White Cat (Curse Workers 1)

The dirt mall on Route 9 is less a mall and more one big warehouse with aisles of individual shops separated by counters or curtains. Barron and I would get Philip or Grandad to drive us, and then we’d spend the day eating hog dogs and buying cheap knives to hide in our boots. Barron would complain about being stuck with me, but as soon as we got there, he’d disappear to chat up the girl who worked selling pickles out of vats.

The place doesn’t look all that different from how it did then. Out front a woman stands by a barrel of pastel-colored baskets while a guy is trying to hawk a bunch of rabbit pelts. Three for five bucks.

Inside, the smells of fried food make my stomach growl. I head toward the back, past the eel-skin wallet stall and the place with the heavy silver rings and pewter dragons, toward the fortune-tellers with their velvet skirts and marked cards. They charge five dollars to say “You sometimes feel lonely, even in the company of others” or “You once experienced a tragic loss that has given you an unusual perceptiveness” or even “You are usually shy, but in the future you are going to find yourself the center of attention.”

There are lots of little malls like these in Jersey, but this one’s only twenty minutes from Carney. The fortune-tellers’ real business is selling charms made by retired residents; a few workers even freelance their services out of the back. It’s the best place to go for a little cheap curse work that’s not directly related to the crime families. And the charms are a lot more reliable and varied than the kind you get from a regular mall or the gas station.

I walk up to a scarf-draped table. “Crooked Annie,” I say, and the old woman smiles. One of her teeth is black with rot. She’s wearing plastic and glass rings over her purple satin gloves, and she’s got on several layers of dresses with tiny bells along the hem.

“I know you, Cassel Sharpe. How’s your mother?”

Annie’s been selling magic for longer than I’ve been alive. She’s old school. Discreet. And with as little knowledge as I have, the one thing I’m sure of is that I can’t afford to share it.

“Jail. Got caught working some rich guy.”

Annie sighs. She’s in the life, so she’s not surprised or embarrassed for me, like people at school would be. She shifts her weight forward. “Out soon?”

I nod, although I’m not sure. Mom keeps saying she didn’t do it (which I don’t believe), that the evidence against her is prejudice and hand waving (which I sort of do believe), and that it will be overturned on the appeal that’s been dragging on. “You miss your mother, don’t you?”

I nod again, although I’m not sure about that, either. It’s easier with her slightly removed, unable to upturn our lives at a moment’s notice. From jail she’s a benevolent, slightly crazy matriarch. At home she’d go back to being a despot.

“I need to buy a couple of charms. For memory. Good ones.”

“What? You think I sell ones that are no good?”

I smile. “I know you do.”

That turns her grin wicked. She pats my face with a satin-covered hand. I remember that I haven’t shaved and that my cheeks are probably rough enough to catch the fabric, but she doesn’t seem to mind. “Just like your brothers. You know what they used to say about boys like you? Clever as the devil and twice as pretty.”

It’s kind of a ridiculous compliment, but it embarrasses me into looking at the floor. “I have some questions, too. About memory magic. Look, I know I’m not a worker, but I really need to know.”

Annie pushes aside a worn pack of tarot cards. “Sit,” she says, and rummages under the table, pulling out a large plastic toolbox. Inside it is an array of rocks. She pulls out a shining piece of onyx with a hole bored through the middle, and a chunk of cloudy pink crystal. “First things first. Here are the charms you’re asking for.”

Lots of really good amulets look like junk. These don’t look so bad.

“I hate to ask,” I say, sitting down backward on the hard metal folding chair. “But—”

“You want something fancier?”

I shake my head. “Just smaller.”

She mutters under her breath and turns back to her stock. “Here, I’ve got this.” She holds up a pebble, maybe a piece of driveway gravel.

“I’ll take these,” I say, pointing to the pebble and the onyx circle. “In fact, give me three of the little ones if you’ve got them. Plus the onyx.”

Annie raises her eyebrows but says only, “Forty. Each.”

Normally I would dicker with her, but I figure she’s inflating the cost so she can justify giving me the information. I pull out the bills and slide them over.

She grins her black-toothed grin. “So, what do you want to know?”

“How can you tell if your memories have been changed? Is there just a black hole in your thoughts? Can memories be replaced with other memories?”

She lights a hand-rolled cigarette that stinks of green tea leaves. “I’m not admitting to knowing anybody when I answer this. I’m just speculating, you understand? All I do is I make some of these amulets and I sell a few that my friends make, and the government hasn’t managed to make that illegal yet.”

“Sure,” I say, affronted. “Just because I’m not—”

“Don’t get your nose in a twist. I’m not explaining for you. I’m explaining it for the edification of anyone who happens to be listening in on this conversation. And they do.”

“Who does?”

She gives me a long look, like I’m slow, and sucks on her cigarette, blowing herbal smoke into the air. “The government.”

“Oh,” I say. Even though I’m pretty sure she’s just paranoid, possibly with a touch of dementia, I feel an intense urge to look behind me.

“On to your questions. How it feels depends on who did the working. The best workers make it seamless. They’ll remove a memory and replace it with a new one. The worst ones are slobs. They might be able to make you remember you owe them money, but if there’s no money in your pocket and you don’t remember spending any either, you’re going to start asking questions.

“Most memory workers fall somewhere in the middle in terms of skill. They leave behind pieces, threads. A blue sky without the rest of a day. Aching sorrow with no cause.”

“Clues,” I say.

“Sure, if you want to call them that.” She takes another long drag on her tea cigarette. “There’s four different kinds of memory curses. A memory worker can rip memories right out of your head, leaving that big hole you’re talking about, or they can give you new memories of things that never happened. They can sift through your memories and learn stuff, or they can simply block your access to your own memories.”

