when I spun around to talk to Jacob. I held my bags out between me and Jackie, and she stared at them, puzzled.
“Jacob, whatever. We’ve obviously both seen other people. Fine.”
He stopped close to me and stared into my eyes. “It doesn’t feel fine right now. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you be waivin’ no bags at me. All I was ax-in’ was did you want a little company, and here you go waivin’ that shit in my face....”
I turned toward Jackie. I was fairly sure she couldn’t care less about the calzone, but Crash’s bag was another story. “That bother you? Huh?”
“Why you be so rude? What I want your skinny white ass for, anyway?” She backed up.
Jacob, meanwhile, had frozen. He was looking in Jackie’s general direction, but I doubted he saw her.
I took a step toward Jackie. “What bothers you about it?” I said. “What’s it feel like?”
Jackie flung a hand up, palm toward me, dragon-lady fingernails splayed. “You be trippin’,” she said, and she backed up some more, the boxy evergreens that bordered the building passing through her thighs. “I ain’t gotta take this shit.”
And she disappeared.
I looked back at Jacob. “I think this stuff is for real.”
He looked at the bag and the furrow between his eyebrows deepened. “I don’t doubt it. Crash is for real. I just wish we could’ve turned to anyone but him.”
“Why, what’s the matter with him?”
“Nothing’s the matter. Just...” he looked over his shoulder at Carolyn in the car. She waited patiently, flipping the radio stations. “Who likes to go crawling back to their ex for a favor after a breakup? It wasn't pretty.”
I tried to imagine what anyone I’d dated in the past ten years could possibly do for me and came up empty handed. “Look,” I said. “You get back to work and I’ll be here figuring out these stones.” And thinking of ways to avoid mentioning my liver. “I’ll be fine.”
I tu
rned toward my door, but Jacob sidestepped and blocked me with his body. He cupped my jaw with one hand, ran his thumb down the side of my cheek, gave me an intense look that I had no idea how to interpret, and then left.
I went upstairs to try and find some way to survive the night without Auracel. Crystals seemed like a pretty lame substitute, but they were all I had. My kitchen counter didn’t seem like a sacred enough space to work with them, but I figured it was cleaner than the floor. I upended the bag and let them slide out, then fished around inside for the directions.
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