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  Chapter Two - Cody

  Old flames die hard, it seems.

  I could tell Lisa still liked me, just from the way she held me a little closer than she really had to, and the way she put her face against the back of my neck once or twice. You can always tell about things like that, if you pay attention.

  That was bad.

  Even worse, I enjoyed it myself. She was pretty and sweet and fun to spend time with, and I swear the way she pressed the tips of her fingernails up against my stomach muscles that day was enough to make me forget my own name. If circumstances had been different, I might have taken the bait, so to speak. No, scratch that; I know I would have.

  But as it was, I knew better than to take even the first step down that path. She didn’t have a clue what she was getting herself into, but I did, and so I owed it to her to keep my distance, much as I might regret it. I had too much going on in my life to think about getting close to anybody.

  Ominous dreams and business headaches were bad enough, but there was yet a third issue that bothered me when it came to forming any kind of potential relationship.

  It so happens that I like to study my family history. A pretty harmless hobby, for the most part. But one of the things you start to notice after a while is what killed everybody. Not to sound morbid or anything, but you can’t help seeing patterns if there happen to be any. I guess I was about sixteen when I first noticed an odd pattern in the way my father’s family died. Not a single one of them ever lived to see his thirtieth birthday. It wasn’t obvious at first because it didn’t seem to affect people who married in; only the natural-born members. But once you did notice, it was plain as a pikestaff.

  My father drowned at twenty-five. My Aunt Linda was killed in a car wreck at eighteen. Grandfather died of cancer at twenty-nine. And the list went on, and on, and depressingly on. It was always something different every time, but always something commonplace like that. Nothing you could put your finger on and say it was anything unusual.

  At first I thought I was imagining things, that it was just a string of nasty coincidences which didn’t really mean anything. But when the list gets as long as your arm and there are still no exceptions, then you have to start wondering if there might be something else at work.

  In fact, in my darker moods I was almost certain the McGraths had our own private version of the Mummy’s Curse, and I was the next one whose head was on the block. Sometimes I felt like I might as well have an expiration date stamped on the bottom of my foot, like a carton of milk.

  Of course I didn’t know that. I couldn’t prove it, the way you’d prove something in a book. But I’d seen the dates on the tombstones. I watched my father drown. I drove past the spot where Aunt Linda died, every time I went to Longview. It was hard not to at least semi-believe it, after all that, and Matthieu’s warning about evil sorcerers only inflamed my fears even more. I never talked about it much, but it was always there in the back of my mind, a dark suspicion that I didn’t really want to think about too often.

  But suffice it to say, I believed it enough to take it seriously. And that along with everything else made me hesitant to get involved with Lisa, or anybody else for that matter.

  I’ve always believed it was cruel and selfish to knowingly drag another human being into danger and heartache, if you have any choice in the matter. Least of all a person you claim to love. I’m not that selfish, or at least I hope I’m not. There’s such a thing as honor, you know, even when it hurts.

  But still. . . I’d be lying if I said I never thought about love and family and all those things. I was always brought up to believe that family is everything, that I have an obligation to the past and to the future, to honor my parents and love my children. In my heart of hearts, nothing would have pleased me better than to find my one and only true love and then settle down to raise corn, kids, and tomatoes at Goliad and live happily ever after.

  Sound funny, coming from a young guy? Well, maybe so. But that’s who I am and I’m not ashamed of it, and I know well enough that I’m not the only boy who ever thought likewise. You might be surprised how many of us think that way, if you took the time to ask.

  But they say you always wish the most for the things you know you can never have, and for that reason among others I could almost wish I’d never bumped into Lisa again at all. I liked her too much, and that made things hard.

  I probably should have found something more productive to do when I got home, but I grabbed my guitar and went to sit under the hickory trees in the back yard to play a few songs. They say music soothes the savage beast, or I guess in my case the troubled spirit. I love all music, but besides red-dirt, my favorite is southern gospel, or blue-eyed soul as Mama always likes to call it. Her father, my Grandpa Tommy, used to play in a band called Southern Psalms when he was young, and when me and Marcus and Cyrus Clay decided to start up a band after high school, he gave me his original 1939 twelve-string Martin acoustic guitar as a graduation present. It’s from him that I get my love of music, and my middle name, and the color of my hair. On a small bronze plate at the foot was the name Tommy Lee Grey, Avinger, Texas and below it the inscription:

  To the Lord God Almighty, the Creator of all Music,

  May the Hands that play these strings give You glory.

