Sleeping in Flame by Jonathan Carroll Page B

here!"
    Her friend looked angry and shook her head. "Leave him alone. He's way ahead of schedule."
    Rednaxela. The crazy man on the bicycle the first day in Vienna with Maris. He had called me Rednaxela!
    Without really seeing, I watched the two women start walking away.
    "Wait!" I ran a few steps to catch them. "What are you talking about?
    Who's Rednaxela?"
    Both women smiled and exchanged glances -- they were in on something I didn't know anything about. One of them gave me a little coquettish shrug.
    "That's your job to find out. You've come this far."
    The other one came up and patted my shoulder. "Everybody's proud of you.
    Don't mind what I said before. I was only teasing."
    They began to leave again. I grabbed the one closest by the arm and pulled her around to face me. Her smile vanished. "Don't touch me! Stop asking questions. Fuck off!"
    I shook her arm. It was thin as a pipe cleaner through the thick wool of her coat. "What are you talking about? Who's Rednaxela? How do you know me?"
    A bunch of birds on the grass started as one and flew away.
    The woman saw a young couple nearby and started screaming in a squeaky voice, "Help! Let me go! Leave me! Help!" Her companion hit me on the back with her purse. The couple came running over and the man pulled me away from the old woman.
    "Who's Rednaxela, damn it!"
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    "You'll find out, shithead!"
    "Just tell me now."
    "The fuck I will, sonny boy."
    I started back at her, but the man held me.
    "Hey, man, are you crazy? That's an old woman!" He was strong and wasn't going to let go.
    The old women scuttled away, watching me the whole time over their shoulders. At first they both looked terrified, but when they were a safe distance away, one of them laughed like a loon and made a crazy face at me:
    thumbs in her ears, pinkies pulling out the corners of her mouth, her tongue zipping in and out like a snake's. Her laugh was so strange and loud that the man, his wife, and I all stopped tussling to watch the two women as they turned and disappeared among the gravestones.
    "Are you crazy, man? Beating up on old ladies? What the hell for?"
    He let go of me and crossed his arms -- a father expecting an explanation from his ten-year-old.
    "Forget it. It was a mistake." I was embarrassed and angry and wished like hell I knew where the
    "ladies" had gone.
    "You don't shake up old ladies in _graveyards_, man. I don't care what you do in your own country."
    I looked at him. "What are you talking about?"
    "This is Austria. I don't care how you treat people in your own country.
    Even if that was your grandmother. Here you do it our way."
    His wife came up and gave me a defiant look. "Where _are_ you from? What kind of language was that? I used to work out at the United Nations, but I never heard people talking as crazy as that before."
    "What do you mean?"
    "That language. Those sounds you were using. Both you and the old women.
    Where are you from?"
    Her husband gave a big snort. "The ocean maybe! Maybe they're all three dolphins in drag."
    I looked at him, his wife. "What did it sound like?" I was frightened.
    She looked at me as if I were putting her on. "You know what it sounded like. You were doing it!"
    Her man snorted again. "What did it sound like? It sounded like this."
    He put two fingers together and started whistling -- whistling so loud that it startled a flock of birds out of a nearby chestnut tree. I looked at him, then at his wife. She nodded at me.
    "That's it. Just like that. Where do you speak like that? Can you do it again?" She smiled encouragingly.
    I didn't tell Maris. What would I say? "I met two old women at the cemetery today. I attacked one and spoke dolphin-whistle to the other. Then they ran away and stuck their tongues out at me." It would have been a funny scene in a film, but in real life it had the ring of cuckooness deluxe.
    And what _about_ that strange language I was supposed to have spoken with them? Where did it fit in, and why hadn't I been