Fic: Boys, toys, electric irons and TVs (Supernatural/Twilight crossover; PG-13)
Title: Boys, toys, electric irons and TVs
Written For: savepureness for the whattheficathon
Fandoms/Characters: Supernatural/Twilight - Mary (Winchester), Alice Cullen, the Yellow-Eyed Demon, various OCs
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 8128
Summary: 1972. Her mother is the worst witch in the Midwest. Mary has long since come to terms with this, but the woman has seriously got to stop summoning demons into their kitchen. It’s unsanitary. And then Alice, the unearthly girl she’s partnered with in history, tells her she’s going to die.
Notes: I’ve only read Twilight, most of New Moon, and Alice’s wikipedia page, so I apologize if I’ve missed some super-vital aspect of Alice that comes out in one of Meyer’s subsequent novels. The independent city of Hamtramck, Michigan, is located entirely within the city of limits of Detroit. Southeast Michigan in the 70s was rarely sunny, and even today, about two-thirds of the year the sky is cloudy, making it a pretty ideal place for vampires who sparkle in the sun to go unnoticed. Title comes from David Bowie’s “Five Years” from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which was released in 1972, as was Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things.
One Saturday last October, Mary Hardecker came home from an eight-hour shift at the IGA to find her mother having tea with a man she didn’t recognize.
“Hello, Mary,” the man had said in a silky voice, “I’ve heard so much about you.”
“Um, thanks,” she’d replied, giving both of them a weird look and a wide berth on her way through the kitchen to the stairs upstairs. She figured he was from the coven in Corktown her mother desperately wanted to join, and didn’t think too much about it.
She had work to do.
-
She was having the absolute worst morning of life. Now, Mary had had a lot of horrible mornings in her day. This one though? This one was the true topper, honestly. For one thing, it was raining like there was a deadline on another Biblical Flood coming due. Wasn’t May supposed to be all happy flowers and not showers from hell?
Her mother had been doing some incantation in the kitchen the night before and one mispronounced bit of Latin later, half their kitchen was scorched. Instead of the thick-cut bacon and toast Mary had been looking forward to, she got to eat stale Cheerios straight from the box because the cupboard full of dishes was a total loss.
After throwing away the rest of the box and pointedly ignoring her mother, who was sitting on the couch in the living room and fighting with Grandpop on the telephone, Mary headed out to her car. It was an ancient Corvair Grandpop had gotten from some guy he worked with when she turned sixteen, extolling its virtues even though it was older than she was and twice as irritable. And, predictably, it seemed to sense that it was a miserable day out and adamantly refused to turn over.
“Why is the universe out to get me?” she asked her mother as she stormed back through the living room to fetch rain boots and an umbrella from the basement. Two of the cats watched her with interest from where they sat on the hearth.
“Turn that frown upside down, Mary Louise,” her mother replied. “No, Dad, I didn’t burn water. You can’t burn-”
Mary stalked the eleven blocks to school, grumbling the whole way and glaring at every tree she passed. A sycamore dropped a curl of bark on her umbrella as she walked underneath it, scaring her and making her trip over the uneven sidewalk and go down hard on one knee. Directly into a puddle.
She was just starting to feel dry again when Mrs. Tulowitzki, her second period English teacher, assigned a six-page paper on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and effectively rained on her all over again. Mary did not hold back a colorful string of obscenities, although she did murmur it against her folded arms.
She scowled at everyone she passed in the hallway, and they avoided eye contact like they usually did. She didn’t even get her usual Patty Milligan sneer of “Witch!” or Patty’s boyfriend Rick begging her not to put a spell on him. As if she’d waste the breath (and her soul) on people like that. Mary had better things to do with her life and what was left of her senior year than deal with people with small brains and small lives. She was already graduating a year early to get away from those people.
There was a fat envelope from Kansas State University tucked under the old dollhouse in her bedroom that said she was leaving town in a few months and she was not looking back. She couldn’t figure out how to break the news to her mother, who was unbalanced on good days.
Patty and Rick were leaning against the lockers, and both gave her dirty looks, but apparently her own expression was forbidding enough that they kept their tongues in their heads for once. As soon as she was past, she smirked.
“She’s blonde, Jasper. Jesus, I don’t know. I just saw Detroit! Blonde girl! Fire!”
She passed two of the new kids, the ones she was pretty sure were some kind of not human. The girl, a tiny, pretty, underfed-looking thing with huge eyes and short dark hair, was speaking to the tall blond boy, who nodded and looked vaguely shifty.
“This isn’t actually Detroit,” Mary said to them as she passed by on her way into her third period history class.
The boy pointed at her. “Oh, look,” he said, “a blonde in Detroit.” He and the girl followed Mary into the room and sat on the opposite side of the room from her.
“This is Hamtramck,” Mary muttered. “We’re not in Detroit.” She pulled out her notebook and rooted around in her purse for her pencil. Which, predictably, was broken when she found it pretending to be eye makeup with two eyeliner pencils and a tube of mascara. Grumbling under her breath, she hauled herself out of her seat to sharpen it just as the bell rang and Mr. Polkiss slammed the door behind him.
