The village leader ushered them into the tiny hut that was occupied by a withered old woman. She sat in an inverted catfish skull, a rocking chair hollowed out and packed with an excelsior of dried vine fibers. Over her skinny shoulders, she wore a fish skin cape with a tall, spiky fishbone collar. In her hand she held a long bone pipe, which gave off the pungently sweet smell of herbal tobacco. Even in the dim light filtering through the translucent yellow walls and the haze of smoke, Ryan could see that Sirena’s pupils and irises were the color of milk. Like the eel’s.
Dean was struck by this, as well, and whispered to his father, “Was she swallowed by a fish, or was she born blind?”
“If you’ve got a question, young man,” Sirena said in a gravelly voice, “best ask me direct.”
“Okay,” Dean said. “You get eaten by a fish?”
A hoarse, cackling laugh burst from the old woman’s throat. “Eaten and spit right back on the bank,” she said. “See these beauty marks it gave me?” Skeletal fingers traced down both sides of her face, pointing out the stripes of pink-white discoloration where the flesh had been etched away. Her scalp had hairless patches of the same color. “Right off, folks around here took my coming out of that fish alive as a sign and a wonderment. And it was a bigger wonderment than anyone dreamed. Inside that fish’s belly I lost normal sight, but I gained the doomie sight. Or mebbe I had it ail along, and never knew until my eyes got melted away.”
The blind woman sniffed at the air like a rabbit, horning in on the exact location of Ryan’s son.
“I’ve had visions about you, young man,” Sirena said to Dean. “You and your six fine friends. Come sit here, and I’ll tell you all about them…” She spread her thin legs and patted her sagging lap.
Dean wrinkled his nose. “Not bastard likely,” he said, crossing his arms over his still narrow boy’s chest.
“If you’ve got something to say to us,” Ryan told her, “let’s hear it.”
“There’s doubt in your voice,” she said. “Looking for proof, are we? Well, how about I tell you something you already know? Your names? Your mothers’ names? Their mothers’ names?”
“Madam,” Doc said, “if you could, as you suggest, pronounce the names of all our maternal grandmothers, it would certainly be evidence in your favor.”
The old woman dismissed her own idea with a wave of her hand. “Nah, the back sight is too easy,” she said. “And it proves nothing. There’s other ways I could’ve found out the names. I didn’t, but that’s beside the point. It’s the foresight, the telling of what’s to come, that’s the real test of doomie power. How about this for proof? There’s a new kind of human being prowling the Deathlands. Not mutie spawned. These folks come from elsewhen.”
“You mean elsewhere?” Ryan said.
Sirena turned her head, following the sound of his voice. “No, Master Cawdor, I mean what I said, elsewhen. Another stretch of time in another place altogether. Our time and place and this other one started out identical, as alike a pair of fish eggs, but oh how different they grew. Nightmare different. These new people are a cross between us and a cockroach.”
Expressions of surprise flickered over the companions’ faces.
“My, my, it’s gotten mighty quiet all of a sudden,” Sirena said, returning to her pipe.
In the hut’s golden gloom, Ryan watched her rock and blow smoke for a minute, then said, “That’s the past, dead and buried. You said you were going to tell us the future.”
The old woman chuckled. “It is the future. Your future, Master Half-Blind. I don’t create it. I can’t change it. I only see it with these…” With the tip of the pipe stem, she indicated the pale, hard-cooked eggs that were her eyes.
“Evidence, madam,” Doc interjected, emphasizing the point by rapping the hut’s dirt floor with his walking stick. “We require substantial and convincing evidence of your claims.”
“Oh, I’ll give you all the evidence you need,” Sirena replied. “There’s a brand-new star in the sky. Hasn’t been a new star like that in more than a hundred years.”