Mark gave me a bewildered half smile, as if not sure whether to believe me.
I opened the batik curtain and went it, letting it swing closed behind me.
Elroy was half-hidden by a pile of cardboard boxes marked with BLUE GREEN ALGAE. HANDLE WITH CARE.
“Mark is here,” I told him. “If you want to go out or whatever.”
“Come with me,” he said. “To take care of business.”
I hesitated. Like everyone in this store, Elroy was all right but slightly different, like his whole concept of reality hung slightly askew. And I had never fully got over the impression that one day one of them was going to pull out a big ritual knife and sacrifice me to the god or goddess of his or her choice.
“In case I need help, young un. Come on.”
“You could take Mark,” I demurred.
But Elroy shook his head. “And leave you here alone? Not right for a young lady.”
After two failed marriages and in my mid-thirties, I didn’t really feel like a young lady, but I bit back my response. I didn’t particularly want to hang around and talk to the possession aspirant, either.
I made a quick detour to inform Mark that I’d be going with Elroy and left through the front door.
Elroy waited in the parking lot, warming up his car, a white Eldorado with huge tail fins and pink accents.
Inside, teddy bears in pastel colors filled all except the driver’s seat. I tried not to bat an eye as I said, people at Eternal Life store were odd and started to push the teddy bears off the seat onto the floor. Elroy gave me a freezing glare, took the teddy bears and put them in the backseat, next to ten hundred or so of their near relatives.
“You know where Jonni lives?” I asked, as he started up his car.
He nodded and mumbled, “Employment application.”
As though he thought I’d suspect him of an illicit affair with Jonni, who must be all of seventeen. I told him about what Mark had said of Jonni, to forestall any more such nonsense.
We drove deeper into the old Victorian district of Lythia Springs, past the zone where houses were converted into shops, through the zone where the houses were houses, each one with a tended lawn to rival the most conventional of suburbs and on to the zone of houses chopped up into apartments, with beer cans on the window sills, and dried-up, dusty front yards.
Elroy pulled up in front of a narrow, violet townhouse.
As he got out of the car, the sun shone on his belt buckle, a huge gold-and-fake-jewels affair with the initials EP picked out in would-be rubies. I shook my head. I’d never noticed the thing. Then again, I didn’t normally go around staring at my boss’s belt buckle.
I walked up the maltreated concrete steps to the violet door. Elroy looked in the fly-specked window to the left. “Too dirty,” he mumbled. “Can’t see a darn thing.”
I rang the bell, tried the massive brass doorknob.
“Is it open?” Elroy asked.
“No,” I said, giving the doorknob a final shove.
“Here,” he said. “Let me try.”
“Be my guest.” I stepped back and he took my place. The sun shone off something, probably his belt buckle, enveloping the knob in a blinding white light. He turned it. “It was unlocked after all.”
The door opened with a mighty creak.
I frowned at the doorknob and followed Elroy into the dark living room. It was decorated in early college student, with sheets of batik in reddish brown tenting the ceiling, covering the walls and draped over the two shapeless sofas.
On the right hand sofa, Jonni lay. “Jonni,” I called, making my way around piles of books and mounds of dirty clothes.
“Jonni.”
She lay on her stomach, in her long T-shirt nightgown, and she didn’t move. Her long blond hair covered her face.
“Jonni,” I called. But even before I knelt by her side and put my hand on her cold, cold neck to feel for an nonexistent pulse, I knew that she was dead. The cause wasn’t that far to seek, either. Several empty prescription-labeled bottles lay scattered on the floor near the sofa.
Shocked, gasping, not sure yet what I felt, I yelled out, “She’s dead. Don’t touch anything.” Just as if this were some stupid murder mystery.
Elroy stood by the sofa, staring down at Jonni’s body. “I knew something had gone wrong,” he said.
“Just don’t touch anything,” I told him, feeling tears well up in my eyes, moist, warm tears roll down my face. Damn, what did Jonni want to go and do this for? She was so young, so pretty. And, unlike me, she hadn’t thoroughly fucked up her life, yet. She should have at least tried her hand at fucking it up further, before giving it up. I stumbled to the kitchen, blinded by tears, looking for a phone. I had to call nine-one-one. I had to get the police out here.
“She’s not dead,” Elroy said. “She just needs waking up.”
I didn’t even attempt to argue. No one that cold could be alive.
In the kitchen a narrow cubicle with a stove and a sink piled up with dirty dishes I found a small, white wall-phone and managed to blink away enough of my tears to dial. I’d no more than dialed the nine when I stopped.
From the living room came the sound of Elvis singing “Are you lonesome tonight.” A bright light shone through the kitchen doorway.
Damn, I’d told Elroy not to touch anything. Did he have to go and turn on Jonni’s music, and every damned light? Damn the man.
I slammed the phone down and walked into the living room, to give him what for.
And stopped. He hadn’t turned on any music. Nor the lights.
Elvis, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, stood in the middle of the living room, dressed in a white-sequined polyester jumpsuit, leaning over Jonni and singing, “all my dreams fulfill.” Light shone around and from him.
And Jonni, Jonni who had been cold and dead, sat on the ratty batik sofa and stared up at Elvis, her eyes full of wonder, her cheeks red.
I couldn’t speak. I could take walk-ins. I could take attempted possession. I could take a hundred different things, but Elvis materializing in Jonni’s living room was just too much. To say nothing of this resurrection business.
I leaned against the wall and wondered what had been in that Rice-dream bar.
Elvis took off his scarf and handed it to Jonni.
Jonni, a dazed, enchanted-looking Jonni, clapped enthusiastically.
“Jonni?” I managed to say.
The light went out. I blinked. It wasn’t Elvis. Only Elroy, who stood there, with his hip poked out, his lower lip sticking forward in a rakish pout. “See?” he said, turning around. “I told you she just needed waking.”
I shook my head. Side-effects of working in a New Age store. You eventually went as nuts as the customers.
I approached Jonni gingerly. She had been dead. I was sure she had been dead. “Are you all right?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said, in her thin, little-girl voice. “Yeah. I had a bad argument with Pete and I took some sleeping pills and slept late, that’s all. You guys want me to come in to the store?”
“Yes,” Elroy said, unequivocal. “Why don’t you go get dressed?”
“I’ll go with you,” I volunteered, not willing to let her out of my sight, lest she should revert to a dead state. I followed her up a rickety stair and into a messy room, where I watched her change into a pair of jeans and T-shirt. And heard the full account of her row with Pete, told in a strangely detached voice.
“And Elroy woke you?” I asked, bringing her back to the present.
“Yes,” she said, and wrinkled her perfect brow. “Only…I didn’t even know he was an Elvis impersonator.”
Elvis impersonator? So, she’d seen it too? Were hallucinations shared, now?
I led Jonni downstairs and out the door, to the car.