“Sure, yeah.” Sarah nodded.
“Why are you a potato handler?” Sarah asked as they trudged up the hill.
“I met Maurice when I was juggling potatoes,” Will admitted.
Sarah lifted an eyebrow.
“I was working as a prep cook on Union Street, juggling potatoes by the dumpster.”
“And Will the magnificent, juggling potato man gifted me this lifetime’s most scrum-diddly-umptious pasty. Sixty-seventy some odd years now, but who’s keeping count,” Maurice said, breathing heavily as he struggled to keep up.
“You sit in the back,” Sarah whispered through the side of her mouth when they approached her car.
She might not have a dark sense of the guy, but she didn’t want him sitting behind her if he had a switchblade tucked in his back pocket.
Will winked and nodded. They stopped at a convenience store, where Will and Maurice ran in to fulfill the man’s request.
“What cat crawled up your bum, you dragged me out of my abode on this cold, windy night?” Maurice asked after he closed the car door. He lit a cigarette that Sarah wanted to extinguish and throw out the window. The smell of cigarette smoke reminded her of her ex-girlfriend, Heather. Heather with the long blonde eyelashes and the silky laugh.
“We have questions about the asylum,” Will told him, shuffling in a paper bag for the man’s sandwich and beer. He handed Sarah a Coke and kept a water for himself.
The man leaned his head back and took a long drag, sighing.
“Man, that’s good.” He turned to Sarah and held up his cigarette. “I only smoke Lucky Strikes on special occasions. Takes me straight back to the Vietnam War. Now a’days I roll my own, but once, maybe twice a year, I pick up a pack of these, and it’s like a little time machine for my lungs.”
“Interesting,” Sarah murmured with a glance at Will, who shrugged back at her.
“Maurice, I want to know about the rumors surrounding the hippie tree. No, I take that back, I want the truth. The real story,” Will said, leaning forward between the seats.
The man snorted and finished his cigarette, flicking the butt out the window.
Sarah considered scolding him for littering but realized it would be a wasted effort. The man was well into his seventies and lived on the streets. He couldn’t care less for her middle-class judgments.
“The Wicked Willow,” the man said in a sing-songy voice, unwrapping his sandwich and taking a huge bite. He chewed thoughtfully, and then returned to his song. “We lay my love and I, beneath the weeping willow, but now alone I lie, beneath the weeping willow.” His voice had taken on a low, haunted quality, and he stared out the window.
Sarah glanced at Will in the rearview mirror, but he held a finger to his lips.
“Singing oh willow waly by the tree that weeps with me.” When he finished, he picked up his beer and cracked the top.
Again, Sarah opened her mouth and closed it, grinding her teeth together to keep from mentioning it was illegal to have alcohol open in a moving vehicle.
“Know that song? The Kingston Trio - mighty fine, mighty fine musicians.” He drank in loud gulps, and then wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“The Hippie Tree is not at fault. She was a beauty in her prime, a magnificent willow nestled there in the magical asylum forest. But you see, she was a beacon for a secret chamber hidden in the trees.”
He turned his gaze on Sarah, but she stared forward, ignoring the intensity of his gaze.
“The lightning took her - BAM!” He clapped his hands together. Both Sarah and Will jumped.
“Shit, man. You made me spill my water,” Will grumbled.
Maurice grinned and twisted in his seat.
“A story like this will make you spill your bladder.” He turned back and took another bite of his sandwich. “I went there once. Few patients did, but you see, I was special. They called me Time Traveler. I could tell them what had been and what would be. My doctor wasn’t in the brotherhood, the secret-keepers, the brain drainers. So, they waited until my doc took a holiday, and then they snatched me in the dead of night. Through the forest we wound, up the hills and down. I might never have known the place but for that willow, rising high into a moon-shone sky. Vines this thick buried the door.” He held his hands apart. “Down a long, slick tunnel into a cold stone room. Torches on every wall, and benches, old wood benches, like you‘d see in Greece at the Coliseum. I always wanted to go there, stand in the pits, watch the gladiators face off against the beasts sent in to destroy them.”
“What was the brotherhood?” Sarah asked, turning down a road that led beneath towering oak trees.
“A secret society,” Maurice said conspiratorially, quivering as he drew another cigarette from the pack.
“Of doctors?” Will asked.
Maurice nodded.
“I liked livin’ there,” Maurice murmured, rubbing his hand back and forth across his bearded face. “Nice bed, and a piano, and the canteen had a burger for a quarter. Real nice folks, except the bad ones, course.” He snorted.
“Who was in the brotherhood?” Will asked.
Maurice frowned and cocked his head. After several seconds, he held up his empty palms.
“Don’t know. There were so many of ‘em, white faces starin’ out from the dark, watching me. They were like a room full of lions, and I was their prey, strapped to a table, waiting to get eaten.”
CHAPTER 27
Now
Sarah
Sarah glanced at Will, who didn’t look remotely suspicious of the man’s story.
“But the takers get taken,” he whispered, licking his lips. “One of them doctors went nutty as an acorn. He still haunts that place, like he’s waitin’ for his old life to be restored, to return to his post as Doctor Evil.”
“He’s still alive?” Sarah asked. “A doctor in the secret society?”
“Oh sure, lots of ‘em prolly are. I am.” Maurice tapped on his forehead.
“How do we find him?” Will asked.
Maurice picked up a chapstick from Sarah’s cup holder and popped off the top. She snatched it out of his hand. He widened his eyes and leaned his head back with a sigh.
“Lips’re mighty wind-burnt this time of year.”
Give him the chapstick,” Will said exasperated, as if he were mediating a fight between two children.
She handed it back, rolling her eyes.
“Lookin’ fer your brains in there?” Maurice asked with a grin before slathering the chapstick on his scaly lips. He replaced the cap and dangled it above the cup holder.
“It’s yours,” Sarah mumbled.
He stuffed it into his pocket.
“I can set a meeting. ’Course, I’ll need a few bucks. Bus fare, a sandwich, pack of slims.”
“Done,” Will said.
Sarah glanced at him, and he glared back at her as if daring her to disagree.
It wasn’t the cost so much as the concern that Maurice would take the money and vanish into the cracks.
“The Doc’s real particular, and a strange one too. I’ll send word with a time and place.”
Sarah pulled twenty dollars from her purse, and Maurice snatched it from her hand, opened the door, and hopped out.
“Wait,” Sarah called, but he’d already vanished into the shadows beyond the streetlights.
Will opened the back door and climbed into the passenger seat.
“A secret society of doctors,” he murmured, gazing into the darkness where Maurice had disappeared.
“Do you believe him?” Sarah asked, dubious.