Magic Street (22 page)

When they all were gone, and Rev Theo was locking the door, he began talking softly to Word.

"Don't count on it being like that every time," he said.

"Rev Theo, I can't believe it happened this time."

"I am a wicked man," said Rev Theo. "I doubted the power of God. He granted the very prayer I asked of him, but I doubted. I touched your arm to try to get you to sit down. I was going to tell you, Word, boy, you can't promise them things like this. It'll just break their hearts when they don't come true. But then Missy Dole came back and... Swear to me in Jesus' holy name that this comes from God."

"Rev Theo, I don't know, but if it saved Shanice's life, who else could it come from but God?

The world is full of evil, but I've been given the power to fight it. Just a little, but power all the same.

Power for good. To combat the power of evil."

Word only shook his head and smiled. "Rev Theo, don't you understand? I could open my mouth right now and it would happen again." He reached out his hand and took Rev Theo by the shoulder and said, "I promise you right now, the Lord has heard your prayer and he will take away the wickedness in your heart and turn your desire back to your wife, and your wife's desire back to you."

He let his hand fall away.

Rev Theo's eyes were wide and full of tears.

"I didn't know you were married," said Word.

"She left me ten years ago," Rev Theo whispered. "A year after I left my fine church and came to this place. She couldn't take the poverty. I couldn't take her materialism. She took my children away from me. I vowed that I could forgive every sinner but I could not forgive her."

"But you do forgive her," said Word.

"As God has forgiven me the pride of my righteousness."

Rev Theo threw his arms around him and wept onto Word's shoulder and Word embraced him as his body heaved with his sobs of relief and gratitude.

"Thank you, O King of Kings," murmured Word. The power to defeat the devil was back in the world again, and it was in his hands.

WISH FULFILMENT Mack woke up lying on the white couch with Yolanda staring into his eyes. "He's awake," she said.

Ceese was apparently kneeling beside the couch near Mack's head. "I can see that."

"You really ought to speak to me with more respect," said Yolanda. "Or I'll make you fall in love with me."

"I'm already in love with you," Mack said. He hadn't realized it until he said it.

"Of course you are," said Yolanda. "Because Oberon is."

"He locked you up in a glass jar and he loves you?" asked Ceese.

"He locked me up in a glass jar because I was imprisoning him under the earth."

Mack closed his eyes.

"He's gone again," said Ceese.

"No, he's just got his feelings hurt," said Yolanda. "It's something Will Shakespeare taught me to recognize. Mortals get sad when their love doesn't love them in return."

"I had a terrible dream," said Mack. "A cold dream."

"Which would explain the shivering," said Ceese.

"I have these dreams," said Mack.

"I know," said Ceese. "You explained it before."

"I started having this one... a couple of years ago. But it's different from the others. I don't know who it is. And up to now I never let it finish. This time I couldn't stop it."

"What does that mean? That the wish came true?" asked Ceese.

"I don't know. Yes, maybe it does. It always did before."

Yo Yo stroked his face. "Come on, little changeling, tell me what you saw."

"He's not that little," murmured Ceese.

"Hush yo' mouth, child," Yo Yo murmured back.

"I was going on stage. In a huge arena. The first time I thought maybe I was like a gladiator because it felt like some kind of contest and I was very nervous. I was afraid I might lose. But then I realized that I was alone, going out there alone in front of the crowd, and they were chanting but I couldn't hear anything. It's like I'm deaf in the dream."

"Any of your other dreams like that? Deaf I mean?" asked Ceese.

"Don't be such a cop and ask a lot of stupid questions," Yo Yo suggested.

"Don't be a fairy queen and boss people around," said Ceese.

"I can always hear in my dreams, and in this one I could hear too, just not the crowd. What I heard was the beating of wings."

"A bird?" asked Ceese.

"What's the wish?"

"I told you. It's hungry. I go out there and I'm so hungry and I see all these people shouting and chanting and waving only they don't make a sound and I can barely taste them, so they just make me hungrier. I hated this dream. I got out of it as fast as I could. Only this time when I tried, all I did was carry the dream with me. So it combined with my escape dream. It became the same dream. And when I looked out the window of the car in my dream, I saw the crowd from the other dream. So I hadn't gotten away like I usually can. And then I felt something slap the car away, just whooosh and it's gone, and there I am alone on the stage of that arena, and suddenly there's something under me.

Something like a motorcycle seat. Or a horse. It moved me forward and suddenly we were right out over the audience, swooping around them, their faces looking up and filled with love and madness and it was frightening, the way we flew. I could feel the wings beating now, and hear them of course—and that's when I first realized the sound was wings. I was riding something but I couldn't see what it was."

"It was a dragon," said Yo Yo quietly.