“Hardecker! You’re late!” he snapped at her as he passed by on his way to the front. “Get in your seat!”
“I’m just-” she started to say, then broke off. She glowered at the fat, balding teacher and continued on her way to the sharpener.
“Careful, Mr. P, Hardecker’s liable to turn you into a toad,” Kirk Brideshead said, a football player with sausage for brains who Mary knew very well had spent his childhood torturing neighborhood cats. Several people in the room snickered, but Mary just remembered the fear of God her mother had put in him when he’d attempted to catnap one of theirs.
The truth was, Mr. Polkiss looked enough like a toad that a spell wouldn’t even be necessary, but Mary didn’t feel the need to point out the obvious. He even had a nervous tic where he darted his tongue out, and he always looked kind of… moist. He was vile and he made Mary really hate American history.
“Pair up. Project time,” Polkiss barked with a mean grin. It was the same tone of voice he used when coaching their basketball team to losing season after losing season. Half the class groaned. Mary slipped back into her seat and considered whether Polkiss would let her get away with repeatedly bashing her head against the desk. She thought probably not.
“Oh? Were those the dulcet tones of disgruntlement I just heard?” Polkiss asked, cocking his head to the side. “Fine. I’ll pick your partners.” Apparently someone had traded his Cornflakes for rabbit turds this fine morning. Mary felt a little better knowing the wretchedness of the day wasn’t just confined to her square of reality.
He surveyed the room with his bulbous eyes and started pointing randomly. “Mr. Stucki, get with Brideshead. He can’t seduce everyone, surely. Miss Bohr, please extract your tongue from Mr. Bridehead’s throat and team up with Mr. Bak. I don’t care if you don’t speak Polish-hop to it!” He paced over to Mary’s side of the room and squinted down the rows. “Jimmy, if you don’t shut your trap, I’m going to send you to Mr. Durchscherer and I promise you no one will miss you. You’re with Jivens.”
“But Mr. P!” Jimmy Templeton, a handsome black kid who had made the all-Michigan basketball team this year, whined. He spent most of his life whining, but he was actually pretty nice to Mary most of the time. His mama was from New Orleans and often supplied her mother with various roots and powders; Mary figured a little hoodoo in his family made them more or less equals. The fact he could sink a free throw with his eyes closed made him somewhat less of a freak at school.
“Oh, ‘cause you’re my dream partner,” Alma Jivens said, rolling her eyes. Alma was four-foot-eight, a little pudgy, and smarter than everyone Mary knew. Combined. They’d had journalism together since freshman year, and this year Alma was editor-in-chief to Mary’s lead reporter. They tolerated each other, but they were never going to be friends.
Alma had been in love with Jimmy Templeton since the fifth grade. Everyone knew this. No one in the class laughed.
“Hardecker, go work with the new girl.” The new girl and her brothers had been in Hamtramck since Thanksgiving, of course, but Polkiss had been the class of ‘72’s history teacher since the dawn of time, so the new kids didn’t have the privilege of names. Mary didn’t exactly have a finger on the pulse of gossip, so even though she knew they were something of a novelty to the Hamtramck kids, she wasn’t even sure what their names were. Polkiss didn’t take attendance.
“Careful, Cullen, Mary Hardecker’s a witch,” Kirk Brideshead warned as the girl gathered her things.
“Wonder why she hasn’t turned you into a monkey, then,” the girl shot back. “‘Cept maybe it’s because you look enough like one for it not to be worth it, you think?” Brideshead gaped at her and Mary glanced at her with a grudgingly impressed smirk. The girl crossed the room and plopped into the empty seat in front of Mary.
“Thanks,” Mary said shortly, not looking at her, “but I don’t really need people to stick up for me.”
The girl shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said. “He’s just lucky I didn’t break his arm. Or sic my brother Emmett on him. He’s built like a bear.” Her lips curved into the kind of smirk that accompanies an inside joke. Mary rolled her eyes and busied herself with scribbling the date at the top of a clean page in her notebook. Five more weeks of school. She could deal with that.
“I’m Mary Hardecker,” she said finally.
“I know. You’re the girl they warned us not to talk to. You don’t look so scary, I’m sorry to say. I think I was expecting claws and scales, maybe.” The girl smiled at her, but Mary stared at her blankly until she looked away, back to Polkiss as he tortured the rest of the class into partnerships. She pointed to herself. “I’m Alice Cullen.”
“Oh, so you’re the girl Cullen,” Mary said, nodding. “I work in the office during my study hall. You and your brothers miss a lot of school.” As she spoke, the brother was paired up with a band nerd who always crossed herself when Mary came too close. Neither of them looked too thrilled at the prospect.
Alice shrugged again. “What are they really going to teach us we haven’t already learned by now? Anyway, I’ve already gone over most of what you’re doing here.”
“If you’re all quite done with the pissing and moaning, I’d like to get on with the rich history of this great nation. If you don’t mind of course,” Polkiss said loudly. The class quieted down and Alice turned around in her seat. He grabbed his chalk holder and paced up and down the aisles, stopping occasionally to stare menacingly at various students.
