"Haunting My Hometown" Part One for Prime Post Number, Day 19 04/19/25

Parts 9-6

9.

The Watcher stumbled down the street.

Headed west on East Broadway.

The wind whistled through the double keyhole in his chest.

He couldn’t help but smile as part of his cheek and jaw had been blown away.

No one got in his way.

That worked out fine because he didn’t feel like giving anyone the time of day.

Rain, sleet, or shine, the Watcher always found himself on East Broadway, downtown, Piasa, Illinois.

Like clockwork.

Or by some other design.

Death had come out of its hole and seen its shadow: six more eternities of hell.

The people seemed strange to him but he was no sojourner and this wasn’t a strange land. This was his turf: his hometown: Piasa born and raised; he suspected he was buried somewhere on top of the hill overlooking the Illinois River.

Women seemed so wicked because he did not want them.

Faces leered ugly because he was alone, but he could be uglier than them.

He had seen hair styles and clothing trends passed back and forth between men and women until he could no longer tell who was a girl and who was a boy. The girls seemed butch and the boys still sucked the tit.

But the young and old could not hide from him. The Watcher took great pleasure scowling into shining happy faces of young and saying “boo” to haggard faces of old. Ruining people’s day was pretty much all he had now.

Anyone past puberty carried an extra forty pounds. This generation was fat. Easy pickings for scaring. The Watcher slipped between their buttons and untied laces as quick as jumping over a candle stick. He was tired of these poor huddled masses yearning to breathe in flavored vapors. He was awash in a sea of dyed hair, dirty faces, and ripped clothing: it was like a nation of beggars-kings had descended upon Piasa. A whole herd of wayward sons: the kind the Watcher liked to pick up and get off.

What bothered the Watcher was not their ignoring him or his decades old decadent decaying wounds, it was his not being able to see himself reflected in their eyes. To them, he was a negative space. Empty and full of nothing. At noon, when the sun was at its zenith, the Watcher cast no shadow. Nor could he find his shadow to thread it back on the sole of his foot. He was a lost boy in a Never-EVER-Land: a Captain Hook that Tick-Tock no longer had to worry about devouring.

The only time the Watcher could see his reflection in glass was in the silver light of the full moon. And then he wanted to run and hide from the demon revealed to him because what he wanted to see in the mirror was concealed. Therefore, the Watcher knew: stay out of the Light. Don’t go into the Light if he could not stand his deeds being exposed and known and being shown for what he was and is and is to come.

And that was how his day ended every day.

In an endless loop.

Shackled to a past that wasn’t dead and that wasn’t even past.

There was just a whole lotta here and now.

Burdened with a driving need to get help. Running upstream with concrete legs. His way would never be perfect.

The body of the Watcher rotted on the greasy ground.

His non-consensual lover fled Piasa town.

He wanted to go up Washington and break the no-contact order.

The precinct station sat two blocks above his shoulder.

At night, a single light burned in a window on the top floor like a beacon for wayward sons—the kind the Watcher liked to seduce and manipulate. There was no safe harbor in at the cop shop: just a interrogation room down in the basement the size of a janitor’s closet with an old desk holding a note book for the interrogating officer and a stiff, old elementary desk for the witness or person of interest or suspect to sit in and spill out their testimony because for the police there was no distinction between witness and suspect: everyone was a person of interest.

The Watcher had to reach the cops. He needed their help. He needed them to take him just a few blocks more to the Piasa Memorial Hospital. There, the doctors could help him: staunch the blood, dig out the bullets, and sew him back up.

The Watcher heard his last gasp and knew his lungs weren’t moving. He heard the slowing echo of his beat and knew it had stilled long ago. The string in his legs grew weak. The Watcher’s consciousness was pulled down a tunnel with black edges telescoping in.

It was like a fade to black in old movie scene.

Except the Watcher knew what the next resolve would be.

