Witch Boy Read online

  I have lost all my manners on top of everything else.

  “Eleanor?” I call as I enter the house. “Eleanor? Chuck?”

  The place is wide open and dead quiet. The sound of the water running past the rear of the house is clear and almost soothing in the absence of anything else. Except that nothing is quite soothing anymore. I take a walk around the first floor, the living room, the kitchen, the hallway. There is nothing going on, and no sign that anybody has been around for a while. Not even Chuck, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, since Chuck’s social life is marginally more stagnant than mine.

  Than mine used to be, that is. How I long for my stagnant social life.

  I go to the foot of the stairs and call once more. “Eleanor. Chuck.”

  Nothing. She must have been really going stir crazy if she took Chuck for a walk. Or maybe they are just bonding.

  At any rate, it is a sensation that takes a little getting used to. As far as I can recall, I have never been in the house, either house, without at least one of them being there with me. I don’t like it.

  I go out to the porch and watch the water flow by, the nearest thing to a living breathing companion I have at the moment. My sudden loneliness is, I realize, ironic, with all the being alone I’m always wanting. But what I want is to be alone, but with my familiar beings close to hand.

  I need my Eleanor, as I figure she needs me. Just on the other side of the wall. And I need my Chuck.

  I gingerly put my feet up on what’s left of the rail and try to make like a regular, slow and easy country gentleman. The stream, the pitiful breeze, the occasional bird. Thus, the world goes by. Nothing moves that isn’t supposed to move. Nobody says anything that contradicts the physical world I knew the first sixteen years of my life.

  I need to spend more time here. On this porch.

  I am not going to any parties. Nothing more can happen to me if I just stay put.

  Bang. It comes from upstairs. I get to my feet.

  Bang, it happens again, and again, as if somebody is pounding the walls with a two-by-four.

  I slowly walk into the house. I walk to the bottom of the stairs and wait there, the way you wait when things go bump in the night and you want to give the silence every chance to explain. I was asleep it was a cat the wind blew off a shingle it was a dream a truck hit a pothole or a cat my mother nodded off into her computer car backfired on the next block.

  The mercy of silence continues another ten seconds.

  Bang.

  I have to go up. I can see my hands shaking in spite of the mighty fists I am making.

  “Chuck?” I call. “Eleanor?”

  Nobody responds.

  I reach the top of the stairs, and my eyes shoot straight down the hall to the open door that leads to the attic stairs and the dim light at the summit. This is not unusual. I come home every day to find that door open. I’ve still never gone up there. I merely close it. Then, when I come up to bed later in the night, I close it again. Not unusual.

  Bang. This is unusual. The door closes itself. Then opens slowly and bang, closes itself.

  The door is mad at me now.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass who you are or what tricks you can do. I’m not coming up there.”

  It slams again and again and again.

  I stand there, like a child who cannot cope with the world, hands covering my ears, eyes shut tight to the world, whatever world. “Shut up!” I shout.

  No deal. The door slamming gets louder and more frequent, until it becomes one long loud unbroken crash, like a car accident played on a loop, and there is no escaping it, no stopping or muting or eluding it and so what I have to do is just…

  Absorb it. I drop my hands to my sides, unsquint my eyes, and let it come.

  “Come, bastard,” I say, and the bastard comes, I can feel it.

  “Come, evil bastard,” I say, feeling something, something like strength, rising inside of me, and the bastard comes, rising, approaching, filling me. I am being entered from without by something, something foreign, something that wants to overwhelm me, but I cannot fold. Not here, not here, not in my house after which I will have nowhere left….

  I wait for more and realize this is it. I am available and prepared for more, but this is what comes, this is the extent of what can happen to me.

  Because I’m not buckling. I’m not fleeing or cracking.

  “Come. Come on, evil, impotent bastard,” I finally shout.

  And the bastard quits.

  There is no more slamming. And there is no next move. I can even hear the water again.

