Night Shift
Page 36

“And then?” Olivia was so wide-eyed she’d looked like an owl.
“And then, she went out into the saloon and told them all that I had died, which was no surprise to anyone. And she told them she would take me back to the ranch to be buried, which was also no surprise, since many people did that. They helped her out by tying me over her horse. The horse, though mighty skittish, got us back to the ranch that night.”
“People didn’t think it was strange she wanted to ride at night?”
“She told them that in the daytime, with the sun, I would be bloated by the time we reached our place.”
Olivia nodded. “So, when you got back to the ranch . . . ?”
“She buried me, as she had to. There was no ranch hand to help her! And when I came out of the ground she was waiting. One of the men in the bar had ridden out to see how she was faring, and perhaps to see if he could console a grieving widow. She had kept him alive for me.”
“But what happened to Mabel after that? What did you do during the Civil War?” Olivia asked.
“Enough history for tonight,” Lemuel replied.
She wondered if she’d been insensitive, asking questions about events so long past. “Does it hurt to remember?”
He thought about that. “Not exactly. But it’s not comfortable, either. And I don’t always remember clearly.” He shrugged. “It’s been a long time.”
Now, as Lemuel pored over books, he was grateful to Mr. Middleton for teaching him to read. Even Mr. Middleton could not have imagined that the man he’d known as Bart Polson would be able to read an ancient language. In truth, Lemuel’s progress was tedious and slow. He was always aware that time was ticking away at the crossroads. He felt it, like a heavy hand on his shoulder, resting heavier and heavier as the nights passed.
Slowly, he translated a sentence out loud. “And when he rises, he will have help by powerful creatures, because he can talk to them while he is still confined. To others, he is silent.” Lemuel thought that over. It seemed ominous, and he began to worry even more whether Midnight could survive the crisis that was surely coming. He bent back over the book, hoping to find another passage that would explain this cryptic sentence, which was in the middle of a paragraph he couldn’t crack.
After an hour of hard work on the text, with no further results, Lemuel was so tired that he left the pawnshop for three hours straight. He hunted. He ran through the scrubby bushes and cacti, he leaped over rocks, unseen and ecstatically himself. He found four passed-out teens camping out to the north by the Río Roca Fría. He took blood from them but left them alive.
Lemuel felt much better after that. Energy was good, reviving; but sometimes, he just needed the blood. He would have enjoyed killing the teenagers, because the energy of the passing was an incredible rush. However, these kids were so well nourished and glossy that he knew they would be missed.
On his way back to the pawnshop, Lemuel thought about the conversation he’d had with Olivia. It had been a long, long time since he’d thought about his past. It was a great thing, to be able to read. He thought of the computer, and how Olivia used hers all the time, while he let Bobo do the computer work for the pawnshop. He felt uneasy using the machine, though he knew the basics. It seemed likely that Olivia could look up his sister’s descendants somehow on the damn thing.
Descendants, Lemuel thought. Descendants. And suddenly, he had an idea. Olivia had gone to bed, but he went down the stairs to wake her up.
 
 
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Fiji was holding Mamie’s hand. Mamie was restless in her dozing state, her legs moving feebly as if she were walking. Her hands were still, though, and Fiji felt how soft Mamie’s skin was, how thin over the bones. Sometimes old people got worn down from the inside out, and that was the case with Mamie. The former Las Vegas showgirl was a shadow of herself.
“She’s only eighty-five,” Tommy Quick said hoarsely.
“She’s always been so tough,” Suzie said. The rhinestones on her glasses frames glittered in the overhead light. “Real tough. Till she had that fall in Vegas on the stairs. And now this obsession with Midnight. Can’t you stop it, Fiji?”
Fiji considered. None of Aunt Mildred’s spells would cover this. Mildred Loeffler had had spells of cooling and heating, spells to freeze people in their places, spells to hold things just as they were until the spell was rescinded (useful in keeping food from spoiling), spells to make the subject more attractive, spells to make the subject more hateful, spells to help your garden grow, spells to protect you or others from harm . . . and a lot of herb work to combine with the spells for better effect. One or two of these had been lethal. But Fiji could not recall any spell that would take away a dangerous and painful call from some supernatural source. If she had known such words, she would have used them on herself.
Fiji didn’t think Mamie was hearing the voice she heard, but clearly, Mamie was experiencing a summoning. Probably the same one all the suicides heard, she thought. Luring them to Midnight and to their doom. But why Mamie, of all people?
Fiji knew two Mamies. If the one being summoned had been the other Mamie, Price Eggleston’s mother, Fiji would have understood. You didn’t raise a son that hateful unless you had an overabundance of hate yourself, in Fiji’s opinion. But this Mamie seemed so helpless and frail! It was hard to remember that she hadn’t always been that way.
Now Fiji had to comprehend that, because Suzie was thrusting a picture in front of her, a picture of a young woman with a pert round face, heavily made up, and clad in a plumed headdress, high heels, and very little in between.
“Wasn’t she gorgeous?” Suzie demanded.
“She was,” Fiji said, keeping her voice quiet. She didn’t want Mamie to rouse completely, because she was going to try a spell of her own.
“Aren’t you going to say some words?” Suzie asked.
“Magic is will, my great-aunt always told me. You may have a set of words to say, but you may not.” At first this had been incomprehensible to Fiji, but now she got it. If you had the magic, the will and intent would form the words, or the sounds, to bend the magic to do what you wanted. She wanted Mamie to forget about Midnight. She began to hum, moving back and forth a little, as she forced her will into a magical channel and put Mamie at the end of that channel.