It ended with the Watcher falling over and becoming another tired, poor huddled mass for the worms to go in lean and come out stout. An offering for the blackbirds to peck ou his eyes and for the beggar-kings to step over.

Nothing more than a greasy spot.

8.

The loop ended, and without much of a supernatural delay, it restarted again.

The Watcher was back on his feet, thirteen blocks headed on East Broadway headed the other way. The day was waning and hell had frozen over in his stilled heart. His destination was always the same: Fast Freddie’s Good Times on East Broadway and Fourth Street—positively Fourth Street as the song went.

Fast Freddie had put his good times into a two story stone building: inside was the longest bar in Piasa and benches to chow down greasy burgers. Upstairs, the good times rolled on with an off the books poker game with a thousand dollar door fee for table stakes. And behind the main building stood an old dilapidated apartment building where the good times rocked and rolled with young girls who had no family and infant kids born of easy riders who all would get fed by the hot and ready johns.

The Watcher didn’t swing that way: He preferred vagabonds: drifters and homeless wayward sons fresh to the pig pen and hungry enough to let him sit next to them at Fast Freddie’s long bar, ply them with a shot of tequila and a beer chaser, share a burger, and then take a walk back to his quarters.

The Watcher could trade a young man’s warm body in bed next to him for a wayward son’s night’s lodging.

He found Fast Freddie’s always the same. Loud rock and roll coming from a speaker in the ceiling (it used to be a juke box in the corner with old forty-fives). The benches only half-full of patrons eating baskets of burgers and fries and the bar sparse with drinkers. The place stank of fry grease, charred burgers, sweat, and cheap sex.

The wayward son the Watcher coveted often was there, waiting. He had coveted him so much, so often, the desire was like putting fire to the Watcher’s bosom. If there was a way for the Watcher to walk out of Freddie’s and find somewhere new to spend eternity that would suit him just fine.

It was like the wayward son had a magnet and the Watcher couldn’t help but be attracted. A young man with greasy dark hair parted by a cowlick. His face lean and rounded with pointed cheeks and chin. His mouth small with red lips and cow-brown eyes.

They had played this scene before.

They knew how it would end.

The talk was small. The need was great. The trap had good bait.

A warm bed for a warm body. Or vice versa or versa vice. A whole lotta vice.

But soon the heat would dissipate.

And everything would turn cool and numb.

A short bus ride down Broadway, careful to sit in different seats on opposite sides, down to the stop on Main Street. There, they disembarked and walked down six blocks to the three story building where the Watcher nested up above.

Back then it was called Wise Dentistry...owned by Robert Wise. Professional creep. He had been the one to give the Watcher his job and make him become the Watcher in the first place.

And what did he watch? A family dentistry office on the second floor, a waiting room on the first floor, and a dark room in the basement while the good doctor let him live in the top floor apartment. The Watcher made ten a week and had to pay his own water and electricity.

But it wasn’t the store the Watcher was minding. It was what was in the basement. The Watcher figured the dentist had a safe somewhere on the property and inside that safe was something valuable that the dentist wanted protected.

Well, in his first week on the job, the Watcher found the safe. People thought it was in the basement where the dentist kept his dark room to make his photos of people’s teeth, but it wasn’t. And soon enough, the Watcher discovered what the good Doctor Wise was keeping inside his safe.

One night, the Watcher stumbled over some photos taken late in the day that the dentist had left up to dry after exposing them. At first, the Watcher couldn’t believe it, so he had to look twice. There were ten pictures of a woman and her two children. All of them had been gassed and when they had been knocked out, the good doctor had taken pictures of them in compromising positions with clothes pulled down and body parts exposed.

The good Doctor Wise was a pervie. And unethical. And a criminal. And worse than that.

The Watcher was the one sitting on the nest of the doctor’s private pornography.

What joy.

