by Laura Bickle
“But the men in black came knocking. When no one answered, they forced their way in. I drew the sword I still had from the Roman days, but I was no match for their numbers and their guns. The family was slaughtered before my eyes and the silver taken from beneath the floorboards. An officer had shot me and left me for dead. They set the house on fire, for good measure.” Lev lifted his shirt, showed Archer a white scar on his ribs. Time had faded it greatly, but not entirely.
“How did you survive?” Archer asked.
“I crawled into the fieldstone fireplace with the smallest child. The fire washed past us. I survived, but the little girl did not. When morning came, all that remained standing was that chimney, black with soot.
“My family was gone. The house was gone. I could not simply wait for another family to move in and continue where I had left off. Everything I had loved was gone. I stayed there at the burned site for weeks. I sorted the bones into piles and buried them under cairns. I healed.”
Lev stared into the contents of his glass. “But I was uprooted. I wandered into Western Europe. I killed some Nazis along the way. I never was much of a fighter, so I killed many of them after they got drunk in bars and wandered out to the alleys to piss. I struck down a straggler here or there in the battlefields as I passed through the lines. But I never found the ones who killed my family. I eventually kept following the sun, going west . . . and I wound up here.”
“You stopped running,” Archer said.
“It seemed as good a place as any to stop. No one asked any questions about my past. Nobody but you, that is.”
Archer stared at the floor. “That’s a lot to absorb.”
Lev smiled at the understatement. “You don’t have to believe me. Door’s that way.”
Archer stayed seated, though he bounced the heel of his hiking boot on the floor. “I don’t know what to think. Being able to hear ghosts is one thing . . . but . . .” he faltered.
“The ghosts are part and parcel of it. All spirits of place can hear the dead. It’s so that we can drive the unwanted ones out of the houses we occupy.”
“I guess that’s why I like being out in the wilderness. In nature.” Archer stared up at the ceiling. “It’s quieter.”
“Yeah. Cities can be difficult, even for an old domovoi like me. To be honest, I have no idea what that means for you . . . being half domovoi. I can’t stress this enough—I’ve never heard of a domovoi having children. Domovoi always search out their own families and never actually, you know . . . make them. Our families aren’t blood.”
Archer seemed to think for a while. “But you did.”
“Maybe so.” It hadn’t occurred to him that way. But he’d been around long enough to know that patterns tended to reassert themselves. It wasn’t lost on him that he’d created his own home. Maybe, on a subconscious level, he’d summoned the magic for a family to fill it.
“You said you were magic,” Archer said. “What kind of magic? Like, pulling quarters from ears?”
Lev shook his head. “I haven’t practiced magic since that time. The magic that the domovoi practice is simple magic. It’s not the fancy magic that ceremonial magicians use. We use dirt, spit, blood, and rocks to accomplish our goals. Our magic is the magic of the earth and the dead. At the beginning of time, our purpose was to keep the dead in the ground and protect the living. Some branches of our family tree still take these responsibilities very seriously. One of our distant cousins, for instance—a hob in a Whitechapel cemetery—keeps Jack the Ripper in his grave.”
“I thought they never figured out who Jack the Ripper was,” Archer said.
“The hob knows. He poses as a groundskeeper, and he’s the only one who knows the Ripper’s true identity. Apparently, the Ripper was annoyed at eternal anonymity and yaps endlessly. I can’t imagine the shitty conversations the poor guy has to listen to on the right side of the crypt. He’s got to use muffling magic every day to shut that madman up.”
Archer listened, eyes wide.
“In twelfth-century Bohemia, I lived with a family whose father was interested in ceremonial magic. I watched him, but never participated. He was interested in many odd things. Mostly, he was convinced that he could birth a unicorn from a goat, and spent more energy trying to get that to happen than preserving his family. His wife eventually fled with the children, and he didn’t notice for days. Eventually, despite my best efforts, he forgot to eat and wasted away. Even the cats wouldn’t gnaw on his scrawny bones. Frankly, that surprised me.”
