by Harvey Click
“What’s a herky-jerky?”
“Mary, you don’t even want to know, and I pray to God you never meet up with one.”
It was dark now, and the only light came from the waning moon and the logs in the fire pit, which had burned down to flickering orange embers. Amy could barely make out Manda’s face, and the shadows of the woods were darker still and filled with rustling sounds that made her skin crawl. She finished peeling the bark off the branch and showed it to Manda.
“Looks good to me,” Manda said. “And don’t worry about the pain, it doesn’t last for long. Plus there’s some benefits in getting rid of those unclean spirits. You won’t crave alcohol or cigarettes so much, and I swear it even helps with cramps that time of the month, if you know what I mean. ”
“How many blows will there be?” Amy asked.
“Only twelve.”
“John, Jake and Mary,” Neoma called from somewhere near the sweat hut, and the two men were already waiting there when Amy came with her switch.
“Mary, did you peel your branch properly?” Neoma asked.
Amy handed it to her, and Neoma ran her fingers over the bare green wood and said, “Very well. Undress and stand against the hut.”
As Amy was about to pull off her T-shirt she noticed that once again men and women were gathering in the darkness to watch.
“What’s with all the peeping Toms?” she said. “Aren’t we all supposed to be like brothers and sisters now? I mean, do these guys like to stand around and watch their sisters take a shower?”
“They’re not standing there for fun,” Neoma said. “When you’re in the sweat lodge and your spirit leaves your body, you give off an odor that can attract demons. The smell of all these people standing around here covers up your smell.”
There was a nonsensical answer for everything; there probably was in all cults.
“Seems to me they’d all smell the same whether they’re gawking at me or not,” Amy said.
Neoma smiled faintly and turned to speak to the people gathered in the shadows. “It seems our newest member is modest,” she said, “so everybody turn your backs.”
They did, and Neoma quietly said, “You disappoint them. They all enjoy watching a good whipping.”
Amy undressed and stood with her hands against the small circular building. She had made up her mind that no matter how much the blows hurt she wouldn’t give Neoma the satisfaction of crying out. But the moment the switch bit into her back, she yelped like a child, and then she yelped eleven more times.
This time in the sweat house as the chanting and the suffocating odor of aromatic steam caused her to collapse, she again found herself perched in a tree looking down at Billy’s house. But this time she knew she was really out of her body, not merely dreaming, and she was afraid. What if she was unable to return to her body? Would Neoma really be able to call her back? She was afraid to fly, afraid that taking to the air would take her farther from her body, where she’d never find her way back.
But she could tell that the house was empty and she knew she wouldn’t find Billy there, and suddenly her wings, as if with a mind of their own, lifted her into the sky and carried her down the lane to the woods high on the hill. There was less moon tonight, but her eyes were keen in the murk, and again she saw no sign of a cooking shed or its rubble, and again she flew to the knoll and perched in a branch of the fallen tree. The chalk circle was less visible now, just a hint of white here and there in the dark grass, and aside from that nothing was changed in Ebbing’s valley.
She knew she wouldn’t find Billy here, and after her wings had rested she wanted to look elsewhere. Maybe he was a prisoner in the old Howard Phillips mansion; maybe she could peer through the windows and spy some sign of him. But that seemed a long way to go, and she was afraid she would get lost and have to roam forever lost without her body, and her fear was so great that she couldn’t make her wings lift her from the knoll.
And then her keen night-eyes spotted something strange: a long blue ribbon was tied to one of the branches of the dead tree she was perched in. She hadn’t seen it the night before, and it certainly hadn’t been there when she was lying on the knoll watching the sacrifice. It couldn’t have been, because it would have been dangling right in her face and she would have noticed it.
Somebody had been here since the night before, and for some reason somebody had marked this tree with a ribbon, but why?
And then the night air began to feel hotter, and she found herself choking and coughing on the dirt floor of the sweat hut.
While Amy and the two men were dressing, Neoma said, “What were you tonight, John, and where were you?”