The Watcher had heard of things like this before. Such people kept a can of lighter fluid along with a lighter in the safe to destroy the evidence if given time. The last Alamo measure was keeping a loaded gun within hand’s reach to escape capture and ridicule of having their deeds exposed in the light and worse…jail time…pornos and pervies and pedos had the worst of it in jail. The Watcher had seen such things up close for himself in one of his extended stays as a guest of the state of Illinois.

But Wise Dentistry was home, for now: home, dirty home.

In through the closed door and up the steep stairs to leading to the narrow flight of stairs behind a closed door leading to the Watcher’s apartment door. Inside his apartment; the coats off; tallboy forty ounce beers pulled out of the dirty fridge; more small talk on the lopsided kitchen table. Bleary tired eyes, deep yawns, stumbling off to share a bed.

Somewhere in the quiet night, the scuffle starts.

The wayward son decides not to abide by the unspoken arrangement.

The deal busted.

Advances rebuffed.

The fire burning in the bosom turns from lust to anger.

Fists fly.

Fingers around the throat.

Bruises up the neck.

The wayward son tries to flee and the Watcher means to block his exit.

Push comes to shove. The Watcher slips down the first few stairs off of his own doorstep. His dandruff up and chest bowed, the Watcher means to bear hug his prey and wrestle him down to the kitchen floor, subdue him and take him there.

Something happens, the Watcher doesn’t expect. But in replaying the struggle time and time again, he is powerless to gain an edge over the wayward son.

Because the wayward son has a gun.

He pulls the trigger.

The bullet slams into the Watcher’s cheek. Some of his jaw and teeth becomes a wreck. Blood splatters the stairwell overhang.

The wayward son slips past the stunned Watcher. He is in pain and shock. But he still has his strength.

Down the stairs, he follows after the wayward son.

He catches him at the threshold of the front door to the business that is now closed. They tussle, but the Watcher cannot get a grip and the wayward son is not having any more of it.

The trigger is pulled several times. The gun goes off and the Watcher catches two bullets square in the chest. The wayward son takes off west down Broadway to run all the way out of town towards the old boundary marker where the pictograph of the Piasa bird that guards the bluff entrance to town waits on a granite cliff.

The Watcher starts to weaken. Breathing comes hard. He knows he is losing blood.

He gives up the chase.

The string in his leg starts to weaken.

Every move becomes slower; every beat of his heart weaker.

A fear that he is losing everything and that everything will soon be lost comes over the Watcher.

The cop station is just a block away. Down the street and then up Washington. He can see the light on at the top floor. And then a few blocks away is St. Ambrose Memorial Hospital.

He might be able to make it.

But he is bleeding out the future.

The Watcher collapses on the sidewalk and makes a greasy spot.

He gives up the ghost.

And the Watcher finds the hole Death hides in.

Death tells him that the music’s over and all that’s left to do is turn out the lights.

And stumble around in the dark.

Only this time…

This time when the Watcher stumbled out of the door hot on the heels of the wayward son in his way back then, there was a startled young girl standing at the threshold of the here and now. She was ginger headed with dark eyes. Dressed in a Catholic school girl green-blue plaid skirt and white button shirt with a chevron patch over her firm bosom.

His eyes went wide and so did hers.

He was going to plow right into her.

Instead, he surprised himself and went right through her.

7.

Kelley Morgan Branscombe often wondered how many people on the streets were just specters lost in their own nightmare?

How many of the passers-by were ghosts? Lost spirits in a purgatory doomed to walk the earth with no rest and replay the worst day of their life over and over again? Before going on to one of two possible eternal destinations.

As soon as Aunt Gwen let Kelley out of the Kia Sorento, she’d reminded her neice, “Be outside here by eleven p.m. sharp. Text me if you want to come home earlier.”

Come home. Her aunt and Uncle Brendan had adopted her at age five—ten years ago. Kelley’s life before consisted of whirlwind weekends of one foster home after another, and before that the terrible tornado of her mother’s descent into madness and drugs and the ensuing upheaval. Kelley had lived twice as long as her tumultuous first five years: though, it seemed as if it had happened to someone else her nightmares told her otherwise.