“You sound a lot less attached to that family.”
“Eh. They survived. The wife went to her mother’s house in Alamannia, and they fell under the protection of a curmudgeonly kobold who rather enjoyed rapping on tables with the little girls and moving around their tea sets when they played with their dolls. They were in good hands. The husband . . . he was something of a self-centered dick, as most magicians are.”
Lev reached forward for a wooden bowl on the coffee table. It was full of polished stones and geodes he’d hammered open, fragments of quartz. He’d found each and every one of them in his walks through Temperance and the surrounding areas. Most were native rocks. Some might have fallen from the pockets of tourists. He fingered through them until he picked up an amethyst geode, about the size of a Ping-Pong ball. He showed it to Archer, spat on it, and closed it in his fist.
He breathed in, breathed out, and concentrated on the stone, feeling its age-old matrix of elements in his hand. The brittle structures moved, reorganized. When he opened his hand, the geode had changed.
A small violet flower sat in his hand. The petals were bruised from his fingers. He hadn’t realized which flower it would be, but the stone must have remembered it.
Archer leaned in and picked the flower out of Lev’s hand.
“Careful,” Lev said. “Monkshood is poisonous.”
“That’s cool,” Archer said.
Lev wasn’t sure how impressed he really was. Domovoi magic wasn’t terribly dramatic, and he was pretty sure any sideshow party charlatan could do a similar small object swap with simple misdirection. It would be up to his son to decide if he wanted to believe or not. It wasn’t like he could call down a lightning bolt or transform a frog into a princess.
Archer turned the flower over in his hand. He put it in his jacket pocket.
“Do you have a place to say?” Lev asked. “My couch is open. For as long as you want it.”
“You know, I’d like that.” Archer’s face split open in a grin. “I think you’ve probably got tons of stories to tell.”
“Many stories,” Lev agreed. “Things that I saw and things that the ghosts have talked about.”
“I’ll go get my stuff together. Be back later?” Archer said, climbing to his feet.
“I’d like that,” he said, echoing his—could he admit it? Yes—son. “I’ll leave the door open for you.”
The two men looked at each other for a moment, then shared an awkward embrace. Archer turned away first. He reached into his jacket and gave Lev a thick manila envelope.
“What’s this?” Lev turned it over. It was sealed, with just his first name written on the front.
“It’s a letter from my mom.” Archer shrugged. “I said I wouldn’t open it.”
“Thanks.”
Archer nodded and waved as he headed for the back door.
Lev watched him go.
Wilma and Caleb appeared, lounging on the couch.
“I hope I didn’t scare him,” Lev said.
Caleb shook his head. “You did well. He’ll be back.”
“I hope so.”
Lev stared at the envelope. It was lumpy and uneven-feeling in his hands. It felt like an envelope full of secrets. After a moment, he opened it and reached inside. He pulled out a letter, folded around a sheaf of photographs.
Lev began with the letter. He recognized Bridget’s flowing handwriting.
Dear Lev,
It’s been quite some time, hasn’t
it? I’m sorry to reach out to you this way. It must be quite a shock to have Archer on your doorstep.
I always intended to tell you. Truly, I did. And I’m sorry. Time just . . . slipped away from me. You know that I worshipped Laima when I met you—remember the necklace that I always wore. She’s a goddess of fate and guardian of pregnant women. And she apparently has a sense of humor. I hadn’t been expecting to have a child. But Laima brought this child to me.
I discovered that I was pregnant about a month after I left Temperance. I thought I’d tell you after I was further along, when I was past the danger of miscarriage. I didn’t think that there was a point in getting your hopes up or disturbing you, either way. That time came and went, and I thought I’d tell you when I had the baby. I went on a retreat to think, and I had Archer with the help of a midwife in a cabin surrounded by redwoods. He was a beautiful baby. He had your eyes. He was the quietest baby I’ve ever met. He just watched and absorbed everything around him.
