“I’m just trying to find a girl.”
“Why you want to go messing around with the dark?”
“Maybe the dark’s messing around with me,” I said.
“Could be.” She nodded and gave me a look somewhere between accommodating and challenging. “You want to see, then I’ll show you.” She closed her eyes, drew several deep breaths then consulted the cards. After a moment she said, “There’s trouble all around you.”
“Go on.”
She shook her head and the flesh on her neck swayed as she reached again for the deck. “Usually when I do this it’s clearer but this don’t… It don’t really make sense, I…” She counted off a series of cards from the deck then selected one and pulled it free. Carefully, as if afraid the table might collapse beneath it, she very slowly laid the card next to the one in the center. “There’s something here, I—Jesus, Lord—I ain’t never seen anything like it before. Not like this, not like…” For the first time her face registered more fear and discomfort than confusion. “I seen my share of negative energy and dark spirits before but not—not like this—never like this. It’s so strong. This ain’t just dark, it’s—it’s unclean—evil.” Despite the heat in the room Mama shivered and began to rub her bare arms with her hands. “And there’s something else, something… something about the eyes. Occhi violenti.”
“Say again?”
“Occhi violenti,” she said, her face a mask of sorrow and burgeoning terror. “Violent eyes.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Death,” she said in a loud whisper. “Sacrilege—it’s sacrilege, you can’t—you can’t stop it now, it’s all around you.”
“I don’t—”
“Whole lot of death.” She shivered again, her doughy face contorting into one pained and fearful expression after another. “Jesus—sweet—Sweet Jesus, this…”
I felt my earlier anger returning. I’d had my fill of shadows and smoke. What had begun as a routine she’d probably been through thousands of times before was now transformed into something more, something real, and something she had clearly not expected.
“It’s like a current it’s so—so strong, but… I never seen nothing like this. It’s cold.” Her hands were shaking with such ferocity she was having difficulty holding the cards. Even as I struggled with the stagnant and engulfing heat in the room, I noticed goose pimples rising along her arms. She was rocked by another shiver. The deck fell from her hands and cards scattered across the table. Again, she shook her head, as if in answer to voices only she could hear. Her face twisted into a grimace and her eyes narrowed as she stared at the clutter of playing cards. “Jesus, God,” she whispered, her hands hovering just above the table. “Jesus… Jesus, God.”
Donald dropped his cigarette to the floor, stepped on it. “This is nonsense,” he said with little conviction. “Absolute—”
Mama’s massive body began to tremble, her lips moving rapidly as if in silent prayer. She seemed to be looking beyond the cards to some deeper horror that had opened a portal known only to her. “No, you—you need to go.”
“What do you see?” I asked.
She blinked her eyes rapidly. “You don’t understand, you—you have to go.”
I stood up, leaned on the table. “What do you see?”
“Get out of here,” she growled, her clarity of mind returning. “Get out, I—”
“What!” I slammed the table with my hand. “Tell me, goddamn it!”
Mama’s body continued to shake. She held her hands up as if to ward me off. “I don’t go there, I don’t go there, Christ Jesus, I don’t go there, I—”
“The natives are getting restless,” Rick said, motioning to the bar. “Let’s move.”
I felt someone grab my arm, realized it was Donald. I pulled free and stepped closer to Mama. “Where don’t you go, Mama? Where don’t you go?”
Her eyes turned wet, and as she held her hands out for me I saw that her fingertips were somehow raw and bloody about the nails and cuticles. They looked as if she’d been clawing at cement for hours.
I remembered the dream with Bernard, and how his hands had looked much the same.
“Good Lord,” Donald said softly.
A chill scampered up the back of my neck. “Where, Mama?” I pressed. “Where don’t you go?”
She began to choke. “There’s—there’s so much blood, it—rivers of it.”
“Move!” Rick said suddenly. He stood in the doorway, partially blocking my view of the bar, but even through the smoke and haze I could see movement out there. The volume of Mama’s voice had signaled something was wrong, and they were coming.
“Mama, where?”
A quiet whimper escaped her. “The dark.” She looked at her bloody hands and began to weep, though she seemed far off now, unaware. “The dark beneath the dirt. You don’t never come back from that dark. You don’t—you don’t know what’s down there, it—it ain’t like us. It wants you—it—wants to bring you down there with it, under the dirt.” Her lips moved slowly, slightly out of sync with the sound of her voice. “It’s got a taste for you. It’s been waiting for you down in that dark under the dirt. You don’t never come back from that dark. Never.”
“Why Mama? Tell me why.”
“‘Cause you got to be dead to be there.”
Before I knew it Donald and Rick were hustling me to the doorway.
“You got to be dead,” Mama’s voice cried behind us. “You got to be dead to be there.”
Tooley and the tall man ran by us into the backroom, hesitating a moment like they weren’t sure if they should stop us or attend to their friend first. They opted for the latter and we kept moving, Rick in the lead, Donald between us, and me pulling up the rear.
The bartender scurried out from behind the bar and stepped in front of us, blocking the door. He held a baseball bat, cocked it back in a threatening posture. “What the fuck did you do to her?”
Rick pivoted and threw two rapid kicks, the first into the bartender’s midsection and the second into his throat. The man vaulted back and crashed into the bar, scattering two stools. As the bat left his hands it rattled against the floor and rolled toward the corner.
We were nearly to the door when I heard screaming and the sound of heavy footfalls behind me. I turned in time to see the tattooed man closing on me, Tooley lumbering along a few paces back.
I might have been able to make it through the exit had I kept running, but probably not. Either way, I was not destined to find out, because I came to an abrupt halt, and as the tall man tried to stop he practically ran right by me. I swung at him as hard as I could while he was still off balance. My fist connected with the side of his face, and as the impact reverberated through my hand and up into my arm and shoulder, he groggily staggered back and fell to the floor.