Haunted by the same restless ghost, a Black woman and a lesbian living in separate timelines must survive the relentless persecution of the same white supremacist before his hatred claims both their lives, unaware that their fates are bound by a mystery that spans generations.
Haunted by the same restless ghost, a Black woman and a lesbian living in separate timelines must survive the relentless persecution of the same white supremacist before his hatred claims both their lives, unaware that their fates are bound by a mystery that spans generations.
“Packs are tied down, babe,” Ben called from the foyer. “Are you ready?”
Cassandra suppressed a sigh. Come on, she thought. This could be fun if I give it a chance. “Yeah,” she called back, opening a cabinet beside the kitchen pantry. “I’m gonna make a
cup of coffee first. You want one?”
“Nah. I’ll get one at The Sunny Side. I’ll wait for you in the car then. Move those buns, hun!”
The front door closed on Cassandra’s saucy reply. She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling as she removed a Yeti cup from one of the shelves. Ben’s enthusiasm was contagious. She still wasn’t sold on the idea of camping for a whole weekend, or at all, really, but it was hard not to feel good whenever Ben became excited. If she were to be eaten by snakes, at least it would be with him.
She snatched a coffee pod from a drawer and started the Keurig. “A good day starts with good coffee,” Daddy used to say, and he was right.
As Cassandra took the half-and-half from the fridge, the fingers on her right hand spasmed, and she nearly dropped it before snatching it with her left. That was close, she thought, frowning at the offending digits. Damn side effects. One of these days, she was going to drop something heavy on her foot. God, how she hated taking those fucking pills—hated more that she needed them in the first place. Zoloft for anxiety, Zaleplon for sleep, and Zyprexa for schizophrenia. Three Zs to help you get your zs, she thought wryly.
Staring at her right hand, the creamer in her left temporarily forgotten, Cassandra wondered at the strangeness of life. Sleep used to come so easily. Before she’d started seeing that ghost. Well, hallucinating it, anyway. Strange how one traumatic experience can change your whole life. You start seeing a spirit, so the doctor gives you antipsychotics. The antipsychotics give you anxiety, so he gives you serotonin meds. The serotonin meds make it hard for you to sleep, and on and on the train goes. Her parents should have invested in pharmaceuticals. They’d be rich by now.
And why had she started seeing that ghost?
Snorting, Cassandra gave herself a mental shake and closed the fridge. Ben was waiting in the car. She moved to the counter and poured the cream until the center of her coffee was a swirl of delicious, creamy brown goodness, and tossed the used pod into the garbage. All of her doctors said she shouldn’t drink coffee, but there were some things a woman simply can’t live without. Besides, she’d never taken so much as a sip before the hallucinations had started.
And strange hallucinations they were. Dr. Bauer, her current psychiatrist, described her condition as ‘a strange and unique case of schizophrenia that challenges our understanding of this mental disease.’ Because Cassandra never saw shapes and shadows that no one else saw. She never heard vibrations or voices that no one else heard. That is, except for one. Her own personal hallucination, Nancy.
No one in Cassandra’s family suffered from the disease. But, as her doctors had pointed out, although they look for genetic markers to predict mental illnesses, they aren’t the only predictor. Trauma can trigger it, too.
Just like that, it’s October 2005, almost thirteen years ago. Cassandra is fifteen again. It will be another four and a half years, two after she began taking the first antipsychotic, Invega, before Cassandra will study the works of a German philosopher, Johanne Fichte, in college. He wrote, “You could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without affecting all parts of the immeasurable whole.” She would read that line obsessively and think, if that were true, then her life might have been forever altered by something as insignificant as a rusted nail—embedded deep into the balding black tire of her father’s Jeep Grand Cherokee.
There was no spare. If there had been, Cassandra’s father would have taken her to Shanice’s party that night instead of her cousin, Antonne. Perhaps then, she wouldn’t have witnessed the horrible nightmare that no fifteen-year-old child should see, or experienced the later horror that would fracture her mind like webbed glass.
***
“Let me do the talking, Cassie,” Antonne cautioned. He signaled and pulled his candy-apple-green Civic next to a curb in front of a house surrounded by a rusted chain-link fence. “We ain’t done nothing wrong. Everything’ll be fine so long as we keep our heads.”
