Ashley Bell Read online

  “Not if we stop this right now.” Bibi pushed her chair back from the table.

  Calida grimaced. “We’ve begun the session. We must complete it, close the door I’ve opened. Or those psychic shock waves I mentioned earlier won’t stop. They’re a beacon. An irresistible summons. You’ll have visitors you do not want.”

  Bibi’s skepticism wasn’t absolute. The piercing needle and the blood argued for Calida’s sincerity, if not for her sanity. After a hesitation, Bibi sat. She pulled her chair closer to the table.

  Her mother and father had not become strangers to her because of their interest in divination and this bizarre gift. The fullness of her love hadn’t diminished whatsoever. Her comfortable image of them, however, was evidently an inadequate likeness, and her long-held assumptions about their interior lives now seemed deficient, immature, if not naïve.

  Stirring her right hand through the wooden tiles in the silver bowl, Calida seemed to speak to an invisible presence. “I bleed for answers. I cannot be denied. Attend me.” To Bibi, she said, “How many letters should I draw?”

  “I don’t know. How would I know?”

  “You’ve got to participate, girl. How many letters?”

  Bibi looked at the kitchen window above the sink and was only somewhat relieved to see that indeed it had been locked. “Eleven,” she said, though she had no reason why that number and not another. “Eleven letters.”

  Paxton and Danny didn’t believe in ghosts. Perry allowed for the possibility, but never expected to see one. Only Gibb was as certain of the reality of unmoored spirits as he was of the existence of the air he breathed, for his mother, who had raised him alone, sometimes saw his dead father walking in the fields behind their house or standing under the oak tree in the yard, or sitting on the porch, smiling and translucent. On those occasions, she said it made sense that dear Harry would decline to move on as souls should, considering that he had loved her and Gibb as no man had ever before loved his wife and son. Gibb never glimpsed the apparition, though he yearned to see it. He knew it must be real, because his mother never lied; and each time she saw the wraith, she grew luminous with delight.

  Yet none of the four SEALs, including open-minded Perry and true-believing Gibb, felt that this town in the barren outback of Hell might be haunted. If anyplace in the world should have made you feel that it lay aswarm with otherworldly presences, it should have been this doomed village. But perhaps the cruelties visited upon these people had been so demonic and vicious, the murders committed with such cold-blooded pleasure and violence, that the many victims had been killed twice, in body and in spirit, and had no choice of either an afterlife or a lingering haunt.

  At 3:00 A.M., when the SEALs had left their surveillance post on the roof, moving into the narrow streets with a stealth that only ghosts could have matched, the town seemed never to have supported life, to have been forever as dead as any crater on the airless moon that shed now only a quarter of its potential light. The dwellings were crammed together, each walled from its neighbors, curiously isolated in proximity to the others, segregated, crude and sullen-looking places, lacking any sense of comfort or community, each family a separate tribe on its own speck of an archipelago, so that no aura of history adhered to the structures, either. Nor did they serve even as monuments to those who had once inhabited them.

  Pax wondered if this deadest of dead places would be the death of him, but he didn’t dwell on the thought. Difficult as it might be for civilians to believe, a battle-hardened SEAL valued his life less than the lives of his buddies, less even than his honor, which was the only attitude to have if you wanted to win a war.

  They had split into two teams and had circuitously approached the target house by using the streets that paralleled the one onto which it faced. Pax and Perry entered, from behind, a damaged building that stood across from what might be Abdullah al-Ghazali’s nest. They took fifteen minutes to ease through the walled and debris-strewn backyard and through the ruined interior to the front door, which had been blown off in an attack seventeen months earlier.

  Crouching just inside the doorway, they studied the house across the street from this closer vantage point, wearing night-vision gear, and confirmed what they had seen previously with periscopic cameras and binoculars. The structure was intact except for pockmarks and divots chipped out by bullets, all the windows protected by exterior metal shutters. Instead of mud bricks plastered over with stucco, the house appeared to be more modern, constructed of reinforced concrete, not an uncommon preference in a country where unending sectarian and tribal warfare once fought with rifles had long ago escalated to machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

  At 5:11 A.M., the mission-specific satellite phone in Paxton’s jacket pocket vibrated. The caller could be only Perry, who with Gibb had taken up a position on the roof of the building to the east of the target house, with a view of its backyard.