“I was a deer again, just like last night,” the young man said. “I was standing in the trees beside the Phillips house.”
“What did you see?” Neoma asked.
“Nothing much. I didn’t see no cars tonight. Didn’t seem to be nothing much going on.”
“What were you tonight, Jake, and where were you?” she asked.
“I was a coyote again the way I always am,” the bearded man said. “I was prowling ‘round the old factory again, but the windows is covered so I couldn’t see nothing.”
“What were you, Mary, and where did you go?”
“I was an owl again,” Amy said as she tied a shoe. “At first I was looking down at Billy’s house again, and then I flew to his woods and sat on the knoll. But somebody has been there since last night. There’s a long blue ribbon tied to one of the tree branches at the knoll.”
“You men are done for the night,” Neoma said. “Mary, you come with me.”
When they got to the house, Neoma told her to have her shower and then come back downstairs. The mirror on the medicine cabinet was up too high for Amy to see most of her welts, but she could feel them. They covered her back, her hips, and the backs of her thighs, and they burned so badly that she had to shower in tepid water. Someone had thoughtfully left a jar of zinc salve on the sink, and she smeared it on as well as she could before dressing.
She smelled fish cooking as she was coming down the stairs, and she wondered why anyone would be eating this time of night. Her stomach was churning with hunger, and if she was expected to sit and watch Neoma or anyone else eat, there was going to be trouble. And yes, Neoma was seated at the dining room table with her laptop, apparently waiting for her meal.
“Sit down,” she said. “I hope you like haddock. Red meat isn’t the best thing to break a fast with.”
All Amy could think of to say was, “Huh?”
“Your second cleansing is over, and I thought maybe by now you’d be getting a little bit hungry.”
“Yeah, a little bit,” Amy said.
She sat, and Ivan brought in a plate and set it in front of her. She was so hungry that she was almost afraid to eat. She started with a single green bean, and her mouth seemed to explode with flavor as she chewed it—delicious green ambrosia, soft but with still a hint of crispness, slippery with olive oil that coated her tongue with luscious delight.
She cautiously tried a piece of new red potato drenched with sweet butter and seasoned with salt, pepper, and parsley, and she was certain she had never tasted anything so good in her life. And then a piece of haddock, sweet and moist, baked with a creamy mustard sauce that made her taste buds tingle with pleasure.
While she was eating, another marvel occurred. Ivan brought in a bottle of cold Chardonnay and poured a glass for her and one for Neoma. When she was finished eating, Amy sipped her wine and said nothing. She didn’t want to interrupt the bliss of a full stomach with words. Even the fiery sting of her welts didn’t bother her at the moment.
She was drinking her second glass of wine when she realized that something was odd. A full stomach plus wine always added up to a desperate craving for a cigarette—but she didn’t want one. In fact the idea of inhaling smoke into her lungs seemed sickening. She wondered if that meant she’d never have painful cramps again.
The food
and wine were making her drowsy, and when she emptied her second glass she yawned.
“If you’re tired you should go to bed,” Neoma said, not looking up from her laptop.
Amy climbed the stairs wearily, and when she opened the bedroom door she saw yet another marvel: someone had placed a small mattress on the floor, complete with sheets, a blanket, and even a pillow! Leaving the nightstand lamp on for Neoma, she undressed, crawled between the sheets, and shut her eyes.
She was already asleep when Neoma came in, but she woke up just enough to open her eyes and see Neoma undress, climb into her bed, and shut off the lamp. In the darkness Amy could still clearly see Neoma’s body in her mind’s eye, like a perfect Grecian statue. She felt something stir in her loins, and she knew she hadn’t been honest when she said that she wasn’t attracted to women.
Chapter 10
Ivan brought Amy a plate of sausage links and scrambled eggs as soon as she came downstairs. Neoma was typing furiously on her laptop and occasionally pausing to take a bite or two of her own breakfast. When the women were finished eating, Ivan cleared away their plates and brought them each a cup of coffee. Amy drank hers in silence, surprised again that she no longer craved a cigarette.
