by William Hawk
“Barely,” I said. “By about a minute. I had to go back to get your drawings.” I nodded to Cy. “He’s trying to drop the force field.”
Julia nodded. “There’s just so much to take in. Nothing is the way that I thought it was.”
I nodded. “I felt the same way.”
Cy paused his salutations, his face lifted to the sky. Then he nodded, and struggled to his feet. We were both handcuffed here, in the bottom of this beautiful valley. It was absurd.
“My ancestors have agreed to shelter us from Little Horn. Let’s enter.”
I gingerly stepped across the same patch of earth that had knocked me on my rear a few days earlier. There was no perimeter fence any longer. The five of us stepped onto the sacred land and looked around.
It seemed like any other plot of rural earth. Bushes and brambles lay strewn across the earth, patches of dirt were punctuated by clods of grass and weeds. I watched Julia bend down and pick up a pile of earth in her hands.
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Cy.
“Why not?”
“Those are my ancestors, and they’re with us right now. We must show them respect.”
She carefully set the dirt back down on the ground and stayed mum. She attempted to walk more lightly across the ground.
Meanwhile, I was growing more than tired of the handcuffs. In frustration, I tried turning around and scratching them off on a tree, but that just chewed up the bark.
Arthur looked at me sadly. “You can’t get those off. I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”
“We could find the sheriff and the deputy and get the key.”
“I don’t think they’re alive,” he said.
Julia was within earshot, so I nodded toward her. “Keep your voice down,” I whispered.
“You can’t go anywhere,” said Cy, “not until we know that Little Horn has gone.”
“How will we know that?”
“Sonny can feel his presence.”
I spun around and looked up toward his ranch. “Can we get Sonny down here to tell us?”
“Oh, he’ll see us,” said the old native. “Remember, he’s a seer. He sees everything in this valley. And he definitely heard the destruction of the Hall of Knowledge.”
We stood there for a while, feeling the damp air, all casting glances over to the patch of forest that we’d seen Roivas disappear into with the sheriff and the deputy.
I saw that Julia had sat down on a fallen log and was hiding her face in her hands. I sat down next to her and pressed my shoulder against hers. “I’d like to put my arm around you, but, you know.”
That got a smile out of her. She put her arm around me. “Is my dad okay, William?”
I felt my breath catch in my throat. “I don’t think so.”
I felt her tense up.
“William. What happened?”
“I’m sorry. There was nothing we could do.”
“What happened?”
“Roivas. He slashed him.”
She pulled her arm away and bent over in panic, saying, “Oh my God, please no,” over and over again.
It was better that she knew. I didn’t want her to be in suspense any longer, not about something like this.
“Roivas slashed him. Then he dragged your father and his deputy into those trees way over there.”
She looked aghast. “What’s wrong with you? We have to rescue him! That’s my father!”
“What can I do?” I said. “Look at me. Look at Cy. And then look at Roivas. What can any of us do? That thing destroyed the entire Hall of Knowledge with its bare hands, from what I saw. I even saw it change shape.” I shook my head. “That creature is too powerful for us to fight. Staying here for the moment is the best thing for all of us to do.”
“But my father…”
“His fate is out of your hands.”
She was crying now.
I knew what she was feeling, but I was powerless to help her or her father.
At that moment, another piercing shriek sounded from the forest. We all turned our heads.
Little Horn was marching out of the trees—and he was headed for us.
I shot to my feet, as did the others. Cy put out a calming hand toward all of us. “This cemetery is protected by my ancestors. He can’t get through.”
Arthur was trembling. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”
“It’s true,” I told him. “I tried to cross this land once, alone, and it was like walking into a piece of Plexiglas. I bounced right off it.”
“But Roivas is more powerful than you,” said Arthur.
“I guess that’s the real question. Who’s more powerful—Roivas or Cy’s spiritual ancestors?”
We all fell quiet as Roivas crossed the landscape. It was like watching the Grim Reaper march toward you. If he could penetrate the force that protected the cemetery, it was certain we’d all be slaughtered. I didn’t want to die, of course, but I had already faced so many threats and had my family murdered, and I felt that I should be more fearless, considering. But I wasn’t. I was terrified to my core as I watched Roivas near the cemetery.
Roivas had returned to a normal human size, but the horns that had sprouted from his body were somehow sharper—and a few were smeared with blood.
I glanced over at Julia. The blood had drained out of her face—she was the picture of pure horror. Then I looked at Grace. This, after all, was her brother—or maybe had been would be the better way to say it. She was frightened, certainly, but she stared at Roivas with an expression more perplexed than scared.
I asked her, “Do you recognize him?”
Grace shook her head. “Not anymore. He looks totally different. I mean, those… horns.” She grew quiet. “But I remember seeing them once, when we were little. We were wrestling at home, like brothers and sisters do, and I did something to him that he didn’t like, and then I thought I saw a couple of them sprout on his back.”
“Was he angry?”
She nodded. “That was just before he threw me against a wall. Our mother put him away on seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold.”
“How old were you?”
“We were five.”
