Curse on the Land

by Faith Hunter

  Paperwork completed, I sealed the birds into a single, extra-large baggie and placed it all in the back of the vehicle. And looked for T. Laine, who was standing, facing the water, both hands to her sides. I knew she was reading the pond in the way of witches. It should have made me uncomfortable, with my churchwoman background, but it didn’t. I had learned about witches and their gifts and it wasn’t devil worship and they didn’t sacrifice goats to Beelzebub. They just had genetically given gifts for the land or the water or the moon or growing things, whatever. With mathematics and geometry, they could harness and use both free energies and those stored in matter to accomplish certain goals.

  T. Laine looked okay, so I began my next chore. Reading the land.

  She had meant hand-atop-ground reading, the way I did at Soulwood, and the way I had done at other sites when PsyLED was looking for clues in a series of kidnappings. I glanced at the four law enforcement officers standing nearby, watching T. Laine, two with well-hidden fear, one with amusement, as if T. Laine was being cute. The other cop, older, graying, looked on with boredom.

  I took a notebook, a pen, a small, square, faded-pink blanket, and the psy-meter 2.0 with me to the edge of the redlining border.

  I had spent all my life hiding my magics, denying them, so I could stay alive and not get burned at the stake by the ultrahardline elders of God’s Glory. And now I was all but flaunting my tie to the land. As one of my teachers at Spook School had said, life was weird.

  After shaking the blanket open and snapping it to the ground, I sat in the middle of it with my knees crossed and the notebook and psy-meter 2.0 in front of me. I synced the device to my cell and sent the recordings to U-18 HQ. I once again noted the date, time, and GPS location on the pad. It looked like I was taking scientific readings. It was utterly a cheat. I studied the land around me, noted a wildlife cam pointed at the pond, the remains of the kudzu-buried, tumbledown buildings on one edge of the property, and spotted the foundations of an old house near them in the pines across the pond. The brick showed signs of a long-ago fire. To my right was a better-kept lean-to filled with farm equipment, a small tractor, and gardening tools, all looking functional and which were secured with massive chains.

  Placing my palm on the ground, I took a cleansing breath, blew it out, and relaxed.

  Instantly I could tell that something wasn’t right, in a way I had no immediate name for. The ground was . . . maybe sick, infested with something, some kind of parasite or illness. The earth beneath my palm felt cold, icy, not to the touch but to the spirit, which wasn’t something I could easily explain to other people. It felt sick and murky and restless. As if it was dying, dying in pain. Alone and afraid.

  I sent a soothing pulse of calm into the land, searching for the cause of the illness. Reaching down into the earth, I found the water source for the pond, an underground, degraded concrete pipe that ran along the low hill about halfway to the crest. The pipe system capped a spring there and collected the water, sending it down through the pipe and into the pond for collection, probably for former use by farm animals. It was a slow trickle of water, and ran off on the far side, through another, smaller pipe, and into a gully. I dove deeper into the land. Below the surface of the hill, near the springhead, was an upthrusting slab of granite angled toward the sky, driven up and broken during some unimaginable earthquake in the far past. It was now shored in place by accumulated layers of shattered rock and compacted soil all around the slab, softening its contours, creating the hillock.

  Along the edge of the granite, I caught a thread of . . . something. Not more than a quiver of reaction, perhaps to my presence. It wasn’t witch magic in the land. Not exactly. Or not like any witch magic I had studied at Spook School. It wasn’t a warmth, like Soulwood, nor an evil like Brother Ephraim. There was no darting, fearful hatred. This was different, more like a vibration of exhilaration, like a trace of scarlet sunlight through the trees in the final moments of sunset. I sought deeper, following the trail of whatever it was.

  It led me through the springhead again and dove deep, through the rising current of springwater, following the vein of moisture into the rock where water was under pressure, seeking outlet. And back up to the pool in a loop. The pond wasn’t deep, but was full of plant life and microscopic life, parasites and minuscule snails, tiny fish swimming sluggishly, and frogs burrowed into the mud. Decaying leaves and tannins. The richness of life and death on a small scale. I followed the traces of the almost-light sensation up to the surface of the pool, which was still and unmoving, and around the pond, following the vibrating hints of the excitement here and there, hoping to find the source.

