Mercury Retrograde

by Laura Bickle

  He sailed along the current until it weakened. He twitched his feathers, gave in to the instinct to flap his wings, and opened his eyes to look down.

  A vast field spread below him, gold and grassy and glinting with dew. A massive elm tree stood at its center, and below its shade stood a man in a white hat.

  The raven made a slow spiral, relishing the last bit of air through his feathers. He skimmed around the tree in a lazy arc, approaching the motionless man on the ground.

  The man opened his arms, as if inviting a lover back. His amber eyes glowed brighter than the dawn.

  The bird slammed into his chest. Feathers melded with flesh, fluttering into a pulse and soaking into skin.

  Gabriel let his hands fall. The bird twitched through his consciousness as he absorbed all it had seen.

  Above him, leaves rustled. Some were living leaves, some dead. The tree stood, scarred and ancient, but its shadow had grown thin. He reached up to pluck a brown leaf from a branch of the Hangman’s Tree. This wasn’t the only withered branch; the tree’s leaves had begun to curl at the center, as if autumn’s breath had come weeks earlier.

  He turned the leaf over in his hands. The tree was dying. He’d felt it even before the leaves had begun to drop, as the magic in it faltered. Even the Lunaria, the Alchemical Tree of Life, couldn’t survive forever. Not after what it had been put through, creating generations of undead to haunt the Rutherford Ranch.

  Not after what he had been put through. If he closed his eyes, he could still remember bleeding into the roots of the Lunaria and the tree’s frantic efforts to put him back together. He’d been torn to pieces in the explosion of a collapsing house. Wood had pierced and rent his body to bits. It would have been best to leave him to dust.

  But no . . . the other Hanged Men had brought him back here, out of sheer instinct. And the last raven had been brought back to him, the last fragment of himself. Through excruciating pain and light, he’d been revived.

  Though not wholly. He was conscious of vast gaps in his memory, as if time had eaten away at an old tintype photograph. He’d forgotten his middle name. He couldn’t remember the exact year he’d come here, though he knew it had happened over a century ago. He recalled bits and pieces of alchemy, arcane bits of ephemera about dissolution and phoenixes. His right hand shook when he wasn’t concentrating on it, and he’d developed a somewhat mechanical twitch in his left eye. An irritating limp came and went, even if he parsed his feet away as ravens and brought them back again.

  Revived. But at terrible cost. The light running through the veins of the tree grew more sluggish with each sunrise. He could feel it choked off, as if some force had girdled it beyond retrieval. The end of the tree would be the end of all the Hanged Men. He remembered that much.

  Behind closed eyes, he thought about that possibility of oblivion. Nothingness was seductive. No more striving to see another day. Just dust. He’d had a taste of it, when he’d lain in pieces within the Lunaria’s embrace.

  He crumpled the brittle leaf in his fist and opened his eyes. His gaze traveled to the south fence, where the rest of the Hanged Men toiled, herding the cattle to the north pasture. This wasn’t just about him; there were the others to think of. The others, who had no voice, who would simply cease to exist along with him if the tree died. He could choose to give up—­but the decision was not his alone.

  And yet . . . perhaps he had seen a solution. The part of his consciousness he’d sent out as a bird had detected something strange.

  Something that might save the last thing he held dear.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BREATH OF LIFE

  “Just breathe.”

  Petra squeezed her eyes shut. Light pressed against her eyelids, creating distracting red dots on the darkness in her skull. Her breath whistled in the back of her throat as her pulse pounded in her neck. The pounding crept up from her throat to her temple, thudding like the beginning of a migraine. She tried to push away thoughts of hydrogen sulfide, black pennies, and dead eyes.

  “There is nothing, emptiness within and without. Feel the void opening in your heart.”

  In response to the gravelly voice, Petra shifted her awareness to her chest. Her heart thumped in time with the pulse in her head. She squinted into the darkness behind her ribs, searching . . .

  Searching.