The look Mary gave him could have peeled wallpaper right off of plaster, but he didn’t stop at all in her row. She was a little disappointed.
“I realize that graduations is coming,” Polkiss said once he got back to his desk, “not to mention prom, and all of your brains have already turned to oatmeal and kielbasa filling, but stay with me here. We’re talking about the Second World War. I’m willing to bet a fair number of you have parents who fought in it.” He picked up the old Quisp box that always sat on his desk and shook it. “Your assignment is to take one of the pieces of paper in this here box and design the best damn oral presentation you can. And yes, you will need visual aids.”
Mary and Alice drew Dwight D. Eisenhower. The prompt was written in Mrs. Polkiss’s neat script. The husband wrote like a third grader who wasn’t even good at chickenscratch. “The chosen one,” Alice said with a small smile. Mary raised an eyebrow at her. “The only one who could defeat Hitler’s war machine. And then Stalin’s Red machine.”
“His nickname was Ike,” Mary said dryly, turning the prompt over a few times in case Polkiss had decided to be sneaky. Luckily, not this time. “I mean, really? Ike?”
Alice grinned. “I happen to like Tina Turner, thank you, ‘Proud Mary.’”
Mary left history with Alice’s phone number and a lighter mood. She ate her lunch in the journalism room as usual, talking about story ideas with the advisor. She spent her actual journalism class, last period of the day, going over the layout for the upcoming issue with Alma Jivens. By the time she walked home, there was a distinct chance that the funny brightness the day had taken on was the sun threatening to poke out of the usual gray Detroit haze and maybe shine.
-
When Mary got home, after taking a shortcut through a few yards and going in through the back door, she found her mother sitting at the kitchen table with a big cup of hot tea and her head in her hands. Grandpop was standing at the stove, looking at the wall and ceiling with concern. “I don’t know, Vivian,” he said, shaking his head. “This don’t look like any kitchen fire I ever seen. And with your mother, I seen a lot of ‘em.”
“Dad,” Vivian Hardecker said sharply. He shrugged.
“Hey there, buttercup,” he said, hugging Mary after she dropped her bag on the table and came to stand next to him. “School okay?”
“I didn’t burn the place down, so I’d say today was a success,” she said.
“That’s not funny, Mary Louise,” Vivian said. Mary rolled her eyes and turned to get the pitcher of lemonade from the fridge. She traded glares with her senior picture, stuck to the door with a magnet shaped like a flamingo proclaiming “Welcome to Ft. Lauderdale!” The flamingo looked confused, which Mary could sympathize with-as far as she knew, none of them had ever been to Florida.
Grandpop laughed, though. “Those kids still giving you a rough time, buttercup?”
Mary shrugged. She had a crick in her neck that just wouldn’t go away. “They don’t count, I decided. It’s not like they’re not all going to just go work at one of the GM plants or turn into little baby factories when we graduate.”
“I’ll have you know I work in one of those plants,” Grandpop said, but he was smiling. He’d worked for Chevrolet for thirty-six years, installing seats in Corvairs and Impalas, and he was damn proud of it. He slung an arm around her shoulders and turned to his daughter. “Vivian, I don’t think you appreciate the brain my granddaughter’s got in her skull.”
Vivian got up to rinse out her teacup in the sink. One of the cats, the black and white one who didn’t have a name, twined itself around her feet.
Mary thought about all the Latin incantations she’d had to learn over the years to “help Mommy with her cooking,” even though they never ate anything Vivian produced (nor did they want to-some of it was foul). Mary thought about all the rituals she’d had to memorize, the trips to Dolores Templeton’s basement for whatever, the endless “three turns to the left, once to the right; second day after the new moon; a photograph of the subject pressed between the pages of Luke in a vellum Bible for seven days; four chicken bones of equal length; and a handful of graveyard dirt.” She had a feeling her mother knew very well what Mary had going on upstairs.
“I have to read Dracula for English,” Mary said, changing the subject and sitting down in her mother’s vacated seat. Svengali, the orange tabby, hopped into her lap and sniffed at her glass.
“I bet Dracula never managed to set his kitchen on fire boiling water,” Grandpop laughed.
-
Alice and her brother didn’t come to history the next day, nor was the other brother who didn’t say boo in her earth science class. It was a nice day out, warm and sunny, so Mary figured they’d gone to enjoy the nice weather somewhere. She stared out the windows in every class and wished she were out there somewhere, too.
After school she headed to work at the IGA around the corner from Grandpop’s house. It was a slow night at the registers-apparently no one in the neighborhood needed cheap beer or a frozen dinner on a Friday night in May-so she and the Transylvanian bloodsucker got very well acquainted. She wasn’t convinced it was literature, but she was glad it wasn’t Charles Dickens. She would have considered a curse on Mrs. Tulowitzki’s life (or beloved rose garden, which the woman talked about ad nauseum every single class period) if she had to read A Tale of Two Cities or Great Expectations one more time before she died.
“Dracula, huh?”
