"I gotta second that request," Deirdre piped in.
The Amerind spirit drew a ghostly knife from its ghostly sheath on her ghostly person.
Doc Two leaned into his lapel and murmured something as he brandished his syringe close to my face.
"Either there really is a Charlie Brown and he and his twin brother grew up to practice medicine," I said, "or these boys are related to the mysterious Dr. Pipt!" Twin grandsons, most likely: they had the same round head and striking features as the old guy in my hypnotropic email. The ravages of Pipt's advanced age had blurred the similarities a bit but the likeness was unmistakable.
This was not good.
Before you could say: "Wonder Twins Activate!" it got worse!
The nurse turned and the devices in her hands shot multiple wired darts at Deirdre and Suki. Simultaneously the door opened and another nurse stepped in behind Kurt and Darcy, shooting them both with another set of wired darts.
A little snap, crackle, and pop and they were on the floor, twitching and incapacitated from being tasered.
"Hey!" I said.
And "Hey!" again as I got a good look at the new nurse as she carefully stepped over the paralyzed bodies on the ground around her feet. She looked even more familiar than our pair of docs. There was a pun in there somewhere but I was too distracted by the sight of Theresa Kellerman in surgical scrubs to think it through right now.
And yelling "Hey!" a third time as Wendy swung her knife, cutting through the silver cord that connected me to my body. I was disconnected and the remains of the cord evaporated like so much morning mist. "You bitch!" I yelled.
"Come, Cséjthe," Wendigo said, "there is nothing that you can do here."
"You let me be the judge of that," I growled as Doc Two peeled back one of my eyelids and stuck the needle of the second syringe between my eyeball and the orbital socket.
Theresa was carrying a zippered valise. She unzipped and pulled out a small transceiver, speaking into it. "Bring the gurney and a body bag. I'll need a couple of extra hands."
"Which one?" the first nurse asked—who, refreshingly, didn't look familiar at all.
"Who would you choose?" Theresa asked conversationally. She unzipped the valise and reached inside.
"A blonde would be more desirable."
"You Aryans . . ." She pulled out a handgun. "You don't like redheads?"
The other nurse shrugged. "The Nipponese would seem the more likely ally."
"More historical, you mean. But I'm not looking to rewrite history and, unlike you, Ilse, lampshades don't float the little man in my boat."
"It is the blood that matters," the nurse said. "It is what drove our master and what drives Josef even now."
"Yeah. Pure blood. That's what gets you all jonesing. But in this case I need the redhead because her blood is tainted." Theresa pointed her gun at Deirdre.
"It doesn't hurt that her bosoms are larger," Doc Two observed as I tried to grab at the weapon.
"There is that," Theresa agreed. And shot Deirdre in the back. With an unwired dart.
I turned on the Indian spook as the eerie quartet set about their preparations to remove the bodies from my room. "Maybe you don't know who you're dealing with, sweetheart," I snarled, dropping into a crouch. I spread my arms and curled my hands into threatening claws. "I'm not just some fangless, half-vampire. I've conquered death many times over! I've defeated vampires, werewolves, and demons! I command legions of zombies! I've got powers—"
A wind sprang up. Don't ask me how a wind blows so that a noncorporeal entity such as myself can feel it but I was suddenly caught in the equivalent of an astral wind tunnel. The buckskin dress on the nubile young Amerind girl was quickly whipped into a thousand rotted tatters. The view might have been titillating had not the psychic storm had the same effect on her sweet smooth flesh. In just moments she went from a maid of seventeen summers to a crone of a thousand winters.
A thousand hard winters.
And she began to grow even as her feminine ripeness collapsed against harsh outcroppings of bone. Her mouth gaped and her gums turned black as teeth receded in a tangled snarl. Her eyes fell back into deep milky pits in their sockets and began to glow like twin sentry fires in the fog. Her arms and legs grew to inhuman proportions and she towered over me, showing vast expanses of gray-and-brown skin mottled with green and white lichens and fungi.
