Secret Worlds (238 page)

The woman looks pointedly at Jake, and says, “
Or
who professes to be, or not to be, a
virgin
.”

“Mom!” Hope croaks.

Hope’s mother doesn’t acknowledge her and, instead, turns to the large boy with the black hair and twelve o’clock shadow above his upper lip. “And just to clarify, Chester, I waited until I was married to Hope’s father, and should I ever find someone as special as he was, I would do the same.”

Her brown hair and green eyes catch firelight when Hope’s mom smiles down at Jake. She steps by him to enter the center of the circle.

She strolls casually in the direction of the cooler. “It’s nine o’clock. I promised your mothers I’d break this up early enough to give all of you plenty of time to walk home before the eleven o’clock curfew, and—” She bounces a finger at the group as she moves closer to the ice chest. “—I will be calling to let each of them know you will be on your way home at ten-thirty.” She glides over the grass, firelight shadowing her calf and thigh muscles, and stops directly beside the cooler. Leaning down, she flips opens the lid.

I am enthralled by the pheromones this woman projects: honesty, kindness, love, and good old Mother Earth beauty.

Only the crackle of the fire disturbs the silence as Hope’s mother closes the lid, and her eyes scan the circle of kids. “Okay, I’ll let you get back to your conversation, and I will be back when it’s time to put out the fire.” With a big smile, she cuts through the circle and, as she jogs out of the firelight, her hair dances on her back.

“Hope Ann Harmony, you know your mother just rolled us looking for alcohol, Right?” the brunette with a heart-shaped ass snaps.

“Yeah, and Heather Alexis Stephens, you better tell me there’s none in that cooler,” Hope answers in a hissy whisper.

“You think I want your mother to put a spell on me?” Heather asks.

“She has never spelled anyone!” Hope says, and then snickers. “But you may become the first.”

If I could breathe, I would be holding my breath as I ride the grass and follow the woman I will be wearing home to meet Gaire before the night is over.

Hope’s mother climbs the stairs to the two-story home and I glide behind her, a shadow under a blanket of night. The outside screen creaks as she pulls it open and it smack’s shut before she can close the heavy wooden door on the humid evening. Inside it’s cool, moody and dark. Candles dance under paddle fans circling above.

The house smells of wood, augmented by heat and humidity; the generations of human residents spice the air with memories. Its structure has stretched and retracted over the years, giving the home character. The screen door and wooden floors creak, the front-door sticks, and the walls have small imperfections. All of this gives the home a soul.

There is an underlying damp, moldy smell, almost acrid. It carries an odor of old books and antique furniture stuffed with cotton batting instead of polyester filler.

We move through a great room with a worn fireplace, and then under an arch into a dining room where darkness swallows the candlelight. But the other side of the room draws a soft glow from a kitchen. It is larger than the dining room, cheerful with big windows on the south wall and a smaller one on the west side over a double sink.

Everything in the kitchen is dated, but pleasantly worn. The floor is black and white tile with counters that match. Everything else is wood, except for stainless steel appliances. A vase full of daisies drips petals on the center of a rough, wooden farm table with six straight back chairs tucked underneath.

Hope’s mother crosses to the sink, fills a clear drinking glass with tap water, and takes a long sip. She turns suddenly, glass still touching her lips, and gazes at an old sepia picture mounted on the wall behind the table. Its oval shaped, wood framed, and displays a woman holding two girls by the hand. They look to be about five or six. The woman is round, wearing a pale cotton shift belted around her ample waistline.

“Nan, I think our little Hope has an admirer,” she tells the picture. “Maybe I’ll bring my tarot cards to the cabin and read his future.”

She stares intently at the picture, laughs, and then raises a hand and firmly says, “And before you say, ’Gracie Jean, girl, you better not be spellin’ that boy!’ I’m gonna tell you, I have no inclination to do so.” Gracie laughs again before saying, “Not yet, anyway.”

Shaking her head with a grin on her face, she sighs. “Let’s see if Hope comes around before they graduate. And if not, I may be putting a spell on her.”

I hug the cabinet-trim on the floor and tuck my smoky shadow underneath appliances as I circle the room and make my way closer to Gracie Jean, my next host.

