Night Terror (23 page)

37

BABS FLIPPED THE TAROT CARDS
with the expertise of a Vegas shark, snapping them onto the table between soft and runny candles. The flickering flames were numerous enough to summon a thin bead of sweat on her wrinkled brow.

She’d done a thousand readings over the years, but rarely for herself. She knew enough about the supernatural to realize that she didn’t want to know her future. Others, half-believers, could take bad news and call it hocus-pocus. Of course they learned in the end, but then it was too late.

Babs, on the other hand, was a full believer—in the cards and other things—and she knew that the cards didn’t lie. They might not be direct. They might reveal the truth in layers that were difficult for the ordinary mortal to understand. But they didn’t lie. That was why she was performing this reading for herself for the fourth time in as many hours. Because sometimes they
were
direct.

The first time she had been shaken but not panicked. She’d stared at the cards for long moments, catching her breath, taking in the fullness of them. Tarot cards could not be interpreted correctly if the adept only read into them the separate meaning of each card. That was strictly for base amateurs. Each card played off the other, each lay revised the lay before, until with the final card, the complete reading could be revealed by a skilled professional.

But that first deal of the tarot had been even more uniformly
ominous than the one she had done for Audrey Bock, until with the fall of the last card, Babs could barely breathe. Never in her years of working with the occult had she seen anything remotely like it. She stared suspiciously at the deck in her hand, but she had shuffled it herself before the reading.

She brewed herself a large pot of tea and forced herself to eat a healthy breakfast of sprouts and tofu. By the time she finished she had almost convinced herself that perhaps she
had
misread the cards both times. It was possible. After all, a reading was just an
interpretation.
If she was depressed or distracted, it might have happened.

She did another reading. This time she used only the twenty-two cards of the major arcana. She wasn’t interested in subtlety.

The cards fell differently this time, as of course they would, but the conglomerate effect was the same. Death. Horrible death in her future. Not just in the future, either. Today. She dropped the rest of the deck as though it were a hot iron and backed away from the table, pulling her eyes away from the cards with great difficulty. Even as she hurried into her bedroom, the picture of the reaper with glowing eyes shining beneath his dark hood and his wicked-long, sharp scythe wrapped in skeletal hands, flashed repeatedly on the front of her brain.

A walk. A nice brisk walk would clear her mind. But as she strode purposefully out onto the porch that afternoon, clutching a thin cotton scarf around her shoulders, she’d stopped in the pale sunlight. What if she was hit by a car?

She’d glanced quickly up and down the street, lifting her chin to peer farther along at the hospital parking lot. One or two cars passed slowly, but they remained on the street. None threatened to leap the curb and run her down, and was that a horrible enough death to match the message in the cards?

She thought not. No, the cards had foreseen something peculiarly gruesome and painful for her and she couldn’t imagine what that might be. Babs was not a reader of Stephen King or his ilk. She didn’t follow the tabloids or study every story on serial killers or watch those types of
movies. In fact Babs hadn’t
been
to a movie since
The Sound of Music
, but she did have an ample imagination nonetheless, and it was working overtime as she stepped down onto the walk in front of her home and tried to decide what to do.

Doris. I’ll go see Doris.

And so she did. By the time she reached the Milche house, she had managed to attain a certain level of calm. Enough to let herself in quietly—since Virgil wasn’t home and she knew Doris was in no shape to answer the door— catch her breath and straighten her plaid skirt. She tiptoed up the stairs and found Doris watching a game show. Doris barely had the strength to register surprise when she saw someone unexpected standing on her threshold.

Babs was astonished at how fast Doris had slipped downhill. Had it really been only a couple of weeks since she’d last seen her? She looked like death itself. If it was possible, she seemed to have lost even more hair and her eyes, sunken before, were now positively entombed in the depths of their sockets. Her withered hand, as she lifted it to welcome Babs, shook like a leaf in a windstorm. For a moment Babs forgot all about her own problems and dropped onto the bed to comfort her old friend.

Doris’s voice was raspy as a leaky radiator. “I missed you, Babs.”

“I missed you, too, Doris. You’re looking good.”

“Don’t give me that baloney.” Doris forced a weak smile. “Won’t be long now.”

“Don’t say that.”

“True. But I don’t worry about it. Pastor comes by every day now. I’m right with Jesus.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“Are you right with him, Babs?”

Babs tried to be right with everyone. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, The Great Spirit, the entities that inhabited the earth. But when it came down to it, had she been wrong all along? Was there a final decision that had to be made? That thought bothered her. What if there
was
only one God and he was the jealous kind the pastor kept whining about?

“I think so.”

“Don’t think so. You got to know. ’Course you got a little more time than I got.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean?”

So Babs told her. Doris’s eyes seemed to slide to the front of their sockets and when her jaw dropped, Babs had the uncomfortable sensation of staring all the way down her inflamed and constricted throat. She wondered if that was what the gateway to hell looked like.

“Need to tell Virgil,” said Doris.

“Why? There’s nothing that he can do about it, Doris. And he wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

“You saying it’s set in stone?”

“When the cards speak like they did today, it is.”

“I don’t believe that. Christ gives all of us choices in this life.”

“I can make all the choices I want as to how my soul is set before I die. I can die a good woman or a bad one. But the cards say I’ll be dead before the next sun rises.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’m trying to make my peace with it.”

“It’s hard.”

“How did
you
do it?”

Doris rubbed the back of her neck and closed her eyes for just a second. “I prayed a lot. And I had Virgil. Much as he thinks he’s not a comfort to me, he is. I’d meant to ask you to keep an eye on him after I was gone….”

