Classics Mutilated (26 page)

Again, the maddening love of my deepest desire came to me in the night, blonde and sensual, voluptuous and glamorous, and with it arrived the heat from a billion viewings of her movies, all the male leering and ogling of her posters and centerfolds. I was the vessel for all the haunted, lonely men from around the world through the last six decades. My father's fantasies of Jayne were as much a part of me now as they ever were of him. I was a red-blooded American male who yearned for perfection, and my goddess brought it to me in the wolf's hour of the bleakest night.  

"I'm yours," she said.

I burned and rolled out of bed and onto the throw rug and hid myself up against the floorboards, her flesh on me no different than licking flames. Smoke choked my lungs. I opened my mouth to speak and steam escaped.  

I groaned. I snarled. I gnashed my teeth as the goddess set upon me. She tore at me like a ravenous animal, a voracious lover, her fangs and claws as ancient as the stone dagger that Abraham raised above Isaac's throat. The goddess fell on top of me, tittering and snorting like a beast.

"I'm yours," she repeated. "I exist for you and you alone. Take me. You're on fire for me.
I love you.
"  

A part of me almost wanted to believe it.

I turned my face away and nearly wept.  

Right after dawn, as my flesh began to cool, Gina visited my room, undid her robe and slid into bed with me. I hadn't slept a second and felt like I never would again. My brain was still boiling. My flesh stung as if ten thousand wasps had set on me. The jostling of the mattress made me stifle a moan. I let out an angry growl.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Nothing," I said.

She brought her lips to my back and jerked away as if in pain. She laid her hand flat between my shoulders and said, "You're burning up. Are you sick?"

"I think I caught the bug."

She didn't know what to do next. She didn't want to catch a virus but didn't want to be left alone. It was wrong of me to play against her feelings, what little she actually had for me, but it was pointless to try to make love to her after being visited by the goddess.  

"Maybe you should go back to your room," I told her. "I don't want you to catch what I have."

"I need to be held," she said. "Will you do that for me?"

"Sure."

"Are you any closer to finding who murdered my father?"

"I already told you that I'd let you know and let you watch."

I wrapped my arms around her and agony roared through my chest. My hands were so weak I couldn't even give her a valid hug. My muscles were nearly useless. We spooned and I pressed my lips to the back of her neck and tried to feel the old lust and want that I used to have for her. But there was nothing there. She gripped my hands and forced me to tighten my embrace. She sighed. After a while she let out a bitter little laugh and fell asleep.

Two days later I took the subway into Manhattan and made my way through the West Village. There was an actual magic store bookended between a computer shop and an Iranian restaurant. It didn't sell magic tricks like disappearing ink or top hats with bunnies, but instead was a place where you could actually find items for rituals of witchcraft. It was called The Weird Sisters.  

I hadn't finished high school or attended college but I still got the reference. The three witches in
Macbeth
were called the Weird Sisters. It might be my best shot at getting some answers or making sense out of my mother's warnings.  

I stepped into the shop and a faint stink assailed me. I knew it well. It was the unmistakable smell of decomposition.

The store was packed with shelves stuffed with jars, bottles, and other containers filled with the likes of foxfire, salamander glands, dried mistletoe, salt, incense, goofer dust (graveyard), goofer dust (crematorium), dried doves' blood, owl liver, bats' wings, rooster hearts, red peppers. I wondered if they threw it around or made stew with it.  

There were ceremonial daggers, chalices, and candles of every color on display. I looked for eye of newt but didn't see it anywhere. I wondered if any of this was real. I thought if it was then animal activists would be down here protesting the place night and day. I wondered if I was just on another wrong trail. I thought about my enemy out there holding a glass jar with a hopping black bug that was Cole Portman's immortal soul.

Other shelves contained reference materials, maps of haunted towns, houses, and castles. I picked up a book called
Witches and Witchcraft
and paged through it. Leaning against a case full of different-colored chalks that aided you in drawing pentagrams and circles of protection, I read about scrying mirrors, divination, the power of names, drawing down the moon, numerology, the Sabbat, how a person's true name has power over him, and how witches sometimes danced around a lightning-struck dead coven tree.

