Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman

by Duncan Eagleson

  My head was pounding again. Strange: while I’d been in that fugue state, my head was about the only part of me not experiencing pain. I leaned against the column, closed my eyes, not wanting to do this, but it was necessary. I reached my senses out to the surroundings, searching for some sense of Suzi Mascarpone. There was nothing. The woman’s spirit had moved on, and it was likely her shade was gone as well. It happens that way sometimes: A shade will download its traumatic experience into a living human, and then it will dissipate.

  Opening my eyes, I reached into my pocket and brought out a packet of tobacco. With shaking hands I dumped some out into a small square of paper, twisted it closed, and set it down on the pavement. Then I produced my lighter and set fire to it. As the tobacco burned, I chanted the Farewell to the Dead.

  The tobacco burnt down, the chant done, I got slowly to my feet and began the walk back to the CA Tower, turning the whole experience over in my mind. The killer had said something. Something like “Be pleased...” I thought at first he was talking to me—to her, that is—but it was soft, breathy... like he was praying or something. Unless Suzi’s shade had been caught in a loop, he was saying it over and over. “Lady,” that’s what it was. “Oh, Lady, be pleased. Oh, be pleased...” And then something else I couldn’t make out.

  “Be pleased, oh be pleased.” It sounded like a prayer, yeah, an entreaty. Did this invocation happen at every killing, or just at this one? Just this one, I thought. It’s a freak, a fluke, a variation on the pattern, and he’s pleading with his Lady, be she goddess, human, or whatever, to continue to favor him, overlook this self-indulgence. “Be pleased.” No, not just overlook it, allow it, but take it as an offering, a sacrifice. It’s not part of the pattern, but it’s still something he’s doing for her.

  It is the moon, I thought. He broke the lunar pattern. He’s getting worked up inside. He’s getting close to the end of the pattern, and he’s doing it for her, his Lady, his Goddess, and there’s something else... What compels the abject worshiper? The worshiped, or its opposite. God—in this case Goddess—or something foul and degraded, a sacrilege. Mascarpone was a Marilynist. Was Marilyn the Beast’s “Lady”? Or did he find the Marilynists offensive? There are several goddesses associated with the dark moon. None of them, at least in their more popular forms, would have found the Marilynists offensive. The lunar goddesses tended to be harlots as well as virgins, particularly in the dark phases. Tiamat, Ummu-Hubur, Hebat, Hecate... The killings could be offerings to any of them.

  But all that, I realized, was speculation, balanced precariously on one point: my intuition that this killing was a fluke, that the Beast’s prayer wasn’t the rite that accompanied every killing, but something special. It was a good theory, but still only a theory. Best not to get too attached to it.

  I thought back over the earlier parts of the vision, before she was caught by the Beast. The knife pressed into her hand, the hand on the elbow. I had forgotten, the harlot had seen Auden earlier in the evening. And we had only Auden’s report of what had happened; there were no other witnesses. Auden was a friend of the fishing captain. Could it be Auden? Could he have had some falling out with Hawthorne? When he met Mascarpone earlier, was he scouting his next victim?

  But, no... Auden was with us when Czernoff had been killed. I doubted there were two shapeshifting killers in the city. Was Auden dirty? A human ally to the killer? It didn’t seem likely. And if the investigator had been the Beast’s inside man, why the charade with the janitor? Auden could have simply let him in. If I couldn’t entirely rule out him as a possible Beast ally, I wasn’t about to put that at the top of my list of likelihoods.

  Back at our rooms in the CA Tower, I found Rok still up, sitting on the couch with a file folder open on his lap. Something in black and white was showing on the big-screen DV, but the sound was off.

  “Nice sneak-out,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Thanks.” Water was sounding good. As I filled a glass at the sink, it occurred to me that a couple of aspirin couldn’t hurt, either. I grabbed the bottle from the counter, shook out a couple and swallowed them, washed them down with the water, then refilled the glass and took it back to the main room. I looked at the guy on the DV. It was Jimmy Stewart. He was ranting silently about something.

  “You go to the tram overpass?” Rok asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “She there?”

  “Yeah, sort of.”

