Shotgun Sorceress (28 page)

“Then we’ll
make
you,” Jason replied, not smiling.

Charlie could feel her shadow spreading beneath her, hiding under the red silt, darkening the water to the color of blood. She could feel the beating of the boys’ hearts, and she knew that the cruel power they’d wielded in the pool was gone in this living water.

“Then I guess you’ll have to come down here and get me, penis breath,” she said. “Unless you’re scared of the water.”

The boys looked at each other, then hopped down the bank and splashed toward her.

“
You’re
the only one who’s gonna have penis breath,” Jason threatened.

“Jason, did you ever think about what it’s like to die?” she asked.

He frowned, confused. “No.”

“That’s too bad. You should’ve thought about it, ’cause now you’re
dead!
”

The dark, silty clouds curling around the boys’ ankles suddenly turned to hard, razor-sharp jaws that clamped deep into their flesh. They screamed as their legs were ground down into the watery maws like celery sucked into a garbage disposal. In seconds their bodies were liquefied and consumed. The slashed rags of their swim trunks and sneakers were all that remained.

Charlie stared at the bloody water and rags and started to shiver. Dear God, she hadn’t really wanted
this
, had she?

Her sandal bobbed to the surface.

Run back to the clubhouse as fast as you can
, the voice told her.
Tell them you came out here to play hide-and-seek with Jason and his little friends. Two men grabbed the boys, but you got away because you were hiding
.

She grabbed the sandal, shoved it onto her foot, scrambled up the bank, and ran through the brush. Oh God, what had she done, what had she done? By the time she made it back to the gate, she was crying and screaming for help at the top of her lungs. It felt good to scream. A half-dozen people crowded around her, and she haltingly told them what the voice had said to tell. Someone ran to fetch Mr. Wilson and the club manager.

They wrapped her in a beach towel, and Mr. Wilson sat with her and tried to soothe her with kind words and a soda from the snack bar. Charlie drank it, even though she felt sick to her stomach. Her lower belly hurt, too, a weird crampy ache she’d never felt before.

The police arrived and searched the arroyo. Soon, the officers came back with the boys’ bloody trunks and sneakers in plastic bags.

    When she finally got back to the house, Charlie locked herself in the bathroom and drew a big tub of hot water.

She undressed and eased herself in, wishing that the tub was bigger so that she could get her whole body under the water. The dried mud melted away from her arms and legs, staining the water a brownish red.

Charlie …

Suddenly, there came a bright pain like someone had stabbed her lower belly with an ice pick. She doubled over, bile rising in her throat.

Her eyes widened when she realized she was bleeding. A thin tendril of blood began to spread through the water. The pain was so bad she thought she might faint.

You’re a woman now, Charlie. Hurts, doesn’t it?

“Please, make it stop,” she whimpered.

You’d be hurting a lot worse right now if I hadn’t been there today to save you from those boys. I won’t take away the blood, but I can take away the pain, if you do something for me
.

“Yes, anything,” she gasped. It felt as if her womb was trying to turn itself inside out.

Tell your aunt and uncle that you don’t want to go back to the club, not after what happened today. Tell them you’re old enough to be at the house by yourself …

    The Wilsons reluctantly agreed to let her stay at home, and the voice took her for long walks around the city. They visited all the playgrounds and parks in the city, and she learned about the best places for her shadow: the river, park ponds, drainage pipes, ditches, even the perpetually sodden ground around the public water fountains.

She also learned to spot the quiet men who lurked near the playgrounds. Sometimes they sat and fed the birds, sometimes they jogged or walked dogs, but they always watched the children. One afternoon, she hung around a merry-go-round until one of the men noticed her. Pretending she didn’t see him, she walked off to a deserted alley.

The man followed her in. He offered her a soda, then tried to grab her. She let her shadow devour him in a puddle of fetid water beside a Dumpster.