She looked up to find Alice and the brother from her earth science class in her lane, Alice holding a box of Kleenex and a big package of spare ribs, the brother with two big bottles of bleach. He was tall and ungodly pretty, but surly- and wan-looking, and he had an expression on his face that plainly said he’d rather be just about anywhere else. Mary could empathize.
“Mrs. Tulo called me morbid,” Mary said as she punched in prices. If she knocked a couple bucks off the meat, who would know? “We have a special on the Kansas City-style barbeque sauce back in the deli if you buy ribs.”
Alice and the brother exchanged looks and Alice shook her head. “Nah, Esme-our foster mom-she’ll figure out something.” She waved a scrap of pink stationary. “She made us a very specific list.”
Mary quoted her a price. “My mom gets weird if people come over, but if you want to meet at the library to work on Ike this weekend, I’m free.”
“I wish I could, but we’re doing a family trip up near Crystal Mountain ‘til Monday. The parents love to camp.” She rolled her eyes, which had dark circles under them like she hadn’t even seen a pillow in some time. “As long as there are cabins I’m happy.”
“Oh,” Mary said as she closed the cash drawer, “that’s cool. I wish my mother did things. Well, no. That’s not true, because if she did I’d have to do them with her. I’ll see you Monday, then.”
Alice nodded. “I should be back by fourth period, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to learn about V-J Day. Again.” They shared a smile then Alice and her brother left. Mary turned back to her book.
Two hours and three customers later, her boss cut her loose. “Don’t go and do something I wouldn’t do, Mary,” he told her with one of his usual creepy grins. Considering Mr. Clarke had very little in the way of impulse control, Mary didn’t feel bad stealing an economy-sized container of Morton’s from the back room. Her mother needed it for a ritual she was planning.
-
It turned out that Mary’s weekend wasn’t free anyway.
Her older brother, Danny, came by on Saturday while Vivian was at work, and insisted she drive into the city with him. The Stooges were playing at some dive bar and since Danny was half in love with Iggy Pop, he wanted to go. The show ended with Danny getting a fat lip and a pair of shiners, which he insisted was the highlight of his week. Mary concurred: she’d broken some annoying college kid’s nose with her elbow in the fight to get near the stage, and she got Iggy’s autograph on her busted copy of Fun House before he passed out.
She slept a few hours on a couch that belonged to some girl Danny had slept with a few years back. The girl had a black dog the size of an alpaca with at least twice as much fur that planted itself in front of her the entire night and stared at her with big, hopeful liquid eyes. Mary, who was accustomed to ignoring such looks, was not fazed.
As Danny and their mother weren’t on speaking terms, he didn’t come in when he dropped her off Sunday morning. Mary still wasn’t one hundred percent sure what the fight had been about, but it involved a rabbit’s entrails getting stretched across the kitchen and something offensive one of Danny’s ex-girlfriends might have said once in private on a day Vivian was late to work or something. Their fights were usually insane, and generally ended badly for some poor animal.
By the time she got to school on Monday, Mary was running on fumes. The summoning ritual Vivian had been planning since February hadn’t worked, and they spent all day Sunday and most of the night with their faces stuck in books that smelled like a dead librarian someone had stuffed in a closet for thirty years. Or rather, Mary spent twenty hours reading demonology texts while Vivian worked her way through the entire container of salt, nine candles of varying heights and colors (in case that actually mattered, despite the ritual explicitly stating that it didn’t), and two different hex bags to no avail.
“You really are the worst witch ever,” Mary told her before she left for school that morning.
“You’re probably right about that,” Vivian had said tiredly, sitting in her usual spot at the kitchen table and staring forlornly into a cup of tea. “What was I thinking, summoning a demon? I can’t even get a spell to get me an award for pie at the fair to go right.”
Alice, however, looked radiant and cheerful when Mary saw her in Polkiss’s class. “What, you sleep the whole weekend?” she asked her irritably. She’d been weighing the pros and cons of sleeping through the toad-man’s lecture.
“It was a rejuvenating trip, what can I say?” She hadn’t been kidding about the ‘bright-eyed, bushy-tailed’ thing, either. Her eyes actually looked golden.
The bell rang and Polkiss was on the warpath almost immediately. So much for Mary’s nap.
“New girl, turn around. You can’t see the board if you’re facing Hardecker. And if you can’t see the board, you can’t learn about history, which means the school district is paying me for nothing. Think of your parents’ tax dollars, new girl.”
In the middle of class, some scout from the U of M poked his head in to have a nice, long chat with Polkiss about one of his basketball drones. Alice turned around. “You want to get together tonight?”
“Sounds like a plan. You mind if Jasper and his partner tag along? They got Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.” She chewed on the edge of her thumbnail.
Mary didn’t care who showed up, really. As long as their Ike project got done and she graduated, she was happy. She could just taste Kansas. “I don’t s’pose you’ve read Dracula,” she said. “I cannot think of a topic for this paper.”
Alice cocked her head to the side and looked thoughtful. “Dracula… well, it’s what set up most of Western vampire lore, right? Write about its influence on future vampire stories. Oh, on a somewhat related note, you want to go see Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things with us afterwards? Jasper’s got a thing for zombies.”
“I think I might love you,” Mary said.
