Chapter 22 Smoke and Mirrors
Smoke and Mirrors
Maybe it was time I retraced my steps.
I drove toward Viv’s place, stopping at the Grey Door bar. I pulled into an open parking space out front, realizing too late that the El Camino sorta stuck out like a sore thumb among pickup trucks and motorcycles. But it also kind of belonged. I left the AC on for Gibby, and headed in.
At this time of night, things were busy.
Young men in neon T-shirts sat at the bar—they were likely construction workers, as crews used brightly colored shirts to distinguish the sparkies, the plumbers, and the carpenters.
Men and women in bikers’ leathers crowded the booths, and sunburned men who looked like they’d just returned from fishing took up the remaining tables.
I slid up to the bar. The owner, Owen Destin, nodded at me. “I’ll be right with you. Shorthanded tonight.”
I glanced at the mirror behind the rows of bottles. I saw myself sitting at the bar, and the seat beside me was occupied by a woman who looked remarkably like Dana Carson, down to the moon-shaped pendant in the hollow of her throat. She stared with black eyes at me through the mirror.
I turned to my right, and found the bar stool there empty.
I knotted my hands before me and stifled a shudder. I was seeing things, and that meant I couldn’t trust myself. Fuck, fuck, fuck…
The owner’s shadow fell over me. I looked up at Owen. Circles tugged under his eyes, his flannel shirt was stained, and he seemed run pretty ragged.
“What can I do you for?” he asked.
“A beer, whatever you’ve got on tap. And a moment of your time.”
He poured me a beer and leaned down to the bar. “What’s up, Koray?”
“Viv Carson has gone missing. Have you seen her?”
Owen frowned. “Shit. She didn’t show up for her shift today. I called, but she didn’t answer. Is she okay?”
“We don’t know.” I told him briefly what I’d found at her house. “Have any of Viv’s customers given her trouble lately? Anyone seem to have an interest in her?”
The owner shook his head. “I don’t put up with that kind of nonsense in my joint. No hitting on the help.”
“Did she have any close friends? People she was dating?”
Owen sighed. “Viv was pretty private that way, all business when she was here.”
I asked him a few more questions, about Viv’s hours, when she worked openings and closings. The owner didn’t have any cameras in the establishment, but he showed me her time cards. Viv’s day off had been yesterday. I couldn’t be sure no one had followed her home from work.
“I sure hope Viv’s all right,” the owner said. “She’s a little kooky, but she’s a good girl. Hard worker. I shoulda known something was wrong when she didn’t show up.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
I made notes on my phone, and the owner went off to serve other patrons. He seemed genuinely concerned about Viv. I could see it in his posture, hunched over and deflated.
A man in a neon yellow shirt from a local electric company leaned on the table next to me. “You know Viv’s a witch, right?”
I looked at him. He took a swig from his beer bottle.
“Hi. I’m Anna Koray.”
“I’m Chris Hasterly.”
We shook hands. “How do you know Viv?”
“I come here a lot. Viv is really out about being a witch. She doesn’t put up with shit from nobody.”
“What does she say?”
“She puts curses on people who fuck her over. Like, there was this guy a few years ago who sold her a car knowing the head gasket was bad. The gasket blew, and Viv put a curse on him. Within a week, the IRS came down on him for tax evasion and his wife served him with divorce papers.” The electrician nodded solemnly. “He never said boo to Viv after that.”
“So you think she’s got the juice?”
“I wouldn’t fuck with her. Put it this way: when the electricity goes out this way, Viv’s house always has power. Makes no fucking sense whatsoever, but it’s true.”
Another lineman peered over at me. “I saw Viv hex a guy who smacked her ass. The owner threw him out, but he lost his dick to a pig a week later.”
“You’re pulling my leg.” I smirked.
“Seriously. Dude got drunk, fell asleep in the barn, and a pig gnawed off his dick.”
This was sounding like urban-legend material. “Either of these guys got names?”
I got names, but I was pretty sure both those guys were in prison right now. “Anyone else maybe have it out for Viv?”
