by P. R. Frost
“When we get our hands on it again,” Cynthia insisted.
“The dog, Shunka Sapa, chose me. I am the new weaver. I need Tess’ and Gollum’s help. I invite them here. You have to accept them.”
Where is the Shunka Sapa? Only the dog of the ages may reveal this cave to the weaver.
The feeling of menace increased. I really wanted out of the cave. More than that, I wanted Scrap to recover and return to my side. I didn’t feel safe without him anymore.
“The dog is protecting the blanket. It was stolen from you when the old weaver died,” Gollum answered for Cynthia.
Many times over the centuries the dog and his descendants have brought new weavers to us. Always the dog.
Never has a weaver been disrespectful to us. Never has the weaver needed assistance beyond what we can give.
“Well, times have changed, guys,” Cynthia retorted.
“It’s a whole new world out there. I’m about the only one Sapa could find who will respect you and the blanket and everything it stands for. Now either get with the picture or get lost.”
Out of the mouths of babes. Or did I say that already?
The misty ghosts faded for a moment. I sensed, could almost hear, an indignant conversation among them.
Abruptly, the cave warmed. Air returned to my lungs.
The lifting of the pressure of unwelcomeness made me feel so light I almost lost my balance. Gollum staggered, too. I grabbed his arm and kept him upright.
I may have leaned in to him, holding myself vertical as much as helping him.
If you are to be the new guardians of the weaver, then you must dream and learn.
My knees turned to jelly, and I found myself on the cave floor, fighting a huge yawn.
I opened my eyes to find myself, Gollum, and Cynthia in a green landscape filled with sharp contrasts of rock and prairie, river, cliff, and plateau.
A steady rain pounded us yet didn’t seem to get us wet. The sky looked black and ominous, but it was full daylight—or as bright as those clouds would allow.
“Where are we?” Nothing looked familiar. My sense of direction, up and down, right and left, forward and back, tilted about five degrees to the left. The colors altered by the same measure as well. And I didn’t even have the comb with me. The slight tug by the North Pole on my senses had disappeared as well.
I shivered a little from the bite in the air. Early spring.
I guessed the season by the depth of the green and the chill.
“I think the better question is, when are we?” Gollum replied.
Found you! Scrap chortled. He bounced into view, more solid and bigger than I had ever seen him. He stood about four feet tall instead of the eight inches I was used to. His wings had grown, too; they reached high above his head and draped below his four-taloned feet. Something else was wrong, but I couldn’t pinpoint it.
He waved a fist full of white hairs, then let them scatter to the rising wind.
“So that’s what he looks like!” Gollum gasped.
“Hey, he’s cute. Can I pet him?” Cynthia asked.
“He’s a pain in the ass and not normally this big or solid,” I snarled.
“As solid as you, babe,” Scrap chortled out loud. “But only in this dimension. Time warps things.”
“What is happening, Scrap?” My senses remained distorted, but Scrap was here. With Scrap, I could defend myself and my companions.
“You jumped a couple of dimensions,” he replied.
“Where’s your cigar, Scrap?”
“Wrong time, wrong dimension. No tobacco here.”
“Then what do we have here?”
“Floods!” Gollum shouted. He grabbed Cynthia by the elbow and began running uphill.
I didn’t wait to see what had alarmed him. Hot on his heels I registered a roar in the background. A roar that had been there ever since I arrived, but I hadn’t noticed it as separate from my other disorientation.
We crested the closest hill. Instinctively, I looked toward the river that wound around the hills below us.
If anything, the water level seemed lower than my first glance moments ago.
“Gollum, what’s happening?” I pointed toward the water.
Sure enough, more and more damp rock on the cliff sides was exposed.
And the roar came from behind us.
I whirled around. Off in the distance, many miles away, I caught a hint of rapid movement.
A brown wall of water raced across the landscape, gouging out a new riverbed. It leveled hills. Boulders as big as houses tumbled like feathers. People, animals, villages—everything was swept up in the relentless surge of water.
