“We want to know what you saw down there,” Izzie continued, keeping her tone level but insistent. “Underground, where Parrish and his people carried out their secret rituals.”
He studied her face closely, as if searching for something hidden there.
“We think you might have encountered something . . .” Izzie trailed off for a moment, thinking of the right way to phrase it. “Something not from here.”
The old man’s eyes widened fractionally.
“I’ll be damned,” the old man said, looking from Izzie to Joyce and then back. “You got the knack, do you?”
Izzie glanced over and saw that Joyce seemed about as confused as she was herself.
“The knack?” Joyce asked.
The old man gave them both an appraising look, and seemed to reconsider.
“Well, maybe you don’t, at that.” He raised one knobby finger and tapped his chin thoughtfully. “But you’ve seen them, haven’t you?”
He leaned forward slightly in the chair.
“Seen . . . ?” Izzie prompted.
“The Ridden,” the old man said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Izzie and Joyce exchanged a significant glance.
“Well, now. You have seen them.” The old man sat back in the chair, his expression softening somewhat. Then he gestured with one arthritic hand to Hasan. “Doc, you mind giving me and these girls a little privacy? I think we do have cause to talk, after all.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Some folks call it the ‘inner eye,’ or ‘second sight,’ or just the Sight,” G. W. Jett said as Izzie and Joyce settled themselves on a cold bench across from him. “I’ve heard in voodoo they talk about folks being ‘two-headed,’ and I figure that’s just about the same thing. Some folks are born with it, and some folks get it somewhere along the way, and there’s even some who can dip in when they drink or eat or smoke the right thing. Seeing the world not just with your eyeballs, but with something else besides, able to see all the things that regular folk don’t even know is there. Call it what you like, but my mother always talked about having the ‘knack,’ so that’s what
I call it.”
“And you have it?” Izzie asked.
The old man frowned for a moment before answering.
“Used to,” Jett said, a bitter undercurrent to his words. “I lost it along the way. It bothered me for a long time, not having it anymore, but eventually I decided that eyesight can fade, and hearing can go, and all the rest, so why not the knack, too? But I was born with it, yeah, and it took a long time getting used to it being gone.”
The old man ran a hand across his forehead, almost as if brushing away a thought, and then continued.
“When I was little I didn’t think too much about it. The knack was just something for family to know, and not something to talk about at school or church or whatnot. It wasn’t even that we were worried what folks might think, just that it was a private thing, not for anyone else to share. Everyone in the whole family knew, though, and there were always relations trooping to our house to get my mother’s advice, or help getting rid of some bad luck, or anything like that. Of course, back then I didn’t have the knack nearly so strong as she did, and all I could see were little hints of things, here and there. More like a tickling at the back of my head than a full-blown thought. But I always knew which neighborhoods to avoid, which houses and strangers to keep clear of, and I could just feel it if something wrong was about to go down.”
Izzie couldn’t help but think of her own grandmother, and the way that so many friends and family had come to her when they felt like they needed a little help.
“My mother died right around the time I was finishing up school,” the old man went on, “and lying in her deathbed she told me that there were dark days ahead for me. When my number came up in the lottery and I got myself drafted into the Marines, I was sure that’s what she had been talking about. And there were dark days aplenty over in Nam, true enough. But whether it was the knack or just dumb luck, I managed never to put a step down wrong, and was always ready when things went sideways out on patrol, and I got through it all without so much as a scratch. That’s when I first picked up the nickname ‘Harrier,’ when another grunt said I charged through minefields like I was harrowing the gates of hell. My luck held out long enough that I got cocky, even, and kept reupping after my first tour was through, and then again after my second, and my third. Fifty-two months in country in all, and it wasn’t until my fifty-first that being cocky caught up with me. The knack saved my ass that day, but that’s a story for another time, I suppose. But even through the worst of all that, the most that I ever got out of the knack was an intuition here and there, a feeling that something wasn’t right, or maybe a premonition that something was about to go south. I didn’t actually see anything until after I was back stateside. And then, the things I saw . . .”
Jett took a deep breath and let out a ragged sigh, and folded his gnarled hands in his lap.
“The first time I felt it was when I got off the plane in San Francisco,” the old man said, his eyes gazing off into the middle distance. “It was like something was tugging at me, like there was a string around my soul and someone was pulling the other end. The knack was telling me there was somewhere I needed to be. All I had in the world was stuffed in the seabag slung over my shoulder, so I changed into
