This was a Friday, after school, when ordinarily I would be in the Abigail Louise Thomas Room, being encouraged by Mrs. Mary O’Toole to move from American standards and current pop to classical music, not as an ultimate destination, just to see if Mozart stirred me as much as did Duke Ellington and Claude Thornhill and Fats Domino. Before I got home from Saint Scholastica’s, Mom had left for a meeting with a talent manager, after which she would catch a cab to Slinky’s. I had come home to freshen up before going to the community center, but when I’d found the work crew from 6-C taking a cigarette break on the front stoop, my plans had changed.
After racing up to the sixth floor to verify that Eve Adams was gone, and after plunging down to the basement to see Mr. Smaller and confirm that the woman was never coming back, I went next to our apartment. Inside, I engaged both deadbolts behind me but neglected to fix the security chain to the doorplate.
Excited, almost giddy with relief, I went directly to my bedroom and opened the nightstand drawer and took out the La Florentine candy tin. I intended to take scissors to the Polaroid of me sleeping and throw the pieces in the Dumpster in the alleyway.
Thus far I had kept the photograph because it seemed to be proof that Eve Adams had threatened me. I couldn’t have taken a snapshot of myself in sleep, especially considering that we didn’t own a Polaroid camera. If someday events unfolded in such a way that Mother learned part of what I had been withholding from her and I was required to explain myself, or if Eve Adams, under one name or another, became aggressive toward me again and I needed at last to ask for help, my Polaroid and the one of Mr. Yoshioka’s tiger screen—and to a lesser extent the photo of Manzanar torn from a book—would serve as proof, if thin, that she had threatened us.
Now that she had left our building, where obviously she would never again be welcome, the photo would not be needed as proof of anything. But it could serve as evidence, evidence that I had kept secret from my mother events of considerable significance. Although she would never invade my privacy, if by some chance she saw the Polaroid, she would wonder who had taken it, why, and when. I could imagine no satisfactory explanation—except the truth. Whatever she might decide was proper punishment for deception, nothing could be worse than her disappointment in me and the sorrow in her eyes. But with Eve Adams gone, I had no need of proof against her and no desire to keep evidence that would convict me of being less of a good son than I wished to be.
In retrospect, as a man of fifty-seven, it’s difficult to reconstruct the reasoning of my nine-year-old self, because at that age the brain is literally still forming; the power of reason is not as strong as the power of fantasy. Yet if I remember correctly, when I took the lid off the La Florentine box, my mood was akin to that of a prisoner freed, for the architecture of deceptions and evasions I’d built seemed to be dissolving like a structure in a dream, freeing me from the prospect of one day being shamed before my mother.
Of the familiar items in my eccentric collection—two were missing. The photograph of me sleeping. The fabric eye. I had not looked in the box for more than a week. I knew instantly that Eve Adams had been in the apartment during the day, one day or another, when the security chain was not engaged, that she—no one else—had taken the items. I couldn’t imagine why she wanted the fabric eye.
One thing had been added to the collection: a strip of glossy paper clipped from a magazine, two inches by six or seven inches, cut from what must have been a full-page photo of a woman’s face, perhaps a glamour shot: the eyes and eyebrows and the bridge of her nose. The subject of the photo must have had blue eyes, but with a purple art pencil, they had been colored to approximately match the shade of Eve Adams’s eyes.
I rubbed one of those eyes, and some of the soft purple color came off on my finger.
With the Polaroid, she had taken the evidence of my deception but also the proof of her interest in me. I assumed that the eyes clipped from a magazine meant, I won’t forget you, snoop. I know where to find you, and if you ever speak of me to anyone, I’ll have great fun cutting you to pieces.
Maybe she would start with my eyes.
At that moment, I realized how foolish I had been to think that she was out of my life forever. I had seen her in a dream before I’d seen her for real, which must mean the dream was true, prophetic. So her name indeed was Fiona Cassidy, not Eve Adams, and she would not be out of my life until sometime after I switched on a penlight and found myself in a staring match with her fixed, dead eyes.
33
What I did next may seem ridiculous and perhaps amusing, but I can assure you that nothing about it struck me as funny at the time.
I sat there on the edge of my bed, the strip of paper stretched between the thumbs and forefingers of my hands, staring at the eyes clipped from a magazine photo. Those eyes weren’t hers, weren’t real, and yet I felt that Fiona Cassidy could see me clearly through them, no matter where she might be at the moment, that they were juju for sure. She wasn’t just strange, not merely mentally disturbed. I had wanted to believe that she was a master lock-picker; but now I felt dead certain that she could conjure herself through doors and walls, that she possessed some occult power of which I had thus far seen only the simplest manifestations.
My first intention was to tear the eyeful strip into tiny pieces and flush them down the toilet. But the next thing I knew, I was in the kitchen, opening a cabinet door under the sink. Among the items stored there was a can with a tightly fitted lid, in which my mother kept a box of six-inch-long matches that she used to reignite the pilot light on the gas oven when occasionally it went out. From a drawer near the cooktop, I withdrew a pair of chef’s tongs.
In the bathroom, I held the strip of paper with the tongs and burned it over the open toilet. Curls of ashes fell into the water, and when no paper was left, I flushed them away.