  I walk to the door, stand in the doorway, and look up. I have achieved something, passed a test, called a bluff. Something bizarre may be happening around me after all, but it is not a great and powerful something. That’s what I say. I am surrounded by tricksters, jugglers and clowns, noisemakers and shadow puppeteers.

  I won’t be afraid, and that will be the end of it.

  I reach in, pull the string and kill the light….

  And illuminate the eyes…of something, I don’t know…. I slam the door myself this time and lean against it, then…no, no, get away from the door. Victims always lean against the door….

  My chest is heaving as I stumble into my room. I close my door, grab for my chair. The machine is now on, and I am focusing, staring, listening so hard to the game starting up that I wouldn’t notice if there were a werewolf chewing on my ear. As if I’m in a tunnel, private and secret and deep and mine alone, I hurtle down through the protective depths of my game, away from all that is above and behind me. I find myself levels and levels deep into Brainwave, kicking ass left and right. I am great, I am sublime. I am untouchable. More than anything untouchable. The muscles at the base of my thumbs are tight and throbbing from work.

  I pause the game. I pause myself. Then I look down.

  Chuck is at my feet.

  “Hi, Chuck,” I say, in a voice so disconnected and filtered through mania that the words should be “Take me to your leader.”

  Chuck’s big droopy eyes are dripping with pity for me.

  I’ll take it.

  I get up, step over Chuck, and walk the length of the hall. No Eleanor, but her computer is humming.

  I am not walking on any stairs, ever again in my whole life, without calling out first.

  “Eleanor?”

  “Marcus Aurelius.”

  I have rarely been so pleased to hear my stupid name.

  When I reach the kitchen, she is happily working away, stir-frying a bunch of vegetables and soft noodles, tossing shrimps and scallops and big chunks of ginger root around in between sips out of a red wineglass that is really more like a fishbowl with a stem on it.

  “Darlin’,” she drawls. Happiness conjures up her North Carolina roots. Happiness and wine combined.

  “Hey,” I say, taking in the great smells, the sizzle, and the crackly old R&B out of the countertop radio.

  “I thought I would make us a special ol’ dinner tonight, celebrate our surviving the first week, reaching Friday night and the weekend in one piece.”

  She pours me a normal-sized glass of wine, hands it over.

  “Also, I’ve got a little department get-together, and you’ve got that party, so it’ll be good for us to have a healthy meal behind us, to launch our first real night on the Blackwater social scene.”

  “I have a what?”

  “’Cause it would be a shame if after all this you wound up going the same recluse route you were taking in Port Caledonia. This is going to be the best thing for us ever, I can just—”

  “I’m not going to any party, Eleanor,” I snap, dumping myself into a kitchen chair.

  She places a steaming, peppery plate in front of me, a riot of colors with red and orange and yellow peppers, snow peas, soy-soaked water chestnuts.

  “What do you mean you’re not going? You’re the one who just told me about this thing not a half hour ago.”

  “The hell I am
,” I say, spearing a shrimp with my fork. What? Now I’m having conversations that I’m not even present for?

  “Please, Marcus, don’t be like this. Get out there and mix. Just give it an honest try.”

  Eleanor uses chopsticks. It is hard to tell quite what she’s using them for, since very little food makes it to her mouth.

  “They’re all freaks here, Eleanor. I don’t need it.”

  “Well, you need something. You can’t just—”

  “I have you,” I say sweetly, trying to take a few years off my face with an extrawide smile.

  “Yes, well, you will have me anyway. You need peers.”

  “I have Chuck.”

  Eleanor appears to be taking this a great deal more seriously than I would have expected. My social seclusion has never been big news or a big problem. She picks at her food with just one chopstick. She picks more successfully at her wine.

  “You,” she says sternly, “would do well to fit in. Now, I’m no fan of conformity…and I think it’s great to go your own way like you do. It’s just that it might be nice to see that you have the option. That you can be a member…of one society or another if you want to. There’s more to life than the woods, Marcus.” It is important to her. Having said her bit, she now seems to have trouble even looking at me. I can’t bear to watch her struggle any longer. I get up and go over to the silverware drawer. I sit back down, hand her a fork.