  Something twitched across the field of her vision. The red lights faded to a thin streak of grey. She could make out a meandering stripe of beach along an ocean, faint in color, like an overexposed photograph. At the edge of the water stood a silhouette—­a man in a black coat with his hands clasped behind his back. Long grey hair was tied back from his face, and he gazed out over the ocean, as if expecting a ship or a bottle to wash in. The figure turned. His eyes were hazel, the only color in this landscape.

  “Dad?” she asked.

  She said it not only in her head, but aloud. Her throat tightened around her pulse and her words, and her concentration slipped. The image vanished.

  Her eyes snapped open. The sky stretched overhead in dazzling blue, and the sun pressed warm on her face.

  An old man sat before her, cross-­legged on a stone. He cupped his chin in his hands, braced on his elbows like a garden gnome statue.

  “You suck at meditation,” he told her.

  “No kidding, Frankie.” She pressed the heel of her hand to her head. She wiggled her toes to generate some feeling. The coyote asleep in her lap grumbled and kicked her.

  “The coyote has no problems getting to the spirit world,” Frankie observed.

  Petra rubbed Sig’s belly. “Sig is much more spiritually evolved than I am.” The coyote knew exactly what he wanted from life and exactly how to get there. It had been true since the first day he’d shown up on her doorstep. He’d had to make some compromises, though: He now wore a flea collar, with ID tags attached.

  “Did you see anything at all, this time?”

  “Just a glimpse . . . a glimpse of my father.” She shook her head. “It could have been just wishful thinking or an imagining. I can’t . . .”

  “You can,” Frankie insisted. “You just aren’t.”

  “I know. I have to.” Petra blew out a frustrated breath. She stared down at the ground, plucked at a limestone pebble. Sun had begun to burn her freckled shoulders, reminding her that this was likely the last day of autumn that would be over sixty degrees. Wearing a tank top and cargo pants, the scars on her arms were exposed: a handprint-­shaped mark around her right wrist and slashes on both. The old handprint had faded to white, while the slashes remained pink and new. The handprint was a burning reminder of the lover she’d lost on an oil rig at sea, and the slashes were a gift from the drug-­dealing alchemist, Stroud, who had wanted her blood to run the Venificus Locus. She would never allow these to be seen in public, but hanging out with Frankie wasn’t really what she considered “public.”

  The pendant her father had given her glinted at her throat: a medallion depicting a lion devouring the sun. She knew now that it was an alchemical symbol, but it was her last tangible tie to her father. It had soaked up the heat of the day, feeling leaden in the hollow of her throat.

  A shadow interrupted the sunshine. Maria, Frankie’s niece, stepped through the field, the grasses scraping her long skirt. The breeze worked loose tendrils of her long dark hair caught up in a complicated series of braids around her head. She held a basket under her arm. For a moment, it seemed that she could have stepped out of time, from an earlier era.

  Sig rolled over, instantly awake. He scrambled up to greet Maria, twitching his nose toward the tantalizing basket.

  “Are the two of you finished plumbing the mysteries of the universe?” Maria reached into the basket to hand Frankie and Petra bottles of water. Frankie tore into his greedily. She offered Sig a dish, and Petra poured half of hers into it for the coyote to drink.

  �
�Not many mysteries have revealed themselves,” Frankie said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He stood, stretched, and walked toward a pool of spring water, dyed a Technicolor blue by algae. He knelt by the edge of the water and began skipping stones across its glasslike surface.

  Maria perched upon a sandstone rock, tucking her skirt beneath her. From the basket, she distributed sandwiches and containers of potato salad. She’d made a stack of meat for Sig, who took it delicately from her hand and wolfed it down as if he hadn’t eaten in a week.

  “So . . . you’re looking for your father in the spirit world?” Maria poked at her potato salad with a fork, not meeting Petra’s eyes.

  “He’s there. I mean . . . he’s somewhere. Maybe just in my head,” she confessed. “His body is in the nursing home. But the thing that makes him . . . his soul, I guess . . . is somewhere else. I spoke with him the very first time I came here.”

  Frankie chortled in the background. “This is the Eye of the World. Drinking the sweetwater is the key to the spirit realm.”

  Petra glanced at the pool of water. “You said you tried it?”