  Perry spoke softly. “Faint interior light, leaking around a shutter. Just now.”

  This served to confirm that the cigarette smoker on the roof, seen the previous afternoon, had not merely used the house as an observation platform, but had taken shelter there, perhaps with the mass murderer Abdullah al-Ghazali.

  Pax and his guys would not move against the house until full daylight, and even then they would wait as long as the situation supported a delay, hoping for some indication that the smoker was not the sole occupant. If the seven terrorists were spread out in, say, three widely separated houses, an attack on one would alert those quartered in the other two, and the element of surprise would be lost. In that event, the odds of nailing al-Ghazali himself were not as good as they ought to be. Regardless, the assault would occur during the coming day; a further delay was too risky.

  From somewhere in the waning night came the eerie cry of that desert wild cat called a caracal, and Paxton tensed.

  Crazy as it was, with the pierced thumb and the blood and the tiger-eyed blond Amazon, with candle wicks popping and hissing, with salamanders of candlelight chasing their own lithe shadows across the tabletop, with the fragrance of roses rising with ever greater—and somehow funereal—intensity from the next room, and with the threat of unknown enemies gathering in the night to home in on psychic waves that Bibi could in no way detect, she nonetheless found her disbelief suspended. For the moment, Calida Butterfly had a presence, an air of authority, that would make the most committed skeptic doubt his own doubt.

  The diviner stirred her right hand through the wood tiles that filled the silver bowl, neither watching to see what letters her fingers plucked from that alphabet soup nor trying to discern them by a Braille-reader’s touch.

  “I command the secret knowledge regarding Bibi’s cancer cure,” she said, her husky yet musical voice conveying an intolerance for resistance from whatever occult power she meant to interrogate. “I bleed for answers. I can’t be denied. Attend me. Why was Bibi Blair spared from gliomatosis cerebri?”

  She dropped four tiles upon the table, and they clicked like dice, and then two more, and three, and a final two. Some tiles were facedown, and she turned them over. She arranged them from A to V and had this: A, A, E, E, F, I, L, O, S, T, V. She lined them up on the table so that if she turned to her left and Bibi to her right, both could read them.

  From eleven letters, even if there were duplicates, many words could be formed. Although Bibi made no move to organize the tiles, she saw LEAVE, LEAF, FAST, FEAST, SOFT, SOLVE, FLOAT, SOLE….

  Calida fingered four letters out of the lineup—EVIL—which didn’t improve Bibi’s mood.

  “We must use all eleven of them to find the true message,” the diviner explained. First she spelled out A FATE SO EVIL and studied it for a moment, but then said, “No. That’s not an answer. At most, it’s a half-assed threat.”

  “Threat? Who’s threatening you? Or is it me being threatened?”

  Rather than answer either question, Calida rearranged some of the letters to spell EAST EVIL OAF. “Off
to a false start,” she said. “Evil isn’t the key word.”

  A quiet but growing urgency in Calida’s manner. A puzzling continued intensification of the fragrance of roses until an odor of floral rot seemed to underlie their perfume…A quickening of the pulse-and-flitter of the many candle flames, so that the table swam with silverfish of light and phantom moths beat their soundless, insubstantial wings against the walls…Bibi began to feel that she was slowly—then more rapidly—succumbing to a fever not born of physical illness, a fever of unreason as dangerous as any infection.

  On the table, FOIL A TEASE made no sense, and it left one letter unused.

  VIA LEAST FOE was likewise without clear meaning.

  Suddenly Bibi saw what the diviner did not, and reached out to spell TO SAVE A LIFE.

  “That’s it,” Calida loudly declared, with no slightest note of uncertainty. “Kid, you’re a natural for this, intuitive. The client never sees the message. They sit like toads, waiting for me to feed them flies.”

