Road To Nowhere (14 page)

“What are we doing here?” she asked.

“I told you, seeing Mother,” he replied.

“Does your mother really live in this tomb?”

“You don’t like the decor?”

“It scares me.”

Free nodded. “I think that’s the point of it. Anyway, I call her Mother. We’re very close, you understand. But my real mother died a long time ago.”

“How did you come to know this person?” she asked.

“She read my fortune.” Free gripped her left arm, steering her the way he wanted her to go. He gestured to the right, but to the right of what she wasn’t sure. The place was a walk through the history of the earth. “She likes to sit in a small room over here when she gives readings.”

“Does she know we’re coming?” Teresa asked.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“She’s a fortune teller. She tells her own fortune every morning when she gets up and knows who’s coming to visit.” Free grinned. “It beats having to keep an appointment book.”

They found the woman sitting in what appeared to be a library. The walls were lined with books, dark and dusty volumes of all sizes with barely legible fading titles. Between the sections of shelves hung maps of places Teresa did not recognize, continents that weren’t on the globe. Huge candles flickered in the four corners of the room. The woman looked up as they entered and smiled with thin red lips.

Her hair was snow white, long like her heavy purple dress. The fine wisps of aged thread almost disappeared into the darkness that hugged her sides. Her eyes were striking, blue and hard, like bits of coral that had been removed from an ocean depth where the sun never shone. She was old, extremely, Teresa thought, her skin lined with time that had not passed easily. But she was not feeble. She crooked a beckoning finger to them as she smiled and gestured for them to sit in front of her on two small wooden stools. They did so.

“Welcome,” she said in a dry voice that sounded as if it had little, if any, breath supporting it. The old woman sat on an overstuffed chair beside a low round wooden table littered with a star atlas, scraps of wrinkled paper, two inkwell pens, and a silver pyramid the size of a grapefruit. Teresa forced a smile, although she felt like getting up and running out the door as fast as possible. This person, she was sure, this
hag
, was not going to tell her anything she wanted to hear.

“Hello,” Teresa said.

“Hi, Mother,” Free said casually, setting his garment bag on the stone floor and crossing his legs.

“Your name, child?” the woman asked.

Teresa hesitated. “Teresa.”

“Your full name,” the woman insisted.

“Teresa Marie Chafey.”

“What time were you born? What day?”

“I was born at exactly ten in the morning on a Saturday,” Teresa said. “My birthday’s November twelfth. I’m now eighteen years old so I was born in—”

“I do not need the year,” the woman interrupted. She turned to her star atlas. “The year is always the same. It doesn’t change with the sun or the moon.”

“Huh?” Teresa said.

“Mother doesn’t do the usual astrological chart,” Free whispered in her ear.

They waited silently while the woman performed her calculations. Soon she had a sheet of orange paper in her hand sprinkled with numbers, astrological signs, and a few strange symbols Teresa had never seen before. An amusing thought – it was amusing given the circumstances – floated through her head.

I wonder how much this woman charges.

“You’ve had a difficult life,” the old woman began after consulting her paper one last time. “Your parents don’t care for you and you don’t care for them. You have been alone most of your life, even when surrounded by other people. You think you are different from everyone else and you’re right. You do not belong in crowds because the crowd does not appreciate your uniqueness. Your talent is vast. You can write poetry and prose, play instruments, and sing like a goddess. All three of these abilities appear to you to be separate, but they are one and the same. You can touch people, that’s your gift. Yet you do not like to be touched yourself. You have built walls to keep the world out and the world, in turn, has built walls to keep you inside. That is how you suffer. Any time you step outside your usual place, and demonstrate what you have to offer, people reward you by throwing stones. Am I not correct, Teresa Chafey?”

“Yes,” Teresa whispered. She was shivering before she entered the castle, now she froze. The old woman’s voice was cold, and it penetrated deep. The truth could do that.

How does she know all this about me? I've never met her until tonight.

A mystery. The building was a mystery. The woman was an enigma. Her hard blue eyes burned with the flame from a candle. She was waiting for Teresa to ask a question. Another mystery, that the old hag would have no trouble unravelling. That’s what scared Teresa most, that she was sitting before a crystal ball that glittered as no mirror could. The woman was just that – a mirror reflecting the person who was sitting in front of her.