-
When Mary got home from school that day, she found her mother still sitting at the kitchen table, head in her hands. Not that this was anything unusual. Since Dad left when Mary was seven, Vivian had spent most of her time alternating between asking for guidance from assorted dark forces and crying all over various surfaces in the house. Mary didn’t think either one was very sanitary. She was tired of cleaning up bodily fluids.
She poured herself a glass of lemonade before she asked what was wrong this time.
Vivian slid the envelope from Kansas across the table. “What’s this?” she asked in a croaky voice.
“Looks like you snooping in my room,” Mary said coolly, sipping her lemonade. Her only outward sign of annoyance was her white-knuckled grip on the poor glass.
“Tone down that mouth, Mary Louise,” her mother snapped.
“Or what? You’ll hex me?” Mary scoffed and set the glass down on the counter. “No offense, Mom, but I doubt you could even give me a nosebleed.”
Vivan jolted to her feet and slapped her, which was apparently all the trigger Mary’s nose needed to start bleeding. “What did I say?” Vivian hissed. Mary coughed and wiped her face while Vivan sank back down in the chair and looked more miserable than usual.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was uncalled for.” “Huh,” Mary said, staring at the red smear across the back of her hand. “Dat I did nod esspect.”
Vivian picked up the envelope and stared at it for a long, tense moment before flicking her eyes up to Mary’s. “They’re offering you money,” she said finally, voice low and hard to hear over the purr of Grandpop’s Chevy rumbling into the driveway. “A lot of it.”
Mary turned to the sink and washed her hands, keeping her head tipped back in hopes of stemming the blood flow. She dried her hands on a towel threaded through the refrigerator handle and grabbed the roll of paper towels. “Not like I could use Grandpop’s GI,” she said, dabbing at her nose.
Danny had already laid claim to that, and he was halfway though Eastern Michigan’s pre-law program. Mary didn’t begrudge her brother his dreams and all, she just wished for a crack at her own. Mostly they just consisted of getting the hell out of Michigan, but then came Kansas and the offer of a spot in their journalism program.
The paper towel soaked through quickly. She threw it in the garbage can in disgust and grabbed the tea towel they used to mop up everyday spills, a little sad it was going to get all bloody. It was just about their last towel in the house without some kind of weird stain.
Vivian was a tall, thin woman with sharp features and large hands. Except for the blonde hair, Mary didn’t look too much like her. She wasn’t much like her at all. “Were you planning on telling me, or were you just going to vanish into the horizon when it came time to move down there?”
Mary shrugged. “Hadn’t thod aboud it.” She could hear Grandpop whistling as he fiddled around in the car’s trunk. It had this awesome false bottom where he kept his hunting rifles and tools and other assorted things he didn’t want people to know he had.
“Mary-”
“No!” Mary exclaimed, throwing the towel down on the counter. “No. Just… don’t, Mom. Do you know what it’s like for me here, at school? Since I was in the sixth grade kids have been holding crucifixes up at me and smearing vile things on my locker in cat food and pig’s blood. I hate everything about this place, Mom.”
“But-”
“And most of all I don’t want to be like you.”
Vivian jerked back like she was the one who’d been slapped, but before she could say anything-before the tears welling up in her green eyes could even really glisten-the screen door screamed and banged open to admit Grandpop. He was carrying his toolbox and had a few pieces of wood under one arm.
“And how are my best girls today?” he asked with a jolly smile. Svengali immediately purred his legs.
“Headed to the library,” Mary said dully. He gave her bloody nose a concerned look.
“Headed to get a drink,” Vivian said.
“Don’t wait up,” they said together.
Grandpop shrugged and broke out his tape measure to start on fixing the damage he could. “Guess I’ll carry the paint in myself,” he murmured.
-
“So, I’ve come to the conclusion that you are the blonde in Detroit I dreamed about,” Alice said as Mary set her bag down on the table. The library was fairly full, but then again it was an ugly gray day out.
Mary gave her a strange look and swung the bad back on her shoulder. “I can’t have this kind of conversation right now,” she said stiffly.
Alice put her hand out, wrapping disturbingly strong, cold fingers around Mary’s forearm. More evidence supporting the Cullens not being totally human-and really, were real people ever that pretty?-but Mary had so many things to worry about that were happening on Earth that she was willing to let classmates with abnormalities slide.
Mary paused but didn’t sit.
“I’m sorry,” Alice said, backpedaling and letting go. She was alone at the table in the middle of the room, but it was clear someone else had been sitting with her. There was a stack of books and the Holocaust and an expensive-looking black bag in front of the empty chair ninety degrees from Alice’s seat. “I should have worded that better.”
Mary sighed and sank down in the chair across from Alice, letting the bag slip down and thump to the floor next to her. “No, okay. What was I doing in this dream?” she asked. Normally, she would have raised her eyebrows, but she was feeling a little out of it. Just like the Reds were only a little good at baseball.
Alice frowned. “Well, you died, actually.” Mary stared at her and slowly raised one eyebrow. “That’s why I came to Detroit. I had a vision about this blonde who dies… and since these visions, they come true sometimes, I told Jasper we had to go find her. And then this weekend I had another premonition, so I guess somebody made another choice, and it was definitely you. Or, you know, it will be.”
