Reborn (9 page)

Nothing about driving the Toyota seemed familiar to me. But I did get the hang of it on the way back. And by the time I returned to the driveway, I felt more relaxed behind the wheel.

Melba drove today. When she turned off her road and onto another one, I suddenly felt vulnerable, like in the hours before I arrived at Melba’s, more than a week ago. In that moment, I realized how protected I’d been the past week. Other cars zoomed past us. My heart took an extra beat each time. Between Melba and the Internet, I had learned enough to know the world was a big, scary place. I wanted to turn back, but stayed silent.

The radio wailed out words to a tune from instruments. Melba called this R & B music. Her lips moved to some of the words, and her head bobbed at the same time. The noise made me nervous.

About ten minutes later, we arrived on the street where my first memory was born. Where the giant hole in the road had once been, a darker patch of road now lay in its place. Sweat beaded on my forehead as I imagined the mob, their glaring gazes, and their nasty comments. As the car slowed, the memory became more vivid. At first, there was nothing but darkness and pressure. My lungs felt squished as my ribs dug painfully into the organs. Then, a noise louder than anything I’d ever heard boomed inside my head, and in the same instant, an intense light blinded me. I clung to Excalibur, squeezing him, as we burst out of the ground. Flesh ripped from my body. Dirt stung my eyes…
we burst out of the ground
. I
had
caused the damage. I gasped in a choking breath, as the now serene street came into view.

“Are you all right?” Melba asked.

I held back the next breath and stared in awe and horror at the sign with
my
name on it. In a low voice, I said, “I came out of the earth,” fully realizing how ridiculous that sounded.

“You what?” The sharpness of her tone broke the hold the sign had on me.

We drove past the oak-lined drive leading to Solomon Brandt Estates, where Excalibur and I had escaped. Wooden structures, decorated with yellow caution tape, sealed off the front entrance to the property.

Excalibur hadn’t had any wounds.
The only blood he wore was what had dripped onto him from me.

“I remember,” I said.

Although she sat side on, I could see her eyes widen.

“What do you remember?”

“I burst through the ground. Right there.” I turned and looked at the new patch of pavement, now behind us.

“Like literally out of the ground? Like you were inside the earth and burst out?”

“Yes. Me and Excalibur.”

“Okay, if you say so.”

Melba’s voice had taken on a skeptic’s tone. She humored me.

Down the road, on the far end of the south side of the estate yard, she pulled into a graveled driveway with a small parking space at the end. She turned off the car and sat there. Scaffolding covered one end of the building. Below the metal poles, white paint chips lay scattered across the lawn.

“All those windows need a good cleaning to get ready for the grand opening. That’s why I brought you with me today, to help with the windows.”

Looked like an easy job, although there were many windows.

But instead of getting out of the car, Melba sat there, looking at the place.

“Aren’t we getting out?” I asked.

“We wait for Wally, the groundskeeper.” She looked at me above her sunglasses. “I never go inside that place alone.”

“Why, what’s inside?” For some reason, looking at the enormous house made me edgy.

“Bad mojo.”

Although I didn’t know what that meant, it didn’t sound good. A couple minutes after we arrived, another car pulled in behind us.

“He’s here,” Melba said. She turned in my direction before getting out. “Are you sure you’re all right? You look pale.”

I decided then, the flashback I’d had seemed too crazy to have really happened. Maybe the new memory had been a dream before I had woken up in front of the construction workers.

“Yes. I’m fine. Driving here gave me unpleasant flashbacks. And that noise you call music has given me a pain in my head.” I rubbed my temples, and turned my attention back to the estate house, and to Wally, who gave me a strange look, and then tipped his hat to Melba before heading toward the back yard.

“Isn’t he coming in?”

“Eventually, but as long as I know he’s around, I don’t feel so… alone. So,” she said changing the subject, “you don’t like my music.” She laughed. “I wonder what kind of music you do like.”

“I should think, none.”

She eyed me with one corner of her mouth pursed. “You probably listened to country before your amnesia.”