Teresa didn’t want to go forward, not yet. She wanted to understand better why her past had died the death it had.

“Why did my boyfriend want Rene instead of me?” she asked.

“Because you scared him,” the woman said. “He didn’t know what you’d do next.”

Teresa chuckled uneasily. “Bill wasn’t afraid of me.”

“Not of you, but of what you would do. They are not the same thing, child. Often, they have nothing in common.”

“Was there another reason?” Teresa asked.

“The reason I have given you is enough. But if you must have another one, I’d say Rene and Bill wanted to be close to each other in a way neither wanted to be close to you. Because” – the woman paused to scratch her chin with a long golden nail – “they couldn’t understand you. People always fear what they cannot understand.”

“You come back to fear,” Teresa said.

“You come back to it. I merely speak what I see. What do you fear, child?”

Teresa suddenly felt defiant It was not pleasant having her brain picked, even when she’d asked for it. But was that true? She hadn’t exactly asked to have her fortune read. Free had just dragged her into this place.

“You tell me,” Teresa said.

“You are afraid to be alone.” She consulted her paper again. “But you can have love in your life if you don’t care how much it costs. You can have it tonight, now, in this place. But you do not want love. You want adoration, and that’s cheap. How much do you want to spend tonight, Teresa?”

Teresa stammered. “I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

The woman leaned closer. Her dark blue eyes, though, did not move in sync with the rest of her. They seemed, for a moment stuck in the space they had occupied since they had entered the room. The eyes could have slipped back into the old woman’s forehead; they appeared to peer at Teresa from beneath the weathered flesh, from a perspective that had nothing to do with modern-day humanity. Teresa had mentally compared the woman to a witch when she first saw her. Now she believed the comparison valid. The woman terrified her.

The hag twisted her thin red lips once more into that grotesque thin line that was supposed to pass as a smile.

“How come you haven’t asked me why Bill didn’t want to sleep with you?” the old woman asked.

Teresa swallowed and lied. “I did sleep with him.” She glanced over at Free and added, “A few times.”

The old woman moved in close. “You drove Bill away.”

Teresa barely shook her head. She could smell the woman’s breath; the taste of copper in it. The hag could have had a mouth full of blood. “Bill didn’t leave me because he was afraid of having sex with me,” Teresa said.

The old woman raised a balding eyebrow. “Then how did you know I was suggesting that?”

“I just knew.”

“When you have sex with someone you become wedded to that person, and Bill was afraid to be wedded to you, Teresa. He was afraid of where you were going.”

“You just said he was afraid of what I might do.”

The woman nodded and sat back. “What you have done has determined where you’re going.” She paused. “Do you want me to speak of your future?”

“No,” Teresa said.

“You are soon to have the things you craved from Bill. The things he didn’t want to give you.”

“I told you not to tell me.”

The old woman cackled. The sound was like the screech of nails on a blackboard. “Why shouldn’t I tell you? It doesn’t cost you or me a cent. My advice is as cheap as the things you are about to receive.”

Teresa stood. “Thank you for your time. I’m leaving.” She turned and strode out of the room, into the vast cavern where both light and direction were confused. Free caught up with her before she could run into a wall.

“Hold on,” he said, grabbing her by the arm. “Don’t be angry.”

She turned on him. “Why did you take me to this awful place?”

“I thought you’d have fun.”

“I’m not having fun.”

“Well, then, I was wrong,” Free said. “But that’s still no reason to leave in such a hurry. Let me show you the rest of the place first. There are rooms in here that’ll take your breath away.”

“No. I hate this place. I just want to get out of here.”

“You have to see one room, at least. It’s where I sleep when I stay here.”

Teresa shivered in the oppressive gloom. “I can’t believe you actually stay here with that old witch. She doesn’t even look like a human being.”

Free was amused. “She isn’t human. She’s just an apparition. You can close your eyes and blow hard and she’ll vanish.” He touched the tip of her nose with his finger. “Close your eyes, Teresa. Let me lead you to a special place.”