Again I thought of an image that had filled my mind the day of my mother's attack. A tree with blood splashing on it.  

I kept reading and came across an article on succubi, demons in female shape that prey on men, raised by powerful sorcery.  

A young woman of maybe twenty-five, who looked more girl next door than anyone who worked in a shop that sold rooster hearts and crematorium dust, appeared. She said, "I'm sorry if I kept you waiting. I didn't hear you come in. I was in the back room. Can I help you?"

I wondered what happened in the back room. I put the book back and said, "I have no idea. It depends, I suppose. Are you a good witch or a bad witch?"

It made her smile. It was a pretty smile that reached her eyes. "You've never been in a store like ours before."

"No."

"How did you find us?"

I had worked my way through most of the street informants and then started aiming myself at the Haitian influx that had suddenly populated the fringes of Bed-Stuy. I asked about voodoo dolls and zombies, and most of the dealers and thieves looked at me like I was insane. But one didn't. One started babbling and praying to Baron Samedi. He told me of shacks in Port-Au-Prince where you could buy potions to kill from afar or make someone love you. It struck a chord. We were in the greatest city on the face of the earth. Surely someone sold such things in Manhattan.

I ignored her question, glanced around, and thought of New York real estate. I imagined just how much of this stuff the owner had to push every day just to make the rent. How many hundreds or even thousands of urbanites were sitting around right now drawing circles of protection around themselves in fifth-floor walk-ups.  

"My name's Kendra," she said.  

"Names have power."  

"Yes, they do."

She had green eyes flecked with gold, blonde hair fixed into a bouncing pony tail. She was a cheerleader type. I could imagine her on the sidelines doing kicks and clapping as the QB sprinted toward the end zone. But her clothing wrecked the girl-next-door image. She wore a wrap covered with the Weird Sisters logo, three witches with their backs to a boiling cauldron. One a crone, one a kind of buxomly mother figure, and the last a seductive teen. On her blouse were ancient symbols, inscriptions in Latin, and verses from the Bible. Her leggings were black with bright white star constellations and signs of the zodiac.

"How about making a man age fifty years almost overnight?" I asked. "Which one of these books will show me how to do that?"

It made Kendra's face close up like a fist. "No one's ever asked before."

"What about stealing a soul? Where can I learn how to poach a man's shadow, his soul, and stick it in a jar and watch it writhe in torment?"

She set her lips and her expression shifted to sadness, interest, and futility. "I can't help you with anything like that. The things we sell are mostly for wiccan rites, pagan beliefs that are in keeping with the harmony of the earth."

The frustration and anger had welled in me. I hadn't slept in days. I was weak and my resolve was waning. "Who can send the world's most perfect woman to love a man to death? Does that take some salamander glands or doves' blood?"

She glanced around but we were alone in the store. She stepped in closer to me, her eyes growing more serious. The dimples faded. Her chin came up.

"Something's happened to you," she said.

"Yes."  

She looked deep into my face and saw something there that put a real fear into her. "You were talking about yourself. You're the one who's afflicted."

I nodded.

"You admit it easily. A lot of people can't. Their rationale refuses to accept such possibilities. They think they're imagining things or going crazy. But you, you believe."

"Yes."

"You've had some past experience with the occult."

I didn't know what to say to that so I didn't say anything. I nodded again.

"The world's most perfect woman loving a man to death isn't a woman at all," Kendra said. "You must realize that. It's a succubus. A demonic entity that drains the life from its intended victim. I can see the stress and strain in your features. You've been trying to fight it, haven't you?" Before I could answer she continued. "Good. You're strong, very strong. You still have a little time left."

"What's the best way I can use that time?" I asked. "How do I find whoever is doing this to me?" I ran my hands over the spines of the books. "Do you know of anyone who is capable of this kind of thing?"  