The sky was an overcast gray, the clouds huge and pregnant with dark promise. They made the shadows cast by the flashing police lights behind them seem ominous. The streetlights along this section of Third Avenue had gone dark years ago; some shattered by rock-throwing kids, others simply burned out over time. Hazed yellow porch lanterns or threads of silvery-white moonlight breaking through the cloud cover provided the only other sources of light. Shadows painted houses in dreary gray tones.
Why does it feel like he’s trying to convince himself instead of me? Cassandra worried. Her stomach twisted. The strain in Antonne’s voice was palpable. Still, she nodded, not being keen on dealing with the police in any case. A sudden, horrible thought occurred to her. “You ain’t got anything stupid in the trunk of this car, do you?”
Antonne looked at her like she’d grown a second head. “What? No! Maybe I got a broken taillight or something.” He studied the red and blue lights in the rearview mirror. “More likely, it’s a case of driving while Black,” he muttered. “Make sure your hands are out where they can see ’em, and remember: Be calm.”
Daddy had given her almost the same lecture many times. Cassandra leaned against the cloth seat and tried to appear as non-threatening as a blind newborn kitten. Antonne gripped the steering wheel at the ten and two positions, his arms limp and relaxed, face blank as he stared straight ahead.
Minutes dragged by. The slick surface of the officer’s Charger glinted beneath the lights circling in the rearview. Thanks to the blinding glare of the spotlight beaming through the back window, Cassandra couldn’t make out much else. Heart fluttering, she turned her attention to the sidewalk outside her window, watching shadows dance against tufts of grass growing out of the cracked cement.
“Ugh,” she complained, “what’s taking them so long?”
“This is what they do,” Antonne replied distantly. He squinted into the side mirror and looked away, wincing. “It’s a power trip. They like seein’ brothers squirm. Makes their chests puff like songbirds.”
“Well, it’s making me anxious,” Cassandra mumbled. That was only half the truth. Her clammy hands trembled. A snare drummer in a high school marching band might struggle to keep pace with her hammering heartbeat. She felt like a rabbit catching the scent of a fox outside its burrow. She looked at Antonne, and despite the way his knuckles trembled on the steering wheel, she felt a little better. I’m not alone, she told herself. We have each other.
A second police cruiser parked behind the first, flashers spinning.
Cassandra swore, twisting in her seat. A heavy stone had settled in her chest and was sinking into her stomach. “What’s going on, Antonne? Why do they need two cops to write a ticket?”
“Standard police procedure,” Antonne assured her. For a wonder, his voice was steady. “They call their squad in case shit hits the fan, especially at night and in neighborhoods like this. Makes ’em feel safer, I guess. Now sit back down! You look like a fuckin’ kid at his first theme park.”
The explanation made sense, but didn’t make her feel any better. What about our right to feel safe? That didn’t matter, of course. They could have been pulled over in the middle of broad daylight, surrounded by a hundred people, and she wouldn’t have felt safe.
People began gathering outside. Some only stood on their porches, but Cassandra saw a few girls her age come as far as the sidewalk. One of them held up a cell phone, pointed toward the car as though recording. That did give her some relief, but only a little.
A tall, lanky officer emerged from the second cruiser. He gestured animatedly to his partner, pointing at the Civic. Cassandra licked her lips, feeling her scalp prickle. Something’s not right. He looks like a child pointing at a toy he wants at Walmart.
After some time, the first officer joined his colleague and approached the Honda from Antonne’s side. He was shorter than his companion but far more muscular. His stiff-legged gait and broad chest reminded Cassandra of a stalking pit bull. His clean-shaven face appeared hewn from rock, and his ears resembled bruised cauliflowers. Apparently, this guy had been in his fair share of brawls. The second followed close behind, looking like a Greyhound with its ears perked, eyes alert for signs of sudden movement.
Cassandra glanced nervously at her cousin, but he seemed unfazed, staring straight ahead with his hands wrapped securely around the steering wheel.
The officer’s black leather belt creaked as he bent, shining his flashlight through the open window. “Good evening, young fellah,” he said. “Mind telling where you’re headed in such a hurry?” His tone was warm and conversational, entirely at odds with his face—just a concerned guy doing what he was paid to do. Maybe Antonne was right. Maybe there really was nothing to worry about.