That shocked me. A kindergartener on a psychiatric hold? The Other Side had come out early in him. I suddenly understood the type of mixed feelings Grace must’ve been carrying for all these years about her brother, Roivas. How difficult would it be knowing that your own brother was the embodiment of evil?
As Roivas drew nearer, the five of us instinctually huddled together. Then he suddenly stumbled backward. The wall.
“It held!” said Arthur.
“Wait,” said Julia, “It’s getting up again.”
I watched as Roivas stood up and brushed off its navy-blue pinstripe suit. Its facial features were a strange blur of darkness and anger, as though its humanity had simply disappeared. I watched as it ran toward us again, and bounced off the wall even harder.
I looked over at Cy. He’d dropped to his knees and was moving his forehead to the earth, face to the sky, a back-and-forth routine. It seemed that he was supplicating his ancestors, pleading with them to stay strong.
Then Roivas stood up a third time. He faced the invisible wall, lifted his arms, and tilted his head back. A peculiar screech came from his throat that descended down to a guttural roar. I could feel the dark energy emanating from his body. Then he began walking, the roar still sounding from his throat—and then he crossed over the line.
“Oh crap,” said Arthur.
“Cy, he’s in!” I shouted. Cy looked up and a spasm of fear crossed his face.
We huddled together in a tight little group, facing Roivas as he crossed the expanse of brush. Raindrops spattered on my head and shoulders.
“What do we do?” shouted Julia.
Grace tugged on my sleeve. “Look.”
She pointed ahead. An elderly figure had quietly crossed the graveyard and planted himself resolutely between our group and Roivas.
&
nbsp; It was Sonny.
Cy shouted something in a language that I didn’t understand. It must’ve been the native language of their people. With his back to us, Sonny merely lifted a hand, then lowered it again—an acknowledgment of the danger, it seemed, but a sign of disregard for his own safety.
I watched as Sonny pointed at Roivas. He began chanting something in that same language, first in a small voice, then in a louder one. Roivas grew taller again, returning to the nine- foot height, and Julia and Grace sucked in their breath. “I never saw him do that before,” said Grace.
“He’s more powerful than the last time you saw him.”
“Much more powerful.”
Sonny was still chanting. He held his thin body stock still, his spindly old-man arms trembling with the effort. Roivas twisted and writhed in front of him, then issued an ungodly shriek, lifted its right arm—and brought it down onto the top of Sonny’s head.
The old man instantly crumpled to the ground. There wasn’t any need to guess what had happened. That was a murder, plain and simple.
Sonny was dead. It was ghastly.
Julia gagged, then started to shudder and shake with intense panic. Grace put her arms around Julia and tried to calm her.
Roivas stepped on the body with a sickening squish and continued marching toward us. Cy’s face was frozen with sheer terror. I’d never seen him like that. We bunched together in a tight knot.
“There must be something,” said Arthur.
“Somebody stop him!” shouted Julia.
“Grace,” I said, “you’re his sister, at least you were in this iteration. Can you get to him somehow? Do you remember a cleaving point, a weakness?”
Next to me, Grace lowered her chin to her chest. Then she lifted her face. “Maybe there’s one thing. I don’t know if it will work. It sometimes worked when we were children.”
“Try it!” said Arthur. “We’re too young to die. Even Cy.”
She took a deep breath, then broke from the huddle and took a few steps forward. She was standing with her chest lifted and shoulders back. I knew that Roivas recognized her, because the ghastly figure stopped advancing. Its facial features seemed to reform on its face, and for the first time, I could see eyes, nose and mouth.
“Roland,” she said.
“Grace,” the creature replied—not in that deep “devil” voice I expected from the movies, but in thin, watery tones.
She stopped and said, “You leave these people alone. You don’t need any of them.”
He flexed his arms, and the horns withdrew and reappeared, much like a cat retracting its claws. “I do. I do, I do, I do, I do…”
When Grace opened her mouth next, her voice had utterly changed. It sounded like a grown man’s voice. “You go to the Purespace.”
“No, I won’t…”
“Yes, you will. The Purespace. Now.” Her voice dropped so low on that last word that it gave me shivers.
Roivas moved forward, and she repeated, “Purespace,” forcefully. “That’s where Proof is.”
He attempted to move toward her, but he faltered, leaped into the air and shrieked, loud enough to echo off the sides of the valley. It flexed its horns. Its face was disappearing and reappearing, as though it were involved in some horrific identity crisis.
“I don’t want the purespace or Proof!” it cried. “That’s your space! I don’t want it!”
“Then go,” said Grace, pointing her finger out of the valley.
Roivas was in the middle of what appeared to be a massive temper tantrum. The creature whirled, stamped its feet, and blasted apart bushes with fireballs. It brought its fists down onto a nearby boulder, splitting it in half. It roared again and again. Finally, it scooped what seemed to be half a ton of earth and threw it at us.
I stood there, cowering with the group. We protected our heads while the cloud of dirt rained down upon me. After it had cleared, we opened our eyes.
Roivas was gone.
Before us, Grace slowly turned around. She looked like she was about to faint. Then she did. I watched her knees buckle and her eyes shut and then her whole body go sideways. I rushed over, but Arthur and Julia, with their arms free, were the only ones who could attend to her.
