Hitting me as fast as a chill, chilling me all down my back, the culling song spins through my head, and the body count grows. Somewhere, Oliphant must be sliding to the floor or toppling out of his chair. All my powder keg rage issues, they strike again.
The more people die, the more things stay the same.
An empty paper plate sits in front of Nash with just some waxed paper and yellow smears of potato salad on it, and Nash is twisting a paper napkin between his hands, twisting it into a long, thick cord, and, looking at me across the candle from him, he says, "We picked up the guy in your apartment building this afternoon." He says, "Between the guy's cats and the cockroaches, there's not much to autopsy."
The guy we saw fall down in here this morning, the sideburns guy with the cell phone, Nash says the medical examiner's stumped. Plus after that, three people dropped dead between here and the newspaper building.
"Then they found another one in the newspaper building," he says. "Died waiting for an elevator."
He says the medical examiner thinks these folks could all be dead of the same cause. They're saying plague, Nash says.
"But the police are really thinking drugs," he says. "Probably succinylcholine, either selfadministered or somebody gave them an injection. It's a neuromuscular blocking agent. It relaxes you so much you quit breathing and die of anoxia."
The woman, the one behind the barricade at the movie shoot who came running with her arm out to stop me, the one with the walkie-talkie, the details of her were long black hair, a tight T-shirt over right-up tits. She had a decent little pooper in tight jeans. It could be she and Nash took the scenic route back to the hospital.
Another conquest.
Whatever Nash is so hot to tell me, I don't want to know.
He says, "But I think the police are wrong."
Nash whips the rolled paper napkin through the candle flame, and the flame jumps, stuttering up a curl of black smoke. The flame goes back to normal, and Nash says, "In case you want to take care of me the same's you took care of those other people," he says, "you have to know I wrote a letter explaining all this, and I left it with a friend, saying what I know at this point."
And I smile and ask what he means. What does he know?
And Nash holds the tip of his twisted paper a little over the candle flame and says, "I know you thought your neighbor was dead. I know I saw a guy drop dead in this bar with you looking at him, and four more died when you walked past them on your way back to work."
The tip of the paper's getting brown, and Nash says, "Granted, it's not much, but it's more than the police have right now."
The tip puffs into flame, just a tiny flame, and Nash says, "Maybe you can fill the police in on the rest of it."
The flame's getting bigger. There's people enough here that somebody's going to notice. Nash sitting here, setting fires in a bar, people are going to call the police.
And I say he's deluded.
The little torch is getting bigger.
The bartender looks over at us, at Nash's little fuse burning shorter and shorter.
Nash just watches the fire in his hand growing out of control.
The heat of it on my lips, the smoke in my eyes.
The bartender yells, "Hey! Quit screwing around!"
And Nash moves the burning napkin toward the waxed paper and paper plate on the table.
And I grab his wrist, his uniform cuff smeared yellow with mustard, and his skin underneath loose and soft, and I tell him, okay. I say, just stop, okay?
I say he has to promise never to tell.
And with the fuse still burning between us, Nash says, "Sure." He says, "I promise."
Chapter 17
Helen walks up with a wineglass in her hand, just a glimpse of red in the bottom, the glass almost empty.
And Mona says, "Where'd you get that?"
"My drink?" Helen says. She's wearing a thick coat made of some fur in different shades of brown with white on each tip. It's open in the front with a powder-blue suit underneath. She sips the last of the wine and says, "I got it off the bar. Over there, next to the bowl of oranges and that little brass statue."
And Mona digs both hands into her own red and black dread-locks and squeezes the top of her head. She says, "That's the altar." She points to the empty glass and says, "You just drank my sacrifice to The Goddess."
Helen presses the empty glass into Mona's hand and says, "Well, how about you get The Goddess another sacrifice, but make it a double this time."
We're in Mona's apartment, where all the furniture is pushed out onto a little patio behind sliding glass doors and covered with a blue plastic tarp. All that's left is the empty living room with a little room branching off one side where the dinette set should be. The walls and shag carpet are beige. The bowl of oranges and the brass statue of somebody Hindu, dancing, they're on the fireplace mantel with yellow daisies and pink carnations scattered around them. The light switches are taped over with masking tape so you can't use them. Instead, Mona's got some flat rocks on the floor with candles set on them, purple and white candles, some lit, some not. In the fireplace, instead of a fire, more candles are burning. Strands of white smoke drift up from little cones of brown incense set on the flat rocks with the candles.
The only real light is when Mona opens the refrigerator or the microwave oven.
Through the walls come horses screaming and cannon fire. Either a brave, stubborn southern belle is trying to keep the Union army from burning the apartment next door, or somebody's television is too loud.
Down through the ceiling comes a fire siren and people screaming that we're supposed to ignore. Then gunshots and tires squealing, sounds we have to pretend are okay. They don't mean anything. It's just television. An explosion vibrates down from the upstairs. A woman begs someone not to rape her. It's not real. It's just a movie. We're the culture that cried wolf.
These drama-holies. These peace-ophobics.
With her black fingernails, Mona takes the empty wineglass, the lip smeared with Helen's pink lipstick, and she walks away barefoot, wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe into the kitchen.