He was speaking to her in his story-telling voice. The voice he used to make the pictures shine with words that told her of John and Candy. Their whole lives had been laid out in the space of a few hours together in the car. He had magic words, just like his magic fingers. She remembered then that she had forgotten to check to see if there was a joker in her back pocket, after all.

Free slowly pulled her forward while she kept her eyes squeezed shut. She trusted him, it was true, but it was equally true that she was afraid to open her eyes and see where she was going. Or to open them and reach in her pocket to discover that Freedom Jack had been wrong about the joker. That it might not be a joke at all, the whole thing, what they were doing tonight.

Time passed as if in a dream. Could a person fall asleep on her feet? Perhaps Teresa did, even with her feet moving. Free’s voice seemed to come to her from far away.

“Open your eyes, Teresa,” Free said. “We must have a toast.”

She opened her eyes. He was standing in front of her with a bottle of red wine and two glasses in his hands. Torches on the wall beside him burned angrily. Teresa saw that she was upstairs now – that she must have climbed steps in her brief trance – and that she was standing in a huge bedroom with open windows that looked out over the turbulent sea. The salty wind tugged at her hair. Free took a step towards her and handed her a glass. He uncorked the bottle in a blur, using his magician speed.

“This wine is very old,” he said and poured the dark liquid into her glass. “Very fine.”

“I shouldn’t drink, I’m driving,” she said.

“Nonsense,” he said, pouring himself a glass, too. He startled her by suddenly tossing what was left of the wine over his shoulder into the fireplace not far from the opulent bed. The glass shattered and then – to her amazement – the fireplace ignited. Flames leaped up the chimney and the room began to warm, despite the breeze pouring in through the windows from the ocean. Free took another step towards her, until he was practically standing on top of her. He raised his glass and clinked their crystal. “To Teresa Marie Chafey,” he said. “May her shivers pass swiftly.” He sipped the wine.

“How do you know I’m shaking?” she asked.

“I know your wrist hurts. I know you feel sick to your stomach. I know because I know everything.” He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. His breath was cool but his lips were warm and she felt his touch as if he had, in one move, caressed her entire body. “Drink your wine, Teresa,” he whispered in her ear. “It will help you through this bad time.”

Teresa tasted the wine. It was warm, thick, like fresh orange juice with plenty of pulp. Had it not tasted so good, though, she would have thought she was drinking human blood. It looked like it. In an instant her nausea began to recede. She took a larger drink and the throbbing in her wrist lessened.

“It’s good,” she mumbled.

“You’re good.” He kissed her ear, her hair, moving slowly back to her face. He kissed her eyebrows and dropped his glass on the floor and the glass splattered at their feet. Fortunately, the wine did not ignite as that in the bottle had. Or maybe it did; she suddenly felt as if she were standing in a pool of flames. The moment was pure eroticism, pleasurable beyond belief. Free tilted her face up and began to kiss her mouth, deep kisses, that made her feel as if she were naked.

You’re so bad.

He could read her mind, that boy. He took the glass out of her hand and led her to the bed where she stretched out beside him and threw her arms round his neck, while his hands moved over her body to places Bill had never wanted to venture. But Teresa did not think about her boyfriend then, nor did she think of Poppy, waiting outside in the car. Her passion consumed her, and maybe the old hag was right and it was cheap, but Teresa felt it was high time she had got a bargain. Free’s mouth was all over her, and the wine in his mouth darkened her skin in places where he caressed her so that, yes, once more, it looked as if the beverage was blood, making her believe that she was bleeding and being eaten by the boy who was making love to her. Yet she laughed at the thought, in her ecstasy. It was all a dream, it must be. Right then, she couldn’t even remember having left home.

The growing sensations in her body took her mind and blew it out the open windows on the cold wind. Out over the sea, which foamed like a cauldron full of witch’s brew. There she saw tall towers in the distance, fortresses of stone and steel built by old wizards and dark lords to defend realms founded on black magic and sharp sword. Her mind flew like a wraith through the dead past, while her body shuddered in the eternal present. The moment was rich. She told herself, in the vacuum that had once contained her thoughts, that it didn’t matter if she could remember everything she had done that night. She was enjoying herself.