  “Any help?”

  I thought about what I had experienced under the tramway. “Maybe,” I said. “Hard to tell yet.” Eventually I’d need to fill Rok and Morgan in on what I’d gathered from the harlot’s shade, but I didn’t have the energy just then.

  “You knew that the fisherman, Hawthorne, fought in the Takeover?” Rok asked. I nodded. “First mate claims the Cap’n once admitted to him—deep, dark secret shared late one drunken night—that he was actually the guy who shot Wendell Crichton.”

  “You believe him?”

  “I think he believed it. I believe his captain probably told him that story. Whether it was true or not, who knows? Anybody can make a claim like that.”

  I sat down beside him on the couch. “Man,” I said, “you got all the finest, most expensive for-pay DV available to you on this nice big screen, all at the expense of Micah Roth and Bay City. Why you watchin’ this low-rent, free channel shit?” The free channels ran a lot of pre-Crash stuff—no copyrights or royalties involved.

  Rok raised one finger, but kept his eyes on the file. “You’d better be fucking joking.”

  I laughed. It made my head hurt. I’d have to try and remember not to laugh often. That probably wouldn’t be too difficult. “Course I’m joking,” I said. “Jimmy Stewart’s The Man. What’s this, Wonderful Life?”

  “Mr. Smith. Get a clue, will ya?”

  I took a slug from the water. Rok looked up at the screen. “You ever wonder what it was like, to live back then?” he asked.

  “Wasn’t like that,” I said, nodding toward the screen. “These things are the fantasy those people had of themselves. Hey, how close is the average DV show today to the reality we experience?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But it’s true, they did have one central government controlled practically the whole continent. That must have been really strange.”

  “Not if you grew up with it.”

  “I suppose not.”

  On screen Stewart was now dumping bags of mail out onto his little desk. For a while there was only the faint hum from the muted speakers. Then Rok said, “You think it’s all about Roth, don’t you?”

  I looked at the thought again carefully. It felt right. “Yeah.”

  “You think Roth lied about Crichton’s pregnant wife?”

  “Nah, I don’t think he lied. But I don’t assume he’s right.”

  Morgan appeared from the other room, her portable balanced open on her forearm. “They’re ritualistic revenge killings, that’s gotta be obvious,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “You didn’t.” She sat down at the table. “Check this out.” She gestured at the screen. “Do you mind?”

  Rok shook his head. “Go ahead,” he said.

  Morgan punched some keys on her portable and Jimmy Stewart vanished from the screen, replaced by the image of Morgan’s desktop, several old articles open in different windows.

  “After the Takeover, the trials focused on Crichton and his top guys,” she said. “But you look at the media reports from before the Takeover, they make it sound like Helena Crichton was the real brains of the outfit, the power behind the throne. Kinda like Crichton was the gun, his wife was the hand that pointed it.”

  I didn’t bother trying to read the articles, but took Morgan’s word for it. The photos accompanying the write-ups showed Crichton with his wife, a handsome woman with hard eyes.

  “They found a body though, didn’t they?” asked Rok.

  “If anybody could come thro
ugh a civil war in one piece, I’d be betting on someone like Helena Crichton. Bitch on wheels, totally as ruthless and power-hungry as her husband. More so, probably. It was a war zone. There easily could have been more than one pregnant woman killed in the fighting. I can’t find anything on how they identified that body.”

  “If she did escape,” I said, “and gave birth to Crichton’s kid, that kid would be...”

  “Hitting his Saturn return about now,” Morgan finished. It wasn’t exactly what I was going to say; I hadn’t thought of the astrological implications, but it was close enough. He—or she, I reminded myself—would be almost thirty.

  Rok snorted. “Guess that means the New Republic of Bay City is hitting its Saturn return, too,” he said. “Makes a certain amount of sense, doesn’t it?”

  Saturn takes just under thirty years to complete one circuit of the zodiac. Astrologers see the Saturn return as the beginning of true adulthood, the ending of the age of innocence, loss of illusions, the time when the Universe forces you to face a bunch of very hard realities.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I guess it does at that. How old was Helena Crichton then? During the Takeover?”

