Old Bones: A Collection of Short Stories (12 page)

“That’s an alarming statement,” Gloria
said.

“It’s true.” Richard sounded ashamed. “She
wrote all about her occult doings in her diary.”

When Gloria asked what diary he meant, he
fetched a black leather book atop a china cabinet. Gloria leafed
through the diary and listened over a glass of tawny port.

Melissa said, “As you know, reverend, when
her husband Charles died this past summer, Fiona withdrew. But she
seemed happiest inside her library, so we left her alone to paint
and read there. It was the library she withdrew to after the
funeral. She barely ever left that room.

“Then I discovered this morning that she had
locked herself inside. She refused to let me in. Her voice sounded
agitated … upset, so I called Richard.”

“I had to kick in the door,” Richard said.
“And that’s when, crazy as it sounds, she wasn’t there—and all the
windows were locked. I checked.” He stared at his glass standing
empty on the table in front of him. “Even crazier was when we found
a Ouija board and tarot cards inside, as well as her diary which
tells of how she has been trying over the past several months to
conjure up my father’s spirit.” Sadness and confusion twisted his
features into a horrible grimace. “What’s happening?” he asked.
“What has she done?” He shook his head and groaned before Gloria
could answer. “Until today, I never believed in the paranormal, the
metaphysical.” He searched Gloria’s face for answers. “What
happened to my mother?”

Gloria’s wine glass flew from the table and
shattered against the stone fireplace across the room. The Bible
she had brought with her—which she had placed the diary on top
of—followed her glass. The diary remained unmoved.

Surprised, Gloria and Melissa yelped. Richard
cried out, “Mother.” He jumped to his feet. “Is that you?”

The air turned frigid and burned against
Gloria’s cheeks. She felt a winter-blooming nip at the tips of her
ears and nose.

Richard yelled at the room. “Where are you?
Show yourself. Please.”

Large and heavy books thumped to the floor
inside the library across the hall from the dining room. Then the
chill left and all quieted.

Richard settled his nerves with a hearty gulp
from the wine bottle—glasses and etiquette be damned, Gloria
reckoned, considering the circumstances. Richard went to the
library door where either he or Melissa had nailed a cross to the
damaged door as Gloria had instructed earlier during their phone
conversation. Richard looked at the cross and cursed all that is
holy. When he finished, he said, “Exorcise the place, reverend.
Whatever my mother has done, fix it. Please.”

Gloria joined him at the door. It had taken
great force to open the large oak door. She fingered the splintered
wood. “Tell me about the voices,” she said.

“Whispers,” Melissa said as she joined them.
“Vague chattering whispers.”

“And laughing,” Richard added. “A woman’s
laugh, but not my mother’s.”

Gloria removed the cross from the door and
stepped inside the library. A chandelier lit the room and seemed to
turn the oak bookshelves and furniture to gold. She helped Richard
and Melissa replace the toppled books, many of them art history
texts and artists biographies. Outside the room’s tall, rectangular
windows, the night had become pitch black. A clock inside the
dining room chimed seven o’clock.

A painter’s large easel stood near a window.
As Gloria looked at the portrait, the unfinished canvas showed the
swift strokes of a seasoned painter. Fiona Bay had sketched her
subject with lines of umber and sienna, whisked in golden hues next
to gentle blues and pink, and had started forming the glow of flesh
with buttery mounds of paint. The woman in the unfinished portrait
seemed to be dressed in multicolored satin linens and silk scarves.
Her face was promising the color of the finest gold, ruby and
sapphire. Her eyes sparkled emerald green and sky blue. Her
unpainted long hair flowed down a seemingly endless body of shapely
beauty.

“Absolutely beautiful,” Gloria said of the
painting and the subject. “She looks familiar. Who is she?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “No one has
been coming to the house to sit. My mother likes her time alone,
even before father died.”

Gloria looked back at the painting. The
cheeks and mouth looked refined, as though someone had added paint
to the portrait while she had looked away.

She turned away and looked back again. There
was no mistaking it: The painting appeared to be painting
itself.

Melissa screamed. “The light. At her easel.
What is it?”

Gold light grew suddenly in front of Fiona’s
easel. Inside the brightness, Gloria saw an apparition of Fiona
wearing a blue denim painter’s smock and holding a large palette in
her left hand. Seemingly unaware of the people in the room, Fiona
rushed her canvas and painted, and then stepped back to admire her
work before repeating the process.

