the bottle down and wiped dust off it.
“I’m going to tell him how rude you are,” said the voice on the phone, “this isn’t very funny.” The line clicked.
“No,” Torrez said as he poured a couple of ounces of rum into a coffee cup. “It wouldn’t have killed me. But it would have made a mindless … it would have made an idiot of me. I wouldn’t have been able to … work, talk, think.” Even now I can hardly make sense of the comics in the newspaper, he thought.
“He had me on his TV, Daddy,” said Amelia’s voice from the answering machine. “I was his channel-changer.”
Torrez set the coffee cup near the doll, and felt it vibrate faintly just as he let go of the handle. The sharp alcohol smell became stronger, as if some of the rum had been vaporized.
“And he gave me candy.”
“I’m sorry,” said Torrez absently, “I don’t have any candy.”
“Sugar Babies are better than Reese’s Pieces.” Torrez had always given her Reese’s Pieces, but before now she had not been able to tell him what she preferred.
“How can you talk?”
“The people that nobody paid for, he would put all of us, all our jars and boxes and dolls on the TV and make us change what the TV people said. We made them say bad prayers.”
The phone rang again, and Amelia’s voice out of the answering machine speaker said, “Sheesh” and broke right in. “What, what?”
“I’ve got a message for Terry Torrez,” said a woman’s voice, “make sure he gets it, write this number down!” The woman recited a number, which Torrez automatically memorized. “My husband is in an alarm clock, but he’s fading; I don’t hardly dream about him even with the clock under the pillow anymore, and the mint patties, it’s like a year he takes to even get halfway through one! He needs a booster shot, tell Terry Torrez that, and I’ll pay a thousand dollars for it.”
I’ll want more than a thousand, Torrez thought, and she’ll pay more, too. Booster shot! The only way to boost a fading ghost – and they all faded sooner or later – was to add to the container a second ghost, the ghost of a newly deceased infant, which would have vitality but no personality to interfere with the original ghost.
Torrez had done that a few times, and – though these were only ghosts, not souls, not actual people! – it had always felt like putting feeder mice into an aquarium with an old, blind snake.
“That’ll buy a lot of Sugar Babies,” remarked Amelia’s ghost.
“What? Just make sure he gets the message!”
The phone clicked off, and Amelia said, “I remember the number.” “So do I.”
Midwives sold newborn ghosts. The thought of looking one of them up nauseated him. “Mom’s dead,” said Amelia.
Torrez opened his mouth, then just exhaled. He took a sip of Amelia’s rum and said, “She is?”
“Sure. We all know, when someone is. I guess they figured you wouldn’t bleed for her, if you wouldn’t bleed for me. Sugar Babies are better than Reese’s Pieces.”
“Right, you said.”
“Can I have her rings? They’d fit on my head like crowns.” “I don’t know what became of her,” he said. It’s true, he realized, I don’t. I don’t even know what there was of her.
He looked at the doll and wondered why anyone kept such things.
His own Bible, on the mantel in the living room workshop, was relatively intact, though of course it was warped from having been soaked in holy water. He had burned out half a dozen verses from the Old Testament that had to do with witchcraft and wizards; and he had thought about excising “thou shalt not kill” from Exodus, but decided that if the commandment was gone, his career might be too.
After he had refused to ransom Amelia’s ghost, he had cut out Ezekiel 44:25 – “And they shall come at no dead person to defile themselves: but for father, or for mother, or for son, or for daughter, for brother, or for sister that hath had no husband, they may defile themselves.”
He had refused to defile himself – defile himself any further, at least
– for his own dead daughter. And so she had wound up helping to voice “bad prayers” out of a TV set somewhere.
The phone rang again, and this time he snatched up the receiver before the answering machine could come on. “Yes?”
“Mr. Torrez,” said a man’s voice. “I have a beaker of silence here, she’s twelve years