Home: Aunt Gwen and Uncle Brendan had given her a stable house and structure. A family with two parents and two red-headed younger cousins who were also her step-sister and brother. And a rigid cycle of both church and school with the parochial system brought to Piasa, Illinois courtesy of the Jesuits following the trail of Pere Marquette in the late seventeenth century.

Kelley was a proud student enrolled at St. Ambrose’s and she wore the green-blue plaid skirt and white shirt with the school crest--a chevron containing a beehive crossed over with a cat-of-nine-tails and a scroll—wherever she would go.

Stranded on a dateless Friday night (because she refused to date anyone) and with nowhere else to go (because she had lost her babysitting job at the Thompsons last weekend--which was a whole other story), she opened the old wooden door to the Meridian Coffee House and was hit with a grave-stepping chill. A mad rush of wrath mobbed her and pushed her back.

Out of the corner of her eye she caught peripheral movement: flat passing shadows chasing each other down the street; one fretting to get away and the other strutting to catch up, puffed up with soundless fury.

I shouldn’t have come, she thought clutching the Celtic cross her aunt had given on her confirmation which Kelley kept slung under her neck. Spook, spook, go away, come back another day!

She wanted to pretend she hadn’t just seen or felt a ghost, but there was no good lying, and lying to herself at that. It was best to ignore it and move on to the next thing.

But Kelley wasn’t going anywhere. She was stuck at the end of a line of other wheel-less teens unsure of what they were to order off the menu. The Meridian Coffee House’s co-owner, Scott, waited behind the bar as if he had all night.

Well, Kelley didn’t have all night. Time crept ever closer to her curfew.

All around her a sea of smells frothed and splashed at her. Pleasing sticky syrups. Polite flowery perfumes. And pungent salty human funk.

Smells were dynamite to Kelley. For most normal people, they were a trigger for memories. But for Kelley, they triggered remote images: smells twisting into colors; morphing into moving shapes; and then into people doing things in the flesh here and now that they would rather keep unknown in the dark.

Something unique clung to the bottom of the scents. A combination of the sweet and sticky, musty and flowery. It brought to mind the origin of the scent: a round red fruit with a seed-studded surface. Kelley gave an involuntary shudder: it was a strawberry.

The smell of strawberries opened a port: Not to memories, but to the here and now.

Above. On the second floor through an archway in an antechamber stood a round table.

Three sisters sat dressed in black empress waisted shirts and skirts. Clad in spider-webbed hosiery. Shod in black leather patent shoes or canvas sneakers. Natural hair dyed.

Three being the charm.

They had laid out tarot cards in a circle with one left to be drawn to fill the center.

The oldest sister, platinum blonded, nodded to the youngest, a pink haired cherub, to draw the next card. Most eager to please, she drew the jumbo-sized card and held it up without looking at it or turning it over. Then the middle sister, a Wednesday’s child and dark-raven haired, took the card in hand and laid it face-up in the dead center of the circle.

The card depicted the Roman numerals XII at the top. Below that was a crossbeam. Upon the beam against the stake a man was hung by his right foot with his left leg bent at the knee to look like an upside down number four. His hands were tied behind his back.

The Hanged Man. Laid out in a traitorous pose.

The sisters licked their thumbs anticipating something wicked to come. Trouble walking.

Kelley was an invisible fly on the wall. A passive remote viewer who would rather not see what was being shown.

She wanted it to end and come back to herself.

But wait, there was more.

Higher still above her and the three squirmy giggling sisters, something stirred. Its emergence pulled Kelley between the floorboards to the upper room where rabbis were betrayed for thirty pieces of silver. It gathered itself like a darkling veil and sat up from a dirty single bed to blink at her. It was aware of her, too. And Kelley didn’t like that at all.