When I ripple over the tile on the floor and up the back of Gracie’s legs, she still stares at the picture of who appears to be her grandmother. I wonder if the girls are Gracie’s mother and aunt.

I circle the flesh on Gracie Jean’s elegant neck, climb over her sloping chin, and cover her mouth with mine. Smoke creeps into her nostrils. She gasps, chokes, and slowly slides to the floor, me attached. When everything that is Gracie fills me, I push it outward, until her flesh covers my smoky body.

I roil and swell as I spread out inside the deflated form that will soon become a carbon copy of the human I just pushed away from me and onto the tiled floor.

As I rise, I try out her voice. “I’m only borrowing her, Nan,” I tell the photograph.

The heavyset woman in the picture sways and tugs the child tethered to her left hand closer.

I spread a grin across Gracie’s lips, and sidle toward the door. The picture on the wall looks like a 3D movie screen as the ghost stretches in my direction. She looks harmless, but still...

“I won’t tell Gaire about you, Nan, not yet,” I tell the apparition bubbling out of wooden frame, “I sure hope you behave yourself!”

When I caper through the living room and out of the house, Gracie’s laughter falls from my mouth and rides the night air. “Gaire will find out about the ghost soon enough,” I tell the stars.

The day after tomorrow, the real Gracie Jean will be in a cabin in the Ocala forest, forty-seven miles north of here. Gaire and I will be staying in the graceful, two-story home until she returns.

I trot toward the lake behind Gracie’s home. There’s a storm drain nearby and it leads to a sewer entrance, and Gaire.

“She died. I killed her, and there was no taking that back,” I say.

I know the doppelganger stands across from me, but this getting to know each other: who I am, where I’ve been, and everything personal in between is difficult. Especially with someone I
feel
like
I’ve just met.

“I understand you killed her, Gaire. You just detailed the incident,” Gracie says. She leans against the cement at her back, both arms crisscrossed over her chest. The heel of one bare foot rests on the toes of the other. “I want to know why.” Her tone is short, snippy. Gracie Jean is clearly not intimidated by me.

It’s irritating. The voice, stance, and demeanor add a parenting blemish to this host’s persona. I’m not a child, and I don’t like being treated like one.

I lean back, prop one shoe against the wall behind me, and nonchalantly say, “The animal in me took over the minute I got a hard on.”

She wants to treat me like an adolescent; I’ll give her pubescence at its finest.

Her eyes flare red for a nanosecond, enough to show me the doppelganger is inside.

“Okay—” Gracie pushes away from the wall and tracks small wet footprints along her side of the drain pipe. “—let’s start over. Your attitude seems a little defensive. We’re supposed to be trying to understand our individual darker sides, and a crass display of words will not endear you to the doppelganger in me.”

I don’t move. “And the conversation will remain counterproductive if you continue to treat me like a human in elementary school.”

Gracie Jean’s eyes pop open. Her mouth does too. Then she quickly dips her head and whispers, “Sorry, this one’s a mother. She may even be a teacher. I didn’t ask. Although I cannot sound or look like myself. I can try to act like myself. Okay?”

It seems appropriate, though uncomfortable, to carry on this conversation leaning against the curvature of the drainpipe. We’re facing each other and a shallow stream of muddy water is flowing between us. Just a trickle, but enough to scent the air with tainted water coming from the dark end of the storm drain.

Standing a few feet from the exit we get a small amount of sunlight, and occasionally a breeze of fresh air. It’s a pleasant tie to the human world. Well, that and the bodies we both wear.

Empty burger wrappers and half-filled soda cans bob at the edge of a pond basin. The pool of water is nestled into a lush flora: palm fronds, oaks laden with Spanish moss, and tall skinny trees strangled by layers of kudzu.

Two rats the size of small dogs scurry around the kind of debris loitering kids toss on the ground. Sniffing and nosing the damp dirt at the water’s edge, the rodents search for sustenance. I feel more a part of their behavior than the one I’m engaging in at the moment.

Kicking a cigarette butt into the burbling watercourse, I follow the butt as it floats all the way to the little pond. One of the rats sits on its haunches and sniffs the air in our direction.