  I found, instead, the geese. The geese swimming on the surface of the pool. Another one was dead. I pulled up the memory of the pond when I was taking photos. All the geese in the circle had been alive and swimming, looking healthy. Now there was a dead one. And the dead goose floating in the water was different from the live geese; there was a faint, delicate hint of that vibration, that almost-light, brightening the feathered body, tangled around it like glowing thread. The thread dropped, seeming tied to the pond and to the earth deep below the surface. Deeper into the land.

  The living geese didn’t glow at all. There was no tendril attached to them.

  The tendril that tied into the dead goose was something I could follow, deep, deeper, back into the hill and down, along the slab of granite, tracing its broken edges and fractured rim, past roots full of life and reaching for moisture and nutrients. Deep and deep. To a place of bedrock and layers of heavy, dense stone. Soft energies swayed here, bright specks of light in yellow and green and blue, moving among shadows of charcoal and very deep red. Like I sometimes saw when I turned off the lights at night, the energies of my own brain and retinas, sparking. But the colors here reminded me of the glow I had seen last night, just before Ephraim grabbed me, though these were moving and swirling, and last night’s hadn’t.

  Stuff in my brain, the glow, and this were too different to be connected. But now that I remembered them, I cached the vague similarities in the back of my mind, just in case.

  I remembered the line of dialogue I had heard at a Star Wars marathon weekend at Spook School, the words uttered by the little green thing, Yoda, “You must feel the Force around you, here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes.” I smiled at the memory, at the image. Or I tried to. But at that moment, the tendril I had been following noted me, and wrapped around my wrist, a silken caress. It tugged, gently, deeper.

  I hesitated only a moment before I followed the motion of the shadows and lights, dancing and twining, with no boundaries or limits. It led me down and down, until we touched something else, something bigger, darker, so far down that there was only pressure and heat and a formless, lightless blackness like the deepest night in a sky without moon or stars, a blackness that stretched through the earth, massive and seemingly limitless. A presence. Powerful. Profound and somnolent. The gigantic thing, so very deep in the ground, was sleeping.

  The lights and shadows twirled across the surface of the deep in the earth, tapping on a layer of . . . something . . . a skin, a thin casing, that kept it separate. A joyful intelligence, happy as a puppy, bounding and pounding its excited paws on its sleeping mother. The lightless presence was the reason the dancing energy had towed me here, the reason for its excitement.

  So . . . two inexplicable things. One thing that was energetic and dancing. One sleeping. And the dancing thing sought to join with, or to interface with, or . . . Yes. To waken the sleeping one.

  The energy of the blackness was utterly unlike what I felt while communing with Soulwood, and equally unlike what I felt from Brother Ephraim. Unlike what I felt from the mutated tree in the church compound, the one that had put its roots inside me to heal me not so long ago. More similar to, but individual from, the huge sentience buried below the mountains in North Carolina. Both were black-as-death, mammoth
things. Presences.

  I let the tendril of puppylike energies spin me around and into their dance, and lead me far across the somnolent thing, as, together, we reached deeper. The thing was immense, a presence more so than a being. A sleeping state of consciousness rather than something composed of matter. It was everywhere I felt and looked, at this depth, everywhere, and looking for the end of it was like looking for the end of earth, so much more just beyond the here and now.

  The presence was covered with a thin membrane, a barrier. Or a coating. A microscopic layer of quiet separating it from the scarlet light-and-shadows dancer. The dancer moved across the barrier of the sleeping presence, pulsing, reaching down from the surface in several places, strings of pinpoint energies, smaller than hairs, power moving up and down the thin byways.

  The light-and-shadow energies slid along my mind like phosphorescence on cave walls, like the warmth of hot springs and magma far below the surface, like drowsy silk, wrapping around me and skimming along my mind. Poking and prodding and petting in their odd little dance. As if learning me.