“You want trouble, I’ll give you some,” the dark man spoke. “Best not go downstairs.”

It had been him who had tried to run her down, Kelley knew. Now he pushed her away and she fell like a broken car down an elevator shaft.

Kelley returned to her five-foot-five one hundred and three pound body with a jolt. But her consciousness had taken a hit to the gut. She was pulled down a long tunnel as the sides narrowed in.

I’m fainting.

Kelley blanked out. No different than taking anesthesia. Her smell returned to her first.

A funk. Stank and stunk. Salty and oniony. Wrapped around her like a Grandma’s green shawl.

Kelley came to and found herself in the arms of a big black girl whom she had never seen before.

“You a’ight?” she asked with her large cow-brown eyes reflecting a ghost-face Kelley Morgan Branscombe’s ginger brown hair and brown eyes.

“I am. Are we black?” Kelley asked not sure of anything.

“I am,” the big black girl said. She had her big beefy arms wrapped around Kelley like she was her white baby doll so precious and fragile

“Then I’m alright,” Kelley said.

And just like that, Kelley made a new friend who proved they had her back. Kelley just hoped that the big black girl wasn’t expecting Kelley to catch her when she fainted. Kelley weighed all of a hundred pounds.

A crowd of pre-teens gathered to gawk and the first thing Kelley did was to make sure her green-blue plaid skirt hadn’t hiked too far up her thighs so that she might be flashing.

She wasn’t.

Scott bent down to offer Kelley some hot tea and the Meridian Coffee House’s other co-owner, Marlena, wiped at her forehead with a cool rag that she used to bus the tables. Scott ran the bar and Marlena ran the tables with her putting the most steps in between the tables and kitchen. In the back, one of Marlena’s teenage sons would help prep food or wash the plates and cups, but they never strayed out of the kitchen.

Marlena expected a lot out of her pre-teen and teen customers. The unspoken rules of the house were clean off your tables, put your plates and cups in a bus tray, don’t cuss, and don’t fight. Well, they could do one out of four with no problem: no one wanted to fight and get in trouble with the cops, their parents, and have Marlena ban them from the Meridian Coffee House.

Kelley sipped the hot tea. The sensation warmed her throat and fortified her weak limbs.

“Get her to sit up,” Scott offered.

The black girl sat Kelley up like a doll at a tea party. She even brought Kelley’s hand with the cup of tea back to her lips so that she might sip and savor. A living doll, Kelley followed through with the suggestions.

“You’re my doll. I got you. Mama ain’t gonna let anything bad happen to you,” the big black girl promised.

Kelley looked deep into those cow-brown eyes, past her own reflection, deep into the heart and soul of this human being. It wasn’t so much of what Kelley saw as what she heard and felt. Kelley could hear other voices. Chiming in at different speeds.

Only they weren’t voices. They were thoughts. This big black girls could pick up on thoughts and feelings. She was a flaming telepath.

The big black girl winked and nodded at Kelley. “I can hear what people think, but you can see what they do. Lordy, I don’t envy you one bit.”

“Well, now,” Kelley said. She wasn’t alone in being weird. Being weird came in all shape and sizes.

“Sit her up in a chair, Scott,” Marlena said satisfied that Kelley was keeping consciousness and her full range of motion.

The big black girl and Scott helped move Kelley’s doll-like weight to a stool along the railing across from the coffee bar. Kelley felt herself again: her weight and her persona. She was thankful for the hot tea, so she took another sip.

“Should I call your mom?” Marlena asked.

By mom, Marlena meant Aunt Gwen. She and Marlena had gradudated from St. Ambrose’s years and years ago. Kelley figured Marlena knew some of Kelley’s family background—maybe even some things Kelely didn’t know yet.

Kelley shook her head and took another sip. Her flesh goosed. Her chest hardened. “I’m feeling much better.”