Lev’s fingers stirred the pile of photos. On the top was a picture of Bridget, her hair pulled back from her face, cuddling a tiny infant wrapped in flannel. She looked radiant, and he felt a pang of sorrow for not seeing this in person. He turned his attention back to the letter.
I adored him, obviously, and you have to understand he became everything for me. Life happened, and it kept happening. We moved to an ashram and focused on day-to-day life. I painted. He played. He loved people and loved nature.
We moved several times over the years, and I saw that Archer reached for a community, everywhere we went. He made families of goats on farms, played guitar with his friends. He made straight As in school. He saved baby ducks from sewer grates and grew gardens. Wherever we went, he grew a garden. County fair prize-winning pumpkins. I think he can become a horticulturalist. And a musician. And a veterinarian.
He is a wonderful, wonderful person. I’m sure you’ll see that.
Lev flipped through pictures of a little boy with a wagon full of dirt. A boy holding a giant white pumpkin. A young Archer with long hair, playing in a garage band. There were pictures of Archer and a group of young men and women, holding skateboards over their heads. There were dogs and cats sleeping on the boy, tangled in hand-crocheted afghans. A picture of Archer driving a tractor, his filthy face beaming at the camera. In another photo, a teenage Archer stood in a muddy river, lovingly holding a giant salamander to his bare chest.
It looked like a wonderful childhood. A perfect one. Lev smiled at that, feeling an emptiness in his belly as he turned to the next page:
But there are things I can’t help him with. When he was sixteen, he started hearing voices. I thought the worst. I took him to a psychiatrist, who thought he might be having signs of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia! I couldn’t accept it. I gave him the medications, but they didn’t help.
I took him to a shaman. I didn’t know what to do. The shaman said that he was a “hollow bone”—that spirits spoke to him. The shaman said he was hearing ghosts. And I believed him. So did Archer. Things got better. But I saw him withdrawing from people, from places.
When he was eighteen, he hiked the Appalachian Trail for nine months. I was in a frenzy of worry. He checked in when he could. But I think he needed that, that solitude. Away from ghosts and the people he loved.
When he came back, he was glowing. He was tan, fit, serene. I thought we were over it. Over the ghosts.
But they came back. He enrolled in college, a beautiful historic campus . . . and he dropped out after a semester. He said that there were ghosts everywhere—in the library, in the study halls, in the dorm where he tried to sleep. All that vigor that he’d gained from his walkabout on the Appalachian Trail had fallen away. He came home a shell.
He kept busy, though. Got a job at a greenhouse. But he needs something that I can’t give him. He needs someone who had a finger in the Otherworld to teach him.
I know that you thought I didn’t know. And to be honest, I tried to talk myself out of it. But on some level, I always knew that there was something Otherworldly about you. Maybe you know how to help Archer, what he needs to know to live serenely in this world.
I have brought him as far as I can. He needs you now to teach him to be the man he can be in this world.
With love,
Bridget
Lev carefully placed the letter on top of the pictures.
“What does it say?” Wilma asked quietly.
Lev was silent for a moment. “It says that he’s mine. And I have to help him.”
Lev plucked another rock from the bowl on the coffee table. He spat on it and closed it in a doubled fist. When he opened his hands, an oxeye daisy bloomed.
Chapter 12
Red Rain
She walked in her sleep.
She had some dim knowing of this. She remembered that she had done so often as a child, and she had done it again at the hospital. When she was a child, Petra knew it was fear of the dark mixed with a deep dreaming sleep that she hadn’t been able to shake off. She’d awaken in her mother’s arms under the scalding hot kitchen light. Petra knew that the hospital sleepwalking came under the influence of too many drugs and an undertow of hallucination that sucked all the light out of her consciousness. This was the same as it had been then; a sense that her head floated in a balloon a half mile above her body, with some background music playing in her head that nobody else could hear.
Maybe now it was Maria’s potions and exhaustion comingling in her gut. After Petra had nearly passed out digging in the refrigerator for lunch meat for Sig, Maria had sent her to bed. She’d poured a liquid into her throat that smelled and tasted like violets.
