Narcissa’s power was nothing compared to this boy’s. This beautiful child had some specific power in his fingertips. He could…I could almost see it, but then it escaped me. When I looked back at my body I saw it was but a step away from Adam and Bo’s frozen bodies.
Time, I cried in my mind. Give me more time to figure this out.
I looked back at the spirit, and he’d changed himself into a man from ancient times, Biblical times. He was walking among people who were crippled and diseased. The spirit was trying to tell me something but I couldn’t understand what.
In the next instant, my body reached the frozen forms of Adam and Boadicea. I saw myself start to open the box, then, just as I was about to see inside it, the dream ended.
When I awoke, I had a headache and I was very tired. I wanted to lie in bed all day, eat candy and watch old movies on TV. I wanted my husband to be there and tease me about being lazy, and I wanted the girls to climb into bed with me and get chocolate on the sheets. I wanted to look out the window and see my father and my sister-inlaw holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, thinking they were alone in the world, unseen by anyone.
For a moment I put my hands over my face, breathed deeply and tried to keep from crying. I tried to pretend indifference to Linc’s beauty, to his beautiful skin, to the way the muscles on his body moved under his shirt, but I wasn’t immune to him.
Last night at dinner, the women guests had done everything they could to get his attention. They’d preened and posed, teased and taunted, while Linc had flirted outrageously. His only concession to playing a gay man was to call a woman “honey” now and then. He was such a stereotype that if he’d been on camera he would have been picketed.
Turning over in bed, I saw that a piece of paper had been slipped under my door. Probably an eviction notice, I thought, then dragged myself out of bed. I felt awful. I was wearing a teddy that was grimy with dirt and had a tear on the side where I’d caught it on a nail. My hose were one giant run, and my body had a coating of dried sweat. My left arm had a bloody gash from where I’d scraped the metal frame of the window when Linc pulled me up and out of the basement.
As I walked across the room I could feel eyes watching me, so I knew the cameraman was up and awake. The bedside clock said it was 9:30.
The paper contained a schedule, my personal busy-every-minute list of where I was to be when. I’d already missed breakfast and an early-morning exercise session. As I tried to flex the stiff, overused muscles of my back, I knew I didn’t need more exercise.
There was a meditation session in thirty minutes; I wanted to make that one. Maybe if I had time to meditate, I could figure out what was going on here. As I stepped into the shower, I wondered if Linc had been given a schedule and if so, what was on it? Carry in buckets of coal? Scrub the kitchen floor?
I was still stiff when I pulled on a pink sweatsuit I found hanging in my closet, but I’d loosened up by the time I left my room and went in search of the solarium where the meditation was to be held. I wished I could pop some caffeine pills to stay awake. But I needed all my senses alert because I wanted to quiz each woman to see what she knew about the goings-on in this house. Surely the women knew the séances were about as real as a Scooby-Doo movie. Didn’t they?
Yawning, I took my place on a mat near the other women, crossed my legs and began to meditate.
Linc
Chapter Ten
I DREAMED I WAS IN BED WITH ALL FOUR OF THE SLAVE girls, their supple bodies all over mine, their hands running over my skin, their lips on my legs, on my neck. One took me in her mouth while another ran her breasts over my face.
When I awoke I was sweating, unfulfilled, and crazy with lust. Worse, I didn’t know if I wanted to call an exorcist or take a couple of pills and go back to sleep.
I lay in bed awhile, dozing, remembering, half dreaming. I dreamed of the girls with their copper-colored skin and I dreamed of Darci in her black teddy wriggling backward along the ground, inching her way through the window.
Somewhere in there, in a state of half consciousness, I began to try to remember things. Isn’t that what that…that creature said I needed to do? I didn’t want to think that I’d seen a ghost. People who saw ghosts ended up in the tabloids and were laughed at. There were some things that enlightened, educated American people knew for facts: There were no ghosts and there were no aliens. Not in real life. If a person who had a college degree met a person who said he’d seen a ghost, immediately the ol’ college degree began to laugh in derision. And classify. People who saw ghosts were put into a lower class, “nonu” as the Mitford sisters called it. “Not upperclass.” Ghosts belonged belowstairs, not in the parlor.
Okay, so where did that put me? Last night Darci had wondered if I was related to some slave who said, “He’s fine. I want him,” yet I’d grown up in a household that thought bad grammar was worse than homicide.
But I’d seen a ghost. I’d stood there and seen Darci’s hand pass through the arm of some guy who had a Sean Connery fixation, a man who was chained to a wall. I’m ashamed to say that all I could think of was running away. When an iron fence had appeared in my path I’d wanted to sit down and start blubbering.
Later, it took all my strength and the courage I had no idea I had to stay in that basement and remove those files. But I knew Darci, little bitty female Darci, would do it if I left, so I couldn’t go. After all, she’d started the whole thing for me, so I couldn’t abandon her, could I?
As I began to wake up I tried to remember what the man-ghost had said. It was like that old rhyme about “dog won’t beat stick.” One thing had to happen before another could. The ultimate happening was for Darci to find her husband, but first…
I picked up a piece of paper and a short, stubby pencil off the bedside table—“13 Elms. Reflections” it read at the top. I wrote, one, give the slaves what they want. Two, the slaves will tell you things. Three, find something from God. Four, use the thing from God to find the kid. Five, find Adam Montgomery. And six, Linc must remember.