“Party,” Antonne replied. “At a nearby friend’s house—sir,” he added belatedly. He turned away from the beam but kept his hands firmly on the steering wheel. “I wasn’t speeding, though. The limit’s 35 through—”
“Nearby, eh?” The cop interrupted, raising an eyebrow. He swung the beam at Cassandra, forcing her to shield her eyes. “And where exactly would that be?”
“Corner of Third and Sistrunk,” Antonne answered. “About a mile or so from here.”
“I know where that is, son; I ain’t lost,” the cop retorted, returning to Antonne. “Problem is, we received a tip about some lowlife selling drugs out of their trunk. You wouldn’t have seen anything like that yourself, would you?”
Antonne swallowed, but his voice remained steady. “No, sir. We ain’t seen—”
“Funny thing is,” the cop interrupted again, “you and your vehicle match the description the caller gave. Ain’t that something?” he asked like he’d just discovered it could snow on a mountain peak in July. The corners of his mouth twitched with amusement.
Cassandra’s heart leapt. What the hell is he talking about? She knew Antonne, and he’d never touched a drug in his life, much less sold them. Obviously, this cop was trying to intimidate her cousin, like he was a common criminal. Her hands clenched into fists on her lap.
A slow scowl spread across Antonne’s face as the officer’s implication sank home. The cop grinned. Antonne shared a knowing glance with Cassandra before replying sardonically, “You mean Black, wearing a t-shirt, and driving anything with four wheels?”
The officer’s grin grew wolfish. His canine teeth were pointy and crooked, solidifying Cassandra’s mental image of a snarling pit bull, giving her a shiver. “Why, yeah, something like that! Now, step out of the car, young fellah. I’ve got to give you a little pat down.”
Cassandra’s eyes bulged. “Wait, what? Why does he have to get out of the car?”
“Shut up, Cassie!” Antonne snapped. Then, glaring at the cop, “This is bullshit, man.” But he opened the car door without argument.
“Maybe. We’ll see. If you ain’t a pusher, maybe you got that pretty little girl working the streets for you.” He chuckled, then echoed Antonne’s earlier words, “Just keep your head. If you ain’t done anything wrong, you’ll be fine.”
Before Cassandra could respond to the cop’s nasty statement, the girl with the cell phone shouted, “Ya’ll leave that man alone! What’s he done?” A growing crowd was gathering behind her. One of them yelled, “Get out of here, fucking pigs!”
The second cop pivoted toward them, raising his hands in a warding gesture. “Police business! Back away! Keep your distance!”
“Don’t make me repeat myself, son,” the first cop warned. He seemed utterly unbothered by the onlookers. “Come on,” he coaxed, “get out, turn around, spread your legs. Keep them hands raised; I’m sure you know the drill.”
Hot blood rushed to Cassandra’s neck and cheeks. For a blessed moment, anger overcame the fear, and she welcomed it. “Excuse me?! What the hell is that supposed to mean, Officer Barbrady?”
“Cassie,” Antonne hissed, “shut up!” He shook like a rag caught in the wind, but judging by the strained look on his face, Cassandra could tell he was struggling to control his anger, too.
Good, Cassandra seethed, nostrils flaring. Racist bastard. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
The cop wasted no time in shoving Antonne against the Civic—hard. The metal frame groaned in grievance. Cassandra cried out wordlessly as it rocked sideways, tilting her against the passenger door.
“HEY!” the girl with the phone shouted. “Did y’all see that? What the fuck was that for, pig?!” She stood on her toes, stretching to maneuver the phone’s camera around the second cop, who had suddenly become a moving human wall. “Leave that poor man alone!”
“Yeah, leave him alone!” another person shouted, and more people joined in.
“—fucking bastards—”
“—assholes!”
“Crooked motherfuckers, every last one of you!”
The second cop gave up on playing blockade against the crowd and drew his gun, pointing it at the ground in front of him. “Enough! Back the FUCK UP, NOW! This is police business! Go back to your homes!”
Two more police cruisers pulled in behind the others. Cassandra bit her tongue to stop herself from screaming. Warm, coppery blood trickled into her mouth. Never had she felt so powerless, and the situation was worsening by the second. The second cop was looking around as though he were surrounded by snarling wolves. If only she could do something, anything, to end this. From the corner of her eye, she saw more officers running toward them, hands resting on holstered revolvers.
