Lady Luck nosleep

Okay, so I used to work at a metaphysical store.

You ever been to a metaphysical store? Do you even know what that is? If not, you can Google it because this is a long story and I think I read somewhere that there is a character limit, and I really don’t want to have to do this in sections. That just seems annoying for all of us.

My boss was a lady named Bianca, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t her real name because who in the fuck is named Bianca? Whatever the case, she called herself Bianca and she carried herself like some weird mixture between a 1940s actress and a crystal-gazing crackpot, flitting around with her gray hair all done up in curls and a cigarette twirling in the air while “gossiping” to me about her astral plane adventures, what crystal fixes the negative energy generated by a social faux pas, and how I needed to find myself a man or I’d end up a sacrifice to some Satanic Panic cult.

“Ashley, dear, they really do exist,” she’d explain between drags. “Just because mainstream media says that we shouldn’t be scared of the LaVeyan archetype doesn’t mean those ne’er-do-wells don’t exist. Besides, you’re too old to still be unmarried. Do you want to end up a spinster?”

Actually, that little exchange can pretty much sum up everything about Bianca that you’d ever want to know. If somebody took Peggy Lee, Delores Del Rio, and David Wolfe and crushed them mercilessly together, that’s Bianca.

But! She paid well. Better than anyone else who wanted to hire me. So there’s that.

The weirdest thing about Bianca, though, isn’t the fact that she was an eccentric aunt that nobody asked for or particularly wanted, but rather the fact that she would trust me--me, a thirty-year-old woman with a criminal record--to run her little back-alley voodoo shop alone while she vanished for months at a time. She called them “business trips.” I guess, sure, she’d come back with little knick-knacks from gift shops in Europe and Mexico and goddamn Russia and would sell them as “blessed relics” or “haunted conduits to the realm of the dead,” but mostly she came back with piles of vacation slides. Literally slides. She’d make me sit and watch on the projector in the back office and everything.

“Business trip” my ass.

Then one day, while I was closing up shop, I hear the bell on the front door ding after I locked it. Scared the piss out of me, but when I turned around, there was Bianca waving a cigarette in one hand and her keys in the other, grinning ear-to-ear as she told me to help her get something out of her truck. You know, a Silverado, just like Audrey Hepburn would drive.

“You’re younger and more vibrant and, let’s not kid ourselves, stronger. You were in prison! You have the muscle of a young Muhammad Ali!”

Okay. Sure. Just like I always dreamed of when I was a little girl. But, yeah, I helped Bianca unload her truck and, honestly, this wasn’t no little knick-knack and it was making a lot of noise for some slides of mountains and beaches. It was a box, about the size of a refrigerator box, covered in a black cloth like she was hiding a magician’s assistant inside. When I loaded it on the dolly Bianca gratefully brought for me while she watched me fight it, it whined.

And you know how, if you have a box or something with something alive in it, you can tell? Like, if you’re carrying a cat in a carrier, it’s really obvious there’s a living thing in your hands? You can tell because a cat would shift its weight a lot more than, say, a stack of books would. It’s painfully obvious, just like it was painfully obvious that whatever was in that box on that dolly was a breathing, eating, fucking, shitting creature just like you and me.

I thought about that a lot as I walked inside, with Bianca chirping at the back of my head about how beautiful South America is, ignoring the fact that I could now see the outline of bars against that black cloth. And fingers wrapped around said bars, the knuckles bumping up against the fabric. Bianca actually looked down at them and kept talking like nothing was there.

Until we got inside. She had me shove the box in a corner next to a shelf of animal bones and a stack of soggy cardboard boxes, but before I could get the hell out, she grabbed my arm and insisted I stay. Lit one more cigarette as though she needed it to punctuate her sentences and whirled me right back into the storeroom with a smile.

“Come now, Ashley! Let me show you what I have! Years in the making, this one!”

I tried to say I didn’t want to see it. I tried to get past her to the door. She wound up burning me with her cancer stick and ripping the cloth off her prize all in one fell swoop, and as soon as I laid eyes on what I’d been hauling, I stopped in my tracks. My feet were as glued to the floor as her souvenir’s feet were chained to its cage.

