I sat on the couch, stewing over my cowardice. I could have convinced her if I’d really tried. Then I stumbled on a thought: Craig. He could do miraculous things. Maybe he could help with this. I still had the page I’d ripped from Lonnie’s Help Me Rhonda book in my wallet. I could make a rekulak spell. As long as I didn’t make too big a crack in the mirror, it could work. I just needed a typewriter. I could make several spells, one for Brad, one for Kaliah, and one for my mom, so I could know for certain if she was telling the truth, if she was just another victim of Blanche.
I grabbed what remained of the flour Zelda had stolen, and I left. I was sure it would be enough to buy a typewriter on this black market. I hoped the otalith had one. In a whole town, there had to be at least one or two typewriters lying around. Be posigetiful.
The light, evenly dispersed across the overcast sky, was fading as I walked to the house on the corner of 4th and D. I knocked on the front door, heard stomping from inside, then the largest woman I’d ever seen answered: the otalith that had threatened to kill me, the otalith I’d sprayed with a hose and told to accept Jesus into her heart. She looked at me with narrowed eyes, then curled her lip, grabbed me by the coat, and dragged me inside.
Chapter 26
MY SHINS SCRAPED AGAINST the threshold as I tumbled forward into the house. I spun loose from the otalith’s grip, but before I could stand, she dropped a heel between my shoulder blades. My stomach slapped against the floor. I heard a crack as her knuckles made impact with the back of my skull. A sharp pain shot deep into my brain like a fracture in a half-split log. The otalith wore rings. But I stood the pain well. By now I was an old hand at being punched. I scrambled to my feet, bucking her off of me in the process. She hollered in surprise as she fell, then spoke clearly as I took my first step to run, “Stop, unless you wanna get shot.”
I turned, looked down. The otalith was on her butt, eyes bulging with rage, pointing a revolver at my chest. The front door was still open behind her, framing the icy walk and empty street. The otalith lurched to her feet and shut the door while keeping her gun and eyes trained on me. She wore a blue Dallas Cowboys hoodie and grey sweatpants. “You’re the bastard that hosed me down,” she said in a husky voice, and smiled a crazy smile with her eyes and not her mouth. “You’re not a Jehovah's Witness at all, are you, you little sneak?”
“I’m sorry I sprayed you,” I said with my hands up. “I needed your cackle for my niece.”
She frowned. “Cackle. I keep hearing about that crap. Your Prime Nabobber comes over every day with that Meadow douche, claims to be an Eagles fan, just straight talks smack. The second I see her without those bubble dudes, I’m going to beat her ass.” She laughed and wagged the gun at me. “Look at your face. You came to the wrong house for a cup of flour.”
“I don’t want any trouble. I’m really sorry about hosing you. What can I do to make it up to you?”
She snorted. “I’ll let you go if you tell me how to kill those bubble dudes. I keep waiting for them to put some probes in me, or some crap like that. You got some alien guns somewhere, cuz bullets don’t do nothin’ to them.”
“Tuvan throat singing. It won’t kill them, but they hate it.”
“Never heard of it. Do it for me.”
“I can’t. It takes training.”
“Do it.” She put a growl in her voice.
“Okay, okay. I’ll try.” I cleared my throat and tried my best to replicate the song I’d heard Lou sing, but I ended up sounding more like Frankenstein having an orgasm.
The otalith cocked her head to the side and squinted one eye. Then her face turned red, and she screamed, “You give me jokes!? Turn around!”
“I’m telling the truth!”
“Shut up! Turn around!”
She directed me down the hall, had me open a door. There were stairs on the other side. I hesitated before descending, and she jabbed me in the back of the head with what I assumed was the barrel of the gun. I went down the stairs.
The basement was well lit and crammed with stuff, like someone had bought out three garage sales and stocked their haul in here. With a quick scan, I saw a knife set, two mini-fridges, several bricks of cash, a blender, table saw, weed eater, motor cycle, tool cabinet, armoire.
In the center of the basement were three medieval torture devices: a wooden chair with hundreds of metal spikes poking out from the seat, arms, and back, a wooden block on a stand with one big hole between two smaller holes, and a metal cage, three feet tall and three feet wide. A chain ran from the top of the cage up through a hook in the ceiling, then back down again to a winch on the wall with a spoked wheel for a handle.
“See all this crap?” the otalith said. “Cash, antiques. It’s a small fortune. Only took two weeks to get. People don’t understand. I don’t survive. I thrive. You can drop me in Iraq and I’d have a hustle before the sun went down. This freaky town is nothing to me. You’re nothing to me. Flour is selling like crazy. People give their firstborn for it. I never had a product so good. See that chair over there? That’s a torture chair from medieval times. Some guy gave that to me for a
