Shotgun Sorceress (27 page)

I was ranting louder than I realized, and the people at the other tables had turned to stare at me and whisper to each other.

“Inside voice, Jessie.” Pal downed his bowl of beef stew in one gulp and looked longingly at the food line.

“Right.” I passed him a packet of peanuts and stuck my tongue out at the staring airmen.

“I know some stuff.” Charlie absently rubbed the jagged white scars on her forearm. “Not about Miko, but about the zombies. She can possess them, but she can’t make them. Someone else does that.”

I sat up and leaned toward her. “Do tell.”

She bit her lip and pulled a pack of Marlboros out of her pocket. Nobody paid the least bit of attention to the “No Smoking” signs on the cafeteria walls.

“I’ve never told anyone about what happened to me.” Charlie’s voice was low. “It’s kind of a long story. I don’t know what to leave out.”

“I think we have time,” I said.

“Okay, then …”

Charlie lit up a cigarette, took a deep drag, and began to tell us about her shadow.

chapter
twenty-five

Charlie’s Story

C
harlie’s real name was Charlotte, and she met her shadow when she was eleven. Her parents had unwittingly let the monster into her life. Her mother was a wedding and party planner, the kind of self-centered yuppie whose friends all got pregnant so of course
she
had to have a baby, too. And while the baby was little and cute and everybody oohed and aahed it was all good. But once Charlie started getting bigger, her mother started losing interest. And her father? He was a Paris-trained chef who owned a very successful pair of restaurants in Miami, but he never should have been allowed anywhere near other people’s children, much less been given one of his own, and I’ll leave it at that.

Her parents trotted Charlie out at social functions so they could show off what solid family types they were to prospective business clients. And one Saturday Charlie found herself on the deck of a boat off the shore of St. Augustine, Florida.

She was off by herself when she heard something whisper her name:
Charlie …

She gave a start and stared over the railing into the sparkling green water. Nobody was there. But as she looked harder, she thought she saw a dark shape moving beneath the waves lapping against the hull.

I can give you what you want, Charlie
, the voice said coyly, a little louder. It was a little girl’s voice, and it was almost as if she heard it inside her head.

Tell me what you want, Charlie
.

“I don’t want anything.” It was wrong to want things, she knew, because wanting things made her parents mad. Wanting just made her chest ache and her eyes burn. Wanting never helped her get anything.

“What did you say?” her mother asked behind her.

Charlie jumped; she hadn’t heard her mother walk up.

“Uh, nothing, Mama …”

Her mother bent down to whisper in Charlie’s ear. Though she still wore the smile she used with her clients, her voice and eyes were cold.

“What did I tell you last night?” Her voice took on a nasty edge.

“You told me to act happy, and smile, and play with Mr. Bannister’s kids, ’cause you want him to hire you,” Charlie stammered.

“So what the hell are you doing over here sulking by yourself,
honey?
Put a
smile
on your face. I swear, you’d better not mess this up for me …”

Letting the threat hang unfinished in the air, her mother turned away and gave the rest of the boat party a bright smile.

“Is she okay?” called Mr. Bannister. He was a huge, hairy man, but he had a nice smile, and he told silly jokes. (“What’s brown and sticky? A stick!”) Charlie decided she liked him.

“Oh, she’s just a little seasick,” her mother replied. “She’s never been on a boat before.”

“Well, how ’bout a swim? That’ll help us work up an appetite. Not that some of us need any help,” he added, laughing as he patted his belly.

His two little boys shrieked in delight and scampered to the ladder. Mr. Bannister stripped off his bright Hawaiian shirt, and her father slipped off his polo shirt and Bermuda shorts. The sight of him wearing nothing but his Speedos made her feel sick to her stomach, and she had to look away.

Tell me what you want
. She peeked over the railing and saw the dark thing spreading like black ink beneath the waves.

“Are you coming?” her mother asked.

The thing in the water scared her worse than anything her parents might do to her later. But she knew her mother wouldn’t believe her if she said she saw something down there. “Can I please just stay up here?”