Cséjtheeee, she rasped, and her breath washed over me like the wind off of the bogs and swamps. She reached down with a spidery, taloned hand and grasped me around my waist as if we were both solid. Commme.
She straightened and I was airborne.
Beating my fists against her hand was pointless. My hands passed through her "flesh" as if it wasn't there and yet she held me in a palpable grip like cold iron. She turned and strode from the rooms.
I say "rooms" for we were now one floor higher thanks to her additional height. We passed through walls and floors, both as ghostly as before, but now I was trapped in the intangible grasp of her giant hand.
A squad of paramedics with sidearms passed through us as we ascended upwards to the roof. A Bell/Augusta AB139 helicopter crouched there. It was a bit oversized for the helipad that serviced the "Life Flight" models that made the short hops between the hospital and the outlying accident scenes. Its twin rotors remained in preflight rotation and a black-clad sniper knelt inside the open cargo door, scoped rifle at the ready. Apparently both of us were going for a ride: body and soul.
Wendigo clambered out to the edge of the roof, faced westward, gathered herself and leapt into the evening skies. Too bad Kurt was a couple of floors down and unconscious. I could have quoted some more of that obscure and meaningless poetry about how Wendy "has wings that fly / above the clouds, above the clouds . . ."
* * *
Long minutes went by and it became evident that we weren't coming down anytime soon. The creature opened its ogrish mouth and began to howl. It was the sound the wind makes when it comes roaring down off the mountains like an express train, like the gale when the ocean makes war upon the land, like the wail of lost souls in the desolate places of the wilderness when a storm that is not just a storm stalks the land.
Clouds came like obedient beasts to the voice of one who calls them. They bounded and frisked, circling and frolicking until a herd had closed about us and we were borne across the heavens in a stampede that quickly darkened from white to gray to black. Strangely, there was no lightning, no thunder, no rain. Just a new stratum of darkness through which we tunneled like moles through midnight earth. We rode the cyclone like a rodeo cross-country event, the gale ripping an occasional glimpse through the thunderheads to display a scrolling blur of distant landscapes below.
We traveled for what seemed like hours. I couldn't escape Wendigo's implacable grip. At this altitude I wasn't sure that I wanted to. The howl of the wind made it impossible to carry on any kind of a dialogue, civil or otherwise. I just hung in her monstrous grasp and pondered how the cutting of the astral cord would affect my disembodied status now.
And what the future had in store for my flesh and the flesh of my friends and unborn son.
The hurricane scream eventually became a tornado wail, then weakened to a storm-front moan. We finally dropped to earth with a breezy sigh.
We came down on a plateau surrounded by mountains, the corona of the setting sun limning the peaks to the west with pale gold shading to cerulean blue. She released me and began to diminish like a leaf falling down a chasm. In moments the monstrous Wendigo was replaced by the young maiden Wendy. I thought about taking a swing now that she was of a more manageable size but decided there wasn't much point.
For the moment.
"Come," she said, and walked toward a distant grove of trees. The distant grove turned out to be a nearby forest. My perspective was skewed by the size of the trees: twisted, stunted, they resembled a blighted patch of bristlecone pines gone bonsai rather than the tall stately firs one expected to find in t
he mountainous wilds. It was hard to make out any details in the failing light, though my astral eyes saw some things better in darkness than my physical eyes did in broad daylight.
"Take my hand," said the creature who had returned to looking like the cover girl for Land O'Lakes butter. "See what I see." The hand that had encircled my waist now fell inside my larger grip.
And I saw blight. The trees began to glow a sickly green like radium excited into a cancerous display. Their roots desperately gasped for pure water and found only a choking toxic broth wherever they turned, probed, or plunged. The creatures that burrowed between their roots, scurried over their bark and branches, or nibbled at the newer leaves and tender shoots, either dropped dead or passed on chromosomal damage to their offspring.
We passed through this nursery of death and came to a lake on the other side. Perhaps giants did their laundry here: a whitish gray scum lay over the surface of the water and vast collections of sudsy bubbles had collected into hive structures along the shore on the westward shores. Here and there the water churned with flashes of body parts that were neither identifiable as mammal, fish, nor amphibian.