"I guess it was," said Mack, and the realization made him sad, because he knew he should be fighting the dragon, not riding on it.

"Go on," said Ceese.

"That's it," said Mack. "That was the dream. After that it just stopped making sense."

"Tell me anyway," said Yo Yo.

"Okay, but it don't mean a thing," said Mack. "I was soaring over the crowd and I looked down and I could feel their love. Their need. Like this woman with a baby. She looked at me and stuck her finger down her baby's throat and pulled out a grape. Then she held it up to me like an offering, like it was a jewel. And a man was reaching up to us and with one beat of a wing the... dragon, the thing I was riding, it blew him clear across the arena and landed him right on top of a woman who hugged him like he was her long-lost lover. Weird stuff. Not like cold dreams. So I thought the cold dream was over."

"It wasn't over," said Yo Yo. "Oberon came into your dream and took control. He's started using the power he put in you, Mack. The power you've gathered from all those dreams. He isn't letting you plug up the stream anymore. He wants the wishes to come true now. He's letting out the flood."

"I know," said Mack, and he started to cry as he remembered. "I tried to stop it. But dream after dream. I'd hear the beating of the wings but I was into an old dream, one I've known for years.

Sabrina Chum, that girl with the really big nose, in her dream she's always an elephant and comes up to a rhinoceros and it saws off her trunk. I hate that dream, the sawing-off part, and I always end the dream before we get there, but this time I saw her trunk lying on the ground. And then the beating of the wings and I was in Ophelia McCallister's dream, where she walks out onto the lawn of her house and there's her husband and he holds out his hand and hugs her and kisses her." Mack shuddered.

"Old man McCallister died a long time ago," said Ceese.

"I just know how these dreams come true," said Mack. "I can think of a lot of ways she could have her husband in her arms again but none of them is very nice."

"Any other dreams?"

"Sherita Banks," said Mack. "She just wants boys to think she's cute. She isn't. She's got a really big butt like her mother. Beyond what most guys would find attractive. Family curse, kind of. But she doesn't dream that the butt gets small, she dreams that boys come up and put their hands on her butt and tell her she's beautiful."

"Sounds kind of sweet," said Yo Yo.

"No," said Mack. "That dream could come true, all right, but it wouldn't be sweet. It could be a gang getting up a train on her."

Ceese nodded. "Anybody else?"

"I was just starting Professor Williams's dream. Not the one where he kills Bag Man. The one where he's listening while people recite his poems. Only this time of course I didn't hear the poems, I just heard the wings beating only that's when they stopped. That's when I woke up."

"So you think those wishes came true?" asked Ceese.

"They didn't always come true back when I didn't know how to stop them," said Mack. "But this time, when I didn't have any control, when I was flying on the back of that thing from dream to dream—I thought, They're coming true. I knew it. Like Yo Yo said. He wants the wishes to come true. He was going from dream to dream."

"And then he stopped when he got to Professor Williams."

Mack nodded. "Yes, but I don't care where he stopped, I care what he did. We got to get on the phone. We got to call people. Like when Tamika was inside the waterbed. If I'd known what was happening, I could have called Mr. Brown and woke him up and told him to look for Yolanda in the water."

"Right," said Ceese, "but then he might have run outside and headed for a pool and he would never have found her at all. I mean, what do we warn people of?"

"We got to try," said Mack. "We got to phone people. We got to go places and try to stop things."

"You got a phone here that works?" Ceese asked Yo Yo.

"No," said Ceese. "But my mom does. Look, I'll go home and we'll start calling. Find out about Sherita. Where she is. I can get a patrol car to go there and stop it if it's really happening like you think. A gang rape."

"What about Sabrina and her nose?" asked Mack.

"I'll call her family. Maybe she's cut herself. Maybe they can still get her to a hospital—reattach it."

"Then why you sitting here, boy?" asked Yo Yo.

"Mrs. McCallister won't answer the phone," said Mack. "She turns it off at night."

"Then you two go there while I go home. We had... who was it?... Sabrina, Mrs. McCallister, Sherita Banks, Professor Williams, and then you woke up. I'm calling everybody and you're going over to McCallisters' house."

By the time Mack got up from the couch and outside the house, he could see Ceese already going around the bend in the road on his way down the hill to home.

Then Yo Yo brought the motorcycle out of the garage and revved it up while Mack got on behind her.

Across the street, the back of the Joneses' house looked out over the street at the bottom of the hairpin—and Yo Yo's house. Now Moses Jones was out on the back deck stark naked yelling down at them. Mack couldn't hear what he was saying because the motorcycle was so loud. But he could see how he nearly had a fit, jumping up and down and screaming after Yo Yo raised one finger. It wasn't even the bad finger. But maybe in the dark old Moses Jones couldn't tell. He was still jumping up and down when they roared on up the hill to McCallisters'.