    After that, her shadow made her hunt in earnest. She walked all day, sometimes even skipping lunch when her shadow scented a pedophile or a new wet place. By early August, she’d trapped two more men. Hunting was easiest when she was on her period; when she was bleeding, her shadow spoke to her constantly, urging her on. When she wasn’t near her period, the shadow spoke rarely, and only around water. When it wasn’t there to reassure her, she worried about the hunt, and lay awake at night, wondering if her soul was destined for hell.

    When school started, Charlie had to abandon her daily walks for the dull routine of books and teachers and bland cafeteria food. She was in junior high school now; she’d hoped it would be better than elementary school, but it was just bigger.

She sat in the back of the classrooms, as always. Almost everyone ignored her. Everyone except her shadow.

It started to whisper ominous suggestions when she was walking to classes:

See that boy? He burned a litter of kittens alive. He’s going to the restroom; follow him in and let me have him
.

See that girl? She’s been trying to poison her baby brother, putting soap in his formula. She’ll kill him soon if you don’t help me take her
.

Charlie knew she couldn’t possibly do what her shadow wanted, not at school. Parks and underpasses were one thing; there was lots of space, lots of ways to slip away unnoticed even if people screamed as they were dying. But she was trapped at school. She’d get caught for sure.

She tried to ignore her shadow’s exhortations by making up rhymes in her head while she was between classes or by doing anagrams and palindromes in class when the teachers got boring. But when her math class had a young substitute teacher named Mr. Berling, the shadow became unbearable.

Mr. Berling was young and smiled a lot. He explained things a whole lot better than their regular teacher, and Charlie liked him.

He touches little girls
, the shadow told her.
Takes them out to see the horsies on his father’s farm and feels them up in the stable
.

“Able was I ere I saw Elba,” Charlie muttered under her breath. Her hands were shaking so bad she couldn’t write.

He’s scum, just like the rest of them. Follow him home, let him take you to the farm. He’ll fit nicely in the horse trough
.

“Stressed desserts.” Charlie thought she was going to start crying.

“Charlie, are you okay?” asked Mr. Berling.

“I think I ate something bad at lunch,” she stammered. “I think I need to go to the bathroom for a while.”

“Please do,” he agreed.

Charlie bolted from the classroom, ran downstairs to the girls’ restroom in the basement. It was usually empty; Charlie prayed no one else would be in there.

She pushed through the door and found four girls clustered around a pack of Camels. Two were inexpertly puffing on cigarettes as the third showed the fourth how to work the childproof lighter. They all turned to stare at her when she came in.

Charlie, get out of here this instant!
the shadow demanded. But it seemed to be growing weaker, recoiling from the smoke. With each breath she took, it slipped farther away.

“Can I try one of those?” she asked, stepping toward the group.

“I guess,” said the girl with the pack. She pulled out a cigarette and handed it and the lighter to Charlie.

Charlie lit it and took an experimental drag, then immediately started to cough and gag. This was surely the foulest thing she’d had in her mouth since … since a time she didn’t want to remember. Eyes streaming, she took another puff.

It was working, wind and fire canceling water and earth. Her shadow’s indignant demands were faint, fading into the rhythmic drip of the leaky faucet.

    Charlie soon learned that it only took two cigarettes a day to silence her shadow. She smoked them on the sly in the bathroom at school and in the backyard at home. When the shadow started to talk to her in her dreams, Charlie bought incense and started burning it in her room at night.

She knew she was vulnerable without her shadow. The sick men she’d hunted before were still around. And she had the awful suspicion that she was still attuned to them, and they were attracted to her. She needed a way to protect herself.

So when her aunt asked her what she wanted for her fifteenth birthday, she asked for martial arts lessons. Her uncle took her to Master Kim’s Tae Kwon Do Dojang, bought her a white uniform and belt, and enrolled her for a class that started that very night.

    Charlie had always hated PE classes, and although tae kwon do was several degrees harder than any sport she’d been made to try at school, she liked it instantly. Unlike running stairs or chasing balls, the kicks and strikes had a
point
, a real and practical purpose. Everything she learned was useful; getting into shape was just a happy side effect.