Mary couldn’t help it. She laughed. When Alice continued to give her that even, concerned look, she sighed and slumped against the table. “Look, Alice-”
“I know this sounds insane,” Alice said quickly. “Bear with me.”
“Oh, it’s not the seeing-the-future ting I have an issue with. That I have no problem believing, trust me. It’s the me specifically being special thing I question.” Mary crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back in the seat. Alice’s expression grew rather sad.
“I know I sound like one of those platitude-a-day calendars teachers have, but seriously, Mary, everybody’s got something about them that’s at least a little special.”
Mary’s lips quirked. “And mine is dying in a dream? Gee, thanks, Alice.” Alice gave her a weak smile.
“But really, Mary… I have these dreams, and sometimes they come true.”
“Usually.” They looked up to find tall, blond Jasper approaching the table, carrying several more books. His expression was calm and unreadable. “Usually they come true.”
Alice waved him off. He sat down at the table, taking the seat behind the large stack of Holocaust books. “They stay true until someone makes a choice that chances the outcome,” Alice said. “By the looks of things, you haven’t made any choices to right your path, if it’s even you steering the car in this labored metaphor.”
Mary looked at Jasper uneasily. Since he’d sat down with that serene look on his face, she’d felt her frustration calming down. The problem was the cloud of panic that rose up to fill the vacuum the frustration left, and all of it left her a little queasy. He nodded to her.
“So I’m going to die,” Mary said slowly. “That’s not exactly the most earth-shaking news you could give me, you know. I mean… we’re all going to die eventually, right?”
Jasper looked away, gold eyes flashing and going distant. Alice gave her another weak smile. “If you choose to look at it as literally as possible, I suppose,” she said, “but fundamentalism is not in fashion.”
Mary sat up a little straighter. Jasper shook his head. “Leave it, Alice,” he said.
“What I’m trying to say, Mary, is that it’s not your choice to make. I think you’re going to die because of someone else’s choice.”
Mary was a little confused. “Well, that’s a sunny prospect,” she deadpanned. “At least I don’t off myself. So, any idea where I am when this happens?”
Alice bit her lip. “This is the part I don’t understand. I don’t actually see you die. There’s conversation I can’t hear, and I can see the wall-painted blue. Nice shade.” She rubbed her forehead and frowned. “Then there’s this bright light, and someone yelling ‘Mary!’ and a lot of smoke.”
Mary groaned. “Why is it always fire?”
“I can’t be more precise than that, and I’m sorry,” Alice said. She paused and looked very closely at Mary, who flushed and had to look away. “Care to tell me why none of this is making you want to call the State Hospital on me?”
“My mother lights candles, fiddles with animal bones, and talks to Satan. You telling me I’m going to die is about the sanest thing anyone’s said to me in a while.” She fidgeted with the fastening on her bag. Jasper snorted and shuffled through his stack of books. “Hey, where’s Lori Cassidy?” she asked, realizing there was an open chair at their table.
“She wouldn’t come when she found out you’d be here,” Jasper said, smirking a little. “Apparently you’re terrifying.”
Mary smiled. “I’ve been her idea of the devil since the sixth grade.”
Jasper and Alice shared a look. “You’re going to have to explain that to me some day,” Alice said.
“Okay, so now that we’ve go the doom and gloom out of the way, can we knock Ike out?”
The only encyclopedia the library had with its E on the shelves was the 1960 edition of the World Book. “This should work, right?” Mary asked as they squinted at the spines lining the aisle. “History doesn’t change every year, right?”
Alice gave her a wry, appraising sort of look. “You’d be surprised.”
-
When Mary got home from the movie, Grandpop was gone and the kitchen smelled like fresh paint. It didn’t look like there had ever been a fire. She felt a hot surge of affection for him and wished-not for even the hundredth time-that he was her guardian instead of Vivian. Although, then again, he’d been Vivian’s parental figure, and just look how that ended up.
But really, it wasn’t Grandpop’s fault his daughter was a witch. He didn’t even know.
It was almost eleven o’clock. She could hear her mother puttering around in the basement and she could smell sage burning the closer she stood to the basement door. She fed the cats then took her school bag upstairs to her room, and when she got back to the kitchen to yell down at her mother from the top of the stairs, she could hear another voice. The light overhead flickered.
“Just… go back,” Vivian said. “I, uh, didn’t mean it.”
A man laughed. “Well, that’s not how it works,” he said in a silky voice that made Mary shiver.
“Well, you aren’t what I ordered,” Vivian said.
“Sweetheart,” the man said in the apologetic tone of voice a veterinarian uses to deliver bad news about the family pet, “that’s not exactly how Hell works. You open the channel and put in a request, sure, and you hope with all your squishy little human heart that you’re getting whoever you were conjuring up. By the way, leave Tammi be for a while. War’s netted her a whole crop of new toys that should keep her entertained for some time. Sit back. Relax. Have tea. Nobody down there wants your soul just yet. You have that pretty daughter of yours to look after.”