“I think we are watching the flood that nearly destroyed my people twelve thousand years ago,” Cynthia whispered in awe and terror.
“The ice dam over in Montana must have broken, releasing more water than fills all of Lake Superior in one gush. It’s forging a new riverbed,” I quoted one of the pamphlets I’d picked up in Half Moon Lake.
The old river behind us continued to drain away.
Soon, only a necklace of mineral lakes would be left. We were probably standing on the site where Donovan Estevez and his demon cohort would build a casino twelve thousand years in the future.
“The real question is, why are we here?” Gollum asked. He peered through the onslaught of rain.
“Over there,” Scrap said. He pointed north.
Movement. A long line of people trudging along the ridgeline, perhaps two miles away, approached us. Too far to see details.
But Scrap elongated and thinned. His head and wings took on a metallic cast. His wings became curved blades with spikes sticking out of the outside edge.
“Those are demons,” Gollum informed us.
“I guessed. Scrap doesn’t do his Celestial Blade thing unless a demon or great evil is present.”
“Sasquatch demons,” Cynthia breathed. “I bet they’ve got the blanket. Maybe we can keep them from stealing it.”
“No,” Scrap spoke from within the blade that balanced so easily in my hand. His voice sounded deeper, more solemn and filled with portent. “We can only observe the past. We cannot change it. In this dimension we are all as transparent to the inhabitants as I usually am in your true time and place.”
I gulped and began swinging the blade, ready to defend myself and my companions.
“Won’t work, babe.” Scrap sounded his usual sarcastic self. “You can’t touch these guys in their own time. They belong here. You don’t.”
“If it won’t work, then why did you transform?”
“Because it is his nature,” Gollum said.
The demons came closer. True demons rather than half-breeds, close to twelve feet tall.
I drew Cynthia and Gollum behind me while I continued to keep the blade in motion.
Sure enough, the lead Sasquatch, obviously male with huge testicles hanging between legs half hidden by auburn fur, clutched the blanket to his chest.
I peered closely at the textile as the demons passed us, seemingly oblivious to our presence. But some of the smaller Sasquatch, possibly half-breeds, looked about nervously.
The blanket looked more vibrant than I remembered, full of color from dried grasses, tree bark, bird feathers, and multicolored wild goat wool. Especially the bird feathers.
Maybe the blanket rippled because the demon who clutched it bounced as he jog-trotted along the plateau.
Maybe.
But it looked to me as if it vibrated with life.
Three of the demons pushed ahead of their leader.
They joined hands (paws?) in a circle and began chanting something in a weird language full of pops, clicks, and grunts. A very similar language to the one the demons who’d kidnapped me had spoken.
The ground beneath my feet rocked. I fought for balance.
The land heaved. I had to jab the Celestial Blade into the rain-slick turf to stay upright.
Gollum and Cynthia flopped facedown, cl
inging to the grass with desperate fingers.
The demons seemed unaffected by the quake. But the three chanting ones broke their circle and stepped back.
A jagged hole opened where they had been standing. A metal ladder led down that hole deep into the earth.
“The demon portal,” I breathed. “Did you get that invocation, language guy?” I asked Gollum.
Abruptly, the world went black, and I tumbled into nothing.
Thank the Goddess I still had my hands on the blade.
Chapter 40
I CAME UP BLIND and swinging. “Easy, Tess. Back off.” Gollum’s voice.
Light glimmered around the edges of my perceptions.
“Did they get you, too?” I asked. Why did my hands feel numb and empty?
“We’re back home, Tess. Back in the cave.”
“Scrap?”
“I can’t see him,” Gollum said.
“I can’t either,” Cynthia chimed in.
“I can’t see anything.” I rubbed my eyes. A little more light. Concentrated in a vertical line off to my left.
Dimension blindness. It will pass. That was one of the Indian ghosts who had started this nightmare.
I closed my eyes and thought for several moments. Yes!