“That’s good,” Scott smiled. He was built like a twenty-three-year-old pudgy teddy bear: a kid’s face bordered with sloppy hair around a huggable, pinch-able paunch. “I was kinda hopin’ you might stick around and look at some evidence that we just received.”

Enough of Kelley’s wits and prescience had returned to now the outcome. “I’ll get grounded.”

“I can have Marlena text your Mom. She can drive you home,” Scott suggested.

6.

“What you got planned?” the big black girl asked without being invited, but hoping for quick entry to the inner circle like she had been a part of it all along.

“Cecilia here caught you before you fell,” Scott said.

Kelley offered out a pale slim hand. “Kelley Branscombe.”

The big black girl took the doll-like hand in her own beefy mitt and gave Kelley’s arm a good snap. “Cecilia Hamilton.”

“Then she can stay and help out, can’t she?” Kelley asked Scott who was a push-over.

“What you got going on, Scott?” chirped a voice from behind.

“Yes, do tell,” chimed in another voice with an expecting tone.

“Maybe we could help out,” offered a third voice whose tone promised not help but condemnation.

The trio of Norn-like sisters had come down from their coven. All they needed was a black cat with a earth-like marble on its collar named Pyewacket. The Normans: They stood in a semi-circle behind Scott, each with their hands on their hips. The oldest, bleach-blonded Winter, middle child and raven-haired Autumn, and the youngest, pink haired Summer.

“I can do just fine helpin’ her out,” the big black girl said.

“This your pet sasquatch?” Winter asked not even deigning to look at Cecilia who could sweep up all three Norman sisters in one bear hug and bounce them out the door if need be.

“‘Pet?’ Oh, no you just didn’t. I’d snatch you bald-headed, blondie, before you could blink an eye,” Cecilia said.

“We don’t fight here, do we, Marlena?” Autumn, being the middle child and the rule keeper, reminded.

“If necessary, I’d throw out the ones who started it,” Marlena said as she got to her feet, picked up her serving tray and got back to serving. “Watch your step or you’ll be the ones out the door.”

“My dad would pull the business license on this place so fast you wouldn’t have time to pack,”Summer warned. “He used to own this building.”

Her dad, Peter Norman, had a maternal uncle, one, Robert Wise. But Mr. Norman had been quick to advise his widowed aunt to sell the building after his uncle had killed himself down in the basement (dentists having a high rate of suicide). After rehabbing the building and scouring the place for a rumored safe, none had been able to find it.

The Watcher knew where it was. The good Doctor Wise sealed it up but good. It wouldn’t be easy to find, if ever.

The emergency over, the Meridian Coffee House got back to business: it thrummed with the hustle of pre-teen jitters and drummed with the bustle of fingers free from ADHD meds. Seats scratched the floors and tables thumped the boards. No one under sixteen could or would sit still.

They hung around for the next thing they could overreact to and Snapchat about.

Kelley sipped her hot tea which was just as bitter as the Norman sisters’ attitude, but a whole lot more palatable. She took in her savior, tablemate, and newfound friend: Cecilia was a super-sized black girl encompassing a single wooden stool with elephantine legs planted on the ground inside plastic leather boots. She wore a triple extra large long sleeve Rush Caress of Steel rock band t-shirt over her fleshly bulges and dark blue jeans stretched across her thunderous thighs and calves.

Her fingers flashed glamorous nails lacquered pink with small fake diamonds glues onto them as she cradled a plastic cup with fruit pieces floating in the juice.

“Ain’t he just one person on a council? Bet Marlena and Scott got a good lawyer. Bet they would sue,” Cecilia said in a sweet-but-not-sincere voice with an unmistakable southern drawl splashed with inner city urban.

“Our dad is a lawyer,” sniped the raven-haired middle child.

“He’s the city D.A.,” trumpeted the red-haired youngest.

“Well, glory, glory hallelujah for him,” Cecilia snorted. “He still gotta answer to a judge the same as anyone. It’s the judge’s court, not a lawyer’s stage.”

