Strange Folk, page 26
“I don’t think so. I need time to think.” She paused, relishing the moment. “Good night.”
Dreama’s face disappeared, and the door came down over the opening with a bang.
THIRTY-TWO
MEREDITH
I can’t sleep,” Meredith said into the dark.
“Me neither,” Cliff answered.
“Let’s see if there’s any food.”
They crept into the living room and found Belva and Luann holding hands on the couch as a game show played on TV.
Belva smiled when she saw them. “I can’t sleep either. I’ll cook us up a little something.” She shuffled slowly to the kitchen and started to take ingredients out of the cupboard. Luann tried to take over, but she swatted her away. “I’m not an invalid. Go sit down.”
Luann didn’t fight her, and she joined the kids at the table. They watched Belva pour milk into a saucepan. While it heated, she pulled herbs from various baggies and pots and placed them on a square of thin fabric. Then she tied it into a bundle and placed it in the pot of milk.
“What was Mom like when she was little?” Meredith asked.
Belva paused with her spoon in the air. “She was real curious and smart, same as you. Like I told you before, she was always inside herself. Even before her daddy died, she lived on the inside. Made me wonder what was going on in there sometimes.”
“So she kept things from you?”
Belva shook her head. “That’s not how I see it—she has her own world in there, and it’s no one’s but hers. We’re all born with it, but some of us don’t really take advantage, do we? We do all our living on the outside.”
Belva set mugs of a steaming milky broth in front of each of them and sat down with her own. Meredith blew on it and took a sip. It was a rich, buttery cream spiced with smoky herb and bitter floral. The warmth of it spread through her like a towel wrapped after a cold bath. Tears filled her eyes, and she looked up at Belva and Luann. “I don’t want to leave.”
Belva sighed and put her hand on Meredith’s. “Oh, honey. I don’t want you to leave either.” Cliff sniffled next to her, and Belva reached over and ruffled his hair.
“I know it’s tough, but your mama’s trying to do right by you,” Luann offered.
Meredith scoffed.
“Your mama had it real hard after your granddaddy died. Growing up all alone in that house with your sick grandma. She did so well in school that we thought it must not be so bad. But we were fools. She was just surviving.” Luann paused. “I understand why she didn’t want to come back, and why she wants something better for y’all.”
Belva frowned. “She’s right. I let your mama down when she was little. She is a survivor. That’s why she’s taking y’all away.”
Meredith took this in. She had fallen so deeply into the groove of being angry with her mother and analyzing her every fault that she had lost sight of the truth at the center of it. Her mom had suffered. Her irritating vigilance wasn’t a personality defect, but a way of ensuring that they would never experience what she had. This had allowed Meredith to grow up without fear, and in that fearlessness, she could see things her mother couldn’t. “I think the hardest thing about leaving is that there’s still so much I don’t know about the work. I don’t know what’s real and what’s fake, and now I’ll never know.”
Meredith had tried to use the power of the land to leave the cave after the shadow brought her there, but nothing happened. It was like the land had died, or at least gone silent, beneath her. She’d thought she had this amazing gift, but when she really needed it, she was powerless. At TJ’s, when the boys grabbed her, and then at the cave. For two days, she had waited, cold and helpless and hungry because she couldn’t save herself.
Belva studied her. “Your mama still at Dreama’s?”
Meredith nodded.
“Well, we still got tonight, don’t we?” Belva got up with some effort and started down the hallway. “Come on now.”
They followed her out into the garden to a place where two rows met in an X. She and Luann took off their shoes and flexed their toes in the grass, and Meredith and Cliff did the same. The blades were soft and cool against her bare skin.
“Close your eyes and concentrate on the land under your feet.”
Meredith and Cliff obeyed.
“Now imagine every person who has walked this land before you.”
Images of faces streamed through Meredith’s mind, and she tried to slow them down, so that she could focus on each one—what they thought and felt, what they feared, what they loved. They were a part of her—she was made of the tiny bits of what they’d once been, and she wanted to feel each bit.
“And every creature that traveled over this land or made its home here.”
Her mind was again a blur of images, of every animal she’d encountered—the tiny barn kitten with its bat fangs, the deer standing elegantly in the morning mist, the bees buzzing over the blooms, the snakes slithering beneath the grass. The amount of life that had existed over time, the density of memory in this one spot, it was overwhelming. It contained too much for her to process.
“And before that, when these mountains stood quiet for millions of years, with nothing to carve out its treasure or poison its air and water. It served no purpose; it only existed.”
The chaos in Meredith quieted, and a calm descended over her. She imagined herself a small tree standing silently on a hillside, looking out on a sun-drenched valley.
“Now I want you to imagine roots growing out of your feet into the land.”
Meredith could feel them slithering out of the bottoms and gently probing the ground. They softly burrowed into the soil and snaked down, and she felt rooted, as if she was that ancient tree. Her roots grew warm, and the glorious heat traveled up her trunk into her middle.
This time, instead of focusing on how she might wield the energy, she only stood there and experienced it. She was a small, quiet part of the land’s sweeping, ancient expanse.