The tug of the North Pole on my nerve endings was back.
My feet found a rock-solid balance. I breathed normally.
Then I opened my eyes. I picked out a few more details in the cave. Rockfall, the pile of sherds Gollum had collected, the remains of an ancient fire that had burned for millennia until the cave-in killed the old woman and sent her dog in search of a new weaver.
That rockfall was the beginning of this entire adventure.
A collapse caused by construction of the casino above. Construction directly on top of a demon portal that the Sisterhood of the Celestial Blade didn’t know about.
They didn’t need to know about it until a few months ago because the weaver and the blanket sealed the portal.
The blanket still existed. We had a new weaver. So why wasn’t the portal closed?
Because Cynthia wasn’t actively weaving the blanket and Sapa wasn’t ripping out her new work each day so that the blanket was never finished. Finish the blanket?
The world comes to an end.
Stop weaving the blanket?
The demon portal opens and demons return en masse.
That might well be the end of the world, too.
“I need a drink,” I muttered.
“It’s almost dark. I think we can safely go outside now without being blinded by the sun,” Gollum said.
“Did you remember the incantation the demons spoke to open the portal?” I asked.
Gollum looked at me, puzzled. “I can’t learn any language that quickly.”
“But you spoke Lakota dialect when you channeled the legend.” The myth might belong to all of the Indian tribes, but apparently only the Lakota had recorded it and allowed the outside world to think it their own.
“I don’t remember a word of it other than what I’ve learned from listening to the tape.”
“Shit. I think we’re going to need that incantation.”
“But we don’t want to open the portal, we want to close it, and keep it closed,” Cynthia said.
“Demons aren’t very smart,” Gollum said, adopting his professor tone. “They probably can’t remember two different chants. They’d use the same one to open and close the portal. Like the word ‘Aloha’ means both hello and good-bye.”
“What day is it, Scrap?” I asked, stepping out into the twilight, grateful that the cave mouth faced east, and not west where the sun set. I couldn’t find Scrap with my eyes or my other senses. He must have done his disappearing act again after transforming.
“My watch says Tuesday, October twenty-seven,” Gollum replied.
“Shit. I’ve got to leave in the morning for the con. Let’s go get a little bit drunk while I pack.”
Three hours later, as I filled my suitcase with the clothes Mom had sent to me and drank from a bottle of single malt scotch I’d found in the local liquor store, Gollum entertained Cynthia with stories of ancient man in Europe. The cat perched on his lap as if it was seated on a throne.
I half listened, marveling at the man’s talent for dealing with an adolescent who would really rather be with her monster dog.
Sapa still guarded the blanket over at Donovan’s office.
The guards with guns kept Sapa and me from stealing the blanket. The dog kept Donovan’s goons from damaging or removing it to another location.
So why didn’t the goons just shoot the dog? Because he’d been touched by the otherworld. Bullets would bounce off his hide, like they did with demons.
Balance, Scrap reminded me from his hidey-hole.
Even demons respect the need for balance.
A loud argument next door interrupted my errant thoughts. I thought I heard echoes of Donovan’s voice in the verbal melee. Specific words eluded me.
Anything that concerned that man now concerned me.
I placed a glass from the bathroom against the wall and pressed my ear against it, hoping to use the old movie detective trick to pick out the nature of the argument.
The volume rose, but the words did not become any clearer. When I stepped away from the wall, I noticed the volume had risen even without the aid of the glass.
Gollum and Cynthia were engrossed in an argument over the intelligence of Neanderthal Man versus Cro-Magnon. Gollum sipped at his glass of scotch quite regularly, and he slurred his words. Between the two of us, we’d drunk over half the bottle. I hadn’t had more than one glass. No wonder Cynthia seemed to be winning the argument that Neanderthal was smarter than normally given credit for.