The doorbell rings.
Mona crosses back through the living room. Putting another glass of red wine on the mantel, she says, "Do not embarrass me in front of my coven," and she opens the door.
On the doorstep is a short woman wearing glasses with thick frames of black plastic. The woman's wearing oven mitts and holding a covered casserole dish in front of her.
I brought a deli take-out box of three-bean salad. Helen brought pasta from Chez Chef.
The glasses woman scrapes her clogs on the doormat. She looks at Helen and me and says, "Mulberry, you have guests."
And Mona conks herself in the temple with the heel of her hand and says, "That's me she means. That's my Wiccan name, I mean. Mulberry." She says, "Sparrow, this is Mr.
Streator."
And Sparrow nods.
And Mona says, "And this is my boss—"
"Chinchilla," Helen says.
The microwave oven starts beeping, and Mona leads Sparrow into the kitchen. Helen goes to the mantel and takes a drink from the glass of wine.
The doorbell rings. And Mona calls from the kitchen for us to answer it.
This time, it's a kid with long blond hair and a red goatee, wearing gray sweatpants and a sweatshirt. He's carrying a Crock-Pot with a brown-glass lid. Something sticky and brown has boiled up around the lip, and the underside of the glass lid is fogged with condensation. He steps inside the door and hands the Crock-Pot to me. He kicks off tennis shoes and pulls the sweatshirt off over his head, his hair flying everywhere. He lays the shirt on top of the Crock-Pot in my hands and lifts his leg to pull first one leg then the other leg out of his sweatpants. He puts the pants in my arms, and he's standing here, hands on his hips, dick-and-balls naked.
Helen pulls the front of her coat shut and throws back the last of the wine.
The Crock-Pot is heavy and hot with the smell of brown sugar and either tofu or the dirty gray sweatpants.
And Mona says, "Oyster!" and she's standing beside us. She takes the clothes and the Crock-Pot from me, saying, "Oyster, this is Mr. Streator." She says, "Everybody, this is my boyfriend, Oyster."
And the kid shakes the hair off his eyes and looks at me. He says, "Mulberry thinks you have a culling poem." His dick tapers to a dribbling pink stalactite of wrinkled foreskin. A silver ring pierces the tip.
And Helen gives me a look, smiling but with her teeth clenched.
This kid, Oyster, grabs the terry-cloth lapels of Mona's bathrobe and says, "Jeez, you have a lot of clothes on." He leans into her and kisses her over the Crock-Pot.
"We do ritual nudity," Mona says, looking at the floor. She blushes and motions with the Crock-Pot, saying, "Oyster? This is Mrs. Boyle, who I work for."
The details about Oyster are his hair, it looks shattered, the way a pine tree looks struck by lightning, splintered blond and standing up in every direction. He's got one of those young bodies. The arms and legs look segmented, big with muscles, then narrow at the joints, the knees and elbows and waist.
Helen holds out her hand, and Oyster takes it, saying, "A peridot ring ..."
Standing there naked and young, he lifts Helen's hand all the way to his face. Standing there all tan and muscled, he looks from her ring, down the length of her arm, to her eyes and says, "A stone this passionate would overpower most people." And he kisses it.
"We do ritual nudity," Mona says, "but you don't have to. I mean you really don't have to." She nods toward the kitchen and says, "Oyster, come help me for a little."
And going, Oyster looks at me and says, "Clothing is dishonesty in its purest form." He smiles with just half his mouth, winks, and says, "Nice tie, Dad."
And I'm counting 1, counting 2, counting 5 ...
After Mona's gone into the kitchen, Helen turns to me and says, "I can't believe you told another person."
She means Nash.
It wasn't as if I had a choice. Besides, no copies of the poem are available. I told him I burned mine, and I've burned every copy I found in print. He doesn't know about Helen Hoover Boyle or Mona Sabbat. There's no way he can use the information.
Okay, so there are still a few dozen copies in public libraries. Maybe we can track them down and eliminate page 27 while we hunt for the original source material.
"The Book of Shadows," Helen says.
The grimoire, as witches call it. The book of spells. All the power in the world.
The doorbell rings, and the next man drops his baggy shorts and peels off his T-shirt and tells us his name is Hedgehog. The details about Hedgehog include the empty skin shaking on his arms and chest and ass. His curly black pubic hair matches the couple of hairs stuck to my palm after we shake hands.
Helen's hands draw up inside the cuffs of her coat sleeves, and she goes to the mantel, takes an orange from the altar, and starts to peel it.
A man named Badger with a real parrot on one shoulder arrives. A woman named Clematis arrives. A Lobelia arrives. A Bluebird ring's the doorbell. Then a Possum. Then someone named Lentils arrives, or someone brings lentils, it's not clear which. Helen drinks another sacrifice. Mona comes out of the kitchen with Oyster, but without her bathrobe.
What's left is a pile of dirty clothes inside the front door, and Helen and I are the only ones still dressed. Deep in the pile a phone rings, and Sparrow digs it out. Wearing just her black-framed glasses, her breasts hanging as she leans over the pile, Sparrow answers the phone, "Dormer, Dingus and Diggs, Attorneys-at-Law ..." She says, "Describe the rash, please."