Lullaby

Chapter 25

Mona rolls the sock off my foot. The stretchy sock insides, the fibers, they peel my scabs off. My crusted blood flakes off onto the floor. The foot is swollen until it's smooth with all its wrinkles stretched out. My foot, a balloon spotted red and yellow. With a folded towel under it, Mona pours the rubbing alcohol.

The pain's so instant you can't tell if the alcohol is boiling hot or ice cold. Sitting on the motel bed, my pant leg rolled up, with Mona kneeling on the carpet at my feet, I grab two handfuls of bedspread and grit my teeth. My back arched, my every muscle bunches tight for a few long seconds. The bedspread's cold and soaked with my sweat.

Pockets of something soft and yellow, these blisters almost cover the bottom of my foot. Under the layer of dead skin, you can see a dark, solid shape inside each blister.

Mona says, «What've you been walking on?»

She's heating a pair of tweezers over Oyster's plastic cigarette lighter.

I ask what the deal is with the advertisements Oyster's running in newspapers. Is he working for a law firm? The outbreaks of skin fungus and food poisoning, are they for real?

The alcohol drips off my foot, pink with dissolved blood, onto the folded motel towel. She sets the tweezers on the damp towel and heats a needle over Oyster's cigarette lighter. With a rubber band, she reaches back and bundles her hair into a thick ponytail.

«Oyster calls all that “antiadvertising,” » she says. «Sometimes businesses, the really rich ones, they pay him to cancel the ads. How much they pay, he says, reflects how true the ads probably are.»

My foot won't fit inside my shoe anymore. In the car, earlier today, I asked if Mona could look at it. Helen and Oyster are out buying new makeup. They're stopping to defuse three copies of the poems book at a big used-book store down the street. The Book Barn.

I say what Oyster's doing is blackmail. It's casting aspersions.

Now it's almost midnight. Where Helen and Oyster really are I don't want to know.

«He's not saying he's a lawyer,» Mona says. «He's not saying there's a lawsuit. He's just running an ad. Other people fill in the blanks. Oyster says he's just planting the seed of doubt in their minds.»

She says, «Oyster says it's only fair since advertising promises something to make you happy.»

With her kneeling, you can see the three black stars tattooed above Mona's collarbone. You can see down her blouse, past the carpet of chains and pendants, and she isn't wearing a bra, and I'm counting 1, counting 2, counting 3 …

Mona says, «Other members of the coven do it, too, but it's Oyster's idea. He says the plan is to undermine the illusion of safety and comfort in people's lives.»

With the needle, she lances a yellow blister and something drops out. A little brown piece of plastic, it's covered in stinking ooze and blood and lands on the towel. Mona turns it over with the needle, and the yellow ooze soaks into the towel. She picks it up with the tweezers and says, «What the heck is this?»

It's a church steeple.

I say, I don't know.

Mona, her mouth gaps open with her tongue pushing out. Her throat slides up inside her neck skin, gagging. She waves a hand in front of her nose and blinks fast. The yellow ooze stinks that bad. She wipes the needle on the towel. With one hand she holds my toes, and with the other she lances another blister. The yellow sprays out in a little blast, and there on the towel is half of a factory smokestack.

She tweezers it and wipes it on the towel. Her face wrinkled tight around her nose, she looks at it close-up and says, «You want to tell me what's going on?»

She lances another blister, and out pops the onion dome from a mosque, covered in blood and slime. With her tweezers, Mona pulls a tiny dinner plate out of my foot. It's hand-painted with a border of red roses.

Outside our motel room, a fire siren screams by in the street.

Out of another blister oozes the pediment from a Georgian bank building.

The cupola from a grade school busts out of the next blister.

Sweating. Deep breathing. Gripping my soft, dripping handfuls of bedspread, I grit my teeth. Looking up at the ceiling, I say, someone is killing models.

Pulling out a bloody flying buttress, Mona says, «By stepping on them?»

And I tell her, fashion models.

The needle digs around in the sole of my foot. The needle fishes out a television antenna. The tweezers fish out a gargoyle. Then roof tiles, shingles, tiny slates and gutters.

Mona lifts one edge of the stinking towel and folds it so a clean side shows. She pours on more alcohol.

Another fire engine screams by the motel. Its red and blue lights flash across the curtains.

And I can't draw another full breath, my foot burns so bad.

We need, I say. I need … we need …

We need to go back home, I say, as soon as possible. If I'm right, I need to stop the man who's using the culling poem.