At Fiona’s side and facing Gloria was her
soul-stealing succubus dressed in a multicolored chiffon robe—a
female demon Gloria hoped never to see again.

“Keeley.” The color fell from Gloria’s face.
Even the fearful cry of the demon’s name somehow permeated the room
with beauty. But Gloria knew that this beauty was fleeting. Her
throat tightened as she thrust her Bible at arm’s length. She had
to save Fiona, no matter the consequences. “Set her loose,
demon.”

Keeley laughed. Tittered, actually. “The poet
is a ministrant. Oh, my long-ago lover, what have I done to you?”
She took a step forward and her robe flowed with her.

Gloria yelled for her to stay back. Keeley
advanced slowly, her gaze fixed on Gloria.

Melissa grasped Gloria’s left arm. “Who are
you talking to?”

Gloria pulled from Melissa’s grasp. “Count to
ten, then you and Richard go to Fiona. Get her out of here while I
distract the demon. Then lock the door and bar it with another
crucifix.” She thrust her Bible into Melissa’s arms.

“I see no one,” Melissa said, looking at the
light.

“What is it?” Richard cried out. “What is
that light in front of my mother’s easel?”

“Go into the light, Richard,” Gloria said.
“Your mother is there. You must pull her out while I distract the
demon.”

Before he could object or ask any more
questions and put all their lives at risk, Gloria rushed into
Keeley’s warm, tender and passionate embrace. Evil was not always
cold.

“I knew I’d find you again,” Keeley said. Her
fervent kiss fell hard upon Gloria’s lips.

The demon’s spicy smell and taste were more
delicious than Gloria remembered. Her long, soft hair—now a
gorgeous mélange of burnt sienna, gold, and black—brushed Gloria’s
face. It aroused her, but not as quickly as it had done more than
twenty years ago when she and Keeley were college students.

Within Gloria’s concerned gaze, she watched
Richard and Melissa pull Fiona from the room. Fiona struggled but
Keeley’s hold on her had weakened. Gloria expected Keeley to
intervene. She didn’t. Her mouth writhed wickedly against Gloria’s
and her eyes fluttered with passion.

As Gloria’s eyesight weakened with the rest
of her body, she heard the door slam shut. Fiona was safe on the
other side.

The kiss ended and Keeley’s embrace softened.
Gloria felt Keeley take the cross from her hand. “We won’t need
this where we’re going,” the demon said. Her teeth penetrated
Gloria’s neck.

Gloria’s concerns for her own safety fell
away as she plunged into a familiar world of darkness she found
both sinful and heavenly.

#

Into
the Void

RONALD PARKER’S CELL phone vibrated on his leather
belt at three minutes of four o’clock that afternoon. He let the
call go to voice mail while he stood with Maggie Miller and her
staff on the wooden terrace of Maggie’s horse and cattle ranch. The
last of the children and their luggage of suitcases and backpacks
were packed and stuffed into the big lime green bus that would take
them north to the highway, and then forty miles west to Erie.
There, the children and their luggage of clothes, books and, of
course, souvenirs from Maggie’s store, would depart for home—some
as far away as California.

The children seemed happy and talkative,
though some looked doleful as they waved goodbye from open windows.
Maggie and her staff waved back as the bus ambled down the long,
dirt drive. A tall man, dressed to the hilt in white clothes, apron
and chef’s hat stared with watery eyes at the ass end of the bus.
He said, “Well, that’s the official mark that summer is over,
Maggie.” He lifted a bushy, black eyebrow and added, “They weren’t
too bratty this year.”

“They were good children,” Maggie said. Her
small, brown eyes watered as she watched the bus leave.

Ronald Parker stepped behind Maggie’s right
shoulder and put on an act of kindly interest. He watched the bus
pass under the arched gate that boasted
Maggie Miller’s Double M
Ranch
in large iron wrought letters. When the bus disappeared
behind a frieze of bristlecone pines, his cell phone vibrated
again.

Again, he ignored the phone.

