It wasn’t quite all the way here yet, hadn’t quite managed to cross over the way its prey had. But it was worrying at the fabric of distance that kept it at bay.
Staley had played her fiddle tunes a thousand times, here in her meadow. What made tonight different from any other?
“You be careful with this music,” Grandma had told her more than once. “What that fiddle can wake in your chest and set you to playing has lived over there behind the hills and trees forever. Some of it’s safe and pretty. Some of it’s old and connects a straight line between you and a million years ago. And some of it’s just plain dangerous.”
“How do you know the difference?” she’d asked.
Grandma could only shake her head. “You don’t till you call it up. That’s why you need be careful, girl.”
Staley Cross is about the last person I expect to find knocking on my apartment door at six A.M. I haven’t seen her since Malicorne and Jake went away—and that’s maybe three, four years ago now—but she looks about the same. Straw-colored hair cut short like a boy’s, the heart-shaped face and those big green eyes. Still fancies those denim overalls, though the ones she’s wearing over a white T-shirt tonight are a better fit than those she had on the last time I saw her. Her slight frame used to swim in that pair.
I see she’s still got that old army surplus knapsack, hanging on her back, and her fiddle case is standing on the floor by her feet. What’s new is the raggedy-ass rabbit she’s carrying around in a cloth shopping bag, but I don’t see that straightaway.
“Hey, William,” she says when I open the door on her, my eyes still thick with sleep. “Remember me?”
I have to smile at that. She’s not easy to forget, not her nor that blue fiddle of hers.
“Let’s see,” I say. “Are you the one who went skinny-dipping in the mayor’s pool the night he won the election, or the one who could call up blackbirds with her fiddle?”
I guess it was Malicorne who told me about that, how where ravens or crows gather, a door to the otherworld stands ajar. Told me how Staley’s blue spirit fiddle can play a calling-on music. It can call up the blackbirds and open that door, and it can call us to cross over into the otherworld. Or call something back to us from over there.
“Looks like it’s not just blackbirds anymore,” she tells me.
That’s when she opens the top of her shopping bag and shows me the rabbit she’s got hidden away inside. It looks up at me with its mournful brown eyes, one ear all chewed up, ribs showing.
“Sorry looking thing,” I say.
Staley nods.
“Where’d you find it?”
“Up yonder,” she says. “In the hills. I kind of called him to me, though I wasn’t trying to or anything.” She gives me a little smile. “ ‘Course I don’t try to call up the crows either, and they still come with no nevermind.”
I nod like I understand what’s going on here.
“Anyway,” she goes on. “The thing is, there’s a boy trapped in there, under that fur and—”
“A boy?” I have to ask.
“Well, I’m thinking he’s young. All I know for sure is he’s scared and wore out and he’s male.”
“When you say boy … ?”
“I mean a human boy who’s wearing the shape of a hare. Like a skinwalker.” She pauses, looks over her shoulder. “Did I mention that there’s something after him?”
There’s something in the studied casualness of how she puts it that sends a quick chill scooting up my spine. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary on the street behind her. Crowsea tenements. Parked cars. Dawn pinking the horizon. But something doesn’t set right all the same.
“Maybe you better come inside,” I say.
I don’t have much, just a basement apartment in this Kelly Street tenement. I get it rent-free in exchange for my custodian duties on it and a couple of other buildings the landlord owns in the area. Seems I don’t ever have any folding money, but I manage to get by with odd jobs and tips from the tenants when I do a little work for them. It’s not much, but it’s a sight better than living on the street like I was doing when Staley and I first met.
I send her on ahead of me, down the stairs and through the door into my place, and lock the door behind us. I use the term “lock” loosely. Mostly it’s the idea of a lock. I mean I’m pushing the tail end of fifty and I could easily kick it open. But I still feel a sight better with the night shut out and that flimsy lock doing its best.
“You said there’s something after him?” I say once we’re inside.
Staley sits down in my sorry excuse of an armchair—picked it out of the trash before the truck came one morning. It’s amazing the things people will throw away, though I’ll be honest, this chair’s had its day. Still I figured maybe a used-up old man and a used-up old chair could find some use for each other and so far it’s been holding up its end of the bargain. I pull up a kitchen chair for myself. As for the rabbit, he sticks his head out of the cloth folds of the shopping bag and then sits there on the floor looking from me to Staley, like he’s following the conversation. Hell, the way Staley tells it, he probably can.
“Something,” Staley says.
“What kind of something?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t rightly know.”
Then she tells me about the roadhouse and her friend dropping her off near home. Tells me about her walk through the fields that night and finding the rabbit hiding in the underbrush near her trailer.
“See, this calling-on’s not something I do on purpose,” she explains when she’s taken the story so far. “But I got to thinking, if I opened some door to who knows where, well, maybe I can close it again, shut out whatever’s chasing Mr. Rabbitskin here.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Well, I’ve got to call him something,” she says. “Anyway, so I got back to playing my fiddle, concentrating on this whole business like I’ve never done before. You know, being purposeful about this opening doors business.”
“And?” I ask when she falls silent.
“I think I made it worse. I think I let that something right out.”
