"That waitress. The redhead. Is she -- "
"And stop staring at her!" Mary whispered fiercely. "You look like a kid trying to peek up some girl's skirt in study hall!"
He pulled his eyes away... but with an effort. "Is she the spit-image of Janis Joplin, or am I crazy?"
Startled, Mary cast another glance at the redhead. She had turned away slightly to speak to the short-order cook through the pass-through, but Mary could still see at least two-thirds of her face, and that was enough. She felt an almost audible click in her head as she superimposed the face of the redhead over the face on record albums she still owned -- vinyl albums pressed in a year when nobody owned Sony Walkmen and the concept of the compact disc would have seemed like science fiction, record albums now packed away in cardboard boxes from the neighborhood liquor mart and stowed in some dusty attic alcove; record albums with names like Big Brother and the Holding Company, Cheap Thrills, and Pearl. And the face of Janis Joplin -- that sweet, homely face, which had grown old and harsh and wounded far too soon. Clark was right; this woman's face was the spitting image of the face on those old albums.
Except it was more than the face, and Mary felt fear swarm into her chest, making her heart feel suddenly light and stuttery and dangerous.
It was the voice.
In the ear of her memory she heard Janis's chilling, spiraling howl at the beginning of "Piece of My Heart." She laid that bluesy, boozy shout over the redhead's Scotch-and-Marlboros voice, just as she had laid one face over the other, and knew that if the waitress began to sing that song, her voice would be identical to the voice of the dead girl from Texas.
Because she is the dead girl from Texas. Congratulations, Mary -- you had to wait until you were thirty-two, but you've finally made the grade; you've finally seen your first ghost.
She tried to dispute the idea, tried to suggest to herself that a combination of factors, not the least of them being the stress of getting lost, had caused her to make too much of a chance resemblance, but these rational thoughts had no chance against the dead certainty in her guts: she was seeing a ghost.
Life within her body underwent a strange and sudden sea-change. Her heart sped up from a beat to a sprint; it felt like a pumped-up runner bursting out of the blocks in an Olympic heat. Adrenaline dumped, simultaneously tightening her stomach and heating her diaphragm like a swallow of brandy. She could feel sweat in her armpits and moisture at her temples. Most amazing of all was the way color seemed to pour into the world, making everything -- the neon around the clock-face, the stainless-steel pass-through to the kitchen, the sprays of revolving color behind the juke's facade -- seem simultaneously unreal and too real. She could hear the fans paddling the air overhead, a low, rhythmic sound like a hand stroking silk, and smell the aroma of old fried meat rising from the unseen grill in the next room. And at the same time, she suddenly felt herself on the edge of losing her balance on the stool and swooning to the floor in a dead faint.
Get hold of yourself, woman! she told herself frantically. You're having a panic attack, that's all -- no ghosts, no goblins, no demons, just a good old-fashioned whole-body panic attack, you've had them before, at the start of big exams in college, the first day of teaching at school, and that time before you had to speak to the P.T.A. You know what it is and you can deal with it. No one's going to do any fainting around here, so just get hold of yourself, do you hear me?
She crossed her toes inside her low-topped sneakers and squeezed them as hard as she could, concentrating on the sensation, using it in an effort to draw herself back to reality and away from that too-bright place she knew was the threshold of a faint. "Honey?" Clark's voice, from far away. "You all right?" "Yes, fine." Her voice was also coming from far away... but she knew it was closer than it would have been if she'd tried to speak even fifteen seconds ago. Still pressing her crossed toes tightly together, she picked up the napkin the waitress had left, wanting to feel its texture -- it was another connection to the world and another way to break the panicky, irrational (it was irrational, wasn't it? surely it was) feeling which had gripped her so strongly. She raised it toward her face, meaning to wipe her brow with it, and saw there was something written on the underside in ghostly pencil strokes that had torn the fragile paper into little puffs. Mary read this message, printed in jagged capital letters:
GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN.
"Mare? What is it?"