Ivory and the Horn (25 page)

“Easy for you to say. This is all old hat for you. You like the fact that it’s real.”

“But—”

Angel turned to her. “I don’t want to be part of this other world. I don’t
want
to be standing at the checkout counter and have to seriously consider which of the headlines are real and which aren’t. I can’t deal with that. I can barely deal with this… this haunting.”

“You don’t have to deal with anything except for Everett,” Jilly told her. “Most people have a very effective defensive system against paranormal experiences. Their minds just automatically find some rational explanation for the unexplainable that allows them to put it aside and carry on with their lives. You’ll be able to do the same thing. Trust me on this.”

“But then I’ll just be denying something that’s real.”

Jilly shrugged. “So?”

“I don’t get it. You’ve been trying to convince me for years that stuff like this is real and now you say just forget it?”

“Not everybody’s equipped to deal with it,” Jilly said. “I just always thought you would be. But I was wrong to keep pushing at you about it.”

“That makes me feel inadequate.”

Jilly shook her head. “Just normal.”

“There’s something to be said for normal,” Angel said.

“It’s comforting,” Jilly agreed. “But you do have to deal with Everett, because it doesn’t look like he’s going to leave you alone until you do.”

Angel nodded slowly. “But do what? He won’t tell me what he wants.” “It happens like that,” Jilly said. “Most times spirits can’t communicate in a straightforward manner, so they have to talk in riddles, or mime, or whatever. I think that’s where all the obliqueness in fairy tales comes from: They’re memories of dealing with real paranormal encounters.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“I know it doesn’t,” Jilly said. She smiled. “Sometimes I think I just talk to hear my own voice.” She looked across her studio to where finished paintings lay stacked against the wall beside her easel, then added thoughtfully, “I think I’ve got an idea.”

Angel gave her a hopeful look.

“When’s the funeral?” Jilly asked.

“Tomorrow. I took up a collection and raised enough so that Everett won’t have to be buried in a pauper’s grave.”

“Well, just make sure Everett’s buried with his boots on,” Jilly told her.

“That’s
it?”

Jilly shrugged. “It scared Macaulay enough to take them, didn’t it?”

“I suppose….”

For all she’s learned about his hidden philanthropic nature, she still feels no warmth towards the dead man. Sympathy, yes. Even pity. But no warmth.

The need in his eyes merely replaces the anger they wore in life; it does nothing to negate it.

“You were buried today,” she says. “With your boots on.”

The slow smile on the dead man’s face doesn’t fit well. It seems more a borrowed expression than one his features ever knew. For the first time in over a week, he approaches her again.

“A gift,” he says, offering up the newspaper-wrapped bundle. “For the children.”

For the children.

He’s turned into a broken record, she thinks, stuck on one phrase.

She watches him as he moves into the light. He peels away the soggy newspaper, then holds up Macaulay’s severed head. He grips it by the haloing blonde hair, a monstrous, bloody artifact that he thrusts into her face.

Angel woke screaming. She sat bolt upright, clutching the covers to her chest. She had no idea where she was. Nothing looked right. Furniture loomed up in unfamiliar shapes, the play of shadows was all wrong. When a hand touched her shoulder, she flinched and screamed again, but it was only Jilly.

She remembered then, sleeping over, going to bed, late, late on that Sunday night, each of them taking a side of the Murphy bed.

“It’s okay,” Jilly was telling her. “Everything’s okay.”

Slowly, Angel felt the tension ease, the fear subside. She turned to Jilly and then had to smile. Jilly had been a street kid once—she was one of Angel’s success stories. Now it seemed it was payback time, their roles reversed.

“What happened?” Jilly asked.

Angel trembled, remembering the awful image that had sent her screaming from her dream. Jilly couldn’t suppress her own shivers as Angel told her about it.

“But at least it’s over,” Jilly said.

“What do you mean?”

“Everett’s paid Macaulay back.”

Angel sighed. “How can you
know
that?”

“I don’t know it for sure. It just feels right.”

“I wish everything was that simple,” Angel said.

The phone rang in Angel’s office at mid-morning. It was Lou on the other end of the line. “Got some good news for you,” he said. Angel’s pulse went into double-time.

“It’s Macaulay,” she said. “He’s been found, hasn’t he? He’s dead.”

There was a long pause before Lou asked, “Now how the hell did you know that?”

“I didn’t,” Angel replied. “I just hoped that was why you were calling me.”

It didn’t really make anything better. It didn’t bring Robbie back, or take away the pain that Macaulay had inflicted on God knew how many kids. But it helped.

Sometimes her dreams still take her to that street where the neon signs and streetlights turn a misting rain into a carnival of light and shadow.

But the dead man has never returned.

B
IRD
B
ONES AND
W
OOD
A
SH

It’s a wonder we don’t dissolve

in our own bath water.

—attributed to Pablo Picasso

1

At first, Jaime knows them only as women with the faces of animals: mare and deer, wild boar and bear, raven and toad. And others. So many others. Following her.

They smell like forest loam and open field, like wild apple blossoms and nuts crushed underfoot. Their arms are soft, but their hands are callused and hard, the palms like leather. Where they have been, they leave behind a curious residue of dried blood and rose petals, tiny bird bones and wood ashes.

In those animal faces, their eyes are disconcertingly human, but not mortal. They are eyes that have seen decades pass as we see years, that have looked upon Eden and Hades. And their voices, at times a brew of dry African veldt whispers and sweet-toned crystal bells, or half-mad, like coyotes and loons, one always rising above the others, looping through the clutter of city sound, echoing and ringing in her mind, heard only from a distance.

They never come near, they simply follow her, watching, figments of post-traumatic stress, she thinks, until they begin to leave their fetish residue in her apartment, in her car, on her pillow. They finally approach her in the graveyard, when the mourners are all gone and she’s alone by Annie’s grave, the mound of raw earth a sharp blade that has already left a deep scar inside her.

They give her no choice, the women. When they touch her, when they make known their voiceless need, she tells them she’s already made the choice, long before they came to her.

All she lacked was the means.

“We will give you the means,” one of them says.

She thinks it’s the one with the wolfs head who spoke. There are so many of them, it’s hard to keep track, all shapes and sizes, first one in sharp focus, then another, but never all at the same time. One like a woodcock shifts nervously from foot to foot. The rabbit woman has a nose that won’t stop twitching. The one like a salmon has gills in her neck that open and close rhythmically as though the air is water.

She must have stepped into a story, she thinks—one of Annie’s stories, where myths mingle with the real world and the characters never quite know which is which. Annie’s stories were always about the people, but the mythic figures weren’t there just to add color. They created the internal resonance of the stories, brought to life on the inner landscapes of the characters.

“It’s a way of putting emotions on stage,” Annie explained to her once. “A way of talking about what’s going on inside us without bogging the story down with all kinds of internal dialogue and long-winded explanations. The anima are so… immediate.”

If she closes her eyes she can picture Annie sitting in the old Morris chair by the bay window, the sunlight coming in through the window, making a pre-Raphaelite halo around the tangle of her long hennaed hair as she leans her chin on a hand and speaks.

“Or maybe it’s just that I like them,” Annie would add, that pixie smile of hers sliding across her lips, her eyes luminous with secrets.

Of course she would, Jaime thinks. She’d like the animal women, too.

Jaime isn’t so sure that she does, but she doesn’t really question the women’s presence—or rather the reality of their presence. Since Annie’s death, nothing is as it was. The surreal seems normal. The women don’t so much make her nervous as cause her to feel unbalanced, as though the world underfoot has changed, reality curling sideways into a skein of dreams.