by M. C. Norris
Nod was a complex realm of layers, which is to say that there were divisions, compartments, but none of those was defined by any impermeable boundaries. Her Nana called them shades. Nod was a realm of shades, where an entity could lose itself in the patterns, if it so desired, winking in and out through the shades for all eternity, or existing in more than one shade at once. You could merge them, bend them, or just slide through the gaps between them. Like the living world, the Land of Nod could be one’s Heaven and one’s Hell, where one’s mood, the flavor of one’s smoke, dictated their place in that seething stewpot of energy and emotion. Cecile knew that if she intended to find and face the Khepra spirit, then she’d have to allow herself to be pulled into some terrible shades, into some places she’d otherwise never have dared to let herself go.
“There are things over there that want to get you,” her Nana Hess had said, widening her eyes and leaning in, nose to nose with her. “It’s just the same as over here in the living world. If you got any sense in your head, then you’ll know when you’re walking into a place you shouldn’t ought to be. Like Storyville, where you can just see the badness all around you, you can feel the evil of a place clear down inside your guts, and your skin just gets to crawling because there’s things waiting there for you, and you know it in your bones. There’s things just looking to do someone harm. Ain’t no different, here nor there. Listen to your guts. Be aware of your surroundings. Stay clear of them bad kinds of places, be it in this world or the next, and you’ll be just fine, C.C.”
Cecile floated through the slipstream, and into the reefs of fog that hung beyond. Already, Nod felt like one of those kinds of places that her Nana had warned her about. It felt like Storyville. She could feel that same prickling way down in her energetic guts that this was a jungle where the predators lurked, needful things that yearned to fasten themselves to your energy, bind to you, meld your energies, keep you, and drag you forever down into their terrible shades. In the spiritual world, it was the same as being eaten.
Something slid past her in the mist, a thing of softly electric hide that buzzed at her from the shadows, but refused to show itself. It followed her, slithering along through the shadows at a safe but disconcerting distance, mimicking her form and energy signature in a manner that failed to strike her as being playful. Things like this, imitators, were best confronted right away before their confidence grew. Her Nana had taught her that. Cecile rotated in the direction of her shady pursuer, inflating herself to ten times her normal size and emitting a blinding effervescence as she charged directly at the passive form. Not surprisingly, whatever it was faded out of manifestation.
Cecile waited in that spot, just observing her misty surroundings. Once she was sure that she was alone, not being watched or followed by anything, she began to call out to ol’ Slim, buzzing her lips, if she had lips at all, with a fluttering sound like the wings of a jimsonweed moth, just the way her Nana had taught her. She waited in the gloom on Nod’s doorstep, searching the nuances of energy for that familiar slinky form with its blinking yellow eyes to come padding out of the mist, twirling affectionate circles all around her, rubbing its sleek cheeks against her side. This time, her loyal friend did not appear.
She’d never stopped to consider what she’d ever think to do if Slim failed to respond to her calls, to lead her the way he’d always done through the maze of shades to Nana Hess. Perhaps she should have considered that possibility at some point before now. Although she’d traveled to her Nana’s shade a thousand times, she was fairly certain that without Slim to guide her, she’d never find that secret abode on her own. Shades constantly changed, due to the changing moods of Nod, and the collective moods of its inhabitants. Things were never exactly where you left them.
“Slim,” she called out, in what she interpreted as being her thin, spiritual voice, when in reality there was no telling what her voice sounded like, or if she had a voice at all. “Kitty-kitty-kitty!”
In the living world, all she’d have to do was to rattle the can opener, and that cat would drop right off the edge of the roof, or down from the limbs of Nana’s magnolia tree, wherever he happened to be causing trouble, and he would come prancing high-tailed to the screen door. There were no can openers to rattle in Nod. If there were, they certainly weren’t made readily available to tourists from the living world.
“Kitty-kitty.”
After a long and eerie silence, a throaty yowl resonated through the mist.