“Fine.” Her mother smiled tightly, then peeled off her T-shirt and went down the ladder.

Charlie moved around the railing to watch the others swim. The Bannister boys giggled as they splashed water on each other. They probably got to go to the beach all the time. She’d lived in Florida all her life, but her parents never took her to see the ocean.
They’d
gone to the beach, but always left her behind with a babysitter. Until today. Today she was finally
convenient
.

A knot of rage tightened in Charlie’s chest as she watched her mother laughing and smiling that fake, fake smile of hers as she treaded water and chatted with Mr. Bannister. And there was her father, floating on his back and looking so very unconcerned and happy with himself, but Charlie knew that men who did what he did deserved to go to hell …

“I want them gone,” she whispered through clenched teeth.

Suddenly, the dark shape surged up under her father. He had just enough time to let out a shriek before it dragged him under and tore him apart, staining the water with his blood.

Her mother screamed.

“Oh Jesus, get in the boat, get in the boat!” Mr. Bannister yelled frantically to his kids.

Her mother, who’d always been a strong, graceful swimmer, had already reached the ladder and was almost clear of the water when the thing grabbed her leg. It yanked her down so hard that Charlie heard her bones snap. Then came another furious churning under the waves. The water bloomed red.

Then silence.

Mr. Bannister, who’d stopped when he saw her mother snatched from the ladder, was treading water with his boys a few yards away. The children were crying, and Mr. Bannister’s face was gray.

Finally, when it was clear the thing had gone, Mr. Bannister towed his kids to the boat and boosted them onto the ladder. After they’d scrambled up to the deck, he hauled himself up with shaking arms.

Charlie was still staring at the fading bloom of blood, numb with shock. What had she done?

Mr. Bannister put his arm around her and gently pulled her away from the railing.

“Oh, please don’t look, you shouldn’t see that,” he said. “Jesus. It musta been a shark. I had no idea they’d be out this time of year. God, I’m so sorry … you poor kid, nobody should have to see something like that.”

She wasn’t sorry, but she was terribly afraid.

    The Coast Guard never found any trace of her parents’ bodies, nor did they manage to catch any sharks. After the memorial service, Charlie left Florida and went to live with her aunt’s family in Cuchillo, Texas. It was hot and dry and far, far away from the ocean.

Her mother’s sister, Lois Wilson, was a real estate agent, a tall blond woman in her early forties who’d married the local tennis pro right out of college. They had two teenage girls, Misty and Jennifer, who were just as tall and pretty as their mother, and like their father they had dazzling smiles, good tans, and killer overhead volleys.

Charlie, like her father, had bark-brown hair, freckles, and a pug nose. And, as her mother had often told her, she was fat. She’d taken a lot of teasing back in elementary school, so she
knew
deep down that she was worthless and ugly, but moving into the Wilsons’ big limestone house just drove it home.

Summer came and school let out, and Misty and Jennifer went off to sports camps. Mrs. Wilson deemed Charlie too young to be left at home alone. So she was sent along with Mr. Wilson every morning as he went to work at the Swim & Racquet Club at the edge of the city.

They’d arrive early, before the club opened. Mr. Wilson would go off to check the courts and open the pro shop. Charlie would be able to swim by herself for an hour or so, when the whole pool was her private blue ocean. She’d pretend she was crossing the English Channel, or she’d throw pebbles in the deep end and pretend she was diving for pearls. Sometimes she wondered about what had really happened at St. Augustine. The voice
couldn’t
have been real. Could it?

But when the club opened and people started trickling in, her paradise rapidly turned into purgatory. By noon the pool was clogged with screaming kids; the poolside became a maze of greased adult bodies basking in the sun. Even worse, her breasts were growing, perpetually sore little lumps that made her feel even more self-conscious. At school, she was covered, camouflaged. Here her every flaw lay blazing in the sun.

One boy, a big red-haired thirteen-year-old named Jason, delighted in harassing her. At first, it was just the usual taunts about her weight. Then his tactics changed alarmingly.