Or maybe it was getting close to the end, and she was just dreaming in Maria’s bed, clutching Gabriel’s papers under the pillow. Then, it had been afternoon. But the hours were bleeding together.
Either way, she could distinctly remember letting herself out of Maria’s house at what seemed to be night. Sig had wound around her legs, his fur soft as feathers around her calves. Barefoot, she walked out into the sharp gravel, then into the field. The tactile sensations should have woken her, pulled her awake and what bit of her soul seemed to be persistently floating above her body back in.
But they didn’t. A remnant of a dream moved through the fields, a familiar shadow.
Gabriel!
She shouted in her head, but she couldn’t make her lips move. Rain speckled her face, warm and soft as blood. It spattered on the ground as she stumbled forward in his wake, trying to follow that silhouette as it wove through the grass.
At her side, Sig whined. Did he see what she saw? He seemed to always come into the spirit world with her and back again. Could he cross into dreams and nightmares? She knew, on many levels, he was a spiritual creature, what Maria would have called a guide. But she wondered how far and how long he could follow her. When she died . . . would he be able to visit her? Or would he be lost forever, and she’d be chasing his memory in dream fields, like Gabriel?
There was no color in this field. Nothing but black and white and grey, stretching forward before her as Gabriel’s shadow flickered beyond her. Only the rain had color—a brilliant red that soaked into the ground, clinging to her bare feet and Gabriel’s shadow. She followed that shadow to the Eye of the World. Instead of its soothing, familiar turquoise color of day or the black mirror of it at night, it churned a restless, luminous red.
Gabriel! she howled with all the force in her head.
He was walking into the waters of the Eye now, into that unnatural red water. He was knee-deep, the water seething around him. He turned, and she saw him in three-quarter profile then. He was as she remembered, everything she remembered: that silence and that stillness poured into a human form. Once upon a time, she thought him indestructible. Now, she knew better.
Gabriel. Don’t leave me. Not yet.
He wasn’t completely the same, though—he was changed in subtle ways. Where the reflection of a man should have played
in the water beyond his knees, there was the shadow of an inverted tree. The Lunaria—she recognized it at once. Its branches reached out, black in the water, spreading over the pool with rapacious speed.
Gabriel closed his eyes and . . . melted.
He just disincorporated, sliding into the water. Where his flesh hit the water, feathers pooled on the surface, spinning out like an oil slick. Hammered by the rain, they began to sink.
Gabriel . . .
And he was gone, and she was standing at the water’s edge with the warm red rain pounding the back of her scalp.
Only the shadow of the tree remained, that reflection under the surface of the water.
She sucked in her breath, stalked toward it, and then into it.
Sig pulled at the edge of her nightdress, growling, but she continued. He let go, whining. He turned and ran.
She was alone. Just her and the tree and whatever death was coming for her.
She waded into the water, feeling its warmth taking over her, and reached for the churning branches of the tree . . .
In the darkness, in the stillness, it was easy to lose grip on reality.
Gabe had heard stories of contraptions, consciousness deprivation tanks, used to harden soldiers for battle and to torture prisoners. He had thought it an odd idea when he’d first heard it. It sounded like being closed up in a bathtub or in a water-filled coffin. And while that seemed bad, it didn’t seem as horrible as all that. He had never fully appreciated the dimensions of the idea, until now.
The water wasn’t frigid, merely unpleasantly chill. That sensation faded; he got used to it quickly, though his hands and feet had gone numb. Once the temperature was no longer an issue, it was hard to even differentiate between the water and the air, leaving him with the sensation of floating in pure darkness. His mind had begun to play tricks on him, creating white flashes of stars in his peripheral vision. There was no sound here, and he began to lose perception. He couldn’t tell if he was speaking his thoughts aloud, or if they remained in his own head. He felt his consciousness spilling outside his body, blending with the blackness of his surroundings, like ink in mud.