  In the deeps, words began to sound, like a bell ringing, a vibration so deep it hummed through my bones. “Floooows, flooows, flows. Pools, pools, pools. Gone, gone, gone.” Over and over. And the movement of the light-and-shadows changed to match the words, as if the dancing power was evolving. As if the rhythms of the earth itself were changing it.

  The silk that had caressed my wrist tightened, roughened, as if perceiving more of what it held. As if understanding, becoming aware. Becoming real. Or becoming matter, transitioning from pure energy to something with weight and mass. It slipped up my arm, twining higher, over my biceps and shoulder and inside. It paused at my heart, watching. And stroked along my nerves. It was light and shadow twining with me, dancing inside me. As if capturing me. Taking me over.

  Inside of me a spark of fear—my fear—flared in the light-and-shadows. Brightening the blackness. Some of the motes of power were clinging to me, to my heart and nerves. As if already a part of me. I tried to withdraw. To pull away. The energies resisted.

  And though it was impossible this far below the surface of the ground, I heard a voice, a human voice speaking in the cadence of a witch working. Flows, flows, flows. Pools, pools, pools. Gone, gone, gone, it sang, the cadence like the words to a spell.

  The silken shadow-and-light was trying to . . . merge with me. To capture me.

  I grunted at the realization and jerked. Trying to get away. But it had trapped me.

  I heard the sounds of my own fear, moaning. “Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh,” with each gasping breath.

  In some part of my mind I felt something. I heard slaps, brutal and fierce. I felt pain. Over and over. And then the resonance of my moans in my chest. The hoarseness of my breath. The thundering of my heart, as if I were sprinting, hard and fast, to outrace death itself.

  “Nell! Fight! Fight this! I’m cutting you free. Fight!” I knew that voice. Occam. He had cut me from the earth once before. I felt things snap and writhe around me. Stinging. Biting. And pulling away in fury. A blast hit my heart. It sped, arrhythmic. Too many thumps in the incorrect order.

  I moaned again, the desperate, meaningless sounds. I flailed, but the silk holding me, inside me, mutated, thickened. Strong and scratchy. It was tying me in place. Deep in the dark. I fisted my hands, as I had been taught. Punched. Fought.

  “Good, Nell. Keep fighting. Only a few more.”

  The silk roughened and twisted, reaching through me, reaching for the roots inside me, the roots that the medical scans said weren’t there, but that I could feel each time I touched my stomach. I pounded against the restraint. It tightened on me. Pulled me deeper again, along the surface of the presence buried in the earth.

  Hibernating, the energies hummed at me, all meaning without words.

  And deeper, a human thought: Get out! Get out! It’s mine!

  If I wake the sleeper, I will become . . . free, the dancing energies hummed.

  No! Never! the woman screamed. The sleeping power is mine!

  Yes, I thought. A woman. Female.

  Before I could tell what species she was, the dancing energies tapped against me again, a torture against my heart, blasts of agony. The light-and-shadow thing was learning too much of me, learning what I was, what my magic did. But I was also learning it. And learning the thing it was trying to wake. The silk of its binding coarsened into hemp, creating a shackle, melding into me. The light-and-energy silk/hemp was nothing like what I compared it to, but those concepts were all I had to describe it. It was a new thing, a new construct. Evolving, moment by moment, fast.

  The blacker-than-blackest-night thing below it was old, old, old, beyond old. This one had been here, always, in the land. Sleeping.

  Fed by blood and death, the dancer thought at me. By war and battle and the life-force soaking into the earth for aeons. It has not been fed in many passages.

  I got an impression of humans falling and dying in violence and war. Left to rot on the surface of the land or buried on/in the earth, generation after generation. Energy tendrils rose from the sleeper, touching the surface where each great battle had taken place. Battles between tribal people, between Europeans and tribal peoples, between the gray and the blue. War. Long in the past to my concept of time, but only yesterday to the sleeping consciousness in the earth. It had fed on death. The dancer wanted it to be fed again. Wanted to give it blood, like in those long-ago times of conflict.

  What the woman wanted, I didn’t know. Was she a witch? Or was she something else?