“Oh my gosh, how did she do that?” asked Julia.
Arthur propped Grace’s head in his hands. The girl soon opened her eyes and blinked twice, then looked around at our faces.
“Grace, you are a wizard,” said Arthur. “But what is a purespace?”
A faint smile spread across her face. “I could see that there was a little bit of Roland left inside of him, but not much. So I threatened him with the punishment that our father used to use.”
“You sounded like a man,” said Arthur.
“I can change my voice. It’s part of my power.” She exhaled. “I’m surprised it worked. But it won’t work again. I could feel that there’s almost nothing left of Roland. In a little while, he’ll be all Roivas.”
“Little Horn,” said Cy pensively. He looked at the mutilated body of Sonny nearby. “That was my friend. He didn’t deserve to die like that. We must bury him.”
We stood there, breathing in the rain, trying not to look at the man’s undignified remains.
Arthur was the first one to break the silence. “So what do we do now?”
“I know,” I answered. “We try to find Julia’s dad to get the key for these handcuffs.”
“If he’s alive,” Arthur whispered to me.
“Even if he isn’t,” I whispered back.
“Julia, you stay here,” I said. “Cy and Grace, you stay too. Arthur and I will go up to the forest.”
They all nodded. Arthur and I began to make our way across the field, picking through the stones and the brambles. We must’ve been quite a sight—me in my handcuffs, him with the bandage around his torso.
“I bet you didn’t see this coming when you hopped into the truck yesterday,” I said.
“Dude, there’s no way I’m going back to school. This has, like, blown my mind. Roivas was sick.”
“I could see his face forming when Grace stood in front of him,” I said.
“I know, me too. Do you think he’s like an ancient power?”
I didn’t answer that. The answer would’ve been really long, and I didn’t know enough about Roivas and Change Agents and the history of evil in the universe to do it justice anyway.
We picked our way up to the edge of the forest. “If they’re alive, they’re probably freaked out—and they have weapons.”
Arthur understood. We stepped lightly through the copse of trees, our footsteps muffled on the pine needles. Our heads swiveled from left to right and back again, looking for anything that might resemble a law-enforcement officer.
Then I spotted it. The khaki uniform, lying on the floor of the forest. I knew he was dead even before we reached him. It was clear from the unnatural way that he was twisted on the ground.
As we drew closer, I saw that it was the deputy. His throat had been slashed, and he’d bled out right there on the forest floor. The animals would be arriving soon, I knew.
“Can you find the keys?” I said.
“I don’t know where they are.”
“They’re on his belt.”
“But where on his belt?”
“I don’t know. Just unlatch the belt and we’ll take the whole thing. We might need the weapons too.”
Arthur reached under the deputy’s body and unlatched the police belt and pulled it out. Then he laid it out on the ground, and we looked down at the hardware. I spotted the keys and nudged them with the toe of my shoe. “There they are.”
My friend grunted and pulled them out of the belt. I turned around, and Arthur fumbled at my wrists for a few seconds. Then I heard a click and felt the handcuffs fall away. It felt incredibly freeing. I walked around, flexing my arms, trying to get the blood moving again.
Arthur slung the dead deputy’s belt around his own waist. Then he looked at me
. “So where’s the sheriff?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s got to be here somewhere.”
“If he’s dead too, he’s got to be nearby. He got slashed across the chest.”
We began to search for the sheriff, fanning out in every direction, but neither of us had any luck.
“Maybe he survived and ran away,” I said.
“That’s doubtful. I wonder if Roivas ate him.”
“Bones and all?”
We looked at each other. Nobody had told me any stories about Little Horn and cannibalism, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.
“Let’s head back and unlock Cy,” I finally said.
We turned and went back down the same way we had come. When we arrived at the graveyard, we stepped through the invisible wall. The others were waiting for us, and as Arthur unlocked Cy’s handcuffs, Julia grabbed my arm. “Did you find him?”
“We found the deputy, but not your dad. We have no idea what happened to him.”
I looked into those hopeful eyes and added, “Maybe he got away!”
Her eyes lit up at that—a tiny beacon of hope. I was glad to give it to her.
We stood there, free of handcuffs, the five of us alive and, except for Arthur’s apparently broken rib, more or less no worse for wear.
“You guys,” said Arthur, “what happened to Sonny?”
He was pointing to where the old neighbor had fallen. A few minutes ago, we’d seen his mutilated body. Now it was gone—vanished from inside his clothing. All that was left was his shirt and pants, lying flat on the dirt.
“You buried him already?” I said. It didn’t seem possible.
“No, we didn’t touch him,” said Grace. “He must’ve just vanished.”
Cy looked very satisfied and not in the least bit surprised. “We’re in the graveyard of our ancestors. They take care of us.”
I ran a hand through my hair and gazed around. This was truly hallowed ground, and I reconsidered my skepticism about all those old stories that native people have about skin walkers and other such creatures. If Roivas could exist and if Sonny’s body could disappear, then anything could happen.
“You’ve seen this happen before?” I asked.