Tessellation
by
George Potter
To hell with you, spirit.
I did not return to this place to do battle with spirits. I returned to this place for my own selfish and important reasons. It was you, spirit, who initiated this conflict. It was you, spirit, who laid down the gauntlet.
So be it.[/i]
"Are you OK?" she asks.
I swim up out of almost sleep, the night and the situation at hand shimmer into existence around me.
I am in a sleeping bag. I am naked. I am not alone.
Stars burn above me, spread and scattered like gems on jewel cloth. The air is warm but not hot. The breeze is gentle but insistent. Such nights and such situations are the material of wonderful memories for the young. I am not young. I'm not old, but I'm not young.
Sometimes it feels like I was never young.
"OK it was good." she says, and I can feel her smile in the dark. "But it shouldn't have stolen your voice." She kisses me quickly. "It wasn't that good."
"Sorry." I tell her. "I think I dozed off." And dreamed. And was warned.
She snuggles up to me and sighs. "I gotta go home in a minute. Sorry."
I squeeze her back, for politeness sake. I'm not comfortable here. Something is watching.
"Where are we, anyway?" I whisper.
She laughs. "You must have been higher than I thought. We're up near the head of Pond Creek, 'bout three miles from my house." A yawn. "This is where everybody goes."
Everybody is a fool then, I think. This is not a good place. It's not an evil place either, but it's far from good.
Something is watching.
Something that lives here.
Everybody says that my Mother is a witch. I've never agreed with or denied that claim. I simply shrug and let them make up their own mind.
My mother is a straightforward, often severe woman of 65 who prides herself on her civility, her cooking, and the pack of children she managed to raise despite poverty and hell's own aggravation. In daily life, through daily stress, there is nothing whatsoever mystical or magical about my mother. Those are facts.
But my Mother knows things, that is also a fact. Many strange and unusual things. She knows the herbs to pick to brew the tea to kill the fever after the doctors have given up. She knows the place to go to find the perfect stone to sit in the garden to frighten crows. I have seen her reason with cats and command strange dogs to lie down and be quiet.
Many things.
Before I left her home, before I made the return to the place where I was born, she told me this:
"If you go into the mountains -- and knowing you boy, that's where you'll stay -- you will see and hear things. Don't be afraid. If you don't turn and look at them, they can't hurt you."
I nodded, serious. I'd have laughed at anyone else, and dismissed them as silly. But this was Mother.
She knows things.[/i]
Her name is Shelly and I watch her dress with eyes now adjusted to starlight.
She is not a particularly pretty girl, but I would not call her plain. She has her own face -- unique and beautiful, not pretty. I approve. Pretty is for flowers and little girls in gingham dresses and black suede shoes. Pretty is for the sentimental. I prefer beauty.
"Stop staring at me because I'm fat." she says, tone battling to sound playful but failing. Too much self consciousness coils behind the words, shattering the glib surface. Real pain lies between them.
She's not fat, but I don't tell her that. It's the stock response, it's expected, and -- like all stock responses -- will burden her with a load of assumptions.
"Skinny women bore me." I say instead.
She laughs.
I'm sitting up now, still naked, sleeping bag puddled around my lap. I watch her pull on a pair of pants with two deft motions and button them. She wears men's clothes. A Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt and Lee jeans, topped with a Harley cap. She manages to look sexy as hell in them, too.
She turns and looks at me. "Get dressed." she commands.
"Why?"
She sighs. "Because I don't have time to pull my clothes back off and attack you. I gotta get home. My nephew will be awake at 7 am sharp, and he'll be jumping on top of my head three minutes later. It's almost 2 am."
I comply, and she walks to her car. I dress quickly, and look around at this apparently popular little hangout. This place that screams danger at me on some low frequency deep in my head.
It's just a big wide spot beside a gravel road, more or less flat. Hemmed in by shrubs and bushes, trees a few hundred feet to the east and west, the road running a winding crooked north/south up the side of the hill.
I hear the car crank but refuse to start. I hear Shelly mutter curses.
Yes. I can feel it. Like a vibration in the air, like a finger pointing at me from the dark.
Something is watching.
Something that lives here.
The starter catches and the car roars into life, load and blaring without a muffler.
"Come on!"
As soon as I turn, facing the car and the headlights that spring into the black, the chill hits me. Imaginary sand skitters down my spine. The hair on the back of my neck stands at painful full attention.
I know, way down on that low frequency, that the watcher just let it's face show.
I do not turn and look. I can feel some awful hot breath chuffing from that face, but I do not turn and look. Rigid, electrified, I walk slowly to the car and get in.
We pull out and move down the hill. The watcher stares.
I do not turn and look.
"You're kind of quiet." Shelly says, as soon as we're on our way toward the mouth of the hollow.
"Sorry.' I say.
Long seconds drift by, empty save the vibration of the car and the roar of the unmuffled engine.
"Are you embarrassed?"
I'm surprised. "Excuse me?"
"Embarrassed. For fucking a fat chick who stripped down and got into bed with you an hour after she met you."
Sometimes people say things to you that leave you at this mental crux-point. If you're smart enough, it manifests as a sort of scattered graph. You can choose how you want to respond by following the graph.
I do not baby her. I do not reassure her. I do not apologize.
"That's the only kind of women I've ever fucked." I tell her, and it's the truth.
She knows it's the truth, and she laughs. Really laughs. So hard she has to pull over for a minute to recover. The laughter giggles back up again several times in the nice warm silence that it created.
When she drops me off, she's suddenly troubled.
"We're not, like, boyfriend or girlfriend or anything, right? You don't think that..."
"I'm a boy. You're a girl. We're friends. Haven't you ever watched movies? Anything could happen."
I close the door, and place my hand on the window for a moment. She reaches across and touches it goodbye. I can feel a warm spark jump across the barrier of the fake glass.
She pulls out and drives off, toward a still sleeping nephew and responsibilities she didn't create.
I decide I like her a lot.
I go inside and shower. I consider going to bed. But I can still feel the hair on the back of my neck, restless with the remnants of that electric charge. Something dances uneasily along my spine and I know sleep will be delayed, perhaps for a day or two.
I sit down, still naked, at my computer desk. I position the wheeled swivel chair perfectly in the center of the pentagram that no one but myself and Cat (who has not chosen to make an appearance yet) can see.
I close my eyes and hold my breath, until the silky flow of the circles protection crawls up my skin and encases me.
Everyone laughs at my computer, since it has no case and much of it is tacked to the wall. It's the only way it will run, since it builds up far more heat than even the four heavy duty fans placed at strategic points can handle. On cold nights the things it processes can heat my bedroom.
I never turn it off. Power outages have no effect on it, since it operates under it's own power. To turn it off, intentionally, would destroy it.
I log on.
The hunt begins.
My father is the greatest mechanic this world has ever seen, and only six people know this fact. Three of them are dead and the other three deserve the sort of trust epic poems are written about.
I once watched my father repair and use an engine my younger brother and myself dug out of the ground: a big block Chevy engine that had waited there patiently for twenty three years. Waited for two children to find and rescue it. Waited for the only hands on the planet capable of giving it life again.
He did this in two days.
Years later, he traded that car for our first computer -- a Commodore Vic 20. On that day, my father found his purpose in life.
When I found out what I could do with the computers my father rigged, I discovered my own.
The night before I left his home, he presented me with this rig. [/i]