“Well, she cursed the Kings of Warsaw Creek,” Chris said matter-of-factly.
Viv was apparently open about that with everyone. “What did she do?”
“She thinks those guys killed her sister, so she curses them every new moon. Says that sooner or later it’s gonna catch up with them.”
“Do you think they know she cursed them?”
The men shrugged. “Maybe. It ain’t exactly a secret.”
“Do you think the curse is gonna work?”
Chris stared up at the ceiling. “I wouldn’t fuck with a woman who can make a pig chew off your junk. Those men oughta get right with God, because they ain’t right with Viv.”
—
Forensics had left Viv’s house and the door was sealed with yellow tape, but I cut it with my pocketknife and let myself in.
I had a duty to follow random leads: weirdos who didn’t tip at the bar; enemies in her personal life; being the wrong place at the wrong time.
But every cell in my body screamed that Viv had been taken by the Kings of Warsaw Creek, and I was out of leads.
The house was eerily silent. I didn’t turn on the lights.
I could see well enough by ambient light—a gift from my father.
Thanks, Dad. Gibby’s toenails clicked on the hardwood floors.
The heat was stifling with the windows closed; candles were melting and dripping wax in a slow tapping on the wood floors.
I crossed the parlor in the dark and sat on the sofa.
I watched Gibby. I wondered if he would smell what he had at the Sumner house—if he’d sense blood.
Instead of pacing agitatedly, he gently sniffed the piano bench and the doorway to the kitchen, then came to sit on the floor beside me.
“You’ve seen some shit, huh?” I asked him, rubbing his ears.
He whined softly.
“I hope Viv is still alive. I hope it wasn’t her you smelled in the basement.”
He didn’t comment, just rested his head between his paws.
I hated traumatizing him. I had very little idea of his background.
He knew death. Part of me wondered if he could be trained as a cadaver dog, but he didn’t have the right personality.
Police dogs were biddable, calm, and took orders well. Gibby was none of those things.
But he was mine, and I loved him. I stroked his back.
I stared at the deck of tarot cards on the coffee table. I didn’t have the first idea of how to read them, and I didn’t touch them. Beside the cards was a mirror with an ornate, tarnished handle.
I turned it over, expecting to see my reflection in it, but the glass was completely black. My silhouette was just a blacker patch of night on it as moonlight flooded in from the window at my back. The moon was a coin-sized blob in the mirror behind me.
I remembered spending time in my psychiatrist’s office, staring at a candle flame in the dark until the darkness swallowed the world behind me and I fell into the labyrinth of my mind.
As I focused on the moon, I felt the same.
It glowed brighter, and darkness surged around me.
Finally, the moon dimmed and winked out, and I was suspended in that familiar hypnotic state.
Night and I were old friends. I didn’t fear the darkness of the woods, and I wouldn’t fear the darkness in Viv’s house, either. She might be a witch, but I was the daughter of a serial killer. I had more evil in my pinky finger than she could muster in her whole body.
The darkness rippled. Whether in my mind or in the glass, I couldn’t be sure. It moved like water, undulating. I saw Dana’s body, curled beside the river somewhere, in a nest of burned grasses. The water washed over her, and the nest was empty.
A figure sliced through the water with exhilarating speed, faster than any human could swim. I glimpsed Dana in profile, long dark hair a cloud streaming behind her. She turned, gazing upon me with black eyes, pale lips curled back on sharp teeth.
I felt it then, her desire for revenge, stewed in and nurtured by Viv’s hate and the fear of her coven. A creature had been conjured forth, a curse, a force to be reckoned with in its element, one that would drag a man down and drown him.
An unstoppable force, with clawed hands and rot-speckled skin. She was beyond human law, beyond control. She’d have her revenge, twenty-five years after her death, under the same unblinking moon.
“But the children,” I whispered. “They don’t deserve this. They’re innocent.”
Her musical laugh shivered over me. How could I hope to stop her?