  “About forty or so, I think,” Morgan said.

  “Isn’t that a little old for a pregnancy?”

  “It’s pushing it, yeah. Didn’t Roth say they’d had trouble getting pregnant?”

  “Yeah, he did.” I nodded, looking at the screen, where Morgan’s cursor was skipping around, flipping through the windows that showed different articles and photos.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “What was that? Go back...”

  She did. There was a photo of Crichton and another man standing in front of a building that looked like a resort hotel.

  “What’s that?” I asked. “That symbol?”

  There was a sigil on the doors of the building. It looked like two stylized commas bracketing a lower case “i,” the shaft of the “i” pointed instead of squared off at the bottom.

  “Crichton’s corporate logo. I think it’s supposed to be C-I-D, for ‘Crichton Industrial Development.’”

  “Imagine that logo upside-down,” I said. “Doesn’t it look a little like the mark the Beast has been leaving?”

  Rok was starting to twist his head sideways when Morgan clicked on something and inverted the picture. We all looked at it in silence for a moment. “I dunno,” Rok said finally. “It’s a stretch.”

  “Yeah,” said Morgan. “I guess I can see it, but it is a stretch.”

  “Maybe I’m just too desperate to make a connection,” I admitted. They were right. The logo would not only have to be inverted, but distorted as well, to match the Beast’s mark. I stared at the screen some more.

  “Okay,” said Rok. “Let’s say, for the moment, Helena Crichton did escape, and gave birth. Would a woman like that stay here and plot revenge? I’d think she’d be more likely to go somewhere else, start over again. No power to be had for someone like her in the New Republic. Maybe she went to Santa Brita or Bendmond. They were more like the old Bay City in those days. Hell, San Angelus was still practically feudal.”

  “Maybe she did,” said Morgan. “I’m assuming some-one like that doesn’t lose their taste for power, and that if Helena Crichton survived, she’d be rebuilding her own little empire somewhere. I’ve got at least three good possibilities, women who fit her profile, who appeared in other cities around the right time period. And she doesn’t need to be here, in Bay City, right now. Maybe it’s just her son who came back.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  The entire roof of the featherweight dune crawler was one huge solar collector. The batteries were fully charged when I signed for it. I turned out of the guard garage and headed down Fourth Street, south toward the river. Once I was over the Fourth Street Bridge, moving southwest out of the city, the buildings got shorter and smaller, going from plascrete and granite to brick and adobe and even some old wood frame buildings. After a while they petered out altogether, and I was speeding through the peninsula south of the Bay. Now I could see glimpses of ocean between the oncoming hills.

  I could probably have consulted Wolf again in the CA Tower, but this seemed more respectful. There was an old sacred circle overlooking the sea at the top of the hill they called “Chaco Head.” The circle of stones wasn’t that ancient—it had been raised sometime just before the Great Crash—but legend said it had been a sacred site for centuries before that.

  The sun was setting as I parked the jeep a few yards from the circle. The stones were larger than I’d expected. Most stone circles you see these days, the uprights come to your waist or chest at most, but these stones were a good seven or eight feet tall. Away to the southeast I could see the cracked remains of one of the great domes that once made survival possible. Back then bees could only survive in that artificial environment, which meant only plants growing under the domes would get pollinated. Almost any new growth plant in the world today was a descendent of something that was grown in one of those domes. Their adoption had saved the human race from extinction through starvation.

  I took off my boots. Bringing my knapsack, I walked to the center of the circle. Took out a little brazier and some sage, and set the sage to burning. I raised the brazier to each of the four directions. Performed the Evening Salute.

  Then I lay down and closed my eyes. Slowed and deepened my breathing. In my mind’s ear I heard the beat of a drum, the shaman’s drum. It might have been helpful to have an actual drum there, but I’d done this so many times I didn’t really need it. In only moments I saw the door, and stepped through it.