The staff filed quietly past him as they
entered the main quarters. All of them gave him the once-over when
they passed. Ronald ignored them and stared at the gate until he
and Maggie were alone. Then Maggie turned and faced him. She was a
thick woman, a foot shorter than he, and still twenty—she would
have been ten years older than Ronald if she were still alive … and
human. Shoulder-length auburn hair fell from her white cowboy hat
and draped the top of her white, fringed leather jacket. Beneath
the jacket was a red flannel shirt tucked into blue jeans that
sported a belt with a buckle almost as large as the kind worn by
wrestlers on TV. Hers, however, had a bucking bronco stallion on
it. Her pants legs were tucked into brown, leather boots with thick
heels that drummed—clomp-clomp—on the floorboards as she hurried
against him.

Her kiss was direct, her mouth hard against
his, her hold as strong and capable of any worker who spent fifteen
hours a day, cleaning stables, caring for horses and cattle, and
helping to feed fifty children and three counselors June through
August with three five-course meals a day. But Ronald knew that her
strength came from more than just exercise.

Despite her firmness and determination, he
pushed away.

“That’s not why I’m here, Maggie,” he said
and tried to cough away the green smoke-like tendrils that swirled
from her and entered his nose and mouth. The floor of the terrace
had begun to tilt. He swayed now and fell into her embrace. She
felt soft, the way he remembered.

Everything seemed to happen instinctively and
at once, though he would realize later that he had succumbed easily
to her magic. When he reached and placed a palm firmly onto one of
her breasts, she gripped his hand and led him around the main
house—clomp-clomp-clomp-clomp-clomp—until they were inside her
quarters and naked behind the locked door of her bedroom.

In bed under the blanket, lying back, she
gazed up at him with a look of silent pleading. Then her arms and
tendrils were locked around him. He fell upon her and she felt soft
and warm and very much like a living woman.

Her tendrils entered him until he lost
himself again. When his head finally cleared, he was on his back
and she was sitting at the edge of the bed, her back facing him.
Her shoulders shook. When he asked if she was okay, she turned and
faced him. Terrible wet tears ran down her cheeks.

“Why didn’t we make a proper go of it?” she
said. “All those times growing up, why didn’t you fall in love and
want to marry me?” She wept giant sobs.

Ronald felt her control over him weaken
enough for him to come to his senses and remember. He said,
“Because you’re … you know … not human.”

Maggie stopped crying. “It’s all been such a
misery and a mess,” she said. “And now that I have you again, I
have to use force. FORCE. Because you don’t love me, Ronny. After
all these years of wanting you, waiting for you to return, I still
don’t have you. Not unconditionally.”

Ronald felt Maggie’s magical hold slip
further. “I need your help,” he said. He started to sit up, but her
tendrils billowed, filled his lungs and held him.

“Maggie. Listen to me,” he cried out. The bed
seemed to list then. He closed his eyes. “I didn’t come to you for
sex.”

“But you wanted it,” Maggie said. “I know you
still dream of me, of how I seduced you back then.” She lay down
next to him and ran her long tongue across his mouth. She said,
“You may not love me, but we belong to each other, Ronny, united by
our actions then … and now.”

“You raped me, Maggie Miller,” he managed to
say. The bed stopped moving. He opened his eyes and dared to look
at her. She looked curious, not angry at his words. “But it wasn’t
you … it wasn’t your fault,” he added. “It was the magic that made
you do it, I know.” He squirmed and felt her hold tighten. “If I
hadn’t insisted on going to Myers Ridge, you would still be
alive.”

Maggie peered up at him. “I love you,
anyway,” she said. “I have always loved you.”

“But it was me who caused it to happen,” he
said.

“Don’t.” She gave him a long sad look that
made him drop his gaze.

“No. This is wrong. This isn’t what I want,”
he said. He tried to pull away. She pressed her forehead against
his and there was a flash in his eyes. Suddenly, he was in the
woods. He was sixteen years old again, and the misty green light
swirled around her naked young body that stood before him. The
green tendrils—not yet belonging to her—wafted their way to him and
seemed to pull him to her, into her arms.

He broke from her and somehow sidestepped the
memory and returned to the present. He opened his eyes and saw that
he was still in bed with her, still within her clutch. Despite the
tinny taste of fear rising in his throat, delicious warmth radiated
from her that he knew no other woman—alive or dead—possessed. All
frustration, all antagonism dissolved.