“Will you tell me what happened after you … after your parents found out what you’d done?” she asks, followed by, “Please?”

A submissive question, laced with discomfort. My neck muscles relax.

“My mother is the creature that
cared
for me. There was no S in parents during my upbringing. Unfortunately, Mother was forced to tell the wendigo who fathered me that I tried to have a sexual relationship with a human—he’s the go-to monster among his race.”

“Damn, that sucks,” Gracie says softly.

“No kidding. I found out just how much it sucked the night he arrived,” I say, momentarily distracted by an urge to take this indoors. The two-story home looms in the distance. “Good old Dad showed up to destroy me.”

Even though I frown at the new face the doppelganger is wearing. Gracie is really lovely, with dark hair, eyes so brown they look black, and a tall, thin frame, but not boney or frail. She glows with natural beauty; the kind of beauty that comes from clean living, healthy food and plenty of exercise. Never before have I desired to look past outer beauty and dig at what lies beneath.

“Mother vehemently opposed my death,” I say, as I scan the house we’re ’borrowing’ while the human and her daughter are somewhere in Ocala.

“And?” Gracie encourages.

Her word, soft and seductive, draws me. Damn, how I hate to call the doppelganger Gracie. I need a name for this creature I find myself falling in love with, not one that changes with every human it wears.

I try to put aside my physical and emotional needs and tend to her, or its, question, but the smell, the rats, and the murky water are more of a distraction than the body the doppelganger is wearing. I fully expect the doppelganger’s mother to pop out of the shadows at the end of the storm pipe and drag Gracie into the nearest sewer drain.

“Look, can we take this inside?” I blurt.

“Um, sure, yeah,” she says, eyes searching mine, “if that will make you more comfortable.”

She bumps off the cement and trots up an embankment into a small field where the pond basin drains into a nature-made lake.

Keeping the pace, I drag my eyes off her ass and try to continue the conversation as we approach the white two-story house.

“While my father paced, mouth in a grimace, all four arms flailing anger, Mother pulled out all of her witchy things.”

“Your dad has four arms?” Her voice is playful and laced with amusement. She grins as we climb the wooden stairs.

I grin back and open the front door. “Yes. Mother has only two. I guess I got lucky.”

She looks runway-model perfect, carries herself like an athlete, and has a very expressive face that says everything but tells me nothing. This is impossible! I can’t read the being inside, and have no idea what my doppelganger is actually thinking or feeling.

“Damn,” Gracie teases. “I bet we could’ve got all kinds of creative with that many hands.”

What the hell? Now she sounds like CeCe. She’s taunting me?

We enter the house. It reeks romance—the last thing I need to add to the physical desire burbling in the animal deep inside me.

Her brown eyes sparkle with laughter as she glances toward a kitchen door to the left while we cross a small entrance way and step into another era. I’m immediately put off by the antique furniture, candles, incense, bookshelves, and tapestry carpets. It reminds me of the home I grew up in.

Gracie yelps excitement and whispers a greeting at the kitchen, catches my quizzical expression, and without hesitation, continues with the greetings. “Hello, prissy living room! Hey there, amazing kitchen. Hi, warm brick fireplace, old and graceful sofa, and beautiful smelling candles.” She scans the area and finally finds me. “Hello, you.”

I look around for something to break.

Color climbs her cheeks. “Sorry,” she trills. “I just love this house. So what did your mother do with the witch things?”

My nostrils flare as I rein in my frustration and answer her question calmly. “She summoned the demon council, and applied for an opportunity to meet with them and plead for my life. It was within her rights to do so.”

“Bet Daddy was pissed.” Gracie plops down on a high-back, velveteen sofa with dark wood trim. The monstrosity doesn’t look comfortable. Her head jerks toward the kitchen and back to me.

“Do you want to explain your unnatural attraction to the rooms in this house?” I ask.

“Sorry again,” Gracie says. “It’s just that I’ve always wanted a home like this. It’s so romantic. Don’t you think? And here I am in this awesome place … with you.”

What the hell do I say to that? This cannot be the doppelganger swooning and pining over a bunch of old and worn fluff. Will every human the doppelganger wears be part of the entity I am so attracted to? Do I have to sort real feelings from each host the creature wears?