I left the noisy bathroom-ventilation fan running, put away the tongs and matches, and returned with a can of air freshener, which I sprayed liberally throughout the bathroom. By the time my mother came home from performing at Slinky’s, there would be no slightest scent of smoke to suggest that I’d been playing with fire.
In my bedroom once more, as I approached the open candy tin, I panicked and became certain that another item had been missing from my collection, its absence previously unnoticed: the Lucite heart containing the small white feather. For the past few weeks, I hadn’t been carrying the pendant with me, as I had faithfully done when it was new and still seemed to glow with imminent magic. A sudden flare of intuition filled me with the conviction that in some way I could not understand, the pendant provided ultimate protection, that if the woman had taken possession of it, then I would be defenseless—and doomed.
I shuddered with relief when I found it in the metal box, and I put it, chain and all, in a pocket of my jeans.
By then I had worked myself into a sweat of dread, so that it wasn’t surprising I became obsessed with the missing fabric eye. I had saved it because, considering the eerie way it had rolled along the alley to me in a breeze that affected nothing else, I’d thought it might have some juju in it. When I’d told Fiona Cassidy as much, while she held the tip of her switchblade in my left nostril, she’d regarded me with contempt and declared, You’re a real little freak in the making, aren’t you? Now I wondered if her mockery had been misdirection, if in fact she saw some power in the fabric eye and had taken it to use against me and my mother.
There have been times during my life when I have wished to be a boy again, not to have the energy and perfect health of youth, but to know once more the innocence and the delight in even the smallest of things that we often fail to feel full strength as the years drift by. What is easy to forget, however, until you apply yourself to the task of memory, is that childhood is a time of fear, as well; some of those fears are reasonable, others irrational and inspired by a sense of powerlessness in a world where often power over others seems to be what drives so very many of our fellow human beings. In the swoo
n of childhood, the possibility of werewolves is as real as the schoolyard shooter, the idea of vampires as credible as the idea of a terrorist attack, a neighbor possessing paranormal talents as believable as a psychopath.
After putting away the La Florentine box, I searched my bedroom for the fabric eye, which the woman might have concealed somewhere: under the bed, atop the chest of drawers, behind the radiator, in the folds of the draperies, behind the valance above the window, where it would enjoy at least a narrow view of a portion of the room … When I found nothing, I sorted through the contents of drawers and inspected every niche in the closet, because after all, when I went to bed and turned off the lights, it might roll out of concealment to watch over me. Undoubtedly, such an eye would have perfect night vision. Again, I found nothing.
In the hallway, I stood at the threshold of my mother’s bedroom, convinced of the necessity to search it as thoroughly as I had combed through my room. Fortunately, a sense of propriety restrained me from rushing madly into her boudoir.
At just that moment of recaptured sanity, the telephone rang, and I hurried into the kitchen to answer it.
“Jonah,” said Mrs. Lorenzo, “you were supposed to come down here as soon as you got back from the community center. Supper’s going to be ready soon.”
I failed to tell her that I had not gone to the center after I’d learned the woman in 6-C moved out. I don’t know if that qualified as a lie of omission, but at least I was deceiving a neighbor rather than my mother. “I’m on my way now, Mrs. Lorenzo.”
Reluctantly, I left the apartment, locked the door, and went down to spend the evening with the widow.
Not an ordinary Friday. But nothing serious yet.
34
Saturday morning. Breakfast out with my mother. A neighborhood diner on Forestall Street. Pancakes with pineapple and coconut sauce. A rare treat. Great fun. Going places with my mother was always fun. She was always fun.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about the purple-eyed witch.
Mom and I took a bus to the planetarium. I loved that place. Planets and stars and galaxies. A new show about meteors, asteroids, comets. It was good. It was interesting. It was interminable.
Then the Museum of Natural History. What a great place. The huge skeleton of a real brontosaurus. The convincing life-size model of a T. Rex. Always before, the T. Rex spooked me. It didn’t spook me that day.
Lunch at Woolworth’s. A grilled-cheese sandwich and coleslaw. Mom couldn’t believe I didn’t want dessert. She assured me that we could afford it. But I said, “No, thanks, I’m stuffed.” The truth is, I wanted it. But I didn’t want to take the time to eat it.
We rode a bus back to our neighborhood, all the way down to the community center. For twenty minutes, Mom sat beside me on the bench and listened to me play piano in the Abigail Louise Thomas Room. Then she had to go home, change, and head off to Slinky’s.
She said, “You’re the man, Jonah. Duke Ellington’s got nothing on you,” and she kissed my cheek.
She thought I’d spend another couple of hours at the keyboard; and on any other Saturday, I would have. But I had other intentions. Besides, I was too nervous to practice effectively. Nevertheless, I needed to remain at the community center for half an hour to avoid encountering my mother when I returned home. I passed the time by playing the melody of “Magenta Haze,” one of Duke’s symphonic pieces, a slow and easy drift from first note to last, which I had to translate from the soprano saxophone solo that was the heart of it.
I needed feedback about what to make of the witch’s final visit to my bedroom the previous day. The only other person with unnerving experience of her dark side was Mr. Yoshioka.
