“Well?”
“Think I heard wrong. Sorry. My hearing of things is like my speech. Trying to explain is—”
“Come join me for a drink while you wait.”
The smile almost splits his face, and certainly adds deep wrinkles where there were none before. He almost floats across the floor to the bar, so elated does he feel by this offering of kindness from so magnificent a lady. A drink in a place he should not be, in the company of a woman he should not know, stews his mind further, until it sends tremors of confused pleasure though his limbs.
“Sit.” She indicates a stool, and he takes it quickly.
Gracie produces two shot glasses from beneath the bar, and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear.
“Thought the place burned,” Vess says. “There was a lot of light up here. Must have been imagining things. I do that sometimes, especially when my mind gets tired.”
“You weren’t imaginin’ things.” She fills the glasses to the top, slides one before him. “It burned all right.”
“Oh. Wasn’t too bad then.” He sips the drink, savoring it and the moment. Accustomed as he is to cheap wine, the bourbon tastes like tears from Heaven. His mouth buzzes, tongue pleasantly scalded by the liquor. He coughs. “Bit of black and burnt, but still all right.”
“I was bored,” Gracie says, crossing her elbows and leaning on them, her face close to his, chin hovering above their drinks. “So I started to rebuild it. I’d rather be stuck in a room, no matter how miserable it might be, than a hole full of charred wood.”
He raises his glass in agreement and takes another sip.
“Not that I intend to be here for much longer.” She raises her own glass, starts to drink. Vess watches her, follows the single drop of bourbon that escapes her lips, winding its way down over her chin and throat until it disappears into the opening of her blouse. A new kind of heat flourishes within him and he grins.
“I’m movin’ on,” she announces, with obvious excitement. “After all these years in this goddamn town, I’m gettin’ out, leavin’ all these wretched people with their wretched lives behind.”
Vess’s grin falters. He wonders if she includes him in her estimation of the townsfolk, but then reminds himself that he is an outsider, a mere visitor, and a woman as pretty and smart as the barmaid would surely know this.
“Can I see the bones?” she asks then, slamming her glass down on the counter hard enough to make Vess jump.
“Oh yes. She might even talk to you,” Vess enthuses, and scoops the bones from his pocket, scattering them on the bar like a voodoo woman about to tell a fortune.
Gracie studies the bones for what seems to Vess to be a considerable amount of time, her expression unreadable until she smiles and looks up at him. The feel of her studying him is not an unpleasant one, and he is abruptly cast into those green eyes as helplessly as a man bound to an anchor tossed into the sea.
His drink no longer seems important.
He is a traveler, and in her eyes, he is seeing a place he has his whole life been forbidden from visiting. He will not, cannot blink.
“That’s hers all right,” Gracie says, and though she moves back a step, she does not look away, and for that Vess is grateful. “Not that I can really tell from the bones.” She chuckles and the sound is magical, like pipe music to wounded ears. “I know because I put her there.” His smile grows. He is not really paying attention to the words, only the lush red lips that form them and the piercing eyes that hold him in place.
“Not here, no not here!” the finger seems to wail from the surface of the bar, which is now oddly slick beneath his fingers. He ignores the cry, watches his world jar, once, twice, and believes it is his heart, which feels like it may explode.
Somehow, it starts to rain inside the bar. The shadows thicken and reach for him, attempting to steal away this delightful interlude. He resists, struggling to hold on.
“Can’t always ssssay it right,” he admits. “Werrdener…”
The barmaid’s scent intoxicates him. He does not want this to end, and is saddened a great deal to realize, as crimson tears flow copiously down his face, his skull deflating under the weight of the long metal pipe Gracie is bringing down upon his head like a woodsman cleaving a rotten stump, that it already has.
Chapter Fourteen
Static shrieks from the radio.
Hands follow.
“What the fuck?” The knife is gone from my throat, tearing off a strip of my flesh as Brody propels himself away from the pale tendrils of mist that are snaking their way free of the CD slot in the car stereo. “What the fuck, man?”
I’m no less scared. While Brody’s going to get hung up on the whole unnatural or supernatural angle here (maybe it reminds him of something from a horror flick he caught at the Drive-In with his high school sweetheart), this is a repeat of a moment I have been trying to avoid since the night Jessica died.
Brody claws at the door. “Unlock it for God’s sake!”
It isn’t locked. At least it wasn’t, but maybe she locked it.
The hands spread out, push further into the car, the tips brushing against my chin, making me flinch, bringing me dangerously close to soiling myself. It’s cold in here now. I can see my breath. I can see Brody’s breath too, pluming over my shoulder.
“Open this goddamn door!”
The mist separates, the CD slot gapes obscenely, lit from within by white smoky light. The black plastic cradle keeping it in place begins to crack. And all the while Patsy Cline keeps singing “Crazy” at the top of her lungs, loud enough to make my eardrums vibrate with pain. I feel a hand on my shoulder and bat at it in terror, but it’s Brody, trying to pull me through the seat. “What is it? What did you do?”
“It’s our song,” I tell him.
He starts kicking at the door.
She won’t let it open.
Her face emerges sideways, slipping impossibly from the too-narrow gap, her features distorting, forming and reforming, coming apart like windblown cigarette smoke only to be whole again before the eye can track the movement. There is nothing but a rope of smoke connected to her head as it rises like a tethered balloon from the CD slot. Her face settles. The face I loved. A face I am terrified to see looming over me now.
Brody screams at the sight of it, renews his assault on the door.
“Oh shut your trap,” Jessica commands and the door Brody is so desperately trying to break open is suddenly blown from its hinges with a tortured shriek of metal, clear into the trees on the other side of the road where it smacks against the trunk of a pine, falls, and is still. Brody doesn’t wait to see whether she intends him to be the next object thrown at high velocity from the car. He hurries out into the road, and straight into the bruised, burned and bloody knuckles of Wintry’s fist.
The kid drops and hits the ground hard.
“Can I turn this down?” I ask, desperately trying to avoid looking at that blue mask hovering three inches from my face.
“Why are you shakin’?”
“It was a close call with the kid, that’s all. I guess I’m not as tough as I used to be.”
“Right.” Even though the expression is made up mostly of dust, smoke, and air, and, for all I know, my own memories of her, the doubt sweeping across it is all too clear. I let out a long low sigh. The kid’s down for a while, thank God, and Wintry’s holding on hard as he can. But in my frightened mind I can still hear a clock ticking, still feel those cold pennies in my pocket. I don’t have time to hang around talking to my wife’s ethereal head, no matter how sentimental that song makes me feel.