“I can feel them!” Cliff exclaimed.
Meredith opened her eyes, and she saw Cliff standing there with his strange light shining brightly in the night.
She looked over at Luann, whose face was content, and then over at Belva, who was watching her.
They locked eyes, and Belva whispered, “This is real.”
THIRTY-THREE
LEE
Lee crouched a few inches from a small space heater in a camouflage hunting jacket, eating a Snickers and reading Redbud’s black book.
Though the room was antiseptically tidy, the cabinets and drawers were brimming with things. Stacks of cheap cotton clothing, three of the same appliance, a box of a hundred fine-tipped Sharpies. Lee had done the same thing in her former life with Cooper; she’d kept a hoard of food in the fridge and things stashed in cabinets all over the house. He’d accused her of many things: consumer addiction, a lack of respect for his family, an ignorance toward money that felt like a euphemism for white trash. It had filled her with such shame that she’d invented new hiding places and shopped only when he was out of town. He’d never known a creature’s scarcity; you stored nuts away for the leaner times. It was the only way to survive.
She’d found a drawer, the only messy one in the entire place, stuffed with empty candy bar wrappers and cookie sleeves and potato chip bags. There’d been a fresh Snickers shoved toward the back. Seeing Dreama’s hoard and binge drawer had coerced her into feeling an empathy she didn’t want to feel.
Every so often, she checked her phone, even though she knew it would offer the same information. No service.
She imagined what was happening to her children out there, unprotected. She wanted to scream, but she’d already done plenty of that to no avail. No one could hear her.
She had made her way through half of her mother’s black book, and she’d yet to find a charm she could use to escape. She’d learned how to take revenge in myriad exquisite ways. To call a straying lover back by nailing his boots to the floor under the bed. That setting fire to a string the length of a man’s cock could render him impotent. But there was nothing that showed her how to climb out of this hole.
She finally came upon the spell that created the shadow. She read through it and compared her slipshod version to the real thing. She hadn’t done a terrible job, though nothing could compare to the force of a spell written in the thick of it.
She turned to a blank page, and then the handwriting changed.
Dreama.
The entries became thick-lined and filled with rage, her pencil grinding into the skin of the pages. Lee had a hard time following their meaning. They were like the rants of one possessed.
Then the entries became neater and more focused. She’d created spells that altered and enhanced her physical appearance, something Lee had never seen in either Belva’s or Redbud’s pages. She’d concocted love and commitment recipes that she used on her husband. She’d written charms that elevated her persuasive powers in business and guarded against unforeseen disasters.
There were no spells that sucked the life out of a body.
Lee wondered if she’d gathered people for this work. She imagined Dreama’s flock of imitators raising their manicured hands around a fire. It didn’t track. Was it possible she did all of this by herself? How?
Lee flipped back to Dreama’s earlier entries and attempted to parse meaning from them. She realized that some were spells she had written for use on her adopted parents, the Shorts, a couple of zealots that Lee hadn’t known very well. The man was obsessively clean. He made them scrub every surface with bleach, and sometimes he would insist they wash their hands with it. Their skin rubbed off in sheets. One time, he forced her brother Earl to gargle with bleach and water after telling him to fuck off, and his throat burned for weeks.
The woman was prone to bouts of paranoia, and she would sometimes lock them in the closet to “keep them safe.” They would sit in there for hours whispering in the dark. Dreama had written a charm that she and Earl said together with their small hands against the door until the lock flicked open.
Lee climbed the ladder with Dreama’s words in her head and put her hands up to the trapdoor. She whispered them and pressed up with her arms, but it didn’t give.
She said them over and over in a more forceful voice, pressing her palms harder and harder into the metal.
But it didn’t budge.
She tried again, this time focusing on all of the years she’d felt trapped in the life she and Cooper built, and before that in the life her mother built in this town. She felt the familiar panic rise through her chest and the certainty of its power as she chanted the words.
But the door still didn’t move. She banged on it hard with her fists and screamed. The sound scraped against her raw throat.
The laws of this work still evaded her. She knew she wasn’t a gifted caster, but was she incapable of even this child’s charm? Had Dreama added a protection to this room? There was still so much she didn’t know.
The panic made her lightheaded, and she suddenly swooned from the top rung and gripped the ladder hard to keep from falling. She slowly lowered herself to the floor. She’d only had chocolate to eat, and she was still acclimating to not drinking, but this felt different. It reminded her of when she, Kimmie, and Dreama had passed each other out one evening in elementary school.
She looked around. It didn’t seem like the room had any ventilation. She wondered if she was losing oxygen, and she imagined herself slowly asphyxiating. She sank to the floor and lay down on her side, focusing on taking shallow breaths and attempting to conserve the remaining air. She thought of when she was a child, and she wanted nothing more than to drift away. A hidden part of Lee, unlocked by the delirium, felt that it could be so much easier to just pass into nothingness.