Cecile froze. This was not one of Slim’s affectionate mewls. Rather, the mournful, ascending moan that cats only produce when faced with the worst sorts of circumstances, when trapped, cornered, or hunkered before a rival in the escalating tension that preceded the wild screams of a catfight. Cecile could almost imagine him, backed up against a wall in the darkest of shades, gathered between coiled haunches, pupils dilated, licking his lips. Hauntingly humanlike, was the sound of an upset cat.
“Slim?” Cecile, called, floating in a direction that she knew ought to be avoided. “Kitty-kitty?” The temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees as she floated over some sort of a threshold. It was interesting, how thermal variances could be detected without a physical body. Then, even in the living world, what was coldness, exactly? When a person stuck their hand into a freezer, they felt its coldness, but what exactly was it that they were feeling against their skin? It was one of those strange sensations that were common to both sides of the stream. It was a difficult sensation to try and explain, whether living or dead, and it was taken for granted in the living world because the feeling was so ordinary, but when estranged from one’s physical body, every sensation was heightened to the most curious sort of experience.
A lugubrious groan heightened to a wavering crescendo that terminated in an aggressive reptilian hiss. Cecile hesitated, unsure of whether or not it was she who was spooking old Slim into such a fuss, or if something else was holding her poor old friend at bay. There was the sense of pressure all around her spiritual form. It was not unlike the changing air pressure that could be measured by a barometer, minutes before a storm. This shade felt cold and confined, yet heavy, crushing her beneath the weight of veiled layers as she penetrated ever deeper toward the nucleus of this cell. It occurred to her that there was no means to measure the distance she’d already traveled, given the absence of time. She might’ve been floating through Nod for ten minutes, or it might’ve been ten-thousand years. Looking back, she realized that there were no landmarks whatsoever in this vast shade that might serve to guide her back in the direction from which she’d come. For the first time in her life of trespassing through the spirit world, Cecile was lost. There was no going back, no finding her way through this miasma of living energy without her usual guidance from old Slim and Nana Hess. She had no choice but to find that missing cat.
Pushing in the direction of the yowls, she found herself struggling with her spiritual form. It was becoming difficult to progress deeper into void, as though she were swimming against some sort of a current, pushing through a tangible barrier set in her path. She wondered if the strange resistance to her advance was something conjured by the powerful will of whatever tenant occupied this rather inhospitable niche. There was definitely something here, lurking at the heart of this repulsive mass of negative energy. She could feel its foreboding presence gathering around her. Whatever it was, Cecile suspected that it knew that she was there.
“Kitty-kitty-kitty?”
Cecile hovered in place for a moment before opting to descend through stratified layers of dark energy toward what appeared to be a discernible bottom. Indeed, when she reached ground level, she found that it was not unlike the floor of a cave. The dried clay was tilled and gouged with long horizontal scrapes, prompting her to wonder if this was not a cave at all, but an enormous excavated tunnel, a spiritual burrow.
As Cecile’s gaze explored the mauled surface of limestone and clay, she spotted something that slowed her flow of energy to a halt. Cast upon the weath
ered surface of the tunnel floor was a single frayed fiber, a strand of red yarn. It began to waver as she examined it, trembling in a gust of sour wind that seemed to flow from the darkest depths of the subterranean corridor. Bits of reddish fuzz tumbled by. Fibers floated on the breeze.
“Nana!” she cried. “Slim!”
The current of foul air in the tunnel increased in velocity. Pebbles trembled and shifted positions. Trails of dust snaked along the floor. The yowl of an unhappy cat pitched suddenly into an earsplitting scream, as whole snarls of red yarn came tumbling by. Fragments flailed through the air, snagging on limestone outgrowths to whip their crimson tails in the gust that built in velocity until it became a mighty roar. Cecile found herself spinning backwards, pirouetting amongst the countless discorporate fragments of what had always been her Nana’s spiritual form. She couldn’t hang on, couldn’t fight against the grim blizzard of filth that harried her like a wad of windblown debris down the length of the tunnel until she careened from the yawning mouth of a cave she never realized she’d entered. As she gathered herself at the cavern’s dark threshold, a stupendous form of crackling green energy thundered upon her from the depths of the shaft.