  “I’ll try,” I say.

  She smiles.

  “But I’m not going to start with this party. I’m just not into it.”

  She nods. We both sip wine.

  “I feel bad,” she says apologetically. “And now, here…you don’t even have Jules….”

  She doesn’t mean to hurt me, just as I don’t mean to hurt her. But it’s two people talking. It just seems inevitable.

  I would love right now to burst out of the chair, stand proudly and announce, “Ah, but I do—I found her and she loves me and we are staying together for ever and ever.” For both our sakes—all three of our sakes—I would love to be able to say it.

  But I can’t. It isn’t true.

  The phone rings. I get up and retrieve it from its mount on the wall. I listen.

  “Yes, this is me.”

  I am looking at my mother as I talk. She beams, that I am receiving a phone call. That is how bad it is.

  “Jule—” I catch myself. I quickly correct myself. “Sorry, Eartha.” It comes out hard. The effect, on the phone, is doubly powerful—that voice is Jules’s voice.

  “Eartha,” Eleanor mouths. She toasts me with her glass, as if this is some mighty achievement on my part.

  “Just calling to make sure you are coming to the party,” Eartha says.

  “No. Actually, I wasn’t feeling up to it. Thanks anyway. Maybe another time.”

  “Please, Marcus, you have to stop this now. You know that this is important. You know everyone is expecting you and that you are the whole point.”

  I am the whole point. Inwardly, I moan.

  “I appreciate that, I really do, Eartha. But I really don’t think I’m up for all this. Not tonight.”

  There is a long deathly silence on the phone. I turn my back to Eleanor’s disappointment and stretch the long, white, curly cord as far down the hall as it will go.

  “Leave me alone,” I whisper.

  “Come to the party,” she pleads.

  “Leave me alone,” I repeat.

  “Listen,” she says, “Things are going to be really bad, if you don’t—”

  I gasp. I’m not frightened. Not more than I am every day now anyway. I am stunned.

  “What’s this, a threat now? You are threatening me?”

  “I am doing no such thing. I am just giving you an idea…of the way things can be, will be, for the likes of us.”

  “The likes of us.” I snort. “I am not the likes of you.”

  “Like it or not,” she says.

  There is nowhere else to go, it seems. After we wait each other out for a few more seconds, I break the silence.

  “Listen,” I say. “I have a really nice dinner getting cold. I’ll see you at school on Monday, and you can tell me all about it.”

  “Your Familiar would like you to come,” she says quickly.

  “What?”

  “Your dog, Chuck. He’s your Familiar. We all have them. It’s kind of like a good-luck charm…except one that knows every corner of your soul too. You know.”

  “Well, no, I don’t know,” I say, and I feel like I am half lying here, “but…right. And how do you know my dog wants me to go to this party?”

  “Well, Marcus, because he’s here.”

  I am about to blow. I grind my teeth, grip the phone as if I can choke the life out of it. I am about to launch, to tear into Eartha and the whole lot of them…when suddenly I am awash, in the feeling that I can say nothing, nothing that will do anything.

  I collapse against the wall with my shoulder pressed against it, and sigh a growly sigh at her.

  “You know, you people are really beginning to piss me off.”

  “I know,” Eartha says gently. “And believe me, Marcus, the last thing we want is for you to be angry. It’s just that it’s important for us to get you here.”

  “Good-bye,” I say, after Eartha has given me directions to the party. I hang up before she can jerk another knot in my brain.

  I am sitting quietly with Eleanor. I must have been on the phone for a while, because my dish is newly heated.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  She smiles kindly, half-refills my glass, then her own. She catches a drip with her fingertip and licks it off.

  I take a mouthful of noodles and bite into a hunk of ginger, which I usually love. But not now. I cannot eat any more.