  Instead of a desert, where I usually encountered the Wolf, I found myself in a walled oriental garden, surrounded by bonsai trees. In size they varied from eight or ten inches tall to some relative giants nearly a full three feet in height. It was like walking through a miniature forest. Some of the trees stood in individual pots on pedestals; others were planted in numbers in large trays that were sculpted and landscaped like tiny parks. The Wolf appeared through a gate at the other end of the garden, this time in the guise of my old sensei, short, bald, and muscular, though he wore a formal kimono rather than the gee I was used to seeing him in.

  “Bonsai trees?” I asked.

  “Almost every possible style and variation,” he said. “Koten and Bujin; Shakan, Kengai, even Netsunari.” He gestured at one in one of the larger trays, where several trees appeared to be growing out of a fallen log.

  It was weird, hearing Wolf’s voice come out of my old sensei’s body, seeing the formal movements of the dojo I was used to, but also the looser, more casual body language Wolf used in his human guises.

  “Sorry, that’s all Greek to me.” He raised an eyebrow. “Well,” I amended, “Japanese, anyway. I mean, I can count to ten, but…”

  “Do you know how bonsai are created?”

  “Genetic manipulation?” I ventured.

  “No. It is all simple horticulture—pruning, trimming, guiding the branches’ growth, taken to the level of an art. Some of these trees are hundreds of years old.”

  “So they’re fragile and delicate Elders.”

  “Hardly. A well tended bonsai is hardier than a full-sized tree, and will outlive normal trees by many decades. But it still remains an artificial product. Just like you.”

  “Me?”

  “What would you be, if you had not found the Railwalker Order?”

  “I dunno. Not an itinerant gambler. Probably I would have continued in construction. Maybe if I was lucky enough or smart enough I’d have saved enough to go to school, become an architect.”

  “In some ways,” he said, “you are like these trees. You have been shaped and pruned by your teachers, your natural tendencies enhanced, energies taught to flow in certain directions they might not have found on their own.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, wondering where this was leading. “I can see that.”

  “Now,” he said, “in what way are you unlike these trees
?”

  I pondered that one. I was sure he didn’t mean that I could move around from place to place, or that my height was normal for someone with my genetics. Whatever he meant, it wouldn’t be something that obvious. I shook my head, shrugged.

  “You give up too easily.” He smiled. “Sit. Meditate. Talk to the trees. We’ll talk again later.” He turned and left the garden.

  I gazed around the garden, feeling for the right spot, the right tree. There was a warm, comfortable feeling about one particularly gnarled and ancient-looking tree that sat at the end of one of the larger landscaped trays. I walked to it and sat down with my back to the tray, leaning my head back against it carefully, as I would have if I was going to commune with a full-sized tree. I couldn’t quite touch the tree, and I wondered if that was important; in all my previous communications with trees I had been in physical contact with the trunk. I closed my eyes and slowed my breathing.

  Trees are living beings that house a form of consciousness just as humans or animals do, but they’re not at all like us. Communication with individual animals isn’t quite like talking, the way the Wolf Spirit and I talk, it’s more like a series of feelings and pictures. With trees and plants, communication is even less like talking, and I barely know how to explain it in words. It’s more like direct knowing is transferred, and even the content of that knowledge is often strange and unexplainable. This time, however, the tiny and ancient tree infused me with memories. Hundreds of years of memories. For trees time is different than for humans. Days pass for them like seconds for us. Yet in this tree, something was different. It seemed to understand time, if not like humans do, at least in a way that was closer to human or animal perception. That was strange, I thought.

  Until the tree’s history began to unfold within me, I didn’t realize I had already formed expectations. I had imagined the tree as a prisoner, subjected to tortures, distorting its shape and natural intentions into an arbitrary pattern imposed by its gardener. Instead, I discovered a mutual shaping between the gardener and the tree, the human’s faster, smaller consciousness adapting to the slower, wider scope of the tree’s, even as the tree cooperated with the gardener’s intentions. Trees don’t have emotions quite like humans or animals, but as close as I could approximate it, this tree seemed almost fond of its original gardener. The gardener had been like a teacher, coaching the tree in understanding something of the humans’ faster consciousness. I felt the human consciousness touch that of the tree, exploring, investigating, seeing into the future patterns the tree contained, considering how to reproduce those patterns in miniature in both time and size.