Free Poltergeist II - The Other Side by James Kahn Page B

Taylor.
    Steve held his bottle high, letting the starlight glitter through its golden shadows. “Me, too,” he said, and took another long swallow. The worm at the bottom of the bottle bounced along the undercurrents. “They say a real man drinks to the last drop—only a chicken’s afraid of swallowing the worm.”
    “It is a strange measure of cowardice and bravery, I think.”
    “Yeah, well—I save the worm for breakfast.” He tried to impress the Indian with false bravado. “Hair of the dog that bit ya, I always say.” He smiled what he supposed was a brash smile and chugged again at the bottle in what he supposed was a devil-may-care manner.
    Taylor smiled sadly at him. “You feel like a leaf at the mercy of the wind, don’t you?”
    Steve was taken off guard. He first impulse was to wisecrack; but something about the stars and Taylor’s voice and the liquor and the strain made him feel suddenly melancholy and open to his own truths. “Yeah, I do, sorta,” he said softly to the ground.
    “Since the day you were born, one way or another, someone has been doing something to you.”
    Now his feelings suddenly flip-flopped, and he became annoyed at this dime-store Indian for making him feel weak. “Hey, I don’t know about that,” he protested.
    “And they have been doing something to you against your will. And by now you’re helpless, like a leaf in the wind.”
    Steve was confused. It was the tequila making him sluggish. “Hey, Chief—why don’t you say what’s on your mind so I can understand it.”
    “You understand,” Taylor replied with the patience of the earth. “No matter how much you like to feel sorry for yourself, you have to change that.” He locked eyes with Steve in order to make him hear. “I am a warrior. A warrior would rather be defeated and die than act against his nature. You are here with me because you want to be here. You should assume full responsibility.”
    “Responsibility for what?” The Indian was beginning to sound like his wife.
    “Everything in your world,” said Taylor. “Everything. Your thoughts, your children, your drinking, your house, this tree, this table, the stars—it’s all alive and part of you, and you are part of it. Part of the pattern.”
    “Okay, I’m responsible for the stars,” Steve said glibly. “What am I supposed to do about it?”
    “Ceremonies help.” Taylor spoke with a knowledgeable flatness, but he was getting peeved by this fool’s disrespect.
    “Ceremonies,” said Steve. “I gotta say I’m not much into ceremonies.”
    “You are irresponsible, then,” Taylor reprimanded. “Warriors and Wise Ones know their own natures, which are contained in the nature of all things, and they perform ceremonies to preserve this order.”
    Steve was feeling sullen in the shadow of this pompous, imperious Indian. He raised his bottle slightly. “I do okay with this little ceremony. Maybe you oughta stop yours and try mine.”
    Taylor sighed. “If the ceremonies stopped, the world would come to an end.”
    Robbie was in his room practicing sitting cross-legged when Carol Anne entered to get her toy phone and guardian angel doll, Katrina, to take downstairs to the makeshift collective bedroom Diane was setting up in the den.
    “Supposed to come downstairs to sleep now,” Carol Anne said to him on her way out the door. When he ignored her, she paused and said, “ Robbie . . . ”
    “From now on, call me Iron Jaw,” he ordered.
    “Robbie, come on,” she said, trying to sound like Mom. “And Mom says don’t forget to clean your braces.”
    “Yeah, okay, okay.” He glowered at her.
    “Don’t ‘okay’ me,” she said in a snit, leaving the room.
    Robbie gave her a parting shot—“You little pest”—and went into the bathroom. He walked past the mirror over the sink, sticking his head out the door to make certain Carol Anne wasn’t around.
    And in that moment a dozen ghoulish faces stared out at him from the depths of