I stepped out onto the back deck overlooking the lake. A tiny slice of a moon drifted in the autumn sky surrounded by a blanket of stars. A fresh breeze ruffled the lake and brought the sharp scent of mineral salts to me—an odor I would now always associate with Sasquatch demons rather than the healing attributed to those mineral salts. The window in the suite adjacent to mine was open. About two feet of space separated my deck from theirs.
If I climbed onto the railing, I could step over the space and get directly beneath that window.
“We’re cutting you off, Estevez. No more delays, no more money. We’re through. If you don’t come through in two weeks, we take over,” Vern Abrams shouted.
“If you’d only listen,” Donovan pleaded.
“We’ve listened enough to your platitudes and innuendos. No more,” Myrna Abrams added. Her strident voice nearly pierced my eardrum.
Someone shoved the sliding glass door open, then rammed it closed again. Donovan stood at the railing gulping air. Even in the dim light, I could tell from his posture that he wasn’t happy. Then he slammed his fist into the top rail. The varnished cedar pole, nearly three inches in diameter bent, almost buckled.
I stepped back into the shadows, unwilling to be a part of or witness to his violence. His physical strength alarmed me.
“Who?”
My movement must have alerted him.
“Just me. Tess. I couldn’t help but overhear. I’m sorry. I wasn’t deliberately eavesdropping.” Like hell I wasn’t.
But I couldn’t tell him that.
“Abrams is my banker. He’s just refused to extend the financing on the casino. There’s no way I can finish on deadline, thanks to those impatient and stupid fools. Homeland Security still has the construction site roadblocked until they finish their investigation. Heaven only knows when that will be.” He took a deep breath to steady himself.
Did he mean that Homeland Security were the impatient and stupid fools, or the Kajiri—the half-blood demons?
“I’m ruined, Tess.”
“Your software company?”
“Mortgaged to the hilt to finance the casino. My house, even the car. I… I’m… I need to be alone. I can’t hope that you will learn to love me when I’m broke.”
He vaulted the railing, landing softly on the sand, then ran off into the night.
I gulped, more than a little confused. There was that “L” word. Call me a sucker, but there was more between Donovan and myself than I wanted to admit. He hadn’t pulled the trigger or authorized Quentin to. But still…
I could never trust him enough to love him as he wanted me to.
Did he love me as he hinted?
I needed to break the spell that man had on me. Until I figured out how to do that, I needed to stay well away from him.
Maybe all I needed was to buy a vibrator and rent some porn.
Would I ever dare love anyone again? Dill had so dominated my emotions I hadn’t thought I’d be able to look beyond the too-short time we had together.
Only now, after three years, was I able to look more closely at the whirlwind love affair, the blind devotion, the all-consuming love… or was it just lust?
I went back inside rather than face my own emotional demons.
Gollum sat straight up in his chair, eyes focused on something too far in the distance for me to pinpoint.
A stream of nonsense syllables streamed from his mouth.
Cynthia tried to write down the sounds on the tiny sheets of memo paper provided by the lodge. I grabbed my brand new Dictaphone and turned it on.
Only then did I note that the bottle of scotch was nearly empty.
Gollum had been almost as drunk the last time he’d channeled a legend in a foreign language. No wonder he didn’t remember it.
Chapter 41
Fruit eating bats drop seeds far from the source thus increasing the number of seedlings away from the mother tree.
MADISON, WISCONSIN, IS a lovely city.
What I saw of it. Flight options out of Moses Lake, Washington, connecting to Seattle were limited. I flew in during the wee small hours of Thursday morning.
The hotel was… a hotel. I’ve seen too many of them to get excited about any of them.
“Tess, you look wonderful for having been kidnapped by terrorists,” my agent Sylvia Watson gushed when we met for brunch that first morning. I’d had a few hours of sleep. She hugged me to her ample bosom. I found my face nearly smothered in her shoulder. She’s that tall and she was wearing four-inch heels. I had managed to find a pair of flats that actually matched in my luggage when I stumbled awake ten minutes before. That left me at my normal five foot two.