“Sorry.”

Doris shrugged. “Marg will take care of him.”

“That must be soothing for you to know.”

“She’s a good woman.”

“I suppose. You know her better than me.”

“Of course, she always thought you were a bit off.”

“Me?”

“Well, not everyone takes to men. Marg is
different
in a different way.”

“You can say that again,” said Babs, studying Doris’s face. “I’m wearing you out. I’ll go.”

“No,” said Doris, gripping Babs’s hand with the little strength she possessed. “Stay long enough to pray with me.”

“Sure.”

They prayed aloud, both asking for forgiveness for their sins. Requesting eternal salvation in the sweet arms of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, and when they were done Babs found that she did feel better.

“Thank-you, Doris,” she said, leaning and kissing Doris lightly on the forehead. “We’ll meet again very soon. I’m sure of it now.”

“Me too.”

“Give my love to Virgil.”

The walk home went better than the walk over. The late afternoon sunlight no longer seemed filtered through a silken cloak of gloom. It had a nearly optimistic edge to it. Babs didn’t doubt her coming demise any more than she had when leaving home, but Doris’s unquestioning faith had shored up her own. Whatever was coming, she was ready to face it.

But stepping into the candlelit house once more, she felt her resolve bending just a little. It was one thing to accept your fate. It was another to move toward it blindly, waiting for a freight train roaring down the karmic path in your direction. She went straight to the cards and read them once again.

The cards told her that she was not going to be alone when she died. That bothered her. She couldn’t be certain from the reading whether it meant she would have friends close by or that someone else would die with her. The final clue that was revealed in each of the separate readings confused her the most, and troubled her more than all the others. It hinted at something she had been wondering about for years. Dreaming about. And
fearing
to the very depths of her soul.

The card showed an unknown woman, linked with death.

And though the cards played themselves close to the chest, she
knew
somehow that the woman was the same one that was such a force in Audrey Bock’s reading. But how could that be? She’d never met Audrey before that day and, as far as she knew, they had no mutual acquaintances.

Her hand kept straying to
The Hanged Man
, with its incongruous image of the woman peering down into the murky pool. Something in the woman’s face was disconcerting
for her. Was the woman seeing things in the future or in the past? Was she searching for salvation or casting a spell of death? Babs sensed that the woman was a focal point, drawing in a twisted web of lines that attached to people and events she couldn’t begin to understand, but people and events that were destined to come together in a terrifying conclusion.

But was that before or after
she
was dead?

Cooder hadn’t made it more than a hundred yards in the hours since the man and woman had passed him. In that time, several other cars and trucks had come along. A couple honked and waved and Cooder studied them as they passed, uncertain as always if he knew the people, if they were strangers being friendly or someone making fun of him. Not that it mattered. He always got around to waving long
after
a car was out of sight anyway.

He stood now in the gathering gloom, watching the moon rise over the rear of the old farmhouse. Backlit, the meandering building looked even more menacing, with only two downstairs windows emitting the vaguest of light, like the eyes of a weasel in a dark woods.

The house seemed to be tugging at him and it stroked his natural curiosity. He studied the ramshackle structure, wondering what it was about the place that touched him so. He’d passed a million old farmhouses in his day. Full of dusty corners they were. Empty rooms a lot of them. Funny, withered-looking sunlight beating its way in through dirty glass, turning into dusty beams in gray spaces filled with falling wallpaper and the smell of wood so dry it clogged the nose. He’d explored them before.

With one foot on the gravel shoulder, the other balanced in the grass that dropped off to the old galvanized drainage culvert, he angled his head, squinting his eyes. Cool wind soughed through the branches of a thick stand of spruce behind him. Other than the breeze, the early evening was unusually quiet, and in that silence, Cooder felt himself slipping even further away.

It wasn’t a frightful sensation. He’d experienced it countless times before. He gave himself up to it, knowing immediately
what was happening. He’d found his guide inside the house. He was seeing through other eyes. Using the senses of another, smaller creature. He felt curiosity, and hunger. And he felt a terrible, tiny heart thumping fearfully in his chest.

He was bathed in darkness thicker than night. He reached out with both hands, but his fingers felt weird, feeble and thin. A door, so huge it seemed to disappear overhead, slowly opened.

A man stood silhouetted in the golden light from the doorway and—as always—it took Cooder a moment to realize that the man wasn’t a giant.
He
was little. The man passed him and spoke in a soft and tender tone.

“Come on, Zach. Time to get out for a little.”

Zach! That was the name! In the corner, a child rose to his feet, shielding his eyes. The giant glanced toward Cooder and froze.

“Goddamned rat!”

Cooder saw a boot sole the size of a refrigerator dropping toward him and he scurried around the wall, underneath the child’s bunk and back inside a crevice in the foundation. The man kicked at the wall and the sound was like thunder, the giant boot sole blocking out the light as it struck the wall. Cooder shivered against the stone, the rat’s thick whiskers picking up every vibration like an insect’s antennae. The boot hammered down at his cave opening like a guided missile, over and over, until finally he heard heavy breathing and the kicking had stopped.

“I’ll get him later, Zach. Don’t worry.”

Cooder peered shakily out of the hole as the giant turned and walked out, followed by the boy. Cooder focused, forcing the rat to follow, skittering along the baseboard, its whiskers flicking like swords, testing the air, every muscle tensed lest the boy or the man glance over their shoulder. But Cooder knew that the last thing the man would think of was the rat getting up the guts to tag along.