The Fifth Sacred Thing (6 page)

“Got caught stealing water one too many times. Hell, I practically grew up in here. My whole family was Witches. They got rounded up in ’43, and I landed out on the streets, right?”

“What do you mean, stealing water?”

“You know, water.”

Bird was silent. There was something here he clearly didn’t understand, something so obvious to Littlejohn that he couldn’t seem to explain it. Was it one of the things Bird had forgotten? How could he know what he didn’t know? He let the matter drop for now.

“How old are you?” Bird asked.

“Nineteen.”

The boy seemed younger than that. Fourteen, fifteen maybe. Bird was nineteen himself, or he had been once, but if that was ten years ago, where had he been? He wanted to grab hold of something, quick, before he sank into an endless well of lost years, spinning his mind like a wheel, trying to remember, not being able to remember. Are five minutes up yet? he wanted to ask. Am I still here? Am I still me?

Something else was bothering him. It was like a faint voice in the back of his head, calling. When he followed it he dropped into a well of pain. Sweat broke out on his forehead.

“You okay?” Littlejohn asked.

“I don’t know.” He was caught somewhere between memory, reality, and something else. He couldn’t tell who the pain he felt belonged to. “Can you ground me?”

“What do you mean?”

Speaking was becoming a greater and greater effort. “I thought you were a Witch.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know any magic. My folks all died before they could teach me anything.”

Bird was trying to ground himself, trying to make contact with the earth, but she seemed miles away, imprisoned under concrete and steel. He bit his own lip hard, trying to breathe, trying to remember an image or a word that could anchor him. “Grab my hands,” he whispered.

Littlejohn obeyed. The pressure on his hands was solid, was real. He could feel his hands and know they were his own and, from that knowledge, follow a trail of sensation slowly up through his body. His own body. His own dull pain of old injuries, which was different, he now knew, from the pain he
heard
inside him rather than felt. Someone was in pain. Someone was calling for help.

“Thanks.” Bird withdrew his hands. “Somebody’s hurt. But it’s not me.”

“Maybe it’s the new guy they brought in yesterday,” Littlejohn said. “They beat him pretty bad.”

“Where is he?”

“The last bunk, over by the door.”

Bird shifted his weight and sat up. The bed creaked.

“Be careful!” Littlejohn whispered. Bird nodded and got up slowly. His body felt odd, both uncomfortable and familiar. He moved slowly, for the sake of silence and because there seemed to be a time lag between each impulse of his brain and each movement of his muscles. At last he reached the bunk nearest the door. A still figure lay there, and Bird could feel pain radiate out from him. He knelt down and placed a hand on the man’s abdomen. The breathing was shallow, and the life force waning quickly. He was dying.

Bird took a deep breath. He wished for Madrone, or Sandy, or somebody else who was talented at healing. Then his mind clutched at the names in a sudden attack of panic. Who was Madrone? Who was Sandy? He thought he remembered them as long as he didn’t think too hard about them. But when he tried to focus on the memory he was swimming in doubt. Was he remembering or inventing? How could he know for sure?

Don’t think, he told himself. Let your hands do it. His mind still felt dull, cloudy, and he couldn’t feel any power moving through him. The pain was a sound in his head. If he could make sound, maybe he could change it, but that wasn’t possible. Could he change the sound in his mind? He thought he remembered an old chant:

The note of “rise” reverberated in his mind, and he held it, strengthened it, imagined it passing through the broken body on the bed. The pain drained away, and the man’s breath became slower, deeper, more substantial. Bird’s inner
hearing
grew keen. The broken ribs, the injured kidneys, were discordant sounds, a rupturing of the body’s harmonics, but he could find a note to repair the worst of the damage. The man would live.

Eyelids fluttered on the man’s face, their movement barely visible in the dark. His eyes opened. Bird could not see their color, only the brightness and intensity that flashed out. His lips moved as if he were whispering. Bird leaned close.

“The earth is our mother,” the man said.

It was the beginning of a chant. Bird caught a sense of expectancy from the man, as if he waited for a reply.