Gobbledy-gook. None of it meant anything to me, I thought, but suddenly I sat upright in bed. I hadn’t exactly lied to Darci but I hadn’t told her the whole truth either. I’d said I knew nothing about my ancestors, which was true. I’d never been told anything, but my parents couldn’t very well keep me from knowing their names, could they? My father was born John Aloysius Frazier the Second. Second, as in my grandfather’d had the same name. Once, I’d asked my father who the first John Aloysius Frazier was and I was told, “He was my father.” Just that, nothing else. Further questions I asked were met with glaring silence.
Because of my father’s refusal to talk about his familial origins I’d formed the idea that they were people I wouldn’t want to know. But then, actors were people my father thought were beneath his notice. Maybe my grandfather was something that my father wouldn’t like, say, a descendant of slaves and proud of it. I’d always had the impression my father thought he sprang from Zeus’s loins. Slaves in chains would have marred his image of himself.
I dressed quickly, then went outside to look for transportation into town. I remembered the way our cabdriver had nearly run from this hideous old brick house so I wanted to find out what the townspeople knew. I saw a woman driving a pickup and asked if I could bum a ride.
“Sure,” she said,“hop on.”
It took me a whole thirty seconds to realize she meant for me to climb into the back with the boxes of produce. Her big black dog was taking up the passenger’s seat. Sighing, I got into the back with the cabbages and thought about how I’d tell my agent about this and make him laugh, but then I remembered that Barney was dead because of me.
When I returned from town hours later, I saw Darci straggling behind the other women as they did a slow, lazy walk through one of the gardens. She was deep into conversation with one of the guests, listening so intently that I wasn’t sure she’d see me hiding in the bushes.
She did, and ye
t again, I wondered what other kinds of things she could do. I knew she could give a person a nosebleed and a headache, that she could sense where people and machines were, and that she could use her mind to make people do things. She said she couldn’t read minds but I didn’t believe her.
“Excuse me,” she said to the woman. “My shoe is untied.”
I’d seen Darci step on the end of her shoelace with one foot and now she moved several steps off the path to tie it. I was but inches from her and I wasn’t surprised to see the woman she was with turn her head away to look toward a small pond in the distance.
When I started to whisper my message, Darci shook her head no, then put her hand on my shoulder, letting me know I was to think my message to her. Since this left her one-handed, she held out her untied shoe toward me. Kneeling, I tied her shoe while sending her the message that I wanted to talk to her. I sent her the image of foot-long sandwiches and slices of cheesecake to let her know that she could miss dinner and come to my dingy little room in the slave quarters.
For no reason except that I could, I took an extraordinarily long time in tying her shoe so I could lengthen my message. In detail, I showed her my dream of the previous night, of me with the four beautiful women, all of them licking and biting on me at once.
I didn’t have to look up to feel Darci’s embarrassment. In my mind’s eye I could feel her reddened face.
When her shoe was finally tied, she took her hand off my shoulder and stepped back on the path, saying,“Sorry I took so long. The lace was in a knot.”
Chuckling, I thought that someone with Darci’s powers wasn’t used to someone like me, someone who wasn’t afraid of her, who wasn’t shocked at her strange abilities. I doubt if she—
I cut off my thoughts because I found that when I tried to get up, I couldn’t. It was as though I were frozen in place. Paralyzed. I wasn’t in pain and my mind worked perfectly well, but my body wouldn’t move.
I knew Darci had done it. Part of me was in awe while another part was appalled. No one on earth could do what she’d just done. Yet she had.
I don’t know how long I stayed that way, probably no more than two minutes, but it was long enough to make me vow to never again play a practical joke on Darci—or at least not a joke I knew I couldn’t win.
After a while I heard Darci’s laughter floating across the shrubbery toward me and I was released. I’d been straining my body so hard against the unseen force that was holding me in place that when it let go I went backward into a rosebush.
When Darci came to my room an hour later, I had three scratch marks on my cheek.
“Slave ladies do that?” she asked.
“You did.” I tried to sound angry and hurt.
Darci smiled. “You wish. So what did you find out when you went into town today?”
“I have a grandfather,” I said, not letting her see that I was amazed, as usual, that she seemed to know everything I was up to. “He’s a faith healer.”
“Holy saints!” Darci muttered, eyes wide.
In this day and age when even kids’ movies have cursing, it didn’t seem possible, but I was shocked at her language.
“No,” she said, feeling my shock. “I’m not cursing. I meant,‘Like the saints did.’ Healing. Curing illnesses.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “The man’s a faith healer. If you believe, you’ll be cured, that sort of thing. I doubt if he can really—”
Darci wasn’t listening to me. She was looking about the room. It was as cheaply done as possible, the upper half of the walls covered in painted Sheetrock and the lower half with grooved batten board. There was an old iron bedstead with a cheap, hard mattress and cheap, rough sheets. A chest of drawers and a tiny table and chairs completed the furniture. The bathrooms were down the hall, “ladies” on one side, “gentlemen” on the other. Since I was the only person staying in the Quarters I had the bathroom to myself.