Sorry, her cage. It was definitely female, but like if a woman had been dropped in a taffy machine or, I don’t know, was part spider. Her torso was so long, her limbs so spindly, and her fingers like something out of Nightmare on Elm Street. Her breasts, while small, were perky and almost attractive, but heavily scarred and severely bruised. But, you know, as odd as her body was, that wasn’t what stopped me in my tracks; I could have thought of some rational explanation for her bizarre anatomy because, you know, human bodies are weird and do weird things sometimes.

No, what stopped me was her face. Literally fox-like, with bright red fur and strange black markings and big, pointy ears high atop her head. Her neck was so long--freakishly long--with a thick mane of fur that was slick with blood that poured out of a gaping hole where her right eye used to be.

She still had the left one. It was large and dewy and pleading. But the other seemed to have been clawed out of her head, and the rest of that side of her face looked like it’d been clubbed in with a pipe wrench. Just looking at her, you could tell that she shouldn’t have been alive. Even she seemed to realize that, with her terrified puppy-dog expression, and it tore my insides to shreds.

She was monstrous but it haunted me. She was pleading with me. She wanted out.

But Bianca just kept bragging, on and on and on. I heard the words, but I didn’t register them for a good, long while. I don’t think she cared. I think the bitch liked hearing herself talk.

“Isn’t she impressive? All the way from Venezuela although, if I’m not mistaken, I think the broker told me she was originally from Brazil? What a find! Do you know anything about Brazilian folklore, Ashley? I wouldn’t peg you as the type to read, but if you ever did, it’s one hell of a ride. We have rabbits and clovers, and they have maned wolves. Isn’t that more impressive? So much more regal, though I hear they smell less than fabulous.”

Maned wolves? I asked her what the fuck that was and she told me it was like a fox, but on stilts. When I pointed out that, yeah, her little guest seemed to get the stilt part down but she was a touch more sophisticated than some fucking wild dog, Bianca pouted for a moment before letting loose with a grin that was as malicious as it was proud.

“Because Lucky isn’t a maned wolf, sweetie. She’s more than that.”

She’s a goddess, specifically the goddess of luck. At least, that’s what Bianca said, but I can’t even believe her name is Bianca, so take it with a grain of salt. I couldn’t figure out how a god, let alone one in control of luck, would ever hit a point in its career that it found itself half-bludgeoned to death in a cage the size of a bookcase but, of course, Bianca had her own bullshit reason for that, too.

“It’s simple, doll,” she purred, poking at Lucky’s ribs and watching her squirm. “Because there are gods more powerful and man is a bit more tricky than he used to be. Besides, she isn’t the lucky one. This is.”

She pitched something at me, fresh from her pocket. I thought it was a ball until it hit me and I realized how heavy it was. A rock? No, because rocks aren’t perfectly round. It was black with gold markings, rings within rings within rings with tiny glyphs that I knew I couldn’t read, even if I could see them clearly. It took me a shameful amount of time to realize what it was though, and the only thing that drove the point home was “Lucky” letting out a high-pitched cry when I squeezed it.

It was her missing eye.

“I really wanted this, but she’s a nice trophy of the hunt, wouldn’t you say?”

She practically herded me outside after that. Said she’d lock up. I almost didn’t want to leave, and when I got home? Well, I ended up spending most of my time staring at my bedroom ceiling and falling into my thoughts for the whole night. I mean, I couldn’t even really believe I had seen what I had seen, but I could still feel the weight of that eye in my hand, and that face? Shit was the kind of thing that gave you nightmares. But those eyes? They were so intelligent, so fucking aware.

God, it was like looking at myself locked up.

I mean, I never meant to go into what landed me in prison, but now that I’m thinking about it, it may give you some idea of why I did what I did. Basically: the “battered woman” defense doesn’t really work to get you out of trouble, more than it just makes you get into less trouble. So, I know what it’s like to be stuck behind bars, beaten down in body and spirit and wondering what you did wrong and why your abuser is still strutting the streets. It’s painful and haunting and downright unfair and, if Lucky was as magical and old and godly as Bianca said--hell, even if she wasn’t--she obviously didn’t deserve what had been done to her. She had that look, like a beaten spouse, begging for one more chance to be a good girl, one more shot at freedom.

And so, I went to work early the next day. Real early. Like, two hours early.