“Why would they do that last one? The blocking access one?” I touch the smooth black circle of the memory stone. It glides against the pad of my gloved finger.

“Because it’s easier to block access than to remove a memory entirely, which makes it cheaper. Just like changing a single piece of a memory is easier than creating a whole new one. And if you remove the block, then the memory comes back, which is nice if you want to be able to reverse the process.”

I nod my head, although I’m not sure I’m following.

“A shady memory worker will charge for ripping a memory but just put a block in. Then he’ll go and charge the victim to take the block back out again. That’s bad business, but what do these kids know? They’ve got no respect anymore.“ She looks at me intently. “Your family never told you any of this?”

“I’m not a worker,” I remind her, but shame heats my face. I should know; my family should have trusted me enough. That they didn’t speaks volumes about what they think of me.

“But your brother—,” she says.

“Can it be reversed?” I ask, interrupting her. I really don’t want to talk about my family right now.

She looks at me so intently that I drop my gaze. Then she clears her throat and starts talking like I wasn’t just incredibly rude. “Memory magic’s permanent. But that doesn’t mean people can’t change their minds. You can make someone remember that you’re the hottest thing out there, but they can take a good look at you and decide otherwise.”

I force a smile, but my stomach feels like I’ve swallowed lead. “What about transformation work?”

She shrugs her shoulders. The bells on her skirts jingle. “What about it?”

“Is it permanent too?”

“Another transformation worker can undo it, so long as the person was turned into a living thing. A changer can turn a boy into a boat and then back to a boy, but the kid won’t live through the transformation. Once a living thing becomes a nonliving thing, that’s that.”

That’s that. I want to ask her about a girl changed into a cat, but I can’t risk being that specific. I’ve risked enough.

“Thanks,” I say, standing. I’m not sure what I learned, except that the answers I need aren’t going to be easy to get.

She winks. “You tell that grandfather of yours that Crooked Annie was asking after him.”

“I will,” I say, although I know I won’t. If I told him I was down near Carney, he’d want to know why.

I start down the aisle when I remember something and turn back. “Hey, is Mrs. Z still living in town?”

Lila’s mother. I think of how I hung up the pay phone at the sound of her voice, about the way she looked at me when she found me in the hotel room at Lila’s birthday party.

How for years I thought she saw some secret darkness in me that even I hadn’t seen.

“Sure is,” Annie says. “Can’t leave Carney, or that husband of hers is going to come after her.”

“Come after her?”

“He thinks she knows where that daughter of theirs got to and won’t tell him. I told her not to worry. She’ll outlast him. Even the Resurrection Diamond can’t work forever.”

“That stone he got in Paris with Lila?” I remembered the diamond had something to do with Rasputin, but I didn’t remember that it had a name.

“Supposed to hold a curse so that the wearer never dies. Sounds like a load of crap, right? That would mean a stone could do more than deflect curses. But it seems to work. No one’s killed him yet, and plenty of people have tried. I’d love to have a look at it.” She tilts her head to the side. “You were in love with his girl Lila, huh? Now that I think of it, I remember you mooning after her. You and that brother of yours.”

“That was a long time ago.”

She leans up to kiss my cheek, which startles me into flinching. “Two brothers in love with the same woman never goes well.”

* * *

Barron dated lots of other girls while he dated Lila. Girls his age, girls that went to his school and had their own cars. Lila would call and ask for Barron, and I would tell some obvious sloppy lie that I hoped she saw through, but she always believed. Then we’d talk until either Barron came home in time to say good night to her or she fell asleep.

The worst times, though, were when he was home and he talked to her in a bored voice while he watched television.

“She’s just a kid,” he told me when I asked about her. “She’s not my real girlfriend. Besides, she lives, like, two hours away.”

“Why don’t you dump her, then?” I thought about the sound of her breath on the phone, evening out into sleep. I didn’t understand how he could want anyone more than her.

He grinned. “I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”

I slammed my hand down on the breakfast table. Stacks of plates and junk quivered. “You’re just dating her because she’s Zacharov’s daughter.”

His grin widened. “You don’t know that. Maybe I’m dating her just to mess with you.”

I wanted to tell her the truth about him, but then she’d have stopped calling.

The yakuza put pearls in their penises, one for every year they spend in jail. A guy makes a slit in the skin of his penis with a strip of bamboo and pushes the pearl inside. It must be spectacularly painful. I figured it couldn’t be nearly as bad to shove three tiny pebbles under the skin of my leg.

In the backseat of Grandad’s car I fold up the left leg of my jeans to my knee. I bought what I thought were the necessary supplies at the nearby mart, and now, in the parking lot, I dump them out of the plastic bag and onto the seat. First I shave a three-inch spot on my calf with a disposable razor and splash it clean with bottled water. It’s slow going. The razor’s cheap, and by the time I’m done, my skin is red and bleeding from tiny cuts.

I realize I don’t have anything to mop up what’s likely to be more blood than I expected. I take off my shirt and press it to the skin, ignoring the sting. I have a bottle of hydrogen peroxide to sterilize with, but I don’t. Maybe I’ll have the balls to use it at the end, but right now my leg is hurting enough.

Sliding a razor blade out of a box of them, I look guiltily out the window of the car. Families are walking through the lot, children pushed in the baskets of carts, men carrying trays of coffees. Don’t look, I tell them silently, and slide the sharp edge over my leg.

It goes in so easily and with so little pain that it frightens me. I feel only a sharp sting and a cold strangeness move through my limbs. It even seems to trick my skin, because for a moment there’s only a line on my leg where the flesh parts. Then blood blooms along the cut, first in spots, then welling up in a long strip of red.