Suddenly Neoma stopped typing and said, “Come upstairs.”
They went to the small room with the small table, and Neoma told her to stand a few feet in front of a bookcase. Odd-looking carvings and ornaments rested on the shelves in front of the books, and on the top of the bookcase sat an empty wine bottle.
“How good are your eyes?” Neoma asked.
“Twenty-twenty.”
“Can you read the print on the label?”
“Yes.”
“Hold this,” Neoma said, placing something in her hands, and Amy glanced down at an intricately carved piece of black wood.
“Don’t look at it,” Neoma said. “I want you to try to make out the features with your fingers, and while you’re doing that I want you to read the wine label and memorize as much of the exact wording as possible. Try to do these two tasks simultaneously, don’t switch your attention back and forth.”
“What is this, some kind of test?”
“Yes. In five minutes I’m going to ask you to recite as much of the label as you can remember and also describe the carving in your hand as accurately as possible. Starting now.”
The back of the wine bottle was facing her, and the rear label promised a full-bodied Shiraz with notes of plum, pepper, vanilla, and chocolate, while two messages from the surgeon general warned about drinking while pregnant and driving while drunk, but the wording was denser than that and difficult to memorize.
The carving in her hands was more interesting. It was nine or ten inches tall, slender, and smooth to the touch, with empty spaces carved out here and there between what seemed to be two figures that were separate in some places but touching in others.
At first she was unable to make any sense out of the details, especially while reading the wine label, so she broke Neoma’s rule and started switching her attention back and forth between the two tasks, and then the figures in the carving came into focus rather quickly. A huge boa constrictor was wrapped around two elongated nude human figures, a man and a woman whose arms were stretched above their heads with their hands clasped together. They seemed to be wrestling or making love or maybe just trying to get free of the snake.
“Lift the carving up a few inches higher,” Neoma said.
Amy did and said, “Is my time up?”
“Quiet. Concentrate very hard on both objects and then move the carving a few inches to the right.”
Amy did.
“Now move it to the left. Now raise it again. Okay, turn around and face me and tell me what the wine label says.”
“Um, it’s a Shiraz, it tastes like chocolate and vanilla and I think maybe plum, don’t drive while pregnant or drunk.”
“I said I wanted exact wording, and that’s not even close. You were concentrating on the carving, weren’t you, and paying almost no attention to the bottle. Okay, then, describe the carving without looking at it.”
Amy described it in detail and then said, “Can I look at it now?”
“You may as well. You failed your test, so you may as well look at your textbook.”
In some ways her fingers had given her a more vivid picture than her eyes did now, though with her eyes she could make out features on the faces that her fingers had missed. The man and woman both had their eyes closed, and their expressions were oddly blank, so she still couldn’t tell if they were wrestling or making love.
“What is it?” Amy asked.
“It’s an African talisman.”
“What does the snake mean?”
“What does it mean to you?”
“Nothing good,” Amy said. “I hate snakes.”
“What do the figures mean to you?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell if they’re fighting or having sex.”
“Let’s say they’re having sex. Is that good or bad?”
“I guess for me that depends on who the guy is,” Amy said.
“And what if they were both women?” Neoma asked. “Is that good or bad?”
“I guess that depends on who the women are.”
Neoma smiled faintly and said, “Okay, sit down and I’ll give you some paper to draw on.”
“Can’t you at least tell me what the last test was about?” Amy asked. “You want me to learn to memorize wine labels or what?”
“No, I just want you to learn how to concentrate fully on two different objects at the same time. We’ll try a different approach tomorrow.”
“Why? What’s the point?”
Neoma took the talisman from Amy and held it in her right hand while she stared at the wine bottle. After a few seconds she lifted the talisman a few inches, and the wine bottle levitated into the air a few inches above the bookshelf. She moved the talisman to the right, and the bottle moved to the right and hovered in midair. Then she moved the talisman to the left again and down, and the bottle sat itself down in its original spot on top of the bookcase.
“Damn,” Amy said. “How’d you do that?”
