I needed feedback about what to make of the witch’s final visit to my bedroom the previous day. The only other person with unnerving experience of her dark side was Mr. Yoshioka.
When I rang his doorbell on the fifth floor, having brought six of my mother’s chocolate-chip cookies on a paper plate, I didn’t know if he would be home. He worked long hours, sometimes on Saturdays, too. But when he opened the door, he seemed to be expecting me.
“Will this be a celebration, Jonah Kirk?”
“A little bit, yeah, I guess.”
He accepted the cookies, and I took off my shoes. Minutes later, we were sitting in his living room with tea, cookies, and those odd little cakes that I pretended to like more than I really did.
I told him everything about Eve Adams that I’d so far withheld, including that her real name was evidently Fiona Cassidy and that I had first seen her in a dream. I didn’t mention Miss Pearl, who had brought me that dream as surely as she’d brought me a piano, because she was a mystery in herself, and one mystery layered on another seemed sure to confuse us at a time when I desperately wanted some clarity.
Although Mr. Yoshioka had been understanding in the past and treated me with the same seriousness that he would bring to any conversation with an adult, I was prepared for his expression of disbelief when I spoke of a prophetic dream. Instead, he listened without expression and, when I finished, he nodded and sipped his tea and closed his eyes as if to consider what I had revealed.
His silence somewhat unsettled me, so that I said, “It’s true, sir. She was in the dream, the two of us in some tight space, with the sounds of rushing water all around.”
He opened his eyes and said, “There is no need to insist. I do believe you. When I was fifteen, I dreamed that my mother and sister perished in a fire. Seven days later, they did indeed burn to death. Their screams were at first very shrill, sharp with pain and terror. But soon they became like the haunting cries of certain nocturnal birds, as if they were beyond pain but not beyond sorrow, as if they were sorrowing over their untimely departure from this world as their souls were borne away on wings and into silence.”
As on my previous visit, my host had provided a tiny pitcher of orange-blossom honey, with which I had sweetened the tea that he took straight. His revelation was so horrible that I could not think what to say, and I picked up my cup and took a sip to buy a little time to process what he had just told me. Although the tea had been sweet a minute ago, it was bitter now, and I put down the cup.
“When did it happen?” I asked.
“On September fourteenth, 1942, but I do not wish to talk about it further. I brought it up only to explain why I accept the truth of your dream without reservation. Over the years, Jonah Kirk, I have come to believe that we who have suffered greatly may from time to time be given the grace of foretelling, so that we may act to spare ourselves from further torment.”
“But in spite of your dream, your mother and sister … they died seven days later.”
“Because of my failure to believe in that grace, because of my anger and my bitterness and my denial.”
Usually, the condition of his heart could be read, if at all, only in his eyes, for he wasn’t given to dramatic facial expressions. Now, however, for a moment, his face became a portrait of desolation.
“Because of my failure,” he repeated.
I liked him too much to bear easily his self-condemnation, and a kind of grief overcame me. Although I was curious, I knew better than to ask him to tell me more about that mortal fire twenty-four years earlier.
Apprehension led me to speak. “You said … you said foretelling is sometimes a gift for people who’ve suffered greatly. But I dreamed of Fiona Cassidy … and I haven’t suffered greatly.”
He said, “Then in time, you will.”
35
That night I dreamed of moonlit woods through which a creature unseen stalked me, of a moon-washed shore along a dark coast where black waves tumbled to the sand and where I felt drawn into the water even though I knew that beneath the turbulent surface swam something more ominous than mere sharks, of a moon-dappled plain where massive slabs of rock thrust skyward like pieces of the shattered vaults of fallen castles and where some presence whispered to me from among the ruins, enticing me into byways where not even the faintest blush of moonlight revealed the way.
Fright woke me. I sat up in bed, listening to the near-total darkness, but nothing in it rustled or creaked, or whispered. After
a minute, I stood my pillow on end against the headboard and leaned back, waiting for my heart to stop knocking like a horse’s hooves on cobblestones. In a while, I could hear the distant traffic noises of the city at night trembling against the window glass.
My dream of fluidly shifting locations and unspecified monsters was too vague to be prophetic. All of it had been just the phantasms of the sleeping mind, and I knew that if ever I were stalked by an enemy of murderous intention or enticed into a moonless dark where Death waited, the fatal moment would not occur in any of the eerie landscapes from which I had awakened.
I harked back to my conversation with Mr. Yoshioka after he had said that in time I would suffer greatly.
Why would she take those things from the candy tin—the picture of me sleeping, the stuffed-toy eye?
In part to unsettle you, to say to you that by her possession of them, she will remain aware of you.
In part? Why else?
Since our previous tea, in which you raised the subject of juju, I have researched the issue—juju in Africa and the variation that in the New World is called voodoo. If this woman truly believes in black magic, she might keep the photograph of you for use as an effigy.
A what?