It started when she was near the four-foot mark in the pool, mutely watching a group of seven-year-olds play Marco Polo, when Jason grabbed her butt. She whirled around, a protest on her lips that died when she saw he’d pulled down the front of his trunks, just enough to expose his genitals.

“Touch my monkey,” he drawled.

The sight made her remember her father. Charlie splashed away from Jason, numb with shock and nausea, and got out of the pool to sit in the cold shade of the snack bar.

Jason was still in the pool, smirking at her. She watched as he called over two of his buddies and whispered something to them. Then all three of them started pointing at her and laughing.

Charlie felt herself blush a deep red. She wished the ground would open up and swallow her. She couldn’t tell the lifeguard what had happened, not
now
, because even if Jason got in trouble, he’d just tell all the other kids what a pussy she was.

She prayed that Jason would get bored and find someone else to bother, but he didn’t. The very next day, he rubbed up against her in the deep end.

“My big brother said you fat chicks are good fucks,” he giggled. “He said it’s ’cause you’re so ugly, you’re grateful to get any dickin’ you can.”

Charlie fled from the pool and went to the ladies’ locker room. She changed back into her shorts, sandals, and a dry T-shirt. There was no way she was going back into the pool. She’d just go watch her uncle give tennis lessons.

But when she stepped outside, she saw that Jason and his two friends were standing around on the sidewalk that led to the tennis courts. Charlie bit her lip. There was no way she could avoid the boys.

Then she noticed that the back gate was open. There wasn’t much to the land beyond, just patchy grass and a winding arroyo obscured by short mesquites and thick brush. The arroyo snaked around the whole west side of the city, a shallow, muddy gash in the arid landscape. Mr. Wilson said that the club owners wanted to turn the land into a golf course, but some local environmentalists had gotten it protected as a wetland. He’d told her not to go back there because people had seen coyotes skulking in the brush.

After St. Augustine, coyotes just didn’t seem all that scary. And there would be butterflies and rocks and plants and stuff, much more interesting than tennis.

Charlie went through the gate and padded across the dry grass toward the arroyo. The sun seemed hotter out here, and now that she was away from the pool and its smells of chlorine and suntan lotion, her head practically buzzed with the scent of a thousand weedy wildflowers. She waded into the brush and stopped beside a patch of sunflowers that towered over her. She stared up at the bumblebees fumbling in the heavy, nodding blooms. A beautiful black-and-yellow butterfly flitted past her face and lighted on a small thorny bush a few feet away. Charlie stepped over and bent down to get a better look at the butterfly. Her shadow crossed it, and it flittered away. The stench of rotten meat slid up her nostrils.

She looked down and saw the fresh carcass of a headless jackrabbit just a few inches from her toes. Shiny black ants covered the ragged stump of its neck and crawled through the blood-matted fur. She could do nothing but stare at it, morbidly mesmerized.

“Hey, fatso!”

Charlie jumped away from the dead rabbit. Jason and his two friends had put on their sneakers and come through the back gate. They were sauntering toward her, grinning. Her heart pounded hard in her ears as she realized the horrible mistake she’d made coming out here where none of the adults could see. The boys would be able to do whatever they wanted if they caught her.

She plunged into the brush, tripping over rocks and fallen branches. Thorns tore at the bare flesh on her arms as she pushed through the mesquites, trying to find a place to hide. Then she broke free of the branches and nearly fell as she stumbled down the muddy red bank into the arroyo. The winding, shallow creek was wide as a road, and the water came up to her knees. Her feet scared away a school of tiny, translucent minnows.

She tried to splash across to the other side, but the red mud sucked at her soles. Her left foot got stuck when she was halfway across. Her terror turned to frustrated anger as she tried to pull her foot free, only to lose her sandal in the mud.

The mesquites rattled, and the boys appeared on the bank.

“Hey, that creek’s too small for a whale like you,” laughed Jason.

Charlie’s heart was pounding with rage.

These little boys need to be taught a lesson, don’t they, Charlie?
It was the little girl’s voice from the ocean, whispering inside her head.

“Yeah, come on out of there,” said one of the other boys. “We just wanna play with you.”

“What if I don’t want to play?” she retorted.