An eye broke the surface and rose another three or four inches out of the water on a flexible stalk of segmented blue flesh. It cruised about like a submarine periscope for several minutes, contemplating an ancient log where something dark and spiny huddled. A sly tentacle slid out of the water and made a half circle move around the spiky lump. As it touched the log's occupant, the dark shape seemed to explode with an audible snapping sound and scores of quills flew in all directions like a land mine full of nine-inch nails. A bubbling scream sounded under the roiling waters and a shredded tentacle disappeared as a dark and huddled shape waddled off of the log and onto the scorched-looking earth that ringed the dark and scummy waters.
We passed by the lake and turned toward a jumble of rocks where the ground sloped upwards and the mountain continued.
There was a cave.
More like a burrow, actually. Too small for a human to enter without crawling. But we walked in without ducking our heads. Apparently the connection I shared with Wendigo not only gave me extradimensional vision but provided automatic resizing capabilities as well.
Handy.
Especially if I ended up haunting rat holes throughout eternity.
At this point I couldn't rule anything out.
Farther in, a bearlike creature curled in on itself, deep in slumbered hibernation. Its right paw was draped across its chest, its claws blunt and misshapen like the toes that splayed from the central pad: they resembled stubby, infantile human toes more than ursine phalanges, despite the fur and coloring. The other paw, draped above the long-snouted skull, was a bifurcated appendage, more like the "hand" of a two-toed sloth with great curving nails that were the size of small tusks. The creature seemed immersed in uneasy dreams and the twin claws clacked together like restless shears as it shifted and grunted in its sleep.
I remembered back to the visions Wendy had shown me in New York on the night of the reception.
Things in the water with extra eyes, no eyes, feelers, and worse. Things in the forest that gave birth to abominations, things that shouldn't have lived but did. And things that were hungry in obscene ways . . .
Snow was falling when we emerged from the cave. The skies were thick with flakes yet the ground remained bare and dry. The lake steamed and vapors marked the passing of the largest ice crystals which lasted long enough to actually touch the ground.
"Do you see?" she asked. "How the land is poisoned?"
"This isn't my forte," I said.
"Of course not," she said. "This comes from the stronghold of The Mangler."
"I don't mean fort like fortress or stronghold. I mean 'forte' like strong point, specialty, strong suit. Some people mispronounce it and say for-tay like the musical term but that's a misnomer." I considered that I was lecturing an ancient Native American woodland spirit on linguistics and stopped. "Anyway, I'm no biochemist but this looks like something way beyond heavy metal poisoning. And how do you get industrial runoff this high up in the middle of nowhere?"
"I will show you. But first I must show you how to ride so you may withstand Nikidik in the flesh when you finally meet."
"Nikidik . . ."
"Nikidik and The Mangler are one," she elaborated. "And, at the same time, they are many."
"Thanks for clearing that up."
She tilted her head back and howled.
The howling grew in volume and intensity after a moment but no wind sprang up, no breeze stirred.
The howling took on multiple tones and became a threnody, a funereal organ playing night hymns. Then they came. Two, three, five, and finally seven in all. Wolves. A scrawny, half-starved pack.
"You must begin by seeing the animus," she explained. "It is not enough to pull the flesh around you. You must pass through the spirit skin and move within the animus to ride and to steer. Do you understand?"
"Not really."
"Look," she said, pointing at the largest male. "What do you see?"
"A wolf."
"Do you see his heart's fire?"
I looked. Just a dark lump: at night all wolves are gray. "Nope."
She walked over and stood before me. "I give you the gift of second sight so that you may take on flesh to meet flesh." She poked me in the forehead with her finger.
She poked me in the forehead!
Her finger went in about an inch or so above the bridge of my nose and sank into the space that should have been occupied by my cerebral cortex.
"Look again," she commanded.
I glanced at the dark blob. "I don't—"
She twisted her finger a little.