  Maria laughed. “Of course. But it didn’t take me anywhere.” She gazed out at Frankie, who dangled his feet in the water and sang to himself.

  Petra’s mouth flattened. “I’ve drunk it three times since then. Nothing.” It caused her to wonder: Had she hallucinated it?

  “So now the meditation practice?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sure that meditation will be helpful to you. I would never discourage you from that.” Maria said. “And I know Frankie can lead you where you want to go.”

  Hearing a splash, Petra glanced at the pool. Frankie’s clothes lay on a rock, and he swam in the water like a wrinkly, pale eel.

  “I sure hope so.”

  “He’ll get you there. He will. You just need to be sure.”

  A smile played on her lips. “Are you social working me over?”

  Maria laughed. “Maybe a little. Nobody leaves work at work for long.”

  Petra looked away.

  “What is it?”

  Petra took a deep breath and told Maria about the scene at the campsite—­the little girl and her dead parents, the mysterious poisoning, and the red eyes of the bodies.

  “You think it was the mudpot?”

  “I don’t think so. Mike’s ­people cordoned off the area, and the bodies are at the morgue. I assume that the coroner will have a better idea. Though . . . I did take some samples and sent them off to the federal lab to see what’s in that mud. To be certain.”

  “Nothing’s certain around here.” Maria fed another piece of meat to Sig.

  “I did another test,” Petra confessed. “I used the Locus.”

  Maria lifted her eyebrows.

  Petra shrugged. “I figured that it was able to detect Stroud’s magic, when he was still screwing around with living mercury. It could find the Lunaria, and . . .” She forced herself not to mention Gabe’s name, and plunged forward. “ . . . I thought it might tell me if there was something not normal going on there. And the compass did detect something. What, I’m not sure . . . I saw a trail of dead grass that made me think of something like Agent Orange as the culprit. But the Locus woke up and was spinning away.”

  “Maybe those campers were into something strange,” Maria mused. “Did you see any Ouija boards or salt circles? Any summoning Cthulhu with a pop-­up gate to hell? I hear the Dark Lord loves toasted marshmallows.”

  “I didn’t see anything more out of the ordinary than camping gear. No copies of the Necronomicon or black candles. I’ll check with Mike to see if he found anything odd in their packs.” Petra doubted it; aside from the miasma of death, the family seemed as wholesome as corn flakes. She picked at her sandwich. “But the Locus felt there was something there. I can’t tell if it was the campsite, the trail of dead grass, or if maybe it was . . .” She trailed off, not wanting to give voice to what she really thought.

  “Maybe it was what?”

  “There was a raven there, watching.”

  Maria stilled. “You think it could have been one of the Hanged Men? Watching you?”

  “I don’t know. If it was one of them, if they had anything to do with it, or know what did . . . they won’t talk to me. Not with Gabe gone.” She swallowed and looked down at her hands. She hadn’t admitted to Maria that she’d begun to feel something for Gabe, but she knew that the other woman guessed.

  Maria came to sit beside Petra on the same rock, putting her arm around her. Sig rested his chin on Petra’s knee. The only sound was the wind stirring the grass. A tear slipped down Petra’s nose and landed in her sandwich wrapper.

  “I don’t know how to feel about this,” Petra said at last. “He died, trying to help me. It was my fault. ”

  “No. He cared for you,” Maria said, brushing a piece of Petra’s dark blond hair out of her face. “He came to find you. You found something human in him. You did a good thing.”

  Petra sniffled ungracefully. “It sure doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I fucked up his . . . his unlife. Whatever he had. Like I fucked up Des’s life.” She traced the palm print burn scar on her wrist. He’d reached for her as he was dying, burned to death in an oil disaster. The scar still felt warm when she thought of him.

  “Give it time. Meditate with Frankie. Give yourself permission to look for more than your father in your time in the spirit world.”

  Maria gathered the remains of the picnic and walked back in the direction of her house. Petra watched her go, envying her certainty.In the short time she’d known Maria, she’d never seen her look backward at anything.

  And looking backward seemed to be Petra’s specialty. She sighed and stood, looking to the pool for Frankie.