I just let myself in, locked the door behind me, walked back to the storeroom, and dropped my bag. It’s funny what some wire, some bolt cutters, and an hour of browsing WikiHow can teach you. I went straight from being a klutz who couldn’t figure out which key was her house key on some mornings to a goddamned professional jailbreaker. And, for all those claws and teeth, I gotta say that Lucky was a very gracious rescue because no sooner had I snapped the chain on her feet did she practically fall on me, squalling, and held me in a shaking hug as she heaved with strange, doggie sobs. Goddess or no, the girl was as human as anyone I’d ever met.

I tried to patch her up. Iodine stains fur like a bitch, by the way. And fur makes it very hard to stitch things up because, well, it just keeps getting in between the thread and the skin. I guess that’s why veterinarians always shave your pet before they do surgery, but I don’t own an electric razor so what’re you gonna do?

I won’t sit here and tell you I did a fantastic job, but well enough that she seemed to be in better spirits. Couldn’t speak a lick of any human language, but she could write pretty decently in English and we sat for a while and “talked.”. Things like how she was older than me or Bianca or anyone alive, and how some powerful guy in some country down south made a deal with her but he wound up being a cunt and she reneged, and now we see the aftermath on the news. She didn’t really know how somebody was able to catch her, but she was pretty sure that asshole had something to do with it. Maybe he prayed to somebody she didn’t get on with.

And Bianca… well, Bianca isn’t her real name, and there’s a lot about Bianca that I didn’t know. The more I learned, though, the more I started thinking real hard about her as a person, where our stock came from, all of those “business trips.” I thought of that shelf of animal bones I’d parked Lucky’s cage next to the night before, and, well, as Lucky put it, “How many of those ‘animals’ do you think were actually animals? How many more do you think she can catch with my power?”

That’s what broke me, I think. I mean, whatever these things were, if they were anything like Lucky, they were people. Bianca was a murderer or, at the very least, an old lady who paid people to be murderers. A torturer. A serial killer. Ain’t it a bad idea to let serial killers run free?

But you can’t call the police about this, can you? Mulder and Scully aren’t real. Oh, no. You gotta be the police yourself.

To say Bianca was surprised when she walked in is putting it lightly, but what can I say? Nobody expects to walk into their own store and get brained by a hammer. Especially not twice. Or three times. Four? I lost count, but I doubt she was around to be shocked after the third blow anyway. What matters is that she’s gone, and she can’t hurt a living, thinking creature ever again.

And I got Lucky’s eye back, from Bianca’s pocket though it maybe cracked a little from the fall. It makes you wonder how Bianca met such a vicious end when the damn thing was supposed to bring good fortune, but maybe there’s a goddess of karma out there, too, who was sick of watching some wannabe debutant flout around killing its spiritual siblings left and right like a paranormal Jeffrey Dahmer. After all, as Bianca said, there are gods more powerful than Lucky.

Or maybe Lucky’s more powerful than she thought. Maybe she wanted me to win, so I did. I can live with that explanation. I kind of like the idea of the old girl getting the last laugh over an old fucking bat that probably paid some poacher to rip her eye out.

By the way: That eye looks much better in Lucky’s head than Bianca’s hand.

I don’t know where Lucky went after that, though. She carved something into my palm, gave me a lopsided foxy smile, and just walked out the door like nobody would notice her. She just kind of left me there with the body and responsibility and a brand new eye-shaped scar on my hand. I guess I should be worried, but I feel invincible. I even think I figured out that that scar is her mark, some kind of brand of favoritism, because if I can be honest with you? It’s been a week, there’s evidence everywhere, I dumped the body someplace obvious, and the police still haven’t fingered me despite me being the last one to see her and a rather nasty criminal record. They want to, I think, but they can’t because everything really tying me to the death just happens to be inadmissible in court or, well, just plain missing.

Also, I got fifty dollars on a scratch-off.

I’m not sure how long it will last, but between you and me, if you ever find yourself face-to-face with some kind of twisted creature, no matter how twisted it may look, it may be worth it to try to get on its good side. If Lucky is real, who knows how far this pantheon goes and what they’re all capable of. Hell, who knows what kind of amazing gift you could get by doing them a favor, even if it’s just getting away with murder.

You can take it from me, a woman who can honestly say Lady Luck is on her side.

Submitted August 10, 2017 at 06:06AM by Ilunibi http://ift.tt/2wJT0Mt nosleep