Cowering like a mouse in the shadow of an owl, Cecile peered up into the twisted face of the abomination, glowering down at her through a pair of burning eyes situated on either side of a gaping hole where a nose should have been. Fleshy cables attached to nipples on the Green Man’s floating head snaked back into the bowels of the tunnel. The discorporate head hovered directly over her spiritual form, as though the entity meant to unhinge its great jaws at any moment and devour her.
“Owen?” she cried, peering up at the floating horror. “Owen Cyrus, is that you?”
The face descended until the gaping nose hole was nearly upon her. Flesh cables dragged over the dusty clay. She could feel the twin kilns that were its glaring eyes starting to bake the outermost layer of her spiritual body. Tiny sprites of plasma swam in and out of its nasal cavity, in the manner of swarms of fawning plankton accompanying some great leviathans of the sea. “You,” it bellowed, stirring great plumes of dust with its breath, “are forbidden here!”
“Where’s my Nana?” she cried, peering askance into the volcanic heat. “What have you done with my Nana and Slim?”
The entity drew back its ragged lips to reveal ranks of crooked teeth. Bits of red yarn were embedded between them. It inhaled a massive volume of the netherworld’s stale air, and it expelled it all in one earthshattering command. “Get out of Nod!”
###
Cecile rose, dripping from the mud, blood chugging in her ears. She couldn’t see. Every muscle in her body ached. Dragging herself up the slippery bank, she smeared at her visor with the back of her arm in an effort to wipe away the layer of river muck, but only when it would not clear away did Cecile realize that it was not mud at all that obscured her sight. She’d slept all day, and darkness had fallen over the Saline River valley.
“Oh, shit,” she whispered, staggering to her feet.
There was no way of telling the time. Panic sent a jolt of cold adrenaline up through her core when she realized she might’ve missed her rendezvous with the Portland steam locomotive at midnight, in Hays. Her muscles howled with the pain that had stiffened them, but she lurched up the slippery escarpment, arms flapping in an effort to maintain her balance on the slough of loose shale. It was no small wonder she’d slept so long and so hard, having been deprived of sleep for several days and nights of an almost constant level of heightened stress and physical exertion. Justifiable or not, if she missed her ride on that midnight steamer, she knew that she was as good as dead.
Still in a state of shellshock over the day’s traumatic events, over the horrors she’d beheld in Nod, it felt like her waking mind was on the verge of a massive overload. The mind wasn’t designed to take so much abuse in such a short window of time. Some fuse in her brain’s wiring felt as if it was just about to pop. Plus, it was still hard to breathe. Even after a full day’s rest, her lungs continued to burn. They almost felt rawer than when she’d lied down on the riverbank. It suddenly occurred to her that the cartridges on her mask were probably all shot.
As she reeled to the crest of the escarpment, she snapped the tubes of greenish liquid from her jaws, one by one, and replaced them with fresh one from the pouch at her hip. She cast the expired ampules into the mud. The air tasted better, almost at once. She’d acquired a taste for the sulfuric flavor of chemically filtered air. The burning pain inside her chest gradually subsided. This one improvement to her physical state was enough to boost her morale, and enable her to seize a second wind.
Jogging across the wastelands beneath a show of electricity that still pulsed through the clouds, Cecile considered the possibility that she’d never even made it over to the Land of Nod at all, that her awful visions may have just been a common nightmare. It was difficult to tell. She’d been so utterly exhausted that it was likely she’d fallen fast asleep before she’d ever made the journey out of her depleted body. She couldn’t remember the beginning of the experience, if there’d been one at all. All she recalled was the enraged floating head of the Green Man, all connected by cables to something else, something immeasurably worse, perhaps, back at the end of that dark tunnel.
Owen Cyrus, the Green Man, was still alive, hiding somewhere in the living world. She couldn’t have encountered his spirit over in Nod, but, if he was a spiritual medium, she guessed that would be possible. Owen was brain dead. He was nothing but an open door to the other side—a helpless marionette in the grasp of his unearthly puppet master.