  I always liked that, although I’ve wondered many times why old folks always seem to want to capitalize every other word that way. Anyway, if you don’t know anything about guitars, then I’ll go ahead and tell you Martins are the best that money can buy, especially the old ones. At first I’d been so intimidated by such an awesome instrument that I’d been afraid to actually play it much, but Grandpa Tommy only laughed and told me to use it for what it was meant for instead of treating it like it was made of gold leaf. So that’s what I did, and ever since then I’ve hauled that guitar around with me all over half of Texas and parts of three other states. It’s one of my most prized possessions.

  So I played His Life is an Open Book, and then Send the Fire and Nebo’s Crossing, singing the words when I felt like it and sometimes not. I can’t sing quite as well as Cyrus, but I’ve been told I have a nice voice. And just like always, it gave me some peace in the midst of my troubles.

  We’d been up till two a.m. the night before, playing a hundred-dollar gig at the Little Brown Jug down on the Longview highway. That’s a honky-tonk place where guys get busted over the head with pool cues and beer bottles pretty regularly, and the smoke is so thick it’ll make your eyes water and it feels almost like walking through a big bowl of tapioca pudding. I don’t much like to play at bars, but when money’s tight then it sure does make it hard to turn down a paid gig. At least there hadn’t been any fights, but I was still tired from the late night.

  So after a while I gave up playing and lay down on the ground instead, looking up at the hickory leaves dancing in the sunlight and using my guitar as a headrest. I pulled my hat down over my face to shade my eyes from the sun, and soon enough I dozed off in spite of myself.

  And dreamed.

  I found myself standing on a rocky hill under a grove of enormous pine trees, disoriented and not sure where I was. Below me was a stony path under the light of a full moon, and presently I saw a girl in a white gown walking silently along. She was paler than usual, but I recognized her immediately as Lisa.

  She passed by me, and I silently climbed down to follow her, till we came to the mouth of a cave in the side of the hill. It was dark inside once we passed beyond where the moon reached, but not quite. A faint gray glow seemed to come from everywhere, just enough to find our way. I followed her down a winding staircase cut out of the living rock, and at last the tunnel opened out into a huge cavern. And here was a wonder of wonders.

  The path went on through a forest of trees, but not like the kind I knew. These were of crystal and glass, brittle and glittering even in the weak light. They were exquisitely beautiful, and as we passed by I brok
e off a twig from one of the crystal branches.

  Then we came to a lake with troubled waters dark as soot, and far off on an island in the middle of the lake was a palace blazing with light. A bridge of silver filigree crossed over to the island, and when we arrived I saw a finely-dressed young man awaiting us.

  Up till then I hadn’t seen anything especially alarming, but when we got close enough I saw that the man was nothing but a skeleton dressed in fine clothes. Lisa seemed not to notice, and she laughed and joined hands with him. Then for several hours I watched them dance, till morning came and she climbed the stone stairway back to the outside world. I couldn’t help but notice that she looked even paler then, weak and sickly, indeed almost at the very edge of death. It was only when we reached the sunlit world again that she seemed to revive a little, but somehow I knew the man in the blazing palace hadn’t turned her loose for long.

  I pulled the crystal twig from my pocket and watched it crumble to black dust in the morning sunlight, and then a voice from above me spoke.

  “Save her from the evil one,” it said.

  Then I woke up, covered in sweat and gripping the grass with my fists. I hate the ones like that, when I know they mean something really important but I can’t guess what it is. Who was the evil one, and what did all the rest of it signify? I couldn’t tell, except that like all the others lately it was obviously something really bad. And worst of all, what was I supposed to do about it?

  I did not need this. It wasn’t like I didn’t already have enough of my own problems to deal with.

  “What’s wrong with you, boy?” Marcus’s voice cut through the haze of reverie, startling me.

  “Huh?” I asked, still half-dozing. I pulled the hat from my face, shielding my eyes from the light. Marcus was looking down at me, and I yawned and sat up.

  “You were twitching and talking to yourself, so I wondered what was wrong,” he said.

  “Oh. I was only dreaming, sort of. That’s all. Sorry about that,” I said.

  “Dreaming about what? Hot mermaid babes in real estate jackets again?” he teased, and I laughed a little. Back when I was eighteen I had a dream about a mermaid who was also a real estate agent and came up out of the sea wearing an old-fashioned gold-colored Century 21 jacket. I never did figure out what that one was supposed to mean, although I have to admit she was a smokin’ hot babe and it sure was entertaining. I told Marcus about it years ago, and he’s never ceased to think it was hilarious.