“You keep saying ‘you think.’ Are you just going on feelings here, or did you actually see something?”
“Oh, I saw something, no question there. Don’t know what it was, but it came sliding out of nowhere, like there was a door I couldn’t see standing smack in the middle of the meadow and it could just step through, easy as you please. It looked like some cross between a big cat and a wolf, I guess.”
“What happened to it?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I don’t know that either. It ran off into the forest. I guess maybe it was confused about how it got to be here, and maybe even where here is and all. But I don’t think it’s going to stay confused. I got only the one look at its eyes and what I saw there was smart, you know? Not just human smart, but college professor smart.”
“And so you came here,” I say.
She nods. “I didn’t know what else to do. I just packed my knapsack and stuck old Mr. Rabbitskin here in a bag. Grabbed my fiddle and we lit a shuck. I kept expecting that thing to come out of the woods while we were making our way down to the highway, but it left us alone. Then, when we got to the blacktop, we were lucky and hitched a ride with a trucker all the way down to the city.”
She falls quiet again. I nod slowly as I look from her to the rabbit.
“Now don’t get me wrong,” I say, “because I’m willing to help, but I can’t help but wonder why you picked me to come to.”
“Well,” she says. “I figured rabbit-boy here’s the only one can explain what’s what. So first we’ve got to shift him back into his human skin.”
“I’m no hoodoo man,” I tell her.
“No, but you knew Malicorne maybe better than any of us.”
“Malicorne,” I say softly.
Staley’s story notwithstanding, Malicorne had to be about the damnedest thing I ever ran across in
this world. She used to squat in the Tombs with the rest of us, a tall horsey-faced woman with—and I swear this is true—a great big horn growing out of the center of her forehead. You’ve never seen such a thing. Fact is, most people didn’t, even when she was standing right smack there in front of them. There was something about that horn that made your attention slide away from it.
“I haven’t seen her in a long time,” I tell Staley. “Not since we saw her and Jake walk off into the night.”
Through one of those doors that Staley and the crows called up. And we didn’t so much see them go, as hear them, their footsteps changing into the sounds of hoofbeats that slowly faded away. Which is what Staley’s getting at here, I realize. Malicorne had some kind of healing magic about her, but she was also one of those skin-walkers, change from something mostly human into something not even close.
“I just thought maybe you’d heard from her,” Staley said. “Or you’d know how to get a hold of her.”
I shake my head. “There’s nobody you can talk to about it out there on the rez?”
She looks a little embarrassed.
“I was hoping I could avoid that,” she says. “See, I’m pretty much just a guest myself, living out there where I do. It doesn’t seem polite to make a mess like I’ve done and not clean it up on my own.”
I see through what she’s saying pretty quick.
“You figure they’ll be pissed,” I say.
“Well, wouldn’t you be? What if they kicked me off the rez? I love living up there in the deep woods. What would I do if I had to leave?”
I can see her point, though I’m thinking that friends might be more forgiving than she thinks they’ll be. ‘Course, I don’t know how close she is to the folks living up there.
I look down at the rabbit, who still seems to be following the conversation like he understands what’s going on. There’s a nervous look in those big brown eyes of his, but something smarter than you’d expect of an animal, too. I lift my gaze back up to meet Staley’s.
“I think I know someone we can talk to,” I say.
The way William had talked him up, Staley expected Robert Lonnie to be about two hundred years old and, as Grandma used to describe one of those old hound dogs of hers, full of piss and vinegar. But Robert looked to be no older than twenty-one, twenty-two—a slender black man in a pin-striped suit, small-boned and handsome, with long delicate fingers and wavy hair brushed back from his forehead. It was only when you took a look into those dark eyes of his that you got the idea he’d been a place or two ordinary folks didn’t visit. They weren’t so much haunted, as haunting; when he looked at you, his gaze didn’t stop at the skin, but went all the way through to the spirit held in there by your bones.
They tracked him down in a small bar off Palm Street, found him sitting at a booth in the back, playing a snaky blues tune on a battered old Gibson guitar. The bar was closed and, except for a bald-headed white man drying beer glasses behind the bar, he had the place to himself. He never looked up when she and William walked in, just played that guitar of his, picked it with a lazy ease that was all the more surprising since the music he pulled out of it sounded like it had to come from at least a couple of guitars. It was a soulful, hurting blues, but it filled you with hope, too.
Staley stood transfixed, listening to it, to him. She felt herself slipping away somewhere, she couldn’t say where. Everything in the room gave the impression it was leaning closer to him, tables, chairs, the bottles of liquor behind the bar, listening, feeling that music.
When William touched her arm, she started, blinked, then followed him over to the booth.
William had described Robert Lonnie as an old hoodoo man and Staley decided that even if he didn’t know a lick of the kind of mojo she was looking for, he still knew a thing or two about magic—the musical kind, that is. Lord, but he could play. Then he looked up, his gaze locking on hers. It was like a static charge, that dark gaze, sudden and unexpected in its intensity, and she almost dropped her fiddle case on the floor. She slipped slowly into the booth, took a seat across the table from him and not a moment too soon since her legs had suddenly lost their ability to hold her upright. William had to give her a nudge before she slid farther down the seat to make room for him. She hugged her fiddle case to her chest, only dimly aware of William beside her, the rabbit in its bag on his lap.