I sounded almost whiny. The sickness was throwing me off balance. I knew better than most people that anyone was capable of almost anything. Looking at me, could this girl guess what I did for a living?

"The question is, do
you
know anyone with that capacity?" Kendra said. "Who hates you that much?"

"It's a long list."

"It's a short one, a very short one. You have to understand that there's a balance," she explained. "Where there's grace, there's depravity. Where there's salvation, there's Satan. Most of the practitioners will use these rituals and elements for peaceful and serene reasons. But some will use them for evil means. There's no way to tell who will do what. Whatever is in their hearts will lead them to taking positive energy and bending it toward ill. The tools aren't bad in and of themselves, but a corrupt intention will use them to an immoral end."

"Have you met anyone here like that? Anyone who could do the things I mentioned?"

"Everyone has the capacity. You don't have to raise a demon. All you have to do is hate enough and focus enough and a demon will find you. The devil always knows your heart."

Now that felt very true to me.

"So what can I do?" I asked.

"There are prayers and spells of protection."

"Care to whip up a few?"

She rubbed the back of her hand against her nose. It was a cute nose. She sort of smiled again, trying to remain amiable despite the heaviness of our discussion. I wondered what had diverted her into working in a shop like this when she should be at some booth on Coney Island letting the boys ogle and flirt with her and buy her cotton candy. Because of my own lost childhood I had romanticized notions of the world where pretty girls like this were concerned. I hoped I hadn't brought a curse to her front step.  

She said, "Maybe I can help."

"I can pay you."

"Don't taint my efforts. Let my willingness be pure."

"Okay."

She turned and moved up the aisle toward the back of the store, her ponytail swaying. I thought if I had grown up next door to her or someone like her my life would have taken a very different course. But that was probably nothing more than wishful thinking.

I took another book off the shelf and continued reading, learning about how pagan rites could be either white—right-handed, clockwise, righteous, and graceful—or black—left-handed, widdershins or counter-clockwise, flying in the face of the natural order of the world.

The electronic bell signaled that someone had stepped into the store.  

I'd made another mistake and left myself out in the open, too close to the front entrance. In the center of the aisle there was nowhere for me to run as Chaz Argento walked up with two soldiers who already had their weapons drawn. I'd never seen either of them before, which told me Chaz had farmed out for hard hitters loyal only to him and not to the Ganucci family. He was making his play.  

I shut the book, put it back on the shelf, and our eyes met. Chaz let out a slow humorless smile.  

He gestured for one of his legbreakers to search the store. The muscle-bound, no-neck thug stalked off and I thought I had to move now, while they were split up. I wasn't packing a gun but I had my knife. As a rule you didn't throw blades, but I was good enough that I could hit the remaining soldier's barrel chest. The knife wouldn't kill him, but it would hurt and scare him, and the blood would spook Chaz. I might just have enough of a diversion so that I could wade in and do some real damage.

Except it didn't happen. Kendra had already been on her way back to me and was only a few feet up the next aisle. The thug returned with her three seconds later, one huge hand clamping her shoulder.  

The pain made her body twist before him, and she couldn't so much as get out a groan. He shoved the girl at me and she tumbled and hit the floor at my feet.  

"Don't be a moron, Chaz," I said.

"Stop talking that way to me! I'm the new skipper. The Ganooch is gone. His consigliere is dead. Someone's got to run the business and I'm in line. You have no say. You have no right."

"I'm only asking for you to give me a few more days."

It got him laughing. "What kind of a mook do you make me for? You think you can bounce my crew off the walls and talk down to me and there'll be no repercussions? You think that's how things happen in this world?"

"We can work together."

"You're not listening to me. You never listen to anybody, now do you?"

Maybe it was true. I didn't go out drinking with the boys, didn't bust chops, didn't play high-stakes poker in the back rooms. Maybe I'd kept myself a little too far out of things for anyone in the crew to trust me now.