She kisses me and goes back inside. Through the glass I see her giving Rinko a potion and leading her into the treatment room.
There’s another reflection in the glass. A ghost.
I turn and the little girl is standing there. Frilly blue party dress and a knife as big as her leg. She stares at me like I’m a rat on her birthday cake.
“Who are you?” I ask.
She doesn’t say anything.
“What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you killing people? You pissed off? Hungry?”
Still nothing.
I take a step toward her. She takes one back. I take another. There’s an earth tremor, like a small earthquake. I look down at my feet. When I look up again, the girl is gone. I walk out to where she was standing. Then to the far wall. I get on my knees to look under all the vehicles. The ground gives way and I land flat on my back. I was run over by a pickup truck about thirty minutes ago. It hurt. Falling six feet onto a sore back hurts more. I lie in the fresh dirt, trying to catch my breath.
“Hi, Stark.”
The voice is breathy. Barely a whisper and hard to hear over the traffic.
I’m lying in a hole as deep as a grave. There’s another hole like a tunnel leading off into the dark. The voice is coming from there.
“What is this?”
A desiccated corpse, gray parchment skin stretched like tissue paper over brittle bones, sticks its head out of the hole like a turtle and draws it back in when the light hits it.
“Don’t you recognize me?” says the corpse.
“You’re a fucking skeleton. How am I supposed to recognize you?”
“Once upon a time you wanted to kill me. Then you wanted to save me. You didn’t do either. You let Parker murder me.”
“Cherry? Is that you?”
Cherry Moon was a member of my old Magic Circle. One of the ones who stood by and let Mason send me to Hell. For staying out of the way, Mason gave her the gift of youth. Creepy youth. Candy is into Japanese cartoons but Cherry Moon wanted to be a cartoon. A forever- prepubescent Sailor Moon love doll in a school uniform. Do you know what it’s like to get hit on by a thirty-five-year-old woman who looks like she’s twelve? No. You don’t. It’s strange and unpleasant on so many levels I can’t begin to count them.
“Was that you who dropped me into a hole in Bamboo House?”
“Do you get followed around by a lot of tunneling dead girls?”
“You saved me from getting shot.”
“Yes. You owe me. You didn’t save me when I was alive. I want you to save me now.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Kill the little girl.”
When I first saw her, I thought Cherry was a ghost cursed to stay on Earth and the hole was just a ghost projection from her mind. Seeing her skeleton crammed into the narrow tunnel, I see I was wrong. Cherry did this to herself.