“Ah hah,” The first cop purred satisfactorily. “What’s this in your pocket, son? A gun?”
An icy spike of terror stabbed Cassandra’s gut. Impossible! Antonne didn’t own a fucking gun! She knew she hadn’t misheard, though, because the second officer immediately turned and raised his revolver, pointing the barrel directly at Antonne’s chest. The girl with the phone screamed something, but her brain could no longer interpret the girl’s words.
“What?” Antonne half-questioned, half-roared. “That ain’t no fucking gun, man, that’s my wallet!” He bucked and half-turned, his eyes wide with fear and confusion.
Cassandra scrambled over the center console, slamming a knee into the hard plastic and nearly tumbling headfirst into the footwell. Every police shooting story she had ever read or heard flashed through her mind. No, no, no!
The officer yelped, leaping backward like a startled cat. In one fluid motion, he drew his gun and aimed it at the young man one local news station would later describe as ‘a teenage thug suspected of drug trafficking.’ “Don’t move, motherfucker!” His face had gone deathly pale, eyes bright and shiny in the headlight’s glare. “Don’t even think about it!”
“Whoah, whoah, whoah, man!” Antonne shouted, throwing his hands back up. “Hold up!”
“Antonne!” Cassandra screamed, leaning out of the car as he stumbled back against the rear door, bouncing off the steel frame with a loud bang. He then fell forward, toward the cop, and his awful death. Cassandra saw the fatal decision reflected in the officer’s hard, frightened eyes, and screamed again, another pointless plea too late to stop anything. The revolver’s muzzle flashed once, twice, three times, cracking like thunder and filling the air with an acrid sulfuric scent.
The crowd erupted into chaos. Some ran back toward their homes, screaming, while others had to be pushed back by shouting police. Cassandra saw none of it. Later, while the nightmare repeatedly played in her mind, she would think how, in movies, people who were shot jerked and convulsed like epileptics having a seizure, but Antonne didn’t. His lean body slammed into the Civic with another dull thud, then slid to the ground gracelessly. One hand clutched his chest as his blood spilled between his trembling fingers in dark, red rivulets, his face etched in a permanent mask of shock and disbelief.
Dimly, Cassandra thought she heard shouting. Or perhaps it was her own screams; she never knew. Antonne’s chest heaved. Blood bubbled in his open mouth, and over the sounds of screams and surging crowd, Cassandra swore she could hear the air rattling in the back of his throat. For the rest of her life, every time she heard someone with the hitching, gasping breath of bronchitis, she’d shiver and think: That’s how Antonne sounded when he died.
A lone tear fell from his wide, staring eyes. It traced a glistening path down his smooth, brown cheek, welled up on his chin, paused, and fell to his chest. There, it mixed with the blood staining his shirt. He hitched in a last, agonized breath and whispered three final words: “Momma, I’m cold.”
***
“Ma’am, can you look here, please?”
Cassandra couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move. She didn’t want to, anyway.
Someone, a man, she thought distantly, snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Ma’am? Can you hear me?”
She sat on the rear step of an open ambulance, legs dangling, vacant eyes unfocused as uniformed people went about their business around her. Exhaustion whispered gentle invitations to come away, to sleep, to leave the world behind, but the blue, red, and white flashing lights hurt even when her eyes were shut. She didn’t want to sleep, afraid that when she closed her eyes, she’d see Antonne’s bloody chest and lifeless gaze.
Fingers snapped again, and this time her gaze flicked to a concerned-looking middle-aged medic standing in front of her. His gloved fingers felt warm and alien against her wrist as he checked her vitals. Some vague part of her understood he was speaking to her, but his voice was muted and incomprehensible.
A slow, mist-like drizzle floated lazily in the air, clinging to her hair and skin, forming droplets resembling shiny wet pins. It gave off an earthy scent, but the mixed smell of sulfur was still so thick that Cassandra could almost taste it. The medic wrapped a woolly blanket around her shoulders. It immediately began showing dark, wet patches. She barely noticed.
Antonne’s canvas-wrapped body lay on a gurney on the road before her. It seemed surreal, like an awful dream—one she couldn’t wake from. Part of her expected him to unzip it and crawl out at any moment, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. He’d tell her it was all a bad joke with a shit-eating grin and laugh until he choked. But Cassandra’s heart knew the truth. It knew, and the knowing filled her with so much sadness she thought she’d drown in it. She’d never hear him laugh again.
