connective leaps necessary to communicate for the first time with people she did not know, or the elements of this conversation were so far off the scale that making coherent sense of them without a shared blueprint was pretty much impossible. 'You're one of what like Bob?' she asked.
'A witch.'
Now it was making more sense.
She still could not completely reconcile Miles' ordinary down-to-earth father with a mystical power-wielding sorcerer, but it explained the collection of powders and nostrums, the mystery of his walking dead body. And if she was going to buy into this witchcraft thing, she might as well take it all the way and subscribe to the notions of good magic and bad magic; white magic and black magic.
Bob would obviously have been a good witch.
But why had he never told this to Miles... or anyone else, for that matter? And how had he kept it a secret all those years? In her mind, she saw him waiting until his children were asleep, then chanting paeans to Satan.
No. That was not Bob.
She didn't really know Bob, though. If this woman was telling the truth--and Claire thought she was--none of them had really known him.
'Is he at the lake?' May asked. Claire found herself nodding.
'He won't know what to do by himself. Bob never taught him.'
'Never taught him what?'
May flipped up her dirty dress, grinned. 'I'm not wearing any panties!'
Claire sighed. Great. Like too many homeless people, this woman obviously had some serious mental problems, and she was going to have to sift through the old lady's words
to determine what was truth and what was delusion--not an easy thing to do when the subject was the supernatural. 'Miles--' Claire began.
May snapped her fingers. 'That's his name! Miles!' 'Miles thinks his father walked to Wolf Canyon. His father is dead, but he's still walking around and he escaped from the morgue several weeks ago.'
'He's going back. They all go back when they die. Or I should say, we all go back when we die. It's part of her curse.'
'Whose curse?'
The old woman cackled. Yeletype firetrap. Teletype firetrap.
Buttfuck Cornelius of love!'
Jesus Christ.
'qsabella,' May said, suddenly lucid once again. 'She cursed us after she was killed, before she was buried.' The old lady smiled at Claire.
'Your house is pretty. Can I go in?
'No.' She was starting to get a headache.
'Isabella promised to come back.'
'I have no idea what you're talking about. Could you start from the beginning? Who are you? Who is Isabella? what the hell does any of this have to do with Bob and
Mi'
A small wind kicked up, a surprisingly localized gust that swirled about her yard, kicking up leaves and picking up dirt, but leaving the rest of the street and the other yards untouched. May stood at the center of the miniature tempest, her hair blowing wildly, as if this was nothing out of the ordinary. It occurred to Claire that she was causing this, that it was an attempt on the old woman's part to get Claire to invite her inside the house. The wind coalesced into a funnel-like dust devil, and pushed its way through a hedge and into the yard next door. She watched it retreat down the street. A Land Rover drove by, oblivious.
Despite the increased dishevelment of her appearance, May seemed suddenly saner, more grounded and rational. 'Wolf Canyon,' she began,
'was a town of witches founded by a man named William Johnson in the mid-1800s. Like many religious and ethnic groups at that time, witches were persecuted. We were hung, drowned, burned at the stake, and William followed the example of the Mormons, who had headed west to establish their own community.'
She smiled widely, reached both hands behind her, started furiously scratching. 'Ass itch! Ass itch!'
Just as suddenly, she was all seriousness. 'William met and married a woman named Isabella. Isabella was a witch, but she was more than a witch.' May's voice dropped. 'She was evil. She started taking over the town, molding it in her own image. Those who disagreed with her were punished. She drove some away, others were mysteriously found dead. Finally, they had all had enough. William was old by this time, but his powers were still strong, and he killed her while she slept. He cut off her head, and the people buried her in a cave up the canyon.
Before they sealed the cave entrance, her head started talking, and she cursed the people of Wolf Canyon. She vowed to return, stronger, and to wreak vengeance on all other witches, to destroy them all. She said that no one would be allowed to leave Wolf Canyon and that everyone in the town would be engulfed by a wall of water and killed.'
May stared off in the distance, almost as though she were in a trance, and Claire shivered.
'Bob and I were born in Wolf Canyon, though we left early. I don't even remember the town, only what my parents told me of it. Isabella's day was long gone, and no one believed by then that her curse would come to pass. Plenty of people had left and returned and left again, and nothing had ever stopped them. But our parents told us of Isabella,
warned us of her, and we grew up afraid, fearing and dreading her resurrection and revenge.
'We met each other again after they built the dam. I was living in New Jersey then. I had a husband and a house and a dog and a good life.
And then I felt it. I felt the screaming of all those souls as they were drowned, as the dam waters flooded in and Isabella's curse came true. I left my husband, left my house, left my dog, and went back to Wolf Canyon. I was drawn there. We were all drawn there, all of us who had escaped the waters, and I met Bob on the shore by the dam, and we both saw the same vision and we talked about what was happening.
There were dozens of us, all standing by the water's edge. She was calling to us from down there, laughing at us, and we understood that she had waited a long time for this and that she would wait even longer. She would wait as long as it took for her to escape.
'We made a vow then to right her, to never let her out. We kept in touch for a while, but then we stopped, like our parents had before us, and maybe that was part of her curse, too. We started new lives, and most of us avoided all thought of Isabella, all mention of magic. Some of us... some of us became...'
May shook her head, tried to smile, looked for a second as though she was about to say something crazy, then continued on soberly. 'Several months ago, it started again. I felt the pull, and I dreamed about Isabella, and I realized that she had grown stronger. She had taken from those of us who'd died over the years and had remained down there, hoarding her power, waiting to use it until she was strong. She was going after the dam builders, too, the ones who had flooded the canyon with water, and she was killing them off one by one, using her powers to find them and hunt them down. She was getting strength from them, as well, even though she was still stuck underwater, in the cave.'
May grew silent, and Claire waited for more, but there was no more.
That was it. Now the old lady did smile, and Claire understood that her craziness was the way she dealt with the tremendous mental strain that she was constantly under. Schizophrenia might be somewhere in the mix, but May's outbursts were also part of her defense mechanism, the means by which she coped with the knowledge she was forced to possess.
That didn't make things any less unnerving, but at least it explained the homeless woman's bizarre behavior in a way that was somewhat comprehensible.
'Dirty face in a rain chair!' May screamed at the top of her lungs.
She looked up into the sky. 'Down by feathers of silence!'