  Bibi said, “Let me get this straight. So I was spared from cancer to save my life. I sort of already knew that.”

  “No, girl, that’s not what it says. You can read the words, but I can read the words and their intended meaning. You were spared from cancer so that you could save the life of someone else.”

  Bibi didn’t at once buy into that interpretation. Save from what, when, where, why? She wasn’t an adventurer, not a superhero—she hated tights and capes—not a woman of action unless the action was on the written page.

  “Who?” she asked. “Save who?”

  “That’s what we ask next.”

  Not quite ready to pose the question, the diviner picked up her glass and quickly swallowed the remaining wine.

  Bibi realized now that the chardonnay was either to help Calida cope with the pain of the needle piercing her thumb or to boost her courage, or perhaps both.

  Stirring her right hand in the silver bowl full of tiles, the diviner said, “I bleed for answers. I can’t be—”

  Before the woman could finish, Bibi’s smartphone, lying on the table, issued a call tone that imitated the antique ring of a rotary-dial telephone. She glanced at the screen and said, “There’s no caller ID. Ignore it.”

  Failure to take the call clearly alarmed Calida. “No! If you don’t answer it, we won’t know if it’s them.”

  “Them who?”

  “The wrong people!” Her candle-glitter stare no longer seemed to be that of a diviner confident that she had her foot on the throat of whatever supernatural entity she had been consulting. “Answer it, for God’s sake.”

  Further disquieted, Bibi took the call. “Hello?”

  A man said, “Top agent?”

  “Huh? Who is this?”

  “What does that mean—top agent?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Why play dumb? It’s the license plate on your car.”

  “Oh. Not my car. My mother’s. Who is this?”

  The caller hung up.

  “Some guy,” Bibi told Calida. “I drove Mom’s car home. He wants to know what the vanity plate means.”

  Calida’s worried frown folded some of the youth out of her face. “Doesn’t sound like one of them.”

  “Whether it’s one of them or not, he must have seen me when I drove home. Or he’s in the parking lot right now. Everything’s sort of sliding, isn’t it?”

  “Sliding? What do you mean?”

  “Downhill, over the edge, into chaos,” Bibi said, and wondered why her usual self-possession seemed to be failing her.

  Well, she hadn’t prepared herself for a world with these sudden new and strange dimensions. She had prepared herself to write stories for The Antioch Review, for Granta, for Prairie Schooner, to publish a first novel with Random House. She didn’t possess the emotional and psychological flexibility to deal easily with sudden inexplicable cancer cures and the supernatural consequences that followed them.

  Calida looked at her oddly. “Everything is always sliding. Life is an avalanche, kid, and you know that as well as I do. Sometimes a slow and more enjoyable kind of sliding, sometimes wild. I read your novel. It’s in there—the avalanche. Get your skis on, girl, and ride the snow wave. Don’t let it wipe you out.”

  “Yeah, well, right now I feel like a spleet.”

  “A what?”

  “A goob, a wanker, a wilma.” She picked up her half-full glass. She pulled a Calida and finished the chardonnay in one long swallow.

  “To save a life,” the diviner said, reading the tiles on the table. “Now let’s find out whose.”

  The shriek of the caracal in the night had worried Pax because he thought it might be the work of a mimic. When two shrieks followed and seemed to originate in a far different place from the first, his concern increased. If he and his guys were known to be in town, maybe they were being stalked by agents of some local warlord, signaling readiness to one another in the language of caracals.

  There were caracals in the Middle East, though their numbers were much lower than in Africa and Asia. Iranians had once trained those cats to hunt birds. Although caracals weighed as much as forty pounds, they could leap straight up as high as seven or eight feet, biting and battering down eight or ten birds at once from a low-flying flock.

  Pax and Danny had stood ready, awaiting another cat cry to judge its authenticity, MK12s in hand, wishing the guns pumped out a more damaging caliber. Yet time had passed, and the dawn had come without incident. Sometimes a caracal was nothing more than a caracal.