“I concentrated on both objects simultaneously and so fully that they became conjoined in my mind. I can do it without the talisman of course, but it’s an invaluable aid to novices. We’re going to work on this until you learn how to do it.”
“Then we’ll be working forever,” Amy said. “I don’t have powers like that.”
“But you do, and I’ve already unlocked one of them. It’s called spirit-travel.”
“You can call it whatever you want, but I call it hallucination,” Amy said. “I think you put some kind of hallucinogen in the steam, and I hope it’s not something that will screw up my brain or make me sick.”
“Then explain this,” Neoma said. “Yesterday I sent Shane Malone to your brother’s woods and had him tie a ribbon around the fallen tree at the knoll, and last night you saw the ribbon.”
“Then I guess John and Jake must have remarkable powers too. One of them sees the old Phillips house, and the other sees the old factory.”
“Unfortunately no,” Neoma said. “John said there weren’t any cars at the Phillips house last night, but I had a man watching the place from down the road and in fact five cars arrived while John was in the sweat lodge. Jake said he saw nothing at the old factory, but in fact there was activity there last night too. John and Jake fall into their trances and imagine they see those places, probably because they want to please me, but the buildings could be burning down and they wouldn’t know it.
“But with you it’s different. When you fall into your trance you really do leave your body and roam about in what’s called an astral body. Most people can’t see astral bodies, except in unusual circumstances, and they aren’t able to open doors or lift objects, but they’re nonetheless real. Your astral body is an owl because that’s your spirit animal. Spirit-travel is a rare and remarkable
gift. I’m not able to leave my body or perform any other type of remote viewing, though I’ve tried to learn how for many years.”
Amy let this sink in for a minute and then said, “Maybe it’s not such a great gift. Manda said it’s possible for your spirit to get lost, and then it just roams around forever like a ghost.”
“All powers have their risks,” Neoma said. “The safest thing to do is to learn to master them, and that’s what I want you to do.”
“So I guess you’re trying to turn me into some kind of witch?” Amy said.
“Something like that. A witch and a warrior, and I don’t have much time to do it. It seems Sandoval is still unaware of us, but our good luck can’t last much longer. We need to make our move soon, before somebody figures out that this place isn’t really a yoga club.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Two months—too long for safety. Ivan arrived first and found this property to lease. Believe it or not, this used to be a nudist yoga camp.”
“Bet the mosquitoes loved that,” Amy said. “Are all these Unseen people from around here?”
“Only a few. Most of them came here with me. And none of them are from Blackwood, except Shane. It’s too risky to recruit someone who lives there because in a town that small everybody knows everybody else’s business. That’s one reason why it’s been so difficult to gather the information we need, but Shane gave us a nice big boost when he found out where the sacrifices are conducted.”
“Couldn’t you have just followed them to see where they go?”
“Try doing that on these roads without being spotted. Besides, their cars are driving around every day in every direction, maybe taking care of business or maybe just trying to confuse anyone who might be watching.”
“You want me to be a warrior for the Unseen, but I don’t even know what it is,” Amy said. “Yesterday I swore an oath to do whatever is in my power to defeat the Lost Society and its minions, but I’ve never even heard of it. How am I supposed to fight the Lost Society if I don’t even know what it is?”
“It’s an occult society that’s been around since the days of Nero,” Neoma said. “It used to content itself with whispering in the ears of emperors and kings and occasionally poisoning a pretender to a throne, but these days it has bigger ambitions. In the 1980s drug cartels decided to hire magi or sorcerers to protect them, and the Lost Society stepped up to fill their need. So now the Society has gotten filthy rich, and they’re using their power and money to transform the world through drugs and narco-terrorism. They rule the opium fields of Afghanistan, the coca fields of South America, you name it, and now they’re setting up shop in remote places right here in the U.S. The Ozarks and the Appalachians are full of little towns like Blackwood. The Lost Society can buy cops the way you buy candy bars—they can buy senators and parliamentarians and prime ministers and even presidents.”