“We must take care of her.” Bird finished the line.

A faint smile moved over the man’s lips. “Thanks, brother,” he whispered, and then slept.

Bird crept back to his bunk and lay back down beside Littlejohn. His head hurt. He wanted to sleep but he was afraid to lose consciousness, afraid he might not find it again.

“What’d you do?” Littlejohn asked.

“He’ll be okay,” Bird whispered.

“Man, you better watch it. They catch you Witching somebody, they’ll kill you. If you take my advice, I’d be cool if I was you. I mean, play like you’re still crazy until you catch on to the scene. Right?”

“Comprendo.”

“Shhh. Talk English.”

“Com
 … right. Got it. Goddess, do I have a headache!”

“You been under a powerful enchantment, maybe. Or maybe you done it to yourself. Where are you from?”

He didn’t know how to answer. Images flashed out at him: faces, gardens, the gingerbread façade of a house with a peaked roof. His head wanted to split open, and he couldn’t tell which of them were real.

“Far away,” he said. That, at least, he was sure was true enough. “Far, far away.”

A bell clanged harshly. Littlejohn jumped out of bed, pulled on gray pants and a sweatshirt, and handed a pile of the same clothes to Bird with an automatic gesture, as if it were something he was used to doing. “Put these on,” he said. “Get up quick. It’s count.”

Bird just had time to slip his clothes on and lurch to his feet when the heavy metal door grated open. Five big guards walked in and surveyed the scene. “Everybody up for count!” one bellowed.

The room was filled with shuffling and grumbling as sixty men struggled to their feet. The man in the bed by the door still lay semiconscious. One of the guards jerked him roughly up to his feet, and he leaned against the metal rail of the bunk as the guards walked around, counting once, counting twice, counting again.

“Line up for breakfast.”

Bird stood behind Littlejohn and followed what he did. He looked for the
man he had healed. In the light, he could see that the man was slightly built, skinny, the brown skin on his face crisscrossed with lines that made him appear, somehow, not old but wizened, dried up like an apple left too long in the sun. But Bird didn’t dare stare too hard or try to catch his eye.

The prisoners filed in a line through a long gray concrete corridor to a dining hall, where they stood in line to receive trays of food delivered by disembodied hands from behind a metal screen. They sat on benches and ate in silence. Bird found the routine strangely familiar, as if some part of him had done it a thousand times even though his mind did not remember. Or maybe it was just that he was surprised by nothing, not the orders barked out to them, not the taste of the glutinous starch that passed for breakfast. He was grateful for the enforced silence. It gave him time to observe the other prisoners and read the expectations in other minds.

They didn’t expect much of him, Bird discovered. When they got back to the barracks someone handed him a broom, shoved him into another corridor, and locked the door. Automatically, he began to sweep.

At the end of the hall was the guard station, a square lighted room with heavy glass windows that allowed the guards to observe Bird and the doorway behind him. Windows on the other side of the station opened onto the dorm, which was empty at the moment. All the men must be at their work stations.

When Bird stood close to the window, he could see the three guards and hear their conversation faintly through the glass.

“So, Harris, you gonna be down here for good now? Guess A dorm decided to clean house.”

“For better or worse. They thought you needed somebody with balls down here in the Pit. Shape you guys up.”

“Yeah, we could use a little shape down here. Unfortunately, yours ain’t exactly it.”

“Not your type, Coleman?”

“King Cole likes the pretty boys. Sorry you don’t qualify.”

“Who’s the pretty boy in the hall?”

“Him? He’s the idiot. Don’t mess with him, he’s crazy. Anybody touches him, he’ll bust your teeth out. Never seen anybody move like that before. They say he’s a Witch—that’s why they done something to his mind. But you touch him or that scrawny girlfriend of his, you’ll believe he’s the Devil himself.”

“Bust my teeth? I’ll bust his fucking balls for him.”

“It don’t do any good. He don’t remember it. He don’t remember who he is or who you are. You bust his ass once and he don’t remember it the next time. He’s got no fear of you.”

