tomb. Poe’s characters were always melancholy, morbid types, given to high drama and emotional outbursts, unnamed nervous maladies and fainting spells.
Somebody always fainted in a Poe story, it seemed, or had a nervous breakdown. But the idea of someone returning from the dead in such brooding, atmospheric tales didn’t seem so far-fetched and particularly since Poe’s characters were pretty much nuts anyway.
But that was the nineteenth century.
Nobody bought shit like that anymore.
Thinking these things and refusing to give them credence even as part of him, deep inside, was creeping closer to believe, he kept thinking about Nicky and Hillside Cemetery getting washed out. His thoughts moved so quickly and took so many erratic hairpin turns in his brain, Deke was not even aware of what was growing inside of him. That nervousness was increasing geometrically until it felt like there was a solid ball of writhing worms in his stomach, one that was expanding and expanding. Jesus.
Chrissy…where the hell are you? Where the hell is anybody?
God, no phone, no TV, no cell, no internet. This was fucking barbaric, this was the Middle Ages again, a world lit only by fire. Just the storm outside and that damn rain and the silence inside, huge and malefic and evolving.
Nothing else.
Nothing else but that muffled knocking sound from upstairs.
32
Wanda Sepperley was really something to watch.
You could hear all those crazy stories as Mitch had, listen to the neighbors swap tales of her, see the old ladies congregating over there on Thursday nights like hens mulling for a rooster, but until you really saw her in action…well, you just couldn’t appreciate it.
When Tommy and Mitch had gotten there, she had been waiting once again, knowing somehow that they would come.
Mitch hadn’t wasted any time: “Do you know where Chrissy is?”
Wanda, knowing she had been visited now as a friend and as a seer, nodded her head, kept nodding it, but she answered no questions. It was not her way. These things took time, took space, took maybe eternities and entire worlds to perform. A simple question? Maybe. But to divine and know and feel these unknowable truths took energy and electricity of the sort that only arced in the lower, pulsing regions of the soul almighty. But how could she explain these things to Mitch Barron and his friend, Mister Tommy? Better explain a summer’s starry night to a blind man or the smell of a crisp Autumn afternoon to someone without a nose. Because next to Wanda, these two men, though righteous of deed and caring of heart, were blind and deaf and could not smell turpentine if it was poured under their nostrils.
So Wanda seized up and shook, but it was no seizure, but maybe an intimate mating of rapture and dream. She became a dusty, stiff thing, a dummy worked by wires in a glass carnival coffin. She shook and trembled and mumbled nonsensical things and what she was doing was driving out the here and the now, letting the forever and the tomorrow fill her like a corked bottle. It was not easy to open up her mind and especially at her age, to fill it with a mesh of spider web, hoping to catch dragonflies and wasps and sewing needles and glittering green night- moths in her net, catch them and slit them open, drain their ruby juice and let it tell her things.
No, not easy, but she would do it. For it was a gift passed down her bloodline and although the ashes of her heart were cool, there was still a vibrant heat to be found beneath.
“Chrissy…” she said after a time, tasting the secret bitter marrow of prophecy on her tongue. “Chrissy…yes, I would know that child. She walks tall and proud, doesn’t she? Crusted with vanity and salted with an immature selfishness, just another child stuffing its pockets with candy…yet, Chrissy walks true and there is a sweetness and a purity in her that would be death to those who would seek to corrupt or harm her. But where is she? In the night and the dampness…her road will be a long one, but you’ll see her again, Mitch, for even now she comes back to you, one step at a time. Be patient and watchful, you’ll be with her again.”
Mitch just stood there, feeling…what? Foolish and silly listening to these things, but yet deep down inside he believed. He did not know how Wanda Sepperley could know these things, but know them she did.
Tommy lit a cigarette and his hand trembled. “See, isn’t that what I told you? She’ll be fine.”
“Fine and right,” Wanda said, a dew of perspiration beading her forehead.
“Sure,” Mitch said. “Sure.”
But it was all crazy wasn’t it? Like going to a sideshow or a fair and having one of those old-time booth witches read your future. Drop in your coin and read the card while the old hag nodded and cackled happily away. It was like that in many ways and in others, it was worlds beyond.
“A mad stew of shit?” Wanda said then. “Is that what you’re thinking, Mitch Barron? Ha! You wouldn’t be the first to laugh in the beginning and weep at the end. Trust, Mitch, just trust what your heart tells you to be true.”
Tommy didn’t have anything to say to any of it.
He looked…worn, tired, as if it had been he that had just read the future, reached out and took hold of those filaments of possibility and fate and followed them to their source, revealing their mysteries.
“But you came for more than that, now didn’t you?”
God, she was good. She really was.
Wanda was old and bloodless and dusty like something stored in an attic trunk, but, dear Christ, she was sighted. And next to her, he was absolutely blind, like an infant just learning to open his eyes, seeing things but not knowing what they were. And what was it like to have a mind like hers? What was that like when your mind was like some line you could cast about in any direction, into the now and the past and the future? A mind that you could toss into the wind like a kite, let it fly and soar and view things from far above? A mind that could look through shaded windows and drift over high rooftops and creep through attic damps? It could pass through walls and minds and follow overgrown paths and sniff like a dog, never losing the scent, but always following it home in the end.
“We came to ask…about a bus,” Tommy told her. “We heard it on the police scanner. There’s a schoolbus of kids lost out there.”
“And you’d like to lead those stray lambs home, would you?”
Tommy shrugged. “Somebody’s got to. People in this town, they’re hiding. They’re all just hiding. I’m not about to hide.”
“Then go in my kitchen yonder,” Wanda said, “bring me that bowl of yellow eggs, a plate, and a bowl. And don’t argue about it.”
Tommy didn’t argue.
He came back with a wooden bowl of eggs, a plate, and a bowl. He set them on the table before Wanda and she just kept nodding her head, her face sallow in the candlelight.
She cracked an egg onto the plate and stirred the yolk with her fingertip. “Something bad there…hah! Feel the cold and the death on my fingertips!” She dumped that yolk into the bowl and cracked another onto the plate. “So much rot there! What a delight! Then and now, such amusement!”
Mitch and Tommy watched her go through five eggs like that, talking to herself, cocking her head and listening as if the yolks were speaking to her, sometimes rubbing a bit of slimy albumen between her thumb and forefinger. Sometimes she would laugh and sometimes frown. Sometimes she’d gasp and other times she’d simply shake her head.
And then she started to talk as she rummaged through yolks, telling them that she was not mad, but was practicing an old world science pretty much forgotten by the folks of today. “Was not the egg the symbol of life that had hatched the world?” she put to them. “Was it not the emblem of fertility and harvest? Could not the power of the egg increase the yield of the crops and make barren women fruitful? Of course it could, you silly men! Shows what you know and what you don’t! Mix corn with egg…yes, corn has substance and egg has meat! Yes, yes, yes! Spill an egg and divine your future! Mix an egg white with your husband’s blood and slurp it down, hence, you will