Mary could hear her mother’s sharp intake of breath. It felt like her heart had swelled an entire dress size with affection. Then Vivian said, “What’s Mary got to do with anything?” in such a surprised, almost derisive tone that Mary’s heart shrank back to normal size, then decided to shrivel a little more just for fun. She scowled into the darkness.
“Well, to be fair, nothing on her own,” he said, still sounding apologetic.
Mary sent a scowl down the stairs for him, too.
“Mary,” he called out, “it’s rude to stand at the top of the steps and not come down to greet your guest!”
Mary stumbled back a step and her mother shouted out something that sounded like “No!” She considered staying very still and pretending that, no, she wasn’t there, but the odds were pretty damn high that this was some force of darkness down in the basement with her mother. As she picked her way down the rickety old stairs, minding the fifth one down and its wicked case of dry rot, she hoped a little desperately that her mother had at least remembered to draw the Devil’s Trap diagram they’d found in one of the texts last weekend.
Vivian had a ritual room set up in the converted coal cellar, away from the furnace and the washer-dryer unit Grandpop found at a junkyard. The washer didn’t seem capable of washing with hot water, but it was nice not to have to truck down to the laundromat every Thursday night like they had when Mary was little. All she could remember now was playing Ping-Pong for hours with Danny while their other half-heartedly flicked through Ladies’ Home Journal and sighed and watched the dryers tumble.
The ritual room was maybe ten-by-eight, with two cinderblock walls and two made of wood, which were raised about two inches off the ground. It always smelled off-remnants of old spells and sadness and excitement and burnt herbs-and the concrete floor sloped toward the drain over by the octopus furnace in the main room. Mary had had to pour a bucket of water to wash blood down the drain before, and she really hoped that was not in her future tonight.
She thought about Alice’s prediction that she would die in a room with pretty blue paint, and suddenly she wasn’t all that frightened anymore.
Her mother was cowering behind the workbench shoved against the far wall when Mary pushed open the door. A tall, nondescript man of indeterminate age was leaning against its opposite end, facing the wall and picking under his nails with an awl he’d taken from the pegboard on the back of the workbench.
“I’m sorry!” Vivian wailed, launching herself across the tiny room and throwing her arms around Mary, who stiffened on contact. Vivian was not exactly a touchy-feely woman. Imminent danger made her a better mother, apparently.
This wasn’t the first time Mary had come home to find her mother had summoned a demon. Once, she’d returned from band practice-before she realized she hated marching in the heat and playing the flute badly-to find Vivian laughing and having tea with a woman with mottled greenish skin and horns. At least she’d assumed the creature was female, judging by its long, luxurious red hair. She’d gone upstairs to her room without a word and spun “Whole Lotta Love” on her turntable as loud as she could stand it.
Another time, her sophomore year, the demon came shaped like a ridiculously good-looking thirtysomething man, dark and a little creepy maybe. She was pretty sure that her mother slept with him.
She patted her mother on the back awkwardly and looked over her shoulder at the man leaning against the workbench, who was slumped lazily with one leg bent and the foot resting flat on the side of the bench. He smiled at her and tossed the awl backwards. It landed with a clang against an ugly pewter chalice engraved with various symbols. Some brackish liquid sloshed out onto the altar cloth Vivian had laid out and Mary realized he was the same man who’d been in their kitchen around Halloween.
“Mary, Mary, Mary,” he said, shaking his head and pushing away from the bench to approach.
Vivian trembled and turned around, hedging to keep Mary behind her. “Don’t you talk to her!” she snapped, waving a pointed finger under his nose.
He cocked his head to one side and looked amused. Mary sucked her teeth and glared at the altar setup on the workbench. The sage smell was fading in favor of the sharp tang of burnt match and spoiled eggs. Mary really hated demons sometimes. “This has really got to stop,” she told her mother.
“I think you’re probably right,” Vivian said, not taking her eyes off the demon. She was shaking so hard Mary put her hands on her shoulders to hold her down. If she were straddling a cliff, she’d have fallen over the edge.
Finally, the demon sighed dramatically and waved a hand. Vivian crumpled to one side, slumped and unconscious against the wall. She looked rather peaceful, considering. Mary sighed herself. She got the feeling she out to be terrified, what with the yellow-eyed demon standing a yard away, looking demonic and stuff, but she’d just come from a zombie movie and she was having a hard time getting back into the horror mindset. “I’m probably in shock,” she said, mostly to herself.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” the demon said.
“Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me,” she replied, putting her hands on her hips. “So are you the big deal or what?”
He laughed. “Am I the big deal?” he repeated, wheezing a little and slapping his thigh. “I just KO’d your mother by waving my fingers at her so, yes, I am ‘the big deal.’ Well, at least as close as a minor witch in Detroit is going to get.” His smile grew a little more feral and Mary started to grow a little uneasy. “Mary Hardecker-I am pleased to meet you, by the way. Heard so much good.”
“I actually vomit rainbows and kittens,” she said.
“That’s a talent, I suppose,” he replied airily.