Melba’s laughter lightened the sudden dark mood I found myself in. But I barely heard it, because when the soles of my sneakers hit the gravel, a noticeable chill shot through my feet, into my veins, then rushed through my body. A heavy weight settled upon me like a giant boulder. The nightmare I’d had on my first night in the apartment flashed through my mind, filling my heart with the misery of the innocent. Pain throbbed at my temples, but I didn’t say anything to Melba. As I neared the mansion, the foreboding worsened to the point where I felt like someone else walked for me, breathed in my breath, saw from my eyes.

“Here we are,” Melba said turning the key in the door handle. Her voice sounded like she spoke from somewhere else in the yard.

She moved aside, motioning for me to go in ahead of her. The scent of fresh paint assaulted me when I first stepped inside. I stood in a large kitchen from another time period, everything as it once was. The small table had even been set for a slave’s dinner. As I gazed, wide-eyed, over the room, an image of the slaves came into view. Outside the windows, they toiled in the yard. And inside this room, the dark-skinned woman from my nightmare busied herself setting pies on a sill to cool. When she finished, she turned—her apron covered in floured handprints—and stared directly at me with saddened eyes.

A light touch to my arm startled me. The image of the slave woman disappeared, along with the people outside.

Melba stood in her place, a puzzled look on her face. “What?”

“Um.” I couldn’t tell her what I saw. Maybe I didn’t even see it. “Nothing, I—”

“You expected a more posh kitchen?”

I didn’t know what she meant, but nodded.

“This is where some of the slave women worked—the luckier ones, not that any were lucky, mind you. But the women who worked here were guaranteed at least one meal a day, and were sometimes able to sneak leftovers and peelings for stewing home to their families.”

Melba slicked two fingers across the wooden countertop, then looked at them, seemingly satisfied. Anxiety, more than anything, filled me now. If helping Melba clean windows would get me out of this place sooner, then I was eager to get to the task.

As if I knew where to go, I exited the kitchen first and found myself in a wide hallway. Instead of taking a left toward the grand staircase, I turned right toward the front door.

“It’s this way.” Melba’s voice sounded far away again.

I didn’t ignore her on purpose. Something pulled me in another direction. When I came to a hall table, I stopped, faced it, and gripped the edges of the highly polished mahogany. Although I tried keeping my focus on the table, I knew what hung before me on the wall. The mirror beckoned, and I couldn’t resist the urge to look into the glass. As hard as I tried not to, a force beyond my control made me lift my gaze until it settled on the image in front of me. I felt some relief when I saw only myself staring back. But as I looked, my image wavered, and a similar one came into view. Hair grew in straggles onto shoulders that appeared beefier than mine. The nose belonging to the image grew sharper, and the lips turned into a hateful snarl. I tried to move, unlatch my grip from the table, but fright paralyzed me.

The evil Solomon stared back at me.

Behind the wave of fear that fell over me, starting at the top of my head like a tight-fitting shirt, his essence poured downward, pushing against my skin. The vile entity covered my face, smothering me, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. When I did take my next breath, it was he who breathed for me. Down over my skin, the invisible tightness crawled.

Against my will, my left hand lifted from the table and reached toward the wall beside the mirror. My gaze followed. Inches from the bullwhip that hung there, my hand shook in the air as I fought the urge to grab it, but I wasn’t in control of my body anymore. Anguished cries from outside suddenly filled the hallway. The bastard controlled my body, but left my mind free and fully aware of the actions I was about to take.

To my right, I felt Melba’s presence. She mumbled something in another language. Haitian, a language I suddenly knew well. Other voices joined hers. She reached a hand in between me and the image of the evil Solomon. She bent closer and blew into her palm, coating the mirror with dust.

The face in the mirror contorted into a mask of rage. Blue eyes turned black. In a frantic race to conquer, Melba traced an X into the dust. The chanting stopped abruptly, ending with a scorned warning. The evil image disappeared.

My hand ceased its advance for the bullwhip, but the nerves in my palm reached out, urging me. The whip’s handle beckoned to me still. I longed to feel the power the weapon wielded.

“Solomon.”

Like waking from a nightmare, I was myself again. Without resistance, I lowered my arm and turned my head to the left. The beauty of Desiree standing in the wide, opened front doorway, haloed by sunlight, surrounded by greenery from the yard and the sounds of birds chirping, pushed the darkness away. My heart swelled. Despite the horror of a few moments ago, I matched her grin. As the two of us stood there staring at each other, Melba quickly shoved something into a front pocket of her jeans, messed her fingers through the mark on the mirror, disguising the X, and burst past me.

