Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day(35)
I am free.
Substance comes back to me in an instant, my feet hitting the ground a split second after the mirror, standing over the fallen body of the old man who would have used me to make himself young again. I turn, and there she is, the new witch with Brenda’s eyes. Teresa. That’s what Danny called her.
She stares at me, eyes wide and frightened. Then they narrow, fear giving way to rage.
“You little poltergeist,” she spits. “Do you know what you’ve done? That was Jack Bandy. He was the oldest water witch this side of the Mississippi. He has allies you can’t even imagine, and you’ve killed him. They’ll end you.”
“First person looks in a mirror, their heart will stop. If he was a witch, guess you didn’t count because you put me there.” I step away from the body, cooling meat that I made, corpse that I put into the world. My eyes remain on Teresa. I can’t trust her not to have another mirror ready and waiting. Woman like this, when she goes to war against the world, she does it with all the tools she thinks she’s going to need. “Where’s your mama? She probably has a few things to say about this whole thing. Don’t think she’s going to be too happy with your part in it.”
My accent is coming back, stronger than it’s been in decades. I sound like the Hollow, and not like the washed-out memory of the South I’ve been since I left. I’m glad of that much. If this is where I end—if this alley is where I get locked in glass forever—I may as well go knowing that I sound like home.
Some of the fear comes back into Teresa’s eyes. “She’s not here.”
“She was in the theater with me when you took me. You a corn witch like she is? I know your daddy was, so I guess if those things run in families, it would make sense for you to carry the same seeds in your soul. Corn witches big on prisoning ghosts in glass? I thought your people would have raised you better.”
She takes a step toward me, hand raised to the level of her shoulder, and the world shifts around us. She’s a corn witch like her parents: I can hear the rustle of leaves in the distance as the field responds to her anger. Corn can break concrete, if it grows fast enough. I’m not sure corn can hurt me, but if anyone can teach me otherwise, it’s probably her.
“Don’t you talk about my people, dead girl,” she spits. “You think you have some sort of rights here? You just killed a man. Dead things shouldn’t be killers. That’s not how the world works.”
“I died because the world isn’t always nice; doesn’t make me any less of a person,” I say, and my words are as true today as they were forty years ago, when I ran out into a storm and the sky fell down on my head. “You locked me up. I let me out. What were you thinking?”
“That nothing happens by mistake,” she says. We’re both stalling. She’s trying to call the corn; I’m trying to figure out what comes next. As long as we’re in this holding pattern, I can wait to see what happens. “Ghosts can grant life. You think God did that by accident? You’re tools for the living, and you’re selfish. You don’t let go. You don’t give what you’ve got.”
“We’re not tools,” I say. “We’re as human as you are. Witches can do things too, but I don’t see many of you standing up and offering to serve the whole of humanity.”
“They’d use us.”
“You’d use me.”
Silence falls, uncomfortable and tight, heavy with the weight of everything that hasn’t yet been said.
Then the corn bursts through the ground.
It’s growing faster than summer kudzu, grabbing for my ankles like rustling hands. Teresa’s eyes are filled with fury, her hand spread wide as she beckons the spreading field onward. I don’t think, don’t pause, just move: I leap for the nearest wall, letting go of solidity in the moment before impact. I pass through the brick, and the alley falls away, leaving me temporarily alone, with no idea what’s coming next.
13: Mama, Mama, Make My Bed
I need to find Brenda. She must know by now that it’s her daughter we’re up against: two corn witches can’t possibly be this close together without noticing each other. I know she said witches don’t feel each other the way that ghosts do, but they’re using the same thing as a focus for their magic. Surely the corn will tell them, if nothing else does.
Ghosts always know when there’s another ghost around. We change the way the air feels. It’s the change I notice first, before Danny reaches through the wall on the other side of me, grabs my hair, and drags me into the dark of the auditorium beyond.
He’s insubstantial, but so am I; there are no barriers to his hands finding what little substance I have, no rules that forbid his fingers to close around my throat. He can’t strangle me—I don’t need air under the best of circumstances, and certainly not when I’m essentially air myself—but old habits die hard, and so he squeezes and I flail, until I manage to break his grip and shove myself away.
He glares at me, and when he opens his mouth, there is no sound, but I understand him all the same. Ghosts can always speak to ghosts, even when the rest of the world would dismiss us as nothing but wind and shadows.
Why couldn’t you stay in New York? he demands. Why couldn’t you stay away, and let me have this?