F. Paul Wilson: Gateways

Semelee was glad she wasn’t misshapen like Corley or Luke or the other members of the clan. But she was special too. She had a weird look that had been enough to bring her a lot of pain, but not weird enough to bring in loose change. She was special in another way. In her own way. Special on the inside.

“Ain’t like this is the first time you ever done this,” she told Corley.

“I know, but I hate it. If’n I do it a million times I’m still gonna hate it. That thing could take my leg off with one bite if it got a mind to.”

“Not just one leg, Corley,” Luke said with a grin. “When you think about it, she could take both off at once—if she got a mind to, that is.”

“Or if I got tired of your whining and told her to,” Semelee added.

“That ain’t funny!” Corley said, dancing in place like a little boy who had to take a wizz.

“Stand still!” Luke said. “We’re tryin to catch fish, not scare ’em away! Just be glad it ain’t Devil doin the herdin.”

Corley’s hands shook. “If’n it was Devil, I wouldn’t be in the water! Hell, I wouldn’t even be on the bank!”

Semelee spotted a dark shape, maybe a foot or two deep, slidin through the water toward them, rippling the surface above as it moved.

Dora was comin, drivin the fish before her.

“Get ready,” she told them. “Here we go.”

Corley let out a soft, high-pitched moan of fear but held his ground and his end of the net.

The shape glided closer and closer to Luke and Corley, and then suddenly the net bowed backward and the water between them was alive with fish, frothing the surface as they thrashed against the net. The two men pushed their poles together and lifted the net out of the water. A coupla dozen or more good-size mollies and even a few bass wiggled in the mesh.

“Fish fry tonight!” Luke cried.

“She touched me!” Corley said, looking this way and that. If his neck would’ve allowed it, it’d be swivelin round in circles. “She tried to bite me!”

“That was just her flipper,” Luke said.

“I don’t care! Let’s get these things ashore!”

“Don’t forget to leave me some,” Semelee said. “Dora’ll be very unhappy if you don’t.”

“Oh, right! Right!” Corley said. He reached into the net and pulled out a wriggling six-inch molly. “The usual?”

“A couple should do.”

He flipped one and then another onto the deck, then headed for shore.

Semelee picked up one of the flopping, gasping fish and held it by its slick, slippery tail over the water.

“Dora,” she sing-songed. “Dora, dear. Where are you, baby?”

Dora must have been waitin on the bottom because she popped to the surface right away. The snapping turtle’s mountainous shell with its algae-and grass-covered peaks and valleys appeared first, runnin a good three-four feet stem to stern. Then her heads broke the surface, all four beady little eyes fixed on her, both hooked jaws open and waitin. Semelee could see the little wormlike growth on each of her tongues that Dora used like fishin lures when she sat on the bottom during the daytime and waited for lunch. Finally the long tail broke the surface and floated behind her like a big fat water moccasin.

Semelee was sure scientists would give anything for a look at Dora, the biggest, damnedest, weirdest-looking alligator snapper anyone had ever seen, but she was Semelee’s, and no one else was gettin near her.

She tossed a fish at the left head. The sharp, powerful jaws snapped closed across the center, severing the head and tail. The right head snatched those up as they hit the water. A pair of convulsive swallows and the mouths were open again.

Semelee gave the right head first crack at the second fish, with similar results, then she stretched her hands out over the water. Dora reared up so that her heads came in reach.

“Good girl, Dora,” she cooed, stroking the tops of the heads. Dora’s long tail thrashed back and forth with pleasure. “Thanks for your help. Better get outta sight now before the dredgers come.”

Dora gave her one last look before sinkin from sight.

As Semelee straightened she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the churned-up water and took another peek. She didn’t hold much with mirror gazin, but every once in a while she took a look at herself and wondered how different things mighta been for her if she’d had a head of normal hair—black or brown or red or blond, didn’t matter, just so long as it wasn’t what she’d been born with.

The surface of the water showed someone in her mid-twenties with a face that wasn’t no head turner but not ugly neither. If heads did turn, it was cause of her hair, a tangled silver-white mane that trailed after her like a cloud—a very tangled, twisted stormy cloud that no amount of combin or brushin could straighten. No amount at all. She should know. She’d spent enough hours as a kid workin on it.

That hair had been a curse for as long as she could recall. She didn’t remember bein born here, right here on the lagoon, and didn’t remember her momma leavin the lagoon and takin her to Tallahassee. But she did remember grammar school in Tallahassee. Did she ever.

Her earliest memories there was of kids pointin to her hair and callin her “Old Lady.” Nobody wanted Old Lady Semelee on their team no matter what they was playin, so she used to spend recesses and after school mostly alone. Mostly. Being left out would have been bad enough, but the other girls couldn’t let it go at that. No, they had to crowd around her and pull off the hat she wore to hide her hair, then they’d yank on that hair and make fun of it. The days she came home from school cryin to her momma were beyond countin. Home was her safe place, the only safe place, and her momma was her only friend.

Semelee remembered how she’d cursed her hair. If not for that hair she wouldn’t be teased, she’d be allowed into the other kids’ games, she’d have friends—more than anything else in the world little Semelee wanted a friend, just one lousy friend. Was that too much to ask? If not for that hair she’dbelong . And little Semelee so wanted to belong.

Since hats wasn’t helpin, she decided one day at age seven to cut it all off. She took out her momma’s sewin scissors and started choppin. Semelee smiled now at the memory of the mess she’d made of it, but it hadn’t been funny then. Her momma’d screamed when she seen it. She was fit to be tied and that scared Semelee, scared her bad. Her only friend was mad.

Momma took the scissors and tried to make somethin outta the chopped-up thatch but she couldn’t do much.

And the kids at school only laughed all the harder when they saw it.

But they ain’t laughin now, Semelee thought with grim satisfaction as she threaded the holes in the eye-shells through the slim leather thong she wore around her neck. At least some of them ain’t. Some of them’ll never laugh again.

She watched the ripples and eddies that remained behind on the surface in Dora’s wake. Something about their crisscrossing pattern reminded her of her dream last night, the one about someone coming from someplace far away. As she watched the water she had a flash of insight. Suddenly she knew.

“He’s here.”

10

Miami International had been a mob scene, far more hectic and crowded than LaGuardia. Jack wound his way through the horde of arrivees and departees toward the ground transportation area. There he caught a shuttle bus to Rent-a-Car Land. In order to help them out of second place, Jack decided to rent from Avis. He settled on an “intermediate” car and chose the most anonymous looking vehicle they had: a beige Buick Century.

The hospital had given him directions from the Florida Turnpike but Jack chose US 1 instead. He figured it would take longer. The red-vested guy at the Avis desk gave him a map and highlighted the way to Route 1.