But a larger part of her, the one that had been fed and fortified over the last few weeks, not only refused to abandon her children but refused to abandon her own existence. There was still so much left for her to discover. She was a universe within a person. She contained warm creeks and mountain ranges veined with a chaotic rock that, once ignited, could radiate fury and intelligence. And there was a whole world out there, filled with people that each held their own fascinating universe to explore.
She wanted to live.
As she lost consciousness and the room faded to black, this desire sparkled inside of her.
THIRTY-FOUR
MEREDITH
Meredith woke to Cliff standing above her like a pale ghost.
“Jesus, what?”
“Something’s wrong with Mom.”
Meredith looked in the corner and saw for the first morning since she’d found Otis that Mom wasn’t in the room with them.
“Where is she?” For some reason, they were whispering.
“I don’t know. She was in my dream. It was dark, and she was really scared.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t just a dream?”
Cliff nodded gravely, and Meredith shivered in the morning chill. “Okay.”
It was cold in the house as Meredith and Cliff searched each room for their mother. Meredith tiptoed past Redbud sleeping in the back room and checked the garden. She usually relished the wet chill of this place so early in the day, the breath of it entering her and filling her with inexplicable vitality. But today she only felt it as fresh fear.
After finding nothing, they finally crept into Belva’s room and came over to her side of the bed. Meredith was afraid to touch her, and as she considered the best approach, a voice came.
“Y’all got something to say?” Belva’s eyes remained closed, and it seemed the voice came from somewhere else in the room. Luann stirred next to her.
“Mom is gone.”
Belva’s eyes opened. “You check the house? The woods? Maybe she’s out for a walk.”
“Her car is gone, too.”
“Welp, maybe she stayed over at Dreama’s.”
“Cliff thinks she’s in trouble. He had a dream.”
Belva heaved herself up. “Tell me about it.”
Meredith loved this about Belva. She didn’t dismiss what everyone else did.
Cliff spoke up in a small voice. “It was dark, like I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel that Mom was there, and she was really hurt and scared.”
Belva slowly got out of bed and shuffled over to the window. She opened it and thrust her head out with her mouth slightly open. A stiff breeze blew through the room and down the collar of Meredith’s shirt. She shivered.
Belva turned back to them, and Meredith saw fear in her hard face. “I think you’re right, Cliffie. Your mama’s in trouble.”
* * *
They came from the trees on their hands and knees, crouching behind thick pine to watch Dreama’s enormous house. The windows were opaque with early-morning sun, so they couldn’t see whether anyone was home. Belva breathed heavily and leaned against a tree trunk while Redbud gave her water; the half-mile walk through the woods had done her in.
“Cliff, you’re the smallest. I need you to sneak along the edge of the trees and see if any cars are in the driveway.”
Cliff nodded and crept through the trees until they thinned and eventually stopped at the front edge of the property. He was still for a while as he searched the area and listened for life nearby.
From the woods, Meredith heard a door slam shut, followed by the clacking of heels against stone. Dreama’s Tesla pulled into the street and drove away. Cliff ran back to them, solemn but giddy. “I saw Mom’s car in the garage when it opened. No other cars. Dreama just left.”
Belva patted him on the shoulder. “Good work.” She took another heaving breath. “Y’all, I gotta save my energy for the walk back. Get me when you found her.” Belva wiped sweat from her forehead and gestured them onward. Luann declared she would stay with her.
Redbud, Meredith, and Cliff ran toward the house with their backs arched low. They snuck along the edge until they found an unlocked back door and entered a room with a pool table, bar, overstuffed couches, and the largest TV Meredith had seen in a while.
They fanned out in the house and took different floors. Meredith wound her way through the pristine bedrooms of the upstairs. She rolled her eyes at Dreama’s closet, which reminded her of the closets in their old neighborhood where the designer shoes were put in glass cabinets like museum artifacts. There was no sign of her mother.
The three of them met back up on the main floor in the kitchen. They hadn’t found Mom either.
Redbud took a large bowl out of a cabinet and started filling it with water from the sink. “I got an idea.”
When the bowl was filled, she set it in front of Cliff on the marble island. “Belva told me you have the sight. That true?”
Cliff looked nervous. “I don’t know.”
“She show you how to scry?”
He shook his head.
“That’s okay.” She gestured for him to get closer to the bowl. “All you gotta do is look into the water, think about your mama, and tell us what you see.”
Cliff shyly leaned over the bowl and stared down into the water. After a few seconds, he looked up at them, stricken. “I can’t see anything.” His chest started to rise and fall rapidly, and Meredith reached out and grabbed his shoulder, attempting to ground him.
“Hey. Look at me,” Redbud instructed.
Cliff turned his head toward her. The hard, weathered angles of her face softened. “I want you to take a deep breath with me, okay?” They inhaled together for a few beats, and then slowly exhaled. They did this two more times, and Meredith could feel him relaxing under her hand.
“Now. Look back into the water, and don’t force it. Just allow yourself to let go and see, like you usually do. Let it come to you.”
Cliff bent back over and gazed down into the water. A glaze came over his eyes that Meredith recognized, like he was looking beyond this dimension into the next.