  As the first hours of light brought no wind, only a deepening quiet, Paxton hoped for some telltale to confirm that more than one of the terrorists resided in the shuttered house. At 8:47, his satellite phone vibrated.

  Perry called from his position, with Gibb, on the roof of a two-story building east of the target house. He spoke in hardly more than a murmur. “One male. Not the smoker. Backyard. Two buckets.”

  “Say again—buckets?”

  “Carrying buckets.” After a pause, Perry said, “Back gate. Into the street. Moving south.”

  “Weapon?” Paxton asked.

  “Drop-leg holster.”

  If the terrorist hadn’t been armed, and if he had ventured far enough from the target house, they might have tried to capture him for interrogation. But one shot would alert the other bad guys—and, if intel was correct, bad girls.

  “Probably night soil,” Perry said.

  He was a fan of historical fiction, especially novels of war and seafaring set in the eighteenth century. Occasionally he used antiquated words, not pretentiously, not even consciously, but because they had become part of his vocabulary.

  “Clarify—night soil,” Paxton said.

  “Shit,” Perry replied, which was pretty much what Pax thought he’d meant.

  Like most small- to medium-size settlements in this blighted country, the town was in some respects medieval. No sewage system. No septic tanks. No indoor plumbing except, in a few cases, a hand pump in the kitchen sink, tapping a private well. There would be an open-air communal latrine just beyond the last buildings, basically ditches and a series of baffles, where people relieved themselves or to which they carried their products. It would be situated to ensure that the prevailing winds more often than not carried the stink away from the town, which meant in this case to the south and west.

  Perhaps the personal-hygiene standards of Abdullah al-Ghazali forbade the dumping of their waste in a far corner of the backyard. More likely, they periodically disposed of it in the communal latrine because the stench it produced and the cloud of flies it drew would identify their hideout as surely as if they had raised over the house one of their black-and-red flags.

  Into his phone, Pax said, “One bucket for men, one for women?”

  “Honorable modesty,” Perry agreed, and he terminated the call.

  Short of knocking on Abdullah’s door and pretending to be from the Census Bureau, they were no
t going to get any better confirmation that all seven terrorists were in the house. The buckets were superb intel.

  In the deep shadows, just inside the doorway of the building that faced the terrorists’ haven, Paxton and Danny began quietly to set up the Carl Gustav M4 recoilless rifle, an antitank weapon that was also effective as a bunker-buster.

  Bibi was wired. Not on chardonnay. Wired on the weirdness of it all. Cranked up by a feeling of impending violence. Like the air pressure before the first lightning flash of a storm so strong that it might spawn the mother of all tornadoes.

  Apparently some weird guy lurked in the parking lot, obsessing over the meaning of the vanity plates on Nancy’s sedan. And evidently a nameless presence stalked the kitchen, because the smell of rotting roses had become a stink, because the candle flames were undulating three or four inches above the lips of the cups that contained them, and because the room had suddenly grown chilly. The wall clock and her wristwatch had stopped, their sweep hands no longer wiping away the seconds, and the digital clock on the microwave had gone dark, as if something that lived outside of time had stepped into this world and brought its clockless ambience with it. Perhaps the psychic-wave detectors, a.k.a. “the wrong people”—whoever or whatever they might be—were already on their way to Bibi’s apartment to beat her to death or suck her blood, or steal her soul, whatever the hell they did to those cretins who were foolish enough to think that a little divination session over the kitchen table would be harmless, gosh, perhaps even fun.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, Bibi would not have taken any of this seriously, for she had been a highly efficient, driven autodidact who had taught herself at least two college degrees’ worth of knowledge, a levelheaded realist who enjoyed fantasizing, yes, but who always knew precisely where the borderline was between the real world and false interpretations of it. She’d had a keen eye for the too-bright, too-fuzzy worlds of idealists and for the too-dark, too-complicated versions of reality concocted by paranoids. Now the borders seemed to have been erased or at least blurred, and for the first time in her life, she felt that among things a modern woman needed, a gun was no less essential than a smartphone.