“Desiree, what are you doing here?”

Desiree’s smile dwindled somewhat as she looked at her aunt. “When I didn’t find you at the house, I thought you might be working today.”

“You seem to be skipping a lot of school lately?”

“Auntie Mel, I’m an adult. It’s okay if I miss a day,”

“You’re barely twenty-one years old. That hardly constitutes you as an adult.”

Desiree rolled her eyes and looked past her aunt to me. Blush stained her cheeks and the bridge of her thin nose. “Anyway, I was hoping I’d find you here, Solomon.”

Melba, her face paled, issued me a warning look over her shoulder, as if telling me to keep quiet about what had just happened. She’d seen, and she, with the aid of invisible others, had crossed the evil entity as it tried to seize my body. I didn’t know how I knew, I just did.

Melba seemed reluctant to let her niece into the house, but Desiree pushed past her and stopped in front of me. Determination sparkled in her eyes as she gazed up. She carried a bag in one hand, and a paper cup in the other; the odor of coffee rose in the steam from an opening in the lid.

“I found out some stuff I thought you might be interested in hearing,” she said.

To see her face and hear her voice again stirred up feelings. A door opened up somewhere deep inside of me to a place I didn’t know existed. It was a bright place, somewhere darkness couldn’t reach. Then I sensed Melba’s glare on us.

“What did you find out?” I asked gently.

“Can we go and sit down somewhere?”

I glanced past Desiree to Melba.

“The kitchen.” Melba stomped down the hall, leaving us to follow.

Desiree gave me a shrug and said low, “What’s her problem?”

“Rodents,” Melba yelled back before I had a chance to think up an answer.

I would rather have gone outside, back to Melba’s, anywhere far from this eerie mansion, but instead, I followed the two women into the kitchen.

There was no sign of the woman from my vision, or her pies. We sat at the small table in a bright area, surrounded by windows. Carefully, Melba pushed the old dishes to one side.

Desiree leaned over the table in my direction; her lime green-shirt hung open, exposing two half-mounds of smooth flesh and a strip of white lace rounding each one. Staying focused on her delicate features became difficult, but I managed to lower my gaze to the large notepad she pulled out of her bag. She placed it on the table, half facing me, and pointed with a lilac fingernail to the first line of writing.

“These are some of the accounts of the slave Harold Davis at eighty-seven years of age, after he’d been free for thirty-seven years. Harold was sold to Joseph Brandt as a young boy for the Brandt Plantation. Right here.”

As she spoke, she shared her gaze equally with me and the notepad. I watched her lips move with each word; when she looked up at me, I met her gaze.

“Harold goes on to say how Joseph, Solomon’s father, beat Solomon and Joseph’s wife almost as much as he whipped his slaves. From what I read, Joseph was a cruel master, but Solomon became even crueler.”

The name Joseph stuck in my brain like a dull ache.

“Harold says, ‘Joseph died while Solomon was only fourteen.’ The cause of death isn’t official, but the rumor was that he owed a debt and debtors came to collect. His mother, Ruby, died of tuberculosis a couple years later. Solomon inherited this plantation when he was just sixteen years old.” Her gaze fell to the coffee cup at one side of the table. “I suppose back in those days, sixteen wasn’t so young.

“Solomon had one sibling, a younger sister, Beth, who he sent to live at a neighboring plantation. Although Solomon was young, he was bitter and hated the world. By the time he reached twenty, he was known as the most ruthless plantation owner in the South. The Brandt slaves were given no materials for building, so they lived in shacks made from fallen trees and sticks, built under the moonlight, because they were forced to work during daylight hours. Their dwellings had no windows, no furniture, or cook stoves. Meals consisted of what they caught in streams and hunted in the forest. They had no time to grow their own gardens, because they worked the plantation from dawn until after dark. Their only vegetables were the ones not fit to cook for their master. From time to time, the slaves would run, but most would get caught… those, Solomon tortured, branded, raped.” Desiree shuddered. “The list of unspeakable deeds goes on.