  Pain exploded through me. Shivered through me, stinging and sharp. The light/dark silk/hemp tightened. A blade sliced into me, beneath my flesh, pain that shivered up through my nerves and flesh, flaying me. I heard something cadenced. A woman’s voice. T. Laine, chanting. A working, using the energies of life and of the earth. I could see the energies of a tearing, cutting spell, a freedom spell. I had learned about spells in Spook School. Learned not to fear them, not when they were used by people I trusted. Like T. Laine. I reached for the power in the spell even as it reached for me. Words hammered me as steel cut me. The blade cutting me free was silver plated. And coated with my blood.

  My blood flowed over my skin and onto the earth. The light/shadow silk/hemp saw my blood and twirled into it, where it spread on the ground.

  I was ripped out of the earth and lifted into the air. “I got her. I got her. Nell. Sugar. Talk to me.”

  It was Occam. I blinked at the sky. Bands of scarlet streaked across the western horizon. Sunset. It was sunset. I had been inside the earth for hours. Darkness took me.

  THREE

  I woke fast, struggling to sit up. Fighting. Trying to get free.

  “Nell, sugar. I got you. I’m here. It’s okay. You’re fine.”

  “Occam?”

  “Yes, Nell, sugar. I’m here. You’re okay.”

  I sobbed and realized that my face was damp with tears and snot and sweat. My short hair clinging to my skin. My heart was racing, and my chest and belly ached. Memory returned. The light-and-shadows dancing in the earth. Evolving to light/shadow-silk/hemp—concepts that almost, but not quite, described what I had seen and felt and experienced.

  The blacker-than-night thing so far below, separated from everything by a membrane of . . . I didn’t know what.

  But the light-shadow dancer had been trying to eat me. Or merge with me. Or become me. My heart rate spiked. I jerked upright, crying out, “Noooo!”

  “Nell, sugar!”

  “No!” I screamed. I forced my eyes to open. The world outside my head was murky and dim, cloudy as if a fog surrounded me. I tried again to sit up and realized I was tied to a hospital bed. “You’uns lemme up,” I shouted. “Lemme up!”

  “Panic attack,” JoJo said. “Let her loose. The restraints are just making it worse now.” A voice murmured something and JoJo sai
d, “You set her free or I’ll cut your expensive restraints myself.”

  And suddenly I was unbound. I scuttle-walked on butt and heels and the pads of my hands to the head of the bed. I was gasping, crying. Sweaty with exhaustion. I wrapped my arms around myself tightly.

  The lights in the room were low, medical devices attached to me, beeping, all crazily now, with my awareness. With my fight.

  “Nell, sugar?” Occam. His hand was out in front of me, palm up, offering an anchor.

  I slipped my hand into his. My whole body shuddered at the contact.

  “You’re okay, sugar. I gotcha. I gotcha, girl.”

  “You cut me free,” I gasped. “You and T. Laine.”

  “Yes. You remember.”

  I fell back on the mattress, the sheets wet with sweat and other bodily fluids. My heart rate and breathing steadied. Slowed. Occam’s hand was a sturdy moor, like a piton in a mountain of rock, or an anchor in a stormy sea, though I’d never seen the ocean. “I remember. I remember. I was trapped. You cut me free.”

  “Yeah. About that. I’m sorry, Nell, sugar. You got some stitches. A lot of stitches.”

  “You coulda cut off my arm and I’da been good with it. I was trapped.” Tears started again and Occam tightened his grip. I placed my other hand over our clasped hands and would have tightened my fingers but for the pain that ratcheted along my flesh.

  “Stitches,” Occam said again.

  “Oh. Ow?”

  “Pretty much ‘Ow,’” he agreed.

  I blinked my eyes clear and asked for water. When someone handed me a Styrofoam cup, I released Occam, drained it all at once, and took another. This one I dumped over my face. The cold felt wonderful on my flushed and sweaty skin. Pea peeked out of Occam’s shirt and darted back inside. The wereleopard chuckled at us both and someone dressed in scrubs patted my face dry with a rough towel.

  “Where am I?” I asked.