Ophelia McCallister lived in the house she had shared with her husband before he died. It was right at the top of Cloverdale, just a couple of houses from where the road dead-ended at the always-locked and often-climbed gateway leading into Hahn Park. Mack got off the bike before it even stopped, pushing himself up like in a game of leapfrog and hopping up so the bike kept going underneath him. But of course he still had a lot of momentum, so he staggered forward and since Yo Yo had just brought the bike to a stop, he crashed into her.

She switched the motor off.

Across the street two neighbors had come to their windows to look at the motorcycle and they didn't seem too happy. Though at least they weren't naked and jumping up and down like Moses Jones had been.

They got to the door and Mack rang the bell and then he knocked loud and started shouting,

"Mrs. McCallister!"

Now the neighbors were out of their houses. "What are you doing?" demanded Harrison Grand, the next-door neighbor on the park side. "Do you know what time it is?"

"I don't know," said Mr. Grand. And then he looked at Yo Yo and suddenly his face brightened.

"She keeps a spare key."

"Where?" asked Mack.

Harrison Grand immediately jogged to the juniper next to the front door and lifted up a rock that turned out to be a fake. He took out a key and within a few moments he and Mack and Yo Yo were searching the house.

"She isn't here," said Grand.

"I thought she would be," said Mack.

"Well she was," said Yo Yo. "Her bed's been slept in. But she's not in it now."

"Why would she leave?" asked Grand.

"Mr. Grand," said Mack, "you know where Mr. McCallister's buried?"

"Well you can bet it ain't Forest Lawn," he said.

Again he glanced at Yo Yo, and again he was suddenly enlightened. "I remember she has a cab come and drive her there every week but I took her once a few years ago and it's... it's..."

He walked to the calendar on the wall over the phone. He pointed to the name and address of the cemetery that had given it out to their customers, including Mrs. McCallister. "But you don't think she's gone to visit her husband's grave in the middle of the night."

Mack knew what would probably happen but he tried to explain anyway. "I know this sound crazy but I think she's with her husband now."

"Dead?"

"No, alive. But with him. You know where his plot is?"

"I don't think so."

Yo Yo touched his shoulder. "Yes you do."

"Yes," he said. "I do."

"Can you take me there?" asked Mack.

"Right now?" he asked.

"You saying she's down inside the—"

He fell silent for a moment, Yo Yo's hand on his shoulder. Then he got an urgent look about him and took off running for the garage of his own house. "Come on, Mack! You come along and help me dig that coffin up!"

"Better get a crowbar to open the lid!" cried Mack as he followed him over to his yard, his driveway. Before they got a pick and shovel and crowbar into the back of his SUV, they could hear Yo Yo's motorcycle taking off at top volume.

Ralph Chum was working late on a client's quarterlies when the phone rang. He picked it up.

"Barbara?" he said.

"Mr. Chum?" asked a male voice.

"Who is this?"

"This is Cecil Tucker, sir. I apologize for calling this late, but it might be an emergency." Ralph vaguely knew that Ceese Tucker was a policeman. Sabrina had mentioned it—she once had a thing for him, though of course it came to nothing.

A policeman calls at this time of night.

"Might be? Is something wrong with Barbara? Was there an accident?"

"Nothing like that," said Ceese. "Sir, is your daughter Sabrina at home?"

"She's asleep, Ceese." Was he actually asking her out, this long after her high school crush on him?

"I know she is, sir. I just wanted to make sure she was home. Sir, would you be willing to go and check on her?"

"Check on her? What are you talking about?"

"Sir, this is going to sound insane. Or like a cruel joke. But I assure you it is not a joke, and I am not insane. Please go into her room and look at her face."

"Look at her—"

"Make sure that nothing has happened to her face."

"What could happen to her face!"

"I told you it would sound crazy. All I can tell you is, think of how much Curtis Brown wishes he had checked on his daughter Tamika a little bit earlier."

"Please check your daughter, sir."

Ralph knew that this was insane, but Ceese sounded so grave, and the thought of this somehow being linked to what happened to poor Tamika Brown... "All right," he said, but he still let annoyance come out in his voice.

"With the light on, sir," said Ceese.

"Yes, with the light on!"

Angrily, Ralph Chum got up from his desk, left his office, and padded through the house on slippered feet until he got to Sabrina's room. From the door he could see that she was fine. There was no need to turn the light on. This was some stupid prank, and now that Ceese was a cop, Ralph could complain about him to somebody with more influence on him than his parents.

He turned away but now the fear came to the surface. Was it possible that Curtis Brown was telling the truth? That something strange and terrible had happened to Tamika and, as he said when he wept on the stand, he might have saved her in time if only he had believed that such things were even possible.