“I don’t like this place,” Darci said. “A lot of pain is inside these walls. I’ve been to other plantations and they aren’t like this. This place was worse than the others. Do you know why Devlin had himself chained to the wall last night?”
“Imitation of what had been done in that room?”
“Yes.” She put her hand against the wall for a moment.
“Delphia’s ancestors were not nice men.”
I thought that was an understatement. I put the sandwiches on the table and as casually as I could, I asked her what she’d found out.
Smiling, eating as though she hadn’t eaten in years, she told me what she’d found out from the other women guests—which was exactly nothing.
“They all know that Delphia is a fake, but they say they come for the food and the light exercise and the massages. By the way, you’re booked solid for messages tomorrow.”
I groaned. “I won’t do it. And if the women don’t have any information, why should I?”
“I think they know quite a bit, actually, but they’re not telling. Each one of them was lying but I’m not sure about what. All I could really feel was that something is to happen here that will make the whole trip worthwhile. Maybe an actual psychic will show up.”
“There isn’t any such thing as—” I started to say, but then I remembered the way Darci had held me in place just an hour ago. “What else?” I asked.
“Nothing. They’re all rich and hate someone intensely. I could feel the hatred around them.”
I reached across the table and touched her wrist with one fingertip. “What about my son?” I asked. I sent images to her of my agent who’d burned to death and of the news photo of the car smashed against a tree.
“All I know for sure is that all of it’s tied together. You, your son, a Touch of God—What?”
I got up to get my pad of paper to correct it. I’d written,“Three, find something from God,” but that man had said “Touch of God” as though it were the name of something.
Darci wiped her lips and looked at the list.
“Anything I left out?” I asked.
“There’s more to it to find my husband,” she said, looking me hard in the eyes.
I knew she was asking me something but I didn’t know what, so I just opened the cartons of cheesecake and waited.
Slowly, she began to tell me about her dream. It took me a while to understand that she believed it had been a dream of prophecy. It took me even longer to figure out that she was asking for my help. If she helped me find my son and his mother, would I help her find her husband?
Since I had no psychic abilities, no talent for anything except acting—and not good at that if the men outside the crypt were to be believed—I didn’t see how I could help. Darci said she didn’t know either but her dream seemed to indicate that I would be needed.
Maybe I was stupid but I agreed to help her.
When I said that, Darci breathed a sigh of relief and dove into the cheesecake. “So tell me everything you found out about your grandfather,” she said.
When I’d finished, she said, “Tomorrow’s Wednesday so we’ll drive to—Where is he and how far away is it?”
“East Mesopotamia, Georgia,” I said, still marveling over the name. “About two hundred miles from here.”
“Tomorrow we’ll drive to East Mesopotamia, Georgia, meet your grandfather, then we’ll be back on Thursday. There’s to be another séance, but this time I think it might be real.”
“More real than last time?” I asked. “The séance where you fainted?”
Darci smiled. “That was before I knew what Devlin could do. Now that I know he’s a Shape-Changer I’m more prepared.”
“Mmmm,” I said, not convinced. When I picked up the empty cartons, I was careful not to touch Darci. I didn’t want her feeling my excitement and nervousness at the idea of meeting my grandfather. I felt like a kid about to meet Santa Claus for the first time. At the same time I was full of foreboding. Would he be like my father, who believed that human warmth was a sin?
; On the other hand, the Internet article I’d read said that John Aloysius Frazier was a faith healer. Did that mean loud praying accompanied by the sound of money hitting a silver plate? If the man had a gold tooth and wore a diamond pinky ring I’d call my father and thank him for never introducing me to my grandfather.
“Linc,” Darci said, reaching out to take my hand.
I knew she meant to soothe me, to use her powers to calm me, but I didn’t want it. I moved away so she couldn’t touch me.
“Okay,” I said, changing the subject, “what do we do with all those files in the tomb?”
“I have no idea,” Darci said. “Let’s look at them and see what we can figure out.”
I didn’t want to return to that cold crypt, so I suggested we haul them into one of the other bedrooms where it was warm and light. Darci agreed, saying she could put a shield around the files so no one in the house would find them, plus the many ghosts would protect them. I said that the sheer dreariness of the Quarters would keep the people from the Big House away.
As soon as I said the “Big House,” I knew where it had come from. The four slaves were near me again and it was their thoughts I was reading.
Darci guessed—or heard—my thoughts and grinned. “Why do you think none of those women at the house come down here and beg you for massages? Those four beauties keep them away.”
“They can be seen?” I asked, too much interest in my voice. I told myself to cool it.
“No, but they can make people feel so creepy they’ll leave. Cold chills. Hairs on the back of the neck standing up, that sort of thing.”
“No bites on the earlobe?”
When Darci smiled it made me feel good to have caused that smile. There was a sadness in her eyes that never went away. I didn’t like to think about last night, when I’d been in the same room with a ghost who liked to chain himself to a wall, then change into some sort of Central Casting pirate.