The guitarist kept his gaze on her, humming under his breath as he brought the tune to a close. His last chord hung in the air with an almost physical presence and for a long moment everything in the bar held its breath. Then he smiled, wide and easy, and the moment was gone.
“William,” he said softly. “Miss.”
“This is Staley,” William said.
Robert gave her considering look, then turned to William. “You’re early to be hitting the bars.”
“It’s not like you think,” William said. “I’m still going to AA.”
“Good for you.”
“Well,” William said. “Considering it’s about the only thing I’ve done right with my life, I figured I might as well stick with it.”
“Uh-huh.” Robert returned his attention to Staley. “You’ve got the look of one who’s been to the crossroads.”
“I guess,” Staley said, though she had no idea what he meant.
“But you don’t know who you met there, do you?”
She shook her head.
Robert nodded. “That’s the way it happens, all that spooky shit. You feel the wind rising and the leaves are trembling on the trees. Next thing you know, it’s all falling down on you like hail, but you don’t know what it is.”
“Um …” Staley looked to William for guidance.
“You’ve just got to tell him like you told me,” William said.
But Robert was looking at the shopping bag on William’s lap now.
“Who’ve you got in there?” he asked.
Staley cleared her throat. “We were hoping you could tell us,” she said.
William lowered the cloth sides of the bag. The rabbit poked its head up, raggedy ear hanging down on one side.
Robert laughed. “Well, now,” he said, gaze lifting to meet Staley’s again. “Why don’t you tell me this story of yours.”
So Staley did, started again with Butch dropping her off on the county road near her trailer late last night and took the tale all the way through to when she got to William’s apartment earlier this morning. Somewhere in the middle of it the barman brought them a round of coffee, walking away before Staley could pay him, or even get out a thanks.
“I remember that Malicorne,” Robert said when she was done. “Now she was a fine woman, big horn and all. You ever see her anymore?”
William shook his head. “Not since that night she went off with Jake.”
“Can you help me?” Staley asked.
Robert leaned back on his side of the booth. Those long fingers of his left hand started walking up the neck of his guitar and he picked with his right, soft, a spidery twelve-bar.
“You ever hear the story of the two magicians?” he asked.
Staley shook her head.
“Don’t know what the problem was between them, but the way I heard it is they got themselves into a long-time, serious altercation, went on for years. In the end, the only way they were willing to settle it was to duke it out the way those hoodoo men do, working magic. The one’d turn himself into a ‘coon, the other’d become a coonhound, chase him up some tree. That treed ‘coon’d come down, ‘cept now he’s wearing the skin of a wildcat.” Robert grinned. “Only now that coonhound, he’s a hornet, starts in on stinging the cat. And this just goes on.
“One’s a salmon, the other’s an otter. Salmon becomes the biggest, ugliest catfish you ever saw, big enough to swallow that otter whole, but now the otter’s a giant eagle, slashing at the fish with its talons. Time passes and they just keep at it, changing skins—big changes, little changes. One’s a flood, the other’s a drought. One’s human,
the other’s a devil. One’s night, the other’s day… .
“Damnedest thing you ever saw, like paper-scissors-rock, only hoodoo man style, you know what I’m saying? Damnedest thing.”
The whole time he talked, he picked at his guitar, turned the story into a talking song with that lazy drawl of his, mesmerizing. When he fell silent, it took Staley a moment or two to realize that he’d stopped talking.
“So Mr. Rabbitskin here,” she said, “and that other thing I only caught half a glimpse of—you’re saying they’re like those two magicians?”
“Got the smell of it to me.”
“And they’re only interested in hurting each other?”
“Well, now,” Robert told her. “That’d be the big thought on their mind, but you’ve got to remember that hoodoo requires a powerful amount of nourishment, just to keep the body up to fighting strength. Those boys’ll be hungry and needing to feed—and I’m guessing they won’t be all that particular as to what they chow down on.”
Great, Staley thought. She shot the rabbit a sour look, but it wouldn’t meet her gaze.
“Mr. Rabbitskin here,” she said, “won’t eat a thing. I’ve tried carrots, greens, even bread soaked in warm milk.”
Robert nodded. “That’d tempt a rabbit, right enough. Problem is, what you’ve got here are creatures that are living on pure energy. Hell, that’s probably all they are at this point, nothing but energy gussied up into a shape that makes sense to our eyes. They won’t be eating food like we do. So far as that goes, the way they’d be looking at it, we probably are food, considering the kind of energy we’ve got rolling through us.”
The rabbit, docile up to now, suddenly lunged out of William’s lap and went skidding across the smooth floor, heading for the back door of the bar. William started after it, but Robert just shook his head.
“You’ll never catch it now,” he said.
“Are you saying that rabbit was feeding on me somehow?” William asked.
“I figure he was building up to it.”
Staley stared in the direction that the rabbit had gone, her heart sinking. This whole situation was getting worse by the minute.