  “No, not this time. It was about a skeleton, mostly,” I said.

  “Dang, boy, you’re weirder than I thought,” Marcus said.

  “Ha, ha, very funny,” I said.

  “So what do you think it means? Anything?” he asked, and I hesitated. Marcus knows all about my dreams, with good reason. But he also knows I don’t like to talk about them much.

  You see, on Christmas Eve my senior year, I dreamed I saw a boy about my age sitting in his bedclothes at the pole barn in the Ore City park, fifteen miles away. I never would have had any reason to go nosing around over there ordinarily, and especially not on Christmas morning. But to make a long story short, I went out there to check, and sure enough there he was, exactly like I saw him in my dream, shivering in the cold and wrapped in a blanket with nowhere to go.

  You probably guessed by now it was Marcus. Turned out his dad got drunk and kicked him out of the house that morning, so he wandered over to the pole barn and tried to think what to do. Christmas Day is a bad time to be out on the streets; everything is closed, and nobody wants visitors. We didn’t even know each other at the time; he went to school at Ore City and I went to Avinger, and we’d never had a reason to meet before then. He was already eighteen, barely, so I guess Mr. Cumby had a right to throw him out if he wanted to, but I thought then as I think now what a sorry thing it was to do.

  So I offered him a place to stay for a while and a job helping out around the ranch. I guess I probably should have asked first, but when I brought him home that day Mama treated him like a long-lost son, just like she would have done with any other lost kid who needed a place to be loved. He’s been here ever since, and in all that time I couldn’t ask for a better friend.

  Except when he gets some kind of bright idea in his head, and then he can be stubborn as a green-broke stallion. Like now.

  “Cody, I’ve been thinking. I was listening to the radio the other day and there’s a preacher down in Longview that was talking about dreams and visions. Why don’t you go see him? Maybe he could help you figure somethin’ out, you know?” he asked.

  That was actually one of the more sensible suggestions Marcus had come up with lately, and I frowned, thinking about it. The simple and obvious dreams I never needed any help with, but what was I supposed to think about crystal forests and dancing skeletons? I’d tried most everything I could think of at one time or another to help figure out the obscure ones like that, from psychology textbooks on dream interpretation to simply praying for understanding, but so far nothing had ever worked. I knew in the old days there were people who could understand the meaning of dreams and visions, like Daniel did for the king of Babylon, and Joseph did for Pharaoh and others. I’d often wished I knew somebody like that; it would make the whole thing so much simpler. But since I didn’t, I was ready to try just about anything.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  Marcus gave me the name and address, and I decided it was worthwhile to go ahead down there and see the man.

  It turned out to be a non-denominational church over on the east side of town, and of course those are always a gamble when it comes to what they teach and believe, but I figured I didn’t have to listen if I didn’t want to. It’s not that I hadn’t asked my own pastor about the dreams before; I had, several times. We’d even prayed together about it. But nothing had ever come of that, and I decided I had nothing to lose by asking somebody else.

  So I went inside and sat down in one of the pews to think for a few minutes, not sure what I wanted to say or even who to say it to. The office was empty and there didn’t seem to be anybody around, although I knew there had to be, since the building was open.

  I hadn’t been there five minutes when a janitor appeared from one of the doors beside the podium.

  “Excuse me, sir, can you tell me where I can find the pastor?” I asked him, getting up from the pew. He gave me a long look, and then shook his head.

  “Nobody here but me, son,” he said.

  “Oh, all right,” I said, disappointed. I was just about to ask him what time I needed to come back, when he got close enough to hand me a folded-up sheet of notebook paper. I took it without thinking.

  “What’s this?” I asked, looking down at it.

  “Go see him. He can tell you what you need to know,” the man said.

  I looked down at the paper, which had the name Brandon Stone written on it, along with an address in Ravanna, Arkansas. I didn’t know who that was, but Ravanna is only about thirty miles from Goliad. I looked up to ask for clarification, but during the second when I glanced at the paper the janitor had already disappeared.

  Well, I’ve had my share of odd experiences now and then, and I guess compared to some of them, a disappearing janitor doesn’t amount to much. I looked at the paper again and figured I had nothing to lose by going to see Mr. Stone, whoever he was.

  My first thought was to wonder if he might be some relation of Lisa’s, unlikely as that seemed. I left the church mighty puzzled, but at least I had something concrete I could do for a change.

  There were still a good three or four hours till it got dark, and I decided that was plenty of time to run over to Ravanna. It wouldn’t take more than an hour or so to get out there and find the place.