“Then he’s dangerous. Why the Jesus is he still alive?”

“They want him kept alive for some reason. I don’t know. Maybe they
think someday his mind’ll come back and they can find out something. Maybe they want to do some experiment on him. Maybe they forgot why they want him kept alive. But you just stay out of his way and he don’t cause no problems. He’s sure as hell no instigator. There’s others that’re worse problems.”

“Like who?”

“Like that new hillboy they brought in last night. Calls himself Hijohn.”

“They all call themselves John. John something, something John. It’s one of their names for the Devil,” Coleman said.

“What’s his problem?”

“His problem is our little problem, and that is: he’s supposed to be dead. They worked him over good. Dropped him in on us as a little lesson to our boys, in case they got any funny ideas. So why is he up and walking today?”

“He’s a tough little demonfucker. But we can fix that.”

The first guard shook his head. “He’s a Witch. Got to be. It stands to reason.”

“You got Witches on the brain, man. You want the guy dead, seems to me we just work him over again tonight.”

“That’s easy enough to say.” Coleman pulled a smokestick out of a pack in his breast pocket and tapped it on his desk. “Wait till you see the paperwork afterwards.”

They went on talking, but Bird decided it would be politic to move away for a while. He swept, stopped, and pondered, then swept again. So he had managed to fight well enough to stake out some small space around himself, even without quite knowing who he himself was.
Diosa
, what had happened to him?

He was even more disturbed by the conversation about the man he had healed. There was too much he didn’t understand. He felt like he’d come into the middle of a story where everybody else knew the background and the plot. He wasn’t even too sure about who the main character was. One thing seemed clear: Hijohn’s life was in danger. He would have to warn him, although what good it might do he couldn’t say. But he owed him that. It seemed clear to Bird, now, that Hijohn’s need had somehow called him back from wherever he was lost. He could have stayed lost for more years yet, maybe forever; the thought was cold in the pit of his stomach.

His body, he noticed, felt aching and clumsy, but the pain was dull and he seemed to be used to it. His left leg and hip hurt, and if he leaned too long on them, the muscles in his thigh began to shake. His hands on the broom handle seemed stiff and clumsy, the fingers somehow misshapen, as if they had been broken and not set right. That disturbed him in some way, almost more than anything else, as if it represented the loss of something so basic that he had to protect himself from the memory. It teased at the back of his mind, though,
like liquid notes of music, like rippling melodies flowing off the strings of his guitar. And then it hit him, with a force almost physical that left him sweating and clutching the broom handle for balance. He could remember his fingers, deft and fluid, not so much making music as matching what existed already and poured through him, his hands one with his instrument and the great singing voice inside him.

He stared down at his broken hands, aching as they curled around the thick broom handle. What had happened to them? To him? In his mind were gardens, the smell of moist earth and roses, the muffled sounds of drums coming out of a basement in a tall painted house that felt like home. Lavender House. The name came to him. Down the street was Black Dragon House, where his grandmother lived, but he could not remember her name or picture her face. He could smell food cooking, onions and garlic and peppers, hear voices and laughter floating down from the kitchen windows. That was real. That was where he belonged. How had he come here, slipped through some crack in time and space to be trapped behind these walls and broken?

“Move that broom, boy!” He hadn’t noticed the guard coming toward him down the hall. It was the big guard, the new one, Harris. As he passed, he shoved Bird roughly out of his way. “Move your godforsaken ass!”

Before Bird could react, he was gone, and that was fortunate, Bird thought, because he was suddenly so filled with rage he could easily have done something stupid. It struck him that if he wanted to die, opportunities abounded. But what he really wanted was to kick down these walls, smash the bars and the metal grates, breathe clear air again.

He could feel rage flowing through him, itself a form of vitality, and the thought came to him that in spite of his pain and his losses he was very much alive.

He might survive to live a long, long time, trapped in these blank walls and bare corridors. His chest constricted, and he labored to keep on breathing.

Where there is fear, there is power, he murmured to himself. He remembered the phrase from somewhere.

He was going to have to get out of there.