With the tweezers, Mona digs out a blue plastic shutter and lays it on the towel. She pulls out a shred of bedroom curtains, yellow curtains from the nursery. She pulls out a length of picket fence, and pours on more alcohol until it drips off my foot clear. She covers her nose with her hand.

Another fire engine screams by, and Mona says, «You mind if I just turn on the TV and see what's up?»

I stretch my jaws at the ceiling and say, we can't … we can't …

Alone with her now, I say, we can't trust Helen. She only wants the grimoire so she can control the world. I say, the cure for having too much power is not to get more power. We can't let Helen get her hands on the original Book of Shadows.

And so slow I can't see her move, Mona draws a fluted Ionic column out of a bloody pit below my big toe. Slow as the hour hand on a clock. If the column's from a museum or a church or a college, I can't remember. All these broken homes and trashed institutions.

She's more of an archaeologist than a surgeon.

And Mona says, «That's funny.»

She lines up the column with the other fragments on the towel. Frowning as she leans back into my sole with the tweezers, she says, «Helen told me the same thing about you. She says you only want to destroy the grimoire.»

It should be destroyed. No one can handle that kind of power.

On television is an old brick building, three stories, with flames pouring up from every window. Firemen point hoses and feathery white arcs of water. A young man holding a microphone steps into the shot, and behind him Helen and Oyster are watching the fire, their heads leaned together. Oyster's holding a shopping bag. Helen holds his other hand.

Holding up the bottle of rubbing alcohol, Mona looks at how much is left. She says, «What I'd really like to be is an empath, where all I have to do is touch people and they're healed.» Reading the label, she says, «Helen tells me we can make the world a paradise.»

I sit up on the bed, halfway, propping myself on my elbows, and I say, Helen is killing people for diamond tiaras. That's the kind of savior Helen is.

Mona wipes the tweezers and the needle on the towel, making more smears of red and yellow. She smells the bottle of alcohol and says, «Helen thinks you only want to exploit the book for a newspaper story. She says once all the spells are destroyed—including the culling spell—then you can blab to everybody that you're the hero.»

I say, nuclear weapons are bad enough. Chemical weapons. I say, certain people having magic is not going to make the world a better place.

I tell Mona, if it comes to it, I'll need her help.

I say, we may need to kill Helen.

And Mona shakes her head over the bloody ruins on the motel towel. She says, «So your answer for too much killing is more killing?»

Just Helen, I say. And maybe Nash, if my theory about the dead fashion models is right. After we kill them, we can go back to normal.

On television, the young man with the microphone, he's saying how a three-alarm fire has most of the downtown area paralyzed. He says, the structure is fully involved. He says, it's one of the city's favorite institutions.

«Oyster,» Mona says, «doesn't like your idea of normal.»

The burning institution, it's the Book Barn. And behind him, Helen and Oyster are gone.

Mona says, «In a detective story, do you wonder why we root for the detective to win?» She says, maybe it's not just for revenge or to stop the killing. Maybe we really want to see the killer redeemed. The detective is the killer's savior. Imagine if Jesus chased you around, trying to catch you and save your soul. Not just a patient passive God, but a hardworking, aggressive bloodhound. We want the criminal to confess during the trial. We want him to be exposed in the drawing room scene, surrounded by his peers. The detective is a shepherd, and we want the criminal back in the fold, returned to us. We love him. We miss him. We want to hug him.

Mona says, «Maybe that's why so many women marry killers in prison. To help heal them.»

I tell her, there's nobody who misses me.

Mona shakes her head and says, «You know, you and Helen are so much like my parents.»

Mona. Mulberry. My daughter.

And flopping back on the bed, I ask, how's that?

And pulling a door frame out of my foot, Mona says, «Just this morning, Helen told me she might need to kill you.»

My pager goes off. It's a number I don't know. The pager says it's very important.

And Mona digs a stained-glass window out of a bloody pit in my foot. She holds it up so the ceiling light comes through the colored bits, and looking at the tiny window, she says, «I'm more worried about Oyster. He doesn't always tell the truth.»

And the motel room door, right then it blows open. The sirens outside. The sirens on the television. The flash of red and blue lights strobing across the window curtains. Right then Helen and Oyster fall into the room, laughing and panting. Oyster slinging a bag of cosmetics. Helen holding her high heels in one hand. They both smell like Scotch whisky and smoke.