A red-and-yellow rose bloomed in the midst of the dark blob. Threads of orange and purple began to weave a skein on a wolf-shaped loom of silver.
"Holy cow!"
"Is that an expression," she asked, "or must I make further adjustments?"
"I'm—fine," I said, wondering if I truly was.
"Then look above the heart's fire. Look for the thought pool."
It was not so much a pool as a vortex. A chakra revolved over the canine cranium and its blue swirls were a cool contrast to the orange pulse of the heart chakra positioned between the creature's ribs.
"You must enter the thought pool as you would dive into a pond from the cliffs above. Only you must dive sideways and stay under once you have entered." She touched my forehead again. "My thoughts to yours, Morning Star. Your thoughts to mine." She reached down and grasped my hand. "As we jump, we will change our size and shape once more. Pay attention as I lead for you shall have to do this on your own, soon."
I opened my mouth to ask for a point of clarification but she was already leaping.
And I was already shrinking.
The cliff jumping analogy was pretty apt: there seemed to be time to point my feet and adjust my trajectory into the heart of the small, blue whirlpool. Even the resizing process seemed more second nature this time around. We entered the wolf's head and a new disorientation set in.
I was caught up in a psychic ménage à trois—Wendigo, the wolf, and me. She was wrapped around my mind in a lover's embrace while the beast panted and warily circled us like a jealous suitor.
More distracting was the return of physical sensations: the feel of the artificially warm earth beneath my paws, the cold wind ruffling my fur, the gnawing pit of hunger in my gut, the rasping chuffs of winter air going in and out of my lungs. More chilling than the arctic mountain breeze was the realization that I was already starting to forget the former sensations of the flesh, so strongly had they slammed home again just now.
I crouched as I waited for the overwhelming kaleidoscope of impressions to subside to manageable levels.
The wolf crouched close to the curiously warm earth.
Go ahead, Cséjthe, take the reins. The toddlers of the Ute People learn to ride the village dogs before they sit astride a pony and then t
he horse.
This ain't no dog.
And it is not a horse that you must learn to master before your work is done on this mountain.
Whatever happened to the art of simple conversation? Why does everyone talk to me in riddles? I reached up and scratched an itch behind my ear and then felt Wendigo laugh as I realized I had just done so with my hind leg.
Very good, Cséjthe! Let the beast's instincts come through without losing hold of the reins.
Yeah? I growled. The wolf growled. I just hope I don't fall over when I try to pee.
* * *
Actually, it was easier than either of us expected. First of all, I had a Native American spirit working her mojo in the mix, which gave me an advantage over all those Amerind skin-walkers or such who had to figure it out on their own and with their own juice. Even so, making the transition from primate and biped to canine and quadruped would have been a major adjustment except I had already done it on several occasions.
So to speak.
Ever since Dracul-Bassarab had showed me how to travel along the dreampaths—translation: limited translocation—I made the not-quite-instantaneous trip in some sort of mental wolf mode. When I arrived, I was still human. Or what still passed for human these days. The wolf form was actually a totemic mental/spiritual state in-between. But for a momentary head-rush it felt amazingly real.
And then there was the werewolf blood that I had received from Lupé . . .
So, not such a big adjustment for the beast within my own self.
After about twenty minutes of bounding around the plateau and chasing my own tail, Wendy said I had mastered the basics and it was time to go.
Okay, I said, where are we going?
Up there.
I tilted my head up in response to the unseen finger pointing inside the wolf's skull.
Thousands of feet above us, near the mountain's summit, was a regularity to the outcroppings and ledges that thumbed its collective nose at the rest of the natural stone of the mountains all around us.
What is that?
It is the reason that the ground is warm in the winter and the water burns all but unnatural flesh. It is where monsters are spawned and the ladder of life is twisted until the ancestors cry out from the deep and ancient places that the world itself is being unmade. It is the fortress of The Mangler, the Nikidik, the undying and forever being reborn. And you must stop him!
Habeas Corpses Page 33