A tattered hot-pink awning with a scalloped edge overhung the entrance. In memory, I heard the hail of bullets that had shattered the windows and doors, and I saw Simon Varner in a black jumpsuit and black ski mask, sweeping a fully automatic rifle left to right, right to left.
He had been a cop. Secondarily a cop. Primarily an insane cultist. There had been four of them. They murdered one of their own, and I killed one of them. The other two were now in prison for life, where they still worshipped their satanic master.
In that moment of my return, I felt as though I were a spirit, having perished in a forgotten conflict, my body shed and left to decompose in some far field. I was unaware of moving my legs, and I no longer either heard or felt my feet stepping across the dirty travertine. I seemed to float toward the ice-cream shop, as if the white beam before me came not from the flashlight that I held but from some mysterious distant source, levitating and transporting me toward Burke & Bailey’s.
The broken glass had been broomed into small jagged piles. Even under a thin film of dust, the sharp edges of the shards sparkled. I thought, Here lie your hopes and dreams, shattered and swept aside, and could not raise a ghost of the optimism that previously I had been able to conjure even in the bleakest moments.
As I crossed the threshold, I saw in memory Stormy Llewellyn as she had been that day, dressed in her work clothes: pink shoes, white socks, a hot-pink skirt, a matching pink-and-white blouse, and a perky pink cap. She’d sworn that when she had her own ice-cream shop, which she expected to secure by the time she was twenty-four, if not sooner, she would not provide her employees with dorky uniforms. No matter how frivolous the outfit she wore, she was an incomparable beauty with jet-black hair, dark eyes of mysterious depth, a lovely face, and perfect form.
Was. Had been. No more.
I think you look adorable.
Get real, odd one. I look like a goth Gidget.
She’d been standing behind the service counter when Simon Varner opened fire. Perhaps she had looked up as the windows shattered, had seen the ominous masked figure, and thought not of death but of me. She had always considered her own needs less than those of others; and I believe that her last thought in this world wouldn’t have been regret at dying so young but instead concern for me, that I should be left alone in my grief.
Maybe one day when I have my own shop, we can work together …
The ice-cream business doesn’t move me. I love to fry.
I guess it’s true.
What?
Opposites attract.
Until now, I had not returned to Burke & Bailey’s after that dreadful day. I knew that suffering can purify, that it’s a kind of fire that can be worth enduring, but there were degrees of it to which I chose not to subject myself.
The tables and chairs were gone, as well as freezers and milkshake mixers and other equipment. Attached to the back wall was the menu of flavors, topped by Burke & Bailey’s newest offering at that time: COCONUT CHERRY CHOCOLATE CHUNK.
I remembered having referred to it as cherry chocolate coconut chunk, whereupon she had corrected me.
Coconut cherry chocolate chunk. You’ve got to get the proper adjective in front of chunk or you’re screwed.
I didn’t realize the grammar of the ice-cream industry was so rigid.
Describe it your way, and some weasel customers will eat the whole thing and then ask for their money back because there weren’t chunks of coconut in it. And don’t ever call me adorable again. Puppies are adorable.
At the end of the long counter, I opened a low gate and entered the work area from which Stormy had been serving customers when the shooting started. The flashlight revealed vinyl tiles littered with plastic spoons, pink-and-white plastic straws, and dust balls that quivered away from me as I moved.
I relied on intuition to stop at the very place that Stormy had been standing when she’d been cut down. The stains underfoot were more than a year and a half old, and I considered them only briefly before moving past them and sitting on the floor.
This was the still point around which my life turned, the axis of my world. Here she had died.
I switched off the flashlight and sat in darkness so complete that it seemed as if all the light had gone out of the world and would never return.
After her death, her spirit had lingered for some days this side of the veil. My grief was so heavy, so bitter, that I couldn’t endure it, and for a while I lived in denial. Lingering spirits look as real to me as do living people. They are not translucent. Neither do they glow with supernatural energy. If I touch them, they have substance. They do not talk, however, and Stormy’s silence should have at once told me that her spirit had left her body and that before me stood the essence of the girl I loved, her splendid soul, but not the girl complete and physical. My denial was close to madness; I imagined conversations between us, made meals that she could not eat, poured wine she could not drink, planned a wedding that could never be consummated. By my desperate longing, I held her to this world days after she should have passed on to the next.
Now, sitting on the floor, behind the counter in the ice-cream shop, I spoke to her, unconcerned that with my paranormal talent I might draw her back into this troubled world. Those who pass to the next life do not return. Not even the power of love, as intense a love as any a man had ever felt for a woman, could open a door in the barrier between Stormy and me.
“It won’t be long now,” I said softly.
I felt that she could hear my words even a world away. That may sound weird to you, but stranger things have happened to me. When you have come face-to-face with a senoculus, a six-eyed demon with human form and the head of a bull, you grow more open-minded about what might and might not be possible.
Besides, I have no choice but to believe that all our lives are woven through with grace, because only then could the promise made to me and Stormy come true.
Six years earlier, when we were sixteen, we went to Pico Mundo’s annual county fair. At the back of a carnival-arcade tent stood a fortune-telling machine. We dropped a quarter in the slot and asked if we would have a long and happy marriage. The card given to us couldn’t have been more reassuring: YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.
Framed behind glass, that card had hung above Stormy’s bed when she still lived. I carried it now in my wallet.
I whispered again, “It won’t be long now.”
I don’t believe it’s possible to imagine a favorite scent, to recall a fragrance as vividly as one can hear a tune in the mind’s ear or see in the mind’s eye a place visited long ago. Nevertheless, as I sat there in the lightless shop, I smelled the peach-scented shampoo that Stormy had used. After a shift cooking in the Pico Mundo Grille, when my hair had sometimes smelled like hamburger grease and fried onions, she gave me that same shampoo; but I hadn’t been able to find the brand anymore and hadn’t used it in months.
“They’re coming to Pico Mundo. More cultists. Inspired by those who … murdered you. They aren’t content anymore with quiet rituals and human sacrifices on secret altars. What happened here has shown them a more thrilling way to … practice their faith. In fact, I think they’re already in town.”
No sooner had those words escaped me than I heard laughter in the distance and then voices echoing through the mall.
I started to get to my feet, but a blush of light rose across the face of the darkness, and I stayed below the counter.