“Change always comes too late for the innocent,” a woman’s voice rasped mournfully—so close to Cassandra’s ear that it almost tickled, startling her out of her stupor.
Slowly, she turned her head, feeling like it was drifting through thick syrup. The air suddenly smelled of sour melons and mildew. A strange woman sat beside her, staring down at the body bag blanketed in mist. Long, thin strands of grimy dark hair lay plastered to her cheeks like sticky strings of chaff. Pale gray fingers gripped the step’s edge—far too pale to be alive. She wore a loose, tattered dress, ripped in several places and stained with thick, dried muck along its lower edges, exposing bruised and severely scratched legs. The sight of her made Cassandra’s skin crawl, but when the woman spoke again, her voice was gentle.
“Someday, this will all seem like a distant nightmare. Memories are like that, especially the awful ones. I know that better than anyone.”
Some instinct inside Cassandra shouted in alarm. Something was wrong, something unnatural, unutterable, and unreal was happening. The body lying on the gurney before her wasn’t the only thing that had suddenly gone batshit in the world.
“Who—” she croaked, coughed, and tried again. “Who are you?”
The woman’s head lifted. Her dark hair fell back like a curtain, revealing an oval face impossibly pallid, almost translucent. A crater-like depression was sunk into the skull just off the center of her forehead, purple and green. Rotted. Maggots squirmed in and out of that hole, horrid and slimy. Her eyes were silvery white from edge to edge. Colorless lips curled in a hideous smile over pearled teeth set in decayed gray gumlines. When she spoke again, a scent like rotted meat flooded Cassandra’s nostrils, causing her to gag.
“Nancy,” the woman rasped, proffering one pale hand. “Please, help me.”
It is a name Cassandra will come to know intimately over the next thirteen years. It will be a constant source of terror, revealing itself time and again without warning, and always with the same plea. Eventually, that terror will fade to fear, and the fear will fade to annoyance. Someday, the annoyance will turn to anger, but today, now, with her cousin’s broken body less than five feet away, Cassandra is filled not with terror, but with wonder.
She realized that she could see the night mist right through it, as if the woman’s hand were made from some otherworldly material less substantial than fog. Yet, at the same time, she could see veins on the back of that hand.
“I need you,” she—it insisted.
Cassandra’s heart gave a single, horrible lurch, and then her throat closed. Darkness wrapped around her like a warm blanket. Before it could take her, one last thought bubbled to the surface of her mind, taking shape even as consciousness drifted away.
Please, God, don’t let me dream.
Kenneth Penn may not be a household name, but if he continues to write novels that are as good as Mississippi Wizards, he may very well be soon.
The book has two distinct threads that eventually come together in a truly suspenseful way. First, Cassandra, a Black woman, and her white husband, Ben, are all set to go camping. This is even though Cassandra suffers from anxiety, sleep deprivation, and schizophrenia. (And she has the meds for all three to prove it.) En route to their campsite in Mississippi, they run into a group of four rednecks who, as the book’s narrative goes, put the “big” in the word “bigot.” Meanwhile, teenage Liza is a closeted lesbian who falls for a new girl in town with blue hair named Mary. She has moved from New York State but doesn’t want to get hurt in a new relationship, thanks to a grandfather in the story who wears the white robes of the KKK. Cassandra and Liza are connected because they can see a ghost: a woman named Nancy, somehow linked to all of this and tying both storylines together.
This book throws everything and the kitchen sink at readers to entertain them – and entertain it does. Mississippi Wizards straddles everything from suspense to horror to serial killer dramas to sweet romance. It reminded me of watching one of those B-movies that would show up on cable TV in the middle of the night that had more business being good than its shoestring budget would suggest. True, Mississippi Wizards can be clunky at times with its exposition, and readers may initially find Liza’s story the more compelling of the two. However, the book more than makes up for this by giving readers characters to genuinely care about and root for, and a big, mean villain who is larger than life and can throw real punches. The book is also incredibly fast-paced. All in all, Mississippi Wizards is a white-knuckle, adrenaline-filled B-movie narrative, and once readers get sucked into the world these people inhabit, they will find it hard to resist and let go of reality. Read this and go tell your friends that you knew Kenneth Penn way back when.