Cecile stopped, slipping in the mud and nearly dumping over onto her rump. She cocked her masked head to one side, listening. She swore that she’d heard something. There, she heard the same sound again, a high-pitched and mournful keening in the darkness from somewhere in the distant west. When it came a third time, she knew without a doubt that she wasn’t hearing things. It was a train whistle.
“Oh, my God,” she cried, lurching into forward motion, her jogging pace increasing to that of a full run. Knees pumping clear to her chest, she sprinted across the sodden flatlands beneath jags of lightning that arced through the sky. She hadn’t run this fast since the first time she was chased by that band of Hunters, outside of New Orleans. In this case, the penalty of failing to run fast enough would be delayed, but in the end, it was the same. Back then, her naivety had spared her the certainty that was now her burden. To run too slowly was to accept a horrible death.
To the bleak southwest, a twinkling string of gaslights slid through the desert darkness, glimmering like the bioluminescence of a sea bottom eel. It was nearing their point of convergence more rapidly than she was, and it didn’t appear to be slowing down. If she wasn’t standing at the train station to hail it down, it was going to pass her by.
“No!” she screamed, running faster than her legs had ever been made to move before. This journey wouldn’t all be for nothing. Malcolm wouldn’t die for nothing. She refused to allow that to happen, by way of her own negligence, not after all they’d been through. She and the train were two vertices, racing toward the nexus of a ninety-degree angle. The timing of their convergence would have to be impeccable. If the engineer of the locomotive failed to see her, then chances were that he would never apply the brake in such hostile territory, especially after passing the Kansas City locomotive in transit, and possibly noticing that it was riddled with bullet holes.
The steam whistle wailed over the wastelands. That cry of warning was for her, she guessed, and only for her. The engineer wouldn’t risk giving away his train’s location in such a treacherous land if not to announce its proximity to an anticipated passenger waiting somewhere near a port of call.
She wasn’t going to make it. Hard as she drove herself, she remained three-hundred years distant from the steam engine that was almost upon the station. Her mouth stretched into a grimace, and tears of despair filled her eyes as the mighty machin
e of steel and steam chugged one end of the station, and out the other side.
“Stop!” she screamed, waving her arms in the air. Cecile yanked Malcolm’s pistol from her belt and fired off three shots into the sky. “Stop!” She lowered the weapon horizontal to the ground, and squeezed off three more shots into the flank of the locomotive. The pings of her bullets were marked by flitting sparks where the rounds bounced off the train’s steel hide. To her astonishment, she heard the squeal of metal on metal. Motes of molten filings sprayed from the engine’s flanks as a hand brake was forcibly applied.
Releasing an agonized wail of relief, Cecile ran to catch to the slowing engine. The train puffed and hissed indignantly as excess steam vented from the boiler. Never before had she been so glad to be so near the chugging components of a manmade machine. It was beautiful, ingenious, and a physical testament to the occasional brilliance of humankind.
“Stop right there!”
Cecile cowered at the burst of automatic weapon fire that punctuated the command. Spumes of mud leapt from a string of pocks at her feet. She gazed warily up to the masked gunman, perched in his nest of sandbags behind the smoking barrel of a large gun. Intuitively, she let the pistol fall from her grip, and raised her hands submissively in the air.
“Identify yourself!”
“Cecile,” she replied, “Cecile Raquet.”
“Who is your commanding officer?”
Panicked, she could not remember the old man’s name. Horse lover. Whiskey drinker. Story teller. “Cobb!” she shrieked. “General Cobb of the KC Militia! I’m Cecile Raquet with the IDC, out of St. Louis!”
The soldier fumbled with the toggle of his ham radio set, tilting his head as he evidently relayed the information to someone of authority. After a moment of tension, he raised the barrel of his machine gun skyward. He climbed out of the nest with his hand on the pistol at his hip. “Where’s your paperwork? Where’s your military escort? There were supposed to be two,” he shouted down at her, raising two fingers in the air. “Two passengers. Where’s number two?”