Another happy benefit of the class was David. He was a year older than Charlie, tall and cute but painfully shy. Charlie was attracted to him the moment she saw him. It took her weeks to swallow her own fear and talk to him after class, but once she did they became fast friends. Best friends, and as far as she could tell, each other’s only friend. He already had his driver’s license, so they often went out to see movies or go hiking in the low hills north of the city.

Six months after they started going out, Charlie knew that she loved David, even though he’d only hugged her briefly and had never tried to kiss her. He didn’t say so, but she suspected it was because of her smoking. His favorite aunt had died of lung cancer, and he hated being around smoke. She cut back as much as she thought she could, and wished she could explain her habit to him. But she knew that her shadow, although it had gone silent, would not tolerate being exposed.

    A year later, David got his red belt, and Charlie got her blue. They were both drenched in sweat by the end of their respective skills tests. Charlie took a quick shower and changed at the dojang, but David never liked showering in the men’s room there, since Master Kim had not thought to provide separate stalls for the men.

“I feel way gross,” he said as they climbed into his truck. “I probably stink, too. Sorry. Let’s go back to my place and let me get cleaned up, and then you wanna go get some ice cream?”

“Sure.” Charlie suddenly realized that she hadn’t had a cigarette all day. She hadn’t smoked that morning because she wanted her lungs clean for the test, and she’d forgotten to bring her pack with her for a puff in the ladies’ room afterward.

“It’s really cool that you’ve got your blue. Now you’ll be able to spar with us in tournaments. I heard Master Kim on the phone the other day; he’s arranging for all of us to go to Corpus Christi next month for the Tejas Invitational. That will totally kick butt; we’ll get to go to the beach. I’ve never been swimming in the ocean before.”

The ocean. Charlie’s skin prickled with dread.

“I—I can’t go,” she muttered.

“What do you mean? You gotta go, this will be too cool to miss!”

“I can’t.” Dammit, why had she forgotten her cigarettes?

“Is it because you’re nervous about competing? You shouldn’t worry about that, you’re really good. And you know how to intimidate people. I mean, you should see the look you get on your face when you hit the heavy bag—”

“Look, don’t bug me about this!” she snapped. “I said I can’t go, end of discussion!”

“Okay, okay, sorry.”

They drove on in silence until they got to David’s house. The place was empty; his father was probably off on a sales trip, and his mother was probably working another fourteen-hour nursing shift at the hospital. David didn’t like to talk about his parents much.

She followed him into the house and to his bedroom. David kept his room excruciatingly tidy; Charlie doubted she’d even be able to find dust on the tops of his bookshelves.

“You wanna just hang out here while I shower?” he asked as he pulled fresh clothes out of his dresser. “If you want a Coke or anything, just help yourself.”

“Okay.”

David padded off to the bathroom, and she sat down on the edge of his bed, trying not to muss the perfectly smooth green bedspread. She stared around at the neat rows of kung fu movie posters on the walls.

I wonder what David keeps under his bed
.

Charlie’s breath caught in her throat. Had that been her own thought, or her shadow’s?

“Are you there?” she whispered, aching for a cigarette. “Damn you, David’s a good guy, there’s nothing bad under his bed.”

Are you sure?

Charlie sat very still, muttering anagrams to herself while she tried to ignore the dreadful curiosity building inside her. She could hear the hiss and spatter of water from the shower.

Are you afraid? If you don’t look, you’ll always wonder
.

“Damn you.” Charlie slid off the bed, got down on her hands and knees, and peeked under the bed. She pushed aside a baseball mitt and a pair of cleats and saw a wide, flat cardboard box. She pulled it out and opened it up. Inside was a stack of comic books in plastic sleeves.

“See, it’s just comics,” she said, starting to rifle through them. “Batman, and Nighthawk, and the Hulk, and … oh shit.”

At the bottom was a Swedish magazine, unsleeved. She couldn’t understand the words, but the pictures of naked prepubescent boys were clear enough. The center spread showed an elevenish boy giving a slightly older boy a blow job. And tucked inside the back cover were three Polaroids of a naked boy in different poses on David’s bed. On the same green bedspread she’d tried not to wrinkle.