“I was innocent, too, once upon a time,” she whispered, her voice like bells. “Blood calls to blood, and I will have theirs.”
I gazed on her then, in terrible understanding. I had to try to stop her, but I knew, deep in my gut, that she was beyond my power. I was only human. She was…not.
“Please,” I said.
She reached forward to touch my face. “Daughter of darkness, let the dark do its work. Do not interfere.”
I opened my mouth to object, to try to ask her to stand down, but her hand covered my mouth. She dragged me down, into the depths. My lungs filled with that cold dark, burning, then became still as I drowned and hung in the water.
I was at one with the dark, suspended in it. I rubbed my face, and my hand came away greenish and with webbed fingers. I jerked my head back. My tongue scrubbed across sharp teeth. I inhaled, feeling frigid water in my lungs, going in, pressing out…no pain.
“What did you do to me?” I hissed. I cast about for the Rusalka, searching for her. My body cut through the waves, powerful and sinuous. For a moment, I forgot my shock and reveled in that power.
“There have been many Rusalki.” Her voice washed over me. “Dana. And now you.”
And I understood this infinite lineage of women who had been wronged, who sought to continue this lineage of horror, in many times and places.
My webbed hand slid over my mouth. Was this my destiny? To become a vessel of revenge, as they had?
“I don’t want this,” I whispered around my fingers.
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what any of us want.” Her voice was distant, fading…
I was snapped back into my body on the couch in Viv’s house by the sounds of a crash and Gibby barking.
I jerked upright on the couch and sucked in my breath, flinging my arm over my face. The front window was shattered, and fire raced across the floor in a blistering explosion.
I dropped to the floor and cast right and left. Escape through the front door was blocked by fire. Flames licked the aged wallpaper, reaching up for the broken photos of Viv’s family on the piano.
I looked behind me, at the window. I jumped up to it and fumbled with the latch. Smoke rolled across the ceiling and down the wall. Distantly, I smelled something sweet in the smoke, something like the scent of artificial roses.
I forced the window open. I gathered Gibby in my arms and flung him through it.
Lastly, I lurched through, landing in a shrub beside the house.
My sleeve was on fire, and I rolled in the dirt and thorns, trying to knock the flames out in the dust. The fire spread over my back, and panic set in.
I smelled burning hair. Gibby growled beside me.
I forced my mind to still, though my heart jackhammered in my chest. Mom had taught me how to find water. I visualized a silvery serpent of underground water in my mind. It twisted, turned, moving up to the surface…
I heard her voice: “You’re a natural. Try again.”
Operating on pure instinct, I trusted that voice of darkness. I flung my arm out, casting out, searching for those veins of water, my eyes tearing.
Something laughed in the darkness, a surreal cackle.
I followed that sound. I stumbled to the tree line, to the creek beyond, and hurled myself into cool water. I submerged myself in coldness, feeling it close over my head.
I rose up out of the creek, gasping, feeling raw and surrounded by steam. I splashed back and landed on my ass. Cold, silver water curled around me, hissing.
In the distance, a shadowy figure moved away, the silhouette of a woman. She looked like Viv, treading water in a curiously eellike fashion.
“Wait,” I implored. “Wait.”
But she was gone, leaving only the glitter of water droplets in her wake as she slithered upstream.
Gibby stood in the water, barking at the trail she left behind.
My rational mind said it was just a water snake.
My irrational mind said it was the curse, the creature that lurked in the water and drowned victims who shared blood with the Kings of Warsaw Creek.
She could’ve killed me. But she didn’t.
Gibby looked at me and growled. His fur stood on end.
“Gibby!” I gasped, before I realized he was not looking at me, but past me.
I looked over my shoulder.
A fox sat on the bank. Sinoe. She cackled once more, that sound I’d followed into the woods.
I reached a hand to her. She padded to me and sniffed, cautious.
Gibby whimpered.
“All right,” I said to the two of them. “We can coexist, right?”
The fox cackled, and Gibby huffed.
I was not optimistic.