When I rang his doorbell on the fifth floor, having brought six of my mother’s chocolate-chip cookies on a paper plate, I didn’t know if he would be home. He worked long hours, sometimes on Saturdays, too. But when he opened the door, he seemed to be expecting me.
“Will this be a celebration, Jonah Kirk?”
“A little bit, yeah, I guess.”
He accepted the cookies, and I took off my shoes. Minutes later, we were sitting in his living room with tea, cookies, and those odd little cakes that I pretended to like more than I really did.
I told him everything about Eve Adams that I’d so far withheld, including that her real name was evidently Fiona Cassidy and that I had first seen her in a dream. I didn’t mention Miss Pearl, who had brought me that dream as surely as she’d brought me a piano, because she was a mystery in herself, and one mystery layered on another seemed sure to confuse us at a time when I desperately wanted some clarity.
Although Mr. Yoshioka had been understanding in the past and treated me with the same seriousness that he would bring to any conversation with an adult, I was prepared for his expression of disbelief when I spoke of a prophetic dream. Instead, he listened without expression and, when I finished, he nodded and sipped his tea and closed his eyes as if to consider what I had revealed.
His silence somewhat unsettled me, so that I said, “It’s true, sir. She was in the dream, the two of us in some tight space, with the sounds of rushing water all around.”
He opened his eyes and said, “There is no need to insist. I do believe you. When I was fifteen, I dreamed that my mother and sister perished in a fire. Seven days later, they did indeed burn to death. Their screams were at first very shrill, sharp with pain and terror. But soon they became like the haunting cries of certain nocturnal birds, as if they were beyond pain but not beyond sorrow, as if they were sorrowing over their untimely departure from this world as their souls were borne away on wings and into silence.”
As on my previous visit, my host had provided a tiny pitcher of orange-blossom honey, with which I had sweetened the tea that he took straight. His revelation was so horrible that I could not think what to say, and I picked up my cup and took a sip to buy a little time to process what he had just told me. Although the tea had been sweet a minute ago, it was bitter now, and I put down the cup.
“When did it happen?” I asked.
“On September fourteenth, 1942, but I do not wish to talk about it further. I brought it up only to explain why I accept the truth of your dream without reservation. Over the years, Jonah Kirk, I have come to believe that we who have suffered greatly may from time to time be given the grace of foretelling, so that we may act to spare ourselves from further torment.”
“But in spite of your dream, your mother and sister … they died seven days later.”
“Because of my failure to believe in that grace, because of my anger and my bitterness and my denial.”
Usually, the condition of his heart could be read, if at all, only in his eyes, for he wasn’t given to dramatic facial expressions. Now, however, for a moment, his face became a portrait of desolation.
“Because of my failure,” he repeated.
I liked him too much to bear easily his self-condemnation, and a kind of grief overcame me. Although I was curious, I knew better than to ask him to tell me more about that mortal fire twenty-four years earlier.
Apprehension led me to speak. “You said … you said foretelling is sometimes a gift for people who’ve suffered greatly. But I dreamed of Fiona Cassidy … and I haven’t suffered greatly.”
He said, “Then in time, you will.”
35
That night I dreamed of moonlit woods through which a creature unseen stalked me, of a moon-washed shore along a dark coast where black waves tumbled to the sand and where I felt drawn into the water even though I knew that beneath the turbulent surface swam something more ominous than mere sharks, of a moon-dappled plain where massive slabs of rock thrust skyward like pieces of the shattered vaults of fallen castles and where some presence whispered to me from among the ruins, enticing me into byways where not even the faintest blush of moonlight revealed the way.
Fright woke me. I sat up in bed, listening to the near-total darkness, but nothing in it rustled or creaked, or whispered. After
a minute, I stood my pillow on end against the headboard and leaned back, waiting for my heart to stop knocking like a horse’s hooves on cobblestones. In a while, I could hear the distant traffic noises of the city at night trembling against the window glass.
My dream of fluidly shifting locations and unspecified monsters was too vague to be prophetic. All of it had been just the phantasms of the sleeping mind, and I knew that if ever I were stalked by an enemy of murderous intention or enticed into a moonless dark where Death waited, the fatal moment would not occur in any of the eerie landscapes from which I had awakened.
I harked back to my conversation with Mr. Yoshioka after he had said that in time I would suffer greatly.
Why would she take those things from the candy tin—the picture of me sleeping, the stuffed-toy eye?
In part to unsettle you, to say to you that by her possession of them, she will remain aware of you.
In part? Why else?
Since our previous tea, in which you raised the subject of juju, I have researched the issue—juju in Africa and the variation that in the New World is called voodoo. If this woman truly believes in black magic, she might keep the photograph of you for use as an effigy.
A what?
Like a voodoo doll. An effigy. A representation of you. She might believe that if she sticks pins in it, she can torment you long-distance.
That’s bad.
Do not worry, Jonah Kirk. There is nothing true about juju or voodoo. Neither works. It is all nonsense.
That’s what my grandpa says.
Then you should listen to him and not worry.
Okay, but why did she take the stuffed-toy eye?