Winter wrinkled her crone nose at Cecilia. “You talk big for being so big.”

Cecilia didn’t even bat an eye. “And you’re all bark and no bite. So, bark away little doggies.”

“Y’all need to take it down a notch or two,” Marlena warned. She shooed off the gawking pre-teens like buzzing flies. “Nothing to see here. Move on!”

The pre-teens trotted off to sniff out other drama. Winter picked up the thread and inserted herself into a proposition of her own making. “Why don’t you do ghost tours here, Scott? My dad could help you get the proper license.”

Scott raised an eyebrow to his partner who frowned back. Kelley shook her head: first, Winter had threatened and now she was suggesting ways she could help. Typical manipulative Norman behavior.

“Who says we got ghosts at the Meridian Coffee house?” Scott asked.

The Norman sisters all snickered.

“Everyone,” Autumn said.

“There was a TV production crew running all up and down Mainstreet. They were just down the block at the Spring Hotel. Heard they got the Drowned Ghost on video,” Summer declared. The Spring Hotel used to be an old YMCA at some point in Piasa’s history. A young boy drowned in the in-door pool back in the 20^th Century. The evidence of this ghost’s presence would be wet foot prints up and down the pool’s concourse either before or after hours.

“So, they had to have come here,” Winter proclaimed in a lawyer-like tone that would have made her old man proud.

That promoted several kids to search Spring Hotel. Drowned Ghost. Piasa, Illinois. The less adroit shared whatever the algorithm brought up first. The more persistent found older posts from past visitors and soon the downstairs of the Meridian was full of the same video being played at different intervals until it turned into dischorded looped human sounds and reactions.

The Watcher couldn’t understand a generation of living people so desperate about knowing about things like death without bothering to look ahead of them and live every second of life left to them. There would be enough of death to last them a lifetime.

He thought the three little witches lame in the slang of his day. They couldn’t scare up the ghost of a chance among all three of them. Now the girl in the Catholic school girl uniform—the one with the brown hair and blue eyes. She had been aware of the Watcher as he had run out the front door in his endless route. And that big black girl…she wasn’t aware of the Watcher other than pixking up on his thoughts.

That was why the Watcher hadn’t chose to torment them. That strange pair—they were more powerful than any tarot reading—would pick up on him. Haunting wasn’t as much fun when the haunted could guess his next move.

Maybe he’d better back go back upstairs. These kids were getting boring. Even the freaks.

“I ain’t never been here before. Does this place ever creep you out?” Cecilia asked. Then she looked sideways at Kelley. “Tell me true.”

Kelley lied: “Not really.”

The Norman sisters snorted out their noses. “We were just talking to a ghost upstairs,” Winter declared.

“Oh, really. You can talk to ghosts?” Kelley said and folded her arms over her chest. “How?”

“Through tarot cards,” Autumn said.

“And an Ouija board,” Summer said.

It was Cecilia’s turn to snort. “You three think you’re witches? Do you go to some kind of witch school? You think it’s some kind of craft to learn?”

“They go to school at St. Ambrose’s with me,” Kelley said. There, the sisters wore the same uniform as Kelley; learned their catechism; studied the lives of the saints; read about Christophanies while trying to write runes in the girls’ bathroom stall walls.

Scott opened a can of worms when he aksed, “Well, did you learn anything?”

“We got a last name,” Winter beamed.

“Schwan,” Autumn said.

“We were trying to get him to tell us where Dr. Wise’s safe is,” Summer said.

The Watcher knew where the safe was, but he wasn’t going to tell, even if they asked “pretty please.”

“You’re just stirring up trouble,” Cecilia warned. “Leviticus Chapter Nineteen tells us not to speak with the dead. Only God knows everything. The dead don’t even always know they’re dead.”