  I put down my fork, stand, and wipe my mouth with my napkin.

  “What?” Eleanor asks, getting up as well. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I say, the latest in a growing series of big, flabby, fat lies. “I have to get going to that party.”

  She perks up, raises her glass. “That’s the spirit, Marcus Aurelius.”

  I drain my glass.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  CHAPTER 7

  The party, symmetrically enough, is at Arj’s house. His house is one essentially straight mile and a half from mine, on the same piece of waterway. Only by the time it reaches Arj’s place, the stream has grown up—broadened, deepened, acquired a seriousness you wouldn’t guess at from my sleepy, dreamy back veranda.

  I follow the water the whole way. It is a lovely route, but it doesn’t seem to be the most practical, since my shoes are half waterlogged by the time I arrive.

  As I walk up the long graceful slope from the riverbank to Arj’s residence, I notice a definite difference between this party and the last one I attended. It is quiet. So quiet I am not sure I have found the right place, until I determine that if I have missed it, I have missed it profoundly. I cannot even see where the next house might be, in any direction, and I decide right here that if this is not it, I am passing on this party once and for all and I am sorry, my lifelong friend Chuck, but you are going to have to go on your own wits to get out of this because mine are AWOL.

  But as I go to ring the doorbell and the door swings open for me all on its own, I figure I probably have the right place.

  The entrance hallway, long like a tunnel cut into a mountain, is lit by nothing other than about five hundred candles sprouting up from growing wax mounds along the floor. The hallway is bigger than the entire house appears to be from the outside. The floor is honey-colored marble, and the carved white-plaster ceiling floats twenty feet above. To my left is a stairway leading, eventually, into blackness, with an ornate iron bannister that looks like an endless, busy, roiling Celtic knot. To my right is a black onyx shelf about eight inches deep and six feet long sticking out from the wall. It is neatly lined with tall, frosted glasses, vine etched and with stems of pewter. All the gla
sses are full of poppy champagne bubbles, and I do not think twice about taking one and walking down the hallway.

  “Hello?” I call, to any and all of the dozens of closed doors I see.

  “You should really take those off,” Eartha says behind me, tapping me on the shoulder.

  I turn around, and she is standing there in a gold and black and purple and green tunic, floor length, embroidered and beaded so that it looks like something between a priest’s Lenten vestments and a Mardi Gras float. Her thick hair is completely tamed, every single strand pulled into one of a hundred fine braids, the braids then turned into a pattern like a crop circle. She is smoking an ivory pipe about a foot long.

  She is pointing at my shoes.

  “It would hardly be a party for you if you went squishing around in wet shoes all evening.”

  I cannot reconcile the vision of her with the absurdity of discussing wet shoes.

  “My god,” I say. I am gawking.

  “Yeah? You like it?”

  “My god,” I say. I am addressing, first, her appearance, which is so stunning I am getting a headache. But I am more broadly addressing…everything. I take a sip of my champagne, attempt to pull myself together.

  “My dog,” I say, one step closer to functioning.

  “Oh, he’s great. Having a ball. He’s telling jokes and stories, and somebody brought a sheep, and they’re really hitting it off…. Why don’t you take those shoes off?” She points to her own foot, extended to show off her naked dog with silver rings on all five toes.

  “Well, I won’t be staying long, so the shoes won’t really be a prob—”

  “You want a hit?” she asks, extending the pipe.

  Whatever is in the bowl smells like toffee and sandalwood and peat and a half dozen of the most caressing scents I have experienced, along with many more I have not.

  “No, thank you,” I say.

  “Then would you mind holding it for a second?” she says.

  I take the pipe reluctantly, and as I do the smoke begins funneling toward me, the way it does when you are the only one in a restaurant not smoking. It has an uncommon, appetizing smell that makes me want to go for it, though I have never deliberately inhaled any smoke in my life. I am furtively inhaling it anyway, and watching the greenish smoke trail the way a cobra watches a snake charmer, when I realize what Eartha is doing.