“This is nuts.”
“If you keep up your useless commentary,” the diviner warned, “I’ll have to put a second needle through the meat of my palm.”
“Not if we stop this right now.” Bibi pushed her chair back from the table.
Calida grimaced. “We’ve begun the session. We must complete it, close the door I’ve opened. Or those psychic shock waves I mentioned earlier won’t stop. They’re a beacon. An irresistible summons. You’ll have visitors you do not want.”
Bibi’s skepticism wasn’t absolute. The piercing needle and the blood argued for Calida’s sincerity, if not for her sanity. After a hesitation, Bibi sat. She pulled her chair closer to the table.
Her mother and father had not become strangers to her because of their interest in divination and this bizarre gift. The fullness of her love hadn’t diminished whatsoever. Her comfortable image of them, however, was evidently an inadequate likeness, and her long-held assumptions about their interior lives now seemed deficient, immature, if not na?ve.
Stirring her right hand through the wooden tiles in the silver bowl, Calida seemed to speak to an invisible presence. “I bleed for answers. I cannot be denied. Attend me.” To Bibi, she said, “How many letters should I draw?”
“I don’t know. How would I know?”
“You’ve got to participate, girl. How many letters?”
Bibi looked at the kitchen window above the sink and was only somewhat relieved to see that indeed it had been locked. “Eleven,” she said, though she had no reason why that number and not another. “Eleven letters.”
Paxton and Danny didn’t believe in ghosts. Perry allowed for the possibility, but never expected to see one. Only Gibb was as certain of the reality of unmoored spirits as he was of the existence of the air he breathed, for his mother, who had raised him alone, sometimes saw his dead father walking in the fields behind their house or standing under the oak tree in the yard, or sitting on the porch, smiling and translucent. On those occasions, she said it made sense that dear Harry would decline to move on as souls should, considering that he had loved her and Gibb as no man had ever before loved his wife and son. Gibb never glimpsed the apparition, though he yearned to see it. He knew it must be real, because his mother never lied; and each time she saw the wraith, she grew luminous with delight.
Yet none of the four SEALs, including open-minded Perry and true-believing Gibb, felt that this town in the barren outback of Hell might be haunted. If anyplace in the world should have made you feel that it lay aswarm with otherworldly presences, it should have been this doomed village. But perhaps the cruelties visited upon these people had been so demonic and vicious, the murders committed with such cold-blooded pleasure and violence, that the many victims had been killed twice, in body and in spirit, and had no choice of either an afterlife or a lingering haunt.
At 3:00 A.M., when the SEALs had left their surveillance post on the roof, moving into the narrow streets with a stealth that only ghosts could have matched, the town seemed never to have supported life, to have been forever as dead as any crater on the airless moon that shed now only a quarter of its potential light. The dwellings were crammed together, each walled from its neighbors, curiously isolated in proximity to the others, segregated, crude and sullen-looking places, lacking any sense of comfort or community, each family a separate tribe on its own speck of an archipelago, so that no aura of history adhered to the structures, either. Nor did they serve even as monuments to those who had once inhabited them.
Pax wondered if this deadest of dead places would be the death of him, but he didn’t dwell on the thought. Difficult as it might be for civilians to believe, a battle-hardened SEAL valued his life less than the lives of his buddies, less even than his honor, which was the only attitude to have if you wanted to win a war.