  Frankie had finished his swim. He lay upon a flat rock the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, stretched out in the sun with a straw hat covering his face. Petra wondered if he journeyed in the spirit world without her, but a snore fluttered the brim of the hat.

  Petra walked through the gravel to the edge of the pool. Sig slipped past her and plunged into the water, dogpaddling in the blue mirror that reflected the autumn sky in perfect detail: the cirrus clouds, a formation of geese moving south.

  She knelt at the edge and lowered her empty water bottle below the surface. Bubbles gurgled against the plastic as it filled. She lifted the full bottle to the sun. It was the color of sea glass, bits of cloudy algae floating inside.

  Bringing the bottle to her lips, she drank. The water tasted cold and with a hint of something sweet, like linden flower. She chugged the bottle, feeling rivulets of it dribbling down her chin and soaking her shirt.

  Clutching the bottle, she sat back on her heels. She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing. Her yearning to speak once more to her father flowed through her, from the soles of her feet to her eyes, heavy with unshed tears. She had so much to ask him.

  The sun pressed down on her; she sought the darkness behind her eyes, tried to slip into one of those trances that Frankie seemed to so effortlessly fall into at the bottom of a breath or the bottom of a bottle.

  A cold shadow passed over her. Petra tried to ignore it, squinched her eyes as tightly as she could, so tightly that she saw sparks behind them. She could get there, she knew it, if she only pushed hard enough . . .

  Frankie’s voice drifted down to her, as gentle as an autumn breeze:

  “You know, I just peed in that water.”

  Her eyes snapped open, and her tongue involuntarily scrubbed the roof of her mouth. She made a face and was about to tell Frankie to go to hell when forty pounds of wet coyote bounded into her lap and began to shake himself off.

  So much for fucking enlightenment.

  There was no way out of this hell. None that he could see.

  Cal pressed his fists to his temples. Th
e thundering in his head. Would. Not. Stop. It was so loud he couldn’t think. It didn’t stop after he took an entire bottle of ibuprofen. It didn’t stop after he drank a whole bottle of vodka. It didn’t stop when he threw both of those up and screamed at the top of his lungs. It was chewing him up inside, and he knew it.

  He moved his hands to his face, pressing his knuckles to his eyes. They came away smeared with liquid silver. With mercury.

  “Fuck,” he moaned.

  The mercury seeped back into his palms and twisted in his arteries. He could feel it moving, crawling up his arms. Its cold fingers wrapped around his heart and his lungs, tapping out a rhythm that was too fast, too fast for any drug he knew of. His heart was gonna fucking explode if he didn’t get help.

  “Fuck you,” he growled at the mercury. And he cursed its creator seven ways to Sunday, with every permutation of the f-­bomb he could summon: Stroud. The stringy old alchemist was dead, but he’d left Cal with this fucking experiment that was chewing his guts out. He’d been shitting silver for weeks, trying to purge it out with laxatives and prune juice. It just left him weak and furious. Furious at Stroud for not taking his own magical creepy crawlies to the grave with him. The motherfucker’s house got blown up when the DEA and Petra’s creepy ranch hand friends had come for him. Wasn’t that enough to keep all of his bad juju down?

  Cal pressed his fingers into the dirt and staggered to his feet. He stumbled through the filthy remains of his camp: a tent made of trash bags set up in the shade of a clump of scrub trees, boxes of Twinkies, and empty energy drink bottles. It was getting too cold at night to sleep on the ground, cold enough that his breath steamed and frost was coming. He left it all behind and moved through the falling darkness toward the road in the distance. His boots clomped in the dust before him, feeling as heavy as concrete blocks. Wrapping his hands around his black jacket, he shivered. The road seemed to twist and slither in his vision, and he struggled to keep it in view.

  The road. Almost there. His boots crunched in gravel, and he nearly fell when he arrived at the shoulder. Bracing his hands on his knees he looked north and south at the empty, wavering asphalt. The sun had set, and stars prickled out above the mountains, swimming in his vision. He couldn’t make out which one pointed north; they all spun overhead like a bad acid trip.