Kelley couldn’t find fault with Cecilia referencing the good Word. Leviticus Chapter Nineteen warned about messing with mediums and spiritists or having anything to do with familiar spirits. Why talk to the dead when you can talk to God? People were to put their faith in God not in someone who died to tell them what they needed to know.

“You really think your sasquatch could survive Catholic school?” Winter mocked.

“Sure I could. Ain’t nothin’ but blood and crosses. Fessin’ up to the priest and givin’ hail marys. Puttin’ a statue of a saint outside for good luck. Then lettin’ the priest speak over cracker and wine. Nothin’ but rituals,” Cecilia said.

Kelley took the Catholic life serious. It had been her anchor and rock against the tumultuous whirlwind nightmares of her early childhood. She had never heard anyone break down her Catholic faith in such simple terms.

Taking that view, no wonder the Norman sisters were pulled by the allure of witchcraft. Runes, spells, chants, rituals, calling out to spirits, and even using blood, too. It seemed like the dark underbelly of the Catholic Church.

That night, Cecilia Hamilton said something Kelley would never forget. “It’s not about rituals. Or signs. It’s about having faith. People get saved by faith and are justified by believing in Jesus. Not by following rituals.”

“We can find that safe for you, Scott. We’re all psychics here,” Winter said. “Except for Sasquatch--”

Cecilia screwed up her face tight and bowed up with a cocked fist by her head. “My name be Cecilia Hamilton! And that name better start comin’ outta yer mouth or I’ll snatch that weave off your bald head, blondie! I don’t care if you are witches! Spells bounce right off me!” Cecilia pounded her chest with her fist.

**Summer started forward to protect the family honor, but Autumn stopped her from getting clobbered because she was outclassed and outmatched and outweighed. Winter folded her arms across her chest. “She’s not worth it.”

“What you mean? I’m the one worth a million. You ain’t worth a dollar,” Cecilia said.

“Girls, last warning,” Scott said. “Marlena already warned you. Now I’m telling you. Play nice or get out. Have your dad call me and I tell him exactly why I asked you all to leave.”

All three girls made amends with pantomine: Winter by sealing her lips by making her forefinger and thumb into a key; Autumn miming the turning of the key and throwing the key over her shoulder; Summer crossing her heart.

“Don’t count Cecilia out, yet,” Kelley said. “If you want weird, and Piasa is weird, the two of us got enough weird for you.”

Piasa was full of weirder things than what Kelley had felt running out the front door of the Meridian Coffee House. Abraham Lincoln had often been spotted in his frock coat and stove top hat walking down Main Street to the old square where he was to debate Stephen Douglas, again. And there used to be an island, Blood Island, out near the Lewis and Clark Bridge. During the Civil War, it had been the site of a stone brick prison for Confederate prisoners sick with tuberculosis. They were sent there to die. On foggy nights, their screams and cries carried across the Illinois River to Main Street and up to the antebellum mansions were the wives of Grant’s officers began to feel sorry for the hell the South had brought upon itself. After the war ended, the cries of the prisoners could still be heard. So, the city elders had the prison torn down and used the brick for the all the foundations and stone walkways of the buildings along Main Street. And still at night when the fogs came, people could hear the anguishing cries of the prisoners. Others reported orbs chasing each other down the street.

“Truce then,” Winter said.

“We want to see the evidence you got,” Autumn said.

“Then the we want to tour the Meridian,” Summer said.

“Well, you don’t ask for much,” Cecilia said.

“Are you expecting ghosts to say hello and shake your hand?” Scott asked.

Marlena, who had gone upstairs to grab the bussing tubs, came back stairs to catch some of the conversation. “Why not? What else could happen tonight?”

There was a commotion outside.

A few sounds that worried Kelley, but which the Watcher liked.

It sounded like a knife folding and the sound of a motor bike.

Something bounced into the front door and the motor bike revved up a few gears and tore down Main Street.

Rather than something wicked arriving, something full of boil and trouble had been delivered.