“If you could just… absent yourself from my house, then that would be wonderful.” She waved her hands and tried not to look at the bowl full of pig blood sitting on the altar. “I mean, don’t you have some damned souls to go torture right now?” She paused, thinking of one of the demonology books she’d spent the last weekend drowning in. “By the way, you’re not getting my firstborn.”
He chuckled. “So like your mother, you are, Miss Mary.”
She scowled at him. “I’m already in Hell, aren’t I?”
“No, sweetheart, you’re just in high school, although in some circles they say it’s not too far off the mark. But anyway, what was I saying?” He tapped his chin. “Right. Firstborns. Your mother refused to hand over the keys to hers, too. Now, normally we frown on that sort of thing-can’t have witches getting too choosy, you know. It makes the Hellfire chorus line awkward at times. But then you were born and we could just tell. ‘That one’s going to be some kind of catalyst, Dad,’ my daughter tells me when Viv squeezes you out. And you know what? My girl was right.” He smiled fondly. Mary felt a little more nauseous, which was saying something considering she was already contemplating bathing his shoes in kittens and rainbows right then.
Then it hit her. “Oh, damnit, Mother,” she said, looking at the unconscious woman. “I’m her second born, aren’t I?” She gave the demon a perfectly miserable look.
“If I could tell you ‘no,’ I would,” he said. “But really, why lie? It’s so unbecoming.” He laughed like a bad comedian in the middle of a routine. Then he winked at her and made a finger gun gesture. “Anyway, I just stopped by to say hello, and to let you know I’ll be seein’ you around.”
And then he was gone.
Mary left her mother where she lay and headed upstairs, where she immediately sat down and wrote seven pages of her Dracula paper. She couldn’t sleep and she didn’t want to sit and stare at the wall in case she started to think, so she did everything she could come up with to distract herself. She wrote two fluff pieces for the newspaper, took notes from one of the Eisenhower biographies she’d checked out, and watched the sun rise.
She cooked bacon and toast in the repaired kitchen and had a leisurely breakfast. Grandpop stopped by on his way to work and stole a piece of her toast.
“You look a little peaky, buttercup,” he told her. “Everything okay?”
“I’m just itching to get out of here,” she lied. “Did I tell you I got a scholarship to Kansas State?”
-
When her mother died during her freshman year, Mary sold her library of black books and demonology texts sight unseen to a man up in Minnesota. He sounded nice on the phone, and was incredibly interested in the collection. “It’ll go to good use this time, Miss Hardecker,” he said.
Mary thought about the demon that had probably killed her mother, or whatever it had been, and she nodded, pinching the bridge of her nose with her finger and thumb. “Yeah, I hope it does,” she agreed. “Thank you again, Mr. Murphy.”
Several years later, Mary was working for the Kansas City Star and having the time of her life. She had friends, a career that was taking off, and an adorable apartment in a good part of town. She was bone-crushingly normal, taking part in a book club, jogging every morning, and going to just about every rock concert that played in the area. She wasn’t fond of Rush, but her editor and close friend Theresa Wallace loved them, and Theresa dutifully went to every Bowie, Kansas, and Blue Oyster Cult show Mary dragged her to and damnit, Mary was a team player.
Right after Easter, Theresa had a birthday and the department went out to celebrate at a bar on the west side of the city. When it was Mary’s turn to buy a round, she struck up a conversation with a good-looking man with twinkling dark eyes and a five o’clock shadow. He was alone, friendly, and had a nice, gruff voice that reminded her pleasantly of Grandpop.
“John Winchester,” he said, shaking her hand politely.
“Mary Hardecker,” she said, grinning. She sent a waitress back to her colleagues with her drinks, but she didn’t return.
When John walked her out to her car later that night, the black Chevy she’d inherited when Grandpop died not long after her graduation from Kansas State, she knew he was the one.
When she realized she was pregnant a month later, he kissed her and immediately asked her to marry him. Danny, who walked her down the aisle, didn’t particularly like John, but he told her he was happy for her as long as she was happy.
And she was.
- Mary wakes up a little disoriented. She’d been having a sweet little dream about introducing baby Sammy to his namesake, sitting on the hood of Grandpop’s car with the man and the trunk still full of wrenches, hammers, and shotguns, on a dusky night with the lights of Detroit in the background.
She peeks into the baby’s room and sees John standing there. He shushes her and she nods and heads downstairs to get a glass of lemonade. The lights are flickering. As she walks past the living room, she realizes that John hasn’t just left the TV on to check on the baby, he’s conked out in front of the set with an arm dangling.
She trips up the stairs and stumbles into Sammy’s room, but she knows what’s going on now and she feels heartsick and dizzy and all the things she didn’t feel the last time she looked up and saw a man with bright yellow eyes looking back at her.
She glances around the room and notices the walls, painted that shade of blue John picked out because it matched her eyes in the sunlight, saying he hoped the new baby might get eyes the same color. It was pretty, he said. Just like her.
She remembers the strange, unearthly girl from high school, Alice’s warning about pretty blue paint and fire and dying, and her heart sinks, through her heels and then through the floorboards and maybe when it feels a little warm it’s just the core of the earth heating up her cockles. Whatever those are.
“It’s you,” she says.
.