BELIEF
Hugh waited in Kramer Books for Rachel for over an hour. Rain splattered across the sidewalks outside, sheets of rain hammering down the darkness beyond the wide windows of the bookstore. He stared out into the rain. The store was packed with people milling around the stacks of trade paperbacks, customers flirting with each other, couples sitting over in the cafe section. Hugh stood alone, staring out through the blurred glass.
Watching.
Hugh knew that Rachel would not be coming. It had been in her voice on the phone. She sounded as if his calling her had repulsed her. The world is a crazy place.
The bag lady standing in the rain, watching him, only seemed to confirm this opinion.
My God, that crazy woman is patient.
But what if Rachel is in some kind of trouble?
The thought seemed to buzz around his ear, and for a second he thought it was another damn wasp.
Let's Pretend, Hugh, that there something going on here. You saw the words in blood. HELP RACHEL. Is it some subconscious thing?
Do you really think she needs your help?
Shit, she's the most self-sufficient person in the world, right?
She needs you about as much as she needs a hole in the head. The bag lady stared through the window at him, unblinking. Hugh felt he'd spent the past hour trying to erase her from the street landscape, trying to see through her, trying to turn her invisible. His head throbbed from a hangover.
But she communicated with me, somehow, don't know how, but it was as if she refocused my eyes. HELP RACHEL.
Scout? You in trouble?
The bag lady began to look urgent; she stomped her feet in the puddles, sending water splashing up against the storefront. I'll wait her out. If I have to wait here another hour, I'll do it. But the woman turned away and began hurrying up Connecticut Avenue in the rain.
Go ahead, wherever the hell you're headed. But she headed to my home.
What if there's -Let's Pretend. Rachel is in some kind of danger. You asshole, Hugh, just standing here, you should be home, you should be there with her. She did sound funny on the phone. Funny and scared the way she was when she lost her baby, why the fuck haven't you gone home yet?
Hugh made his way through the crowd of people at the entrance of Kramer Books; he felt like he was drowning. When he was on the street in the blinding rain, he ran after the bag woman, towards home.
Halfway up the hill he caught up with her. "Wait!" She turned and glared at him. “You seen the signs! You know you seen the signs! They gonna do it tonight. Ain't no more girls gonna die, and if I gotta do it myself I will, Mr. Big Man, but I can't help your woman if I'm fighting the other one. I ain't God, just old Mattie Peru, flesh and blood and I can only fight one battle at a time!" Her anger seemed to dissolve with the rain, and Hugh realized the woman was crying. "I know what waits for me up to the Screamin' House, and I ain't afraid for me. I know the hell I'm headin' for. I know my crime." She drew the skull from between the folds of her bags. "This here's my babygirl that those in the house killed, mister, and it was a Mr. Big Man just like you that gave me the seed for my girl and gave my girl the seed for her baby, and now they gonna bring something into the world that don't belong here."
She tossed the skull to him and he instinctively caught it the way he would catch basketballs in college. When he looked back at Mattie, as he held the skull, he saw:
The Old Man, battered, rain washing blood from the jungle of cuts and open wounds. His upper jaw opened and closed mechanically, the lower jaw just hung slack in a pocket of skin. "Hugh. Fuck everything, and get up to that house now! It's too late for me, and they got Ted, they killed him and they filled his body with one of their own, but Rachel. For all the love you have for her, get the fuck up there." Hugh glanced down at the skull: it glowed in the slashing rain like a lantern.
And he believed.
He believed the way a man believes when it is four in the morning and the rational world doesn't tell him otherwise. He believed the way a man wakes up when he remembers a smell, wakes up and realizes he has been sleeping, and the smell is fire, and his house is burning. He believed the way a man believes in something when there is nothing else to believe in.
"Rachel," he said.
And he knew it was true. It cut through every ounce of intellect in him, but he knew these visions were real, oh, but God, what if he'd waited too long?
But when have I ever been right before? II all been delusions, this could be just another one.
And then he thought: fuck that.
Knifing through all his thoughts: Scout, you be safe, I'll come get you.
"We gotta go now. "Mattie grabbed his arm. The touch of her hand was like an electric shock, a current ran between them. He heard her voice in his head: "I am Mattie Peru, and the spirits of this house are evil, and of them, the most powerful and malevolent is called Gil DuRaz, Baron Samedi, the guardian of the dead. He has been both man and demon, and he murdered my daughter." Interwoven with the sound of her voice, Hugh saw a fetus with the translucent blue eyes of his own father, the creature he'd seen in the shadows of the vanity.
"God," Hugh gasped.
Mattie let go of him, and the vision evaporated. "They been waitin' for a long time, and now they got their chance, mister, but we gotta get up there, we just gotta."