Headlights(88)

I look around the room as if it holds some kind of answer. Standing here by the door, Hannah Lawrence on the bed in front of me. The blizzard outside. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I think we need to talk to it,” she says.

“Talk to it.”

“Ask it what it wants. It spoke to us through Father Sky, it’s spoken to me before, at night. I bet it can do it again.”

“How would we even possibly…”

“It comes when I’m at my darkest, my most afraid,” she says.

I still don’t know what she’s getting at.

She takes a long breath through her mouth and exhales. “I think we have to get scared. Really scared. That’s when it comes. Before, anyway.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I don’t know. I mean, there’s no handbook on this.”

“Okay. So we get scared.” I nod, can’t believe I’m going with this.

“Yeah,” she says.

“Right. So, um … What makes you scared?”

She gives me a look like I am the dumbest man on earth.

“Yeah,” I say. “So … proximity. Not having the nose plug in, I guess?”

She stares at me and nods, her eyes already filling again.

“And … you?” she says after I don’t say anything else.

What do I say to this? A million things run through my mind. Everything.

What comes out is,

“Dancing.”

“… Dancing.”

I clear my throat. Run my good hand over my head again. “This is a stupid idea. I don’t know why I’m listening to any—”

“We can dance.”

“I don’t want to dance!”

“Well, I don’t want to smell you! But if we’re going to get anywhere with—”

“Cowboy dancing.”

“What?”

“Like, um. You know, cowboy waltz. Or square dance, folk dance. Any of it.”

“That scares you.”

“Didn’t used to,” I say. But I don’t give her more than that. I don’t know if I can. “And music. Certain songs. Certain music.”

“Okay,” she says.

Terror in her eyes.

My heart slamming in my chest.

“Okay,” I say. “So … we’re gonna do this?”

“Yeah,” she says. She bites her lip, eyes on me.

The snow outside, the shadow in the bathroom, that book on the bookshelf. That feeling of a great sweeping avalanche, pulling at my feet.

“We call the Witchwalker to us.”





2



There’s a radio in the room, and as soon as I turn it on, it plays Lee Hazlewood’s “Your Sweet Love.” I’m turned away, fiddling with it—pretending to, on the bedside table closer to the door. I take a breath to collect myself.

I try another station, and it’s the same song. This was the song that played all around us in the mountains in my dream.

I dreamt this, Hannah and me, dancing.

How?

I turn. The shadow in the bathroom disappears, as if it doesn’t want to be a part of this.

Hannah is there, her socked feet on the carpet—her boots in the corner behind her—in front of the two chairs. Mine are by the door. I stand again with my back to it.

We watch each other as the song plays. Every nerve in my body at attention.

“So…” I say. “We think it’ll just … come to us? Somehow? If we do this. Do you mean through one of us, like with Father Sky?”

“I don’t think so,” she says. “I mean, it’s never done that with me. As far as I know, anyway. But I think … it might just be in the room, with us. Maybe.”

She’s maybe five foot five. Standing there in jeans and the green sweater. The shoulder of it has fallen down below her collarbone. My eyes catch on it, move back up to her face. Light green eyes focused on me, she fidgets a little, anxious.

She says, “I think it’s like the radio, almost,” she says. “My theory, anyway. Like maybe the thing is always there, or it’s always wherever it is. Um, broadcasting … But even if it’s trying to reach us, we don’t always let it. We don’t always turn it on or tune in to the right station.”

“You think fear and pain are the right station.”

“I don’t know if they’re the only ones, but they’re the ones I’ve reached it through before. Or the ones that let it through to me, if that makes sense.”

She seems self-conscious, nervous both about what we’re maybe about to do, but also to propose the ideas. This woman who minutes ago I was certain was the cause of so much pain, so much violence. The one who is so seldom around other people.

I nod.

“Okay,” she says again.

She takes a deep breath, her chest rising and falling, the muscles of her neck and collarbone flexing beneath her skin. All of her is tense.

“We don’t have to do this,” I say. “I don’t even know if—”

If I can.

“We have to do something,” she says, shrugging that bare shoulder. “They’ll come for us as soon as the weather calms.” And there is such a look of fear and resignation and sadness on her face that I think maybe she’s right.